Sword of the Gods

by Bruce R Cordell

  Demascus jumped to his feet and threw himself through the door. Behind him echoed a scream of rage and a blast of scalding air.

  Chant was already bounding down the spiral stairs three at a time, gripping his remarkable crossbow in one hand. The pawnbroker’s green brocade shirt was blackened, but he was obviously still very much alive. Demascus was relieved; if the human had come to serious harm helping him—

  Light blossomed overhead, bright as the noonday sun. Demascus didn’t look; he concentrated on overtaking Chant even as his suddenly sharp shadow fluttered ahead of him on the curved steps. His body worked smoothly and efficiently, and even in the face of being burned to a crisp, he exulted in the sense of strength in his limbs.

  The azer waited for them at the bottom of the stairs. Its hammer was so hot it glowed white.

  Chant yelled, “Don’t engage it!” and hurtled over the side railing while still ten feet above the floor. He did a fair impression of someone skilled at leaping from heights, though his landing lacked something of grace; it was more of a bounce. But then he was up and making for the kitchen even as Demascus vaulted the railing on the opposite side.

  “Chant Morven, you’ve made yourself an enemy this night!” thundered Chevesh’s voice from somewhere above.

  Demascus dropped, delighted with how easily his body took the impact. His muscles knew what to do; he flexed into the fall with his waist and knees, and vacated his landing spot a heartbeat before the azer’s hammer smashed down.

  Then he was through the kitchen and out of the tower, running down the street after the pawnbroker beneath a sky showing the first hints of approaching dawn.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AIRSPUR

  THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

  CHANT EASED THE DOOR SHUT. HE’D APPLIED A SPOT OF OIL to the hinges before leaving, and the door closed without a sound. Regular soft snores continued to issue from the back of his shop. Demascus still slept.

  He was in serious need of some rest himself. But he hadn’t gotten where he was by doing what was easiest. Or by making simple assumptions. Which was why he’d spent the morning putting out feelers on Demascus. He wanted to believe everything the pale man had told him was true. But belief and evidence were two different animals.

  Why’d he get involved with the stranger? Now a mad wizard has it out for me, he thought.

  Under normal circumstances, Chant wouldn’t have given an amnesiac lost soul the time of day. Too many folks in similar straits showed up at his shop with a tale of woe, clothes a decade out of fashion, and a keepsake to sell off. Usually stinking of ale and missing a tooth or two.

  Chant was jaded. He had to be; he’d be a poor pawnbroker if his heart went out to every sob story related to him within the confines of his shop.

  And it was precisely because he was jaded that he’d been intrigued by the stranger, he realized. Demascus’s tale was demonstrably more interesting than a drunk who’d been rolled for all his possessions, memory included. The theft of the scarf before his very eyes, a piece of fabric Chant had kept safe for four years, proved that. The stranger was part of something big, even if the man couldn’t remember exactly what it was.

  Which meant that helping Demascus find himself again might prove to be Chant’s salvation too. And if not that, at the very least a much-needed diversion. That was, assuming Chevesh didn’t find his shop later that day and burn it to the ground …

  Anyhow, providing a few sniffers with a description of a tall man with tattoos the color of a dead hearth was more than a mere precaution. Information channeled through informants, rats, and snitches around the city might eventually provide enough clues to recover all of Demascus’s memory.

  It was entirely possible Chant would learn the stranger really was only a dockworker who’d managed to survive being sacrificed by some wizard’s first and last demon summoning. Well, that was interesting. It would mean Demascus was a lucky sod.

  But, no. The way he’d seen Demascus handle himself against the mage, even with no memory of who he really was … well, he was obviously not a commoner.

  Chant tucked the “closed” sign into the front window, then padded to the other side of his shop.

  Demascus had stripped to his smallclothes. He slept on his stomach, one arm a pillow for his head. The man’s tattoos ran down each arm and continued all the way to the end of his two longest fingers. But the design that ran along Demascus’s arms was just an outlier of the main tattoo on his back, which seemed to be some sort of intricate pattern of jagged filaments that suggested the shape of a sword. It was incredibly elaborate.

  Chant had considered tattoos for himself on a couple occasions, but had never made the committment. Tattoos containing magic were too expensive. And nothing of enough positive consequence in his life had occurred that he wanted to set it down with such permanence.

  Sometimes, forgetting was a kind of absolution … though Demascus obviously didn’t see it that way.

  What would it be like to have no memory of himself and his deeds? Might it be the ultimate exoneration? A blessing indeed, for some; to forget your past, and move forward with a fresh start. Chant’s lips twisted.

  He would give much to leave behind his problems. Most notably the series of astoundingly poor decisions he’d made some two years earlier at Master Raneger’s Den of Games. Being rash had always served Chant well. But taking “bold” chances was something only novices did when it came to gambling. He should have known that the eladrin’s games were fixed. Indeed, he had known; but he’d trusted more in a pair of pawned dice than Raneger’s ability to swindle his customers. Ebony dice that their owner assured Chant would bring him luck. Why hadn’t he been more canny? Any dice with actual power to bring their owner lasting luck surely wouldn’t have shown up in a pawnshop.

  Chant had tested the dice countless times, and found them astoundingly reliable … until the one time it counted. At the Den of Games, the dice turned on him.

  It was ironic. All the people who showed up in his shop to pawn their valuables to pay off debts—their liabilities were nothing to what Chant owed Master Raneger’s house.

  Of course, even if he managed to forget what he owed, regular reminders would be served, thanks to the bruisers who showed up each tenday to shake him down for a repayment, plus interest. Chant’s network of sniffers and spies was a trembling sapling compared to Raneger’s mature tree. No matter how Chant wriggled, he was unable to free himself from the end of the hook Raneger had set for him.

  If it wasn’t for Jaul, he would have fled Airspur, and started fresh somewhere else. Maybe Calimshan, where genasi were also said to be common, but perhaps Cormyr, or Aglarond, or High Imaskar …

  But Jaul made that impossible.

  He recalled his last contact with his son, sliding down memory’s well-worn and rutted path. It had been in this very shop, and Chant had been angry.

  “You run with those toughs long enough,” he shouted at Jaul, “and sooner or later you’ll end up doing something you’ll never be able to live down!”

  “What, like stealing?” said Jaul, his jaw set. “Like spying? Like lying to almost everyone you meet? Like what you do, Father, every day of your life?”

  Cold fury crested over Chant’s composure, washing away his calm words and reasonable answers on how everything in life falls along a continuum. About how shades of gray were only gray if you didn’t take the time to fully consider their repercussions. And how if you moved too far to the far end of that spectrum, gray turned to darkness, and there was no coming back.

  Instead he yelled, “Get out my shop! No son of mine talks to me that way!”

  Jaul stormed out that day, and never returned.

  The next time Chant saw his son, it was in the Den of Games, working as a bouncer in the front room. Seeing Jaul there, just seventeen years old, preening in Raneger’s colors as he watched the door, was too much.

  It was a betrayal. Lost in the fumes of blueleaf and a river of gold ale
, Chant determined to show Raneger a run on the house like he’d never seen. He fished the ebony dice from their pouch and blew on them. He retreated to the back room, where only high rollers were allowed. There, he proceeded to bankrupt himself.

  In the aching light of the following afternoon, a politely worded message arrived by courier. In thin letters drawn out with soulless efficiency, the message indicated the obscene sum he owed Raneger.

  He turned the message over and saw the likeness of his son sketched on the back. Sharp terror tugged at his stomach. He knew immediately what the portrait implied. He realized only then how bullheadedly he’d pursued his own destruction.

  Despite their estrangement, or perhaps because of it, Jaul would serve Raneger as the perfect, if unwitting, hostage.

  “Damn it all.”

  The sleeping man snorted and turned in his sleep.

  Sorry, Demascus, he thought, and moved farther from his guest’s cot.

  With such a run of bad luck, it was oddly fortuitous he hadn’t sold off Demascus’s scarf. He’d almost done it a few times, after the tall stranger failed to return to claim it in the time specified. Without it—

  Exhaustion crashed down on him like a barrow of stones. An image of his bed wafted before him, soft and warm in the loft. But not yet. His mind was gummy from lack of sleep, but he had one more thing to check before he allowed himself a nap.

  Fable appeared from nowhere, her green eyes luminous in the light trickling through the shutters.

  “You scared me, you little devil,” he whispered. The cat twitched an ear, then padded across the floor to an empty crate. Fable liked to sit in the short-sided crate like it was some kind of cat throne. Funny little creature. He smiled.

  Chant wound around a display of silvered dishes and formal napkins, and paused before a rusted ship anchor. He pulled it out of the way, shoved a wooden box of pewter mugs with his foot, and paused to regard the cabinet he’d uncovered. Books and scrolls were visible through the cabinet’s narrow glass doors. He scanned the titles. He’d accumulated a collection of tomes and librams over twenty years of buying oddments. Some were from the libraries of down-on-their-luck genasi, but the core of the collection was from a single source: a group of ragged salvagers had brought him a chest filled to bursting with moldy tomes. They’d told him they’d pulled the chest from a Chessentan ruin they found on an earthmote south of Airspur.

  Chant had paid good coin for the books, thinking he could turn around and sell them at a fair markup.

  But there they still moldered. Apparently not as many book collectors wandered through pawnshops as he’d hoped, and he’d never taken the time to set up an external sale.

  Maybe that was good. The things Chevesh had mentioned reminded him of something he’d seen scrawled across one of the pages.

  He pulled a thick volume from the shelf that smelled of mushrooms and was titled Cults of Tyranny. He opened it on the counter.

  The book could have used an index. Or even a table of contents. Chant paged through, searching for the image that had caught in his memory when he’d first shelved the book so many years ago.

  And suddenly there it was on the page: the image of an eye, superimposed on a jagged spiral design. The caption read, “The Cult of the Elder Elemental Eye was the heart of a religious sect that terrorized locals when it sprang up in west Chessenta in 1340 DR. The cult hired bandits, consorted with demons and evil powers, and caused much destruction before it drew so much attention to itself that it was finally destroyed by an alliance of forces. The cult never managed to gain a foothold in Faerûn, which some attribute to Mystra’s direct intervention.”

  That was all.

  Chant frowned, and paged through the rest of the book. He found nothing else related to the Elder Elemental Eye.

  He turned back to the page with the symbol again and studied it. It looked sort of familiar, like he’d just …

  “Waukeen’s empty purse!” he cursed. He knew where he’d seen it.

  Demascus began to struggle in his sleep. The man’s hands went to his own neck, as if he were trying to loosen a shirt collar drawn too tight. He thrashed and yelled, “No!” and sat up on his cot, eyes wide and blinking.

  “What’s wrong?” said Chant.

  “Huh?” said Demascus, staring at him in confusion.

  “You were dreaming. A nightmare of some kind.”

  Demascus rubbed his neck. He mumbled, “Oh. Yeah.”

  Chant studied the pensive expression on Demascus’s face. Whatever the dream had been about, it hadn’t been pleasant. He decided not to press.

  Instead he said, “I’ve found something you might find interesting. Come take look at this,” and pointed at the picture in the book. “Remind you of anything?”

  Demascus swung his feet off the cot and into his boots, then came to the counter.

  He examined the symbol, and his eyes narrowed. He said, “Minus the eye in the center, that’s the sign that fellow at the Motherhouse had on his neck!”

  Chant shook his head. He said, “Chevesh wasn’t lying.”

  Demascus began donning his gear. “Time to call the Firestorm Cabal to account,” he said.

  “Hold on; we need a plan. We can’t just burst into the Motherhouse and accuse everyone there of being liars!”

  “Why not?” Demascus said. He finished with his armor and belted on his sword.

  “Because if they lied to us before, they’ll probably try to kill us to protect their secret. If they’re summoning demons, I doubt they value our lives, except as possible sacrifices.”

  “If it was as simple as that, they would have killed us when we were there yesterday. Anyway, Lieutenant Leheren wasn’t lying to me, I’m sure of it. It was the other two, Jett and that other genasi.”

  Chant nodded but raised his hands, “Let’s think this through.”

  Demascus ignored Chant and pulled on his coat as he walked to the exit. “We can think it through on the way.”

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed? If the Cabal really is calling demonic monsters into Airspur, maybe we should figure out some way to alert the queen that she’s being hoodwinked by the very people she hired to …”

  But Demascus was already gone.

  Chant was tired. His muscles ached from the evening’s escapades, and he’d managed to bang his shin somewhere along the way. It was so tender to the touch that when his boot top accidentally brushed it, he yelped with pain.

  He considered letting the stranger go and be done with him. The thought of his bed was a powerful lure.

  Fable meowed. “You already ate this morning,” he told the cat. “Earn your keep and find the rat who keeps eating holes in the tapestries.” Fable just looked at him, then settled more comfortably in her crate.

  He glanced at the wall above the counter. Jaul’s likeness, rendered in deft strokes of black ink, was pinned there. Chant muttered, “I swear this is going to be the death of me,” and left his shop.

  He dashed to catch up with the swiftly departing Demascus. He garnered a few looks for his haste; Chant wasn’t known as someone who dashed anywhere, unless it was to be first in line at the buffet held once a tenday at Creighton’s Sea Bonanza. It was an image of portly ineffectualness he’d worked hard to fashion, and he cursed Demascus for making it necessary to reveal himself as capable of moving so rapidly in front of all his contemporaries.

  He reached Demascus’s side and said, “Wait!” then put his hands on his knees and gasped for breath. All for show, of course. If anyone had noted his athletic dash, they were treated to a wheezy, gasping finale that should make it all right.

  Demascus waited. His eyes widened in surprise. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  The last time Demascus had seen him move swiftly, Chant had taken steps three at a time, vaulted a banister, and sprinted out of a wizard’s tower without showing any ill effect.

  Chant waved him off without explaining his apparent lack of breath and straightened. He said, his vo
ice low, “I’m going with you. I’ll help, I told you before. But we have to be a bit more cautious. We can’t just run up to the front doors and demand to be let in.”

  “Then what?”

  Chant began walking. He said, “We find a spot where we can observe the Motherhouse from a distance, and we watch.”

  “What’s that going to accomplish?” The man’s lips were thin with impatience.

  “We wait until we see Leheren or Jett emerge. We follow them without revealing ourselves until they’re well away from the structure. That way, if we confront them for answers, they won’t have the entire strength of the Firestorm Cabal to call in their defense.”

  Demascus considered. He said, “What if they don’t come out?”

  “Then we devise a new plan.”

  “That sounds awfully close to making it up as you go.”

  “My speciality.”

  Damascus sighed. Finally he said, “That sounds … reasonable. Thanks for helping me, Chant. It seems I’ve got something of an impetuous nature.” He frowned, as if unhappy with the idea. “I really appreciate you going out on a limb for me, especially given my situation.”

  “Like I said before, I’m helping you because information is coin, and this situation is shaping up to be a dragon’s hoard.” And only coin will see Jaul to safety, he thought.

  They made their way in casual fashion, by roundabout routes suggested by Chant, until they reached an earthmote with a parklike overlook. From it, they could look down on the Firestorm Cabal’s main safehouse.

  Demascus scanned the vista, his eyes growing wide. “I don’t understand. Are we lost?”

  Chant was confused too. He hated that feeling. “No … we’re not lost, but …”

  The Motherhouse was gone. In its place was a gutted, fire-blackened ruin of tumbled stones that sent a pillar of smoke into the sky.

  “Lords of light,” whispered Demascus. “What’s happened?”

  Throwing caution to the wind, they descended, until they stood with the crowd of onlookers who’d gathered to regard the spectacle of destruction.