Shadowrealm (34 page)

Riven stopped pacing and glared him. "We have this power, we can do something else. There's another way."

Cale knew better. Even if they could defeat Mephistopheles, they could not do so before he destroyed what he had taken from Magadon. "Riven, it's the only way. Riven—"

Riven held up his hands, as if trying to stop Cale's words from charging toward him.

"Just give me a damned moment, Cale. A moment."

Cale waited, felt the power of the spell draining away. He shifted on his feet.

Riven looked up, his expression hard. "No, you're giving up again, Cale."

Emotion flooded Cale but he could not determine if it was anger or something else. He stepped forward and grabbed Riven by the cloak. The shadows around him engulfed them both, spun and whirled.

"I'm not! I'm fighting all the way." He calmed himself,

spoke in a softer voice, releasing Riven. "I'm fighting all the way, Riven."

Maybe Riven understood, maybe he didn't.

They stared at one another a long moment. Riven's face fell.

"How can it be the only way, Cale? After all this?"

Cale shook his head, smiling softly. "How can it not? How else could it end?"

Riven looked away, down. "You're doing this for him?"

"There's nothing else," Cale said. "Just us. That's the reason for everything. Understand?"

Riven looked up, his face stricken.

Cale held out a hand. "You've been my friend, Riven."

Riven's lower lip trembled. He clasped Cale's hand, pulled him close for an embrace.

Cale took Weaveshear by the blade,-handed it hilt first to Riven. The reality of his decision started to settle on him. His legs felt soft under him. His hand shook. Riven pretended not to notice.

1. "The fiend doesn't get this," Cale said. Riven took it, nodded.
   

"I will keep my promise," Cale said. "You keep ours to him. You remember it?"

Riven's face hardened. He nodded again. "I remember it."

Cale turned to Rivalen. "Keep your word, too, Shadovar."

Rivalen's face was expressionless, his eyes aglow.

Faces and memories poured through Cale's mind but he pushed them aside and pictured Cania. He drew the darkness around him.

At the last moment, he changed his mind and pictured not the icy wastes of the Eighth Hell but the face of a grateful boy, the boy who had once invited him into the light. It suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world that Cale see Aril, a boy he had met only once.

"Good-bye," Cale said to Riven.

Riven didn't speak, perhaps he couldn't. Eyes averted, he signed, "Farewell" in handcant.

Aril slept on his side, peaceful in his small bed. Blankets covered him to the neck. His head, with its mop of hair, poked from the bedding. Cale stared at the boy for a time, thinking of times past, friends and enemies, all of them the scar tissue of a lifetime. Aril slept peacefully, contentedly. Cale found the moment... fitting.

A boy sleeping safely in his bed, free of fear, with his whole life before him. He realized why he had needed to see Aril instead of Shamur, Tamlin, or Tazi. He wanted the last person he saw on Faerűn to be innocent.

He put the back of his shadow-dusted hand on the boy's cheek and thought of Jak.

"I did what I could."

He hoped it made a difference for someone, somewhere.

He stepped through the shadows and into the darkness outside the small cottage. The quietude of the village seemed alien after the chaos of the battlefied. He had only a short while before time back in the Shadowstorm would resume.

The smell of chimney fires filled the cool air. He glanced around the village. Three score cottages sat nestled around a tree-dotted commons, quiet, peaceful, safe. The two-story temple of Yondalla, the lone stone structure among the log and mud-brick buildings of the village, sat near the common's edge and rose protectively over the whole, a shepherd to the sheep. Smoke issued from the temple's two chimneys, filling the glen with the smell of cedar, and home. The hearths burned fragrant wood and were never allowed to grow cold.

Cale inhaled deeply. He fought back tears born in realizations come too late.

He allowed that on at least one night not long ago the village owed its safety not to Yondalla, but to him. He had killed a score of trolls while he had answered to Jak's ghost, while he tried to climb into the light.

But there was no answering to the dead, and the light was not for him. Not anymore. Not ever.

He looked up into the vault of the sky, unplagued by the roiling ink of the Shadowstorm. The Sea of Stars twinkled above him, Selune and her train of glowing Tears. He fancied he could see an absence in the celestial cluster circling the silver disc of the moon, the hole out of which one of the Tears had plummeted to Faerűn, the hole for which Jak had died, the hole mirrored in Cale's soul. He thought of the little man and his pipe, tried to smile, but failed. He had never filled the hole. And now he never would.

Power burned in him, cold, dark, near limitless. He could hear words spoken in the shadows on the other side of Toril, could rend mountains with his words. He knew more, sensed more, was more, than he could have imagined. His memories, Mask's memories, reached back thousands of years—before Ephyras even—recollections of deeds, people, and places long gone.

Melancholy shrouded him, wrapped him as thoroughly as the shadows. He understood Mask at last, but only now, at the end of things. He realized, too, that Mask had understood him, perhaps better than he had understood himself.

You wish to transcend, Mephistopheles had told him once.

Mask had said it to him, too, though not in words.

And Cale had wished to transcend, and so he would, though not in the way he had conceived.

He felt the connection to Riven back in Sembia, a connection that reached through time and distance. The assassin's grief, buried deeply but present, touched Cale. He swallowed the fist that formed in his throat.

They were friends, by the end. It had gone unacknowledged too long. He was glad they had said appropriate good-byes. The words had seemed small for so profound a moment. Cale would miss Riven, as he had Jak.

He reached into the pocket of his cloak and removed the small throwing stone Aril had given him. He had carried it for months, a reminder, a talisman of hope. The events involving Aril seemed ancient, something that had happened on another world, in another time. The smooth rock felt warm in his hand, solid.

"Shadowman," he whispered, recalling the name the half-lings had given him.

He placed the stone on the ground in the doorway of the cottage where Aril and his mother slept, a gravestone to mark his passing. The last thing his hand touched on Faerűn would be a river stone given him by a grateful halfing boy who had named him "Shadowman." He thought it fitting.

"Good-bye," he said, thinking not just of Aril.

He closed his eyes and readied himself. He did not lack for resolve but he still wanted the moment to stretch. An eternity passed between heartbeats. He savored the faint smell of pine carried by the westerly wind, the thrill of energy that permeated everything around him, all of Faerűn.

He had only seen it in full in that moment. He would miss it. He took comfort in the fact that he had helped preserve it, at least for a time.

Ready, he sank into the comforting familiarity of the darkness. It saturated him, warmed him. He knew the night now the way he knew his own skin. It was part of him. It was him.

He bade it good-bye, too, and stepped through the shadows, through the planes, to Cania.

The ordinary darkness of a Faerűnian night yielded to the soul-blighting darkness of the Hells. The reach of the time stop did not extend to Cania.

Cale sensed the cold of the Eighth Hell but his newfound power rendered him immune to its bite. But his enhanced senses and expanded consciousness made the horrors of the Eighth Hell more acute.

He stood on a wind-blasted plateau of cracked ice that overlooked a frozen plain cut by wide, jagged rivers of flame. Damned, agonized souls squirmed in the rivers, seethed in its heat like desperate, dying fish caught in a tidal pond. Others wandered the endless ice with empty expressions, dazed and frozen, their minds empty, their fates as cold and unforgiving as the air.

Towering, insectoid gelugons made playthings of the damned in the rivers, eviscerating, impaling, or flaying them as caprice took. Despair saturated the plane, a miasma as palpable as the cold and darkness. Shrieks of pain filled the wind, prolonged, agonized wails that Cale knew would never end. In the distance glaciers as old as the cosmos ground against each other and Cale felt in his bones the vibrations of their never-ending war.

The wind tore at his cloak, howled in his ears, and exhaled the stink of a charnel house, the reek of millions upon millions of dead who would spend eternity in pain. The suffering was eternal.

The darkness around Cale, the darkness that was Cale, swirled and churned. He felt the shadows of Cania, its deep and hidden places, its dark holes, but not as he felt them elsewhere. All shadows answered to Cale, but not to the same degree. Mephistopheles's power touched everything in Cania, tainted it, made it foreign even to Cale's divine consciousness. Cale forced Cania's darkness to answer his will and shrouded himself in its cover.

It was time to keep his promise.

Through their connection, Riven felt Cale leave Faerűn and move to Cania, felt the oppressive despair and unending suffering almost as strongly as if he were standing on its ice himself. He held Weaveshear in his hand, the weapon dripping darkness. He willed his lost saber back into its scabbard and it appeared there instantly.

Around him, as still as statues, stood the company of Lathanderians, a rose-colored glow still noticeable around the edges of their shields. Several lay dead on the ground, their ears leaking lumpy red liquid.

Furlinastis's huge, dark form lay sprawled across the plains, one wing gone, countless gashes open in his scales. The shadows and wraiths that had filled the sky were gone, returned to the Plane of Shadow.

Rain hung motionless in the air. A bolt of lightning hung in the darkness, splitting the sky, caught in mid-moment by the spell. Caught so, the Shadowstorm seemed almost tranquil, beautiful.

Sakkors, too, hung in the distant sky, barely visible behind its curtain of shadows. Magadon sat in its core, lost in the Source, lost in the damage his father had done.

Rivalen eyed him, golden eyes aglow, shadows burning with the same dark power that filled Riven, that filled Cale.

"I see it, now," the Shadovar prince said, his voice hushed, pained. "It is not what I thought."

"It never is," Riven said. "Keep your promise, Rivalen."

Riven left the threat unsaid.

The shade prince nodded.

Riven looked on the faces of the Lathanderians until he found Regg. Blood and mud spattered the warrior's bearded face. Dents dotted his breastplace. Links of his mail hung loose at the shoulder. Riven reached into his beltpouch and withdrew the small pouch of Urlampsyran pipeweed. He stuffed it into one of Regg's belt pouches.

"I do not think we'll get to share that smoke."

With that, Riven drew the darkness around him, the power, and rode it to his temple on the Wayrock. He materialized on the lowered drawbridge. The night sky above him twinkled with stars instead of the oppressive ink of the Shadowstorm.

His girls slept in the entry foyer, frozen by the time stop. He went to them, petted each in turn. He enjoyed the moment. He loved his girls. They were innocence to his transgressions.

He stood, thought of his task, and hardened his will.

He set down Weaveshear, inhaled, readied himself.

The wind gusted, pushed against Cale. He held his ground, drew on his power and let it fill his voice.

"I have come to keep my promise, devil!"

His words boomed across the plain, as loud as a thunderclap. The ground cracked, split under him. Chasms opened in the ice. Great shards of soot-stained snow and rock broke off mountains and fell in roiling clouds of ice to the plains below.

A million devils looked up and answered him with a bellow. The damned, spared their tortures for a moment, sighed at the reprieve. Somewhere, the halls of Mephistar itself rang with his words.

Within three heartbeats gelugons began to materialize around Cale, their white carapaces stained with soot, their vicious hook polearms painted with the gore of ages. Wet, greasy respiration came in pants from between their clicking mandibles. The opalescent surfaces of their bulbous eyes reflected Cale in miniature.

A dozen appeared, two score, a hundred. Their eager clacks filled Cale's ears. The ice groaned under the weight of their collective mass.

Cale stared at them in turn, let them see the power lined up behind his eyes, and their eagerness turned to uncertainty. The shadows around him roiled. They encircled him, claws scrabbling in the cracked ice, but none dared advance. They sensed what he was. He was not for them and they knew it. He stood in their midst untouched, an island of shadow in an ocean of diabolism.

"Inform your master—"

Mephistopheles appeared among them in a cloud of soot and power. They bowed at his arrival, the clack of their carapaces like the breaking of a thousand bones.

"I was aware of your presence the moment you dared set foot in my domain, shadeling."

The archfiend stood as tall as a titan, towering over his minions, over Cale. His black, tattered wings cast a shadow over the assemblage, over the whole of the plane. The heat from his glowing red flesh melted the ice and snow under his feet and sent up faint clouds of steam. The wind stirred his coal-black hair, tore dark smoke from his muscular form. He held his great iron polearm in one hand and lines of unholy power danced on its tines.

Cale truly saw the archfiend for the first time. Mephistopheles was nearly as old as the multiverse, his power and presence as rooted in reality as the celestial spheres. Shar was older, but not Mask. Cale understood the archfiend's full power for the first time.