Twilight Falling (27 page)

The creature uttered a surprised hiss and dropped into a hunched crouch as it whirled to face him.

To Cale’s right, Riven awakened with a gasp, his hand going immediately to his unsheathed sabers, which lay beside him. He took in the scene in a breath.

“Dark!” he cursed, and scrambled to his feet.

Even hunched the creature stood taller than Cale, with warty green skin as creased and rough as old leather. Beside it Jak—held immobile by some spell, Cale assumed—looked as small as an infant. Arms as thick as Cale’s legs ended in long, black nails; legs as wide as a man’s waist ended in splayed, clawed feet. Veins, muscles and sinew pulsed and flexed with each movement of its powerful frame. A flat head, dominated by a wide mouth and row upon row of teeth, sat on a short, thick neck. Its face struck Cale as vaguely amphibian. Somehow, it reminded him of a toad. Its eyes were merciless gray slits—the easterner’s eyes.

This was the easterner’s true form, Cale intuitively knew. And he also knew, as he had known when he had faced the shadow demon Yrsillar, that this creature was not of Toril.

Jak’s blood, black in the firelight, glistened on its clawed fingers.

“Everything feels pain,” the creature croaked, and winked at Riven.

It stuck its blood-soaked fingers in its huge mouth and slobbered them clean.

Cale roared and charged. Riven bounded over the campfire to join Cale’s attack. As he did, the assassin shouted a word that recalled to Cale the syllables the assassin sometimes spoke in his sleep: “Vredlaul!”

The utterance of the word staggered the powerful creature. It stumbled backward a step as though it had been punched in the chest. Cale closed, raised his blade high—

—and the easterner croaked a word of power and darkness fell. Utter pitch. Cale could see nothing. He swung his blade anyway but struck nothing. He froze, dropped into a crouch, and listened.

“Here,” he hissed, so he and Riven could get an idea of where each stood.

“Here,” answered Riven, from his left.

Cale advanced a step, blade held ready for a quick stab in any direction, ears peeled. He had an idea of where Jak was and stayed in that vicinity.

“Here,” he said again.

“Here,” answered Riven, a few steps ahead of Cale but still to his right.

Cale heard nothing. Where was the blasted thing?

As abruptly as it fell, the darkness suddenly lifted. Cale and Riven stood a few paces apart. The creature was gone.

Cale kept his gaze from Jak, at least for the moment. He could not allow himself to be distracted.

He signaled Riven in handcant, Invisible. Move on my signal.

Riven nodded understanding.

Cale waited only a heartbeat before giving the signal.

Both men exploded into action around the campsite. Leaping, lunging, blades cutting the air. Neither struck anything.

“Gone,” Riven said afterward, sweating and breathing heavily.

“Stay alert,” Cale said, and he went to Jak.

The spell still held the halfling immobile. The easterner had broken all of his fingers. They twisted and jutted at angles that made Cale’s stomach turn. Too, the creature had bared Jak’s chest and flayed the skin and muscle above his heart. Cale could see the white of bone peeking through that shredded mass of red. The easterner had done to Jak what Riven had threatened to do to the easterner.

Cale held his breath as he held his ear to the halfling’s mouth. There! Breath. Jak still lived, despite the torture he had endured. Cale could hardly imagine the pain Jak had felt, was still feeling. Tears threatened but he held them back.

“I’m sorry, little man. I’m sorry.”

They should have killed the easterner! They should have cut him up and burned him to ash, just as Riven had said. Cale would never make that mistake again. Not with any of them. Two and two were four, bastards.

He had prayed for spells from Mask earlier in the night—at midnight, during his watch—and had requested spells of healing. Mask had granted his request, and had also granted Cale knowledge of another prayer that Cale had never before cast. Fortunately, that spell was not necessary.

Eyes blurry with tears, Cale recited prayers of healing, pouring into them all of his concern for Jak. One spell. Another. Another.

The wounds in Jak’s flesh slowly closed, shrank to only white scars. Bone reknit. His breathing grew more regular. His body was healed. His soul… ?

“Hang on,” Cale said.

He clutched his holy symbol, and whispered a spell that would free Jak from his paralysis.

The moment the spell took effect, Jak gasped and fell forward. Cale caught him and pulled him close. He could feel the halfling shaking, crying. Cale said nothing, only held his friend and waited for him to gather himself.

Jak could say nothing, only cried and quietly vented into Cale’s cloak the pain and rage that his immobility had prevented him from expressing previously.

“I’m sorry, Jak,” Cale said finally.

“What in the gods’ names are you sorry about?” Riven said, his tone as cold as Deepwinter. “If Fleet wasn’t so averse to doing what needs done, this never would have happened.”

Cale shot the assassin a look so heated that even Riven wilted. Had he been within arm’s reach, Cale would have killed him.

“You keep your godsdamned hole shut or I’ll put my blade through it and out the back of your head. Then I’ll cut you to pieces and burn you to ash. You understand? Do you understand?”

Riven took a step back.

Jak shook his head and leaned back. He pulled away from Cale, wiped away his tears, and examined his fingers. He didn’t make eye contact with either Cale or Riven.

“No, Cale,” Jak said. “He’s right.”

Cale started to protest but Jak cut him off. “No!” Jak looked Cale in the eyes and Cale saw something in his friend’s gaze that he had never before seen there: hate. “He’s right. I put down the pin. I’m not a Harper anymore. It’s time I got my hands dirty.”

Cale could think of nothing to say. He didn’t know whether to take Jak’s change of heart as a good or a bad thing. He remembered that Sephris had called Jak a “seventeen.” He feared that the equation had just changed.

Dawn did not lift the weight from Cale’s soul. The thick clouds kept the landscape cast in a dull gray, which mirrored his mood. The three comrades said little as they walked the road back to Selgaunt. To Cale, Jak seemed conspicuously grim. The halfling had covered his bloodstained tunic with his travelling cloak, but that only hid the damage. Seemingly of their own accord, Jak’s hands from time to time went to his chest, to the scars. He often flexed the fingers that the easterner had methodically broken, blinking at the memory of the pain.

Seeing that, and recalling Jak’s hard words from the previous night, Cale despaired for his friend. He knew that certain actions, once taken, irrevocably polluted a man’s soul. Cale had taken such actions long before, as had Riven. Jak never had, but Cale feared that he soon would. He blamed himself. His own words to Jak haunted him—Sometimes good people have to do hard things. He had known even when he’d mouthed the words that they had been a rationalization, a seductive invitation to walk a gray path. The first step down that path was always the hardest. But Cale knew too well that after that first step it became harder and harder to take another path. Jak seemed to have made up his mind to walk it.

Riven walked a few strides ahead. Cale drifted near Jak.

“You all right?” he asked softly.

Jak looked startled, as though he had not noticed Cale beside him.

“What?” the halfling said. “Yes. I’m fine.”

Cale nodded, and walked beside his friend for a while longer.

“You’re not that kind of man either, Jak,” Cale said. “You never have been. Don’t forget that. Don’t lose yourself.”

Jak merely nodded, his mouth grim. Cale said nothing more, only walked next to his best friend and tried silently to offer his support.

They reentered Selgaunt with only a cursory questioning by the gate guards. Cale explained away their appearance by stating that they had been caught without shelter in the rain and that was that.

Despite their fatigue and hunger, they moved briskly through the streets, already crowded with farm carts and carriages, and headed directly for Sephris’s residence. Each grabbed a sweetmeat from a vendor and ate on the run.

When they arrived at the overgrown lot of the eccentric sage and opened the squeaky iron gate, the caretaker priest didn’t emerge from the house to greet them. Cale’s stomach tightened. He and Riven shared a glance. The assassin put his hands on his saber hilts.

They hopped up on the porch and rapped on the door. Nothing.

“Dark,” Cale softly swore.

He drew his blade. Riven and Jak did the same. Cale held up three fingers and counted them down. Three, two, one—

He kicked the door, splintering the jambs and knocking it from its hinges, then charged into the house. Riven and Jak followed hard on his heels, blades bare.

They rushed through the foyer to the main hallway. Smeared blood, already hardening to a brown crust, covered the walls and obscured Sephris’s scrawling. The wild blood pattern reminded Cale of the way a child might gleefully cast pigment on a blank canvas. The perpetrator, Azriim or Dolgan, probably, had reveled in the bloodshed.

In the main living room, they found the body of the caretaker priest, flayed and gutted, with his intestines draped around his neck like a shawl. Cale had to control a sudden rush of nausea. The body was only just beginning to stink. Jak stared at the tortured priest with haunted green eyes. Cale put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come on,” Cale said, and he headed for the library.

He moved without urgency; he already knew what they would find there.

The library looked much the same as the last time they had visited, except that Sephris lay slumped over his desk in a pool of blood. His throat had been torn open by a claw as large as that of bear. Sticky, blood-soaked papers covered the desktop. There was no sign of a struggle. It appeared as though the loremaster had sat at his desk impassively while his throat had been opened.

Cale simply stood and stared. The sphere sat heavy in his pack. Too many had died for it, and all in vain. For who could tell them the time it tolled?

“Now what?” Riven asked, echoing Cale’s thoughts but in a tone devoid of emotion.

He kicked at some of the papers on the floor, a careless gesture that somehow offended Cale.

“Leave those be,” Cale snapped. Two people had been brutally murdered, no doubt to keep Sephris from telling them any more about the sphere, and the assassin spoke of it without sensitivity. “And keep your mouth shut.”

Jak walked to the desk. Cale followed.

“Look at him, Cale,” Jak said. “He must have seen them coming.” Jak touched some of the blood-soaked papers, each covered in Sephris’s equations. “He must’ve known they were coming. Why didn’t he run?”

Because two and two are four, Cale thought but did not say.

Instead, he said, “I don’t know, Jak.”

He looked at the slates on the floor near the desk and wondered if one of them predicted the loremaster’s own murder.

Jak looked to Cale and asked, “Riven was right to ask. What now?”

Cale thought of the unusual prayer Mask had put in his brain for the first time the night before. It made him uneasy to think about it but they had nothing else.

He took a deep breath before answering, “We ask Sephris.”

Cale and Jak gently removed Sephris’s corpse from the desk chair and arranged it on the floor of the library. Riven did not assist, instead keeping his distance. Cale thought that he understood why. Speaking with the dead reminded Riven—reminded Cale too—that the souls of the men they had each murdered in the past lived on still in Kelemvor’s realm. It made Cale’s skin crawl to think that so many angry souls awaited him beyond the void. The thought of opening that door made his heart race, but he knew he had no choice. They had to speak with Sephris.

“Ready?” asked Jak.

Cale’s dry mouth would not form sounds so he simply nodded. Jak thumped him on the shoulder, stood, and backed off a few strides.

With unsteady hands, Cale donned his mask and sat on his knees beside Sephris. The sphere sat on the floor beside him, sparkling in the candlelight. Cale placed his fingertips on the loremaster’s chest and forehead, took a breath, and began to chant the prayer that would open the door between the realm of the living and the planes of the dead. The words poured from his lips as though eager to be spoken, and his voice gained volume as he went on. A roar filled his ears, a sound like the crashing of Uktar waves in Selgaunt Bay. Cale continued the chant, bent against an invisible spiritual storm that he could not see but could sense.

A soft, violet glow suffused Sephris’s corpse. It took all that Cale had to keep his fingertips on the loremaster’s body. The glow grew brighter. Brighter. Cale could feel a space opening up. The line between the living world and the dead opened with a soft pop. Cale’s flesh went cold.

Sephris’s ghost, his soul, rose up from the corpse.

To Cale, Sephris seemed both there and not there, surrounded by a gulf that was not so much seen or felt as it was implied.

He was staring into eternity, Cale realized. He felt tiny.

And somewhere in that gray limitlessness that extended forever behind Sephris’s shade lurked the souls of the men that Cale had killed, ghosts haunting a ghost. Cale couldn’t quite see them, but he could sense them, could feel the heavy accusations contained in their empty eyes. There were many, he knew. Too many. Some of them had deserved death, but many had not. As a young man, Cale had never cared to make the distinction, and that failure haunted him. He kept his gaze on Sephris and tried not to think of his past, though it literally stared him in the face.

Sephris’s soul, translucent and limned in violet light, hovered in the air above his body. With disturbingly empty eyes, the loremaster looked down on Cale.

“We led them to you, Sephris. I’m sorry for that.”