by Paul S. Kemp
“We are leaving,” Riven said. “Cale, think.”
“No,” Cale said to him, his eyes on the shadows arrowing toward them, the giants stalking across the meadow. “I am finishing this.”
He felt Riven staring at him, into him.
“No,” Riven said.
The darkness around Cale whirled. “No?”
Riven’s good eye narrowed. “No.”
Four giants stepped through the shadows and materialized before Cale and Riven, huge blades held high.
Before Cale could brandish Weaveshear, he felt a flash of warmth as the magic of Riven’s teleportation ring took hold. He tried to resist it, failed, and Riven transported them across Faerûn.
Three hours after Reht’s army entered the storm, the rain turned to a downpour, the wind to a gale. The scouts stopped returning word back to the lines. Perhaps they had gotten lost. The army was marching blind and the men were edgy. Reht could sense it.
Dawn had come but the storm put a blanket between the earth and sky. What little sunlight penetrated the swirling clouds and rain served only to gild the abnormality of the earth under the storm with a lurid glow. The wind pulled at Reht’s cloak. His mount tossed her head and whinnied into the storm. He rode a little behind his men in the center of the line, bent against the rain, clutching his cloak closed, his mount sinking into the sloppy earth. The air seemed to pull at him. He felt his strength diminishing.
The line of his army extended a bowshot in either direction but even under the effect of a spell that granted him darkvision he could see little more than the score or so men to his immediate left and right. The shadows and rain swallowed the rest.
“Tighten up the line,” he shouted at two of the runners who lingered near him. “Pass it to the commanders.”
“Aye,” the runners said. They saluted and galloped off, one to the left, one to the right, shouting to tighten up the line. The wind, rain, and darkness soon ate their voices and Reht lost sight of them.
“How can we fight in this?” Reht said to no one in particular. “The air itself is an enemy.”
The line gradually tightened, the men crowding more closely together. Reht could see maybe three score men, all of them squinting against the rain and magical darkness. Many had blades drawn, though there was no visible enemy.
The cold seeped into Reht’s bones. Mennick, Kelgar, and several more runners rode beside him. Reht looked at their shadowed faces and saw blue lips, pale skin, and uncertain eyes.
Lightning painted the fog green. Thunder boomed and their horses reared and neighed. Men cursed. He steadied his mount with effort.
“Steady men!” he shouted. “Steady!”
The darkness and rain played havoc with his perception. He frequently saw movement at the edge of his vision, ominous hints of creatures or men, but moving forward they found nothing. Shouts from his men sounded from out in the blackness, faint and distant. His men, too, were seeing ghosts, or becoming ghosts.
“The Shadovar cannot turn us back with wind and darkness,” Kelgar shouted, though the shadows hollowed out his words. A few “ayes” answered the big warpriest, but most of the men continued forward in sullen silence.
“This is uncanny,” said Mennick, though Reht barely heard his voice. Mennick pointed. “Look at the trees.”
Stands of trees materialized out of the darkness. Leafless, skeletal, their limbs stuck out of the boles at twisted, agonized angles. Their dry boughs rattled in the wind. The men pointed and murmured.
Mennick steered his horse close to Reht’s side and spoke in a tone only Reht could hear.
“Do you feel the air, Commander? It has changed. As the storm grows stronger, the air seems to steal strength. I find it hard to breathe. Do you feel it?”
Reht nodded.
“The deeper we move in, the worse it is becoming.”
Reht looked the mage in the eye and saw concern there. The nervous seed in Reht’s stomach sprouted leaves.
“We’ve made a mistake,” he said.
The storm was not Shadovar magic. It was something else entirely, something not of Faerûn, and he had led his men right into it.
“Halt,” he said, but his voice broke. He turned to the runners, cleared his throat, kept his voice steady. “Halt! We are calling a halt and turning around. Do it now!”
“Commander …” Kelgar said.
Reht threw back his hood and stared at the warpriest. “You see what this is as clearly as I. There are no Shadovar here, priest. This is something else and we need to get clear of it. Now, follow your orders.”
Kelgar stared back, nodded. “Aye, General.”
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to get out,” Mennick said.
To that, Reht said nothing. He did not know either.
Word spread but slowly in the rain, in the darkness. The line stopped at last and reorganized for a march out of the storm. Horns sounded, their clarion strangely muffled.
“On the double quick!” Reht said to his runners. “Pass it on!”
“The scouts?” Mennick asked, his horse blinking in the rain.
They had not had word in hours. The scouts were either lost or … something else. Reht shook his head, refusing to give voice to his concerns.
“They will have to catch up with us.”
Mennick nodded, and looked back into the darkness.
Orders carried through the pitch, the men prepping to move out on the double quick. The rain abated and some of the men cheered. The darkness, however, remained unrelenting.
Reht found the absence of rain more ominous than comforting. Black mist curled around the muddy ground, around the twisted dead trees, and around the nervous hooves of their horses, who pranced and neighed. For the first time, Reht realized that he had not seen a wild animal in hours. He stilled his heart and forced calm into his voice.
“On the double quick! Move!”
The wind at their backs swallowed the last of his order as it picked up, howled, and took on a strange keening. The line lurched forward as the cold deepened. Reht’s teeth chattered and the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. He felt eyes on him, looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing save the darkness. His instincts screamed at him to run, told him that something unforgiving out there in the darkness was coming for him. He saw the same sentiment reflected in the alarmed faces around him.
They were moving too slowly.
“On the double quick! On the double quick, damn it!”
“There!” someone shouted, the word nearly lost in the wind. “There!”
Shouts erupted along the line and carried through the black. Reht turned in his saddle to see thousands of coal red points of light floating in the darkness, as numerous as the stars.
Eyes.
The darkness was coming for them.
The keening sounded again, a mistuned longflute, and Reht realized it was not the wind. It was the creatures, shrieking at them, closing on them.
“Around and hold formation!” he shouted, and hated himself for the tremor in his voice. “Around and hold!”
The shouts of commanders carried through the darkness, echoing his words. Horns sounded again, making a cacophony with the keening.
The army scrambled into formation as the wind turned to a gale and the creatures sped toward them. A few men deserted, fled with their horses at a dead run. Reht cursed them for cowards.
Armor chinked, men cursed, and weapons were readied. Hundreds of crossbows and bows twanged. A swarm of bolts and arrows flew into the darkness at the eyes, veering wildly in the wind. The creatures wailed again, apparently unharmed, and closed. Soul deadening cold went before them.
Reht drew his blade, readied his shield. His magically augmented vision allowed him to distinguish the creatures as they neared, but barely. Vaguely humanoid in shape and composed of living shadow, they rode the wind and flew like arrow shots through the night. Red eyes glowed with malice.
“Shadows!” Kelgar shouted, and
clanged his blade on his shield.
The darkness deepened as the throng of shadows closed. Some darted into the earth and disappeared. Others flew high and circled around the army. Still others flew directly for them. There were still more behind the initial wave, so numerous they blotted out the storm. They seemed unending, filling the air with their cold, their shrieks, their hate.
They hit Reht’s army and men and horses began to scream. Beside Reht, Kelgar roared a battle cry and galloped into the shadows. A lightning bolt shot from the war priest’s outstretched hand as he charged the undead. Two other Talassans followed him, whooping battle cries.
“Hold your ground, dammit! Hold!”
The darkness prevented a large-scale organized response and the battle turned into a series of isolated melees. Shadows darted in and out of Reht’s field of vision, merging with the darkness in the air. Red eyes flashed past him, around him, over him, under him. He slashed and stabbed at any within reach, heard the men near him do the same. His horse reared, kicked, whinnied.
He and a dozen other men formed a circle, but it proved useless. The incorporeal shadows moved as freely through the earth as through the air. He and his men were attacked from all sides no matter their formation. The cold hand of panic gripped some of the men, more.
Magical globes of light formed in the darkness but lasted only moments before the shadows blotted them out. Screams sounded from all directions, muted shrieks, all of it an eerily beautiful symphony for the dying.
Reht’s mount neighed and bucked as a throng of shadows burst from the ground under it. The movement threw Reht, and he hit the ground in a clatter of steel. His mount wheeled, nearly trampled him, and darted off in a panic.
Reht scrambled to his knees, to his feet, slashing, shouting. Men fought and died beside him, around him. The shadows nearest him focused their dead, glowing eyes on him and in the otherwise blank holes of their faces he was able to distinguish features.
“Lorgan?”
His fellow commander’s expression wrinkled with hate. Reht saw other faces he recognized and understood what had happened to Lorgan and his men.
And what would happen to Reht and his.
“Find peace, old friend,” Reht said, and charged Lorgan.
Lorgan shrieked and his features dissolved again into indistinguishable darkness. Other shadows darted in close, reached through Reht’s shield and armor, cooled his flesh, diminished his soul. He screamed, and slashed at Lorgan. His enchanted blade bit Lorgan’s shadowy form and sent streamers of deeper darkness boiling away into the air, but Lorgan reached into Reht’s chest and nearly stopped his heart. Reht staggered backward, gasping, his vision blurred.
In the distance, he heard the sound of chanting, the Talassans calling upon the power of their god to fight the undead. Reht glanced around, saw men and horses dead and dying all around him. He heard their shouts, screams, and whinnies, but he felt isolated, alone in a cyst of darkness warring against his own personal shadows.
The surrounding sounds diminished then went silent. He heard only his own labored breathing, his grunts as he swung his blade, and the sound of his own heartbeat keeping time in his ears. He slashed, backed away, stabbed, twisted, stabbed again. Shadows emerged from the ground and passed into and through him. Others flew, heedlessly, at and through his blade, reached into his chest to his lungs and heart, stole his breath, his strength. He staggered, still breathing, still fighting. He looked around for a mount, any mount, saw none. He tripped over a corpse and fell on his back.
Shadows swarmed him. He felt so cold he could not breathe, felt his heart slow. He saw Lorgan’s face in one of the shadows over him, Enken’s on another, both of them caricatures of the living men they once were.
They reached for him. He felt himself drifting, floating. He reached for the maps at his side, thinking of his father, and the cartographer to whom he should have been apprenticed, the life he should have led. Cold filled him and he gasped. He could not see anything but red eyes and darkness.
He died thinking of maps and regrets.
He rose thinking of hate.
CHAPTER THREE
2 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms
Cale and Riven materialized on the Wayrock, outside the Temple of Mask. Sunlight, alien after the darkness of the storm, cast the temple’s shadow out before it. Cale and Riven stood within the column of darkness. Rain dripped from their cloaks.
Both men turned and looked back toward Sembia but the Shadowstorm was too far away to see. Cale saw only the rocky ledges of the Wayrock and the boundless blue-gray of the sea. White clouds dotted the sky. There was no indication of the black lesion spreading across Sembia, across Faerûn.
Still staring into the distance, Cale said to Riven, “Never do that again.”
Riven, too, stared over the sea. “I do what needs done, Cale. Get clear on that. I’ll do it again next time, and the time after that. You don’t get to give up.”
The truth in Riven’s words stung. Cale faced him. “I wasn’t giving up.”
Riven said nothing. He didn’t need to. Cale sighed, looked away. He was tired and did not understand how Riven was not.
“How do you keep fighting, Riven? Why? Not for Sembia.”
Riven made a dismissive gesture. “No. Not for Sembia.”
“Then?”
Riven tapped the holy symbol he wore around his neck, the black disc. “This is why. Mask wants Kesson Rel dead and his divinity returned to him. That is enough of a why. Should be enough for you, too.”
Cale stared at the disc, at Riven’s face. “It’s not.”
“Then find something that is. This is a long way from over.”
Cale shook his head. “You don’t understand. You can’t.”
Riven stared at him for a moment. “You’re tired. I see that.”
Cale looked Riven in the eye, grateful for even that little bit of shared understanding.
“Yes. I’m tired.”
Riven’s face did not change expression. “It’s a lot of weight.”
“It is.”
“Bear it. We can only see this through together. You see that, yes? Find a way to stay with it.” When Cale said nothing, Riven went on, “Cale, you didn’t kill Jak. You didn’t. And you didn’t take Magadon’s soul, and you didn’t make that Uskevren boy join with the Shadovar. You’re carrying weight that is not yours to bear. No damned wonder you’re tired.”
Cale heard the words, heard the sense in them, but they did nothing to ease the burdens he bore. Safe, far from you. That was what his god had said to him.
“Let’s go,” he said and started up the drawbridge.
Magadon stepped out of the darkness of the temple’s interior and appeared in the archway. The mind mage looked as thin and dried out as an old stick, wan, with circles the color of bruises under his eyes.
“Mags,” Cale said, and tried not to wince at Magadon’s appearance.
Riven’s two dogs bolted through the archway past the mind mage and for their master, a blur of brown fur and wagging tails. Riven knelt to meet them, rubbed heads and sides. They growled playfully and jumped on him.
Magadon walked up to Cale, wavering in his stride like a drunk. He looked even paler in the light.
“You all right, Mags?” Cale asked.
“I want off this island, Cale,” he said. “Now.”
Each time Magadon said “Cale” instead of “Erevis,” Cale felt it like a punch in the stomach. He and Riven shared a look. Riven stood and pointed at the temple.
“Go on,” he said, and the dogs darted back inside. To Magadon, he said, “You don’t look well.”
“That’s because I’m not.”
“Then why leave the island now?” Riven asked. “Stay. Get better.”
Cale saw anger in the crease between Magadon’s eyes, quickly suppressed.
“My own affair,” Magadon said.
“Is that right?” Riven said.
Cale reached out to touch Magad
on’s shoulder. The mind mage recoiled but Cale persisted, taking his thin shoulder in hand.
“Listen, Mags. Kesson Rel is here, in Faerûn. He opened a rift. The Calyx is pouring through. It’s rolling across Sembia.”
A spark touched tinder in Magadon’s white eyes and something kindled there. Cale decided to take it as hope and was pleased to see it.
“Where? We’ve got to kill him, Cale. I can use the Source to …”
He stopped, white eyes wide, perhaps realizing he’d said too much. He took a step back, and his gaze darted about, as if looking for an escape.
“The Source?” Cale and Riven said in unison.
Magadon licked his lips, steadied himself.
Cale spoke softly. “What are you talking about, Mags?”
Riven did not speak softly. “We nearly died taking you out of the Source. The Hells if you’re using it for anything again. The Hells if you’re leaving this island. You’re not yourself. You’ll wait—”
Magadon’s face contorted with rage. He emitted a roar and bounded forward for Riven, hands reaching as if for the assassin’s throat.
Riven put a short, sharp kick in Magadon’s gut and the mind mage doubled over at his feet, gasping, coughing, retching.
“Damn it,” Cale said to both of them.
Nayan and Vyrhas materialized out of the shadows in the archway of the temple.
“It’s all right,” Cale said to them, and waved them back. “Go, Nayan. It’s all right.”
The shadowwalker looked at Magadon, at Cale, then at Riven. He nodded, bowed, and melded back into the darkness.
Magadon recovered his breath and rose to his knees. He glared at Riven and an orange glow formed around his head, rage leaking from his skull.
Riven had a blade at his throat in a breath.
“I feel a tingle in my head, Mags, and I open your throat. I mean it.”
