Sentinelspire Read online

  We are about to see the birth

  of a glorious new world.

  “Or what?” said Lewan, and he was proud that his voice didn’t tremble, for his heart was beating double-time under Talieth’s imperious gaze.

  Instead she looked at him and said, “Or I’ll see that you’re given the best traveling clothes we have, as many supplies as you can carry, weapons of your choosing, and I’ll have you taken out the gates and down the mountain. You can go wherever you like.

  “And in a few days’ time, or a tenday, or perhaps even a month if the gods smile upon us, when Sentinelspire explodes and shatters the land for a hundred miles; when a cloud of dust and ash and fire covers half the known world, choking babes in their sleep, killing wild beasts and livestock, and strangling sunlight from this season’s crops—and very likely next season’s as well—if you’re far enough away to escape that … well, then, I suppose you can live the rest of your life knowing that you could have helped prevent it.

  “Once the fires have died, the earth cooled, and the ash blown away, you can even come to the great hole in the ground where once we lived, and you can dance on the place where we died. Is that what you want, Lewan?”

  I have not sat idle these years.

  THE CITADELS

  Neversfall

  Ed Gentry

  Obsidian Ridge

  Jess Lebow

  The Shield of Weeping Ghosts

  James P. Davis

  Sentinelspire

  Mark Sehestedt

  SENTINELSPIRE

  The Citadels

  ©2008 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Hasbro SA, represented by Hasbro Europe, Stockley Park, UB11 1AZ. UK.

  FORGOTTEN REALMS, Wizards of the Coast, D&D, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by: David Seidman

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-6377-5

  640-A2811000-001-EN

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  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books in the Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Epigraph

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  Part One: Assassins Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Two: The Fortress of the Old Man Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part Three: The Return Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part Four: The Old Man of the Mountain Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  About the Author

  acknowledgements

  First, many thanks to Mr. Ed Greenwood, for creating this vast world for us to play in.

  Thanks to the editors at Wizards of the Coast—Phil Athans and Susan Morris—for helping me to get on the Forgotten Realms® horse and leading me to the gate. And mostest especialliest to Erin Evans, for helping to whip this book to the finish line. Her many suggestions, research assistance, and never-ceasing encouragement were an indispensable help in crafting this story. Didn’t Stephen King once say that the editor is always right? I don’t know about all editors, but Erin certainly was!

  I utilized many books in researching Sentinelspire. My thanks to their authors, especially:

  The Horde Boxed Set by David “Zeb” Cook and Steve Winter

  The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting by Ed Greenwood, Sean K. Reynolds, Skip Williams, and Rob Heinsoo

  The Unapproachable East by Richard Baker, Matt Forbeck, and Sean K. Reynolds

  Faiths and Pantheons by Eric L. Boyd and Erik Mona

  Special thanks to Gary Larson for “Cow Poetry.”

  The wise men know all evil things

  Under the twisted trees,

  Where the perverse in pleasure pine

  And men are weary of green wine

  And sick of crimson seas.

  —G.K. Chesterton,

  “The Ballad of the White Horse”

  A note to the reader

  In the following story, characters appear who do not speak the Common tongue of Faerûn—and sometimes even those who speak Common choose not to do so. Most of the time, the meaning will be clear or explained in context. If not—or if you’re like me and love lists of strange words—the following guide will prove useful. Please note that the Orcish phrases are of the dialect of the Stone Tooth clan of Vaasa.

  Ash sissaan—“Enter” or (more loosely) “come inside.” (Killoren)

  Anukh—“Attack!” (Orcish)

  Arumwon—“Beast brother,” a sort of animal friend given to the sacred rangers of the Stone Tooth Clan of orcs, native to Vaasa. (Orcish)

  Berun Kharn kienelleth—“Hope must become vengeance.” (Aglarondan)

  Dam ul dam—“Blood for blood.” (Orcish)

  Drassit—Imperative verb, meaning “(you) harass” or “(you) trouble.” (Aglarondan)

  Drekhe—Literally, “Flee!” or more loosely, “Get away!” (Aglarondan)

  Dukhal—An insult, meaning “bastard.” (Orcish)

  Jankhota saalthua—“The time has arrived.” (Killoren)

  Kumash damun!—“Taste the blood!” (Orcish)

  Lur’ashai—“Little lord” or “little master.” (Killoren)

  Malwun—Literally “oathbrother.” The term for a blood brother among the zuwar. (Orcish)

  Mal karash!—“Oathbreaker.” (Orcish)

  Neyë—“Come here!” (Orcish)

  Ragh ala—“Calm down.” (Orcish)

  Toch gan neth—Imp
erative verb, meaning “(you) lead her away.” (Aglarondan)

  Zuwar—A sacred hunter among the Stone Tooth clan of orcs, native to Vaasa. The zuwar are hunters sworn to the service of Malar the Beastlord.

  Prologue

  2 Mirtul, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR)

  The Yuirwood

  They had come not long after midnight. With the moon and stars drowned in a sea of cloud, the darkness beneath the trees had become absolute. How such a large force had penetrated the depths of the Yuirwood, no one yet knew. It was unheard of. Unprecedented. But to strike so near one of the Circle’s holiest sites, to murder the Masters of the Yuirwood and bring fire to the trees, that was sacrilege. Such a crime demanded blood.

  Chereth followed the ranger through the wood. Aeryll was the man’s name. Man? No, Aeryll was the youngest member of their band, scarcely more than a boy, not even a year out of his Jalesh Rudra. Aeryll held aloft a thin chain, a starstone dangling from it. The stone’s soft silver glow gave the ranger enough light to guide them to a small clearing, a place where massive slabs of stone broke out of the earth. Little grew here—tufts of tall, sharp grass from the fissures of rock, and mosses in the recesses of stone that saw little sunlight. Chereth and the ranger emerged from the forest just as the clouds let loose a soft rain.

  The Masters of the Yuirwood—Triem and the seven of his band who had survived—stood in the lee of a tall boulder. Someone had bound two starstone necklaces to the long tufts of summer grass that sprouted from crevices in the rock. Just enough light for the humans to see. Another figure, his dark clothes torn and streaked with blood, huddled at their feet, his elbows bound behind his back, his knees and ankles tied before him.

  Triem, his hood pulled down on his shoulders, turned at Chereth and Aeryll’s approach. “Master Chereth,” he said, and bowed.

  “This is the only one captured?” asked Chereth.

  “Mandel’s band is pursuing the others eastward. We’ve heard nothing so far.”

  “It took nine of you to apprehend this one?”

  A moment’s silence before Triem answered, but there was no apology in his tone. “You saw him, Master. What he did. Yes, it took nine of us.”

  Chereth looked down on the man huddled in the grass. He walked around Triem, and two of the other rangers stepped back to allow him to approach the captive.

  “You are Kheil,” said Chereth.

  The man looked up, his eyes bright in a face masked by blood. A slight gash near his scalp had bled freely, soaking his visage.

  “How did you find us?” said Chereth. “How did you come undetected so deep into our sacred wood?”

  The man said nothing. His glare did not falter.

  “Why did you come? Why bring murder to our Circle?”

  The man’s back stiffened, pride and arrogance entering his countenance. “No one thwarts the Old Man of the Mountain and lives to tell about it.”

  Chereth leaned upon his staff and looked Kheil in the eye. “We have much the same rule.” He straightened and turned to Triem. “Kill him.”

  Triem and his rangers dragged Kheil through the woods. The soft rain turned to a torrent as the warm winds off the Sea of Fallen Stars met the cooler air coming down from the Tannath Mountains, creating a thunderstorm that rattled the early summer leaves and shook the hills. Lightning flashed, making the wood a mass of flickering light and shadow. Triem wore his hood down so as not to impede his ears and eyes, and when the band left the woods to cross clearings or crest a hill, the rain hit him like nails, stinging his skin.

  They reached the hilltop. There, shuddering in the fury of the storm, stood the Tree of Dhaerow. The tree had died many years before, but its leafless corpse still stood, gray and hard like some withered old sentinel on the hill. It had a foul air about it that made Triem want to walk away and not look back. Perhaps it was the lingering of ghosts or the scent of death upon the grass. Here, the Masters of the Yuirwood hanged the most vile criminals—murderers, rapists, and worshipers of the dark gods. But Triem had long feared that the tree had a presence of its own. Dead it might be, but the old oak had an awareness about it that he had never liked.

  “You’re going to hang me, then?” said Kheil. He looked up at the Tree of Dhaerow. The hard rain had opened his head wound again, and blood and water soaked him from his scalp down to his boots. “I’m disappointed. I’d heard you Yuir rangers had more imagination.”

  Aeryll stepped forward, his smile cold in the lightning flashes. “You’ll—”

  “Enough,” said Triem. “Aeryll, say nothing.”

  “That’s right,” said Kheil. “Just—”

  Dorren, a ranger so big that his brothers in the Circle often taunted him about being half giant, hit Kheil so hard that blood and water sprayed the rangers standing ten feet away.

  “Quickly,” said Triem. “Before he comes to his senses. Let’s not make this any more of a struggle than we have to.”

  The rangers unbound Kheil, then tied his wrists in front of him. They secured a rope of braided leather over the new bindings, then threw the remaining length over the lowest, thickest branch of the old oak. Dorren hauled on the rope until the tips of Kheil’s boots barely scraped the mud. The sudden pressure on his arms and the wind and rain in his face woke him.

  Kheil swallowed and said, “Whuh … what—?”

  Dorren drew his dagger, cut away Kheil’s clothes, and tossed them into the mud while Aeryll pulled off the assassin’s boots.

  “What are you doing?” Kheil asked, his speech slurred. In the light from a distant flash of lightning, Triem saw something in Kheil’s eyes. Fear.

  “Relieving you of your disappointment,” said Triem. “The Masters of the Yuirwood may lack many things. Imagination is not one of them.”

  The other rangers drew their knives. Cold steel flickered in the storm light.

  The storm ravaged all of Aglarond that night. The Masters of the Yuirwood hunted the surviving assassins through their sacred wood, but none were ever found, save the dead.

  As the storm passed, breaking itself against the Tannath Mountains and turning its spent fury over the Umber Marshes to the east, Triem’s band left the Tree of Dhaerow and the flayed corpse that hung from it. When the thunder had diminished to no more than a low rumble in the distance, and the stars and sinking moon began to peek through the clouds, a lone figure climbed the hill to the Tree of Dhaerow. No one saw the figure cut down the corpse of Kheil. No one watched as he bore Kheil’s corpse far away.

  He heard singing. A voice, deep and rich, like cedar smoke, chanting in a tongue he could not understand. But the deeper meaning tugged at him, reaching through the pain to that part of him that still remembered a world where pain did not define him. Hope and life broke him like vibrant color breaking shadow. And that color was green.…

  He gasped, his body taking in a great breath that burned his lungs.

  Sounds filled his ears—water dripping from summer leaves, frogs and toads croaking like wet branches rubbing in the breeze, a cacophony of crickets. Beneath these sounds, like the accompanying harp to a bard’s song, was the gurgle of water running sweet and clear. He found himself filled with a thirst such as he had never known.

  “Easy,” said a voice.

  He opened his eyes and saw a figure kneeling to one side of him. Sunlight broke through the ceiling of leaves, and a few beams played over the figure. Streaks of gray flecked his long brown hair, but the sunlight brought out a deep green, like moss peeking out from tree bark. His coppery skin was smooth, but his eyes gazed with the wisdom of years, and the ears protruding from his hair swooped up into a sharp tip. Too thick for an elf, yet not thick enough for most humans, this one had to be a half-elf, and with that knowledge, a name floated to the surface of his mind.

  “Chereth?” he asked. “How …?”

  “How what?”

  “How did I …?” He searched his memory and found only broken bits and pieces. Chereth, a druid, one of the Masters of the Yui
rwood, that ancient forest so far from … where? The mountain. A lone mountain rising to great height above miles of rolling grassland. Sentinelspire. That was the mountain’s name. “How did I come here?”

  “You would not say,” said the half-elf.

  He sat up and looked down on his body. The pain—the memory of which made him flinch—was only a dull ache in his flesh, but the scars remained, crisscrossing his torso, his arms, his legs. Looking at them, he remembered—rain and wind, a gnarled tree, and through it all, cold knives glinting in the light of a storm.

  “You do remember then,” said the half-elf. “I was not sure.”

  “They … they killed me. Th-the knives, they—”

  “Yes.”

  “You told them to kill me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why … this? Why call me back?”

  The old half-elf raised his hand, and Kheil saw something dangling from it—a leather cord tied to a knotwork of twisted vines, all braided round three small stones. As Chereth raised it into one of the sunbeams, the light caught in the stones, and Kheil saw that they were jewels of some sort.

  “All your life you have dealt death. Now the god of life calls you. Time to answer.”

  Part One

  ASSASSINS

  Chapter One

  14 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

  The Northern Shalhoond

  Lewan crouched in the cover of the thick brush near the stream. The long tree-shadows and tall grasses made for good cover, but a large predator would detect any movement. Lewan kept absolutely still, save for his eyes, which flitted about, searching for anything on the move. The sound of the stream would hide all but the loudest sounds should he need to move—but it would do the same for anything approaching. Still, he could have sworn that his ears had caught something a moment ago.

  The sound came again, off to his right—wheet-wheet!—the call of the spotted crake, one of the many small birds that made its home in the tall grasses where the trees of the Shalhoond thinned before fading into the Great Amber Steppes. Lewan answered with a crane’s call.