Shadowbred

by Paul S. Kemp

  The moment the shadow animated, it began to squirm free of the floor. Rivalen took it by the armpits—it felt slippery in his grasp, as if coated in oil—and helped draw it forth. He turned it and held it before him like a cloak—it had no weight—and looked into its face. A duller version of his own golden eyes looked back at him. He smiled. His shadow self was as much a construct as his brother’s homunculi.

  “You know what you are to do?” Rivalen whispered.

  “I am you,” the shadow self hissed.

  “Then do it.”

  Rivalen released the shadow and it floated to the overmaster. It hovered over the bed for a moment, leering, then stretched itself into little more than a ribbon and wormed its way into the Sembian’s body through one of the nostrils.

  When it was gone, Rivalen cast another concealment spell on the body and surveyed the chamber one final time. The chamberlain would find the overmaster dead in his bed of a failed heart, his personal wards and the alarm spell still intact. Perfunctory divinations would be cast but would reveal nothing. Resurrection would fail, if tried, and the customary attempts to speak with the dead would reveal only what Rivalen wished.

  Satisfied, he thanked Shar, drew the shadows about him, and rode them in an instant back to Brennus’s scrying room. The homunculi greeted his return with applause.

  “Well done,” Brennus said.

  Rivalen did not acknowledge the praise. Events would move quickly. He needed to contact Elyril.

  The Lord Sciagraph entered her dream, dwarfed her consciousness. The proximity of the Divine One hollowed out Elyril, reduced her to an empty rind of flesh. Her dream-self trembled with awed anticipation. It had been two decades since she had last felt the oblivion of the Lord Sciagraph’s presence.

  Then, she had been a mere adolescent, the daughter of a Sembian noble family. The Lord Sciagraph had entered her dreams for the seven consecutive nights of the new moon and ordered her on the last night to do Shar’s will by murdering her parents and older brother in their sleep.

  Awed by the magisterial void of Volumvax, the Divine One, the Lord Sciagraph, the Voice and Shadow of Shar, Elyril had obeyed. Her parents had been planning to murder her anyway. She knew that for certain.

  The memory of that blood-spattered winter night in Uktar still pleased her. The murders became her Own Secret, an event known only to Elyril, Volumvax, and Shar, and as reward for the deed Shar had granted her a secret name: Nightbringer.

  The murder had resulted in Elyril being fostered in the house of her aunt, the Countess Mirabeta Selkirk. Elyril assumed her fostering to be Shar’s plan all along, so she wasted no time worming her way into the confidence of her aunt, a dark-hearted, petty woman whose only virtue was unbridled ambition. Over the years, Elyril became the daughter Mirabeta wished she’d had, so much so that the countess sent her own sons away from the capital and paid for Elyril’s tutors. By the time Elyril reached womanhood, she had become the countess’s chief advisor and confidante. Elyril made it a point to dismiss all suitors, which only pleased her aunt further.

  “I serve only the Countess Mirabeta,” Elyril always told them.

  So positioned, Elyril had bided her time and waited for word from the Lord Sciagraph to learn what Shar wanted next. The wait had been long, but it appeared to be over.

  Elyril let her dream-mind careen into the cold, empty abyss of Volumvax’s manifesting eminence. She tumbled downward toward infinity, and the metaphorical fall went on for a time that felt like years. Her body smashed flat as her fall was arrested on a bleak gray dreamscape, as level and featureless as a board of slate. The abrupt stop elicited a gasp but otherwise left her unharmed. Naked, small, and merely human, she rose to her knees and waited for her lord and intercessor to reveal himself fully.

  Within moments a heaviness suffused the air, its presence more tactile than visible. An oiliness formed on Elyril’s skin, black, thick, and viscous. From her earlier experience, she knew it to be the precursor to the manifestation of Volumvax. She waited, eager, awed, shaking with anticipation.

  Slowly, like sweat squeezed from pores, darkness oozed from the slate of the dreamscape. She kept still as it formed an expanding pool at her feet. The touch of the shadowstuff elicited shivers. She sensed her physical body, still asleep in her bedchamber, trembling with the ecstasy and exquisite terror that accompanied contact with the divine. Her heart thumped like a war drum, her flesh tingled, and blood pulsed in her pelvis. She knew that she would awaken with the flushed skin and weak legs that always afflicted her after sexual release, but she did not care. She was in the presence of Volumvax, the highest servant of her goddess, himself a demigod, and she trembled.

  The shadowstuff rose up and began to take shape before her, solidifying, twisting itself into a form that Elyril’s mind could not fully comprehend, whose dark borders reached into the secret corners of the world, whose presence murdered light.

  Elyril averted her gaze and abased herself before her manifesting lord, pressing her forehead into the slate of the dreamscape. She knew that she was unworthy to look upon Volumvax, even in a dream. The Divine One was too beautiful in his darkness for a human to see unveiled.

  A palpable wave of bitterness went forth from the forming demigod and washed over Elyril. Primal emotion pressed against her mind until she screamed. The sound died the moment the scream left her lips, absorbed by the nothingness around her. Terror and excitement drew her breath forth in gasps.

  After a timeless moment, she felt a presence before her, so heavy, so substantial that it surely must shroud the world.

  Elyril knew when Volumvax’s gaze fell upon her trembling form. She felt his eyes on her back like the stabs of twin spears. The weight drove her chest flat against the floor and she lay there, pinioned by his might, impaled by his eyes.

  Drool dripped stupidly and unheeded from her lips as she mouthed the words to the Supplication: “I kneel before Shar’s Shadow, who shrouds the world in night. I kneel before Shar’s Shadow …”

  Elyril knew that the Lord Sciagraph would not speak in her dream. He never did. But she heard him nevertheless; she knew him nevertheless. She waited, her breath like a bellows. As one moment stretched into another, she tried to brace herself. Her fingers gouged grooves into the dreamscape. Her heart bounced in her chest. Her lungs rose and fell, rose and fell.

  “I kneel before Shar’s Shadow, who shrouds the world in night. I kneel before Shar’s Shadow …”

  Volumvax touched her, the gentle caress of the demigod who would rule the world in Shar’s name.

  An instant of excruciating pain wracked her body. She convulsed, and swallowed her scream only by biting down hard on her tongue and pressing her forehead into the ground. Back in her bed, blood from her mouth joined the drool that already dampened her pillow.

  The pain passed quickly, replaced by indescribable pleasure. The touch of divine fingers excited such arousal in her already sensitized body that she experienced wave after wave of sexual release, one rapid, agonizing, ecstatic pulse after another. The wail elicited by that ecstasy was uncontainable, even in the dream. She arched her back and groaned her pleasure into the nothingness.

  Volumvax’s fingers lingered on her flesh as he communicated his intent. His eyes burrowed through her back and into her soul to impress upon her his will, Shar’s will: So says Shar, the Lady of Loss, through her instrument and Shadow, the Lord Sciagraph. Follow the Nightseer until the sign is given and the Book is made whole. Then, summon the Storm to free the Divine One. This to be a secret known only to we three.

  Elyril sagged, began to weep. She had waited for so long to be Shar’s instrument. The time, at last, was at hand.

  Now see the Lady’s vision for you, secret even from me.

  The Lord Sciagraph removed his hand from Elyril, leaving her bereft, and the gray plain instantly fell away. She found herself alone, suspended within the nothingness. Elyril’s stomach rushed into her throat. Vertigo made her dizzy. Back in her bedchamber,
she felt her body vomit its evening repast.

  Mountains, seas, rivers, and plains took shape far below her. Her nausea passed and she recognized the landscape. She was floating as high as the clouds above an image of Faerûn’s heartland. She could see for leagues in all directions. The landscape stretched from the sandy wastes of Anauroch and the Dalelands in the north to the Dragon Coast in the south, from the jagged Stormpeaks that bordered Cormyr on the west, to Sembia and Ravens Bluff in the east. She recognized the dark lesions on the land as cities: Arabel, Selgaunt, Urmlaspyr, her own home of Ordulin.

  She waited.

  After a moment a thin, purple-veined tendril of shadow formed in Anauroch, within Shade Enclave, home of the Shar-worshiping Shadovar and their high priest, the Nightseer, Rivalen Tanthul. The tendril expanded southward and east, toward Sembia. At the same time, a second shadowy tendril, thick and blunt but also lined with veins of purple, burst out of Ordulin and made its way west across Sembia.

  Elyril smiled to see Sembia caught in the vise of her goddess’s will. She smiled even more to see one side of that vise originate in Ordulin, presumably with her.

  Summon the storm, the Lord Sciagraph had commanded.

  The two fronts moved inexorably toward one another, swallowing the light, shrouding the land. Darkness devoured Sembia, and all of Faerûn cowered. Elyril watched it all, satisfied that she would live to see Shar’s final victory in Faerûn, until …

  A third tendril of darkness, narrower but deeper than the other two, arose in central Sembia and expanded rapidly outward in both directions to meet the onrushing shadows of Shar. This tendril bore no trace of Shar’s holy purple.

  The competing fronts of shadow met and did battle. Elyril shouted in rage as darkness warred against darkness. Who would dare stand in the path of the Shadowstorm? How would—

  Without warning, the vision ceased and Elyril was alone in the nether. She screamed her frustration into the void.

  Some time later she awakened in her bed, sweat-soaked, exhausted, and staring up at the beamed ceiling of her bedchamber in her aunt’s mansion east of Ordulin.

  “No!” she said, and sat up, disturbing the vomit, blood, and drool that stained her silk sheets and pillow. Her tongue ached from where she had bitten it in her dream. She ignored the pain and the sloppy mess on the bed.

  Volumvax’s will throbbed at the forefront of her consciousness and she whispered it aloud: “Summon the storm to free the Divine One.”

  She wanted to know more, needed to know more, but she knew she would learn nothing else. The Lord Sciagraph and the Lady of Loss kept their secrets. Such was the nature of the faith. As a priestess of Shar, Elyril often had to act while ignorant of Shar’s plans.

  Near the foot of her bed, she heard Kefil stir. The black mastiff climbed to his feet, stretched, and uttered a contented rumble from deep in his huge chest. The dog’s shoulder stood even with the top Elyril’s bed and his bloodshot brown eyes fixed on her.

  You thrashed about in your sleep, Kefil projected. Gray hairs dotted his massive jaws, and his bleary eyes showed their age.

  Elyril smiled in spite of her concerns. The dog spoke to no one but Elyril—it was their secret. Kefil had first spoken to her the night after she had murdered her parents. He had been a pup then, and his name had been Mors. Elyril had renamed him after her dead brother. She assumed his intelligence to be a gift granted by Shar. Over the intervening years, he had become a trusted confidante. Her aunt hated the dog, but allowed Elyril to keep him in her room anyway.

  Kefil whirled around to nibble at an itch in his hindquarters.

  “The Lord Sciagraph spoke to me,” she said to him, and offered no further explanation. She would not share even with Kefil the intimacies of her relationship with Volumvax.

  Kefil continued biting his itch, and respectfully asked no further questions.

  Mindful of her soiled sheets, Elyril carefully pushed the silk from her legs and swung them off the huge bed. Her head felt as if it were stuffed with rags; her temples pounded. She cradled her brow in her hands.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said to Volumvax, wincing at the pain in her tongue and head. “It is my humble pleasure to serve.”

  Kefil abandoned his itch and devoured some of the darkness in the room.

  Elyril smiled. Kefil always hungered for shadows. The mastiff sank back to the floor with a grunt.

  A tingle under her scalp told her that the Nightseer was trying to contact her through the magical silver and amethyst ring she wore. She looked down, saw the amethyst set into her ring sparkle as its magic linked into the Shadow Weave. The connection opened.

  You have received a sign, dark sister, Rivalen said, and it was not a question.

  Elyril’s breath caught. Volumvax had commanded her to keep the sign a secret. How could Rivalen have known? He could not know of Elyril’s relationship with Volumvax, could he?

  Elyril could not answer the Nightseer for a moment. Finally, she responded. Yes, Prince Rivalen. I have received a sign. I believe the Cycle of Shadows is beginning.

  A long pause passed before Rivalen answered. No, dark sister. The Cycle was begun long ago, thousands of years before your birth. Know that the Overmaster is dead.

  Elyril gave a start. Dead? When?

  This night. He appears to have died in his sleep.

  Elyril giggled. She had never fancied her aunt’s cousin.

  All will suspect murder, she projected. And most would suspect her aunt.

  And they will have their murderer, Rivalen answered. Resurrections will fail and none but a user of the Shadow Weave will be able to learn the true cause of death. Speaking with the spirit of the dead will reveal a name—the name of he who we wish known as the killer. Be certain that it occurs in public, before the High Council if possible. Prepare your aunt to take power. Prepare yourself to steer her as I and the Lady direct.

  Elyril’s aunt had been positioning herself for over a decade to challenge Kendrick for power. With Elyril’s aid, Mirabeta had bribed or extorted alliances from fully half of Sembia’s High Council. She would be among the leading candidates to replace the dead overmaster.

  That should not be difficult to arrange.

  That is what I expected, Rivalen said, and Elyril thought she heard a smile in the tone.

  Night shroud you, Nightseer.

  And you, dark sister.

  A gentle hum in Elyril’s ear indicated that the magic of the sending ring had gone quiescent. Rivalen was gone.

  Elyril sat on the edge of her bed for a moment, letting the import of the night’s events settle on her. She had been directly contacted by the two most powerful servants of her goddess. She must indeed be Shar’s instrument. Now she needed only to await the sign, and for the book to be made whole.

  But what book?

  She did not know. For the moment, it was Shar’s secret.

  She touched the disc she wore on a chain around her neck. Years earlier she had paid a wizard to make the black and purple disc permanently invisible, then used it in a ceremony sacrificing him to Shar. No one but Elyril, Volumvax, and Shar knew of the symbol. Its existence was their secret. So, too, was the fact that the holy symbol stored the souls of those Elyril had killed, including her parents.

  Elyril’s headache reminded her that divine visions did not come without a physical price. She stood, and her legs, weakened from sexual release and the exhaustion that accompanied contact with the Lord Sciagraph, wobbled under her. She touched a fingertip to her tongue, looked at the blood, clasped the invisible holy symbol that hung from her neck, and whispered a healing prayer to Shar. The wound in her tongue closed; the pain in her head subsided.

  She noticed a chill in the room. Embers glowed in the huge stone hearth that dominated her bedchamber, but they offered scant warmth to her body, covered as it was only in a thin nightshift. She crossed the chamber, stirred the embers with a poker, and added a log. She caught Kefil leering at her out of the corner of her eye. She k
new her lithe body pleased the dog.

  Flames rose from the stirred embers and caught quickly, sending flickers across the room. The wood crackled.

  She walked to the night table and rang a small, magical brass bell. Her personal servants, all magically attuned to the bell and others like it, heard its ring no matter where they were or what they were doing.

  After ringing, she began a mental count. She had adopted her aunt’s rule that servants had a twenty count to attend her after the ring, no longer, or they would be flogged. Before she reached ten, she heard the sound of feet rushing down the hall, the tinkling of bells, and a hesitant knock on her door.

  “Enter,” she commanded.

  The door opened. Daylight from the hall outside cascaded into the room. She blinked in it. She had not realized that the sun was well into its daily course.

  “Close that door,” she snapped.

  Kefil growled at the sudden light.

  A skinny adolescent boy hurried in, eyes on the floor, and closed the door behind him. The room returned to darkness. The youth wore the black tunic, belled head wrap, and calf-length trousers that Mirabeta required of all the servants. Bony legs and arms jutted from the clothes, the limbs like those of a scarecrow. Elyril did not know his name and did not care. Probably the boy was the result of one of the sexual unions that Mirabeta had arranged between her servants. Her aunt enjoyed breeding the staff, selling some to slavers, some to fighting rings, some to brothels, and keeping those who pleased her. She had done so for decades.

  “Mistress,” the boy mumbled. “You summoned me?”

  The boy’s eyes never left her bare feet.

  Kefil stood up and the boy gulped. The mastiff cocked his head and eyed the boy as he might a piece of meat.

  “My sheets and bed pillow require laundering,” Elyril said. She reached for the tiny iron snuffbox she kept in the drawer of her night table.

  “Yes, Mistress,” replied the boy. He stepped to the bed, keeping as much of it between him and Kefil as possible, and began to gather the sheets.