Plague of Spells as-1

by Bruce R Cordell

  "To what realm have I come?" he whispered.

  "Changes to Faerыn's landscape, such as the earthmote you see above the plain, are not uncommon since the Spellplague swept through," said a bodiless voice.

  "You are still in Faerыn, in the southeastern foothills of the Giant's Run Mountains." It was the same voice as before.

  Raidon jumped to his feet, swiveling to see if he could catch a faint gleam or wavering in the air that would betray the speaker's presence.

  "I remember you!" yelled Raidon. "I heard you beyond the gates of demolished Starmantle! And again, in…" he trailed off. His head still resonated with the thump it received upon his arrival. He sensed some great dread hiding just beyond his attention, biding its time.

  "Correct, Raidon. However, Starmantle was not the first time you and I conversed. We spoke at some length many years ago, when you traveled to where my physical body lies. My name is Cynosure."

  "Cynosure?" The name was familiar, but he couldn't recall why.

  "Yes. You visited me in Stardeep several years before the Year of Blue Fire. You accompanied Kiril Duskmourn on her return to the citadel dungeon where she once served as Keeper."

  "Stardeep!" exclaimed Raidon. The threads of memory connected, and he remembered.

  Cynosure was an artificial entity. A golem, but more than that.

  He… it? It was an immense humanoid forged of crystal, stone, iron, and more exotic components, though when Raidon had met the golem, it was rusted, pitted, and stained by centuries of existence.

  Cynosure was a golem whose sophistication eclipsed all other artificial constructs. It stared unblinking into the containment fires of Stardeep's inner most prison cell. Raidon had seen the golem descend into that cell and do battle with the thing housed there. A thing called the Traitor.

  The monk remembered the design fused onto Cynosure's metallic chest-the Cerulean Sign. The placement was similar to the one Raidon himself now sported.

  "How is it I hear your voice? Are you not restricted to Stardeep's buried corridors?"

  "I remain so bound; however, I can act through any suitably prepared vessel, even far from Stardeep. Somehow, I can now also manifest my attention and some few surviving magical abilities of Stardeep through you."

  "Through me? What abilities?"

  "Speech, for one. Also, I teleported you from Starmantle to the edge of Nathlekh when you were hurt a few tendays ago, and again just now to pull you out of Nathlekh. Unlike speech, however, moving you such great distances saps my finite and failing reserves."

  "You… pushed me through a portal? Without an actual portal gate? And without being physically nearby?"

  "Yes. In a way, I am physically with you. Special circumstances allow you and me to interact, Raidon, though you and me only. I could not transport another, unless they were with you. My connection with you is possible because of the new fusion between you and your Cerulean Sign."

  Memory painted an image of his amulet dissolving in ravening blue fire. He recalled the agony as the lingering symbol branded him. He dropped his gaze and opened the silk jacket he'd purchased in Nathlekh. The symbol of his amulet still marked him, its size scaled up to cover his entire upper chest, as if the Sign's power was sufficient to expand to whatever medium that contained it.

  Cynosure's voice continued, "The Spellplague stitched your amulet's power into your mind and body. Raidon, you have become a breathing manifestation of the Sign."

  The monk said, "In Starmantle, I was able to tap the Sign's power when aberrant ghouls attacked me. But I did so almost instinctively…"

  The disembodied golem's voice said, "Your life energy has invigorated the symbol. Or else the Sign's potency was magnified by the Spellplague. Others touched by that changing flame, if they survived at all, were scarred with strange new abilities. In any case, your first use of the Sign drew my attention. As you know, I am also bound to the Cerulean Sign."

  Raidon lifted his gaze again to the unsupported, earthen mass hovering above the horizon, though his mind traced images more fantastic. He suddenly remembered that Cynosure was more than a single golem. Stardeep's Keepers had told him Cynosure's sentience was housed simultaneously in several golem bodies distributed throughout the dungeon of Stardeep. The golem's arcane awareness stretched insubstantially between dozens of bodies scattered around the halls, tunnels, and galleries. Cynosure, a sentient construct with multiple vantages, was the perfect warden of the dungeon stronghold where a Traitor served his eternal sentence.

  "You have many vantages on the world, then?"

  "No longer. Raidon, you are my one remaining contact beyond my trapped body. I can see and interact with the world in and around your physical location, as I once could with my other lesser selves in Stardeep, before it was destroyed."

  Raidon said nothing for a moment as he wrestled with the implications of the golem's last words. Finally he replied, "Do you try to provoke me? What do you mean? Certainly Stardeep can't be destroyed, else the traitor would be freed or dead. Either way, that would have ushered in a disaster."

  "What other word would you use to describe the Year of Blue Fire?"

  Raidon flinched and said, "You suggest that the prisoner of Stardeep, the Traitor they called him, the high priest for some forgotten group of aboleths, was released, and the Spellplague was the result? Not true. It was the goddess of magic's murder that collapsed the Weave and initiated the damned Spellplague. So I confirmed in Nathlekh while I searched for…" The monk trailed off, his concern over Stardeep eclipsed by the hollow recollection of his daughter's fate.

  Raidon slid down the boulder's rough side until he sat once more, his ears filling with an inchoate roar.

  Cynosure was talking. "Many threads were pulled when Mystra died. Most accept the goddess of magic's death touched off already unsteady zones of wild magic. But in the past, when the previous goddess of magic perished, no Spellplague resulted. I believe other factors contributed to the virulence of what finally occurred. I believe the Traitor's escape, timed uncannily close to Mystra's murder, was an additional constituent that co-generated the Spellplague."

  Raidon heard the words, but their meanings did not distract him from an image of Ailyn playing in the courtyard with a passel of tame city cats.

  The golem's voice droned on. "On the other hand, the disaster the Keepers of the Cerulean Sign most feared, the appearance of the Abolethic Sovereignty, never materialized. But perhaps our error was in assuming the Sovereignty would immediately return. Perhaps the Spellplague was a necessary ingredient, required to condition reality enough to permit the great old aboleths' return. Perhaps the Year of Blue Fire was so virulent that it reactivated previously dormant fossil dimensions…"

  "Raidon, are you listening?" demanded Cynosure.

  The monk followed Ailyn through several more happy memories, a path that concluded at a clay marker with his daughter's lonely name stenciled on it.

  "Leave me, Cynosure," he murmured. "I grieve."

  No further word emerged from the air. Raidon was alone with his loss.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Green Siren on the Sea of Fallen Stars

  What infantile game is Behroun playing, wondered Japheth.

  A porthole leaked watery daylight into the warlock's cramped cabin. A ratty travel duffel lay next to him on the cot. Japheth's things lay scattered from the duffel's open mouth. Empty vials, elixirs, crushed essences of this and that, and his other tools littered the rumpled blanket. A large travel chest sat opposite the cot and took up a majority of the cabin's floor space. He'd had it delivered from the hold to his room, claiming it was his own. The chest's side was stenciled with the Marhana crest.

  No one had connected the "ghost attack" with the bulky piece of luggage open before him.

  No one except Japheth. He had watched the altercation of a few hours earlier unfold in a daze, but that was normal when walking the crimson road. It was just that detachment from reality that e
nhanced a walker's sensitivity to psychic and spiritual phenomena. Thus he'd seen the shadowy figure rise out of the hold. He'd observed when it was struck down by Captain Thoster's war wizard.

  When the apparition shriveled beneath Seren's magical attack, his augmented vision noted a spark of blue fire zip away from where the shape disintegrated. Despite Seren's spell of seeing, she missed the fleeting movement. But Japheth saw the flame plunge into the side of a large chest in the hold.

  Once the hubbub, inquiry, and heated recriminations by fearful crew died down, Japheth descended into the hold to see into which chest the spark had fled.

  The chest turned out to be the property of Marhana Shipping.

  Behroun hired Japheth to aid Captain Thoster, but also to gather intelligence about Thoster's privateer enterprise to make certain the pirate wasn't cheating Behroun out of more than could be overlooked. Lord Marhana had also apparently sent along a second spy, this one to keep tabs on Japheth himself.

  Oddly, the spy Behroun had selected was Lord Marhana's own sister.

  The warlock gazed into the open chest at a sleeping girl's features, loose and smooth as she lay nestled amid clothing and waterskins. Bits of food and other detritus lay in the chest with her-she'd obviously been living inside for several days.

  Japheth would never have guessed the girl… what was her name? Anusha! Japheth wouldn't have guessed Anusha had the proper mental mindset to become a spy. Impossible as it seemed, he couldn't deny the evidence of his eyes: Anusha possessed the same shape as the dark, burning silhouette he'd seen three times now, the last just hours ago when Seren had somehow discorporated the menacing image. If Anusha was its source, he supposed it was lucky she hadn't died in the psychic backlash. On the other hand, perhaps she was hurt in some mental fashion Japheth couldn't overtly observe; he hadn't been able to wake her by saying her name aloud or shaking her.

  The warlock had vaguely noticed the girl around the Marhana estate over the last few years, without really paying her too much mind. Lately he noted she had started dressing more like a woman than a child. And why not? She had grown. She must be at least twenty years, come to think of it. An adult, despite how Behroun seemed to treat her. Looking back, he supposed she was held back from the rights and responsibilities of true adulthood, as the children of the privileged often were. If she had been born into the circumstances most faced across Faerыn, she would already be about her chosen trade in a journeyman's capacity, possibly even married and caring for children of her own.

  Japheth said, "Anusha, wake up!" She stirred slightly, but did not open her eyes.

  She wasn't unattractive. Now that he thought back, he remembered she had essayed a few awkward attempts to engage Japheth in conversation. He'd always cut those moments short. The warlock disliked Behroun so much that he'd instinctively backed away from any interaction with the man's younger sibling.

  When he'd thought about her at all, he'd assumed she was a lonely girl to be pitied for her isolation, nothing more. He'd been proved wrong. Her apparent role at Marhana Manor must have been an elaborate ruse to fool anyone who had business with Behroun that Anusha was harmless.

  Japheth continued to study her.

  He never suspected Anusha might be spellscarred.

  "Time to see what you have to say for yourself," he muttered as he snagged a blue vial from the litter of eccentric objects on his cot.

  He popped the vial's stopper and poured its fizzing contents into the girl's mouth. The scent of honey and orange blossoms filled the restricted cabin. He was unconcerned she would choke on the fluid, despite her slumber. It was an elixir of healing; he could not harm her with the fluid even if he wanted to.

  Anusha's eyes opened, bleary and wincing away from the light. She blinked a few times, and then tracked around until she focused on Japheth. Her brows knit, as if someone had just posed her a riddle she couldn't quite solve.

  Japheth said, "Hello in there. Anusha, isn't it?"

  "Uh…" she said, her voice cracking with disuse.

  "I must admit, you fooled me. I am in awe of your theatric skill. Still, the job Behroun set you in this ship to accomplish is done. Now that I know you're aboard, you'll not catch me unaware of your scrutiny again. Not that I had planned on double-crossing Behroun… though his mistrust wounds me."

  "W-what?"

  Japheth plunged forward. "What I find far more intriguing is how you pursue your spycraft. How long have you been spellscarred? I didn't think you were caught in the initial wave-of course, if you had been, you would be grossly disfigured, I suppose."

  "Spellscarred?"

  The girl continued to play her role, so well in fact that Japheth wondered if one or more of his assumptions were incorrect.

  Despite himself, he reached out and said, "Let me help you out of there, eh? Then you can tell me your side of things. How your brother put you up to it and all that."

  Anusha tried to sit up, groaned, and fell back.

  "Take my hand," said Japheth, his palm still proffered.

  Anusha took it, and he pulled her into a sitting position. Her fingers were cool and slightly clammy. She relinquished his grip, coughed, ran a hand through her tangled hair, and… blushed?

  She said, "F-first, you're wrong. Behroun didn't send me. I came on my own; he doesn't know I'm here. This is probably the last place he'll think to look for me. He's a toad."

  "A toad?"

  "He doesn't care anything about me-only if I can help him get adopted into New Sarshel's lineage of noble Houses. Without me to back up his claim, there's no way they'll let him join their cozy club."

  "I see," said Japheth, though he did not. "So why are you here, if he did not set you to spy on me?"

  "I had to go somewhere!" She threw up her hands. "Behroun was trying to send me away to the country; he thinks assassins are after me." She snorted.

  "Assassins that have a strange, ghostlike silhouette, perhaps?"

  She looked down and said, "Yes."

  Japheth waited a moment then asked, "A shape you call to do your bidding am I right? Some sort of spirit of the air that answers and reports to you?"

  "No, that shape is me," she blurted, looking directly into his eyes for a moment, then glancing down again. "The shape is… my dream self. I dream myself out into the world, leaving my sleeping body behind. Usually no one can see me. Except for you. And a guard dog on this ship. And… people can see my reflection."

  "You're a wizard then, despite your tender years, able to cast spells of scrying." "No, I-"

  "Perhaps you have applied yourself to the mental arts and have learned psionic, remote viewing?"

  "Nothing like that!" she protested. "No, it just happened one night. I was having a dream. One of those dreams where you know you are dreaming? And I saw you."

  "Me?" He forgot his follow-up inquiry about how Behroun intended to communicate with her while she spied.

  "Yes. I was lost in the city I thought a dreamscape. Then I saw you, and I followed you. I thought it was all inside my own head. You walked into an old curio shop, and, um…"

  The warlock realized she had seen him purchase traveler's dust. Unexpectedly, a sliver of shame touched him. It was his turn to blush.

  "Anyhow," said Anusha, "when you left the shop, I followed you back to Behroun's office. I saw you… agree to Lord Marhana's demand. I thought it was all a fantasy of sleep. Then I discovered everything I witnessed actually happened. I was seeing the waking world."

  Japheth looked at the girl with narrowed eyes. He said, "I don't understand."

  Anusha shook her head. "You think I do? It just happened to me. I took a nap, and next thing I knew, I was dreaming myself into the world!"

  "Have you had any contact with spellplague?"

  She shook her head, but her eyes grew thoughtful. Anusha said, "No, but I've been beset by dreams of burning blue. Isn't that how it looks?"

  Japheth nodded. "I think my assessment is correct. You are spellscarred."

 
The girl shuddered. She said, "The one thing I know for certain is that I saw Behroun when he didn't know I was watching. He is an awful man."

  "He has his peculiarities," offered Japheth diplomatically. The girl was a sibling of Lord Marhana, even if only by one parent. And she still could be spinning a great yarn and secretly working with her half brother.

  "He is a killer, and I hate him," she declared, staring at Japheth as if challenging him to say differently.

  The warlock changed tactics. "So you… 'woke' to strange new abilities and learned your brother was a bastard, who-"

  "Literally a bastard," she interrupted.

  "Yes, right," he sighed. "My question, then, is merely this: how is it that I find you stuffed, of your own accord apparently, into a travel chest on a ship of freebooters allied with your oh-so-hateful half brother?"

  "I told you! He was trying to send me away, out of the city. I decided I would go, but somewhere of my own choosing. Somewhere he would never think to look for me. Somewhere I could see things I was never allowed to even imagine while I was kept safe in my suite. Since I can dreamwalk, I thought I could mingle even with pirates and stay safe."

  "You sought adventure? I hate to break it to you, but the stories about the exploits of heroes leave out-"

  "That's only half of it!" she snapped. "Mostly, I was worried. I wanted to see what Behroun is so excited about. I wanted to know what sort of deal he's going to make with pirates and who knows what else. I'm still loyal to my family name, you know, even if everyone treats me like I'm a child. If Behroun means to do something to drag the Marhana name through tar, I intend to stop him."

  "Hmm," mused Japheth. He hadn't expected that sentiment. Perhaps she wasn't as emotionally-shallow as he'd initially assumed.

  Japheth said aloud, "If your words are not lies to blind me-"

  He raised his hand to silence her protest.

  "Why are you on board this ship physically at all? If you can dreamwalk, why didn't you just send your dream self to the ship? If we sink, you could have awakened safely on land. Now you'll go down with the rest of us."