Azure Bonds

30 The Citadel of White Exile

“Alias, are you all right?” Olive asked, bending over the swordswoman.

“I feel like I’ve been taken apart and put back together, with lots of pieces missing,” Alias moaned.

“That’s a pretty sick joke,” Olive chided. “Apt, but sick.”

“What do you expect?” A throbbing pain had filled her head, her flesh stung from half a dozen cuts, and she felt badly sunburned. She opened her eyes, then shut them instantly, growling, “Well, that was a mistake.”

A bright white light seared her eyeballs, leaving blue dots dancing before her mind even after she’d squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. This was not the icy white of sun on snow or the ivory white of silk, but the hot, burning white of coals in the center of a forge.

Shielding her eyes, she ventured another look. The sky above was convoluted whirls of white-whites and off-whites—hot matter and even hotter matter swirling and twisting in a vain attempt to combine.

“This is where the gods roll across the sky like storm fronts,” she muttered.

“What?” Olive asked.

“Nothing. Just a line from an old tale.”

“Right,” the halfling said, realizing just who must have told her the tale. “You going to lay there all day?” she asked.

Alias sighed and sat up. Beneath her were gray flagstones shimmering in the light of the white-on-white sky overhead.

Olive knelt beside her. The halfling’s glittering white dress, a copy of the one Cassana had worn to last evening’s midnight dinner, was covered in mud and blood.

To Alias’s right, Akabar and Dragonbait were kneeling over a fifth figure—the stranger who’d helped them fight the battle on the Hill of Fangs. Alias felt a momentary twinge of jealousy that they were looking after the stranger before they did so for her.

Don’t be a fool, she told herself. For someone who’s just fought two dozen assassins, a witch, and a lich, and who’s broken a staff of power, you’re in pretty good shape. You got off easier than Syluné did in Shadowdale. A pang of grief went through her, though, as she remembered how the river witch had met her end.

Is there a difference, she wondered, between the sadness that real people feel and the sadness I was made to feel? What reason would any of my makers have to make me grieve for someone like Syluné? None, she decided. I can think for myself, and I can feel for myself. The “masters” don’t have anything to do with it.

Remembering the recent deaths of all but one of the masters, she looked down to examine her sword arm. The limb still ached from the disappearance of the top three sigils—Cassana’s, Zrie Prakis’s, and the Fire Knives’. All remaining members of the assassins must have been wiped out by the explosion of Zrie’s staff of power. The arm that the sigils occupied had been overgrown with the waving serpent pattern, but only the concentric rings of Phalse’s master remained. And the blank space that’s left, Alias thought, remembering with a shudder Olive’s prediction that something might now grow there.

Alias tried to stand and stumbled to one knee. She was tired and battered. She leaned on Dragonbait’s sword, stood up, and looked around. They were atop a very tall tower that thrust into the shining white sky. The crenelations of the wall about them were curved and pointed like the stones about the Hill of Fangs had been.

She looked down from the tower. It rose from a plain of shining, gray stone that spread out in all directions as far as the eye could see. In a circle about the tower’s foundation, the stone was solid and unmoving, but just beyond, the ground was cracked and shifting like a mud or lava flow.

“You know, Olive, I don’t think we’re in the Realms anymore.”

She limped over to Akabar and Dragonbait. The stranger’s faded garb was a shredded mass of tatters, and his arms and legs were lacerated by a hundred bites the size of large coins. Larger gashes lay across his forehead, chest, and torso, and blood ran freely from his wounds. Olive came up beside Alias and whistled in a low tone.

Dragonbait had the man’s head cradled in his claws, and small, bright arcs of yellow bridged the space between his hands and the man’s face, visible even in the bright light of the white sky. The smell of woodsmoke filled the air. Before their eyes, the flow of blood ceased, and the wounds on the man’s face began to heal. The stranger’s grimace faded and his expression grew peaceful, the deeper wrinkles smoothed from his weather-worn face.

Akabar moved swiftly and surely, tending to the damage that remained when Dragonbait’s healing powers were exhausted. The mage smeared a viscous, green paste over the wounds not yet closed and bound them with strips of his borrowed robe.

Alias knelt beside the mage and the saurial. “Who is he?” she asked.

Dragonbait turned a curious stare on her, and Akabar said, “You don’t recognize him? Are you sure?”

Alias studied the face. He was familiar. Beneath the gray hair and the wrinkled flesh was a man who must once have been very handsome, with a well-formed figure. “Nameless!” Alias whispered.

She turned to explain to the others. “He was in my dream in Shadow Gap, only much, much younger. Unless this is his grandfather or someone.”

“You don’t remember him from anywhere else?” Akabar prompted.

Alias screwed up her face trying to think, but she couldn’t recall him. He wasn’t in her pseudo-memory and there was no other time that she could have known him.

“Of course she can’t remember him,” Olive said with a sniff. “She was just a baby then.”

“What are you talking about?” Alias asked.

“You were just born—so to speak. He set you loose with Dragonbait to look after you. You might say he’s your father.” Olive reached down to touch her on her right wrist where the tattoo wound about the empty space. “He’s the Nameless Bard. Ring a bell?”

“The Nameless Bard,” Alias echoed as she leaned back and thought deeply. She knew that story, but hadn’t associated it with Nameless from her dream. She rocked back and forth as she recalled the tale in full and began to really understand for the first time what she was meant to be and what she had actually turned out to be.

Nameless opened his eyes, and, though his sight was mostly shielded from the bright sky by the four adventurers surrounding him, he raised his hands to shield his eyes. He scowled deeply and muttered, “Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig.”

Akabar and Olive exchanged glances. The halfling shrugged. Alias moved closer to the old man.

When Nameless caught sight of the swordswoman, he tried to sit up, but his remaining wounds caused him too much pain to do so. Dragonbait moved to support his back, but Nameless waved him away. With some effort, he pulled himself to a seated position, facing Alias.

He gazed at her bloodied, disheveled form and sighed. “You are everything I intended—and more.”

“You’re the Nameless Bard,” Alias replied, her tone even and emotionless.

“Yes. Do you remember my tale? I did not put it in you, as I did the other tales, but told it to you the hour you first woke, while we waited for the potions to heal Dragonbait so you could run away with him.”

Alias shook her head. “I don’t remember hearing it. I only remember it.”

“What do you remember?” Nameless prompted her.

“It’s the tale of a man with overweening vanity who betrayed his scruples trying to complete a task he knew very well had the potential for tremendous abuse.”

Olive gasped and Akabar bit on his lower lip.

The color drained from Nameless’s face.

“Am I wrong?” Alias asked.

A long moment passed. The cloudless sky flashed and crashed as a lightning storm erupted overhead. The energy discharges cast sharp shadows of the party on the tower roof’s gray flagstones.

“How can you say that?” Nameless whispered.

“Sounds to me like she put her own interpretation on the story,” Olive said smugly. “What do want to bet she tinkers with your songs, too?”

In a defeated tone, the true bard said, “I’ve failed.”

Akabar grinned. “True. You tried to make a thing, and instead you created a daughter. In Turmish, we’d say you were blessed by the gods.”

Alias smiled at the mage gratefully.

“Might even outdo her old man as a bard,” Olive predicted.

Nameless looked up in surprise at the halfling. Obviously it had never occurred to him that his creation might improve on his work. He was too proud and too vain. “I gave you everything I could,” he said.

“A false history, your songs, and no true name,” Alias said.

“I gave you a past so you would not feel alone and removed from those you would live among, and my songs were all I had left. I set you free at the price of my own freedom. When Cassana dragged me from my cell to distract you in a dream, I tried to warn you. She controlled most of my words and actions, but I did tell you how to defeat her kalmari.”

“Yes. You did those things,” Alias admitted flatly.

The true bard looked anguished. “But you still hate me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Alias replied. A grin broke through her grim expression. “Don’t human children often disagree with their parents without hating them?”

“Do you think of me as your father then?”

The swordswoman shrugged. “I don’t know. You hardly gave me anything in the way of a family in my memories. I’m not very practiced at feeling filial affection. Do you think of me as a daughter?”

Nameless looked down at the flagstones for a moment before meeting her eyes again. “To be honest, no. At least … not until now.”

“That’s all right.” She leaned forward and brushed her lips against his wrinkled cheek. “I found myself two good friends, and you gave me a brother.”

“A brother—” Nameless did not understand at first. “Oh, yes. You share the saurial’s soul.”

Dragonbait shook his head.

“You do. Phalse divided your soul,” Nameless told the paladin. “You have half a soul each.”

Dragonbait’s eyes squinted with displeasure. He extended two claws, pointed at Alias and retracted one, pointed at himself and retracted the second.

“He should know,” Olive said. “He’s the expert on souls.”

The lizard nodded.

“You can’t split a soul and get two souls,” Nameless argued.

“Why not?” the halfling demanded. “They’re infinite things. If you break them up, you still have two infinite things.”

Akabar stared in amazement at the short bard.

“What?” Olive asked, uncomfortable in his case. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” the Turmish mage replied. “I’m simply surprised at the firmness of your theological argument.”

“Halflings go to church, too, you know … sometimes.”

Alias yawned. The exertions of the past month, the first month of her life, were beginning to catch up with her. “This is all very interesting,” she lied, “but what I’d really like to do is catch Phalse and his master and take care of this last blasted sigil.”

“But don’t you see what this means?” Nameless said. “You really could be human.”

“So?”

“So?” the true bard exclaimed. “Doesn’t that matter to you?”

Alias shrugged again. “Dragonbait says I have a soul, and that means I’m not a thing. I’ve already decided that the rest doesn’t matter much. Most adventurers aren’t particularly fussy about whether you’re human or halfling, mage or fighter, and all the rest, just so you pull your own weight and remain loyal to your party. Isn’t that what you taught me?”

Nameless nodded, a little astounded that she had come to all these conclusions on her own without guidance. Perhaps, as Akabar had said, his endeavor had been blessed by the gods—better gods than Moander.

“So,” Alias said, trying to steer the conversation to more practical matters, “this is the Citadel of White Exile. It used to be your home. Do you have any idea where Phalse could be?”

“I abandoned the citadel to Phalse. Before I left, Phalse’s master built a bridge from here to his own realm, which Phalse uses to report to him. It’s in the courtyard below. Unless the little monster hides in one of the tower rooms, there is no place else for him to go.”

“Why not? Where does that plain lead?” Alias asked, pointing across the monotonous expanse of gray below them.

“This place was built to be completely secure. Heft a rock into the sky.”

Dragonbait broke off a piece of flagstone and did as the bard had instructed. The stone went up smoothly about fifty feet before it exploded in a rainbow of fireworks against the background of the white sky.

Nameless explained, “Above us is the Plane of Life, called the Positive Material Plane by sages. Any unprotected thing that enters explodes as every bit of matter within it achieves its full potential and becomes a star. There is no escape that way.”

He motioned toward the gray expanse beyond. “We sit on the border between the Plane of Life and the Plane of Gems, which sages call the Para-elemental Plane of Minerals. Wordy lot, sages. Out on the Plane of Gems, all unprotected living things are relentlessly turned into crystals of stunning beauty and complete lifelessness. Phalse, as far as I know, has no protection against either of these effects. The only way to this place are the two bridges built by Phalse’s master, one to his domain and one to the Hill of Fangs.

“You must be very cautious looking for Phalse. When I arrived, I was attacked by one of his master’s guard beasts—all mouths and teeth. And Phalse still has Cassana’s wand, which still has power over you.”

Alias nodded. “What about Phalse’s master?”

“None of us has ever seen him. Cassana sent someone through the portal to his domain to find out about him. Her agent was returned in pieces. The saurial can lead you to the other portal. Phalse brought him out of it. Your … shell and his body were branded in the courtyard, then brought up here and taken to the Hill of Fangs, and from there into Westgate.”

“Will you be all right here alone?” Alias asked.

“Yes. The energy-wrought sky has certain healing properties. I will wait here until I feel strong enough to walk. Then I will follow you.”

“Perhaps, Alias, you should remain here, too,” Akabar suggested, “so that Phalse cannot use the wand on you.”

“Look, Akash, whose battle is this, anyway? Phalse might try to use the wand, but I’ve already beaten its power once. I’m not about to cringe from it now.” Then, in a more gentle tone, she asked Nameless, “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer that we waited for you to heal?”

Nameless shook his head. “You don’t want to give Phalse a chance to call in reinforcements from the lower planes. If you defeat Phalse, you can force him to call his master from his domain through the portal and deal with him.” He looked up at the saurial. “You remember the way?”

The lizard nodded.

Alias frowned a little, still dissatisfied with leaving Nameless alone. Akabar thought to himself, she must care about him more than she knows.

“All right, Dragonbait. Which way?”

The saurial led them to a gap in the crenelations. A single set of stairs, steep, narrow, and without a railing, wound along the outside of the tower. Alias’s frown grew deeper when she saw they would have to go down in single file.

“I’m going to go first until we reach a door,” Alias said. “May I borrow your sword just a little while longer, Dragonbait?”

The saurial cocked his head in the manner that Alias usually assumed meant he hadn’t understood the question. Now she was beginning to believe it simply meant he didn’t want to answer the question. The fragrance of violets filled the air. She held the strange weapon out, thinking he might be uncomfortable allowing someone else to wield it.

“If you’d rather have it back, I’ll understand,” she said, but the lizard shook his head and pushed her hand away gently, indicating she should keep the blade.

When this is over, we’re going to learn to talk together, she promised herself. She started down the stairs, Dragonbait behind her, followed by Akabar. Olive brought up the rear. The halfling sighed at the steepness of the stairs, though their narrowness did not disturb her in the least. She trotted down them casually. Akabar, however, pressed himself against the wall of the tower and kept his eyes on his feet.

Nameless waited until Olive’s head disappeared below the level of the wall, then counted to twenty before limping to the staircase, gripping his wounded side. Half concealed by a large, fanged crenelation, he watched them descend. When they’d entered the first door, the true bard started down the stairs himself. He reached the first door and passed by it, continuing farther down the staircase. His only hope lay in the possibility that the tower had not given up all its secrets to its new owner.

On the ground far below, outside the tower’s protective shell, a cloaked figure lowered the hand that had been shielding his eyes from the sky’s light. Carefully, he removed the eye-cusps that gave him the sight of an eagle and replaced them in the small egg that was their home. He sighed, and his breath circled like fog through the transparent envelope that surrounded him. Then he took up his staff and made his way over the broken terrain of gem-stones to the Citadel of White Exile.

When the companions had passed through the door, and Dragonbait had pushed past Alias to scout ahead, he had left Hill Cleaver still in her grasp. Without a weapon, the swordswoman was only a human of soft flesh and tool-using hands, while the saurial felt quite confident with his claws and powerful jaws.

The passages were lighted by the stones of the wall, which shone from within—a benefit of the citadel’s position. Akabar was reminded of the light that had come from behind the elven wall that had imprisoned the Abomination of Moander, but these walls glowed with a rosy light that gave them all a ruddy hue.

They passed through one chamber, then another. Both had held some furniture, but recently had been stripped bare. The dust on the floor was disturbed as though several heavy objects had been dragged across it. The small prints of the pseudo-halfling crossed the rooms, as well as a set of large, heavier boots, nearly giant size.

They came to a pair of doors made of crystal that, like the the walls, glowed from within. The doors opened at a touch.

A large hall lay beyond. Dragonbait froze upon entering the room. It was not arranged the way it had been more than a month ago when he’d been dragged through it. There had been a long feasting table, and the walls had been covered with banners of some of the Realms’ older nations. The table and banners were gone, replaced by twelve biers. Each funeral stand was occupied by a body.

Alias’s first guess was that the citadel’s new inhabitants had turned this room into a morgue, or maybe even a meat locker.

Dragonbait, already standing in the center of the room, spun about in obvious confusion. A brimstone stench emanated from his body.

“Brandobas’s Beard!” Olive exclaimed, already near enough to see what useful things might be left on the corpses. “They’re you!”

Uneasily, Alias walked closer to the bodies. They were all as similar as a batch of bowls a potter might throw in a day. Each face had the same features, some were thinner, some wider, but they all had her features. Each face was framed with hair some shade of red, from reddish black to strawberry blonde. Their skin tones covered the spectrum from the pale flesh of the north to the swarthy complexions of the south.

Their dress was more varied. A body in the heavy armor of Mulhorand lay beside one in wolfhide robes and the headpiece of the far north. The sultry slitted dress of a Waterdeep courtesan—something perhaps from Cassana’s closet—adorned a body one bier over from another dressed in the conservative robes of a Moonshae druid. A weapon lay beside each, a mace or sword or sickle or dagger. One figure, wrapped in black, was equipped with eastern weapons whose uses were unfamiliar to Alias.

Yet they were all her. Earlier models? Alias wondered. Then she shook her head grimly. No, later improvements. How foolish to think that they would stop at just one. A few minutes ago, when she’d thought herself unique, she’d been certain she could prove her worth, justify her own existence. But what if she was just one of a pack, a herd of Aliases to be unleashed on the unsuspecting worlds?

She forced herself to stand closer to one of the bodies—one dressed as a cleric of Tymora in robes of white trimmed with blue, with her holy symbol—a silver disk—hanging on a chain about her neck. Alias fought back the queasiness in her stomach and touched the body, grabbing the right wrist and turning it to reveal the underside of the arm.

The pattern of serpents and waves was there, as motionless as a tattoo placed on a piece of dead flesh. The only sigil in the pattern was the bull’s eye of Phalse’s master. There was no blank spot at the wrist for Nameless. The flesh was clammy, like clay.

Akabar came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Dead?” he asked.

“Dead,” she echoed, “or at least not alive. Or less alive than me.” She shook with anger. “This is all I was to them. A thing to be copied over and over.”

“Easy now,” Akabar said, squeezing her shoulder gently. “They’re no more like you than a painting of you would be. If you want, we can destroy them.”

“No!” Alias snapped. “Whatever they are, I will not see them destroyed. They’re no more … evil than I am. I’m going to kill the last master and lay them to rest that way.”

Akabar stood silent for a moment, then nodded. “As you wish.”

Alias could tell he was trying to determine if her reaction was a natural one or another pattern, like her obsession to reach Yulash had been.

Olive shook her head, disapproving of Akabar’s tone. Just like a mage. Thinking too much with the head, not enough with the heart. Wonder how he’d feel if we offered to burn up his brothers?

Dragonbait snapped out of his shen state. He could not understand what his senses were telling him about the women laid out before him. Each body possessed a living soul, but the saurial could not sense a trace of a spirit in any of them. Is that all that separates them from death—or birth? he wondered.

“Is the courtyard over there, Dragonbait?” Alias asked, pointing to a second pair of crystal doors at the far end of the hall.

The saurial nodded.

Alias approached these doors and inspected them. They glowed in the same fashion, but there was something different about them. They made her uneasy. Then she realized why.

They drew her. As with the elven wall in Yulash, she could not resist moving toward them. She wanted to open them. What she sought lay beyond them in the courtyard.

She glanced at the others. Akabar pulled a small bundle from his belt, fishing out spell components. Dragonbait took a two-handed sword from one of the biers. Olive placed an ear against one of the doors. She pulled back, rubbing her ear. “No noise, but it’s very warm.”

Alias took a deep breath as she reached for the door. She wanted to be prepared to slam it shut in an instant or dodge aside if some horrible beast came lunging out.

The door pushed open at a touch, revealing a large, open courtyard. To the right and left, passages wove farther into the mazework of the tower. Directly across from them, a balcony opened onto the splendor of the shimmering Plane of Life. In the center of the court was a large pool filled with swirling patterns of silver and red, like the portal on the Hill of Fangs. This pool was set into the floor, though, and ringed with bluish stones.

A small form, dressed in shades of red and brown was seated on the stones. He smiled a smile wider than any human or halfling could manage, and his blue-on-blue-on-blue eyes glinted wickedly. In his hands he passed back and forth Cassana’s slender, blue wand.

“Welcome home, One,” Phalse said. “I take it you have met Two through Thirteen.”