Shadowbred (18 page)

Midnight approached and with it came temptation. He could pray to Mask for a spell of divination, use it to locate Magadon. A simple prayer, used one time and never again. He looked at his hands, at the ribbons of shadow that dangled from his fingertips.

He fought the impulse. Magadon would not want him to do it.

He whispered an expletive at Mask and sat in his familiar chair under the elm, surrounded by the night, one with the dark. Crickets chirped. The nightjar cooed. A soft wind stirred the trees.

He withdrew Jak’s pipe, the pipe he had smoked at midnight for the last year or more, the pipe with which he defied Mask. Holding it by the handle, he eyed it.

For the first time, he put it aside unused.

Midnight arrived and Cale cursed Mask again but could not

bring himself to smoke. He felt the pull of his god. He resisted, but not for long.

He could not let Magadon suffer due to his own stubbornness. He snatched darkness from the air and carefully formed it with shaking fingers into a mask of shadow, which he placed over his face. The shadows clung to his skin.

He reached out to his god and prayed. He asked for only a single spell, something that would help him locate Magadon.

Mask answered immediately, and Cale could not deny the rush he felt when he connected with his god. He felt a charge in his mind as the power to cast the spell embedded there. Mask tried to give him more power, to draw Cale back fully, but Cale cut off the connection despite the comfort it brought him. He wanted no more than necessary from the Shadowlord.

Heart racing, breath coming fast, Cale wiped his palm through the air and smeared the darkness into a black rectangle that hovered before him. Ready, he murmured the words to the divination Mask had provided. As the spell took effect, Cale picture Magadon in his mind and spoke his name aloud. The magic went out in search of his friend.

Swirls of pitch formed on the lens’s surface. Cale powered the spell with his will and again pronounced Magadon’s name.

The lens remained dark. Cale tried again and still the spell revealed nothing. He poured all of his desire into the magic, but still it showed nothing.

Cale let the magic dissipate, disappointed and worried. Wherever Magadon was, Cale’s scrying magic could not reach him. For the moment, there was nothing else to be done. He removed the mask of shadow from his face and dispersed it.

“Nothing has changed between us,” he said to Mask, but he heard the lie in his words. Something had changed. Cale had opened a door he had closed over a year ago, and he liked what he found on the other side. Shutting it again would be difficult.

For the next few hours he sat under the tree and watched the sky, trying to decide his next course. He watched stars rise and set. Hours passed and still he came to no decision.

Dawn was only a few hours away when a tickle started in his ears, then increased to a buzzing. Hope rose in him and Cale rode it out of his chair and onto his feet.

Magadon? Mags?

The buzzing in his ears intensified and Cale did not feel the telltale sensation of mental contact. Instead, he realized the tingle was the touch of an ordinary spell. His hope turned to alarm and the names of several enemies he had left alive throughout the years ran through his brain. Darkness leaked defensively from his pores. He reached to his belt for Weaveshear but realized he had left the weapon in its scabbard back in the cottage. He cursed.

The buzzing grew louder, but it slowed. He recognized it as a voice speaking rapidly, a sending. The buzz continually slowed until it matched the speed of a normal voice. When Cale heard it, he had trouble brearhing. He had not heard it in a long while.

Mundane means of contacting you failed, said Tamlin Uskevren, the son of his former lord. I need help. If you still love my mother, sister, the memory of my father, return to Stormweather immediately.

Cale’s surprise at hearing from Tamlin caused his thoughts to bounce around like crazed bees. A thousand questions coursed through his mind, a thousand memories: of Tazi, of Shamur, of Thamalon, and of Stormweather Towers. A surge of emotion ripped through him, a feeling like he’d known while searching the Dragon Coast for Magadon. He recognized it for what it was: the feeling that things were right.

He started to reply to the spell, to ask for some time to consider, but realized that it was nothing more than a one-way sending that did not allow for a reply. For all he knew, Tamlin could have cast it a tenday earlier. The magic could have been seeking Cale for days. Whatever crisis had caused Tamlin to seek him out may already have become more acute, or passed entirely.

He had met his god and his past in the same night. Sephris Dwendon’s words bounced around his brain. Two and two are four.

He looked to the cottage where Varra was sleeping, and guilt squeezed his stomach. He chided himself for bringing her there. While he had never misled her with words, he knew his actions had

given her a false impression. She assumed he would stay with her in the cottage. But he knew that he could not. A cottage in the forest was not where he belonged. Helping his friends, helping his family, that was where he belonged.

Cale considered the implication of the sending. Tamlin had to be desperate to reach out to him. Cale and Tamlin had disagreed often, mostly over the young man’s dissolute lifestyle. And while Cale had seen Tamlin change for the better in rhe months before Cale had left Stormweathet Towers, their relationship had never been warm.

Cale looked up at the sky and imagined how it would feel to see the Uskevren again. He realized then that he had already made up his mind. At the moment, he could do nothing more to find Magadon, and Magadon would have told him to go help his family. He would leave at once. And after he had put matters with the Uskevren to right, he would return to the search for Magadon.

He looked back at the cottage and saw Varra at the open window. The sight of her made his heart race. She ducked out of sight and soon a light flared in the cottage. She emerged carrying a small clay lamp. She wore only her night dress and the wind stirred her dark hair. The image reminded Cale eerily of the spirits that he, Jak, Magadon, and Riven had seen on the Plane of Shadow, moving through the ruins of Elgrin Fau—the Seekers of the Sun.

Varra hurried over to the elm. He stood as she approached.

“Did I awaken you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Not you. Are you all right?”

He nodded, positioned the other wooden chair beside his. She sat and so did he. He saw little good to come from equivocating.

“I received a message.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “A message? Tonight? How?” He cleared his throat. “A spell, from the son of a very old friend.” Varra looked only mildly surprised that Cale had received a magical sending in the dark of night. “The friend you have been seeking?” “No. Another.”

She stared into the woods. So did he. The distance between them was much greater than that between the chairs.

“What did it say, this message?” she asked. “It asked for my help,” Cale answered.

She nodded. Silence sat heavy between them. Cale wrestled with how to tell her he had to leave. Before he could say it, she asked, “Why don’t you share with me, Erevis?”

The question took him off guard. “What do you mean?”

“I mean …” she trailed off, searching for words. “Each night when you leave the meadow and do… whatever you do, I lay awake, terrified that you won’t come back. Did you know that? You have never told me where you go, what you do.”

Cale looked at his hands. “I didn’t… I thought you were sleeping. And you do not want to know.”

She looked at him. “Yes, I do. I see the bloodstains on yout clothes. You try to wash them off in the brook but I see them. I’ve asked no questions about it, about anything, but…”

She looked away.

Cale said nothing, merely stared at his hands as if they had an answer. Shadows slowly rose from his fingertips. He watched them drift off into the night like smoke and made up his mind to tell her the truth. He turned in his chair to face her.

“Here it is, then. Sometimes when I leave here, I go to help some of the villages around us.”

She cocked her head. “Those villages are days away, Erevis.”

Cale nodded. “You know what I am, Varra. I can travel very fast through the darkness.”

She stared at him, eyes wide, and nodded at him to continue.

“While I’m away, I…” he gazed into the night, “… kill things. Creatures, mostly. Marauding monsters, trolls and the like. It’s gotten worse of late. But sometimes people. It depends. That is the blood you have seen on my clothing.”

He saw the shock in her eyes but pushed onward. “They are evil things, Varra. Evil men.”

She scooted back in her seat, as far from him as the chair allowed. He doubred she even realized it. He knew then that leaving was the right thing to do for her, too.

“Why do you do it?”

Cale swallowed. “Because I promised a friend once that I would try to be a hero. It sounds absurd, I know. But I meant it. And when I do … those things, I’m keeping the promise to save people.”

Varra stared into the woods. “The world is too big to save everything, Erevis.”

He shook his head. She did not understand. “I do not want to save everything. I just want to save something. I need to.” The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted them.

Varra’s look was sharp enough to cut flesh. She studied his face. “Is that why you brought me from Skullport? Because you needed to save me?”

Cale could not look her in the eyes. His silence answered her well enough.

“You don’t love me?” she asked softly, and her voice quavered.

He did look into her eyes, then. He leaned forward and took her hands in his. She was so warm. “Varra, I care for you. Very much. I feel something between us, something … wonderful. But there are things I must do, and those things stand between us like a wall. That’s why I do not share myself with you. I cannot keep my promise here. It’s not enough, what I’m doing. I need to do more.” He swallowed, then said, “I felt like myself when I was looking for my friend, Varra. I was talking with people and standing in places that belonged on a street in Skullport, and I felt like myself.”

He felt embarrassed saying it, but there it was.

She spoke in a small but resolute voice. “You cannot be yourself here? With me?”

Cale spoke quietly. “I am not a man made to be a husband, to live in a house, tend a garden. Varra, listen to me—I have fought demons, killed creatures from other planes with my hands, these hands.” He held up his shadow enshrouded hand, scarred and cal-lused. “I watched a wizard dim the sun, then broke his body as mine broke. I am different from other men. More than in my skin. I’ve seen forry winters and I will see hundreds more, thousands maybe. But who I am, what I am, was determined in a few key hours scattered over the course of my life up to now. I cannot change that. I do not want to change it.”

Varra shook her head. “No, Erevis. Everything you do is who you are, not a few moments. You choose to focus on certain events and let those define you, but they needn’t. You are more than that.”

Cale looked away. He could not expect her to understand. She did not know what he had seen, what he had done.

She glanced up at the stars. “We are finally’ talking to one another, but only to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye” sounded hard to Cale, but he nodded and said nothing. He could think of nothing else to say.

She took a deep breath and laid her palm on his cheek. “Do you remember what I said to you, back in Skullport, when we first met?”

Cale spoke nine languages but Varra’s words then, still stuck in his brain, had confounded him. “Retain ilnes baergis,”

“It means, ‘I know your soul.’ And I do, Erevis. I do not want you to leave. And I do not think you ate as different from other men as you think. You would be a good husband, a good father. Your deeds are different, but not your heart.” She smiled and Cale thought her beautiful. “You would stay if I asked you. I know you would. But you would resent me for it. I cannot live with that.”

Cale started to protest but knew she spoke truth. They had never lied to each other. He would not start now.

“We are connected, Erevis. I don’t know how or why. I just know that we are. Do what you must. Go, help your friends. I’ll remain here.”

Cale looked into her eyes. “What will you do?”

She smiled and waved a hand at the cottage. “I will keep up the house and tend my garden. I will draw water from the well and put food on the table. This is home for me now. It will not be the same without you, but it will still be home.”

“I am sorry, Varra,” Cale said, and meant it.

She smiled. Her tears glistened in the starlight. “I know those are not idle words. That is why I love you.”

She touched his lips. He kissed her fingers. She closed her eyes and smiled. Without another word, she rose, pushed him back in the chair and climbed atop him.

“Varra…”

She hushed him with a finger on his lips. He looked into her eyes and understood—they both knew this was farewell. He surrendered to the moment, wrapping his arms around her, kissing her neck. Her body radiated warmth; his radiated shadows.

Her hands answered his, caressing his shoulders, his hair, the back of his neck. She kissed his ear, his lips. He slipped her nightdress over her head and ran his hands down the length of her nude body. She tugged at his nightshirt.

He put everything out of his mind except her—her smell, her touch, her taste. He wanted to remember them always. She responded with the same urgency. Soon they were lost in each other, and his hands, the bloodstained hands that had killed demons, slaads, and dozens of men, were gentle for a time.

Afterward, they walked naked to the cottage in silence, holding hands. When he entered, he took his gear from his old wooden chest and donned his enchanted leather armor, strapped on Weaveshear and his daggers, pulled on his boots. His gaze fell upon the book he had received from the guardian of the Fane of Shadows. He had not opened it in over a year. The last time he had opened it, he discovered that Mask had placed a black mask within it—a new holy symbol. He held the book in his hands, studying its face. He flipped open the cover.