Watching the spider prepare its attack, Vedoran caught his foot against one of the loose stones. He uttered a cry and went down hard on his knees, exposing his back to the spider.
Like a dream, everything fell into place. Vedoran heard Ashok’s chain whistling as it flew through the air. The spider leaped for Vedoran, and at the last possible breath Vedoran spun and put his hands up to block the bite attack he knew was coming.
Ashok’s chain got to the spider first. The end stuck in the creature’s abdomen and dragged it back several feet.
The spider immediately changed its attack course and leaped on Ashok, covering his torso with its body and knocking him to the ground. While Vedoran pretended to recover, the spider sank its mandibles into Ashok’s shoulder.
Vedoran got to his feet and limped toward Ashok. He waited until the spider had delivered its poison before he drew his own sword and came at the creature from behind.
Ashok raked the chain across the spider’s abdomen so he could push it off him and draw out the poisoned mandibles. He got his boot under the creature and levered it off him, just in time for Vedoran to put his blade through the spider’s body.
Legs jerked and twitched as the spider tried to move, but Vedoran’s sword held it in place like a pin until it died with Ashok’s blood still dripping from its mouth.
Ashok cursed and sat up gingerly, wiping blood from his neck and chest. His wounds bled and oozed poison liberally. Vedoran saw Ashok’s face crease in pain.
“You were right. We should have waited for the others,” Vedoran said. He hooked the end of Ashok’s chain with his boot toe and dragged it out of reach. Ashok heard the metal links clink against the stone and looked up at Vedoran.
“You were clumsier than usual,” Ashok said. He tried to gain his feet, but Vedoran stepped close, into his space, and Ashok was too unsteady to rise without making himself helpless. “I always thought you were the picture of grace—a true, cold warrior.”
“And you are the opposite,” Vedoran said. “You fight with too much passion and too little regard for yourself.”
“Is this where it ends then?” Ashok said. “You kill me for taking your place as leader?”
Vedoran laughed. “I gave you credit for being smarter than that,” he said. “I told you: you and Chanoch are nothing to me. This is much bigger than both of you.”
“Yes,” Ashok said. “It’s about the gods. Neither of us can control our fates.”
“I can take the burden out of your hands, at least,” Vedoran said. “It’s time for the truth to come out. It’s time for you to claim your heritage.”
Ashok’s mouth tightened. He held a hand over his bleeding wound. “Whatever you think of me, I didn’t kidnap Ilvani, and I didn’t have anything to do with her torture.”
“I believe you,” Vedoran said. “But you’re planning to overthrow the city anyway, or so the evidence will show.”
Ashok winced as the poison threaded through his blood. His face was flushed, though from pain or anger Vedoran couldn’t say. “Is this going to give you what you want, Vedoran?” he asked.
“No,” Vedoran said. “But ruining you is ruining Tempus, at least for Ikemmu. I’ll have to settle for that.”
Ashok surged up then and wrapped his arms around Vedoran’s waist. Caught off guard, Vedoran stumbled and fell back over the spider corpse. Ashok got on top of him and reached for Vedoran’s blade.
Grunting, Vedoran punched Ashok in the face with his left hand. The blow got Ashok in the jaw and broke his momentum. He grabbed Vedoran’s tunic to steady himself. Vedoran swung his sword and clipped Ashok on the back of the head with the pommel.
Weakened already by his wounds and the poison, Ashok went limp on the ground next to the spider’s corpse. Vedoran sat up and sheathed his weapon. He crouched next to Ashok and loosened the buckles of his armor. He removed the bone scale breastplate and searched inside until his fingers found a slit in the leather where a pouch was hidden.
He reached inside and pulled out several folded parchment sheets, blood-spattered but legible, written in Ashok’s hand. Vedoran unfolded the maps and noted the detail Ashok had used in recording the city’s defenses.
“You damned yourself from the beginning,” Vedoran said.
Gravel crunched near the tunnel bend, and Vedoran looked up sharply.
Ilvani stood several feet away, watching him.
“What are you doing here?” Vedoran demanded. “You were supposed to stay with the others.”
Ilvani walked forward and kneeled next to Ashok’s prone body. She brushed the hair off his forehead and trailed her hand down to his neck to feel for a lifebeat. Her hand came up bloody, but she seemed satisfied. She wiped her hand on her skirt.
“He was attacked,” she said. She looked up at Vedoran.
“A spider jumped out of the crevice up there,” Vedoran said, pointing to the creature’s hiding spot. “It poisoned Ashok.”
“Poisoned him with a sword hilt,” Ilvani said. She fixed a mocking, innocent expression on her face.
Vedoran worked his jaw. There were two courses open to him. If she’d only witnessed him rendering Ashok unconscious, there was nothing to worry about. But if she’d heard everything.…
There was one way to know, Vedoran thought. He wondered if Ilvani would rattle as easily as her brother had.
“You’re right, I knocked Ashok unconscious,” Vedoran said. “He was trying to run away—with this.” He held out the bloody parchment sheets.
With a curious tilt to her head, like a child, Ilvani took the sheets and unfolded them. Vedoran went on, “This may be hard for you to hear, Ilvani, but I’ve discovered something shocking about Ashok. He’s been deceiving us all this time.”
“Everyone lies,” Ilvani said. She examined the notes, and her brow furrowed. “He’s not an artist. Why would he draw pictures?”
“So he could deliver the information to his enclave once he had escaped the city,” Vedoran said. Ilvani looked even more confused. “Natan didn’t tell you about that, did he? Ashok was captured by patrols outside of Ikemmu. He was a prisoner of the city while you were a prisoner in those caves.”
“Two prisoners, two different prisons,” Ilvani said. But she was listening, Vedoran thought. That was the important thing.
“Ashok was able to rescue you because he came from the same enclave that took your scouting party prisoner,” Vedoran said. “I saw it myself—the way he knew the layout of the tunnels, where the guards would be—only I couldn’t confirm it until now. Ilvani, Ashok was responsible for what happened to you.”
He waited for her reaction, but she only continued to stare at the parchment sheets in her hands. She didn’t appear to have heard him, or the words weren’t registering in her mind. She looked down at Ashok, but her gaze was turned inward.
“He looks peaceful,” she said.
“Even the guilty can seem at peace,” Vedoran said. “Ilvani, I’m sorry to have to tell you all this. I didn’t want to.”
“Uwan,” Ilvani said. “Natan. Ask them.”
“They were deceived as well,” Vedoran replied.
Ilvani’s face scrunched up, but there were no tears. She looked as if she might break apart instead. She brought her hands up in claws to cover her face.
Vedoran took a step toward her, but she backed up and screeched, “No! Ask them. Ask them, and they’ll tell me, and then it can be but not before. Before it’s just words, and you’re putting them together so they’ll sound pretty.” She looked at him with an expression very close to hatred in her eyes. “Why do you all do that?”
“We’ll make this right,” Vedoran said. “I’ll present the evidence to Uwan, and Ashok will be dealt with, I promise you.”
Ilvani looked at the parchment in her hands and said a series of words Vedoran didn’t understand. The parchment floated up from her palm, hung in the air for a breath, and vanished.
Vedoran caught his breath. “What did you do with them?” he cr
ied.
“Safe,” Ilvani said. “They’re safe in the Ashok box until needed.” She looked at him, a hard set to her face. “Time to go,” she said.
A woman made of stone, Vedoran thought. He realized he wouldn’t get her to change her mind. He briefly cursed the loss of the evidence, but perhaps it was meant to be.
Who better to make the case before Uwan, than the woman whose life Ashok’s people had ruined?
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
ASHOK AWOKE TO A DULL THROB AT THE BACK OF HIS SKULL. HE was on his feet, blind, and breathing hot air. It didn’t take him long to assume the rest.
He was in a cell, chained deep in the caves behind the forges. Maybe it was Chanoch’s cell. He couldn’t tell for the hood covering his face. There were no sounds; the room was absolute silence and cold.
In a flash of morbid humor, Ashok remembered the cleric’s words to him, when he’d first woken in Ikemmu.
Perhaps someday you’ll see how we treat our prisoners. Prophecies abounded in Ikemmu.
You have no one to blame but yourself, Ashok thought. You should have left the city when you had the chance. But you didn’t really want to escape, did you? Ever since he’d ridden out of that cave and left the slaughtered members of his enclave behind, he’d been looking for punishment in place of absolution. He’d betrayed his own people, and he’d betrayed Ikemmu by not confessing the truth.
Ashok only hoped, before it was all over, that he would be given the opportunity for that confession. If they left him alone in the dark, forgotten, he would fade away and still bear the shame.
No. It wouldn’t happen. Uwan would come. Ashok knew the leader would be there in the dark, at some moment. He hadn’t left Chanoch alone.
Ashok closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but he was aware of the lingering ache in his shoulder. His hands were numb from being held above his head. A tingling sensation ran down his arms. And he was cold, so cold all over, except where his breath was trapped inside the hood.
They were none of them sensations that he cared to think about. All were associated with a lack of feeling, a frozen state from which he couldn’t emerge. Ashok stomped his feet hard just to feel the shock go up his legs. He twisted his body from side to side as best he could, trying to coax some feeling back into his limbs, but the chains were suspended so tightly he had trouble drawing a full breath.
He tried to remember the journey back to Ikemmu, but his mind was choked with fog. There were snatches, bits of conversation where his name had featured prominently, but he couldn’t remember the words. He hoped Tatigan had reached the surface and his caravan safely, and he enjoyed the brief regret that he would never see what the world of Faerûn looked like. He imagined that it would be a place full of people like Tatigan and Darnae, and that gave him comfort.
Some time passed, and perhaps he slept, but more likely Ashok thought he drifted in and out of stupor. Once a guard came into his cell with a bucket and helped him to relieve himself. Ashok was faintly grateful for not having to soil himself, but the guard never removed the hood, and Ashok felt it was one of the most humiliating experiences of his life.
The next time the door opened, Ashok didn’t detect the heavy tread of the guards, but a single set of footsteps. They stopped in front of his cell. Whomever it was, Ashok could hear their slow indrawn breaths, and feel the contemplative silence with which the stranger regarded him.
“Well met, Uwan,” Ashok said.
“The guards tell me you’ve been restless,” Uwan said. “That’s a good sign. If you’d been subdued, we’d have had to move you somewhere else. We won’t risk you fading.”
“So I haven’t been condemned yet?” Ashok said. He turned his head to follow Uwan’s pacing outside his cell, though it was a futile gesture to try to see through the hood.
“Not yet,” Uwan said. His tone told Ashok that it was a foregone conclusion. “The evidence is being gathered.”
“By Vedoran,” Ashok said.
“Yes,” Uwan replied, and he stopped pacing. Ashok heard his hands moving over the bars. He could picture the leader deciding how much he wanted to say.
“Ask your questions,” Ashok said. He’d been waiting for the moment, and felt a profound relief that the time had finally arrived. “I’ve nothing left to hide.”
“Is it true?” Uwan said. “Did you kidnap Ilvani?”
“No,” Ashok said. “Not directly. My father ordered the attack on the scouting party. I was sent out of the city to track down a pack of shadow hounds that had been harrying us. Between them and Ilvani’s party, we were surrounded.”
“A wise tactical decision,” Uwan said. “Your father is a shrewd leader.”
“My father was a butcher,” Ashok said. There was no passion in his words, but they were no less true for the lack of feeling. “He sacrificed my brothers to each other and to the rivalry within the enclave. We had a heavily fortified position in those caves; we didn’t have the constant threat of attack, and we launched no offensives against other enclaves.”
“So without any enemies to fight, your own people became the threat,” Uwan said.
“We fought amongst ourselves, took any excuse to stave off the shadows,” Ashok said. “When I came to this city and saw the arms you displayed, I thought, what an impossible challenge, to launch an attack against your forces.”
“You’d found exactly what you needed to pull your enclave together and focus its attention on a new enemy,” Uwan said.
“And maybe I could stop slaughtering my brothers,” Ashok said. “Yes, that was the goal.”
“Why didn’t you go through with the plan?” Uwan asked. “Vedoran and the others … You had them all together on your home soil. Why didn’t you give them up?”
Ashok sighed. His entire body was numb, and he was weary from speaking while only drawing half breaths. He needed pain, something intense to focus his thoughts. He hadn’t felt so desperate in a long time. “I know what you want me to say,” he said. “You want me to say that it was Tempus’s will. It wasn’t.”
“Then why?” Uwan said, and for the first time anger broke through his carefully restrained tone.
“Because I had never known trust, or what it meant to fight with comrades who would defend me to the death, until I came here,” Ashok cried. “I didn’t want to lose that, so I attacked my own people. I used the nightmare to slaughter them.” He’d done no better than Reltnar. He’d acted out of the same desperate need to feel alive.
“You rescued Ilvani,” Uwan said. He seemed to be speaking to himself. “But that isn’t enough for the Beshabans. They want you executed, so they can prove the fallibility of Tempus.”
“By Ikemmu’s law, I should be executed,” Ashok said.
“We await the evidence,” Uwan replied.
“I’ve offered my confession,” said Ashok.
“Enough!” Uwan cried. Something metal—his sword perhaps—slammed against the cell bars and rang loudly in the quiet chamber. “I’ve heard nothing.”
“You can’t deny what you know,” Ashok said. “It betrays everything you believe. You’ll go mad.”
“Not for this,” Uwan declared. “You had a choice, and you made it. You chose the way of Ikemmu.”
“You may forgive me,” Ashok said. “But the shadar-kai cannot afford to forgive.”
Uwan laughed bitterly. “Is that why you do this? To taunt me with my own words? You’d throw your life away to prove that I was wrong about Chanoch?”
“You’re wrong about many things,” Ashok said. “Chanoch was one casualty. Vedoran was another. You’ve done him and others like him a great wrong.”
“And now I’m paying for it,” Uwan said. He sighed. “I know. Tempus aid me, I know that I’ve brought this upon myself. He tried to warn me. My god tried to tell me what you would mean to this city, but I didn’t understand. Now it’s too late.” He was silent for a breath then said, “Natan is dead.”
Ashok had thought he had no e
motion left in him, but when he heard that he sagged against the chains.
“It will destroy her,” Ashok said.
“It may already have,” Uwan said bleakly. “She disappeared as soon as she returned to Ikemmu, when they brought you back in chains.”
“What happened?” Ashok said.
“Natan was murdered in the chapel,” Uwan said. “We discovered his body hidden in an antechamber soon after you left the city with Tatigan. Vedoran claims you are responsible. He accuses you of killing Natan when he had a vision of your treachery. He says that you planned to escape to the surface.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Ashok said.
“I thought not,” Uwan said as he began to pace again. “But the damage is done.”
Ashok closed his eyes. He wished he could sleep. He’d never desired oblivion more. “So it was all for nothing,” he said. The one good thing he’d tried to do in getting Ilvani out of that nightmare place, all undone.
“You’ll spend one more night here,” Uwan said. “Tomorrow at the Monril bell you’ll be taken to the top of Tower Makthar, and Vedoran and the Beshabans will present their evidence against you. They’ve rallied a large number of supporters to their cause, more than I thought possible. However I rule, it will divide the city. But if I judge you guilty, you’ll be brought back here to await your death by the shadows.”
He started to walk away. Ashok called after him, “You can’t ignore the evidence. If you act according to your emotions, you’ll lose the peoples’ faith. Then the Beshabans will be able to act, with the full support of the discontent shadar-kai.”
Ashok heard Uwan stop at the door. He knocked on it for the guards to let him out. “You’ve a tactical mind equal to your father’s,” he said. “I say this as a compliment, though I know it gives you little comfort.”
The door closed, and Ashok was alone in the dark again.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
ASHOK SLEPT IN FITS, DREAMING OF HOUNDS AND RUNNING ACROSS the Shadowfell plains. His muscles woke him screaming with cramps. He broke out in a cold sweat until the pain and tightness subsided. Invigorated, he could not sleep again for a long time.
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