“Yes,” Sithe said. “He saw death, as you say. Why, then, was he pleased?”
“Because it meant he still lived.”
Sithe stared at him a long, long moment. She offered the slightest of nods.
“There is a void within each of us,” she said. “Whether we try to fill it with faith or with magic, with will or with love, each of us must accept that it remains—boundless as existence and infinite as nonexistence. Fill yours with hate and you will be like me.”
“No,” he said. “I have something more powerful than hate.”
“Oh?” Sithe eased into a fighting stance. “Then show me.”
He ran toward her. The splintered dagger in his hand blazed with light—not unlike that of Vindicator—and he let power surge through his arm. His fingers tightened around the hilt and his hand shook, but he would not falter. Anger surged within him—anger and justice.
As he charged, the genasi slashed at him. He had no defense to offer—none but his faith. The axe clanged off his shoulder as though it struck something metal and skipped off.
He lunged at her, striking her full in the chest with his shining dagger. Holy power flowed through him—the power of the Threefold God, channeled not for healing but for avenging. He buried the blade deep into her—or would have, had it not caught on the aura of pure blackness that surrounded her.
He saw, in that moment, the armor of her faith flicker around her—powerful, dark, and filled with hate. He saw, reflected in her obsidian eyes, his own: a suit of weathered steel—breastplate, gauntlets, greaves, an entire suit of full plate. His faith was not white like that of some fairytale knight, but deep and gray: dubious in its intent, forceful in its application. He could see his pale eyes reflected in hers. So too could he see the great helm that covered his face.
Their faiths strove with one another until, impossibly, his proved the stronger.
Kalen’s strike drove Sithe back and she toppled to the ground.
They stared at one another in the chilly twilight as the moon rose and the last peaceful night of Luskan began. They stared wordlessly, though many words hung between them.
“What is it,” Sithe asked finally, “this strength you’ve found?”
“I do as I must.” Kalen shrugged. “For those I must protect.”
Sithe nodded. “You are ready,” she said. “Shadowbane.”
7 FLAMERULE (DAWN)
AS DAWN BROKE, THE GANGS OF LUSKAN CAME.
They came to the abandoned market in numbers great and small. They marched into the square from various directions. Each gang wore a different color, the better to identify them in the melee that would surely come.
The Dragonbloods marched in from the west, alongside their vassals: the Blacknails, the Pack Wolves, and the Glass Smashers. The Shou wielded all manner of swords and other blades. Many clutched disks of iron filed into points to use as crude but deadly carvestars. Leather armor cut to show her red dragon tattoo, the great warrior Kasi strode in front, a katana clasped in her hands. The Shou and their minions wore jade green sashes to mark them from the other gangs.
From the northeast came the Coin-Spinners, led by Eden herself. The one-eyed priestess had girded herself for the occasion in a gold-inlaid breastplate that had once held precious stones but now displayed only empty sockets. Walking was clearly an effort, but she managed it surprisingly well. She wielded a vicious flail that hung loose at her side, but she was all smiles. “Lady Luck be with us!” she shouted and her forces responded in kind. They were by far the best equipped, but then, they were first among the Five. Every one of them wore a painted gold sash.
At first, it seemed the Master of the Throat would go unrepresented. Then the ground near the northernmost point of the market began to stir and corpses pulled themselves from the riven earth. The living gangs of Luskan drew back, but the undead paid them no heed. The Master of the Throat’s chosen vessel was truly horrific: a hulk built from a dozen corpses that surveyed the field like a general. The corpses had no colors, but there was no mistaking them.
From the mean streets of east Luskan came the Dogtooths, the Bloodboots, and the Hide-Etchers, along with Torm’s Trollops. The last were sharp-as-blades, tough-as-stone festboys and festgirls, with nothing like play on their minds today. The four gangs had ever been lesser players in Luskan, and perhaps they saw an opportunity this day to rise higher. They had chosen orange for their color.
Finally, the Dead Rats filtered in from the south, along with the massive Dustclaws. Since the death of Duulgrin, the brutes had followed the woman who now stalked in front of them: Sithe with her reaving axe. The Dustclaw bruisers cut an odd juxtaposition with the weaselly Rats, but strange times made strange allies. The Dustclaws had donned the same red kerchiefs the Rats wore.
They were all gathered, ready to begin.
A cry went up from the Dogtooths and soon every gang in the square echoed it: “Shadowbane!” they called. “Shadowbane!”
Kalen rose from where he lay hidden in the center of the market, obscured beneath a ratty cloak. His sudden appearance struck them to expectant silence.
Eden stepped forward. “Well, Shadowbane—we’ve all arrived. What now?”
Muffled agreement filtered around the square, all eyes looking to him for what would come next. Kalen surveyed the gathered forces silently, noting how they all stood ready for a charge. At least they were not fighting yet, which he took as some small victory. It would not last, he knew. He held up his hand.
“Now I will speak with each of your kings,” Kalen said, projecting his voice to fill the open area. “Together, we will decide the new course of Luskan.”
Those words met with murmured agreement and a few shouted insults. Ultimately, the various leaders stepped forward. Kasi for the Shou, Eden for the Coin-Spinners, Sithe for the Dead Rats and Dustclaws. The Dogtooths and their ilk sent a hulking man with a great spear, from which hung many shriveled fingers. Finally, the patchwork corpse of the Master of the Throat lurched and lumbered toward him.
“All’s well,” Kalen murmured. “All’s—”
Instinct rose within him, but just too late. An arrow gleamed in the sun, hidden from his eyes until it thudded into his shoulder. Although he could barely feel the arrow’s sting, the impact knocked him to the ground. If he hadn’t trusted himself to move at just the right instant, it would have ended up in his heart.
Poison coated the arrow’s point. He could not feel it, but he recognized the effects of the paralytic venom on his body.
Kalen heard a cry go up and he looked to the gangs as they surged forward. That single arrow—like a flaming taper tossed into dry hay—had burnt up all his plans. Instantly the battle began.
With that, the world vanished.
When Kalen awoke, chaos surged in Luskan’s market square.
The Dogtooths crashed into the Dragonbloods, the Coin-Spinners hacked at red-kerchief marked Rats and locked blades with hulking Dustclaws, and the legions of the Throat fought against them all. Blades slashed, arrows flew, cries sounded, and blood flowed. Dust rose from a thousand stomping feet, covering everything.
A Dustclaw roared, charging in toward three Dogtooths, scattering them like mangy dogs, but a crossbow bolt stopped the brute dead in his tracks. The woman who had shot him fumbled to reload, her hand shaking. The bruiser lumbered toward her, seized the crossbow, and smashed her face with it. They fell together, wrestling in the dust.
Nearby, a hirsute woman—a Dead Rat, by her red kerchief and weasel-like features—leaped onto the back of a Bloodboot and tore off his ear with her teeth. Two zombies stumbled out of the dust and reached toward them both. The man without an ear, already terrified and in agony, ran. The woman, distracted with her new prize, didn’t see them coming until it was too late. She screamed as they pummeled her into the ground.
Kalen had thought he would have more time, but someone had betrayed him.
A tall, feminine form materialized out of the swirling dust.
“Eden,”
he said, struggling to rise against the venom in his blood.
The priestess stepped toward him. She wore a huge smile. “Why Brother!” she said. “I thought for sure you’d have the sense to flee by now.”
A mountain-sized creature loomed out of the dust—the Master of the Throat. Eden turned and Kalen saw her coin flare with light. “Begone, in the Lady’s name!”
A storm of power lashed at the hulking zombie and its component corpses abruptly shattered into a dozen pieces, flinging congealed gore in every direction. Some of the muck spattered across Eden’s face and she laughed madly.
A hand touched Kalen on the shoulder—Sithe. Blood spattered the genasi, but Kalen thought none was her own. “Shadowbane,” she said.
“Sithe!” Eden said. “Burn in the Lady’s gaze!”
The priestess waved her hand and a lance of white light stabbed at Sithe, only to be deflected off her black axe. The genasi strode forward, setting her weapon whirling. As the women clashed, Kalen managed to get to his feet. He gazed around to take in the battle.
All was madness. Shou hacked at Dustclaw, Dustclaw at Dogtooth—hundreds of men and women lashed out at anything that did not wear the same colors. A Shou was cutting pieces off a Bloodboot, who howled but couldn’t manage to fight back. A Hide-Etcher drove a blade into a Blacknail’s ribs and stumbled to his next victim. The killer was in turn transfixed with a spear that nailed him to the ground.
Kalen had to stop the fighting. He had to get to the kings.
He cast about, searching. The Master of the Throat he’d seen destroyed. Sithe and Eden had vanished into the dust, fighting loudly with great bursts of power—and wild swirls of Eden’s laughter. Kasi of the Dragonbloods was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that was for the best—the woman had every reason to want him dead, as a matter of honor.
The ground rumbled and Kalen nearly fell to his knees. The quake stirred up half a hundred shouts. Everywhere the folk of the battle paused in their enthusiastic bloodletting to look around wildly for the source of the disturbance.
A frozen hand closed around Kalen’s spine and fear settled in his bowels. He knew, in that moment, that he had been wrong in some pivotal way. Somehow, he had been mistaken and now they were all going to perish.
A great sound rose through the market—a chittering, chattering, deafening drone that made the gangs in the square cover their ears. The ground shifted and mounds began to rise, just as if some great hand were pushing upward through the burned and blistered soil. Cobblestones popped free of the dirt and skittered down the rising hills. They reminded Kalen of the sores he’d seen on victims of the Fury.
Gods. Kalen saw, too late, what was coming.
The top of one rising hill burst open, sending forth a surging flow of spiders and locusts, beetles and centipedes—all manner of horrors that crawled and devoured. Another of the hills burst, and another—each into a swarm of black, biting death.
“Flee!” Kalen cried, limping toward the nearest building. “Flee—!”
These eruptions contained no mere half-formed, stillborn pests, such as had been birthed from victims of the plague. Rather, the spiders were the size of dogs, the locusts like falcons, and the millipedes the length of a man’s arm. They looked like nothing born of this world—glowing with red and purple veins of fire, bristling with spines and fangs. The swarm was huge and it grew every greater by the heartbeat.
The vermin of Luskan came to play at the kingmaking, as though the city herself had decided to fight for her throne.
Folk screamed and ran, but the swarm fell on them, enveloping them in rivers of vermin that stung, bit, and feasted. Hornets and locusts scattered the warring gang members, stinging madly. A Dead Rat was subsumed and vanished into the dirt, his screams dying away to wet gurgles, then nothing. When the swarm passed on, only bones remained where the man had fought, seconds past.
Gang members died by the score, hacking vainly but ultimately overrun and reduced to mere bones within terrified heartbeats. Hundreds more fled, screaming.
Kalen, who had managed to climb onto a low windowsill, watched it all in horror and dawning realization: this was the plague. He had expected a single man or woman who controlled the swarms. But if the plague was a thousand ravening creatures, how could he hope to fight it?
A loud buzz sent Kalen dodging aside as a wasp the size of his head stabbed at him with a stinger the length of a belt dagger. He caught the creature by its wings and its slimy body thrashed, its abdomen working to thrust its stinger into him. Angry fire burned in its murderous, faceted eyes.
The wasp exploded away from his face, bloody chunks of carapace splattering the bricks. Her axe streaked with gore, Sithe stepped onto the windowsill at Kalen’s side.
“This is no mere swarm but a demon,” Sithe said. “What do we do?”
“Save as many as you can,” Kalen said, and he leaped down toward the swarm.
He fell among the ravening beasts, blades slashing madly this way and that. He kicked a beetle away and cut a spider that lunged at his face into two pieces. Creatures fell away with hisses, angry or dying, but more flowed to take their place. He stabbed and ripped, kicked and flailed, but he might as well have tried to hold back the ocean with his hands. It was like the swarm of rats on the floating derelict: thousands of beasts acting with one mind—one awful will.
He thought he heard a word in the endless cacophony of the creatures’ voices. That single word chilled him more than any battle cry: “Feed.”
“Be aware,” Sithe said at his back. She swept her axe around, ringing them in flame that consumed the rushing beasts. It bought them a moment of respite.
“Lady Luck protect us!” Eden shouted.
Through the blood and dust, Kalen shot a glance to where Eden stood, glowing with divine power. Of all those assembled, she was the only one not startled by the swarm’s appearance. Was that merely her faith?
Regardless, a shimmering golden aura surrounded her, swelling outward to encompass her followers. The swarm shied away, crawling all over itself to escape the gold radiance. The ragged folk in the square—both Coin-Spinners and those of the other gangs—flocked to the protection her magic offered.
“The goddess shows her favor!” Eden cried. She pointed to Kalen. “See the man who would be king and yet leads you only unto death!” She spread her arms. The coin in her eye socket gleamed. “Only through the Lady will you be saved!”
Those words—their offer of hope—and her magic brought scores, if not hundreds of panicked Luskar rushing toward her. Dogtooth or Dragonblood, Dustclaw or Bloodboot, and even a good number of Dead Rats flocked to the miracle of Tymora … or was it Beshaba?
“Can you get to her?” Kalen asked. “To Eden?”
Sithe nodded coolly, her axe gleaming with dark fire. “I shall be with her straightaway.”
“Bring her back unharmed,” Kalen said. “We need her.”
Sithe looked at him curiously. “She is your enemy,” she said. “She manipulated this to secure her own power. For all you know, she summoned the demon.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Kalen said. “Whatever she’s doing, it’s keeping the swarm at bay. We need her to save the others.” He gestured to the hundreds of Luskar trapped by the waves of the swarm, fighting frantically to keep the beasts from their flesh. Scores or even hundreds of skeletons lay bleached and sparkling on the ruined field.
“We are not saviors,” Sithe said.
“Are you afraid?”
The genasi gave him a cold glower, turned, and ran toward the Coin-Spinners. As she went, she slashed back and forth with her axe, sending blood and pieces of vermin flying. Kalen breathed easier.
Then the swarm rose up before Sithe like a wall. The genasi paused and Kalen watched, horrified, as the wall became a hand that lunged to grasp at her. Sithe hacked at it, but the hand broke over her like a wave, coating her body in a hundred stinging, rending beasts. Sithe screamed in shock and agony—a sound Kalen never thought he woul
d hear from her lips. With a sharp suction in the air, she abruptly vanished into the void, taking a score of the fiendish creatures with her.
A shadow blotted out the sun and Kalen turned toward the main swarm. He watched, with awe and terror, as the swarm before him rose up in a mountain—a mountain that split into a vaguely humanoid shape with arms, torso, and even a head.
“Feed,” the creature said, in a thousand hissing, chattering voices. “Feed!”
Kalen saw his death rising before him and he had no escape like Sithe did. He looked down at the dagger in his hand, coursing with gray fire, then back up at the creature. He reversed the knife in his hand and pointed it at the swarm’s face.
“Come then, demon,” he said. “Shadowbane calls.”
A thousand thousand voices answered the challenge with a cry. The swarm crashed toward him like a wave. He whispered a prayer to the Threefold God, ready to meet his end.
Abruptly, a circle of shadow appeared before him like a door in the air. From it came a crack of thunder that sent the swarm rippling back.
He felt her before he saw her, the blue fire inside him singing. “Myrin?” he asked.
“Well met, Kalen!” The blue-haired woman stepped from the shadow door, her cheeks and collarbone gleaming with blue runes. She fanned her fingers and an arc of fire engulfed the swarm. The creatures fell back, screeching and burning.
Myrin beamed. “Don’t tell me you thought I wouldn’t come back to save the day? Not to mention your tight little—”
“ ’Ware!” Kalen reached for her as the gathered swarm lunged forward.
Myrin raised her hand and a shield of flames scorched into place around them. The swarm rebounded from her magic, flames consuming those creatures who struck first.
“You can do this?” Kalen asked.
Myrin nodded. “The shield is a simple spell I learned over the last year,” she said. “The fire is something I saw in Umbra’s memory. I just combined the two—ughn!”
The swarm hammered at her shield again. This time, Myrin fell to one knee, shaken at the effort of holding off the horde. Black veins laced her spell like cracks and blood trickled down from her nose. Again the demon struck. Myrin moaned louder.
Shadowbane: A Forgotten Realms Novel Page 27
