by Paul S. Kemp
“Of course,” said Thamalon, forcing a smile. “You have the authority to act in my name.”
Rivalen stared down at Thamalon, his mouth a hard line. “You will find that our relationship will change somewhat as Sembia is consolidated under Shadovar rule.”
A small pit opened in Thamalon’s stomach, a place for the truth to settle.
“I fear ‘somewhat’ does much work in that sentence, Prince.”
Rivalen waved a hand in the air, batting aside Thamalon’s point. “You will remain titular head of Sembia but you will answer ultimately to me and to the Most High.”
Thamalon tried to keep the shock from his face and voice. “But I assumed we would rule as equals. I thought—”
“Your assumption was incorrect. We are not equals. You are an instrument of my will, and the Lady’s.”
Thamalon’s mind spun. He struggled to keep his mental balance. “After all we have accomplished?”
“We accomplished nothing. I accomplished all. You are but the face of it to the outside.”
Thamalon flushed. “But—but I worship the Mistress. I minted coins, Prince. I thought to become a shade, like you. I thought we were … friends.”
Only after he had uttered the words did he realize how ridiculous they sounded, like the whines of a child. Embarrassment heated his cheeks.
“You will become a shade, Hulorn,” Rivalen said. “I will keep my word. Promises are kept in these days.”
“Thank you, Prince,” Thamalon said, pleased at least by that, though he could not meet Rivalen’s eyes.
“The transformation is prolonged and painful. Your body and soul are torn asunder and remade.”
Thamalon backed up a step, eyes wide.
Rivalen followed. “The agony will plague your dreams for years.”
Thamalon felt nauseated, and backed up another step. “Your family and friends will die and turn to dust. You will linger, alone.”
Thamalon bumped up against a wall. Rivalen loomed over him.
“But in the end, you will be hardened, made a better servant to the Lady, made a better servant to me.”
“That is not what I wanted, Prince.”
“It is exactly what you wanted. Power. You simply wanted to pay no price for it. But you are a Sembian, Hulorn. You should have known there is always a price. And the price will be pain and eternal loneliness.”
Rivalen said it in the tone of one who knew that of which he spoke.
Thamalon gulped, imagined the pain of his transformation. He looked into his future and saw a friendless, solitary existence, feared and hated by those he ostensibly ruled. He did not want it, not anymore.
“Please, Prince. No. I abdicate. Here, now. To you.”
“It is too late for that.”
Tears leaked from Thamalon’s eyes.
“What have I done?” he said, his voice soft.
Rivalen smiled, his fangs making him look diabolical. “Your bitterness is sweet to the Lady.”
Mask manifested in a place that was no place, amidst the nothingness of cold and featureless gray. He manifested fully, not in one of the trivial, semi-divine forms he sometimes showed to worshipers.
He floated alone and small in an infinite void, the womb of creation. He marveled that the bustling, colorful, life-filled multiverse had been born from such yawning emptiness. He marveled, too, that the creation would one day return to the void. He was pleased he would not see it, though he knew he would have played his small role in causing it.
As would those who came after him and took his station.
Or perhaps not, if things went as he wished. He had planted his own seeds in creation’s womb. Time would tell what fruit they bore.
“I am here,” he said, and his voice echoed through infinity. Fatigue settled on him all at once. He had been running a long while, delaying the inevitable. Surrender was not in him. He supposed that was why she had chosen him, why he had chosen his own servants.
His voice died as the feeling of nothingness, of endless solitude, intensified. He felt hollow, as empty as the space around him.
She was coming.
He held his ground and his nerve. The moment was foreordained. Within him, he carried all of the power he had stolen many millennia before, plus some—but not all—of the added power that he’d amassed since his ascension. And power was the coin she demanded in payment of his debts. The Cycle had turned.
“Show yourself. You owe me that, at least.”
It had taken him a long while to accept that he would not be the herald who broke the Cycle of Shadows. He had stolen the power thinking he would. His hubris amused him. He found hope in the possibility that those he had chosen might break it, sever the circle.
“I see hope in your expression,” she said, her voice as beautiful and cold as he remembered. “Hope is ill-suited to this place.”
He swallowed and held his ground as the nothingness took on presence and he felt the regard of a vast intelligence that existed at once in multiple places, multiple times. She had seen the birth of creation. She would see it end.
“The Cycle turns,” she said.
He felt her cold hands on him, felt the spark of divinity within him answer to its original owner’s touch. She had taken her favorite form among many—a pale-skinned maiden with black hair that fell to her waist. The emptiness of the void yawned in her eyes. He looked at a point on her face below her eyes—he dared not look into those eyes lest he see his fate. The slash of her red lips against the paleness of her face struck him as obscene.
“I am come to pay my debt,” he said, and bowed his head. He found his form quaking. In her presence he experienced the frailties he had not felt since his ascension. The experience pleased him.
She ran a hand through his hair, put her forehead to his.
“Your debt is long overdue. Mere repayment is inadequate recompense. Surely you know this, Lessinor.”
He had not heard his birth name spoken in so long its pronouncement caused him to look up into his mother’s eyes … and regret it.
He saw there the oblivion of non-existence, the emptiness that awaited him. He had not wished to see it. He had wished it only to happen, one moment existence, one moment non-existence. He did not wish to know.
The frailties endemic to his one-time humanity resurfaced. His body shook. He did not wish to end. He did not wish to know what “end” meant. All that he had done, all that he had been, for nothing.
Or perhaps not. This time, he kept the hope from his face.
“Ah,” his mother said, and sighed with satisfaction. “You see it now, here, at the end of things.”
He nodded.
“Interest is due on your debt, my son.”
He nodded once more. He had expected as much and prepared. In the millennia in which he had been worshiped the faith of his followers had made him something greater than that which he had initially stolen from her. That she knew. But she did not know its scope, and that he had hidden some.
“I am come to pay that, as well … Lady.”
He could not bring himself to name her his mother. She had possessed a vessel to birth a herald, nothing more.
“I know,” she said, and drew him to her in an embrace. Her arms enfolded him, cooled him. She stroked his hair, cooed. He put his head on her shoulder and wept.
Only then did he realize that he was cooling, that his power was leeching away, that the void he had seen in her eyes was coming for him. He gripped her tighter, closed his eyes, but could not dismiss the image of the end that awaited him.
“Shh,” she hissed, and held him tightly.
He was sinking, disappearing in her vastness, entering the void. Non-existence yawned before him. He tried to speak, to rebel at the final moment, but could not escape her grasp.
Darkness closed in on him. He tried to enter the void with hope in his heart, recalling that he, the son of the Lady of Secrets, had kept a secret from—
EPILOGUE
9
Ches, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)
The ghosts of the past haunt my mind, specters of memory that manifest in sadness. I run an alehouse in Daerlun, now. It is a small thing but small things are all I find myself suited to now. My appearance startles no one in these days; most have seen creatures more exotic than me. I fill cups, tell jokes, hire bards, and try to brighten a few spirits in otherwise dark times. I call my place The Tenth Hell and the caravaneers and hireswords who stream through Daerlun seem to like the name.
The Tenth is my personal Hell, I tell them, and they think I am making a joke, given my horns and obvious fiendish lineage. But I do not mean it as a joke.
One hundred years have passed since Erevis Cale died. There have been other landmarks in my life since then, other tragedies, but his loss remains the most painful, the point that defines the “after” in my life. He sacrificed himself to save me when I did not merit saving. For that, I owe him what I am. And I owe it to him to be worthy of what he did.
There are still days when I tap a keg and convince myself that he is not gone, not forever. How can he be? I saw him do too much, survive too much, to be gone. I stare into the shadowy corners of my place, eye the dark alleys of Daerlun, looking for him, expecting him to step from the darkness, serious as usual, and call to me:
“Mags,” he will say.
But he never does.
He is gone, forever I suppose, and no one has called me Mags in over ninety years. I do not allow it to anyone but Riven, and we have not spoken since two years after the Shadowstorm retreated.
He looked different when I saw him, darker, more there. Over a tankard of stout in the alehouse that I would buy seventy years later (it was called The Red Hen, then), he told me what he had become.
I believed him. I could see it in the depths of his eye, in the way the darkness hugged his form. He sat in the alehouse for several hours and I’d wager that only one or two patrons other than me even noticed him. He had become the shadows.
“Faerûn thinks Mask is dead,” I said.
He took his pipe out of his mouth and exhaled a cloud of exotic smelling smoke. Shadows bled from his flesh, as they once had from Cale. He looked at me with an expression that did not belong to a mere man. His voice was a whisper, the rush of the wind through night shrouded trees.
“He is, but not forever. Let’s keep that our secret, Mags.”
I detected a threat in the statement, in the way the darkness around me deepened. I nodded, changed the subject.
Our conversation started with recent events and moved back through time. We spoke of Cale, Kesson Rel, Rivalen Tanthul, the Sojourner, Azriim the slaad, even our days in Westgate. I asked after his dogs, the temple. He did not touch his stout and when we parted it had the feeling of permanence.
“Take care, Mags,” he had said.
I almost touched his arm but lost my nerve at the last moment. “Are we friends, Drasek?”
“Always, Mags.”
I turned for a moment at the crash of a breaking tankard and the string of curses that accompanied it. When I turned back, he was gone. We spoke again only once more.
A few years later, in the Year of Blue Fire, the Spellplague ravaged Faerûn. Many people measure time from that point onward. Me, I still measure it from the day Erevis Cale died.
I was making my living as a caravan guide and roadman for the wagons streaming in and out of Sembia, working with the kind of men and women I now serve in The Hell. I did not learn the full scope of the changes wrought by the Spellplague until much later but I saw its effects in the Hen, when a wizard sitting at the table next to me looked up from his tea, wild-eyed.
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened his mouth to speak, managed only to utter the word, “Something …” then froze in his chair. His blood and flesh had turned to ice. I learned later that the Spellplague had turned the Weave to poison and caused havoc with practitioners of the Art. The magical surges and vacuums changed Faerûn forever.
I continued to work as a guide. Travelers from abroad told alarming tales around the campfires—some areas of Faerûn had sunk into the ground, replaced by chasms and lakes filled with dire, loathsome creatures from below. Seas had drained. Whole chunks of the world had simply disappeared, effaced from history and memory, replaced by parts of some other world that had bled in to fill the void. Thousands died, millions perhaps, including gods, and the world was transformed.
I found the tales hard to believe, and wanted to see for myself. Journeying across central Faerûn, I saw chunks of the world floating free in the air, eerie echoes of the Shadovar’s floating cities. I saw twisted creatures rise from steaming pits to pollute nature with their presence.
And everywhere I saw fear and uncertainty in the eyes of Faerûn’s people. Men and women of every profession and station gathered together in alehouses and taverns after night fell and shared whatever dark news they had heard that day. I saw the comfort they took in one another’s presence, the importance of a common meeting place, and decided then that I would run an alehouse one day.
Wherever I went, no one seemed to know what caused the plague, though rumors abounded. My suspicions turned to the Shadovar and Shar, since Sembia, which had traded the darkness of the Shadowstorm for the darkness of Shadovar rule, went largely unaffected. To this day Tamlin Uskevren still rules Sembia, at least in name, though he answers to Rivalen Tanthul.
We all answer to someone or something.
Me, I answer to the past. Always will.
When I reached the dark shores of the Abolethic Sovereignty, with the hypnotic rhythm of its lapping waters, I turned back. Faerûn was different and I had seen enough. For the first time in my life I wanted to settle in somewhere, make a home, find another way of life. But I had one thing to do first.
I sought out Riven.
I hired a small ship out of shadow-shrouded Selgaunt and took it to the Wayrock. I told myself that I wanted to ensure that Riven was all right, that he had survived the Spellplague, but I think what I really wanted was to ensure that I was not the only one still living who carried the weight of our past.
I left the crew aboard ship and rowed a dinghy to the island. Mask’s temple remained intact, the drawbridge lowered. I entered, walked its dark, empty halls, but found no one. Tears fell as I walked. I remembered the days I had spent in the temple, lost in fiend-spawned dreams, planning evil, harming my friends.
I hurried from that place, chased by self-loathing, and walked the island. Shadows filled the hollows and low spaces. The surf crashed; the birds squawked. I climbed the hill and visited Jak’s cairn. It was well-tended still.
I thought at the time that Riven must have returned to the temple from time to time, but no longer resided there. Perhaps too many memories stalked its halls for him, too. I was wrong.
As I rowed back out to the ship, shadows coagulated around me. The boat pulled a deeper draft as additional weight settled on it. I tried to turn, but the darkness held me fast.
“Riven?”
Riven’s voice sounded in my ear, as if he were sitting right behind me. His tone was one of surprise.
“Cale has a son, Mags.”
“A son? How? Where? He lived through the Spellplague?”
“He was born afterward. He will be born afterward, rather.”
“Will? What are you saying?” I set the oars and tried to turn on my bench, but failed. “How? Cale died in—”
“Mask pushed her forward through time to save her from the Shadowstorm, and from the Spellplague. I haven’t yet located her.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“Why indeed,” Riven said.
That was not the answer I had expected. “But … aren’t you him? Don’t you know?”
“I am not him, Mags. I just have some of his power.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Men have sons. Maybe nothing. Maybe it was just something he did for Cale.”
I thought
not, but held my tongue.
“He told me I would be back for him,” Riven said.
“Who?”
“Your father.”
I tried again to turn, failed. “Back for whom? Cale?”
But the darkness lifted and Riven was gone. I have not seen him since.
I returned to the ship, used my power to cause the crew to forget that they had brought me to the Wayrock, and returned to Daerlun. Years later I bought my place, my Hell, and here I reside.
My mind still bears the scars of my time with Riven and Cale. But they are healed. Mostly. The Source floats in Sakkors’ core, one of the two floating enclaves that hover over the reborn Empire of Netheril, but I no longer feel its pull. I rarely use my powers at all. My father’s voice no longer troubles my sleep. Only memories trouble my mind now, not addictions and archfiends. I hope my life is worthy of the sacrifice Erevis made to save it.
I still check the dark corners of the Hell, the shadowy alleys of Daerlun, but not just for Erevis. Also for his son. When I recall Riven’s words to me aboard the dinghy, I think that Erevis’s story may not yet have unfolded fully. Perhaps it can be completed only through his son. Perhaps that is why Mask spared him.
Time will tell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul S. Kemp is a graduate of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the University of Michigan Law School. He practices corporate law in a suburb of Detroit. There, chained to his desk, he remains a hapless slave to the unforgiving Capitalist Machine. When he manages to steal a few private moments out of the eyeshot of his merciless bureaucratic captors, he types a few meager words on an old Vic 20 computer—the writing is his sole release from a life otherwise filled with unending toil.
Before he was locked in his office, never again to see the sun, Paul was known to enjoy the company of a lovely redhead he vaguely remembers as his wife, Jennifer, and that of his twin sons. He also enjoyed Yankee baseball, University of Michigan football, a well-poured Guinness, a fine cigar, and any decent sci-fi or fantasy flick, but that was all before his life became a living hell of memos, legal briefs, and utterly pointless emails.