The Edge of Chaos (26 page)

“Nice hit,” he snarled, but his expression was of a wounded animal, cornered and more vicious than before. “Now it’s your turn.”

Abruptly, Beaugrat sheathed his sword. He pressed his wrists together with his palms facing Slanya. What was he doing?

Blue fire flickered to life from the spellscar on his shoulder, rippling like ignited oil down to his elbow and encasing his whole arm.

A wave of nausea pulsed through Slanya. But as she focused on Beaugrat’s spellscar, she felt something awaken inside her. Energy sparking from one point to another, prickling against her skin. Her own spellscar activated, illuminating her skin. And as the wild magic permeated her and fragmented her, she suddenly she understood how Beaugrat created the blue fire.

‘ She understood, and she reached out to affect it. As her spellscar web attuned to Beaugrat’s power, Slanya’s reality split and split again until she could barely keep her mind integrated. But she found the essence of Beaugrat’s ability. Slanya felt the wild magic flowing through Beaugrat’s scar, and she willed it to stop. In an instant, the web of filaments that made up her spellscar closed down his power.

The blue fire on Beaugrat’s arm guttered and dwindled away then died. He stared at his hands in disbelief. “How did you … ?”

Slanya didn’t really know. When her spellscar flared to life, she simply understood how Beaugrat’s own spellscar worked—and how to stop it from working.

The big man stumbled, weakened and in shock. He fell to his knees, his plate armor ringing against the tile floor.

Slanya wasted no time. The fragments of her reality made physical combat difficult and quick movements nauseating. Her staff came down hard on his head, and Beaugrat collapsed to the floor in a heap of metal and flesh.

Slanya glanced around. Tyrangal and the genasi guard

fought vigorously, each unable to do serious harm to the other. Tyrangal was clearly the more powerful wizard, but the genasi’s shield made her invulnerable to attacks. On the opposite side of the room, Kaylinn and two others from the monastery had reached Duvan. They were examining him, and as much as she wanted to go to Duvan, her skills were needed elsewhere for the moment.

Can I do it again? Slanya wondered. Turning, she reached out with her ability and touched the genasi wizard fighting to a near stalemate with Tyrangal. Yes. In moments, Slanya understood the source and nature of the guard’s protective shield. She saw how the shield ability worked.

Different shards of reality vied for the attention of Slanya’s mind. She could not hold everything together, and part of her knew that if she didn’t stop using her spellscar ability shortly, her mind would unhinge completely from the physical world around her.

She wanted to try one more thing first. Whether it was worth the risk to herself, she never considered. Watching as though from farther and farther away, Slanya tried to reverse the process. She used her spellscar ability and tried to amplify the guard’s shield.

And she saw the shield double in diameter, then triple. Before her fragmenting eyes, Slanya watched as the shield grew so large that it soon encompassed Tyrangal as well. The genasi’s eyes went wide in astonishment.

Astonishment turned to fear as the full power of Tyrangal’s spells descended upon her. Cast from inside the bubble, Tyrangal’s flames incinerated the genasi guard.

The guard’s aquamarine skin blackened, charred, and blistered. In seconds, the genasi was reduced to soot hovering in the space where a fully alive being had been. The shield vanished, and the genasi’s remains drifted in the air like dust.

Turning slowly, Slanya’s mind sparkling like a constellation of independent stars, she became aware that Kaylinn was

yelling something from where she stood over Duvan’s limp body. As Slanya’s spellscar waned in successive pulses, she tried to focus, tried to reintegrate herself. It seemed to take forever, but eventually she heard what Kaylinn was yelling.

“He’s dead!” Kaylinn said. “Duvan is dead.”

Stunned and enraged, Slanya screamed, “No!” But she could barely hear herself.

Beaugrat lay slumped at Slanya’s feet, completely helpless. Anger rose up in her. Duvan was dead, and it was this man’s fault. Duvan did not deserve to be dead. Duvan had saved her life several times. He was her friend.

As if watching herself from far away, from different vantage points simultaneously, Slanya reached down and took hold of Beaugrat’s bruised head. She crooked his jaw into the fold of her right elbow and made sure her grip would not slip.

Anger welled up inside her. She clenched her jaw and with all her strength, jerked Beaugrat’s head in a rapid, wrenching twist. The snap of his spine made a satisfying crunch, and she knew he was dead.

Part of her knew she shouldn’t want revenge. She had been taught that revenge accomplished nothing. Part of her knew she’d done this before, a long time ago as a little girl. But that time it had accomplished something. That time, revenge had changed her life.

That wasn’t revenge, she realized. That was escape. Survival.

Here, too, killing Beaugrat was survival. The man had proven that he would keep coming back. His continued existence was a danger to Duvan. Well, not anymore.

Slanya stood, her reality fragmented. Queasy, her awareness floating out of her body, she collapsed next to her dead victim.

Duvan stood on a featureless plane—a flat gray landscape stretching as far as he could see. The sky overhead was a lighter shade of gray. Ahead, there were no trees or rocks or hills or vegetation of any kind. He could no longer taste the intense iron tang of blood in the back of his throat, and the thick smell of blood had disappeared.

There were no other people on this vast plane, none close enough to see at least. However, he could hear something. Whispers and hissing bass voices were the only sound, an undercurrent of indistinguishable vocal droning that seemed to come from all around. Those whispers permeated his spirit, seeming to snap at his soul like dogs.

Where am I? he wondered.

Duvan examined himself. He was whole, his body sound except far a dry cut under his ribcage. No blood there, but the scar remained open. It didn’t hurt. In fact he felt nothing-no pain, no joy. Nothing. Only emptiness.

He felt like an animated husk—a hollowed-out marionette.

Turning, Duvan caught sight of a small, gray bump on the horizon—a tiny blip on the flat landscape of gray. He started walking toward it, his progress marked only by the shape’s fractional increase in size. But whatever it was, that dŤH bump on the otherwise Sat plane, Duvan felt drawn to it.

Deep gray and black shadows drifted like tatters of wind-driven fog all around him as he walked. He felt no fear and no fatigue as he walked and walked. For hours he walked, and the dark bump on the horizon grew little by little. Days and tendays and even months seemed to pass as: he trudged forward. He had no sense of time in this place.

Fragments of memory flitted through his mind. He’d heard tell that souls passed to the Fugue Plane, Kelemvor’s home, to be judged. Perhaps that is where I am, he thought. But where is Kelemvor?

After more hours of walking, some of the whispered voices grew more distinct. One of them started talking to him, telling him that he didn’t have to go to the City of Judgment. Telling him that there were better options. The gods might not want him, but there were lords elsewhere who would accept him with open arms. He would start out at the bottom, but a soul like his could rise quickly. He would have power and eventual dominion over many others.

Duvan shook his head and marched on.

You should consider the offer, the whispers murmured. You are one of the Faithless. Your fate will otherwise be an eternity of boredom and monotony. The death god will entomb you in the walls of his city, forever.

Duvan walked on, considering. The Faithless—he had heard of that legend. No god to speak for him meant spending eternity as part of the City of Judgment. Duvan felt detached from himself, but even so he knew that he did not want to end up that way.

But the alternative? An eternity in the thrall of the demons of the Abyss. Endless boredom or endless pain.

As if on cue—although it could have been hours later since Duvan had completely lost track of time—another voice came to him. “Duvan?” It was not the low hiss of the demons’ voices. This was a voice he recognized. “Duvan?”

He turned to see a shimmering archway shining with blinding light, so bright he couldn’t see anyone through it. “I am here,” he said.

“I have come to guide you back, if you will come,” the voice said. “You must decide quickly, for the spell does not last long.”

Somewhere in the distant, hollow recesses of his mind, Duvan remembered his life—the struggles, the distrust, the pain.

There was also pleasure, he remembered. That had been

part of his life. And contentment. Sadness, yes, but also humor and even joy, once or twice.

“I will come,” he told the voice—a voice he recognized as belonging to the High Priestess Kaylinn of Slanya’s monastery. Slanya had not betrayed him after all. His friend Slanya had come to save him.

His friend. Duvan liked the thought of that.

“Step through,” Kaylinn said. “Come back into the light.”

And so he did.

***** ***

Commander Accordant Vraith strode purposefully through the throngs of revelers who had arrived for the Festival of Blue Fire. Pilgrims young and old had come to this broad, grassy field on the boundary between the mundane and the glorious. Entire families celebrated here along the border of the Plaguewrought Land.

The pilgrims had brought their wagons full of supplies and had built huge bonfires whose flames licked the sky. Here and there, pilgrims danced to music and singing. They feasted on roasted food and drank wine and ale without restraint. Many children joined in the festivities, and Vraith noticed more than a few coming-of-age rituals under way.

They smelled of joy and intoxication. Chaos and abandonment.

Vraith felt the stirrings of her spellscar beneath her sternum, eager to pull the threads of their souls and weave them together. If her ritual worked, some part of each of these lucky volunteers would end up locked inside the new border.

Vraith’s deputy—Renfod, himself a Loremaster Accordant— came up next to her, joining a handful of others here to carry out her instructions. The chaotic crowd would have to be at

least minimally structured, which she knew might prove more difficult than performing the actual ritual. It was one thing to arrange five or ten people, and quite another to organize a thousand or so.

The evening sky reddened overhead as she neared the border veil. Like a sheen of oil on water, the barrier reflected an undulating rainbow, stretching like a semi-translucent curtain as far as she could see in all directions. Most of the pilgrims gave the barrier a wide berth.

“Has anyone seen Brother Gregor?” Vraith asked nobody in particular. “He’d better have brought his elixir.”

Renfod nodded, then said,. “He’s here, Commander. At the edge of the festivities.”

Vraith smiled. “Excellent. We’ll start with him. Lead on.”

Renfod’s dark form angled away from the border veil and through the crowds of drinking and dancing pilgrims. Vraith appreciated the man’s efficiency, his obedience, and willingness to serve.

Still, there was no need to get sentimental. He was just one filament in the tapestry of her rise to authority and power. A willing filament to be sure, but nothing more. Her ascendancy would culminate, ultimately, in her rapture—her melding with the sharn. She would become one with the transcendent collective minds of the sharn; she would live in the Blue Fire and across many universes simultaneously.

Unfortunately, while Renfod bent over backward to help her further her cause, the same could not be said for Brother Gregor.

She hated that she needed him. But there was nobody else who could work the alchemical magic that he could. The man had a gift. She’d had to resort to non-magical forms of manipulation—persuasion and cunning. That was all right with Vraith, however; she was good at those talents too.

Renfod and his entourage cleared a path to the periphery

of the festival throng. They passed a wedding ceremony underway. The tall bride was all smiles in her lace finery, while her portly groom looked nervous behind his well-clipped beard.

“There he is,” Renfod said as they circumnavigated the wedding, pointing a little ways ahead at Gregor.

The monk’s shock of white hair was a beacon tinged with red in the light of the waning sun. He stood with several other monks and clerics from the monastery, all surrounding a large metal cauldron. Vraith could see as she approached that the cauldron was full of dull green liquid.

“May the Blue Fire burn inside you,” Vraith said.

“Pray Oghma grants you wisdom,” Gregor replied, his tone icy.

Vraith pretended to ignore Gregor’s cold attitude; she gestured at the cauldron with her hand. “I trust the elixir is ready?”

“It is,” he said. “Now I just need to get people to drink it.”

“I can help,” she said. Then, turning to Renfod, “Let’s get our militia to arrange everyone in a long line. Tell them that I will come by and bless them each individually with a small cut on their palms and a drink from the cauldron. The ritual can begin only when this is completed.”

Renfod nodded and then strode away, barking orders.

“This thing you do,” Gregor said. “I have your word that it will be used to tame and capture the spellplague in all its forms across Faerun?”

Vraith stared hard into Gregor’s gray eyes. “Don’t start having second thoughts now, monk. You’re in too deep to swim to the surface on your own.”

Gregor refused to back down. “You didn’t answer the question.”

So he was going to need her to lie. That was fine with her; lies came easily to her. “Someone’s word,” she said, “is as fickle as the next famine or plague or war. I give you my word, for whatever that is worth to you.”

Gregor’s brow knitted in puzzlement.

“But,” Vraith said, “nobody’s word is worth what you think it is. The only thing that you have of value is your own internal compass, your own faith. Gregor, you either trust me to do what you believe needs to be done, or you do not. My word cannot change that.