Near them, the confused slaad continued to sit on the stairs, wounding himself and muttering.
Jak ignored the creature, touched his friend, and spoke the words to healing prayers. Most of Magadon’s wounds closed, and color returned to his face.
Afterward, still eyeing the confused slaad warily, Jak used more healing prayers to close the gouges in his own legs and shoulder.
They looked up toward the top of the tower, and Jak prayed to the Trickster and Tymora that Cale had made it to the top before Magadon’s psionic effect had ended.
They looked at the enspelled slaad, then looked at each other.
“We’ll go past him if possible,” Jak said. “Through him if need be.”
“Through him,” Magadon said grimly.
As he advanced up the stairs toward Dolgan, the nonplussed slaad looked a question at him.
Magadon slashed open the slaad’s throat with a hard cross slash. Dolgan fell backward on the stairs, surprise in his eyes, gurgling and spasming.
Magadon walked over him and up.
“Don’t slip on the blood,” the guide said to Jak.
Jak nodded and followed.
Cale waited until Azriim stepped into the glowing archway. When he did, the slaad’s body blotted out the orange light and cast a long shadow behind him. Cale sensed the semi-comprehensible space-between-space that connected the shadows he’d gathered around him and the shadow that Azriim cast. As always, it was not but a step in a direction that could not be represented on a map, that most beings could not see or sense. He readied his blade, prayed that the tower did not interfere with his ability, and took the step.
A moment of motion and he found himself standing behind Azriim. The slaad must have sensed him for he started to turn, but too late. With gritted teeth, Cale drove Weaveshear into Azriim’s back, through his spine, and out his green-skinned chest. Azriim screamed in pain, bared his fangs in agony, and started to fall. Some small thing the slaad had held in his hands went skittering across the floor of the chamber beyond the archway. Warm, black blood cascaded down Weaveshear’s hilt and over Cale’s hands. He twisted the blade as Azriim collapsed, eliciting another hiss. He put his foot into the semi-prone slaad’s back and kicked him off the blade and through the archway.
The chamber under the cupola was nothing more than an open space covered with a metal roof. Arcane symbols were engraved into the metal. Cale had no idea what the cupola’s purpose might once have been.
In the center of the chamber, erupting from the stone of the tower like the edge of a giant knife, was a faceted wedge of crystal taller than Cale. It pulsed with power and sent its orange beam of arcane might sizzling through the hole in the cupola and toward the top of the cavern.
“I said I would kill you,” Cale said, and was surprised to hear in his words the same emotionless tone he sometimes heard in Riven’s voice—the tone of an assassin doing his work.
The slaad apparently could not move his legs. On all fours, he dragged them behind him like dead things as he tried to move away from Cale.
So you did, Azriim replied, and even his mental voice seemed strained with pain.
With surprising suddenness, the slaad whirled around, pointed a palm at Cale, and uttered an arcane word. A fan of clashing colors flew from his hand and exploded around Cale—
—and drained harmlessly into Weaveshear. Cale felt the blade pulsing with the absorbed power, vibrating from its proximity to the magical beam.
Azriim’s mismatched eyes went wide. He turned and dragged himself after the item he had dropped. Cale saw it lying on the floor not far from them: a silver nut latticed with black veins, about the size of Jak’s closed fist. A seed.
Cale jumped forward and put his boot into Azriim’s back. The slaad hissed in pain and collapsed onto his belly.
You would not kill me in these clothes, would you? Azriim asked, and Cale almost laughed at the absurdity of the question.
Cale saw the wounds he had inflicted with Weaveshear beginning to close. The slaad’s leathery skin was sealing itself. Soon, Azriim would have the use of his legs again. The creatures regenerated quickly, perhaps more quickly than Cale himself. He knew then that he would have to finish Azriim with brutal, overwhelming, final violence.
Cale hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should spare Azriim, force him to tell all he knew of the Sojourner.
No, Cale decided. He would learn what he needed to know some other way. Azriim had to die. At that moment, chororin required it.
He raised Weaveshear high for a decapitating strike.
“This is over,” he said, and was pleased to hear that his voice was his own and not Riven’s.
Azriim turned to face him, turned to face death. His mismatched eyes did not show fear, but they did go wide.
By the time Cale realized that Azriim’s eyes were wide from surprise, not fear, it was too late.
Agonizing pain exploded in Cale’s back. Magical steel pierced his flesh, his kidneys, and scraped against his ribs and spine. He looked down to see the tips of two blades making little tents of his cloak before poking through. Two saber tips.
Riven’s sabers.
Warm blood poured down Cale’s back, and trickled down his front. Sparks exploded in his brain. His vision went blurry, but somehow he managed to keep his feet. Riven pulled both blades free. Cale hissed at the shot of agony that ran through his frame as the blades withdrew. He tried to turn around but his body would not respond. It was all he could do to stay upright. He clutched Weaveshear hard in his fist but felt it slipping from his grasp.
“It’s over, Cale,” Riven said, his voice as frigid as a winter gale. “It’s over.”
A saber stab again impaled Cale’s organs. Another. He could not even groan. The strength went out of his legs. He collapsed to the floor, and the fall seemed to take forever. His hearing went dull. Sounds seemed to stretch impossibly long, into a scale he’d never before noticed. Only the rasping of his breath and the irregular hammering of his heart sounded clearly and normally in his ears.
Cale lay on his side, his eyes open, his breathing labored. He felt his shade flesh struggling to regenerate, but feared it would fail. Riven had done a lot of damage. Like Cale, the one-eyed assassin knew how to kill. And the assassin knew how to betray.
In some distant part of his brain, Cale wondered when Riven had made the decision to turn on them, wondered whether the assassin had planned it all along. For a reason he could not explain, Cale thought of the Plane of Shadow. He cursed himself for a fool, a trusting fool. In his mind, he could hear Azriim laughing.
Riven walked past him, past the prone slaad, and retrieved the silver seed. Sabers still bare and bloody, he walked back to stand over the slaad. Two saber tips pointed at Azriim’s heart.
“My mind is open,” Riven said to the slaad. “Read it.”
Azriim’s mismatched eyes narrowed and Cale sensed the flow of mental energy. A fanged grin spread across the slaad’s face.
“I come with you, and participate in what’s to come,” Riven simultaneously asked and ordered.
Azriim nodded. Riven sheathed a saber and extended a hand to help the slaad up. Azriim took it and climbed slowly to his feet. His regeneration had returned the use of his legs.
“Give me the seed,” Azriim said.
Riven ignored him, and Cale could imagine but not see the assassin’s sneer.
Still holding the seed, Riven turned to Cale. He knelt down on his haunches so that he and Cale could see into each other’s faces. Riven’s eye was cold, the hole in his other socket black and deep. Cale thought back to an alley in Selgaunt, when Riven had been helpless before him. He should have killed him then.
“I side with the winner, Cale,” Riven said. “You don’t see it, you never saw it, but you’ve already lost.” He stood, spat a glob of saliva onto Cale’s cheek, and added, “And I’ve been Second long enough.”
Cale tried to grab his boot, failed, coughed up blood, but managed
to groan, “You’ll always … be Second … to me, Zhent.”
Riven stood still for a moment, and Cale waited for the finishing saber cut. It did not come, and when the assassin spoke, Cale could hear the sneer in his voice.
“It doesn’t appear so now.”
Together, Riven and Azriim walked to the huge crystal in the center of the room. They stood for a moment before the crystal and looked at the orange beam, the beam that powered the Skulls, that kept Skullport from collapsing.
Without ceremony, Riven handed the seed to Azriim. The slaad appeared startled by the gesture, but took the seed.
Azriim looked at Cale and said to Riven, “If he lives, he’ll come looking for you.”
Riven eyed Cale coldly and replied, “I hope he does.”
“We need to get you some new clothes,” Azriim said with a smile, then he slipped the seed into the beam.
The moment the silver seed touched the orange light, it disintegrated into a million glowing particles, all of them streaking upward like a swarm of fireflies, spreading along the net of power. The orange glow darkened, turned crimson. The air changed. Cale’s ears popped. A low, vibratory hum sounded, growing louder and louder. The entirety of the chamber bucked, shook. The tower rattled. The huge crystal cracked and a million fine lines manifested along its facets.
Cale turned his head and saw that outside the cupola, stalactites detached from the ceiling, fell gracefully through the air, and crashed thunderously amongst the ruins. Clouds of dust went up from the point of impact. It was raining stone.
It was at that moment that Cale realized that the bleeding in his back had stopped. His flesh closed the wound. Though still weak, he reached into his cloak pocket and found his holy symbol. The feel of its soft velvet in his hand comforted him.
I’m the First, he thought. I’m the First.
He searched his mind for a spell, something to stop Riven and Azriim. He found one, tried to utter the words, but was unable to maintain his concentration. He could only watch them, could only bear witness to his failure.
Azriim, grinning like a lunatic, took out his teleportation rod. Riven grabbed the slaad by the arm.
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
Still wearing that stupid grin, Azriim nodded and said, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The slaad began to manipulate the rod.
From behind him, Cale heard a voice—Jak’s voice—exclaim, “Riven! I knew it, you black-hearted whoreson!”
Azriim and Riven looked up in surprise.
Cale turned his head to see Jak and Magadon standing in the cupola’s archway. Both looked to Cale. He tried to indicate to them that he was all right, that he would live, but managed only to blink at them.
Jak’s mouth went hard.
“Bastard,” he said to Riven.
As fast as a lightning strike, the halfling pulled two throwing daggers from his chest bandolier and whipped them across the chamber.
Cale heard one sink into flesh. Riven grunted, and Cale turned to see one of the blades buried to the hilt in the assassin’s shoulder.
“I’d kill you for that, little man,” Riven said, grimacing as he pulled the dagger free. “Except that you’re already dead. And I’m leaving.”
The assassin had something in his hand. He hurled it back at Jak. The halfling couldn’t dodge it, and the small wooden object thumped into Jak’s chest, doing no damage, and fell to the floor.
Jak’s pipe.
“Be thankful it’s not steel, Fleet,” Riven growled.
“You’ve wanted this,” Jak said, and started to advance across the chamber. “Now you’ve got it. Come on, Zhent!”
Magadon walked beside him, blade bare.
“You won’t get away, Riven,” the guide said.
“I already have, tiefling,” Riven replied with a sneer.
Azriim continued to twist the teleportation rod. Cale tried to shout at Magadon to connect psionically to Riven, but he could not say the words.
Riven looked past Jak and Magadon and toward the cupola’s archway.
“They don’t look happy,” the assassin said, and he and Azriim winked out.
“Coward!” Jak shouted at the empty air.
Cale followed the assassin’s gaze and saw six of the Skulls streaming into the cavern. Though they were still far away, Cale could see that their mouths were open, and he heard the howls of rage and dismay that went before them. Lines of energy crackled around the guardians like lightning.
The chamber continued to shake. Stalactites fell in increasing numbers. The net of power formerly visible along the ceiling crackled and sparked, its power failing. It felt to Cale as though the entire chamber was in danger of imminent collapse.
Jak and Magadon rushed to his side and sat him up. Cale hissed with pain as he rose slowly to his feet.
Jak said, “Cale, are you—Trickster’s toes! You’re soaked in blood.”
Leaning on his friends, Cale said, “I’ll be all right.”
His shadow-infused flesh continued to work its miracle.
A lightning bolt exploded through one of the cupola’s archways and blew them across the floor. They all fell face down on the stone. The hairs on Cale’s arms stood straight up.
The Skulls are coming, he thought. And they’re angry.
“Come on,” Cale said, slowly clambering to his feet.
Jak and Magadon at his side, he limped across the chamber to the opposite archway. They stood there on the edge of the tower, looking down on the ruins far below. Soon the lost city would be covered in rock, the chamber forever lost to history.
Above them, the ceiling of the cavern was aglow in intermittent flashes of crimson lightning and showers of sparks. Cale saw some of the Skulls wheeling frenetically around the cavern, preventing what destruction they could, and patching the net of power where possible.
But two others were coming for the tower. Keening, aglow with power, rage, and despair, they blazed toward the comrades.
The tower shook under Cale’s feet, nearly knocking him off the side. The world shook above them.
Still bleary-eyed from his wounds, Cale said, “Hold on to me and get ready to jump.”
Magadon and Jak went wide eyed.
“What?” Jak asked.
Cale gathered what darkness he could around him. He needed more. It was too bright at the top of the tower.
“Jump, little man,” he said. “Together.”
Still they hesitated.
Two Skulls streaked into the cupola.
“Your transgression shall result in your slow flaying and prolonged torture, you—”
“Now, godsdamnit,” Cale ordered.
Beams of energy fired from the Skulls’ eyes.
Jak and Magadon, clutching Cale between them, jumped.
REAPING THE HARVEST
Levitating in midair in the nursery, Vhostym pressed his ear to the trunk of the Weave Tap and blinked against the increasingly bright pulses of power that ran the length of the artifact. Most creatures wouldn’t have been able to see much beyond their own hands in the light of those pulses, but even that dim luminescence stung Vhostym’s eyes.
From the burgeoning upper limbs and thick, twisted roots of the Weave Tap hung the desiccated, blackened corpses of the captive devas and demons whose life-force had fed the Tap’s early growth. Their mouths were thrown open with the pain of their slow, agonizing deaths. The impaled corpses looked like some macabre fruit, as wrinkled, dry and twisted as prunes. Had he touched one of the corpses, it probably would have crumbled to dust.
Vhostym looked upon the dead celestials and fiends without emotion. The weak, he knew, must always suffer the will of the strong. And Vhostym was strong. The creatures died to serve Vhostym’s purpose, speeding the growth of the Weave Tap’s first seed.
His slaadi had planted that seed at the provenience of Skullport’s mantle. Already the seed’s tendrils had spread throughout the city, harvesting its power, pooling it.
On the other side of Faerûn, a wave of arcane energy was gathering and would soon course along the Weave from the blossoming seed back to the Tap, where it would be stored. Vhostym could feel the power rising through the fabric of magic like a gathering tide, could feel it preparing to race toward him like a gale-driven storm.
Vhostym’s heart beat faster than it had in centuries. He braced himself for the rush and attuned his vision to see magical power.
The sentience in the Weave Tap also seemed to feel the pooling power. Its roots began to squirm, its limbs to writhe. The movement was so slow as to be almost imperceptible, except that the dried corpses of the demons and devils broke apart in that movement, crumbling into a million black snowflakes.
The silver beat of the Weave Tap’s pulse accelerated, faster and faster, gaining intensity. The slight increase in light caused daggers of pain to stab behind Vhostym’s eyes, but he endured. He would witness the success of the first step in his plan.
The power was coming …
And there it was.
Without a sound, the spirals of diamond embedded in the circular cyst of the nursery began to glow with magical luminescence. The light—not real light, but a perception funneled through the lens of his magic-detecting vision—caused Vhostym no harm. The diamonds flared with the brilliance of a sun as more and more magical energy flooded them. The entire nursery began to thrum with power. The flakes of the demons and devas swirled around the nursery like dust devils. The limbs of the Weave Tap stretched slowly for the diamonds. Its roots squirmed toward the floor, as though attempting to brace itself more fully in the Shadow Weave, against the expected influx of magic from the Weave.
Vhostym waited, savoring the moment. His eyes boiled from the silver pulse of the Weave Tap, and his soul burned with the knowledge that he had succeeded.
With a suddenness that took even Vhostym aback, three thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine diamonds emitted finger-thick rays of magical energy into the Weave Tap. The living artifact was suspended in a grid of arcane power as fine as a fisherman’s net. The tree throbbed with power, faster and faster. It’s limbs squirmed as though in ecstasy, until its formerly bare stalks exploded amber leaves, each of them throbbing along their black veins with the arcane power contained within.