Key of Stars

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

Feywild

Long before he had been old enough, Raidon had yearned to join Xiang Temple. He’d been certain he’d love fighting. His mother had let him observe the choreographed but nonetheless spectacular fights the monks demonstrated on festival days. Watching all the ways someone could move and evade, and manipulate a foe with a subtle twist or hip rotation was all the magic Raidon had ever craved.

When he was eight years of age, he enrolled. His expectations were fulfilled, and more. He loved the forms, the conditioning, and the camaraderie. The first years numbered among his most cherished memories. And after all those years, he still relished the complexities of striking, despite where his vocation had ultimately led him.

Remembrances of his training came to Raidon as he moved through the fey forest. A towering tree reminded him of the pillars that graced Xiang. Firefly gleams flaring in the shadows to either side recalled the fantastic lanterns that hung over the main dojo. Above, the sun glimmered through a ragged cloak of green and gold leaves, which was in color like the silk belt he was given upon achieving his first rank.

Then Japheth stepped out of the black cavity of his cloak. The warlock didn’t shake loose any pleasant associations.

Their trip through the woods of Faerie was rapid, at least. Raidon could move much faster than his companion, but Japheth could take shortcuts and leap ahead. Raidon would then make up the distance with a quick burst of reaching strides.

The monk tried to recall the contented glow of his early training again, then allowed the image to fade. The moment was past.

The memory of the petrified Traitor returned front and center. Seeing the statue, as it slipped down the hound’s path of shadow, had shaken Raidon.

Something terrible was loose, and he didn’t know if anyone had the knowledge or the power to stop it. The thought actually worried him. He’d imagined he had gone beyond the ability to feel concern. And so, paradoxically, Raidon was also grateful.

Of course, he wished he could have made the return to human feeling via some other route. Each time he concentrated on the gnarled, twisted shape of Stardeep’s “escaped” prisoner, the Cerulean Sign became as ice across his chest.

The half-elf shook his head. Worry was an old friend, much preferred to the desolate winds howling across his soul since the … incident … in Xxiphu. He’d believed his mind was shattered for good.

Yet here he was. Pushed past the breaking point, he’d located the grit to keep trying. And in that resilience, in the uncomplicated striving, he’d found a simple peace. It was the peace he’d once taken for granted, but forgotten.

Achieving one’s goals was not what brought lasting satisfaction-it was the journey itself that gave peace. When one stopped trying for what was new or what was right, finally satisfied in one’s past achievements, or maybe too tired to continue trying to make or find something new, then life was finally over.

It was entirely possible his current mood was an aberration, and doomed to go the way of all his earlier hopeful thoughts, but he was determined to enjoy the calm it brought while it lasted.

Ahead, Japheth translated across a chasm, and Raidon leaped it. A press of wide trunks lay on the chasm’s opposite side, obscuring the view ahead. He sprinted through the trees, leaning into each course correction, laying a hand on warm bark when necessary to make particularly sharp turns.

When the monk regained sight of the warlock, the man stood at the edge of a clearing amid the towering trees. It was the clearing holding the stone dais on which they’d arrived in the Feywild.

A figure stood on the platform, the suggestion of a smug smile tugging the corners of his mouth.

Raidon felt as if someone had just punched him in the stomach.

“You!” said Japheth, his tone incredulous.

The Lord of Bats’s smile widened. The green glyph slithered on his forehead like a leech looking for blood. Its influence woke a cool resonance in Raidon’s spellscar.

An iron spear appeared in Japheth’s right hand. It glowed cherry red from infernal heat. The warlock hurled it. Before it could find its mark, the archfey opened his mouth, releasing a torrent of screaming bats that instantly filled the hollow. Flapping darkness hid the spear’s trajectory.

A voice issued from the obscured clearing. “I’ve taken possession of this exit,” the archfey said. “To go through, you must defeat me.”

“We beat you before, Neifion!” Japheth yelled over the sound of flapping bat wings.

“You’re in the land of my power, fool,” the archfey called. “You chased me out of your dreary catacombs with the aid of all your friends, but in the Feywild, I command the very earth and air.”

Raidon came up beside the warlock and yelled, “Neifion, forget your revenge. Your hate blinds you to the true nature of your ally. Malyanna may be eladrin, distant kin to you perhaps. But she serves creatures of abomination, who would wreak ruin not only on Faerun, but Faerie too, and beyond. Is your revenge so important that you’d destroy your home?”

Silence met the monk’s entreaty for several heartbeats.

“She is an ally of convenience,” Neifion said. “Once Japheth is blooded and rendered, and serves as one of my homunculi, she can rot. Until then, I find her gifts useful.”

“He’s insane,” Japheth said to Raidon, shaking his head. “Reason isn’t going to work on the Lord of Bats.”

“Insanity is something I’ve come to understand,” Raidon said. “Sometimes, even the crazed can come to see reality.”

The swarm of bats obscuring the hollow expanded. Suddenly, scratching, chittering darkness tore at Raidon’s face, the back of his hands and forearms, and his chest.

He slapped his palm onto his Cerulean Sign. A blaze of blue light swept from him. Where it touched, the press of bats faded like shadows fleeing a sunrise.

Raidon allowed the influence of his Sign to wax, until its boundary washed away the last bit of darkness in the hollow, revealing the platform and its occupant.

Neifion’s smile soured. “I suppose I’ll have to kill you too, monk,” he said.

Raidon charged the archfey. His initial front kick knocked the Lord of Bats to the edge of the platform, but didn’t push him off the dais as Raidon had expected.

The monk closed with his foe again, his hands ready to block or strike.

Neifion’s cape flared outward, transforming into great wings. His limbs lengthened, and his pale skin sprouted ratty fur. His body expanded in size fourfold. His horrid leathery wings stretched from one end of the hollow to the other.

The hybrid creature swept one enormous wing at the monk. Raidon ducked beneath the edge, and came up on its trailing side. Something blurred in the corner of his vision, and Raidon dived sideways off the platform. A gargantuan fist wound with holly vines smashed down where he’d been standing.

With groans of straining roots, the trees surrounding the hollow woke to animation. They raised clenched fists of branch and bark. Each was kin to the creature that had almost killed Raidon below the Marhana mansion-and that had only appeared for the space of a single attack.

The skyline surrounding the clearing was transformed into a jagged, closing circle of leaning treants. Raidon was surrounded. Again, worry threaded his mind.

The Lord of Bats laughed. Another gnarled fist the size of a boulder crashed down, but Raidon evaded it on light feet. The impact sent the ground cover of leaves swirling away. Several earth-shaking booms told the tale of a series of narrow escapes.

Angul vibrated in its sheath, humming with impatience to be pulled. Thankfully, it didn’t jump around so violently it threw off Raidon’s dance of evasion. How long would the blade behave itself?

Points of light flared into existence around Japheth’s head. The warlock gestured, and one blue-white orb leapt upward in a halo of choking smoke. It transfixed a treant and burst with a miniature detonation of blinding illumination. The creature straightened and clapped twiggy hands to its eyes.

Three more points of light sped away from Japheth, each dazzling another of the awakened trees. Only two treants continued to lean over the hollow, scrabbling after the darting monk with hands the size of bazaar carts.

“You are ever my nemesis,” Neifion said, and gestured at Japheth with a winged claw. A whirlwind of writhing vines attempted to wrap around the warlock, but Japheth vanished into his cloak before the verdant strands could tighten.

Raidon dodged a treant fist, feinting as if to dash out of the hollow. Instead he threw himself into a backward roll, covering the distance to the still chuckling Lord of Bats in half a heartbeat. He flipped out of the roll and channeled his backward momentum to twist his body around, clenching his fists tight even as it took fire from his cerulean spellscar.

The spinning backfist caught the Lord of Bats beneath his pointy, ratlike chin. The sound of the contact boomed across the fey forest. Neifion’s winged body arced through the air, off the platform, and across the clearing. It smashed into the knee of a blind treant.

Raidon leaped after his foe. The monk realized his error even as he committed himself to the attack-the awakened tree that had inadvertantly stopped the Lord of Bats’s progress through the air was no longer blind.

The monk twisted his body, trying to alter his trajectory in the air. A treant fist the size of a boulder clipped him, and broke Raidon’s course toward Neifion with a sharp correction directly down.

Raidon managed to twist one final time, orienting himself so he could slap his arms out on either side to break his fall. But the tree creature’s fist continued downward too, and like a hammer, pounded him into the anvil that was the ground.

Japheth stepped from his cloak. The thunder of massive fists flailing the ground shuddered through the earth, nearly making him stumble, even though the clearing lay several dozen paces away through a screen of obscuring trees. The warlock saw Raidon darting about, avoiding one bone-crushing blow after another. Each dodge seemed a minor miracle.

Why hadn’t Raidon drawn Angul? Raidon was exceptional, but the blade in the monk’s hand made him nearly unbeatable, at least against most foes.

But Neifion was in a different category. Their chances against the archfey, even with Angul in play, were poor. The Lord of Bats was simply too powerful on his home turf, as the creature had rightly boasted.

The only way he and Raidon were going to escape was to convince Neifion to give up his vengeance. Which meant Raidon’s earlier diplomatic tack was correct. Japheth either had to try that again, or just turn and run away into the forest …

Japheth stepped around the bole of a tree into the clearing, just in time to see Raidon’s string of successes end beneath a treant fist. The sound of the impact was awful.

But Neifion was on his back, and had reverted to his humanoid form. By the way the archfey was shaking his head and groaning, it was obvious the monk had landed a telling blow before his fall.

Perfect!

Japheth called on his pact, incanting the apocalypses over which a star named Khirad had burned over the ages. Akin to the light of the star itself, a pale blue flame sprang from the warlock’s brow. The light washed over the supine Lord of Bats. Though still adjusting to the lore of his new pact, Japheth knew that Khirad’s radiance sometimes revealed secrets and gruesome insights. With its gleam in his eyes, perhaps the Lord of Bats would forget his vengeance for a time.

“Neifion, listen!” called Japheth. “Recall what the half-elf said; what do you really know about Malyanna’s ultimate intentions?”

The bald head of his old master wavered around to look at Japheth. The creature’s pupils were huge, and glowed pale blue.

“She serves ancient powers,” Neifion said. “She’s no different than any fervent cleric of forgotten gods. She’s dangerous, but all her actions are ultimately futile. Whatever entities she serves, their time is over. It is the way of the worlds.”

“Lord of Bats, search your heart, and your memories,” said Japheth. “Do you really, truly believe Malyanna’s actions are futile? She has found her ‘Key of Stars’ and even now likely presents it to the Eldest aboleth in Xxiphu. Trust me when I tell you this: she could unlock an age of horror, one so overwhelming that it could completely wipe away Toril and its echoes. If the world dies, so dies the Feywild.”

“The world is hardier than you suspect, mortal,” replied Neifion.

“Is it?” asked Japheth. “The Spellplague hit us only eleven years ago. Toril and its echoes yet shift and shudder from that onslaught. It is now, perhaps more than at any previous time in Faerun’s history, that the entire dimensional edifice could be kicked over and shattered by a determined assault from outside.”

The light of Khirad sparkled in the Lord of Bats’ eyes as he stood. He blinked, and the light failed.

But Neifion didn’t move. His eyes slowly narrowed. “Outside?” he said.

“From beyond all the worlds where people, gods and demons dwell, beyond our concept of time itself,” said Japheth.

“You’re awfully knowledgeable of such esoteric matters for someone so recently pledged to a Lord of Faerie.”

“My pact is with the stars now, Neifion. The association we shared is through. You may hate me, and rightly so-”

“You have my lesser skin, you rat-snuggling bastard.”

Japheth swallowed and continued, “Someone of your intellect must realize seeing me to my grave is a sideshow compared to the threat posed by the waking Sovereignty. I’m trying to stop Malyanna, and you should too. Even if you don’t care about the screams of a world eaten alive by the Far Realm incursion she plans on triggering with her Key, I imagine you are concerned with your own continued survival.”

Neifion laughed. “I swore I’d eat your liver after you bound me with the curse of the Feast Everlasting,” he said. “And I mean to have my cloak back, and a new homunculus in the bargain-fashioned from your flesh. However, you do raise an interesting point to ponder.”

“Malyanna counts on your rage toward me,” said Japheth. “It blinds you to the magnitude of the change she hopes to accomplish.”

The Lord of Bats said, “I wonder …”

The glyph on the archfey’s brow went into spasm. Neifion cried out and clapped a hand to his head.

The glyph transformed, lengthened, and became a green serpent covered in thousands of black, blinking eyes instead of scales. Its tail was a dual-pronged spike, and its head was all mouth and teeth.

It wrapped itself three times around the Lord of Bats’s neck, stabbing with its pronged tail and ravaging Neifion’s face with its maw.

Japheth’s mouth dropped open in surprise.

Neifion’s fingers became talons, and he tore at the creature, trying to pull it from his face. Despite all the Lord of Bats’s strength and fury, the serpent tightened its stranglehold. Its eyes blinked in a syncopated rhythm that instantly stirred nausea in the warlock’s stomach.

Japheth realized the serpent glyph had lain dormant on Neifion, learning the man’s power, all the while becoming inured against it. Malyanna had foreseen the possibility of her ally eventually turning on her.

“Get this thing off me!” Neifion said, his voice a choked whisper.

The warlock shook off his paralysis and invoked the influence of Acamar, a dark and distant star. Crackling black energy shrouded him. A stray bolt speared the serpent, and pulled it off the Lord of Bats in a spray of blood.

The moment the serpent was free of Neifion, a treant fist hurtled down from the canopy and smashed the awful thing into a goopy splatter of green paste.

Japheth and Neifion looked at each other. The bites the serpent had scored on the Lord of Bats’s cheek oozed blood, and red rings of constriction abraded his neck.

“Well?” said the warlock.

“You’re still a dead man, Japheth, don’t think otherwise,” said Neifion.

“But?”

Neifion chuckled. “But you’ve gained a little time with your clever arguments, and timely aid,” he replied. “Still, when we see each other next, watch your back, mortal.”

The archfey leaped upward, his flesh flowing and elongating into a gargantuan bat mid leap. He ascended as quickly as an arrow, then winged west. Japheth lost sight of him as soon as he cleared the hollow.

With the archfey’s departure, the awakened trees settled backward, fading once again into green somnolence.

Japheth turned to Raidon.

The monk was no longer curled on his side. Instead he rested in a lotus position facing Japheth, his eyes open and clear. Wounds marked him, but the man wasn’t inches from death as the warlock had feared.

“I heard what you said to Neifion,” said Raidon.

“Yeah?” said Japheth.

“Yes. About everything and everyone dying if Malyanna has her way.”

“I was trying to convince him I wasn’t his enemy.”

“But what you said-it was still true.”

Japheth nodded.

“Your heart is in the right place, despite your allegiance,” Raidon said. The sword sheathed on the monk’s hip groaned in complaint, but the monk ignored it.

Japheth bit back his initial sarcastic response. If he could find the strength to be diplomatic with Neifion, certainly he could do the same with the monk.

“You care,” the monk said, as if surprised.

“Of course I care, I’d be an idiot not to,” Japheth replied.

The monk nodded thoughtfully.

“How are you doing?” the warlock asked.

“Rebuilding my strength,” Raidon said. “One of Neifion’s awakened trees broke a few bones when it hit me.”

“I saw. Did Angul heal you?”

“No. If I allow it, the lore of Xiang Temple suffices. Though slower, meditation on the healing syllables of my order doesn’t corrode my thoughts like the Blade Cerulean’s impatient power.”

“Ah.”

Raidon smiled. “What I said earlier, about you caring-it inspires me, warlock,” he said. “If you, an addict to hell drugs and ill-considered pacts, can try to put the world before yourself, how can I not attempt the same?”

Japheth frowned. But he nodded. “I hope you can, Raidon,” he said. “Of us all, you are the one, with your Sign and sword, most capable of stopping Malyanna from opening the Far Manifold.”

The warlock held back a final bit of honesty, lest he disrupt Raidon’s equanimity. He hadn’t been entirely candid with Neifion or the monk. Sure, he cared for the world. But he cared for Anusha more. He’d shown that before, when he’d stolen the Dreamheart.

It was only because Anusha had pledged herself to Faerun’s defense that he was here. Had she decided to seek peace in a distant land for the time left to them, leaving some other hero or god to step into the breach, Japheth would have been more than happy to accompany her.

Of course, Anusha wouldn’t be who she was if she hadn’t decided to face the threat of the Sovereignty head on, even though that meant pushing him away. The more he discovered her secret strengths, the more she occupied his thoughts. It was possible she was stronger than he, than Raidon, or really, anyone he knew.

He was proud of her. He adored her.

But he was still hurt. Try as he might, he couldn’t forget how she’d pushed him away.