The Ghost King (29 page)

W
e are nothing! There is nothing!” the priest screamed, storming about the audience hall in Spirit Soaring, accentuating every word with an angry stomp of his foot. His point was furthered by the blood matting his hair and caked about the side of his face and shoulder, a wound that looked worse than it was. Of the five who had been with him out and about the Snowflakes, he had been the most fortunate by far, for the only other survivor had lost a leg and the other seemed doomed to amputation—and only if the poor woman even survived.

“Sit down, Menlidus, you old fool!” one of his peers yelled. “Do you think this tirade helpful?”

Cadderly hoped Menlidus, a fellow priest of Deneir, would take that advice, but he doubted it, and since the man was more than a decade his senior—and looked at least three decades older than Cadderly—he hoped he wouldn’t have to intervene to forcibly silence the angry man. Besides, Cadderly understood the frustration behind the priest’s rant, and didn’t wholly dismiss his despairing conclusions. Cadderly, too, had gone to Deneir and feared that his god had been lost to him forever, as if Deneir had somehow simply written himself into the numerical maze that was the
Metatext
.

“I am the fool?” Menlidus said, stopping his shouting and pacing, and tapping a finger to his chest as he painted a wry smile on his face. “I have
called pillars of flame down upon those who are foes of our god. Or have you forgotten, Donrey?”

“Most surely, I have not,” Donrey replied. “Nor have I forgotten the Time of Troubles, or any of the many desperate situations we have faced before, and have endured.”

Cadderly appreciated those words, as apparently, he saw in looking around at the large gathering, did everyone else in the room.

Menlidus, though, began to laugh. “Not like this,” he said.

“We cannot make that judgment until we know what this silence is truly all about.”

“It is about the folly of our lives, friend,” the defeated Menlidus said quietly. “All of us, and do look at us! Artists! Painters! Poets! Man and woman, dwarf and elf, who seek deeper meaning in art and in faith. Artists, I say, who evoke emotion and profundity with our paintings and our scribblings, who cleverly place words for the effect dramatic.” His snicker cut deep. “Or are we illusionists, I wonder?”

“You do not believe that,” said Donrey.

“Who believe our own illusions,” Menlidus qualified. “Because we have to. Because the alternative, the idea that there is nothing more, that it is all a creation of imagination to maintain sanity, is too awful to contemplate, is it not? Because the truth that these gods we worship are not immortal beings, but tricksters promising us eternity to extract from us fealty, is ultimately jarring and inspiring despair, is it not?”

“I think we have heard enough, brother,” said a woman, a renowned mage who also was possessed of significant clerical prowess.

“Have we?”

“Yes,” she said, and there was no mistaking the edge to her voice, not quite threatening but certainly leading in that direction. “We are priests, one and all,” Menlidus said.

“Not so,” several wizards pointed out, and again the bloody priest gave a little laugh.

“Yes, so,” Menlidus argued. “What we call divine, you call arcane—our altars are not so different!”

Cadderly couldn’t help but wince at that, for the notion that all magic emanated from one source brought him back to his younger days in the Edificant Library. Then he had been an agnostic priest, and he too had wondered if the arcane and the divine were no more than different labels for the same energy.

“Save that ours accepts the possibility of change, as it is not rooted in dogma!” one wizard cried, and the volume began to rise about the chamber, wizards and priests lining up against each other in verbal sparring.

“Then perhaps I speak not to you,” Menlidus said after Cadderly locked him with a scowl. “But for us priests, are we not those, above all others, who claim to speak the truth? The divine truth?”

“Enough, brother, I beg,” Cadderly said then, knowing where Menlidus was going despite the man’s temporary calm, and not liking it at all.

He moved toward Menlidus slowly, wearing a carefully maintained expression of serenity. Having heard nothing from Danica or his missing children, Cadderly was anything but serene. His gut churned and his thoughts whirled.

“Do we not?” Menlidus shouted at him. “Cadderly of Deneir, above all others, who created Spirit Soaring on the good word and power of Deneir, should not doubt my claim!”

“It is more complex than that,” said Cadderly.

“Does not your experience show that our precepts are not foolish dogma, but rather divine truth?” Menlidus argued. “If you were but a conduit for Deneir in the construction of this awe-inspiring cathedral, this library for all the world, do you not laugh in the face of such doubts as expressed by our secular friends?”

“We all have our moments of doubt,” Cadderly said.

“We cannot!” Menlidus exclaimed, stamping his foot. That movement seemed to break him, though, a sudden weariness pulling his broad shoulders down in a profound slump. “And yet, we must, for we are shown the truth.” He looked across the room at poor Dahlania, one leg gone, as she lay near death. “I begged for a blessing of healing,” he mumbled. “Even a simple one—any spell at all to alleviate her pain. Deneir did not answer that plea.”

“There is more to this sad tale,” Cadderly said quietly. “You cannot blame—”

“All my life has been in service to him. And this one moment when I call upon him for my most desperate need, he ignores me.”

Cadderly heaved a sigh and placed a comforting hand on Menlidus’s shoulder, but the man grew agitated and shrugged that touch away.

“Because we are priests of
nothing!”
Menlidus shouted to the room. “We feign wisdom and insight, and deceive ourselves into seeing ultimate truth in
the lines of a painting or the curves of a sculpture. We place meaning where there is none, I say, and if there truly are any gods left, they must surely derive great amusement from our pitiful delusions.”

Cadderly didn’t have to look around the room at the weary and beleaguered faces to understand the cancer that was spreading among them, a trial of will and faith that threatened to break them all. He thought to order Menlidus out of the room, to chastise the man loudly and forcefully, but he dismissed that idea. Menlidus wasn’t creating the illness, but was merely shouting it to the rafters.

Cadderly couldn’t find Deneir—his prayers, too, went unanswered. He feared that Deneir had left him forever, that the too-inquisitive god had written himself into the Weave or had become lost in its eternal tangle. Cadderly had found power, though, in the fight against the fleshy beasts of shadow, casting spells as mighty as any he might have asked from Deneir.

But those spells, he believed—he feared—hadn’t come from the one he had known as Deneir. He didn’t know what being, if any being, had bestowed within him the power to consecrate the ground beneath his feet with such blessed magic.

And that was most troubling of all.

For Menlidus’s point was well taken: If the gods were not immortal, then was their place for their followers any more lasting?

For if the gods were not powerful and wise enough to defeat the calamity that had come to Faerûn, then what hope for men?

And worse,
what was the point of it all?
Cadderly dismissed that devastating thought almost as soon as it came to him, but it indeed fluttered through his mind, and through the minds of all those gathered there.

Menlidus spat his devastating litany one emphatic last time. “Priests of nothing.”

* * * * *

“We are leaving,” Menlidus said to Cadderly early the next morning, after an eerily quiet night. That respite had not set well with poor Cadderly, however, for Danica had not yet returned.

No word from his wife, no word of his missing children, and perhaps worst of all, Cadderly still found no answers to his desperate calls to Deneir.

“We?” he replied.

Menlidus motioned through the door, across the hall and into a side chamber, where a group of about a dozen men and women stood dressed for the road.

“You’re all leaving?” Cadderly asked, incredulous. “Spirit Soaring is under a cloud of assault and you would desert—”

“Deneir deserted me. I did not desert him,” Menlidus replied sharply, but with a calm surety. “As their gods deserted them, and as the Weave abandoned three of them, wizards all, who find their life’s pursuit a sad joke, as is mine.”

“It didn’t take much of a test to shake your faith, Menlidus,” Cadderly scolded him, though he wanted to take the words back as soon as he heard them escape his mouth. The poor priest had suffered a failing of magic at the very worst moment, after all, and had watched a friend die because of that failure. Cadderly knew that he was wrong to judge such despair, even if he didn’t agree with the man’s conclusion.

“Perhaps not, Cadderly, Chosen of Nothing,” Menlidus replied. “I only know what I feel and believe—or no longer believe.”

“Where are you going?”

“Carradoon first, then to Cormyr, I expect.”

Cadderly perked up at that.

“Your children, of course,” said Menlidus. “Fear not, my old friend, for though I no longer share your enthusiasm for our faith, I will not forget my friendship to Cadderly Bonaduce and his family. We will seek out your children, do not doubt, and make sure that they are safe.”

Cadderly nodded, and wanted nothing more than that. Still, he felt compelled to point out the obvious problem. “Your road is a dangerous one. Perhaps you should remain here—and I’ll not lie to you, we need you here. We barely repelled that last attack, and have no idea of what may come against us next. Our dark enemies are out there, in force, as many of our patrols painfully learned.”

“We’re strong enough to punch our way through them,” Menlidus replied. “I would counsel you to convince everyone to come with us. Abandon Spirit Soaring—this is a library and a cathedral, not a fortress.”

“This is the work of Deneir. I can no more abandon it than I can abandon that who I am.”

“A priest of nothing?”

Cadderly sighed, and Menlidus patted him on the shoulder, a symbolic reversal of fortunes. “They should all leave with us, Cadderly, my old friend.
For all our sakes, we should go down to Carradoon as one mighty group. Escape this place, I counsel, and raise an army to come back and—”

“No.”

Menlidus looked at him hard, but there was no arguing against that tone of finality in Cadderly’s voice.

“My place is Spirit Soaring,” Cadderly said. “To the bitter end?” Cadderly didn’t blink.

“You would condemn the others here to the same fate?” Menlidus asked.

“Their choices are their own to make. I do think we’re safer here than out there on the open trails. How many patrol parties met with disaster, your own included? Here, we have a chance to defend. Out there, we’re fighting on a battlefield of our enemy’s choosing.”

Menlidus considered Cadderly for just a moment longer, then snorted and waved his hand, motioning to the people across the hall. They hoisted bags, shields, and weapons and followed the man down the corridor.

“We’re left with less than fifty to defend Spirit Soaring,” Ginance remarked, coming to Cadderly as the angry fallen priest departed. “If the crawling beasts come at us with the ferocity of the first fight, we will be hard-pressed.”

“We are more ready for an attack now,” Cadderly replied. “Implements are more reliable than spells, it would seem.”

“That is the consensus, yes,” said Ginance. “Potions and wands did not fail in the field, even as spellcasting misfired or fell empty.”

“We have many potions. We have wands and rods and staves, enchanted weapons and shields,” said Cadderly. “Make certain that they are properly distributed as you sort our defenses. Power to every wall.”

Ginance nodded and started away, but Cadderly stopped her by adding, “Catch up to Menlidus and offer him all that we can spare to take with him on his journey. I fear that his party will need all that we can give, and a fair measure of good luck, to get down the mountainside.”

Ginance paused at the door, then smiled and nodded. “Simply because he abandons Deneir does not mean that Deneir should abandon him,” she said.

Cadderly managed a weak smile at that, all the while fearing that Deneir, though perhaps inadvertently and through circumstances beyond his control, had already done exactly that, to all of them.

But Cadderly had no time to think about any of that, he reminded himself, no time to consider his absent wife and missing children. He had found
some measure of powerful magic in his moment of need. For all their sakes, he had to learn the source of that magic.

He had barely begun his contemplation when shouts interrupted him.

Their enemies had not waited for sunset.

Cadderly rushed down the stairs, strapping on his weapons as he went, nearly running over Ginance at the bottom.

“Menlidus,” she cried, pointing to the main doors, which stood open.

Cadderly ran there and fell back with a gasp. Menlidus and all the others of his band were returning, walking stiff-legged, arms hanging at their sides, vacant stares through dead eyes—for those who still had their eyes.