And it had grown.
Suspended in midair by magic, in the exact center of the nursery, hung the living artifact. It had blossomed to three times the size it had been when his slaadi first brought it from the Fane of Shadows. With its long, thin limbs, snaking roots, and narrow trunk, to Vhostym it somehow looked feminine. He thought it sublimely beautiful and marveled that mere human priests—even those inspired by their goddess—could have crafted such an item.
Its glossy black bark pulsed with energy as it fed. Rings of soft, silver light periodically ran the length of its trunk, the pulse not unlike the greedy gulp of a magic-addicted drunkard. Even that mild silver illumination stung Vhostym’s skin and caused him to blink back tears with each palpitation.
The limbs of the Weave Tap’s mostly leafless canopy extended upward to grow into and out of the still living, twitching bodies of the semi-conscious, opalescent-skinned astral devas that Vhostym had suspended there. After bursting from the celestials’ writhing forms, the Tap’s limbs continued upward before melding with the warp of the Weave. Then it disappearing into nothingness toward the rounded, diamond-dotted ceiling. Similarly, the Tap’s thick roots extended downward to penetrate the squirming bodies of the semi-conscious ghaele demons. Bursting from their malformed backs the roots invisibly enmeshed themselves in the weft of the Shadow Weave near the rounded floor, itself speckled with amethysts.
Vhostym ignored the pained moans of the creatures upon which the Tap fed. They were little more than sentient, pain-ridden husks. Living fertilizer, their nearly extinguished life-force had helped speed the Tap’s growth. Already the artifact had produced one ripe seed. Soon, a second would be ready. And two was all Vhostym would need to realize his ambition.
He floated across the nursery to hover before the Tap. The blank, ivory eyes of the devas, and the thick, puss filled black orbs of the ghaele, stared at him unseeing, blind to all but their pain.
“Silence now,” he said.
Vhostym cast a spell on the demons and devas that rendered them silent. Their mouths still moved in agony, but their verbalization no longer troubled his ears. He reached out and caressed the bole of the Tap with his frail hand. The warm bark felt more like supple leather than wood. He put his ear to the bark and sighed. A flash of the Tap’s silver pulse set his eyes to watering and his skin to burning, but he endured. He looked with anticipation on the burgeoning seed, hanging alone from an otherwise bare, low-hanging limb. The seed was ovate, about the size of a fist, with throbbing black veins that crisscrossed its silver rind. In a sense, the seed was a metaphor, as was the Weave Tap itself. The priests of Shar had distilled an allegory of opposites down to a physical manifestation—a unique tree. Shar and Selûne; new moon and full moon. Shar and Mystra; Shadow Weave and Weave. Perhaps the perfect enmeshing of those opposites was the secret of the Tap’s beauty and power. Of course, in the end the Tap remained a creation inspired by Shar, and hence a tool designed to spite Mystra and Selûne.
On a whim, Vhostym had tried to contact the Tap psionically, but had received no response. He had sensed a lurking self-awareness, but the artifact’s consciousness was so focused on its purpose—growing, tapping—that it could perceive nothing else.
He eyed the thin limbs of the Weave Tap and imagined them as they were meant to be: blossoming with leaves of power. When one of the tree’s seeds was “planted” in a location of powerful magic, it would instantly root in the fabric of the magic there and pass the power thus gained along the net of the Weave and back to the Weave Tap, where Vhostym would be waiting to harness it.
He had chosen with care the locations at which he would seed the Weave. He had dismissed mythals outright. While the mantles of elven high magic were areas of highly concentrated power, they were also too conspicuous. Tapping a mythal would have immediately drawn the attention of Toril’s most powerful high mages, and Mystra’s Chosen as well, and it was too soon for that. Instead, he had opted to tap a form of mantle magic different from mythals, but nearly as powerful. Already his brood had taken the first Tap seed and journeyed to the location of the first such mantle, a one-time Netherese Enclave.
Eager to check on their progress, he concentrated briefly and sent his mind through the planes, across Faerûn and under it, until he touched Azriim’s consciousness. During the first instant of contact, he sensed what Azriim sensed, but only dully, as though through a haze of mindwine.
He could smell the sour, organic reek of too many humans and other creatures crammed into too small a space. He heard the rising and falling murmur of a crowded street, and saw a web of catwalks, ladders, and ramshackle buildings sprouting like mushrooms from the walls of a mammoth cavern deep under the earth. If not for the mantle of magic that protected the city and spawned its guardians, the cavern would long ago have collapsed of its own weight.
Welcome to Skullport, Sojourner, projected Azriim, when Vhostym allowed his son to sense the psionic contact. The arsehole of Faerûn.
Vhostym went directly to the point and asked, Have you located the provenience of the mantle?
We continue to observe the activities of the Skulls, Azriim answered. We believe the answer, if there is one, can be learned there. You are certain that another chamber survived the destruction?
I am, Vhostym said. And it will be near the main chamber. The mantle could not exist without a focus. It is there.
Few knew that the mantle magic protecting Skullport was Netherese in origin. Still fewer had deduced—as had Vhostym—that a cavern entirely separate from the city itself must contain the magical focus of the mantle, the source from which the mantle emanated. It was in that focus that the seed of the Weave Tap was to be planted.
Vhostym suspected that the Skulls, Skullport’s magical guardians, after whom the city had been named, had magically shrouded the chamber in which stood the mantle’s focus. Accordingly, he had provided his brood with wands that would give them the ability to deal with any wards cast by the Skulls to disguise the mantle’s origin. They had only to find its general locale.
Vhostym would have searched for it himself—after all, Skullport was underground—but his body was deteriorating, despite his spells. Besides, the Skulls would have immediately sensed his presence. Though he knew that he could destroy Skullport’s guardians with relative ease, he was not yet ready for direct confrontation. The mantle could be damaged in the process, or worse, the Chosen drawn to the site of the conflict.
No, implanting Skullport’s mantle with the seed of the Weave Tap required planning, stealth, and misdirection—Azriim’s strengths. Vhostym would leave the implementation of that part of the plan to his eldest son. Azriim’s reward for success would be transformation to gray.
Use the teleportation rods with caution, he projected to Azriim. Be especially cautious before teleporting within Skullport. Teleporting from one location in the Underdark to another location in the Underdark can sometimes have unpredictable results.
Azriim’s mental voice, fat with insolence, replied, Your concern touches us all.
Vhostym resisted the urge to cause pain to his impudent son.
Continue your efforts, he instructed Azriim, then he broke off contact.
The rush of anger caused by Azriim’s impertinence sent shooting pains along his thin body. He clutched his staff and mouthed the words to a spell that dulled his body’s ability to feel pain. With effort, he calmed himself.
He already had waited centuries; he could wait another tenday, another month. His brood would find what he had sent them to find, and he would have the Crown of Flame before the end.
STARMANTLE’S SHADOW
After everyone had awakened, Cale related what he’d learned of the Weave Tap from reading the tome. He didn’t mention the silken mask he’d found within its pages, nor did he mention the fact that he’d slept perhaps two hours but no longer felt tired.
“So it’s an artifact?” Jak asked, drawing thoughtfully on the pipe he always smoked upon waking.
&nb
sp; Cale could only relate what he’d read, and didn’t purport to understand it all.
“It is, but it’s also a living thing,” Cale said. “You saw it, little man. Shar’s priesthood made it, or found and nurtured it, after the fall of Netheril as a way to spite Selûne and the newly-birthed Mystra. Its roots extend into the Shadow Weave, while its limbs reach into the Weave proper.”
“The warp and weft of magic,” Jak said from around his pipe stem.
Magadon sat cross-legged in the gloom with his fingers steepled under his chin. His wide-brimmed hat cast his face in darkness.
“What does it do?” asked the guide.
Riven coughed and spat—as much the assassin’s morning ritual as Jak’s smoking—and asked, “Why do we care?”
Jak blew smoke Riven’s way and shook his head in disgust.
Cale chose to ignore Riven and looked at Magadon when he said, “It siphons the magic of the Weave, magnifies it, and makes that power usable by the mage who possesses the Tap.”
“How?” Jak asked.
Cale shrugged and answered, “The tome did not specify the method.”
“Those slaadi were no mages,” Riven observed.
“No,” Cale agreed. “But I’ll wager their master, this ‘Sojourner’, is.”
To that, Riven said nothing, merely studied his hands.
“If so, the Sojourner could be scrying us now,” Magadon said, looking up into the starless sky.
Jak shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” the halfling said, and frowned at his pipe, which had apparently gone out. “Divinations do not seem to work in this place. At least mine don’t. I’ll wager he cannot scry us here. Besides, he may have no interest in us anymore. He might think we’re dead at the bottom of the Moonmere. Why scry for the dead?”
The guide acknowledged Jak’s point with a tilt of his head then asked, “What do we think this Sojourner wants to do with the power of the Weave Tap?”
Cale shrugged, chewed some trail tack, then said, “No way to know.”
“‘Additional variables,’” Jak added, quoting Sephris, the chosen of Oghma and ostensible madman who had prophesied their fate, albeit in mathematical riddles. The halfling tapped the ashes from his pipe and stuffed it back into his belt pouch. “Whatever it is, we can be sure it’s not good.” He glared at Riven. “And that’s why we care, Zhent.”
Riven scoffed, stretched, and said, “Speak for yourself, Fleet.” He paused for a minute then nodded at the belt pouch into which Jak’s pipe had vanished. “You have an extra one of those?”
Jak, eyebrows arched, asked, “What? A pipe?”
Riven nodded.
Jak nodded back, shared a perplexed look with Cale, then took his spare pipe—a plain, wooden-bowled affair—from a belt pouch. He tossed it to Riven along with an extra pipeweed tin and a tindertwig.
“Keep it. And that’s good pipeweed from Mistledale,” the halfling said. “Don’t waste it.”
Obviously familiar with the paraphernalia, Riven tamped, lit, and began to smoke without saying a word. Cale’s astonishment must have shown on his face.
“You’ve never seen a man smoke?” Riven asked him.
“I’ve never seen you smoke,” Cale answered.
Riven blew out a series of perfect smoke rings, gave a hard grin, and said, “And I’ve never seen a man with yellow eyes who can move from shadow to shadow. I guess this place is changing us all, Cale.”
To that, Cale could only agree.
“We’ve got to get back,” Jak said, “find those slaadi, and stop the Sojourner. No one else even knows what’s happening.”
“And no one else needs to know,” Riven said from around the pipe. “Understood?”
Jak looked at the assassin as if he had turned green and asked, “What in the Hells are you talking about? Did the pipeweed go to your head that fast? We need help with this.”
Riven drew on Jak’s pipe, discharged the smoke from his nose, and looked to Cale, who sighed and nodded.
“This is our fight, Jak,” Cale said. “It’s personal; it’s been personal right from the start. We end it, no one else.”
Jak’s mouth hung open.
“Our fight!” the halfling said at last. “Dark and empty! This is big, Cale, bigger than us. That Tap is an artifact. We’re talking about the Weave itself. This isn’t some guild grudge we’re settling. We need help. I know some people who …”
Cale stared at his friend and Jak grew quiet. Cale knew it was big, but he also knew it was his.
“We can do it, Jak.”
Riven uttered something between a cough and a laugh.
The halfling turned from Cale, looked to Magadon, and asked, “You too?”
Magadon shrugged and made a show of reorganizing his giant pack while he said, “One of those slaadi killed Nestor, took his place, then nearly killed you. It’s personal for me as well.”
“You three aren’t thinking right,” Jak said, then mumbled, “Trickster’s toes. Trickster’s hairy toes.”
At Jak’s expression of dismay, Cale struggled to keep a straight face.
“We’ll stop them, little man,” Cale said. “We’ll be enough.”
“You better be right,” Jak said, and obviously meant it.
Cale’s mirth vanished. He had better be right, indeed.
Magadon stood, squirmed into his pack, and adjusted the straps.
“We can’t stop anyone sitting here,” said the guide. “Gear up. Let’s move.”
Cale stood and began to gather his gear.
The halfling touched the spot on his back where one of the slaadi, Dolgan, had run him through.
He shouldered his own pack with a grunt and said, “We do owe those damned slaadi some blood, don’t we?”
“That we do,” Cale answered with a smile.
He could see that the halfling was coming to terms with the decision.
“Now and again you say something that makes sense, Fleet,” Riven said.
He put out his borrowed pipe, pocketed it, and pulled on his pack.
“You keep your words behind your teeth, Zhent,” Jak replied. “And remember … that’s my pipe.”
It took another two days, but at last the forest began to thin. By the time they broke for a midday repast on the second day, they were in the midst of endless plains that rose and fell like ocean swells. The tall grass, with thick, abrasive blades that looked like serrated daggers, reached to Jak’s thighs. Only occasional copses of trees broke the flat monotony. Each tree was so gnarled it looked like it had twisted itself into knots trying to escape the soil. In truth, Jak had felt more comfortable in the brooding forest than he did in the plains. He felt exposed under the onyx sky. He could see little farther than a short stone’s throw. There was nowhere to hide.
He held his holy symbol in a sweaty fist and his bluelight wand in the other. It seemed he had been sweating since the moment he arrived in that dark plane. He felt small, in a way that had nothing to do with his stature. When he considered the transformations of Riven and Cale, thought of the artifact, and saw in all of it the machinations of gods, he felt as though he were witnessing a myth in-the-making. It frightened him.
The stakes—albeit unknown—also frightened him. In the past, his adventures had been just that: adventures, and generally of interest only to him. But events had grown larger than the stuff of tavern tales. At that moment, Jak was pleased that he was nothing more than an obscure priest of a minor god.
He looked over at Cale, saw the dusky skin, the yellow eyes, the shadows that clung to him, and thought: Heroes have too much weight to carry.
“The correspondence seems to be holding,” Magadon observed from his position out in front of them. The even tone of the woodsman’s voice helped to relax Jak. Magadon seemed … steady somehow, like an old oak tree, like he always knew where he was and where he was going.
He was a seventeen too, Jak thought, recalling old Sephris.
Magadon went on,
“If it continues, we should reach the Shadow equivalent of Starmantle in two or three days.”
Assuming it’s not moving away from us, Jak thought but nodded anyway.
The shifting terrain of the Shadow Deep made him feel like the land under him was a skiff floating on an endless, invisible sea. The thought made him queasy and he pushed it from his mind.
As the trek continued Jak tried several times to engage Cale in conversation, but each time Cale deflected the attempt with an inhospitable grunt. The halfling knew what that meant—Cale was thinking, planning.
Riven, for his part, seemed content to walk in silence, alone with the newfound power in his hands, which he continually examined as they traveled. Jak wondered uneasily what else Riven’s hands could do, what else they had already done.
Late in the day it grew windy, then began to rain. Thick dollops of black water, whipped into sheets by a gusting wind, thumped against Jak’s face as hard as sling bullets. Vermillion lightning ripped the sky into pieces. Deafening thunder pounded the earth. The storm was gorgeous and terrifying all at once, like the demon lord Cale and Jak had once fought.
Magadon called a halt and they camped under the eaves of a copse of something like elms. Jak made sure to create a beef stew with his spell that evening, to keep Riven’s mouth shut. Though Magadon’s weathered and oiled tents managed to keep the rain off of him, he struggled through only an hour or two of intermittent sleep.
The storm continued through the next day, but still they made good progress. Magadon refused to stop for the weather and Jak was glad. He wanted out of that plane and, if the theoretical city held the way out, he wanted to get there as soon as possible.
Sometime near the middle of that day, they reached their destination.
They stood atop a low rise, ineffectually shielding themselves against the wind and rain with their hats or the hoods of their sodden cloaks. A gently sloping, shallow valley extended before them. At its bottom, visible to Jak only in the lightning flashes, a ruined city erupted from the plain like a plague boil. The overgrown ruins covered as much acreage as did Selgaunt, perhaps more. Only the low, squat buildings in the city’s densely-packed center had remained intact. Jak saw no people in the streets, no movement at all. It was eerie.