Plague of Spells

by Bruce R Cordell

  Scarlet light bathed the room. Nogah looked up at the widened fissure in the ceiling. A single, vast, red eye peered down through the rent. Her heart stuttered, and her breath caught.

  Leave foolishness behind you, Nogah reprimanded herself. She was master, and this great leviathan of the deep was leashed to her will via the Dreamheart. Why else had it come?

  Nogah spoke, “Great one of the depths, I thank you for your service.”

  The eye regarded her, unblinking. She felt curiosity through the light mental connection the Dreamheart provided.

  Curiosity sidling toward yearning.

  Nogah decided to send the great kraken away. She had proved she could summon the creature at need. She was growing uncomfortable under the creature’s unwavering scrutiny.

  She issued a mental command of dismissal through the relic.

  The link jerked and parted, gone. Nogah took an involuntary step back.

  The eye finally blinked. A basso scream blasted through the hall: Gethshemeth’s voice.

  “You misunderstand my role.”

  Each word was so loud it was like a separate assault.

  Nogah sputtered. “I … you … you are here because I commanded your aid …”

  “No.”

  The negation was like a gate crashing down, cutting off escape.

  “I am here for what you retrieved for me from below.”

  “The stone is mine!” yelled Nogah in sudden understanding, clutching it and pulling back. “I summoned you, and I can dismiss you. Leave me!”

  The tentacle tip swaying before Nogah lashed forward and struck her with the strength of ten monitors.

  She blacked out. A moment later, consciousness blinked back. She was in the air, tumbling head over flippers. She didn’t have the Dreamheart. “No—”

  A wall arrested Nogah’s trajectory. If not for her residual claim on the relic’s power, she would have died in that instant.

  As it was, she slid to the floor and crumpled into a heap. She could only blink as the kraken’s tentacle tip encircled the Dreamheart. Tentacle and relic retreated up through the hole in the ceiling.

  “That which was ancient before the world breathed is now mine.”

  Nogah tried to rise, collapsed.

  “Divinity itself is now within my reach.”

  Nogah sobbed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  West of the Ruins of Starmantle

  The rain sputtered a while longer, then stopped. It hadn’t been enough to douse the wildfire that blazed to the south, burning a swath through the seedling pines of Gulthmere Forest. In some places, the fire flared so bright it cast orange highlights on the low clouds. Winding columns of smoke and soot twisted up toward those same clouds, merging into a single, ashen morass.

  Raidon Kane coughed in the damp, sooty air. He wondered how far he had traveled. Not far, given his condition. Then how long had it been since he staggered west from Starmantle’s crazed gates? Plaguechanged ghouls nearly ended him there. One tried to eat his leg. Raidon worried more about the creature’s claim, that the monk was “spellscarred.”

  His exhaustion was a physical weight lying on his back. He was feverish, and his damaged foot had at last gone numb. His body’s overwhelming fatigue tried to convince his mind that an immediate nap was the best possible choice.

  Raidon struggled to crawl onto a large outcrop. He imagined it would be more defensible than the plain. He’d seen jackals sniffing around, and he worried other predators might be trailing him from Starmantle. Undead predators with too many mouths.

  The rain made the outcrop slick. He kept losing his grip. Even when he found a good hold, the piece crumbled, sending him sliding back toward the ground.

  Once a small ledge broke under his weight to reveal a cyst of red spiders, each the size of one of Raidon’s hands. The wildfire gleamed ominously from their scarlet carapaces. The arachnids clacked oversized fangs at Raidon, then scurried away in a single line like a tendril of blood.

  He was nearly to the top. Then a spasm in his acid-burned foot caused him to backslide. He slid down half the distance he had just so laboriously climbed.

  “By Xiang’s seven swords.”

  Raidon’s concentration was absent. He couldn’t summon the mental discipline necessary to heal his wounds. The skin from his foot and leg was peeling away, and blood constantly oozed from the raw wound. Dirt crusted everything. Infection had likely already set in.

  Raidon tried to push aside concerns over his injury. He couldn’t worry about that now. He needed sleep, and a safe place for it.

  A new pain seared. The nerves in his lower leg were not quite dead. The sting sawed right through the shreds of his focus. Raidon slid all the way back down to the outcrop’s base, scraping skin from his fingers and forearms.

  He lay face down in the mud, coughing into the cruel earth that apparently had decided this day was to be his last.

  Would that be so bad, he wondered?

  “Try again, Raidon,” came a voice from nowhere. “You have nothing more to lose.”

  The monk raised his head from the mud to glance weakly around. He was alone.

  Of course. As his mind gave up its sovereignty over reason, he supposed chimeras would appear to bedevil him.

  But the phantom voice had a point.

  Unless he discovered the strength necessary … well, death would claim him. So why not try again? One more hard effort, he told himself. After that, he could rest, hopefully enough to lift the exhaustion that hung on his limbs and eyelids like ballast.

  He endured another fit of coughing that threatened to scrape his lungs right out of his chest.

  What was it the elders of Xiang Temple taught?

  “The usefulness of a cup is its emptiness,” he whispered.

  Nothing could help him now but his own force of will. Anything was possible, or nothing.

  He prepared for a final effort.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Leaving New Sarshel, Impiltur

  Waves flashed past the prow. The water moved independently of the ship, giving the illusion the craft moved more swiftly than its true speed. The vessel was four days and four nights out of New Sarshel’s port. The sky was cloudless, and stars in the millions studded the heavens, a plethora of riches hinting at distances and ages vast beyond comprehension.

  An elaborate figurehead hung on the pirate ship’s stem, below the bowsprit. The figurehead was a half painted, half sculpted woman with shimmering green scales in place of clothing. She leered into the night, her eyes unnaturally brilliant. The figurehead gave the ship her name, the Green Siren.

  The Green Siren did not fly its true privateer colors; it still ran under the flag of Marhana Shipping.

  A tall man cloaked in what seemed darkness stood at the ship’s prow, above and slightly behind the figurehead. The edges of his cloak flapped in the wind, echoing the movements of the much larger sail luffing and snapping above.

  The man withdrew a small, dull tin from his cloak. The tin contained death. A long, slow death, popularly conceptualized as a one-way trip down an imaginary road. A crimson road, red like the eyes of those who used what was inside the tin.

  The man’s eyes were not red, but he was most certainly a traveler. He owed his lack of symptoms to his pact with the Lord of Bats.

  It had seemed like a good deal at the time, reflected Japheth.

  He carefully removed the tin’s lid. Inside lay nestled his supply of traveler’s dust: tiny roseate crystals, each slightly larger than a grain of sea salt.

  Shielding the contents from the wind with his forearm, he plucked forth a crystal.

  Japheth tilted his head back and, with practiced grace, dropped the grain into his left eye. “Lord of Bats, protect me,” he whispered.

  Japheth learned of the entity called the Lord of Bats when he was an acolyte librarian working the back stacks of the many-towere
d library of Candlekeep. In the confusion and turmoil following the Spellplague, and later, the Keeper of Tome’s mysterious disappearance, the magical wards that protected the sensitive and dangerous scrolls and tomes from casual perusal in Candlekeep failed for some time.

  The aftermath of Mystra’s murder also marked the period Japheth put his first tentative foot on the crimson road.

  Back then, no one yet realized that, once addicted to traveler’s dust, an early death was inescapable for the user, regardless of whether it was quick or prolonged.

  The grain on his eye was dissolving. The flapping sail and the stars beyond began to blur and waver. Japheth blinked. Anticipation was part of the experience.

  The essence of the liberated dust reached his blood and his mind, penetrating to his soul. The constraints of rules and preconceptions deserted his consciousness, leaving behind a red-hazed vista of breathtaking clarity.

  Japheth felt transfigured, alive, and potent. Nothing else was like this feeling. It was bottled perfection, the crystallized blood of divinity itself, perhaps. While striding the crimson road, all sorrows sank beyond recall, while all joys were raised like blazing stars.

  When Japheth began taking traveler’s dust as an acolyte a decade earlier, his initial forays on the crimson road produced similar bliss.

  At first.

  It was under the compulsion of traveler’s dust that Japheth dared the forbidden stacks, even while the rest of the staff defended the library-fortress from refugees swarming the Coast Way. In the wake of the Year of Blue Fire, chaos ruled Faerûn.

  Not that Japheth had cared about consequences or chaos while in the grip of his newfound drug. The lucidity that accompanied a walk on the crimson road blinded him to things that customarily would have captured his entire interest.

  Japheth recalled how, as a drugged acolyte, he had sauntered past wonders: a heavy book made of copper foil stamped with arcane sigils, bound between thin covers of beaten silver; a book bound between sheets of yellowish iron, whose indecipherable title alternately burned with fire and sparked with electricity; and a libram bound between two metallic angel wings, from which glorious voices issued.

  No, under the influence of dust, he had passed by these glamorous wonders to the chamber’s far corner, shadowed and dank. There he plucked a small, brownish tome from behind a larger book that pulsed with ominous power. To his dust-tuned senses, the small brown folio glimmered with a haunting, soon-to-be-realized significance.

  The book’s plain face was stamped in fading dye with the words, Fey Pacts of Ancient Days.

  Young Japheth quickly retreated to his cell and closed himself away from his fellows. By then, the refugee surge had been beaten back, but the Keeper of Tomes needed finding. Japheth didn’t care if he ever saw the Keeper of Tomes again. He wanted to be left alone with his traveler’s dust and the tome he’d stolen from the forbidden stacks.

  Within the book he found strange names and properties of primitive earth spirits, ancient and strong. Once, claimed the hoary tome, the beings attached to these names were worshiped as gods. Sadly, remonstrated the crumbling text, Faerûn had largely forgotten these ancient Powers.

  The names in the pilfered tome called to him. And so he read, day in and day out. All would have been bliss, but for a change in his trips on the crimson road.

  Japheth was approaching the “first bend,” as the transition later came to be called, of his journey. In other words, the traveler’s dust brought him less joy with each use, but his body’s desire for the substance only increased.

  It was around this time that traveler’s dust was suddenly recognized as being a slow poison, not “distilled joy” as certain Amnan suppliers had successfully and lucratively marketed it. Amn had weathered the Spellplague better than most, and in its aftermath, Amn’s merchants were already making a profit among refugee populations and untouched kingdoms alike.

  Some cities banned the sale of dust, and its users, easily marked by their eyes, were shuffled off to secure cells where they could reach their journeys’ end in peace, if allowed to keep their supply of dust. When their dust was confiscated, as usually happened out of misplaced morality, the resultant death was an awful thing to behold. Deprived walkers invariably became violent, first toward others, then to themselves.

  All these things Japheth heard whispered beyond his door by the other acolytes. They knew the dust had him. They saw how his eyes slowly filled with crazed lines of blood. They witnessed how his hands shook so badly at times he could scarcely restack borrowed tomes. They remembered how he had boasted of being a traveler on the newly discovered crimson road.

  Young Japheth despaired. He decided to end his life with what dignity he could muster. He decided to take all the traveler’s dust he possessed in one gluttonous mass. He would dash to the end of the road with the speed of a racing hound.

  The suicidal acolyte’s vision burned as he poured twenty or more grains in each eye. He was catapulted out upon a scarlet plain and saw for the first time a literal road.

  And he saw its awful terminus.

  A shouted hail pulled Japheth from his reverie. A man approached along the unlit starboard side of the Green Siren.

  Japheth didn’t need light to recognize the swaggering figure of Captain Thoster. The captain sported a prodigious hat, a gold-trimmed coat that swept the ship’s deck, and a slender, straight sword in a silver sheath.

  With the sensitivity to magic lent him by the partial dose of dust still sparking through his blood, Japheth saw a translucent, greenish glimmer to the captain’s skin, as if just below its surface, a scalelike contour yearned for release. The captain liked to joke about his “unclean parentage.” Perhaps it was no joke.

  Thoster closed the distance between them, apparently as comfortable in the dark as Japheth. Another hallmark of the man’s tainted blood, the warlock supposed.

  “Any more sightings of your pretty little ‘ghost girl’?” asked Thoster.

  Japheth gave a curt shake of his head.

  “Sure you ain’t imagined her, bucko?”

  “I am certain, Captain.”

  “Hmmph,” snorted Thoster, pulling out a pipe and miniature coal urn from the pocket of his great coat. “I never saw her,” he said, as if that was indictment enough of Japheth’s claim.

  “She manifested once in Behroun’s office, and a second time a few days ago, as we boarded. She was standing where I stand now. I told you all this.”

  “Sure you ain’t prone to imagining what just ain’t there?”

  “I have an … acquired sensitivity … to things seen and unseen. She is real.”

  The captain reserved comment as he skillfully lit his pipe with a cherry red ember.

  “And she might be dangerous,” added Japheth, though he had to admit he hadn’t sensed any malevolence in the ghostly image. Mainly, he wanted to draw a reaction from the cocky pirate.

  Thoster admonished, “Well, don’t go spooking my hands. The tars stand up well enough to most anything the sea’ll throw their way, be it a Cormyrean merchantman or sea devils. But they got an out’a proportion fear of ghosts and spirits of the dead.” He shrugged and puffed. The glint in his eye belied his easy words. He was telling Japheth to keep quiet about the topic, or else.

  The warlock replied, “I am on this ship as Behroun’s agent. I don’t much care what your crew thinks or fears. If I feel something endangers the mission, I will eliminate that threat. No matter its source.”

  “Easy, son. All I’m asking is you restrict ghost talk to me or my first mate, Nyrotha.”

  “I’m not a fool.”

  Another puff of smoke drifted into the night air, then, “Some say all who walk the crimson road are fools.”

  Japheth felt a flush warm his face. How had he come to this, that the words of a pirate could shame him? He said, “Behroun warned you would attempt to bait me, Thoster. For your own sake, hope you do not succeed in rousing my ire.”

  “Oh, ho!” laughed the cap
tain. “Think I already have!”

  Japheth turned away to look past the ship’s prow and the open sea that reflected a million glittering stars. He could feel Thoster’s amused regard on his back.

  “Come, my friend, don’t be so sour! We’ve both knocked around the dingy corners of this bad old world, haven’t we? Who don’t have their vices, eh? If you knew half what I pollute myself with, you’d wonder how I rise each day from my cot!” Thoster loosed a hearty laugh.

  Japheth said to the night, “I have witnessed the wholesale reaping of thousands who walked, screaming, to the end of the crimson road. I beheld the terror of the gnashing teeth that rim that final abyss, the maw of a demonic god-beast. Those before me walked onward, shrieking in mortal terror for their immortal souls. They marched off the edge. They were sucked down into that awful darkness and were consumed. Snuffed out forever.”

  The warlock turned back to Thoster and asked, “Have you ever seen anything like that, Captain, in this ‘bad old world’?”

  The captain was silent for a moment. Japheth decided he’d managed to push the old salt back on his heel.

  Thoster asked, “How’s it you still live? Behroun told me you’ve walked the road for a decade or more. You should’ve perished years ago, ain’t that right?”

  It was Japheth’s turn to laugh. “The fey spirits I commune with provide me with more than the words to curse the heart, still beating, from the chest of an enemy.”

  Thoster frowned, his easy manner finally dissipating. The captain recognized Japheth’s veiled threat. He began, “Listen, if you—”

  An ululating scream interrupted Thoster’s response.

  The yell of pain and terror resounded. Another cry followed. “Ghost! A ghost is killing Dorlan!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Green Siren on the Sea of Fallen Stars

  Heaps of black stone lay tumbled in plank silos in the moist confines of the ship’s hold. A brownish fungus had a good start across the slick piles, an indication that the heavy ballast hadn’t seen much rotation in recent months.