Ascendency of the Last

by Lisa Smedman

  “Consume them!” Molvayas cried.

  Riders slammed spike-spurs into their mounts, sending them leaping at the enemy. Spells flew thick and fast between the slave hovels as the rival groups battled. A roiling wave of conjured slime smashed one of the huts flat and broke against the mount of one of House Philiom’s priests. The lizard convulsed, thrashing its tail in agony, but the priest went down laughing, his arms waving above his head as he sang his god’s name. A heartbeat later, a dark purple boil burst up through the slime, assumed the vague outline of a drow, and staggered on quivering legs toward the nearest enemy. It wrapped its “arms” around that rider’s mount. As the lizard collapsed, its body dissolving, another of House Philiom’s priests launched a spell that imploded the rider’s head.

  Kâras spurred his mount between two of the slave hovels, seeking refuge. As soon as he reached a point where the others couldn’t see him, he reined his mount to a halt. He threw down his tentacle rod and whispered a prayer to the Masked Lady, healing his frost-burned thumb.

  A hiss made him look up. He wasn’t the only one back there; Molvayas had followed him. The fanatic had heard Kâras’s prayer. He bared his stained teeth in a furious grimace. “Imposter!” he howled. His arm jerked up, flicking his tentacle rod back—ready to strike.

  Kâras shot a poisoned bolt from his wrist-bow, but Molvayas whipped up his shield and gurgled a one-word prayer. The metal shield turned into a shimmering disk made up of droplets, which caused the bolt to dissolve instantly when it struck. .

  Molyvas smiled and flicked his whip.

  “Masked Lady, cloak me!” Kâras cried as the tentacles flicked toward him. A sphere of darkness leavened with sparkles of moonlight sprang into being around him. The tentacles smacked into it and glanced aside—all but one, which brushed Kâras’s left knee, instantly deadening it. His leg muscles felt as though they’d turned to mush. He’d been leaning in that direction, and his left foot slipped out of the stirrup. He toppled sideways to the muddy ground, the weakened leg collapsing beneath him, his right foot still tangled in its stirrup, which had twisted up and over the saddle. The lizard, struck in the tail by a tentacle, twisted around to bite at its weakened, useless tail, dragging Kâras behind it.

  Molvayas flicked the tentacles back, readying for a second strike. Kâras twisted to face his opponent. He spat out foul-tasting mud, pointed, and chanted a prayer. It should have immobilized Molvayas, but the Ghaunadaurian priest somehow shrugged it off. His arm whipped forward, and the tentacles lashed out a second time.

  Kâras at last yanked his foot out of the stirrup. He tried to roll behind his mount, but wasn’t quick enough. Tentacles struck his shoulders and the back of his neck. His arms immediately numbed and fell limp at his sides. His head flopped forward on a loose-boned neck. Gasping, desperately trying to blink the mud from his eyes, he mumbled a prayer through numbed lips. “Masst Laybee, dribe him frum me …”

  A foot squelched in the mud next to his ear. Kâras twisted around and saw Molvayas looming over him. The tentacles of his rod were coiled around his waist; the handle hung like a sheath at his side. As he chanted, a green tinge appeared around his hands. Slime trickled down to his wrist, then fell, hissing, into the mud next to Kâras’s ear. In the distance, Kâras heard the sounds of battle, and the squelch of his mount limping away.

  “See him,” Molvayas chanted. “Devour him. Destroy him.”

  Kâras steeled himself. He was ready. A moment more, and he would go to his god—and find out, at long last, if it really was the Lady of the Dance who wore the mask, or if the Shadow Lord wore her.

  Molvayas bent down, his slimed fingers splayed. But before he could touch Kâras, a cord appeared around his neck and yanked him backward. A bolt of darkfire erupted out of his chest, burning a smoking hole through the eye embroidered on his tabard. Yet still the priest didn’t go down. He clawed at the strangle cord around his neck, choked out a word, and his neck softened to the consistency of jelly. The strangle cord slipped through it and was gone. His neck solid again, Molvayas twisted furiously to meet his opponent, his hands raised to cast a spell.

  Kâras seized his chance. He flailed with his good leg, snapping it against the back of Molvayas’s knee. The priest staggered and toppled sideways, forced to check his fall with his hands. They slid into the foul-smelling mud. Snarling, he reached for his rod. But before the tentacles could uncoil from his body, a second bolt of darkfire caught him square in the mouth and exploded out of the back of his head, carrying bits of brain and skull with it. Molvayas fell over backward with a strangled cry. The rod’s tentacles suckled at his smoking remains for a moment, then fell still.

  A green-robed drow with distinctive pink eyes stepped over the corpse and kneeled beside Kâras. His mud-splattered tabard bore Ghaunadaur’s unblinking eye, but the prayer he whispered as he touched Kâras’s weakened arms, neck and leg was to another god entirely. “Masked Lord,” he intoned, “heal him.”

  Sensation and strength returned. With a shudder, Kâras sat up. “My thanks, Valdar. That was close.”

  Valdar helped Kâras to his feet. “Not much of a ‘truce between Houses,’ is it?”

  Kâras shook his head in agreement. “The fanatics’ vows don’t seem to count for much, when it’s time for a Gathering. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into full-scale war.”

  “Have you heard anything yet? Has she been in touch?”

  “‘Soon,’ was what she said, the last time we spoke.” Kâras wiped mud from his face with a sleeve. “I pray she’s telling the truth. A tenday-plus-two is long enough. This is worse than Maerimydra.”

  A kobold burst out of a nearby hovel, skidded to a stop as he spotted the two drow, and tried to duck back through the door. Valdar whirled and threw; his knife buried itself in the slave’s throat. A snap of his fingers brought the knife back to his hand, even as the kobold fell.

  “May the Masked Lord grant that prayer,” he said as he wiped the blood from his blade with a white silk handkerchief. He tucked the weapon back into its wrist-sheath. “I’m certainly ready for her call. My bunch is slurping out of the palm of my hand. Ripe for Gathering, you might say.”

  Kâras shook his head. Valdar actually seemed to be enjoying this mission.

  They paused to listen. The shouts and cries of battle continued. Over them came a distant gonging: the call for House Philiom’s priests to return to their keep. The larders were once again full, and the Gathering was at an end.

  “Time for me to go,” Kâras said.

  “Me too.” With a wink, Valdar vanished. One moment he stood next to Kâras; the next, he had teleported away, as silently as he’d come.

  Kâras picked up his tentacle rod. He glanced around. His own lizard had curled against the wall of a hut to chew off what remained of its tail. But Molvayas’s mount was whole. Kâras ran over to it and sprang into the saddle. He drove his spurs into its flanks and hissed. The lizard scuttled away, climbing up and over the nearest hovel. As it descended the opposite wall, he heard shouts of triumph: the priests of House Abbylan had discovered Molvayas’s corpse.

  Kâras rode away from the hovels, onto the field that separated the two keeps. The House Philiom priests were just ahead, forming up their mounts. This done, they rode hard for their keep, following the line of bubbling black pools left behind by the tentacles’ return to the earth. Some of the priests were wounded and clung to their saddles. One sagged, then tumbled backward across his lizard’s tail. His body dragged for a moment, but then his foot slipped from the stirrup, and he fell away. The other riders ignored him and continued to ride.

  Kâras rode with them. The priests of House Abbylan followed for a time, hurling spells at the retreating group, but soon gave up the chase. Eventually the priests of House Philiom reached their own, now empty fields. The slaves, rightfully fearing they might be gathered along with the slaves of House Abbylan, would have fled when the line of tentacles sprouted from the earth. Kâras rode past the hovels, to
the keep, and over its drawbridge. When the last of House Philiom’s priests was inside, House boys sprang to the capstans and cranked the drawbridge shut.

  Kâras dismounted. The surviving priests glanced around, taking stock. They’d lost five of their number, including Molvayas.

  “Where’s Molvayas?” asked Shi’drin. He was their second-in-command, a stunted drow with a pustule-crusted face. “Did anyone see him fall?”

  “I did,” Kâras answered. “One of House Abbylan’s priests killed him.” He flicked his rod, sending a shiver through its three black tentacles. “I dealt with him in turn.” He didn’t bother explaining why he was mounted on Molvayas’s lizard. Those who followed Ghaunadaur’s creed took what they needed, scorning those who were too weak to keep it.

  Shi’drin nodded. He touched the eye on his tabard. “Ash to ash; mud to mud,” he intoned. “May the Ancient One consume what remains.”

  The other priests—all but one, who had collapsed after dismounting and was being eaten by his lizard, bringing the total lost to six—touched their tabards. Kâras did the same, doing his best to ignore the wet rip of flesh and the gulps of the lizard as it bolted down the dead priest. He wanted desperately to escape to the solitude of the room he’d been assigned after he arrived on House Philiom’s doorstep, claiming to be from Skullport. He wanted to cleanse his body of mud, shroud himself in magical darkness and silence, block out the shrill screams that echoed constantly down the keep’s foul-smelling corridors, and pray. Pray for the strength to continue this blasphemous charade and see his mission through.

  In each of the keeps of Llurth Drier, other Nightshadows were, no doubt, thinking the same. Their counterparts were stationed in distant Eryndlyn, and in Shadowport, and in the surface cities of Waterdeep, Bezantur, Calimport, and Westgate—everywhere Ghaunadaur’s foul cult festered.

  Kâras wondered if the Nightshadows he and Valdar had chosen for this mission still lived. It had been a knife’s-edge thing, this day, for Kâras himself. By the Masked Lady’s grace, Valdar had been there to step in, but it would only be a matter of time before one of the Nightshadows was caught and revealed them all.

  A boy took the reins of Kâras’s lizard. He climbed down from it and walked across the portico, edging his way through the crowd, to the exit. Before he reached it, a hand fell on his shoulder.

  “You will be rewarded,” Shi’drin said in a low voice, his eyes gleaming. Then, louder, to all the priests, “Come! We will feed the altar this very cycle in celebration of our Gathering.” He pointed at the nearest House boy. “You! Spawn! Tell the boys to prepare the sacrifices.”

  Kâras choked down his apprehension. He could tell by the look in Shi’drin’s eye that the priest realized he was somehow responsible for Molvayas’s death. Now one of two things would follow. Reward, for ensuring Shi’drin’s promotion to Molvayas’s former role as the keep’s Eater of Filth. Or retribution.

  Both might very well take the same form: sacrifice, on Ghaunadaur’s altar.

  Yet Kâras could do nothing—not with a score of gleeful priests sweeping him along in their midst. Stinking of blood and sweat, babbling their joy at a successful Gathering, they hurried down the corridor to the shrine at the heart of the keep. Had Shi’drin not singled Kâras out, he might have slipped away, perhaps even feigned collapse and been left behind. But the new Eater strode just behind Kâras, prodding him forward.

  They burst through a curtain of damp, rotted black silk into a room with walls, ceiling, and floor polished to the slickness of glass. A dozen columns of the same mottled purple stone, each carved with a rune, ringed an irregularly shaped dais that rose in two tiers. Atop the dais stood a lump of porous black stone: the altar itself. A gong hung above the dais, its bronze deeply pitted by the acid that condensed on it, trickled down its sides, and dripped onto the altar.

  A purplish mist drifted through the chamber. As he passed through a patch of it, Kâras touched his disguised holy symbol and silently prayed for strength. The mist left a stinging film on his skin and clung to him like lingering dread. Just setting foot in the shrine took all of Kâras’s courage. The air was so foul he felt as if he were wading through liquid sewage. The closer he got to the altar, the worse it got. He was an intruder here, a person from another faith. At any moment he’d be exposed, consumed.

  Then they’d be on him, like carrion crawlers on a corpse.

  He shook his head furiously. If he didn’t get a hold of himself, he’d soon collapse in a gibbering heap on the floor. With a shaking hand, he gripped his disguised holy symbol. Masked Lady, he silently prayed, swallowing down his bile. See me through this. Help me to do your work. Shadow my doubts and cloak my fears.

  The priests halted in a loose-knit group before the altar. Shi’drin stepped to the front, turned, and raised his hands. His fingernails were filthy, the sleeves of his robe soaked with slime and blood. He caught Kâras’s eye. For one terrible moment, Kâras thought Shi’drin might ask him to perform the sacrifice. Then Shi’drin closed his eyes.

  “Ghauandaur, your faithful servant calls,” Shi’drin intoned. “In your name, I feast.” Then he transformed. His fingers melted into his hands, his arms trickled toward his body like melting candle wax, and his head turned into a blackened puddle on his shoulders. Soon all of him, including his robe and tabard, had turned to ooze. The black blob he’d become bulged against the lowest step of the dais, and flowed up to the altar.

  The other priests formed two lines, stretching from the doorway to the dais. Kâras, by careful maneuvering, placed himself as far from the altar as he could get, beside the chamber’s only exit. He pretended to follow along as the priests muttered their devotions and swayed back and forth. He moved his lips in time with the rest, mumbling what he hoped would pass as a prayer.

  Fortunately, Ghaunadaur’s faithful had no set liturgy. Like the god they worshiped, their rituals were amorphous and ill-defined. Each priest praised the Ancient One in his own fashion. If any of the others noticed that Kâras was uttering nonsense, it wouldn’t matter. He just prayed that the Ancient One itself wasn’t listening.

  A few moments later, the first of the sacrifices staggered into the altar room: an orc, her eyes glazed, a dribble of the drug she’d been forced to drink drooling from her mouth. Even from a distance, Kâras could smell its licorice-sweet scent. The tempo of the priests’ mutterings increased, found a rhythm. “Onward. Oblivion. Onward.”

  With each word, the captured slave took a step forward, stumbling as if shoved by invisible hands between the two rows of priests. Compelled by their magic, the orc made her way, one halting step at a time, to the dais. At last she bumped her shins against it, fell forward, and cracked her head on the stone. She rose, her snout bloody. She levered herself up onto the first layer of the dais. Then the second. Then onto the altar stone itself.

  The priests fell silent. With a wet, slurping sound, the black ooze that was Shi’drin slithered onto the altar. As it engulfed the orc, the glaze fell from her eyes. Her cry of anguish was cut short as her flesh sizzled. The stench of burned hair filled the room. For a heartbeat or two she struggled, then fell still. A pitted bone poked momentarily out of the black ooze, then got slurped back inside.

  Now a second slave stumbled into the room, this one a male half-orc. Like the first sacrificial victim, he stank of the drug he’d been forced to consume. The priests began their chant anew, compelling him forward.

  Sickened, Kâras played along. “Onward. Oblivion. Onward.”

  One by one, eleven more captured slaves marched to the dais, climbed to the altar, and were consumed. Feeling faint, Kâras wondered if the sacrifices were ever going to end. He vomited in his throat, and harshly swallowed the bile down again.

  As the thirteenth captive was being dissolved, a sound like stone being slammed by a sledge rent the air. Instantly, the priests fell silent. Heads turned. Kâras peered down his line and saw that a Y-shaped crack had opened in the altar stone and the altar had split i
nto three pieces. Judging by the reactions of the priests, it was an auspicious omen. They seemed tense, anticipatory.

  Kâras didn’t like the thought of that.

  A greenish sludge oozed out of the cracks and puddled on the upper level of the dais. It dribbled onto the lower level, then onto the floor. Kâras watched it, his every muscle tense. When it reached his boot, he shifted his foot slightly. Its stench made his stomach lurch. But he couldn’t very well flee, not with the others watching. He stood his ground, sweating, as the sticky green ooze flowed past his boots. He prayed it wouldn’t dissolve the leather, burn through to his feet, and reveal him as a spy.

  It didn’t.

  No more victims staggered through the curtain; the sacrifice seemed to be at an end. Yet the priests continued to sway and chant Ghaunadaur’s name. Kâras glanced at the curtain, wondering if he could slip away without anyone noticing. He decided not to risk it. Meanwhile, the green stuff kept oozing from the altar like blood from a wound. It was obviously a manifestation of Ghaunadaur. But what did it mean?

  A moment later, one of the novices burst into the chamber. He threw himself onto the floor and wormed his way to the altar through the sludge, fouling his robes. “Masters!” he cried, his voice shrill with excitement. “The lake is in turmoil! It’s turned a bright purple. A spawning has begun!”

  The black blob on the altar flowed upward, assumed the shape of a drow, and morphed back into Shi’drin. The Eater’s eyes grew wild with anticipation. “It is come!” he cried. “The Great Devouring is at hand!”

  “They have come!” the other priests chanted. “His servants have come!” As one, they turned and rushed from the room.

  As the other priests jostled each other in an apparent frenzy to be devoured by whatever was rising out of the lake, Kâras hung back. He felt dizzy with fear. Llurthogl was spawning? Why now? Had Ghaunadaur sensed an enemy among his fanatics? Kâras glanced nervously at the green ooze that fouled his boots, wondering if it was about to consume him.