City of Torment (8 page)

CHAPTER NINE The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) City of Nathlekh A remarkable bridge provided access to Nathlekh. Not long ago, no such bridge had been required. A decade earlier, a slow but inexorable earth movement thrust a majority of the city’s Shou ward several hundred feet higher than the rest of the city. Hundreds of structures along the edges of the fault were destroyed. By chance, the destroyed structures were mostly the homes of non-Shou, though the Shou faced their own share of loss. When the earth stopped moving, the survivors slowly forgot their fear, especially those whose homes, mansions, and businesses remained. As many pointed out too, the new city heights provided an unexpected but welcome defensive stance against a landscape suddenly more dangerous than ever before. Thus, once the sky fires, earth movements, and attacks by plaguechanged monsters subsided, a collection of the city’s Shou nobles poured a large portion of their considerable wealth into the creation of the bridge. The Dragon Bridge supported a wide and thick stone span that sprang from the earth near the piers on Long Arm Lake to rise in a diagonal line all the way up to the Sky District. The Dragon Bridge was named for its supporting arches, each of which took the form of a sculpted, sinuous stone dragon. Each successively larger stone dragon bore the weight of its span section in a unique fashion�some on arched backs, others in wide maws, and even one, who stood closest to Nathlekh’s stone column, in clawed hands raised high above its head as it reared on its hind legs. A series of three massive, gated checkpoints along the bridge’s span guarded against attacking ground forces, or, as happened on occasion even more than a decade after the Spellplague, groups of homeless refugees. Each gated wall contained barracks for a company of bridge guardians commanded by a gate captain. Raidon Kane ascended the Dragon Bridge in the back of a cart drawn by two donkeys, driven by an old Shou farmer. Raidon silently wondered if he were, in truth, being brought to Nathlekh as the farmer claimed. Last time he’d been here, there’d been no Dragon Bridge. It seemed impossible that such a dramatic change could overtake the city in little over a decade. Then again, the changes that occurred while the blue fire raged defied reason. In comparison to what he’d seen in Starmantle, Nathlekh’s uplift hardly seemed worth mentioning. His foot cramped suddenly, as if to rebuke him for recalling the awful image of Starmantle and the ghoul-like aberrations that inhabited it. He wondered if the wound would ever completely heal. Even now, wrapped in linens provided by the kindly farmer’s wife, his foot seeped fluids. Each new day, he concentrated all his healing ability on the limb, attempting to re-knit more of the lost skin and sensitivity to touch. Each day, he convinced himself he made a little more progress. In truth, the wound was much improved. Raidon might have walked this final distance into Nathlekh today, probably with just a minor limp. But the solicitous farmers, who’d found him crawling amid their turnip beds a tenday earlier, who’d nursed him back to health in their modest dwelling, wouldn’t hear of him walking so soon. They offered to take him up to Nathlekh by donkey cart. In the end, he’d gratefully accepted. The biggest mystery of all was his location. He was far closer to the city when the farmers found him than he should have been. The last thing he recalled was falling asleep in the rain on top of a hard-won bluff near Starmantle. Even upon reaching the safety of the bluffs top, he half suspected he would never see another day. But he survived. When he opened his eyes next, it was to a cool sunrise. There was no bluff, no burning forest, and no rain. He lay in a turnip field. He couldn’t recall anything between falling asleep and waking along the edge of a farm. A turnip farm that turned out to be nearly two hundred miles west of his last location just outside Nathlekh! Raidon wondered again if he were going insane. It could be he was losing his memory before his mind. Or perhaps the Spellplague described to him by the ghouls had so altered the landscape that cities and other previously fixed points had become unstuck from their old foundations. He didn’t have enough information to rightly judge. A new thought struck him. Perhaps the Cerulean Sign had something to do with it. Had the symbol, now spellscarred into his flesh, somehow contrived to move him toward his unconscious goal while he lay at death’s door? Sometimes it seemed he could almost discern a voice speaking his name___ Raidon pushed these speculations from his head. Right now, all that mattered was finding Ailyn. He tried to imagine in what circumstance he’d find her. His anxiety over what had become of the girl was more painful than his throbbing foot. They ascended the great dragon-supported bridge. As the cart approached the third and final gate, a gate guard signaled the farmer to stop his cart. Words penetrated Raidon’s apprehension. The gate guard was saying… only. Turn around and take your cargo with you, I said. Be glad I do not fine you.” “What is this nuisance?” Raidon spoke up. “Why are you holding us up? This man has no cargo today but me. He is due no merchant fees.” The guard sneered and returned, “In these dangerous times, non-Shou who wish to enter Nathlekh can only do so with an invitation.” “But this man…” The guard’s implication struck home. The guard referred to Raidon, not the farmer. Raidon began again, “My father is a son of the east, and he raised me in Telflamm, some thirty… nay, forty years ago. But disregard that; I am a resident of Nathlekh. I kept my residence here before the Spellplague. My daughter lives here even now. You cannot deny me entry to my home.” The guard tried to meet Raidon’s gaze. And failed. Apparently he was unused to opposition from people in donkey carts. He scowled. “Stay here. I’ll get the captain.” The man stalked off. Raidon usually passed as Shou, but sometimes strangers noticed his fey ancestry. His long-absent mother’s blood manifest in him only faintly, but was visible to those sensitive to such differences. Raidon’s ears were ever so slightly pointed, the shape of his skull was perhaps narrower than other Shou, and his bearing was straight, though no straighter than any other practitioner of Xiang Do. He thought of himself as Shou. Usually, his mother’s blood didn’t cause any problems… except sometimes among other Shou. The farmer ventured, “The city folk have seen too many horrors during and after the Year of Blue Fire. They outlawed refugees and fey from entering the city five years ago. Xenophobia and nationalism grip even those who were once counted as wise.” Raidon grunted. Normally when he suffered such slights, he imagined his mind a depthless pool of water in which insult, injury, and pain were feeble pebbles, easily swallowed. Today his foot hurt, and he was worried about his daughter. His focus was askew, and without its calming influence, he anticipated the possibility of the captain proving difficult. Raidon imagined what he might do in response. The teachings of Xiang Temple stirred, scolding him for holding himself beyond their guiding principles. Raidon clenched his fists, and then allowed them to relax a finger at a time, exhaling as he did so. The captain strode up with the hateful guard in tow. The captain was a tall Shou in laminated mail. He gave Raidon an extended look, and then said, “Allow these through.” He turned and stomped back to the commandery. The original guard’s frown deepened and he muttered, “You don’t fool me. Don’t think this is over.” With that, he stepped aside and allowed them to proceed. The man’s hate-filled stare followed them until the side of the gate blocked Raidon’s view. Once inside, the farmer let Raidon down from the cart. The farmer wished him luck in finding his child. Raidon nodded, thanking the man. He did not dishonor the man’s generosity by offering payment. Sincerity was enough reward for those raised according to eastern traditions. As the sound of the creaking cart diminished into the distance, Raidon studied Nathlekh’s vista. But his thoughts were on Ailyn. What had come of a child so young, left alone save for paid servants, in the face of the greatest calamity of the age without a parent’s guidance? Nothing good, his apprehension insisted. His worry proved unbearably accurate. ***** Three days later, Raidon’s search concluded at the foot of a four-foot-high, hardened clay structure resembling a beehive. All around him were similar structures. Clusters of clay markers of various dimension protruded from the ground, though the largest ones were central, and the smaller ones spiraled around them. Raidon stood in Nathlekh’s “city of the dead,” where the deceased were interred. He stood before one of the smallest clay markers, a desolate and broken man. It was Ailyn’s grave. From an inner pocket of his jacket, he pulled with shaking hands a weathered, corroded bell. He whispered, “I brought this for you, as I promised…” He laid the gift before the marker. The tinkling, glad sound it made drew hot tears to his cheek. Grief squeezed his heart. His chest was a hollow, gasping emptiness. He could barely draw in air, his throat was so tight. Raidon had learned Ailyn perished in the first tremors preceding Nathlekh’s sudden rise in altitude. She’d been dead more than ten years. That knowledge did nothing to lessen Raidon’s grief. The staff he’d paid to watch over her in his absence had scattered to the four winds after her death, but Raidon had found one working in a scullery. This one described Ailyn’s fate to Raidon in shaking, terrified tones. The monk wondered again what thoughts had flashed through her head, as the walls of their dwelling collapsed, and the servants had rushed from the domicile, leaving her alone. Had she cried out for him? An anguished sob escaped Raidon, and he collapsed across the grave marker. ***** According to Shou tradition, if surviving relatives and descendants pay sufficient respect to their dead, the dead in their turn exercise a benevolent influence over the lives and prosperity of their family. Thus it was not uncommon for a Shou household to set aside a small area called a shrine, where small carved representations of one or more dead relatives were set. While a few shrines were populated with a plethora of figures with a one-to-one correspondence to dead ancestors, most Shou households kept only a single figure to represent all those loved and lost. In his absence, Raidon hadn’t been able to see to it that this simplest and oldest Shou tradition of mourning was followed. Even after her death, he had disappointed his adopted daughter, Raidon thought, his head pressed against the cool clay of Ailyn’s grave marker. He was despicable. It was as if scales dropped from his eyes, revealing Raidon to himself with hideous new understanding. All his philosophy and mental disciplines, his Xiang Do and pride in his skill� were these anything more than crutches he used to hold up his own ego? No. They were but facades that hid his true, demonstrated deficits for the things that mattered most in the mortal world. He’d allowed his “monster hunting” and vapid search for his long-vanished mother to distract him from the one thing in his life with true meaning. His daughter. His dead daughter. Raidon screamed, clutched at his queue and pulled, thinking he would rip it out. “Raidon!” The monk paused. Who’d spoken? His grief had broken his mind, and now he hallucinated. The idea of descending into the innocence that madness offered was sickening and appealing in equal measure. “Raidon, look to the cemetery entrance,” came a voice from nowhere. The voice had a familiar cadence. His overmastering, sorrow couldn’t prevent his eyes’ quick flick upward. He saw through the press of clay markers to the cemetery’s granite entry arch. A small mob of people poured through the graveyard gate, chanting a slogan over and over, though not in any particular harmony. The unruly group was led by none other than the guard who’d tried to refuse the monk entry into Nathlekh. The guard was not wearing his official tabard of the city�instead, a liquor-stained smock. The slogan they chanted abruptly became intelligible to Raidon: “No fey in Nathlekh! No fey in Nathlekh!” A distant part of himself was surprised how quickly his desolation ignited to red fury. Before he quite realized it, Raidon was striding toward the mob. His hands itched to strike something, and these small-minded bigots had just volunteered to be his targets. That which remained of his training attempted to forestall his path. But Raidon’s impulse would not be quelled. Ailyn was dead because he’d failed her. What else mattered? When thirty paces separated the mob from Raidon, the guard called for the chant to cease with an upraised fist. He began, “The new kingdom of Nathlan does not accept non-Shou! Especially not Shou with blood polluted by the half-breed elves! I told you before to stay out. Since you were too arrogant to listen, we…” The guard’s shouted speech trailed off. The mob around him continued their inane chant. The monk continued his steady advance, eyes fixed on the guard. The smoldering height of fury burning in Raidon’s visage wasn’t the reaction the guard expected. He tried to retreat, and failed. The press of his riled-up followers pinned the man in place. Realizing his danger, the guard yelled, “He is about to attack�grab the outlander!” The man’s voice squeaked with alarm. The rabble’s chant turned into a roar as they streamed forward. The guard stayed back, his fear ebbing as the mob blocked Raidon. The guard’s brave face returned, and he called out something in a jeering voice, but his words were lost in the screaming mob’s imprecations. A red-faced, screaming Shou grabbed at Raidon’s new silk jacket. Another in pleated corduroy tried to club the monk with a rusted mace. A boy scratched at his face with painted but chipped fingernails. Raidon evaded the grab with a counterpunch that dropped the Shou, and a simultaneous kick sent the mace spiraling into the face of a third man, who crumpled. The boy laid two long welts down his cheek, but his attention was already shifting to more significant threats. Two corpulent women rushed him, their hair unrestrained and harpy-wild, their meaty fists gripping sharp cooking implements. Simultaneously a hard-faced smith, still in his singed smithy apron, came up behind Raidon with a hammer. Raidon bobbed around one woman’s flailing knife and arrested the smith’s hammer swing with a palm-thrust to the smith’s shoulder with his right hand. With
his left arm, he caught the other woman at the elbow with his own, joint to joint as if preparing to do a jig, then swung her around by turning his own body. He flung her down into the path of two new attackers: dockmen with boat hooks. The woman tripped one of the men and distracted the other long enough for Raidon to leap to the top of a nearby clay marker. His damaged foot burned, but Raidon’s anger flamed hotter. Above the fray he saw the original guard, who still hadn’t moved as the mob surged to do his bidding. The guard’s gaze jerked up and fixed on his nemesis. Raidon pointed a finger at him and shook his head slowly back and forth. It was a promise that no matter the obstacles, Raidon would not be denied his target. The man’s face paled, but he waved back to the cemetery entrance. An actual force of Nathlekh guardsmen in uniform was assembling there, and the man seemed to take confidence from that sight. The guard yelled. Raidon made out his words above the mob’s din by reading his lips. “If you hurt me, you�ll face them!” Raidon soundlessly mouthed back, “I don’t care.” Then he bounded over the heads of the reaching throng to another clay marker, closing a quarter of the distance between himself and his target. “Raidon, this man is not responsible for Ailyn’s death. If you kill him in your despair, your soul will be stained,” came a new voice, somehow audible over the screaming rabble. It was the same voice that had warned Raidon of the mob’s appearance. Whoever or whatever it was, its reasonable advice inflamed his ire all the more. He replied, as he leaped again to a marker a mere ten paces from the guard, “Invisible spirit, mind your own affairs and leave me to mine!” “Your affairs are my affairs, Raidon,” came the instant response. “You have become my sole view into the world, and though I am pledged to obey a holder of the Sign, my pledge to the Sign itself is the greater duty. If you force me to it, I must protect its sanctity before your wishes. Past lapses must not be allowed to repeat themselves.” The words of the invisible demon intrigued that small portion of Raidon’s mind not overwhelmed with murderous grief. But he did not pause. The monk hurdled the last of the screaming Shou that surged between him and his target. He charged, leaping high off one last clay monument as if it were a ramp. A flying elbow to the guard’s crown would� An ozone scent and crackle of light appeared in Raidon’s line of flight. He spasmed and twisted, violently attempting to alter his body’s trajectory in midair. He failed. He passed through the discontinuity’s dark orifice and was gone. ***** Raidon fell through a void littered with a million distant points that sparkled eternal white, ruby, emerald, and sapphire. Before he could gasp, he passed through another discontinuity. He dropped sideways into weeds lurking around the base of a granite boulder. Disorientation and sunlight blinded him; he wasn’t quite able to avoid knocking his head on the great stone. The pain and unpleasantly loud crack of his skull meeting the rock produced a blaze of light and pain. His anguish and anger spiraled away into a daze of dulled vision and distracted wit. He lay where he’d fallen, flat on his back, blinking up at a blue sky streaked with high scudding clouds. Rotating his head to the right, he saw grassy foothills of some unfamiliar, though reassuringly terrestrial, mountain range. No multicolored stars. He gradually rotated his head to the left, wincing at a muscle strain, and saw more far hills, more miles of empty prairie between. No roads, fields, lone homes, or walled cities lay their straight, artificial lines across his perspective. The uninhabited landscape, in its irregular and unexpected outlines, was a physical balm he absorbed across his entire body. Raidon lost himself for a time, watching the wind blow wave after wave through the green and yellow grass, while white clouds boiled in molasses-slow movements above. An indeterminate time later, the call of a prairie hawk shook the monk from his inadvertent meditation. “So I am losing my mind,” he said as he sat up. He leaned back against the boulder on which he’d hit his head. From the new vantage, he gained a view of a distant feature he’d earlier missed, and gasped. A great splinter of rock hung unsupported above the plain. Its lowest point narrowed to a ragged and splintered needle, but the unmoored rocks opposite, upper surface was broad and level. Even from where he sat two or three miles away, Raidon observed trees, grass, a lake, and even a tiny waterfall feathering off the side of the gravity-defying, floating tract. “To what realm have I come?” he whispered. “Changes to Faer�landscape, such as the earthmote you see above the plain, are not uncommon since the Spellplague swept through,” said a bodiless voice. “You are still in Faer�n the southeastern foothills of the Giant’s Run Mountains.” It was the same voice as before. Raidon jumped to his feet, swiveling to see if he could catch a faint gleam or wavering in the air that would betray the speaker’s presence. “I remember you!” yelled Raidon. “I heard you beyond the gates of demolished Starmantle! And again, in…” he trailed off. His head still resonated with the thump it received upon his arrival. He sensed some great dread hiding just beyond his attention, biding its time. “Correct, Raidon. However, Starmantle was not the first time you and I conversed. We spoke at some length many years ago, when you traveled to where my physical body lies. My name is Cynosure.” “Cynosure?” The name was familiar, but he couldn’t recall why. “Yes. You visited me in Stardeep several years before the Year of Blue Fire. You accompanied Kiril Duskmourn on her return to the citadel dungeon where she once served as Keeper.” “Stardeep!” exclaimed Raidon. The threads of memory connected, and he remembered. Cynosure was an artificial entity. A golem, but more than that. He… it? It was an immense humanoid forged of crystal, stone, iron, and more exotic components, though when Raidon had met the golem, it was rusted, pitted, and stained by centuries of existence. Cynosure was a golem whose sophistication eclipsed all other artificial constructs. It stared unblinking into the containment fires of Stardeep’s inner most prison cell. Raidon had seen the golem descend into that cell and do battle with the thing housed there. A thing called the Traitor. The monk remembered the design fused onto Cynosure’s metallic chest�the Cerulean Sign. The placement was similar to the one Raidon himself now sported. “How is it I hear your voice? Are you not restricted to Stardeep’s buried corridors?” “I remain so bound; however, I can act through any suitably prepared vessel, even far from Stardeep. Somehow, I can now also manifest my attention and some few surviving magical abilities of Stardeep through you.” “Through me? What abilities?” “Speech, for one. Also, I teleported you from Starmantle to the edge of Nathlekh when you were hurt a few tendays ago, and again just now to pull you out of Nathlekh. Unlike speech, however, moving you such great distances saps my finite and failing reserves.” “You… pushed me through a portal? Without an actual portal gate? And without being physically nearby?” “Yes. In a way, I am physically with you. Special circumstances allow you and me to interact, Raidon, though you and me only. I could not transport another, unless they were with you. My connection with you is possible because of the new fusion between you and your Cerulean Sign.” Memory painted an image of his amulet dissolving in ravening blue fire. He recalled the agony as the lingering symbol branded him. He dropped his gaze and opened the silk jacket he’d purchased in Nathlekh. The symbol of his amulet still marked him, its size scaled up to cover his entire upper chest, as if the Sign’s power was sufficient to expand to whatever medium that contained it. Cynosure’s voice continued, “The Spellplague stitched your amulet’s power into your mind and body. Raidon, you have become a breathing manifestation of the Sign.” The monk said, “In Starmantle, I was able to tap the Sign’s power when aberrant ghouls attacked me. But I did so almost instinctively…” The disembodied golem’s voice said, “Your life energy has invigorated the symbol. Or else the Sign’s potency was magnified by the Spellplague. Others touched by that changing flame, if they survived at all, were scarred with strange new abilities. In any case, your first use of the Sign drew my attention. As you know, I am also bound to the Cerulean Sign.” Raidon lifted his gaze again to the unsupported, earthen mass hovering above the horizon, though his mind traced images more fantastic. He suddenly remembered that Cynosure was more than a single golem. Stardeep’s Keepers had told him Cynosure’s sentience was housed simultaneously in several golem bodies distributed throughout the dungeon of Stardeep. The golem’s arcane awareness stretched insubstantially between dozens of bodies scattered around the halls, tunnels, and galleries. Cynosure, a sentient construct with multiple vantages, was the perfect warden of the dungeon stronghold where a Traitor served his eternal sentence. “You have many vantages on the world, then?” “No longer. Raidon, you are my one remaining contact beyond my trapped body. I can see and interact with the world in and around your physical location, as I once could with my other lesser selves in Stardeep, before it was destroyed.” Raidon said nothing for a moment as he wrestled with the implications of the golem’s last words. Finally he replied, “Do you try to provoke me? What do you mean? Certainly Stardeep can’t be destroyed, else the traitor would be freed or dead. Either way, that would have ushered in a disaster.” “What other word would you use to describe the Year of Blue Fire?” Raidon flinched and said, “You suggest that the prisoner of Stardeep, the Traitor they called him, the high priest for some forgotten group of aboleths, was released, and the Spellplague was the result? Not true. It was the goddess of magic’s murder that collapsed the Weave and initiated the damned Spellplague. So I confirmed in Nathlekh while I searched for…” The monk trailed off, his concern over Stardeep eclipsed by the hollow recollection of his daughter’s fate. Raidon slid down the boulder’s rough side until he sat once more, his ears filling with an inchoate roar. Cynosure was talking. “Many threads were pulled when Mystra died. Most accept the goddess of magic’s death touched off already unsteady zones of wild magic. But in the past, when the previous goddess of magic perished, no Spellplague resulted. I believe other factors contributed to the virulence of what finally occurred. I believe the Traitor’s escape, timed uncannily close to Mystra’s murder, was an additional constituent that co-generated the Spellplague.” Raidon heard the words, but their meanings did not distract him from an image of Ailyn playing in the courtyard with a passel of tame city cats. The golem’s voice droned on. “On the other hand, the disaster the Keepers of the Cerulean Sign most feared, the appearance of the Abolethic Sovereignty, never materialized. But perhaps our error was in assuming the Sovereignty would immediately return. Perhaps the Spellplague was a necessary ingredient, required to condition reality enough to permit the great old aboleths’ return. Perhaps the Year of Blue Fire was so virulent that it reactivated previously dormant fossil dimensions…” “Raidon, are you listening?” demanded Cynosure. The monk followed Ailyn through several more happy memories, a path that concluded at a clay marker with his daughter’s lonely name stenciled on it. “Leave me, Cynosure,” he murmured. “I grieve.” No further word emerged from the air. Raidon was alone with his loss.