by Paul S. Kemp
Tamlin’s expression showed pleasure at the thought of compelling Cale. “How?”
Rivalen took a white rook from the coffer, held it in the air over Saerb, beside the toppled white knight. He used a minor magic, released it, and it hovered in place.
“Leave that to me,” Rivalen said.
“And afterward? What of Mister Cale? I would rather he not be involved in what we have built here. His presence will vex me.”
Rivalen knew what Tamlin wanted to hear. He crushed the pawn in his fist, and let the pieces fall to the floor.
“Leave that to me, also.”
Tamlin licked his lips. “I would participate in that.”
Rivalen heard sincerity rather than bravado in Tamlin’s tone. It both surprised and pleased him.
“Perhaps you will have that chance,” Rivalen said.
“I would like a chance at more,” Tamlin said. “Shadedom, as I mentioned.”
Before Rivalen could respond, Tamlin went on. He must have rehearsed the words in the privacy of his mind many times.
“I have converted to Shar. Fully. I feel her here.” He touched his chest. “A weight. But welcome. My soul is hers.”
Rivalen nodded.
“I wish to complete my conversion. Make my body hers as well.”
“You negotiate this with me as if it were just another contract between merchants. It is more.”
Tamlin looked crestfallen. “I know that, Prince. I do not make the request lightly. I know it is more.”
Rivalen eyed Tamlin, nodded, and the shadows around him swirled. He had done his work well.
“Understand, Tamlin, that becoming a shade does more than simply transform your body. You will no longer be human. You will live alone, with history as your companion. Your family will die, your friends, even elves die and you live on. Everything will crumble and you will continue. Imagine watching the world slowly surrender to its end, the end Shar’s teachings tell us is inevitable. You will be a witness to the end. No peace of the grave for you. Perhaps this sounds appealing, but I assure you it is as much burden as boon.”
“It is a burden I am ready to bear. I am already alone.”
“Very well,” Rivalen said. He gestured with a fingertip and a charge of arcane power disintegrated the prone black king nestled within the Shadowstorm. “But first things first.”
Kesson Rel stood on one of the stone balconies that protruded from his spire. He had moved his entire tower from the Adumbral Calyx to Toril. It hung over the blasted, withered ruins of Ordulin like an accusatory finger, a black dagger driven into the heart of the city. The stink of Ordulin’s dead hung in the air, as thick as the darkness.
Black clouds roiled in the sky as far as he could see, an expanding blanket of night that obliterated the sun, obliterated life.
In the distance, jagged bolts of green lightning knifed through the darkness, each bolt the byproduct of the energy gathered by the storm as it murdered Toril, each a conduit through which the energy was transferred back to Kesson’s spire, where a continual stream of crackling bolts attached the spire’s top to the sky like a hundred umbilicals. The spire transformed the gathered energy, focused it on a point in Ordulin below the floating spire. There, a small dark seed had rooted in Toril’s reality. Out of its emptiness would grow the annihilation of the world.
Kesson touched the holy symbol embroidered on his robes, the black disc of Shar, and smiled.
Living shadows thronged the air around the tower, wheeled and spun like a cloud of bats, their eyes like coals. Regiments of shadow giants marched in the darkness. And still darker things roamed the outer fringes of the storm. Kesson felt every life within the growing darkness, mice and men, felt each of them die in turn.
He savored the taste of destruction, luxuriated in the bitter tang of death. It had been a long while since he had enjoyed it on so massive a scale. He had destroyed Elgrin Fau long ago, but only imperfectly murdered his world. Its slow demise continued even now, thousands of years after it had begun. He still could not return to finish what he had begun. He had failed Shar then and his failure had driven him to madness. His goddess had bound him in the Calyx as punishment for his failure, allowing him freedom to Faerûn only now.
He would not fail her again. And his atonement would be the end of Toril.
Rivalen left and Tamlin walked the halls of the Hulorn’s Palace, his mind and body afire for his transformation.
His feet bore him up stairways until he stood on the highest balcony of the palace’s northwest tower. These days he often retreated to the balcony when he wished solitude, a moment with his thoughts away from the burden of leadership.
The brisk wind carried the smell of fish off the bay and snapped the pennons atop the turrets above him. The high vantage afforded him a panorama view of his city, of Selgaunt Bay, of the floating mountain of Sakkors. From so high up Selgaunt and the water of the bay looked still, quiet, like a painting, the bustle lost in the lens of distance.
The forest of the Hulorn’s hunting gardens stretched before him, a walled swath of green that fell away to reveal the towering spires, domes, and towers of Temple Avenue. The avenue was quiet, almost dead. No bells tolled the hour in Milil’s Tower of Song, and no flames danced in the ever-burning ewers on the portico of Sune Firehair’s House. No festive pennons danced atop the spires of the Palace of Holy Festivals. Temple doors up and down the avenue were closed, their priests and priestesses arrested or fled, their windows dark, pews and worship benches empty. Only the gray stone of Shar’s temple had open doors and lit glowballs, and the Shadovar priestess Variance Mattick presided over the prayers to the Lady. Tamlin fancied he could hear the sound of the Thirteen Truths in the air. He touched his holy symbol and whispered them to the wind.
He looked past the tangle of Selgaunt’s winding streets and broad thoroughfares, past the packed bunches of wood-shingled and tiled roofs, past the turrets of the mansions of the Old Chauncel, and past the Khyber Gate, to where Sakkors hovered three bowshots up in the air on its craggy, inverted mountaintop. Shadows enshrouded it. It looked like a storm cloud, like he imagined the Shadowstorm must look. Not even the afternoon sun could defeat its fog of darkness. From time to time the breeze parted the swirl of shadows and hinted at a tiled rooftop, an elegant turret, a soaring spire, but the entirety of its appearance was a mystery, a secret. The patrol of shade-mounted veserabs had withdrawn into the city. It was soon to travel north and west in answer to Rivalen’s will.
When it did, it would take with it the priests and priestesses of the other Selgauntan faiths, currently held captive in the Shadovar enclave. Tamlin suspected their quarters to be less than luxurious and the suspicion pleased him. He regarded them all as traitors, but could not yet bring himself to give the order to execute them. Some of them had headed their temples since Tamlin was a boy at his father’s knee.
He began instead to let them drift into the background of his mind, let concern for their fate slip into the recesses of public consciousness. When they had adequately faded from the collective memory, he would do what needed done. Rivalen had told him it was necessary. Perhaps Tamlin would assure Rivalen that he was worthy of shadedom when he gave the order for their execution. He would have the order drawn up.
Meanwhile, only Shar’s worship would be sanctioned in Selgaunt. And soon, Shar’s worship would predominate across all of Sembia. Perhaps Tamlin would tolerate other faiths for a time, but only for a time. The Lady of Loss consumed rival faiths the way the Shadowstorm consumed Sembia, drowning them in her darkness.
A distant rumble of thunder sounded from the north, from the Shadowstorm. Tamlin’s dreams of rule depended upon Prince Rivalen stopping it. He looked toward Ordulin and imagined he could see the advancing edge of the Shadowstorm.
“Goodbye, Mirabeta.”
He hoped she had died in pain. She merited such a death.
His thoughts surprised him for a moment, but only a moment. He realized that his religious convers
ion had freed him to think openly about matters he once would not have considered, or at least would not have acknowledged. The self-realization pleased him. Shar and Rivalen had freed him from the shackles of his past, the shackles of an outdated morality. The old Tamlin had died the moment he plunged the sacrificial dagger into Vees Talendar. And Tamlin had buried the body of his past self in the depths of his worship.
An urge struck him, a desire to symbolize his death and rebirth. He knew how he would do it.
The diminutive of his father’s name died with the old Tamlin. He was, after all, not smaller than his father. He was larger than his father could ever have hoped. He was not Tamlin, not Deuce, but Thamalon II, and would be from then on. Perhaps he would order a coin minted to that effect. He thought Rivalen would appreciate the gesture.
As the sun sank lower, roofed the sky in the crimson of blood, Sakkors began to move. Watching the monumental edifice, the whole of it as large as Selgaunt, fly through the air brought Shar’s praises to Tamlin’s lips. Rivalen would take it north, toward Saerb, and trap the Saerbian refugees between a Shadovar army and the onrushing Shadowstorm. He hoped thereby to force Mister Cale to assist him in destroying Kesson Rel.
Rivalen had seemed unsure that Mister Cale would accede, but Thamalon knew Cale would. Mister Cale still thought about morality the way Thamalon once did, the way Thamalon’s father once had. Thamalon knew better now. The refugees were a tool to be used to achieve a greater end. Their individual lives were of no moment.
“Love is a lie,” he recited. “Only hate endures.”
He stood on the balcony for over an hour, watching Sakkors vanish into the night. His city came to life with nightfall. Linkboys illuminated the streetlamps. Shop windows glowed. He watched it all with a smile. He had fed his people in the midst of famine, defended them against an unwarranted attack instigated by an ambitious, lying overmistress. Saerloon was already his. Urmlaspyr would soon follow, as would Yhaunn.
If anyone had the right to rule Sembia, it was him. He had earned it. He need only convince Prince Rivalen to share with him the secret of transforming into a shade. Then his rule would last for a thousand years.
He looked into the darkening sky. Selûne had not yet risen. The moonless twilight belonged to Shar.
“In the darkness of night, I hear the whisper of the void.”
He found he was wiping his right hand on his trousers and could not understand why.
CHAPTER SIX
4 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms
Cale and Riven materialized on a rise in the shadow of a stand of towering larch at the outskirts of the Saerbian refugee camp at Lake Veladon. The wind tore leaves from the limbs, showering them in debris. Iron-gray clouds roofed the sky directly above. Behind them loomed the Shadowstorm. Cale did not turn but he felt the weight of it between his shoulder blades, imagined in his mind the dark clouds sliding across the sky, a black curtain closing on Sembia’s final act. Thunder growled like a beast, announcing the storm’s hunger.
“We need to hurry,” Cale said. He felt urgency down to his bones. He tried to contact Magadon.
No response. The connection remained dormant.
From their vantage point atop the rise, they saw the camp below bustling with activity. Wagons and mule-drawn carts were being arranged around the outskirts of the camp into a large caravan. Teamsters checked yokes, wheels, axles, the animals themselves. The horses, oxen, and mules endured their examinations with the passivity of the exhausted and underfed. Many gave starts or snorts with each roll of thunder.
The men and women of Abelar’s company, their otherwise shining armor dulled by the wan light of a diseased day, supervised the organization of the caravan. Cale noted only a few score. He presumed the rest to be on patrol.
Several men stood knee deep in the lake, filling barrels and skins with water, then passing them on to pairs of youths who splashed out of the shallows and carried them to the wagons. Thin dogs darted around the camp, tails wagging, barking, excited by the activity.
“Breaking camp,” Riven said.
“Wise,” Cale said.
Behind them, the sky rumbled its disapproval.
“Come on,” Cale said, and started down the rise. Riven’s words slowed his stride.
“Abelar is as broken as Mags, Cale. He just doesn’t know it yet. Remember that.”
Cale considered the words, considered the man, and shook his head. “Not broken. Cracked. Both of them. But fixable.”
Riven looked unconvinced but let it go. Together, they hurried down toward the camp.
The teamsters saw them coming, stopped their work, and hailed them. Children waved and smiled. Women and men packing up their goods took a moment to nod a greeting or utter a hail. Cale did not know where they found their resiliency.
“Tough folk,” Riven said, taking the thoughts from Cale’s head.
Cale nodded. He wanted to feel fondness for them but did not. He didn’t know what he felt. He pitied them, understood their plight, but felt no connection, at least no human connection.
He was broken, too. Or cracked. And he was not fixable.
By the time they had reached the center of the camp, they had picked up a contingent of children and young men. Cale did not need his darkness-enhanced hearing to hear the frequent mention of the words “hero,” “shadows,” and “Mask.”
Two of Abelar’s company directed them to Abelar and shooed the children back to their duties.
They found Abelar standing among a stand of trees at the shore of the lake, away from those gathering water, arms across his chest, staring out at the still waters as if he had lost something in them. Cale and Riven navigated down the riverbank.
“Abelar,” Cale said, and his voice pulled Abelar around only reluctantly. Cale noted the lack of a holy symbol, the new breastplate that did not feature an enameled rose.
Abelar smiled a welcome, stepped forward and clasped hands.
“Erevis, Riven, well met and welcome. I am pleased to see you returned. How did matters fare within the storm? Your woman?”
Cale shook his head.
Abelar put his other hand on Cale’s shoulder. “I am sorry, my friend.”
“Thank you,” Cale said.
Abelar’s eyes grazed Riven’s holy symbol, moved away. His jaw tightened and a tic caused his left eye to blink.
“We came to warn you about the storm,” Cale said, nodding back at the growing blackness. “Seems you scarce needed it.”
“We thought it dark magic out of Ordulin. It seemed best to stay out of its path.”
“It did not originate in Ordulin,” said Cale. “But in the Plane of Shadow, with Sharrans.”
“Sharrans,” Abelar said, the word a curse. His eyes again returned to the surface of the lake.
“I fear Ordulin may be … gone,” Cale said, thinking of his conversation with Mask on the Wayrock.
Abelar turned to him, a stricken look on his face. Cale envied him his empathy.
“There are tens of thousands of people there,” Abelar said. “And the Dawn Tower? Gone? What magic is this?”
Before Cale could answer, a voice from atop the bank carried over the rain.
“Papa! Papa! Rain coming! Hurry!”
The three men looked up to see Elden appear at the top of the riverbank. Exertion reddened his round face. Labored breaths came from his mouth, still somehow slack even in a smile. But his eyes shone with … something. Cale thought it insight or perhaps unfiltered love. He found he envied Elden, too.
The boy’s expression fell when he saw Cale and Riven. He looked uncertain, eased back a step, and looked over his shoulder.
“Grandpapa.”
Endren appeared behind him and his reassuring hand on Elden’s shoulder seemed to steady the boy. Endren, dressed in mail and with a blade at his belt, nodded at Cale and Riven, crouched, and said something in Elden’s ear. The boy visibly relaxed.
“The healers have done well by my son.” Abelar s
aid, waving to Elden. He smiled at his boy, though the fate of Ordulin still haunted his eyes. He took Cale and Riven each by the shoulder and turned them around. “Come.”
They started up the rise and Elden’s eyes grew wider at Cale and Riven’s approach. He looked like he might bolt, but Endren kept a hand on his back and the boy held his ground. Father and son both had nerve, it seemed.
“These are the men who brought you back to us, Elden,” Endren said, loud enough for them all to hear.
“My knows,” Elden said. He slid behind his grandfather and peeked out from behind his legs like an archer through an arrow slit.
They gained the rise. Cale and Riven nodded a greeting at Endren, at Elden. The boy avoided eye contact.
“It rain again soon, Papa,” Elden said to Abelar, avoiding eye contact with Cale and Riven. “Hurry to tent. Hurry.”
“First, a dragon grab,” Abelar said. He knelt, arms out, and the expression he had carried when looking at the lake—the look of having lost something—disappeared entirely. Instead, he looked like a man who had found something.
Elden smiled and braved his uncertainty. He charged Abelar and leaped into his embrace. Abelar roared like a dragon, nuzzled the boy’s neck, and Elden giggled uncontrollably.
Cale could not help it. He chuckled, too. The boy’s laugh was as contagious as plague. Even Riven smiled.
Abelar stood, his son under one arm.
“Elden, these are Papa’s friends, Erevis and Riven. Do you remember them?”
The boy didn’t look at them. He pointed at the sky. “It going rain.”
“These are the men that saved you,” Abelar said to him. “They returned you to me.”
A cloud passed over Elden’s face, a personal Shadowstorm. He put his cheek on Abelar’s shoulder.
“Rain, Papa.”
“It’s all right,” Cale said to Elden, to Abelar. He could imagine how he must appear to some children. He would not have made much of a father.
Abelar kissed his son and placed him in the ground. “Grandpapa will take you back to the tent. I need to speak to Erevis and Riven. I will be along soon.”