Midnights Mask (27 page)

They turned their feet to the ruins and swam. They threw water behind them as fast as they could.

Too slow, Cale’s mind kept repeating. Too slow.

Another screech from the kraken filled the sea. The ruins rumbled as the movement of the creature’s body shook the pile. A sharp crack sounded and the kraken uttered another shriek, this one in exultation. Cale knew what it signified-it had torn the crystal free of the sea bed.

Faster, Cale! Jak said, his voice filled with panic.

But both of them knew they already were swimming as fast as they could.

Magadon, Cale projected to the surface, but received no response. Mags! If you can hear me, get the ship out of here. Right now. Something is coming, something… big.

The Source is awakening, Erevis, replied Magadon, and his mental voice boomed inside of Cale’s head. I understand its language now, its purpose, its powers. I can use it—

Mags, forget all of that, Cale said. Just get the ship out of there. Right now. Make for Selgaunt. We’ll meet you.

Cale said that last though he did not expect to survive. Bubbles streamed from his mouth; shadows leaked from his skin. He kicked, threw his arms out and down. Already his limbs felt like lead. His muscles were burning. How long had they been swimming upward? Where in the Hells was the surface?

He glanced downward just as the kraken squirmed its body entirely free from the ruins. The pile started to collapse, the roar of falling stone loud enough to hurt Cale’s ears. Sakkors was lost in a cloud of silt.

The kraken, with one powerful undulation of its enormous body and tentacles, wiggled free of the destruction. It swam backwards, leading with its head, and the glowing red crystal stuck out of the gash in its head like a unicorn’s horn. The two outer tentacles ended in diamond-shaped pads covered in suckers the size of kite shields. The creature swam an arc around the ruins, as if testing out a body long atrophied through lack of use. It angled upward and its eyes-as large as wagons-seemed to fix on Cale and Jak.

Keep going! screamed Jak.

They swam with an energy born of terror.

Another shriek of rage filled the deep. Cale looked down to see the kraken undulate its body and swim after them. Its huge form cut through the water as cleanly as a razor. It matched a bowshot with each undulation. Its eyes never left them.

Cale looked up and saw nothing to indicate that they were nearing the surface. No light, no anything. Terror birthed panic.

The kraken was closing, eating up the distance. Cale could feel it.

They were dead, he knew it.

Still, he kept kicking. It was not in him to surrender. He kicked, swung his arms, swam for all he was worth. His heart must surely burst.

He looked back and saw nothing but the kraken’s eyes, the pupils as big across as he was tall.

They breached the surface. Air. Starlight.

Gasping, spent, Cale did not allow his astonishment to cloud his thinking.

“Dispel it, Jak!” he shouted. “Hurry!”

Jak pulled his holy symbol and began to cast. Both of them knew that if Jak’s spell failed to overcome the magic of the slaad’s wand, they would die right there.

As Jak mouthed the words to his spell between gasps, Cale tried to look out over the water, to spot Demon Binder. He did not see it. He hoped Magadon and Evrel had gotten the ship clear of the area.

Selgaunt, Mugs, he projected again, and received no response.

He did not bother to look down. He knew what was underneath them. He knew too what would happen if it reached them. The water was blood red and growing brighter. The kraken, with its horn of glowing crystal, was closing. Cale could feel it coming within his bones, the same way he could feel a storm on the winds.

He drew the darkness around himself and Jak. lf Jak’s spell succeeded, he would take them into the shadows instantly. If Jak’s spell did not succeed, then he would die cloaked in the darkness that had become his constant companion.

Jak shouted the last word to his spell and pointed his holy symbol at Cale.

The green glow that tethered Cale to the Material Plane winked out.

Cale felt the waters rising under them. The kraken was right below them. A scream from the creature rose up from the water and burst into the night air.

Cale hoped never again to hear such a sound.

The shadows around them deepened, swallowed them, and took them away.

*****

Magadon felt it when Jak and Erevis traveled the darkness and vanished. If only Demon Binder could have done the same. There was no wind. The ship had no way to go anywhere.

And the creature that long had held the Source’s mind captive was surfacing. Magadon sensed its anger. He saw it in his mind’s eye-a body as large as a town, tentacles lined with suckers like shields, a savage, curved beak that could rend a ship in two with a single bite. A Kraken. And it was bringing the Source with it. Magadon’s expanded consciousness sensed that the Source jutted like a narwhal’s horn from an open wound in the kraken’s head. The Source was awakened and surfacing.

Magadon was terrified at the implications.

A crewman called out from the starboard side of Demon Binder and the rest of the crew pelted past Magadon and across the ship to look over the side. Magadon knew what they saw: The glow of the Source had turned the sea blood red between Demon Binder and the slaadi’s ship. Magadon heard the alarmed voices of the crew, sensed their growing fear.

The Source, nearly awake now, was still feeding him. He drank all he could, despite the harm it did to his body. He had never felt anything like it. Knowledge poured into him. His head pounded and he felt blood leaking from his ears, his nose. He hoped the warm fluid running out of his eyes was clear and not red. He groaned with the pain, exulted in the power.

Selgaunt, Mags, Cale had projected.

The crew began to point, shout. The glow was growing brighter. The water off the starboard side roiled. Foam sprayed into the air as tentacles as thick around as kegs burst from the sea. The kraken’s glistening body followed, displacing so much water that it sent waves into Demon Binder strong enough to cause it to list. The kraken’s huge eyes, half-exposed above the waterline, looked first on Demon Binder, then on the slaadi’s ship.

It turned and headed for the other ship.

The panicked screams of the survivors aboard the slaadi’s ship carried over the sea. The kraken cut through the water like a blade. It closed the distance to the slaadi’s ship rapidly. Its body dwarfed the vessel. The screams of the ship’s crew grew louder. Tentacles thicker than the mainmast squirmed over the deck, crushed men to pulp, wrapped the ship from maindeck to keel. Wood splintered, shattered. The masts toppled. The ship buckled. The creature pulled all of it underwater and fed on what it wished.

The slaughter had taken less than a five count. There was no sign of the slaadi’s ship. The kraken swam a tight circle and started for Demon Binder.

The crew shouted in alarm, and alarm quickly turned to panic. Evrel shouted orders but no one heeded. Some stared at the onrushing mountain, some screamed, some milled about, looking for something, anything, that might allow them to be spared.

Magadon stared not at the kraken but at the Source, sticking out of the creature’s head. It was still pouring mental energy into him. Magadon knew what he had to do. He knew it might kill him.

The kraken was closing. Several of the crew screamed defiance at the sea, shook their fists at the beast; others wrapped their arms around their bodies, fell to the deck, and awaited death.

Awaken, Magadon said, and used the power granted him by the dreaming Source as a prod to spur the sentience of the crystal awake.

The kraken was two bowshots distant. One.

Awaken!

The Source stirred to wakefulness. The crystal in the kraken’s head flared blazing red, a pulse of power and light so bright it seemed for a moment as though a crimson sun had dawned over the sea.

Magadon screamed; the kraken shrieked; the crew wailed.

The awakened Source sent a call into the sky, along the Weave, so powerful that Magadon knew it could be sensed across Faerun. It spoke only a short phrase, in a language-ancient Netherese—that Magadon had learned only moments before.

am here, it projected. Help me.p>

Magadon did not know to whom it was speaking–, perhaps it had called to no one—and he had no time to consider the implications.

The surge of power emitted from the awakened, fully-conscious Source knocked Magadon to his knees. He lowered his mental defenses and took into his mind everything the Source offered. New mental pathways opened; understanding dawned; realizations struck him, revelations. He grabbed his head and held it, fearful it would fly apart. Sounds were coming from his mouthgibberish—but he could not stop them. In those few moments he learned more of the Invisible Art, more of

himself, than he had learned from a lifetime of study. But he needed more.

Give it all to me, he projected to the Source, and was astounded at the power contained in his mental voice. The Source answered.

The power that filled Magadon doubled that which he previously had received. His mind felt aflame. He felt his veins straining. Dagger stabs of pain wracked his skull. Blood gushed from his nose, his ears. His vision went blurry. He forced himself to hold onto consciousness. Despite the pain, he let the power come until the Source had given him everything it had.

The Source dimmed while Magadon glowed with the power contained in his mind. He was soaked in blood, snot, saliva. He did not care. He roared and his voice boomed over the water. The crew turned from the kraken to face him. Their wide eyes showed fear, wonder. Evrel shouted but Magadon could not hear him. He heard only a keening in his ears, punctuated by the drumbeat of his heart. In that instant, he knew that his mental abilities exceeded even those of the Sojourner.

Behind the crew, he saw the mountain of flesh closing on Demon Binder, saw the glowing facets of the Source coming closer.

Magadon looked inward and found his mental focus. It brought him calm. He reached out with his mind in a way he had never before done. As his consciousness expanded, he saw the fluidity of reality, the uncertainty of outcomes, the interconnections not between events but between possible events. He knew he could affect those possibilities; he knew he could make the improbable—even the highly improbable-reality.

At his command, reality conformed to his will. At the bow of Demon Binder, a glowing, golden vertical line appeared. It expanded rapidly in width and height until it formed an oval larger than the ship. The glow wavered, steadied, and an image appeared—a shoreline, the lantern

light from a city, a thicket of masts and ships.

Selgaunt Bay. The crew stirred, ran for the bow as if to jump off the ship and into the bay.

Magadon exerted his will and pulled the portal toward Demon Binder.

A golden glow suffused ship and crew as they entered the portal. The kraken’s shriek of rage chased them through. A tentacle struck the ship just before the magic took hold and sent it careening forward. The crew fell to the deck, shouting in alarm.

In a blink, Demon Binder floated peacefully on the still waters of Selgaunt Bay. Magadon, wobbly, sealed the portal behind them.

Cut off from the Source, he felt bereft. Knowledge and power flowed out of him, as ephemeral as the memory of dreams. He held on to what he could, but it was disappointingly little.

The crew rose to their feet and looked around with dazed expressions. One cheered, another, another. Soon the whole crew was shouting, singing, thumping each other on the back.

Smiling faces turned to Magadon and lost their mirth. Magadon touched a hand to his face. It came away bloody. His vision blurred and he fell.

The surge of power from the planted Weave Tap seed caused the tower to shake under Vhostym’s feet. His sons had done it. They had planted the second seed of the Weave Tap in Sakkors’s mantle.

A charge went through Vhostym’s frail body—a wave of exultation that would have caused him to leap for joy had his body not been so broken. He controlled his emotions only with difficulty.

Soon he would have the Crown of Flame.

Vhostym had been young when he and his father first had walked in the shadow of the Crown. Vhostym had been stronger then, not as sensitive to light. He still remembered the smell of the wind off the water, the feel of the air on his skin, the sounds of the surface heard through his own ears. He recalled the moments with fondness. The light had burned his skin but he had endured; his father had made him endure. Father had intended to harden Vhostym to pain, and to excite his ambition by showing him the possibility of a life on the surface, under the sun.

Father had taught the lesson well.

Vhostym had come to believe that nothing was unattainable, not for him, and he was about to prove it. He could track the course of his life back to those moments shared with his father under the Crown of Flame. In a sense, he had been born that day on the surface. He could trace all the accomplishments of his life back to that single event.

It was fitting, then, that he would end his life with the same event. He would create a Crown of Flame, tame it not only for a few moments but for an entire day, and walk in its shadow before he died.

He thought of his sons and reached out his mental consciousness for them. He linked with Azriim and Dolgan immediately. He saw through their eyes a dark city street. They were in Selgaunt, and both were restless.

He allowed Azriim to sense the contact.

Sojourner, his son said. We wish what we were promised.

Soon, Vhostym answered. It would be dangerous for you to return here now. Wait where you are. I will contact you after I have completed my task. All of this will be finished soon.

He sensed Azriim’s perturbation, Dolgan’s disappointment, the human’s… ambivalence.

He reassured his sons. You will have what you were promised. I will keep my word. I will leave here what you require for your transformations.