Midnight's Mask

by Paul S. Kemp

  Captain Sertan eyed the gems and licked his lips. He might have agreed to Azriim’s request even without the aid of the wand. There was no cargo he could carry that would profit him more than what Azriim offered.

  “That sounds quite reasonable, friend,” said the captain, and he walked down the gangplank. His voice had the lazy lilt of the enspelled. “Tell me more.”

  Azriim smiled in a comradely fashion. “I want you to set to tonight and sail for Traitor’s Isle. Anchor there and wait for up to a tenday. I and my two companions will meet you there, probably within only a few days.”

  “Meet us? You won’t be aboard?”

  “Not at first. But we will show eventually.” He pressed the rubies into the captain’s hands. “And if we do not, keep what I have paid you and be about your own affairs.”

  “Very well,” the captain said. “I will recall the crew.”

  Azriim smiled. “Excellent! But first show me your ship.” Azriim needed to memorize the appearance of the vessel, to make teleporting there easier.

  They turned and walked up the gangplank. Azriim knew that the wand’s effect would last only a few days, but he figured that would be long enough. Cale would either show within that time or he would not. And if Azriim had need, he could always renew the effect of the wand once he came aboard near Traitor’s Isle.

  He looked the captain up and down and said, “I admire your garb, by the way.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ANGRY GHOSTS

  Cale, Jak, and Magadon followed Sephris and the Oghmanytes as they walked toward the Sanctum of the Scroll.

  “He must have moved into the temple,” Jak said. “Or they forced him to move there.”

  “So it appears,” Cale said.

  When they first had met Sephris, the Chosen of Oghma had lived with a caretaker in a small residence near Temple Avenue. Sephris had covered the walls of his home with erudite mathematical scribblings. That was where Jak and Cale later had found his corpse, gutted by the slaadi. The creatures had murdered the loremaster for helping Cale and Jak. Cale guessed that the Oghmanyte high priest had moved Sephris into the temple for his own security.

  “Do you think he will be … upset when he sees us?” Jak asked. He twirled his pipe in his fingers, a nervous habit.

  “We’ll soon know,” Cale answered.

  “Who is he talking to?” Magadon asked, indicating Sephris.

  From their position behind and slightly oblique to Sephris and the Oghmanytes, they could see the loremaster in profile. His lips moved continuously, though he appeared to be talking to no one in particular. Cale was too far away to read them, but he knew well enough what the words were.

  “He is talking to himself,” Cale said. “Calculating.”

  “Calculating?” Magadon asked.

  Jak said, “He does mathematics, the kind no one understands but him. That’s how he knows things. He’s always doing it.”

  Magadon’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘knows things’? Is he a prophet?”

  “Of sorts,” Cale said. “Wait, and watch.”

  The priests neared the tiered steps that led up to the double doors of Oghma’s temple.

  Still muttering as he walked, Sephris pulled a stylus—the kind with a sharpened tip that was used to write in wet clay—from an inner pocket of his robes and pushed up his sleeve. He pressed the stylus’s tip into his forearm and began to write on his flesh. His expression never changed, even when he started to bleed.

  “Gods,” Magadon oathed, aghast. “Is he mad?”

  “Maybe,” Jak said. “But I’ve never before seen him do anything self-destructive. What’s wrong with him?”

  Cale shook his head.

  At first the priests accompanying Sephris did not notice his wounds. When they did, one of them shouted and the whole group stopped. Another of the Oghmanytes, a young, brown-haired woman, gently pried the stylus from Sephris’s fingers, all while speaking what Cale took to be gentle reassurance. The loremaster calculated throughout, offering the woman only token resistance. Another of the priests, a middle-aged man with wavy blond hair, stepped forward, took Sephris’s bleeding forearm in his hands, and whispered what Cale assumed to be a healing spell. The wounds in Sephris’s arm closed.

  “This may not be a good idea, after all,” Jak offered.

  Cale agreed. It appeared that Sephris may have truly gone mad.

  “Agreed,” he said. “Let’s see where his sums take him. If he wants to see us, he will let us know. Otherwise, we go to Elaena.”

  The priests escorting Sephris closed their circle more tightly around the loremaster and hustled him forward. He moved with them, as stiff as an automaton, still calculating. The group reached the stairs and started up.

  Sephris put three stairs under him and stopped, head cocked to the side. The priests tried to pull him along but he resisted.

  “Here we go,” Cale said.

  The three of them continued their slow walk forward, eyeing Sephris.

  One of the priests asked Sephris a question and the whole group tried to move him forward, but the loremaster held his ground. He irritably pushed away the hands that tried to force him up the stairs. He turned around, numbers and formulae still tumbling from his lips. He dropped the book under his arm and scanned the crowd as he calculated. The gazes of his escorts followed his.

  Sephris’s eyes found Cale and Cale read his lips: “… two and two are four,” the loremaster said.

  Korvikoum, thought Cale.

  They stared at one another over the crowd of passersby. Sephris looked to Magadon, to Jak, and Cale did not see pleasure in the loremaster’s expression. More like … resignation.

  The little man waved tentatively.

  Sephris did not wave back. The priests escorting him saw Jak’s wave, Sephris’s stare, and frowned. Brows furrowed; hands went to maces. Quiet words passed between them. Two spoke aloud the words to spells that Cale guessed to be divinations. They were examining the trio. They reported whatever they learned to the tallest priest in the group, who nodded. The two others tried to turn Sephris around and guide him up the steps.

  “What do we do?” Jak asked softly.

  Before Cale could answer, Sephris pushed away the two priests near him—demonstrating surprising strength—and started down the stairs toward Cale. The two priests caught him quickly and stopped him cold. Sephris struggled, began to shout numbers, formulae. The loremaster’s words made no sense to Cale. He sounded like the madmen elsewhere on the street. Passersby watched with wide eyes.

  “What in the Hells are they doing to him?” Jak said.

  “Come on,” Cale said, and hurried forward.

  The two priests forcibly turned Sephris around and bodily carried him up the stairs. He continued to shout over his shoulder, kicking and flailing. The rest of the priests moved to the base of the stairs to intercept Cale. There, they formed up and waited, their expressions hard, their hands on mace hafts.

  Cale did not slow until he stood face to face with the tallest of the four.

  “We are here to see Sephris Dwendon,” Cale said, and started to push past the priest. The man put a hand to Cale’s chest and halted his advance. With effort, Cale resisted the urge to punch him in the face.

  “He is not seeing anyone at this time,” the priest said. He stood a head shorter than Cale, but looked to be built as solid as a tree.

  “That’s a horse’s pile,” Jak said.

  On the stairs above, Sephris struggled furiously in the grasp of his fellow priests.

  “The three are come,” the loremaster called. “Let me go. Let them come. I need to hear their words to finish the equation.”

  Jak tried to dart past the priests, but they stepped before him and blocked his way. They started to draw their maces and Jak backed off, palms raised.

  Cale stared into the eyes of the priest. He could not control the shadows that sweated from his pores.

  The priest’s eyes widened behind his scarlet
mask but to his credit, he did not back down.

  “He needs our words,” Cale said, his voice low. “You heard him.”

  “You heard him,” Jak echoed, nodding.

  “What did they just say?” Sephris shouted from above. “What did they just say? I know their sums. Let them come, now! It is important.”

  The priests trying to manhandle Sephris up the stairs had not managed to get the loremaster very far along. Both of their masks sat askew on their faces. Both were huffing.

  A crowd started to gather at the base of the stairway, looking on. Cale could feel dozens of eyes on his back.

  The priests looked twitchy but did not stand aside.

  “I will summon the Scepters,” the priest said.

  “He wants to see us,” Cale answered, and nodded up at Sephris.

  “That is not his decision,” the priest said, his mouth a hard line. The other three priests shifted their stances nervously.

  “Not his decision?” Jak exclaimed. “We are his friends. He’s not your slave.”

  Before the priest could reply, another priest appeared at the top of the stairs, above Sephris and the priests wrestling with him. He wore an elaborate black vest embroidered with gold thread. A neatly trimmed dark beard housed a severe mouth. He called to the priests below.

  “Enough! Veen, let them come up! Now. Enough, loremaster,” he said to Sephris. “They are allowed to pass.”

  Veen, the priest in front of Cale, looked relieved. He and his fellows stepped out of the way and the three companions hurried up the steps, two at a time. Behind them, Veen ordered the crowd to move along and the four Oghmanytes fell in behind Cale and his comrades.

  The two priests who had tried to restrain Sephris released him. The loremaster stood between the sweating priests, gasping and still calculating as he waited for Cale, Jak, and Magadon to approach. He appeared to be counting their steps as they climbed. When they stood before him, he said, “Three of you, on the ninth day of the ninth month during the fifth hour after noon.” His gaze looked not at Cale but through him. To Cale’s surprise, Sephris’s voice lacked its typical mania-fed intensity. “The variables are … complex.”

  “Loremaster,” Cale said. “We are surprised to see you.”

  “I am not surprised to see you,” Sephris said, and gave a mirthless smile. Cale saw an unexpected hardness in the loremaster’s expression. He remembered Sephris’s words to them when they had called to his spirit after his death—Release me, Erevis Cale. My time on Toril is complete. It has not summed to zero. The loremaster had seemed at peace then, for the first and only time since Cale had made his acquaintance.

  “What have they done to you?” Jak softly asked, and stared accusingly at the two priests to either side of Sephris. They did not meet the little man’s gaze.

  Sephris ignored the question, looked Cale up and down, and said, “The darkness has found you, First of Five. Soaked you. And you think it is done. But it has only begun. There is more, much more, yet to come. To all of us. Did you know that? Did you know what you were doing? What you were causing?”

  Cale felt Jak’s and Magadon’s eyes on him. The priests, too, stared holes into him.

  He swallowed and managed to say, “I’ve done what I’ve had to. I can’t always see the consequences.”

  “Come inside, Sephris,” called the bearded priest at the top of the stairs. “You can speak with them inside. Come.”

  “You do not see them because you do not want to see them, First of Five,” Sephris said. He spun and stalked up the stairs.

  The six Ogmanytes fell in behind him, along with Jak, Cale, and Magadon. Cale’s legs felt heavier with each step.

  Riven sat for more than an hour in the late afternoon shadows across the street from the scribe’s shop. His old garret, adjacent to the shop, stood dark and closed.

  At last he saw what he had come to see and his brewing anger dissipated. A butcher’s boy hurried through the street traffic with a package of wet cloth in his hand. He carried it to the door of the scribe’s store, knocked, and waited, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. When no one responded to his knock, he opened the door and took a step inside.

  The fat scribe appeared in the doorway, irritated, and hustled him out.

  “I told you not to bring that into my shop,” the scribe said.

  “Then answer my knock, goodsir,” the boy said, and pushed the package into the scribe’s hands.

  The scribe fumbled with a retort, managed nothing, pushed a few coins into the boy’s hand, and hurried him off. The boy ran past Riven, never noticing him.

  The scribe—Riven could not remember his name—unwrapped the cloth to reveal a pile of boiled meat scraps. Seemingly satisfied, he retrieved two shallow buckets he kept near his stoop and put equal portions of the scraps in each.

  Whistling a tune and nodding at a passerby, he carried the buckets to the doorway of Riven’s garret. He used a key to open the door and entered. Some bustling sounds issued from just within. After a moment, he exited with another bucket and put both down on the ground.

  “Come, girls!” he called, and gave a whistle so loud and piercing that Riven figured the sailors back in the Dock District had covered their ears. “Here, dogs!”

  The few passersby on the street eyed the scribe curiously but otherwise paid him no heed.

  Riven waited, watching, expectant, hopeful. To his surprise, his heart was racing.

  “Come on, girls!” the scribe called again. “Are you out there? Here!”

  The scribe put his fingers to his mouth and was about to unleash another whistle on the world when two small, four legged figures padded out of an alley to Riven’s left and started across the street.

  Riven could not contain a grin when he saw his girls.

  “There you are,” said the scribe. He nudged the bucket of scraps with his toe. “Come now. Mealtime. It’s boiled organ meat. Very good. And water I drew this morning.”

  The dogs pelted across the street, tails wagging, but skidded to a stop halfway. They stood in the street, noses in the air, sniffing. Both of their tails went stiff, then began to wag. The older bitch turned an excited circle, chuffing. Her whelp fairly jumped on her back in excitement.

  Riven’s grin broadened.

  The girls looked in Riven’s direction and bounded toward his hiding place, tongues lolling. That they had recognized his scent gave Riven more pleasure than anything had in a long while.

  “Dogs!” the scribe called, and stomped his foot. “No! Come, here! Here! Beware the wagons!”

  The dogs darted out of the way of two vegetable carts pulled by mules and crossed the street.

  Riven rose from the shadows.

  The scribe saw him and his expression fell. He reached for a post to help him keep his feet.

  The girls swarmed Riven, jumping up on his legs, yipping. He held a hand down and they licked his fingers. He scratched their ears, petted their flanks, each in turn. They looked exactly as they had when he had left them. Both were well fed. The scribe had kept his word.

  “You,” called the scribe across the street, a nervous tremor in his voice. “You’ve returned.”

  Despite his delight at seeing the girls, Riven put on his professional sneer before walking across the street. The girls trailed him, circled him, tails wagging. He found it difficult to look intimidating with two small dogs jumping about his legs and yapping.

  The scribe watched him approach, mouth open, as though he wanted to speak, but said nothing.

  “I told you I would check on you from time to time,” Riven said, and kept his voice hard.

  The scribe nodded rapidly enough to shake his paunch. “Yes. I’ve done as you asked. You see?” He pointed at the buckets of scraps, the other bucket of water.

  “I don’t recall asking,” Riven said.

  For a moment, the scribe lost his tongue. “Yes. Well, they’re good dogs. Very good. They come every day.” He kneeled and patted their flanks with genuine affe
ction. They licked his hand but quickly returned to circle excitedly around Riven. “Look how happy they are to see you,” the scribe said, standing. “They’ve even forgotten their food.”

  Riven had trouble keeping his expression hostile.

  “You’ve done well,” Riven said, and it was the best show of appreciation he could manage. He left unstated the fact that he would have killed the scribe without hesitation had he done any less. “I will be leaving again soon. But I will be back for them. Until I am, keep doing as you have. You have enough coin?”

  “Of course,” the scribe said.

  Riven had paid him enough previously to care for the dogs for a year or more.

  “Good. Go, now.” Riven waved him back to his shop. “Be about your business. I want to check on my garret in privacy.”

  The scribe looked to Riven, to the dogs, and almost smiled. He was wise enough to keep a straight face, however, and melted back into his shop.

  Riven watched him go, then gathered the three buckets and entered the garret with the girls.

  The moment he shut the door behind him, he sank to the floor and put the buckets before him.

  “Eat, girls,” he said.

  They seemed more interested in him than the food, so he accommodated them with stomach rubs and head scratching. Finally, he coaxed them into eating. As always, they shared space around the bucket rather than squabbling for position as most dogs would.

  “No rivalry for First and Second, eh?” he said. The older bitch turned to regard him with a question in her brown eyes and scraps dangling from her jaws. He only smiled and she returned to her meal.

  Afterward he spent a few hours with his girls, doing nothing more than playing or petting them. He wondered what they did all day, and the wondering made him worry. They could run afoul of a wagon cart, a horse, or some petty bastards like the pirates Riven had left dead on the streets of Skullport.

  His girls were gentle creatures—he had no idea why—but he did know that gentleness was not rewarded on the street. He had learned that lesson often in his youth. But somehow his girls had managed to survive without becoming vicious.