Plague of Spells

by Bruce R Cordell

  Then she saw what the illithids had delved so deeply to unearth. The merest edges of something. Something horrible. The mere act of trying to comprehend it was like scraping her naked brain with a trowel. Surely it was an abomination. She turned to swim free, flexing her legs for the first mighty escape stroke …

  Nogah blinked, and in that instant, her perception shifted. Curiosity rekindled.

  Instead of swimming away as if her sanity depended upon it, she drifted closer through the swirling blood and sediment, hardly realizing she did so. She still couldn’t grasp the magnitude of the image. She tried to wrap some mote of comprehension around the object, partly chiseled from stone … from stone whose age dwarfed the mountains above. Which meant the enigma, the massive thing that refused to clearly reveal itself to her understanding, was older than continents.

  Blinking, Nogah shuddered. Had the Sea Mother sent her to unbury this artifact, to finish what the mind flayers had started? A head-size stone lay near the greater object yet bound in its stone matrix. It seemed the illithids had broken away a sample from the far more gargantuan object still frozen in the wall, before their dig outside the seal had drowned.

  She said a quick prayer to the Sea Mother, asking for guidance. Her inquiry fell into a void of silence.

  Her hand moved to trace the spherical artifact. If she couldn’t grasp the whole, perhaps the tiny piece would yield up clues.

  She picked it up. What was it? A stone bauble? A tiny portion of a … what? A petrified remnant of some long-dead sea beast? Something like that, a strange certainty informed her, though even that notion was, somehow, a failure of imagination. If she grasped a piece of something far larger, that which was in turn only the merest tip of something … monstrous.

  The elixir’s duration was almost complete. Without giving herself time to weigh the decision, she retained her grip on the loose piece, rough from where the illithids had cut it away from its parent.

  Her first impression had been correct—it was essentially round but already seemed lighter in her hands. Though the object was about the size of her head, she was able to carry it without difficulty.

  As she kicked back toward the nautilus, past the drifting corpse of her junior whip, her fingers began to tingle, then her arms. Odd notions suggested themselves, like worms insinuating themselves through Nogah’s consciousness. Odd, even disquieting.

  But so fascinating …

  CHAPTER THREE

  Eleven Years After the Spellplague

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  New Sarshell, Impiltur

  A thin man with a pocked face chalked a flat expanse of gray slate in quick, precise strokes. The sharp scent of limestone grew in the stuffy chamber with each mark.

  The scratching chalk grated at Lady Anusha Marhana’s ears. She glanced away from the lesson her tutor scribed to gaze out the open window. How she wished she were outside. She hated her lessons. She’d rather be down at the docks watching the ships come in, watching the men unload salvage from other lands.

  More notably, she had planned to attend the revelry in the Marivaux mansion this evening. Anusha had bought a new gown, new shoes, had the servants do her hair, sent out a reply confirming her attendance, only to have her half brother dash her hopes. Behroun said Marivaux was of a social stratum lower than her own, and that it wouldn’t do for her to mix with them. Rubbish! In fact—

  “Lady Marhana.” The reedy voice of her tutor pulled Anusha’s attention back to the board.

  “Yes?” she said, as if she’d been paying attention all along.

  The man gave her an admonishing glare and said, “Lord Marhana pays me to advance your education. Would you waste his hard-earned coin?”

  Anusha’s first instinct was to shrug. Her half brother, Lord Behroun Marhana, cared only for appearances. He was all about the façade, and substance only for what it contributed to the image of courtly nobility. The man wanted to cement himself among the reforming aristocracy of scarred Impiltur. In an attempt to gain a seat on the nascent Grand Council forming after the failure of the royal line, Behroun required the family to appear to possess a polite education.

  Despite her opinion, she restrained her instinctive, dismissive gesture. Anusha was twenty years old this month, and even without her recent course on high society manners, she recognized a shrug might be perceived as childish. Instead she merely looked her tutor in the eye, trying to appear interested.

  The man sighed, shaking his head as he turned back to point at what he’d written on the board. “What does this say?”

  Anusha read aloud, “I am old and battered and have left a heap of bloody, bitter mistakes behind me high enough to bury empires.”

  “Good diction,” murmured her tutor. “Who said it, and when?”

  “Elminster of Shadowdale, of course,” replied Anusha. She had no idea if she was correct, but it sounded like something the old sage might have said. It was just one more quote among the hundreds he was known for. Who cared what year he’d uttered it?

  Anyway, the old sage had dropped out of common knowledge after the Spellplague. He’d been affected like everyone else, and some whispered the old man’s powers had been stripped in the disaster. She heard one story from a dockworker, who had it from a Cormyrean merchant, who heard from a Mulhorandi refugee, that Elminster was glimpsed wandering the Planes of Purple Dust, bald and tattooed with spellscars so outré that—

  “Good,” replied the tutor. He used the quote as a bridge into another historical fact about Faerûn, a story about how a black arrow was responsible for Imphras the Great’s reunification of Impiltur. Three hundred years ago!

  History lessons were hard. It was all so dry and … pointless! Everything before the blue fire was irrelevant to how things were today. Anusha had been ten or eleven years old when the Weave collapsed. In Sarshel, the event had come and gone with little to mark it in its first days.

  She did recall one particularly lurid account of the event in a report circulated among the sea traders. When Behroun was out of his office, she had slipped in and penned a copy of the report for herself. She could remember it almost by heart: “Magic goes awry, and the world trembles. Magic, earth, and flesh too, burn beneath veils of azure fire that dance across the skies, day and night. The hardest hit are the mages, who lose their magic, their minds, and sometimes, their souls. Where the blue fire touched down, everything changes. Whole villages are gone, save for a few horribly altered former inhabitants, now monstrosities. It is some sort of spell plague, one that even the gods fear to catch!”

  Anusha had several tendays of bad dreams after reading that. Nightmares, in fact, of blue fire burning her flesh away, leaving nothing but a substanceless image behind. Dreams that had returned to trouble her recently, in fact.

  In Impiltur, no disasters fell from the sky. But stories of atrocities to the south and east continued to roll in from occasional crazed refugees, and the shoreline began to recede. Worst of all, spellcasters forgot their spells. Local officials were finally convinced beyond all doubt that something very bad was in the offing.

  Certainly a sinking Sea of Fallen Stars had seemed disaster enough for a city reliant on the many docks and piers that serviced its sea trade. Then again, she had been too young to appreciate the slow fall of the water’s level as something terrible enough to choke a city. Likewise, when magic began to go awry, she didn’t personally witness it. Her family’s shipping fortune shielded her from seeing wizards melting themselves in the street as they adjusted to magic’s new regime. But she had heard all the gruesome stories.

  It was during this period that her half brother learned of his inheritance. Marhana Shipping was all his. The same day, Anusha learned that her mother and father perished together on their flagship trading vessel with all hands in Sembia. Something to do with the Shadovar.

  It was not something she wished to dwell upon. To Lady Anusha Marhana, the Spellplague was just one more event over and done with, no worse than h
er own personal history of sad remembrances. The Year of Blue Fire was best relegated to history’s boring tomes of who said what and when.

  “… so Faerûn is splintered,” continued her tutor, oblivious to Anusha’s lapse of attention. “Communications and trade remain rare and may degrade further before things turn around. Whole nations are gone, never to return—”

  Anusha’s sigh was overloud, and the tutor heard it. He placed the chalk on the board ledge, turned, and flashed a tight smile. He said, “The lady is obviously overtired. The hour is late. I’ll return again tomorrow, and we’ll pick up where I left off. Please read the manuscript on the Heltharn dynasty. Tomorrow I shall test your knowledge about Impiltur’s royal line.”

  Anusha said, “I can tell you this without reading it—the Heltharn dynasty is broken, and the Grand Council is ascendant. So says Behroun.”

  The tutor’s tight smile faltered. He looked suddenly tired. He said, “Perhaps. Perhaps it is so, and the king will not return.” Without another word or his usual remonstration to study, the thin, pock-faced man walked out, letting the door to Anusha’s suite hang ajar.

  Anusha’s brows furrowed. Had she said something in poor taste? Did the man have personal connections to the dead king and his family? Or was he merely a loyalist without a king to obey? Behroun said there were many like that around, interfering with the Grand Council’s fledgling plans.

  The girl pushed aside troubling thoughts and rose from her desk. Lassitude clutched at her. The tutor had suggested she get some sleep, and she was so very tired. Bad dreams of unending, heatless blue fire assailed her, making her dread the night. Not knowing how else to deal with the troubling images, she had fought sleep.

  She entered her bedroom. Her canvases nearly crowded out the bureau, the nightstand, and her large bed. The coverlets, blue and pink, looked so soft, so tempting. She shuffled forward, knowing sleep would finally win out against her fear. She hoped the dreams would leave off tonight. Either way, slumber could no longer be denied.

  Anusha opened her eyes. Had she dreamed? She couldn’t remember anything since she’d flung herself onto her bed. Her bed right over there. Her bed where a girl still lay adrift in sleep’s dark bonds.

  The sleeping girl was herself. Her long skirts, ruffled blouse, and long boots lay in a heap on the floor.

  A moment’s more confusion gave way to understanding. She was dreaming now! She was caught up in a tiny story being spun out by her mind, except she was atypically aware. She dreamed and knew it!

  She tensed, but the terror she recalled fuzzily from her previous nights of nightmares was absent. All was quiet and restful. She’d heard that if one could learn to recognize when caught in slumber’s nets, one could apply some conscious control over the dream. Instead of being caught up in the moment, as was usually the case, the whole thing could be more like attending theater. Like watching a play, written as it went along.

  She liked that idea. I shall go with this as long as it lasts, she told herself. What will my mind conjure up?

  She smiled to think of herself as separate from her mind—her tutor would tell her that was an illusion. But the fact that she could look down on her sleeping, slowly breathing body argued otherwise. No, wait—this was a dream, she reminded herself.

  Anusha left her room, her suite, and the upper story of the manor. The front hall was empty but for a few servants polishing relics Behroun had staged around the space as if he were a real noble. Over the fireplace hung a slender long sword, which was scribed, right on the blade, with the Marhana crest. Anusha’s father had, by all accounts, been an able swordsman in his youth.

  The servants in the front hall couldn’t see her. They didn’t react to her presence. Why should they? It was her dream—her world! On impulse, she glided right through the front door as if it were nothing but smoke. A moment of darkness and disorientation, then she was through.

  Laughing, she ran down the wide front steps. Anusha passed through the thick iron gates that separated the manor from the street, feeling only the slightest tug of resistance.

  “How wondrous!” she exclaimed. A passerby started, glanced sharply around. Anusha studied the man in garish noble garb, but his gaze slid right past her. She covered her mouth to stifle a giggle. Small noises escaped anyway, emerging like a strangled wheeze. The man’s eyes widened and he hurried off, pursued by a laugh she could no longer restrain.

  Skipping, she set off down the street. She had to explore all the fun possibilities of this dream before she woke up!

  First, she’d visit the docks. She loved the tall ships and handsome dockhands with stories of far places. Imagine seeing those same sail-topped silhouettes by night! She ran unseen through the street, straight on down toward the dock district. Despite Marhana’s active role in shipping, they kept their mansion far from the piers. So she had to run quite a ways, over a mile. She didn’t mind—it was her dream, and she decided not to feel tired by the exertion.

  Just as she neared the first wharf, a strange pinch pulled a gasp from her. The sensation felt almost like the sudden jerk of an invisible cord. She slowed, but continued to move forward. The pinch came again—

  Anusha opened her eyes in her bed. The saffron lengths of linen that swirled around her bedposts glowed in the candlelight from the single night-flame on her bureau.

  “Oh!” she groaned, realizing she was awake, leaving her brilliant dream behind.

  If she didn’t think too much, maybe she could recall it. Sometimes good dreams could be picked up again, if she didn’t clutter her mind with too many other thoughts. And she was still so tired from so many nights of too little rest.

  She turned on her side, closed her eyes again, and tried to recall the dream.

  She had wandered, conscious of herself in the dream, walking where she would, going where she wanted without others dictating restrictions, unseen by other dream dwellers …

  Again Anusha found herself standing next to her apparently sleeping body. She clapped her hands in triumph. She was back in the dream!

  This time, she’d avoid the docks. She’d try someplace else.

  How about … the Marivaux revelry! If she couldn’t attend the Marivaux party in reality, perhaps she could dream about it.

  She exited the Marhana manor, unseen as before, and ran down the street.

  What must have been a full hour of wandering forced her to admit she didn’t actually know where to find the Marivaux home. She had expected she would merely come upon the place, as such things happen in dreams.

  But that hadn’t happened. Just seedier and seedier storefronts, separated by larger and larger tracts of completely empty, broken structures—victims of the interregnum following the retreat of the wharf.

  Was she lost? Anusha frowned. Was she not the author of her own slumbering fancy? Perhaps it was time to wake up, after all. She didn’t like the direction in which this dream was headed.

  Then she saw Japheth.

  Anusha gave an involuntary gasp. Japheth walked the dark streets with his black cape drawn around him like a raven’s wings, striding purposefully as if he, at least, knew where he was going.

  Japheth was one of Behroun’s agents. Anusha had seen the man around the manor and even exchanged a few words with him. His hair was black, as were his eyes—like wells reflecting a starry night sky. The last time he’d greeted her, just a few days prior, her cheeks colored, her arms felt too warm, and sensible words deserted her.

  She fell in behind the cloaked shape, wondering where he was going. It was a ramshackle neighborhood. Did he know someone here? She didn’t like to think of him being familiar with its stench-worn ways.

  Japheth walked another block until he paused under the sign of a unicorn horn.

  A single glass window provided a view into a bizarrely decorated interior display. Anusha shuffled closer and identified a shrunken head, heaped candies wrapped in colorful paper, playing cards depicting dragons, smoking accessories, fancifully decorated goble
ts and tankards, and oddities beyond her knowledge.

  Japheth entered. She followed, passing through the closing door as if it were mist. Inside she spied a grandfatherly dwarf puffing away on an elaborately carved pipe.

  The dwarf saw Japheth and launched his spiel, “Got some salvage? I’ll give you a fair price. No? A gift, then, you seek? Or something for yourself. A keepsake! Look around; my inventory is second to none. Don’t be afraid of the mess! Who knows what treasures you’ll find hidden away in dark corners? Those willing to spend a little time come away with real gems.”

  Japheth raised a hand to silence the dwarf and asked, “Have you any traveler’s dust?”

  The dwarf’s surprised breath covered Anusha’s own. The dwarf darted a glance to the entrance. After a scan of the empty shop, the proprietor gave a slow nod. He said, “I might have a tin. It’ll cost you. Supply has been tight lately.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure. I’ll give you thirty pieces of gold right now. What say you?”

  The dwarf’s eyes narrowed. He replied, “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “I am the very soul of discretion. Come—I’ve got gold in my pocket. You’ve got dust to unload. Let’s deal.”

  When the strange transaction concluded, Japheth tucked a small, dull tin into a fold of his cape. Anusha fell in behind Japheth as he exited the shop.

  But her mind whirled. Traveler’s dust! Did Japheth walk the crimson road?

  She hadn’t noticed any of the telltale signs—trembling hands, sometimes slurred speech, and most telling, of course, eyes the color of blood. Anusha heard the substance appeared only a few years ago, but already it was banned in most civilized places because all who used it died, sooner rather than later. The crimson road led inevitably down to a final, bloody sunset.

  Then again, Japheth was an adept—he was one of the new breed who’d learned the trick of calling upon magic in the Weave’s absence. She’d heard Behroun refer to Japheth as a warlock. Perhaps he could mask the drug’s effect, or hold off its eventual price.