by Troy Denning
“Well?” Svanhild pressed.
I craned my neck over my shoulder. “You ask too many questions, Sister.”
Svanhild jerked back as though I had struck her, yet her arms stayed tight around my waist—the better to hold me when Fzoul sprang his trap, I supposed.
I furtively scanned the shadows, until it came to me I had little to fear from an ambush. With Tyr’s protection to keep me whole and a mount such as Halah to insure my escape, no assault would harm me or my quest. Thus assured, I did a foolish thing: I leaned down to pat my faithful horse on the neck.
Halah swung her head around and bared her sharp teeth, and I barely had time to move my leg before her jaws snapped together.
Svanhild leaned forward. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She is angry because the dog escaped.” Mystra’s spell compelled me to add, “Or maybe because I took her bone away.”
“Who is the master?” Svanhild snorted. “You or Halah?”
“Who do you think? As I said, Cyric made her.”
Kelda turned down a broad, rocky furrow that had once been a street. About fifty paces ahead, the path ended beneath a high, unbroken wall. There we found the rest of the acolytes. They were waiting in the mouth of a steep-sided trench where someone, or perhaps something, had tunneled through the rubble to create a narrow passage.
One of the brothers pointed down the channel. “The Annihilator went there. Thir is still—”
“Hurry!” Thir’s voice sounded muffled and distant as it rolled out of the trench. “He’s trying to escape!”
Kelda and the others rushed into the trench at once, but I held Halah in check and let them clatter through the dark alone.
“Go!” Svanhild commanded, kicking at Halah’s flanks.
A snarl like a lion’s rumbled up from the mare’s throat, and she took a tentative step forward. I jerked the reins to stop her, and she in turn kicked up her rear legs, nearly dislodging Sister Svanhild.
“Malik! What are you doing?” Svanhild clutched my waist to keep from falling. “I thought you wanted to catch Fzoul!”
“As I said, you ask too many questions.” Mystra’s spell compelled me to add, “I did not get this far by being stupid. I see the ambush you are planning.”
“Ambush?” Truly, she sounded surprised, and I realized how practiced she was at lying.
A loud crack echoed out of the narrow trench, then a silver flash bounced off its steep walls. Someone screamed in agony.
“See?” I exclaimed. “I am no fool!”
The acolytes cried out as one. A soft roar crackled out of the trench, then an orange glow lit the stones in its depths.
Svanhild took one arm from my waist, and something sharp pricked my back. “You wanted to find the Annihilator, and we have found him. Now ride!”
“Stupid woman—do you think I fear your knife?” Despite my words, I had nudged Halah into the trench, for I still meant to track Fzoul to his home. “You saw the quarrels bounce off my back when I entered Zhentil Keep. I am protected by Tyr himself.”
“Tyr?” Svanhild shoved her dagger forward, but the blade tangled in my robe and scraped past my ribs and did not inflict even a scratch. She spat on my neck. “Traitor! Tyr-loving spy!”
“Me?” I paid no attention to her attempt to kill me. “You are the betrayer!”
As all this happened, we rode half the length of the trench. I could have leaned out and touched the stones to either side, and the walls loomed so high above us they blocked the moonlight. Halah raised a terrible clatter as she stumbled through the darkness—but this hardly mattered, for a mighty roaring and a horrid screaming suddenly arose from the far end of the channel.
I looked up to see an imposing, long-haired figure twenty paces down the trench, trapped against a half-buried wall. A low curtain of fire burned between him and the handful of his attackers still standing; the rest of the One’s acolytes lay rolling on the ground, screaming in agony and beating at the flames on their bodies.
My throat grew dry at the prowess of my quarry, but I had no time for wonderment. Svanhild pushed herself from Halah’s rump and dropped to the rubble behind us.
She fell to her knees and raised her arms to the heavens. “O Cyric, god of gods, One and All, hear this, the prayer of your servant, Svanhild of Zhentil Keep.”
“No!” I jerked Halah’s reins around, but the trench was too narrow and rocky for her to turn quickly.
“Mighty One,” continued Svanhild, “you have placed your trust—”
I pulled so hard on Halah’s reins she reared and turned. Her front hooves struck the trench wall and caused a clattering rubble slide.
Svanhild shouted, “—in a traitor!”
“Lying trollop!” I drew my dagger and flung myself off Halah’s back.
Before my feet touched ground, a silver flash sizzled down from the channel rim and struck Svanhild full on the brow. Her head vanished in a spray of blinding fire and bone, and I came down upon the headless corpse and drove it down into the bottom of the trench. For a time, I lay on top of the gruesome thing, too stunned to move and trying to blink the sight back into my eyes, gagging on the harsh fumes that rose from the place where Svanhild’s face should have been.
“I trust she is dead.” The words were so deep and resonant I mistook them for the One’s, until I realized the man was speaking in a single voice instead of a thousand. “We cannot have her calling the Mad God, can we?”
I rolled off Svanhild’s body and looked up. The speaker stood at the crest of the trench wall, high overhead, silhouetted against the pale night sky. With long, flowing hair and a high-collared cape stretched over a pair of broad shoulders, he looked eerily similar to the figure trapped at the end of the channel.
The man stared into the trench and lifted his arms high. “Rise up!” I thought he was calling to me, until he added, “Awaken, my children!”
A tremendous clatter arose along the entire length of the passage. Halah let out a startled whinny and at last wrenched herself around to face me. Behind her, the orange glow at the end of the trench had vanished, and now the rubble beside her began to churn. Halah bared her teeth and backed away.
“No, Halah! Come this way!”
Halah continued to retreat, then heard the stones behind her also stirring and stopped in her tracks. I stepped forward to grab her reins, but a pair of long arms suddenly shot out of the rubble between us. In the darkness, they looked like the branches of a gnarled myrrh tree, and I could see well enough to tell that one of these limbs ended in a deformed claw.
“Halah, come to me!”
The mare raised her head at my tone, then growled.
A head emerged from the rubble to join the arms that separated us. By the light of its burning red eyes, I perceived it to be the face of a corpse, long dead, with shriveled gray skin still clinging to its skull. The creature looked toward me and began to dig itself out of the rubble.
Of course the thing was not alone. The clatter of shifting stones continued to build along the length of the trench, and I glanced around to see dozens of pairs of red eyes emerging from beneath the rubble. I uttered a curse on Svanhild’s soul, then looked back toward my mare, my only means of escape.
“Halah, now!”
Halah fixed a dark eye on my face, then snarled and sprang forward. The corpse between us lashed out and caught her foreleg with its twisted claw. She bit the arm off in midstride and stopped beside me with the gruesome thing still clamped between her teeth. I thanked the One for her loyalty and started to step around to mount her.
She reared up and planted her hoof in my chest and pushed me straight to the ground.
“Halah!” I glanced along the trench and saw a dozen red-eyed silhouettes shambling toward us. “Let me up! What are you doing?”
Halah growled and brought her face down close to mine. She rolled the corpse’s filthy arm between her teeth and made a low, menacing nicker.
“Halah?”
The first corpse shambled closer, lacking the arm my horse had bitten off. It stooped down and grasped my ankle with its remaining hand. Halah allowed this, and I recalled the threat I had made before we crossed the bridge.
“Halah, I am sorry I interrupted your meal, but we had to leave the city.” A second corpse came up, and she permitted this one to grasp my arm. “And I would never ask the One to turn you back into a nag. You know this.”
Halah snorted in my face, just as she had done when I seized her bone, then took her foot off my chest and trotted on.
“Halah?”
I tried to rise, but the two corpses pushed me down. I grabbed a stone and smashed the skull of one, but this did not even loosen the thing’s grasp. A third cadaver grabbed the rock and pinned my weapon hand to the ground.
“Halah!”
Her only reply was a mocking snort, now painfully distant. I kicked and rolled and tried to squirm free. Every time I moved a body part, another corpse arrived to pin it down. Within moments, I lay buried beneath a pile of rotting and writhing flesh, and my own limbs became more twisted and bent than Our Dark Lord’s mind.
I cursed the One a thousand different ways. I called him a buffoon and an oaf, a fraud and a cheat and a miser, a maker of empty promises and a squanderer of borrowed wealth, a murderer and a liar and a thief, and a hundred names twice as scornful. Nor did I repent; I could think only of the great sacrifices I had made for the love of Cyric, and of how it would all come to naught because he had given me a horse so fickle she would betray me over a bone!
That the One did not strike me dead was but a testament to his limitless compassion, and perhaps to Tyr’s protection. By the time I heard someone more graceful than a corpse skulking about near my head, my blasphemous fury had cooled. I fell silent, listening hopefully as this person stopped beside the pile and moved the limbs of a few cadavers away from my face, and then I saw my betrayer.
“Thir!”
She had changed the hemp robe of the One’s temple for a silken cloak with a plunging bodice. Around her neck she wore a silver amulet shaped like a human hand, with a pair of emerald eyes staring out from the palm—the holy symbol of Iyachtu Xvim. Her face still bore the welts where I had slapped her.
“How nice to see you, Malik. It’s a wonder the Banedead did not kill you.” She smiled sweetly, then spit in my face. When I proved too helpless to wipe her spittle from my eyes, she turned away and added, “He seems harmless enough now, Tyrannar.”
A pair of heavy boots crunched across the rubble, and then the imposing figure I had seen silhouetted against the sky peered down at me. He had a princely face with a square jaw and a drooping red mustache, and his pale eyes were as cold and cruel as the heart slurping in my breast.
“I am Fzoul Chembryl.” He took a cloth sack from his belt and kneeled down to pull it over my head. “I hear you have been looking for me.”
Forty-Three
The City of the Dead was a jewel losing its glitter. Kelemvor stood in the highest pinnacle of the Crystal Spire and watched a gray tide washing across his realm. As the dreary wave spread, the glimmering window lamps winked out, the shining street lanterns went dull, the sparkling candles flickered and faded to black. Only an ashen gleam remained, cloaking the city like the pall of a coffin, illuminating every corner with a pale, shadowless glow. Lord Death was extinguishing the lights of his domain. From that moment forward, no flame would burn within its walls, no sun would shine upon its streets. In the City of the Dead, there would never again be brilliant light or velvet black, only countless shades of gray.
“Kelemvor, I do not think much of these changes.” As Mystra spoke these words, she appeared in the pinnacle beside Lord Death. “I hope you will forgive me for saying so.”
“There is nothing to forgive.” Kelemvor turned to face Mystra, revealing that he had changed more than his city. “I did not do it to please you.”
Mystra gasped. She had seen at once that Kelemvor had changed his customary leather armor for a pearly cloak and charcoal hood, but that had not prepared her for what lay within the clothes. Her lover’s rugged face had been replaced by the impassive visage of a silver death mask. His eyes had changed from emerald gems to drab gray orbs that lacked both pupils and irises, and his mane of wild black hair had grown as white and silky as spiderwebs. Even his brawny chest, now hidden beneath a tattered breastplate of scale mail, seemed sunken and hollow.
Kelemvor waved a hand over his new figure. “This appearance is more in keeping with my true nature.”
Mystra raised her hand to her mouth and said nothing, as she could think of nothing gracious to say.
Kelemvor shrugged. “I see that Avner succeeded.”
“Yes. Thank you for sending him.”
“Mask sent him, not I.”
“So Avner said.” Mystra paused. “I wanted to speak with you about that. Avner does not deserve—”
“Avner is now the Seraph of Thieves. What’s done is done, and you have no time to waste on things that cannot be changed.” Kelemvor took Mystra’s arm and guided the astounded goddess across the room. “The instant Helm is free, he will look for you here. Perhaps you should see what you came to see, then leave. You have much to do before the trial.”
Though stunned by the curtness of Kelemvor’s words, Mystra nodded at their truth. “Yes, Talos has been making inroads—”
“Forget Talos, Mystra. Answer the charges!” They reached the other side of the pinnacle, and Lord Death’s tone grew more calm. “If you do not, we are both doomed. Tyr has not separated our charges.”
“Is that your only concern, Kelemvor?” Mystra jerked her arm free. “I had not thought you so selfish. Perhaps you should fetch Adon, and then I will leave.”
“I cannot bring him to you.” Kelemvor pointed through the crystal wall, down to a huge crowd of souls awaiting judgment outside his palace. “Adon stands in line.”
“Line?” Mystra pressed her face to the crystal and peered into the shadowless gray light of the City of the Dead. Even to a goddess, the throng was too distant to discern a single soul. “You’re making Adon stand in line?”
“Of course. He rejected you in life; that makes him one of the Faithless. Moreover, he begged me to steal your worshipers from the Fugue Plain, and that makes him one of the False.”
“But Adon is insane!” Mystra whirled on Kelemvor. “You understand that better than anyone.”
“I must hold even the insane responsible for their choices.” Kelemvor stared down at the throng. His eyes could see individual souls no better than Mystra, but he knew which speck was Adon: the one at the end of the line. “If I do not punish the insane when they turn from their gods, then half of Faerûn will go mad. Too many mortals are too lazy to pay their gods the proper worship.”
Mystra spun Kelemvor around and stared into his empty gray eyes. “Have you gone mad yourself? Who are you hiding behind that mask? Cyric? Tempus? Mask?” She backed away, raising her hands to blast the imposter with raw magic. “You cannot be Kelemvor. He would never say such things.”
“This is the same Kelemvor to whom you, Mistress Ariel, paid a very special price on the way to Elminster’s Tower.”
Mystra did not lower her hands. Many people knew that Ariel had been her true name as a mortal, Cyric among them. And Cyric also knew that she had revealed it to Kelemvor during the Time of Troubles, as a sort of payment for accompanying her to Elminster’s Tower. But there was one thing Cyric did not know about the arrangement.
“What was the price, Kelemvor?”
He answered at once. “Your love.”
“It is you.” Mystra lowered her hands, then waved an arm at the dreary city outside. “But why, Kelemvor?”
“Because I am the God of Death.”
“But where is your pity? To condemn Adon—”
“Pity is for mortals, not the God of Death. Adon will be judged according to his words.”
Mystra’s jaw fell. She stared out over the drab city
for a long time, and finally turned to Kelemvor. “Then I want you to return him to life for me.”
“Return a madman to life? Who would that serve but Cyric?”
“Who is not your concern,” Mystra replied. “It is enough that I ask.”
“No. That Adon will speak against you is your concern, but he has already dared denounce me for being your lover. I will not have him undermining the belief of my own worshipers.”
“I am begging you, Kelemvor.” Mystra stepped closer to Lord Death and took his hands. “In the name of our love!”
Kelemvor shook his head. “Not even for you. I must fulfill my duties as a god—and I warn you to do the same, or it will be the Circle taking your powers, not Talos or Cyric.”
Mystra jerked her hands away. “How dare you lecture me! I did not become a goddess to turn my back on those who—”
Jergal’s shadow-filled cloak appeared between Mystra and Kelemvor. “Excuse me, Lord Death, but Helm demands an audience.”
“Kelemvor, return Adon to life!” Mystra’s words echoed out of the empty air, for no sooner had the seneschal spoken Helm’s name than the goddess had vanished. “Return him to Faerûn, or our love is done!”
“Then it is done already,” Kelemvor replied, though even he could not tell if Mystra heard him.
“What is done?” Helm appeared behind Jergal, in the very place Mystra had been standing the instant before. “And I warn you, do not try to hide—”
“Do not threaten me, Coldheart.” Kelemvor stepped straight through Jergal’s body, so that he stood nose to visor with Helm. “I am not hiding the goddess Mystra. You may search my realm if you wish, but if you ever threaten me again, it will take Ao himself to save you.”
Helm stepped back and bowed his head. “A search will not be necessary, Lord Death. Your word is sufficient”
Then the Guardian vanished as quickly as he had appeared—and not only to pursue his prisoner. Something in Kelemvor’s tone had suggested that he was eager for blood, and Helm had no wish to test his prowess against that of a new Lord Death.