Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad (14 page)

Kelemvor could say no more than Mystra, for the truth was just as Cyric claimed.

After the One finished, Tempus looked him up and down. “All you say is true, but if you think to trade your own life for-“

“Not at all!” Cyric said. “All I ask is that I be charged for my own… actions.”

The request is reasonable.” Oghma’s comment surprised Cyric more than it did Mystra or Kelemvor. “A case could be made that Lady Magic and Lord Death are more guilty of neglecting their duty than is Cyric.”

Tempus’s visored face swung toward Tyr. “Can I expand my charges to include the other two?”

Tyr glanced at the crumpled veil in his hand. “Done.”

Mystra whirled on the Eyeless One. “How dare you!” she stormed. “I may have disobeyed you, but I am not like Cyric. Neither is Kelemvor!”

“We will decide that in a tenday,” Tyr replied. “Use the time to prepare for your trial.”

Nine

Even the darkness of the Shadow Sea could not save me from the power of Mystra’s magic. Though Rinda’s journal lay hidden beneath an icy blanket of murk and my eyes could not read a single letter, syllables spilled from my lips one after another and strung themselves into words. The words knotted themselves into sentences, which bound themselves into paragraphs, and I spoke the foulest profanities that had ever assailed my ears. Yet these words were nothing compared to the blasphemies that had poured from my mouth in the Pavilion of Cynosure. Soon Cyric would torture me a thousand ways, and I saw each in overwhelming detail. They all ended with bitter death, with me lying alone and forlorn upon the Fugue Plain with no god to claim me-no god except Lord Death, who would sentence me to an eternity of torments as terrible as those inflicted by the One.

Some uncertain time later, my stomach rose into my chest, and the sea of icy shadow melted into wisps of black mist. The wall of a great tower appeared before me, silhouetted against the golden disk of Lathander’s dawn sun. Cyric had returned me to Candlekeep in the same place from which he had plucked me, and now I was plummeting down alongside the Keeper’s Tower.

Favoring a quick death on the moat’s rocky bank to a slow death in its boiling water, I kicked my feet up over my head. The leather journal flapped open in my hand, and even then did Mystra’s magic compel me to read what I had glimpsed:

” The skin of my father, Bevis the Illuminator’-“

The outline of the stony bank emerged from the sulfurous vapor below. I thought my death would come quickly and at last still my blasphemous tongue, but Cyric’s trial was not over. I hit the stones with a soft thump, then bounced into the air and tumbled down the slope. And such was Tyr’s protection that I suffered only a dizzy head.

I came to a rest against a scraggly pine, then finished the sentence that had been on my lips when I struck the ground: “-‘was used to make the parchment for draft 398, and I knew my own skin would be used for draft 399 if my words did not please Cyric.’”

The accursed journal still lay in my hands!

Dawn was full upon Candlekeep; the sun stood a hand’s span above the ramparts, flooding the citadel with golden light and laying down long streaks of shadow behind trees and towers. From the ward below came the bustle of companies forming to receive unexpected orders, but the area near the Keeper’s Tower seemed surprisingly deserted, with not a monk or soldier in sight.

The Cyrinishad’s fetor hung thick and cloying in the air, and I felt a shadow of the revulsion that had sickened me when I touched its iron box. The beckoning rustle of the tome’s parchment pages swelled into a blaring drone, but no longer did the sound come from Rinda’s window. Now it reverberated through the thick walls of the Keeper’s Tower, growing deeper and more sonorous as it settled toward the lowest floor.

They were moving the Cyrinishad!

And though my greatest ambition remained the recovery of the sacred tome, I was helpless to rescue it from the thieves who had it now. Even had I been a mighty warrior capable of slaying a dozen men, Mystra’s magic compelled me to do nothing but read from the accursed journal in my hands.

” ‘Cyric had brought me to that rank parchment shop to begin his story because he was born there. It is a pity his mother didn’t toss him into a tanning vat and forget what she had borne; certainly Faerun would have been the better for it!’”

As this sacrilege gushed from my lips, a booming clamor erupted on the far side of the Keeper’s Tower. A company of guards thundered across the drawbridge, and the rustle of the Cyrinishad’s pages became a deafening roar. Then that meddling Harper witch shouted some orders, which I could not understand on account of the noise in my ears, and a small band of warriors left their fellows to rush down into the ward. I knew at once that they were carrying the One’s sacred book, for the sound that filled my head grew more distant and more shrill.

I gathered myself up and stumbled across the hill, thinking I might circle around and follow them from a safe distance. My eyes darted from Rinda’s journal to the uneven terrain and back again, caught in a constant struggle between ground and page. I had gone only a few steps before the meddling witch came around the tower with more than a dozen men. They could not have been thirty paces away, yet they were mere silhouettes creeping along through the steam that rose from the moat, crouching down to peer through the sulfurous vapor and search the water’s steely surface for my scalded body. Fearful of drawing their attention, I stopped and dropped to my knees and clasped my free hand over my mouth, but even that could not stop me from reading.

” ‘Cyric spoke until dawn, though I will not offend my readers with all the lies and false words he spewed forth that first night, except to say that I returned home sick and weary. There I was greeted by the second god I had met that day, a mysterious figure who arrived with Lord Chembryl of the Zhentarim to ask me to write a companion to Cyric’s tome of lies. So it was that I began the True Life of Cyric that same day.’ “

Though my palm muffled these blasphemies, they rang as loud as bells to my own ears, and I was certain my foes would hear them too. I turned across the hill and placed the journal on the ground before me, then crawled forward on my hands and knees, reading as quietly as I knew how, watching between words for loose rocks that I might send tumbling down the hill.

The witch and her companions edged along the moat and stopped beneath Rinda’s window, where the guards stirred the water with the butts of their halberds. Of course, they did not find my body.

“Lodar, get some hooks and line so we can drag the moat,” said Ruha. The Cyrinishad’s droning had grown distant enough that I could hear her words. “Balas, go ask Zale to rouse the rest of his hippogriffs. If that little murderer did not drown, then he has flown away.”

The two soldiers moved to obey, Lodar returning to the drawbridge and Balas starting down my side of the slope. I rolled into a shallow crevice where a nearby pine had rooted itself. This cranny was a little deeper than my body was thick, and just wide enough for my belly-an ideal place to hide, at least until I could finish Rinda’s accursed journal and turn all my thoughts to the Cyrinishad.

After Balas passed by, I squirmed onto my stomach so I could watch my foes above, then surrendered to my compulsion. The journal contained nothing but blasphemies and lies, and yet these made as much sense as the truth, so that not only was I compelled to read Rinda’s vile story, but also to give it consideration and search out the inconsistencies that proved it false. Unfortunately, these were exceedingly few and small, as she was the most accomplished liar who has ever written.

After that first day, when Rinda met Cyric and that other cowardly god who would not show his face, she wrote day and night, meeting Cyric at the parchment shop at strange hours, then returning home to slave an equal time on the profane True Life of Cyric. And while she did all this, Mystra and Oghma and many other jealous gods struggled against the One and his sacred plan, turning Zhentil Keep, which was Rinda’s city, into a place of deadly intrigue and shadowy battles. The time came when her last friend perished in this struggle. She despaired of surviving alone, and, fearing the One’s wrath in the afterlife, wisely decided to destroy her unfinished work on the True Life Of Cyric. Before she could act, the coward-god revealed himself to her as Oghma the Wise and promised to look after her and protect her from the One and All.

Rinda wrote with such a plain and honest style that I would have believed these lies, save for the contradiction in her story: only a fool would believe Oghma powerful enough to defy Cyric the Almighty, and Rinda was no fool.

As I read this, the droning of the Cyrinishad grew more distant and more shrill in my ears, but I could not answer its call. With Ruha and the soldiers still searching the moat above me, I would have been discovered the instant I sent a stone clattering down the slope.

A long stream of hippogriffs began to rise from their pens and fly off in all directions to search for me. Then Lodar and three more men returned with a tangle of ropes and hooks, and the soldiers began to drag the moat. They started beneath Rinda’s window and worked their way around the entire tower, drawing forth old soggy mattresses and swine carcasses and many other vile things, none of which was my body. It was a great relief to see the witch rushing to inspect each new discovery. As long as this business kept her occupied, there seemed little chance she would interrupt my reading.

At last, the day came when Rinda finished her work. Cyric came to her house and read the Cyrinishad from cover to cover and saw that it was perfect, and he took great pleasure in ordering Fzoul Chembryl, who was a notorious Unbeliever, to peruse the book. At once, Fzoul acknowledged the omnipotence of the Dark Sun. Then Cyric ordered him to punish Rinda, for the One had found the True Life of Cyric hidden beneath her floorboards and knew how she had betrayed him to Oghma. Fzoul obeyed, stabbing her in the stomach so she would die slowly and in agony. This so pleased Cyric that he bestowed on Fzoul the honor of reading the Cyrinishad to the masses of Zhentil Keep. He also commanded Fzoul to destroy the True Life, a volume which the One found too loathsome to touch himself.

As I read this, a lone hippogriff came swooping over my head and stopped my heart-if not my reading-but the creature did not wheel around to pluck me from my cranny.

Instead, it raised its wings and settled to the ground at the summit of the hill. The witch rushed over to speak with the rider. She stood close to him, like a lover, and they spoke too softly for me to hear. The man shook his head and waved his hand at the sky. The meddling Harper glanced back toward the moat, which her soldiers had already dragged two times, then began to scan the hillside around me. Something inside my stomach wanted to leap up and flee, but my head knew better than to think I could escape while reading a book.

My eyes were drawn back to the page, where I read of the low treachery of the One’s enemies. After Cyric left Rinda’s house, the god Mask emerged from Fzoul Chembryl’s body, where he had been hiding to shield Fzoul from the power of the Cyrinishad. The Shadowlord healed Rinda. Oghma appeared also, and he gave Fzoul the True Life of Cyric to read in the Cyrinishad’s place before the masses of Zhentil Keep. Then the thieving God of Wisdom bestowed his diamond scroll on Rinda and gave her Cyric’s sacred chronicle to safeguard.

I glanced up from Rinda’s journal to see the witch motioning her soldiers away from the moat. “He is not there, or you would have found him. Let us work our way down the hill.”

The soldiers dropped their hooks and spread out along the slope. I looked back to Rinda’s journal-I could not help myself.

Fzoul read the True Life Of Cyric at dawn the next morning, and the lies in the vile book so inflamed the masses that they rioted at once. Then, as soon as the One turned his attention to the disaster in Zhentil Keep, the harlot Mystra stirred up a rebellion in the City of the Dead, and Cyric was helpless to save himself.

I came very near to believing these lies, as they did much to explain how the One lost the Throne of Death. Fortunately, at the last moment I perceived the flaw in Rinda’s words, which was the impossibility of the One being helpless in any manner.

Up near the Keeper’s Tower, the Harper and her soldiers began to creep down the slope, peering up into the boughs of every tree and thrusting their halberds down into every crevice. I began to inch backward down the slope, my eyes still fixed on the page before me.

Although Rinda did not claim to see Cyric’s failure for herself-a rare honesty for her-she heard later that Mask was overcome by the Cyrinishad’s power, and that during the rebellion in the City of the Dead he confessed his betrayal to Cyric. According to Rinda, the One grew so furious he lost control of himself and, in his attempt to kill Mask, accidentally freed Kelemvor’s spirit On this falsehood, there is no need to comment; we all know the One never has accidents. I spat upon the page and smeared my dribble around to smudge the ink.

Then the Cyrinishad assailed my ears with a tremendous hissing. The cold nausea that had assaulted me in Gwydion’s chamber returned, and my nostrils filled with the vile stench of sulfur and offal. I knew at once that my foes meant to drop the Cyrinishad into one of the boiling cesspools below their latrines, where no mortal could venture and no immortal would. I was filled with a terrible longing to rush to the holy tome’s rescue-and also with the dreadful fear of glimpsing again its Dark Truths.

I started to rise, but then I saw the Harper hag standing at the other end of my crevice, peering up into the pine boughs over her head. Fearing the slightest movement would draw her attention, I froze and fought to keep my gaze from returning to Rinda’s book.

Despite my terrible predicament, I lost my battle. My fingers turned the page ever so quietly, and my eyes read the first line, and the words welled up inside me, and nothing I could do would keep my lips from whispering them:

” ‘As for Cyric, now he sits alone in his Shattered Keep, lost in delusions of grandeur and absolute power, leaving his church on Faerun to grow ever more fragmented and weak. Some say this is because the shock of losing the City of Dead drove him insane, but I know better. Cyric was the first to read the Cyrinishad; his own lies drove him mad.’”