The girl’s eyes were wide. The high color in her cheeks drained to parchment white. She believed him.
“Terrified, I regretted my decision and called out for succor, promising anything, if someone would save me from my self-inflicted fate. And thus, when a great bat sailed down from the burning sky, I thought it was my savior. It grasped me up before I could plunge to the road’s terminus. Its claws held me tight, but they also cut me.”
Japheth’s words quickened. “It winged up through a tempest of fire, ice, and lightning, until we emerged into an enchanted reflection of the world. I saw streams of crystal water, vivid forests of living green, and mountains so high their beauty and majesty stopped my breath. I recognized it as the same landscape described in a tome I had been reading, Fey Pacts of Ancient Days. I realized the great winged creature was an entity also named in that tome, and I knew fear again. For the creature that held me could be none other than the Lord of Bats.”
Into the silence that followed, Anusha asked, “Who is the Lord of Bats? A god?”
Japheth shook his head. “No god, but a powerful and potent creature, if called up in just the proper fashion. More by luck than wit, I had done so in dabbling with the ancient tome that named him, and my subsequent promise to enter into a bargain with any that saved me. The Lord of Bats had the strength to find me, save me, and seal a pact between us.”
“A mutually beneficial pact?”
“It might have been, but in the urgency of my need, I promised everything and all; I pledged my soul, though I needn’t have done so, had I known better. The Lord of Bats took advantage of my desperation. He sealed my pledge to him in a physical object—a small emerald pendant. The pact stone. It is the pact stone Behroun threatened to break, if I didn’t do as I was told.”
Anusha’s brows tightened with incomprehension.
“My pact stone is, for all its small size, laden with consequence. Because it exists, I can call upon fell powers and feats of magic that are known to the Lord of Bats. Moreover, I can command the Lord of Bats’s lesser minions, use his implements of power as my own, and even travel to his shadowed fortress. The stone is a potent tool, and it binds me to him, and him to me.”
“Why would he cede you so much of his power? That seems like a mistake.”
“The pact stone has one more function. The Lord of Bats pledged to take back my pact-born powers, then to drink my blood and eat my body, should the stone ever be destroyed. He invested the stone with such consequence so he could hold it to ensure my good behavior. If the pact stone is broken, I lose my powers and the Lord of Bats comes for me to collect his due.”
“Oh!” Anusha gripped his shoulder as if to comfort him. He didn’t shrink from the contact.
“The Lord of Bats showed me the pact stone. He told me he would destroy it if I did not do as he commanded in all things. He said I would be his puppet in the world that had banned his entry. He said that through me, the Lord of Bats would hunt the world again, as he had done in the days when humans were still ‘beasts without language’ and Faerie hadn’t receded from the world.”
The warlock clenched both fists and said in a louder voice, “Snatched so recently from the crimson road, I had little to lose. Without pondering the danger, I called swiftly and without full understanding on the power the Lord of Bats bequeathed me. I wrested the pact stone from him even as he brandished it!”
“He let the stone go?”
“His ego was his undoing, I suppose. He couldn’t conceive I’d have the effrontery or wit to immediately act. Perhaps he was used to dealing with primeval men of duller wit. Perhaps his fey nature prevented him from recognizing my mortal desperation. After he realized his error, it was too late. With stone in hand, I commanded a portion of his power, and I held the implement through which he’d planned to leash me. We fought, but I imprisoned him in the highest spire of his own fortress. I claimed the castle as my own and returned to the world. I was my own agent, and the world seemed alight with possibility and promise. Until your half brother stole the stone.”
“Behroun is a criminal and a bastard,” agreed the girl. “I can’t believe I share even half his blood. But he is no wizard or sage. How did he discover the significance of the stone?”
“That question has long troubled me. I suspect the Lord of Bats sent out messages on bat wings far and wide. The Lord of shadow-mantled Darroch Castle schemes always to break the stone, whereupon he would free himself and find me. He must have made contact with Behroun and showed Lord Marhana the significance of the stone. Not long after, I received a cordial invitation to visit New Sarshel.”
The girl sniffed. “He has a way with words, when he tries.”
“Yes, and my guard was down. I had no reason to suspect a trap. Moreover, I didn’t expect anyone in the world to recognize the pact stone’s significance, and I was lax in its safekeeping. Once I arrived in New Sarshel, your half brother employed master thieves to bring him the stone. His instruction from the Lord of Bats was to smash it. But upon gaining my pact stone, Behroun was too savvy to break it. Instead, he uses it to compel my service even as the Lord of Bats meant to.”
“I am so sorry, Japheth.”
He made no reply. He merely looked into her eyes. They were dark pools of mystery hinting at unplumbed depths.
She leaned forward, her lips slightly parted. It would be so easy to bend to meet her halfway and touch his lips to hers.
His heart tried to escape his chest, beating with two coequal emotions: confusion and desire.
The warlock stood abruptly and said the first thing that came into his head. “Would you like to see Darroch Castle? I can show you. We can use my cloak as a bridge.”
The moment was broken, as he’d intended. And now half regretted.
The girl sighed. Then she cocked her head and smiled. She nodded up at him. “I’m on a ship bound for who knows where because I wanted to see wonders beyond Sarshel. Now you say you want to show me the castle you keep in your cloak? Of course … but is it safe?”
Japheth already wished he’d come up with some other way to derail the moment. He didn’t want to rescind his offer, though. He replied, “Safe enough, as long as you stay close to me.”
“Now?” The girl rose from the edge of her travel case. He smelled her warm scent.
Exhilaration made him incautious. He knew it, but didn’t give himself more time to think it through. “Why not?”
Japheth swirled his cloak off his shoulders. He turned toward the cabin’s door and held the fabric with his arms outstretched before him and slightly raised, so that the hem just touched the floor. He took one quick pace to the door and pressed the narrow rectangle of darkness he held into the door frame. When he released his grip and stepped back, the cloak remained in place, obscuring the wooden door behind it.
“It looks like a door of darkness,” Anusha breathed.
He nodded. “It is. It leads to my castle.”
They stepped forward. Anusha flinched as if expecting to bump her head, but instead, shadows grabbed them. Cold hands pulled them along a tunnel whose floor, walls, and ceiling were composed of leathery, undulating wings. With a flurry of flapping and a whiff of ammonia, the darkness released them.
They stood in a subterranean vault whose dimensions were lost to cobwebbed corners. Behind them along a rocky wall wavered a door-shaped opening. Japheth’s cabin was blurrily visible within the rectangle.
Piercing gold and silver light from their right made them both squint. The light poured inward from an irregular, natural-looking cave mouth. Through it Japheth saw a verdant mountain meadow whose vivid colors stole his breath, as always, and whose piercing scents brought tears to his eyes. He’d never ventured in that direction, for Darroch Castle was the other way.
The gold and silver light from the cave mouth slowly fell to purples, blues, and shadow black. Over the span of a few hundred feet, the dim illumination was transformed to a dreary radiance of hopelessness. The last glimmers of li
ght were enough to reveal a vast castle, one whose mortar was black and whose bricks were immense blocks of void. A central spire rose above the walls, so high it brushed the vault’s stalactite-toothed ceiling. Immense wings stretched out from each side of the spire, rapacious and dragonlike in their span, like hunger itself made manifest.
Anusha stifled an involuntary cry and shrank back.
The noise set the ceiling to churning and chittering. It was thick with roosting bats of every variety. Many had never flown the skies of Toril.
“Shh, it is all right, Anusha.” He reached for her hand, and she clutched back tight.
“The bats on the ceiling will not harm you while I am near. The vast wings you see on the castle are immobile. They possess no life, not now, anyway. The Lord of Bats is safely bound and cannot enter his shape of old while he remains imprisoned. And I don’t intend to release him.”
In the wan light, he saw her slowly nod, though her eyes didn’t leave the unmoving shape that crouched atop the structure.
“Perhaps we should return to the Green Siren,” suggested Japheth.
Anusha gazed around with rapt eyes.
“No … no. It is just … amazing. To know where I now stand, someplace so far from the … world itself? I’ve never traveled by magic in such fashion. It is like the stories of the spells wizards commanded before the Spellplague.”
“Those abilities are returning to many across Faerûn,” said the warlock.
“Yes, and not too soon. But even the most powerful of the old wizards would have been hard pressed to travel so far in a single step. We are not even in the world any longer.” Her wide eyes met his. Even in the dim light of the cave, it was a connection he couldn’t long hold, if he didn’t want to be drawn into a rash act.
He blinked to escape her gaze. He was glad she couldn’t see him well in the darkness. Why had he brought her here? To impress her? His base instincts worked against his reason, perhaps.
No, a small cynical part of him remonstrated. You know exactly what you are doing.
He said, more to defend himself from his own accusing thoughts than in answer to Anusha, “I merely make use of what I’ve stolen from the Lord of Bats.”
“I am sure it is all beyond me, whatever the source.”
Japheth coughed and suggested, “We should enter soon, if we are to do it at all. I can only successfully travel here once out of every four or five times I try. Access depends on a lunar schedule I haven’t quite worked out yet. And I am more vulnerable without my cloak. So time is of the essence.”
She nodded.
They walked forward, past a growth of dark purple mushroom caps, each the size of a dinner plate. Japheth pointed and said, “I should gather a couple more of those caps. When distilled, their taste can cause any creature to fall asleep. It is what I made your potion from, now that I think of it!”
Anusha didn’t respond, and Japheth remembered she was still suspicious of his gift. A twinge of guilt touched him. In truth, when they’d returned to the boat after the attack of the sea hags, it had taken several hours before he was able to rouse Anusha from her somnolence.
He led the girl through the gates of Castle Darroch and down a long entry gauntlet. He ordered the creeping, wrinkled, guardian homunculi back to their holes in the side walls before Anusha could see their horrific features. The castle was defended by the Lord of Bats’s many “children,” who answered now to Japheth as if he were their creator.
They reached the foyer, which was lit by countless candelabra burning with green flames. A wide but shallow pool of dark water half flooded the space, and long, pale forms darted beneath its surface.
Japheth guided Anusha past the pool up four flights of stairs. They passed busts of enigmatic, slender humanoids on each landing. Lords of the Feywild, Japheth had always assumed. Anusha lingered, but he urged her onward, explaining again that they should not dally.
Finally, they entered the Grand Study. There, paintings of surreal landscapes, sculptures of fantastic beings, and objects too strange for mortal classification were displayed behind glass. The collection spanned centuries and worlds.
“This is all yours?” asked Anusha, finally relinquishing his hand. “It must be worth a king’s ransom!”
“These belong to the Lord of Bats. The collection could well be priceless, but I’ve never removed even a single item.”
Anusha moved to gaze upon a painting of a spray of orange and yellow: a desertscape in the grip of a storm. The hint of some vast tower was visible behind the haze of blowing sand.
“Why not?” she asked.
He shrugged, said, “It is just a feeling I have. I fear too many changes could upset some balance I’m not consciously aware of. Like the game where children remove twigs, one at a time, from a pile, until one twig too many causes the pile to topple. I fear to disturb things too much lest I accidentally release the Lord of Bats from his confines.”
The warlock’s eyes unconsciously sought a balcony overlooking the Grand Study. The balcony was accessible via a narrow stair on the wall. The high space was bare but for an iron door.
Anusha’s eyes followed his. “He’s up there?”
Japheth nodded.
She studied the door with wide eyes, then said, “I hear talking.”
Japheth cocked his head. Sure enough, the slight buzz of voices, at least two, sounded from the balcony.
Vertigo clawed his abdomen. With eyes tight, he sprang up the narrow stairs, two at a time. He felt off-balance without his cloak streaming behind.
The steel door to the balcony was open a crack, and yellow light flickered beyond. He shoved open the door and gasped.
A great oaken table dominated the chamber beyond the door. A feast of rare sumptuousness was laid out on silver platters, heaped in golden urns, and sloshed in crystal decanters. Chairs lined the sides of the table, each one unique in design and workmanship, as if every piece was imported from a completely different kingdom or culture. A few were so oddly shaped that a regular person would find it difficult to sit.
A thin man, bald and pale, with narrow squinting eyes, pointed ears, and drab black clothes sat at the head of the table on a chair as grand as any throne.
It was the Lord of Bats in his least form. He sat as he always sat, where Japheth had bound him in a feast never-ending.
The warlock sucked in his breath as if struck because of the two people sitting to each side of the Lord of Bats. They shouldn’t be there; they couldn’t be!
But they were.
One was a woman. Her slender limbs and graceful poise transcended mere humanity. Her white skin literally glowed like moonlight, and her eyes were utterly black. Her hair was dark blue-black, and her ears were pointed. She might have been a moon or sun elf, but he’d never known a moon or sun elf to glow before.
The other was a man in unremarkable clothing. A man whose features were rough and uncouth in comparison to the woman’s. A man who was terribly familiar.
“Behroun Marhana?” gasped Japheth.
The man to the Lord of Bats’s left turned midsentence. He stopped speaking, and his eyes widened on seeing the warlock.
“Japheth?” asked the man. “Why, it is! Our host never informed me you could visit here in his home-turned-prison.”
Japheth’s mouth remained open, but he had no words. As unlikely as it was, the man was indeed Behroun. But how? Disorientation made him dizzy. He couldn’t connect the threads.
The pale man spoke, “This one stole my skin; he uses it as a cloak. With it, he can travel between the world and my domain.” His white hand plucked a cherry tomato the color of blood from a silver platter. He tossed it into his mouth and chewed with gusto.
“What is the meaning of this?” Japheth demanded of the Lord of Bats, attempting to assert some control over events that careened beyond his comprehension.
“I have guests. It has taken me some years, but my invitations finally went out and were answered in person.”
&nb
sp; The woman merely gazed upon Japheth with emotionless, ageless eyes, as if nothing he could do or say could ever surprise her or break her from centuries-long ennui.
Behroun chuckled, said, “Neifion promised me extraordinary things, but only if I shatter a certain emerald he revealed to me. I think you know the one.”
The Lord of Bats glared at Behroun, saying, “You have yet to destroy it.”
“Neifion?” wondered Japheth.
“The Lord of Bats has a name, same as you and me,” Behroun explained. “But that’s hardly important.”
“Ah …” temporized the warlock, well beyond his depth. Then, “The Lord of Bats, uh, Neifion, he was the one who told you about my pact stone? I knew it.”
“My pact stone,” interrupted the pale lord. “Which you stole from me. I sent my last loyal children into the world to find an ally, and found Lord Marhana. He agreed to retrieve my property. But he failed to complete the task I set him.”
“Your grace, as I said from the beginning, be patient. When Japheth has finished his current task, I shall give you the emerald as I promised.”
“That is what you have been telling me for some time now.”
As the Lord of Bats spoke, Behroun absent-mindedly picked up a succulent pear from the table, one of several heaped in a crystal bowl.
The woman to Neifion’s right reached her slender arm across the table and slapped the fruit from Behroun’s hand before he could take a bite. The fruit spun across the room and landed in shadow.
The woman said, “I told you. Do not eat from this table. If you do, you shall never leave it.”
Behroun blanched. “I know that, Malyanna, but damn the old king if this food doesn’t look enticing!”
The elflike woman replied, “It is a lethal enchantment given a pleasant guise.”
Japheth knew that the woman, whatever her otherworldly origin, spoke the truth regarding the great feast—it was one of the Lord of Bats’s own tricks. Japheth had commandeered it and used it against its creator when he’d assumed control. The warlock wondered again if she was native to the bright, fey lands beyond the cave. Perhaps she was a moon elf “noble,” an elder native of the Feywild, inscrutable and dangerous. What was her place in all this? Was Malyanna her name or a title?
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