by Paul S. Kemp
Cale spoke softly but earnestly, gesturing often with pointed fingers and clenched fists. At first Magadon looked confused, but after a time the guide nodded slowly and said something in reply to Cale. Riven took a step back, as though Cale was threatening him, and shook his head. His voice rose in anger.
“No,” the assassin said. “That’s madness.”
Cale shot a concerned glance at Jak and replied to the assassin in an intense whisper. Shadows bled from his hands and exposed skin, as if his intensity was squeezing darkness from his pores. In a thoughtful tone, Magadon too said something to Riven, evidently reinforcing Cale’s point.
Riven shook his head again, but less forcefully. He looked at Cale with narrowed eyes and asked a question. Cale didn’t blink, and Jak heard his reply clearly over the rain:
“You already know why.”
At that, Riven showed his signature sneer, but Jak saw the insincerity of it. If he hadn’t known better, Jak would have sworn he saw fear in Riven’s eye.
Magadon put his hand on the assassin’s shoulder and offered him comforting words. Riven glared at him, brushed his hand aside, and said something in a sharp tone. Magadon frowned and took a step back.
Cale spoke to Magadon in a language Jak did not understand. Magadon answered in the same tongue, but slowly.
For a moment, Magadon, Cale, and Riven simply looked at each other. Riven said something and nodded. To Jak, the assassin’s tone sounded as final as a funeral dirge.
“Do it,” Cale said to the guide, loud enough for Jak to hear.
Magadon visibly gulped but nodded. He put his fingers to his temple and closed his eyes. A halo of white light formed around his head. The glow expanded, and moved to encapsulate Riven. While it glowed, Magadon spoke softly to the assassin. Then the guide nodded at Cale, who added something further, again speaking in a strange language. Throughout, Riven said nothing. Abruptly, the light flared out.
For an instant, a veiled look came over Riven’s face but quickly vanished.
What in the Nine Hells just happened? Jak wondered.
Cale caught Jak’s eye and smiled softly—an insincere smile—before nodding at Magadon.
Riven said, “What are you doing?”
Cale responded softly. Magadon then asked something and Cale nodded. The guide hesitated for a moment, put his fingertips to the side of his head and closed his eyes. A moment later, a nimbus of angry red energy formed around his skull. It flared brightly. Another such halo formed around Riven’s head. The assassin gripped his skull in his palms, groaned, and collapsed. Cale said something in a terse manner to Magadon, and another red nimbus formed around Cale’s head. He too groaned and collapsed to the ground. Magadon took a deep breath, then screamed in pain and fell to the dirt himself.
All three lay on the ground unmoving.
Jak couldn’t help himself; he ran over and knelt first at Cale’s side. To his relief, the tall man was breathing.
“Erevis,” he said, shaking Cale gently. “Cale.”
Cale’s yellow eyes fluttered open and Jak forced himself to stare into them. Cale blinked and groaned, obviously disoriented. When his eyes regained their focus, he sat up, shook his head, and climbed to his feet. Magadon and Riven both were rubbing their temples, groaning, and struggling to sit up.
“What happened?” Jak asked, even though he knew he shouldn’t.
A curious expression crossed Cale’s face, and Jak thought he might have been struggling for words.
Finally, Cale said, “Precautions, little man. Let’s leave it at that.”
To that, Jak said nothing. Cale obviously wanted Jak ignorant of what had transpired. Jak hoped his friend knew what he was doing.
With nothing else to do, Jak removed his holy symbol and uttered prayers of healing over each of his companions. Even Riven, perhaps still too disoriented to protest, accepted the spell. The warm energy flowed through Jak and into his comrades. It seemed to bring each of them back to themselves, at least somewhat. None of them spoke of what had just transpired. To Jak, each of them looked at though they had just awakened from a deep sleep.
When Cale had drained the last of his waterskin and recovered himself as fully as seemed possible, he looked around, eyed his friends, and said to them, “Let’s leave this place.”
Jak said, “We’re just waiting for you to tell us how, my friend.”
Cale didn’t bother to explain that he had an intuitive feel for the overlap between Toril and the Plane of Shadow.
Instead, he simply said, “Watch.”
He concentrated for a moment, attuning himself to the correspondence between the two planes. When he had his mental hands around the connection, he opened his eyes and traced a glowing, vertical green line in the air with his forefinger. At any moment in time, he knew, the Plane of Shadow and Toril were separated by a planar barrier as thin as the cutting edge of an elven thinblade. Cale could slice open that barrier at will.
Putting his palms together and making a knife of his hands, he poked them through the center of the glowing line and drew them apart, as though he was parting draperies from before a window in Stormweather Towers’s great hall. The line expanded after his hands to become a rectangular curtain of ochre light hanging in the air—a gate back to Toril.
The appearance of the gate evoked a grin from Jak.
“After all this,” the halfling said, shaking his head, “and it was just that easy.”
Cale didn’t bother to tell his friend that it hadn’t been easy at all, that the transformation back in the Fane had changed his body, but it was only a short time ago that the place had transformed his soul.
Instead, he nodded at the portal and said to Jak, “That’s home. You’re the first, little man.”
Jak hesitated for only an instant. He beat his hat on his thigh to free it of mud, donned it with verve, smiled broadly, and hopped through the gate.
Magadon followed.
“Well done, Cale,” he said, and stepped through, bow held at his side.
Before Riven stepped into the gate, the assassin stopped and looked Cale in the face.
“I had to do it, Cale,” the assassin said. “I’d seen it.”
“Maybe,” Cale said.
Riven frowned, then said, “You’re the First, Cale.” He nodded at the gate. “And that’s not home anymore. Not for us.”
“Go through, Riven,” Cale said.
Just as the assassin was about to step through, something registered with Cale. He grabbed Riven by the arm.
“The teleportation rods,” he said. “They didn’t crumble to dust, did they?”
Riven looked him in the eye and replied, “We had to go through this, Cale. I know what I saw. You had to be our way out.”
In his mind, Cale heard Sephris say, Two and two are four.
“We all could have died,” Cale said.
Riven shrugged.
“Where are the rods now?”
“I threw them in the bog,” the assassin said with a smile, “the moment I understood the vision.”
“Afraid you couldn’t have resisted temptation?” Cale asked.
Riven grinned.
Cale released Riven’s arm and said, “Go through.”
Riven did.
Cale lingered for a moment in the glow of the gate and spared one last glance around the Shadow Deep. Its darkness seemed familiar to him, comforting, like the companionship of an old friend. Its gloom felt more protective than oppressive. He knew that Riven had spoken the truth. The gate to Toril did not lead home, not for him, not anymore.
But for a moment at least, he would turn his back on the darkness.
He stepped through the portal. It felt like slipping into warm water.
THE CITY OF SKULLS
An immense, complicated network of caverns and tunnels honeycombed the rock below Faerûn’s surface, stretching for leagues in all directions—the world below the world, the sunless expanse of the Underdark. To Azriim, it felt much the same
as the Sojourner’s pocket plane, itself simply a pinched-off portion of the Underdark.
In the endless night of that oppressive realm, a quarter-league below the city of Waterdeep, Skullport squatted in an immense L-shaped cavern carved from the rock by the slow but inexorable flow of the dark waters of the Sargauth, the underground river that fed Skullport a steady diet of ships and fresh water. The unsupported vault of the cavern’s soaring but stalactite-dotted ceiling would have collapsed of its own weight long ago if not for the mantle magic that supported it.
Even in his current, vulgar form, Azriim could feel the subtle currents of magic moving through the still, dank air of the city. The mantle’s magic touched everything, and it remained powerful, even after the death of its creators many centuries before.
Millennia earlier, Azriim knew, the cavern in which Skullport stood had been part of a much larger complex of caverns used by Netherese arcanists for magical experimentation—Sargauth Enclave, it was called, or so the Sojourner had explained to Azriim. It was the Netherese who first crafted the magical mantle that blanketed the caverns, an attempt by the human arcanists to secure the safety of their new city and to mimic the highest achievement of elven high magic, the mythal. But when the most powerful of the Netherese archwizards, Karsus, temporarily unraveled the Weave in a failed bid to achieve godhood, the enclave’s mantle temporarily ceased to function. Those few heartbeats during which magic was dead in Faerûn were as catastrophic to Sargauth Enclave as they were to the rest of the Empire of Netheril. Most of the caverns in which the enclave had stood, no longer buttressed by the magic of the mantle, collapsed in a hail of stone, crushing hundreds.
But a few caverns, by sheer happenstance, suffered only partial collapses. Centuries later, in one such cavern, Skullport squirmed from the corpse of the ruined Netherese outpost like an infestation of maggots. There it crouched, flourishing in the darkness and damp, a great fungus hiding in the shadows.
Bordered on three sides by trade tunnels stretching away into the Underdark, and on one side by an underground bay formed by the dark, pooling waters of the Sargauth, Skullport gradually grew into an important trade link in the chain of the Underdark’s unsteady economy. Beings of all races came to the Port of Skulls to trade in wares and flesh.
With limited space in which to build, the city’s inhabitants filled the cavern’s L-shaped floor and grew upward. Dilapidated homes, shops, and vice-dens—most built of salvaged shipping lumber washed down to the Sargauth by the currents of the surface sea—hugged the walls and ceilings of the cavern like lichen, or lay stacked one upon another, layer after layer, like a human child’s blocks. The roof of a brothel might be the floor of the eatery built above it.
An intricate network of catwalks, recycled ships’ rigging, tightropes, swings, and unstable bridges connected the buildings that stood above floor level. Strung from structure to structure, or spiked to the stalactites that pointed down from the vaulted ceiling like spear tips, the “hemp highway” made for an effective, if precarious set of airborne streets.
To Azriim, looking up from the floor, the hemp highway resembled the web of an insane spider, vibrating with the movement of hundreds of struggling flies going about their business. With a frequency bordering on clockwork—at least once every twelve hours or so—someone would fall to a screaming, splattering death on the streets below. Sometimes a bridge or catwalk gave out, but just as often it was a creditor’s or enforcer’s patience that finally came to a vciolent end.
Without fail, the moment the corpse hit the street Skullport’s residents stripped it of valuables as quickly and efficiently as a swarm of fire ants stripped the flesh from anything unfortunate enough to cross its path. Azriim found it amusing.
He and his broodmates had been in the city long enough even to have learned the vernacular and the less-than-sensible geography. Skullport’s natives—skulkers, they called themselves—conceptually divided the city into three distinct sections: the Port, which was nearest the bay; the Trade Lanes, which straddled the L-shaped center of the cavern; and the Heart, the darkest and most dangerous area of the city, which stood in the bulb-shaped terminus of the cavern. Each of those sections was further subdivided into subsections to reflect the vertical elevation: lower, middle, and upper. Over the past tenday or so, Azriim learned that the nomenclature was inexact, and that what one person might call the Upper Trade Lanes, another might call the Middle Port. No matter. The city was the same everywhere, whether walking a rickety bridge through a forest of stalactites in the Upper Heart, or elbowing through the crowd of illithids and drow in the Lower Trade Lanes. It was dark, lit only by torches, candles, lanterns, and dim glowballs. And it stank of decayed corpses, wet garbage, and rotting fish.
At every level, the narrow streets and walkways teemed with all manner of hard-eyed creatures: houseless drow mercenaries, white-eyed derro savants, inscrutable illithids, fierce orcs, chattering gnolls, and much worse. Violence was common and bloody, even in public streets, so weapons, wands, fangs, and claws were always bare.
Azriim loved the chaos.
Coffles of slaves, the true coin of Skullport’s realm, were as ubiquitous on the lower levels as the drug dens, prostitutes, and muggings. They stood in huddled groups, vacant-eyed and hopeless, awaiting their fates—humans, dwarves, goblins, elves, and creatures Azriim did not recognize. Some would end up as laborers, some as test subjects for chirurgeons, some as food. And even after death, those who were not consumed would continue to work. Zombie laborers were commonplace, especially on the docks. Shambling and stinking, they loaded and unloaded cargo from the many ships that called at the piers of the Port of Skulls.
Unable to help himself, Azriim grinned his mouthful of perfect teeth (even in his current form, he refused to adopt foul teeth or show any eyes other than his natural blue and brown orbs), reveling in the degeneracy of the place. He savored its barely controlled chaos the way he might a fine meal. His only complaint was the filth and the stink. Skullport was the boil on the arse of the world, and it stank accordingly. He would never get his clothes clean. He had not yet been able even to keep them dry. A slow but steady drip of brownish, mineral-laden water fell from the ceiling above, causing the whole city to swell with moisture, and giving the stifling air a mineral tang.
With so many creatures packed into so small a space, the tension was palpable, a temperamental beast that lurked behind every transaction, every word, face, and gesture, waiting to erupt. But for the presence of the Skulls, Azriim knew, the city would long before have devolved into a bloodbath.
Thinking of the Skulls erased his smile and brought a frown to the thick-lipped, doughy face he wore. Skullport’s ostensible rulers were almost comically absurd—flying, glowing skulls of all things—but they managed to keep the city under control and the flow of trade continuous. The Skulls kept the violence of the city manageable through the careful, but seemingly chaotic, application of power. Not enough to wreak mass destruction, but just enough to instill the fear of an ugly death. Their spellcraft was paltry compared to the Sojourner’s, of course, but still powerful enough to keep the populace from running amok.
To Skullport’s citizens, the Skulls were enigmatic, even mystical. To Azriim, they were nothing more than what they were.
When Sargauth Enclave collapsed, the mantle supporting the caverns had absorbed the consciousnesses of thirteen of the mightiest Netherese arcanists killed in the destruction. They later rose from the ruins as the Skulls, the creatures that had given the city its name. For Azriim, the Skulls held no awe. They were simply another obstacle to be overcome on his way to transformation into gray.
Since arriving via a portal in Waterdeep—innumerable portals in Faerûn ended in Skullport—Azriim, Dolgan, and Serrin had remained inconspicuous in the city by changing forms and lodgings frequently. Throughout, they had painstakingly studied the movement and behavior of the Skulls. They noted the time it took the creatures to respond to street fights in various parts of th
e city, and the frequency with which they were seen in certain locations. From that, they had deduced the general direction of the Skulls’ hidden lair, not far up the winding western tunnels that led into the wilds of the Underdark. Azriim was confident that somewhere in a cavern off of those tunnels, hidden by time, fallen rock, and the Skull’s magic, unbeknownst to all but the Skulls themselves, stood another cavern that had survived the destruction of Sargauth Enclave. The Sojourner had assured him of as much, and that made it so.
It was in that hidden cavern, that second surviving remnant of Sargauth Enclave, that the Skulls laired. And it was there that Azriim would find the focus for Skullport’s mantle, there that he must plant the seed of the Weave Tap. Since their arrival in the city, Azriim had kept the seed in magical stasis, held within the small, invisible, extradimensional space created by the magical ring on his finger. He could release the seed with a shake of his hand and a mental command.
But first things first, he reminded himself. With practiced ease, he regained his smile. He suspected it looked like more of a grimace in his current form.
Azriim walked—plodded, really—the packed earth avenues of the Lower Port, threading his way through the crowds and trailing his mark: a thin, pot-bellied, tonsured human named Thyld, who walked with a limp and wore stained, threadbare brown robes. Azriim had been trailing Thyld for over a tenday, learning the human’s habits, his haunts, and his tastes. Azriim felt as though he’d learned as much about the human as there was to know. Thyld was a “collector” for the Kraken Society, an organization perceived by the factions in Skullport to be a legitimate broker of information. The human had contacts among most of the important power groups in the city, in places both high and low. In addition, Thyld ran a lucrative side business, unbeknownst to his Kraken Society superiors, selling some choice bits of information to interested parties in the city. That made him ideal for Azriim’s purposes, which was unfortunate for Thyld.