The Cleric Quintet: Canticle
Prologue

 
Aballister Bonaduce looked long and hard at the shimmering image in his mirror. Mountains of wind-driven snow and ice lay endlessly before him, the most forbidding place in all the Realms. All he had to do was step through the mirror, onto the Great Glacier.
"Are you coming, Druzil?" the wizard said to his bat-winged imp.
Druzil folded his leathery wings around him as if to privately consider the question. "I am not so fond of the cold," he said, obviously not wanting to partake of this particular hunt. "Nor am I,"
Aballister said, slipping onto his finger an enchanted ring that would protect him from the killing cold. "But only on the Great Glacier does the yote grow." Aballister looked back to the scene in the magical mirror, one final barrier to the completion of his quest and the beginning of his conquests. The snowy region was quiet now, though dark clouds hung ominously overhead and promised an impending storm that would delay the hunt, perhaps for many days.
"There we must go," Aballister continued, talking more to himself than to the imp. His voice trailed away as he sank within his memories, to the turning point in his life more than two years before, in the Time of Troubles. He had been powerful even then, but directionless.
The avatar of the goddess Talona had shown him the way.
Aballister's grin became an open chuckle as he turned back to regard Druzil, the imp who had delivered to him the method to best please the Lady of Poison. "Come, dear Druzil," Aballister said. "You brought the recipe for the chaos curse. You must come along and help to find its last ingredient."
The imp straightened and unfolded his wings at the mention of the chaos curse. This time he offered no arguments. A lazy flap brought him to Aballister's shoulder and together they walked through the magical mirror and into the blowing wind.
* * * * *
The hunched and hairy creature, resembling a more primitive form of human, grunted and growled and threw its crude spear, though Aballister and Druzil were surely far out of range. It howled again anyway, triumphantly, as though its throw had served some symbolic victory, and scooted back to the large gathering of its shaggy white kin.
"I believe they do not wish to bargain," Druzil said, shuffling about from clawed foot to clawed foot on Aballister's shoulder.
The wizard understood his familiar's excitement. Druzil was a creature of the lower planes, a creature of chaos, and he wanted desperately to see his wizard master deal with the impudent fools-just an added pleasure to this long-awaited, victorious day.
"They are taer," Aballister explained, recognizing the tribe, "crude and fierce. You are quite correct. They'll not bargain." Aballister's eyes flashed suddenly and Druzil hopped again and clapped his hands together.
"They know not the might before them!" Aballister cried, his voice rising with his ire. All the terrible trials of two long and brutal years rolled through the wizard's thoughts in the span of a few seconds. A hundred men had died in search of the elusive ingredients for the chaos curse; a hundred men had given their lives so that Talona would be pleased. Aballister, too, had not escaped unscathed. Completing the curse had become his obsession, the driving force in his life, and he had aged with every step, had torn out clumps of his own hair every time the curse seemed to be slipping beyond his reach. Now he was close, so close that he could see the dark patch of yote just beyond the small ridge that held the taer cave complexes. So close, but these wretched, idiotic creatures stood in his way.
Aballister's words had stirred the taer. They grumbled and hopped about in the shadow of the jagged mountain, shoving each other forward as if trying to select a leader to start their charge.
"Do something quickly," Druzil suggested from his perch. Aballister looked up at him and nearly laughed.
"They will attack," Druzil explained, trying to sound unconcerned, "and, worse, this cold stiffens my wings."
Aballister nodded at the imp's rationale. Any delay could cost him, especially if the dark clouds broke into a blinding blizzard, one that would hide both the yote and the shimmering doorway back to Aballister's comfortable room. He pulled out a tiny ball, a mixture of bat guano and sulphur, crushed it in his fist, and pointed one finger at the group of taer. His chant echoed off the mountain face and back across the empty glacier ice, and he smiled, thinking it wonderfully ironic that the stupid taer had no idea of what he was doing. A moment later, they found out.
Just before his spell discharged, Aballister had a cruel thought and lifted the angle of his pointing finger. The fireball exploded above the heads of the startled taer, disintegrating the frozen bindings of the ice mountain. Huge blocks rained down, and a great rush of water swallowed those who had not been crushed. Several of the band floundered about in the ice and liquid morass, too stunned and overwhelmed to gain then-footing as the pool quickly solidified around them.
One pitiful creature did manage to struggle free, but Druzil hopped off Aballister's shoulder and swooped down upon him. The imp's claw-tipped tail whipped out as he passed by the stumbling creature, and Aballister applauded heartily.
The taer clutched at its stung shoulder, looked curiously at the departing imp, then fell dead to the ice.
"What of the rest?" Druzil asked, landing back on his perch. Aballister considered the remaining taer, most dead, but some struggling fertilely against the tightening grip of ice.
"Leave them to their slow deaths," he replied, and he laughed evilly again.
Druzil gave him an incredulous look, "The Lady of Poison would not approve," the imp said, wagging his wicked tail before him with one hand.
"Very well," Aballister replied, though he realized that Druzil was more interested in pleasing himself than Talona. Still, the reasoning was sound; poison was always the accepted method for completing Talona's work. "Go and finish the task," Aballister instructed the imp. "I will get the yote."
A short while later, Aballister plucked the last gray-brown mushroom from its stubborn grasp on the glacier and dropped it into his bag. He called over to Druzil, who was toying with the last whining taer, snapping his tail back and forth around the terrified creature's frantically jerking head-the only part of the taer that was free of the ice trap.
"Enough," Aballister said firmly.
Druzil sighed and looked mournfully at the approaching wizard. Aballister's visage did not soften.
"Enough," he said again.
Druzil bent over and kissed the taer on the nose. The creature stopped whimpering and looked at him curiously, but Druzil only shrugged and drove his poison-tipped stinger straight into the taer's weepy eye.
The imp eagerly accepted the offered perch on Aballister's shoulder Aballister let him hold the bag of yote, just to remind the somewhat distracted imp that more important matters awaited them beyond the shimmering door.