Dawn of Night (13 page)

The assassin waved a hand dismissively and said, “I’ve never tried to hide it.” He looked past Magadon to Cale. “Like I said, you’re our way out of here, Cale. Not the gate. Stop fighting it.”

“You said that before, Zhent,” said Cale, glaring, “and it’s still the same nonsense.”

“Not so,” Riven sneered. “I’ve seen it, Cale, dreamed it. You’re the only way we’re getting out of here. And you’re the reason we’re still here. You’re still hanging on to what you were. You’re changed. We’re changed. You keep saying it with words, but not feeling it. Let it go. Stop fighting.”

Cale simply stared. He could frame no reply, because there was no reply to be made. Deep down, in that secret part of his brain that he kept walled off, he knew that Riven spoke the truth. Cale had been fighting it, and fighting it hard since the moment he’d opened his eyes to see a starless sky. He was not human. He never would be again. He’d told himself as much, had seen it in Jak’s haunted eyes, heard Magadon state it across a fire, but he’d held it at bay with the wall of his will, kept the reality of it from infecting his psyche. And that wall was crumbling.

Tears started to form in his eyes—whether from frustration, fatigue, fear, or some combination of all of them, he didn’t know-but he blinked them back. He wouldn’t give Riven the satisfaction.

The assassin stared at him, waiting.

“Cale?” Jak asked tentatively.

He’d voluntarily transformed his body to save Jak, but had fought the transformation of his soul. He couldn’t fight it any longer. He was too tired, and he was a shade. A monster.

What had he done to himself?

Weaveshear fell from numb fingers. His legs went weak. He fell to his knees and turned his face to the ground. He would have screamed his anger into the night, but he couldn’t muster the strength to shout. Instead, he simply sat there and let the rain wash over him. After a moment, he raised his gaze and looked upon Riven. The assassin returned his look, expressionless, and nodded.

Cale nodded back. Staring at Riven all the while, Cale made a conscious decision, steeled himself, and surrendered to what he had become.

He thought he could hear Mask laughing.

Darkness entered him, enveloped him, a cocoon of night.

Knowledge flooded Cale-the full scope of his abilities as a shade. He knew then that his body resisted magic, that he could form animated duplicates of himself out of shadowstuff, could turn invisible in darkness, could travel between worlds. He saved them from the destruction of the Fane when his instincts tapped those powers. Having embraced it, he knew he could do it at will.

He was the Divine Agent of Mask, the Champion of the Shadowlord. He knew the names of the others who served Mask in a similar capacity: Drasek Riven, Kesson Rel, Avner of Hartsvale…. Proxies, Chosen, Agents, Seraphs—they had many titles. But among them all, Cale was the First and Riven the Second. It was Cale and Riven who would retrieve for the Shadowlord what he had lost.

Groaning, Cale gripped his head between his hands and tried to prevent his skull from exploding under the pressure of the influx of knowledge.

He knew in that instant that Riven was right. Cale was their way out. The irony was that Cale could not have escaped the Shadow until he surrendered to it. He knew that Mask had planned it that way. Mask planned everything that way.

Time passed, he didn’t know how long, and gradually his head ceased pounding. He sat on his knees in the grass. Around him, everything stood quiet except the patter of the rain. It would never wash him clean, he knew. Not anymore.

Thazienne….

A touch on his arm. He looked over and saw Jak, concern writ clear in the halfling’s green eyes.

In Luirenal, the baffling said, “It doesn’t matter, Cale. I’m your friend. I’ll always be your friend.”

It did matter, but Jak’s simple words brought Cale more comfort than anything else could have. He even managed a smile.

“I know. Thank you, Jak.” He cleared his throat and said, “Earlier, when I snapped at you—”

Jak waved it away.

“Forgotten,” he said.

Cale nodded, patted the halfling’s arm. Still a little lightheaded, he leaned on Jak and climbed to his feet. He took a deep breath and looked to Riven and Magadon.

“Riven was right,” he said. “I know how to get us back to Faerűn.”

Riven looked only mildly smug. Magadon looked both pleased and alarmed.

“How?” the guide asked, hope in his voice.

“I’m going to shift us there,” Cale replied. “But first we need to have a conversation. I’ve been considering something for a time. We need to handle it before we leave this place.” He looked an apologetic glance at the halfling. “Jak, stay here.”

“What?” the halfling asked in surprise. “Why?” “Trust me,” Cale said.

He offered a smile. It was better if Jak knew nothing of what Cale was about to propose.

The halfling looked perplexed, and maybe a little hurt, but he nodded anyway.

****

Jak tried to hide his frown as Cale steered Riven and Magadon out of easy earshot. The halfling knew that Cale must have a good reason to exclude him—likely due to a discussion of what Cale sometimes referred to as “methods”-but that lessened the sting only a little. Besides, Jak wished Cale had spoken to him about it beforehand. Jak didn’t need to be sheltered from hard choices, not anymore. His views on what was acceptable had changed since his torture at the hands of the slaad.

Merely recollecting that agony made his eyes water. He still bore the scars of slaad claws on his chest and on his soul. He supposed he always would.

But in the aftermath of that pain he had come to realize that sometimes—but only sometimes—principle must give way to pragmatism. It was a hard lesson, but a true one. Otherwise, the slaadi and those like them would always win.

Sometimes good people have to do hard things, he thought, recollecting Cale’s words to him on that rainy night outside of Selgaunt.

He knew the words stank of a rationalization, but he knew too that they were true. The truth was just so ugly that it sometimes needed to be rationalized.

He wondered what hard things his three companions were discussing just then. He wondered if his old friend Sephris would still consider him a seventeen.

He pulled his pipe, quickly gave up trying to light it in the rain, and instead twirled it in his fingers; a nervous habit. He eyed his comrades sidelong, trying not to listen, but unable to keep himself from watching.

Cale spoke softly but earnestly, gesturing often with pointed fingers and clenched fists. At first Magadon looked confused, but after a time the guide nodded slowly and said something in reply to Cale. Riven took a step back, as though Cale was threatening him, and shook his head. His voice rose in anger.

“No,” the assassin said. “That’s madness.”

Cale shot a concerned glance at Jak and replied to the assassin in an intense whisper. Shadows bled from his hands and exposed skin, as if his intensity was squeezing darkness from his pores. In a thoughtful tone, Magadon too said something to Riven, evidently reinforcing Cale’s point.

Riven shook his head again, but less forcefully. He looked at Cale with narrowed eyes and asked a question. Cale didn’t blink, and Jak heard his reply clearly over the rain:

“You already know why.”

At that, Riven showed his signature sneer, but Jak saw the insincerity of it. If he hadn’t known better, Jak would have sworn he saw fear in Riven’s eye.

Magadon put his hand on the assassin’s shoulder and offered him comforting words. Riven glared at him, brushed his hand aside, and said something in a sharp tone. Magadon frowned and took a step back.

Cale spoke to Magadon in a language Jak did not understand. Magadon answered in the same tongue, but slowly.

For a moment, Magadon, Cale, and Riven simply looked at each other. Riven said something and nodded. To Jak, the assassin’s tone sounded as final as a funeral dirge.

“Do it,” Cale said to the guide, loud enough for Jak to hear.

Magadon visibly gulped but nodded. He put his fingers to his temple and closed his eyes. A halo of white light formed around his head. The glow expanded, and moved to encapsulate Riven. While it glowed, Magadon spoke softly to the assassin. Then the guide nodded at Cale, who added something further, again speaking in a strange language. Throughout, Riven said nothing. Abruptly, the light flared out.

For an instant, a veiled look came over Riven’s face but quickly vanished.

What in the Nine Hells just happened? Jak wondered. Cale caught Jak’s eye and smiled softly—an insincere smile-before nodding at Magadon.

Riven said, “What are you doing?”

Cale responded softly. Magadon then asked something and Cale nodded. The guide hesitated for a moment, put his fingertips to the side of his head and closed his eyes. A moment later, a nimbus of angry red energy formed around his skull. It flared brightly. Another such halo formed around Riven’s head. The assassin gripped his skull in his palms, groaned, and collapsed. Cale said something in a terse manner to Magadon, and another red nimbus formed around Cale’s head. He too groaned and collapsed to the ground. Magadon took a deep breath, then screamed in pain and fell to the dirt himself.

All three lay on the ground unmoving.

Jak couldn’t help himself; he ran over and knelt first at Cale’s side. To his relief, the tall man was breathing.

“Erevis,” he said, shaking Cale gently. “Cale.”

Cale’s yellow eyes fluttered open and Jak forced himself to stare into them. Cale blinked and groaned, obviously disoriented. When his eyes regained their focus, he sat up, shook his head, and climbed to his feet. Magadon and Riven both were rubbing their temples, groaning, and struggling to sit up.

“What happened?” Jak asked, even though he knew he shouldn’t.

A curious expression crossed Cale’s face, and Jak thought he might have been struggling for words.

Finally, Cale said, “Precautions, little man. Let’s leave it at that.”

To that, Jak said nothing. Cale obviously wanted Jak ignorant of what had transpired. Jak hoped his friend knew what he was doing.

With nothing else to do, Jak removed his holy symbol and uttered prayers of healing over each of his companions. Even Riven, perhaps still too disoriented to protest, accepted the spell. The warm energy flowed through Jak and into his comrades. It seemed to bring each of them back to themselves, at least somewhat.

None of them spoke of what had just transpired. To Jak, each of them looked at though they had just awakened from a deep sleep.

*****

When Cale had drained the last of his waterskin and recovered himself as fully as seemed possible, he looked around, eyed his friends, and said to them, “Let’s leave this place.”

Jak said, “We’re just waiting for you to tell us how, my friend.”

Cale didn’t bother to explain that he had an intuitive feel for the overlap between Toril and the Plane of Shadow.

Instead, he simply said, “Watch.”

He concentrated for a moment, attuning himself to the correspondence between the two planes. When he had his mental hands around the connection, he opened his eyes and traced a glowing, vertical green line in the air with his forefinger. At any moment in time, he knew, the Plane of Shadow and Toril were separated by a planar barrier as thin as the cutting edge of an elven thin-blade. Cale could slice open that barrier at will.

Putting his palms together and making a knife of his hands, he poked them through the center of the glowing line and drew them apart, as though he was parting draperies from before a window in Stormweather Towers’s great hall. The line expanded after his hands to become a rectangular curtain of ochre light hanging in the air-a gate back to Toril.

The appearance of the gate evoked a grin from Jak. “After all this,” the halfling said, shaking his head, “and it was just that easy.”

Cale didn’t bother to tell his friend that it hadn’t been easy at all, that the transformation back in the Fane had changed his body, but it was only a short time ago that the place had transformed his soul.

Instead, he nodded at the portal and said to Jak, “That’s home. You’re the first, little man.”

Jak hesitated for only an instant. He beat his hat on his thigh to free it of mud, donned it with verve, smiled broadly, and hopped through the gate.

Magadon followed.

“Well done, Cale,” he said, and stepped through, bow held at his side.

Before Riven stepped into the gate, the assassin stopped and looked Cale in the face.

“I had to do it, Cale,” the assassin said. “I’d seen it.” “Maybe,” Cale said.

Riven frowned, then said, “You’re the First, Cale.” He nodded at the gate. “And that’s not home anymore. Not for us.”

“Go through, Riven,” Cale said.

Just as the assassin was about to step through, something registered with Cale. He grabbed Riven by the arm.

“The teleportation rods,” he said. “They didn’t crumble to dust, did they?”

Riven looked him in the eye and replied, “We had to go through this, Cale. I know what I saw. You had to be our way out.”

In his mind, Cale heard Sephris say, Two and two are four.

“We all could have died,” Cale said.

Riven shrugged.

“Where are the rods now?”

“I threw them in the bog,” the assassin said with a smile, “the moment I understood the vision.”

“Afraid you couldn’t have resisted temptation?” Cale asked.

Riven grinned.

Cale released Riven’s arm and said, “Go through.” Riven did.

Cale lingered for a moment in the glow of the gate and spared one last glance around the Shadow Deep. Its darkness seemed familiar to him, comforting, like the companionship of an old friend. Its gloom felt more protective than oppressive. He knew that Riven had spoken the truth. The gate to Toril did not lead home, not for him, not anymore.

But for a moment at least, he would turn his back on the darkness.

He stepped through the portal. It felt like slipping into warm water.

An immense, complicated network of caverns and tunnels honeycombed the rock below Faerfm’s surface, stretching for leagues in all directions-the world below the world, the sunless expanse of the Underdark. To Azriim, it felt much the same as the Sojourner’s pocket plane, itself simply a pinched-off portion of the Underdark.