Plague of Spells

by Bruce R Cordell

  The monk continued his steady advance, eyes fixed on the guard. The smoldering height of fury burning in Raidon’s visage wasn’t the reaction the guard expected. He tried to retreat, and failed. The press of his riled-up followers pinned the man in place.

  Realizing his danger, the guard yelled, “He is about to attack—grab the outlander!” The man’s voice squeaked with alarm.

  The rabble’s chant turned into a roar as they streamed forward. The guard stayed back, his fear ebbing as the mob blocked Raidon. The guard’s brave face returned, and he called out something in a jeering voice, but his words were lost in the screaming mob’s imprecations.

  A red-faced, screaming Shou grabbed at Raidon’s new silk jacket. Another in pleated corduroy tried to club the monk with a rusted mace. A boy scratched at his face with painted but chipped fingernails.

  Raidon evaded the grab with a counterpunch that dropped the Shou, and a simultaneous kick sent the mace spiraling into the face of a third man, who crumpled. The boy laid two long welts down his cheek, but his attention was already shifting to more significant threats.

  Two corpulent women rushed him, their hair unrestrained and harpy-wild, their meaty fists gripping sharp cooking implements. Simultaneously a hard-faced smith, still in his singed smithy apron, came up behind Raidon with a hammer. Raidon bobbed around one woman’s flailing knife and arrested the smith’s hammer swing with a palm-thrust to the smith’s shoulder with his right hand. With his left arm, he caught the other woman at the elbow with his own, joint to joint as if preparing to do a jig, then swung her around by turning his own body. He flung her down into the path of two new attackers: dockmen with boat hooks. The woman tripped one of the men and distracted the other long enough for Raidon to leap to the top of a nearby clay marker. His damaged foot burned, but Raidon’s anger flamed hotter.

  Above the fray he saw the original guard, who still hadn’t moved as the mob surged to do his bidding. The guard’s gaze jerked up and fixed on his nemesis. Raidon pointed a finger at him and shook his head slowly back and forth. It was a promise that no matter the obstacles, Raidon would not be denied his target.

  The man’s face paled, but he waved back to the cemetery entrance. An actual force of Nathlekh guardsmen in uniform was assembling there, and the man seemed to take confidence from that sight. The guard yelled. Raidon made out his words above the mob’s din by reading his lips. “If you hurt me, you’ll face them!”

  Raidon soundlessly mouthed back, “I don’t care.” Then he bounded over the heads of the reaching throng to another clay marker, closing a quarter of the distance between himself and his target.

  “Raidon, this man is not responsible for Ailyn’s death. If you kill him in your despair, your soul will be stained,” came a new voice, somehow audible over the screaming rabble.

  It was the same voice that had warned Raidon of the mob’s appearance. Whoever or whatever it was, its reasonable advice inflamed his ire all the more. He replied, as he leaped again to a marker a mere ten paces from the guard, “Invisible spirit, mind your own affairs and leave me to mine!”

  “Your affairs are my affairs, Raidon,” came the instant response. “You have become my sole view into the world, and though I am pledged to obey a holder of the Sign, my pledge to the Sign itself is the greater duty. If you force me to it, I must protect its sanctity before your wishes. Past lapses must not be allowed to repeat themselves.”

  The words of the invisible demon intrigued that small portion of Raidon’s mind not overwhelmed with murderous grief. But he did not pause. The monk hurdled the last of the screaming Shou that surged between him and his target. He charged, leaping high off one last clay monument as if it were a ramp. A flying elbow to the guard’s crown would—

  An ozone scent and crackle of light appeared in Raidon’s line of flight. He spasmed and twisted, violently attempting to alter his body’s trajectory in midair. He failed. He passed through the discontinuity’s dark orifice and was gone.

  Raidon fell through a void littered with a million distant points that sparkled eternal white, ruby, emerald, and sapphire. Before he could gasp, he passed through another discontinuity.

  He dropped sideways into weeds lurking around the base of a granite boulder. Disorientation and sunlight blinded him; he wasn’t quite able to avoid knocking his head on the great stone.

  The pain and unpleasantly loud crack of his skull meeting the rock produced a blaze of light and pain.

  His anguish and anger spiraled away into a daze of dulled vision and distracted wit.

  He lay where he’d fallen, flat on his back, blinking up at a blue sky streaked with high scudding clouds. Rotating his head to the right, he saw grassy foothills of some unfamiliar, though reassuringly terrestrial, mountain range. No multicolored stars.

  He gradually rotated his head to the left, wincing at a muscle strain, and saw more far hills, more miles of empty prairie between. No roads, fields, lone homes, or walled cities lay their straight, artificial lines across his perspective. The uninhabited landscape, in its irregular and unexpected outlines, was a physical balm he absorbed across his entire body. Raidon lost himself for a time, watching the wind blow wave after wave through the green and yellow grass, while white clouds boiled in molasses-slow movements above.

  An indeterminate time later, the call of a prairie hawk shook the monk from his inadvertent meditation.

  “So I am losing my mind,” he said as he sat up. He leaned back against the boulder on which he’d hit his head. From the new vantage, he gained a view of a distant feature he’d earlier missed, and gasped.

  A great splinter of rock hung unsupported above the plain. Its lowest point narrowed to a ragged and splintered needle, but the unmoored rock’s opposite, upper surface was broad and level. Even from where he sat, two or three miles away, Raidon observed trees, grass, a lake, and even a tiny waterfall feathering off the side of the gravity-defying, floating tract.

  “To what realm have I come?” he whispered.

  “Changes to Faerûn’s landscape, such as the earthmote you see above the plain, are not uncommon since the Spellplague swept through,” said a bodiless voice.

  “You are still in Faerûn, in the southeastern foothills of the Giant’s Run Mountains.” It was the same voice as before.

  Raidon jumped to his feet, swiveling to see if he could catch a faint gleam or wavering in the air that would betray the speaker’s presence.

  “I remember you!” yelled Raidon. “I heard you beyond the gates of demolished Starmantle! And again, in …” he trailed off. His head still resonated with the thump it received upon his arrival. He sensed some great dread hiding just beyond his attention, biding its time.

  “Correct, Raidon. However, Starmantle was not the first time you and I conversed. We spoke at some length many years ago, when you traveled to where my physical body lies. My name is Cynosure.”

  “Cynosure?” The name was familiar, but he couldn’t recall why.

  “Yes. You visited me in Stardeep several years before the Year of Blue Fire. You accompanied Kiril Duskmourn on her return to the citadel dungeon where she once served as Keeper.”

  “Stardeep!” exclaimed Raidon. The threads of memory connected, and he remembered.

  Cynosure was an artificial entity. A golem, but more than that.

  He … it? It was an immense humanoid forged of crystal, stone, iron, and more exotic components, though when Raidon had met the golem, it was rusted, pitted, and stained by centuries of existence.

  Cynosure was a golem whose sophistication eclipsed all other artificial constructs. It stared unblinking into the containment fires of Stardeep’s inmost prison cell. Raidon had seen the golem descend into that cell and do battle with the thing housed there. A thing called the Traitor.

  The monk remembered the design fused onto Cynosure’s metallic chest—the Cerulean Sign. The placement was similar to the one Raidon himself now sported.

  “How is it I hear your voice? Are you
not restricted to Stardeep’s buried corridors?”

  “I remain so bound; however, I can act through any suitably prepared vessel, even far from Stardeep. Somehow, I can now also manifest my attention and some few surviving magical abilities of Stardeep through you.”

  “Through me? What abilities?”

  “Speech, for one. Also, I teleported you from Starmantle to the edge of Nathlekh when you were hurt a few tendays ago, and again just now to pull you out of Nathlekh. Unlike speech, however, moving you such great distances saps my finite and failing reserves.”

  “You … pushed me through a portal? Without an actual portal gate? And without being physically nearby?”

  “Yes. In a way, I am physically with you. Special circumstances allow you and me to interact, Raidon, though you and me only. I could not transport another, unless they were with you. My connection with you is possible because of the new fusion between you and your Cerulean Sign.”

  Memory painted an image of his amulet dissolving in ravening blue fire. He recalled the agony as the lingering symbol branded him. He dropped his gaze and opened the silk jacket he’d purchased in Nathlekh. The symbol of his amulet still marked him, its size scaled up to cover his entire upper chest, as if the Sign’s power was sufficient to expand to whatever medium that contained it.

  Cynosure’s voice continued, “The Spellplague stitched your amulet’s power into your mind and body. Raidon, you have become a breathing manifestation of the Sign.”

  The monk said, “In Starmantle, I was able to tap the Sign’s power when aberrant ghouls attacked me. But I did so almost instinctively …”

  The disembodied golem’s voice said, “Your life energy has invigorated the symbol. Or else the Sign’s potency was magnified by the Spellplague. Others touched by that changing flame, if they survived at all, were scarred with strange new abilities. In any case, your first use of the Sign drew my attention. As you know, I am also bound to the Cerulean Sign.”

  Raidon lifted his gaze again to the unsupported, earthen mass hovering above the horizon, though his mind traced images more fantastic. He suddenly remembered that Cynosure was more than a single golem. Stardeep’s Keepers had told him Cynosure’s sentience was housed simultaneously in several golem bodies distributed throughout the dungeon of Stardeep. The golem’s arcane awareness stretched insubstantially between dozens of bodies scattered around the halls, tunnels, and galleries. Cynosure, a sentient construct with multiple vantages, was the perfect warden of the dungeon stronghold where a Traitor served his eternal sentence.

  “You have many vantages on the world, then?”

  “No longer. Raidon, you are my one remaining contact beyond my trapped body. I can see and interact with the world in and around your physical location, as I once could with my other lesser selves in Stardeep, before it was destroyed.”

  Raidon said nothing for a moment as he wrestled with the implications of the golem’s last words. Finally he replied, “Do you try to provoke me? What do you mean? Certainly Stardeep can’t be destroyed, else the Traitor would be freed or dead. Either way, that would have ushered in a disaster.”

  “What other word would you use to describe the Year of Blue Fire?”

  Raidon flinched and said, “You suggest that the prisoner of Stardeep, the Traitor they called him, the high priest for some forgotten group of aboleths, was released, and the Spellplague was the result? Not true. It was the goddess of magic’s murder that collapsed the Weave and initiated the damned Spellplague. So I confirmed in Nathlekh while I searched for …” The monk trailed off, his concern over Stardeep eclipsed by the hollow recollection of his daughter’s fate.

  Raidon slid down the boulder’s rough side until he sat once more, his ears filling with an inchoate roar.

  Cynosure was talking. “Many threads were pulled when Mystra died. Most accept the goddess of magic’s death touched off already unsteady zones of wild magic. But in the past, when the previous goddess of magic perished, no Spellplague resulted. I believe other factors contributed to the virulence of what finally occurred. I believe the Traitor’s escape, timed uncannily close to Mystra’s murder, was an additional constituent that co-generated the Spellplague.”

  Raidon heard the words, but their meanings did not distract him from an image of Ailyn playing in the courtyard with a passel of tame city cats.

  The golem’s voice droned on. “On the other hand, the disaster the Keepers of the Cerulean Sign most feared, the appearance of the Abolethic Sovereignty, never materialized. But perhaps our error was in assuming the Sovereignty would immediately return. Perhaps the Spellplague was a necessary ingredient, required to condition reality enough to permit the great old aboleths’ return. Perhaps the Year of Blue Fire was so virulent that it reactivated previously dormant fossil dimensions …”

  “Raidon, are you listening?” demanded Cynosure.

  The monk followed Ailyn through several more happy memories, a path that concluded at a clay marker with his daughter’s lonely name stenciled on it.

  “Leave me, Cynosure,” he murmured. “I grieve.”

  No further word emerged from the air. Raidon was alone with his loss.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Green Siren on the Sea of Fallen Stars

  What infantile game is Behroun playing, wondered Japheth.

  A porthole leaked watery daylight into the warlock’s cramped cabin. A ratty travel duffel lay next to him on the cot. Japheth’s things lay scattered from the duffel’s open mouth. Empty vials, elixirs, crushed essences of this and that, and his other tools littered the rumpled blanket. A large travel chest sat opposite the cot and took up a majority of the cabin’s floor space. He’d had it delivered from the hold to his room, claiming it was his own. The chest’s side was stenciled with the Marhana crest.

  No one had connected the “ghost attack” with the bulky piece of luggage open before him.

  No one except Japheth. He had watched the altercation of a few hours earlier unfold in a daze, but that was normal when walking the crimson road. It was just that detachment from reality that enhanced a walker’s sensitivity to psychic and spiritual phenomena. Thus he’d seen the shadowy figure rise out of the hold. He’d observed when it was struck down by Captain Thoster’s war wizard.

  When the apparition shriveled beneath Seren’s magical attack, his augmented vision noted a spark of blue fire zip away from where the shape disintegrated. Despite Seren’s spell of seeing, she missed the fleeting movement. But Japheth saw the flame plunge into the side of a large chest in the hold.

  Once the hubbub, inquiry, and heated recriminations by fearful crew died down, Japheth descended into the hold to see into which chest the spark had fled.

  The chest turned out to be the property of Marhana Shipping.

  Behroun hired Japheth to aid Captain Thoster, but also to gather intelligence about Thoster’s privateer enterprise to make certain the pirate wasn’t cheating Behroun out of more than could be overlooked. Lord Marhana had also apparently sent along a second spy, this one to keep tabs on Japheth himself.

  Oddly, the spy Behroun had selected was Lord Marhana’s own sister.

  The warlock gazed into the open chest at a sleeping girl’s features, loose and smooth as she lay nestled amid clothing and waterskins. Bits of food and other detritus lay in the chest with her—she’d obviously been living inside for several days.

  Japheth would never have guessed the girl … what was her name? … Anusha! Japheth wouldn’t have guessed Anusha had the proper mental mindset to become a spy. Impossible as it seemed, he couldn’t deny the evidence of his eyes: Anusha possessed the same shape as the dark, burning silhouette he’d seen three times now, the last just hours ago when Seren had somehow discorporated the menacing image. If Anusha was its source, he supposed it was lucky she hadn’t died in the psychic backlash. On the other hand, perhaps she was hurt in some mental fashion Japheth couldn’t overtly observe; he hadn’t been abl
e to wake her by saying her name aloud or shaking her.

  The warlock had vaguely noticed the girl around the Marhana estate over the last few years, without really paying her too much mind. Lately he noted she had started dressing more like a woman than a child. And why not? She had grown. She must be at least twenty years, come to think of it. An adult, despite how Behroun seemed to treat her. Looking back, he supposed she was held back from the rights and responsibilities of true adulthood, as the children of the privileged often were. If she had been born into the circumstances most faced across Faerûn, she would already be about her chosen trade in a journeyman’s capacity, possibly even married and caring for children of her own.

  Japheth said, “Anusha, wake up!” She stirred slightly, but did not open her eyes.

  She wasn’t unattractive. Now that he thought back, he remembered she had essayed a few awkward attempts to engage Japheth in conversation. He’d always cut those moments short. The warlock disliked Behroun so much that he’d instinctively backed away from any interaction with the man’s younger sibling.

  When he’d thought about her at all, he’d assumed she was a lonely girl to be pitied for her isolation, nothing more. He’d been proved wrong. Her apparent role at Marhana Manor must have been an elaborate ruse to fool anyone who had business with Behroun that Anusha was harmless.

  Japheth continued to study her.

  He never suspected Anusha might be spellscarred.

  “Time to see what you have to say for yourself,” he muttered as he snagged a blue vial from the litter of eccentric objects on his cot.

  He popped the vial’s stopper and poured its fizzing contents into the girl’s mouth. The scent of honey and orange blossoms filled the restricted cabin. He was unconcerned she would choke on the fluid, despite her slumber. It was an elixir of healing; he could not harm her with the fluid even if he wanted to.