by Lisa Smedman
Halisstra yanked her finger out. Had she not, the darkness would have drawn her irrevocably into itself. Into the void that was the skull’s empty eye socket. She knew what the tendril of darkness was: raw negative energy. Seeping out of… nowhere. Drawing everything it touched into oblivion.
What bliss that would be.
The wind shifted. In order to reach the tendril of ash, Halisstra would have to move to a spot where Wendonai might see her. At the moment, his attention was wholly focused on Cavatina. He crouched over her, his quivering nostrils savoring her weakness. Demons, however, weren’t stupid. Not always. The moment he spotted movement behind him, Halisstra’s chance at escape would be extinguished.
She’d have to make sure he didn’t spot her, then.
Softly, she began to sing. When her song ended, she was as invisible as the wind. Then she began a second song, one that would provide a distraction.
Before she could complete it, a voice pealed out. It was Cavatina, her voice raised in joyous song, “I … am … redeemed!”
Wendonai rocked back, astonished. An anguished howl tore itself from his throat.
Snarling out the final word of her song, Halisstra conjured up an image of herself and sent it hurtling toward Wendonai. The illusionary attack would buy her only an instant, but an instant was all she needed. As the false image hurled itself at Wendonai, claws raking and teeth bared, Halisstra dived for the stream of black and plunged both hands into it. The darkness seized them in its icy grip and wrenched her body inside.
Utter cold gripped Halisstra. Her body felt thin and fragile as paper as the negative energy teased it into an impossible length. Thinner, thinner, until it was a ragged flutter. Nothingness loomed, a vacant eye socket that led down into still, cold darkness.
Then oblivion claimed her.
Cavatina’s eyes widened in surprise as Halisstra hurled herself at Wendonai. The demon snarled, but made no move to battle Halisstra. Instead he twisted around, staring intently at the pile of skulls.
Halisstra struck himand disappeared.
An illusion!
Something odd was happening to Cavatina. A brilliant white light poured from her body, illuminating the demon from below and throwing a harsh shadow across the ground behind him. White as the moon, the light sang from Cavatina’s pores. A crackling square of darkness drifted down through this light, settling upon Cavatina’s face with a velvet-soft touch, then disappearing. The demon, inside her mind a moment ago, was shut out. Peace filled Cavatina’s mind, gentle as a mother’s lullaby, even as the searing white moonlight poured from her skin with the rage of a mother’s wrath.
“Eilistraee!” Cavatina cried.
Wendonai reared to his feet, his leathery wings flapping. He staggered backward, wincing, as if pummeled by invisible blows. He shot Cavatina a look of anguished rage.
“No!” he howled. He shook a blood-red fist at the sky. “I will not be denied her!”
Flames erupted on his crimson skin and crawled across it in white-hot waves, licking at the wound in his abdomen. He forced himself, stomp by stomp, toward Cavatina. Bulling his way in through the protective shield that Eilistraee had thrown up around her.
Cavatina threw herself to the side. She rolled onto her stomach, her bound hands scrabbling against the gritty soil. An instant later, her holy symbol was in her hands. Clutching it, she forced herself to her knees. She sang out an urgent note, and the blackened singing sword rose into the air behind Wendonai. Soot exploded from the blade, revealing gleaming steel. Then the sword began to sing.
Wendonai whirled to face it.
Too late. Cavatina yanked her bound hands toward her chest, urging the sword forward. Its point plunged into the demon’s chest, finding his heart. The sword’s peal of triumph drowned out the demon’s anguished roar and the angry howl of the rising wind. Wendonai staggered, clutching the hilt that was rammed tight against his chest. A bloodied length of steel protruded from his back, quivering in its victory dance.
Before the demon could heal himself, Cavatina sang out another prayer. This time, her voice was funereal and low. The dirge she sang resonated through the blade in the balor’s chest and vibrated through his blood with each pulse of his massive heart. He staggered, his cloven feet scuffing furrows in the salt-crusted earth. His wings snapped erect and fluttered stiffly, and his eyes blazed. Even as the dirge forced him to his knees, Wendonai shook his massive horned head.
“This … is not finished,” he gasped. “You cannot… kill me.”
Another lie. Wendonai had made one terrible, fatal mistake. Had this battle taken place anywhere else, Cavatina would have been unable to kill him. The demon’s essence would have fallen back into the raw chaos of the Abyss, there to be reborn. But in the Abyss, he was as mortal as she was.
Cavatina braced herself. When Wendonai died, the resulting void would tear at the fabric of the Abyss, rupturing it in a tremendous explosion. She, too, would die.
That didn’t matter. Her soul would join Eilistraee’s eternal dance, and Cavatina would have her victory.
Cavatina was on her knees, still at bound at ankle and wrist with the smoldering remains of the demon’s whip. But Eilistraee’s symbol was in her hands. Tiny and dull though the ceremonial blade might be, it would be Wendonai’s downfall.
She ended her dirge with two droning words: “Die, Wendonai.”
The balor’s eyes rolled back in its head. He groanedlong and low as tortured metal twisting apart. Then he began to tilt to one side. The wind howled, tearing at Cavatina’s hair and driving sharp granules of salt into her bare skin. The demon’s hands clawed at the air, as if he were desperately trying to prop himself upright, but to no avail.
With a crash that rattled the ground on which Cavatina knelt, Wendonai fell.
For several heartbeats, the air was utterly still.
Wendonai was dead, even though his body had not been consumed.
And Cavatina was still alive.
A miracle.
The glow that enveloped Cavatina abruptly ended. She let out a shuddering sigh. “Praise be to you, Eilistraee. In my time of need …” Realizing something, she amended her prayer of thanksgiving. “Masked Lady,” she corrected. “My heartfelt thanks, for… everything.”
She moistened her wind-chapped lips. They were crusted with salt, but she tasted something far sweeter.
Redemption.
She shuffled on her knees to where the demon lay. Using the length of blade that protruded from his back, she sliced apart the tight binding of leather around her wrists. Then she sat, raised her bound legs, and sawed the bindings off her ankles. She nicked herself in several places but didn’t care. It was all part of the dance.
Leaping to her feet, she gave in to it. Whirling, clapping, spinning in place. A victory dance. Not just for herself, but for the Masked Lady. Embracing all that they both had become.
Only in the middle of it did she suddenly remember Halisstra. She whirled in place, but the salt-encrusted plain was as bare as it had always been. Empty and flat, stretching as far as the eye could see.
“Where is she?” Cavatina wondered aloud.
She’d asked herself the same question, nearly two years ago, after slaying Selvetarm. Just as she had then, she vowed to search for Halisstra. Only when Cavatina found her again, Halisstra would pay for her treachery.
With a grunt, Cavatina flopped the dead demon onto his side. His lips were pulled back, his fangs exposed in what looked like a grin.
“Go ahead and smile,” Cavatina told him. “It’s Eilistraee who has the last laugh.” She planted a foot on his chest and yanked out the singing sword. She whirled it around her head, letting the dark blood slide from it. The sword pealed its joy.
What now? Cavatina thought as she glanced around. This is the Abyss, and I still need to escape.
Her eye fell on the pile of blackened skulls. A thin tendril of black seeped from the eye socket of one of them. She crouched and peered at its source.
The void she stared into left her mind spinning. For an instant, she felt nothingnot even the beating of her own heart. Her very soul teetered on a blade’s edge: on one side, life; on the other … nothing. Just a terrifying emptiness.
Cavatina reeled back, sickened. The eye socket was indeed a portal. A portal to death itself.
There had to be another way out of there. Halisstra must have gone somewhere. And if she could escape, then so could Cavatina. She was a Darksong Knight. A slayer of demons. No, a slayer of demigods. She…
She smiled. There is was again. Pride. It had nearly been her downfall, more than once.
Still, she would find a way out of there. When she’d trained as a Darksong Knight, her instructors had foreseen just such an eventuality. More than one of them had followed a demon onto its home ground, slain it, and returned to tell the tale. They’d told her how it was done. The prayer was one Cavatina had never attempted before, but she was certain she could master it.
Anything was possible, with Eilistraee’s grace.
Holding her sword in both hands, Cavatina raised it until the blade was horizontal with the ground. Then she spun and sang. Her blade tried to dip toward the skull portal, but she would not allow it. Muscles straining, she kept it level. Then suddenly the point plunged down, driving itself deep into the salt. A shaft of twined moonlight and shadow shot out from that point, a hair’s breadth above the ground and thin as a sword blade. A path that only a devotee of the Masked Lady could see. A path to the next nearest portal.
Cavatina yanked her sword from the ground. With the softly humming blade balanced across one bare shoulder, she set out upon the path.
Kâras stepped down into the boat, taking care that his too-short legs didn’t stumble. Getting used to being half his usual size was the easy part. Coping with having his face bare was harder. His mask a bright red handkerchief-peeped out of the pocket of the leather vest his piwafwi had transformed into. He resisted the urge to touch it.
Gindrol and Talzir followed him, each seamless in his magically altered form. Their disguises were perfect to the last detail: bare scalps, mottled gray skin, wiry muscles, and pebble-black eyes. They even wore a deep gnome’s suspicious glower. They might have been born svirfneblin, for all anyone could tell.
The rowboat was narrow and black, with blunted ends. The three disguised Nightshadows settled onto its bare wooden seats, Kâras in the front with the strongbox resting on his knees. Gindrol, just behind him, took the oars in hand. Each was a length of fused armbone, ending in a cupped hand.
The splashes of the oars were drowned out by the clattering of bone on bone. The lake-filled cavern was vast, but its entire ceiling was studded with skulls, giving it a bumpy, off-white appearance. The lake itself was utterly flatthe slight wake the rowboat produced immediately stilled. A chill emanated from the water, up through the wooden plank on which Kâras sat. He found himself shivering and tried to force his muscles to relax. He didn’t want the others to think he was afraid.
The lake was deep, but the Faerzress that permeated the stone there shone up from below, lending the water a faint bluish glow. Silhouettes flitted through its depths: water spiders, hunting their prey.
At the center of the lake lay an island, on which stood the ruined city of V’elddrinnsshar. The island itself was a slumped mass of off-white limestone whose top had been leveled. Streets wound between empty stalagmite buildings that rose like tapering fingers questing for the ceiling. At the center of the island stood a larger spire of stone, its top sheared off. Kiaransalee’s temple capped it, a brooding block of black marble. Ghosts flitted above it like demented swallows, their anguished moans filling the air in an eerie chorus.
As the boat drew closer to the island, Kâras could make out huddled shapes choking the streets of the abandoned city: the bodies of the dead. Several lay on the dock, arms or legs draped loosely over the edges where they had fallen. A dozen rose to their feet in silence as the boat scraped against the stone steps that led up to the dock. All were drow, their skin paled to dull gray. Each had flesh pocked with enormous, long-since ruptured blisters: the puffball-like hallmark of the ascomid plague. Had those blisters been fresh, the slightest touch would have ruptured them, releasing a cloud of deadly spores that would propagate the disease. But it had been a century since the plague had swept through there, killing everyone in the city.
Kâras twisted around on his seat and saw that Talzir’s eyes were wide, his lips tight. Gindrol, who was rowing, still had his back to the dock.
“Steady,” Kâras told them, his svirfneblin voice strange in his ears. “Remember, they need our voidstone. They’re not going to kill us … yet.”
The svirfneblin that was Talzir cracked a grim smile.
One of the undead drowa female whose finery hung in tatters on her blistered bodystaggered down the steps and reached down for the strongbox Kâras held. Shaking his head, he drew it out of her reach.
“This isn’t for you, Mistress,” he told her. “It’s for your Reaper.”
A chuckle sounded from one of the doorways at the rear of the dock. From it stepped a drow female wearing the loose black robe and gray skullcap that marked her as a Crone.
Silver rings decorated each finger. An hourglass, filled with white sand, hung against her chest, and a dagger with a bone handle was sheathed at her hip. Her skin was smudged with gray: ashes, taken from a pyre and mixed with rancid fat. Kâras steeled himself against the smell as she approached. Back in Maerimydra, it had always made him gag.
He clambered up the steps, gripping the strongbox. Talzir and Gindrol followed. All three bowed at the Crone’s approach. Barely acknowledging them, she tossed the sack she was holding at their feet. It landed with a clatter: the sound of gemstones clicking together.
When she reached out for the strongbox, Kâras feigned reluctance. He shifted the box in his hands, making sure to draw her attention to it. The wood appeared gouged, as if it had been chewed on
“Is there a problem?” she asked. Her voice was as cold as a corpse.
“We were attacked.” Kâras said. “A bulette mistook the strongbox for its lunch.”
“Good thing it didn’t swallow the contents,” Talzir piped up from behind him, “or it would have gotten a terrible stomach ache.” He gave a nervous-sounding laugh.
The Crone’s eyes narrowed. “Give it to me.”
Kâras shifted his feet. “But”
“Give it to me!”
Kâras obliged, lifting the strongbox. Just as the Crone’s hand was about to touch it, he moved the box upward. Her hand passed through the illusionary lid and touched the voidstone. For the briefest of instants, her eyes widened in alarm and her mouth parted in a scream.
Then she was gone.
With a thought, Kâras altered his form. His body doubled in size, changed gender, assumed the face he’d just been staring up at. His vest became a robe, his mask a skullcap, and the dragon-skin ring on his finger multiplied itself by eight and turned silver.
He stared disdainfully down at the other two Nightshadows and shouted in a cold female voice, “Where did he go? Speak!”
The undead drow glanced back and forth between the transformed Kâras and the spot where the real Crone had just been standing. One of them pawed at Kâras’s sleeve, and he warned it off with a glare.
Gindrol and Talzir, meanwhile, played their parts to perfection. Shuffling, nervous, they refused to meet the “Crone’s” eyes. On cue, the boat rocked, as if an invisible person were stepping into it. Kâras stared in that direction. “Ah. Lost his nerve, did he?”
Gindrol bent to scoop up the sack, but Kâras stamped a foot down on it. He pretended to open the strongbox. The illusionary lid sprang open, and he looked inside. The voidstone was a dark, fist-sized hollow at the center of the box. With a satisfied nod, he pretended to close the missing lid.
He removed his foot from the sack. “Go,” he ordered the other two.
Cring
ing, they retrieved the sack and scrambled back to the boat.
All part of the act.
It was lost on the undead, of course. The animated corpses that surrounded Kâras hadn’t the intelligence to understand the subtle scene the three Nightshadows had just played out. But the quth-maren that stepped out of a nearby doorway did. Tall and gaunt, made up of nothing more than oozing muscle stitched rudely over bone, it stared at Kâras with eyes that wept blood. As Kâras met its stare, panic welled inside him. He felt if he were drowning, thrashing about in panic, going under in a sea of blood.
Masked Lord, he pleaded fiercely, strengthen me.
The panic dissipated, leaving only a nervous bead of sweat that trickled down the small of Kâras’s back. He glared at the animated dead who clustered around him, fawning for his attention. “Clear a path for me,” he ordered.
The quth-maren nodded. It waved a hand, and the plague-killed drow standing on the dock folded to the ground, lifeless once more. Then it gave a hacking cough, deep in its chest. A wad of blood-tinged mucous shot from its mouth and landed on the stomach of a corpse that had Iain down immediately in front of Kâras. The acidic spit sizzled, burning clean through the body, down to the stone beneath.
The quth-maren gave a gurgling chuckle and padded up the dock, leaving bloody footprints in its wake.
Behind Kâras, Gindrol and Talzir pulled away from the dock. The splashes of their oars were rapidly lost amid the clattering of the skulls overhead and the wails of the ghosts that flitted above.
Kâras forced his shoulders erect and followed the quth-maren with a haughty, confident step. They walked through the ruined city. Everywhere Kâras looked lay plague victims, preserved by fell magic. They rose at his approach, bowing in subservience to the Crone he appeared to be. Some plucked at his cloak with blistered fingers; he shrugged them away imperiously.
Movement down a side street caught his eye. He glanced in that direction and saw a monstrous hound nearly four times his height, made up of a seething mass of bodies, with teeth made from broken femurs. It sniffed at the dead, selected one, and closed its teeth around it. Lifting the corpse into the air, the monstrous hound shook its head, scattering chunks of flesh left and right. It paused in this gruesome task to stare back at Kâras, blood dribbling from its mouth like drool.