The Night Parade

by Scott Ciencin

  The vortex sat there, only five feet over Myrmeen’s head, and she felt as if she were experiencing the worst possible gale winds. She found a post buried deeply in the ground and hung on, even though its upper half had been eaten away by the vortex. Staring up at the wildly changing kaleidoscope of color, Myrmeen felt an intense heat wash over her. The vortex was translucent, and through it she could see the glimmering blue-white raindrops fall to the yawning, hungry void, vanishing as they struck its surface. The portal shuddered as if it had gorged to the point of explosion, but it swallowed the darksome energies released by the sphere anyway. When they were gone, the vortex trembled, as if it was now addicted to the energies of the apparatus.

  Myrmeen shook as she watched the vortex. She wondered if it still retained some of Pieraccinni’s mind, or if it operated solely on instinct, need, and lust. The city was rich in magic, and if the vortex still hungered, it might yet attack the city.

  Without warning, the vortex shrank with incredible speed and collapsed in on itself. It dwindled until it once again hovered over the remains of the Gentleman’s Hall, then it became too small to see through the heavy rains and vanished. The portal apparently had followed the rest of the apparatus and its power to the dimension where it had sent the mystical object.

  Myrmeen began to laugh, and soon her laughter gave way to tears of thanks that were washed away by the storm raging on around her. After a time, she became vaguely aware that people were coming. She hoped they were human. There was no fight left in her. Only the steady, insistent drumming of the rain upon her back kept her from losing consciousness. Soon she felt hands on her back, and she angled her head to see that the men who had found and were helping her to her feet were indeed human.

  She stared up at the sky and smiled as she realized that the night had not left them. In the fairy tales her mother had read to her when she was a child, and in the stories that Reisz had recited on the long nights when he had held her in his arms and she had quaked in terror at the storm, the dawn always arrived with the expulsion of evil.

  There was no dawn. There would be no perfect day for a very long time.

  Myrmeen turned to the faces of the men surrounding her, stunned to recognize the dark-haired nineteen-year-old she first had glimpsed at a table in Arabel. “Ord?” she asked.

  He nodded weakly, explaining that he had been wounded but not killed. He was found by the men who had come to help her, a band of adventurers who had several vials of healing potions and felt obliged to pour them all down Ord’s throat when they saw the pin that marked him as a Harper. A cleric was with them, and his magic had completed the task of restoring the young man.

  Ord reached to his breast and removed the pin, gesturing for Myrmeen to come closer. “You should be the one to wear this for a time. It’s what my parents would have wanted.”

  Myrmeen did not object when he secured the pin to her leathers. She took the young man’s hand as they went out into the rain-swept night to find Krystin.

  Epilogue

  Myrmeen stared into the face of Pholuros Argreeves, a tall, handsome, brown-haired man in his early forties. Argreeves ran a private temple for the worship and study of magic, and he had been a member of Suldolphor’s highly touted Council of Mages for two decades. He had a forceful personality coupled with a fairness and a gentle nature that had surprised Myrmeen.

  She had arrived at the city with a military force large enough to show the council that her request for an audience with Argreeves and his daughter would not be denied. Her show of force had turned out to be completely unnecessary. The mage acted as if he had been expecting her and explained that he had always known this day would come. He made no excuses for his actions and did not beg Myrmeen’s forgiveness. They met in the beautifully adorned audience chamber of his temple, statues of the great fallen sorcerers of the last two decades lining the walls—including one of the archmage Elminster, who had “died” and been resurrected so many times that the council found it easier to leave his statue on display, just in case. Weapons and arcane items that once had been rumored to contain spirits or curses were hung on the wall or preserved under glass. Murals had been painted on the arched ceiling, depicting great moments of triumph and tragedy for their kind, the births, lives, and deaths of the most revered mages in recorded history. Elminster once again took up more than his share of space.

  Through a handful of windows on the right-hand wall Myrmeen saw Krystin walking through the garden with Ord, who was too busy enjoying the pleasures of life and allowing his wounds, both physical and emotional, to heal before he launched himself on a new quest.

  Calimport had survived the second coming of the great storm, and this time the citizens were well aware of the Night Parade and its activities. Without the apparatus, the creatures could not reproduce, but many thousands of the monstrosities had survived and escaped, and there were doorways still to be discovered leading between their world and the Realms. All of the creatures who had been near the temple of Sharess had been consumed by the gigantic eye of entropy that had been released from the apparatus’s cage.

  Vizier Djenispool had formed a special arm of the military to deal with the city’s infestation, and warnings about the night people had been spread throughout the Realms. The war was far from over, but Myrmeen’s part in the battle was finished, at least for now.

  “Are you certain you want to do this?” Pholuros Argreeves asked.

  Myrmeen stared at the mage before her. “No,” she said, “but I have to do this.”

  Argreeves lowered his gaze. “Then what you tell her is up to you,” he said, his words gossamer as he turned and walked to the end of the long corridor, leaving Myrmeen to absently admire the many artifacts on display until she heard a soft, feminine voice call to her.

  “Milady?”

  Myrmeen looked up. The child approaching her from the double doors at the end of the hall was dressed in a white, flowing gown with a frilly bodice and elegantly styled sandals. Her soft brown hair was pushed back in a bun, held in place by a jeweled headband with white and red roses tucked into her hair. Her skin was pale, her eyes jade green, and her lips were touched with only a trace of scarlet.

  Myrmeen’s first thought was that the child did not even look like her, and she wondered if she had been deceived. Then she looked closely and saw that the deep emerald eyes were those of Dak, the hair jet black at the roots and dyed to appear the same as that of her adopted parents. The child’s hands had been at her side, but Myrmeen could see that they were soft and delicate hands that clearly had never been sullied by the hard lessons of manual labor or the artistry of sword wielding and combat. The girl wrung them nervously as she approached.

  “Father said you wished to see me,” she said as she bowed with an unexpected grace, bending to one knee as she spread the folds of her gown like an imported fan, displaying the beautiful designs that had been etched into the fabric, invisible at first because they were off-white against ivory. “My name is Lynelle Argreeves, daughter of Pholuros and Mia Argreeves, granddaughter of—”

  “Yes, I know,” Myrmeen snapped impatiently.

  Stunned, the child looked at her with wide, hurt eyes. Apparently, a harsh word was rarely spoken to this girl.

  Myrmeen could hear Reisz’s amused and somewhat admonishing voice in her head: Well, here you are, Myrmeen, at the end of your quest. You have your daughter—so what are you going to do with her? Have Krystin teach her the discipline of the sword?

  “Are you happy here in Suldolphor?” Myrmeen asked.

  “Oh, yes, milady,” Lynelle said with a bubbling enthusiasm that erased any hint of her earlier reserve. “Here I have my studies, my parents, and my suitors—each and every one a true gentleman.”

  “Your studies,” Myrmeen said, grasping for some common ground with this alien child. She is to become a mage, perhaps, and such pursuits certainly would help to grow some cal-louses on her far too trusting and vulnerable soul.

  “Yes,”
Lynelle said brightly, “our library contains the works of the poets from all the ages—not that I believe that my humble scribbling will ever gain such recognition, but there is an art to be admired, a beauty forgotten by many, that must be explored—particularly the poems of love, for without them our world would be a barren and lifeless place. Don’t you agree?”

  Myrmeen stared at the child, finding it incomprehensible that this could be her daughter. The longer she watched Lynelle’s pretty face, the more subtle clues she discovered that made her believe this was her child.

  This girl wouldn’t last five minutes alone on the streets of Calimport, Myrmeen thought. She felt as if she were about to crush a beautiful flower underfoot in her blind race to pursue her own fulfillment.

  “What do you know of me?” Myrmeen asked.

  Lynelle smiled. “That you are the ruler of a shining city called Arabel. Why you wish to waste your time with my lowly presence, I do not know.”

  “Why do you think I’m here? Hazard a guess.”

  “My father often has strangers come and speak with me, sharing their views, imparting their wisdom, so that my life is not so cloistered—or so he says. Frankly, many of them are bores. I do not sense that you would be such.”

  “You are most kind,” Myrmeen said in a halting, arduous fashion. The enthusiasm that had gripped her on the journey from Berdusk was now fading. Even her memories of the ceremony at the Twilight Hall, where she officially had been brought into the ranks of the Harpers, did not bring comfort.

  What did you think you would accomplish here, Myrmeen? Reisz’s hearty voice asked in her mind.

  I wanted to know that she was safe and happy.

  You already knew that.

  Myrmeen realized that this moment had played a thousand times in the theater of her mind. In her fantasy, she told Lynelle the truth and the girl embraced her, turning her back on the life she had led for the past fourteen years. Tearfully, they rode off together, beginning a cherished journey of exploration, embarking on a quest that would have no conclusion, as the raising of a child was an adventure that lasted until a parent’s final days, no matter what age mother and daughter attained.

  “Mistress Lhal?”

  Myrmeen was abruptly snapped from her revery by the child’s voice.

  You are my daughter. Say it.

  “Mistress Lhal, you haven’t said why you wished to see me. I am—very curious.”

  The child was becoming worried. There was no other reason for her slip of etiquette, at least by the standards of Suldolphor. It was not proper to ask a caller his or her business; a decent host waited until visitors felt that the time had come to announce their purpose. The child would know this and understand the breech in conduct.

  Tell her.

  Myrmeen hesitated, looking into the deep jade-green eyes of her daughter, and was reminded of Dak. Each time she had found Krystin staring into the emerald locket, she had wanted to say, Your father had eyes like this. They were the first thing that attracted me to the man.

  Myrmeen felt it odd that she was thinking of Krystin at a moment like this. Suddenly she understood why, knew what Reisz had been trying to tell her all along:

  All quests had an ending. If they did not, they would not be quests, simply life, the seemingly endless stretch of days leading to twilight and eternal darkness. By filling her mind and her heart with an endless string of quests, she had been ignoring her life, and it was going on without her. That was why she had felt so hollow and empty that night in Arabel, when she looked out at the storm with longing and desire for something she could not identify. That explained why she had felt that, despite her many achievements, she had accomplished nothing with her life.

  Staring into Lynelle’s eyes, she knew she had to make a choice, embark on a quest that would shatter this child’s peaceful existence, or walk away from it finally, content with the knowledge that her little girl had been raised with love and had been given from infancy more than Myrmeen ever had been equipped to provide for her.

  There was no choice.

  “My father was a poet,” she said softly, “a lyricist. I had hoped that perhaps you had heard of him, and that your vast libraries might hold some of his work, something that would help me remember him, now that the past is slipping away.”

  Lynelle nodded slowly and asked Myrmeen her father’s name. The fighter told her, then added that there was no reason to hurry in this pursuit. Myrmeen would be in Arabel for a very long time. If the girl came across anything, her kindness in forwarding copies of the poems would be appreciated.

  “It would be my honor, Mistress Lhal.”

  “You may go. My time is short, and I have a pressing engagement.”

  “Of course,” the child said as she bowed again, the top of her head showing the roots beneath her resplendent headdress.

  “I have one last question,” Myrmeen said. “Why do you dye your hair?”

  Lynelle blushed. “To look more like my mother. It seems I inherited the hair of my grandmother on my father’s side, who died giving birth to my father. It’s vanity, I know.”

  “Not at all,” Myrmeen said. “You’re very lovely.”

  With a wide, embarrassed smile, Lynelle half bowed and left the room with a lightness of step that she had not displayed when she had entered. Two figures, Krystin and Ord, stood in the doorway as Lynelle departed.

  As Krystin entered the hall, Ord drew back and shut the door, leaving them alone together.

  “Was she everything you had dreamt she would be?” Krystin asked.

  Myrmeen swallowed hard. “No,” she said, trying to hold back the tears welling up inside her, “but you are.”

  Krystin was shaken. She had no idea how to respond. She surprised them both by throwing her arms around Myrmeen and holding the woman as tightly as she could. The tears came, and Myrmeen clutched Krystin’s back tightly. Krystin responded with strength matching that of the older woman.

  There was a dawn somewhere in this bleak, terrible world, and Myrmeen knew she would no longer have to search for it alone.

  About the Author

  Scott Cencin is a novelist and screenwriter who lives in Sarasota, Florida. He spent the early part of his career writing and directing television commercials, and served in the same capacity on several short made-for-cable TV movies. His first two novels were the TSR fantasy best sellers, Shadowdale and Tantras (written under the pseudonym Richard Awlinson). He went on to write the time travel novels Glory’s End and The Pirate Paradox as Nick Baron. Under his real name, he is the author of The Wolves of Autumn and its sequel, The Lotus and the Rose, for Warner. This year will also see the release of his contemporary horror trilogy for Zebra/Pinnacle, The Vampire Odyssey, The Wildlings, and The Parliament of Blood. The Night Parade is his seventh novel.

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