Its every thought was open to them!
“There is a place for you, Yharaskrik,” the Ghost King promised. “Hephaestus is the instinct, the anger, and the physical power. Crenshinibon is the collection of near-eternal wisdom and the dispassion—hence judgment—of a true god. Yharaskrik is the freedom of far-reaching projection and the understanding of the surrealism of worlds joined.”
One word, buried in the middle of that declaration of power, revealed to Yharaskrik the truth: judgment. Of the parts of the proposed whole, judgment sat atop the hierarchy, and so it was Crenshinibon that meant to hold its identity. The dragon would be the reactive, the illithid would serve as the informative, and Crenshinibon would control it all.
And so it was Crenshinibon, Yharaskrik realized in that awful moment, who was granting the liches a greater measure of autonomy, and only because the Crystal Shard knew with full confidence that they would ever remain slaves to it, their ultimate creation.
Yharaskrik’s only chance would be to get through to Hephaestus, to convince the dragon that he would lose his own identity in that ultimately subservient role.
In response to that unhidden notion, the dracolich laughed, a horrid, scraping noise.
* * * * *
Solmé had bested Fetchigrol. Centuries before, they and five others had joined in common purpose, a complete unification into a singular artifact of great power and infinite duration. Fetchigrol wasn’t supposed to care that Solmé had outdone him. Crenshinibon’s explanation had been instructive, not a chastisement.
The apparition, an extension of something greater than Fetchigrol, a tool for the furthering of Crenshinibon and nothing more, wasn’t supposed to care.
But he did. When Fetchigrol stood at the docks of ruined Carradoon later that same night and reached through the planes to the Shadowfell, he felt elation. His own, not Crenshinibon’s.
And when his consciousness returned to Toril, rift in hand, and tore open the divide, he took great satisfaction—his own, not Crenshinibon’s—in knowing that the next instructive lecture would be aimed at Solmé and not at himself.
Huddled crawlers poured through the rift. Fetchigrol didn’t control them, but he guided them, showing them the little inlet just north of the docks, where the waters of Impresk Lake calmed and the tunnel complex began. The crawlers didn’t fear the tunnels. They liked the dark recesses, and no creature in all the multiverse more enjoyed the hunt than the ravenous, fleshy beasts of the dark Shadowfell.
More came through as the rift swirled in on itself and started to mend, to return to the stasis of natural order.
Fetchigrol, Crenshinibon’s blessing clear in his eager thoughts, tore it open wide again.
And he ripped it open again when it began to diminish sometime later, knowing all the while that each reopening weakened the fabric of separation between the two worlds. That fabric, that reality of what had always been, was the only real means of control. Gradually, the third tear began to mend.
Fetchigrol tore it wide yet again!
Fewer crawlers came through with each rift, for the shadowy gray region the apparitions had been inhabiting was nearly emptied of the things.
Fetchigrol, who would not lose to Solmé, reached deeper into the Shadowfell. He recklessly widened his call to the far edges of the gray plain, to regions he could not see.
He never saw or heard it coming, for the beast was a creature of shadow, and silent as such. A black cloud descended over the apparition, fully engulfing him.
In that terrible instant, he knew he had failed. It didn’t matter the issue, for there was no anchor to the specific disaster.
Just failure. Utter, complete, and irrevocable. Fetchigrol felt it profoundly. It devoured any thoughts he might have for the situation at hand.
The shadow dragon couldn’t get through the rift, but it managed to snake its head out far enough to snap its great jaws over the despairing apparition.
And Fetchigrol had no escape. To plane shift would merely place him more fully before the devouring dragon on the other side of the tear. Nor did he have any desire to escape, for the despair wrought by the shadow dragon’s black cloud of breath made Fetchigrol understand that obliteration was preferable.
And so he was obliterated.
* * * * *
In the Shadowfell, the dragon receded, but marked the spot of the tear, expecting that soon it might widen enough for it to pass through. When it left, other beasts found their way to the opening.
Nightwings, giant black bats, opened wide their leathery wings and took flight above the ruins of Carradoon, eager to feast on the lighter flesh of the material world.
Fearsome dread wraiths, humanoid, emaciated, and cloaked in tattered dark rags, who could leach the life-force of a victim with a touch, crawled through in hunting packs.
And a nightwalker, a giant, hairless humanoid twenty feet tall, all sinewy and with the strength of a mountain giant, squeezed its way through the rift and onto the shores of Impresk Lake.
* * * * *
In the cave on the cliff, the Ghost King knew.
Fetchigrol was gone, his energy winked out, lost to them.
Yharaskrik was an illithid. Illithids were creature of callous logic and did not gloat, but dragons were creatures of emotion, and so when the illithid pointed out that it had been right in its condemnation of Fetchigrol’s plan, a wall of rage came back at it.
From both Hephaestus and Crenshinibon.
For a moment, Yharaskrik didn’t understand the Crystal Shard’s agreement with the volatile beast. Crenshinibon, too, was an artifact of pragmatic and logical thinking. Unemotional, like the illithid.
But unlike Yharaskrik, Crenshinibon was also ambitious.
And so Yharaskrik knew at that moment that the bond would not hold, that the triumvirate in the dracolich’s consciousness would not and could not remain tenable. It thought to find a host outside the dragon’s body, but dismissed the notion immediately, realizing that nothing was as mighty as the dracolich, after all, and Hephaestus would not suffer the illithid to survive.
It had to fight.
Hephaestus was all anger and venom, that wall of rage, and the illithid went at him methodically, poking holes with logic and reasoning, reminding its opponent of the inarguable truths, for those truths alone—the recklessness of opening wide a gate to an unknown plane, and the needed caution in continuing against a foe as powerful as the combined might of Spirit Soaring—could serve as a premise on which to build its case.
By every measure of the principles of debate, Yharaskrik was far beyond its opponent. The simple truth and logic were on its side. The illithid poked its holes and appealed to reason over rage, repeatedly, thinking to turn the favor of Crenshinibon, who, he feared, would ultimately decide the outcome of their struggle.
The battle within became a wild assault without, as Hephaestus’s dracolich form thrashed and clawed at the stone, breathed fire that melted stone and minion alike, and bull-rushed walls, shaking the entire mountain in great tremors.
Gradually, Hephaestus began to play out his rage, and the internal battle diminished as it became a session of dialogue and discourse. With Yharaskrik leading the way, the Ghost King began to sort how it might correct for the loss of Fetchigrol. The Ghost King began to accept the past and look to the next move in the wider, and more important struggle.
Yharaskrik took some small comfort in the victory, fully recognizing that it might be temporary in nature and fully expecting that it would battle Hephaestus many more times before things were finally settled.
The illithid turned its thoughts and arguments to the very real possibility that Fetchigrol’s demise indicated that the apparition had reached too far into what had once been the Plane of Shadow. But for reasons still unknown to the Ghost King, the Plane of Shadow had become something more, something bigger and more dangerous. It also seemed to be somehow moving closer to the Prime Material Plane, and in that event, what consequences might result?
Crenshinibon seemed not to care, reasoning that out of chaos, the Ghost King could only grow stronger.
And if a dangerous and too-powerful organized force had come through the rift, the Ghost King could simply fly away. The Crystal Shard, Yharaskrik understood implicitly, was far more concerned about the loss of two of the seven.
For Hephaestus, there remained only unrelenting and simmering anger, and most of all, the dragon’s consciousness growled at the thought of not being able to exact revenge on those who had so ruined the beast in life.
While Yharaskrik thought of times to come and how to shape the wider path, and Crenshinibon considered the remaining five and whether any repairs were called for, the dragon only pressed, incessantly, for an immediate assault on Spirit Soaring.
They were not one, but three, and to Yharaskrik, the walls separating the triumvirate that was the Ghost King seemed as impenetrably thick and daunting as ever. And from that came the illithid’s inescapable conclusion that it must find a way to dominate, to force oneness under its own commanding will and intellect.
And it hoped it could hide that dangerous ambition from its too-intimate fellows.
CHAPTER 19
PRIESTS OF NOTHING
We are nothing! There is nothing!” the priest screamed, storming about the audience hall in Spirit Soaring, accentuating every word with an angry stomp of his foot. His point was furthered by the blood matting his hair and caked about the side of his face and shoulder, a wound that looked worse than it was. Of the five who had been with him out and about the Snowflakes, he had been the most fortunate by far, for the only other survivor had lost a leg and the other seemed doomed to amputation—and only if the poor woman even survived.
“Sit down, Menlidus, you old fool!” one of his peers yelled. “Do you think this tirade helpful?”
Cadderly hoped Menlidus, a fellow priest of Deneir, would take that advice, but he doubted it, and since the man was more than a decade his senior—and looked at least three decades older than Cadderly—he hoped he wouldn’t have to intervene to forcibly silence the angry man. Besides, Cadderly understood the frustration behind the priest’s rant, and didn’t wholly dismiss his despairing conclusions. Cadderly, too, had gone to Deneir and feared that his god had been lost to him forever, as if Deneir had somehow simply written himself into the numerical maze that was the Metatext.
“I am the fool?” Menlidus said, stopping his shouting and pacing, and tapping a finger to his chest as he painted a wry smile on his face. “I have called pillars of flame down upon those who are foes of our god. Or have you forgotten, Donrey?”
“Most surely, I have not,” Donrey replied. “Nor have I forgotten the Time of Troubles, or any of the many desperate situations we have faced before, and have endured.”
Cadderly appreciated those words, as apparently, he saw in looking around at the large gathering, did everyone else in the room.
Menlidus, though, began to laugh. “Not like this,” he said.
“We cannot make that judgment until we know what this silence is truly all about.”
“It is about the folly of our lives, friend,” the defeated Menlidus said quietly. “All of us, and do look at us! Artists! Painters! Poets! Man and woman, dwarf and elf, who seek deeper meaning in art and in faith. Artists, I say, who evoke emotion and profundity with our paintings and our scribblings, who cleverly place words for the effect dramatic.” His snicker cut deep. “Or are we illusionists, I wonder?”
“You do not believe that,” said Donrey.
“Who believe our own illusions,” Menlidus qualified. “Because we have to. Because the alternative, the idea that there is nothing more, that it is all a creation of imagination to maintain sanity, is too awful to contemplate, is it not? Because the truth that these gods we worship are not immortal beings, but tricksters promising us eternity to extract from us fealty, is ultimately jarring and inspiring despair, is it not?”
“I think we have heard enough, brother,” said a woman, a renowned mage who also was possessed of significant clerical prowess.
“Have we?”
“Yes,” she said, and there was no mistaking the edge to her voice, not quite threatening but certainly leading in that direction. “We are priests, one and all,” Menlidus said.
“Not so,” several wizards pointed out, and again the bloody priest gave a little laugh.
“Yes, so,” Menlidus argued. “What we call divine, you call arcane—our altars are not so different!”
Cadderly couldn’t help but wince at that, for the notion that all magic emanated from one source brought him back to his younger days in the Edificant Library. Then he had been an agnostic priest, and he too had wondered if the arcane and the divine were no more than different labels for the same energy.
“Save that ours accepts the possibility of change, as it is not rooted in dogma!” one wizard cried, and the volume began to rise about the chamber, wizards and priests lining up against each other in verbal sparring.
“Then perhaps I speak not to you,” Menlidus said after Cadderly locked him with a scowl. “But for us priests, are we not those, above all others, who claim to speak the truth? The divine truth?”
“Enough, brother, I beg,” Cadderly said then, knowing where Menlidus was going despite the man’s temporary calm, and not liking it at all.
He moved toward Menlidus slowly, wearing a carefully maintained expression of serenity. Having heard nothing from Danica or his missing children, Cadderly was anything but serene. His gut churned and his thoughts whirled.
“Do we not?” Menlidus shouted at him. “Cadderly of Deneir, above all others, who created Spirit Soaring on the good word and power of Deneir, should not doubt my claim!”
“It is more complex than that,” said Cadderly.
“Does not your experience show that our precepts are not foolish dogma, but rather divine truth?” Menlidus argued. “If you were but a conduit for Deneir in the construction of this awe-inspiring cathedral, this library for all the world, do you not laugh in the face of such doubts as expressed by our secular friends?”
“We all have our moments of doubt,” Cadderly said.
“We cannot!” Menlidus exclaimed, stamping his foot. That movement seemed to break him, though, a sudden weariness pulling his broad shoulders down in a profound slump. “And yet, we must, for we are shown the truth.” He looked across the room at poor Dahlania, one leg gone, as she lay near death. “I begged for a blessing of healing,” he mumbled. “Even a simple one—any spell at all to alleviate her pain. Deneir did not answer that plea.”
“There is more to this sad tale,” Cadderly said quietly. “You cannot blame—”
“All my life has been in service to him. And this one moment when I call upon him for my most desperate need, he ignores me.”
Cadderly heaved a sigh and placed a comforting hand on Menlidus’s shoulder, but the man grew agitated and shrugged that touch away.
“Because we are priests of nothing!” Menlidus shouted to the room. “We feign wisdom and insight, and deceive ourselves into seeing ultimate truth in the lines of a painting or the curves of a sculpture. We place meaning where there is none, I say, and if there truly are any gods left, they must surely derive great amusement from our pitiful delusions.”
Cadderly didn’t have to look around the room at the weary and beleaguered faces to understand the cancer that was spreading among them, a trial of will and faith that threatened to break them all. He thought to order Menlidus out of the room, to chastise the man loudly and forcefully, but he dismissed that idea. Menlidus wasn’t creating the illness, but was merely shouting it to the rafters.
Cadderly couldn’t find Deneir—his prayers, too, went unanswered. He feared that Deneir had left him forever, that the too-inquisitive god had written himself into the Weave or had become lost in its eternal tangle. Cadderly had found power, though, in the fight against the fleshy beasts of shadow, casting spells as mighty as any he might have as
ked from Deneir.
But those spells, he believed—he feared—hadn’t come from the one he had known as Deneir. He didn’t know what being, if any being, had bestowed within him the power to consecrate the ground beneath his feet with such blessed magic.
And that was most troubling of all.
For Menlidus’s point was well taken: If the gods were not immortal, then was their place for their followers any more lasting?
For if the gods were not powerful and wise enough to defeat the calamity that had come to Faerûn, then what hope for men?
And worse, what was the point of it all? Cadderly dismissed that devastating thought almost as soon as it came to him, but it indeed fluttered through his mind, and through the minds of all those gathered there.
Menlidus spat his devastating litany one emphatic last time. “Priests of nothing.”
* * * * *
“We are leaving,” Menlidus said to Cadderly early the next morning, after an eerily quiet night. That respite had not set well with poor Cadderly, however, for Danica had not yet returned.
No word from his wife, no word of his missing children, and perhaps worst of all, Cadderly still found no answers to his desperate calls to Deneir.
“We?” he replied.
Menlidus motioned through the door, across the hall and into a side chamber, where a group of about a dozen men and women stood dressed for the road.
“You’re all leaving?” Cadderly asked, incredulous. “Spirit Soaring is under a cloud of assault and you would desert—”
“Deneir deserted me. I did not desert him,” Menlidus replied sharply, but with a calm surety. “As their gods deserted them, and as the Weave abandoned three of them, wizards all, who find their life’s pursuit a sad joke, as is mine.”
“It didn’t take much of a test to shake your faith, Menlidus,” Cadderly scolded him, though he wanted to take the words back as soon as he heard them escape his mouth. The poor priest had suffered a failing of magic at the very worst moment, after all, and had watched a friend die because of that failure. Cadderly knew that he was wrong to judge such despair, even if he didn’t agree with the man’s conclusion.
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