Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad (6 page)

“My liege?” The Just One’s voice held the barest quiver.

If you are conducting a trial, you must observe the formalities. You, of all gods, should understand this.

Though Tyr had twice tried to steer the proceedings along a proper course, he simply lowered his chin. “Yes, my liege.”

Good. When you begin the trial, one Faerunian day hence, you will all observe the rules. Now, what charge have you raised against Cyric?

Tyr lifted his head and studied Cyric’s dark eyes. The charge shall be Innocence, I think.”

“Innocence?” So loud and shrill was Cyric’s shriek that several gods cringed. “But I am the Lord of Murder! The Prince of Lies! The Sower of Strife! The Master of Deception!”

“The charge is Innocence,” Tyr declared. “Innocence by reason of Insanity.”

Four

By the One, there is no pain greater than that of a man dying Faithless! How long I lay in the wicked sun on that blood-soaked hill, I cannot say. Where the bull’s horn had pierced me, there was an ache as hot as white iron. A fever had dried my mouth until my swollen tongue blocked my throat, and though I could scarcely breathe, from my lips came these terrible words:

“Cyric, you are a tapeworm in the gut of the heavens!”

I meant them to the depths of my agonized soul. For years I had stood vigil, watching for the sacred Cyrinishad, doing all any mortal could to return it to my worthy god. Now the Cyrinishad was lost through no fault except Cyric’s, who had filled his Church to bursting with chaos and discord. I cursed the One again! Now my vision would never be. I would never stand before that vast host of Believers to read from the sacred book, never return home to repay the prince and reclaim my fortune and my wife. My Dark Lord had failed me, and I felt as foolish as the sheep that follows its master to the slaughter.

I swore my lips would never again sing his praises.

A terrible fear seized me then, and my eyes turned to fountains, pouring forth their tears. I was a Faithless man at the brink of death. Soon my spirit would let go my flesh and sink beneath the stones and go down to that place where the gods claimed the souls of their Faithful. But I had closed my heart to Cyric. He would not answer my cries, and I would be left to wait until Kelemvor fetched me to the City of the Dead. I would be marched before the Crystal Throne and judged according to the deeds of my life, and the verdict would be most harsh indeed.

I fell to trembling and begged Cyric to take me back, but he had no use for cowards and would not hear my prayer. The wicked sun burned hotter still, and I had to close my eyes against the damning light.

I dreamed then of the many torments of the City of the Dead. Kelemvor stacked me in the Wall of the Faithless, where my head was stung by a hail of sleet and my feet scorched by the fires of the World Forge. He threw me into the Pool of Fools, where my eyes melted and my flesh dissolved in the Boiling Acid of Bliss. He laid me into the Road of Betrayers, where my skull was crushed and my bones broken beneath the Iron Wheels of Duty. All this I dreamed and more, until I had suffered the thousand torments of Kelemvor’s city and knew all the tortures that awaited me there.

Then I awakened to yet another.

Inside my belly came a tugging and a miserable pain, as if a new-forged dagger had plunged deep into my wound. I saw that I had rolled onto my back. Night had fallen and the air had cooled, but I took no comfort in these things, for upon my chest stood one of Kelemvor’s black-feathered harbingers. The vulture was silhouetted against the moon, its white eyes rimmed in crimson and its naked head smeared with carrion. The filthy thing had stuck its beak into my wound, and it was trying to pull a string of entrails from the hole!

Seeing the great haste Kelemvor was making to claim my spirit, I screamed in terror and pummeled the bird with my bare hands. The squalid beast spread its wings and began to flap-though it did not pull its beak from my wound. Had a volcano erupted in my belly, I would not have felt such pain! I imagined the bird rising like a kite on a string of my own entrails. Then I sat up at once, grabbed the wretched creature, and wrung its neck and flung its filthy corpse down the hill.

The night was as still as a painting, save for the distant lights flickering in the high windows of Candlekeep. The air reeked with the stench of battle, of blood and offal and all else that dying men spill, ripened by a day in the sun. Counting myself lucky I was not yet part of the rotting mass, I turned my thoughts to how I might survive.

First, I needed water. My whole body was aflame, my throat raw and swollen. Having lived near Candlekeep so long, I knew where to find springs, but even the closest lay too distant for a dying man to reach. But atop the hill lay the fallen riders of the Ebon Spur, and I had seen plenty of waterskins hanging from the saddles of their bulls.

I started up the slope, crawling on hands and knees, whining like a child. Halfway there I had to rest. It seemed impossible to continue, but no rider had done me the courtesy of dying closer to hand. I pushed myself up and resumed my journey, for I had seen what awaited me in Kelemvor’s realm if I perished on the hill.

I crawled, then collapsed, then crawled and collapsed again, until I lay just below the summit. I could lift nothing but my head. This I dared not lower, for if it touched the ground, my eyes would close and never open again.

At last I found the strength to roll onto my side and inch forward like a worm. I crested the knoll and saw a forest of black feathers flashing and gleaming in the moonlight as Kelemvor’s harbingers feasted on the corpses of the Faithful. Just two paces away, three of the foul birds were dancing over the carcass of a mighty war bull. From behind the beast’s shoulder protruded a rider’s leg, the foot still caught in the stirrup. And from the saddle hung a waterskin filled with the sweet nectar of rivers.

I dragged myself forward. The three vultures hissed and raised their wings, then gave a great shocked cry and rose into the air. When they were gone, a silhouette stood behind the fallen bull where none had been before. The figure had the shape and white-gleaming eyes of a man, but the shadows of the high-piled dead clung to his shoulders, and I could not say whether he was a rider of the Ebon Spur or a Dark Lord’s bodyguard.

“Thank the Fates!” My words were but a feeble croak. “Bring me some water.”

“As you wish.”

The shadow spoke not with one voice, but with a thousand, all as deep and rasping as a grinding stone. The rest of Kelemvor’s flock took flight, drumming the air with their wings and blocking the light of the moon. I forgot my thirst and pushed myself down the slope, cursing the pride that had turned me from Cyric. Now I had no god to defend me from this fiend.

There came the slosh of water not far above my head, and the air cooled. My limbs shivered uncontrollably, and even the heat of my wound became the burning of frozen flesh. The phantom was upon me, and I could do naught but surrender.

“Malik, why do you tremble?”

His voice was as terrible as before, and I dared not look up. I wanted to ask how the apparition knew my name, but my cold lips would not part.

“Did you not beg for water? Come now, open your mouth.”

An icy toe nudged my ribs, then I was on my back, ray mouth stretched wide as a cavern-though not by my own effort. A stream of liquid gurgled from the waterskin and splashed upon my face and coursed past my lips.

The fluid was as thick and foul as a sewer! It was cold and salty, and it filled my nose with the stench of spoiled meat. My gorge rose and expelled the loathsome slime, but the rancid stream continued to pour and gush down my throat, until my belly was so full of the swill that it bubbled from my wound like water from a spring. In vain, I tried to close my mouth and roll away, but my body was not mine to command. My entrails grew chill and twisted in upon themselves. The scream that followed could not have been my own, for no man’s voice had ever made such a sound.

“Ah-so this is why one does not let a man with a stomach wound drink.” Again, the phantom spoke in a thousand voices, and still he continued to pour that odious sludge into my mouth. “But I am not to blame, am I? You ordered me to bring water.”

The last of the vultures swept clear of the moon, and the hillside was aglow in silvery light. Above me I saw a grinning skull’s face with black-shining eyes. A crimson film clung to his ivory cheeks. His body was a mass of veins and sinew covered by no skin of any kind, and it undulated like a wave upon the sea, as if it did not have a single bone beneath its gristle.

Nor was this the worst of what I saw, for now I could see the stuff that poured from the waterskin, and it was not water. It was full of clots and bubbles, and of a color so darkly red that it seemed almost black.

Now, when I was a merchant in the City of Brilliance, this would have caused my stomach to purge itself, which would certainly have killed me on the spot. But my years outside Candlekeep had much hardened me, as there were many times when I had kept myself alive by eating and drinking vile things, and so my discovery only returned my strength at once.

I rolled away from the phantom and, leaping to my feet, rushed down the slope. When I reached the bottom of the hill, I went to the Way of the Lion and turned toward Beregost, paying no heed to the lonely distance ahead.

And, indeed, it did not matter. Before I had taken two steps, the bloody wraith loomed before me. He struck my right eye a blow so savage that the lid swelled instantly shut.

My hand flew to my face, and I turned and ran with a strength that only grew with the agony of my wounds. Every breath was as a bellows, fanning the white-hot fire in my belly. After some twenty paces, the phantom still had not overtaken me. I stopped and looked around with my good eye, but saw nothing. It appeared the fiend had grown tired of his fun. Candlekeep loomed ahead, and thinking it wise to stay beyond the reach of the Low Gate’s archers, I turned to leave the road.

At once the phantom blocked my path. His white fingers hissed through the air, and his curved black talons raked my neck. A fountain of hot blood erupted, drenching me from my robe to my tattered shoes. I turned back to the road and ran until the fear of Candlekeep’s arrows grew stronger than my fear of the phantom. Then I slowed, daring to look over ray shoulder.

Nothing.

Again I turned to leave the road, and again the wraith was there! He slapped the right side of my head, and it is a wonder my skull did not burst. A great surge of air rushed down upon my ear, then shot through my head from one side to the other. I grew dizzy and lost all hearing in the bloodied ear. A terrible throbbing ensued, but this new pain brought even greater strength. I turned and sprinted.

At last I realized the phantom was forcing me toward Candlekeep. Perhaps thieving Oghma had sent him to capture me, as I was the spy who had discovered the Cyrinishad’s arrival. My heart sank further, for I had denounced Cyric, and who else could I call to save me from Oghma’s servant? I continued toward the Low Gate, wondering how I might save myself. My fear grew with every step, but my strength never faltered, which was good, as the wraith assailed me horribly whenever my pace lagged and would certainly have killed me if I had fallen.

At last I reached the Low Gate and could go no farther. The portcullis had been lowered against our army’s attack and not yet raised. I grabbed the bars and began to climb, knowing the guards who watched from their spyholes would either take me prisoner or kill me, though perhaps less horribly than the phantom.

A band of ice closed around my ankle and jerked me from the portcullis. When I crashed to the ground, I was again lying at the fiend’s mercy.

“Not yet,” the phantom said in his thousand voices. “You have not heard my command.”

“Whatever you desire.” I turned my good ear toward him, for it would no doubt pain me greatly to miss his command. “But I beg you, let me live. I will be no use to you dead.”

“More than you think,” said the wraith. “But for now, it suits me that you are alive. Stop your trembling.”

This news certainly came as a great relief. Even so, I could not obey his command. I had lost the use of an eye and an ear and ached from countless other assaults, and I could not stop shaking for fear of suffering more.

My disobedience did not seem to trouble him. “You have seen the Cyrinishad?”

I nodded. “It was in an iron box, bound with many chains.” In the blink of an eye, the phantom snatched me up by my bloodied throat and held me to his face. “An iron box?” His breath was as a dog’s, foul and rancid from eating rotten things. “How did you see inside?”

“I could not. But I saw the bearers. The woman wore a diamond amulet shaped like Oghma’s scroll.”

The grasp of the wraith grew tighter on my throat, and the vision in my one good eye began to darken.

“Oghma could make a thousand of those baubles!”

I began to have unpleasant suspicions about the wraith’s identity, and I grew eager to stay in his favor as much as possible. “I am certain it was the sacred Cyrinishad! Even through the iron, I felt its darkness, and I smelled a foul odor that could only have been human parchment.”

The phantom did not release me, but neither did he crush my throat.

“And I heard it whispering!” The fiend’s grasp loosened, and so I added, “Its voice was soft, no more than a rustle, but I know the sacred truth when I hear it!”

This last revelation seemed to convince the phantom, for his hand opened and I found myself slumped against the portcullis.

“Good. Then you will go and fetch it for me.”

“Fetch it, Dark Prince?”

“At once,” the phantom replied, and I knew without doubt that I was speaking to Cyric; no mere wraith would dare claim one of the Dark Sun’s thousand names. “I have need of it.”

I smiled with relief. Cyric had already punished me terribly for losing faith, but now he had taken me back. The worst had passed. “As you wish, Mighty One. I shall fetch it right away.”

I turned and looked up toward Candlekeep, but saw only the endless gray rise of the jagged tor upon which the citadel stood. The Low Gate was Candlekeep’s only access. One could not go around it, for it was carved into the tor itself, creating a sort of tunnel, and the cliffs flanking it could not be scaled. Knowing the importance of the gate, its builders had made it impenetrable. The portcullis was made of iron bars no man could bend and no elephant could lift. Then came the gates themselves, gilded with tin and reinforced by a drawbar as thick as a fire giant’s waist. The watch portals of the guards were too small to admit a pixie. I saw no way to break in, yet I continued to study the gate in earnest, so that I might appear eager to obey. I was certain Almighty Cyric would show me how to breach the impervious defenses of the citadel.