Cale did not turn, did not rise, refused to bow. His heart raced but he stared at Jak’s grave and kept a tremor from his voice.
“You are not welcome here, not now.”
“Why? Because you are communing with your dead friend instead of your god?”
“Yes. You are unwelcome.”
“So you said, but you called me. I heard you.”
Perhaps Cale had. He did not know anymore. Perhaps his soul whispered to the darkness in a voice the rest of him could not hear.
“Since when do you answer my call? You are a liar.”
Mask chuckled. “Quite so.” The god’s tone changed, took a threatening cast. “And speaking of liars. You have been a naughty priest, talking with archfiends.”
Cale’s breath caught. His heart lurched. The darkness around him roiled.
“You thought I did not know? Tut, tut. I see clearly into darkness and there’s no darker place than your soul.”
The words mirrored Cale’s own thoughts, but he summoned what defiance he could. “Then you know what I promised him and what that means for my promise to you.”
The shadows darkened, tightened around him, their embrace a restraint rather than an embrace. Mask spoke with a voice as hard and sharp as a vorpal blade.
“Those promises are yours to keep, priest. I will hold you to your word.”
Cale managed a half turn of his head, but saw only shadow, darkness. “You are a bastard.”
“Yes”
“I hate you.”
Mask chuckled. “It is not me that you hate. I understand your true feelings all too well.”
Cale refused to follow the words where they led. Irritation made him rash. “Do you still have that hole I put in your armor? Show yourself and I’ll give you another.”
Mask’s chuckle faded. “I keep it as a souvenir of our meeting. Do you still have that hole I put in you?”
Cale tensed. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Cale did. The shadows were hollowing him out, turning him into a shell of a man.
“I’d do it again, too.”
“That’s why you’re a bastard.”
“Among other reasons,” Mask said. “Some men in your situation would be grateful to me. What I gave you allows you to save those you want to save, to harm those you want to harm. I made you more than a man.”
But I can’t save myself, Cale wanted to scream. His anger boiled over, exploded out of him in a burst of words and darkness.
“This,” he fought through the restraints and held out his arms as the shadows roiled around his flesh, “has not made me more than a man. It’s made me less.”
Mask said nothing for a moment, then, “You understand that much sooner than I did.”
The words startled Cale. He started to stand but the shadows solidified, held him still, a penitent before Jak’s grave.
“Who are you?” Cale asked. “What are you?”
Mask sighed. “I am what I am. Once a man, then a god, then a herald of something … awkward. But always a thief and a debtor. Same as you.”
Cale did not feel up to parsing the words of his god. “I am tired.”
“So you said.”
“You are, too, yes?”
Mask said nothing.
Cale continued, “Tell me what is happening.”
“The Shadowstorm is come. Our debts are coming due. You understand well about debts. You’re as Sembian as anyone actually born there.”
“What kind of debts? Who pays?”
Mask spoke softly. “Old ones. And we all pay. It is not for me to break the cycle. Perhaps another will, in another place, another time.”
“What do you mean?” Cale asked.
“You keep your promise to me, priest, or the Shadowstorm will swallow all of Sembia. So complain to your dead friend, then go to what used to be Ordulin.”
“Used to be?”
“See it through, priest. Things are almost at an end.”
Cale’s anger forced shadows from his skin. He picked up a stone from Jak’s cairn, balanced it in his palm. He held Aril’s stone in one hand, Jak’s in the other.
“I will see it though. But not for you.”
He felt Mask at his side, felt the god’s breath on his cheek.
“I know. That is why I chose you for this. I want to tell you something, something I have said too rarely to those I’ve … harmed.”
Cale froze, fearful of what would follow. Shadows leaked from him in pulses, an echo of his racing heart. “I’m sorry,” Mask said.
Cale heard sincerity in the words. He tried to turn, but failed.
“You said you were a herald? Of what?” A thought crossed his mind, then, an awful possibility. “Do you … serve her?”
But the moment was lost. Mask was already gone. The sound of the distant surf returned. Cale remembered to breathe. It took him some time to recover and when he did, he put a hand on Jak’s grave.
“I will do what I can, little man.”
When he dissolved the shadows around him, he found the Shadowwalkers no longer on the drawbridge. He stood and rode the shadows into the temple. He turned his form to shadow, invisible to ordinary sight, even that of the Shadowwalkers, and walked the halls seeking Magadon. He found the mind mage alone in a small, stone-walled meditation chamber, balled up in the corner. Faint starlight shot through a high, narrow window and divided the cell in half, light and dark, a line separating Cale from Magadon.
Stress lined the mind mage’s face; his hands were fists. A vein pulsed in his temple, the visible manifestation of the storm raging behind his closed eyes. He murmured to himself. Cale could not understand the words.
Cale shed his shadows, turned visible.
“Mags.”
Magadon shook his head, murmured louder, wrapped his arms more tightly around his legs, as if trying to hold himself together.
“Magadon.”
“Leave me alone!”
“Mags, it’s me. Erevis.”
Magadon opened his eyes, the movement so slow his eyelids could have been made of lead. The whites of the mind mage’s eyes glowed in the darkness.
“Cale.”
The mind mage’s voice sounded far away, and Cale wondered in what far realm his thoughts had been wandering.
Cale stepped into the cell, across the spear of starlight, and kneeled beside his friend. Magadon smelled of old sweat, a sick room. Cale put a hand on Magadon’s shoulder.
“Are you all right?”
The black dots of Magadon’s pupils pinioned Cale. “No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
Cale stood, extended a hand to Magadon. “On your feet.”
Magadon took his hand, rose.
“I’ll fix this, Mags. I’m going now.”
Magadon licked his lips and blinked away sleep. “I want to come with you. I should be part of it.”
“You know you cannot be there. But I want you to link us and keep us linked. Can you? Or is it too much?”
Magadon consulted his will, nodded. “I can do it.”
“If you need me, if anything happens, if you … start slipping, you tell me.”
Magadon held his eyes for a moment then nodded.
“No farther, Mags.”
Magadon smiled, and Cale saw in it the last bit of hope wrung from the husk of his deteriorating mental state.
“There’s not much farther to fall, Cale,” Magadon said.
“Do it,” Cale said.
Magadon closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. He winced as a red glow flared around his head. Cale felt the irritating itch root behind his eyes, the effect of the opening mental connection.
It will need to be latent most of the time, Magadon projected.
Cale noted that Magadon’s mental voice sounded deeper than it had previously, more like his father’s voice.
If you need me, Cale said. Tell me and I’ll come.
Magado
n nodded. Cale squeezed his shoulder and left him with his thoughts, with the war in his skull. The moment he left the cell, he felt the connection go latent.
Cale sought Nayan, found him sitting alone in a dining hall lit only by the two thin tapers melting away into their holders. Looking upon him sitting there, Cale decided that the Wayrock Temple had become a mausoleum, where the dead and dying sat alone in dark stone rooms.
The small man wore a loose shirt and trousers and a sense of purpose. He stood as Cale entered. A plate of bread and cheese sat on the table before him. Cale was distantly pleased that Nayan had not heard him approach.
“Sit,” Cale said. “Eat.”
Nayan tilted his head in gratitude. His body sat but his eyes never left Cale’s face.
“The Shadowlord visits you in physical form,” Nayan said.
“Sometimes.”
“You are blessed.”
Cale chucked. “So you say. Nayan, I need you and the others to remain here and watch over Magadon.”
Nayan’s expression did not change, but the shadows around him surged. “You are leaving?”
“For a time. With Riven.”
“We would accompany you. Serving the Right and Left hands of the Shadowlord is what brought us here.”
“You will be serving me by watching my friend. He cannot be left alone. But he cannot come with me.”
Nayan studied Cale’s face, and finally nodded. “Where are you going?”
Cale thought about the answer for a moment. “To kill a god,” he said, and exited the hall to find Riven. He found the assassin in the central hall on the second story, his two dogs in tow. They wagged their tails at Cale but did not leave their master’s side.
A question lodged in the lines of Riven’s brow, then smoothed into an answer.
“Found something, after all, I see.”
Riven could read him.
“Something,” Cale acknowledged, thinking of Mask, of Magadon, of Jak.
“What next, then?” Riven asked.
The shadows around Cale swirled. “We tell Abelar the nature of the Shadowstorm so he can get the refugees out of its path.”
“Then?”
“We kill Kesson Rel. Or die trying. Mags is nearly gone.” Riven inhaled, nodded. “Plan?”
“Go to Ordulin. Find him. Kill him.”
Riven chuckled through his goatee. “Must have taken you a while to come up with that.”
Cale smiled despite himself. He still found the rare demonstrations of Riven’s humor as incongruous as beardless cheeks on a dwarf.
“That double of him that we fought back in the Calyx,” Riven said. “The real him will be stronger than that.”
Cale nodded. “I know.”
Riven looked away, nodding, finally bent down and pet his dogs, the gesture one of farewell. He stood.
“There’s nothing for it. Let’s gear up.”
CHAPTER FOUR
4 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms
Brennus held his mother’s platinum necklace in his palm. The facets of the large jacinths caught the dim light of the glowballs and sparkled like flames.
“Pretty,” said the homunculi perched on his shoulder.
He nodded. His father had given it to his mother thousands of years earlier, on the night she died. Her body had been found in her chambers that night, as though she had died in her sleep, but the missing necklace suggested something else—murder. Despite a magical and mundane search of first the palace then the city, the murderer and the necklace had never been found.
Until recently.
Brennus had found the necklace buried in the soft earth of a meadow in a Sembian forest while he had been trying to determine the whereabouts of Erevis Cale’s woman, Varra. Varra, pursued by living shadows, had inexplicably disappeared from the face of Faerûn. Brennus had scoured the meadow from which she’d vanished. He’d found no clue to Varra’s fate, but had found one to his mother’s.
The find unnerved him. He recalled Rivalen’s words about the involvement of Mask and Shar in the events unfolding in Sembia. Like Rivalen, Brennus did not accept coincidence.
He turned the necklace over, eyed the inscription on the charm, the words of another age resurrected from a shallow Sembian grave: For Alashar, my love.
He had mentioned the necklace to no one, not Rivalen or his other brothers, not his father. The necklace had torn open the scab of long forgotten grief, returned to him memories and feelings buried with his mother’s body centuries ago. Perhaps that was why he had not shared his find with his brothers or father. He saw no reason to raise their grief from the dead.
He had cast numerous divinations on the necklace to ensure its authenticity, used it as the focus for other divinations, all in an effort to determine his mother’s true fate, and all to no avail. Thousands of years had passed since her death. He knew the murderer was dead. But he still had to know the truth. He owed his mother that much.
He had been closer to his mother than any of his brothers. She nurtured his love of constructs, clapped with delight at the first gear-driven wood and leather automatons he had built as a boy. He mastered the art of divination only later, at his father’s urging, to learn the truth of his mother’s fate.
But the truth had eluded him then, as it did now, and now the inquiry must wait still longer. He needed to turn his Art fully to Erevis Cale, to Kesson Rel, to the Shadowstorm. He and Rivalen needed information if they were to fulfill the Most High’s charge to annex Sembia and make it the economic workhorse of the reborn Empire of Netheril. To that end, they were to leave the realm only mildly scarred by war.
The Shadowstorm would leave more than mild scars were it not stopped soon.
He puzzled only a little over the religious implications of the fact that two of Shar’s most powerful servants, Rivalen the Nightseer and Kesson Rel the Divine One, seemed at cross-purposes in Sembia’s fate. Brennus’s faith in Shar started and ended with nothing more than words, and those mostly to appease his father and Rivalen. Belief did not sink below the surface in him. Whatever conflict existed in the Sharran church, it was a matter for Rivalen to answer for himself. Though he would also answer to the Most High should he be unable to stop Kesson Rel.
Brennus put his mother’s necklace in an inner pocket, near his heart. A sudden sensory memory struck him—the smell of her dark hair. The shadows around him swirled. He recalled her laughter, the crisp, unrestrained sound of it. …
“Home now?” his homunculi said in unison, bringing him back to himself.
“Yes,” Brennus said. He pulled the darkness around him, pictured in his mind the circular divination chamber in his manse on Shade Enclave, and rode the shadows there.
He smiled when he felt the air change. Unlike the moist air of Selgaunt, rich with the tang of the sea, the cool air of the enclave bore the dense, aggressive aridity of the great desert over which the city flew, though it wouldn’t be a desert for much longer.
Ephemeral ribbons of shadow formed and dissolved in the murk, the welcome tenebrous air of home. A domed ceiling of dusky quartz soared over the circular chamber in which Brennus performed his most challenging divinations. Dim stars peered down through the quartz, diffident pinpoints of light that barely penetrated the haze.
“Home,” his homunculi said, their voices gleeful. They leaped from their shoulder perches and pelted across the polished floor of the chamber, sniffing at the floor and occasionally squealing with delight.
“Mouse turd,” one of them said, holding a tiny mouse pellet aloft like a trophy.
Brennus smiled and shook his head at their foolishness. He intoned the words to a sending spell and transmitted a message to his seneschal, Lhaaril.
I am returned to Shade Enclave for a short time to work my Art. In four hours I will take a meal.
Lhaaril returned, I will have it prepared. Welcome home, Prince Brennus.
Brennus gave the homunculi some time to frolic then walked to the center of the scrying cham
ber where stood a cube of tarnished silver, half again as tall as a man and positioned to take advantage of the invisible lines of magical force that veined the world. His homunculi, having completed their olfactory reunion with their home, climbed his robes and resumed their normal place atop his shoulders.
He held an open palm before one of the cube’s faces. His homunculi mimicked his movement, giggling. Shadows extended from his hand and brushed the cube. At their touch the silvery face took on depth. Black tarnish swirled slowly on its surface, a cloudy ocean of molten metal.
When the cube fully activated, Brennus began his inquiry. He cast one divination after another, scoured the past and the present, and the entire face of Faerûn. Shadows and sweat leaked from his flesh. He worked in silence and his homunculi soon grew bored and fell asleep on their perches, bookending his ears. Their snores did not affect his concentration.
Despite the comprehensiveness of his magic, Brennus’s spells resulted mostly in frustration. He learned nothing of Varra; she remained … absent. And he learned nothing of Erevis Cale, his activities or location. The power that warded him allowed him to slip the grasp of any attempted divination. Brennus suspected that Mask himself might cloak Cale.
Brennus did learn of the world from which Kesson Rel hailed, a cold world of which Brennus’s most powerful spells revealed little more than a name—Ephyras—and the promise of darkness as deep as the void. He pulled back before pushing his spells further. The hole felt too deep. He feared falling into it.
He turned his spells back to Faerûn and another series of divinations showed the swirling darkness of the Shadowstorm as it roiled across Sembia, deforming and transforming the life with which it came into contact. It grew in strength as it expanded. The currents of negative energy swirling invisibly in its midst could drain the life from a man in a matter of hours.
Within the storm, Brennus saw the ever growing army of shadows, their numbers legion. He saw the regiments of towering, pallid, shadow giants clad in gray armor and darkness, saw the spire of Kesson Rel’s otherworldly abode hovering like an executioner’s blade over the twisted, shadow-haunted ruins of Ordulin, and saw in the tortured sky a slowly turning maelstrom of shadow and dull viridian light, the rictus of the planar rift vomiting up the corrupting darkness of the Plane of Shadow. Repeated lightning strokes flashed between the clouds and the spire. The sight of it made Brennus dizzy. His homunculi stirred uneasily in their sleep, and one waved a hand before its face as if to shoo away a pest.