The Diamond (7 page)

trivial world where his body lay dead swam back, overwhelming all else. Snarling silently to muster

his will, he returned, seeking the cry of Heart.

Paladin strode deeper into the diamond. The next mirror held a reflection that moved like him, but

had cruel eyes and olive skin—and a sword arm whose flesh gave way to bare bone. Paladin

remembered this man from the world he’d left but could give him no name.

He lifted his arm. Bare bones moved in unison. “I’m no assassin,” Paladin said fiercely, and heard

the eerie reflection make the same resolve, the silver-slim words mocking.

“I fight for what is right. I slay for freedom.” Paladin and Assassin spoke those words together. Lie

and truth lay together, indistinguishable from one another. The diamond’s power was deepening

with each new chamber. It pressed viciously on head and heart.

Heart. Paladin’s lips set in a thin line, and his blade flashed out. Assassin cracked. He stared for a

moment in surprise, bony sword arm uplifted, before the cloven mirror gave way and slid tinkling

to the floor.

Deeper. Up and in. Heart drew him on.

A young man’s face confronted him next, full of hope, honest and determined and inexcusably

innocent. Paladin swung his blade without hesitation.

It met not chill glass and uncaring silver but soft flesh. The man sobbed, staggered, and fell

forward.

A real man? Another warrior seeking Heart? A comrade!

Heart’s own sorrow bled into the moan that came from Paladin. He set a hand to the young man’s

bleeding side.

This one, too, had a name, lost in the wash of truth and illusion. He was in Paladin’s mind nothing

more or less than Hero. Paladin’s touch closed the weeping wound. Hero rose. No apology or

explanation needed to be spoken; Hero understood. Paladin drew and offered his dagger. It was

accepted with the ghost of a smile. Side by side, they went on through the silvered maze.

Another young warrior appeared in a mirror, the youthful semblance of Paladin himself.

“I am Jacob. I will battle beside you.”

The words bore such earnest weight that Hero motioned Jacob to step from the glass and walk

shoulder to shoulder with them.

The fighter emerged. Reflected flesh became momentarily scaly, tentacular, before swimming into

solid human flesh! A lie garbed in borrowed shape. Paladin’s blade sundered the emerging

shapeshifter, dropping him in a thousand shards of ringing glass.

Paladin and Hero nodded warily to each other and pressed on toward the sobbing lady’s song.

They found themselves in a wide chamber ringed with her—or varying reflections of her. One

mirror showed a warrior maiden, clear-eyed and noble. The next held a pirate lass, all black

leather and lascivious eyes; a third displayed a meek lady pleading from a tower window; its

neighbor showed a medusa with writhing hair. Hundreds of images implored for release from the

glass. Hero stood frozen, drawn to each pleading woman.

Paladin shook his head. False images, partial truths. Heart was no idealized image, but a true

creature. Paladin would not be seduced by lies told about women. He would be inspired by truths

told by them.

Hero nodded, understanding. Young, open, and so vulnerable, he led with his broad, brave heart.

The song rose, mournful, beyond the chamber. Paladin listened and pointed. A curving way

opened, nearly hidden between alike imploring images. The two men ventured on.

Fiends lunged without invitation from the glass, a roaring menagerie of rending claws, venom-dripping stingers, scourgelike tails, twisted horns, and smoking spittle. They flooded forth as if the

mirrors were portals gaping from the Abyss.

Paladin and Hero stood back to back, blades flashing among tentacles and barbed whiskers.

Shrieks arose amid the battle cries. Paladin severed the head of a mantis towering over him,

leaping across its carapace to slash the snarling faces of two jackal-men, and shattered the mirror

behind them. Cracks segmented shadowy figures who rushed to leap the silver margin, and all

collapsed in a rain of shards.

The pommel of Hero’s dagger crashed into another mirror, and a dozen fiends tumbled into

oblivion. He swung for the next, but flesh interposed itself—scabrous and oozing, cracked and

sword-worn. Living meat barred the way to other mirrors, lifting claws and grinning with yellowed

teeth.

Crying out the names of their mothers and their gods—names not so dissimilar—Paladin and Hero

hacked at fiend flesh, winning through to panel after panel. Dead fiends lay heaped across the

silvered floor, strange blood darkening the glass, as gate after gate fell.

Ten living fiends stood atop a hundred dead to guard the last looking glass, aflicker with emerging

horrors. Hero and Paladin carved a grim path through them.

The last fiend fell, its left head laid open by Paladin’s sword and its right skewered through the eye

by Hero’s dagger. Black blood steamed, and silence fell.

Standing exhausted, Paladin and Hero looked into the last mirror and saw themselves: two blood-soaked warriors burned by gouting acids, stabbed, slashed and bone-broken. Paladin’s sword arm

changed direction in two places. A severed beast claw jutted from his temple. Hero’s ribs showed

through a row of gaping wounds, wherein his organs pulsed through a rain of blood. The

comrades were walking dead men, too busy slaying to notice that they should die. Now they had

time to look.

Hero wheeled and collapsed, lifeless.

Paladin staggered. His world went black. Falling, he smashed his sword against the glass.

The riven mirror collapsed, and the false wounds it had projected onto Hero and Paladin fell away

with it.

At last Paladin understood this house of mirrors. He’d thought it a mind of madness, filled with

images twisted to obscure the truth, or a sorcerous cage constructed to hold Heart ever captive

behind falsities. But it was neither.

The diamond was a mind but was not mad. It was the mind of a world; in any one facet of the

diamond, truth was only partially reflected. Truth dwelt not in one angled view of something too

large and complex to be fully seen in a thousand images. Truth dwelt beyond and beneath. It

could be apprehended not by staring into one reflection but by staring into them all. Paladin would

find Heart not by smashing and slaying but only by combining all reflections into the one true

creature they mirrored.

He sheathed his sword, helped Hero rise, and stepped into the space beyond the last mirror they’d

shattered: a mirrored passage that snaked away through deceptive turns. Its silvered panes held

faces: a moon-faced sharper, a much-scarred old pirate, a pale man-giant, a black-bearded mage,

a bronze-skinned man in robes of state, a pair of idiot brothers, a crooked lumber merchant

Paladin ignored these images, grasping the corners of mirrors and pivoting them slowly, one after

another. He was opening up the passage, creating a large, circular space. Hero did likewise,

pushing back the mirrors on the opposite side of the passage into an inward-curving silver wall.

They worked speedily, repositioning and checking over their shoulders to match alignments. When

they completed the first circle, the diffuse starlight that shone through the interior of the diamond

intensified. They made a second circle beneath the first, pushing back the mirrors of the floor.

When it was done, the room sparkled in warm brilliance.

When they formed the third, the light grew so intense it pushed at the silver and glass it struck,

realigning the other facets of the great diamond. Not merely hundreds but thousands of mirrors

were brought into focus, blazing like festival sconces, each witness to all that had happened since

Heart’s disappearance.

At last light surged out to every corner of the diamond—and the vision Hero and Paladin sought

erupted into sizzling incandescence before them. Lightning-white the place blazed, around Heart.

She floated in beauty at the center of it all: a creature of pure light, her raiment a rainbow, her

scepter a staff of lightning, her eyes twin blue flames.

Paladin and Hero fell to their faces before her.

Her song now was one of triumph as her power blazed brighter. The black tentacles clutching the

diamond ignited, their flames adding to the brilliance. The globe of mirrors melted away, and a

blast of pure force roared out amid the circling stars and wandering moons. With an answering

roar the fire spread down the evil tree.

Freed at last, Heart would burn her former captor to oblivion. Her soul would sear the tree away.

But what of the world it was rooted in? The worlds upon worlds into which it had sunk its wicked

roots? Would they be destroyed, evil and good alike consumed in flames?

Paladin glanced at his comrade. Hero could do it. Hero could whelm the folk of the world below

and bring their axes to bear on the base of this horrific tree.

Thousands of axes. Tens of thousands. If they chopped it through, the massive crown, a world

unto itself, would pull away among the stars to erupt safely above and beyond all. Hero could do

it.

But Paladin could not. This was she whom he sought, the Heart of all his world. If she was

destroyed in flame, he would perish with her.

Empowered by the lightning blasts of Heart, Paladin hoisted Hero, bore him to the spinning edge,

and flung him down toward the world. He shouted through the firestorm the only words they

shared: “Save it!”

Hero understood. Therein lay his greatness. Despite his youth, his fumbling naiveté, the heart so

untried and vulnerable in his breast, in the end Hero always understood. And in worlds of truth,

understanding bridged any distance.

Immediately, Hero was at the base of the tree, and at once in every farmstead and village and

city clustered about it, exhorting folk to bring their axes, and save their world. He was believed

and obeyed. That was the power of understanding in a world of truth.

Paladin felt the first thunderous thousand blows shiver the tree. He staggered, striding against the

gale of light and power toward the blazing woman. She recognized him. Something in her knew

the garment of scars that cloaked his soul. With a single finger of fire, gentle as a caress, she

flung him from the inferno, down to the verdant world below.

All the while he fell, Paladin wept; he’d been so close to his love and now he was hurled farther

with each breath.

Just before he reached ground, the massive tree groaned. Cut through, it swayed. The blazing

bole turned listlessly once before easing up, away from the ground. It hung in the sky, engulfed in

racing flames. A white-hot inferno tumbled up into the arching heavens. It was shrinking into vast

distance when it blazed its last.

The flash blinded all who looked at it. It blinded Paladin, where he lay in a scorched glade, and the

thunder that followed rattled the teeth in his head. A shock wave of wind slammed into him,

thrusting him down through earth and bedrock beneath, whirling him through the swirling

subterranean passages of Lethe. Even as he lost consciousness, falling asleep in one world to

awaken in another, he knew she was dead.

His Heart’s Desire was dead.

“The Tree of Illusion, grown to overbalance the real world in which it has root,” mused Khelben,

watching the final stitches snipped from the Open Lord’s eyes. “The octopodal crown can be none

other than Aetheric III. But what of this diamond?”

“Diamond be damned,” hissed Piergeiron as his eyes at last struggled open, blinking into the

glaring chandeliers. “Eidola is dead. The Heart is dead.”

Khelben leaned over, helping the dead man up. “Perhaps not. Perhaps this glorious soul you saw

wasn’t Eidola, but—”

Before the Lord Mage could say more, Piergeiron saw the woman who lay in the casket beside his

own. He sprawled across it and wept bitterly.

Another Trial for Noph

In the streets above the cold stone of the palace dungeon, Waterdeep rejoiced beneath a sunset

sky.

Piergeiron lived.

He had returned. He’d risen during his own funeral to tell a tale of such mythic force that two

dozen bards were writing ballads, in moments snatched between the leap-dances and reels

demanded by the crowds. The very sewers of Waterdeep throbbed to the tread of thousands of

dancing feet. Piergeiron himself had blessed the revelry from his balcony. Khelben expressed his

delight in the form of green and gold fireworks, blazing and popping above the harbor.

It seemed only Noph wasn’t rejoicing. He stood in the cell where he’d met with his father, and a