A flash ran along the ceiling above him, leaving a wide crack in its wake, and Cadderly realized he had no time.
He took up his adamantine spindle-disks and looped the cord over his finger. He sent them into a few fast movements, running them down to the end of the cord then snapping them back into his palm, to tighten the cord.
“I hope you made these strong,” he mumbled, speaking as if Ivan Bouldershoulder were standing next to him.
With a determined grunt, the young priest hurled the spindle-disks at the door. They cracked off the wood, knocking a deep dent in its surface. A flick of Cadderly’s wrist sent them spinning back to his hand, and he hurled them again at the same spot.
The third throw popped a hole in the wood and a fierce wind filled with red, stinging dust assaulted Cadderly. He kept his balance and his composure and whacked the door again, his spindle-disks widening the hole.
The flickering light to his side became continuous, and Cadderly glanced that way to see the very corridor dissolving, arcing fingers of electricity leading the way toward him, breaking apart the magically-created stone so that it might be consumed.
Barely twenty feet away loomed nothingness.
Cadderly’s weapon hit the door with all his strength behind it. He couldn’t even see through the stinging dust, just flailed away desperately.
Ten feet away, the corridor was gone.
Cadderly sensed it, hurled the disks one final time, and threw all his weight against the weakened door.
Danica and Dorigen worked their way past scores of swarming Trinity soldiers, men and monsters alike. Many stopped to regard the fierce monk curiously, but seeing Dorigen beside Danica, they only shrugged and went on their way.
Danica knew that Dorigen could have had her overwhelmed with a single word, and she spent more time looking at the wizard than the scrambling soldiers, trying to figure out exactly what motivated the woman.
They heard the firbolg’s roar from beyond as they came up on a corner, and heard the wind-cutting sweep of Vander’s greatsword, and the frantic cries of dodging enemies. A goblin rushed around the bend, skidding to a stop right in front of Dorigen.
“Three of ’ems’s down!” it shrieked, holding four crooked fingers up before it. “Three of ’em’s down!” A sickly feeling washed over Danica. “Three of ’em’s down!” The goblin’s smile disappeared under the weight of Danica’s fast-flying fist.
“We have a truce,” Dorigen reminded the volatile monk, but it seemed to Danica that Dorigen was not overly concerned, was even amused, by the wounded goblin squirming around on the floor.
Danica was up to the corner in an instant, peering around it, afraid of what she was about to see. Ivan, Pikel, and Shayleigh lay helpless on the floor, with Vander, showing a dozen grievous wounds of his own, straddling them. The firbolg’s huge sword worked back and forth to keep the multitude of pressing enemies back.
An orc cried out something Danica didn’t understand, and the enemy troops broke ranks, rushing away from the firbolg, tearing past Danica and turning, diving, into the corridor behind her. She understood the reason for the retreat when the scene cleared, revealing a battery of crossbowmen down the hall beyond the firbolg, weapons leveled and ready.
Vander cried out in protest, apparently realizing his doom. Then a glowing apparition of a hand appeared behind him, touched him, and he swung around, his sword cutting nothing but the empty air.
Danica’s first reaction was to spin and drop the wizard, guessing that Dorigen must have been the one who’d brought forth the spectral hand. Before the monk moved, though, the crossbow battery opened up, launching a score of heavy bolts Vander’s way.
They skipped and deflected harmlessly off the firbolg. Some stopped in midair, quivering in front of him, then fell, their momentum expended, to the ground.
“I am true to my word,” Dorigen said, walking past Danica and into the open corridor. She called for Vander to be at ease, and shouted for her own troops to cease fighting.
Some soldiers, orcs mostly, near Danica eyed the monk dangerously, clutching their weapons. It was clear that they didn’t understand, and didn’t trust the strange events unfolding.
The soldiers who had accompanied the monk and Dorigen from the wizard’s area, who had witnessed Dorigen’s fury against the orc that had gone against her commands, sent a line of whispers spreading throughout the ranks, and Danica soon relaxed, the threat apparently ended. She rushed around the corner and found Vander slumped against the wall, thoroughly exhausted and gravely wounded.
“It is over?” the firbolg breathlessly asked.
“No more fighting,” Danica answered.
Vander closed his eyes and slid slowly down to the floor, and it seemed to Danica that he would die.
Danica found the dwarves and Shayleigh alive, at least, and the elf maiden actually managed to sit up and raise one hand in greeting. Ivan was by far the worst off of the three. He’d lost a lot of blood and was losing more even as Danica tried futilely to stem the flow. Even worse, his legs had gone limp and were without feeling.
“Have you any healers?” Danica asked of Dorigen, who had moved up to stand over her.
“The clerics are all dead,” a nearby soldier answered for the wizard, his words sharp-edged as he, too, tended to a wounded man, a Castle Trinity soldier fast slipping into his final journey to the Fugue Plane.
Danica winced, remembering Cadderly’s brutal work against that group, thinking it terribly ironic that his necessary actions against Castle Trinity’s priests might cost his own friends their lives.
Cadderly! The word assaulted Danica as surely as would an enemy spear. Where was he? she wondered.
The potentially disastrous consequences of his showdown against Aballister, his father, rang clearer to the monk, especially with Ivan cradled helplessly in her arms. Shayleigh seemed stronger with every passing moment, and Vander’s cuts had already clotted and were somehow mysteriously on the mend. Pikel groaned and grumbled, finally rolling over with a curious, “Huh?”
But Ivan … Danica knew that only his dwarf toughness was keeping him alive, doubted that even that considerable strength would support him for much longer. Ivan needed a priest who could access powerful spells of healing—Ivan needed Cadderly.
Dorigen ordered several men to assist Danica in her efforts, and sent several others to the priests’ private quarters to search for bandages, healing potions, and salves. None of the men, standing in the blood of their own allies, seemed overly eager to aid the brutal intruders, but none dared to disobey the wizard.
Danica, pressing hard against a pumping wound in Ivan’s chest, her armed soaked with blood, could only wait, and pray.
The tiny sun blazed red, the air was hazy with swirling dust, and the rocky, barren landscape ranged from orange sand to deep crimson rock. All was quiet, save for the endless, mournful call of the gusting, stinging wind.
Cadderly saw no life around him, no plants or animals, no sign even of water, and he couldn’t imagine anything surviving in such a desolate place. He wondered where he was and knew only that the barren realm was nowhere on the surface of Toril.
“No place that has any name,” Aballister answered the young priest’s unspoken question. The wizard walked out from a tumble of boulders and stood facing Cadderly. “At least none that I have ever heard.”
Cadderly took some comfort in the fact that he could still hear Deneir’s song playing in his mind. He began to sing along, quietly, his hand with the magical ring clenched at his side.
“I would be very careful before attempting any spells,” Aballister warned, guessing his intent. “The properties of magic are not the same here as they are on our own world. A simple line of fire—” the wizard looked at the ring as he spoke—“might well engulf this entire world in a ball of flame.
“It’s the dust, you see,” the wizard continued, holding his hand up into the wind then folding his long, skinny fingers to rub against the red powder in h
is palm. “So volatile.”
Aballister’s sincere calm bothered the young priest. “Your extradimensional home is no more,” Cadderly said, trying to steal the wizard’s bluster.
Aballister frowned. “Yes, dear Cadderly, you have become such a bother. It will take me many months to reconstruct that magnificent work. And it was magnificent, don’t you agree?”
“We’re stranded here.” It was spoken as a statement, but Cadderly, fearful that his words might be true, privately intended it as a question.
Aballister’s face screwed up, as though he thought the claim absurd. Cadderly took comfort in that. If the wizard possessed some magic that would get them home, the young priest believed that Deneir would show him the way, as well.
“You’re not a traveler,” Aballister remarked, and he shook his head, seeming almost disappointed. “I never would have guessed that you would become so paralyzed by the comforts of that miserable library.”
Then it was Cadderly who screwed up his face, confused by the wizard’s choice of words. “Who are you?” Cadderly asked suddenly, without thinking, without even meaning to speak the thought aloud.
Aballister’s burst of laughter mocked him. “I am one who has lived many more years than you, who knows more about you than you believe, and who has defeated men and monsters much greater than you,” the wizard boasted, and again his tone reflected sincere serenity.
“You may have done me a favor with your stubborn determination and your surprising resourcefulness,” Aballister went on. “Both Barjin and Ragnor, my principle rivals, are dead because of you, and Dorigen as well, I would guess, since you came into my home alone.”
“Dorigen showed me the way in,” Cadderly corrected him, more interested in deflating Aballister than in protecting the woman. “She is very much alive.”
For the first time, Aballister seemed truly bothered, or at least perplexed. “She would not appreciate your telling me of her treachery,” he reasoned. He started to elaborate, but stopped suddenly, feeling an intrusion in his thoughts, a presence that didn’t belong.
Cadderly pressed the domination spell, the same one he’d used to “convince” Dean Thobicus to allow him to head out for Castle Trinity. He focused on the area of blackness he sensed was Aballister’s identity, and sent forth a glowing ball of energy to assault the wizard’s mind.
Aballister stopped the glowing ball and pushed it back toward the young priest.
How easily you work around the limitations of our physical surroundings, the wizard telepathically congratulated him. Though you prove yourself a fool to challenge me so!
Cadderly ignored the message, and pressed on with all his mental strength. The glowing ball of mental energy seemed to distort and flatten, moving not at all, as Aballister stubbornly pushed back.
You are strong, the wizard remarked.
Cadderly held similar feelings for his adversary. He knew his focus on the sphere was absolute, and yet Aballister held him at bay. The young priest understood the synaptic movements of Aballister’s thoughts, the clear flow of reasoning, the desperation of curiosity, and it seemed to Cadderly almost as if he was looking into some sort of mental mirror. They were so similar, the two opponents, and yet so different!
Cadderly’s mind began to wander, and he began to wonder how many people in Faerûn might possess similar mental powers, a similar synaptic flow. Very few, he believed, and that led him to begin calculating the probabilities of their meeting….
A glowing sphere, the mental manifestation of pure pain, leaped his way, and Cadderly dismissed his tangential thoughts, quickly regaining his focus. The struggle continued for some time, with neither man gaining any advantage, neither willing to relinquish an inch to the other.
It is of no avail, came Aballister’s thoughts.
Only one will leave this place, Cadderly replied.
He pressed on, again making no headway. But then Cadderly began to hear the melody of the song of Deneir flowing along beside him, falling into place near him then within him. They were the notes of perfect harmony, sharpening Cadderly’s focus to a point where the unbelieving wizard couldn’t follow. Aballister’s mind might have been Cadderly’s equal, but the wizard lacked the harmony of spirit, the company of a god. Aballister had no answers for the greatest questions of human existence, and therein lay his weakness, his self-doubt.
The glowing sphere began to move toward the wizard, slowly but inevitably. Cadderly felt Aballister’s welling panic, and that only scattered the wizard’s focus even more.
Do you not know who I am? the wizard telepathically asked.
The desperation in his thoughts made Cadderly believe the words to be another pointless boast, a fervent denial that anyone could hope to defeat him in mental combat. The young priest was not distracted, maintained his focus and the pressure—until Aballister played his trump.
“I am your father!” the wizard screamed.
The words slammed into Cadderly more profoundly than any lightning bolt. The glowing sphere was no more, the mental contact shattered by the overwhelming surprise. It all made sense to the young priest. Awful, undeniable sense, and after viewing the wizard’s thought patterns, so similar, even identical to his own, Cadderly couldn’t find the strength to doubt the man’s claim.
I am your father! The words rang out in Cadderly’s mind, a damning cry, a pang of loneliness and regret for those things that might have been.
“Do you not remember?” the wizard asked, and his voice sounded so very sweet to the stunned young priest.
Cadderly blinked his eyes open, regarded the man and his unthreatening, resigned pose. Aballister crooked his arms as though he were cradling a baby.
“I remember holding you close,” he cooed. “I would sing to you—how much more precious you were to me since your mother had died in childbirth.”
Cadderly felt the strength draining from his legs.
“Do you remember that?” the wizard asked. “Of course you do. There are some things ingrained deeply within our thoughts, within our hearts. You cannot forget those moments we had together, you and I, father and son.”
Aballister’s words wove a myriad of images in Cadderly’s mind, images of his earliest days, the serenity and security he’d felt in his father’s arms. How wonderful things had been for him then. How filled with love and perfect harmony.
“I remember the day I was forced to give you up,” Aballister purred on. His voice cracked, and a tear streamed down his weary old face. “So vividly, I remember. Time has not dulled the edge of that pain.”
“Wh-why?” Cadderly managed to stammer.
Aballister shook his head. “I was afraid,” he replied. “Afraid that I alone couldn’t give you the life you deserved.”
Cadderly felt only compassion for the man, had forgiven Aballister before the wizard had even asked for forgiveness.
“All of them were against me,” Aballister went on, his voice taking on an unmistakable edge—and to Cadderly, the sharpness of the wizard’s rising anger only seemed to validate all that Aballister claimed. “The priests, the officials of Carradoon. ‘It will be better for the boy,’ they all said, and now I understand their reasoning.”
Cadderly looked up and shrugged, not following the logic.
“I would have become the mayor of Carradoon,” Aballister explained. “It was inevitable. And you, my legacy, my heart and soul, would have followed suit. My political rivals couldn’t bear to see that come to pass, couldn’t bear to see the family of Bonaduce attain such dominance. Jealousy drove them, drove them all!”
It all made perfect sense to the stunned young priest. He found himself hating the Edificant Library, hating Dean Thobicus, the old liar, and hating even Headmaster Avery Schell, the man who had served as his surrogate father for so many years. Pertelope, too! What a charlatan she’d been! What a hypocrite!
“And so I have risen against them,” Aballister proclaimed. “And I have searched you out. We are together again, my so
n.”
Cadderly closed his eyes, put his head down, and absorbed those precious words, words he’d wanted to hear from his earliest recollections. Aballister continued talking, but Cadderly’s mind remained locked on those six sweet words. We are together again, my son.
But his mother had not died in childbirth.
Cadderly didn’t really remember her, just in images, flashes of her smiling face. But those images certainly didn’t come from Cadderly’s moment of childbirth.
And I have searched you out.
But what of the Night Masks? Cadderly’s own mind screamed at him. Aballister had indeed searched him out, had sent hired assassins to murder him, and to murder Danica.
It was only then that Cadderly suspected that the wizard had placed an enchantment over him, had sweetened his words with subtle magical energies. The young priest’s heart fought back against that idea, against his own logical protests. He didn’t want to believe that he was being deceived, wanted desperately to believe in his father’s sincerity.
But his mother had not died in childbirth!
Aballister’s charming tapestry began to unwind. Cadderly focused on the wizard’s words once more—and found that the man was no longer coaxing sweet images, but was chanting.
Cadderly had let his guard down, had no practical defense against the impending spell. He looked up to see Aballister loose a sheet of sizzling blue lightning that wobbled and zigzagged through the popping red dust. The wizard apparently understood the properties of the landscape, for the blast deflected unerringly toward Cadderly.
The young priest threw his arms up, felt the jolting, burning explosion jerk his muscles every which way, felt it grab at his heart and squeeze viciously. He sensed that he was flying, but felt nothing. He sensed that he’d slammed hard against some rock, but was beyond the sensation of pain.
“Now you are dead,” he heard Aballister say, distantly, as though he and the wizard were no longer facing each other, were no longer on the same plane of existence.