Dawn of Night

by Paul S. Kemp

  Void

  Calling upon the library of data stored in his mind, he observed several distant planets, derived their mass, their precession, the length of their seasons, their aphelion and perihelion. The exercise made him smile; he recognized it as an attempt to use mathematics to make chaos predictable. Such ordering was the curse of sentience, an irrepressible desire to engage in an ultimately futile exercise.

  Shadow

  The guide unslung his ashwood bow, drew an arrow from his quiver, and scanned the swamp. Pools of black water stood to either side of them, steaming in the humidity. The dark trees of the swamp loomed like watchtowers.

  Necropolis

  Thunder boomed and another lightning flash illuminated the city. Jak caught a clear glimpse of toppled buildings, crumbling megaliths, and broken statues worn by the weather and pitted into anonymity. Sculptures perched atop the roofs of the small, single story buildings in the city’s center, the only intact statuary in the ruins. Cale’s voice was grim when he said, “Those are tombs.” Jak’s skin went gooseflesh. There were a lot of them.

  Elsewhere

  The nursery opened wide around him, a circular cyst in the earth of his pocket plane. Forty-four paces in diameter, the polished walls of the perfectly spherical room gleamed in the dim green light of a single glowball. Lines of diamonds and amethysts glittered in alternating spiraling whorls inset into the walls.

  BOOK II

  THE

  EREVIS CALE

  TRILOGY

  THE

  EREVIS CALE

  TRILOGY

  Book I

  Twilight Falling

  Book II

  Dawn of Night

  Book III

  Midnight’s Mask

  Also by Paul S. Kemp

  R.A. Salvatore’s War of the Spider Queen

  Book VI

  Resurrection

  Sembia

  The Halls of Stormweather

  Shadow’s Witness

  For Jen, A, and B

  And they went forth into the dawn of night.

  Long by wild ways and clouded light …

  —Algernon Charles Swinburne Tristram of Lyonesse

  THE SOJOURNER

  Vhostym wished to make one last observation before he began the final stages of his plan. He attributed the desire to nostalgia, to a need to see things as they existed at that moment. For soon, everything would change.

  Propelling his projected form upward with the power of thought, Vhostym extended the range of his illusionary proxy to the far limits of his spell—the edge of Toril’s sky, leagues above the surface, where the blue of Toril’s celestial sphere gave way to the bleak darkness of the cosmos. From there, he looked outward through the eyes of the image and into endlessness. The void of the heavens yawned before him, the massive, limitless jaws of the greatest of beasts. In its infinite expanse, Vhostym bore witness to the immensity of creation, the perfect mathematics of motion, and the insignificance of his own existence.

  He, among the most powerful of beings on any world, felt insignificant. The feeling amused him, mostly because it was true. Even his grand plan, as ambitious as it was, faded into negligibility in the face of the endless ether.

  The meaninglessness of existence comforted him. Juxtaposed against infinite time and space, even the greatest of beings were small.

  Distant but still obviously enormous, Toril’s sun dominated his view, once of the countless blazing eyes of the beast. Though he could not see them from that distance, he knew that the fiery star continually spat jets of flame into the cosmic darkness, the smallest of which could have immolated even the City of Brass and all of the efreeti in it. Had Vhostym been looking at the glowing orb through his physical eyes, the light would have blinded him and charred his skin as black as the void. The pain would have lasted only a few excruciating moments before the rays would have reduced him to a heap of seared flesh. Even mild starlight caused his physical form pain unless he took magical precautions—hence his underground existence. His advancing illness had only made his vulnerability to sunlight more pronounced. As a younger githvyrik, he had for centuries sought a spell that would eliminate his extreme sensitivity to light, but to no avail. He could not change what he was.

  But he could change the world, at least for a time.

  The details of his plan marched through his brain, a progression of steps as orderly and logical as those used to solve a complex equation. The scope of his ambition appalled and delighted even him. He could do it though, of that he was certain. He would do it.

  Other, less grand courses were open to him, of course. Through his magic he could have simply adopted a form that suffered no ill effects from light. He could have faced the sun, as he did then, through the eyes of a projected image, and in that way gain the Crown of Flame. But those were paltry substitutes for the reality, and both were insufficient to satisfy him. Before the end, he would see the crown with his own eyes, feel it against his flesh. And to do that, he needed to stand on the surface of Toril. The thought of it caused him a pang of longing, a desire to feel the coolness of an unfettered breeze against the pale skin of his face.

  He set aside his reverie and continued the observation.

  In the infinity beyond Toril’s sun, innumerable planets and stars spun through the deep, pinpricks of light dancing through the dark. Vhostym observed their motion for a time, his intellect automatically translating their movement into equations that only he could understand. Calling upon the library of data stored in his mind, he observed several distant planets, derived their mass, their precession, the length of their seasons, their aphelion and perihelion. The exercise made him smile; he recognized it as an attempt to use mathematics to make chaos predictable. Such ordering was the curse of sentience, an irrepressible desire to engage in an ultimately futile exercise.

  Still, the countless celestial bodies enthralled him. To the uninitiated, the night sky seen from Toril’s surface probably appeared to be a veritable ocean of twinkling lights, as though the universe was a sack stuffed full. Vhostym knew that to be fiction. All told, the entirety of the celestial bodies in the universe filled the vacuum of the cosmos no more than fish filled a sea.

  The universe, Vhostym knew, was emptiness, a vacuum filled with dust motes and beings ignorant of their own insignificance. The irony was, due to Vhostym’s congenital hyper-sensitivity to light, he could see the multiverse only through a projected image, itself a fiction, itself an empty form.

  But soon he would see it through his own eyes rather than through the lens of his magic. Then the Crown of Flame would be his. And when he had that, he would have everything he wanted.

  Millennia ago, not long after the revolution that had freed his people from their illithid tyrants, he had been of a more philosophical bent. Then, he had hopefully pondered how one being could meaningfully affect the cosmic vastness for the better. Initially, he had thought the answer to be ever-increasing power. But as his power had grown—grown so large as to be nearly unparalleled—so too had his understanding. In the end he had come to realize that attempting to affect the universe was the desire of fools. It was too big, too random, too uncaring. He was a dust mote, as was everyone and everything else.

  Life had no overarching meaning, he had learned, no grand purpose. Not even his life. There was only sensation, experience, subjectivity. That realization, equivalent to an epiphany for a religious zealot, had freed him from his self-imposed moral shackles. In a flash of insight, he had realized that morality was as much a man-made construct as a stone golem. He had come to the abrupt and stunning realization that characterizing an action as good or evil was absurd. He had elevated himself beyond good and evil. What was, was. What one wanted to do and could do, one ought to do. There w
as no other ought, no other objective standard.

  That principle had informed his subsequent existence.

  He looked down through his slippered “feet” to the spinning sphere below him. The great globe of Abeir-Toril turned its way through the heavens—a whirling green, blue, and brown jewel dusted here and there with a fringe of white clouds. It too was wondrous in its way, a beautiful gear in the clockwork of the universe. True, Vhostym might have improved its symmetry by leveling a mountain range here, or draining a sea there, but still the surface of his adopted world was beautiful.

  The surface. Merely thinking about it turned him maudlin. He had set foot on it in his own form only once, as a very young gith, and for only moments. But during that single visit he had seen for the first time the Crown of Flame, and that vision had birthed in his mind a possibility. He would create the crown himself, and with it walk Faerûn’s surface for as long as he willed.

  He looked up and to his right, to the silver orb of Selûne, cresting over the horizon line of Toril, and the swarm of her tears. He knew the moon goddess would not be pleased when his plan began to take shape. Neither would Cyric, the Mad God.

  It amused Vhostym to think of the divine consternation he soon would cause. He cared not at all, of course. The ire of gods meant as little to him as did the morality of humankind. Gods were little more than men made immortal, driven by the same banal instincts and desires as mortals. Immortality was easy to attain, Vhostym knew. It was living a meaningful existence that was hard.

  Vhostym watched Selûne finish its rise above Toril and knew that the time had come to begin, but still he lingered, teetering on the edge of the void. With the object of his desire within reach he felt satisfaction in prolonging the final moments of denial. He knew the reason—consummation of his plan represented a threshold, established a line of demarcation between before and after. For the moment, he wanted to savor the before, to capture it in his mind like a portrait.

  He again looked down on Toril, saw the broad outline of Faerûn, and located the Inner Sea. There, below the cottony clouds, he fancied he could see the island that he had chosen to house the focus for the greatest spell he would ever cast.

  Thousands would die, he knew. Perhaps tens of thousands.

  So be it, he thought.

  He willed what he willed, and so it would be. With that, he decided that it was time to cross the threshold, to begin the after. The before was boring him.

  With a thought, he dispelled his projected image and returned his consciousness to his body. The universe instantly fell away and darkness enshrouded him. As always, it took a moment to overcome the physical and mental torpidity caused by the projection spell. He sat cross-legged on a plush rug. His flesh felt thick and clumsy compared to the lightness of his soaring soul. He imagined he would feel something akin to that lightness when he set foot again on Toril’s surface, when he possessed the Crown of Flame and looked into the dark sky with his own gaze.

  Inhaling as deeply as his failing lungs would allow, he opened his eyes. The darkness of his pocket plane contrasted markedly with the light of the outer cosmos but he could see clearly nevertheless. His vision extended simultaneously into several spectra, several planes, but his smooth, stone-walled sanctuary looked the same in all of them—unremarkable. He had grown weary long ago of living under the earth. Millennia before, he had pinched off an area of Faerûn’s Underdark, essentially creating a pocket plane of his own—a part of Faerûn, but still separate from it. It felt more a prison every decade, not unlike his body.

  Several magical gems orbited his head, whirring around at a distance of a few handspans. It was in observing those gems that he had found the inspiration for his plan. Still, he found their incessant hum irritating at the moment. Floating in each corner of the chamber, iridescent glowballs lit the square meditation room, their dim green light an order of magnitude dimmer than starlight and barely perceptible by most beings.

  He braced himself, unfolded his legs, and started to rise. His body was weaker than usual. As always, pain wracked his bones the moment he put weight on them.

  Refusing to surrender to the wasting disease that plagued his skeleton down to the marrow, he forced himself to stand without magical assistance. That small victory brought him satisfaction. For centuries, his magic had held age and disease at bay. But time was a relentless opponent, and even the most powerful of his magic was losing its battle with the passing years. He had considered lichdom of course, but had dismissed it. He relished the pleasures of the flesh too much even in his old age, though in recent years those pleasures were few. The sensory emptiness of undeath was not for him.

  Besides, he had lived a full life in his ten thousand years. He had but one thing left to do. Once it was done he would be fulfilled. With the Weave Tap in his possession he could do it.

  He raised his hand to cast a spell but stopped before uttering the arcane words. He stared for a moment at his outstretched hand. The appearance of his flesh disturbed him—bone white, parchment thin, speckled with dark age spots and threads of black veins. His nearly translucent skin wrapped his fingers and hands so tightly that he could distinguish individual bones.

  I am almost a lich already, he thought with a touch of sadness.

  He had lived too long, and spent too much time underground. The latter problem soon would be resolved. As for the former, well … time would claim him when it would.

  He fought down a bout of melancholy, admonishing himself for indulging in such weakness. With exaggerated dignity, he straightened his magical gray robes and composed himself. It would not do for his brood of slaadi to see him dismayed. He regarded them as his children; they should not see their father in distress.

  Decades ago, needing loyal servants to implement the plan he had conceptualized even then, he had removed the slaads’ eggs from the chaos of their native plane of Limbo. Afterward, he had magically altered them in the egg, instilling the raw essence of magic into their still-forming bodies. After their emergence from their shells, he had nurtured them as a father, rearing them on the rarefied nutriment of raw magic and the brains of sentient creatures. They still had a taste for the latter, and a thorough understanding of the former.

  Being creatures of chaos, each of his brood had responded differently to the process. Vhostym took a father’s pride in their multifarious personalities—Azriim, the intelligent but willful son; Dolgan, incredibly strong and loyal but also somewhat servile; Serrin, fast and merciless; Elura the …

  Elura the dead, he reminded himself without sadness. Had the brood been able to return her body to him, he might have resurrected her. But divinations had revealed that the priest of Mask and his comrades had reduced Elura to ash. He missed her, in his way. He would have called her the most adventurous of the brood. She had taken pleasure in the males of many species, including Vhostym himself, centuries ago….

  Without further waste of sentiment, he put her out of his mind.

  In the end, the pre-birth process to which he had subjected the brood had transmogrified them into more than ordinary slaadi. Their magical natures had been enhanced to various degrees. But despite the differences from their ordinary kin, their slaadi biological heritage still ran strong: each felt a compulsion to change from the caterpillar of their current form—that of a green slaad—into the butterfly of the more powerful gray. To do so, they required an influx of arcane power, an admixture of magic known to Vhostym and few others. Vhostym would provide that to his sons upon the consummation of his plan, recompense for their success in retrieving the Weave Tap and serving him for so many years.

  Had it been possible, he would have retrieved the Tap himself. But even his power could not have pierced Shar’s Fane of Shadows. Only a shadow adept could have done so. So his brood had manipulated the shadow mage Vraggen into gaining them entry. The plot had taken months to unfold, but at last they had succeeded and the time was nigh to move forward.

  He spoke a word of power and held his op
en palm before one of the blank walls of his sanctuary. The magic warped space. The stone wavered, vanished, and was replaced by a door-shaped aperture. Vhostym levitated a few hands breadths off the smooth floor—to ease the strain on his body—and floated through the portal. It sealed shut behind him the moment he cleared it.

  In contrast to the austerity of the meditation chamber, the lounge beyond was stuffed with luxuries. Piles of silks, soft cushions, furs, divans, and chairs from many worlds lay strewn haphazardly around the room. As a young man, when he had sought sensation in mistleaf, potent liquors, and the pleasures of the flesh, such things had seemed important to him. No longer. Only one thing was important to him.

  Of the hundreds of chambers and rooms that existed in the honeycombed rock of his Underdark pocket plane, that room alone he allowed to remain in such disarray. The chaos of the decor and the decadence of the furnishings appealed to his slaadi. It was their favorite chamber.

  Azriim and Dolgan awaited him there.

  Azriim sat on a divan on the far side of the lounge in the form of a half-drow, stylishly dressed. Vhostym thought his son enjoyed that body better than his own—a human form was perhaps a more suitable tool for enjoying sensation, he supposed. And what Azriim enjoyed, Azriim did. Vhostym admired that about his son. Of the four slaadi of the brood, Vhostym thought Azriim had taken after him the most.

  Seeing Vhostym, Azriim stood and bowed, a reluctant gesture for the prideful slaad.

  “Sojourner,” he said.

  Vhostym smiled. Azriim had never called Vhostym “father” or “master,” only “Sojourner.” It was enough. Vhostym respected his independence.

  On the floor near Azriim, Dolgan crouched on his haunches in his natural form—a hulking, bipedal, toad-like creature with leathery green skin and a face full of fangs. The flesh of his muscular forearm oozed black blood from self-inflicted claw scratches. His dullest son was obsessed with pain—both giving it and receiving it. The fact that the slaadi quickly regenerated their wounds only fed Dolgan’s fetish. Even as Vhostym watched, Dolgan’s wounds closed to light scars.