Midnight's Mask

by Paul S. Kemp

  The crew grumbled about the glow and shared hard looks. Before the captain could protest, Azriim said,

  “I know it is awkward, Captain, but it is a necessary precaution.”

  “We are like a beacon out here,” one of the crew shouted to the captain.

  “Wizards be damned,” growled another.

  “What are we into, Cap’n?” asked another.

  “Take this,” Azriim said, loudly enough to be heard by the crew nearby. He produced another ruby, his last, from his belt pouch. “To compensate for the inconvenience. The magic will harm neither crew nor ship. In fact, it will protect us all.”

  The captain looked at Azriim, at the ruby, and took it.

  “Be about your rest or your duties, jacks,” the captain said to the crew. “We can trust these mates.”

  The captain’s firm reassurance quieted the crew. Captain Sertan ran a professional ship and his men obviously respected his word.

  “I appreciate your trust, my friend,” Azriim lied.

  The captain nodded, took the compass from Azriim’s hand.

  “I’ll get this to Nimil at the helm.”

  “I would like to set to immediately,” Azriim said. “Time is of the essence.”

  The captain hesitated, nodded, and walked away. As he did, he called out to the crew, “On your feet, lads. Selüne is bright and her tears are shining. Let’s set to now. The sooner we get the lubbers to where they are going, the sooner we get to spend the coin they have paid. You’ll all be in whores, grub, and drink for two tendays.”

  A round of tired cheers greeted the captain’s words. The crew rose from deckbags and started to prepare the ship for sail. She’d be underway soon enough.

  Azriim smiled at Dolgan and Riven. The wounds Cale had given were fully healed, though his shirt was ruined.

  “An eventful evening, not so?” he said, still smiling. He looked down at his clothing and frowned. “I need a new shirt.”

  A score or more slavers swarmed the deck toward Cale and Jak. The seamen brandished steel in their fists and scowls on their faces. Across the ship, the door to the sterncastle suddenly splintered, forced open from inside. It triggered Jak’s ward.

  A blast of ice shards and cold exploded from the door jambs. The four ship’s masters who had tried to exit screamed, grabbed at flesh torn apart by blades of ice and wood, and fell to the deck.

  “I tried to stop you by jamming the lock, you dolts!” Jak shouted.

  Many of the advancing crew heard the commotion from behind, saw the dead or dying masters, and slowed their charge.

  Cale clutched his mask and incanted a prayer to the Shadowlord. The spell summoned a magical blade of force that answered to Cale’s mental command. The blade materialized in the air beside him and at his mental urging, streaked at the big slaver who had ordered the charge. The man tried to parry with his overlarge cutlass, but the blade’s darting attacks drove him back.

  Two of the slavers tried to assist their comrade, while the rest continued to advance. Several hurled daggers or knives. Cale and Jak hunched, and most flew wide or short, but a few struck home. The shadows that surrounded Cale prevented the two daggers that hit him from doing any more than bruising his skin, but one knife slit a furrow in Jak’s cheek, and another dagger stuck in his shoulder. He jerked it out with a grunt—it had penetrated only slightly—glared at the crew, and incanted a prayer to his god.

  When the little man finished his spell, he pointed his holy symbol at the slavers. Three went wide-eyed, turned, and fled in terror as if chased by a prince of Hell; two others turned with a snarl and began punching their comrades; three more stopped where they stood, let their blades fall from their hands, and babbled nonsensically in their native tongues.

  “It will not last long,” Jak said.

  “There’s only two, jacks!” shouted one of the crew, to bolster his comrades.

  The rest nodded, brandished their blades.

  With a mental command, Cale formed the shadows around him into a confusing, constantly shifting jumble of illusory images. When he was done, there were not two but seven.

  Still the crew advanced, wary but determined. Fifteen paces. Ten.

  From nowhere, two slavers landed in a crouch beside Jak and Cale. Cale had only a moment to curse himself for forgetting the two men he had seen atop the forecastle. They must have avoided the blast from Azriim’s ball of fire.

  The approaching sailors cheered at the appearance of their comrades and rushed forward as one.

  “Ware!” Jak shouted, and dodged back from the slash of the smaller of the two, a hard-eyed Thayan. The larger, his three gold earrings glinting in the moonlight, seemed confused by the shifting array of shadow duplicates that surrounded the actual Cale. He hacked wildly with his cutlass at the nearest and the touch of his blade dispelled the image. Cale answered with a slash across the man’s chest and finished him with a stab through his throat. He whirled around to see Jak driving his shortsword into the gut of the little slaver, who fell to the deck, screaming and bleeding.

  They turned to face the rest of the charging crew and watched with surprise as one of them fell face first to the deck, an arrow sprouting from his back. The slavers around the fallen man shouted, stopped their charge, looked around the deck. Cale, too, tried to pinpoint the source of the fire as another arrow took a second slaver in the throat. Another hit a third in the arm and sent him spinning to the deck, screaming with pain.

  The shots were coming from the crow’s nest.

  I’ll explain, Magadon’s voice said in their heads.

  Cale gave a shout, stepped through the shadows and into the midst of the crew, slashing with Weaveshear. The blade opened the throat of one surprised slaver, pierced the chest of a second. One of those whose mind was clouded by Jak’s spell took an awkward cut at Cale, slipped on the deck, and fell at Cale’s feet. Cale stabbed him through the chest. He died clutching Weaveshear’s edges.

  A cutlass slashed across Cale’s back, a blow that would have felled him but for the protection granted by the shadows. Instead, the weapon merely opened a painful gash that his skin soon closed. Cale spun around with a reverse slash from Weaveshear but the slaver parried the blow, snarled, and bounded back. Cale followed up, at the same time mentally commanding his summoned blade to attack the slaver. It streaked in from the side and opened a gash in the man’s shoulder. While he screamed, Cale decapitated him with a crosscut from Weaveshear.

  From the forecastle, Jak shouted the words to a spell and a white beam of energy streaked into a slaver near Cale. The energy seared the man’s skin and drove him to the deck, where he lay prone and unmoving.

  “This ship is ours!” Magadon shouted down from the crow’s nest. “Flee on the ship’s boat or you all die!”

  An arrow thumped into the deck, vibrating, near a slaver’s feet. Another arrow went through the chest of a second slaver.

  With an effort of will, Cale caused a cloud of impenetrable shadows to surround him. Cale could see through the blackness perfectly, but he knew the slavers would be able to see nothing. He took up Magadon’s call.

  “Run, you whoresons!” he shouted, and advanced on the slavers. “This ship is ours!”

  Those who were not still enspelled turned and fled for the ship’s boat. Cale slammed his pommel into the heads of those still under the mind-muddling effect of Jak’s spell. They fell to the deck, dead or unconscious.

  Let them go, Cale projected to Magadon, as perhaps six slavers worked to lower the ship’s boat from its rigging. They had it lowered within a few breaths and all of them leaped over the side and scrambled into it. They cursed their conquerors as they rowed away. They would die or not on the sea. Cale did not care.

  The ship was quiet.

  Cale and Jak stood on a deck littered with corpses, a handful of unconscious slavers, and the still-enspelled helmsman. Jak called on the Trickster and healed himself with a prayer. Cale let his flesh repair the wounds he had suffered.

>   They watched with disbelieving smiles as Magadon descended from the crow’s nest. Just to be certain that Magadon was Magadon, Cale spoke the prayer that empowered him to see magical auras. Magadon showed no aura, though his bow and several of his arrows glowed in Cale’s sight. The guide was himself.

  Cale and Jak met him at the bottom of the mast, full of questions.

  “I felt you die,” Jak said.

  Cale took the guide by the shoulders and shook him.

  “As did I. Or so I thought.”

  “A play,” the guide said and smiled. “Riven wanted the slaadi to believe he killed me, so I projected a false sensation to you two and to them.”

  The guide let the words register with Cale and Jak.

  “Riven?” Jak said. “A play?”

  “Why?” Cale asked. “If he’s with us, why not just help us kill the slaadi here and now? We could have done it had he not interfered.”

  Magadon looked at Cale and answered, “I asked him the same thing. He said Mask wanted it this way, that Mask wanted the slaadi to escape. This time. He said you would understand.”

  Cale considered that, finally gave a slow nod. He did understand. The Shadowlord had an agenda that he had not yet seen fit to share with either his First or his Second. Riven was just doing what he thought Mask wanted. Cale had been on that path once.

  “The Zhent’s playing us,” Jak said, and could not keep the hostility from his tone.

  Cale knew that it was not Riven but Mask who was making the play.

  Magadon shook his head. “I do not think so. I have a latent visual leech on him. He suggested it, so that we could follow. He said he would stay with the slaadi until the time was right. I believe him, Erevis. He’s with us.”

  “Agreed,” Cale said softly.

  Jak shook his head and muttered, “That Zhent has more angles than a prism. I hope we know what we’re doing.”

  Of course, Cale did not know what they were doing. Mask had directed Riven to help the slaadi escape Demon Binder. Cale could not imagine why.

  CHAPTER 8

  AGENDAS

  Vhostym prepared to leave his pocket plane. He knew that he would not return. He would send for the Weave Tap when the time arrived.

  He felt no nostalgia over his departure. The place had served him well as an isolated location from which to put his plan into place, but its utility was at an end. And Vhostym retained nothing that did not have utility.

  The binding spells with which he had confined the demons, devils, and celestials he used in his research would degrade over the coming centuries. Eventually, the creatures would be free to slaughter one another or to return to their home planes. Or not. Vhostym did not care what became of them. Their utility too was at an end. In his mind, he cataloged the threescore spells he had spent the last few hours preparing. He inventoried components for the spells, checked the magical paraphernalia that adorned his person. He reached into a belt pouch and counted the twenty magical emeralds he had personally crafted to prepare for this night. They were all there, with the exception of the one he had provided to Azriim.

  He was ready.

  His ragged breath sounded loud and wet in his ears. He felt increasingly tired. The pain in his limbs, in his muscles, his bones, wracked him. He reached into his mind and diminished his brain’s capacity to register painful sensations. The agony decreased but did not end. He endured it. His illness was advancing quickly, inexorably. He needed events to move just as quickly. He had only a little time remaining, and therefore none to waste.

  From the extradimensional storage space within his robe pocket, he withdrew a fillet of jade. Rather than lift his arms to place it on his head—the motion would have caused him added pain—he instead took hold of it with his mind and floated it atop his brow. He then incanted the words to one of his most powerful transmutations, a spell that would allow him to take an incorporeal form. All of his items and components would accompany him into incorporeality, and would remain as solid to him as the real world would seem insubstantial.

  When the magic took effect, his flesh tingled, its malleability palpable. He regretted that he would have to once more spend time in a form other than his natural body, but he was not yet prepared to set foot on the surface in his own flesh.

  His body dissolved relative to the material world. His flesh, clothing, and spell components turned gray and insubstantial. The world around him lost color. A channel opened between his being and the Negative Material Plane—a necessary element of the spell—and a preternatural cold suffused him. He willed his body to stand on the chamber floor, though he could have floated through it had he wished.

  The transformation did nothing to end his pain, which, like his equipment, had followed him into his ghostly form. But the new form did not have the sensitivity to light that was the congenital curse of Vhostym’s material flesh.

  He incanted another spell and turned invisible. Afterward, he cast again and teleported from his pocket plane to the surface of Faerûn, to a mountainous region on the frontier of the realm of Amn.

  He materialized where he intended, in a thicket of century-old ash trees, near the bottom of a tree-dotted, steep-sided mountain vale. Darkness shrouded the valley. Mountains walled him in, dark and ominous. A brook wound its way through the vale’s trees.

  Vhostym’s form allowed him to see well even in darkness, allowed him to sense the lifeforces of the animals around him. The creatures perceived the negative energy of his form and cowered in their dens, instinctively terrified of him.

  They were wise to be frightened, for he had death on his mind.

  Neither Selüne nor her tears were visible above the mountains, but a window of stars shone down from a cloudless sky. The wind stirred the ash leaves, but his form felt nothing but the pain of his illness. He longed to smell the air, feel the breeze.

  Soon, he reminded himself.

  Vhostym knew that a single, twisting pass behind him was the only nonmagical means of entering or exiting the vale. He knew too that mages and priests in service to Cyric kept the pass hidden with illusions and spell traps to protect the vale’s secret—a tower hidden within the ash trees. Vhostym could mark the tower from where he stood only because he knew where to look.

  The windowless, square spire of gray stone stood in the center of the vale, near the brook, barely visible through the trees. The crenellated top, silhouetted in the starlight, looked like a mouthful of broken teeth. Four soldiers armed with glaives and armored in mail stood watch on the ground before the temple. They were all human, so Vhostym assumed they must have some magical device that allowed them to see in the dark.

  A raised drawbridge lay flat against the tower’s face. The drawbridge did not rest at ground level, but about a troll’s height up the wall. Vhostym knew that the double doors behind the drawbridge opened onto the second floor of the tower.

  Vhostym floated forward through the trees, toward the tower, an invisible harbinger of doom. Nothing visible on the tower’s exterior bespoke its dark purpose but Vhostym knew it to be a temple of Cyric the Dark Sun, one of two towers built in hidden vales in the Small Teeth, a mountain range that made up the southern border of Amn. Though a distance of a few leagues separated the two temples, a secret underground tunnel wormed under the mountains to link them.

  The Towers of the Eternal Eclipse, the worshipers called them. Vhostym found the name ironic and appropriate.

  Decades ago Vhostym had scoured Faerûn for the material he would need, along with the Weave Tap, to complete his greatest spell—a peculiar type of stone that fell from the heavens. The stone had a latent property—the ability to amplify arcane power cast through it.

  One of Vhostym’s divinations had at last located a large deposit of the stone in the Small Teeth, in the form of Cyric’s temple. Further magical inquiries had determined the origin of the stone. Millennia before, a small rock with this special property had blazed a path of fire across the sky and smashed into the mountains, exposin
g a seam of granite. The impact pulverized the otherworldly rock and left a crater in the mountains, but the heat and pressure of the impact had transferred the stone’s properties into the local granite. Later, a sect of Banites—the original builders of the temple—had quarried the stone to build their towers. The temple was later taken over after the Time of Troubles by the Cyricists. Neither the Banites nor the Cyricists ever learned of the amplifying properties of the stone.

  For months after learning the nature and history of the towers, Vhostym scried them repeatedly. He had memorized their interiors, their defenses. He knew the locations of the warding glyphs and spell traps that guarded some of the towers’ interior doors. He knew the number and nature of those who garrisoned each spire: roughly fivescore soldiers, a dozen priests, and a handful of mages. The High Priest of Cyric who reigned over the towers, one Blackwill Akhmelere, occupied the eastern tower this night, so he would be spared.

  No one in the western tower would live more than another hour.

  Vhostym cast a long series of protective spells. When he finished, an array of invisible magical wards sheathed his person. Unless they could be dispelled—and no one within the tower had the power to counter Vhostym’s dweomers—he was virtually invulnerable to harm from either weapons or spells.

  The most powerful of the defensive wards would not last long, however, so speed would be his ally. He removed a root from his pouch, chewed it, swallowed, and recited another spell. When he finished, his spectral body felt energized, faster.

  He was ready to begin. Vhostym started forward.

  A sudden call went up from the guards before the tower and he stopped his advance. The guards scrambled aside as the sound of a winch mechanism carried through the valley and the drawbridge started to lower. In moments, the drawbridge’s edge was flat on the ground, forming a ramp from ground level to the elevated double doors. The twin iron slabs of the temple doors swung open, torchlight poured out, and a group of twenty sword-armed and mail-armored soldiers trooped down the drawbridge.