This was no world tree, but something darker and deadlier. A world in itself, huge and alive, or—no, a creature that wished to be a world. Its thousand limbs in their dark and mighty magnificence clutched the glowing diamond.
He looked at that awesome stone. It drew him up. The lady hung unseen within it, crushed on all sides by titanic, yet balanced, forces. She sang out from its bright depths.
Paladin would save her.
He was suddenly there, beside the diamond, a cage within a cage. In it, entrapped, was Heart, who called to him.
Now he saw how the stone had held so powerful and beautiful a creature as Heart captive so long: the diamond was no clear crystal, but a hall of mirrors. Reflections, semblances, illusions; the most potent of magics in a world of truth. A labyrinth of lies and deceptions, receding into endless illusions that worked with eye and mind to betray body and soul.
Truth is, in the end, powerless against dazzle and shine.
The mournful throb of Heart came distantly from within.
Mirrors can be broken. Paladin drew steel. He would smash his way into the maze and carve a path inward to Heart.
The luminous mirror before him bore his own determined features. He shattered them and stepped into the slanted space beyond. Angled planes all around gave back his appearance.
The first few reflections showed Paladin as he was, only subtly reversed. His sword arm was switched, his forward knee had been traded for the trailing one. Others held images even farther from…
Paladin gritted his teeth and swung. A delicate magic can slay if it reverses thoughts until self and purpose are lost. Ten images of swordsmen struck in unison.
The world shattered. Another passage opened. Paladin stepped through.
The mirrors he now faced showed him the snout and tusks of a boar, black lashes and snakelike, slit-pupiled eyes, a blood-gorged cockscomb and wattle. He looked like a monster. He was a monster. Monsters must die.
“You fall first,” he snarled in sudden rage, and clung to what he was, naming himself aloud as he swung shattering steel. Shards boiled away before him like smoke, and suddenly that unreal and trivial world where his body lay dead swam back, overwhelming all else. Snarling silently to muster his will, he returned, seeking the cry of Heart.
Paladin strode deeper into the diamond. The next mirror held a reflection that moved like him, but had cruel eyes and olive skin—and a sword arm whose flesh gave way to bare bone. Paladin remembered this man from the world he’d left but could give him no name.
He lifted his arm. Bare bones moved in unison. “I’m no assassin,” Paladin said fiercely, and heard the eerie reflection make the same resolve, the silver-slim words mocking.
“I fight for what is right. I slay for freedom.” Paladin and Assassin spoke those words together. Lie and truth lay together, indistinguishable from one another. The diamond’s power was deepening with each new chamber. It pressed viciously on head and heart.
Heart. Paladin’s lips set in a thin line, and his blade flashed out. Assassin cracked. He stared for a moment in surprise, bony sword arm uplifted, before the cloven mirror gave way and slid tinkling to the floor.
Deeper. Up and in. Heart drew him on.
A young man’s face confronted him next, full of hope, honest and determined and inexcusably innocent. Paladin swung his blade without hesitation.
It met not chill glass and uncaring silver but soft flesh. The man sobbed, staggered, and fell forward.
A real man? Another warrior seeking Heart? A comrade!
Heart’s own sorrow bled into the moan that came from Paladin. He set a hand to the young man’s bleeding side.
This one, too, had a name, lost in the wash of truth and illusion. He was in Paladin’s mind nothing more or less than Hero. Paladin’s touch closed the weeping wound. Hero rose. No apology or explanation needed to be spoken; Hero understood. Paladin drew and offered his dagger. It was accepted with the ghost of a smile. Side by side, they went on through the silvered maze.
Another young warrior appeared in a mirror, the youthful semblance of Paladin himself.
“I am Jacob. I will battle beside you.”
The words bore such earnest weight that Hero motioned Jacob to step from the glass and walk shoulder to shoulder with them.
The fighter emerged. Reflected flesh became momentarily scaly, tentacular, before swimming into solid human flesh! A lie garbed in borrowed shape. Paladin’s blade sundered the emerging shapeshifter, dropping him in a thousand shards of ringing glass.
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 itself—scabrous 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 partiall
y 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 naiveté, 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 enmities 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.
Forgotten Realms - [Double Diamond Triangle Saga 09] - The Diamond Page 5
