Midnights Mask (31 page)

“I’m not,” Cale answered. “The sun is?

As they charged down the hall, Cale whispered the words to a spell that allowed him to see dweomers. The double doors glowed in his sight, the wards evident to his magic-sensing vision. The Sojourner had warded the doors well. Cale did not hesitate. Blade in hand, he threw his shoulder against them and knocked them open.

Glyphs flared and magical energy blazed out of the jambs. Weaveshear drank it all and Cale suffered no harm. Power rushed into the blade’s steel and it emitted a cloud of shadows. The weapon vibrated in Cale’s grasp, pregnant with the Sojourner’s power. Cale whirled around, pointed the tip at the head of the stairs, and waited.

The moment the slaadi appeared, he discharged the energy.

A beam of viridian light streaked from Weaveshear’s tip—the recoil drove Cale back a step-and hit Azriim in the stomach. The slaad bared his fangs and grimaced but the energy seemed to have no effect. Even Azriim looked surprised. He looked up and grinned a mouthful of sharp teeth.

“Go,” Jak said to Cale. “We’ll hold them off. Get the Weave Tap. Kill it.”

Cale hesitated as the slaadi advanced.

“Go,” Magadon said over his shoulder.

Cale nodded, turned, and ran into the room. Judging from its size and the defaced murals painted on the walls, the room once was a religious sanctum of some kind. Scorch marks marred much of the floor, as if a magical battle had been fought there.

In the center of the chamber stood the Weave Tap, grown to ten times the size of the sapling Cale had seen the slaadi remove from the Fane of Shadows. Silver limbs formed a canopy for golden leaves sparkling with arcane power. A silver pulse periodically raced up the bole, like the beat of a heart. The energy in the room stood the hairs of Cale’s arms on end.

The Tap’s roots stood exposed, the ends melded with the floor of the chamber. The entire ceiling of the room glowed silver. Cale visualized the tower shooting a beam of magical energy from its top into the sky. If he killed the Tap, he would kill the beam, kill the eclipse, stop the Sojourner.

He stepped through the space between shadows and covered in one stride the distance between the doorway and the Weave Tap. He materialized amidst its roots, near the bole.

Behind him, he could hear his comrades fighting for their lives with the slaadi. The combat had leaked through the doors into the sanctum. Cale turned to see Azriim unleashing a flurry of claw strikes against Riven. The assassin held off the attack with a whirling counter of his sabers, but barely. The slaad forced Riven backward through the doorway and fired a bolt of energy from his palm at Magadon, who was fighting alongside Jak to finish off Dolgan. The energy struck the guide squarely and drove him into the wall-hard.

Dolgan took the opportunity to tear into Jak. A claw strike sent the little man careening backward, bleeding from his chest. He answered with a stab of his shortsword and a shouted spell. White fire flew from his hand and struck the slaad in the chest. It scorched Dolgan’s skin, but the slaad only grinned.

Jak looked over his shoulder and caught Cale watching.

“Kill it, godsdammit!” the little man shouted. He turned and charged Dolgan. Magadon climbed to his feet and joined him. Blades and claws met.

Cale turned, sheathed Weaveshear, and wrapped his arms around the Tap’s bole. The wood felt warm, like skin, and the moment he touched it, he knew the Tap possessed sentience.

He gritted his teeth as the Tap’s awareness reached for his mind. He did not resist it. The mental touch was not hostile, merely unfocused, flailing. Still, it indicated a living, self-aware creature.

Cale sensed its nature through the mindlink—born of the Weave and the Shadow Weave, of light and darkness, forever existing in the gray area between the poles of its being.

Just like Cale.

And Cale was going to kill it. He had no choice.

I’m sorry, he thought, and hoped it understood.

For a breath, but only a breath, he almost reconsidered. But the sounds of combat from behind brought him back to himself. Jak screamed. Magadon shouted. Another spell sizzled into the stone.

Pulses of silver light throbbed between Cale’s arms as regular as a heartbeat. Cale pictured the first place in Selgaunt that came to his mind and called upon the darkness to move both himself and the Weave Tap there.

The darkness answered. Pitch surrounded him and the Tap. He felt the familiar sensation of being stretched parchment-thin, and in the next heartbeat found himself blinking in the half-light of Temple Avenue. He had brought the Weave Tap with him. It stood beside him, towering and unstable on its exposed roots.

Shouts of surprise greeted his appearance. The street was crowded.

“Look! Look there!”

The street traffic stopped. Horses started, snorted at his sudden appearance. Heads poked out of coaches, out of temple windows. A hundred faces, formerly upturned to watch the partial eclipse, turned to regard him. The pilgrims near him backed away quickly, warily. Children regarded him with wide eyes. A walkway philosopher pointed his finger at Cale and berated him as an agent of devilry.

“Is that a tree?” someone shouted. “Look at it!”

Exposed to the partial sunlight, the Weave Tap began to writhe and smoke beside Cale. The silver pulses came faster, faster, the frantic beat of terror.

Cale backed off, eyes wide. People poured out of the temples to watch.

The Tap’s branches and roots twisted, curling with agony, blackening in the partial sunlight. Formerly glowing leaves of pure arcane power fell from smoking limbs, showering the street and disintegrating in small explosions of sparks. The Tap’s consciousness still had a vague hold on Cale’s mind and he distantly sensed its pain and fear.

Bark peeled; the tree’s trunk split. Cale imagined the equivalent happening to a man—bones shattering, skin burning, peeling away. It was too much.

The Tap started to topple over.

“Get out of the way,” Cale shouted to no one in particular, and the assembled crowd retreated.

The Tap caught for a moment on one of the Hulorn’s statues, then crashed fully to the street. Limbs shattered. Magical energy sprayed out in all directions.

“I’m sorry,” Cale said to it again.

The Tap’s death throes became increasingly violent as it burned in the sun. The crowd shouted, oohed. The Tap’s thrashing limbs and roots threw off intense flashes of power. Where they landed, unpredictable magical effects occurred: cobblestones sprouted legs and scurried into the crowd; flowers rained from the sky; a horse was transmogrified into a mouse; one of the bestial statues that lined the street-a manticore—sprang to life and flew roaring into the sky.

The crowd of pilgrims turned and ran, panicked. From afar, Cale heard the telltale clarion of a trumpet. A squad of Selgaunt’s watch, the Scepters, was coming.

Cale wanted to wait, to ensure that the Tap died and that the geyser of magic accompanying its death would cause no real harm. But his friends needed him. He stood for a moment, torn. The Tap’s silver heartbeat slowed. He felt it dying.

Erevis! Magadon projected into his brain, his voice urgent. We need you!

Magadon’s tone sent alarm through Cale.

The Scepters rounded the corner at a run, blades bare. They were a dagger toss from Cale. The watch sergeant looked first at Cale, then the burning, dying Weave Tap, and slowed his advance. He pointed the tip of his weapon at Cale.

“Hold there, good sir,” he said.

Beside Cale, the Weave Tap burst into flames. Gray-green smoke poured into the sky. Cale glanced into the faces around him and saw…. Sephris.

The loremaster was staring at him out of the crowd. He shook his head and mouthed some words. “Two and two are four.”

Erevis! Magadon called again, and the despair in the guide’s voice made Cale’s mouth go dry.

Ignoring the Scepters and the loremaster, Cale stepped into the shadow of a nearby statue and imagined in his mind the chamber in which he had found the Weave Tap. He drew Weaveshear.

“I said do not move,” the watch sergeant commanded again.

The darkness gathered around Cale.

The Scepters rushed him.

The last thing he saw before he moved across Faerun to the tower was Sephris, calculating.

Cale materialized in the shadows of the sanctum, an eerie void with the Weave Tap gone. What he saw near the doorway froze him.

Magadon, prone, bleeding, and laboring to breathe, cradled Jak in his lap. He had a hand the little man’s brow. Jak lay across the guide’s legs, covered in blood, unmoving. Unmoving.

Riven stood near them, watching, blades held slackly at his sides. His expression was impossible to decipher-it could have been controlled grief, contained rage, or indifference.

“Jak?”

The word came out of Cale’s mouth before he could stop it. He tried to move but his body would not respond.

“Jak?” he said again, his voice louder.

He knew his friend would not answer.

A ragged gash opened Jak’s throat. The little man’s blades lay on the ground near him. He was not breathing. Neither was Cale.

“I tried to save him….” Magadon choked as he looked up. Tears glistened in his colorless eyes.

Cale swallowed. His vision was blurry. His body went weak, numb. He managed a step forward, another. He could not take his eyes from the body of his friend, his best friend.

“I thought you were going to miss the festivities,” said a voice, Azriim’s voice. “I am glad to see you return.”

For the first time, Cale noticed the slaadi. They stood on the other side of the sanctum’s double doors, denied entry by a barrier of force. Magadon must have raised it. The barrier distorted the air like a lens of imperfect glass. The slaadi’s forms looked twisted and distended through it, but Cale could still see Azriim’s smirk. Both held their teleportation rods in their hands.

Cale ignored the creatures, sheathed his blade, and moved to Magadon’s side. He knelt and pulled Jak’s limp body from the guide. Jak felt so… light. The little man’s eyes were open but unseeing. Cale could not quite believe how small his friend looked, how fragile. Had he always been that small?

Jak’s shirt was twisted around his torso and for some absurd reason Cale found himself straightening it. He tried to ignore the sticky fluid that clung to his fingers. He noticed that the little man’s left fist was clenched around something. Cale gently peeled back the fingers-he had never noticed how tiny were Jak’s hands-to reveal the jeweled pendant that served as Jak’s holy symbol. Jak must have taken it in hand before the end. Cale’s eyes welled and he closed his friend’s hand over the symbol.

He stood, cradling his friend, and carried him a few steps away from the doors. It seemed right to him that they be apart from everyone else.

“Look at him,” Dolgan said from behind the barrier, and Cale heard the mockery in the slaad’s tone. “I think he might weep.”

Cale kept his back to the slaadi and looked down into the little man’s green eyes. A thousand memories rushed through his mind. In all of them, Jak was smiling, laughing, smoking. Cale could not remember laughing except when he had been in Jak’s company. What would he do without him?

The tears pooling in his eyes fell down his cheeks, welled in his eyes, splashed on the little man’s face. He wiped them away. A sob wracked him.

His mind was empty. He wanted to say something, anything, but no words would come. instead, an inarticulate animal sound emerged from his throat, a primal expression of the inexpressible.

They had been through so much. Survived so much. Only to end like this?

His mind kept repeating: Flow can this be? Flow can this be?

Jak’s body was cooling in his hands. His best friend was growing cold. Cale was distantly conscious of his rage beginning to build. It welled up from the core of his soul, soaked him, caused his body to shake. Shadows swirled around him, little flames of darkness.

The rage gave him a focus, something to hold onto, a purpose.

His tears stopped. His sobs stopped. The world restarted.

He turned, met Riven’s gaze, held it. Neither of them said anything. Cale saw something in the assassin’s eye, something he had never seen. Riven’s breath came fast; he bled from half a dozen small cuts. Magadon still lay on the floor, propped on his elbow, trying to staunch the gashes in his chest and abdomen. From the grotesque angle from which the guide’s leg jutted from his hip, Cale could see it was broken or out of joint. The guide’s face was nearly as white as his eyes. His eyes were glassy but focused.

Cale had healing spells at his command but he could not use them on Magadon, not then. At the moment, Cale’s grief was the whetstone that sharpened his rage that honed his hate. He had no healing in him. He had only anger. He could do only harm.

He knelt down on one knee and set Jak on the floor, against the wall. He brushed his hand over the little man’s face and closed his eyes, gently. It was the last gentle thing he would do for a time.

“He is crying,” Azriim said. Dolgan chuckled.

‘Cale thought back to the docks in Selgaunt when Jak had told him they should be heroes if they had the chance. He would honor his promise to the little man. But not yet. Before he could be a hero, he first had to be a killer.

He rose, looked over at Magadon, and said, “Which one?”

Magadon stared at him uncomprehending. He was going into wound shock.

“Which one did this?” Cale snapped. His tone was harsh; he had not meant it to be. Shadows boiled from his skin. His fists were clenched.

“The big one,” Magadon stammered, his words slurred.

Cale nodded. He looked through the barrier at Dolgan the big one. The distorted air magnified the slaad’s claws. Blood coated those claws. Jak’s blood.

Cale’s hands opened and closed, opened and closed. The pounding of his heart filled his ears. With effort, he took control of his anger, channeled it.

“I think you’ve made him angry, Dolgan,” Azriim jibed.

Dolgan fixed Cale with a hard glare and bared his fangs, “Good,” the slaad said.