by Paul S. Kemp
None of them moved. They continued to stand just inside the door, as though fearful that to enter the library would immerse them in the same mad world in which Sephris lived.
“Do you know why we’ve come?” Cale asked him.
Sephris folded his hands behind his back and looked up to the ceiling.
“Many variables, of course …”
He trailed off, muttering to himself, pacing the library, studying nothing. Cale wondered if he should ask the question again.
“Variables,” Sephris muttered, “variables.” He stopped walking and turned to look at Cale, his gaze sharp. “You’ve brought me something.”
“That shows nothing,” Riven said. “A Turmishan palm reader could—”
“You’ve brought me a half,” said Sephris with a smile, “but you wish the whole.”
Cale felt the hairs on his nape rise. Beside him, Riven stuttered to a stop.
“Didn’t I say so?” Jak said, and shot an I told you so look at Riven. “Show him, Cale.”
Cale unslung his pack.
“You require an answer within two days,” said Sephris, nodding. “Two. Hmm. These formulae are complex. You three present quite the problem. Interesting….”
Cale, wondering how in the Nine Hells Sephris seemed to know what he knew, removed the half-sphere from its burlap blanket. He held it up for the loremaster to see. The gems within the quartz sparkled in the candlelight.
“We need you to tell us what this is,” Cale said.
For the first time since they’d entered the library, Sephris seemed to give something his full attention. He stared at the half-sphere—hard. He seemed to have stopped breathing.
“Place it on my desk,” he said. “Careful of my papers.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Cale walked across the library, mindful of the debris on the floor, and placed the half-globe on Sephris’s desk. As he did, he looked at the slate on which Sephris had been writing. The numbers and symbols on it were written in half a dozen different languages, at least two of which Cale didn’t recognize. Probably Sephris had invented his own branch of mathematics to symbolize his thinking.
“How many languages do you speak?” Cale asked in Chondathan.
Sephris waved a dismissive hand and answered in Turmishan, “There is only one, young man, and it is not written with letters. Now, move away from my desk.”
Cale did.
Staring at the half-sphere throughout, the loremaster walked to his desk and sat. He put his chin in his palms and stared at it, transfixed, his eyes drinking it in, whispering to himself all the while. Cale realized as he backed toward the door that the loremaster was actually counting the flecks of gemstones within the half-sphere. Dark and empty! There were hundreds, at least—perhaps thousands.
“Is he counting the gems?” Jak asked in a whisper, when Cale had retreated back to the door.
Cale nodded, watching.
When Sephris looked up some moments later, he seemed surprised to see them there.
“You, still?” the loremaster said. “This changes everything. Everything.”
He picked up his slate, wiped it clean with the sleeve of his robe and began to write furiously.
“A dominant variable,” he muttered. “Dominant.”
Cale, Riven, and Jak could do nothing but stand and wait while Sephris scratched his head and studied what he had written.
“No,” Sephris muttered, and again he wiped the slate clean. He started anew to write but stopped and looked up at them. “Return to me in eighteen hours. I will provide you with your answer then.”
“No, Sephris,” Cale said. “We cannot.”
He couldn’t leave the half-sphere unprotected.
Sephris looked taken aback; he must not often be refused. He eyed Cale shrewdly.
“It will be safe here with me. Look.” Sephris hurriedly scribbled a formula on the slate that filled it only halfway. He held it up for Cale and said, “Do you see? It will be safe until at least the nineteenth day of this month.”
The scribblings meant nothing to Cale, but he needed an answer, and that meant abiding by Sephris’s rules. They could keep watch from the street.
“Eighteen hours then,” he agreed.
“Excellent. You may go.”
At that, Riven scoffed. Under his breath he said, “By your leave, milord.”
Cale said nothing. They turned, opened the door and exited. The priest-caretaker greeted them in the hall.
“Did you find what you sought?”
Cale deflected the question. “We’ll return tomorrow evening.”
“Very well,” said the priest, content not to press. “I’ll expect you then.”
And that was that.
When they reached the street, Cale eyed the nearby buildings. One of them, a three story stone tallhouse, had a roof with only a slight pitch.
Cale pointed and said, “There. We’ll keep watch in shifts, in case Vraggen makes another grab for the half-sphere.”
In truth, Cale didn’t think the mage would risk another attack, but he wanted to be certain. The tallhouse roof offered a nice vantage of the entire street.
“Good,” Jak said.
“I’m in,” Riven said, “but there’s something I need to tend to first. I’ll be back before nightfall.”
“Describe the something,” Cale said.
“My concern, Cale.”
They exchanged glares. Cale knew it would be pointless to press.
“Act as though you’re being watched,” he said.
Riven sneered and laid a hand on one of his enchanted sabers.
“I always do,” the assassin said. “I’ll be back near sunset.”
As Riven walked away, Jak said, “I don’t trust him, Cale. Not as far as I could throw a troll.”
Cale made no comment, just stared into Riven’s back. He was not sure if he trusted the assassin either. Obviously Mask did, but that gave Cale no comfort—Mask was a bastard, after all, and always had his own agenda.
“Let’s get situated on that roof.”
Riven hurried through the streets, his left hand on a saber hilt, heading for the Foreign District. After he’d left the Zhents a few months earlier, he’d purchased a nondescript flat there. It still felt strange to him to have somewhere to go, somewhere he considered his home. While in the Network, he had made a habit of changing the location in which he slept at least twice per tenday, more out of a sense of professional caution than genuine fear. Riven rarely left enemies alive, and the dead didn’t often carry grudges.
After he’d left the Zhents, he hadn’t seen the point of moving around so often. In truth, after he’d resigned he hadn’t seen the point of much at all. He had saved enough coin to keep him in whores and luxury for years, but that kind of life didn’t appeal to him. If he’d been a weak man, he might have turned to a weak man’s vices—drink and drugs—but those things had never held a draw for him either. So for a time, he’d felt aimless.
To his surprise, that had changed the day he found his girls, and changed still more when he had heard the Lord of Shadows’s Call in his dreams.
Riven reached under his tunic to touch the onyx disc that hung from the chain around his neck. He had taken it from the corpse of the last hit he’d performed for the Network: a fat merchant who had run drugs into Cormyr for the Zhents, but had compromised an operative when he was captured by the Purple Dragons. For Riven, the disc symbolized two things: the end of his relationship with the Zhents, and the beginning of his relationship with Mask.
While he wasn’t a priest like Cale—Nine Hells, the mere thought of that made him sneer—he also wasn’t the man he once was. His mind was opening, he knew; something was happening, though he didn’t yet know what. He knew only that he served Mask, and for the time being that knowledge was enough. That his service made Cale uncomfortable only made it more satisfying. Riven respected Cale, but didn’t like him.
Still, Riven knew the Lord of Shadows had a purp
ose for Calling him and Cale almost simultaneously. Mask whispered that purpose in his dreams. Riven understood it when he first awakened, when his skull felt as though it was filled with squirming snakes, but the basis for that understanding fled from memory as the dreams faded out of his consciousness. Still, the understanding remained, the certainty, and Riven didn’t question further.
He supposed it was faith, and that thought made him laugh.
For most of his life, Riven had thought that faith made men weak, made them dependent upon the divine rather than their own resources. He had held men of faith in contempt, even those in the Zhents. Especially those. In fact, the return of the Banites to authority in the Network had been the very reason he’d left it. The Zhents under the resurgent Banites would not be the Zhents in which Riven had flourished. The new Church of Bane was too fanatical. But Mask had taught Riven to make distinctions among faiths. Faith didn’t have to make a man weak or mad, though it often did—he thought of Gauston, The Righteous Man, Verdrinal, and that fool Sephris. In Riven’s case, faith was making him stronger. He could feel it changing him. Mask didn’t make demands of Riven. Mask said to him, Here is a way to strength. Take it if you will. Riven had taken it, for he respected strength—those who had it, and those who shared it with him.
When he neared his flat, Riven circled the block a few times to determine if he had a tail. He didn’t. Satisfied, he headed for home.
His flat shared half the space in a one-story wooden building with a scribe-for-hire’s shop. The scribe—Riven had never bothered to remember his name—owned the building and had let it to Riven only because he was afraid to refuse. The scribe made his living notarizing bills of lading and shipping contracts, and drafting documents for the illiterate. He also sold paper, ink, and writing quills. He and Riven had exchanged exactly one sentence since Riven had taken the flat and that suited Riven fine. Riven made the scribe so nervous that the man’s ink-stained hands visibly shook anytime Riven walked in his direction. That too suited Riven fine. No conversation meant no questions.
The building stood at the corner of Mal’s Walk and Drev Street, both narrow, dirty little cart roads near Selgaunt’s western wall. Most Selgauntans held those who lived “under the wall” in contempt, but Riven felt at home there. He could have afforded a much nicer location, of course, but denied the urge. Luxury made a man soft, he knew, and needed only look to Cale for an example of the phenomenon.
The thought of betraying Cale and that little bastard Fleet had entered his mind, of course, but he had dismissed it. Mask clearly wanted him and Cale to work together, and Riven still owed Vraggen a handswidth of steel in his gut for that spell. More than a handswidth. He thought of the dark place that spell had taken him, full of shadows. …
He shook his head. In any event, the surest way to get a go at Vraggen was to pair up with Cale, and if the half-drow and the rest of his crew got in his way, all the better.
He strode past the door to the scribe’s shop, past his own door, and ducked down Mal’s Walk. He didn’t see the girls—they’d be along—and no one else was in sight. He pulled a slim dagger from a boot sheath, slid the blade between the shutters of his only window, and carefully lifted the latch. Silently, he pulled open the shutters and slid through the window.
Good habits, he told himself. Unless absolutely necessary, he tried to avoid obvious entrances and exits. With all the corpses he’d left in his wake, it paid to stay sharp.
No one was inside the two room flat. Riven’s spartan furnishings took up little space. In the front room, a plain wooden table and chair stood near the hearth. An oil lamp and a water jug sat upon the table. Other than the hardware for the hearth and the girls’ buckets beside the door, the room contained nothing else. His bedroom contained a wood framed bed with a feather mattress—his lone indulgence—with a wagon-trunk at its foot. That trunk held most of his personal belongings.
Around the room he had secreted the wealth he’d accumulated throughout his career in the Network: several diamonds behind a loose stone in the chimney, and four separate coin caches under the floorboards. He went to each in turn, removed the contents, and put them in his coin purse.
He was leaving; he knew that. Possibly, he would not return. Cale didn’t see that yet, but Riven did. Whatever they were involved in, whatever Vraggen and this half-drow were scheming, it was bigger than Selgaunt. It had to be. Riven’s dream visions had become more frequent, the pain in his skull upon waking more intense. Mask was preparing him for something….
A scratch at the door drew his attention, a chuffing at the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.
“Here I come,” he said, smiling.
He rose and glided across the room. He checked the buckets—one filled with water, one filled with the boiled scraps he regularly purchased from a butcher on Tenderloin Street. Typically, he pre-paid by the month, and a butcher boy delivered the buckets of scraps every day or two.
He opened the door and the girls thundered in, tails wagging and tongues lolling.
He kneeled down to receive their charge and they nearly bowled him over. He rubbed each behind her ears.
“Hey, girls, hey. Good dogs, good dogs.”
They licked him in greeting, fairly covering him in dog spit, while their tails wagged furiously. He fought through their affection to shut his door. The smaller of the two, a short-haired brown and black mutt with bright eyes, flopped onto the floor and showed Riven her stomach. Riven obliged her with a belly rubbing.
The larger brown hound with the gentle eyes, obviously the smarter of the two, left off Riven’s affection and went for the buckets while the other was distracted with the belly rub. The smaller caught on fast, though. She rolled onto her feet and scampered over to the food. The larger made a hole and the two began to eat in earnest.
Riven slid near them and patted their flanks as they ate. He marveled at how gentle they both were. Most strays would squabble over food, and growl if they were disturbed while eating. Not his girls. He thought they might be a bitch and her daughter but he had no way of knowing for sure.
“I’m thinking I’ll be gone for a bit, girls,” he said, surprised at how sad those words made him.
He’d grown attached to his girls, as attached as he got to anything. They looked back at him, meat and drool hanging comically from their mouths. He scratched each behind the ears again. The smaller licked his hand.
“But I’ll make sure you’re cared for.”
He had encountered the girls on his way home one night, perhaps two months before. Both dogs, obvious strays, had been as weak as infants and as thin as reeds. When Riven held out his hand and softly called to them, they had approached him timidly. But when he gently rubbed their muzzles and flanks, their diffidence vanished and they fairly overwhelmed him with licks. Since then, they’d been his girls, and they returned to his flat almost every day. He suspected that they lived in the alley nearby.
He’d never bothered to name them. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he would someday.
Riven had loved dogs since boyhood. Back in Amn, in a life that was so far removed from the present that it seemed to be someone else’s past, he had been a kennel boy for Lord Amhazar, an insignificant but sadistic nobleman with a taste for women and violence. Riven’s hours with the dogs had been the only happy moments in an otherwise harsh boyhood typified by episodic beatings and chronic hunger.
One morning, that nobleman had beaten him senseless for a reason Riven still did not understand. It was Amahazor’s signet ring that had popped Riven’s eye. Afterward, he’d left Riven for dead on the side of the road. But Riven didn’t die. A passerby, a slaver out of Calimshan, had taken him in and for reasons still unclear to Riven, nursed him back to health, and trained him with weapons. Looking back, Riven realized that he owed that slaver much. He might have told him so if he hadn’t put a punch dagger into the base of his skull over a decade before.
When Riven reached early manhood—even then he
was already a highly efficient killer—he’d returned to the Amhazar estate in the night, murdered his former lord and the entire Amhazar family, then burned the place to the ground. He’d spared only the serfs and the dogs from the slaughter.
You can always trust dogs, he thought, looking at his girls as they licked the bucket clean. Dogs were utterly guileless. Dogs always stayed loyal. Not so with men, as Riven knew well from experience.
Absently, he rubbed them each in turn. They lay on their bellies on either side of him, full and content.
He would not betray the trust they had given him.
“Stay,” he said to them, and he rose.
They gave no sign they understood, but both their tails drummed the wood floor.
“I’ll be back.”
He opened the door and walked next door to the scribe’s shop.
The door was ajar so Riven walked in without knocking. The small shop was crammed full with shelves covered with parchment rolls, inkpots, quills, paperweights, and a host of other paraphernalia that Riven, who could not read and write, didn’t recognize. The scribe, a thin, plain looking man with squinty eyes, sat behind a huge walnut desk on one side of the room. He was writing something on a piece of parchment and had not yet looked up at Riven.
“Hold just for a moment,” he said. “Let me finish this thought.” He thumped the paper with his quill point. “There.” He looked up. “Now—”
When he saw Riven, his gaze went in rapid succession from Riven’s scabbarded sabers to the window that looked out on the street, to Riven’s face. His squinty eyes went as wide as fivestars.
“You! Ah—I mean, how can I help you? Is something wrong with the flat? Or do you want to purchase something?”
Trying to get out from behind his desk, the scribe tripped over his feet. When he caught himself on the desk, he toppled his ink pot and spilled ink over whatever it was he had been writing.
“Oh, dark! Dark and empty!”
He tried to sop up the dark fluid with some spare paper, succeeding only in staining his fingers black.
