EXILE OF THE HIDDEN CITY
ADEPT OF FORGOTTEN MYSTERIES
SORCERESS OF THE CELESTIAL NADIR
USUSI
It’s not the dark—it’s what the darkness hides.
Qari reached out from the glow into the darkness where Ususi trod and said, “Take my hand, Sister. You shouldn’t be so afraid of the dark, you know. Darkness is my constant companion. It doesn’t terrify me. I’ve learned to make a friend of it.”
Ususi strained toward the hand. She struggled to rediscover her missing limbs. Or should she just will herself forward? She yelled, “Qari, where are we? What’s going on?”
Qari swiveled her head so that the shocking emptiness of her missing eyes was indisputable. Qari said, “You need to embrace the darkness, as I have.” So saying, she reached up with her other hand and pointed at the sunken, cavernous pits where eyes should have looked out.
WILL SHE SEE WHAT DARKNESS HIDES?
THE WIZARDS
Blackstaff
Steven Schend
Bloodwalk
James P. Davis
Darkvision
Bruce R. Cordell
Frostfell
Mark Sehestedt
Dedication
For Dee
Acknowledgments
Rob Heinsoo’s development suggestion is much appreciated, as it lays the groundwork for Kiril Duskmourn’s emergence as an important character.
Martial arts instruction provided by John Staab gave the author firsthand knowledge of the effectiveness of several techniques, such as choke-outs, which make appearances in this story.
A barren land smoldered beneath a cover of ash.
The desert was still, grim in its isolation, and decorated with bleaching bones and drifts of snow white sand. Ripples across the dunes traced meandering lines under a merciless sun.
The roar of a storm shattered the deathly quiet. The chalky stillness rose up to become a howling waste of breathless suffocation. Lightning etched jagged trails through clouds of airborne grit. Wind scrabbled over blasted stone.
When the wind screamed, the desolation recalled the ancient mistake that birthed it, a mistake of such scope it doomed its perpetrators, burying their memory beneath centuries of sand.
A blot above the storm twisted, strained, and ripped. Ruinous dark lay behind the dust-hazed sky, littered with debris.
The aperture over the desert widened, and something moved within the newborn gap. Something terrible.
A splinter of darkness slipped through the opening and fell—a shard of stone almost a mile in length—like a hungry predator bounding into unguarded territory.
It slammed into the desert floor, and nearly three hundred feet of its razor-sharp length punched into the bedrock beneath the shifting dunes.
Shock waves pounded out from the point of contact, clearing the air and overpowering the dust storm’s constant shriek. Moments later, the storm settled back, cloaking the waste in a roaring haze of stinging sand. The splinter remained upright, its head rising above the storm’s roil as a lighthouse rises over a wave-racked coast. In the full light of reality, the structure bore a faint purple translucence along its edges, though its core remained black.
The time of imprisonment was finished.
The time for sweet retribution was at hand.
Spring, 1374 DR
The vengeance taker walked steadily, not hurrying, not lazing.
He ambled across a scrubland of long dead grass, his boots crunching brown blades, and his steps carrying him past stony outcrops. Sparse foliage, cactus, and an occasional squat, thorny tree dotted the endless miles. Waterless gullies sometimes splintered the terrain. The only limit to his vision was the next distant rise. Unless he counted the mountains.
To the taker’s left was a rugged, desolate barrier of stone. The crags of those distant heights promised no mercy on any who attempted passage. But Iahn Qoyllor traveled a path parallel to the mountains, not toward them. The Giant’s Belt would not try his strength, at least not this journey.
His unwavering stride ate the miles.
He had been on the trail just over two months. When he received the order to find the fugitive, he accepted the task, despite its seeming impossibility. Within a few tendays, his considerable skill unearthed a trace nearly ten years cold. Until recently, his target had lived in the city of Two Stars. He wondered again why she’d left after such a long residence. Had she sensed his eventual arrival? Iahn didn’t like to dwell on uncertainties. Among his brethren, he was known for his preference for action over supposition, and proof over faith.
The vengeance taker was close. He no longer sustained himself by imagining the day he would finally catch her. The need for such a crutch had passed. He knew with certainty he was just days behind the woman. Maybe only one day, if she paused in her route, as she sometimes did.
Iahn was a creature out of place in this too-bright wasteland. A masterwork crossbow, its arms folded against the barrel, was strapped to his left calf. His hide leggings were the color of volcanic stone, and the leather vambraces that wrapped his arms from elbow to wrist were blood red. His eyes were flecks of winter ice.
In his right hand Iahn carried his dragonfly blade with its long hilt carved of lyrwood, a tree of the ancient world that now grew only behind the Great Seal. The hilt concealed a slender dagger, needle sharp, that few living creatures had ever seen. Many foes, now dead, had glimpsed its silvery line as it ended their days. He called it a thinblade. Others of his order called it a stiletto.
A shriek jerked Iahn’s attention to his side. His left hand was instantly in motion, anticipating trouble, before he recognized the scrub falcon perched on red-leafed chaparral. He nodded at the small predator and lowered his arm, the object affixed to his hand unused.
Oiled straps secured a pitted metallic relic—his damos—to the palm of Iahn’s left hand. Every vengeance taker was issued one. A damos was the only badge of vengeance taker rank. Their most feared weapon, a damos contained the baleful fuel for vengeance taker sorcery that doubled as a uniquely potent venom.
Iahn topped another rise and saw telltale wheel ruts and hoofprints. Those ruts had become like a friend—obvious markers to hearten him. He no longer needed to ask the Voice for directions to stay on the fugitive’s trail. In fact, the tracks revealed she traveled at a modest pace, unaware she was sought, neither speeding up to evade Iahn nor slowing down to intercept him.
Something in a rut caught Iahn’s notice. He approached and squatted. Unfamiliar spoor stared back. The vengeance taker frowned.
Malformed hoofprints, smaller than the equine prints that drew the fugitive’s wagon, partly obscured the wheel ruts. These prints were new to his quarry’s path. A greenish film glistened in a few of the smaller prints. Had the woman summoned allies to patrol her back trail? Perhaps his earlier assessment of her foreknowledge was wrong. Perhaps the wizard knew fully that her heritage sought her, despite her attempt to discard all connections with her homeland. She possessed ability enough, but what clue had she found that tipped her off? Did she know a vengeance taker was after her?
He continued to squint at the intruding spoor. These prints seemed somehow … ominous. Even as he studied the glistening mucous, it dissipated, leaving the prints dry. He was lucky to have noticed it at all.
Perhaps the intruding sign was unrelated to his quarry, but Iahn didn’t approve of assumptions. He retained life where many lesser people walked into traps because of too much imagination.
His desire was enough to cajole his damos open, like an eye dilating, revealing a dark cavity filled with oily fluid. Only a vengeance taker could hope to survive contact with the poison within a damos. The fabled magic of his ancestors assured that the reservoir would never run dr
y. The secrets of its fabrication were lost to time. In this day, vengeance takers counted but twenty-one, a number that equaled the remaining number of relics.
With a smooth and practiced glide, he flicked two drops of venom from the reservoir onto his fingertip. The damos closed immediately of its own accord. Each bead was so potent that if introduced into his waterskin, he’d have poison enough to kill twenty people. He considered the droplets for a moment, then licked the glistening globules from his finger.
His cheeks warmed and sweat broke on his brow. The desert was blotted out by a roar of light and a flare of sound. His eyes fluttered, momentarily beyond his conscious control. He collapsed to one knee as weakness clawed his viscera. The poison was loosed in his blood, scrabbling to find some small chink in his hard-won resistance.
A whisper broke from the cacophony. Iahn concentrated his senses, straining to hear the words spoken. Distinguishing the Voice from phantom noise generated by a poisoned brain was tricky. The prophetic spirit spoke to anyone who succumbed—or nearly succumbed—to the venom, but most survivors and victims failed to understand the words. It didn’t matter to the victims, because hearing the Voice meant an ugly death was only a few heartbeats away.
Hopeful apprentices built up immunity by imbibing minute doses of diluted poison, then stronger and stronger droplets over time, gradually and painfully, to acquire resistance to damos venom. The final test was the ingestion of a full, concentrated dose.
Failure was obvious, if unsightly.
Honor was accorded to those who lived. Apprentices who spoke a true prophecy graduated as vengeance takers and took up their badge of office after swearing fealty to the Lord Apprehender of Deep Imaskar.
Nausea stirred, and Iahn’s muscles loosened as the cacophony intensified. Then the Voice broke through dissonance into clarity.
“More than vengeance tracks the fugitive. An entity foretold …”
The message dissolved into inchoate syllables that poured into a river of relief from the damos’s venom-induced pain. Iahn’s body was throwing off the lethal effects of the dose. With the return of his senses, the Voice fled. Until next time.
Still on one knee, he considered the insight bequeathed him. No doubt Iahn himself was vengeance. It was the title of his rank and profession. Simple. So the fugitive was sought by someone other than himself. Which probably meant the strange marks along the wheel ruts were not the fugitive’s doing, but instead were traces left by this “other.”
Iahn sighed. The damos’s messages were always brief and usually truncated. A longer message required a greater dose, and to hear all that might be foretold would be the listener’s first sermon of the afterlife, even for a vengeance taker.
Iahn straightened. It wouldn’t do to lose the fugitive at the last moment. He was accustomed to achieving his goals, no matter the difficulty.
He would find Ususi Manaallin and kill any force or creature that stood in his way.
Spring, 1374 DR
Darkness. Blowing, howling, damp gloom. Shadows reaching like fingers … grasping. Stretching closer. Screaming….
Ususi woke, sitting upright, a cry on her lips. Where, what…?
The dream.
The same damned dream that pursued her up the years.
She focused and slowed her too-rapid breathing. Just three days had passed since the dream last visited, but it had lost none of its immediacy, none of its mystery, and none of its enveloping terror.
Calm down, she thought. It’s over—it’s done, it can’t hurt you. Nothing has changed. It was just a dream. Wasn’t it?
The excuses were familiar. She and her sister Qari made the same excuses to reassure each other when they were children. When they’d shared the same nightmare. But Qari had never known light—for her, darkness was natural. Her poor sister, already cursed to a sightless existence, had lost all remaining shreds of her reason when their parents died in the accident. After that tragedy, Qari was hidden away from even the enclosed world of Deep Imaskar, sightless and speechless. For all Ususi knew, the same terrible dream replayed through her sister’s mind day after day after day, its terror unrelenting.
Ususi slammed her fist down on the nightstand. “What are you?” she screamed. “What do you want from me? Leave me alone!” She pushed all thoughts of Qari from her mind. Thinking about her sister was something she did only by accident.
The echoes of her yell died to nothing, and the darkness, the natural darkness of the night, pressed close.
And yet something about that darkness was unnatural, too. The lantern on the wall beside her bed, a lantern whose wick earlier burned with heatless flame and promised enough light for years, was dead.
Beyond its ability to terrify, the dream had the unsettling ability to reach beyond her closed eyelids. She’d awakened from the nightmare on other occasions to discover candle flames, lanterns, torches, and even campfires doused. Not even magical lights escaped being snuffed by her nightmare vision.
That allowed her to recognize the dream’s malevolence. It was Darkbringer. Lightquencher. Dreamstalker. Something that craved darkness couldn’t be good. She never managed to free herself from the curse of her personal nightmare, or flee far enough from its reach, despite all her abilities and the miles she’d put between herself and the hidden place of her birth.
Ususi rose. She was done with sleep for the night.
Time for some tea. She set the wick of the doused lantern freshly alight with a word of kindling.
The interior of her traveling wagon was small but tidy. Everything was stowed just so. The cunningly designed interior of the coach was a marvel of carpentry, blending wood, metal, and glass, offering a surplus of storage that didn’t sacrifice living area. Its elegance and grace was like the cabin of a small yacht designed by a noble who knew the value of precious space, but her coach was a craft that traveled upon land.
She folded the bed into the wall, forming a bench, and pulled an inlaid board from its slot, producing a sturdy table. From a cupboard, Ususi gathered the kettle, a crock of loose green tea, a silver spoon, and sugar cubes. The motions of preparation, almost ritualized, calmed her. Soon enough, she’d prepared an aromatic beverage in a delicate fired-clay cup.
Sipping, Ususi thought back to the day she had commissioned the master carpenter of Two Stars to build the traveling wagon. It had been, what … a year ago? A year since she’d decided to give up her decade-long residence in Two Stars. A year since she had parted ways with Marrec and the others. Marrec had his own quest, and she had hers. She’d lived in Two Stars almost since she defied the lord apprehender and slipped past the Great Seal….
But that was long ago. What mattered now was her self-imposed mission of discovery. She would locate and map every site of power of her godlike ancestors, the Imaskari. Years of study had led her to the very first site of her obsession, the Mucklestones. That ancient ring of standing stones was one of the few known portals that connected to the famous Celestial Nadir—famous to Deep Imaskari wizards, anyway.
The Celestial Nadir was an artificial demiplane created by the original Imaskari Empire. It could be accessed only from certain locations, and only if one possessed a keystone. All the keystones were thought to be lost.
Then, just a short year ago, a surviving keystone was given into her keeping by its former custodian in the Forest of Lethyr. She wasn’t sure if the previous guardian knew or understood the keystone’s significance, or Ususi’s heritage. She’d assumed the Nentyarch of Yeshelmaar had not known. On the other hand, the Nentyarch was a wise elf, and perhaps had understood what the gift meant to Ususi. Certainly no other person could have used the keystone better than she—at least no other person in a position to investigate the Nadir.
Ususi set down the cup. She plucked the keystone from its chain around her neck and gazed into its amethyst depths. The keystone was critical to opening the Mucklestones. More than that, it could open any portal created by the Imaskari to gain entry into the Celestial N
adir. With the stone’s aid, she might well discover all of the famed twenty gates.
Each gate led into the Celestial Nadir, but each gate opened onto a different portion of that primeval space. So far, she had found only a single entry into the Celestial Nadir—the Mucklestones—and she had already plumbed those depths. Nineteen more gates to go.
The Mucklestone Gate opened onto great voids of cool darkness. Narrow, unsupported stone roads wound through that void. The paths sometimes connected enigmatic islands of stone, collections of debris, free-floating lakes, and stranger detritus of a vanished time. Most of the paths led to innocuous or crumbled ruins.
Unfortunately, her exploration revealed the Mucklestones opened onto an unimportant edge of the Celestial Nadir, far from the core that would shelter important Imaskaran relics. She was certain that other paths, closer to the core of the Celestial Nadir, would lead to secrets of fabulous power. Such as one or more of the fabled Imaskarcana.
While walking the paths of the Celestial Nadir connecting to the Mucklestones, she’d found nodes of translucent, purplish crystal. They formed almost like natural geodes within the artificial demiplane; they were manifestations of the Celestial Nadir itself. Her keystone was carved from the very same crystal, which could be found only in the Celestial Nadir.
She recalled again her surprise upon seeing raw Celestial Nadir crystal trading across the gem counters in the city of Two Stars.
She pulled from her purse a chunk of rough crystal whose hue matched that of the keystone, though unfinished. When she’d seen it in the gem shop in Two Stars, purely by accident, she’d purchased it immediately. According to the shop owner, the gem went by the ungainly name “Datharathi crystal.” A small lot of it had come up from the far south, from somewhere in the Durpar region.
Her discovery of the fragment was the final impetus she’d required to continue her quest. The fragment was clear evidence that at least one other of the twenty gates, besides the Mucklestones, still operated. Moreover, someone was entering the Celestial Nadir and mining its substance for profit! Celestial Nadir crystal was a natural sediment of the artificial plane her ancestors had created, and could be found nowhere else.
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