Azriim, Dolgan, and Riven stood on the maindeck near Captain Sertan, just in front of the helmsman’s station. Lifelines were strung across the deck to form a web of rope over the entire ship. The crew clutched the lines tightly as they moved. Azriim and Dolgan, too, kept their grip on a line. Only Riven and the captain seemed able to hold their balance unassisted on the listing ship and slippery deck.
“Keep us square to the wind, Nimil!” Sertan shouted to his helmsman.
Veins stood out on Nimil’s temples, his forearms. He held the tiller so tightly that Azriim figured he had left an imprint of his hands in the wood.
“Aye, Captain,” grunted Nimil, his thin hair pasted by rain against his head. “This gets much worse, we’ll lose the rudder.”
“She’ll hold,” Sertan answered. He stared out at the storm and the sea, evaluated his sails and masts, eyed his crew.
“Sharp about your business, lads!” he shouted to every crewman within earshot. “Sharp about your business and the Coffer will carry us through. This blow cannot last much longer.”
Sertan looked at Azriim, squinted through the rain. “If we get sideways to this, Umberlee will claim us all this day. How close are we?”
Azriim clutched the Sojourner’s compass in his hand. He had taken it from the table beside Nimil the moment the storm had hit. He did his best to hold it flat in his palm and examine the needle. The movement of the ship made it difficult. Finally, he took a satisfactory reading: the needle in the center of the sphere pointed westward and slightly downward.
“Very close!” Azriim shouted, and added for effect, “Hang on, my friend.”
The enspelled Sertan put a comradely hand on Azriim’s shoulder and grinned.
“We will make it!” Sertan said. “And the first round of drinks is on your coin!”
Azriim only smiled in answer.
Not more than a quarter hour, Azriim projected to Riven and Dolgan, as the Coffer rose up another swell, then plummeted back down. Then—
He cocked his head, sensing mental contact. At first he thought it might have been the Sojourner, but realized quickly that the sensation was too severe for his father. He looked at Dolgan and saw that the big slaad was wincing.
Do you feel that? asked his broodmate.
Azriim nodded. Riven and the rest of the crew looked around, rubbed their temples. The pain intensified until slaadi and men clutched their heads in pain. Two seamen lost their grip on the lifelines and went over the side. The storm’s wail swallowed their shouts. No one else witnessed their fate and Azriim did not care.
What is this? Riven projected, his mental voice tight. He had a hand on his blade and the other on his brow.
“What sorcery is this?” shouted Sertan, holding his massive head in his hands.
Azriim was not certain. The mental contact was incredibly powerful but also primitive, as though born of a consciousness only half-formed. He had never encountered anything like it before.
He tried to answer the contact with an innocuous mental touch but felt no connection. The mental abilities with which the Sojourner had gifted Azriim and Dolgan were quite limited and the consciousness did not seem to sense him….
Azriim looked at his compass, at the sea, and a realization hit him. It was the only explanation for this strange mental contact. No wonder the Sojourner had been unable to scry Sakkors.
The mantle was sentient, or nearly so.
We are closer than I realized, he projected to Dolgan and Riven, and smiled through his discomfort.
They nodded and tried to keep their feet on the slippery, rolling deck.
Riven and the rest of the crew still clutched their heads, grimacing at the pressure building in their skulls. Even Nimil released the tiller to hold his head. The ship started to turn.
Dolgan shoved the helmsman aside, took the tiller in his own hands, and wrenched it back into position. Azriim feared his broodmate’s strength would break the rudder but it did not, and the ship straightened.
“I am seeing things!” Riven shouted, and finally took hold of a lifeline. “What in the Abyss is happening?”
The ship rolled up another swell, crashed down. A wave took another crewman over the side. Another.
The captain cursed through his haze.
Above, the rigging holding a sail on the mizzenmast finally snapped and the canvas flapped free in the wind. The sudden loss of the rigging sent a boom whirling a half-circle around the mast. It hit a sailor in the midsection and knocked him overboard.
Azriim feared that Dolphin’s Coffer soon would not have enough crew to sail her.
Then, the mental torture ended as abruptly as it had started. The crew looked up and around, dazed, but hurriedly set to retaking their ship from the storm. Crippled but unbroken, Dolphin’s Coffer sailed on.
Still shaking his head, Riven asked, “What was that?”
Azriim smiled. “Not what. Who.”
The assassin and Dolgan both looked a question at him but Azriim offered no further explanation.
“The storm is breaking,” said a crewman huddled on the forecastle. He pointed ahead, to a break in the clouds through which stars were visible.
Almost as soon as the crewman said it the rain slowed, then ended. The wind fell off entirely. The ship sails went slack and the vessel gradually coasted to a stop. A thankful rustle wound its way through the men, followed by a hoarse cheer.
“Well done, lads,” the captain said to his crew. “Well done. Didn’t I say she’d hold together?”
Azriim was not sure what to make of the calm. He found it portentous. Beside him, Riven must have felt much the same thing. The assassin eyed the sky, the black, rolling expanse of the sea, and said, I do not like this.
Azriim smiled. Not to worry, assassin. We are not remaining aboard.
Azriim held up the Sojourner’s spherical compass on his palm. The needle within pointed straight down.
Vhostym appeared inside the sanctum of his tower, now safely removed to the top of the Wayrock. Still incorporeal, he floated into the outer wall of the tower and down to the root of the structure. There, he examined the bonds between the native stone and the transplanted tower. His spell had done its work well. The tower looked as though it had been built atop the Wayrock rather than moved from a secret mountain vale in the south of Faerûn. He would need it to be well rooted when he began the spell.
He was pleased. Things had unfolded exactly as he had hoped.
He glanced skyward, to the stars, to Selüne, to her tears. He already knew which of them he would use. He picked it out of the glowing field of silver points that trailed after their mistress. He imagined his spell taking effect, imagined how it would feel.
The time was drawing near. He needed only the power of Sakkors’s mantle and he could begin.
Extending his consciousness across the Inner Sea, he reached out for Azriim’s mind but could not make contact. He assumed that meant that his sons were in proximity to Sakkors. The ruined city’s mantle had rebuffed Vhostym’s attempts to scry it, so it surprised him only a little that it also interfered with mental contact.
A sudden, sharp pain ran the length of Vhostym’s spine. He gritted his teeth and waited for it to pass but the pain lingered longer than usual. He bore it, hissing, and it passed at last.
He needed to complete his work soon.
He flew back up to the top of the tower, floated through a wall, and entered the former sanctum of Cyric. He dismissed the spell that made him incorporeal and his flesh solidified instantly. The sudden weight on his weak muscles and bones caused him to stumble. He fell to the floor, on all fours, and the impact sent knifing stabs of pain into his kneecaps and wrists. He screamed from the pain—the first time that he had ever given voice to his agony with more than a hiss—certain that the fall had cracked several bones.
Physically and mentally tired, he remained in the undignified posture for some time. He had taxed himself by using so many spells to claim Cyric’s temple. It had
been decades since he had done so much in so little time.
And there was more yet to do.
His breath came rapid and wet. He prepared himself to stand. He could have used a spell or mental power to assist himself but refused out of pride. He would stand under his own power; he had to.
He moved one leg, then another, gingerly asked them to bear his body. The memory of the pain still lingered in his knees, but he straightened them and made them bear him up. When they did, he allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction, but only a moment.
Despite his fatigue, he had to prepare the tower.
He first whispered the words to a spell that summoned the Weave Tap from the pocket dimension in which he had left it. He pronounced the final couplet, energy flared, and the dendritic artifact appeared before him. It stood about as tall as a dwarf maple. Dim light pulsed along the silvery bark of its bole. Golden leaves dripping stored arcane power hung from its limbs.
Vhostym felt the Tap’s distress at being removed from its nursery in the pocket plane. The twisting mass of its roots and the tips of its gilded limbs squirmed for a moment in agitation, seeking purchase in the Weave and Shadow Weave. Roots dug into the stone of the floor, found a home in the Shadow Weave and went still. Limbs reached upward for the ceiling but the tips disappeared into the net of the Weave before reaching the roof. They, too, went still.
Vhostym felt the Tap’s agitation change to contentment.
Rest easy, he projected to it, though he did not think it could understand him. Or perhaps he could not understand it. The Tap had been born in shadow to serve the priesthood of the goddess of the night. Like Vhostym, it was vulnerable to the sun, but unlike Vhostym, it felt no loss from its vulnerability, no need to conquer its weakness.
The Tap simply existed, and in that existence found contentment.
Vhostym stared at the living artifact. He suspected that the Tap felt contentment only because its sentience was limited. Aware of little beyond itself, the Tap did not crave, need, or covet. Not in the way Vhostym did, not in the way all sentient creatures did.
The curse of sentience, Vhostym knew, was that it bred desire, ambition. And those birthed discontent. Vhostym exemplified the point. In the course of satisfying his own desires, he had razed worlds, killed millions.
He felt no guilt over his deeds, of course. Guilt required for its existence the failure to meet some moral absolute. Vhostym had learned better thousands of years ago. Mathematics was the only absolute in the multiverse—two and two were always four. Morality, on the other hand, was merely a convention with which men mutually agreed to delude themselves. There were no moral facts, just preferences, and one was no better than any other.
“Take solace in your simplicity,” he said to the Tap.
He used a spell to lift his feet from the floor and floated out of the sanctum. He closed the doors behind him and warded them with a series of spells, a precaution born more of habit than necessity. No one knew of his refuge on the Wayrock. No one knew what he intended to do there, not even his slaadi, and by the time anyone did, it would all be over.
He floated through the halls of the tower until he reached the central room two floors below the sanctum, a chamber more or less at the midpoint of the tower.
Slowly, painfully, he lowered himself to the floor. Lying on his back on the bare stone, he placed his arms out wide and spread his legs apart. The floor felt cool through his robes. Attuning himself to the energy of the stone, he closed his eyes and started to hum. As he did, power gathered in him. He channeled it through his body and into the stone of the tower. When he felt the stone vibrate slightly in answer, he changed from humming to chanting. His voice, carrying power in its cadence and tone, rang out through the large chamber, reverberated against the walls, ceiling, and floor. The stone absorbed the power he offered and its vibrations increased to a mild shaking. He felt the floor softening under his body, as though it would embrace him. He ceased his inarticulate chant and recited words of power. They fell from his lips and hit the shaking stone. With the words he coaxed the power of the rock to the surface. He felt as if he were resurrecting the dead. He knew he had succeeded when the floor beneath him grew as warm as living flesh.
The power was awakened.
He nearly ended the ritual there but decided to do something more, something he had not contemplated initially, something for his sons—a final gift from their adoptive father. They had earned it.
Vhostym knew that slaadi spent most of their lives striving to metamorphose from their current form—whatever that might be—into the next, higher form. Azriim and Dolgan thought they would find contentment with their full transformation into gray slaadi, but Vhostym knew better. The change to gray would itself birth in them another drive, a need to transform yet again into another, higher species of slaad. That form was the most powerful his sons could attain, and only in that form could they find the contentment that Vhostym hoped to find when he brought forth the Crown of Flame.
He decided that he would spare them the lengthy search for the means of that transformation. Instead, he would transform them, and that would be his legacy.
He changed the cadence of his incantation and laced into the words a second spell, one that would take effect when his sons appeared within the tower. After only a short time within the tower, they would be transformed from gray slaadi into death slaadi.
Vhostym imagined the pleasure his sons would feel, and the thought made him smile.
When he finished the spell, he sat up, dizzy and lightheaded. He took a few breaths to recover, then attuned his vision to see dweomers. He immediately saw not active magic but a complex matrix of magical lines that crisscrossed the tower’s walls, ceilings, floor.
The entire tower was now a focus that Vhostym could use to amplify the power he soon would draw from the Weave Tap.
He rose cautiously to his feet. Behind him, he saw that he had left a silhouette of his body pressed into the stone. He stared for a time at the image of his body. He had not realized how frail he had become.
It does not matter anymore, he thought, and looked away. His work was nearly done. All was prepared. He had only to wait for his sons to plant the second seed of the Weave Tap in Sakkors’s mantle.
Then he would summon the Crown of Flame.
A second ship had joined the first. Ssessimyth sensed the tiny vessels floating on the sea far above him—floating on his sea, drawing the attention of the Source. The storm he had sent had not dissuaded the crews. They had sailed into its teeth and survived. He knew the ships had come to take the Source from him. What else could be their purpose?
He had ended the storm as his minions neared the surface. They would find it easier to attack a becalmed ship than a moving one. He used the dreaming Source’s power to fill his minions with rage, hunger for manflesh.
Feast, my children, he sent to them. Feast.
Frustratingly, the Source continued to feed him only half-measures, realities that Ssessimyth felt but did not live. His anger swelled. He tried and failed again to pull the attention of the Source back to himself alone, to share its dreams with only him. It resisted and Ssessimyth’s body jerked in agitation. He became conscious for the first time in a long while of the throbbing pain in his head, of the ruins around him, the coldness of the water, the darkness of the deep. His waking dream—more beautiful than reality ever had been—was ending. At least temporarily. As it did, he felt something he had not felt in centuries: rage. He would not let his universe slip away easily.
If his servants did not kill those who dared try to share the Source with him, he would kill them himself. He knew that at least one creature aboard the ships was in contact with the Source, stealing its visions from Ssessimyth. He would not tolerate it much longer.
CHAPTER 12
OUT OF THE DEPTHS
Cale and Jak shared a look
What kind of presence? Cale asked Magadon. Under the sea? Is that what the slaadi are after?
&n
bsp; I am not sure, the guide answered, and curiosity colored his tone. There’s a consciousness here, Erevis. It’s primitive, almost childlike, but very powerful. It’s also torpid, as if sleeping. It does not communicate in a way that I can make sense of, but it makes itself … available.
What does that mean? Cale asked.
Magadon answered, I am not certain yet. I need some time.
Cale did not think they had time to spare.
“It is breaking!” shouted a sailor from the forecastle. “There, look!”
Cale followed the man’s gesture and saw a hole in the clouds ahead. Stars peeked through.
As if in answer to the sailor’s words, the rain slowed, stopped. The wind, too, died. Cale put a hand on Jak’s shoulder and smiled. Demon Binder had made it through.
From the maindeck behind them, Cale heard Evrel ordering a headcount.
Do what you must, Cale projected to Magadon. But do not lose track of the slaadi.
I won’t, the guide answered.
Cale turned and looked out on the calming sea, where the swells already were settling. That was when he saw it.
The slaadi’s ship floated not more than three bowshots away, glowing green on the black waves. And Demon Binder was closing fast. Despite the lack of wind, Jak’s elementals propelled the vessel rapidly over the sea.
The light from the slaadi’s ship was growing larger, brighter.
“Tell the elementals to stop us, Jak,” Cale ordered. “Right now.” To Magadon, he projected, Mags, tell the captain to snuff all lights aboard ship and to keep the crew quiet. Now.
Cale knew that light and sound traveled far across a calm sea. As though to make his point, a cheer carried across the water from the slaadi’s ship.
Cale unhooked the lanterns from the prow and let them fall into the sea. Within moments, the crew had snuffed all other lights aboard Demon Binder. The ship’s forward progress stopped. Jak must have dismissed his spell and released the elementals from their service. Demon Binder bobbed in silence on a calm sea, within eyeshot of the slaadi.