Shadowrealm (23 page)

When he had, he fixed hope on his face and returned to his covered wagon, found Endren and Elden within. Elden's brown eyes brightened when Abelar entered.

"Papa!"

He hugged Elden while Endren looked a question at him. Abelat shook his head in answer. Endren sagged.

"You all wight, Papa?"

"I'm all right," Abelat said to his son, and cradled his head. But he was not. Nothing was all right. His body was with his son but his thoughts kept returning to his company.

S

Cale, Riven, and Rivalen materialized in a dust-choked courtyard. The ground shook and Cale imagined the earth upon which the temple stood cracking, crumbling, falling into the annihilating hole devouring the world.

"All right?" he asked Riven, and the assassin nodded.

"As am I," Rivalen said, though Cale had not asked.

They did not have much time. In the distance, he heard the moans of thousands of specters. The undead would find them, if the world did not end first.

A sculpture of glistening black stone dominated the courtyard. It depicted a tall, faceless woman in flowing robes. A circle of tarnished silver, ringed in amethysts, adorned her breast.

Before her in a fighting crouch stood a shorter male figure, a man clad in a long cloak. Leather armor peaked from under the cloak and he held a slim blade in each hand. A black disc adorned his chest.

The three men stared at the statue a long while, the implications freezing them in place. Shock stole anything Cale might have wanted to say. He heard his heart in his ears. Riven and Rivalen, too, seemed dumbfounded.

The shaking ground and the toar of a collapsing world roused them from stupor.

"How?" Riven said. "Is that... ? That cannot be right."

Cale just shook his head, staring at the statue, seeing in the male figure the form of the god he had faced in an alley in Selgaunt.

It could not be what it appeared to be.

Rivalen glided forward to the statue, and the shadows around him stilled. He stared at the sculpture for a time then whispered a prayer. Kneeling, he brushed dirt and dust away from a pedestal of silvery metal to reveal engraved words, weathered by age. He waved a hand over the letters, mouthed a couplet, and his magic undid the weathering. The writing appeared clear against the stone.

Cale didn't recognize the jagged script and didn't want to know what it said. The statue was enough. The affinity between his power and Rivalen's was enough. He needed no more, wanted to know nothing more. He held his mask balled up in his hand. Shadows leaked from between his fingers.

"Do not," he said, knowing what Rivalen intended.

Rivalen looked over his shoulder, his golden eyes afire.

"How can I not? We must know."

Cale remembered his discussion with Mask on the Wayrock, remembered what the god had left unsaid.

Do you serve her? Cale had asked.

He didn't want an answer.

"Why must we know?" Cale asked.

Rivalen smiled, showing fangs. "You know why."

He cast a spell that Cale recognized as one that would allow the prince to understand any written words. The ground shook as the magic took effect and the Shadovar prince read aloud.

"The Mistress of Night and the Shadowlord, her... herald."

The word hung in the gloom, the three men processing the import. Like Ephyras itself, Cale's world shook, circled the edge of a bottomless hole. The shadows around him whirled and spun.

"Herald?" Riven asked.

Cale tried to keep his feet, his bearings. He clutched his mask so hard it made his fingers ache. "We've been played," he said finally. "Mask and Shar are not enemies. They are allies."

Riven stared at him, mouth partly open. "No."

"Riven..."

The assassin shook his head. "No, Cale. No. There is another explanation."

"What explanation?" Cale said, and darkness shot from his flesh. "We freed Kesson Rel. Kesson Rel caused the Shadowstorm. Mask wanted it all the time. We've been duped. He is her herald. Her herald, Riven."

Riven paced a circle, agitated. He glared at Rivalen as if it were the Shadovar who had betrayed them. "No. Freeing Kesson was an accident. We were supposed to kill him."

"So we thought," Cale said. "But Mask knew. He always knows."

"It's too much, Cale," Riven said. "Even for a god. No."

Cale made a gesture that took in the dead world around them. "This is what we've wrought. Look at it. We killed Toril."

Saying the words placed the weight of what they had done squarely on Cale's shoulders. He sagged, wanted to sit down, to sleep. He had been trying to become a hero. Instead, he had unwittingly ended the world.

Riven stopped pacing, took a deep breath, a deliberate calm. "I don't believe it. We're not seeing something—something fundamental."

"We see it," Cale said. "It's just ugly."

"We don't," Riven insisted. "And stop giving up, damn it. You aren't what Fleet wanted you to be so you want to quit. To the Hells with Fleet."

Anger caused the shadows around Cale to whirl. Shame caused his face to warm. He advanced on Riven but his anger faded before he had taken two steps.

"I am not giving up. I just... this is the opposite of what I've been trying to do."

"There is something you have not considered," Rivalen said, his deep voice cutting through the space between Cale and Riven.

Cale had almost forgotten the Shadovar was present. They looked at him, waited.

"Kesson Rel is a heretic," Rivalen said. "Shar tolerates him but he does not serve her. She wants me to stop him. If Mask is allied with her, then he wants you to stop him, too."

Cale nodded at Rivalen's holy symbol. "How do you know he's the heretic? Maybe she only tolerates you and it's Kesson who serves her. Maybe you've been played, same as us."

Rivalen tilted his head to concede the point. "We'll know soon enough. I intend to drive back the Shadowstorm. He intends the opposite. Which of us prevails is the true servant of the Lady. To succeed, I need you."

Riven clutched at Rivalen's words, nodded as if he and the Shadovar were blood brothers. "He's right. And there's more to this, Cale. We cannot see it all, but we need to keep faith."

"Faith," Cale said, the word bitter and dry in his mouth.

Riven nodded at Rivalen. "He wants to stop the Shadowstorm. You want to stop it. That's enough. We see it through."

Cale heard in Riven's statement an echo of Mask's words to him back on the Wayrock.

See it through.

Perhaps there was something he could not see. He decided to think so. He had no other course. The alternative was calamitous. To do nothing was to allow the Shadowstorm to spread across Toril, to turn it into Ephyras.

"Faith, then," he said to Riven, and uncurled his fingers from around his mask. He held it up, looked through the empty eyeholes. "I hope we're right."

"We are," Riven said.

Cale gathered himself, licked the dust of Ephyras from his lips and asked Rivalen, "The weapon we came for is in the temple?"

"Yes, but I do not know where exactly," Rivalen said. "Describe it. Of name it."

With either a description or a name, Cale could divine its location.

The ground shook again. The rumble of crashing earth sounded close. Too close.

"The Black Chalice," Rivalen said.

Cale and Riven shared a look as the walls of Fate closed in a little closer. The spirit of Avnon Des had told them of the Black Chalice back on the Plane of Shadow, had told them Kesson Rel had drunk of it in defiance of his god.

"The chalice is a weapon?" Cale said.

Rivalen hesitated long enough for Cale to conclude that he either didn't know or was about to lie.

"A drink from it transforms a Chosen of Mask," Rivalen said.

Cale had been transformed enough already. "Into what?" Rivalen stared into his face, finally shrugged. "I do not know."

Riven cursed. "You don't know? How can you not know?"

Cale held up a hand to forestall anything further. "Doesn't matter." They had no choice. He held his mask in hand and spoke the words to a divination. When the spell reached its apex, he spoke the words of the item he sought.

"The Black Chalice."

The shadows spiraling around Weaveshear coalesced into a single, thick stream and flowed toward the temple. The weapon tugged at his hands, pulled him along. Cale felt like a fish who had just taken the bait.

"Follow me," he said.

----------Ł-

The rain grew worse as Regg and the company approached the border of the Shadowstorm. Lightning veined the sky. Thunder shook the earth. The wall of black loomed, churned,

spun. The Shadowstorm became Regg's world. He could not take his eyes from it.

"Dawn follows night," he said to himself. "Always."

Animals fled before the storm as though it were a forest fire—birds, rabbits, deer, foxes. The creatures broke around the company, howling, chittering, squeaking.

Regg said nothing to his company. He didn't need to. None wavered. They served the Morninglord and feared no darkness.

The wall of the Shadowstorm loomed before them, tangible, a black veil that hung across the world, separating the before from the after. It pulsed and expanded as they watched, lurched forward like a serpent, gulping the land. The grass and trees writhed at its touch, twisted into bleak caricatures of themselves.

"Light!" Regg shouted, and Roen and his priests withdrew wooden wands capped with ivory and held them aloft. Light blazed from the wands' tips. Magical daylight defied the darkness.

Thunder boomed.

Regg spared a look up and down his line. Men and women faced the darkness with blades and shields bare, light above them, light in their eyes.

"Onward," he called.

So illuminated, two hundred and fifty servants of the Morninglord breached the Shadowstorm, and Lathander's light did battle with Shar's darkness.

The wards on the members of the company shed motes of rosy light as the life-draining darkness of the storm eroded theit efficacy. Darkness crowded close around the wands wielded by Roen and his fellows, dimming but not eliminating their luminescence.

Regg had no strategy other than to fight and survive as long as they could. He hoped to draw out the intelligence guiding the

storm, give it pause, slow the storm's advance, and win the Saerbians some extra hours to wait for Cale and Riven to succeed.

The company walked through a rain soaked nightmare land of twisted, wind-stripped trees, and shriveled grass and shrubs. Nothing moved. It was only them and the storm. No one in the company spoke, except to give occasional orders. All had their eyes on the darkness around them.

"There," said Trewe, and pointed ahead.

Two dozen pairs of red eyes materialized in the darkness before them, rose up out of a copse of twisted trees. They started dim and distant, but grew bright as they closed.

"Shadows," Regg said.

Trewe's trumpet did battle with the thunder as two dozen living shadows streaked out of the darkness, red eyes bright with hate. They uttered a high-pitched keening as they closed, the sound enough to raise the hairs on Regg's neck.

"Roen!" Regg shouted. "Your junior priests with me!"

Four of Roen's junior priests rushed forward to Regg's side, their armor clattering.

The shadows shrieked, closed.

Regg held forth his shield, enameled with Lathander's rose, and the priests brandished their holy symbols. Regg waited until the shadows were within twenty paces.

"Now," he said.

He and the priests channeled divine power and their symbols luminesced. Power went out from them in a wave of pale light and hit the advancing shadows.

The shadows' keening died with them. The Morninglord's power turned all two dozen into stinking ribbons of black vapor dispersed by the wind.

"Perhaps they know we're here now," Regg said to the priests.

Thunder tumbled and lightning flashed. When the spots cleared from Regg's vision, he saw that his words had been prophetic. Ahead, so many pairs of eyes blinked into existence in

the darkness that they looked like a clear night sky filled with red stars. There were thousands upon thousands.

"Gods," Trewe said, and faltered in his steps.

Regg did not know how much time the company's stand would earn the refugees, but he intended to acquaint the datk-ness with Lathander's light.

"Ready yourselves, men and women of Lathander!" he shouted.

CHAPTER TWELVE

6 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms

Cale, Riven, and Rivalen left behind the statue of Shar and Mask and strode across the crumbling earth for the double doors of the temple. Octagonal gongs flanked the doorway.

Cale eyed Rivalen sidelong and reminded himself not to trust the Shadovar, shared interest or no. Cale's god might serve Shar, but Cale did not serve a Sharran.

"The doors are enspelled," Rivalen said. He held forth his holy symbol and incanted a counterspell without breaking stride. The doors, carved from a rich black wood and inscribed with writings in the same script as that on the statue, clicked and swung open. A lingering spell caused the gongs to sound a deep, funereal chime. Dry air carried the fading, distant

smell of incense. Cale swore he heard whispers in the wind but they faded before he could make out any words.

Riven bounded inside, blades bare and leaking shadows.

"Nothing," the assassin called back.

Cale let Rivalen follow then fell in behind him.

Behind them, the moans of the specters grew louder. Cale looked back, saw the gray cloud of spirits rise into the sky and hurtle toward the temple.

"Quickly," he said.

Following the pull of his divination, Cale led them through a black-tiled foyer, vaulted halls, and darkened corridors. Shadows swam in languid spirals within the crystalline walls, or coalesced from nothingness in the air before them. For a reason he could not articulate, Cale thought of the Fane of Shadows.

They found all of the halls and chambers empty even of debris. The structure remained intact but it had been gutted, a mummified version of a temple with only a hint of a dark past to haunt its halls.