Midnights Mask (17 page)

A raised drawbridge lay flat against the tower’s face. The drawbridge did not rest at ground level, but about a troll’s height up the wall. Vhostym knew that the double doors behind the drawbridge opened onto the second floor of the tower.

Vhostym floated forward through the trees, toward the tower, an invisible harbinger of doom. Nothing visible on the tower’s exterior bespoke its dark purpose but Vhostym knew it to be a temple of Cyric the Dark Sun, one of two towers built in hidden vales in the Small Teeth, a mountain range that made up the southern border of Amn. Though a distance of a few leagues separated the two temples, a secret underground tunnel wormed under the mountains to link them.

The Towers of the Eternal Eclipse, the worshipers called them. Vhostym found the name ironic and appropriate.

Decades ago Vhostym had scoured Faerun for the material he would need, along with the Weave Tap, to complete his greatest spell-a peculiar type of stone that fell from the heavens. The stone had a latent property— the ability to amplify arcane power cast through it.

One of Vhostym’s divinations had at last located a large deposit of the stone in the Small Teeth, in the form of Cyric’s temple. Further magical inquiries had determined the origin of the stone. Millennia before, a small rock with this special property had blazed a path of fire across the sky and smashed into the mountains, exposing a seam of granite. The impact pulverized the otherworldly rock and left a crater in the mountains, but the heat and pressure

of the impact had transferred the stone’s properties into the local granite. Later, a sect of Banites-the original builders of the temple—had quarried the stone to build their towers. The temple was later taken over after the Time of Troubles by the Cyricists. Neither the Banites nor the Cyricists ever learned of the amplifying properties of the stone.

For months after learning the nature and history of the towers, Vhostym scried them repeatedly. He had memorized their interiors, their defenses. He knew the locations of the warding glyphs and spell traps that guarded some of the towers’ interior doors. He knew the number and nature of those who garrisoned each spire: roughly fivescore soldiers, a dozen priests, and a handful of mages. The High Priest of Cyric who reigned over the towers, one Blackwell Akhmelere, occupied the eastern tower this night, so he would be spared.

No one in the western tower would live more than another hour.

Vhostym cast a long series of protective spells. When he finished, an array of invisible magical wards sheathed his person. Unless they could be dispelled-and no one within the tower had the power to counter Vhostym’s dweomers-he was virtually invulnerable to harm from either weapons or spells.

The most powerful of the defensive wards would not last long, however, so speed would be his ally. He removed a root from his pouch, chewed it, swallowed, and recited another spell. When he finished, his spectral body felt energized, faster.

He was ready to begin. Vhostym started forward.

A sudden call went up from the guards before the tower and he stopped his advance. The guards scrambled aside as the sound of a winch mechanism carried through the valley and the drawbridge started to lower. In moments. the drawbridge’s edge was flat on the ground, forming a ramp from ground level to the elevated double doors. The

twin iron slabs of the temple doors swung open, torchlight poured out, and a group of twenty sword-armed and mail-armored soldiers trooped down the drawbridge.

All of them wore the hard looks of experienced fighters. Each bore a longbow and stuffed field pack over his shoulders. A short-haired, dark-eyed priest in plate armor led them, trailed by a boy who steered a mule loaded with field gear. The priest bore a black staff capped with an opal. The opal radiated a soft, red light that allowed the humans to see, but would not itself be easy to see from a distance. The red light highlighted the priest’s breastplate to reveal an enameled image: a white, jawless skull, the symbol of Cyric the Mad. The gate guards bowed their heads as the priest stalked down the drawbridge and passed them. Waving his staff, the priest offered them Cyric’s blessing.

A raiding party, Vhostym guessed.

He knew the Cyricists often raided the merchant caravans that braved the mountain paths between Amn and Tethyr. Sometimes they raided for food and supplies, other times they raided only to murder or take captives for later sacrifice.

The double doors closed behind the raiding party and the drawbridge clicked its way back up.

The ringing of the raiders’ mail and the stomp of their boots sounded loudly in the night as they picked their way through the trees. The priest gazed about alertly as he walked but his eyes passed over Vhostym without hesitation. The party walked along the path near Vhostym and marched on toward the pass. Within moments, the night swallowed them and their red light.

Vhostym stared after them, pondering the capriciousness of the multiverse. Had the patrol been scheduled to move out only a quarter hour later, it never would have left at all. Vhostym was reminded again of the utter randomness, the absolute meaninglessness of the multiverse. He might have wished that existence had

a greater purpose but he knew better and refused to deceive himself. It simply was. Of course, an existence without external purpose was also an existence without boundaries, at least for one of Vhostym’s power. The reminder spurred him to action.

He turned back to the tower and spoke aloud a word of power.

Time stopped, at least subjectively. The world froze, except for Vhostym.

The spell would last only a short while, but he could cast it again if necessary.

Taking his pouch of enchanted emeralds in hand, he spoke a stanza of arcane words and teleported into the first floor entry hall of the tower. Torchlight lit the room but the brightness did not trouble Vhostym’s incorporeal form. Two soldiers and one of the temple’s wizards stood within, frozen between breaths. The drawbridge winches stood in alcoves to either side. Two closed wooden doors awaited in the opposite wall.

Without hesitating, Vhostym dropped one of the emeralds on the floor—the gem took corporeal form when he released it-and spoke a command word. At his utterance, the jewel shattered into a rain of shards and left in its wake a green glow that encompassed the entirety of the entry hall and extended through the wooden doors. The abjuration embodied in the glow restricted any form of extradimensional magical travel, including teleportation, into it or out of it.

Vhostym’s hastening spell augmented the already-rapid flight granted him by his spectral form and he passed rapidly through the wooden doors. A wide stairway led down. Murals depicting the Dark Sun stained the walls. The corridor linked with several rooms as well as the watch stations set in each corner of the tower. Vhostym dropped a gem, and another, until a green glow covered the entire first floor. He noted the location of those within as he moved-the guards armed with long bows at

the watch stations; the servants asleep in their beds.

He floated downward through the floor and did the same on the ground floor, where most of the guards were quartered, and in the dungeon, where a few guards kept watch over prisoners. Then he floated up through the floor and did the same on the third floor, which featured a large central room around which lay the chambers of underpriests and lesser mages. In moments, that entire floor too was cloaked in green. He moved up to the next floor and repeated the process, this time painting in green the rooms of the senior priests and wizards.

A sudden rush and blur of sound told him that time had resumed. He was in the uninhabited, large central room on the fourth floor. Other than an endless series of wall murals depicting the Dark Sun reading the Cyrinishad, the room featured nothing other than several doors, four pillars, and two stairways, one leading up and one down.

He imagined the surprise the inhabitants of the tower must have felt-between blinks, the rooms they occupied had lit up with a green glow. From below, he heard alarmed shouts. No doubt someone was rushing for one of the tower’s many alarm bells.

A door to his left flew open and a priest in his night clothes, but with a blade clutched in his hand, burst out. He looked through and past Vhostym and padded toward the stairway.

Vhostym put the priest out of his mind, repeated the word of power, and again stopped time. The priest froze in mid stride. Vhostym floated up through the floor to the fifth story. There, he found almost the entire level to be a single, open chamber dedicated to the wretched rites of Cyric the Dark Sun. Inlaid tiles formed a sunburst in the center of the chamber, on which sat a pedestal of white stone shaped like a jawless skull. Vhostym could feel the magic in the room as a tingle on the nape of his neck. Wrought-iron braziers with skull motifs stood in each corner. A score or so of skeletons in plate armor lined the

walls. Vhostym ignored it all and placed his abjuration gems.

He floated to the only room off the ceremonial chamber-the bedchamber of Olma Kulenvov, the highest-ranking cleric in the tower. The embers from a dying fire lit the chamber, and Olma slept comfortably in her opulent, carved ash bed. Vhostym dropped a binding gem, activated it, and exited through the roof.

Each corner of the tower’s roof featured an external observation ledge. Vhostym cast a holding ward on the doors that led to each of the posts. Three guardsmen stood on each ledge, immobile between moments. Vhostym rapidly cast a series of spells that conjured a cloud of noxious green fumes over each post. The clouds of gas appeared over and around the guards. The men were dead but did not yet know it. They existed between the last two breaths of their lives. When time resumed, the men would inhale the choking fumes and die painfully.

Vhostym flew down to the ground and cast a spell at the feet of the guards on the exterior of the tower. The evocation summoned a small, spinning ball of potential energy that would explode after a delay, the length of which Vhostym chose as he cast: a fifteen count. Then he cast another holding ward on the drawbridge and double doors.

No one would be allowed to escape the tower.

He sank below the surface of the vale, blind while he traveled through solid rock, until he reached the beginning of the broad, earthen tunnel that linked the western tower with the eastern. Timbers set at even intervals supported the ceiling. A simple incantation twisted the wood of the score or so timbers near Vhostym. They shattered, shooting splinters and chunks of jagged wood in all directions. Several passed through Vhostym’s form.

The sudden loss of support caused the roof of the tunnel to sag, crumble, finally to collapse. There would be no

escape through it either. Vhostym returned to the surface and examined his handiwork.

He had turned the temple into a tomb. Those outside it would be dead when time restarted, and those within could not escape.

He waited, eager to begin.

After less than a ten count, the blurry rush of sound and motion told him that time had resumed. It was time to kill.

*****

Cale, Jak, and Magadon stood on the maindeck of Demon Binder, looking at one another.

They had a ship, still cutting through the sea, but had no one to man it.

“What now?” Jak asked.

Cale thought about it and made his decision.

“We take a moment to free the slaves, then find the slaadi and kill them. Right now.” To Magadon, he said, “You have a link with Riven?”

Magadon nodded. “Erevis, are you certain? Riven said he would signal us when the time was right.”

“hags,” Cale said, “Mask wanted the slaadi to escape and they escaped. That’s all I am going to give Riven and that’s all I’m going to give Mask. We want the slaadi dead for our own reasons. Mask’s are… incidental to those.”

Jak’s eyebrows raised but he held his tongue.

Magadon blanched and shook his head. “I should have such nerve when it comes to speaking of my own father.”

Cale knew that Magadon was born of Mephistopheles, an archdevil. The guide did not even care to speak his father’s name.

“Mask isn’t my father,” Cale said.

“No,” Magadon agreed, though the word sounded more like a question than a statement.

To Jak, Cale said, “Go release the slaves, little man.

See if any of them can sail this ship to take the rest back to land. We are leaving as soon as they’re out.”

Jak nodded. “I saw keys for the cages on one of the corpses.” He turned and sped off.

“Show me, Mags,” Cale said.

Magadon furrowed his brow in concentration and a rosy glow haloed his head. He held out his hand to Cale. Cale took it, felt his mind meet Magadon’s, and saw what the guide saw through Riven’s eyes….

They were on a ship sailing its way through the night and the dark water. A soft, inexplicable green glow shrouded the entire vessel. Cale had no notion what it was. The ship sported three masts to Demon Binder’s two, and its sails were triangular rather than square.

Riven stood on the maindeck and looked out over the sea. An enormous peak exploded up from the sea behind the ship. Sheer sides rose from the waters and extended toward starry skies. A single tower on a high promontory was backlit by the starlight.

Cale knew the name of the island, though he had never seen it before. Everyone who lived near the waters of the inner Sea had heard of Traitor’s Isle. Sailors used the island and its magical tower as a distance marker. Cale let the mental image of the ship sink into his mind. He extended his senses to feel the shadows aboard and….

Felt nothing.

He tried again but still could not feel the shadows aboard the other ship. Something was blocking him.

The green glow. It was somehow blocking his ability to transport himself aboard. He clenched his fists in frustration. He considered trying to transport them into the water near the ship, but dismissed the idea. Even a small mistake in the transport could leave them alone on the open sea. Besides, even if he could put them next to the ship’s hull, how then would they get aboard?

“What is it?” Magadon said.