The Night Parade (39 page)

“What’s wrong?” Reisz asked. “What is it?”

“A strange thought,” Myrmeen replied. “I’ve always prided myself on paying all my debts. I swore I would go to my end without owing anyone, but it seems I still owe Pieraccinni a small fortune.”

Reisz’s stricken expression vanished, replaced with an odd glimmer of excitement. Without explanation, he suddenly ran from the marble slab and raced past a collection of monstrosities that darted out of his way, the glowing energies of the apparatus causing them to recoil in fear.

“Reisz, where are you going?” Myrmeen called.

Instants before he vanished down a narrow side street, Myrmeen turned to Krystin and said, “I don’t know what might happen. Protect the children.”

“I will,” Krystin said. Myrmeen turned and only barely heard Krystin’s next words: “I will, Mother.”

The storm engulfed Myrmeen’s senses, and she forced herself on, through the rain, ignoring the lancing pain that came to her with every movement. After several minutes had passed without any sight of Reisz, Myrmeen feared she had lost him.

She ambled forward, Lord Sixx’s blade still trapped in her shoulder. Blood leaked down her back, the sting of rain in her wound causing a throbbing to begin in her head. Myrmeen recognized the area into which she was running, amazed that she had found the strength to move so quickly despite her injury. She wondered if her sister’s blood coursing through her veins was responsible for her sudden strength and dismissed the thought. She knew her true motivation was her resolve to pay Reisz back for the kindness, love, and devotion he had given her so many years earlier. She only wished there was something more she could do for him above being at his side when he passed on.

A flood of creatures emptied into the street before her. They raced past Myrmeen without giving her any notice. She pushed herself to move beyond them and venture into the building that had spewed them into the night: the Gentleman’s Hall. Dragging herself through the main chambers of the establishment, Myrmeen found the door to Pieraccinni’s lair thrown open, the merchant on his knees before Reisz. Pieraccinni was no longer human. He was as Alden had described him: His skin was dark blue, like that of a shark, the smoothness interrupted by bulging red and green veins. He had an oblong head, hooded eyes, and flaps at either side of his neck for air. His body shook as if he had palsy, and she recalled the phrase Alden had used, comparing him to a sea creature under unremitting pressure.

Myrmeen’s offhand comment about Pieraccinni apparently had caused Reisz to think of the night Alden had joined their war. The boy had described the disturbing sight of his employer, Pieraccinni, transforming into a monster. Lucius had suggested that Pieraccinni was a living siphon of magical energy with immense power. Power enough, Reisz obviously had gathered, to absord the destructive forces emanating from the apparatus.

“Myrmeen, get out of here!” Reisz barked.

“Leave the apparatus and join me,” Myrmeen said. “He can’t get out of this room.”

“I don’t want to take that risk,” Reisz said.

“Reisz,” she pleaded, her voice cracking, “please! Don’t leave me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and bit his lower lip until it bled. Then he turned back to her and said, “Myrmeen, get out before it’s too late.”

At his feet, Pieraccinni babbled incoherently. Myrmeen recalled Alden’s description of what he had seen, and she suddenly understood Reisz’s plan. Pieraccinni’s curse was that he drew magical energy into himself. Lord Sixx had created this room to dampen any arcane power. With those wards removed, magic would come flooding in, overwhelming the man. Reisz hoped that Pieraccinni could take inside himself the apparatus’s magic and spare the city its imminent destruction.

“Reisz, I-“

She stopped. I love you, she wanted to say. She finally wanted to give him the words he had needed to hear, the words he deserved to hear, especially now.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said.

“It’s not a lie.”

He nodded. “And you.”

Suddenly the walls buckled and a long fissure snaked across the roof. Through the crack that had been created Myrmeen saw the rolling fireball that had been contained within the three-story-high cage at the waterfront. It had broken free of its cage and followed the apparatus.

“Myrmeen, run!” Reisz hollered.

She scrambled from the room. Passing through the doorway, Myrmeen hesitated and looked back to see the bloated, quivering body of the arms merchant ripple and become insubstantial. The creature wailed in unimaginable agony as a hole appeared in its chest and grew larger. The gap was filled by a vortex of rapidly changing images: a lake of fire; a dominion of jagged, roughly hewn clouds; a city built entirely on the remains of its dead, bones for supports, skin for covering; and a long desert trail being crossed by hooded creatures taxied in chariots that were alive and screaming under an aqua sky. The abominations were no more repugnant than the ones the Harpers had encountered in Calimport, but they existed in such numbers that as Myrmeen anchored herself in the doorway and stared at the dying creature’s lair, she felt she might be sick with fear.

All paths lead here, a voice called. I am the doorway.

Pieraccinni was not a man—he was not even alive by her standards; he was one of the portals that the Night Parade had used to make the journey to the Realms. To disguise the portal, he had been cloaked in flesh, given a personality and memories, but they were nothing but lies.

Within the portal lay a swirling, chaotic mass of hellish images. Myrmeen saw demons yanking their eyes from their heads and consuming them, colonies of monstrosities waging war against one another, and landscapes where a human being would have burned the moment he touched the ground. Near each of the shifting images were creatures staring at the portal in fascination. Myrmeen wondered how long it would be before one of them decided to reach through the doorway and enter the small room.

Through the fissure in the roof Pieraccinni was able to leech the magic of her world to feed the rift, giving it strength to grow wider. She realized that without Lord Sixx’s dampers in place, the portal would continue to expand until all the magic in the world had been depleted. That meant it could grow large enough to engulf continents, perhaps even the world itself.

“Reisz, we have to close the gateway!” Myrmeen shouted.

The Harper nodded, steeling himself as he hurled the apparatus into the yawning pit before him. Suddenly the lightning cage dissolved, releasing the ball of energy as it shot forward, bursting into one of the shifting tableaus. The portal was engulfed in blinding blue-white energies.

Reisz turned to run from the room when Pieraccinni’s arm shot out, the force of the creature’s will making it corporeal. He grabbed the Harper by the heavy belt at Reisz’s waist and dragged him toward the swelling portal with inhuman force. Before Myrmeen could race to his side, the roof was torn from over their heads as the three-story-high counterpart of the sphere of entropy lowered itself into the room. The fiery, over-sized eye was no more than a dozen feet above their heads and closing. Myrmeen watched in horror as Reisz was yanked toward Pieraccinni.

“Give up the quest, Myrmeen,” he called to her. “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for until you do!”

Before she could take a step in his direction, Myrmeen saw Reisz throw his head back and stifle a scream as he was consumed by the portal that had been Pieraccinni. The arcane energies snapped his body apart and ate him alive. All traces of the merchant’s humanity vanished, leaving only the portal and the massive sphere of light that continued to descend, trying to follow its smaller counterpart. Whatever it touched disintegrated instantly.

Tears streaming down her face, Myrmeen pulled herself away and raced from Pieraccinni’s lair. An implosion of sound and light knocked her from her feet and sent her body rocketing across the dining hall. Turning, she picked herself up and saw that the portal and the sphere had connected. The vortex seemed to be consuming the ball of energy, the fiery, magical lace that made up its outer edges straining to weave itself around the sphere.

This was no time for gawking, she reminded herself. Heavy gusts of supernatural winds racked what was left of the Gentleman’s Hall. She ran for the door and in moments she was on the street, stumbling to the ground half a block away. She chanced a look back at the Gentleman’s Hall and saw that the establishment no longer existed. The vortex had grown to encompass the entire building, and the blue-white sphere was now half swallowed up, its lower part emerging in some other world, some nightmare dimension safely away from her own.

The gigantic eye then began to shudder and lose its form. The pressures being exerted by the portal were too much for the sphere. Its pupil spun wildly as if it were searching for a glimpse of the being that had been its undoing. The dark iris stopped for a moment as it fixed its gaze on Myrmeen.

Fear gripped her. She wondered if the sphere really was the eye of the night creatures’ god, as she had imagined earlier. If so, had it seen her? Had it sent an image of her face to its own counterpart in a dimension of undreamt of horror? Would it remember her and seek vengeance?

The street began to shudder, and she scrambled to her feet, prepared to run, but there was no time and nowhere for her to go. The vengeance of the dark god was at hand, it seemed. Suddenly the sphere exploded, spreading a cloud of blue-white energy that resembled shimmering sand released from a shattered hourglass. The energies licked at the sky above Calimport, tinging the heavy rains. Before the unnatural rains could fall, the vortex spread even wider, cutting across an area two blocks in diameter. Buildings were cut in half, their upper portions disintegrating.

The vortex sat there, only five feet over Myrmeen’s head, and she felt as if she were experiencing the worst possible gale winds. She found a post buried deeply in the ground and hung on, even though its upper half had been eaten away by the vortex. Staring up at the wildly changing kaleidoscope of color, Myrmeen felt an intense heat wash over her. The vortex was translucent, and through it she could see the glimmering blue-white raindrops fall to the yawning, hungry void, vanishing as they struck its surface. The portal shuddered as if it had gorged to the point of explosion, but it swallowed the darksome energies released by the sphere anyway. When they were gone, the vortex trembled, as if it was now addicted to the energies of the apparatus.

Myrmeen shook as she watched the vortex. She wondered if it still retained some of Pieraccinni’s mind, or if it operated solely on instinct, need, and lust. The city was rich in magic, and if the vortex still hungered, it might yet attack the city.

Without warning, the vortex shrank with incredible speed and collapsed in on itself. It dwindled until it once again hovered over the remains of the Gentleman’s Hall, then it became too small to see through the heavy rains and vanished. The portal apparently had followed the rest of the apparatus and its power to the dimension where it had sent the mystical object.

Myrmeen began to laugh, and soon her laughter gave way to tears of thanks that were washed away by the storm raging on around her. After a time, she became vaguely aware that people were coming. She hoped they were human. There was no fight left in her. Only the steady, insistent drumming of the rain upon her back kept her from losing consciousness. Soon she felt hands on her back, and she angled her head to see that the men who had found and were helping her to her feet were indeed human.

She stared up at the sky and smiled as she realized that the night had not left them. In the fairy tales her mother had read to her when she was a child, and in the stories that Reisz had recited on the long nights when he had held her in his arms and she had quaked in terror at the storm, the dawn always arrived with the expulsion of evil.

There was no dawn. There would be no perfect day for a very long time.

Myrmeen turned to the faces of the men surrounding her, stunned to recognize the dark-haired nineteen-year-old she first had glimpsed at a table in Arabel. “Ord?” she asked.

He nodded weakly, explaining that he had been wounded but not killed. He was found by the men who had come to help her, a band of adventurers who had several vials of healing potions and felt obliged to pour them all down Ord’s throat when they saw the pin that marked him as a Harper. A cleric was with them, and his magic had completed the task of restoring the young man.

Ord reached to his breast and removed the pin, gesturing for Myrmeen to come closer. “You should be the one to wear this for a time. It’s what my parents would have wanted.”

Myrmeen did not object when he secured the pin to her leathers. She took the young man’s hand as they went out into the rain-swept night to find Krystin.

Myrmeen stared into the face of Pholuros Argreeves, a tall, handsome, brown-haired man in his early forties. Argreeves ran a private temple for the worship and study of magic, and he had been a member of Suldolphor’s highly touted Council of Mages for two decades. He had a forceful personality coupled with a fairness and a gentle nature that had surprised Myrmeen.

She had arrived at the city with a military force large enough to show the council that her request for an audience with Argreeves and his daughter would not be denied. Her show of force had turned out to be completely unnecessary. The mage acted as if he had been expecting her and explained that he had always known this day would come. He made no excuses for his actions and did not beg Myrmeen’s forgiveness. They met in the beautifully adorned audience chamber of his temple, statues of the great fallen sorcerers of the last two decades lining the walls—including one of the archmage Elminster, who had “died” and been resurrected so many times that the council found it easier to leave his statue on display, just in case. Weapons and arcane items that once had been rumored to contain spirits or curses were hung on the wall or preserved under glass. Murals had been painted on the arched ceiling, depicting great moments of triumph and tragedy for their kind, the births, lives, and deaths of the most revered mages in recorded history. Elminster once again took up more than his share of space.