Dawn of Night (18 page)

“How long were we gone?” Cale asked.

Magadon shrugged and answered, “No way to know that.”

To Jak and Riven, both smoking away like chimneys, Cale said, “Take a few moments, then gear up. We need to move.”

He knew that Azriim and the rest of the slaadi would not have been idle. Cale would spend the travel time back to Starmantle thinking of a way to track them down.

Within hours they had reached the southern road out of Starmantle. A day and a half later and they had arrived at the city itself. By then, Cale had become almost inured to the pricks of pain caused him by the sun. Almost.

As always, the gates of Starmantle were thrown open and the spear-armed guards hardly noted them as they passed inside, except to smirk at their filth. Glares from Cale and Riven wiped the guards’ smiles away.

The city’s wide streets appeared much as Cale and his companions had left them-crowded with men, horses, humanoids, wagons, and stink-a stark contrast from the dark, desolate ruins of Elgrin Fau. The row of temples still loomed over the cityscape, supervising the sin with a knowing wink. Starmantle had not changed.

But they had. The Plane of Shadow had changed them all. Cale looked at their clothes, all faded to shades of gray and black, and knew that each of them had left more than the color of their clothes behind in the darkness.

Riven peeled off his dirt-caked cloak and tucked it under his arm.

“Where and when are we meeting?” asked the assassin. Jak stuck a finger in his chest.

“Where do you think you’re going, Zhent?” the halfling asked. “We ought to stick together.”

Riven flashed his stained teeth. “You’re welcome to accompany me,” Riven answered. “I need to tend my gear, get cleaned up, take a meal, then take a whore. Food and flesh, Fleet. What else is there?”

Jak looked mildly shocked and said, “Pipeweed, philosophy, religion, friendship… lots of things, Riven.”

Riven offered a sincere, “Bah,” as he watched a stray dog sniff its way along the street. Cale would have sworn he saw caring in Riven’s face, but when the assassin looked up, his face was as hard as usual.

“What about you, Cale?” Riven asked. “Mags? Either of you interested?”

Cale hadn’t engaged the services a prostitute since he’d left the entirety of his feelings for Thazienne Uskevren scribed on a piece of paper back in Stormweather Towers, though he had felt the drive often enough. Self denial was another form of cleansing pain, he decided, and resolved that he would not surrender to his needs just then.

“No,” he said, and left it at that.

“Well enough,” Riven said. “Mags?”

The guide doffed his cap, pushed his hair back, and shook his head.

“I think not. I’ll gear us up for the next—” The guide stopped in mid-sentence and looked to Cale. “Where are we going next?”

Cale did not yet have an answer, but he thought he had a means that might help them find out.

“I’m still thinking,” he said. “I hope to know by tonight.” “Let me know when you know,” the guide said, “so I

can equip us appropriately. Meantime, I’ll procure the necessities.”

Cale nodded. For a moment, he debated with himself.

Finally, he said to the guide, “Magadon, I feel like I owe it to you to say this…” He took a deep breath. “If you want to, if this is too much for too little, now is the time to walk away. I hope that you won’t, but I want you to know there’s an out. No shame and no hard feelings.”

Cale regretted saying the words almost the moment he uttered them.

A brief look of hurt and surprise flashed across Magadon’s face, but the guide recovered his composure quickly, fixed his knucklebone eyes on Cale, and offered a grin.

“What do I look like,” he asked, “a Zhent assassin for hire?”

Riven scoffed.

Magadon continued, “We’re long past three hundred pieces of gold, Erevis. I’ll be seeing this through, if you please.”

Cale couldn’t help but smile, both relieved and chagrined. In less than a tenday, he’d come to count on the guide’s solid presence. He thumped Magadon on the shoulder.

“Good,” Cale said. “Mags, I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” Magadon said. “It’s appreciated but unnecessary. You remember our conversation back on the Plane of Shadow?”

Cale nodded.

“So do I,” Magadon said, and left it at that.

Riven scoffed again and said, “There’s your friendship, Fleet, as sweet as a turnip, ain’t it?” The assassin looked to Cale. “If you’re done with the orders now, Cale, I’ll be finding my flesh.”

To all of them, Cale said, “We meet at the Ninth Hell, around the tenth hour tonight. We’ll take our rest and recreation today, but tomorrow we start again. In the meantime, stay clear of the Underworld.”

Cale didn’t want any of them bumping into Dreeve and what remained of the gnoll’s pack. If the creature had returned to Starmantle, he probably still held a grudge.

Cale seized each of them with his eyes before offering his last bit of advice: “And remember that the slaadi are shapechangers. They could be anywhere and anyone. Walk lightly, and stay sharp.”

He gave a serious nod, then Riven set off for his whore and Mags for his gear.

Cale, looking forward to the darkness of a common room and the warmth of a meal, started in the direction of the Ninth Hell before he realized that Jak had lingered behind. He looked back and saw the halfling, with a wistful ‘expression, watching Riven move through the crowd. Jak noticed Cale’s gaze on him, flushed with embarrassment, and jogged to catch up.

“What is it?” Cale asked.

“Nothing,” Jak said, but his eyes found the road. “Food sounds good, is all.”

“We can get a meal at—” Realization dawned.

Still staring at the ground, Jak wore an embarrassed grin. His cheeks flushed as red as an apple.

“The touch of a woman’s hand doesn’t sound bad, either, eh?” Cale asked.

Jak looked chagrined but did not deny it.

“What was it your fat uncle always said?”

Jak looked up but didn’t make eye contact as he replied, “A man’s work merits a man’s reward. Of course, he was talking about meals, not… other things.”

Cale knew that, but the principle was the same.

“You can still catch up,” he said, nodding after Riven. “I’ll see you at the inn.”

Jak ran off like a bowshot.

*****

Despite the name, the Ninth Hell Inn and Eatery was well-tended, well-built, and well-run. The paunchy innkeeper, wearing a food-stained apron and sporting a lazy eye and thinning brown hair, greeted Cale with an insincere smile wanting for several teeth. Cale gave him a nod of welcome while he surveyed the common room out of professional habit: a single hearth with a low fire, eleven round tables with stools, windows on three sides, and a stairway leading up to the rooms. A handful of other patrons sat the inn’s tables-tan-faced day laborers on midday repast, mostly. No one and nothing dangerous.

Assuming things were as they appeared.

As he stepped out from behind the bar, the innkeeper ‘s nose wrinkled a bit at Cale’s road-worn attire, but he quickly recaptured the hospitable look innate to the brotherhood of innkeepers. Thankfully, he seemed unbothered by Cale’s dusky skin. Cale had feared that his transformed appearance would cause him to stand out as clearly as an orc in a dwarf-hold, but in truth, he probably looked like nothing more than a dark-skinned southerner. Like Magadon, he could pass for human with only a little work.

“A meal, a room, and a bath for the road weary traveler,” the innkeeper said. “I’ll see to it immediately.” Cale couldn’t help but smile at the man’s effusiveness. “Two rooms,” Cale corrected. “Adjacent. I have three comrades. The rest is right.”

He handed over to the innkeeper eight gold fivestars. He still didn’t have any local currency.

“Sembian, eh?” the innkeeper said, eying the coins. Cale made no reply.

“Hmm, then,” the innkeeper continued, frowning. “Two rooms it shall be. Top of the stairs, last two doors on the left, then. I’ll see to it that a washbasin finds its way to your room. Meantime, sit where you will and I’ll have food brought.”

“Thank you,” Cale said.

The innkeeper wiped his hands on his apron and extended one.

“Call me Crovin, or Crove if you prefer. I’ll answer to either.”

Cale took the man’s palm in his right hand.

“Crove,” he acknowledged, but did not offer his own name.

“Hmm. Very well, then,” Crovin said, frowning still deeper.

He walked back toward the taproom.

Cale found an isolated table to the right of the hearth and eased into a seat. Afternoon sun poured in through the open shutters of the common room’s windows, but Cale’s table was comfortably cast in shadow. With an insignificant exercise of his will, he increased the intensity of the shadows around his table, creating a cocoon of darkness in which he could relax.

In moments, a thin young woman with her long sandy hair pulled into a horsetail brought him a meal of mutton stew, bread, and a creamy cheese made from goat’s milk. Absently, he thanked her and began to eat. The fare was good, but his mind remained on the slaadi: finding them and killing them. He had an idea of how to do the former, and he’d never needed instruction on the latter.

The heat he felt when he considered the slaadi surprised him. Jak burned with desire to stop the Sojourner and his slaadi in order to save innocents. Though Cale understood the sentiment, he knew that saving innocents didn’t motivate him, at least not primarily. The slaadi had tortured Ren, murdered other Uskevren house guards, nearly killed Jak, taken Cale’s hand, and indirectly stolen his humanity. That motivated him-revenge.

Or justice, he thought, trying to prettify it.

He found it telling that in ancient Thorass, the words for revenge and justice, charorin and chororin, shared a common linguistic origin, distinguished only by a difference in vowels. That was the fine line between the two concepts-vowels. Fortunately, Cale was not interoited in distinguishing them. He cared not at all which of the two he was after, so long as at the end of it the slaadi and the Sojourner ended up dead. And if doing so saved innocents and served Mask—and Cale knew that it

would accomplish at least the latter, he just couldn’t see how—then so much the better.

He swirled his ale. It felt good to put a name to his anger: chororin, he decided to name it. Justice: for Ren, for Jak, and for himself. He coiled his anger, his need for chororin, into a tight ball and placed it close to his heart. It would be his compass, the new sphere about which his universe would turn until the slaadi and their master were all dead.

He thought of something Riven had said to him back in Selgaunt: You be Mask’s tool, Cale. I’ll be his weapon.

Cale would be a weapon too. And it was time to sharpen his edge.

He flagged the barmaid as she passed by. She smiled down at him, the tired smile of a tired woman. He removed a platinum coin from his belt pouch and handed it to her. Her eyes went wide.

“Please see to it that a few extra ewers of clean water are placed in my room,” he said.

She slipped the coin into her bodice.

“Uh, um… Of course, sir,” she stammered, then bustled off.

Cale took some time to savor the last of his cheese and stew. After gulping down the ale, he headed upstairs to his room to hunt slaad.

He opened the last door on the left to reveal a small room that smelled faintly of stale sweat and the smoke from poor-quality pipeweed. A straw-stuffed mattress sat against one wall under the room’s only window while a chair, chamber pot, and a rickety wooden table stood against the wall to Cale’s right. Atop the table sat a ceramic washbasin, three tin ewers of water, and a clay oil lamp. Cloak pegs stuck out of the wall like fingers. Cale doffed his filthy attire. Stripping down to only tunic, vest, breeches, and weapons belt, he hung the rest on the pegs.

Cale crossed the floor and pulled the shutters closed, sealing out most of the sun and the sounds from the street

below. But for the grid of light cast on the floor through the shutter slats, darkness cloaked the room. He willed it darker still, and darker it grew.

To fully prepare himself before casting the powerful divination he was contemplating, he donned his mask and sat cross-legged on the floor. He regulated his breathing, offered a prayer to Mask, and focused his mind on one thing: Azriim. In his mind’s eye, Cale pictured the slaad in both his natural form and in his half-drow form. He imagined the slaad’s mismatched eyes, one brown and one blue, the asymmetry seemingly always present irrespective of the form Azriim took.

Cale let the darkness embrace him, as soft as a feather bed. He pulled out the need for ch.rorin and let it feed his intensity, until the image of Azriim in both of his known forms had burned itself into Cale’s brain. When that image felt as sharp in his mind as the edge of a horn-blade, he rose and went to the table. Intuitively, he knew what to do.

Cale filled the washbasin with the water from one of the ewers. He whispered a word of power, spiraled his regenerated hand in the dark air, and came away with his fingers enmeshed with a cats-cradle of reified threads of shadow. He held his hand over the basin and let the liquid shadows slip from his fingers to coil in the water. He unsheathed one of his daggers and without even a wince, opened the palm of the same hand. He held the slash over the basin and let his blood drip into the water. In the darkness, the crimson fluid looked black, as black as his thoughts. The wound bled for only a few heartbeats before the regenerative properties of his flesh sealed the gash. With his dagger blade he stirred them all together-water, shadows, and blood-all the while praying to Mask to consecrate the brew.

When the surface of the water became as black and reflective as polished obsidian, he knew the Shadowlord had answered. He stared at the mirror-like surface of the water, seeing his masked face reflected there, and whispered the words to a spell that allowed him to scry a person or thing that he mentally selected, wherever they were. He imagined Azriim.

Cale’s reflection vanished from the surface of the basin. Points of dim ochre light lit the water like distant embers in the deep. Cale felt the intangible threads of magical power scouring Faerűn, searching for the slaad, searching…