The Diamond tddts-9
Page 5
Paladin and Hero nodded warily to each other and pressed on toward the sobbing lady's song. They found themselves in a wide chamber ringed with her-or varying reflections of her. One mirror showed a warrior maiden, clear-eyed and noble. The next held a pirate lass, all black leather and lascivious eyes; a third displayed a meek lady pleading from a tower window; its neighbor showed a medusa with writhing hair. Hundreds of images implored for release from the glass. Hero stood frozen, drawn to each pleading woman.
Paladin shook his head. False images, partial truths. Heart was no idealized image, but a true creature. Paladin would not be seduced by lies told about women. He would be inspired by truths told by them.
Hero nodded, understanding. Young, open, and so vulnerable, he led with his broad, brave heart.
The song rose, mournful, beyond the chamber. Paladin listened and pointed. A curving way opened, nearly hidden between alike imploring images. The two men ventured on.
Fiends lunged without invitation from the glass, a roaring menagerie of rending claws, venom-dripping stingers, scourgelike tails, twisted horns, and smoking spittle. They flooded forth as if the mirrors were portals gaping from the Abyss.
Paladin and Hero stood back to back, blades flashing among tentacles and barbed whiskers. Shrieks arose amid the battle cries. Paladin severed the head of a mantis towering over him, leaping across its carapace to slash the snarling faces of two jackal-men, and shattered the mirror behind them. Cracks segmented shadowy figures who rushed to leap the silver margin, and all collapsed in a rain of shards.
The pommel of Hero's dagger crashed into another mirror, and a dozen fiends tumbled into oblivion. He swung for the next, but flesh interposed itselfscabrous and oozing, cracked and sword-worn. Living meat barred the way to other mirrors, lifting claws and grinning with yellowed teeth.
Crying out the names of their mothers and their gods-names not so dissimilar-Paladin and Hero hacked at fiend flesh, winning through to panel after panel. Dead fiends lay heaped across the silvered floor, strange blood darkening the glass, as gate after gate fell.
Ten living fiends stood atop a hundred dead to guard the last looking glass, aflicker with emerging horrors. Hero and Paladin carved a grim path through them.
The last fiend fell, its left head laid open by Paladin's sword and its right skewered through the eye by Hero's dagger. Black blood steamed, and silence fell.
Standing exhausted, Paladin and Hero looked into the last mirror and saw themselves: two blood-soaked warriors burned by gouting acids, stabbed, slashed and bone-broken. Paladin's sword arm changed direction in two places. A severed beast claw jutted from his temple. Hero's ribs showed through a row of gaping wounds, wherein his organs pulsed through a rain of blood. The comrades were walking dead men, too busy slaying to notice that they should die. Now they had time to look.
Hero wheeled and collapsed, lifeless.
Paladin staggered. His world went black. Falling, he smashed his sword against the glass.
The riven mirror collapsed, and the false wounds it had projected onto Hero and Paladin fell away with it.
At last Paladin understood this house of mirrors. He'd thought it a mind of madness, filled with images twisted to obscure the truth, or a sorcerous cage constructed to hold Heart ever captive behind falsities. But it was neither.
The diamond was a mind but was not mad. It was the mind of a world; in any one facet of the diamond, truth was only partially reflected. Truth dwelt not in one angled view of something too large and complex to be fully seen in a thousand images. Truth dwelt beyond and beneath. It could be apprehended not by staring into one reflection but by staring into them all. Paladin would find Heart not by smashing and slaying but only by combining all reflections into the one true creature they mirrored.
He sheathed his sword, helped Hero rise, and stepped into the space beyond the last mirror they'd shattered: a mirrored passage that snaked away through deceptive turns. Its silvered panes held faces: a moon-faced sharper, a much-scarred old pirate, a pale man-giant, a black-bearded mage, a bronze-skinned man in robes of state, a pair of idiot brothers, a crooked lumber merchant…
Paladin ignored these images, grasping the corners of mirrors and pivoting them slowly, one after another. He was opening up the passage, creating a large, circular space. Hero did likewise, pushing back the mirrors on the opposite side of the passage into an inward-curving silver wall.
They worked speedily, repositioning and checking over their shoulders to match alignments. When they completed the first circle, the diffuse starlight that shone through the interior of the diamond intensified. They made a second circle beneath the first, pushing back the mirrors of the floor. When it was done, the room sparkled in warm brilliance.
When they formed the third, the light grew so intense it pushed at the silver and glass it struck, realigning the other facets of the great diamond. Not merely hundreds but thousands of mirrors were brought into focus, blazing like festival sconces, each witness to all that had happened since Heart's disappearance.
At last light surged out to every corner of the diamond-and the vision Hero and Paladin sought erupted into sizzling incandescence before them. Lightning-white the place blazed, around Heart.
She floated in beauty at the center of it all: a creature of pure light, her raiment a rainbow, her scepter a staff of lightning, her eyes twin blue flames.
Paladin and Hero fell to their faces before her.
Her song now was one of triumph as her power blazed brighter. The black tentacles clutching the diamond ignited, their flames adding to the brilliance. The globe of mirrors melted away, and a blast of pure force roared out amid the circling stars and wandering moons. With an answering roar the fire spread down the evil tree.
Freed at last, Heart would burn her former captor to oblivion. Her soul would sear the tree away. But what of the world it was rooted in? The worlds upon worlds into which it had sunk its wicked roots? Would they be destroyed, evil and good alike consumed in flames?
Paladin glanced at his comrade. Hero could do it. Hero could whelm the folk of the world below and bring their axes to bear on the base of this horrific tree.
Thousands of axes. Tens of thousands. If they chopped it through, the massive crown, a world unto itself, would pull away among the stars to erupt safely above and beyond all. Hero could do it.
But Paladin could not. This was she whom he sought, the Heart of all his world. If she was destroyed in flame, he would perish with her.
Empowered by the lightning blasts of Heart, Paladin hoisted Hero, bore him to the spinning edge, and flung him down toward the world. He shouted through the firestorm the only words they shared: "Save it!"
Hero understood. Therein lay his greatness. Despite his youth, his fumbling naivete, the heart so untried and vulnerable in his breast, in the end Hero always understood. And in worlds of truth, understanding bridged any distance.
Immediately, Hero was at the base of the tree, and at once in every farmstead and village and city clustered about it, exhorting folk to bring their axes, and save their world. He was believed and obeyed. That was the power of understanding in a world of truth.
Paladin felt the first thunderous thousand blows shiver the tree. He staggered, striding against the gale of light and power toward the blazing woman. She recognized him. Something in her knew the garment of scars that cloaked his soul. With a single finger of fire, gentle as a caress, she flung him from the inferno, down to the verdant world below.
All the while he fell, Paladin wept; he'd been so close to his love and now he was hurled farther with each breath.
Just before he reached ground, the massive tree groaned. Cut through, it swayed. The blazing bole turned listlessly once before easing up, away from the ground. It hung in the sky, engulfed in racing flames. A white-hot inferno tumbled up into the arching heavens. It was shrinking into vast distance when it blazed its last.
The flash blinded all who looked at it. It blinded Paladin, where
he lay in a scorched glade, and the thunder that followed rattled the teeth in his head. A shock wave of wind slammed into him, thrusting him down through earth and bedrock beneath, whirling him through the swirling subterranean passages of Lethe. Even as he lost consciousness, falling asleep in one world to awaken in another, he knew she was dead.
His Heart's Desire was dead.
"The Tree of Illusion, grown to overbalance the real world in which it has root," mused Khelben, watching the final stitches snipped from the Open Lord's eyes. "The octopodal crown can be none other than Aetheric III. But what of this diamond?"
"Diamond be damned," hissed Piergeiron as his eyes at last struggled open, blinking into the glaring chandeliers. "Eidola is dead. The Heart is dead."
Khelben leaned over, helping the dead man up. "Perhaps not. Perhaps this glorious soul you saw wasn't Eidola, but-"
Before the Lord Mage could say more, Piergeiron saw the woman who lay in the casket beside his own. He sprawled across it and wept bitterly.
Chapter 4
Another Trial for Noph
In the streets above the cold stone of the palace dungeon, Waterdeep rejoiced beneath a sunset sky.
Piergeiron lived.
He had returned. He'd risen during his own funeral to tell a tale of such mythic force that two dozen bards were writing ballads, in moments snatched between the leap-dances and reels demanded by the crowds. The very sewers of Waterdeep throbbed to the tread of thousands of dancing feet. Piergeiron himself had blessed the revelry from his balcony. Khelben expressed his delight in the form of green and gold fireworks, blazing and popping above the harbor.
It seemed only Noph wasn't rejoicing. He stood in the cell where he'd met with his father, and a fictitious fireball had blasted Artemis Entreri and Trandon into twin piles of ash-this wood ash, by his boots.
Noph growled to himself. Appearances, facades, deceptions; how could Khelben nod so sagely at Piergeiron's morality tale when the Blackstaff himself had just perpetrated a treasonous deception on the entire city? "Being a hero is the most confusing job in the world," Noph complained aloud.
"Well now, getting down to the brass, you hit the snail on the prosuberbial head there," a basso voice answered, from disconcertingly nearby.
Noph looked up into the tragicomic mope of Becil Boarskyr's face, the cell bars stretching his red jowls back into a doglike grimace. It was not a pretty sight. "Mayhap," Becil added, "that's on account of because it's not a job."
"What are you talking about?" Noph snapped wearily.
"A job's something they give you compensatory damages for doing it. But heroes don't get any monetary renunciation. If they did, they'd be just missionaries."
"Mercenaries," Noph corrected reflexively.
"Yes, that's it, mercy killers-"
"Mercenaries!" Noph snarled. "People who fight for money: mercenaries!"
Becil nodded amiably. "Yes, mammonaries. Which is why being a hero doesn't provide a fellow the fine emnities of lordly life."
"Amenities."
"Amen to that, yourself. Anyway, when a hero does his goodliness, it's like he doesn't get fiscal repercussions because it's not him who gets paid but the whole world."
Noph suddenly understood. The whole world gets paid. He stared at the twin dust piles.
Khelben hadn't benefited from the jailbreak. He'd nothing to gain from keeping Eidola's identity a secret. He'd not seized power during Piergeiron's long incapacity. In each case, Waterdeep had been made the richer, not the Lord Mage. He was a hero because he acted on behalf of everyone but himself. The whole world got paid.
"Now, as long as we're conversating about those of us who worship mammon getting the chance to go prostate before the sanctuary of our golden god-"
"Prostrate," Noph corrected irritably. "Don't throw around words you don't know."
"I'm planning to expose myself about the jailbreak unless I get some commercial satisfaction."
"You what?" Noph asked, emerging from the empty cell to glare at Becil.
"I observated the deception you and that Blackshaft perpetuated on the Waterdousians," Becil said. "And so, I'll need twenty thousand gold for you to buy the pleasure of me keeping my mouth shut."
"You're going to blackmail Khelben?"
"Blackboil is such a dirty word-"
"No one will listen to you."
"I have the truth."
"It can't be called truth when put to such purposes."
"You'll see."
"I already see," Noph assured him darkly, and then stiffened. An insistent thumping echoed down the hall, followed by muffled shrieks and curses.
Noph ran toward the sound, passing along corridors to a solidly barred floor hatch. He pulled the bar and flung back the hatch. Beneath was a latched iron grating, its bars as thick as his wrist, and beneath that a deep well. A rickety ladder clung to one side of its shaft. The shouts and screams came from the depths below: desperate human voices.
"I wonder how much the world'll be paid for this," Noph mused grimly, as he yanked a lantern from a wall hook, undid the latch, swung back the grating, and started climbing down the well.
His legs made long shadows in the lantern light. He felt like a spider scuttling down a hole. Real spiderwebs broke as he descended through them; they clung to him in a gossamer net.
Ancient rungs cracked under his feet. The lantern light didn't reach the bottom of the well. How deep did this shaft go? The dungeons under both castle and palace were below the sewers, he'd once been told, and he'd come another two hundred feet, at least. The chill made fleeting smoke of his breath.
This could only be a way into Undermountain.
The cacophony of shouts, roars, and shrieks grew deafening. It sounded as if whoever was down there wouldn't survive much longer.
A smooth stone floor became visible below. It belonged to a small chamber, sporting only a door of iron-banded oak in one wall. Leaping from the ladder, Noph landed in a crouch. His feet stirred thick dust as he rushed toward the door. A fat oak beam was cradled across it; the brackets that held it glowed with blue motes of power.
The circling sparks settled into letters, spelling out a clear warning: DO NOT OPEN UNDER PAIN OF DEATH.
"Open up!" a man shouted, from just beyond the barred door. It shuddered with blows from fists or hammers or axes but did not give way. There was a slim crack between the boards, and an eye glared at Noph through it. "Open up, or we'll die!"
Noph looked again at the stern inscription. "You'll have to find another way out!"
"There is no other way out, blast you! We're barely holding off a pair of deep ogres. Open up!"
"Then I'll be barely staving them off," Noph pointed out. "Besides, there's an inscription. A prohibition. A law. I can't compromise the security of-"
"Yes, yes, Piergeiron's Palace! We know! We're agents of his… or some of us are!"
"But under penalty of death-"
"It's the death of four or the death of one, lad. Save your own skin and you've doomed ours. Open the door, and we can fight side by side."
The choice was obvious. It was written large in enchanted letters before him. If the folk trapped on the other side really were agents of Piergeiron, they'd not ask him to defy laws and jeopardize the security of the palace. What if the deep ogres won past, and climbed up to rampage through the palace? More likely there were no deep ogres, and this was a band of villains wanting to trick their way into the palace. What were the lives of four unknowns worth in the balance against his? The choice was obvious.
A terrible scream came through the door, followed by a wet thrashing sound.
"I feel like a gods-damned traitor," Noph hissed, heaving the beam out of its bracket.
The enspelled timber had not even struck the floor before the door crashed open. Noph fell back, sword hissing out.
A moon-faced man tumbled through first, his fancy clothes much slashed and beribboned with blood. Stumbling over him came a soot-besmirched dwarf.
A slender woman in glimmering armor staggered out next.
"Aleena!" Noph yelped.
A weak, answering smile showed through the blood and grime on her face as she collapsed beside the others. There was a man behind her, a silver-garbed paladin. Miltiades! The paladin backed slowly into the room, his warhammer ringing and swinging with the profound, determined motion of a blacksmith's maul.
His anvil was a gigantic creature. Its eyes-dinner plates awash in blood-glowed furiously from grimy folds of flesh. The sheer weight of the ogre's lips shaped a permanent scowl around jagged green teeth. Hands as big as men groped from the darkness, snatching at the paladin's armor. Only the persistent, ringing blows of the hammer kept those hands at bay.
If the ogre emerged from the cramped passage, they'd all be slain. And another beast would follow the first.
A sudden flare of flame drew Noph's eyes. The oak beam he'd pulled from the door was afire. It rattled and gave off a high whistling as the magics laid on it did their work. The heat coming off it was already enough to shrivel the cobwebs clinging to Noph into smoky tracers.
The choice was obvious.
The young hero dropped his sword, bent, and hefted the hissing beam. Fire raced across his hands and up his arms. Agony stabbed through him. He snarled, heaving the timber above his head, and lunged at the ogre, thrusting it like a spear into the monster's gaping maw. One end distended the squalling beast's throat. Green teeth clamped on blazing wood.
"Down," Noph shouted, shoving Miltiades to the floor. They fell together and rolled.
A corona of fire flared from the ogre's astonished face, and its mantle of hair ignited with a whoosh, standing away from its head. The beast's throat bulged out like a bullfrog's. The log in its chattering teeth flared bright red, then white, and then exploded.