by Paul S. Kemp
“Yes, you do,” Cale said. “Mask had this planned long ago, and you dreamed it, the same as me.”
Cale and Vasen stared at one another a long moment, then both spoke at once.
“Write the story.”
With that, Vasen took the small gem from his pocket, shattered it. A clot of shadows formed before his face. He spoke into them.
“We have him, Riven. We’re with Erevis and he’s alive.”
The shadows he’d spoke into dissipated, presumably carrying their message to Riven in the Shadowfell.
Cale stood and drew the shadows around them.
“We go,” he said.
Vasen’s voice sounded from the shadows shrouding Riven.
We have him.
That was all Riven needed to hear. He charged across the battlefield, stepping through the shadows as he went, cutting down lesser devils each time he appeared. Mephistopheles pursued him from above, shouting. Bolts of energy shot from the archfiend’s palms, narrowly missing Riven and putting huge smoking divots in the earth. Riven dived, rolled, spun, and sprinted, dodging the archfiend’s attacks, playing for time. He ran through everything he knew. He hadn’t missed anything but he didn’t know enough. He’d schemed for decades to arrange for everyone needed to arrive in Ordulin. But after that . . .
He wasn’t sure what would come next. Just as Mask had split his divinity up among a few Chosen, so had he split his plan up among many of his servants. Riven might have been the most powerful of them, but he could see only pieces. He’d gambled everything in the hope of some sudden revelation.
His wandering thoughts distracted him. Mephistopheles materialized before him, haloed in dark power, having teleported into Riven’s path. The archfiend stuck Riven with a fist, discharged the power in his hand, and sent Riven tumbling head over heels, momentarily stunned. Dozens of devils swarmed him, glaives and swords and claws and teeth trying to cut through his protective shadows and tear at his flesh.
I’m not leaving, Magadon projected to the Source. I just need to see. The Source’s response was muddled, but grateful. It was fading. Rich with power drawn from his bond with the Source, Magadon reached out for Brennus, who maintained his station at the westernmost point of Sakkors.
I need to see through your eyes for a moment, he projected.
When Brennus did not object, Magadon created a sensory link between them, allowing him to see through the Shadovar’s eyes.
Sakkors flew through Sembia’s shadowed sky at tremendous speed. Far ahead loomed the black wall of the Ordulin Maelstrom. Lines of lightning lit the thick clouds, endless flashes. The dark clouds roiled and churned, as if agitated, as if something within them were angry and waiting.
Rivalen stood over Sayeed, the man’s despair palpable, his skin covered in Shar’s holy words, his mouth stuffed with the pages of The Leaves of One Night. Riven was coming with the son of Erevis Cale to read those words, but they did not say what they hoped. He placed a hand on Sayeed’s back and the man trembled under his touch.
“The death I promised you will come. First the world, then you, then me.”
And then release.
More trembling from Sayeed.
Rivalen took his holy symbol in hand, stared into Shar’s eye, felt the wash of her power over him. She’d taught him what he needed to know. His life had been an incremental crawl toward revelation and truth.
“Nothing endures,” he said, intoning Shar’s Secret Truth. “Nothing.”
Long, many-forked lines of green lightning lit the black clouds. Thunder growled. Shar’s eye pulsed with power, with anticipation. She wished to incarnate, to feed. She would have her wish soon.
He stepped through the darkness to stand atop a large chunk of the ruined tower once occupied by Kesson Rel. There, he waited. His enemies were coming. When they arrived, he would destroy them, free his goddess, and then watch the Lady of Loss devour the world.
Cale, Vasen, Orsin, and Gerak materialized at the edge of the plaza in Ordulin. It looked much as it had when Cale had set foot there long ago to face Kesson Rel. Cracked stone and crumbled buildings littered the area like the tombstones of titans. Green lightning lit the shadowed haze in a ghostly light. The wind gusted. A fog of shadows swirled in the air.
In the center of the plaza hung a slowly turning void, a cold emptiness that stretched back through time and space forever. Shar resided in the eye; Cale could feel her in it, the weight of her malice, the pressure of her regard. Her existence did not fill the emptiness; it defined it. He felt nauseous.
“Dark and empty,” he said.
Prone before the eye, hunched and shirtless, was a man. Words covered the skin of his back, the sight of them unnerving, somehow. His eyes were open but appeared to see nothing. His mouth, too, hung open, but parchment had been stuffed into it. His cheeks bulged with so much of it they looked distended.
“Gods,” Orsin whispered. “That’s Sayeed.”
“It’s grown,” Cale said, nodding at the eye. He’d seen the void long ago, when Kesson Rel had first created it.
A presence manifested, weighty, power radiating from it in waves.
“It’s soon to grow more,” said a deep voice, Rivalen Tanthul’s voice, from right behind them.
They whirled as one to see the nightseer standing right behind them, his golden eyes glowing out of the darkness of his hood. They shouted, brandished their weapons, but too late. Rivalen spoke a single word, and the power contained in it knocked them all to their knees, all but Cale.
Weaveshear absorbed and deflected the power in Rivalen’s spell, but the force of it turned the blade warm and drove Cale backward. He kept his feet and skidded backward across the plaza, toward Shar’s eye. He could feel the Lady of Loss glaring into his back.
Vasen, Gerak, and Orsin lay on the ground, groaning.
Rivalen stared at Cale, his golden eyes narrowed, head cocked in a question.
“Cale?” Rivalen asked.
Cale had faced Rivalen before, when Cale’s god had been alive and Rivalen had been only a man. Now Cale, a man without a god, faced a onetime man who was now a god.
He charged, and Rivalen did not even move. Cale crosscut with Weaveshear, but the blade rang against the shadows swirling around Rivalen as if they were made of steel. Rivalen grabbed Cale by the face with one hand, spoke a word of power, and discharged unholy energy from his palm. Ordinarily the shadowstuff in Cale allowed him to resist the effects of magic, but not when the magic came from the hand of a god.
Pain pulled a muffled scream from Cale. His skin blistered and popped. Bones cracked. Casually Rivalen cast him aside. Cale hit the stone of plaza in a heap, rolling over, groaning while the shadowstuff in his body undid the damage Rivalen’s spell had caused.
“I wasn’t sure I’d see you again, Cale,” Rivalen said. “I didn’t know if your son would succeed. It’s good that he did, though. You’ve arrived here alive only to die.”
Rivalen grabbed Orsin and Gerak by their cloaks and lifted them in one hand, then grabbed Vasen in the other. He carried them all toward Shar’s eye, and Cale feared he would throw them into the eye.
Cale rolled over, gritting his teeth at the pain, and rose to all fours. The shadowstuff in him reknit his bones, closed the blisters on his skin. He watched Rivalen toss the three men on the cobblestones, near the prone man.
Cale rose, stepped through the shadows, and materialized behind Rivalen with Weaveshear raised for a decapitating strike. Rivalen turned, a contemptuous expression on his face, and intercepted the strike with his bare hand. It didn’t even cut his flesh. He tore the weapon from Cale’s grasp and tossed it aside.
Cale growled, lunged forward, drove the top of his head into the bridge of Rivalen’s nose.
He might as well have struck a stone wall. Rivalen sneered, grabbed Cale by the throat, and lifted him from his feet.
“You’re just a man, Cale. These events are beyond you.”
Cale gagged, choked, kicked Rivalen in
the chest, but the blows did nothing. Rivalen, too, was beyond him.
“Listen to the words of your son,” Rivalen said.
Rivalen kneeled, still holding a struggling Cale at arm’s length, and touched Vasen.
Vasen’s eyes snapped open, widened when he saw Rivalen and Cale. He reached for a blade, but his scabbard was empty. Rivalen grabbed him by the arm, pulled him upright, and slammed him down by the figure hunched before Shar’s eye.
“Read it,” Rivalen commanded. “You came here to read it, didn’t you?”
Vasen looked back at him, at Cale, his eyes glowing yellow in the shadows.
“You thought I didn’t know why you came? You think I didn’t know Mask’s plan? I knew all along. I knew it all. You gambled everything to come here and read the Leaves. So let’s hear it read.”
Rivalen shook Cale as he spoke. Cale, unable to breathe, started to see sparks. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, and at the end of it was his son.
“Read it!” Rivalen said. “Read it aloud.”
Magic infused the phrases, turning the command into a compulsion.
Vasen turned and in a slow monotone began to read the words written on the back of the hunched figure, the words of The Leaves of One Night.
Rivalen shook Cale again. “Listen. Hear what your son says, Cale.”
Compelled by Rivalen’s spell, Vasen uttered blasphemous words dictated by Shar herself. The sound made Cale wince, hurt his ears. As Vasen intoned the black syllables, Shar’s eye began to spin faster. It emitted an unsettling, discordant hum.
Desperately, Cale kicked and punched at Rivalen, blows that would have left a human insensate or dead but that had no effect on Rivalen. Cale could scarcely breathe. He was fading.
He had to get away. Before he lost consciousness, he let himself feel the shadows around him, in the plaza. He grasped at them, pulled them around him, and rode them across the plaza, to the darkness behind a fallen sculpture. He collapsed there, gasping, blinking. Darkness leaked from his skin. The shadowstuff in him began to heal the damage Rivalen had done to his windpipe.
He peeked around the statue to see Rivalen with his arms held out, shouting into the dark sky. “Watch then, Cale! Watch as your son ushers in the end! There’s no moment of weakness written in the Leaves! I’ve read it! Do you hear me? There’s only her moment of triumph! Do you hear, Cale! Do you!”
Shar’s eye expanded, spun faster, and the hum turned to a roar like rough surf. The ground of the plaza began to vibrate. For all Cale knew, all of Toril might have been vibrating. The power emanating from the eye charged the air. Little balls of lightning exploded all over the place. Acrid smoke mixed with the shadows, all of it an echo of a world Cale had once visited, a world destroyed by Shar.
He’d survived his own death only to watch the world die.
Riven regained his bearings in moments. He let divine power explode outward from him in all directions. The force of it blew the devils a spear cast away from him, like dry leaves in an angry wind. He stood, shadows coiled around him, and faced Mephistopheles.
The archfiend alit on the battlefield twenty paces from Riven, his eyes glowing red with hate, his hands aglow with power, his wings beating a slow promise of Riven’s death.
“Couldn’t wait any longer, eh?” Riven said, his tone mocking. He sheathed his sabers. “Overreached, did you? Asmodeus has grown unhappy with his lapdog, eh?”
Mephistopheles’s brow furrowed in anger. “You know nothing, mortal, and you don’t deserve the power you stole. You don’t even know how to use it. It’s right that I tear it from your flesh while you scream.”
Riven sneered, shadows boiling around him in an angry cloud. “That’s a high-pitched bark you have, lap dog. Yap, yap.”
Mephistopheles roared, beat his wings, and bounded toward Riven. Power crackled around the archfiend, buckling the earth as the archfiend closed in.
Riven waited, waited, braced himself, and at the last moment threw himself at Mephistopheles. Instead of dodging the archfiend’s grasp, he clutched Mephistopheles’s hands in his own. The two of them spun, each gripping the other, vying for advantage. Dark power surged into Riven, blistered his skin. He grimaced against the pain, the shadows whirling around man and devil darkening, deepening.
“Hey,” Riven said through the pain.
Mephistopheles looked into his face, a question in his red eyes.
Riven sneered. “Let’s go for a ride.”
The shadows turned black as ink and pulled both of them across the plains and to Ordulin.
Chapter Fifteen
Abruptly the sound emitted from Shar’s eye changed pitch to a hungry whine. Vasen continued to recite the words of The Leaves of One Night. He spoke the words only slowly—he was resisting Rivalen’s compulsion—but the spell forced him to speak the unspeakable, them clearly, loudly.
Rivalen cocked his head, as if listening for something far off. “Here they come at last,” he said, and faded into the shadows. A churning cloud of deep shadow formed in the plaza, sparking with energy, and out of it tumbled Riven and Mephistopheles. Shadows and baleful energy swirled around devil and man. They gripped each other by the hands, shadows and unholy power sizzling between their palms as they struggled.
Mephistopheles roared, beat his wings, and shoved Riven back, the effort raising veins and sinew in the black skin of his chest and arms. Riven stumbled backward. Mephistopheles extended his arms and shot a column of swirling hellfire from his palms. It burned through the shadows that protected Riven, slammed into his chest, and drove him backward, his cloak and flesh charring. Riven rolled out of the path of flames, grimacing against the pain, and put a hand to his temple.
“Riven!” Cale shouted, and started to draw the shadows around him.
Riven looked at him sharply and Cale felt the weight of his gaze, the power in his regard.
“Stay where you are!” Riven barked.
Mephistopheles saw Cale, too, and turned to face him. “Cale! How did you escape my realm?”
Rivalen emerged from the darkness near Vasen, near Shar’s eye, his hands at his sides, leaking power. “And now we’re all here and the end is come.”
“So you say,” Riven said. “But—”
Appendages shot like striking asps from Shar’s eye, long ropes of darkness that squirmed forth and grabbed Riven and Mephistopheles, coiling around them, cutting off Riven’s words.
“No!” Mephistopheles roared, before one of the appendages shot into his open mouth and down his throat, gagging him.
More and more appendages squirmed forth from the now-shrieking eye, wrapping around the two gods, cocooning them in Shar’s darkness. Mephistopheles writhed and fought, dark energy flaring from his exposed flesh. Riven did not struggle, and soon both were entirely covered.
Immediately the thick twist of appendages that led back to Shar’s eye began to pulse, like a gulping throat. And with each gulp Shar’s eye grew incrementally larger. With each gulp, the power of the empty being that lived behind the eye grew.
“And so dies the herald,” said Rivalen.
Cale understood immediately what was happening. Shar was coming. She was consuming their divinity, and when she ate it all, she would emerge and devour the world. And it had started with Vasen reading The Leaves of One Night. He had to stop it and he saw only one way. He had to kill the man on whom the Leaves were written. He prepared to step through the shadows, but before he did, he felt a familiar itch behind his eyes. Magadon’s mental voice, strained, sounded in his head.
Erevis?
Cale could hardly believe what he was hearing. He put his back against the statue’s pedestal, sank down and into the shadows. Mags? Mags?
Erevis, it’s so good to hear—
Later, Mags. Where are you?
Almost to Ordulin. I’m with the Source on Sakkors.
The Source!
Erevis, I have to mind link Riven to you, to us. I want you to prepare yourself.
For wha
t?
This.
Cale felt the connection open between him and a god. Agonizing pain coursed through Cale. His body felt as though it were on fire. He was feeling what Riven was feeling, tiny bits of himself getting chewed off by Shar’s maw.
Cale might have screamed. Or he might have just been experiencing Riven’s screams.
Behind the pain, he sensed the sweep of Riven’s mind stretching across time and worlds, the understanding so vast and deep that Cale recoiled. And behind that, he felt the hopeful voices of the faithful pleading with Riven for a sign, the burden all gods carried.
The . . . book, Riven projected. Her weakness . . . in . . . the book.
There is no weakness in the damned book!
Has . . . to . . . be. Find it . . . or we all . . . die.
The mind link with Riven closed.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Cale said.
Rivalen’s deep voice rang out. “This is over now, Cale. Are you bitter? Do you see now the fool Shar has made of you and your ridiculous god?”
“Shut up,” Cale whispered. To Magadon, he projected, Mags, I need you to link me with my son.
Let me see through your eyes.
Cale looked at Vasen and felt Magadon’s consciousness settle into his vision. A deeper itch behind the eye, a short, sharp pain in his left temple. The connection between them opened.
Vasen? Cale said.
No response. Cale felt waves of resistance, self-loathing, rage, but still Vasen read the words and still Shar fed.
Listen to me, Vasen. You have to find the moment of weakness in the book. It’s there.
Still no response.
Think of everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard and done. It’s there, Vasen. Mask had a plan. He set all this up. He’s a better schemer than Shar could ever hope to be. It’s there somewhere. You just have to see it.
Still nothing.
It’s there, Vasen. You’ll find it. I have faith in you.
