by Troy Denning
Then a man’s voice rumbled through the sitting room door and called upon Gwydion to remove the drawbar. The woman furrowed her brow, and I saw my folly at once. A servant of thieving Oghma would never help me recover the Cyrinishad. I pressed the tip of my dagger against the scribe’s breastbone, and at that instant the voice of the witch voice filled the room.
“Rinda, open the door!”
Rinda’s green eyes snapped open before me. Even in the candlelight, I must have seemed a fiend from the Abyss, with my boiled face and battered eye and burst lips. I started to clamp my ragged palm over her mouth, but already the scribe had pulled a knife from nowhere and was slashing at my throat.
“Gwydion!” she screamed.
Now all that follows happened in a whirl, and so swiftly that I can neither recall it in absolute precision, nor recount it with complete accuracy.
I threw myself backward. Rinda’s blade slashed across my cheek, spilling hot blood all down my chest and leaving my face as numb as stone. Then the shrew leapt from her bed as naked as a beast and hurled herself upon me. Since my dagger was raised between us, she impaled herself to the hilt. She gave a great cry and lashed out once more, barely missing her mark. I saw that she wore no key about her neck, only the sparkling amulet of Oghma. I perceived then that the iron lockbox probably had no key at all, as its guardians never wished it to be opened.
A loud clanging arose in the adjacent room. This caused me some befuddlement, for it was certainly no door being battered down. I hurled the dead woman off me and scrambled toward the archway to see what magic Ruha had cast.
I met Gwydion in the doorway. There was no blood on him anywhere, which only made him more dreadful to behold. His head lolled about on the back of his shoulders, careening back and forth as he tried to swing it around so he could see to attack me. He had selected weapons for close quarters, holding a dagger in one hand and a hand axe in the other. Apparently he planned to separate me from my limbs himself, as the guards were now battering at the door and he showed no interest in unbarring it.
I will not say what my body did then, as it was neither seemly nor important. I scrambled back into Rinda’s room until I bumped into the edge of the table. Gwydion came after me, snapping his shoulders sideways so that his head swung around to leer in my direction. In the next instant, his axe was arcing toward my head.
I flattened myself atop the book on the scribe’s table, knocking the quill and inkwell to the floor. My foe’s axe struck the wall behind my head, knelling my doom. I rolled in the only direction left to me, into the window casement, then snatched up Rinda’s book and held it before my face like a shield.
Gwydion’s dagger struck the book with such force that it drove me out the window, and I found myself plunging down toward the steaming moat, still clutching Rinda’s leather volume between my fists.
What could I say, except: “Cyric, the One, the All!”
Eight
In this much, gods are the same as mortals: those most eager for a thing arrive first. Long before Cyric’s trial, Mystra manifested herself in the Pavilion of Cynosure and hid in a gloomy corner. There she lurked for a time, as still as a thief among the camels. The chamber looked the same as always to her, an alchemist’s laboratory cluttered with braziers and glassware, but now it was dark and empty. She scanned every nook and shadow, and when she grew certain that no other god lurked there, she stepped from her hiding place to work her treachery.
The shrew worked quickly, first chiming a tin bell to make Cyric’s voice ring false when he read the Cyrinishad. Then she wiped all the tables in the chamber with a living sponge, so the power would be drawn from the sacred words as they passed through the air. Next she summoned a serpent up through the floor and plucked its forked tongue from its mouth; this was to ward against oily words of persuasion and half-truths and promises of convenience, or lies of any kind.
When Mystra finished with the poor snake, she concealed her treachery by dropping a white veil upon the floor. The cloth had hardly touched the stones before the other gods began to arrive, Tempus clad in his armor, Shar cowering beneath her shadows, Talos haloed by an aura of flashing lightning.
“Kelemvor is not here?” asked Talos. The Destroyer’s voice crackled with excitement, for nothing served his savage nature better than the annihilation of a god. “Surely he has not changed his mind?”
“Of course not!” said Sune, appearing in a swirl of red hair and flashing teeth. “Kelemvor has a steady heart.” She glanced in Mystra’s direction, then added, “Too steady, sometimes.”
Moving quickly to deflect Sune’s jealousy, Tempus dropped to his knees at her feet. “If there be battle anywhere on Faerûn today, it shall be for love!” he declared. The Goddess of Love was as fickle as a halfling in the desert, and she could be trusted to keep her promise only when showered with constant affection. “I am smitten by your radiance.”
“And I am wild with lust!” Talos added.
To prove he spoke the truth, Talos set a crackling diadem of lightning in Sune’s hair and circled her in a lewd dance. The goddess blushed and giggled, but she did not look away.
Chauntea and Lathander arrived together on a beam of golden dawn light, and old man Silvanus came striding down the ray behind them. Tyr appeared next, as always lacking both his right hand and his eyes. He took his place in the circle, then scowled at the number of spaces still empty.
“The trial was to begin promptly at Candlekeep’s dawn.”
At that moment, Kelemvor appeared at Mystra’s side. His face was pale with fear, and he carried his sword on his belt. “I apologize for being late. But my full attention was required in the City of the Dead. Gwydion returned.”
Gasps and murmurs filled the pavilion. Every god there knew who Gwydion was and what he guarded, and they were all as quick as cobras to see how Cyric meant to use the book against them.
“What of the Cyrinishad?” demanded Tempus.
Kelemvor’s eyes went vacant, then he shook his head and shrugged. “I cannot remember.”
This surprised no one, for each god knew the power of Oghma’s enchantment. All eyes looked toward the Just One, and nine voices together demanded that he bar the Cyrinishad from the trial. Mystra spoke loudest of all, for she was much practiced in the art of deceiving men and knew that Tyr would suspect her treachery if she appeared unconcerned.
The Eyeless One raised the stump of his wrist, signaling for quiet. “We have dared to summon a fellow god to trial. If the verdict goes against him, we have it in our power to annihilate him—a penalty many are eager to levy.” At this, he paused to turn his empty eye sockets upon Kelemvor. “It is only just to let Cyric defend himself as he wishes. If his words enslave us, that is nothing compared to the fate you have planned for him.”
As the pavilion rumbled with outrage, Oghma manifested himself at Mystra’s side, and his eyes were filled with dread. “Forgive me. All my attention has been turned upon the Fugue Plain. I can hear Rinda calling, but the amulet she wears prevents me from finding her spirit.”
“What does Rinda’s spirit matter?” thundered Talos the Destroyer. His fear sizzled through the pavilion in crackling white bolts. “Cyric has his book!”
The pavilion fell silent. Kelemvor reached for his sword.
Mystra caught his arm. “What are you doing?”
“I will not listen to that book of lies!” Kelemvor said this for all to hear. “Before I serve Cyric, I will rot in the Abyss!”
Tyr pulled a white-glowing hammer from the empty air and fixed his eyeless gaze upon the God of Death.
Before the Just One could warn Kelemvor against attacking Cyric, Mystra grabbed Lord Death’s arm and asked, “What makes you think our only choices are rotting or slavery?”
“Tyr has decided—”
“You will not change Tyr’s mind with your sword, and Tyr is the judge. You cannot defy him.” Mystra pulled Lord Death’s hand from his sword. “Ao would not allow it. Trust me in this.”
Kelemvor scowled. Mystra held his gaze and did not look away, and finally his eyes lit with a secret comprehension. “As you wish. Perhaps I am being rash.”
“Good.” Mystra looked toward Tyr, then added, “No matter how much we hate Cyric, we must abide by the Just One’s decisions.”
Tyr nodded, for he was a buffoon, and buffoons are easily deceived by a woman’s fawning words. He opened his hand and released his glowing hammer back into the empty air.
Oghma was not so easily fooled. He frowned and said, “I trust you mean what you say, Lady Magic. Remember, Ao knows all.”
“Ao does not know all. If he did, he would have done something about Cyric before now.” Mystra looked back to Tyr and said, “Since we must abide by your decrees, Just One, I ask that you hold Cyric to the same standard. I believe the trial was to start upon Candlekeep’s dawn?”
“So it was,” replied Tyr. “The charge is innocence by way of insanity, by which Cyric stands accused of failing in his godly duty to spread strife and discord beyond his own church. Since the Mad One is absent, who will speak against the verdict?”
It surprised no god present that the following silence was as deep as the Abyss. Tyr’s eyeless gaze slid from one god to the next, lingering on each just long enough to observe a formality.
It was at this moment that Gwydion attacked me in the Keeper’s Tower. His blow sent me tumbling out the window, still clutching the thick volume that had blocked his dagger.
“Cyric, the One, the All!” I cried.
Then I slammed down on something that felt like a log tangle. The air left my lungs in a burst, the book slapped my chest, and a skull’s face eclipsed the brightening sky above me.
“You are late,” rasped the One. He was as a giant to me. I lay in the palm of his skeleton’s hand, with bony fingers as long as camel necks dancing beside me. He had eyes the size of wagon wheels and a jagged cavern for a nose and teeth that looked like two rows of ivory shields. One of his fingers curled down to tap the volume on my chest “Hide that beneath your robe.”
At first I did not understand. It seemed foolish beyond imagining that the One and All could mistake the plain ledger in my arms for the holy Cyrinishad, but Cyric closed his bony fingers about my body and began to squeeze.
“Obey!”
“But Mighty One, this is—”
“Do it now, Malik!” Darkness spilled from his eyes and poured over my body like a river, and I was swept into a sea of icy shadow. “The trial has begun.”
How long I floated there is impossible to say. It seemed at once an instant and an eternity. I barely had time to tuck the book beneath my robe, yet a thousand thoughts drifted through my head. I recalled that while Rinda wore Oghma’s diamond scroll about her neck, neither Cyric nor any other god could know the Cyrinishad’s location. I perceived that even if the book in my possession had been the sacred tome, the One could not have known it, and he certainly realized this. Then I saw Our Dark Lord’s mistake: he believed that Oghma’s enchantment had disguised the Cyrinishad as the book in my hands.
After an uncertain time the sea of icy shadow vanished, and we entered the Pavilion of Cynosure. I saw a dozen different places at once, a forest and a cavern and a golden sky and a battlefield and eight more, all in the same space. Each setting seemed as solid and certain as Faerûn itself, and each was filled with twelve shapeless, blinding radiances. Afraid of losing my sight, I covered my good eye at once—the other was still swollen shut—but the lights shone through the very thickness of my skull. They were a ring of fiery suns inside my head, burning in a dozen colors, and nothing I could do would shut them out.
“You are late, Cyric.” Tyr’s words filled me to bursting. “We have read the charges.”
“You are mistaken as usual, No-Eyes,” answered the One. “I am on time. You and the others are early.”
Though the indignation that rustled through the pavilion was only a murmur to the gods, to me it seemed a rumbling earthquake. Cyric took no notice of it, but set me upon what was a stretching rack to him and a featherbed to Sune and a crypt to Kelemvor.
“But your hastiness hardly matters,” said the One. “I know the charge, and I stand ready to refute it.”
“How? By torturing that poor mortal to death?” asked Mystra. A glittering stream of magic separated from her radiance and streaked across the room to douse me. At once, all my wounds and injuries vanished. “We all know you are cruel, Cyric. The issue is whether you are capable.”
I saw at once that the harlot was trying to anger the One and get me killed, and so I cried, “What have you done? I have no use for a whore’s kindness!” Next to the booming voices of the gods, my words were as a cricket’s chirping, but I did not let this stop me. I spat toward Mystra’s radiance, and I yelled, “A plague upon your Mysteries and your Order! They are as nothing to the Way of True Belief!”
A peal of Cyric’s laughter knocked me from my perch and sent me plummeting to the floor, and as surely as this bruised my ribs, it also saved my life. In that instant, six lightning bolts from six different gods struck the bench where I had been standing. If none of these attacks came from Mystra, and if she did not revoke the magic that had healed my wounds, I am sure it is only because she feared the wrath of Our Dark Lord.
Still chuckling, Cyric plucked me from the floor and held me out on display. “This is Malik el Sami yn Nasser, and I will not have you killing him. Malik is my witness.”
“Witness?” growled Kelemvor.
“Surely I am allowed one witness.” Cyric addressed this to Tyr. “He will be my only defense.”
“By all means,” said Tyr. “Anyone you wish may speak.”
“And this time no one will interrupt?” Cyric asked. “Especially with lightning bolts?”
“Any witness speaks under my protection,” Tyr promised. “No harm will come to him. Is that clear, Talos?”
A crackle of reluctant consent sputtered from Talos’s radiance. Then he began to drift about the pavilion, wreaking destruction across all twelve forms of the chamber’s existence. Kelemvor’s radiance drifted closer to Mystra. Sune slipped over behind Tempus, and Shar’s luminous shadow began to shrink in on itself. They all knew of the book hidden beneath my robe, and like Cyric, they all believed it to be the Cyrinishad.
“There is no need for the mortal to speak!” Sune’s radiance moved so close to Tempus’s that they became one. “Perhaps Tempus will reconsider his charges?”
“No.”
“For me?” In her desperation to prevent the reading of the Cyrinishad, it is a wonder Sune did not offer to have him on the spot. “I would be most … passionate.”
“Tempus, you would do well to accept her offer,” urged Shar. “Pressing your charges will only make matters worse for us all.”
No sooner had the Nightbringer added her voice to Sune’s than Silvanus and Talos added their voices to hers, and then Chauntea and Lathander added theirs to the growing chorus, and I saw that it hardly mattered what was hidden beneath my robe. The book could have been The Caliph’s Guide to Love, and still they would have withdrawn their charges.
But not Mystra, and not Kelemvor, and not Tempus. Together, they exclaimed, “No!” and a veritable wind swept the pavilion.
When it had passed, the Battle Lord added, “I will not withdraw the charges. I cannot.” And this was true, for Tempus would not break his word to Mask.
“Nor do I ask it,” said the One. I felt his smirk in the prickling bumps that rose on my skin. “Indeed, I demand the right to answer the charges. Malik, you will read from the ledger.”
“Read, Mighty One?” I felt almost relieved not to have the Cyrinishad beneath my robe; after the terrible nausea I had suffered merely touching its box, I doubted I would have survived reading the holy tome itself. “Me?”
“You, Malik—now!”
As I pulled the ledger from my robe, a deafening murmur filled the pavilion. The radiances of Tempus and Talos and Kelemvor al
l drifted closer, and Tyr moved to cut them off. Such a lump formed in my throat that I could not speak, for I perceived that I would be annihilated in the coming battle.
Mystra stepped forward and caught Kelemvor’s arm. “Wait! Let him read.” Without awaiting a reply, she turned to me. “Go ahead, Malik. Start from the beginning. No one will harm you.”
The harlot’s reassurance astonished her fellow gods as much as it did me. Kelemvor stopped on the spot, as did Talos and Tempus, and even Tyr’s radiance spun around to face Mystra.
“What?” cried Cyric.
“She said to let him read.” Tyr’s voice was thoughtful. He remained silent a moment, then his radiance slowly swirled back toward Cyric. “Surely, you have no objection to that?”
“Of course not, but if she changed the book when she cast that healing spell on my witness—”
“She did not tamper with your evidence,” said Tyr. “I have checked. Now, will you let him read?”
“Yes.” The smugness in Cyric’s voice had been replaced by wariness, and when he addressed me, I could feel the cold suspicion in his words. “Go ahead, Malik.”
I opened the book and saw that it was Rinda’s journal, with a dozen blasphemies in the first paragraph alone. Knowing what a grievous mistake it would be to read such sacrileges in the presence of the One, I decided to replace them with the story of the ascension of Our Dark Lord, which every child in the Church of Cyric learns by heart.
But when I opened my mouth to speak, a great hissing filled my ears, and instead of A Childhood in the Shadows, a terrible sacrilege spilled from my unwilling lips. I could read only what lay before me:
“ ‘I first met Cyric in a parchment shop, where the putrid air reeked of bloody hides and offal-filled tanning vats. The stench of the place was overwhelming, yet also fitting; nothing could describe better my feelings toward the Prince of Lies.’ ”
I tried to stop reading. But as soon as my eyes rose from the page, that terrible hissing filled my head, and I found myself staring at the next line. I did not know it then, but Mystra’s spell against lies had caught me. I had to read the story in the ledger—and once I had begun, it was impossible to stop! Imagine my horror as the blasphemies continued to pour from my mouth: