Free The Ghost King by R.A. Salvatore

dwarf cried, his voice modulating in volume as if carried on gigantic intermittent winds.
    “Stay away from it!” Jarlaxle warned, and he felt a slight push at his back, compelling him toward the starry spot, the rift, he knew, to the Astral Plane.
    Athrogate began to flail wildly, suddenly afraid, for he was not far from that dangerous place. He began to spin head over heels and all around, but the gyrations proved irrelevant to his inexorable drift toward the stars.
    “Not like that!” Jarlaxle called.
    “How, ye stupid elf?”
    For Jarlaxle, the solution was easy. His drift carried him beside a tree, still rooted solidly in the firmament. He grabbed on with one hand and held himself easily in place, and knew that an easy push would propel him away from the rift. That was exactly what it was, Jarlaxle knew, a tear in the fabric of the Prime Material Plane, the result of mixing the energies of two extra-dimensional spaces. For Jarlaxle, who carried items of holding that created extra-dimensional pockets larger than their apparent capacity, a pair of belt pouches that did the same, and several other trinkets that could facilitate similar dweomers, the consequences of mingling them was not unknown or unexpected.
    What surprised him, though, was that his extra-dimensional hole had reacted in such a way with that shadowy being. All he’d hoped to do was trap the thing within the magical hole when it tried to flow back into the plane of the living.
    “Throw something at it!” Jarlaxle cried, and as Athrogate lifted his arm as if to launch one of his morningstars, the drow added, “Something you never need to retrieve!”
    Athrogate held his throw at the last moment then pulled his heavy pack off his back. He waited until he spun around, then heaved it at the rift. The opposite reaction sent the dwarf floating backward, away from the tear—far enough for Jarlaxle to take a chance with a rope. He threw an end out toward Athrogate, close enough for the dwarf to grasp, and as soon as Athrogateheld on, the drow tugged hard and brought the dwarf sailing toward him, then right past.
    Jarlaxle took note that Athrogate drifted only a few feet before exiting the area of weightlessness and falling hard to his rump. His eyes never leaving the curious starscape that loomed barely ten strides away, Jarlaxle pushed himself back and dropped to stand beside Athrogate as the dwarf pulled himself to his feet.
    “What’d’ye do?” the dwarf asked in all seriousness.
    “I have no idea,” Jarlaxle replied.
    “Worked, though,” Athrogate offered.
    Jarlaxle, not so certain of that, merely smirked.
    They kept watch over the rift for a short while, and gradually the phenomenon dissipated, the wilderness returning to its previous firmament with no discernable damage. All was as it had been, except that the specter was gone.
    * * * * *
    “Still going east?” Athrogate asked as he and Jarlaxle started out the next day.
    “That was the plan.”
    “The plan to win.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m thinkin’ we won last night,” the dwarf said.
    “We defeated a minion,” Jarlaxle explained. “It has always been my experience that defeating a minion of a powerful foe only makes that foe angrier.”
    “So we should’ve let the shadow thing win?”
    Jarlaxle’s sigh elicited a loud laugh from Athrogate.
    On they went through the day, and at camp that night, Jarlaxle dared to allow himself some time in Reverie.
    And there, in his own subconscious, Hephaestus found him again.
    Clever drow
, the dracolich said in his mind.
Did you truly believe you could so easily escape me?
    Jarlaxle threw up his defenses in the form of images of Menzoberranzan, the great Underdark city. He concentrated on a distinct memory, of a battle his mercenary band had waged on behalf of Matron Mother Baenre. In that fight, a much younger Jarlaxle had engaged two separate weapons mastersright in front of the doors of Melee-Magthere, the drow school of martial training. It