by Paul S. Kemp
Riven took a step back.
Jak shook his head and leaned back. He pulled away from Cale, wiped away his tears, and examined his fingers. He didn’t make eye contact with either Cale or Riven.
“No, Cale,” Jak said. “He’s right.”
Cale started to protest but Jak cut him off. “No!” Jak looked Cale in the eyes and Cale saw something in his friend’s gaze that he had never before seen there: hate. “He’s right. I put down the pin. I’m not a Harper anymore. It’s time I got my hands dirty.”
Cale could think of nothing to say. He didn’t know whether to take Jak’s change of heart as a good or a bad thing. He remembered that Sephris had called Jak a “seventeen.” He feared that the equation had just changed.
CHAPTER 12
THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Dawn did not lift the weight from Cale’s soul. The thick clouds kept the landscape cast in a dull gray, which mirrored his mood. The three comrades said little as they walked the road back to Selgaunt. To Cale, Jak seemed conspicuously grim. The halfling had covered his bloodstained tunic with his travelling cloak, but that only hid the damage. Seemingly of their own accord, Jak’s hands from time to time went to his chest, to the scars. He often flexed the fingers that the easterner had methodically broken, blinking at the memory of the pain.
Seeing that, and recalling Jak’s hard words from the previous night, Cale despaired for his friend. He knew that certain actions, once taken, irrevocably polluted a man’s soul. Cale had taken such actions long before, as had Riven. Jak never had, but Cale feared that he soon would. He blamed himself. His own words to Jak haunted him—Sometimes good people have to do hard things. He had known even when he’d mouthed the words that they had been a rationalization, a seductive invitation to walk a gray path. The first step down that path was always the hardest. But Cale knew too well that after that first step it became harder and harder to take another path. Jak seemed to have made up his mind to walk it.
Riven walked a few strides ahead. Cale drifted near Jak.
“You all right?” he asked softly.
Jak looked startled, as though he had not noticed Cale beside him.
“What?” the halfling said. “Yes. I’m fine.”
Cale nodded, and walked beside his friend for a while longer.
“You’re not that kind of man either, Jak,” Cale said. “You never have been. Don’t forget that. Don’t lose yourself.”
Jak merely nodded, his mouth grim. Cale said nothing more, only walked next to his best friend and tried silently to offer his support.
They re-entered Selgaunt with only a cursory questioning by the gate guards. Cale explained away their appearance by stating that they had been caught without shelter in the rain and that was that.
Despite their fatigue and hunger, they moved briskly through the streets, already crowded with farm carts and carriages, and headed directly for Sephris’s residence. Each grabbed a sweetmeat from a vendor and ate on the run.
When they arrived at the overgrown lot of the eccentric sage and opened the squeaky iron gate, the caretaker priest didn’t emerge from the house to greet them. Cale’s stomach tightened. He and Riven shared a glance. The assassin put his hands on his saber hilts.
They hopped up on the porch and rapped on the door. Nothing.
“Dark,” Cale softly swore.
He drew his blade. Riven and Jak did the same. Cale held up three fingers and counted them down. Three, two, one—
He kicked the door, splintering the jambs and knocking it from its hinges, then charged into the house. Riven and Jak followed hard on his heels, blades bare.
They rushed through the foyer to the main hallway. Smeared blood, already hardening to a brown crust, covered the walls and obscured Sephris’s scrawling. The wild blood pattern reminded Cale of the way a child might gleefully cast pigment on a blank canvas. The perpetrator, Azriim or Dolgan, probably, had reveled in the bloodshed.
In the main living room, they found the body of the caretaker priest, flayed and gutted, with his intestines draped around his neck like a shawl. Cale had to control a sudden rush of nausea. The body was only just beginning to stink. Jak stared at the tortured priest with haunted green eyes. Cale put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on,” Cale said, and he headed for the library.
He moved without urgency; he already knew what they would find there.
The library looked much the same as the last time they had visited, except that Sephris lay slumped over his desk in a pool of blood. His throat had been torn open by a claw as large as that of bear. Sticky, blood-soaked papers covered the desktop. There was no sign of a struggle. It appeared as though the loremaster had sat at his desk impassively while his throat had been opened.
Cale simply stood and stared. The sphere sat heavy in his pack. Too many had died for it, and all in vain. For who could tell them the time it tolled?
“Now what?” Riven asked, echoing Cale’s thoughts but in a tone devoid of emotion.
He kicked at some of the papers on the floor, a careless gesture that somehow offended Cale.
“Leave those be,” Cale snapped. Two people had been brutally murdered, no doubt to keep Sephris from telling them any more about the sphere, and the assassin spoke of it without sensitivity. “And keep your mouth shut.”
Jak walked to the desk. Cale followed.
“Look at him, Cale,” Jak said. “He must have seen them coming.” Jak touched some of the blood-soaked papers, each covered in Sephris’s equations. “He must’ve known they were coming. Why didn’t he run?”
Because two and two are four, Cale thought but did not say.
Instead, he said, “I don’t know, Jak.”
He looked at the slates on the floor near the desk and wondered if one of them predicted the loremaster’s own murder.
Jak looked to Cale and asked, “Riven was right to ask. What now?”
Cale thought of the unusual prayer Mask had put in his brain for the first time the night before. It made him uneasy to think about it but they had nothing else.
He took a deep breath before answering, “We ask Sephris.”
Cale and Jak gently removed Sephris’s corpse from the desk chair and arranged it on the floor of the library. Riven did not assist, instead keeping his distance. Cale thought that he understood why. Speaking with the dead reminded Riven—reminded Cale too—that the souls of the men they had each murdered in the past lived on still in Kelemvor’s realm. It made Cale’s skin crawl to think that so many angry souls awaited him beyond the void. The thought of opening that door made his heart race, but he knew he had no choice. They had to speak with Sephris.
“Ready?” asked Jak.
Cale’s dry mouth would not form sounds so he simply nodded. Jak thumped him on the shoulder, stood, and backed off a few strides.
With unsteady hands, Cale donned his mask and sat on his knees beside Sephris. The sphere sat on the floor beside him, sparkling in the candlelight. Cale placed his fingertips on the loremaster’s chest and forehead, took a breath, and began to chant the prayer that would open the door between the realm of the living and the planes of the dead. The words poured from his lips as though eager to be spoken, and his voice gained volume as he went on. A roar filled his ears, a sound like the crashing of Uktar waves in Selgaunt Bay. Cale continued the chant, bent against an invisible spiritual storm that he could not see but could sense.
A soft, violet glow suffused Sephris’s corpse. It took all that Cale had to keep his fingertips on the loremaster’s body. The glow grew brighter. Brighter. Cale could feel a space opening up. The line between the living world and the dead opened with a soft pop. Cale’s flesh went cold.
Sephris’s ghost, his soul, rose up from the corpse.
To Cale, Sephris seemed both there and not there, surrounded by a gulf that was not so much seen or felt as it was implied.
He was staring into eternity, Cale realized. He felt tiny.
And somewhere in t
hat gray limitlessness that extended forever behind Sephris’s shade lurked the souls of the men that Cale had killed, ghosts haunting a ghost. Cale couldn’t quite see them, but he could sense them, could feel the heavy accusations contained in their empty eyes. There were many, he knew. Too many. Some of them had deserved death, but many had not. As a young man, Cale had never cared to make the distinction, and that failure haunted him. He kept his gaze on Sephris and tried not to think of his past, though it literally stared him in the face.
Sephris’s soul, translucent and limned in violet light, hovered in the air above his body. With disturbingly empty eyes, the loremaster looked down on Cale.
“We led them to you, Sephris. I’m sorry for that.”
Sephris smiled enigmatically. His empty sockets made it threatening.
“Two and two are four, Erevis Cale.”
“I understand that now,” Cale said softly, and thought he actually did.
“Do you?”
Cale realized then that Sephris seemed calm. His gaze was steady, his mind focused. Death seemingly had stripped Sephris’s soul of Oghma’s “gift.” For the first time, the loremaster seemed at peace. Cale saw before him the man Sephris must have been before losing himself in his faith. He realized then that service to a god effected a metamorphosis in the believer so gradual that the believer himself couldn’t see it.
He wondered how much his own service to Mask had changed him.
With effort, he put all of that out of his mind. He knew that he didn’t have much time. His spell couldn’t keep Sephris in the living world for long. And the eyes of those he’d murdered, still lingering at the edge of his perception, bored holes into him. He wanted to end it.
“We have the sphere, Sephris,” said Cale. “The whole sphere.” Cale held it up for the spirit to see. He felt as though he was a supplicant making an offering. “Tell us the time.”
Sephris’s empty gaze focused on the glittering sphere.
“This is the dominant variable of your life, First of Five,” the ghost said. “By this, you will be changed.”
Cale didn’t like how much those words echoed his own thoughts.
“It bespeaks the time of the appearance of the Fane of Shadows,” Sephris said. “A temple that journeys through the worlds on the currents of the secret Weave.” Sephris studied the sphere for a few moments then added, “The Fane will appear in the deepest darkness of the night twelve days from now.”
Cale found that he had been holding his breath. He blew it out in a gust.
“Thank you, Sephris.”
“There are more variables in this equation than you now see, First of Five.”
That alarmed Cale. Things already seemed complex enough.
“What variables?” Cale asked.
But Sephris provided nothing further.
“Release me now, Erevis Cale,” said the ghost. “My time on Toril is complete. It has not summed to zero.”
Cale tried to find the sense of that, then nodded and said, “Find peace, loremaster.”
He let the magic of his spell unravel and the door between realms closed. The library stood silent.
Assuming good weather, the Dragon Coast was eight days away by ship. Cale would have to arrange their passage and leave a message for Tamlin telling the lord of Stormweather that he was leaving Selgaunt. He gathered himself, stood, and looked Jak and Riven in the eye.
“We’ve got twelve days to reach the Dragon Coast.”
“Close,” Riven growled.
“Other variables?” Jak asked, with one eyebrow cocked. “What do you suppose that means?”
“Who in the Hells knows,” Riven said. “He didn’t make sense when he was alive.”
Cale smiled despite himself while he returned the sphere to his pack.
“We’ll find out soon enough, little man,” said Cale. “In the meantime, we’ve got a ship to catch.”
CHAPTER 13
THE DRAGON COAST
Brine covered Cale’s clothes in powdery patches, but he didn’t care. The clean smell of the Dragonmere and the brisk westward wind made him smile. He stood with his hands on the aft rail of Foamrider and watched the deep blue of the sea trail behind them. He had lingered there most of the trip, listening to the crying gulls, the drone of the waves, and the snap of the ship’s sail. To his right, barely visible above the line of the horizon, rose the grassy plains of the Dragon Coast. Behind them, only a dark line on the horizon, stood the pines and cedars of the Gulthmere Forest. The merchant cog Foamrider and her captain, Mres Liis, had carried them all the way across the Inner Sea.
Looking thoughtfully at the calm sea, Cale realized that he had probably sailed over those very same waters over a decade before, when he had fled Westgate for Selgaunt. While Foamrider hadn’t sailed far enough west for Cale to have caught sight of the Dragon Coast’s largest city, seeing those seas and thinking of his time there brought back a host of memories—some good, some bad. Literally and figuratively, he felt that he was returning to his roots.
It felt surprisingly good. It felt honest. And the truth was, Cale enjoyed being aboard ship. He remembered a favorite saying among Inner Sea sailors: A wild sea calls only wild souls. He supposed that he must possess a wild soul, because despite the open-sea squall of three days before, the sea spoke to him.
Not so for Jak, he thought with a smile. Or if the sea did speak to the halfling, it didn’t say anything the halfling wanted to hear. Jak had spent the first five days of the journey sending puke over the railing. The squall had made the seasickness worse. Only when their journey was near its end did he seem to have found his sea legs at last. That, or his stomach simply had nothing more to offer Umberlee and her waves.
Unlike Jak, the voyage hadn’t bothered Riven. Cale thought that he probably had been aboard ship before. The assassin had spoken little during the journey. Instead, he had daily donned his aloof sneer and his holy symbol, and practiced his bladework on deck. The challenge of maintaining his combat balance on a listing deck seemed to interest him. Cale and he had sparred twice, both to a draw. Even the hard-bitten sailors had watched those combats with admiration. They had hung from the rigging and hollered encouragement to one or the other. Other than that, though, the crew had kept their distance from the three comrades and asked no questions.
Exactly as Cale wanted it.
“Starmantle to fore!” shouted the boy from the crow’s nest above.
Reluctantly, Cale turned from the sea and made his way off the aft deck to forward. From there, even without a spyglass, he could see Starmantle’s spires and towers rising above the horizon line. The features of the cityscape grew clearer as Foamrider drew closer.
It was far smaller than Selgaunt, Cale saw, but seemed to have a lot of temples. Strange for a city with Starmantle’s reputation.
Jak must have heard the call of the sailor announcing Starmantle. He emerged from below deck, hopped up on the foredeck, and followed Cale’s gaze across the sea.
“So that’s Starmantle, eh?”
“That’s it,” Cale said. He looked at the halfling sidelong. “You look better. Eat anything?”
Jak grimaced and replied, “I’ll wait until we’ve got earth under our feet, thank you. When I was a boy, my father had a dwarf friend—Uncle Korik, we called him. Well, Uncle Korik said that a man could only keep his feet and his sense if he was standing on something solid. He’d never set foot on a ship. That’s wisdom, Cale.”
Cale grinned.
Jak chuckled and added, “Besides, these sailors have got nothing but saltpork and dried fruit. I need a piping hot stew.” He snapped his fingers. “And speaking of pipes.” He pulled out his ivory-bowled pipe, tamped, and lit with a tindertwig. After a time, he blew smoke at Starmantle and said, “I haven’t heard good things about that city.”
“You’ve heard right.”
Though Starmantle had a reputation as one of the least violent cities along the Dragon Coast, it still made Selgaunt look as peacef
ul as a hamlet of halfling matrons. Thieves, pirates, orcs, and worse were as common in Starmantle as the rats.
“I’ve seen worse,” Riven said, suddenly beside them. He spat over the railing and into the sea.
Cale had not even heard the assassin approach. Dark, but he was good! Almost as good as Cale.
“I don’t doubt it,” Jak said as he blew smoke rings into the air.
Riven sneered but said nothing.
In silence, the three watched the city approach. The marble facades of the many temples gleamed in the afternoon sun. Ships of all kinds, from galleys to caravels to longboats, filled the harbor.
The voyage had taken nine days. They had only three days to get into the Gulthmere, find the Fane, and stop Vraggen.
“We’ll need to find a guide who knows the forest,” Cale said.
“Shouldn’t be a problem to find a guide,” Jak observed, and he blew another smoke ring. “Just a problem to find one we can trust.”
“I know one,” Riven said. “Or did, if he’s still alive. Magadon Kest. He knew the southern Dragon Coast well.”
“A Zhent,” Jak said, and managed to make the word not sound like an expletive.
“No,” Riven said, and nothing else.
Cale looked the assassin in his one good eye and asked, “You trust him?”
“No,” Riven said, and spat. “But he’s a guide. And a good one.”
Well enough, Cale thought, and looked back out to sea. At least they had a lead.
Jak blew smoke into the sky.
Riven turned to Cale and said, “You know that if the mage has spies in the city, he’ll know when we arrive. These sailors will sell us for coppers.”
Cale knew that, but there was nothing for it.
“It’s a big city,” he said, and left it at that.
They would have to hope that the crowds would make them anonymous.
Riven cleared his throat and drummed his fingers on the rail.
“We could kill them all,” said the assassin, “scuttle this tub, and take a dinghy in.”
