by Paul S. Kemp
“These are accusations. I need proof before I authorize steps.”
Rivalen crossed the room and stared down at Tamlin. “I will give you proof. This moment. Stay near me and remain silent.”
The darkness deepened around them until Tamlin could not see. His stomach fluttered as the shadows moved them elsewhere. He heard a voice, Vees’s voice, chanting as the darkness parted.
“Love is a lie,” Vees said. “Only hate endures. Light is blinding. Only in darkness do we see clearly.”
Rivalen and Tamlin stood in the back of a vaulted, windowless chamber. Wooden pews arranged before them faced a black altar draped with a purple and black altar cloth. Vees Talendar, dressed in black robes, knelt before the altar, chanting. He held in his hands a black disc ringed in purple—Shar’s symbol.
Coming face to face with Vees’s treachery lit Tamlin’s anger. He exhaled in a hiss.
Vees stopped chanting of a sudden and started to rise and turn.
Rivalen surrounded them in darkness and whisked them back to the study in Stormweather Tower. When the shadows parted, Tamlin slammed a fist on the side table. The impact tipped his wine goblet and the red fluid pooled on the table and dripped to the floor.
Vees had lied to him, betrayed him, betrayed the city.
“He must be held to account,” Tamlin said.
“He must be punished,” Rivalen said, and the shadows about him swirled.
“I will have him arrested.”
Rivalen put a hand on his shoulder. The strength in the Prince’s hand surprised Tamlin. The shadows around Rivalen churned, touched Tamlin.
“He is a heretic. I would ask that you allow me to see him punished in accordance with church doctrine.”
“What does doctrine demand?” Tamlin asked, though he knew the answer.
Rivalen did not blanch. “Death.”
Tamlin stared into Rivalen’s golden eyes. His breath came short and shallow. He hesitated, then remembered Rivalen’s words—Squeamishness is seldom rewarded in war. His heart raced but his anger burned.
“His family will not stand for it.”
The shadows around Rivalen roiled and he took on a sly look. “Vees Talendar died in combat with the Saerloonian army. I saw it. His body was crushed nearly beyond recognition in the rubble of the wall. He will be buried in a mass grave with the others who fell, assuming his body can be recovered at all.”
Tamlin looked into Rivalen’s eyes and considered. If Vees had been in seclusion since the battle began, as it appeared he had, the claim could hold up. And if it did not, the threat of revealing a Talendar son as a heretical Sharran would keep a scandal from erupting. He took a deep breath, nodded. “I saw the same thing.”
Rivalen did not smile, but his eyes showed approval. “You have grown in our time together.”
Tamlin nodded, pleased with Rivalen’s praise. He had grown.
“I wonder,” Rivalen said softly, “whether you are willing to take the final steps?”
Tamlin looked up, a question in his eyes.
“You have seen what Shar offers and have expressed a desire to know more. I have seen in your face that you wish, even, to become one of us?” Rivalen held up his hands and the shadows swirled around his flesh.
Tamlin did not bother to deny it. He had seen shades do what ordinary men could never hope to do.
“All of that is possible,” Rivalen said. “But you must demonstrate your commitment to Shar, to me, to yourself. May I be candid?”
Tamlin tried to speak but his mouth was dry. He nodded.
“Too long you have tried to do things halfway, to compromise, to equivocate, to hedge. This, perhaps, is a lesson you learned from your father. I understand well a father’s effect on his son.”
Tamlin did not respond, but knew that Rivalen was correct. Thamalon had always been a negotiator, a conciliator. Tamlin, too, had always sought a middle path. It had been easiest.
Rivalen continued. “Shar will not stand for such and neither will I. A new world was born today, Tamlin. Your decision here, now, will determine what role you have in it.”
Tamlin thought of his mother, his sister, his father, brother, Cale. They would never understand what he had seen, faced, been through. But he decided that he did not need them to. And that decision freed him, for the first time in his life.
“You know my mind, Prince. You know what I want.”
Rivalen smiled, showing his fangs. “Then it falls to you to administer punishment to Vees Talendar. In so doing, you will help me reclaim the temple he has desecrated with his heresy. In so doing, you will earn the favor of the Lady of Loss. Are you prepared to do this?”
Tamlin felt mildly lightheaded. He tried to swallow but could not. He was sweating. He felt as if he were standing at the edge of a cliff. Rivalen’s eyes burned into him. He thought of all the times he had stood in the study, facing not a Prince of Shade but the disapproving eyes of his father. He thought of the times he had overheard his father confiding to Erevis Cale his disappointment with Tamlin.
He was done trying to satisfy others. He would satisfy himself. He looked from the top of the cliff, eyes open, and stepped off.
“No more compromises, Prince,” he said.
Rivalen nodded. “Have you ever taken a man’s life before?”
Tamlin cleared his throat. “Yes. But not like this.”
Rivalen nodded. “There is no shame in that. Ready yourself. I will prepare matters.”
Rivalen returned to his quarters, pleased. He saw potential in Tamlin and hoped the boy would not fail him. He would regard it as unfortunate if he needed to kill him.
He sat on the lush divan before the fireplace. The ambient light of the city’s streets filtered in through the windows. Long shadows stretched across the chamber. The darkness embraced him.
On the floor near the divan sat the warded chest that held The Leaves of One Night. Rivalen had turned the chest invisible, but his magically enhanced vision saw invisible objects as clearly as visible ones. He pulled the chest before him, spoke the series of passwords that allowed him to bypass the wards, and opened the lid.
Tendrils of shadows snaked into the air. Sussurant, indecipherable whispers filled the chamber for a moment.
Within the chest lay the holy book. Rivalen intoned another series of passwords, reached within, and withdrew it. The moment he touched it, a cacophony of voices sounded in his mind, whispers, shouts, screams, mutterings. He knew they pronounced secrets from ages past, present, and future, but he could not make sense of the words.
The silver characters on the book’s frigid cover shifted under his touch, squirmed like worms beneath his fingertips. He held the book on his lap for a time, running his fingers over the pages and losing himself in its utterings. Variance had once told him that listening to the voices too long made the listener mad. Rivalen knew better. Listening to the voices made the hearer wise.
His mind drifted, floated. He thought of the mother he had murdered, his coin collection, his father, his brothers, he thought of the centuries he had spent in darkness. He considered the role of the goddess in his life and saw that the thread of her plots sewed together every moment of his existence from birth to present. It was her voice that spoke to him through the book. He could not understand the divine tongue in which she spoke, but he knew it spoke of a plan to return existence to the perfect, unmarred nothingness of pre-creation.
He focused on the present, on the role he had played and would play in effecting his goddess’s will. Events had transpired much as he had hoped. He had only a single frayed end to burn off.
He took his hand from the book—instantly missing the voices—and touched the holy symbol he wore around his neck. He should not take the next step without an augury.
Softly intoning the words to a spell that allowed him communion with Shar, he expanded his consciousness. He found himself floating in emptiness. Insignificant. Alone.
A presence manifested and the emptiness had purp
ose, consciousness.
The power of Shar’s mind, the frigid cold of the void tugged at him. He slipped toward it. Oblivion beckoned. He resisted its call and sent Shar his question.
Vees Talendar, Lady?
The void spoke with a woman’s voice and its power stripped him bare.
The Dark Brother has served his purpose, as all do. Even you.
The words made Rivalen uneasy. I would know more, Lady. Knowledge would allow me to serve you better.
You know what you need to know, and are ignorant of those things of which you should be ignorant. Proceed as you have planned, content in your knowledge and in your ignorance.
Rivalen dared not dispute the matter.
Thank you, Lady, he said, and cut off the spell. He returned to his body, shaking, gasping, cold. He swallowed and grounded himself back in the world by clutching the divan, feeling the floor under his feet. His flesh bled shadows, and they swirled around him torpidly. He felt at sea. He knew much, but not all. Whatever Shar had planned, Rivalen was but a part of it.
He took a moment to compose himself, then activated the magical ring on his finger and reached out for Vees Talendar.
Nightseer? Vees asked.
Summon the members of your congregation and meet me in the temple, Dark Brother. I have news from the Lady of Loss.
Yes, Nightseer.
Rivalen cut off the connection, returned the book to its chest, and reset his wards. A shadow stretched across the chest. Rivalen turned, expecting to see someone, but there was nothing. He attributed the sensation to an aftereffect of his communion.
He stood, drew the shadows about him, and transported himself to the secret temple of Shar. He had to prepare matters for Talendar and Tamlin.
Elyril watched Rivalen draw the darkness about him and disappear. Excitement made her giddy. She had seen The Leaves of One Night, the rest of the book to be made whole, had heard its whispers in her mind. She had seen the Nightseer commune with Shar and had felt the Lady’s presence in the room.
Elyril willed her body corporeal and moved across the chamber to the invisible chest. Her burned and withered flesh felt constraining. She felt heavy in her skin, uncomfortable, but she endured it for a time. Her incorporeal form was her true form. The flesh she had worn for decades—the flesh that had been withered by the Nightseer’s spell and transformed in fire—had been only the mask she wore until Shar had revealed to her the truth of the Shadowstorm.
She knelt before the invisible chest, holding her holy symbol between the unfeeling stubs of her fingers. Her shriveled lips pronounced the supplication without grace. “In the darkness of the night, we hear the whisper of the void.”
The shadows in the room shrouded her like a lover. She took it as a sign. She imagined Volumvax’s touch would feel much the same.
She pronounced the words that allowed her to see invisible items and the chest appeared to her. With careful precision she repeated the words she’d heard the Nightseer use to dispel the protective wards on the chest. She held her breath, unlatched it, and threw it open.
Whispers filled the air, indecipherable utterances that hinted at madness, despair, and darkness. Elyril looked into the chest and there saw the book. The otherwise ever-changing silver characters on the book’s black cover stilled. She read aloud the words written there, words written centuries before for her, and only her, to see. “Night comes. A storm of shadows is its herald.”
The cover dissolved into a stinking black mist and dissipated into the air. The pages of The Leaves of One Night lay exposed, naked.
She took out the rest of the book to be made whole, the book gifted her by Shar herself in the guise of the guardsman, Phraig, the book she had pulled from the fire of her own transformation. It trembled in her grasp like a living thing. Its cover flew open and the pages flipped until they reached the gap in the text, the void that wanted filling.
She echoed the words of the Nightseer and discharged the wards cast on The Leaves of One Night. She lifted it gently from the chest—whispers sounded in her mind—and placed it atop the other book.
The darkness in the room deepened. The books bound themselves one to the other.
The whispers in her mind intensified, rose in triumph. She clutched her head and gritted her teeth. The voices, thousands of them, spoke at once in a babble of tongues, tones, dialects. She could not bear it for long. She wanted to scream for silence, to demand that they speak so she could understand—
The voices fell silent.
Elyril, sweating, gasping, stared at the book.
A single voice sounded in her head, a woman’s voice so heavy with power that it stole Elyril’s breath.
Summon the Shadowstorm, Dark Sister.
The book slammed shut.
Elyril stared at it, awed. Its words were an elaborate lie. But in the spaces between its words lay the truth of the ritual.
She picked up the book and dropped her ring, the ring the Nightseer had given her, the ring that had triggered her transformation, into the Nightseer’s chest.
“Know my secret now, Nightseer.”
She turned herself and the book incorporeal. She rose through the ceiling of the Nightseer’s quarters and up into the moonless sky, where she shouted her joy into the darkness.
She would do her goddess’s bidding and complete the ritual. She would sit at the side of the Lord Sciagraph as he ruled a world covered in darkness.
She laughed when she realized that the Nightseer would soon know that the Lady of Loss kept secrets even from him.
Cale materialized in darkness on the lowered drawbridge that led into the temple of Mask on the Wayrock. Faerûn’s stars shone in the sky above him. The night clung to him. The smell of clean sea air filled his nostrils and he inhaled deeply. The soft rush of the distant surf sounded in his ears.
Riven’s two small dogs tore out of the archway and charged Cale, tails wagging. Cale kneeled and patted their flanks, pleased to see them. They licked his hands, put their forepaws on his arm and tried to lick his face. The shadows that coiled about him seemed not to trouble them.
He stood and looked to his right, to the hill where he and Riven had buried Jak. He nodded at the little man’s grave. He thought Jak would have been pleased with Cale’s resurrection of the dragon.
“Come on, girls,” he said to the dogs. “Inside.”
The dogs sped ahead of him and he followed them into the temple of his god. He smiled when he thought that Mask had been able to fill his temple with only two men and two dogs.
He found Riven, Nayan, and Magadon awaiting him in the foyer. Riven’s dogs circled their master. Riven patted them absently.
“What is it?” Cale asked.
“All went well with the dragon?” Riven asked.
“As well as it could,” Cale said.
“You should have left him dead,” Magadon said.
“You don’t mean that, Mags. The dragon was not a willing vessel.”
Magadon stared at him. “I mean it. You just don’t like that I mean it.”
Cale felt a flash of anger but stifled it. He remembered Magadon’s mindblade, its yellow light polluted by black streaks. Magadon, too, was not a willing vessel.
Nayan disrupted the awkwardness. He said, “A priest in service to Abelar Corrinthal has been seeking you. He contacted me through a sending. I have ignored it until now.”
“Abelar Corrinthal?” Cale asked, surprised.
Nayan nodded. “We returned Endren to him. He knew of me in that way. He purported to be your ally.”
Cale would not have called Abelar an ally, though he had reached an understanding with the man.
“Who is Endren?” Magadon asked. “What does he have to do with matters?”
“Endren is a Sembian nobleman,” Cale said. “Abelar is his son and a servant of Lathander. They’re enemies of the overmistress.”
Magadon’s face showed no recognition, or perhaps it was apathy.
“Sembia is at war, Mag
s,” Cale explained. “Or at least it was. I met Abelar on the road out of Selgaunt. He and his men stopped an attack on the Hulorn. They probably saved my life, too. I owe him.”
“You owe me,” Magadon said.
Cale held his calm with difficulty. “I know.”
“What does Abelar want with you?” Riven asked.
Cale looked to Nayan and the shadowwalker shook his head. “The sending asked only for you to attend him,” Nayan said.
“Perhaps he needs assistance with the war?” Cale said.
“That is not our fight,” Magadon said.
“Maybe the Uskevren boy is in trouble,” Riven said. “Rivalen Tanthul had him under his sway.”
Magadon looked to Riven. “Rivalen Tanthul?”
Riven’s eye narrowed. “Your fight now, eh?”
“I asked you a question,” Magadon said, and advanced on Riven.
Riven’s mouth hardened. “Take a step back, Mags. Do it now, and get your mouth under control.”
“I want Rivalen Tanthul dead for what he did to me.”
“That’s both of us, then,” Riven answered. “Step back.”
Magadon did and turned to Cale. “Take me to Rivalen, Cale.”
“No.”
Cale’s word brought Magadon up short. “No? I owe him.”
Cale nodded. “As do I. As does Riven. But Rivalen Tanthul is no more our fight than is Sembia’s civil war. Not now, at least.”
Magadon’s brow furrowed, his colorless eyes narrowed.
“We have other concerns,” Cale said soothingly. “You need some time, Mags. You’ve been through a lot. We all have.”
“Time is the last thing I need,” Magadon said softly, and looked away. “Or have.”
“Nayan, get him some food and a place to rest,” Cale said. “He’s had it harder than Riven and I.”
The easterner nodded and beckoned Magadon into the temple. Magadon sighed, nodded, and followed Nayan.
“Mags,” Cale called after.
The mindmage turned. He looked ten years older than he had when Cale had first met him. “Kesson Rel is the priority, Mags. Trust me.”
