Dawn of Night (9 page)

Riven coughed and spat—as much the assassin’s morning ritual as Jak’s smoking—and asked, “Why do we care?”

Jak blew smoke Riven’s way and shook his head in disgust.

Cale chose to ignore Riven and looked at Magadon when he said, “It siphons the magic of the Weave, magnifies it, and makes that power usable by the mage who possesses the Tap.”

“How?” Jak asked.

Cale shrugged and answered, “The tome did not specify the method.”

“Those slaadi were no mages,” Riven observed.

“No,” Cale agreed. “But I’ll wager their master, this “Sojourner’, is.”

To that, Riven said nothing, merely studied his hands.

“If so, the Sojourner could be scrying us now,” Magadon said, looking up into the starless sky.

Jak shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” the halfling said, and frowned at his pipe, which had apparently gone out. “Divinations do not seem to work in this place. At least mine don’t. I’ll wager he cannot scry us here. Besides, he may have no interest in us anymore. He might think we’re dead at the bottom of the Moonmere. Why scry for the dead?”

The guide acknowledged Jak’s point with a tilt of his head then asked, “What do we think this Sojourner wants to do with the power of the Weave Tap?”

Cale shrugged, chewed some trail tack, then said, “No way to know.”

‘“Additional variables,’ ” Jak added, quoting Sephris,

the chosen of Oghma and ostensible madman who had prophesied their fate, albeit in mathematical riddles. The halfling tapped the ashes from his pipe and stuffed it back into his belt pouch. “Whatever it is, we can be sure it’s not good.” He glared at Riven. “And that’s why we care, Zhent.”

Riven scoffed, stretched, and said, “Speak for yourself, Fleet.” He paused for a minute then nodded at the belt pouch into which Jak’s pipe had vanished. “You have an extra one of those?”

Jak, eyebrows arched, asked, “What? A pipe?” Riven nodded.

Jak nodded back, shared a perplexed look with Cale, then took his spare pipe—a plain, wooden-bowled affairfrom a belt pouch. He tossed it to Riven along with an extra pipeweed tin and a tinder-twig.

“Keep it. And that’s good pipeweed from Mistledale,” the halfling said. “Don’t waste it.”

Obviously familiar with the paraphernalia, Riven

tamped, lit, and began to smoke without saying a word.

Cale’s astonishment must have shown on his face. “You’ve never seen a man smoke?” Riven asked him. “I’ve never seen you smoke,” Cale answered.

Riven blew out a series of perfect smoke rings, gave a hard grin, and said, “And I’ve never seen a man with yellow eyes who can move from shadow to shadow. I guess this place is changing us all, Cale.”

To that, Cale could only agree.

“We’ve got to get back,” Jak said, “find those slaadi, and stop the Sojourner. No one else even knows what’s happening.”

“And no one else needs to know,” Riven said from around the pipe. “Understood?”

Jak looked at the assassin as if he had turned green and asked, “What in the Hells are you talking about? Did the pipeweed go to your head that fast? We need help with this.”

Riven drew on Jak’s pipe, discharged the smoke from

his nose, and looked to Cale, who sighed and nodded.

“This is our fight, Jak,” Cale said. “It’s personal; it’s been personal right from the start. We end it, no one else.”

Jak’s mouth hung open.

“Our fight!” the halfling said at last. “Dark and empty! This is big, Cale, bigger than us. That Tap is an artifact. We’re talking about the Weave itself. This isn’t some guild grudge we’re settling. We need help. I know some people who . .

Cale stared at his friend and Jak grew quiet. Cale knew it was big, but he also knew it was his.

“We can do it, Jak.”

Riven uttered something between a cough and a laugh.

The halfling turned from Cale, looked to Magadon, and asked, “You too?”

Magadon shrugged and made a show of reorganizing his giant pack while he said, “One of those slaadi killed Nestor, took his place, then nearly killed you. It’s personal for me as well.”

“You three aren’t thinking right,” Jak said, then mumbled, “Trickster’s toes. Trickster’s hairy toes.”

At Jak’s expression of dismay, Cale struggled to keep a straight face.

“We’ll stop them, little man,” Cale said. “We’ll be enough.”

“You better be right,” Jak said, and obviously meant it. Cale’s mirth vanished. He had better be right, indeed. Magadon stood, squirmed into his pack, and adjusted

the straps.

“We can’t stop anyone sitting here,” said the guide. “Gear up. Let’s move.”

Cale stood and began to gather his gear.

The halfling touched the spot on his back where one of the slaadi, Dolgan, had run him through.

He shouldered his own pack with a grunt and said, “We do owe those damned slaadi some blood, don’t we?”

“That we do,” Cale answered with a smile.

He could see that the halfling was coming to terms with the decision.

“Now and again you say something that makes sense, Fleet,” Riven said.

He put out his borrowed pipe, pocketed it, and pulled on his pack.

“You keep your words behind your teeth, Zhent,” Jak replied. “And remember… that’s my pipe.”

*****

It took another two days, but at last the forest began to thin. By the time they broke for a midday repast on the second day, they were in the midst of endless plains that rose and fell like ocean swells. The tall grass, with thick, abrasive blades that looked like serrated daggers, reached to Jak’s thighs. Only occasional copses of trees broke the flat monotony. Each tree was so gnarled it looked like it had twisted itself into knots trying to escape the soil. In truth, Jak had felt more comfortable in the brooding forest than he did in the plains. He felt exposed under the onyx sky. He could see little farther than a short stone’s throw. There was nowhere to hide.

He held his holy symbol in a sweaty fist and his blue-light wand in the other. It seemed he had been sweating since the moment he arrived in that dark plane. He felt small, in a way that had nothing to do with his stature. When he considered the transformations of Riven and Cale, thought of the artifact, and saw in all of it the machinations of gods, he felt as though he were witnessing a myth in-the-making. It frightened him.

The stakes—albeit unknown—also frightened him. In the past, his adventures had been just that: adventures, and generally of interest only to him. But events had grown larger than the stuff of tavern tales. At that moment, Jak was pleased that he was nothing more than an obscure priest of a minor god.

He looked over at Cale, saw the dusky skin, the yellow eyes, the shadows that clung to him, and thought: Heroes have too much weight to carry.

“The correspondence seems to be holding,” Magadon observed from his position out in front of them. The even tone of the woodsman’s voice helped to relax Jak. Magadon seemed… steady somehow, like an old oak tree, like he always knew where he was and where he was going.

He was a seventeen too, Jak thought, recalling old Sephris.

Magadon went on, “If it continues, we should reach the Shadow equivalent of Starmantle in two or three days.”

Assuming it’s not moving away from us, Jak thought but nodded anyway.

The shifting terrain of the Shadow Deep made him feel like the land under him was a skiff floating on an endless, invisible sea. The thought made him queasy and he pushed it from his mind.

As the trek continued Jak tried several times to engage Cale in conversation, but each time Cale deflected the attempt with an inhospitable grunt. The halfling knew what that meant—Cale was thinking, planning.

Riven, for his part, seemed content to walk in silence, alone with the newfound power in his hands, which he continually examined as they traveled. Jak wondered uneasily what else Riven’s hands could do, what else they had already done.

Late in the day it grew windy, then began to rain. Thick

dollops of black water, whipped into blk-ets by a gusting

wind, thumped against Jak’s face as hard as sling bullets.

Vermillion lightning ripped the sky into pieces. Deafening

thunder pounded the earth. The storm was gorgeous and

terrifying all at once, like the demon lord Cale and Jak

had once fought.

Magadon called a halt and they camped under the eaves of a copse of something like elms. Jak made sure to create a beef stew with his spell that evening, to keep Riven’s mouth shut. Though Magadon’s weathered and

oiled tents managed to keep the rain off of him, he struggled through only an hour or two of intermittent sleep.

The storm continued through the next day, but still they made good progress. Magadon refused to stop for the weather and Jak was glad. He wanted out of that plane and, if the theoretical city held the way out, he wanted to get there as soon as possible.

Sometime near the middle of that day, they reached their destination.

They stood atop a low rise, ineffectually shielding themselves against the wind and rain with their hats or the hoods of their sodden cloaks. A gently sloping, shallow valley extended before them. At its bottom, visible to Jak only in the lightning flashes, a ruined city erupted from the plain like a plague boil. The overgrown ruins covered as much acreage as did Selgaunt, perhaps more. Only the low, squat buildings in the city’s denselypacked center had remained intact. Jak saw no people in the streets, no movement at all. It was eerie.

They stood looking at the ruins for a long while, as though assuring themselves that they were not looking upon an apparition. A pinpoint of golden light flashed from somewhere in the city’s center, from amidst the low buildings, as though someone had briefly uncovered a bulls eye lantern.

Jak’s breath caught, and he strained to see. He thought he might have imagined the light but it repeated again quickly. To him, that light, that color, bespoke one thing: a way home.

“Did you see that?” he shouted to Cale and Magadon over the wind.

Both nodded.

Magadon said, “That’s the only natural looking light we’ve been since we arrived.”

“A way back?” Jak asked.

He couldn’t keep hope from coloring his voice. Magadon shrugged and said, “Possibly.”

They squinted into the wind. The flash came again.

“A beacon, maybe?” Riven asked.

Cale drew Weaveshear and said, “Or maybe a lure. Either way, there’s only one way to find out. Ready?”

Jak nodded and drew his short sword and dagger. Riven too drew his sabers, and Magadon his bow.

“Stay sharp,” Cale said, starting down the rain-slicked grass of the valley.

Thunder boomed and another lightning flash illuminated the city. Jak caught a clear glimpse of toppled buildings, crumbling megaliths, and broken statues worn by the weather and pitted into anonymity. It looked as though the city had been destroyed in some unrecorded cataclysm. Sculptures perched atop the roofs of the small, single story buildings in the city’s center, the only intact statuary in the ruins.

“The buildings in the center of town look odd,” Jak observed. “Too small for a home. What do you make of them?”

Cale’s voice was grim when he said, “Those are tombs.”

Jak’s skin went gooseflesh. There were a lot of them.

*****

Magadon led them into the ruined city, marking the path ahead with his bow. Cale walked beside the guide, coiled, Weaves] tear in hand. Jak and Riven followed after, widely spaced, blades at the ready, eyes alert. Butterflies fluttered in Jak’s gut. He couldn’t keep his hands from shaking, causing the shadows cast by he and his companions in the blue light of his wand to dance on the ruins.

Crumbling, weed-overgrown buildings rose out of the darkness. Even in ruin, the structures managed to imply a sense of architectural majesty. Soaring arches, thick marble columns, and elaborately carved stonework were the rule. The city must have been beautiful to behold once.

Shards of bone stuck from the earth, most humansized, but some gigantic. Cale simply stared at them and said nothing.

A broad, flagstone-paved avenue stretched before them, extending into darkness toward the crypts in the center of town. Weeds, tall grass, drab wildflowers, and even the occasional tree sprouted from between the cracked stones of the road. The ruins were old.

All but the cemetery, at least.

Jak felt uneasy, the way he did when unfriendly eyes were upon him, but he could not pinpoint a reason. He had an ominous sense of something lurking nearby, something malevolent.

Despite the continuing rain, the air felt clingy and thick, as though they were walking through a mass of invisible cobwebs. Jak could not help but hold his dagger before his face and try to part the air with it.

In silence, they trekked through the dead streets of a dead city. Riven and Magadon took the flanks, spreading out ten paces to the left and right, clearing buildings as they moved. Jak and Cale spaced themselves a few paces apart and walked down the broad road. Having descended into the valley, the ruins blocked their view of the necropolis so they could no longer see the occasionally flashing gold light. It didn’t matter. They knew where to go. The road led directly to it.

Within a quarter hour, the rain lessened to something more moderate than a downpour, but lightning still flashed through the sky. Jak kept alert to Riven’s side of the street-Jak’s responsibility—but now and again stole a look at Cale. His friend’s faraway gaze followed Magadon, but sometimes moved dully from here to there. Jak would never get used to those yellow eyes.

The halfling moved near Cale and asked in a sharp whisper, “What is it?”

Cale, who looked startled, said, “I don’t know, Jak. I feel like I know this place somehow, like my mind is a palimpsest and the faded writing is now becoming visible.”

Jak did not even know what a palimpsest was, but his skin went gooseflesh again.

“How would you know this place?” he asked. “The book from the Fane?”

Jak watched as Riven entered the crumbling entrance of what once might have been a shop. He exited a moment later, signaling that it was clear.