by Paul S. Kemp
“I am not giving up. I just … this is the opposite of what I’ve been trying to do.”
“There is something you have not considered,” Rivalen said, his deep voice cutting through the space between Cale and Riven.
Cale had almost forgotten the Shadovar was present. They looked at him, waited.
“Kesson Rel is a heretic,” Rivalen said. “Shar tolerates him but he does not serve her. She wants me to stop him. If Mask is allied with her, then he wants you to stop him, too.”
Cale nodded at Rivalen’s holy symbol. “How do you know he’s the heretic? Maybe she only tolerates you and it’s Kesson who serves her. Maybe you’ve been played, same as us.”
Rivalen tilted his head to concede the point. “We’ll know soon enough. I intend to drive back the Shadowstorm. He intends the opposite. Which of us prevails is the true servant of the Lady. To succeed, I need you.”
Riven clutched at Rivalen’s words, nodded as if he and the Shadovar were blood brothers. “He’s right. And there’s more to this, Cale. We cannot see it all, but we need to keep faith.”
“Faith,” Cale said, the word bitter and dry in his mouth.
Riven nodded at Rivalen. “He wants to stop the Shadowstorm. You want to stop it. That’s enough. We see it through.”
Cale heard in Riven’s statement an echo of Mask’s words to him back on the Wayrock.
See it through.
Perhaps there was something he could not see. He decided to think so. He had no other course. The alternative was calamitous. To do nothing was to allow the Shadowstorm to spread across Toril, to turn it into Ephyras.
“Faith, then,” he said to Riven, and uncurled his fingers from around his mask. He held it up, looked through the empty eyeholes. “I hope we’re right.”
“We are,” Riven said.
Cale gathered himself, licked the dust of Ephyras from his lips and asked Rivalen, “The weapon we came for is in the temple?”
“Yes, but I do not know where exactly,” Rivalen said.
“Describe it. Or name it.”
With either a description or a name, Cale could divine its location.
The ground shook again. The rumble of crashing earth sounded close. Too close.
“The Black Chalice,” Rivalen said.
Cale and Riven shared a look as the walls of Fate closed in a little closer. The spirit of Avnon Des had told them of the Black Chalice back on the Plane of Shadow, had told them Kesson Rel had drunk of it in defiance of his god.
“The chalice is a weapon?” Cale said.
Rivalen hesitated long enough for Cale to conclude that he either didn’t know or was about to lie.
“A drink from it transforms a Chosen of Mask,” Rivalen said.
Cale had been transformed enough already. “Into what?” Rivalen stared into his face, finally shrugged. “I do not know.”
Riven cursed. “You don’t know? How can you not know?”
Cale held up a hand to forestall anything further. “Doesn’t matter.” They had no choice. He held his mask in hand and spoke the words to a divination. When the spell reached its apex, he spoke the words of the item he sought.
“The Black Chalice.”
The shadows spiraling around Weaveshear coalesced into a single, thick stream and flowed toward the temple. The weapon tugged at his hands, pulled him along. Cale felt like a fish who had just taken the bait.
“Follow me,” he said.
The rain grew worse as Regg and the company approached the border of the Shadowstorm. Lightning veined the sky. Thunder shook the earth. The wall of black loomed, churned, spun. The Shadowstorm became Regg’s world. He could not take his eyes from it.
“Dawn follows night,” he said to himself. “Always.”
Animals fled before the storm as though it were a forest fire—birds, rabbits, deer, foxes. The creatures broke around the company, howling, chittering, squeaking.
Regg said nothing to his company. He didn’t need to. None wavered. They served the Morninglord and feared no darkness.
The wall of the Shadowstorm loomed before them, tangible, a black veil that hung across the world, separating the before from the after. It pulsed and expanded as they watched, lurched forward like a serpent, gulping the land. The grass and trees writhed at its touch, twisted into bleak caricatures of themselves.
“Light!” Regg shouted, and Roen and his priests withdrew wooden wands capped with ivory and held them aloft. Light blazed from the wands’ tips. Magical daylight defied the darkness.
Thunder boomed.
Regg spared a look up and down his line. Men and women faced the darkness with blades and shields bare, light above them, light in their eyes.
“Onward,” he called.
So illuminated, two hundred and fifty servants of the Morninglord breached the Shadowstorm, and Lathander’s light did battle with Shar’s darkness.
The wards on the members of the company shed motes of rosy light as the life-draining darkness of the storm eroded their efficacy. Darkness crowded close around the wands wielded by Roen and his fellows, dimming but not eliminating their luminescence.
Regg had no strategy other than to fight and survive as long as they could. He hoped to draw out the intelligence guiding the storm, give it pause, slow the storm’s advance, and win the Saerbians some extra hours to wait for Cale and Riven to succeed.
The company walked through a rain soaked nightmare land of twisted, wind-stripped trees, and shriveled grass and shrubs. Nothing moved. It was only them and the storm. No one in the company spoke, except to give occasional orders. All had their eyes on the darkness around them.
“There,” said Trewe, and pointed ahead.
Two dozen pairs of red eyes materialized in the darkness before them, rose up out of a copse of twisted trees. They started dim and distant, but grew bright as they closed.
“Shadows,” Regg said.
Trewe’s trumpet did battle with the thunder as two dozen living shadows streaked out of the darkness, red eyes bright with hate. They uttered a high-pitched keening as they closed, the sound enough to raise the hairs on Regg’s neck.
“Roen!” Regg shouted. “Your junior priests with me!”
Four of Roen’s junior priests rushed forward to Regg’s side, their armor clattering.
The shadows shrieked, closed.
Regg held forth his shield, enameled with Lathander’s rose, and the priests brandished their holy symbols. Regg waited until the shadows were within twenty paces.
“Now,” he said.
He and the priests channeled divine power and their symbols luminesced. Power went out from them in a wave of pale light and hit the advancing shadows.
The shadows’ keening died with them. The Morninglord’s power turned all two dozen into stinking ribbons of black vapor dispersed by the wind.
“Perhaps they know we’re here now,” Regg said to the priests.
Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. When the spots cleared from Regg’s vision, he saw that his words had been prophetic. Ahead, so many pairs of eyes blinked into existence in the darkness that they looked like a clear night sky filled with red stars. There were thousands upon thousands.
“Gods,” Trewe said, and faltered in his steps.
Regg did not know how much time the company’s stand would earn the refugees, but he intended to acquaint the darkness with Lathander’s light.
“Ready yourselves, men and women of Lathander!” he shouted.
CHAPTER TWELVE
6 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms
Cale, Riven, and Rivalen left behind the statue of Shar and Mask and strode across the crumbling earth for the double doors of the temple. Octagonal gongs flanked the doorway.
Cale eyed Rivalen sidelong and reminded himself not to trust the Shadovar, shared interest or no. Cale’s god might serve Shar, but Cale did not serve a Sharran.
“The doors are enspelled,” Rivalen said. He held forth his holy symbol and incanted a count
erspell without breaking stride. The doors, carved from a rich black wood and inscribed with writings in the same script as that on the statue, clicked and swung open. A lingering spell caused the gongs to sound a deep, funereal chime. Dry air carried the fading, distant smell of incense. Cale swore he heard whispers in the wind but they faded before he could make out any words.
Riven bounded inside, blades bare and leaking shadows.
“Nothing,” the assassin called back.
Cale let Rivalen follow then fell in behind him.
Behind them, the moans of the specters grew louder. Cale looked back, saw the gray cloud of spirits rise into the sky and hurtle toward the temple.
“Quickly,” he said.
Following the pull of his divination, Cale led them through a black-tiled foyer, vaulted halls, and darkened corridors. Shadows swam in languid spirals within the crystalline walls, or coalesced from nothingness in the air before them. For a reason he could not articulate, Cale thought of the Fane of Shadows.
They found all of the halls and chambers empty even of debris. The structure remained intact but it had been gutted, a mummified version of a temple with only a hint of a dark past to haunt its halls.
The floors groaned, buckled, and shook as more and more of Ephyras fell into the void outside. Dust fell from the ceilings. Cracks opened in the walls.
Paintings here and there repeated the iconography of the Mistress of Night and the Shadowlord, her herald. Cale could not long look at them. The images had a dreamy, surreal quality, as if produced in a fit of madness or a drug haze.
Eventually they entered the large central chamber under the faceted dome. The ceiling soared above them. A horseshoe shaped altar of black stone sat centermost. Inlaid stone formed images on the floor—a black circle bordered in purple and within it, offset from its center, another black circle, bordered in red—the Shadowlord’s circle within Shar’s circle, the one orbiting within the other.
Magic-sculpted shadows formed an image on the interior of the dome above. A female figure, her face hidden in the shadow of her black cloak’s hood, descended from a storm of roiling black clouds. Lightning presaged her approach. Already on the ground before her was a man, clad in black and steel, and cloaked in shadows.
The herald, preparing the way for the mistress.
Riven put a hand on Cale’s shoulder, pulling him back to himself.
“Look there,” the assassin said, and pointed with his chin at a small item sitting atop the altar—a tarnished chalice of silvery metal. Thin streams of shadows leaked from its contents, circled its rim.
The shadows leaking from Cale and Rivalen mirrored those emerging from the chalice.
“Is that it?” Riven asked. “It’s just sitting here waiting for us?”
“There is no one else on this world to bother it,” Rivalen said, his voice soft. “And Shar’s temple will not fall until the world ends.”
“Mask’s temple,” Riven corrected, and Rivalen smiled.
“Come,” the shade prince said, and started forward.
Enshrouded on Sakkors in shadows and dark thoughts, Brennus felt the ring on his finger open the magical connection between himself and Rivalen.
Brennus, his brother said. We have gained the temple but this world will soon end. Is there anything I must do to prepare for the freeing of the divinity in Kesson?
Brennus stared at the amethyst and silver ring, his anger and the shadows around him seething. He wanted to tear the ring from his finger, never hear his brother’s voice again.
Brennus?
Take the chalice, Brennus said. I am still determining the rest.
Rivalen’s irritation was palpable. Determine it faster. We will face Kesson upon our return.
Then delay the confrontation, Brother, Brennus said, and said that last as if it were a curse. Lie if you must. Dissembling is one of your strengths.
What did you say?
Brennus had overstepped. I am overtaxed, Rivalen. Listen to me. The sequence of spells you will need to cast upon the release of the divine power is nuanced. But you will need the chalice as a focus. Take it from the temple and keep it with you. I will contact you again when I am certain of the rest.
He broke off mental contact before Rivalen could respond. He stared at his mother’s necklace, into the face of the complicity he would feel if he did nothing to avenge her murder.
But doing something meant disobeying his father, perhaps sacrificing the possibility of a new Empire of Netheril.
He cursed, and slammed his fist on the table.
Cale, Riven, and Rivalen approached the altar in reverent silence. Outside, Ephyras quaked under Shar’s onslaught and the moaning of the specters rose above the whistle of the wind.
The chalice—beaten, tarnished silver chased with tiny black gems that spiraled around its stem—sat atop a black altar cloth. Thin ribbons of shadow curled from its rim. The three men stared at it for a long moment.
“Such a small thing,” Riven said, sheathing his blades.
But Cale saw into it, through it. The chalice was simply the doorway, a drink but a symbol. He placed Weaveshear in its scabbard, stepped forward, and reached for the chalice.
Riven grabbed his hand, staring a hole into his face. “Are you certain?”
“It is the only way,” Rivalen said from behind them.
Cale nodded and Riven released him. Cale was walking in the steps of Kesson Rel, he knew, trailing him like a shadow. He put his hand, his shadow hand, on the chalice and found it cold, the cold of a grave. A jolt went through him, a charge from head to toe. He lifted it and discovered it weighed much more than it should.
Riven and Rivalen, perhaps involuntarily, crowded close. The shadows around Rivalen mixed with those around Cale, those of the chalice. Riven stood in the midst of their collective darkness.
Cradling the chalice in both hands, Cale held it close and looked within.
An oily, glistening liquid filled it to perhaps a quarter of the way. But Cale knew the chalice’s depths went on forever, that the substance within, and the power it embodied, extended much deeper than the shallow depths of the cup. The darkness in the chalice reached back through time and worlds to the creation of the multiverse. He was looking upon the power of a god, the primal stuff of creation. Shadows leaked from it, and him, in languid ribbons.
The moans of the specters grew louder outside, the wail of the wind more pronounced. Ephyras continued to die, its corpse falling into oblivion. Its death throes rocked the temple, shook dust from the walls. Cracks like veins formed in the floor, spreading from wall to wall.
“Drink!” Rivalen said. “The end is coming.”
Pieces of the dome cracked, broke, and fell in a rain of crystal to the floor. Riven and Rivalen shielded themselves with their cloaks. Cale stood in the midst of the ruin, untouched, transfixed by the chalice. The wind screamed through the openings in the dome, carrying with it the hateful, desperate moans of the specters. Dust and darkness swirled.
“Cale?” Riven asked.
“If this goes wrong,” Cale said to Riven, and nodded at Rivalen. “Kill him.”
With that, he lifted the chalice, let the cool, greasy liquid touch his lips, and drank.
Brennus lived in the space between the betrayal of his mother and the betrayal of his father. He could not long hold that ground. Either he honored his mother’s memory by exacting payment from her murderer, or he did as his father instructed.
He didn’t know if he could live with himself if he did nothing to avenge his mother.
But if he acted, Sembia could be lost and his father would kill him.
He ran his fingertips over his mother’s necklace, the necklace that had been brought to him as if by providence. He recalled the moments he had shared with her, the joy. He had experienced little of either since her death.
He made up his mind, nodded to himself, and activated the communication ring.
Rivalen, when Kesson Rel is dead, the divine po
wer in him will flow to the empty vessel, Kesson’s successor, the Chosen of Mask who drank from the chalice. Here are the sequence of spells you must cast, using the chalice as a focus, to take that essence for yourself.
He recited a series of incantations and abjurations.
Thank you, Brennus, Rivalen returned. You have done well.
Brennus cut off the magic of the ring. The darkness around him deepened.
He had just murdered his brother. The spells he had named for Rivalen would not capture Kesson’s divine power for Rivalen. They would cause the power to consume him.
He put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. He didn’t know how long he sat there before a tug on his cloak caused him to look up.
His homunculi sat on the table near him, the leathery skin of their brows creased with worry.
“Master sad?” one asked.
Brennus inhaled, sat up. The darkness around him was a shroud. “No.”
Both of them smiled and held out their hands. “Treat, then?”
He smiled tiredly, took two paper-wrapped sweetmeats from his cloak, and handed them to his creations. They squealed with delight and ate with vigor.
His mother would have laughed. She would have said, That is quite a family you have, Brennus.
Indeed it was.
Power entered Cale, wormed its way through him completely, hollowed him out. In an instant he lost whatever humanity remained in him and became a shell, the temple at the edge of nothing made flesh, intact but empty.
And as much in danger of crumbling.
He dropped the chalice and fell to his knees. His scream mingled with that of the wind and the specters. The hole yawned in him, an emptiness that needed filled. His mind spun. Jumbled thoughts ricocheted around his brain.
He struggled to get his intellect around what had happened, what was happening. The chalice did not contain divinity. It contained revelation, realization, the possibility of divinity that skulked about in the silence of the human soul. But the possibility was so large, so consuming, that a mortal form awakened to it could not long bear the truth before it simply disincorporated.
