“It is not true!” Malik screamed. “Whatever the prince says, it is all a terrible lie!”
For once, his curse did not compel him to say more, and the whispering quieted. A strange sloshing sounded beside him. Malik opened his eyes and saw white fire in his brain. He closed them again, and the fire went away.
“Why do you torment me like this?”
He tried to turn toward the sloshing and found his head held motionless by a strap across his brow.
“I have done nothing wrong!”
“Oh, but you have, Seraph,” hissed a cold voice—a familiar cold voice. “You have stolen from the Hidden One.”
“Stolen?” Malik cried. “What have I stolen … aside from a few dozen coins from the pockets of worshipers in my own temple?”
“The worshipers themselves,” the voice said. “You have stolen the Lady’s faithful.”
Malik was greatly relieved to recognize the voices as Prince Yder’s. If Yder was doing the speaking, then they would not be in the Palace Most High, and it could not be Telamont Tanthul who had ordered the terrible punishment.
A pair of cold fingertips pulled Malik’s eyelids open. The brilliant fire returned, but this time the white fire was only a silver light as blinding as the sun, and there was a chasmal darkness in the center—with two blazing eyes and a heart of cooling embers.
“The Lady is angry, Malik.”
As Yder spoke, Malik’s eyes grew accustomed to the pain, and he discerned a pair of huge hooked horns crowning the head of the dark figure above him.
“In-d-deed,” Malik stammered. “I can see that for myself … though in truth I must say she does not look very ladylike to me.”
This caused a strange murmur of gasps and chuckles to spread outward behind Yder. There followed a moment of silence, and Malik had the sense that his captor had turned away to glare at his followers.
“Make a joke of your own god if you wish, little man,” Yder said, “but when you make fun of the Hidden One, it is the Lady who laughs.”
The prince’s fingers pressed down until Malik thought his eyeballs would burst.
“Who was joking?” Malik cried.
The murmur that followed this was even louder than the first. Yder’s hand came away from Malik’s head.
“Silence!”
The command was muffled, as though the prince had turned his back when he spoke it. Malik blinked the spots from his eyes and again found himself staring at the dark figure overhead. It was a ghastly demon as large as Aris and as black as night itself, with long curving talons at the end of outstretched arms.
Yder returned his attention to Malik and said, “Mock the Hidden One again, and I shall pull your brains out by your own antlers.”
The prince grabbed Malik by one of his horns, and a dark hand appeared on the hooked horn of the figure overhead.
Malik bit his own cheek, lest he cry out in astonishment and give the prince an excuse to do as he threatened. The monster above was certainly his own shadow, but that gave him no hint of relief. Melegaunt Tanthul had once summoned the wretched being to serve as a guard, and the accursed thing had made clear it would like nothing better than throttling Malik with its own hands.
“You are learning, Seraph,” Yder said. “Perhaps this will not be as difficult as I feared.”
“Not difficult would be good,” Malik agreed. “I am a captive in the temple of Shar the Ni—?”
Yder struck him a blow that returned his thoughts to their muddled state.
“Do not speak the Hidden One’s name!”
“I am only trying to be certain,” Malik complained. “How do you expect to convert me, if you will not tell me who it is I am to worship?”
For the first time, Yder’s face came into view. He was wearing the black skullcap and purple mask of the high priest.
“You would convert?” he asked.
Malik’s chest began to grow cold and tight, as it had when Fzoul Chembryl had asked a similar question in the hidden temple of Iyachtu Xvim. At the time, he had been weak from torture and assured only of a life of impoverishment in servitude to a mad god, and nothing would have pleased him more than to find protection in the church of some other deity. But that had been before he understood how impossible it was for him to betray the One, and before he had established what promised to be—in addition to the altar that would give Cyric control over the Shadow Weave—the wealthiest temple in all Faerûn.
“Convert?”
The tightness in Malik’s breast became a smashing weight. The heart beating—slurping—in his chest was not his own, but a rotting mass of curd that, in a fit of the deranged genius of the mad god, the One had plucked from his own body and traded for Malik’s mortal—though far healthier—heart. Since that day, the mere thought of betraying Cyric brought crushing agony. It was all Malik could do to continue speaking.
“Certainly I will convert.” His chest felt as though someone was standing on it. “I will convert you and all of your followers to the Church of Cyric, the One and All!”
The weight vanished.
Yder’s fist came from nowhere, catching Malik in the side of the mouth. Two teeth came loose and got caught in his throat. Malik began to choke.
“Trifle with me all you wish,” Yder said. “The goddess relishes your blood on her altar.”
Malik’s only answer was a cough. He grew dizzy from lack of breath, and the world started to close in around him. He fought to stay conscious, summoning his anger by imagining his wealth in the hands of Prince Yder and his filthy Sharists.
“Nothing to say?”
Yder struck him again, and Malik’s mouth grew so full of blood that it bubbled over his lips and spilled down his cheeks onto Shar’s altar.
“That is good, Seraph,” Yder said. “You are learning to please the Lady.”
Unable to do anything else, Malik stared at the monstrous shadow hanging above him. A purple crescent appeared where the traitorous thing’s mouth should have been—a smile. It thought he was going to choke to death.
Malik continued to cough.
“You will convert, Seraph,” Yder said. “All you control is how long it takes.”
“The Hidden One rules all,” said someone behind the prince.
A chorus of whispers filled the chamber as Shar’s worshipers repeated the paean. Had he not been so busy coughing and choking, Malik would have laughed. He might die upon Shar’s altar or even rot upon it, but he would never convert. That was the one thing he did not control at all.
Malik’s vision narrowed to a black tunnel, then went completely black. Yder’s voice came to him from far away, demanding that he pay attention and not insult the Hidden One by closing his eyes upon her. The prince’s cold fingertips settled on his eyelids and pulled them open, and that was the last thing Malik felt before sinking into a soft bed of unconsciousness.
The next thing was the heel of a large hand slamming him between the shoulders, and the icy fingers of another one dangling him upside down by his ankle.
“Breathe, you craven little ranag!”
The hand struck Malik again. The teeth upon which he had been choking flew from his lips, along with a mouthful of blood and bitter-tasting bile. He started to gasp and cough at the same time, two conflicting actions that left him helplessly hiccuping for breath.
“Did you really think you could escape that easily?” Yder demanded. “The Hidden One will not be deprived of her pleasure.”
Malik opened his eyes and was blinded by the same painful radiance as when he had returned to consciousness before.
“And I am most thankful for that,” Malik said, “though I know it is likely to cost me a month of terrible agony!”
Knowing Yder would interpret his gratitude as progress toward a conversion, Malik would have liked to stop there and enjoy the reward any good torturer would bestow on him as incentive for further progress—but Mystra’s curse would not allow it.
“Now I can finish what I have started by converting yo
u and your followers to the Church of Cyric—” Malik tried to bring his hands up to cover his mouth, but found his wrists manacled together behind his back. The words continued to spill out—“so that I may spare my soul the danger of having to present itself at the Shattered Castle after I have failed to seize control of the Shadow Weave for the One, as he instructed.”
Yder shook with such a rage that the chains binding Malik’s wrists began to jingle. Malik cringed and tried to guess whether he would lose fewer teeth by clenching his jaw or leaving it to hang slack, but the blow never came. Instead, the prince remained silent and continued to hold him upside down, allowing Malik a few precious moments to study his surroundings.
They were, as Malik had guessed from the altar, in a temple to Shar—though it was certainly far from what he had imagined such a place would look like. While the walls were covered with the expected images of mysterious women and dark disks limned in purple flame, the chamber itself was blindingly bright, so much so that the shadows dancing on the walls seemed more real than the worshipers standing motionless in long rows of pews. There were easily a thousand Shadovar there, all submerged to their knees in a glimmering pool of mirror-bright fluid. As thick and viscous as quicksilver, the liquid was slowly flowing out toward the edges of the chamber, where it gathered at the walls and vanished down the drainage pits in lazy whirlpools.
Malik recognized the liquid instantly. It was the same thing that he and his friends had found inside the Red Butte in Karsus, spilling out of the Karsestone that Galaeron had used to summon Shade back into the world.
The prince hoisted Malik by the chain between his manacles, forcing his arms up and back until he thought his shoulders would break.
“In my centuries,” Yder said, “I have learned a few things about pain.”
Malik felt sick to his stomach. Though the One had blessed him with the ability to suffer any amount of agony and still have the strength to perform his duties as Seraph, that did not mean he was immune to pain. Quite the contrary. It seemed to him that he always felt pain more acutely than those around him—and usually a great deal more of it.
As Yder turned back toward the altar, Malik was not all that surprised to find himself looking at a luminous white boulder about the size of a horse. There was a jagged fissure down the center, and from this crack poured a steady flow of the silvery liquid that had filled the temple.
The stream was, Malik knew from his earlier adventures in the Red Butte, the last whole magic in the world. Seventeen centuries earlier, a mad Netherese archwizard named Karsus had tried to steal the godhead of Mystryl, the goddess of magic at that time. It had been a terrible mistake. The Weave had filled Karsus to bursting and killed him on the spot, and it had split into the Weave and the Shadow Weave. The luminous white boulder was Karsus’s heart—all that remained of the mad archwizard—and the silver magic pouring from it was all the remained of the original, unsplit Weave.
Though Cyric’s rancid heart began to slush so hard that Malik could barely hear himself think, he forced himself to remain calm. The Karsestone, as they had dubbed the boulder, was undoubtedly an artifact of untold power, but it seemed to Malik that for Shar’s worshipers to tolerate its bright light inside their hidden temple, it had to be something more—something much more.
“The Karsestone!” Malik gasped as though he had just realized what he was looking at, for it was important to his plan that Yder did not realize how much Malik understood about what he was seeing. “That seems an odd altar for followers of the Nightsinger.”
“Shadow is born of light,” Yder said.
The phrase was repeated by a thousand whispering voices as Yder hoisted Malik onto the stone and laid him facedown.
“All the same, so much bright light must be a great insult to your goddess … unless the Karsestone is the source of the Shadow Weave, of course.” Malik swore a silent oath, for it been Mystra’s curse that compelled him to add such a clumsy probe, then he hastened to add, “Or the one you worship here is not really Shar, but some other Hidden—”
Malik’s face smashed into stone as his tactic succeeded in angering the prince and distracting him from the gaff.
“I told you never to call the Hidden One by name.”
“My apologies,” Malik said. His voice sounded rather nasal, for his nose had been shattered and was pouring blood down over the Karsestone. “I only meant that this is certainly the last place the Most High would look for his stolen Karsestone.”
“What makes you think it is stolen?” Yder asked, not quite able to keep the smugness from his voice.
Ever wary of the Seraph’s ability to escape, the prince pinned Malik’s neck to the stone with one hand while he removed the chain from the manacles and attached it to a ring hanging from an iron post alongside the altar. Malik didn’t know whether to be glad his plan had worked or ashamed it had taken so long for him to see the true nature of things.
For the Shar worshipers to tolerate the Karsestone’s brilliance in their temple—and, more importantly, for the goddess not to strike dead the ones who permitted it to be there—the boulder had to be of inestimable value to the Nightsinger. Malik no longer doubted that much—it was the source of the Shadow Weave, as Mystra’s curse had caused him to blurt out, or something that she wished to keep hidden from the other gods.
More terribly, if Shar considered Shade a safe place to hide such a thing—and if Telamont Tanthul truly had given the Karsestone to Yder for the Hidden One’s temple—then she had to feel secure in her control of the city. For Shar to feel secure in her command of the Shadovar, she had to control the Shadow Weave itself.
“The spiteful hag!” Malik cried. “She has commanded it all along!”
“Curse her now all you wish, Malik.”
Yder spun him around then flipped him onto his back and fastened another chain to his second manacle.
“Before this is done,” the prince added, “you will sing her praises.”
“And you will lick the offal from my boots!” Malik shot back. “The Shadow Weave is Cyric’s by right! Am I not the one who saved the life of that fool Galaeron so he could betray his word to Jhingleshod and steal this stone?”
It was his own anger that compelled him to say this and not Mystra’s curse, but he knew it was a mistake the moment the words spilled from his mouth. Yder’s yellow eyes turned as bright as the sun. He bared his ceremonial fangs and bent so low that Malik feared the prince would bite his nose from his face.
“Is that why you came here?” he demanded. “To steal the Hidden One’s crown?”
Malik said nothing and looked away.
“Answer!” Yder commanded. “Answer, or I will feed you to your own shadow.”
The prince pulled his head aside so that Malik could see his shadow’s hateful eyes glaring down at him. No longer did the monstrous thing seem dependent on Malik for its form. It looked as thick and as solid as any giant he had ever seen. Malik looked away on the pretext of meeting Yder’s angry gaze.
“Do you think I am afraid of my own shadow?” he demanded. “I am favored of the One. I have seen a thousand things that were a hundred times worse … though never any who know all the wretched things I have done in my life.”
“Look!” Yder grabbed Malik’s aching jaw and forced him to stare up into his shadow’s angry eyes. “You have seen the trouble Galaeron’s shadow has brought on him. What do you think yours would do, were I to let it inside you?”
“Why should I fear such a thing?” Malik squeaked. “If a shadow is all the things I am not, this one is undoubtedly as charitable as I am selfish, as trustworthy as I am corrupt, as brave as I am craven. My shadow would only make me all the things that women desire and men admire.”
“What of Cyric?” It was the shadow that asked this question—and that flashed a brutal purple smile as it did so. “How would he feel about a Seraph who was all those things?”
The blood went cold in Malik’s veins, and he swung his gaze to Yder
.
“What was your question again?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
1 Eleasias, the Year of Wild Magic
In the dim light of the cell, the link was easier for Vala to feel than to see, even with skin numbed by cold and calluses. She worked her foot up the chain until she felt pit-roughened metal, then pinched the loop between her toes and lifted it toward her mouth. Even flexible as she had grown over the past couple of months, she could not bring it all the way to her face. Once the chain went taut, she used her leg muscles to pull herself closer. She let her toes slide down one link then spit a mouthful of saliva onto the pitted surface.
Vala had her doubts about whether she could actually spit her way to freedom, but with her hands manacled behind her back and no other tools to work with, it was the best she could do, and it gave her something to focus on when she was not being abused by Escanor or his retainers. She could not just sit there in the dark, waiting between sessions. She had to keep trying, to know she was at least attempting to escape.
Besides, when she had started, there had been no pits in the link at all. Vala let the chain go slack, then wrapped her toes into it and began to jerk downward against the eye hook that secured it to the wall. A hundred times, then find the link and spit. If she just kept working at it, something would give. The hook would loosen in the wall, or the link would grow rusty and break, or a guard would think she had lost her mind and grow careless enough to let her kill him. Something would happen. It had to, if she was ever to see her son again.
A voice whispered, “Vala?”
Vala hit the end of the chain and was back on the floor before she realized she had jumped. She spun on her seat, her legs cocked for thrust kicks, and found no one there.
Great, she thought. Something has happened. I’ve started to hear things.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” the voice said.
Vala squinted toward the voice and saw nothing but murk, then a tiny man in black robes hopped onto her foot. She wasn’t just hearing things. The man—the delusion, she corrected herself—had an unruly black beard and dark eyes, but his face and arms were too light to be Shadovar.
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