by Paul S. Kemp
“Keep moving,” he said.
The wind kicked up, moaned.
“That’s not the wind,” Riven said, his eye narrowed.
The three men stopped and closed the distance between them. Shadows swirled around both Cale and Rivalen.
The moans, prolonged and agonized, sounded distant, muted, as if heard through thick stone walls. Cale looked around, up, and down. He stared at the black ground beneath his feet.
“Dark,” he said.
“Ready yourselves,” Rivalen said, his holy symbol dangling on its chain from his left hand. “Not all life is gone from this place. Not yet.”
As if summoned by his words, the spirits of the dead rose from the corpse of Ephyras. Hundreds, thousands of gray, translucent forms floated out of the barren earth all around them and filled the sky. Their forms were humanlike, though slighter, with elongated heads and tiny ears. Their overlarge eyes were as dead and hollow as their world. Despairing moans issued from the holes of their mouths.
They were everywhere.
“Spectres,” Rivalen said, and started to cast a spell.
Haunted, despair-filled faces fixed on the three men. The specters’ miens twisted with hate and the moans turned from agonized to rage-filled.
Cale reached through Rivalen’s shadows and grabbed him by the cloak, interrupting the casting.
“We cannot fight this many. We hold them at bay and keep moving. The temple is why we’re here.”
Rivalen’s eyes flashed with anger for a moment before he nodded.
Cale held his mask in a sweaty hand, and the shadows around Rivalen’s flesh curled around it. Riven empowered his blades until they bled shadows. The specters swarmed forward from all sides, a fog of dead souls so thick it obscured their vision.
Cale held Weaveshear forth in both hands, called upon Mask, and channeled divine power through the blade. Shadows poured from it, expanded, and formed a hemisphere of translucent darkness around the three men, under their feet.
Cale braced himself as the specters crashed into it by the tens, by the hundreds. He staggered under the onslaught and the sphere began to collapse inward. The moans and wails grew louder.
One of the specters stuck his hand through the sphere, tore open a gash about as long as a short sword, and started to squirm through. Hundreds of others lined up behind him, screaming, clawing at one another to get through.
Rivalen bounded forward, blades whirling. He caught the specter halfway through, and slashed it across the arms and shoulders. He dived under its incorporeal touch, drove both sabres up through its chest, and it dissipated with a dying moan. The other specters tried pushing through the hole.
“Rivalen!” Cale shouted, and held out his left hand, his shadow hand.
Rivalen took it in his own, called upon Shar and joined his power to Cale’s, to Mask’s. The sphere darkened and the gash resealed, severing in twain a specter caught halfway through the opening.
“Keep moving!” Cale said. He tried to ignore the unexpected kinship he felt with Rivalen. The divine power they each channeled meshed comfortably, much more so than Cale had ever felt when joining his power with Jak’s. Cale chose not to ponder what it might mean.
The specters thronged around the hemisphere. Their moans drowned out the wind and their forms nearly blotted out visibility. Twisted faces, malformed mouths, and dead eyes pressed against the barrier. Cale had to peer through and past their translucent forms to keep his bearings. The intermittent flashes of lightning helped.
They moved as rapidly as they could, attracting more and more specters as they went. Sweat beaded Cale’s brow and dripped into his eyes. Rivalen said nothing, merely gritted his teeth, held his holy symbol aloft, and joined his power to Cale’s. Shadows poured from both of them to replenish the hemisphere as it weakened here or there.
The press of the undead caused Cale’s head to ache. His body weakened with each step. His breath came hard. He felt like he was yoked to a wagon.
“I am failing,” Cale said.
Riven pulled threads of darkness from the air, spiraled them around his fingers, and touched them to Cale. Healing energy poured into him, refreshed his mind, renewed his strength.
“Holding?” Riven asked.
“For now.”
Cale looked at Rivalen, who also looked strained.
“Do what you can for him, too,” Cale said.
“The Hells with him,” Riven said softly.
“If he dies, we die. I cannot do this alone.”
Riven frowned, went to Rivalen’s side, and touched the prince with healing energy. He didn’t wait for thanks or acknowledgement, and Rivalen offered neither.
The hemisphere shrank incrementally as they moved across a desert of bones and ruins. The moans of the specters wormed through Cale’s ears to his skull, causing his temples to pound. The ground vibrated with the distant rumble of collapsing earth.
“What the Hells is that?” Riven asked, bracing himself against another tremor.
Cale could hardly see through the strain, the sweat, could hardly hear through the wind and moans. “How close are we, Riven? We cannot hold this much longer.”
As if to prove his point, one side of the hemisphere collapsed, pressed in like a squeezed waterskin. He and Rivalen both groaned, sagged, channeled what power they had left.
The specters swarmed, but the border of divine power held—misshapen, failing, but intact for the moment. The moans of despair turned to wails of frustration.
Riven moved to the edge of the barrier and peered through the darkness, through the specters. Only the veil of Cale and Rivalen’s power separated the assassin from hundreds of undead. The specters, driven mad by the proximity of their prey, scrabbled against the hemisphere, moaning desperately.
“I see it.” Riven gave a start, went pale. “Dark, Cale. The world is disappearing behind it.”
Again the ground shook under their feet. Cale had no time to ponder Riven’s words. “We’re out of time. We use the shadows. I will take us. Rivalen, hold as long as you can. I need only a moment.”
Shadows churned around Rivalen but he nodded. Darkness poured from his holy symbol, supporting the shrinking hemisphere.
Cale ceased lending his power to the support of the barrier. The release elicited a strained grunt from Rivalen. The hemisphere shrank in on them. The specters pounded against it like mad things.
Cale peered through them, looked in the direction Riven had indicated.
He saw it in a depression below them—a temple.
The whole of it was composed of smoky quartz streaked with veins of black. A dome capped the structure. Spires stood at each corner, just more bones of the dead jutting from Ephyras’s dust. Long threads of shadow weaved in an out of columns, arched windows, statues. Closed double doors faced toward them. Cale was surprised to see the temple intact. The fact that it stood whole on an otherwise dead world struck him as somehow obscene. Magic—or something else—must have preserved it.
Beyond it, he saw what Riven had seen. The earth fell away. A black hole several bowshots in diameter yawned in the earth, a void in the world. The ground immediately around the hole slowly turned, like the flow of water around the edge of a maelstrom. It cracked, crumbled, sent up a cloud of dust, collapsed into the hole that was eating the world. It was getting larger as it fed.
He wondered if there were other such holes on Ephyras, other voids devouring the world.
“Transport us!” shouted Rivalen.
Cale pulled his eyes from the hole and drew the darkness about them. For a moment, he considered leaving Rivalen behind. He looked back, met Rivalen’s gaze, and saw in the Shadovar’s golden eyes that he realized what Cale was thinking. Cale saw no fear there.
Cale included Rivalen in the shadows he gathered. They would need him to defeat Kesson Rel. The darkness deepened around them as Rivalen shouted, fell, and the sphere collapsed entirely. The specters swarmed them, arms outstretched. Their touch reached through a
rmor and flesh, cooled bones, slowed hearts, stole life. They filled the air, turned the already cold breeze frigid.
Cale held his focus in the midst of the chaos and rode the shadows to the temple, Riven and Rivalen in tow.
Regg mounted Firstlight so that his company could more easily see him. She remained calm despite the rain, thunder, and the onrushing Shadowstorm. Regg turned his back to the darkness to face his company, knowing as he looked upon them that all of them would die in the darkness and some would rise again as shadows. In the distance, Sakkors hovered in its cloak of ink.
Regg did not shout. He did not draw his blade. He spoke only loud enough to be heard over the rain. As he spoke, Roen and the priests moved from soldier to soldier, using spells and wands of pale birch to ward the men and women against the life draining power of the Shadowstorm. A flash of soft rose-hued light denoted the wards taking effect.
“Turn and look,” Regg said to his company. “See the men and women and children you are bound to protect.”
As one they turned, looked down on the Saerbian refugees huddled in their wagons and blankets against wind and rain, against evil and darkness.
“That is why we fight,” Regg said. “They need time. It is their only hope. We must give it to them.”
He patted Firstlight’s neck and dismounted.
“Go,” he told her, and swatted her flank. “Bear someone to safety.”
She nuzzled him then trotted off to rejoin the rest of the company’s horses.
Regg nodded at Trewe and the young soldier sounded his horn to signal the march. Heads emerged from wagons, tents, and carts. Hope animated the gazes of the refugees, though fear lurked behind it. Shouts carried over the rain—well-wishes. A small boy stood at the back of his cart, soaked by the rain, one hand in a trouser pocket, the other raised in farewell. He didn’t wave, just held a hand aloft, as still as a statue.
Regg returned the gesture, turned, and led his company on foot toward the darkness.
“That is why we fight,” Trewe said from beside him.
The lightning framed the silhouette of a horseman on a rise to the right of the company—Abelar on Swiftdawn. He held his blade in hand and with it, formally saluted them.
Thunder boomed.
Every blade of every man and woman in the company came from its scabbard and returned the salute as they passed and marched into darkness.
Abelar sat his saddle in the rain and watched his company march on the double quick toward the Shadowstorm. He felt drawn after them, pulled by the faith that had been his companion for years. But his love for Elden tethered him to the camp. He could not abandon his son again. Elden couldn’t take it. And neither could Abelar.
But he feared he could not take abandoning his company either.
He watched the company until darkness and the rain began to swallow them. They looked tiny, insignificant as they marched into the black wall of the Shadowstorm. He tried to catch their silhouettes in the frequent flashes of lightning but eventually lost them to the smear of night.
The Shadowstorm roiled and churned, as if eager for their arrival. Abelar had his doubts that mere men would be able to slow it. But he had no doubt that they had to try. He would hold out hope.
He dismounted Swiftdawn, took her to the outskirts of the camp where the company’s other horses gathered, heads low, whickering in the storm. He rubbed Firstlight’s nose. The other horses neighed, pranced nervously. Perhaps they smelled coming battle in the wind.
“Keep the rest of the horses calm,” he said to Swiftdawn and Firstlight. “We may need them yet.”
Both horses tossed their heads and neighed.
If he had to, Abelar would do as Regg had sugggested. He would put every refugee he could on the company’s mounts and charge them over the Stonebridge. The Shadovar would resist, but perhaps some would get through.
After seeing to the horses’ needs, he left them and walked through the rain among the Saerbians, asking after their spirits, calming them with his presence. They smiled gratefully for his attention and asked Lathander to bless him. He looked off in the distance, in the direction of his company, and felt unworthy of blessings.
A young mother with a child at her breast looked up at him from out of a rain soaked tent. Rain pressed her brown hair to her head. Tears streaked her thin, wan face.
“Will we make it to Daerlun, Abelar Corrinthal?”
Abelar looked at her, at the suckling child, and found that his throat would not dislodge words. He nodded, forced a smile he did not feel, and turned back into the rain.
Frustration bubbled up in him, needing release. He wanted to shout his anger into the sky but held it in for fear of alarming the refugees. Instead, he walked the camp with clenched fists and clenched jaw, until he regained control of himself.
When he had, he fixed hope on his face and returned to his covered wagon, found Endren and Elden within. Elden’s brown eyes brightened when Abelar entered.
“Papa!”
He hugged Elden while Endren looked a question at him. Abelar shook his head in answer. Endren sagged.
“You all wight, Papa?”
“I’m all right,” Abelar said to his son, and cradled his head.
But he was not. Nothing was all right. His body was with his son but his thoughts kept returning to his company.
Cale, Riven, and Rivalen materialized in a dust-choked courtyard. The ground shook and Cale imagined the earth upon which the temple stood cracking, crumbling, falling into the annihilating hole devouring the world.
“All right?” he asked Riven, and the assassin nodded.
“As am I,” Rivalen said, though Cale had not asked.
They did not have much time. In the distance, he heard the moans of thousands of specters. The undead would find them, if the world did not end first.
A sculpture of glistening black stone dominated the courtyard. It depicted a tall, faceless woman in flowing robes. A circle of tarnished silver, ringed in amethysts, adorned her breast.
Before her in a fighting crouch stood a shorter male figure, a man clad in a long cloak. Leather armor peaked from under the cloak and he held a slim blade in each hand. A black disc adorned his chest.
The three men stared at the statue a long while, the implications freezing them in place. Shock stole anything Cale might have wanted to say. He heard his heart in his ears. Riven and Rivalen, too, seemed dumbfounded.
The shaking ground and the roar of a collapsing world roused them from stupor.
“How?” Riven said. “Is that …? That cannot be right.”
Cale just shook his head, staring at the statue, seeing in the male figure the form of the god he had faced in an alley in Selgaunt.
It could not be what it appeared to be.
Rivalen glided forward to the statue, and the shadows around him stilled. He stared at the sculpture for a time then whispered a prayer. Kneeling, he brushed dirt and dust away from a pedestal of silvery metal to reveal engraved words, weathered by age. He waved a hand over the letters, mouthed a couplet, and his magic undid the weathering. The writing appeared clear against the stone.
Cale didn’t recognize the jagged script and didn’t want to know what it said. The statue was enough. The affinity between his power and Rivalen’s was enough. He needed no more, wanted to know nothing more. He held his mask balled up in his hand. Shadows leaked from between his fingers.
“Do not,” he said, knowing what Rivalen intended.
Rivalen looked over his shoulder, his golden eyes afire.
“How can I not? We must know.”
Cale remembered his discussion with Mask on the Wayrock, remembered what the god had left unsaid.
Do you serve her? Cale had asked.
He didn’t want an answer.
“Why must we know?” Cale asked.
Rivalen smiled, showing fangs. “You know why.”
He cast a spell that Cale recognized as one that would allow the prince to understand any written wo
rds. The ground shook as the magic took effect and the Shadovar prince read aloud.
“The Mistress of Night and the Shadowlord, her … herald.”
The word hung in the gloom, the three men processing the import. Like Ephyras itself, Cale’s world shook, circled the edge of a bottomless hole. The shadows around him whirled and spun.
“Herald?” Riven asked.
Cale tried to keep his feet, his bearings. He clutched his mask so hard it made his fingers ache. “We’ve been played,” he said finally. “Mask and Shar are not enemies. They are allies.”
Riven stared at him, mouth partly open. “No.”
“Riven …”
The assassin shook his head. “No, Cale. No. There is another explanation.”
“What explanation?” Cale said, and darkness shot from his flesh. “We freed Kesson Rel. Kesson Rel caused the Shadowstorm. Mask wanted it all the time. We’ve been duped. He is her herald. Her herald, Riven.”
Riven paced a circle, agitated. He glared at Rivalen as if it were the Shadovar who had betrayed them. “No. Freeing Kesson was an accident. We were supposed to kill him.”
“So we thought,” Cale said. “But Mask knew. He always knows.”
“It’s too much, Cale,” Riven said. “Even for a god. No.”
Cale made a gesture that took in the dead world around them. “This is what we’ve wrought. Look at it. We killed Toril.”
Saying the words placed the weight of what they had done squarely on Cale’s shoulders. He sagged, wanted to sit down, to sleep. He had been trying to become a hero. Instead, he had unwittingly ended the world.
Riven stopped pacing, took a deep breath, a deliberate calm. “I don’t believe it. We’re not seeing something—something fundamental.”
“We see it,” Cale said. “It’s just ugly.”
“We don’t,” Riven insisted. “And stop giving up, damn it. You aren’t what Fleet wanted you to be so you want to quit. To the Hells with Fleet.”
Anger caused the shadows around Cale to whirl. Shame caused his face to warm. He advanced on Riven but his anger faded before he had taken two steps.
