Dawn of Night

CHAPTER 4 NURSING THE NIGHT

Vhostym uttered the words to a spell, waved his hand, and opened a dimensional portal through the smooth stone wall and into the nursery. The moment the aperture materialized, moans of pain hissed through the magical door, the steam of agony escaping a heated beaker. Vhostym tuned out the sounds, though he felt like moaning himself. His affliction grew worse daily, despite his spells and medicaments. His bones throbbed with pain. He imagined he could feel them putrefying within him, one at a time.

Pushing out of his mind an image of himself as a shapeless blob of flesh, Vhostym floated into the chamber.

The nursery opened wide around him, a circular cyst in the earth of his pocket plane. Forty-four paces in diameter, the polished walls of the perfectly spherical room gleamed in the dim green light of a single glowball. Lines of diamonds and amethysts glittered in alternating spiraling whorls inset into the walls-three thousand nine hundred and fifty nine of each stone. The amethysts, attuned to the shadow Weave, fairly hummed with channeled power; the diamonds, attuned to the Weave, sang at a slightly higher pitch. The sum of the stones, when combined with the one of the Weave Tap, equaled seven thousand nine hundred nineteen, the one thousandth prime number.

A number of power, Vhostym knew.

The gems, arcane spirals, and the Weave Tap combined to make the nursery a nexus of the Weave and the Shadow Weave, a place where the frayed edges of both lay exposed and sizzling. Fertile ground for arcana, so to speak; rich soil in which the Tap could grow.

And it had grown.

Suspended in midair by magic, in the exact center of the nursery, hung the living artifact. It had blossomed to three times the size it had been when his slaadi first brought it from the Fane of Shadows. With its long, thin limbs, snaking roots, and narrow trunk, to Vhostym it somehow looked feminine. He thought it sublimely beautiful and marveled that mere human priests-even those inspired by their goddess-could have crafted such an item.

Its glossy black bark pulsed with energy as it fed. Rings of soft, silver light periodically ran the length of its trunk, the pulse not unlike the greedy gulp of a magic-addicted drunkard. Even that mild silver illumination stung Vhostym's skin and caused him to blink back tears with each palpitation.

The limbs of the Weave Tap's mostly leafless canopy extended upward to grow into and out of the still living, twitching bodies of the semi-conscious, opalescent-skinned astral devas that Vhostym had suspended there. After bursting from the celestials' writhing forms, the Tap's limbs continued upward before melding with the warp of the Weave. Then it disappearing into nothingness toward the rounded, diamond-dotted ceiling. Similarly, the Tap's thick roots extended downward to penetrate the squirming bodies of the semi-conscious ghaele demons. Bursting from their malformed backs the roots invisibly enmeshed themselves in the weft of the Shadow Weave near the rounded floor, itself speckled with amethysts.

Vhostym ignored the pained moans of the creatures upon which the Tap fed. They were little more than sentient, pain-ridden husks. Living fertilizer, their nearly extinguished life-force had helped speed the Tap's growth. Already the artifact had produced one ripe seed. Soon, a second would be ready. And two was all Vhostym would need to realize his ambition.

He floated across the nursery to hover before the Tap. The blank, ivory eyes of the devas, and the thick, puss filled black orbs of the ghaele, stared at him unseeing, blind to all but their pain.

"Silence now," he said.

Vhostym cast a spell on the demons and devas that rendered them silent. Their mouths still moved in agony, but their verbalization no longer troubled his ears. He reached out and caressed the bole of the Tap with his frail hand. The warm bark felt more like supple leather than wood. He put his ear to the bark and sighed. A flash of the Tap's silver pulse set his eyes to watering and his skin to burning, but he endured. He looked with anticipation on the burgeoning seed, hanging alone from an otherwise bare, low-hanging limb. The seed was ovate, about the size of a fist, with throbbing black veins that crisscrossed its silver rind. In a sense, the seed was a metaphor, as was the Weave Tap itself. The priests of Shar had distilled an allegory of opposites down to a physical manifestation-a unique tree. Shar and Selune; new moon and full moon. Shar and Mystra; Shadow Weave and Weave. Perhaps the perfect enmeshing of those opposites was the secret of the Tap's beauty and power. Of course, in the end the Tap remained a creation inspired by Shar, and hence a tool designed to spite Mystra and Selune.

On a whim, Vhostym had tried to contact the Tap psionically, but had received no response. He had sensed a lurking self-awareness, but the artifact's consciousness was so focused on its purpose-growing, tapping-that it could perceive nothing else.

He eyed the thin limbs of the Weave Tap and imagined them as they were meant to be: blossoming with leaves of power. When one of the tree's seeds was "planted" in a location of powerful magic, it would instantly root in the fabric of the magic there and pass the power thus gained along the net of the Weave and back to the Weave Tap, where Vhostym would be waiting to harness it.

He had chosen with care the locations at which he would seed the Weave. He had dismissed mythals outright. While the mantles of elven high magic were areas of highly concentrated power, they were also too conspicuous. Tapping a mythal would have immediately drawn the attention of Toril's most powerful high mages, and Mystra's Chosen as well, and it was too soon for that. Instead, he had opted to tap a form of mantle magic different from mythals, but nearly as powerful. Already his brood had taken the first Tap seed and journeyed to the location of the first such mantle, a one-time Netherese Enclave.

Eager to check on their progress, he concentrated briefly and sent his mind through the planes, across Faerun and under it, until he touched Azriim's consciousness. During the first instant of contact, he sensed what Azriim sensed, but only dully, as though through a haze of mindwine.

He could smell the sour, organic reek of too many humans and other creatures crammed into too small a space. He heard the rising and falling murmur of a crowded street, and saw a web of catwalks, ladders, and ramshackle buildings sprouting like mushrooms from the walls of a mammoth cavern deep under the earth. If not for the mantle of magic that protected the city and spawned its guardians, the cavern would long ago have collapsed of its own weight.

Welcome to Skullport, Sojourner, projected Azriim, when Vhostym allowed his son to sense the psionic contact. The arsehole of Faerun.

Vhostym went directly to the point and asked, Have you located the provenience of the mantle?

We continue to observe the activities of the Skulls, Azriim answered. We believe the answer, if there is one, can be learned there. You are certain that another chamber survived the destruction?

I am, Vhostym said. And it will be near the main chamber. The mantle could not exist without a focus. It is there.

Few knew that the mantle magic protecting Skullport was Netherese in origin. Still fewer had deduced-as had Vhostym-that a cavern entirely separate from the city itself must contain the magical focus of the mantle, the source from which the mantle emanated. It was in that focus that the seed of the Weave Tap was to be planted.

Vhostym suspected that the Skulls, Skullport's magical guardians, after whom the city had been named, had magically shrouded the chamber in which stood the mantle's focus. Accordingly, he had provided his brood with wands that would give them the ability to deal with any wards cast by the Skulls to disguise the mantle's origin. They had only to find its general locale.

Vhostym would have searched for it himself-after all, Skullport was underground-but his body was deteriorating, despite his spells. Besides, the Skulls would have immediately sensed his presence. Though he knew that he could destroy Skullport's guardians with relative ease, he was not yet ready for direct confrontation. The mantle could be damaged in the process, or worse, the Chosen drawn to the site of the conflict.

No, implanting Skullport's mantle with the seed of the Weave Tap required planning, stealth, and misdirection-Azriim's strengths. Vhostym would leave the implementation of that part of the plan to his eldest son. Azriim's reward for success would be transformation to gray.

Use the teleportation rods with caution, he projected to Azriim. Be especially cautious before teleporting within Skullport. Teleporting from one location in the Underdark to another location in the Underdark can sometimes have unpredictable results.

Azriim's mental voice, fat with insolence, replied, Your concern touches us all.

Vhostym resisted the urge to cause pain to his impudent son.

Continue your efforts, he instructed Azriim, then he broke off contact.

The rush of anger caused by Azriim's impertinence sent shooting pains along his thin body. He clutched his staff and mouthed the words to a spell that dulled his body's ability to feel pain. With effort, he calmed himself.

He already had waited centuries; he could wait another tenday, another month. His brood would find what he had sent them to find, and he would have the Crown of Flame before the end.