Pikel could have just pulled the pin out of the crank to set the spindle spinning, but the time for finesse had passed. With a “Whoop!” to try to distract the crossbowman a moment longer, the green-bearded dwarf hopped from the bar to the shelving along the wall, crashing aside scores of mugs and bottles, the shelves breaking away under his weight.
“Ooooooo!” he wailed as he slammed his club against the crank.
Spindle and all broke out from the wall, hanging stubbornly by a single peg. Pikel, on his knees beside Fredegar, looked at it as though it had tricked him, but then, with a loud popping noise, the last peg gave and the whole assembly rocketed up into the air.
“What?” the confused crossbowman asked.
His companion behind him gasped.
The chandelier took the crossbowman on the shoulder, spinning him over the precipice.
He crashed into the wood pile beside Ivan, the stunned dwarf nodding, stupefied. As though the gods had decided to play some macabre joke, Ivan heard the distinctive click a moment later as the crushed man’s crossbow, pressed harmlessly between the man and the broken stairs, fired.
“Hee hee hee,” chuckled Pikel, standing again to watch the spectacle. He forgot that the spindle above him was fast unwinding, and dropping, and he was back to his knees when it ricocheted off his skull.
“Oooo.”
“Set the rope!” he heard Ivan cry, and shaking away his dizziness, Pikel wrapped the rope in his arms.
Ivan grasped his axe handle in his teeth—not an easy thing to do!—and started up. He noticed that the remaining assassin in the pile behind him was getting to his feet, so he jumped back down to the raised end of a plank lying between him and the man. Ivan’s end snapped down and the end under the crawling assassin went up, slamming the man under his chin. He groaned and rolled away, grabbing at his shattered jawbone.
That done, Ivan leaped up again, stubby arms pulling him up the rope to the level of the other crossbowman. To the side, he noticed that Pikel was similarly climbing.
Ivan rushed on, finally getting his head high enough so that he could see the other man.
It was not a pleasant sight.
For the second time in the last few moments, Ivan Bouldershoulder stared into the wrong end of a readied crossbow.
Pikel made the ledge and let go of the rope, realizing only then that he had not secured it below him.
Ivan dropped like a stone. The crossbow fired, harmlessly high. And the stubborn assassin on the first level, his jaw grotesquely shattered, realized his folly in going to the rope under the climbing dwarf.
As he sat atop the man, atop the pile of broken stairs, Ivan, for perhaps the first time, thought it was not such a bad thing to have a scatterbrained brother.
Still on all fours, the young priest skittered fast and sure-footed along the edge of the adjoining building. His spindle-disks clung tightly to his hand, hanging to the end of their cord and bouncing along the building’s side. Cadderly hardly noticed them, and had no time to stop and replace them in any event. Nor did the young priest note that the pain in his wounded thigh was no more.
He spotted Danica, running weakly away from him, limping, and saw the two black-robed killers in pursuit, gaining on the stumbling woman with every stride.
Cadderly came up on the other side of the building, where the alley opened perpendicularly to a wide lane of craft stores called Market Square. Two merchants, up at dawn to prepare for the coming day, spotted the young priest and stared, then pointed up and called out something that Cadderly didn’t bother to decipher.
Too enraged to think of his movements, Cadderly slipped headfirst over the side of the building, going down hand over hand. A banner had been strung along thick ropes across the alley as a sign for one of the craftsmen’s shops.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, Cadderly ran across the tightrope. He heard a shout of disbelief from the street below, but didn’t even realize that it was aimed his way. Back on the many-angled roof of the Dragon’s Codpiece, the young priest charged off, nothing but Danica in his thoughts.
He spotted her a moment later—she had leaped across the narrow alley to the next building—stumbling over the crest of a dormer, going headlong. The two men went over right behind her.
“No!” the young priest tried to call out, but his word came out as a strange, squealing sound.
Never slowing, his eyes focused straight ahead, Cadderly flew over the short alley expanse.
One of the black-robed killers emerged from the place Danica had gone, in full flight. Cadderly feared he was too late.
The remaining man in the corridor darted into Cadderly’s room, brushing aside the smoke and stench of charred flesh that blocked the doorway.
Pikel grabbed the rope again, and Ivan began to climb, his efforts aided by his brother’s hauling movements toward Cadderly’s door.
Pikel drove on, much relieved when he saw Ivan’s stubby hand come over the lip of the hallway. But then four shapes emerged from Cadderly’s room.
Pikel instinctively let go of the rope. He winced at Ivan’s diminishing wail and the dull thump as his brother landed again on the assassin at the bottom of the rope. Pikel couldn’t worry about it, though, not with four killers just a few strides away.
But the assassins were no longer interested in battle. Seeing the stairs gone, they sought other avenues of escape. One grabbed the rope and without even testing to see if it was secured, leaped over the precipice. The others ran the other way down the hall, scrambling over the railing wherever they found high spots—tables mostly—where they could get down.
Pikel thought to give chase, but he paused when he heard a door creak open, and heard chanting. The next thing the green-bearded dwarf knew, he was lying several feet from where he had been standing, a sharp burning pain in one side, and his shocked hair wildly dancing on end.
Me brudder. The words cried out in Pikel’s mind over and over, a litany against the swirling dizziness, a reminder that he could not remain up there, lying helplessly on the floor.
Ivan heard the man land beside him, and he felt the other one squirming slowly beneath him. The dwarf opened one heavy eyelid to see the assassin standing over him, sword in hand.
The thrust came before the dwarf could react, and Ivan thought he was dead, but the assassin struck low, beneath Ivan.
Ivan didn’t question his luck. He struggled to a sitting position, trying to locate his axe, or anything else he might use against the standing killer.
Too late. The assassin’s sword came up again.
“Me brudder!” Pikel cried as he flew over the precipice.
The assassin dived away, rolled to his feet, and followed his companions out the door.
Pikel hit Ivan full force.
Ivan groaned as he waited patiently—he had no choice in the matter—for Pikel to crawl off him.
“If ye’re looking for thanks, keep looking,” Ivan grumbled.
Cadderly was too late in getting to the scene—for the sake of the other assassin.
The young priest relaxed as soon as he crested the steep roof. Danica was below him, in a valley between several gables. The remaining assassin was there, too, kneeling before Danica, his arms defenselessly by his sides and his head snapping to one side then the other, blood and sweat flying wide, as Danica landed blow after blow to his face.
“He’s dead,” Cadderly remarked when he got beside the young monk.
Danica, sobbing, slammed the man again, the shattered cartilage of his facial bones crackling under the blow.
“He’s dead!” Cadderly said more emphatically, though he kept his tone calm and unassuming.
Danica spun, her face contorted with a mixture of rage and sorrow, and fell into his arms. Cadderly wrapped his arms around her, and Danica jumped back, staring at the young priest in disbelief.
“Wh-what—?” she stammered, stepping back even farther, and Cadderly, noticing the change for the first time, had no answers for her.
>
His arms and legs, covered in white fur, had become those of a squirrel.
SEVENTEEN
MENTOR
Turn it back,” Danica pleaded, her voice edged in desperation, her hands trembling at her sides.
Cadderly stared, helpless, at his squirrel-like limbs. He hadn’t the slightest idea how to begin to reverse the process, and he admitted as much to himself and to Danica.
Danica moved to him, or tried to, until the pain in her side sent her lurching over. She grasped at the bloody wound in her abdomen just above her hip, and slumped to one knee.
Stubbornly, Danica got back to her feet, one hand held out in front of her to keep her concerned lover at bay.
“That must be tended,” Cadderly pleaded.
“With squirrel arms?” Danica’s retort stung the young priest more than she had intended. “Turn your arms and legs back to human, Cadderly. I beg you.”
Cadderly stared long and hard at his limbs, feeling deceived, feeling as though his god—or the Weave—had led him astray. Danica stood before him, needing him, and he, with the limbs of a rodent, could do nothing for her.
The young priest searched his memory, let page after page of The Tome of Universal Harmony flip through his thoughts in rapid succession. Nothing explained the transformation he’d somehow brought upon himself.
But while Cadderly found no clear answers, he did begin that distant harmony, that sweet, inspiring song where all the mysteries of existence drifted past him, waiting to be grasped and deciphered. The song rang out a single word to the young priest, the name of the one person who might help him make sense of it all.
“Pertelope?” Cadderly asked no one in particular.
Danica, still grimacing, stared at him.
“Pertelope,” he said again, more firmly. He turned his gaze to Danica, his breath coming in short gasps. “She knows.”
“She knows what?” the young woman asked, wincing with every word.
“She knows,” was all Cadderly could answer, for in truth, he didn’t really know what information the headmistress might have for him. He sensed only that the song was not lying to him, nor was it leading him astray.
“I must go to her.”
“But she’s at the library,” Danica argued. “It will take you three—”
Cadderly stopped her with an outstretched palm. He closed his mind to the stimuli around him and focused on the song again, felt it flow across the miles, calling him to step into it. Cadderly fell in with the tune, let it carry him along. The world became a dreamscape, surreal, unreal. He saw the gates of Carradoon and the western road leading into higher ground. Mountain passes zipped along beneath his consciousness then he saw the library fast approaching, came upon the ivy-strewn walls, and passed right through them … to Pertelope’s room.
Cadderly recognized the tapestry on the back wall, to the side of the bed, the same one he had stolen so that Ivan could use it in making a replica of the drow crossbow.
“I have been waiting for you to come to me,” he heard Pertelope say. The image of the room shifted and there sat the headmistress on the edge of her bed, dressed as always in her long-sleeved, high-necked black gown. Her eyes widened as she regarded the presence, and Cadderly understood that she saw him, with his rodent limbs, though he had left his corporeal form far behind.
“Help me,” he pleaded.
Pertelope’s comforting smile fell over him warmly.
“You have found Affinity,” the headmistress explained, “a powerful practice, and not without its dangers.”
Cadderly had no idea what Pertelope was talking about.
Affinity? He had never heard the word used in such a way.
“The song is playing for you,” Pertelope remarked, “often without your bidding.” Cadderly’s face revealed how startled he was.
“I knew it would,” Pertelope continued. “When I gave you The Tome of Universal Harmony, I knew the song would begin to play in your mind, and I knew that you would soon find the means to decipher the mysteries hidden within its notes.”
“I have not,” Cadderly protested. “I mean, things are happening around me, and to me—” he looked helplessly at his own limbs, translucent replicas of his corporeal form—“but they are not of my doing, not of my control.”
“Of course they are,” Pertelope replied, drawing his attention away from his polymorphed limbs. “The book is the conduit to the magical energy bestowed through the power of Deneir. You summon and guide that energy. It comes to your call and bends to your will.”
Cadderly looked down, helpless and doubting, at his deformed body. He knew Pertelope could see his problem, and wondered if Danica could as well, back on the rooftop in Carradoon. Those squirrel limbs flew in the face of what the headmistress was saying, for if Cadderly could control the magic, as Pertelope insisted, then why had he remained half a rodent?
“You have not learned to control your power,” the headmistress said to him, as though she’d read his mind, “but you’re still a novice, after all, untrained but with magnificent powers at your fingertips.”
“Powers … from Deneir?” Cadderly asked.
“Of course,” answered Pertelope coyly, as though Cadderly’s next remark would come as no shock whatsoever to her.
“Why would Deneir grant me such powers?” the young priest asked. “What have I done to warrant such a gift?”
Pertelope laughed at him. “You are his disciple.”
“I am not!” Cadderly said, and he gave a horrified expression, realizing that he had offered that admission to a headmistress of his order.
Again, Pertelope only laughed. “You are, Cadderly,” she said. “You are a true disciple of our god, and of Oghma, as well. Do not measure fealty in terms of rituals and attendance to duties. Measure it by what lies in your heart, by your morals and your love. You are a scholar, in all your inquisitive mind and in all your heart—a blessed scholar. That is the measure of fealty to Deneir.”
“Not according to Avery,” Cadderly argued. “How often has he threatened to throw me out of the order for my failings in those rituals you dismiss so quickly?”
“He couldn’t throw you out of any order,” Pertelope replied. “One cannot be ‘thrown out’ of a religious calling.”
“Religious calling?” Cadderly replied. “If that’s what you call it then I fear I was never in the order to begin with. I have no calling.”
“That’s absurd,” replied Pertelope. “You’re as attuned with the precepts of Deneir as any person I have ever met. That, my young priest, is what constitutes a religious calling. Do you doubt the powers you’ve begun to unlock?”
“Not the powers,” Cadderly replied with typical stubbornness, “but their source.”
“It is Deneir.”
“So you say,” answered Cadderly, “and so you are free to believe.”
“You will too, in time. You are a priest of Deneir, a follower of a god who demands independence, the exercise of free will, and a reliance on intellect,” Pertelope continued, again as though she had read Cadderly’s mind. He had to wonder if Pertelope hadn’t played through the same conversation herself, many years ago.
“You are supposed to question—to question everything, even the nature of the gods and the purpose of being alive,” Pertelope continued, her hazel eyes taking on a faraway, mystical look. “If you would follow blindly from ritual to ritual, you would be no better than the cattle and sheep that dot the fields around Carradoon.
“Deneir doesn’t want that,” Pertelope went on, calmly, comfortingly, and looking directly back at the frightened young priest. “He is a god for artists and poets, free-thinkers all, else their work would be no more than replicas of what others have deemed ideal. The question, Cadderly, is stronger than the answer. It’s what drives growth—growth toward the wisdom of Deneir.”
Somewhere deep inside, Cadderly prayed that Pertelope was speaking truthfully, that the apparent wisdom of her words wasn’t just the feeble ho
pe of one as confused and desperate as he.
“You have been chosen,” Pertelope went on, bringing the conversation back to more concrete terms. “You hear the song and will come, over time, to decipher more and more of its notes, to better understand your place in this confusing experience we call life.”
“I am a wizard.”
“No!” It was the first time the headmistress had appeared angry during the conversation, and Cadderly, wisely, didn’t immediately reply. “Your magical gifts are priestly in nature,” Pertelope asserted. “Have you cast anything but spells you’ve witnessed other priests cast?”
Cadderly thought long and hard. In truth, everything magical he had done in some way, at least, replicated clerical spells. Even the so-called “affinity” wasn’t so different from the shapechanging abilities exhibited by the druids who’d been caught up in the chaos curse. But still, his powers were different, Cadderly knew it somehow.
“I do not pray for these spells,” he argued. “I don’t get out of bed in the morning with the notion that I should be able to create light this day, or that I will find need to turn my arms into a squirrel’s paws. Nor do I pray to Deneir, at any time.”
“You read the book,” Pertelope replied. “That is your prayer. As far as selecting spells and memorizing their particular chants and inflections, you have no need. You hear the song, Cadderly. You are one of the Chosen, one of the few. I had suspected that fact for many years, and came to understand just a few tendays ago that you would take my place.”
“What are you talking about?” Cadderly asked, his near panic only intensified by the fact that Pertelope, as she spoke, had begun to unbutton her long gown. Cadderly gaped in amazement as the headmistress peeled the garment off, revealing a featureless torso covered by skin that resembled the hide of a shark, covered not with skin, but with sharp pentacles.
“I was raised from childhood on the Sword Coast,” the headmistress began wearily, “near the sea. My father was a fisherman, and often I would go out with him to tend the nets. You see, I found affinity with the shark, as you have with squirrels—with Percival in particular. I came to marvel at their graceful movements, at the perfection of that oft-maligned creature.