Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad (29 page)

“It is all so vague! Am I seeing these things or not?”

“What things, dear Adon?”

Though the voice was as quiet as a thought, the patriarch knew it had not come from inside his own head. He threw off his blanket and rolled onto his knees and spun around to search for the speaker.

The room was empty.

“That proves it.” Adon cowered on his mattress. “I’m mad.”

“Mad?” Now the voice came from behind him. It was soft, like a woman’s, and sickly sweet. “Not at all, Adon. If you were mad, you would belong to Cyric. Do you think I would let that happen?”

“I am mad.” Adon refused to turn toward the voice. “I am hearing voices.”

A laugh followed. “But isn’t that normal when a goddess speaks with her patriarch?”

Something rustled on the other side of the room. Adon turned toward the noise, but saw nothing. The sound had come from a bas-relief near the enormous double doors.

He broke into a sweat and stared at the scene. The carving showed Mystra dancing with a circle of horned fiends. The beasts were all about her, falling to the ground and writhing in ecstasy-or perhaps they were thrashing in pain. Adon could no longer see any difference; the scene depended entirely upon how he looked at it. The brutes could have been grinning or grimacing, as he decided.

Adon squeezed his eyes closed. “If you care about me at all, dear goddess, you will leave me alone.”

“You have nothing to fear from me, Adon. I will cause you no harm.”

The patriarch pushed himself across his bed, away from the voice, and stepped onto the floor. He glanced out across his balcony and saw Mystra outside, still battling the kraken. This did not shock him, for he was sane enough to recall that gods can create more than one avatar.

A pair of stony footsteps echoed across the floor, as though someone had entered the room. Adon looked back toward the door and saw that Mystra’s figure had stepped out of the wall carving. She was walking toward him slowly.

Adon crouched behind the headboard of his bed. “Stay back!”

The alabaster goddess was small, standing only as high as Adon’s waist. Her hair floated about her head like pale smoke, and her eyes blazed with a fierce yellow light. Beneath the curve of her upper lip gleamed the tips of five little fangs.

The figure waved a white claw down her pale body. “How can you doubt what you see, Adon, when it is set in stone?”

Adon screamed, for what he saw was a fiend more wicked than any from the Abyss.

The doors to the anteroom swung open. Prince Tang entered, thrusting a square-tipped sword before him. “Patriarch! What is-“

The avatar swung an arm toward the intruder. “Leave us!”

At once the doors swung shut, knocking Prince Tang back across the threshold. He had no chance to withdraw his hand; his forearm became lodged between the great doors. There was a sharp crack, and his sword clanged to the floor.

The prince allowed a cry of pain to slip from his lips but quickly regained his usual composure.

“A thousand pardons, Goddess,” said Tang, peering through the crack between the doors. Despite the unnatural bend in his arm, his voice betrayed no pain. “I did not mean to interrupt.”

“Then be silent!”

Mystra fluttered her hand in the prince’s direction. His eyes closed, then he slumped to the floor, his arm still caught between the doors. The goddess hardly looked at him; instead, she raised her alabaster arm toward Adon.

“Now come to your goddess and take comfort.”

Adon could only stare at Tang’s crooked arm. The Mystra he remembered would never have injured a mortal so callously.

Of course not, said a voice in his head. You would have turned away if you knew the truth about her, and she needed you to start her church. Mystra was always good at such games-or have you forgotten how she played Kelemvor and me against each other?

“Cy-cyric?”

The instant Adon gasped the name, Mystra’s avatar jumped onto the foot of his bed. “Adon, come to me!”

The avatar’s voice was so commanding that Adon found himself stepping around the headboard to obey.

No, Adon! If you go to her, I cannot protect you.

The patriarch stopped.

Call my name now, and I can save you.

“Save me?” Adon shook his head, praying that he was not yet mad enough to believe such a lie. “You would never save me.”

Say my name, and I’ll spare you her wrath.

The alabaster goddess sprang off the foot of his bed. “No, Adon, do as I command.” She started toward him, and her lips drew back to show her fangs in all their painful glory.

Adon retreated into the arch that opened onto his balcony. “Keep back! Don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?” Mystra’s little avatar stopped a pace away. The flesh had peeled from her cheeks, and the bone underneath was as white as the rest of her. “Adon, I want to help you.”

Then leave me alone!”

Mystra shook her head slowly. Her silky hair turned into black smoke and flowed into the room like bitter incense. That I cannot do. You have gone mad, poor boy.”

“But you said-” Adon gasped and rubbed his neck; the smoke had made his throat so dry he found it difficult to speak the words. “You said that if I was mad, I belonged to …”

The patriarch would not speak the One’s name.

Go ahead, Adon. Say it.

Adon shook his head and continued to stare at Mystra. “You said that if I was mad, I would belong to him.”

“I said I would never let that happen. And now the time has come to prevent it.”

The statue stepped forward, raising her arm to strike.

Adon rushed to the edge of the balcony. Out on Hillshadow Lake, he saw Mystra’s avatar walking across the water. She did not look up, for she was peering beneath the surface, stabbing at her quarry with harpoons of lightning. With each strike, the water rose like a curtain, and still none of it made a sound.

Say my name and let me save you!

“I’d rather die!” And this was true, for Adon feared Cyric’s promises even more than he feared a Faithless death. “I will trust to Kelemvor’s justice, but I will never trust you.”

With that, he threw a leg over the balcony rail and looked down. Five stories below sprayed the Morning Fountain, surrounded by a stone terrace where the temple’s Faithful liked to make their morning devotions. The court was empty now; the Faithful had all walked down to the shore to watch the silent battle between Mystra and the kraken. A few dozen townspeople had also gathered at the lake to observe the spectacle.

The goddess’s avatar grasped Adon’s arm. He tried to shove her away, but her talons were buried too deep.

Say my name, urged the voice in his head.

“I spurn you!” he screamed. “I repudiate both of you!”

Then Adon turned and flung himself off the balcony.

He was halfway to the fountain before he asked himself where he had found the strength to pull free from the grasp of a god, and by then, there was no time to recant-or to embrace the One.

Thirty

Mystra was still battling the kraken when she felt a pain in her heart and heard a body splash into the fountain beneath Adon’s balcony. Her avatar reached the terrace before the splash faded from the air, but already she was too late. The patriarch lay floating in the pool, his dead eyes staring at the sky, a cloud of red blood billowing outward around his head. A crack had opened in the fountain wall where his skull had struck, and now a steady stream of water was pouring out upon the terrace.

The goddess pulled Adon’s body from the pool and clutched it to her breast. Then she saw his spirit draining through the pool’s cracked wall.

“Adon!”

“Forgive me …” The patriarch’s words were garbled and prolonged. The red-clouded current had stretched his spirit into a figment from a nightmare, and his ghostly face was as thin as a snake. “Cyric tricked meee….”

“Adon, how can there be anything to forgive? This was not your doing.” Mystra kneeled beside the fountain and waited until her patriarch’s spirit pooled on the patio in a shimmering blob. “Speak my name and I take you back.”

Adon’s face broke into a crackled pattern; the water was seeping down between the paving stones, and his spirit with it. “Say … name?” The shattered voice was shrill with fear. That’s what… he … wanted!”

“What he wanted does not matter!” shouted Mystra.

Already, Adon’s face had become nothing but a pattern of ghostly lines. The goddess thrust a hand into the water to give his spirit something to cling to. “Call me to save you, and I shall return your spirit to your body!”

There came a strangled gasp, but even Mystra could not claim it for her name; the sound could have been a worm drowning as easily as the patriarch’s voice. Adon’s spirit sank beneath the stones. Mystra screamed, and there was such a surge of magic that spells misfired all across Faerun. Now Adon would be lost to her until he reached the Fugue Plain, and that would be some time hence-after he found his way out of the elemental plane of water. The journey would not be as painful as Zale’s passage through the paraelemental plane of magma, but it would still be difficult, and Mystra vowed to have her vengeance.

A swarm of onlookers arrived to gape at the corpse in the goddess’s lap. Most were her acolytes, but a few were curious townsmen who felt no shame in invading the temple’s privacy. They were all too stunned to speak, on account of both Adon’s death and the miracle of seeing one Mystra on the terrace while another hunted the kraken in the lake. A few Faithful fell to their knees and opened their hands in the starburst sip of their goddess, and others ripped their cloaks in lamentation for the patriarch. But no one thought to offer any aid, or ask what had happened, until Prince Tang ran onto the terrace.

“Lady Magic, what has happened?” The prince cradled his broken forearm to his chest and carried his square-tipped sword in his other hand. “What have you done to Adon?”

Mystra scowled. “What did I do, Prince Tang?” As she spoke, her avatar grew larger and stretched forward, so that she was suddenly looking down on the prince. “I did nothing, except trust in you to guard him.”

Prince Tang paled to the color of ivory. “Please forgive me, Lady Magic; I have made a terrible mistake. But when I saw your statue speaking-“

“My statue, Prince Tang?” Mystra stood, still clutching Adon’s body in her arms, and now she was as tall as a verbeeg.

“Your statue from the wall carving.” No sooner had the prince said this than he perceived how easily he had been duped and began to prattle on without a trace of his usual composure. “Your statue ordered me to go, then slammed the door on my arm so I could not, then it put me to sleep, and when I awoke-“

That is enough, Prince Tang.” Mystra spoke in a milder tone, for she was a weak-willed goddess who never punished her servants for a failure they were helpless to prevent. After Tang fell silent, she lowered Adon’s corpse into the arms of four waiting acolytes. “Care well for your patriarch’s body. He will soon have need of it.”

“We shall.” They took the corpse and started for the temple.

Mystra turned back to Prince Tang, then shrank to a height nearer his. “Now let me see to that break.”

That would be most kind, honorable goddess.” The prince presented his twisted arm. “I regret my inadequacy in defending your patriarch, but before I realized what was happening, I was asleep and unable to call for help.”

There is no need to apologize.”

Mystra took the prince’s arm above and below the break, then pulled in opposite directions. The bone straightened with a soft pop. Tang’s legs nearly buckled, but he was too vain to scream or faint, which any honest man would have done. The goddess placed her hands over the injury, then continued to absolve the prince of blame.

“You could not be expected to keep Adon safe from another god.”

“Another god?” Tang asked. “You doubt it was Cyric?”

“Someone wants me to believe it was Cyric.” Mystra made no mention of who that “someone” was, for she did not want to say the name before so many onlookers. “And when someone wants me to believe one thing, I am inclined to believe another.”

Here, Mystra was thinking of the battle between the Hlondethar and their enemies, when Mask had bragged about duping her into proving her own guilt. She saw how it would serve the Shadowlord to start a fight between her and Cyric, and how Mask often favored such duplicity, and how the God of Thieves might steal Adon’s sanity instead of using spells or curses to wreck it. She decided this was exactly what had happened and resolved to have her vengeance on the Shadowlord.

When Mystra removed her hands from Tang’s arm, the swelling had gone, as had the purple color and every other trace of injury. Prince Tang flexed his fingers and smiled.

“A thousand gratitudes, Lady Magic.” He bowed his head, but only briefly. “The arm has healed.”

Mystra smiled. “Mending your injuries is the least I can do. Pass me your sword, and you shall have a true reward.”

Prince Tang’s eyes grew bright, and he passed the sword over at once. The hilt and scabbard were encrusted with rubies and sapphires and diamonds, but when Mystra removed the sheath, it was clear the weapon had been made for combat. The silvery blade gleamed with the legendary sheen of hundredfold Shou steel, which kept a better edge than any metal worked by mortals.

The goddess ran her finger down the blade, coating the edge with a film of her sparkling red blood, and spoke a mystic syllable. Her blood sizzled away in a wisp of brown smoke, and then a crimson light gleamed deep within the Shou steel. So beautiful was this sheen that the onlookers all gasped in delight.

Mystra slipped the sword into its scabbard. “This blade will slay any hound it strikes, whether the creature was born from natural or unnatural loins.”

Though he was as inscrutable as any Shou prince, Tang could not keep his brow from rising. “Any hound, Lady Magic?”

“Yes, Prince Tang.” A bewildered murmur rustled through the crowd of onlookers. Mystra ignored it and kept her attention fixed on the prince. “And while you hold it in your hand, no beast can follow your spoor, whether the creature be of this world or any other.”