Magic, Sairché thought. And not his.
Rhand swallowed, but the rage in him didn’t fade. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll let you know when the carriers have arrived.”
The girl watched him leave, a smug smile playing on her mouth. Her luminous eyes fell on Sairché once more. “How droll you assumed a mere archdevil could stand against the might of the Lady of Loss,” she said. “If you find your tongue. devil, perhaps you can tell me another funny tale.”
The scroll lay in a box, buried only a few inches under the packed earth floor of the tiny hut. Dahl levered it out of the hole with the blade of the stone spade Armas had found him. The half-elf stood silent and watching in the doorway.
“Half-done,” Dahl called. Armas said nothing. “You can start looking for the components in the thatch any time,” Dahl added. The fledgling Harper stood silent. “Armas?”
Armas jerked at the sound. “What?”
“Components.”
“Sorry.” Armas stepped into the hut and sighed, reaching up for the roof.
“Your friend . . . do you think she knows what she’s doing?”
Dahl opened the scroll to find a very detailed spell and smiled—gods, he loved this. “Which part? The sorting?”
“Aye.”
Dahl shrugged, his eyes on the lines of runes before him, the diagrams, the list of components. “Seems so. Tharra and Oota made it sound as if she picked people they knew had been Chosen. Though with any luck, it won’t matter to us.” He glanced up at Armas, realization dawning on him. “Oh . . . You’re one of them?”
Armas kept his eyes on the thatch. “She stopped me as we left.”
“Oh.” Dahl looked back down at his scroll. “Well, many blessings.”
“I suppose.”
Dahl had read the first few lines several times over when Armas cleared his throat.
“She says she can’t tell what will come of it or when. And all I can think of is how many gods there are . . . It’s a fearful thing.”
“Yes,” Dahl said dryly. “The gods smiling on you is terribly frightening.” He heard the venom in his own voice and cursed himself. You’re not seventeen and newly fallen, he told himself. Armas has taken nothing from you, and he doesn’t deserve your pique. “I suppose,” he said, more kindly, “it probably is frightening. You do have my sympathies.” He wondered how many of the Chosen Farideh named might be favored by Oghma, and realized he was reading the same line on the scroll again.
Armas sighed again. “She said she thinks it will be soon. Says the mark is sharp. I suppose that’s a small blessing on its own. Not long to wait and wonder.” He stepped to the left, rifling through the straw and twigs. “If it’s something wicked, I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe walk into the lake with my pockets full of stones.”
“Why would a wicked god choose you?” Dahl murmured. “Are you wicked?”
“I was helping Tharra.”
“That hardly counts.”
“According to who? Who can claim to know the will of the gods, right? Ah!” He pulled a small jar and then another out of the thatch, like plucking apples from a tree. Dahl took them: oils of sacred juniper and distilled troll saliva. He frowned and looked back at the ritual scroll—both were mentioned. The latter was a very expensive component and there was quite a lot of the former—but neither was used to achieve the sort of effect Tharra had described.
He unrolled several more inches of the scroll—familiar phrases, familiar directions, intermixed with unfamiliar forms. This line was reused from pre-Spellplague castings of destructive magic out of Lost Halruaa; that one borrowed the structure of protective spells the Turmishan wizards crafted during the Wailing Years; that focusing diagram was absolutely crafted by Oghmanyte casters in Procampur. Very complex, Dahl thought. Very confusing.
Armas pulled down still more components. Powdered silver and salts of copper, resins of obscure flora and ground teeth of strange beasts. A packet of dragon scales, a pouch of iron filings, a purse of dried purple blossoms that smelled strongly of mildew. A delicate crystal bottle of residuum. Bottles of specially imbued inks and paints.
“That’s all,” Armas said, rubbing his uncaged hands as if they ached.
“That’s more than enough,” Dahl said, at a loss in regards to the sheer quantity of components. Eleven different items. Easily thousands of coins worth, especially when you added in the hamadryad’s ash. He wondered if Tharra had used it all or if Farideh had reclaimed the rest. He’d have to check.
Each component was included in the ritual—which made no sense at all to Dahl. The various ingredients had their own attributes, their own abilities to draw or repel or create patches of magic. But together . . . Together these made a mess.
“What do you think the chances are I end up being able to dig the shelters faster?” Armas said abruptly. “Maybe it’s someone who’s seen what trouble we’re in.”
Dahl shook his head, still studying the ritual. “Would be nice.”
“Torden’s got people carrying dirt out of the shelters, dumping it in secret places. They’re moving quickly, but they’ve got only enough room for eight hundred or so—no more. Would be nice to make earth turn to air or some such.”
Dahl kept his tongue, all too aware that his envy was misplaced and unflattering. Armas had no idea why Dahl should even be envious. He read on, through several more utterly tortuous steps, half his mind on the puzzle before him and half on the never-ending puzzle of Oghma.
Dahl sighed and rolled the scroll back up. “We can go. I’ll need to look at this some more. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What does these days?”
Indeed, Dahl thought, as they collected the multitude of components into a cloth and bound it shut. Preparing to fight Adolican Rhand and some crafty devil at the side of a drow, a cunning half-orc, an arrogant sun elf, a girl you thought was dead, Lorcan, and scores of people the gods have given the powers to make daisies and see souls.
And all you have is a ritual that makes no sense, he thought glumly. He looked up at Armas, who was studying the space outside the hut with a similar glumness. A pang of guilt went through Dahl’s stomach—the day after his mentor turned out to be a traitor, the half-elf turned out to be the Chosen of an unknown god. It wasn’t worth ranking hardships.
“My former teacher told me something very wise once,” Dahl said. “The sort of wisdom you don’t believe at first, at least not for yourself. But maybe you’re not as pig-headed as me.”
Armas regarded him. “I’ve never been called stubborn.”
“There are times when what you want doesn’t matter. Things are already in motion and the gods have already made their wills plain. So the very best thing you can do is to just remember who you are and take things as they come—one at a time.”
Armas smirked. “ ‘Shut your mouth and accept it’?”
“You don’t have to shut your mouth,” Dahl said. “But there’s something to be said for recognizing you’d best let a god have their full say before you decide to retort.” They walked back through the camp to Oota’s court. The paths and alleys were all but empty, faces peering out of windows as they passed. Off in the distance, he heard the jangle of guards patrolling.
“They’re going to notice sooner or later,” Armas muttered. “Then what?”
“Then we hope your god’s a fighting sort,” Dahl said, “and your gift happens to be punching those bastards back into the Shadow Plane.”
They made it back without incident to find the makeshift hall still busy with people—all standing a good distance from Farideh, who sat on the edge of Oota’s dais, her head in her hands. Dahl went over to her.
“You all right?”
“Headache,” she said, her voice muffled. “This is exhausting. I just need a breath.”
Dahl sat down beside her and unrolled the scroll once more, to the line he’d read twice. “Have they gotten any farther with the rooms underground?”
“Torden think
s they’ll be able to get a thousand in, if they don’t have to be there long. If they squeeze.”
Two-thirds, Dahl thought. Five hundred souls left behind to be wiped off the plane.
Farideh lifted her head. “Do you know the worst part? There’s a scroll in Rhand’s study that would solve all of this. A spell to make a cavern in the earth. And I didn’t take it.”
“How were you to know?”
Farideh shook her head, as if she ought to have, somehow. “I could go back. I could steal it—”
“No,” Dahl said firmly. “We have time still. We have the ritual—” He stopped, a sudden stillness in his heart. He unrolled the length of the scroll, skimming down the parchment, hunting for the completion of the spell-piece he’d just read, knowing it would have to be there.
It wasn’t.
“Stlarn and hrast,” he swore. He threw the scroll to the ground and clutched his own head. “It’s broken. It’s shitting broken.”
“What?” Farideh said. “Can you fix it?”
Dahl shook his head. “That’s why it makes no sense—that devil must have made it senseless.”
“Can you fix it?” Farideh said again.
“No,” Dahl said, considering the pieces that he’d found, the ways they seemed to just miss each other’s effects. “The problems are too big, too . . . insidious. It looks like a proper ritual, all together. It feels like it should make sense and I’m just missing something. There’s bits here that have the sort of hints and markers that suggest some very recognizable wizards’ handiwork. See”—he picked up the parchment and pointed to a line of runes—“that’s absolutely one of the Blackstaffs from around the turn of the century. Really common element in their spells, starting around—”
“Dahl,” Farideh interrupted.
He pulled his hand back. “Right. So if you’re just looking, there’s no reason to think this isn’t built off of some powerful old spells that have been repaired and strung together. But if you trace the effects, you get nothing. That Blackstaff magic? It’s missing the completing line—that part won’t do a damned thing. The magic’s just going to fade as you cast it. Other parts, they actively cancel each other out.
“And,” he added, “if that weren’t bad enough, these components—while they’re all very potent and high quality—are the wrong sorts of things.” He sighed. “I should have guessed. Godsbedamned devils.”
Farideh shook her head. “Why would he sabotage his own end of the plan? If she doesn’t carry out the gathering, he’s the one who gets blamed. And I don’t see how he could turn this around—he’s the one who gave Tharra the ritual and the components.”
“Gods’ books, he’s a devil,” Dahl said. “Who knows what they’re thinking?” Farideh looked away and Dahl wished he’d kept his tongue that time too. “Sorry,” he said. “We have a hole in the ground and another day before Rhand expects you back. And I sold them on a worthless ritual—I’m not in the best of moods.”
“We’ll have to attack the tower,” Farideh said.
“How’s our army coming?”
“I have no idea,” Farideh said. “There are still Chosen among them, and Cereon and the others are trying to find gentle ways to spur their powers. But so far? We have numbers, not strength.” She rubbed her neck. “We have to rescue the ones he’s captured. Soon.”
“Tonight,” Dahl said, well aware that the delay was killing every one of them. But they needed Phalar, and the drow wouldn’t go out in the daylight. And the moment they breached the tower, Rhand would know he had a rebellion on his hands. Everything would have to happen right after.
And they had nothing to throw at the black glass tower but their own selves.
He closed his eyes. Lord of Knowledge, he prayed, Binder of What Is Known, for the love of all that is good and right and true, help me figure out what in the Hells I’m supposed to do here. You may have given me the means to seek the truth, but I am well out of options and now would be an excellent time to stop being so—
He stopped himself and blew out a breath. “You don’t still have that flask do you?”
She stiffened. “No.”
“Liar,” Dahl said.
“I’m not giving it to you,” she said. “It just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you pour out where someone might stumble into it.”
“It’s not some sort of dragon acid—”
Armas pushed through the remaining prisoners, looking blanched and out of breath.
“You need to see this,” Armas said.
They followed him down several roadways, out through a growing crowd of prisoners waiting for the underground shelter to widen enough for them too. They were all staring up at the same spot, thirty feet above the middle of the camp: a ball of energy the size of a fist hung in the air over the camp, sizzling blue and black.
“It started,” Cereon said in heavily accented Common, “as a mote. That was a quarter hour ago. It’s magic—strange magic. Destructive and something else. Something—” He turned and spoke Elvish to Armas.
Armas frowned. “It’s going to collect something.”
Dahl said a silent apology to Oghma, because here indeed were the means to solve the unsolvable: Magros hadn’t given Tharra the proper tools to perform the gathering, because someone else was going to do it.
“Get everyone underground,” Dahl said. “Let’s hope this spell works the same way.”
“My lady,” the apprentice says, “ have you nothing to do but muddy the Fountains?”
Farideh doesn’t—at least she tells herself that. She cannot act without knowing where her enemies are, she cannot strike without being sure of who stands in the way. At least here she has a view of what’s happening—as slim and mendacious as a sliver through a cracked door. But it’s better than walking blind.
And if she wants to see clearly, the next vision has to be called. She’s been avoiding it, almost-asking more times than she cares to admit. But as she’s crawled back and back and back through the past, until the waters grow cloudy with the detritus of the petals, it’s hunkered there in the back of her thoughts, waiting like a dragon in a cavern, knowing that eventually it will be time to come out.
“Show me,” she says, trying for solemnity, “the Toril Thirteen and the day they cursed the tiefling race.”
The waters shimmer and shiver, and a faint mist seems to rise up off their surface, followed by the image of a grove at night, the ground burnt bare up to the roots of winter-dead trees. There are thirteen tieflings arrayed around the grove. Hooved and horned and winged and tailed and some who might as well be human, for all their fiendish blood shows—but Farideh knows they are tieflings all the same. Six men, six women, and the Brimstone Angel herself.
Bryseis Kakistos stands on polished black hooves, facing a statue shaped like what must be the king of the Hells: a man with the great horns of a ram, broadshouldered and beautiful even hewn out of bedrock. Blood paints the stone, as if tides of it have lapped Asmodeus’s feet.
Farideh peers into the waters, waits, but Bryseis Kakistos doesn’t look away from the statue, her confederates arrayed around her. Farideh can see that Lorcan was right—some do not seem to wish to be there. A man with snow-white hair and antlers sprouting from his brow. A woman with serpent’s eyes and a jungle of red curls around her long horns. A boy on the edge of manhood, whose fretful hands seem to have been attached the wrong way around.
And others watch the Brimstone Angel as if she is the source of all riches. An ancient man with ram’s horns and a beard to his knees. A fox-faced woman with a smile that sets Farideh’s nerves on edge, even through the waters. A handsome man who wafts shadow and darkness with every move.
But Bryseis Kakistos doesn’t turn. Farideh finds herself edging to this side and that as the chanting rises and the magic gathers, as if she can move around the surface of the water and see her wicked ancestor’s face. The magic around the basin snaps and fizzes as if Bryseis Kakistos is calling on it, too.
> “What are you doing?” one of the apprentices demands. Farideh looks up, just as the chanting reaches a terrible peak, just as it turns into screams. The apprentice pushes her back, away from the waters, and she doesn’t see the end or whether Bryseis Kakistos ever turned to face her coven. She can only see the reflection of a terrible light—a fire to rival a crashing star—that reflects so brightly off the waters that it dapples the ceiling as if it were truly there in the room with them all.
“That is enough!” the apprentice all but shouts. And Farideh realizes, it will never be enough. She cannot stop Rhand’s experiments by spying. She cannot change the past by watching it. She cannot change where she stands, not now. No matter what features she recognizes in her ancestor’s face, she is not the Brimstone Angel, she never will be.
She cannot save them all. They are already damned.
Chapter Twenty-one
26 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) The Lost Peaks
Dahl fought the urge to bury Cereon and Oota in details that made it clear this was the only viable option. But the longer the two of them watched Dahl, waiting for the other to speak first, the harder it was.
“You were willing before,” Farideh pointed out quietly, “when Dahl was the one casting the scroll.”
“ ‘Willing’s not the word I’d use,” Oota said. “ ‘Back against the cave wall,’ on the other hand—”
“You are quite a madman, Harper,” Cereon interrupted. “We shall die.”
“You said yourself the spell is destructive, that it gathers,” Dahl said. “If that’s not a replacement for the ritual scroll Tharra thought she was given, what else is it?”
Cereon raised a slim, pale eyebrow. “There is no way to know.”
“Just as there’s no way to know who’s casting it,” Oota said. “Or what they want from us.”
“Their motives don’t matter,” Dahl said. “They want you all dead so that they can claim the Chosen’s powers—whether that’s to raise up a new god or armor an old one or just sacrifice us in the name of stopping Shar is irrelevant. The spell is already happening and our best bet is to ride it out.”
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