The Godborn

by Paul S. Kemp

  “This is for you, bastard,” Magadon grunted, pushing his agony into the dying devil. He shoved the creature backward and the fiend stumbled back against the wall, tripping on tankards, trying and failing to push its innards back into its abdomen.

  Magadon reached back to the bar and grabbed an arrow in his fist, sidestepped a feeble stab by the devil with its sword, and plunged the arrow into the fiend’s eye, deep into its horned head.

  The devil fell to the floor and Magadon rode him down, the two of them slick in shared gore. He pulled the arrow out and drove it into the fiend’s other eye.

  Magadon stood, breathing hard, his legs still weak, and found Riven right behind him, crouched atop the bar, backlit by the glow of the spreading flames. Shadows made a slow swirl around him. Somehow he reminded Magadon of a crow.

  “Like old times,” Riven said.

  Magadon stood upright, wobbled, nodded.

  “You all right?” Riven asked. He wasn’t even breathing hard. In passing Magadon wondered if he breathed at all.

  Magadon looked at the gory arrow in his hand, his blood-soaked clothes, the corpse of the devil behind him, his burning tavern.

  “I’m good,” he said. He picked up the hogshead from the floor and found that the spill hadn’t drained it entirely. He filled two tankards and gave one to Riven.

  “It’s a shit brew,” he said, draining his.

  Riven drained his, too. “Best I’ve had in a long while, Mags.” Riven’s pipe appeared in his hand, already lit, and he took a long draw.

  “Fire brigade will be coming,” Magadon said, as he watched his tavern burn, a thick column of smoke pouring through the hole in the ceiling. His fiendish blood protected him from heat and fire. Riven, too, would feel no threat from flames.

  “Too late for this place,” Riven said. “Sorry, Mags.”

  Magadon shrugged. “I’d had enough of it anyway.”

  Riven nodded. “Let these bodies burn. If these three had been working for your father, we’d have had ten score fiends here by now, and maybe the archfiend himself.”

  The mere hint of Mephistopheles’s name, spoken by a godling, caused a cool wind to waft through the bar. Flames hissed and popped, the sound suggestive of dark words.

  “These three were working for themselves, probably trying to get in your father’s favor. Their mistake.”

  “Aye.”

  Riven took another draw on his pipe, exhaled the smoke. “Well?”

  Magadon eyed his old friend, more god than man, while the life he’d built burned down around him.

  “I’ll be ready,” he said.

  “Well enough,” Riven said, and Magadon thought he looked relieved. “Link us, then.”

  “A mind link?”

  “So I can call you when I need you. Just leave it laying there so I can pick it up if I need it. And don’t look around in there, Mags. You won’t like it any.”

  The thought of linking minds with a god disconcerted Magadon, but it needed to be done. He opened his mind, drew on his mental energy, reached out for Riven’s mind.

  The shock of contact caused him to gasp. Mindful of Riven’s admonition, he kept the link superficial and narrow. Still, he sensed at a distance the scope of Riven’s mind, his expanded perception of time and place, the voices of the faithful that echoed through his mindscape.

  “Gods,” Magadon said softly.

  “Gods, indeed,” Riven said. “Makes a man a monster, Mags. No way to avoid it.”

  “I’m . . . sorry.”

  Riven shrugged. “We’ve all got our burdens. And don’t feel sorry for me just yet. Things will get ugly for you before all’s said and done. Count on it.”

  Magadon smiled ruefully. “When has it not?”

  Riven grinned. “Stay sharp, Mags. See you soon. And Mags? He’s alive.”

  “Who?”

  “Cale. And we’re going to get him.”

  “What? Wait!”

  The darkness gathered, folded Riven into it, and he was gone.

  He’s alive. He’s alive. The words and their implication pushed all other thoughts out of Magadon’s mind.

  Cale was alive. And his son was alive.

  Grinning like a lunatic, Magadon gathered his weapons and gear. He donned his wide-brimmed hat, fitted it over his horns, and walked unharmed through the flames and into the night-shrouded streets of Daerlun. Already some passersby had gathered. The fire wouldn’t spread, though. It’d burn up his garret and the tavern, but nothing else.

  One of them, a tall, gaunt bald man who held an open book in his hands, struck Magadon oddly. He didn’t look at the first like the rest of them. Instead he wrote something in his book with a quill.

  The man must have felt Magadon’s gaze. He looked up from his book.

  His eyes had no pupils. They looked like opals set in his skull. He grinned.

  Goose pimples rose on Magadon’s skin. He had no idea why. Something about the man . . .

  “Hey, are you all right?” shouted another of the gathered passersby, a sailor with drink-slurred speech. “You all right, friend? Look at your clothes! Gods man!”

  The bald man had gone back to his book, writing, his mouth bent in a secretive smile.

  “I said, are you all right?” the sailor shouted again.

  Magadon looked at the sailor, raised a hand, and smiled. “I’m fine.”

  He was better than fine. He was good as he’d been in a hundred years.

  Chapter Two

  Magadon walked for a time, thinking. The streets bustled even at the late hour: Mule-drawn wagons of supplies moved toward the barracks, and groups of grim-faced soldiers stood on corners, monitoring the traffic and the passersby. The city was preparing for war. Every day hundreds of soldiers marched out of the city to the parade grounds outside the towering basalt walls that ringed Daerlun, and there drilled for hours. Scouts mounted on veserabs—giant-winged lamprey-like creatures—swooped over the city, carrying messages from Cormyrean nobles to High Bergun Gascarn Highbanner. Rumors had an alliance brewing between Daerlun and Cormyr. Magadon wasn’t sure that would be enough to thwart a Sembian assault, when it came.

  He didn’t realize it until he arrived, but his boots had carried him to the east gate. Beyond the dark, basalt wall, the shroud of Sembia’s shadowed night hung across the sky. Lines of green lightning flashed, the veins of Sembia’s sky. He felt the gentle touch of the Source’s consciousness brushing against his own.

  Sakkors was out there, floating in the dark. As was Cale’s son. And with that, he knew what he would do.

  The gate was closed and the guards stiffened at his approach. But their minds were ordinary and easily manipulated by his mind magic. “I’m on official city business by order of the high bergun,” he said, and pushed acceptance of his statement into their minds. “I need to get out of the city right now. Apologies for the late hour.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the gate sergeant, a heavyset bearded fellow whose breath smelled of onion and pipe smoke.

  In moments, Magadon stood outside the gates, with the basalt walls of the city behind him. He stared across the plains at the distant wall of shadowed air that blanketed Sembia. He’d walked Sembia in the dark before, with Erevis Cale at his side. They’d braved the Shadowstorm and trekked to Ordulin. The memory made Magadon smile.

  “Walking in our footsteps, old friend,” he said, and started off. Using the Source’s mental emanations, he kenned the direction and distance of Sakkors. It floated in Sembia’s perpetual night south of the Thunder Peaks, about halfway between Daerlun and Ordulin. And Riven had said that whatever was to happen must happen in Ordulin.

  Riven said he wanted Magadon’s help. But how could Magadon be of assistance to a god? The same way he had assisted in the murder of a god a century before. He would draw on the power of the Source to augment his own. He felt the Source’s mental emanations, answered them with his own. See you soon, he projected.

  He avoided the roads—fearing he�
��d encounter Sembian troops—and instead moved rapidly across the plains. His bow and woodcraft kept him fed and his mind magic and stealth kept him unobserved. Even traveling cross-country he spotted Shadovar patrols from time to time, once including what appeared to be a prisoner-transport caravan. He stayed well south of the Thunder Peaks and the Way of the Manticore, but he still saw signs of the gathered Sembian troops there. Even the perpetual gloom could not hide the light, like faintly burning stars, from thousands of campfires in the distance.

  The Sembians had blocked the road between Daerlun and Cormyr on the one hand and the Dalelands on the other. Whatever army the Dalelands had to face, they’d face alone.

  Magadon did not take time to investigate any of it more thoroughly.

  Riven had asked him to be ready, so he kept moving east, moving directly for Sakkors, for the Source.

  The twisted, malformed trees and whipgrass of the Sembian countryside saddened him. He’d walked the plains when they’d been lush with old trees and fields of barley. Now the leafless skeletons of old elms and oaks rattled in the gusty wind. He put a hand on the trunk of any old elms he encountered, a moment of bonding between two living things that had once seen a Sembia under the sun.

  He stayed off the roads and skirted wide around villages, although many appeared abandoned, their fields fallow and weedy. Possibly they’d fled as Sembian forces had marched east or possibly something worse had happened to them.

  Monsters prowled the plains. From time to time Magadon heard growls and roars in the distance, occasionally caught motion out of the corner of his eye. Often he nocked an energized arrow into his bow, but he never had to fire. The creatures that stalked the darkness left him unmolested. The pull of the Source grew stronger as he covered the leagues. And as he grew closer, he sensed an undercurrent to its pull, a sadness. The Source’s mind seemed dulled and melancholy. He didn’t understand it. As he neared it, as he sensed the full scope of its power, he grew nervous. He feared he could lose himself in it again. But by the time he actually spotted Sakkors in the distance, a dark star hanging in the lightning lit sky of Sembia’s night, he knew for certain he could resist its pull. He could use the Source and still keep himself. He’d been broken once before by using it, shattered, really, but his reassembled self was stronger than the original.

  Small, dark figures flitted around the floating mountain on which Sakkors stood. They looked tiny from afar, but Magadon knew them to be Shadovar cavalry mounted on scaly-winged veserabs. The Source seemed finally to sense him fully, and its pull grew plaintive. It wanted him to come closer, to deepen their connection.

  He eyed a stand of pine directly under the floating mountain and drew on his reserve of power. A dim orange glow haloed his head, and a mirror of the glow shone in the spot he’d mentally chosen under Sakkors. He activated the mind magic and it moved him instantly to the wooded spot under Sakkors. The mountain floated over him, huge and ominous. And somewhere within its center was the Source.

  Magadon opened his mind and let the Source’s touch wash through him, let part of its power, its ancient consciousness, become part of his own. He sensed right away that it had lost no power, but it had lost acuity, and in an instant Magadon understood.

  The Source had been calling to him, for a hundred years it had been sending mental energy out into the world in a desperate effort to reach out to him. It missed him. It wanted him near.

  Why? He projected, but knew the answer before the Source offered it. The Source was dying, its sentience slowly fading away. Worse, it was aware of its impending demise, the slow erosion of its self-awareness. It was afraid. And it was alone, surrounded by beings that didn’t understand it and could not connect with it.

  I’m so sorry, he projected.

  The Source’s fear and sadness tightened his chest, caught him up in its swirl, and swept through him. He sank to the bed of pine needles, weeping, and wrapped his arms around his knees.

  It had wanted him to come to it, for a century, and he had not answered.

  He’d failed it.

  Forgive me, he projected.

  It did. In fact, it had nothing for him but affection, and his connection with it, and his sympathy, mitigated its sadness and alleviated its fear. It welcomed his companionship the way a thirsty man welcomed a drink, another mind to keep it company as it faded. It had simply not wanted to die alone. I’ll stay with you throughout, he promised. When the city moves, I’ll move with it. I won’t leave you.

  He felt its gratitude. He made a place for himself under the city, hidden by his mind magic and the pine trees, and kept company with the oldest consciousness he’d ever encountered. Shadovar patrols came and went, sometimes cavalry on veserabs, sometimes soldiers afoot, but none ever noticed him. Over the days and nights, the Source showed him many things, events from its past, possible futures, jumbles of nonsequential nonsensical things that he could not follow. Time passed oddly for him as he walked in the Source’s dying thoughts. Its consciousness took odd turns, made strange connections, moved from things extraordinary to things mundane. He came to understand that he’d lost himself in the Source the first time not because of the Source’s malice but because of its loneliness. It was a consciousness with no body, and it had wanted mental and emotional companionship so much that its over exuberant consciousness had simply overwhelmed his. He’d been unready then. But one hundred years had passed since, and he was ready now. Magadon experienced months and years in moments, lived lives in hours, laughed and cried and raged. But always he kept a firm hold on himself, on his purpose.

  There may come a time when I need your help, he said. Will you help me? The Source answered, in its way, that it would if it still could. Magadon broke his connection with the Source only once, to send a message to Riven through their mind link. He didn’t know if Riven would receive it, but he wanted to try.

  I’m ready, he projected, and nothing more.

  Then he waited, keeping deathwatch on the Source, his thoughts often turning back to Riven’s words.

  Erevis is alive. And he has a son. And his son is the key to everything.

  Vasen had never known the father whose blood ran in his veins, but Erevis Cale lived on in him somehow, haunting his dreams. Vasen always saw him as a dark man with a dark sword, a dark soul. In the dreams he never saw his father’s face, and rarely heard his voice. They somehow communed without truly seeing one another, in blindness, in quietude, and over the years through the sense-starved dream connection Vasen believed he’d come to understand what Erevis would’ve wished for him to know—the depths of loss, the pain of regret. Everything he’d learned of his father seemed to circle around regret.

  Vasen was dreaming now, he knew. He saw only darkness before him, deep and impenetrable. Frigid air stirred his hair, felt like knives on his skin.

  Erevis spoke to him, each word a treasure, his deep voice pushing aside the silence of the dreamscape.

  “I am cold, Vasen. It’s dark. I’m alone.”

  Vasen knew solitude all too well. He’d spent his life among others, but always apart from them. Vasen tried to move but could not. Something was holding him in place. The cold was growing worse. He was shivering, going numb, paralyzed.

  “Where are you?” he called.

  “Vasen, you must not fail.”

  The words hung there for a time, heavy, portentous, filling the darkness. “Must not fail at what?”

  “Find me. Write the story.”

  “How? How can I find you? You’re dead!”

  Vasen felt colder. He wanted to ask more questions, wanted to see his father’s face at long last, but the darkness receded.

  “Wait! Wait!”

  Vasen caught a flash of glowing red sky, rivers of fire. He heard the screams of millions in torment.

  He awoke on his pallet, shivering, heart racing. He stared up at the cracked, vaulted ceiling of his quarters in the abbey. The gauzy, dim gray of a newly birthed morning filtered through the single window of hi
s quarters. He could count on one hand the number of days he had seen more than an hour or two of sunlight in the past year. He’d gotten used to Sembia’s perpetual shroud long ago, the same way he’d gotten used to many things.

  Letting the dream slip from the forefront of his mind, he sat up, his flesh still goose pimpled, and recited the Dawn Greeting, the words softly defiant in the ever-dim light.

  “Dawn is Amaunator’s gift. His light dispels darkness and renews the world.” He sat on the edge of his sleeping pallet for a time, bent over his knees, his head in his hands, thinking of Erevis, the legacy he could not escape even when asleep. He’d been dreaming of his father more and more in recent months. He examined his calloused hands, his skin the color of tarnished silver, his veins a deep purple. Shadows webbed the spaces between his fingers and spiraled up his forearms, gauntlets of night. He stared at them a long while, the curves and whorls and spirals, the script of his blood. When he shook his hands, the darkness dissipated like mist.

  The light of your faith is stronger than the darkness of your blood, Derreg had often told him, and most of the time Vasen credited the words. But sometimes, after awakening from a dream of Erevis and sitting alone with only his shadow for company, sharing time with the darkness he felt lurking around the edges of his life, he wasn’t so sure. Erevis’s life haunted Vasen’s; Vasen’s heritage occluded his hopes. He sometimes had the feeling that he was doomed to live a history written by someone else, unable to turn the page to get to his own life. The shadows that cloaked him, that he could not escape, were the story of his life.

  Write the story.

  What did that even mean?

  Derreg had told him often that Vasen had to prepare himself, had drilled it into him with such fervor that Vasen’s childhood had been no childhood at all. It had been training of mind, body, and spirit since he’d been a boy. “Prepare for what?” Vasen had asked through the years.