Shadowbred (45 page)

Magadon cocked his head and said slowly, “Erevis?” Cale gritted his teeth as his body painfully knit back together. “We’re here, Mags,” Cale said, and nearly fell. “Riven and I are both here. Get him, Riven.”

He knew Rivalen would be coming.

Riven moved warily under the huge crystal and put his hands on Magadon’s shoulders. Riven was as gentle with Magadon as Cale had seen him with his dogs.

“It’s part of him,” Riven said, nodding at the Source’s veins that grew into Magadon’s flesh.

“Leave me,” Magadon said, and grinned like a madman. He showed fangs for eyeteeth. “There’s power here. And wonders. Leave me. I am content.”

Cale remembered the kraken, its mind lost in the false world of the Source. He remembered Magadon had said to him once that contact with the Source exacted a price. He was seeing it firsthand.

Get me out, Magadon said in Cale’s mind.

Cale tried to walk, found that his legs could support him, and moved to Riven’s side. He threw aside his cloak, soaked as it was with blood.

“We pull him out or cut him out,” Cale said.

“I will harm you if you try,” Magadon said absently.

I will not allow it, but you must hurry, Magadon projected.

The shadows across the room started to deepen and churn.

“Pull him,” Cale said in alarm, and whispered a healing spell to accelerate his recovery. Mask’s healing energy warmed him, eased the pain.

Riven tried to pull Magadon free, failed. Cale assisted and the two Chosen of Mask tried to pull their friend free of his addiction.

The veins of the Source started to give way. Magadon screamed as the strings grew taught, ripped his flesh. Blood oozed from his arms. Cale watched glowing eyes form in the darkness across the chamber. Riven saw them, too. They pulled harder. Magadon groaned as a number of black veins, glistening with blood, snaked out of his skin, but Magadon did not come free. He dangled there, a macabre marionette.

“Stop! Leave me and I will give you what you need to defeat the Shadovar, Erevis. The whole power of the Source channeled into one weapon. Here. Now.”

Magadon and the Source flared and pulsed rapidly.

Power went into Weaveshear. The blade vibrated in Cale’s hand. Shadows poured from it, darker than before, and spiraled around them. With so much power diverted from the mythallar to Cale’s blade, Sakkors began to slowly descend.

Cale watched Rivalen and the two other Shadovar emerge fully from the darkness, their glowing eyes wide as their city started to lower back into the sea.

“Your blade,” Magadon said, his voice far away. “It will absorb even their shadow magic spells. Cut them down, Erevis. The power of an entire city is in your hand. Just leave me. You are my friend. Leave me.”

Cale hesitated, tempted. Magadon grinned, nodded, his eyes pulsing in time with the Source.

Free us! Magadon screamed in Cale’s head. He is almost gone!

Rivalen pulled a thin black blade from the scabbard at his belt. The pommel, inset with an amethyst, was tinged with purple light.

“Give me the powet of the Source, Magadon,” Rivalen said.

Magadon laughed. “No. I gave it to him. I am free of you.”

Rivalen’s eyes widened and all three shades began to incant.

“Pull him loose,” Riven said to Cale.

“No. You are my friend,” Magadon said again. “Leave me.”

“I am your friend,” Cale said. “That’s why I can’t leave you.”

Cale slashed the exposed veins hanging between Magadon and the Source.

Magadon screamed and collapsed. The sinewy cords spat sparks of red energy and squirmed back into the crystal.

Rivalen’s companion fired a blistering beam of green energy that hit Cale in the chest. Cale’s flesh repelled the magic and it dissipated harmlessly.

“I will return for you,” Cale said to Rivalen, and pointed the charged Weaveshear at him.

“We will be here,” Rivalen said.

Cale imagined the Wayrock in his mind. His mind was cloudy, the image faint. He held onto it as best he could, wrapped Magadon and Riven in his darkness, and stepped through the shadows.

When the darkness parted, they were not on the Wayrock. They were sitting atop a hillock of ash-covered ice, under a steel gray sky, overlooking an icy plain dorted with pits of hellfire. The souls of the damned squirmed in the pits, screaming their agony into the sky. The smell of brimstone polluted the freezing air. A frigid breeze stirred up a cloud of ash and ice and carried with it the stink of a charnel house.

“Welcome to Cania,” said a voice.

Mephistopheles’s voice.

Shadows bled from Cale’s skin. A trickle of blood leaked from his ears.

Magadon began to laugh.