Sword of the Gods

by Bruce R Cordell

  I see you, she thought. She took off after him.

  After that, it became a sort of game.

  Kalkan was adroit at moving quickly through Airspur, from bridge to mote, and mote to cliff. The fellow used every shadow to his advantage, and seemed able to glide through knots of congestion and traffic without pausing.

  Riltana was equally adept at moving quickly through the city, but her paths were rooftops, lamp posts, and bridge supports. The hardest part was to stay close enough to Kalkan that she wouldn’t lose him, but far enough back that he didn’t realize he had a tail.

  The first time Kalkan circled back to a plaza he’d previously visited, Riltana was sure he knew he was being followed. But after he employed a few more false paths and backtracking tricks, she realized he was probably merely taking standard precautions before returning to his lair—she did exactly the same thing every time she returned to her loft after a night of work.

  This guy is good, she thought, realizing she’d just lost Kalkan for the third time. Had the creature gone up the wide stairs on the north cliff face near the Drakeyards, or down?

  She chose up. The stairs’ ultimate destination was a ridge. She breathed easier when she saw the flash of a dark hood. Kalkan ducked into the front gate of a manor house walled in white stone.

  Where others saw walls, Riltana saw roads built deliciously high. She launched herself on a passing breeze. The moment her boots found the wall top, she dropped to her belly. It wouldn’t do for her to be silhouetted against the view.

  She was just in time to see elaborate double doors close behind Kalkan.

  The mansion was certainly ostentatious enough to be a noble’s residence. But Riltana mostly avoided burgling such homes. Nobles usually had the means to employ more than merely natural safeguards for their treasures and loved ones.

  She studied the building’s facade, looking for likely entrance points. The upper story balconies seemed like her best bet, assuming she could avoid triggering any arcane wards.

  Riltana squirmed along the wall until a tree obscured her from the manor. It was a generous magnolia tree, blushing pink with blooms well out of season. She flung herself off the wall onto a branch that would have been too thin to support her weight had she not been moving so quickly and with a lifting breeze beneath her feet. Then she literally cartwheeled sideways through the air, mimicking an aerial seed caught by the wind, and landed light as a petal on the closest balcony.

  The terrace fronted a lounge filled with comfortable chairs. A table was strewn with papers, a bottle of wine, and a single empty glass.

  The room appeared empty. She watched, crouched low, silent.

  The question came unbidden: Why am I all by myself getting ready to storm the citadel of the enemy? She’d run Kalkan to ground. The smart thing to do would be to leave immediately, and collect Demascus, Chant, and Carmenere …

  Well, probably not Carmenere. As far as the silverstar was concerned, Riltana’s business with Kalkan had nothing to do with the welfare of the city. The earthsoul had made it crystal clear that she cared more for the concerns of others than she ever had for Riltana.

  The thief ground her teeth. Screw going for help; she could handle this on her own.

  She slunk into the lounge.

  The papers covering the table were letters. All of them were apparently from dealers quoting prices for particularly expensive sculptures, paintings, or old tomes. All were addressed to Kalkan. Kalkan apparently had an eye for expensive art. How wonderful. And unhelpful.

  She sidled to the door and peered into the hallway beyond.

  Several more doors, and a stairway at one end.

  And … voices! Or one voice anyhow.

  A gruff cadence echoed from one of the doors at the end of the hallway. She strained to catch individual words, but the sounds were too muffled.

  Riltana tiptoed down the hallway, prepared to dash at the first sign anyone suspected her presence.

  She slipped up to an open door and peeked in.

  The room was set up for heavy-duty ritual magic. The large arcane circle permanently inscribed across the floor was the first tip-off. Gold had been poured into the inscribed circle, making its permanency all the more flamboyant. Small piles of incense sent up trails of smoke at four points along the larger circle.

  Kalkan stood at the center of it, chanting, gazing into a second circle, similar to the first—except it was smaller and inscribed on the wall. He held a smoking thurible in one clawed, oddly jointed hand.

  This is my chance, she thought. I should jump him while he’s distracted.

  A slaughterhouse stench made her hesitate.

  Kalkan removed his hood. The beast that had worn Jett merely as a facade was revealed once more. It was hard to believe it had been a masquerade all along.

  But the creature had Jett’s voice, which was Kalkan’s voice. And a gravelly, smirking way of speaking that was both infuriating and frightening in equal measure.

  The chant finished with a rising, snarl-like shout. Riltana shrank back from the doorway, afraid he’d heard or seen her.

  She drew her blade an inch from its scabbard, ready to fight or run …

  Kalkan said, “The way is open, Great One. Can you hear me?”

  He wasn’t talking to her!

  A whisper came back, a sibilant sort of hiss. Riltana couldn’t quite make it out. She crept to her former position to see what awful thing had been summoned.

  Kalkan still faced the circle on the wall, which had become an abyss of darkness. He said, facing it, “Demascus remains a loose end.”

  Leech piss! she thought. Kalkan was reporting in to some kind of superior.

  The whisper returned, issuing from the void, just loud enough for Riltana to make out, “You must prepare for the end game, my disciple. Soon enough, he will discover or remember where his sword is, and try to recover it.”

  “It is destined,” Kalkan said.

  “Then go to the deva’s tomb. Await him there. He will come to you.”

  Kalkan replied, “I remember, Great One. It is I who told you.”

  What was that supposed to mean? she thought. Kalkan is some kind of diviner?

  Kalkan set the thurible on the floor, then as casually as if he were walking from one room of his manor to the next, he entered the circular hole of nothing in his wall, and was gone.

  “Rat-snuggler!” she hissed.

  Her first instinct was to rush the cavity and see where Kalkan had gone.

  No, she told herself. You’ve already pressed your luck too much.

  So she waited a full song, then another, studying the circular hole. It didn’t fade back to becoming a mere wall, as she’d half feared and half hoped.

  Time to get Demascus, she thought. Instead, she stole into the room to give it a quick once-over.

  A table squatted on the opposite wall, heavy with glass jars, piles of scribbled parchment, inks, quills, and colored stones. Behind the table, the wall was plastered with drawings. She edged closer, and realized they were, every one, of Demascus.

  There were probably a hundred. Demascus wearing armor, climbing stairs, fighting with a greatsword, wielding two matched long swords, Demascus leaping a massive crevice, standing at attention in a line of mighty soldiers, bending his knee to someone in a throne who glowed with divine power, Demascus with his Veil strangling a giant, whirling through shadow, and … more. All drawn with the same strong lines and attention to detail. All focused with monomaniacal contemplation on one person.

  Riltana put a hand to her mouth. She’d seen something like this once before, when she’d broken into the home of a barrister rumored to have a breathtaking collection of rubies. Instead she’d found a secret room covered in likenesses of different women. All women who’d previously gone missing, never to be seen again.

  Riltana had fled the home and anonymously tipped off the peacemakers the next day. The man had turned out to be some kind of vampire or ghoul—she’d never really fou
nd out which—living like a normal person by day, complete with a law practice, friends who all would swear up and down he was one of the most thoughtful people they knew. But each tenday he meticulously planned how to kidnap, kill, and eat a fresh victim. All so perfectly that no one in Airspur ever became suspicious that a monster lived in their midst, preying on them.

  The drawings before Riltana were exactly like that, though they seemed to span several different … incarnations, if that was the right word. As if Kalkan was a serial killer, but always chose the same victim, over and over, through each new life. How extraordinarily dreadful if true, she thought.

  The carrion smell was thicker at that end of the room than when she’d first noticed it at the entrance. Kalkan was gone. So where was it coming from?

  She approached the wall, but veered toward a closet door in the corner. It was being used as just one more surface to display drawings of Demascus. She opened it.

  The nauseating odor swelled tenfold. The chamber beyond was a blood-soaked slaughterhouse of hanging meat, stripped of fur and skin. Most of it was swollen with rot and maggots, and a malodorous discharge pooled beneath each carcass, thick with flies. Bloody knives plunged into a wooden carving block showed that bits and pieces of the flesh had been carved off and … eaten?

  Oh gods, she thought. She gagged on rising bile.

  The carcass closest to the door—it almost looked like a dangling arm, not a hoof as she’d first thought …

  Riltana lost her composure to a fit of explosive retching.

  The hanging carcasses were not animals; they were people.

  CHARTER TWENTY-THREE

  AIRSPUR

  THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

  UP THERE,” THE THIEF TOLD DEMASCUS, HER VOICE STILL flat.

  She ascended one side of a set of matching stairs that converged on a landing. Afternoon light blazed down the steps from a stained-glass window depicting an apple tree laden with red orbs.

  Demascus followed the windsoul up.

  She’d found him and Chant searching the alley where the secret passage had let out. His relief had dissolved his dour mood. He was so happy he could have kissed her. She explained she’d trailed Kalkan back to his lair, but her manner had been oddly subdued. She explained that Kalkan had escaped through a hole in the wall.

  He hadn’t wasted time interrogating her. And here we are, he thought. In the home of the creature who’s haunted my dreams since I first woke on that damned altar. He was close to understanding everything … which worried him more than anything else.

  “Kalkan owns this manor?” said Chant. “A place like this will set you back some serious coin.”

  Riltana paused at the top of the stairs. She said, “It’s probably how he was able to get away with feeding off people, owning a place with grounds so large that neighbors couldn’t hear their screams …”

  The thief had also explained she’d found a room filled with rotting corpses hanging from the ceiling. Apparently, Kalkan’s predatory features were more than just show. He really was a flesh-eater. A man-eater.

  And not only a predator—but a schemer interested in killing Demascus. Kalkan had insured that Demascus would be caught up in Murmur’s schemes. Schemes somehow entangled with a previous life, where he’d evidently stymied several demons kin to Murmur, with the help of allies he no longer remembered the least thing about …

  That was an unproductive line of thought. Soon, he would know more.

  The Veil claimed his sword, or ring, would trigger more memories. But Riltana said Kalkan waited by his tomb, where perhaps the items, the ones he’d seen in his visions, lay with the moldering remains of one of his former selves.

  If he went for those objects, Kalkan was sure to attack him.

  Those objects contained the missing portion of himself, of which he was apparently only a fraction.

  When it came down to it, he was no longer certain he wanted that reunion to occur.

  What good can come of looting a corpse I shucked like a snake’s skin? he thought. That life is over; maybe its memories should be too. And what if I absorb so much, I lose myself, and become a different person? Won’t that be a death for the man I’ve learned to be these last few days?

  He was afraid the answer was yes.

  “Are you coming?” said Riltana. She stood at end of the hallway, her arms crossed. Her normally lustrous skin seemed drawn and almost tarnished, as if she was sick.

  Demascus took a deep breath, then joined her.

  The room was as she’d described it, complete with a still active portal leaking darkness, a rogues’ gallery featuring himself in various guises and outfits, and an overwhelming smell of death.

  Riltana stayed near the entrance. He and Chant went to the wall and gazed at the drawings. Kalkan had a gift for art—at least when it came to capturing images of his favorite topic—Demascus.

  Demascus studied his portrait in one particularly compelling piece. His back was to the perspective, and he stood poised with a two-handed runesword held high, his Veil and many charms aloft in the wind blowing across the mountain peak on which he stood. Hovering off the face of the peak was a colossal dragonlike abomination, its breath of billowing green gas enfolding him.

  Demascus had no memory whatsoever of the event. Or … of any of the other scenes depicted on the wall in their hundreds. That was the person he might become if he found his memories. The man depicted was a complete stranger.

  “Kalkan’s made quite a study of you,” Chant said quietly.

  He had no words.

  “The bodies … are behind there,” Riltana choked out. She pointed to a door in the corner.

  “Should we examine them?” Chant said.

  He said, “I’d rather not.”

  “Good choice,” said the thief.

  The drawings tore at his guts enough, with all the unanswered questions they posed. He didn’t need to be wrenched by seeing the trophies of a murdering psychopath.

  Demascus retreated from the drawings, until he stood before the portal. The darkness was a physical blot, hanging just an inch off the wall. The lip of the effect wavered and blurred, as if renegotiating its terms with reality every moment. Beyond it, he imagined Kalkan watched him.

  What would happen if I simply walk away? he wondered. He could break the cycle the pictures hinted at. Leave Airspur, and settle down in some distant land and learn a peaceful trade. Beer brewing maybe, or storytelling. This is my last chance to stay ignorant. My last chance to stay myself.

  And if he did turn away, he’d resign himself to forever wonder why he’d killed a priest in cold blood.

  “Let’s go find our friend,” he announced.

  “Lead on,” Chant said, “We’ll follow.”

  Demascus unsheathed his latest sword, and grabbed the Veil in his other hand. Just to see if he’d get an answer, he addressed it.

  “Veil, what lies beyond this portal? Is it my tomb?”

  A single word appeared in pale light in the fabric:

  Yes.

  Demascus stepped through, and found himself on the shore of a sunless sea.

  An earthy breeze engulfed and cooled him. He was underground, in some kind of canyon-sized cave chamber. A ramshackle collection of boulders formed a circle on the cave floor, and he was standing in the center of it.

  He stepped out of the stone-bounded area to clear the portal, and to get a better look at the island that lay at the center of the half-drowned vault. Dark wavelets rolled to the island’s bone-strewn shore. Pale cavelight from luminescent growth and faded runes illuminated dozens of wide catacomb mouths along the island’s periphery, providing watery paths deeper inside. The failed majesty of ruins lay heaped above the winding entrances like a crown of broken spires.

  He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it.

  “Where on Toril are we? What’s that?” came Riltana’s voice. She stepped clear of the circle, her gaze fastened on the funerary island.
A moment later Chant flickered into view. His eyes widened at the panorama.

  “Is that your tomb?” said the thief. “I mean, the tomb of your last … self?”

  “I suppose it must be,” he replied. “Except it looks grand enough to be some fallen necropolis. Thousands must be interred there!” The magnitude of the darkling island took his breath away.

  “If you say so,” said Chant, who remained in the stone circle where he’d appeared. “How do we get across the water? I’m not swimming, I’ll tell you that for free.”

  “There,” said Riltana, pointing at a gondola-like craft pulled up along the shore not far from where they’d appeared.

  Chant gave an exaggerated sigh and left the circle. They trooped down to the boats across pocked black rock and inspected the boats. One was more than large enough to carry them all. Demascus was amazed that the boats all seemed seaworthy, despite how ancient they were.

  “This one’s got oars,” Riltana noted. “You won’t have to get your clothes wet after all, Chant.”

  They pushed the craft out into the cold water and hopped aboard.

  “Be ready,” the pawnbroker said. “If this place has guardians, it’s a good bet they live in the water.”

  “Then why provide boats?” Riltana asked.

  “To lure us into range,” Chant said knowingly. He flipped a crossbow bolt through his fingers as his eyes scanned the nighted waves.

  Demascus hoped the pawnbroker was wrong, but didn’t have any evidence to soothe the man’s worry. So he took up the oars and sent the skiff gliding out across the lake.

  Except for the occasional splash of ice-cold water from a dipping oar, nothing troubled their passage. No one spoke as Demascus rowed. The sound of keel scraping stone marked their landfall on the cemetery island.

  A craft smaller than their own was moored next to a stone jetty.

  “There!” Demascus said. “Someone came this way.”

  “Kalkan,” Riltana said.

  They tied up next to the smaller craft, then searched it. If it had been Kalkan’s conveyance, he hadn’t left anything behind.