by Paul S. Kemp
“I know. But you must go. I am to be here alone.”
Browny licked his hand, refused to move, started to whine.
“Why?” The Oracle put his forehead against the dog’s head, rubbed his sides, and stood. “Because the chick has turned into a bird. And now we must kick him from the nest. Go fetch the abbot.”
Yellow lines of power spiraled out from Brennus’s outstretched fingers, flowed around and into one face of his scrying cube. Shadows spun around his body; sweat slicked his brow.
He was hunting a ghost.
“Come back,” he murmured, and once again slightly tweaked the nature of his spell.
An echo of the images Rivalen had shown to him had to remain in the cube. They had to.
He pictured his mother’s face, pictured the flower-filled meadow, her outstretched hand as she died.
On his shoulders, his homunculi hunched and mirrored his expression of concentration.
A charge ran through the line of his spell and a flash of light appeared in the cube. An image flickered, just for a moment, his mother lying amid a field of purple flowers. The image was blurry, not as clear as when Rivalen had shown it to him, but it was there. It was there.
“What did you wish for, Mother?” Rivalen asked, the replay of the images slurring his voice.
His mother, poisoned by her own son, said, “To be the instrument of your downfall.”
The image fragmented on the face of the cube: eyes, nose, hands, all falling to pieces before fading altogether. Brennus cursed and his homunculi echoed him. He blinked, wiped the sweat from his face, adjusted his spell, and tried to pull the echo back, but the face of the cube remained black.
“Damn it,” he said.
A soft knock sounded on the scrying chamber door.
“Not now,” he snapped.
“Apologies, Prince Brennus,” said Lhaaril, his seneschal. “But—”
Brennus irritably waved a hand and the ward on the door dispelled with a soft pop. The wood and metal slab swung open on silent hinges to reveal Lhaaril, standing alone in the dark hallway.
“You know I’m not to be disturbed in this chamber,” Brennus said.
Lhaaril, his hands clasped across his stomach, bowed his balding head. Shadows poured from his flesh, a sign of his agitation. “Yes, Prince. Humblest apologies. But the Most High wishes to see you.”
The words brought Brennus up short. His homunculi squeaked with alarm. Shadows slipped from Brennus’s skin. “When? He sent a summons?”
“No,” Lhaaril said, looking up, his glowing green eyes narrowed with warning. “He’s here, Prince. Now.”
The words did not quite register. “Here? On Sakkors? Now?”
From the dark hallway behind Lhaaril, the voice of Most High said, “Yes, Brennus. Now.”
Lhaaril stiffened, glanced over his shoulder in irritation, back at Brennus, and spoke in a formal tone. “Prince Brennus, your father, Telemont Tanthul, the Most High.”
“I think he knows who I am, Lhaaril,” said the Most High, and glided around the steward.
The Most High towered over the seneschal, and his platinum eyes glowed feverishly out of the black hole of his sharply angled, clean-shaven face. An embroidered cloak hung from broad shoulders that age had not bowed. He held a polished wooden staff in one ring-bedecked hand. His body merged with the darkness, the outline of his form shifting, difficult to separate from the shadowed air of Sakkors.
“That will be all, Lhaaril,” said Telemont.
The steward held his station, jaw stiff, upper lip drawn tight, and looked at Brennus.
Brennus nodded at him while he tried to gather his thoughts. “That’s all, Lhaaril.”
Lhaaril’s exhalation was audible. “Yes, Prince Brennus. Shall I have a meal prepared for two?”
Brennus looked his father, asking a question wioth his eyes.
“I can’t stay long.”
“Very well,” Lhaaril said. He bowed first to the Most High, then to Brennus, and exited the scrying chamber.
“This is a surprise,” Brennus said.
His homunculi cowered, covered their faces with their hands.
“I imagine it is,” the Most High said. “So . . . ”
Brennus cleared his throat. “So.”
Father and son regarded one another across the gulf of things unsaid. The silence grew awkward, but Brennus refused to break it. At last the Most High did.
“You and your constructs,” he said, smiling, and nodded at Brennus’s homunculi. “Like Rivalen with his coins.”
“I’m nothing like Rivalen,” Brennus answered, and could not keep a bitter edge from his voice. “And you’ve always hated my interest in shaping-magic, father. Mother encouraged it, but never you.”
“No,” the Most High said, irritation coloring his voice. “I didn’t. Because I wanted you to focus on your gift with divination magic and—”
Brennus had heard it all before. “What do you want, Father?”
The Most High looked everywhere but Brennus’s face. Brennus had never seen his father so discombobulated. “Did you know that Rivalen no longer collects coins?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Brennus said. “What use would a god have for such things?”
Shadows swirled around the Most High. “Godling,” he corrected. “Not a god.”
“Neither,” Brennus corrected in turn. “Murderer.”
Telemont sighed. “Still that?”
“That.”
Telemont glided toward Brennus’s scrying cube. “I explained this to you before, Brennus. We needed him.”
“You needed him. Do you still need him? He does nothing more than sit in his darkness and ponder his goddess. He can’t be of use to you, now.”
To that, the Most High said nothing.
“Or perhaps he’s just too powerful for even the Most High to challenge now? Is that it?”
The sudden tension in the air caused Brennus’s homunculi to squeal in alarm and secret themselves in the hood of his cloak.
The Most High turned to him, his platinum eyes mere glowing slits, the darkness about him deepening.
It took everything Brennus had not to back up a step or lower his gaze, but he thought of his mother and held his ground. Shadows swirled around him.
“You push and push, Brennus,” the Most High said softly. “And then push again. My patience is not limitless.”
Brennus’s homunculi trembled. Brennus bit his lip and held his tongue.
The fire in the Most High’s eyes diminished to coals. He cleared his throat.
“I didn’t come here to fight with you. And Alashar . . . died long ago. I’ve come to terms with how it happened, with the . . . compromises I’ve made.” He turned from Brennus and put his hand on the face of the scrying cube. “This was just used. What were you scrying?”
Brennus lied. “I was . . . searching for the Chosen. As you asked me to do.”
The Most High turned once more to face him, and Brennus’s lie crumbled under the weight of his eyes.
“And I was also searching for . . . something else. Something I hope to show you someday.”
The Most High seemed not to hear him. He spoke absently, almost to himself. “Matters are afoot in Faerûn, in Toril. I don’t mean the wars. The Dalelands will soon fall to our forces, but I mean something more than squabbles over territory. Something is changing. There’s power in the air, stirrings.” He seemed to remember himself and looked over at Brennus. “Have you felt it?”
“I have sensed something,” Brennus said carefully, although he’d been so fixated on Rivalen and Mask and Erevis Cale’s child that he’d had time to notice little else.
The Most High nodded. “I need you to refocus on the work I’ve asked of you, Brennus. Find the Chosen for me, as many as you can, as fast as you can. I believe they’re important.”
“Important, how? This change you feel, it’s connected to the Chosen?”
Telemont nodded, turned, paced before th
e cube. “The Chosen and the Gods. Pieces are moving. I’ll admit that it’s still opaque to me. But yes, the Chosen are involved somehow. I need them found.”
“And then? You hold them? Kill them?”
Using his divinations, Brennus had already identified a score of Chosen for the Most High, but it was painstaking, time-consuming work. Surprising work, too. He had not expected there to be so many Chosen. It was as if the gods had birthed a brood of them in preparation for something neither he nor the Most High had yet been able to discern.
Brennus had provided names, descriptions, and locations of those he’d found, and after that, he had no idea what happened. In truth, the only Chosen he was interested in was already dead—Erevis Cale.
The Most High stared into Brennus’s face. “Just find them, Brennus.”
Brennus nodded. “I hear your words, Most High. Will that be all?”
The Most High approached him, and his expression softened. “Must it be like this forevermore, Brennus? I barely see you. We were never . . . close like you were with your mother, but there wasn’t always this distance. You no longer attend the Conclaves. Your brothers ask after you. Yder is overseeing war with the Dales, yet I suspect you know nothing of it. Our Sembian forces recently took Archendale. Did you know that?”
Brennus knew nothing of any of it. His obsession with Rivalen had driven him into isolation. “I’ve no interest in the movement of our armies. That’s work for Yder. I have my own work.”
The Most High’s expression regained its imperious cast. “Your work is an obsession with your brother, with your mother, with revenge.”
It was too much, and the shouted answer slipped Brennus’s control before he could rein it in. “And it should be your obsession, too! He murdered your wife! You should want revenge! You! You fear him, though, don’t you?”
The Most High’s mouth formed a tight line. “You overestimate his power and underestimate mine. And now you’ve come dangerously close to overestimating my capacity for indulgence.”
Brennus swallowed and said nothing, knowing an apology would sound foolish. Inside his cloak, the homunculi trembled uncontrollably.
“You do as I’ve told you,” the Most High said. “Am I understood?”
Brennus stared into his father’s face, bowed his head, and said, “Most High.”
“Am I understood, Brennus?”
“Your words are clear.”
The Most High studied his face, seemingly satisfied. His expression softened once again. “If it helps, I believe Rivalen is being punished, Brennus. He’s gone mad. He thinks he’s going to end the world.”
Brennus blinked. “And you think he can’t?”
“Of course he can’t,” the Most High snapped, and shadows swirled around him. “He stares at a hole in reality for days on end. His thoughts bounce around in the cage prepared for him by his goddess. He dreams only of darkness and endings and suffers for it.”
“He should suffer.”
“My point isn’t so much about him as you. Live your life, Brennus. We have work to do in Faerûn.”
“I will, Father.”
The Most High stared into Brennus’s face for a long moment before nodding. He pulled the shadows about him, was lost in them, and was gone.
Brennus swallowed down a dry throat, exhaled. The homunculi poked their gray heads out of his clothing, looked around, their pointed ears twitching.
“Father gone now?”
“Yes,” Brennus said.
“Do as he ask?” they inquired as one.
“Eventually,” Brennus said. He moved to his scrying cube and once more tried to resurrect the image of his mother’s murder.
Chapter Seven
Standing in the doorway of Ana and Corl’s small, warm cottage, Elle drew her hood tight. The austere darkness of the late afternoon contrasted markedly with the warm glow of the cottage.
“Our thanks once more for the eggs, Elle,” called Ana from behind her. “You’re welcome,” Elle said, tying the string under her chin. “You’d do the same if your hens were producing.”
“Even so.”
“It’s Idleday,” Elle said, half turning. “So stay in and keep dry.” Ana tended a cauldron near the hearth. Her husband, Corl, sat in a roughmade chair before the fire, sharpening the blade of a hoe.
“Aye,” called Corl. “There’s naught to be done in this weather, anyway. And thank you, Elle. You’re a saint.”
Corl’s sincerity touched her.
“Go feed that baby something,” Ana said, smiling at her and nodding at Elle’s belly.
“Aye,” Elle said. She pulled the door closed behind her and stepped out into the muddy cart road. The namesake elms that ringed the village whispered and creaked in the wind. The rain smelled of decay. A shit rain, Gerak would have called it, and she would have frowned at his use of profanity. She worried for the village’s crops. A fouled rain would harm an already fragile harvest. More of her neighbors than Ana and Corl would suffer.
The dark sky rumbled. The underside of the clouds looked burned, as if the world had caught fire and charred them black. But she knew how to read the sky, the subtle variations among the blacks and grays, and she thought the low, swirling clouds promised an end to the rain, and soon.
Odd, she thought, the things to which a person became accustomed. She’d grown up in Sembia’s darkness and knew it as well as she knew the soil. But she’d never seen the unveiled sun and wasn’t sure she’d know what to do if she ever did. But she hoped to find out one day.
The thought summoned a smile. She felt oddly hopeful. Gerak would return on the morrow or the day after, perhaps with fresh meat, and she carried his child in her womb, a life unexpected. She ran her hands over the bulge of her stomach and her eyes welled. The changes to her body wrought by the pregnancy seemed to make her weep over everything. She felt silly but smiled nevertheless.
She wiped her eyes as she walked the sloppy cart road, her mind on the baby, barely cognizant of the mud fouling her shoes and soaking the bottom of her cloak. She thought of a time years earlier, when Chauntea’s greenpriests still traveled Sembia, using their magic to assist villagers with their crops. She remembered an elderly greenpriest, as thin as a reed, who had preached that where life grew there was always hope. Back then, Elle had rolled her eyes at the words. But now, with a child in her womb, she understood exactly what the priest had meant.
The child in her belly was hope.
Again her eyes welled. Again she smiled in embarrassment at her own sentimentality.
“Hope,” she said, testing out the word. It sounded good, sounded right. She ran a hand over her belly. “If you’re a girl, we’ll call you Hope.”
The sky rumbled with thunder. Elle refused to surrender her smile or her mood. She made a dismissive gesture at the sky.
“Bring your worst,” she challenged.
She crossed the village commons, heading for her cottage. The Rins’ milk cow was there, head down, chewing the grass. A scrawny barn cat slinked through the underbrush, probably stalking a field mouse. The Idleday weather had kept everyone else inside, even the children. Two fishing boats tethered to posts at the edge of the pond bobbed in the chop.
Before she reached the cottage the rain lost its stink and reduced to a drizzle. With the weather cooperating and leftover stew already in the soup kettle, she decided she’d walk a bit more, maybe stroll the edge of the village and enjoy the elms.
Shutters opened as she walked and she exchanged greetings with her neighbors.
“The rain is soon to stop,” she called to Mora.
Mora looked up, nodded. “How’s the loaf?”
Elle put her hand on her belly. “Rising.”
“The gods keep it and you.”
“And you, Mora.”
Her feet carried her eventually to the two oldest elms in the village— the Gate Elms, everyone called them. The road from the plains went right between them and extended out into the darkness, a string t
hat connected the village to the dangers of the plains. The road faded after only a short distance, devoured by Sembia’s perpetual gloom. She stared at it a long while, rubbing her stomach. Gerak was out there somewhere, alone in the dark. She stood there under the leaves, sheltered from the drizzle, and wondered where he was, how he fared.
“Your daddy’s out there,” she said to Hope. “He’ll be back soon.”
She turned to go, but a sound from out in the plains caught her attention. A man’s voice, she was sure, although she had not made out any words. Gerak returning? A lost traveler? She considered calling out but thought better of it. Gerak was not due to return and Fairelm had not seen a traveler in many months. She looked back at the village, the homes and barns and sheds within earshot were mere shadowy blobs in the gloom. Her fine mood evaporated as distant thunder rumbled anew, the sky having its vengeance for her taunt.
“Probably nothing,” she whispered.
Still, she sheltered near the bole of one of the elms, her hand on the bark, and listened. She put her other hand on the handle of the small eating knife she carried. It would make a poor weapon.
Long moments passed and she heard nothing more, so she allowed herself to exhale. Probably she’d imagined the sound, or transformed a distant animal’s howl into a man’s voice. The gloom sometimes fooled the senses. Turning, she started back toward the village.
The sound of rattling metal froze her, tightened her chest. A man’s voice sounded from out in the darkness.
“Don’t move,” he said, and she didn’t. Surprise shackled her feet to the ground, put a lump in her throat, sent her heart racing so hard she felt dizzy. Horrors lurked on the plains and some of them could speak like a man. She knew she should call out for aid, but her voice seemed to have died in the sudden dryness of her mouth.
She heard the slosh of something large in the mud of the road, drawing nearer, the jangle of chains. She imagined huge feet thumping in the earth, something snatching her from the darkness and stealing her away. Gerak and the neighbors would wonder what had happened to her, but no one would ever know. She’d become a warning tale for children.