Shadowbred (9 page)

Magadon figured there was a lesson in that. Too bad he had not learned it sooner. Magadon had not had the oak’s strength. The last year had broken him.

“Or bent me, at least,” he murmured.

The oak’s leaves were changing from green to autumn red. They looked beautiful even at night, especially at night, framed against the starry sky and glinting in the silver moonlight of the newly risen crescent of Selune and her Tears.

Magadon flattened his palm against the oak. He had missed the tree, or he had missed… the part of his life it represented.

But he was reclaiming that part of his life, reclaiming himself.

Droppings at the base of the tree caught his eye. He knelt to examine them, and recognized raccoon pellets. He stood, smiling. Things were coming back to him. He had not forgotten his woodlore.

A soft skitter sounded up in the tree. Magadon looked up and found two pairs of masked eyes peeking down at him—a mother raccoon and one of her young. He would not have seen the creatures but for the nightvision granted him by his fiendish blood.

“You’ve picked a good home, mother,” he said to the larger raccoon.

Mother and baby cocked their heads to the side, chittered, and ducked back into their hidden den. Magadon patted the tree’s trunk.

“Can you bear some more company, old man? I promise you will find me an easy guest.”

The oak kept its own counsel, so Magadon unslung his pack— stuffed full with gear, as always—and sat with his back against the trunk, facing the camp. The campfire was going strong, and merchants and men-at-arms sat around it on barrels, crates, and logs, talking, drinking, laughing.

Magadon stretched out his legs, interlaced his fingers behind his neck, and blew out a sigh. The oak felt good at his back. His friend Nestor had once said, “There’s naught steadier than an old oak.” Magadon knew it to be true. And he knew there was much to be said for steadiness.

He hoisted his waterskin in remembrance of Nestor and took a long drink. Thinking of Nestor and his death brought back a wash of memories, some good—of Erevis, Riven, and Jak—and some bad— of the Sojourner, the slaads, the Weave Tap, and… the Source.

Recalling the Source made him squirm. He cleared his throat and tried to forget what it had shown him, what he had known, what he had been, for those few moments of contact. But memories were stubborn things.

He unclenched his hands from behind his neck and held them before his face. A tremor shook them, softly at first, but growing stronger. He knew what was coming. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and waited. He had seen the same shaking in minddust addicts who had gone too long without their snuff.

The need came on him, the hunger. A tic caused his right eye to twitch.

The Source had given him so much knowledge, so much power. He could have done such good with it….

He should find it, go to it, and bond with it once more.

“No,” he said, and shook his head. Even if he had surrendered to his need, he could not have gone to it. The Source lay at the bottom of the Inner Sea, sticking out of the head of a creature as large as a city.

Magadon recognized what was happening and fought, as he did every day, to keep hold of himself. His mental addiction to the Source had caused him to lose himself once. An entire year of his life had vanished into a haze. He would not allow it to happen again.

He took a deep, shaky breath, felt the oak at his back, the breeze on his face, and the clean air in his lungs, and heard the laughter of the caravaneers, and rode out the pull.

After a time, it passed, more quickly than the day before. He was beating it. The realization strengthened him further.

Another chitter came from above. He looked up to find not two, but a row of six raccoon faces staring down at him, presumably the mother and all of her young. He could not help but smile at their wide-eyed, curious expressions. One of the young climbed over another and the mother chittered at them.

“Very well,” he said. “I will be on my way, but only after I eat.” The raccoons continued to stare at him with bright eyes through their masks.

Magadon pulled a half-wheel of cheese and two mostly-brown apples from a leather bag in his backpack. He habitually ate alone, separating himself from the caravaneers. He did not quite feel up to companionship. He thought the men of the caravan decent fellows, but he needed meditation more than company. Or so he told himself.

The raccoons chittered at him in irritation.

He took another bite of apple. “You don’t frighten me,” he said to them with a smile. “I have seen angry eyes behind a mask before.”

He took another bite of apple and noticed the black, clawed nails that had once been his normal fingernails. He sank them into the apple to hide them.

Inexplicably, his contact with the Source had changed not only his mind but also his body, somehow stirring the blood of the archdevil father that polluted his veins. As his mental powers had expanded, his body had come to more closely resemble that of his diabolical sire. As had his proclivities.

Soon after his separation from the Source, the nightmares had begun. The Nine Hells haunted his dreams. When he slept, he saw souls burning, writhing, screaming in pits of fire while leering devils looked on. The visions had grown worse over time. He felt as if they were moving toward some climax that would drive him mad. For months, he had feared sleep.

He had grown desperate, had sublimated his desire for the Source and his need to escape the dreams by turning first to drink, and when that did not stupefy him adequately, to drugs. He had lost himself for months. The dreams had not stopped, his need for the Source had not stopped, but he had been so dulled that they had bothered him less.

He scarcely remembered those days. He did remember that during the all-too-rare moments of clear-headedness, he had considered reaching out with his mind to Erevis or Riven, his friends, but had lacked the courage. His stupor had not dulled his shame

over what he had become. He had not wanted his friends to know of it.

Besides, each of them had their own burdens to carry.

The visions of the Hells had eventually left his dreams and invaded his waking hours. He’d hallucinated immolations on the city streets at midday, heard his father’s voice in the call of street vendors, seen devils in the darkness of every alley. He was falling into madness, but could not stop the descent.

Blood of my blood, his father assured him in a voice smoother than Calishite velvet.
can end all this and give you what you want, what you need.p>

Magadon had never been sure if the voice had been real or imagined, but he had been tempted. He awoke one night in a dust den, his shirt stained with blood—someone else’s. He’d known then that he had to do something to save himself or he would die, in spirit if not in body.

Ironically, the Source, by expanding his mental powers, had given him the tool he needed. He used it, performing a kind of psychic chirurgery on his own mind, walling off most of the dark, addicted portions of his consciousness from the rest. He likened it to cutting off a gangrenous limb, but this was more like splintering himself. He’d had to divide himself to save the whole. He could not cut off all of the addiction or all of the dark impulses, but he had severed most of them from his core.

And it worked. Mostly.

He still dreamed of the Hells. His body told him that he had not slept well in months, but his conscious mind did not remember. That was the important thing. He worried what kind of rot was occurring within him, unnoticed behind the mental wall, but he figured a man half-saved was better than a man wholly-damned.

A loud round of laughter from the merchants shook Magadon from his ponderings. One of the merchants, a brown-haired man with a pot belly and receding hairline, stood up and called over to him. Magadon thought he remembered his name was Grathan.

“Woodsman! We’ve a wager here. We all know that you never doff that hat.”

“Even when you sleep,” one of the men-at-arms shouted.

Grathan nodded. “Even when you sleep. I say you’ve something even more peculiar than your eyes under it.”

Magadon’s eyes—colorless but for the pupils—often drew comment. He had explained them to the merchants as a defect of birth, and he supposed it was, coming as it did from his fiendish blood. Most called them “asp eyes” because they looked like single pips on the dice: an unlucky roll.

“A scar or somesuch, perhaps,” Grathan said.

“Or maybe a balder head than Grathan’s,” shouted another of the merchants, bringing the rest to hoarse laughter.

“That’d be bald, indeed! A scar’d be better.”

Grathan waited for the laughter to die down, then gestured at a young merchant who sat near him. “Tark here says you wear it out of superstition, for luck or somesuch. Which is it? There are twenty silver falcons to the man with the right of it.”

Magadon pushed his floppy, wide-brimmed hat back on his head, though he took care to keep it over his horns.

“This hat?”

“None other,” said the merchant.

Magadon decided to amuse himself by telling them the truth. “I wear it to hide the devil horns sticking from my brow. Or somesuch. And that makes you both as wrong as an ore in a dwarfhold, so you can add the twenty falcons to my fee.”

The merchants and men-at-arms loosed raucous guffaws.

“Has you by the danglies there, Grathan!”

Grathan laughed along with the rest, even toasted Magadon with his tankard. When the group quieted, he said, “Done, sir. Such sum to you … or somesuch.”

Magadon appreciated the turn of phrase. He tipped his hat in a salute.

“But the added fee only if you share a drink with us,” called Tark, who had a much more commanding voice than his willowy frame suggested. “You abstain with such fortitude that Noss here,” he jerked a thumb at a burly man-at-arms near him, “claims you’re an ascetic Ilmaterite monk in disguise.”

Noss’s face wrinkled with puzzlement and he slurred through his beard. “Huh? Ascetic? What is that, a drunkard?” More laughter.

“A drink, sir,” seconded Grathan, and the others around the fire nodded and murmured agreement. “Come, join us. Our journey is almost done and custom demands we share a drink with our guide while still on the road.”

Noss filled a tankard with ale and held it up for Magadon.

Magadon rehearsed an excuse in his head, prepared to offer it, but surprised himself by changing his mind. It was custom around the southern shores of the Inner Sea to drink with a guide while on the road; and more than that, he suddenly wanted company more than privacy.

He adjusted his hat, collected his bow and pack, and rose to his feet.

To the raccoons, he said, “I’m away, Mother.” To the merchants, he said, “I can put your minds at ease that I am no ascetic, goodsirs, not by a wide margin. I’ve had everything from homebrewed swill in Starmantle to firewine in Westgate. But these days, I have sworn off spirits.”

The merchants booed and hissed, but all held their smiles. “You still must shed the hat,” someone called. “Yes! The hat!” “Yes!”

Magadon realized that his hat had become the focus of too much attention, albeit intended as jest. He had to do something to diffuse the matter or one of the men would grab it off his head as a fireside prank. And if the caravaneers learned that he was fiendspawn, the smiles and camaraderie would vanish as quickly as they had appeared. He had seen it happen before when someone discovered his horns, or the birthmark that marred his bicep.

As he approached the fire, he summoned some of his mental energy, used it to extend his consciousness, and lightly reached into the minds of the dozen caravaneers around the fire. None showed any sign of noticing.

He took a subtle hold of their visual perception, pulled off his hat, and modified what they all witnessed. Instead of horns, he caused

each of them to see only a smooth brow and his long dark hair. “Not even bald!” one of them shouted.

“You see?” he said, and fixed the hat back on his head. He released his hold on the caravaneers’ senses and offered a lie. “Neither scar nor bald head. I wear the hat because it belonged to a close comrade who fell to gnolls while we were on the road together. So when I am on the road, I rarely take it off. Well enough?”

The men understood that. “Well enough,” most said in more subdued tones, and all nodded. Two even raised a drink in a salute. Others cursed the gnolls.

Magadon drew tight the drawstring on the hat and took a seat by the fire. As the jests, tales, and insults flew, he held his conversational ground as well as any. For the first time in almost a year, he truly felt like his old self. He was pleased to see that his hands remained steady throughout the evening, even when his thoughts returned to the Source, as they continually did. The pull was weakening, albeit slowly.

As Grathan and another merchant debated the intricacies of Sembian contract law, Magadon’s mind drifted back to a night long ago, on the Plane of Shadows, when he and Erevis had shared a conversation across a campfire. Not banter or debate, but honest words between men. Magadon had admitted his lineage to Erevis and Erevis had admitted his fears to Magadon. Neither had judged the other. They’d become friends that night. Later events had only strengthened the bond.

Magadon missed Erevis and Riven, missed them both more than he missed the Source, more than he had missed the oak.

He realized all of a sudden that he had been foolish to isolate himself. His friends had not judged him for being born of a devil and they would not have judged him for his addiction to the Source. He had lost himself all the more easily for not having his friends around him. He resolved to find them as soon as the caravan reached Starmantle.

His mind made up, he allowed himself to enjoy the camaraderie around the campfire. After a few hours, the drink took its toll on the caravaneers. By the time Selune passed her zenith, the merchants and

men-at-arms had begun to wander to their wagons for sleep. A few, including Tark, nodded off where they sat. Grathan stood. “I’m off to sleep.”