Exile's Return: Conclave of Shadows: Book Three

by Raymond E. Feist

  “I can see that would pose a problem,” said Kaspar, in a tone that suggested he didn’t entirely believe what he was hearing. The Chaos Wars, to most scholars, was a creation legend, a mere story to explain how the world came to be the way it was.

  Samas smiled. “I can see you don’t believe me, but that doesn’t matter. I’m not about to tell you his name.” He winked. “Because I don’t know it. Most theologians call him ‘the Nameless One.’”

  Kaspar grinned. “There was a time in my life when I would have openly scoffed at all this, but what I have gone through these last few years…” He shook his head. “I will try to be open-minded.”

  “To understand what a catastrophe this was, you have to understand something about the way the universe works. Nothing is destroyed. Can you understand that?”

  Kaspar said, “But I’ve seen things destroyed.”

  “You’ve seen things transformed.” Samas pointed to the wood bin. “If I take a piece of wood and put it in the hearth, what happens?”

  “It burns.”

  “Would you say it was destroyed?”

  “Yes,” said Kaspar.

  “But it’s not, you see. It becomes heat, and light, and smoke, and ash. When a man dies, the body becomes corrupt, and like everything else in nature, it is part of a cycle. We bury bodies or we burn them, but it doesn’t matter if the body feeds worms or turns to ash, it is transformed, not destroyed.

  “But the mind and spirit, they live on. The spirit we know goes to be weighed, and if worthy returns to a better place on the Wheel of Life. If less worthy, a lesser place. But what of the mind?”

  Kaspar admitted to himself that he was now intrigued. “What of the mind?”

  “That goes to the gods, you see. What you’ve experienced, what you’ve learned, is the entirety of universal understanding—every living being returns consciousness to the gods. And they in turn evolve.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “Good. Some time between the creation of the universe and the Chaos Wars something went terribly wrong. The Nameless One is the most likely culprit, but we do not know for certain. Even the living gods do not know. But at a critical time, when the universe was changing, a war erupted in heaven.

  “The lesser gods rose against the greater gods, and with them rose the Dragon Lords to challenge both lesser and greater gods. The Dragon Lords were cast out of this universe, and left to wander in an alien dimension until the Riftwar.”

  “Really?”

  “That was what that was all about. You didn’t think it was something as petty as the Tsurani wanting to conquer a metal-rich world, did you?”

  “I thought it had to do with Tsurani politics back on Kelewan.”

  Samas smiled as he dried off his hands. He motioned for Kaspar to return to the kitchen table. “You are an educated man, I see. No, whatever the invaders thought, it was the Nameless One behind the attack. You see, evil profits from extreme chaos or extreme order. Good profits from a balance between the two. With total order, there is no growth. With total chaos, everyone and everything is constantly at risk. In the end, you will discover that by its nature, evil is insanity.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Samas looked at Kaspar as a tutor would a truculent child. “Surely, I don’t need to explain this to you?”

  Kaspar said, “I am truly not sure.”

  “Have you ever wronged a man…just to do him harm? Or have you always had a reason?”

  Kaspar answered quickly. “There was always a reason.”

  “There you have it,” said Samas as he sat down. He motioned for Kaspar to fetch over a cup of water for him. “You would never look at yourself as ‘evil’ no matter what the other fellow thought of what you did. It’s in our nature. And that’s the great secret of evil. It is never viewed as evil by those who perpetrate the evil.”

  Kaspar handed him the water cup and sat down. “Well, I have done things that I now question.”

  “So you’ve grown wiser with age. But at the time, the choices you made seemed reasonable.” Samas held up his hand to cut off any debate. “Even if you thought they were questionable choices at the time, I’m sure you justified them as being necessary, ‘the ends justifying the means.’ Am I right?”

  Kaspar nodded ruefully.

  “If every choice was weighed independently on a moral basis—that is to say, without claiming justification like justice, revenge, or necessary ruthlessness—then far less evil would be done in the world. Every faith in every temple has one creed in common, in one form or another: ‘Do as you would have be done to.’”

  Kaspar sat back, crossing his arms over his chest. “I think I understand.”

  “Good, because if you do, then you can see that the only explanation for evil beyond the justifications men make is that it is insane. It is destructive and it lends itself to nothing useful. In short, it is madness.”

  “Keep going.”

  “You need a serious grasp of this concept before I can tell you the rest of what you need to know prior to your leaving.” Samas cleared his throat and took another drink of water. “Evil is wasteful. It consumes, but it never creates.”

  “So, by its very nature the Nameless One must be insane?”

  “Yes!” said Samas, slapping his palm on the table. “You do understand. The Nameless One has no more ability to be sane than a chicken can play a horn.” Kaspar looked bemused by that example, and Samas pointed to his mouth. “No lips. You can teach a chicken all you want, but it’ll never learn.”

  Kaspar found this amusing. “Very well, I’ll embrace the notion that evil is insanity.”

  “Good, because then you’ll understand what came next. When Arch-Indar died, the other Greater Gods—fearing that the Nameless One would be unopposed and there would be no balance—did something that has happened only this one time; they cooperated. The remaining Greater Gods, even the Abstainer, used their combined power to banish the Nameless One to another realm.”

  “So that left five Greater Gods?”

  “Yes, though it may as well be four. Helbinor, the Abstainer…well, he doesn’t do anything. He abstains.” Samas shrugged. “It’s one of those things that can drive a theologian to drink.”

  “If they were combining their power, why didn’t they just destroy the Nameless One?”

  Samas grinned. “Because nothing can be destroyed, do you see?”

  Kaspar blinked. “Like the firewood. Yes, they could only…change him.”

  “And not very much, really. They couldn’t change his nature, but they could change his location. So they found another realm, a dimension outside this one, and they found a world, one so vast that our world would be but a pebble on its beach. And there they bound him, and buried him deep within the heart of the greatest mountain on that planet. And there he resides today.”

  “So if he’s in this other realm, why is he a problem?”

  “I’ll spare you the theology, but remember how I said if you knew his name, he could control you?”

  Kaspar nodded.

  “That’s how powerful he is. Think of the Greater Gods as…controllers, forces of nature, if you will; not nature such as the wind and rain, but rather the essence of how the universe is put together—good, evil, the balance, the builder, the worker-from-within, the granter-of wishes, and the abstainer. The world of the physical and the mystical—all things are governed by these controllers.”

  “All right,” said Kaspar. “Now, what does this have to do with the relic I carried up here?”

  “We don’t know. What we suspect is that it is from a different plane.”

  “Again, I don’t understand,” said Kaspar, looking confused.

  “You’ve no doubt heard the expression, ‘damn him to the seven lower hells!’”

  Kaspar nodded.

  “Well, there are not really seven levels of hell or seven levels of heaven. Or rather, they’re the same thing. The gods reside in the first level, we
in the second. Or some maintain they are the same, but two sub-levels.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Kaspar. “I’m lost.”

  “Ever peel an onion?” Samas asked.

  “No, but I’ve eaten many,” said Kaspar.

  “Then you know that that they are made up of many layers. Consider the universe as an onion, but made up of only seven layers. That’s a bit arbitrary, but it’s the agreed-upon number. In any event, assume we live on the highest level, save for the gods. At the lowest are beings so alien to us we can not even imagine them. In between are beings that range from totally alien creatures to those which are similar to us.

  “Demons come from the fourth and fifth levels, and with great magic can exist in our world. They are able to feed on life energies here and survive, even thrive. The demon who engineered the Serpentwar, or the Emerald Queen’s War as I think you know it, was from the fifth circle.”

  “Demon?” asked Kaspar, his eyes wide. “What demon?”

  “I’ll tell you that story some other time. In any event, if you’ve heard of beings called the Dread, they live in the sixth circle. They suck the very life energy out of anything they touch in this plane of reality. They can exist here, but if they did they would wither even the grass beneath their feet. The creatures from the seventh level cannot even survive here—they gather energy so quickly from the very air and light they would destroy themselves, along with a very large portion of the landscape around them.

  “That armor, we think, is from the second circle, the plane of existence next down from ours. But we’re only guessing, and we wouldn’t advise you to make any decisions based upon that supposition.”

  Kaspar said, “No disrespect, Samas, but what is the point of the lecture?”

  “So that you would realize how vast the arena is in which you play. The woman who gave you the disc?”

  “Yes, the witch?”

  “She is no witch. The image on that disc is that of Arch-Indar.”

  “But you said she was dead.”

  “She is. What you met was a memory of her.”

  Kaspar sat up, his mouth open in disbelief. “But I spoke with her! She waved her hand and Flynn fell asleep! She handed me that disc, and that’s real enough.”

  “Oh, she’s real. But she is only a memory of the Goddess. If she gains enough worshippers over the centuries, she may return. But for the time being you must realize how powerful the Greater Gods are. They are so powerful that the memory of one lives on as a self-aware, conscious being, an entity in her own right.”

  Kaspar sat back. “Ah, nothing is destroyed.”

  “Yes!” Samas said, clapping his hands in delight. “You do understand! It’s as if you died, but a single hair from your head fell to the soil and had all your memories and a will of its own. That’s a bad analogy, but it’s the best I can do when I’m sober.”

  “I took you to be an abstemious order,” said Kaspar with a laugh.

  “We ran out of ale and wine three years ago. It’s one of the reasons Keeper Andani went to Ispar by the Sea. Otherwise I’d be drinking more than water. This magician you told us of, Leso Varen—”

  “Yes?”

  “I think he is not mortal.”

  “You think he’s a memory of the Nameless One?”

  “No. I think he is a dream.”

  Kaspar was about to protest, then considered the admission he had made about Hildy.

  Samas continued, “The Nameless One had relics from before the time he was banished, and over the centuries men have found them. All of them go mad, some sooner than others, if they keep those items. But those that do keep them for a long time gain powers from their master. They also become part of his mind, and long after the mortal body has perished, they live on as dreams in the mind of the god.

  “I mention that to point out there are others loose who mean to return the Nameless One to our world.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because they are mad,” said Samas.

  Kaspar sat back. “You’ve convinced me that I play in a game so vast I doubt I can comprehend it. So let us just say the stakes are high. But I still do not know what it is I am to do.”

  Samas said, “I know. We have given you all the knowledge we have. There’s only one more thing we may do for you.”

  “What is that?”

  “Why, let you speak to the gods, of course.”

  FIFTEEN

  KALKIN

  Kaspar sat motionless.

  Samas stood up. “Come along. We might as well go and see them now.”

  “The gods?” Kaspar said after a moment.

  “Why, certainly.”

  “I thought your job was to protect the gods?”

  Samas motioned for Kaspar to stand, and said, “You’re hardly a threat. No, we protect the gods from being constantly annoyed and distracted by mortals. Prayer was created as a way for a man to let the gods know what he’s concerned about. The temples have slightly more efficient means, but they’re limited. A cleric of one order can hardly speak to the deity of another order. But there is a way to confront the gods directly. We guard protect their privacy in a manner of speaking. Come along.”

  Samas led Kaspar from the kitchen, through the empty great hall, and entered a small room. There, he removed a torch from a large metal container holding a dozen or more. Opening a pouch at his belt, he removed flint and steel, handed the torch to Kaspar, then struck sparks into it, until a flame caught. He replaced the flint and steel into his pouch, took the torch from Kaspar and led him into a series of tunnels going directly into the heart of the mountain.

  After walking for a few minutes, Kaspar said, “How do I speak to the gods?”

  “As you would to anyone else, I suppose.”

  “You’ve never spoken to them?”

  “No. I’ve had no reason to. We Keepers really don’t, if you think about it. Our mandate is narrow; protecting the gods from…well, you’ll see in a moment.”

  The tunnel was long and dark. Then Kaspar saw a light ahead. Samas said, “We’re almost there.”

  “Why are you letting me talk to the gods if you’re supposed to protect their privacy?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They reached a cavern, but one filled with light. In the middle of it sat the source of the light. It was a platform of a pure white substance that looked at first to be marble, but as Kaspar drew near, he saw that it was a single piece of translucent material. Two steps of the same material allowed one to mount the platform. A soft white glow from it was bright enough to illuminate the entire cavern, but was surprisingly free of harshness. Kaspar felt no discomfort looking at it.

  “What do I do?” he asked softly.

  Samas laughed. “Everyone who comes here whispers the first time.”

  Kaspar repeated the question in a conversational tone.

  “Just walk onto the platform.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Kaspar took a step and Samas said, “I suppose I should bid you farewell.”

  “Why? Won’t I be coming back?”

  Samas shrugged. “Maybe. Few people are given this opportunity. And a few manage to get into the Pavilion by other means.” He looked as if he were trying to remember. “A pair of magicians managed it about thirty or forty years ago. I don’t know what happened to them. And a hundred years ago—I was told this, but don’t know how accurate the story is—two beings, men or something else walked into the Hall of the Dead, crossed the River of Death, and entered Lims-Kragma’s Hall.”

  “Flynn just did that.”

  “But these two came back!” Samas took a step forward and extended his hand. “In any event, you’ve been good company, Kaspar of Olasko, and if you don’t come back this way, I’ll remember our time together.”

  “Well, all things considered, I hope I do see you again, Samas.”

  The Keeper smiled, and said, “Just walk to the middle.”

 
Kaspar did as he was told and found a golden circle inscribed in the middle of the platform. He stepped into it.

  Instantly he felt something. It wasn’t a vibration, or a hum, but his body felt a tingle, as if energy was coursing through the very fiber of his body. Then a pair of golden spires rose up out of the platform, to his right and left, each spire a latticework of tiny golden threads. Kaspar’s eyes couldn’t quite make them out. They weren’t metal, or light, or anything he readily recognized, but they were brilliant and he felt his pulse race at the sight of them.

  They lengthened, seeming to grow out of the base, and crossed before Kaspar’s face. Following the circle, they formed a helix as they rose. Kaspar saw other spires appear and soon he was confined in a golden cylinder of light.

  Then everything vanished. Kaspar felt a cold beyond human endurance pass through him, a cold so stunning he could not even gasp.

  Then there was total darkness.

  Kaspar felt as if he was floating. Then he opened his eyes. The sun was on his face, and he felt a slight chill. As the floating sensation ceased, he realized he was on a hard surface.

  He sat up.

  He was on a marble floor. He reached out and touched the stone. Then he looked around. The floor stretched out in all directions, and his senses were confounded for a moment.

  He stood up. The floor was punctuated at regular intervals by columns, crenellated depressions in the surface giving them texture. He moved to one and touched it. It felt smooth and looked like ivory.

  Between the columns hung silken draperies of translucent white gauze which swayed with the breeze. He looked up and saw that there was a glass ceiling above, through which the sun shone down.

  There were no other features and after a moment, he decided to move toward the source of the breeze.

  After passing though half a dozen hangings, he saw one that wasn’t occluded by the gauze, and what he saw made him pause. He was on top of a range of mountains, and below him he could see snow-capped peaks and clouds reflecting back the afternoon sunlight. He approached the edge cautiously and looked down.