The Godborn

Chapter Twelve

Devils swarmed the woods. Vasen could hear them all around, lumbering through the brush, snarling.

“They’re trying to cut us off!” Vasen said. “Faster!”

“I can hardly see anything!” Gerak said, nearly tripping over a log. Vasen forgot that he and Orsin could see clearly in darkness and Gerak could not. He lit up his shield and the glow filled the forest. Shadows rose all around them. Vasen felt them knocking against his awareness, a sensation he’d never felt so strongly before. He stared at the sword in his fist, wondering.

Flaming spines flew, breaking his train of thought, and a devil bounded into their midst. It knocked Gerak to the ground and clamped its jaws down on his leg. He screamed, tried to roll out from under the creature while Vasen shouted and drove Weaveshear through the devil’s side, impaling it on the black blade. The devil reared back, snarling with pain. Orsin appeared to the devil’s right, his hands charged with dark energy. He slammed his fist into the creature’s open mouth and drove it out the top of the devil’s skull. The fiend collapsed in a heap, its shattered head leaking brains and ichor.

“All right?” Vasen asked Gerak, pulling him to his feet. More devils were closing.

“I’ll manage,” he said, wincing as he tested his leg. Before Vasen could say anything more, Gerak’s eyes went wide and he pushed Vasen to the side while bringing his bow to bear. A snarl sounded from behind and above and Vasen whirled in time to see a spined devil leaping down from one of the pines at Orsin. Gerak’s bow sang, and an arrow caught the fiend in mid-flight, sinking to the fletching in the devil’s throat. The creature hit the ground writhing, its squeals of pain a rasping wheeze through the hole in its throat. Gerak fired again, hit the devil in the chest, and the creature went still.

All around them, pines and undergrowth were catching fire from the devil’s spines. Growls and snarls sounded from all sides out in the woods. Once again Vasen felt the peculiar sensitivity to the shifting shadows around him. He felt their distance from him, their taste and texture. He felt them in much the same way he had come to feel his faith after he’d been called by Amaunator.

His god allowed him to draw on his faith, turn it into energy, and with it, serve the light. The shadows, too, were tools, and his blood allowed him to draw on them, use them, too, didn’t it? Hadn’t his father commanded the shadows?

He looked at his hands, saw the shadows leaking from his flesh, wrapping around Weaveshear. He felt the connection between the darkness in his flesh, the shadow he cast behind him from the light of his shield and the shadows all around them. Light and shadow were one, merged in him. He could move through them, if he wished. He knew he could.

“Vasen,” Orsin said. “Vasen, we must go.”

Vasen nodded.

“Too late,” Gerak said, and started planting arrows in the ground near him, within easy reach. “They’re all around. There’s nowhere to go.”

The woods blazed around them, the fires jumping from pine to pine. The air grew hotter with each moment. The scrub and beds of pine needles caught flame like tinder. Soon the entire wood would be ablaze. The devils slunk among the flames, a half-dozen maybe, the silhouettes of their fiendish forms moving among the trees and flames unharmed by the heat, their eyes glowing red in the flames. They moved with the slow certainty of predators, wolves who’d finally ringed their prey and brought it to heel.

“Then we fight here,” Orsin said, and dragged his staff on the ground, tracing a circle around him, delineating his own personal arena. “You get your stand, after all, Gerak. There’ll be other lives after this one, my friends. I hope we all meet again in one of them.”

Vasen glanced back at the abbey but couldn’t see it. It was lost to the smoke, fire, and the trees. With the Oracle dead and the abbey abandoned, the valley didn’t belong to the light anymore. It belonged to the shadows.

To the shadows.

His perception narrowed down to a single thing-the vein of shadow spun out for him by Weaveshear, a dark line drawn across reality, reaching back to the abbey, stretching forward through the flames, past the devils, and out farther into the woods, a tether between past and present, with this moment standing at the intersection. The blade was the line that connected him to his father and his father’s abilities.

He felt the tendril in his mind, felt its path as it wove through the woods, felt its end point.

He knew where it was leading them.

Gerak fired into the trees. Out in the dark, a devil screamed, but the rest continued to close. They were preparing for a rush. Orsin held his staff before him in both hands, his face serene, calm. The crash of a large form moving through the woods sounded from the direction of the abbey. The bone devil was coming. The gleeful shrieks and whines of the spined devils heralded the larger fiend’s arrival.

The heat from the fire was increasing as the flames spread. The sky glowed orange. Clouds of smoke poured into the air.

“Look!” Gerak said.

Above the space where the abbey would be, a glowing green line formed in the sky and widened until it formed a large rectangle in the air. A portal. Dark forms moved on the other side of it, growing larger, larger, until they burst forth through a magical door.

“Shadovar,” Gerak said. He took aim but it was too far for a shot.

A score of veserab-mounted Shadovar flew through the portal. The great, winged worms reared up when they materialized in the air, their wings beating rapidly. The riders tried to steady them. One of the Shadovar, backlit by the glowing portal, wore no armor and rode the largest of the veserabs. He looked down on the abbey, on the woods, his glowing eyes the color of polished steel.

Without warning a shower of flaming spines flew at the companions from all directions, dozens of them, a rain of fire. Most got caught up in the nearby trees and set them ablaze, but a score fell among the comrades. Vasen blocked most with his shield and the rest bounced off his armor, but Orsin and Gerak had no such protection, and both grunted with pain as spines pierced clothing and flesh.

“They’re coming,” Orsin said, plucking a flaming spine from his arms.

The devils were coming in a final rush. Their shrieks and growls reached a crescendo, and in the glow of the fire Vasen could see them bounding through the underbrush and trees toward them. From the direction of the abbey he saw the looming shadow of the bone devil, striding like a colossus through the pines.

“Stand next to me,” Vasen said. “Now. No questions.”

Above them, the veserabs keened as the huge beasts winged over the flames. Vasen heard the Shadovar shouting to one another, pointing down at the devils, at the comrades. The steel-eyed Shadovar in the long robes swooped toward them. He extended a hand, and energy gathered in his palm.

Vasen reached out for the shadows as Gerak and Orsin came to his side.

“What are you doing?” Gerak asked.

Orsin must have known. “What he was born to do.”

When Vasen felt his mind take hold of the shadows, he drew them closer, deeper, darker. They swirled around him and his companions.

Vasen felt comfortable in the darkness, at home. The shadows dimmed the light of the world, but not the light of his faith. He could embrace both the heritage of his blood and the fact of his faith. He did not have to choose one or the other. He could have both.

The devils broke through the flaming trees. The Shadovar above discharged a black bolt of energy from his hand. Vasen touched each of his friends, stepped through the shadows, and took them from that place.

Frustration made Brennus white-knuckle the reins on his veserab. Ovith had led him to believe the son of Cale could not call upon any such powers. He cursed.

“Scour the woods!” he said to the riders who’d accompanied him. He spoke in a normal tone, but a spell put his voice in each of their ears. “Find them! Now!”

The heat and smoke rising from the burning forest made visibility poor. He wheeled his veserab over the woods, the river, the abbey. His riders did the same. Cale’s son would not be able to walk the shadows far. Not even a true shade could take them far.

“You see them?” he called.

“No, my lord!”

“No, Lord Brennus!”

He felt an itch on his flesh, the touch of a powerful divination, and immediately knew from where it came: Rivalen. He cursed again. His brother would be coming.

Below, a handful of spined devils prowled the blazing woods, bounding through the inferno. A bone devil strode among them. He looked back to the abbey, which sat dark and apparently abandoned, more like a mausoleum than a sanctuary of Amaunator that had evaded Shadovar detection for a century.

“What changed?” Brennus asked himself.

“No one home,” said one of the homunculi perched on his shoulder. “But why? Why now?”

Holding the rose of Amaunator by the few remaining links of its lanyard, Brennus intoned the words to another divination, focusing the magic around the son of Erevis Cale. When he finished the spell, he felt it latch onto its target. The rose symbol lifted from his palm and flew toward the east, pulling against the lanyard.

He did not bother to alert his men. Eager, he spurred his veserab to the east. The huge creature veered, beat its wings, and flew like a shot quarrel through the air.

“Have him now?” one of the homunculi asked.

“Yes,” Brennus said. “We have him. But the nightseer is coming.” The homunculi cowered in Brennus’s cloak, shivering.

The three comrades materialized in the woods on the eastern side of the valley. Mountains loomed before them, forming a dark wall. The rush of the cascades sounded loud in Vasen’s ears. Wind whispered through the pines. The relative quiet felt expectant.

“The tarn,” Orsin said, nodding.

“You said it was holy,” Vasen said.

The line of shadow extending from Weaveshear led off into the woods, toward the tarn.

“What tarn?” asked Gerak. “What just happened?”

In the distance they could see the orange glow of the burning woods.

The dark, winged forms of the veserabs flitted over the inferno. One of the Shadovar had peeled away from the burning woods and flew in their direction, each beat of his mount’s huge wings devouring the distance.

“The Shadovar are coming,” Orsin said.

Vasen started toward the tarn. “Come on.”

They followed the line of darkness that connected Weaveshear to the water.

Standing at the tarn’s edge, they looked down into water so dark and still it looked like a hole. The shadows from the sword plunged into the depths. “So?” asked Gerak, looking over his shoulder.

Orsin looked to Vasen.

Vasen stared at the water, licked his lips. “We follow it.”

Gerak looked at him as if he were mad. “Into the water?”

A series of shrieks from behind turned them around-a veserab. The canopy blocked their view of the approaching Shadovar, but Vasen knew he was close.

“Yes, into the water.”

“There are better places to hide,” Gerak said. “I could lead us-”

“It’s not to hide. It’s to go.”

“Go? Go where?” Gerak asked.

Vasen shrugged. “Go where. . I’m supposed to go. I know how this sounds. But I also know I’m right.”

Gerak shook his head, cursed softly. He looked at Orsin. “This makes sense to you?”

Orsin nodded slowly. “It does.”

“Well, past lives make sense to you, too, so I don’t credit your opinion much.”

Orsin chuckled at that.

Gerak eyed the water warily. “I don’t swim,” he admitted at last.

Vasen smiled, then lied. “Me, neither. But I don’t think we’ll need to.”

Closer shrieks from the veserabs, the susurrus of beating wings.

“I’m asking you to trust me,” Vasen said.

Gerak looked from Vasen, to Orsin, back to Vasen. “If you’re wrong, I’ll find you in our next life.”

Again Orsin chuckled. Vasen joined him. “Well enough.”

The shadows ten paces from them swirled, deepened, and two pinpoints of steel gray light formed in their midst. The darkness coagulated into the form of the Shadovar leader. His lower body vanished into the darkness, so that he appeared to disincorporate below the knees. His thin, angular face showed no expression. His hands glittered with rings. Two tiny creatures, their skin like clay, perched on his shoulders-homunculi.

“Wait,” the Shadovar said, and extended his hand. Energy gathered on his fingertips, writhing tentacles of shadows.

Vasen didn’t wait. He raised his shield, brandishing Saint Abelar’s rose, and channeled his faith into it. Rose-colored light exploded out from it in a blaze of beams, casting the entire meadow in bright light. The Shadovar and his homunculi cried out, shielding their eyes from the sudden glare.

“Go!” Vasen said, and tried to push Orsin and Gerak into the water.

But before any of them could jump in, the sky above them ripped open with a thunderclap, the sound so loud that it made Vasen’s bones ache and flattened him to the ground. Ears ringing, he raised himself to all fours.

“I’ve sought you for decades, son of Cale,” said a deep, resonant voice from above, a voice so full of power that it seemed to use up all the air. Vasen could hardly breathe. “And here you’ve been all the while, hiding under my nose.”

Vasen staggered to his feet, his shield still blazing, and looked up.

Another Shadovar descended from a glowing green rift in the dark clouds. He had no mount. He rode only the column of his power. Darkness spun around him, mingled with the swirl of his dark robes. Power went before him, palpable in its strength. He seemed more. . present than anything else in the world, more solid, more there. Golden eyes blazed in the dark hole of his face.

“Rivalen,” said the steel-eyed Shadovar, his tone dark with hate.

Vasen knew the name. Prince Rivalen Tanthul, the Nightseer of Shar, rumored to be divine.

“Rivalen,” Orsin whispered. “One of the three.”

“We must go,” Vasen said softly, helping Gerak and Orsin to their feet. He edged them toward the water.

Rivalen reached the ground, a cloud of darkness swirling at this feet. His entire lower body was lost to the shadows. He looked as if he were riding a thunderhead as he walked toward them.

“You aren’t leaving,” Rivalen said. “None of you are.”

“Rivalen,” the other Shadovar said.

“Be silent, Brennus,” Rivalen said, and made a cutting gesture with his hand that lifted Brennus from his feet and drove him backward into one of the pine trees. Either wood or bone or both cracked from the impact.

“You think your infantile plotting is unknown to me?” Rivalen said to Brennus. “You think your intent is unknown to me?”

To Vasen’s shock, Brennus climbed to his feet. “No,” he said, his steel eyes flashing. He held something up in his hand, a jeweled necklace. “I’ve made my intent plain. And nothing has changed.”

Rivalen’s eyes never left Vasen. “You’re mistaken, Brennus. We’ve found the son of Cale. Everything has changed.” He waved his hand and the light went out of Vasen’s shield. “Enough with that shield.”

Brennus’s gaze went from Rivalen to Vasen and back to Rivalen.

Vasen backed toward the shadowed tarn, Gerak and Orsin beside him. He held his shield and Weaveshear at the ready, although he expected neither to be of any use.

“I don’t fear you, Shadovar,” Vasen said, and meant it. “And my name is Vasen.”

Rivalen smiled, revealing small fangs. “You should fear me. You have your father’s spirit, Vasen. But it won’t save you. Or the world.”

Rivalen glided toward them, the ground seeming to vibrate under the weight of his power.

“Run, you fools!” Brennus shouted to Vasen, and started to incant the words to a spell.

Rivalen’s expression hardened, his eyes flashed.

Vasen whirled, grabbed Orsin and Gerak by the bicep, and before they could protest shoved them into the tarn. They sank out of sight instantly. He looked over his shoulder as he jumped in himself.

A column of flame extended from Brennus’s hand and engulfed Rivalen. Rivalen stood unharmed in the midst of the fire, the dark eye of a blazing storm, and loosed a jagged bolt of green energy not at Brennus but at Vasen.

Vasen interposed sword and shield as his feet hit the water. He expected death or worse, but the energy of the spell was drawn to Weaveshear like metal shavings to a lodestone. The weapon seemed to absorb much of the power of the magic, although the force of the spell still sent Vasen skittering over the surface of the tarn like a skipped stone.

He sank into the water with the energy of the spell still sizzling around his blade, the green glow lighting the otherwise inky confines of the tarn. The water seemed to seize him in its grasp, pull him downward, as green lines of energy from Rivalen’s magic snaked around the blade, around the hilt. Vasen thought to release the blade too late and the energy touched his flesh.

He screamed, expelling a stream of bubbles, as a jolt of agony coursed through his body and his heart seized. He felt as if his ribs had been shattered. His vision blurred and he struggled to remain conscious. His body spasmed, and even with his darkness-enhanced vision he could see nothing. He expected a splash to sound from above-Rivalen pursuing to retrieve his corpse-but he heard nothing, just the quiet of his own agony.

He knew he was dying because the water felt not cold but warm, pulling him rapidly down, drinking him in, swallowing him whole. In his rush to escape he’d killed not only himself but Gerak and Orsin. They’d all drown, lost in the shadowed tarn forever.

Darkness swirled around him, a manifestation of his regrets, his pain, his failure. He was falling, falling forever into the deep.

“See you soon,” Rivalen said to Vasen, and flew to the edge of the tarn. He saw only the ghost of his reflection on the deep water, his golden eyes staring back at him like stars.

The tarn must have been a latent portal, activated by Weaveshear. He knew in that moment Drasek Riven must have put it there. It amused Rivalen to think of Riven, a small minded fool with his plots and counterplots, trying to foil Rivalen’s own. Riven was just another pawn in Rivalen’s game.

Brennus’s chuckle pulled him around. “Not even a godling gets what he wants all the time. You failed, Rivalen. You wanted Vasen Cale and you failed to get him.”

Rivalen laughed, loud and long. “I wasn’t here to capture him, Brennus. He has a role yet to play. I was here to make sure that you didn’t capture him. It’s you who’ve failed. You’ve who’ve done nothing but further my ends. You see nothing, little brother, and at every turn do as I wish.”

Shadows swirled around Brennus “You lie!”

Rivalen laughed more. “Your bitterness is sweet to the lady.”

Brennus’s steel eyes blazed with anger.

“I don’t have to kill you to hurt you, Brennus. Remember that. Now run back to Sakkors, obsess about mother and revenge, and watch, helpless, as my plans end this world.”

Brennus visibly bit back whatever words he might have said. His shoulders sagged as shadows gathered around him, deepened, and transported him back to whatever hidey-hole he had prepared for himself.

Rivalen smiled after his brother left. Brennus had once more had his hopes crushed. He was almost ripe for the picking, ready to serve as Rivalen’s tool in translating The Leaves of One Night. Brennus’s despair and bitterness ran deep.

Rivalen rose into the air on a column of darkness and power, surveying the valley. He had one more matter to which he must attend.

The Shadovar who served his brother had vanished, presumably following Brennus in flight. A handful of spined devils ran amok in the wood, burning everything flammable, torturing what animals they could find and catch. The valley was ablaze in fire and torment, a miniature version of the Hells. A bone devil prowled the pines among its smaller kin, aimless in its strides.

Rivalen saw Mephistopheles’s hand in it. As always, the Lord of Cania sought the divine power that Drasek Riven and Rivalen had taken from Kesson Rel. The archfiend, too, must have guessed that Vasen Cale was the key to unlocking the divinity from its three holders.

Of course, Mephistopheles wanted the power only to give him the upper hand in his war against Asmodeus. Rivalen didn’t want it at all. He wanted to use it, feed his goddess with it, and in so doing, restart the Cycle of Night and end everything.

Rivalen rode the shadows to the abbey. Much of it was ablaze, but fire and smoke could not harm Rivalen. He walked among the flames, amused that the home of the sun god finally radiated light, but only in its immolation. Tapestries curled as they burned. Roof timbers gave way in a shower of sparks. Stone cracked, fell in a hail of rubble.

Amid the ruins Rivalen found the corpses of two spined devils and the body of an old man, beaten beyond recognition. No other bodies.

That gave Rivalen pause.

The Oracle must have known an attack was coming. So he’d sent everyone away.

What else had he known?

His feet carried him through the fires to what appeared to be a shrine. The room included two burned biers, one knocked from its pedestal, the lid defaced and burned, the body that had been within burned to an unrecognizable cinder. He wondered who had been interred there, then reminded himself that it didn’t matter. The world and everyone in it, including him, would soon end in nothingness.

He pointed a finger at the ceiling and discharged a ray of energy that disintegrated a perfect circle through it, revealing the dark sky above. Through that he flew up and out into the night.

He rose high into the sky, one with the darkness, and looked down on the narrow gash of the flaming valley, the burned-out abbey.

Below, the devils continued to burn the woods and kill whatever creatures they could find.

“Mephistopheles’s creatures,” he said, irritated at their presence.

He moved from the darkness in the sky to the darkness under the canopy of the woods, a few paces from two of the spined devils. His sudden appearance halted their loping strides through the undergrowth. They crouched low, spines raised, teeth bare. He gestured, let power flow from his hand, and ripped every spine from their hides in a shower of flames and ichor. They yelped with agony and fell rolling to the ground, their raw, exposed flesh accreting pine needles and dirt. The cloud spines hung over them. He reversed all of them, pointed the barbed tips downward, and drove all of them back into the devils’ flesh. They shrieked and died.

He felt the darkness around him, the velvet of its touch across the entire valley. He sensed the location of another devil, stepped through the shadows to it, and, with a flick of his finger and a minor exercise of power, turned it inside out.

He moved to another, another, methodically destroying each of the creatures in ever more grotesque fashion.

“Stay in your hole in Cania, Archfiend,” he said, as a blast of life-draining energy left another spined devil a lifeless bag of hide and bones. “When the time is right, we’ll meet in Ordulin. All of us will.”

He saved the bone devil for last. The thin, lumbering creature stalked through the pines, its mouth open in a pained scream. It thrashed about wildly with its overlong arms and clawed hands, the long, curling tail that ended in a sharp spade of bone.

“Freedom!” it shouted, the word nonsensical, the tone tinged with madness.

Rivalen stepped from the shadows before it, let it see him. It halted, crouched, and flexed its claws. Its lower jaw dropped open, the fangs dripping with foul saliva. Stupidly, it pelted toward Rivalen, shrieking for blood.

Rivalen raised a hand, palm outward, and immobilized the creature in mid-stride. Dark energy whirled around it, holding it fast, keeping it silent. Rivalen stalked forward, contemplating suitable ends.

He felt a presence in the trees behind the devil, and an armored man burst out of the tree line. He was as tall as Rivalen but built as thickly as a barrel. He bore a large single-edge sword and a square shield in his hands. Dark, dead eyes stared out of a face barely visible for the thick beard he wore. Rivalen sensed the minor enchantments on the man’s shield, sword, and armor, but it was the twisting, odd signature of the magic affecting the man himself that kept Rivalen from annihilating him where he stood.

“Get away, Shadovar!” the man said, pointing his sword at Rivalen. “Back, I said.”

He advanced on Rivalen with blade and shield at the ready.

Curious, Rivalen retreated a step, hands held up in a gesture of harmlessness.

Rivalen tried to mask his power but the man seemed to pick up on it as he neared. He stopped his advance, a stride or two before the immobilized devil.

“Just leave us,” the man said.

“Us?”

The man’s eyes moved to the bound bone devil, back to Rivalen.

“Leave, Shadovar.”

Rivalen took a step forward, let more of his power manifest. Perhaps sensing what Rivalen was, the man fell back a step, eyes wide. “You’ve a fondness for devils? Who’s this creature to you?”

The man found his nerve and looked up sharply, as if Rivalen had slapped him. “He’s no creature, shade. He was-is-my brother.”

Rivalen understood the implication immediately. “And now he serves Mephistopheles?”

“He was betrayed by Mephistopheles! We both were!”

Rivalen saw an opportunity, used his power to put guile into his voice. “And the archfiend’s betrayal turned him into. . that?”

The man nodded hard, once.

“What’s your name?” Rivalen glided forward, closing the distance between them.

“What difference does it make? It’s all lost now. Everything. It was all for nothing.”

The words pleased Rivalen. He pulled the man’s name from his mind. “Sayeed. Your name is Sayeed.”

Sayeed’s brow furrowed. He took another step back, sword and shield ready.

“There’s nothing to fear,” Rivalen said, waving a shadow-strewn hand dismissively. “A minor cantrip. Your name hovered at the forefront of your thinking because I asked the question. You serve the archfiend as well, Sayeed?”

The man’s jaw tightened as he chewed on rising anger. “I serve myself. And my brother.”

“Your brother is gone. Whatever he was, that isn’t him.”

Sayeed’s expression fell but only for a moment before he recovered his stoicism. “We were-”

He cut himself short, shaking his head.

Again, Rivalen knew his words before he spoke them. “You were cursed. But not by the archdevil?”

“No, not by him. The Spellplague changed us.”

“Ah,” Rivalen said with a nod. “But Mephistopheles promised you release.” Rivalen gestured at the bound devil, Sayeed’s transformed brother. “And that is how an archfiend honors his word.”

The man glared at Rivalen, his hands opening and closing on the hilt of his sword. “A Shadovar is no better.”

Rivalen smiled. “Oh, you are world-weary, Sayeed. I see it clearly. I’ve known others like you, many others.” His memory flashed on Tamlin Uskevren, whose pain Rivalen had used to twist the young nobleman to his ends. “The world has treated you harshly. Hope wanes. Despair rises, replaced by bitterness. It’s warranted. You’re afflicted by hardship. I was, too, once. The Lady offers a place to lay such weight.”

Sayeed shook his head, looked away, but Rivalen saw something awaken behind the indifference. “The Lady? Shar?”

He said the word as many did, in hushed, fearful tones.

Rivalen stepped close to Sayeed, the two of them eye to eye, Sayeed caught up in Rivalen’s shadows.

“Shar, yes. The Lady of Loss knows your pain. What burden do you bear, Sayeed brother of Zeeahd? I’m her servant. Confess it to me.”

Sayeed swallowed. “No. It’s mine to bear.”

Rivalen admired the man’s stubbornness. “Share it. Perhaps I can help ease the weight.”

Sayeed stuck out his chin. “I require no help.”

Rivalen recognized the ground Sayeed stood on, offering the last bit of defiance. He saw potential in the man, a possible use. His despair and bitterness ran deeper, perhaps, than even Brennus’s. Shar had put Sayeed in Rivalen’s path, and Sayeed was but a small step away from where Rivalen needed him to be.

“Well enough, then,” Rivalen said. “Luck to you.”

He turned and glided away, allowing Sayeed a few moments to think.

“You’ll leave us?” Sayeed said to his back.

“What are you and your cursed brother to me, Sayeed?”

Rivalen started to gather the shadows around him.

“Wait!” Sayeed called, and Rivalen knew from the man’s tone that he had him. He let his hand brush the holy symbol of the Lady he kept on an electrum chain about his neck.

“You said you could help,” Sayeed said.

“I said ‘perhaps I could help.’ You’re yet to give name to your affliction.”

“My affliction,” Sayeed said, and started to pace in agitation. “My affliction.”

Rivalen waited, letting matters take their course.

Sayeed walked a circle, an animal filled with pent-up anger. His voice gained volume as he spoke. “My affliction is that I’m no longer a man. I don’t taste food or drink. I don’t take pleasure in a woman’s touch! I feel nothing! Nothing! Not even pain!”

Before Rivalen could act, Sayeed slid his hand along the length of his sword. He didn’t wince. Blood poured from the wound, but only for a moment before his skin closed. He held up his hand for Rivalen to see. It was unmarred.

“I’m not alive, but death is kept from me. Can you help me with that, Shadovar? Can you? Kill me if you can!”

Rivalen thought of Shar’s eye, of The Leaves of One Night. He stepped close and put his hand on Sayeed’s shoulder.

“I can help you. Indeed, I can.”

Sayeed looked up, his eyes clear, as dead as those of a corpse. “I want. . help.”

Rivalen steered Sayeed around until he faced his transformed brother. “You’ll have it. And you will help me in the process. Will you do that, Sayeed? Help me? Help the Lady?”

Rivalen felt Sayeed’s body sag at the request, but he nodded vacantly. “What things?”

“A small thing, but important. I need you to read something, is all.”

“Read something?”

The man was lost, broken, as soulless as a living human could be. He was exactly what Rivalen needed. He would serve even better than Brennus.

“I’ll explain in time. But now you must do something else.” He nodded at the bone devil. “Kill it. Kill what’s left of your brother. Kill what’s left of your life before today, before this moment.”

Shaking his head, Sayeed tried to step back but Rivalen held him fast, shadows swirling around him. “That’s my brother. I can’t. I won’t.”

Rivalen tightened his grip on Sayeed’s shoulder. A man who felt pain would have cried out. Sayeed gave no response.

“That is, indeed, your brother, but you must do as I say. He’s a tool of Mephistopheles, Sayeed, and Mephistopheles betrayed your brother and you. But you will have your revenge. I vow it. You will see Mephistopheles suffer. But first, you must do as I’ve asked.”

Sayeed stared at the bone devil, the towering fiend held helpless by Rivalen’s spell.

He needed reassurance, so Rivalen gave it to him.

“This is how it must be. Free him, Sayeed. Give him death. End his suffering.”

Sayeed’s jaw tightened. He nodded, his mouth set, his brow furrowed. He took his blade in both hands. “Release him.”

“There’s no-”

“I won’t execute him while he is helpless!”

“Very well.”

A minor exercise of will freed the bone devil from the spell. Instantly, the creature rushed forward, bony claws raised high, the spike of its tail curled up over its head.

Rivalen backed away as Sayeed ducked under the devil’s claw slash and sidestepped the spike of its tail, which drove deeply into the soil. Sayeed rode his momentum into a spinning slash that severed the devil’s leg and sent it toppling to the earth.

Sayeed was atop it before it could rise to even a sitting position.

“I hate you!” he screamed, and drove his blade into the devil’s chest again and again. “I hate you for this!”

Rivalen didn’t know if Sayeed was speaking to him or his transformed brother or to Mephistopheles, and he didn’t care.

“Your bitterness is sweet to the Lady,” he muttered.

Sayeed would be perfect. Perfect.

Presently it was over. The devil’s body was chopped apart, ichor staining the grass. Sayeed wiped his blade clean on the turf and sheathed his weapon over his back.

“You did him a service,” Rivalen said. “And now you’ll do so for me. The Lady’s eye is on you, Sayeed. She sees you clearly.”

He gathered the shadows about them both and rode the darkness from that place to Ordulin.

Brennus materialized in his safe room in Sakkors, a vaulted, lead-lined chamber stocked with multifarious magic wands, staffs, scrolls, and potions, and warded with the most powerful abjurations he knew. Two iron golems greeted his arrival with creaky nods; the towering metal constructs were obliged to attack anything and anyone that appeared in the safe room unescorted by Brennus.

He doubted his defenses would be enough to keep Rivalen out, should his brother choose to attack, but it would at least allow Brennus advance warning.

He collapsed into a chair, the shadows about him whirling madly. His homunculi emerged from his cloak and, instead of taking their usual perch on his shoulders, curled up in his lap, shivering. He rubbed their heads and in time their shivering stopped. Brennus’s rage, however, did not abate.

He reached into his cloak and removed his mother’s platinum necklace- the jacinths looked dull in the darkness, like extinguished stars-and the rose holy symbol once borne by Vasen Cale. He resolved to die before leaving his mother’s murder unavenged. He simply needed to find a weakness in Rivalen, a crack in his defenses.

Rivalen’s words haunted him.

Rivalen knew it all. Rivalen had foreseen it all. Brennus could not stop him, could not avenge his mother’s murder.

“Rivalen is going to destroy the world,” he said.

He would have done anything to stop Rivalen, to kill him, but Brennus could see no way to do so.

He had to try to get to Cale’s son. He was missing something. He had to be missing something.

Because if he wasn’t, Rivalen would soon kill everything.

Vasen seemed to fall forever. He had no idea which way was up. He was turned around, air-starved, dying. He prepared to inhale a lungful of water, to end it all, when strong hands grabbed him by the cloak, felt for his arms, and pulled him upward with a lurch.

He emerged into darkness, gasping, shadows churning around him. A drumming sounded in his ears, a rhythmic beat that seemed to shake his entire body. He heard a roar, like the cascades of the valley but more ominous. As his vision cleared and the shadows around him diminished, he expected to be staring into the golden eyes of Rivalen Tanthul. Instead, he found himself staring into the tattooed face of Orsin, the deva’s white eyes filled with concern.

“He lives,” Orsin said.

Vasen sat up with a lurch, coughing, spitting dark water. The drumming he’d heard was not coming from his ears, nor the rush from the cascades. He sat on a polished obsidian floor in a small, rectangular chamber. . somewhere.

The air, viscous with shadows, felt thick in his lungs. As he had back in the woods of the valley, he felt the shadows all around him, felt them everywhere, to the limit of his perception. And he was connected to them, tethered. A swirling mass of darkness obscured the floor in one side of the room.

“That’s where we came out,” Orsin said.

“Came out?” Vasen said. His mind was fuzzy.

Gerak stood at a narrow window nearby, looking out. His body looked bunched with stress. The drumming and roar came from outside the window. “Can you stand?” Orsin asked him.

When Vasen nodded, Orsin pulled him to his feet. His entire body ached and his chest still burned. The energy from Rivalen’s spell had left a painful scorched patch on the skin of his hand. He sheathed Weaveshear. The weapon felt at home on his belt.

“Where are we?” Vasen asked.

“You tell us,” Gerak said over his shoulder. “Come here. Look.” Vasen and Orsin joined Gerak at the window and both of them gasped. The narrow window focused the volume of the drumming and roaring and the sound hit them like a gale. The three comrades stood in a high tower of obsidian, part of a larger keep or castle that featured delicate spires and high, smooth walls, the whole of it awash in shadows.

Outside the walls, surrounding it on all sides, was a horde of nightmarish size. Devils stood in ranks, thousands of them, some horned, armored, and as tall as giants. Others short and fanged, like the spined devils. Some stood as tall as giants, others as short as halflings. Some flew in the air on membranous wings. Some oozed or crawled. Large horned devils, their red skin emitting flames the same way Vasen’s skin emitted shadows, moved among the multitude. Weapons bristled everywhere: pikes, axes, swords. The size of the force took Vasen’s breath away. Shadows poured from his flesh. And throughout the horde the same heraldry was featured, huge oriflammes that showed a black hand and a sword, both sheathed in flames.

“Gods,” Vasen breathed.

“We’re in the Hells,” Gerak said, a hint of panic in his tone. “We must be.” Vasen felt the shadows behind him deepen, fill with power. He turned to see a short, lithe man step from the darkness, although the shadows clung to his form in a mist. A goatee hid a mouth that looked like it never smiled. His angular face, the dark skin pockmarked with scars, looked sharp enough to cut wood. Twin rapiers hung from his belt and he held a pipe in his hand. Black smoke curled up from the pipe to mix with the shadows.

“You’re not in the Hells,” said the man, his accented voice rich with power. “You’re in the Shadowfell. And it’s about time. Things are moving quickly now, and so must we.”

Orsin assumed a fighting stance while Gerak fumbled for an arrow.

The man’s mouth formed a sneer, showing stained teeth. The shadows about him whirled. He drew on the pipe, inhaled deeply, blew it out in a dark cloud.

“Wait,” said Vasen to his comrades, and held up his hand.

“Thinking before you act,” the man said with an approving nod. “Your father was the same way. Most of the time.”

“You’re Drasek Riven,” Vasen said. He had to be.

Riven nodded, took another draw on the pipe.

“The Left Hand of Shadow,” Orsin breathed.

Riven looked sidelong at Orsin. “If you fall to your knees, shadowalker, I promise you I’ll stab you in the face.”

Outside, the roar of the fiendish army and the beat of the drums rose higher, seemed to make the entire citadel shake.

Riven seemed barely to notice. He had eyes only for Vasen. “We don’t have a lot of time for explanations. You’re going to have to do as I tell you.”

As if to make his point, a blare of horns from outside sounded.

“I don’t even know what’s happening,” Vasen said. “I just watched my abbey burn, saw the Oracle die. We fought devils, Shadovar-”

“Shadovar? Which Shadovar?”

“What?” Vasen said. He was still processing events.

“Rivalen,” Orsin offered.

Riven’s face darkened. Shadows swirled around him. “Rivalen left Ordulin? What did he say?”

“He didn’t say much of anything,” Vasen said, and shadows boiled from his skin.

Riven paced the room. “He saw you and let you go?”

“We escaped,” Vasen said. “He didn’t let us do anything.”

“What are you saying?” Orsin asked.

“I’m saying you’re here because he let you go. If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead. I didn’t. . see that.” He looked sharply at Vasen. “Do you feel anything unusual when you look at me?”

Vasen shook his head. “I don’t understand. Should I?”

Riven stared into his face. “He changed you, Vasen. Or rather I changed you. . Shit, shit, shit. Did I miss something? What am I overlooking? I thought you’d know, that you’d come here and know.”

Shadow churned around Vasen, too. “You thought I’d know what?”

Riven whirled on him. “Know how to get this out of me! And out of Rivalen and Mephistopheles! You’re the key, Vasen! You’re supposed to be able to get the godhood out of all of us.”

A long silence followed.

“I don’t know how to do that,” Vasen said at last.

Riven stared at him a long moment, their shadows, their lives, intersecting, crossing.

“I see that,” he said at last, and took a step back. He exhaled, shadows churning around him. “Fine. Things are where they are. We have to keep going.”

“Going where?” Gerak asked.

“To the Hells,” Riven said. “Vasen is going to Cania to rescue his father. Erevis Cale is our best hope now.”

“You’re mad,” Vasen said. “My father’s dead.”

“No, Riven said. “He’s alive. Trapped in magical stasis. And you’re going to get him out.”