by Troy Denning
“I have been remiss in my duties. Have you prepared the list of my judgments as God of Death?”
In Jergal’s white gloves appeared a scroll as thick as a giant’s waist. “I have.”
“Good.” Kelemvor glanced at his Seraph of Death, then said, “We will begin the difficult case of Avner of Hartwick.”
Had Avner been alive, his knees would have gone weak and he would have felt sick to his stomach. As it was, he merely dropped a few shadowy feathers and did his best to stand up straight, determined not to embarrass himself by falling to his knees or begging for mercy.
If Kelemvor noted Avner’s stoic acceptance of fate, he did not show it “Bring me the list.” The God of Death motioned Jergal forward, then took the scroll and began to scan names. “Now go and fetch the God of Thieves, if he will stop gloating over Mystra’s imprisonment long enough to see me.”
“He will not have the choice.”
Jergal did not turn toward the exit; he merely began to float toward it. Avner stepped aside and let the seneschal pass, catching a glimpse of himself in the perfect mirror on the wall. Instead of the mighty Seraph of Death, he saw a sandy-haired orphan of ten years, doing his best to hide his terror behind a mask of cynicism and cunning. The narrowed eyes and furrowed brow did less to make the boy look dangerous than lonely. Avner lost his poise and began to tremble.
Kelemvor looked up from the scroll long enough to cock an eyebrow, then returned to his reading and left Avner to the horrors of his imagination.
Jergal appeared before Lord Death’s throne. “Mask is in the anteroom, awaiting your summons.”
“How kind of him. Show him in.”
At once, the Shadowlord’s wispy voice filled the Judgment Hall. “I am under Tyr’s protection!”
A second Jergal appeared in the doorway, his disembodied white glove dragging along a tangle of writhing shadow.
“I warn you, Kelemvor!” Mask stopped squirming long enough to assume the shape of a huge firbolg; the warrior had both legs, but only one arm, and in his hand, he held the magical chien stolen from Prince Tang. The jewel-encrusted sword was barely as long as the firbolg’s forearm. “If you want to share Mystra’s cell—”
Kelemvor rolled his eyes. “Helm has his hands full guarding Mystra. But I have not called you here to assault you, Mask. There is no need to put on airs. They mean nothing to me.”
To emphasize his point, Lord Death nodded toward the mirror. Mask’s reflection was that of a little creature with a doglike muzzle and a pair of goat’s horns on its scaly head. This kobold had two faces and seemed even smaller and more spindly than most, for there was only one leg beneath its hips, and the huge Shou sword in its hand was longer than its body.
Mask cried out and changed his shape to that of a burly minotaur; his reflection remained that of the kobold. The Shadowlord began to shift forms faster than a mortal could blink, becoming a Bedine sheikh, a Knight of Myth Drannor, and a dozen other noble warriors. The image in the mirror always remained that of a pitiful little kobold with a sword bigger than he was.
At last, the God of Thieves gave up and simply assumed the kobold’s form, then allowed Jergal to drag him toward Lord Death’s throne. “Is that what you brought me here to show me?”
“Not at all,” Kelemvor replied. “I asked you here because I have been reconsidering the case of Avner of Hartsvale.”
Mask glanced at the Seraph of Death, seeming to notice him for the first time. “Reconsidering?”
“Perhaps I was mistaken in refusing to return him.”
“Mistaken!” Mask’s tone grew angry; in his arrogance, the God of Thieves believed that Mystra’s imprisonment had caused Kelemvor to fear him. He puffed his figure into that of a burly dwarf, then raised his nose and dared to place his foot on the crystal step beneath Kelemvor’s throne. “It is too late to beg my forgiveness.”
“I am not begging anything, especially from a craven little god such as you. What I am doing is offering to give Avner’s spirit over to your care.”
“My care?”
To hide his surprise, the God of Thieves scratched his scruffy chin and turned away. He began to look the seraph up and down, as any man might before purchasing a camel, but the Shadowlord was not trying to drive the price down. He was only buying time to think. If Kelemvor started acting like a proper God of Death, the verdict at the trial just might go in his favor—and then Mask would have yet another powerful enemy.
The Seraph of Death stood as straight as a rod and glared down at the Shadowlord’s spindly silhouette. True, he had once worshiped the God of Thieves, but he had also answered the high call of duty and not flinched; nothing Mask could do would change what Avner had become in that moment.
At length, the Shadowlord twisted his kobold’s snout into a snaggle-toothed smile, then turned to face the God of Death. “You expect me to take him back? After you have ruined him?”
“I do not expect anything. I only ask if you want him.”
Mask shook his head. “Not now—not until he proves himself worthy.”
“Proves himself?” Kelemvor leaned forward. “How?”
The Shadowlord tipped his snout up and scratched his chin. “Let me think. Something will come to me, I am sure.” He made a great show of studying the ceiling. “I have it! Something you will appreciate more than I. He can free Mystra!”
“No one can do that,” Kelemvor objected. “Not with Helm guarding her.”
“Ah—well, I thought you might say that.” Mask shrugged. “Too bad. If he succeeded, I was going to make him my Seraph of Thieves. As it is, I suppose you will have to change him into a rat and send him into the Maze of Alleys.”
The Shadowlord shook his head as though disappointed, but when he turned to leave, his shadowy muzzle was grinning.
“I can do it.”
Mask stopped on the spot, then whirled around and pointed his kobold’s snout at Avner. “What did you say?”
“I can do it Allow me to borrow a few things from this chamber, and I will free Mystra.”
“Take anything you like, Avner.” Now it was Kelemvor’s turn to smile. “When you have succeeded, I am certain the Shadowlord will keep his word—will you not, Mask?”
Mask’s first thought was that Lord Death had tricked him, but how could the God of Death have known he would insist on testing the seraph, much less foreseen the nature of the test? The answer was that he could not have; Avner’s boast was nothing but the desperate attempt of a condemned spirit to escape his fate. Mask twisted his kobold’s muzzle into a confident smirk, then looked up at the seraph. “Agreed. If you can free Mystra, then you are a better thief than I.”
Thirty-Six
Time has no meaning for the dead, so when Adon found himself standing on the blinding expanse of the Fugue Plain, it was with no idea how long it had taken to get there. He recalled striking his head on the fountain and opening his mouth to scream, and then a great tidal wave had rushed down his throat to fill his lungs. His spirit left his body with less effort than it takes a man to slip from his robes. The cold waters swept him away, and Mystra’s face appeared on the surface, blurry and rippling in the current, once again the beautiful goddess of his memory.
Then Mystra asked him to speak her name. The hatred returned to her eyes and the anger rose again in her voice. Adon cried out and sank into the depths of a black cold ocean, and the goddess’s image shattered above him and vanished.
After that, his journey became at once endless and ephemeral. A swirling light appeared in the darkness ahead, and he swam in its direction until the waters thickened into a sea of slurping, sucking ooze. The swirling light became a distant glow, and he burrowed toward it until the mud hardened into a granite plateau. The distant glow became a radiance shining on the horizon, and he stumbled after it until his march became a numb and mindless trek. Then the radiance became a boundless white expanse, and the patriarch found himself standing upon the Fugue Plain with no certain memory of how he h
ad come there.
The ground quivered beneath his feet like something alive and restless, and the air buzzed with the drone of a million voices, and all around him the spirits of the dead beseeched their gods to come and rescue them from this empty wasteland.
Nearby, a matron cried, “O Chauntea, Great Mother, Golden Goddess of Grain, Merciful Giver of Life! Answer this, the call of your Faithful servant Gusta, who has borne fifteen children and planted a bountiful field each spring and prayed to you every day of her life. I beg you, take me into your garden—”
A shaft of golden light split the sky, and over Gusta’s head appeared a winged herald bearing a yellow cornstalk. The harbinger lowered her stalk, and a flaxen beam shone down to engulf Chauntea’s beseecher; at once, the cares and concerns of Gusta’s life melted away, and her spirit grew so light that it floated up the flaxen beam into the herald’s arms.
A short distance ahead, the spirits of a hundred warlocks and sorceresses had gathered into a great throng, all facing the same direction and staring at the sky. A low murmur rose on the far side and raced toward Adon and broke over him with all the force of a wave upon the ocean.
“Mystra!”
So loud was the cry that the patriarch grimaced at its volume; he could imagine it crossing the heavens and reaching Mystra’s ears in her palace of shimmering magic.
“O Mystra, Lady of Mysteries, Guardian of the Weave, answer this, the call of your Faithful worshipers!” A hundred voices spoke at once, yet their words were clear. “When will you deliver us, we who have spent our lives studying your wonder, spreading the glory of your magic to every corner of the land? Hear the appeal of your worshipers, Lady Magic. Look! Here is Mandra the Mighty, who changed the Sea of Petark to wine, and here is Darshan the Dread, who filled the Chasm of Narfell with diamonds, and here is Baldemar the Brilliant, who …”
The prayer droned on, proclaiming the loyalty of Mystra’s Faithful and the feats of each, and before five wonder-workers had been named, the patriarch saw the heralds of a dozen other gods appear and retrieve their worshipers. Of all the deities of Faerûn, only Lady Magic seemed content to ignore the pleading of her worshipers, to leave them gathered upon the Fugue Plain like a lost herd of cattle.
Adon ran over to the crowd. “Stop it!” He pushed his way to the center. “Mystra won’t come! She cares nothing for us!”
The throng fell silent, and all eyes turned to stare at him.
“Forgive me.” Adon turned in a slow circle. “Mystra deceived me, and so I have deceived you.”
An enchantress as beautiful as any woman on Faerûn stepped close and looked the patriarch up and down, then shook her head in sadness and turned away.
“It is nothing,” she said. “Only poor Adon.”
Adon grabbed the woman’s arm. “I have seen Mystra’s true face! She is an evil hag! If she cared for us, why hasn’t she sent a herald for us?”
“She will,” answered another spirit, this one a tall black-bearded wizard. “We must believe she will.”
“Why?” Adon cried. “Don’t you see she has deceived us?”
“Poor Adon.” The enchantress reached up and touched his cheek. “Poor, mad Adon.”
Adon pushed the enchantress’s hand away. “listen to me! Mystra’s eyes burn with hatred! Her mouth is filled with poison and fangs—”
“Enough!” The black-bearded wizard slammed a palm into Adon’s chest, knocking him to the ground. “If we listen to the patriarch’s madness, we will suffer his fate. He is Faithless!”
“Faithless!” gasped Adon.
“We must leave him.” The enchantress backed away, forcing the other spirits behind her to do the same. “His madness will destroy us all.”
As one, the throng drifted away, leaving Adon alone on the Fugue Plain. He watched them go, and when they were so far away he could no longer hear their prayers, he rolled onto his knees.
He clasped his hands before his chest and looked toward the heavens. “O Kelemvor, Lord of the Dead and Judge of the Damned, heed this, the call of your dead friend Adon.…”
Thirty-Seven
The Believers of Zhentil Keep were the strangest group of Faithful anywhere on Faerûn. All seventeen lived in the same hall of cold stone, and slept in the same crib of straw, and washed themselves in the same baths, and ate from the same wooden basin, and shared among themselves everything they owned without rancor or enmity of any sort. They said they did this on account of the many privations of their city and especially of their temple, but any fool could see they liked matters as they were. As we sat on the barren floor passing the gruel bowl from hand to hand—they did not own a single spoon—there was much joking and laughing and warm touching, and no one ever complained when he emptied the bowl and had to go refill it from the kettle.
Svanhild was standing by the fire, describing my entrance into the city. “And Malik said, ‘I am Faithful to Our Lord Cyric, the One and All.’ He didn’t care whether the guard or anyone else knew he was a Believer!”
Svanhild no longer looked the crone, having washed her grime off in the temple baths. She had done the same for me—as I said, the Believers of Zhentil Keep share everything—and supplied us with the same flaxen robes worn by everyone in the temple. Hers fit just tightly enough to prove she was no more than half the age I had thought at the gate, but of course I had already seen this in the baths.
“He kicked the guard aside—” Svanhild pulled up her robe and raised a well-shaped leg to demonstrate “—and rode into Zhentil Keep as proud as Lord Orgauth himself. Then, when the Believer’s Shower started, Halah reared and began cracking heads, and Malik yelled, ‘That is what awaits those who insult the One!’ ”
Svanhild pointed her finger at the floor and spoke in a voice deeper than my own, which drew many loud guffaws from her fellows. They were not laughing at me, but at the blasphemers whose skulls had been split by Halah’s hooves.
“ ‘Such is the wrath of Cyric!’ he yelled, and the guards fired their crossbows.” Now Svanhild fixed her gaze on me, and I have never seen such devotion in the eyes of a woman. “The bolts didn’t even scratch him. You should have seen the guards’ faces!”
I felt the heat rise to my cheeks, for Svanhild had already hinted she wished to attend me after dinner. In truth, her advances had been so bold they filled the heart in my breast with a sense of godly due, and it was a wonder I had not enjoyed her already—especially after so many seasons away from my wife. Yet what were women to me when the True Life was at hand? I could think of nothing but stealing the book and curing the One’s madness, and of saving myself from the City of the Dead, and of the great reward Cyric would bestow on me after he won his trial. Of course, I also thought of the four short days left to do all this, and of the difficulty of finding Fzoul Chembryl in a city as strange as Zhentil Keep, and of the chance that he no longer had the True Life of Cyric. But most of all, I thought of the terrible consequences for the One’s Church if any part of my plan failed, and it was on account of this that I felt little interest in eating the temple’s gruel or sleeping in its crib of straw, and certainly not in sporting with its women.
“Malik?” Svanhild shook my shoulder; I had been so lost in my thoughts I had not noticed her leave the fireplace. “Friar Fornault asked what spell you used.”
“Spell?” I shook my head clear, then looked across the circle to Fornault Blacksun. The Friar, as they called him, was a snake-eyed man of fifty, as gaunt as his acolytes and far too ready with that lizard’s grin of his. On his index finger, he wore an iron starburst-and-skull signet. “I know no spells.”
Fornault creased his slender brow, and somehow that smile remained upon his thin lips. “You’re not a cleric?”
“No, I am the Finder of the Book.” I had told Svanhild about finding the Cyrinishad as she scrubbed my back. As there had been several other people in the bath, these events were already known throughout the temple. “I have never needed magic to serve the One and All.”
> Fornault’s smile drooped at the corners. “So I have heard, but the Great Annihilator’s spells are more powerful than my own.” The Friar and his acolytes called Fzoul Chembryl the Great Annihilator, as he was the one who had read the True Life on the morning of the Razing and ruined Zhentil Keep’s faith in Cyric. “You will forgive me for finding it strange that the One would send someone with no magic to punish our enemy.”
The heart in my breast grew cold and spiteful, and I was seized by the urge to pull my dagger and strike this fool dead. I resisted this temptation, and not only because I feared his acolytes would never let me reach him. According to Svanhild, Fornault Blacksun was the only person in the room who knew where to find Fzoul Chembryl, and he had not yet parted with this knowledge. I forced myself to return the Friar’s smile and tried to conceal my anger.
“I only asked you to help me find Fzoul Chembryl.” I picked my next words carefully, on account of Mystra’s truth spell. “I did not say the One sent me, or that I came to punish Fzoul.”
Fornault’s eyes flashed with anger, but his smile remained intact. “But you did not say otherwise. Perhaps you should tell us what you do want with the Great Annihilator.”
Knowing I could not lie, and that neither Fornault nor his acolytes were likely to approve of my plan to cure the One, I clenched my jaw and said nothing. But neither did I look away, for the cold anger in my breast was making me bolder than I should have been.
The lizard’s grin vanished from the Friar’s face. “I am not comfortable helping just anyone find the Great Annihilator.” In any other temple of True Believers, such an explanation from the high priest would have been an unthinkable sign of weakness; in Zhentil Keep, it seemed as natural as the bricked-over windows. “A foolish attack is sure to bring swift retribution, and Lord Orgauth would simply stand by and watch. Nothing would please him more than to be rid of our temple without risk to himself, as only fear of the One’s wrath makes him tolerate our presence.”