The Magehound

The wizard glanced around the room in search of some explanation. The walls, though ancient and crumbling, were decorated with remnants of carvings depicting legends told of the goddess Mystra. Zilgorn could barely make out a shattered marble altar amid the heap of stones against the far wall. From one tilting pillar dangled a hanging censer designed for the burning of incense, but which now held an abandoned bird's nest. Clearly this had once been a Mystran temple, and most likely the ancient site from which Chalzaster’s forebears had come. Apparently the archmage had returned to his ancestral village. But why had he died here?

Zilgorn stooped to tug a sword from a crumbling fist. He studied the markings on the blade. They were magical, of that he was certain, but he felt no pulse of life within the steel. A very fine tiger's eye, a golden gem nearly the size of a pullet's egg, had been set into the ornate hilt. But the stone was dull and milky, as if the sword had been blinded.

"Not blinded," Zilgorn murmured with sudden understanding. "Drained."

"Master, look at this!"

Hazzle's voice blended excitement and awe. The necromancer dropped the magic-dead sword and strode across the room. His apprentice pointed toward a crystalline statue, a transparent, life-sized image of an elf warrior frozen in a battle-ready crouch, muscles tensed for a sudden charge.

The statue was female, exquisite in the beauty of its subject and the artistry of its crafter. Zilgorn had never seen its equal. Yet certain things about the statue troubled him. The elf woman's lovely features were frozen in a rictus of pain, and her crystalline hair hung strangely lank.

Absently he brushed at his own damp black locks. A horrible suspicion took root in his mind and began to blossom.

"The warriors fell with their weapons," he mused. "Chalzaster, an archmage, died on his feet But what of this elf woman?"

"Elf woman?" Hazzle was clearly disconcerted by this notion. "This is but a statue, a treasure from some long-lost time."

"Is it?" said Zilgorn with dangerous calm. He fisted his hand and drove it toward the crystal warrior. As he suspected, his hand plunged deep into the translucent image. What he did not expect was the bitter chill that assaulted him, not merely the cold of death, but the utter absence of warmth that spoke of a void, a frigid absolute emptiness. Zilgorn jerked his hand free and showed his student the blue-white skin.

Hazzle sucked air in a quick, startled hiss, and several of the men made signs of warding-a superstitious, peasant-brained response to the unknown, something that would have irritated Zilgorn had he not been consumed with more important matters.

The wizard shook his hand until a measure of warmth and feeling returned. He tore a corner from the parchment map and walked back to the bones of his former master. Taking Chalzaster's medallion in one hand, he pressed the parchment against the sigil. During his apprenticeship, he had been magically empowered to affix Chalzaster's sigil to the spell scrolls he copied, thus marking them as authentic copies of the archmage's work. This power was his to command until the day he died, so by this reasoning the sigil should burn a glowing red shadow of itself onto the parchment

But it did not. Whatever magic the medallion had once held was long gone.

Zilgorn rocked back on his heels and considered this. Chalzaster had no patience for anything mundane or magic-dead, so every person with him had surely been a wizard, or possibly a cleric. All had died quickly, according to the power they held: most of them in the act of attacking, the great Chalzaster in mid-spell. But the elf woman, a creature whose essence and body and soul were fashioned of magic as surely as a rainbow was made of light, had been drained so quickly that she had left nothing but a transparent, profoundly empty image. Zilgorn had never heard of such a thing, but he knew death well-well enough to see his own death foretold by the bones of Chalzaster, and his pretensions of magical power mocked by the elf's frozen ghost.

The necromancer stiffened. "Away from here! Flee this place at once!"

The panic in his voice lent wings to the other men's feet. They charged from the ruined temple and stumbled frantically down the narrow path.

They pulled up short at the water's edge, eyeing the dark, simmering surface as they struggled to calm their frenzied breathing and quiet their pounding hearts.

Quiet.

It occurred to Zilgorn suddenly that the swamp had become eerily silent At twilight, the swamp usually seethed with life, but no crocodiles roared from the shallows, no birds shrieked or twittered in the canopy, no monkeys scolded. Even the insects had stopped humming. The swamp itself seemed to be huddled down, wary and watchful.