The Godborn

Chapter One

Eleint, the Year of the Awakened Sleepers (1484 DR)

Glaciers as old as creation collided, vied, and splintered-the crack of ancient ice like the snap of dry bones. The smell of brimstone and burning souls wafted up from rivers of fire that veined the terrain. Cania’s freezing gusts bore the innumerable screams of the damned, spicing the air with their pain. Towering, insectoid gelugons, their white carapaces hard to distinguish from the ice, patrolled the banks of the rivers. Their appetite for agony was insatiable, and with their hooked polearms they ripped and tore at the immolated damned who flailed and shrieked in the flames.

Mephistopheles perched atop an ice-capped crag a quarter-league high and stared down at his realm of ice and fire and pain. Plains of jagged ice stretched away in all directions. Black mountains hazed with smoke scraped a glowing red sky lit by a distant, pale sun.

And he ruled it all. Or almost all.

His gaze fixed on the mound of shadow-shrouded ice that had defied his will for a century, and his eyes narrowed. His anger stirred the embers of his power, and the air crackled around him, baleful emanations of the divinity he’d stolen from the god, Mask.

Staring at the shadowy cairn, he sensed that events were picking up speed, fates being decided, events determined, but he couldn’t see them. Matters were fouled and he suspected the shadowy cairn had something to do with it.

“Permutations,” he said, his voice as deep and dark as a chasm. “Endless permutations.”

He had schemed for decades to obtain a fraction of the divine power he now held, intending to use the power he’d gained in a coup against Asmodeus, the Lord of Nessus, a coup that would have resulted in Mephistopheles ruling the Nine Hells. But events on one of the worlds of the Prime had made a joke of his plans.

The Spellplague had ripped through the world of Toril, recombining it with its sister world, Abeir, and causing chaos among gods and godlings. A half-murdered god had literally fallen through the Astral Sea and into the Ninth Hell. Asmodeus had finished the murder and absorbed the divinity.

Mephistopheles, who had plotted for decades to become divine, had managed to take only a fraction of a fraction of a lesser god’s power, while the Lord of the Ninth had become a full god through luck. By chance. And Mephistopheles was, once more, second in Hell.

Worst of all, he feared that Asmodeus had recently learned of his plans. Mephistopheles’s spies in Nessus’s court spoke of mustering legions, of Asmodeus’s growing ire. A summons had reached Mephistar, Mephistopheles’s iron keep. Asmodeus’s words had been carried on the vile, forked tongue of the Lord of Nessus’s sometime-messenger, the she-bitch succubus, Malcanthet.

“His Majesty, the Supreme Overlord of the Hells, Asmodeus the Terrible, requires His Grace’s presence before his throne in Nessus.”

“Supreme, you said?”

“Shall I tell His Majesty that you take issue with his title?”

Mephistopheles bit back his retort. “He sends me Hell’s harlot to convey a summons? To what end is my presence required?”

Malcanthet had ignored the question, offering only, “His Majesty wished me to inform you that time is of the essence.”

“And my time is limited. I will attend when I’m able.”

“You will attend within a fortnight or His Majesty will be forced to assume that you are in rebellion. Those are the words of His Majesty.”

Mephistopheles had glared at her while his court had muttered and tittered. “Get out! Now!”

Malcanthet had bowed, smirking, and exited the court, leaving Mephistopheles to stew in uncertainties, his court to gossip in possibilities.

Mephistopheles had managed to put off a reckoning with Asmodeus for decades. He’d made excuse after excuse, but the Lord of the Ninth’s patience had finally worn thin. Mephistopheles had little time and few options. He wasn’t ready. Far below, the cairn of ice mocked him. Shadows leaked from it, dribbled out of its cracks in languid streams. Often he’d tried to burn his way to the bottom of the cairn, but the ice would not yield. He’d had hundreds of whip-driven devils tear into the mound with weapons and tools, all to no avail. He’d attempted to magically transport himself within the hill and failed. He could not even scry what lay at its bottom.

And yet he had his suspicions about what lay under the shadow-polluted ice. “Erevis Cale.”

Saying the name kindled his anger to flame.

Mephistopheles had torn out Cale’s throat on Cania’s ice and taken the divine spark of Mask then possessed by Cale. Then, while Mephistopheles had been distracted by his triumph, Cale’s ally, Drasek Riven, himself possessed of another divine spark, had materialized and nearly decapitated Mephistopheles.

The pain remained fresh in Mephistopheles’s mind. His regeneration had taken hours, and by then, Cale’s body had been covered by the cairn that vexed him so.

Unable to destroy the cairn, finally Mephistopheles had simply forbade anyone from approaching it. Intricate, powerful wards allowed no one to go near it but Mephistopheles himself.

Staring at the cairn, his anger overflowed his control. He leaped from his perch and spread his wings-power and rage shrouding him. Millions of damned souls and lesser devils looked up and then down, cowering, sinking into their pain rather than look upon the Lord of Cania enraged.

He tucked his wings and plummeted toward the cairn, Erevis Cale’s tomb. He slammed into it with enough velocity and force to send a shock wave of power radiating outward in all directions. Snow and ice shards exploded into the air. The damned of Cania uttered a collective groan.

He looked down, his breathing like a bellows, his rage unabated. The hill remained unmarred-a mound of opaque ice veined with lines of shadow. He aimed his palms at the cairn’s surface and blasted the ice with hellfire. Flame and smoke poured from his hands, engulfing the cairn, the back blast cloaking him in fire and heat. He stood in its midst, unaffected, pouring forth power at the object of his hate. Around him, ice hissed, fogging the air as it melted. Shadows poured from the hill in answer, a dark churn that coated him in night.

The ice renewed itself as fast as his fires could melt it. The shadows swirled amid the storm of power and snow and ice-mocked him, defied him. He channeled fire and power at the hill, relenting only long enough to let the shadows disperse, the spray of ice and snow to settle. And when it did, he saw what he always saw: the unmarred cairn.

It was protected somehow and he did not understand it. Something was happening, something he could not see. Mask was in the center of it, the cairn was in the center of it, and he could not so much as melt its ice.

And now-and now-Asmodeus was coming for him.

Ropes of shadow leaked from thin cracks in the cairn’s ice and spiraled around Mephistopheles’s body. He threw back his head, stretched his wings, flexed his claws, and roared his frustration at the cloud-shrouded red sky. The sound boomed across his realm, the thunder of his rage. Distant glaciers cracked in answer. Volcanoes spat ash into the sky.

When at last he was spent, he fell into a crouch atop the cairn, put his chin in his hand, and considered his options.

He saw only two courses: He could ask forgiveness of Asmodeus and abase himself before the Lord of Nessus, foreswearing rebellion, or he could obtain more power, enough to equal Asmodeus’s, and so empowered, pursue his planned coup.

He much preferred the latter. And yet if he moved to obtain more divine power, he’d be moving blindly. Mask had put in place some kind of scheme- was the cairn not evidence of that? — and Mephistopheles did not want to stumble into it and inadvertently serve Mask’s ends. Mephistopheles feared losing the divinity he’d already gained in an effort to gain more, for he had no doubt that Mask had plotted for his own eventual return.

But he had little choice. Time had grown short. Over the last hundred years he’d scoured the multiverse for information about Erevis Cale and Mask, trying to suss out Mask’s play so that he could thwart it. He’d tortured mortal and immortal beings alike, eavesdropped on the whispered conversations of exarchs and godlings, listened to the secrets carried in the planar currents, wrung what information he could from the nether with his divinations.

And he’d learned only one thing, one tantalizing clue: Erevis Cale had a son.

He’d come to believe over the years that the son had something to do with the secret buried under the ice, his ice, that the son was at the center of Mask’s scheme, and that if he could find the son, he could end Mask’s plans, whatever they were, at a stroke. Then he’d have had the freedom to move against the two men who, like Mephistopheles, held fractions of Mask’s power.

He’d pacted with many mortals over the decades, promising them rewards if they brought word of Erevis Cale’s son. He’d bargained with so many that he’d lost track of them. But none had ever located Cale’s son. It was as though the son had simply disappeared.

And now events had, at last, outrun Mephistopheles’s ability to plan ahead of them. He could no longer wait to learn the full picture of Mask’s scheme. He could no longer spare time searching for Cale’s son. Asmodeus was coming for him, as he did for any who dared plot rebellion. Mephistopheles would need more power to face the Lord of Nessus. And he knew where he could get it.

Drasek Riven and Rivalen Tanthul each possessed a spark of Mask’s stolen divinity. If Mephistopheles killed them, he could take their divinity and face Asmodeus as a peer.

He looked down at the cairn, imagined Erevis Cale’s frozen body buried somewhere under its ice. He tapped the ice with a clawed finger.

“I haven’t forgotten your son. And I won’t. And your dead god won’t be coming back, whatever his schemes.”

For answer, only more shadows.

He shook them off, stood, cupped his hands before his mouth, and put a message in the wind for Duke Adonides, his majordomo, blowing it in the direction of Mephistar. The gust tore over Cania’s icy plains.

“Prepare the legions to march on the Shadowfell. Drasek Riven is to die.”

Riven stood in the uppermost room of the central tower of his citadel-a fortress of shadows and dark stone carved in relief into the sheer face of a jagged peak.

The plaintive, hopeful prayers of Mask’s few remaining worshipers in Toril bounced around in his head, the background noise of his existence, a din that made him want to dig out his remaining eye with his thumbs.

Lord of shadows, hear my words. .

From the darkness, I speak your name, Shadowlord. .

Return to us, Lord of Stealth. .

“I’m not your damned god,” he said, and drew on his pipe. As best he could, he pushed the voices to the back of his consciousness.

There’d been many such voices a century earlier, but they’d gradually faded and there were only a few now. He wondered, not for the first time, if Rivalen or Mephistopheles-who also possessed some of Mask’s power-also heard them, or if the fading hopes of Mask’s faithful were his burden alone to bear. He suspected the latter, and he wondered what that meant.

Annoyed, he exhaled a cloud of pungent smoke and let his gaze follow it out the tall, narrow window and down to the shrouded land beyond his citadel.

The starless black vault of the plane’s sky hung over a landscape of gray and black, where lived the dark simulacra of actual things. Shadows and wraiths and specters and ghosts and other undead hung in the air around the citadel, or prowled the foothills and plains near it, so numerous their glowing eyes looked like swarms of fireflies. He felt the darkness in everything he could see, felt it as an extension of himself, and the feeling made him too big by half.

The Shadowfell had been his home for the past one hundred years. More his home now than Faerun, he supposed, and the realization annoyed him further. He’d never wanted to be a god, never wanted to spend his days in shadow, listening to the whines of the faithful, caught up in the machinations of beings he hadn’t even known existed when he’d been only a man. Back then, he’d wanted only to drink and eat and gamble and enjoy women, but now. .

Now he still wanted to drink and eat and gamble and womanize, but the divinity squirmed within him, a toothy thing that chewed at the corners of his humanity, eating away at the man to make room for the god. And unless he did something soon, it would consume his humanity altogether. He hated it, hated what it had done to him, and for what it insisted he hear and know.

For as the divinity opened holes in the man, knowledge not-his-own filled the abscesses. The fractional divinity within him revealed its secrets only gradually, a slow drip of revelation that had been unfolding over decades, a plodding education in godhood. He wondered if that, too, was his burden alone to bear. Because if Mephistopheles and Rivalen did not experience it the same way, well. . what did that mean?

At the least it meant that new memories bubbled up from time to time, popped in his mindscape, and loosed their stinking contents into his consciousness. Riven consulted them not as a man looking back on his own experiences but as a scholar would a scroll written in a language in which he was barely fluent. Mask kept his secrets even from Riven, letting him in on the game only a little at a time.

And the game, it turned out, had been a long con. Mask had played them all, including his mother, Shar.

Mask had been Shar’s herald on Toril, the prophet who started her Cycle of Night, a divine process that had repeated itself countless times across the multiverse, and had, in the process, destroyed countless worlds. And each time, on each world, the cycle ended the same way, had to end the same way-with Shar consuming the divinity of her herald. The divine cannibalism of her own offspring allowed the Lady of Loss to incarnate fully, and once she did, she reduced everything in the world to nothing.

Cycles of Night had left the multiverse pockmarked with holes. Voids of nothingness were the footprints Shar left as she stalked through reality. Riven knew the amount of life she’d destroyed in the process, and it nauseated even him. And apparently it had been too much for Mask, also, for when it came to Toril, he hadn’t played his part.

“The cycle must be broken,” Riven said, the words exiting his mouth, but not feeling at all like his own words.

On Toril, Shar had consumed only a portion of Mask’s divinity, for he’d hidden the rest away, and what she’d consumed was not enough to finish the cycle, not enough to allow her to incarnate. Mask had trapped his mother halfway through her incarnation. She existed now within a hole in the center of the Ordulin Maelstrom, raging, gazing out through a window of nothingness at a world that had defied her, at least temporarily. Mask had frozen Toril’s Cycle of Night.

But Shar was still hungry, and she wanted the rest of her meal.

Riven possessed some of Mask’s divinity, Mephistopheles possessed some, and Rivalen Tanthul, Shar’s nightseer on Faerun, possessed the third portion. The divinity could only come out of them one way-with their deaths. And as much as Riven hated godhood, he hated being dead even more. He wouldn’t be feeding himself to Shar anytime soon.

He’d learned more as Mask’s memories showed him the game. He finally remembered what he’d done-what Mask had done-to Cale’s son, Vasen. And he’d learned of Mask’s plan to return.

“To end the cycle, resurrect the herald,” he said, the words once more like foreign things on his lips.

Mask had changed Vasen in the womb, given him a very special ability, and pushed him forward in time to hide him. Vasen was the key. Vasen could release the divinity in Rivalen, Riven, and Mephistopheles, and do it without killing them. But he had to do it with all three of them present, and he had to do it while Shar looked on. That meant it had to be done in the Ordulin Maelstrom.

If it went right, Mask would reincarnate. If it went wrong, the Cycle of Night would re-start and run its course.

“This should’ve been Cale,” Riven muttered.

Riven had never had Cale’s mind for plans, and he struggled to keep everything straight in his head.

“I should’ve died, not him.”

But then again, Cale wasn’t dead.

Mask had seen fit to reveal that bit of information to Riven recently. Riven had wrestled with the implications for days. He didn’t quite see how it fit into the rest.

All he knew at this point was that Cale was alive. Alive and trapped under Hell’s ice for a century.

“Damn, damn, damn.”

Mask had either kept Cale alive somehow when he should’ve died or brought him back to life immediately after his death. Riven didn’t know which, and didn’t understand why. He didn’t even understand how. He presumed that Cale, too, must have still had some of Mask’s divinity, a tiny sliver that Mephistopheles hadn’t taken. That was the only explanation.

Riven’s head spun as he tried to think through all the players and their plots. Everything was complicated, wheels within wheels, plans within plans within plans, and somehow Riven had to sort it out and end up on the right end of things.

Yet he suspected that Mask had kept still more secrets from him. Riven could spend a decade planning, then learn something new tomorrow that changed everything, put everything in a new light.

He put it out of his mind for the moment, looked out on his realm, and tried to enjoy his pipe.

Flashes of viridian lightning periodically knifed through the dense churn of low clouds, painting the landscape for a moment in sickly green. Gusts of wind summoned dust as fine as ash from the foothills, whipped through the plains and caused the twisted grass and oddly angled branches of the Shadowfell’s trees to hiss and whisper. The miasmic, gloomy air, soupy with shadows, thronged with undead, pressed down on Riven’s mood.

He’d long ago had enough of the Shadowfell, but he left the plane only when absolutely necessary. His close connection to it meant that he was strongest when here, weaker when away. He knew Mephistopheles and Rivalen both would kill him if they could, each for their own reasons, and he dared not give them a moment’s weakness to exploit, not unless he must. They’d both tried to scry him from time to time. He felt their divinations pawing at him, making the air around him charged and itchy, but the spells never quite latched onto him. His divinity allowed him to slip almost all scrying.

But the Lord of Cania and the nightseer knew where he was. And he knew where they were.

“The three of us,” he said. “Stalemated.”

His voice drew one of his dogs, bitches he’d had for decades. She pushed through the door behind him, padded over, and plopped down at his feet with a tired exhalation.

His mood immediately improved. Her short tail beat against the smooth stone floor. When he looked down and smiled around his pipe, she flopped on her side to show her age-fattened belly.

Shadows slipped out of her flesh. She’d been a tan, white, and brown mutt once, but years in the shadows, years with Riven, had turned her dark. The Shadowfell had seeped into her, the same as it had into Riven, turning them both into shadows of themselves.

She whined for attention, tail still thumping, and Riven took the hint. He scratched her chest and stomach and she answered with happy sighs and more wags. He tried not to follow the implications of her graying muzzle and labored breathing. Unlike Riven, she was not divine, not immortal. Shadowstuff had extended her life, but it would not keep her alive forever.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said, and she just wagged happily. He should have let his girls die in peace in Faerun, still themselves, still normal.

Her sister, also as black as ink, caught wind of the petting and ambled in. She plopped down and showed her stomach, too, and Riven surrendered fully. He set his pipe on the floor and vigorously scratched and petted each of them. They rolled over and put their heads on his legs, licked his hand. Shadows spun around all three of them. He smiled, thinking how they must look, the dark god and his fat, tail-wagging shadow hounds.

“You’re good girls,” he said, patting their heads, stroking their muzzles.

He would have been dead inside without them, he knew that. He sometimes felt that they were the sole thread connecting him back to his humanity. And he missed his humanity. He missed need, the satisfaction that came from striving for ordinary things and achieving them. Divinity had expanded his mind but dulled his body to pleasure. He could partake of food, drink, and women, but he experienced all of them at a distance, almost as an observer, not a participant. The curse of a divine mind, he supposed. For some reason the pleasure he felt smoking his pipe remained sharp, so he smoked often. Jak Fleet, an old companion of his, would have smiled to see it.

“All right, girls,” he said, and patted them each one last time before grabbing his pipe and standing. They watched him stand, forlorn, as dogs do.

He’d drawn on his pipe, thinking, planning. He’d put things in place as best he knew how. Now he had to wait for Vasen-he’d be over thirty by now-to come to him, for he dared not visit Cale’s son again. After that, he had to rescue Cale. Then he had to resurrect a god or destroy the world, one or the other.

“Damn,” he said.

He thought of his old life, thought of Cale, Jak, and Mags. Mags.

He made up his mind. He’d need Mags, someone he could count on, someone he could trust. He’d risk leaving the Shadowfell one more time before all the pieces started to move.

Magadon stood behind the bar of his tavern, wiping one tin tankard after another with a dirty rag. He’d closed an hour earlier and his now-empty place-a rickety taproom he’d named the Tenth Hell, to amuse himself-felt hollow. It still carried an echo of the day’s stink, though: smoke and beer and sweat and bad stew.

Daerlun, and indeed all of Faerun, had changed much over the eighty years he’d owned the place, but his tavern remained more or less as it was since the day he’d first bought it. He’d done nothing but minimal maintenance.

It was frozen in the past. Like him.

He, too, had changed little over the years. He’d let his horns and his hair grow long, and he’d grown more powerful in the Invisible Art, but little else. He was passing time, nothing more and nothing less. He served his ale and his stew, his weapons and gear stored under the bar, while he waited.

Damned if he knew for what. Something.

The tavern was a two-fireplace, decrepit wooden building that attracted a decrepit clientele who didn’t mind a half-fiend barkeep. The building nestled against Daerlun’s eastern wall, squalid and lonely. If the Shadovar and their Sembian allies ever marched on Daerlun-which had declared itself an independent city decades ago-they’d come from the east, and Magadon’s tavern would be among the first buildings to burn. Maybe there was meaning in that.

The threat of war with the Shadovar had loomed over Daerlun for decades, as much a shadow on the city as was the miasmic air of neighboring Sembia. Over time the populace had gotten so used to the threat of an attack that it had gone from danger to jest: “As probable as Sakkors floating up to the walls,” they’d say, in reference to something deemed unlikely.

But the jests had been fewer of late. Teamsters and peddlers and soldiers spoke in quiet tones of skirmishes in the perpetual dark of the Sembian plains, of Shadovar forces blockading the lands south of the Way of the Manticore, of battles being fought in the Dales. An open call for mercenaries had gone out from Sembia, and Magadon imagined shiploads of blades-for-hire sailing into the ports of Selgaunt and Saerloon. The war would eventually reach Daerlun and its towering, obsidian walls. If the Dales fell to Sembia’s forces, Daerlun would fall next. Magadon didn’t think it would be long. Sakkors had been sighted once or twice on the distant horizon, floating on its inverted mountain, hanging in the dark Sembian sky like a promise of doom.

Sakkors. Magadon had not actually seen it himself in many years, but then he didn’t need to. He’d seen it long ago and dreamed of it often. The sentient crystalline mythallar that powered the city and kept it afloat-it called itself the Source-had permanent residence in Magadon’s mind.

Long ago Magadon had nearly lost himself in the Source’s vast consciousness. He’d augmented his mind magic with its power and become a godling, at least for a moment. In the process he’d also become a monster, but his friends had saved him, and he’d stood with Erevis Cale and Drasek Riven and defeated a god.

Thinking of those times made him smile. He considered those days the finest in his life, yet things felt incomplete to him. That was the reason he could not move on. That was the reason he tended bar and bided his time.

The Source still called to Magadon, of course, but because he’d grown stronger over the decades, its call no longer pulled at him with the insistence it once did. Instead the Source’s mental touch felt more like a gentle solicitation, an invitation. He could’ve blocked them-a simple mind screen would have shielded him-but the Source’s touch had become familiar over the years, a comforting reminder and a connection to a past he wasn’t yet ready to let go.

Clay lamps burned on a few of the tavern’s time-scarred tables, casting shaky shadows on the slatted wood walls. He stared into the dark corners of the room, a little game he played with himself, and let a doomed flash of hope spark in his mind. He gave the hope voice before it died.

“Cale? Riven?”

Nothing. Shadows danced, but none spoke. Cale was dead, Riven was a man-become-a-god, and Magadon hadn’t seen him in almost a century.

He blew out a sigh and hung all but one of the tankards he’d cleaned on their pegs behind the bar. He filled the one he’d kept from the half-full hogshead and raised it in a salute. After draining it, he set to closing down the tavern for another night, all of it routine. His life had become rote.

He went to the tables, each of them wobbling on uneven legs, and blew out the lamps. The low fire in the hearth provided the room’s only light. He checked the stew pot on its hook near the hearth, saw that almost nothing remained, and decided to leave cleaning it for the morning. He took the iron poker from the wall, intending to spread the coals and head to his garret next door, where he’d lay awake and think of the past, then fall asleep and dream of the Source.

All at once the air in the room grew heavy, pressed against his ears, and a cough sounded from behind him. He whirled around, brandishing the poker. Instinct caused him to draw on his mental energy and a soft, red glow haloed his head.

The darkness in the tavern had deepened so that he could not see into the corners of the room. He stood in a bubble of light cast by the faint glow of his power and the fire’s embers. He slid to his left, holding the poker defensively, and put his back against the hearth. He’d left his damned weapons behind the bar.

“Show yourself,” he said.

He charged the metal poker with mental energy, enough to penetrate a dragon’s scales. Its end glowed bright red. The light cast shadows on the walls.

“I said: Show yourself.”

“You carry that instead of a blade now?” said a voice from his right.

Magadon whirled toward the voice and shock almost caused him to drop the poker.

“Riven.”

The darkness in the room relented. The weightiness in the air did not.

“Nice that someone remembers that name,” Riven said. He stepped from the darkness, emerged from it as if stepping out from behind dark curtains, all compact movement and blurry edges. Sabers hung from his belt. A sneer hung from his lips. He hadn’t aged, but then he wouldn’t have. Magadon reminded himself that he was not talking to a man but a god.

Riven glided across the room, his footsteps soundless, and Magadon could not think of a single word to say. Riven smiled through his goatee and extended his hand. Magadon hesitated, then took it. Shadows crawled off Riven and onto Magadon’s forearm.

“It’s good to see you again, Mags. I don’t have long. My being here puts you at risk.”

“At risk? From what? I don’t-”

Riven was already nodding. “I know you don’t. I know. And that’s as it must be. Mags, the Cycle of Night either succeeds or fails. And that’s up to us. Maybe.”

Magadon’s head was spinning. His thoughts were inchoate. “The Cycle of Night?”

Riven nodded, started pacing, dragging his fingertips over the tabletops as he moved, the shadows clinging to his form. “This is a shithole, Mags.”

“What?”

Riven chuckled. “I caught you by surprise here. Apologies. I need you to be ready when I call. I just. . need someone I can rely on. Can you do that?”

Magadon could not quite gather his runaway thoughts. He resisted the impulse to cough out another stupid question. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Riven looked almost sympathetic. “I know you don’t. But that’s good for now. I don’t even know what I’m talking about half the time because they’re not my words and only half my thoughts.”

Magadon blinked, confused.

Riven looked at him directly, his regard like a punch. “Can you be ready, Mags?”

“I. . don’t know.”

Riven nodded, as if he’d expected ambivalence. “Where’s your pack? Your bow and blade?”

Magadon started to find his conversational footing. “Behind the bar.”

“A barkeep,” Riven said, chuckling. “Not how I saw things going for you.”

“Not how I saw things going for me, either,” Magadon admitted with a shrug. “It’s been a hundred years, Riven. You show up, you talk about things as if I should know what they are, but I don’t and-”

“I found Cale’s son. Thirty years ago. I found him.”

The words stopped Magadon cold. “Found him where? He was alive thirty years ago? He’d have been over seventy years old.”

Riven shook his head. A pipe was in his hand, although Magadon had not seen him take it out. “You have a match?”

Magadon shook his head.

“Gods, Mags. You used to be prepared for anything.” He shook his head. “No matter.”

He put the pipe in his mouth and it lit. He inhaled, the glow of the bowl showing the pockmarks in his face, the vacancy where his left eye should have been. The smoke joined the shadows in curling around him.

“He’s not seventy,” Riven said. “He was newborn thirty years ago. It’s a long story.”

“How could he have been newborn thirty years ago? Cale would’ve been dead seventy years by then.”

A smile curled the corners of Riven’s mouth. “I told you it was a long story.” “I’ve nothing but time.”

Riven nodded, blew out a cloud of smoke. “But I don’t.”

“You’re telling me he’s still alive? The son?”

“He’s alive and he’s the key, Mags.”

Magadon shook his head, unable to make sense of things. “The key to what?”

“The key to fixing all this, undoing it, making it as it should have been, stopping Shar’s Cycle of Night. But it’ll have to happen in Ordulin.”

Magadon was still not following, although the mention of Ordulin turned Magadon’s mind to the Shadovar, to Rivalen Tanthul, Shar’s nightseer. Magadon had been captured and tortured by Rivalen and his brother, Brennus, long ago. “Rivalen and the Shadovar are involved?”

Riven nodded. “More than involved. Rivalen’s trying to complete the Cycle, and he’s clever, Mags, very clever. But maybe too clever this time. Your father’s involved in this, too, although he’s a bit player. And so are you. Or at least you are now.”

“My father?” The last time Magadon had seen his father, Mephistopheles, the archdevil had flayed his soul. He banished the memory.

“You all right?” Riven asked.

Magadon nodded. “Where’s Cale’s son?”

Riven’s eye looked past Magadon, to the east. “He’s out there in the dark. A light in darkness, is what they say. He’s safe, though.”

“You tell me where he is, I can go to him. Keep him safe.”

Riven shook his head. “No, you can’t. He’s where he’s supposed to be. Now he’s gotta come to me. Besides, I need you here.”

“For what?”

“I told you. To be ready when I call.”

“What does that even mean? You’re talking in circles.”

Riven grinned around his pipe stem. “I don’t know what it means yet. I’m figuring this out as we go. I just know I want you ready. I’ll need your help. Just like always, just like it was back before. . everything.”

“Like it was back before,” Magadon echoed. He pointed with his chin at the stew pot, still hanging over the embers. “Do you eat? Now that. . you are what you are? There’s a little stew there. Or an ale, maybe?”

“I eat,” Riven said, losing his smile. “But it’s not the same anymore. It’s like I can’t help but analyze instead of just enjoy it.” He shook his head. “It’s complicated.”

Magadon put a hand on Riven’s shoulder in sympathy, but Riven pushed it aside and cocked his head, as if he’d heard something, and a half-beat later a loud thud sounded from above, a powerful impact on the roof that cracked a crossbeam and shook the entire tavern. Dust and debris sprinkled down.

Magadon looked up. “What-?”

Another thud, the crossbeam cracked further, and the entire roof sagged.

“Shit,” Riven said, exhaling smoke. The pipe was already gone and he had his sabers in hand. Magadon had not even seen him draw them.

A heavy tread on the roof, creaking wood, a scrabbling on the roof tiles, as of blade or claw.

“They must’ve followed me,” Riven said, taking position beside Magadon, his body coiled, shadows swirling. “They must’ve been watching me in the Shadowfell somehow, waiting. Or maybe they’ve been here the whole time? See anything unusual recently?”

“What? No.”

Another thump, more splintering and dust, more tension.

Magadon drew on his store of mental energy, shaped it, formed it into a cocoon of transparent force that surrounded his body and would protect him as well as plate armor. He tightened his grip on the poker, looked up at the bowed roof.

“Who followed you?” he whispered.

“Agents of your father,” Riven said, his voice low and edged.

“Devils, then.”

A crash and a sharp prolonged splintering as the roof gave way entirely. The main crossbeam hit the floor with a boom, in the process crushing a table and two chairs. Tiles and wood planks and two winged fiendish forms poured down through the hole. The devils hit the floor in a crouch, narrow eyes on Riven and Magadon, tridents clutched in clawed hands, membranous wings tucked behind their back.

The fiends-Magadon recognized them as malebranche-stood taller than even a very tall man. Thick muscles clotted in bunches under their gray, leathery skin. Each wore ornate vambraces and a pauldron over one shoulder. Two curved horns jutted from their brows, overlooking vaguely reptilian features. Their oversized mouths had a pronounced underbite, and a pair of tusks stabbed upward from their lower jaw.

“Shadows aren’t the same here as they are in the Shadowfell,” one of them said, its voice gravelly. The other grabbed a chair and hurled it at Riven. Riven ducked under it casually. The chair smashed against the hearth and splintered, spilling the stew pot.

“They’re about the same,” Riven said with a sneer.

The devils opened their mouths in a deep growl. Licks of flame danced between the tines of their tridents.

“They can’t get out alive,” Riven said. “Neither escapes.”

“Understood,” Magadon said. He pulled from the deep pool of mental energy that filled his core, shaped it into a field of latent force, and transferred it once more to the tip of the poker he held. A halo of red energy formed around the point.

The devils leaped at them, the tree-trunks of their legs propelling them forward like shot quarrels. Magadon hurled the energized poker at one of them, while Riven bounded forward with preternatural speed, meeting the larger malebranche’s charge with a charge of his own.

The fireplace poker flew true and slammed into the smaller fiend in midleap. The latent force with which Magadon had charged the tip allowed the makeshift weapon to strike with exaggerated force. The impact knocked the fiend out of the air and into a table. It bellowed with pain and rage, the poker sunk a hand span into its hide.

Meanwhile, Riven faced the other devil, his blades a whirlwind of steel, his movements trailing shadows. He sidestepped the devil’s charge and a stab from its trident, leaped over another stab, slashed and spun and cut. The devil retreated under Riven’s onslaught, bumping into tables, stumbling into chairs, its trident too slow to parry the speed of Riven’s assault. Two clay lamps hit the ground and shattered, spilling their oil.

Riven, his speed and skill that of a god, carved flesh from the devil in gory ribbons. The creature roared, ichor spraying from its wounds, and stabbed at Riven with its trident again and again, hitting only empty air. Its trident scraped the floor, and the flames between the tines ignited the oil.

The devil Magadon had knocked prone jerked the poker from its flesh and intentionally toppled another table into the flames. The lamp atop it broke, spilling its oil. Tables caught fire, a chair, another chair, the floor. Smoke clotted the air.

Magadon cursed and sprinted across the common room. The fiend leaped to its feet and gave chase. Magadon jumped over the bar, sending two tankards and a plate clattering to the floor, and landed in a heap on the other side. He scrambled to his feet and looked back to see the fiend coiling for a leap.

Drawing from his reserve of mental energy, Magadon formed it into a spike of force that bound the devil’s leg to the floor. The fiend leaped anyway, and the floor planks that now adhered to its clawed feet tore loose, the dislodged nails and wood screeching like the damned. Thrown off balance, the fiend fell forward into a table, splintering it under its weight.

Behind it, more smoke and flames. Riven and devil dueling in the flames. The room would soon be an inferno.

Magadon grabbed for his bow and quiver and had both in hand by the time the devil had regained its feet. Magadon nocked, charged his arrow with mental energy, drew, and fired into its face. The missile sunk into the devil’s throat and it screamed, staggered back, clutching at its neck. As it did, it made a wild throw with its flaming trident, and the huge weapon struck Magadon squarely in the chest.

Although the tines did not penetrate the field of force that sheathed him, the sheer power of the blow drove him backward against the wall, cracked ribs, and drove the air from his lungs. Dislodged by the impact, tankards rained from their pegs. The hogshead fell to the floor, broke open, and covered the floor in beer.

Gasping for air, coughing on the growing cloud of smoke, Magadon staggered back to the bar and reached for another arrow from his quiver. The devil he’d shot spun frenetically around the burning common room, toppling tables and chairs, screaming, its breathing an audible squeal through the hole Magadon had put in its throat.

Behind the wounded devil, Riven continued his dissection of the larger devil. Riven’s blades were a blur, slashing, stabbing, cutting. The devil roared and spun, lashed out with claws, trident, even a kick, but nothing landed. Riven was too fast, too precise. The fiend bled dark ichor from dozens of wounds. Its flesh hung in scraps from its body. A final crosscut from Riven’s saber severed its head.

As Magadon nocked another arrow, the surviving devil finally pulled the arrow from its throat, screaming in agony. It fixed its eyes on Magadon, its huge chest rising and falling. It spit a mouthful of black ichor and rushed him.

Magadon sighted and powered his arrow with enough mental energy to fell a horse. The tip glowed an angry, hot red. He picked a spot between the devil’s eyes and prepared to draw.

Before he could loose his shot, Riven stepped through the shadows, covering the length of the room in a single stride. He appeared in front of the devil, his sabers sheathed. He held a thin loop of reified shadow in his hands.

He dodged a surprised slash from the fiend’s claws, spun, and looped the line of shadow around the fiend’s neck. Before the devil could respond, Riven leaped atop the fiend’s back, wrapped his legs around the devil’s mid-section, and pulled the line taut.

The devil reared back, eyes wide, choking, gasping for breath, shooting a mist of blood from the hole Magadon had put in its throat. It spun, reached back to claw at Riven, staggered around the room, bumping into tables, chairs, walking through the flames. Throughout, Riven rode its back in calm, deadly silence, the shadow garrote choking out its life.

Magadon relaxed, set his bow on the bar, and his body lit up with pain, the suddenness of it like a lightning strike. The tip of a black sword exploded out from his abdomen and showered the bar in blood. He gasped, screamed, looked down uncomprehendingly at the dark wedge of steel protruding from his guts. His mouth was filling with blood. He gagged on it. His vision blurred.

“Shit!” He heard Riven shout. “Mags!”

“I’m all right,” he tried to say, but he wasn’t, and no words emerged, just a gurgle of blood. He put a hand on the gore-slicked bar to stay upright as his knees started to buckle. His clothing was already soaked in blood, his thoughts overwhelmed by pain.

A chuckle from behind.

He turned his head-it seemed to take forever-and saw a male devil standing behind him, holding the dark blade on which Magadon’s dying body hung. It wasn’t another malebranche. It looked almost human, save for its violet skin and the two thin horns that jutted from its head. Shadows and leather armor wrapped its lithe body. Magadon recognized it as a breed of stealthy fiend used by other devils as quiet killers and assassins. It must have entered the tavern with the malebranche, invisible or clad in darkness. Magadon had missed it. And it had killed him.

“Riven,” Magadon tried to say, but it just came out an inarticulate gurgle of blood. He tried to focus but his eyes wouldn’t hold onto anything but the devil’s face, the red eyes, the fanged mouth.

The fiend gave a smile as it twisted the blade in Magadon’s guts, then jerked it free, scraping ribs, widening the wound. A gush of warmth poured from the slit. Magadon screamed and the pain displaced numbness.

Desperately he grabbed at the pain, focused on it, lived in its center for a moment, a moment during which he ignored the blood and shit seeping from the hole in him. He grabbed at the devil with arms gone weak. He lurched, staggered, and would have fallen had he not gotten hold of the fiend by the forearm.

The devil tried to shake him loose but Magadon held on. The devil pulled back his blade for another stab but before he could Magadon made a spike of his will and drove it into the fiend’s mind.

The devil sensed its danger immediately. It resisted the mental intrusion, tried to shake Magadon’s grip loose, but its desperation fed Magadon’s physical and mental grip. His fingernails sank into the fiend’s skin and his mind put a psychic hook in the devil’s consciousness.

The devil stabbed him again, but Magadon was beyond pain, and heard, more than felt, the blade slice his flesh and organs, grate on bone. Lights flashed before his eyes, sparks, then darkness. He was fading, falling, but he held onto the fiend’s mind and used their connection to set up an empathetic connection. When he felt the connection take firm hold, felt the psychic bridge between them, he grinned, tasting blood, and transferred the wounds and every damned bit of pain in his ruined body through the connection and into the devil.

The fiend’s eyes went as wide as coins. It dropped its blade as its fanged mouth opened in a wail of pain. Shadows swirled around it, a storm of darkness. A jagged hole opened in the devil’s abdomen, spilling gore, as the hole in Magadon pinched closed and painfully healed.

“This is for you, bastard,” Magadon grunted, pushing his agony into the dying devil. He shoved the creature backward and the fiend stumbled back against the wall, tripping on tankards, trying and failing to push its innards back into its abdomen.

Magadon reached back to the bar and grabbed an arrow in his fist, sidestepped a feeble stab by the devil with its sword, and plunged the arrow into the fiend’s eye, deep into its horned head.

The devil fell to the floor and Magadon rode him down, the two of them slick in shared gore. He pulled the arrow out and drove it into the fiend’s other eye.

Magadon stood, breathing hard, his legs still weak, and found Riven right behind him, crouched atop the bar, backlit by the glow of the spreading flames. Shadows made a slow swirl around him. Somehow he reminded Magadon of a crow.

“Like old times,” Riven said.

Magadon stood upright, wobbled, nodded.

“You all right?” Riven asked. He wasn’t even breathing hard. In passing Magadon wondered if he breathed at all.

Magadon looked at the gory arrow in his hand, his blood-soaked clothes, the corpse of the devil behind him, his burning tavern.

“I’m good,” he said. He picked up the hogshead from the floor and found that the spill hadn’t drained it entirely. He filled two tankards and gave one to Riven.

“It’s a shit brew,” he said, draining his.

Riven drained his, too. “Best I’ve had in a long while, Mags.” Riven’s pipe appeared in his hand, already lit, and he took a long draw.

“Fire brigade will be coming,” Magadon said, as he watched his tavern burn, a thick column of smoke pouring through the hole in the ceiling. His fiendish blood protected him from heat and fire. Riven, too, would feel no threat from flames.

“Too late for this place,” Riven said. “Sorry, Mags.”

Magadon shrugged. “I’d had enough of it anyway.”

Riven nodded. “Let these bodies burn. If these three had been working for your father, we’d have had ten score fiends here by now, and maybe the archfiend himself.”

The mere hint of Mephistopheles’s name, spoken by a godling, caused a cool wind to waft through the bar. Flames hissed and popped, the sound suggestive of dark words.

“These three were working for themselves, probably trying to get in your father’s favor. Their mistake.”

“Aye.”

Riven took another draw on his pipe, exhaled the smoke. “Well?”

Magadon eyed his old friend, more god than man, while the life he’d built burned down around him.

“I’ll be ready,” he said.

“Well enough,” Riven said, and Magadon thought he looked relieved. “Link us, then.”

“A mind link?”

“So I can call you when I need you. Just leave it laying there so I can pick it up if I need it. And don’t look around in there, Mags. You won’t like it any.”

The thought of linking minds with a god disconcerted Magadon, but it needed to be done. He opened his mind, drew on his mental energy, reached out for Riven’s mind.

The shock of contact caused him to gasp. Mindful of Riven’s admonition, he kept the link superficial and narrow. Still, he sensed at a distance the scope of Riven’s mind, his expanded perception of time and place, the voices of the faithful that echoed through his mindscape.

“Gods,” Magadon said softly.

“Gods, indeed,” Riven said. “Makes a man a monster, Mags. No way to avoid it.”

“I’m. . sorry.”

Riven shrugged. “We’ve all got our burdens. And don’t feel sorry for me just yet. Things will get ugly for you before all’s said and done. Count on it.”

Magadon smiled ruefully. “When has it not?”

Riven grinned. “Stay sharp, Mags. See you soon. And Mags? He’s alive.”

“Who?”

“Cale. And we’re going to get him.”

“What? Wait!”

The darkness gathered, folded Riven into it, and he was gone.

He’s alive. He’s alive. The words and their implication pushed all other thoughts out of Magadon’s mind.

Cale was alive. And his son was alive.

Grinning like a lunatic, Magadon gathered his weapons and gear. He donned his wide-brimmed hat, fitted it over his horns, and walked unharmed through the flames and into the night-shrouded streets of Daerlun. Already some passersby had gathered. The fire wouldn’t spread, though. It’d burn up his garret and the tavern, but nothing else.

One of them, a tall, gaunt bald man who held an open book in his hands, struck Magadon oddly. He didn’t look at the first like the rest of them. Instead he wrote something in his book with a quill.

The man must have felt Magadon’s gaze. He looked up from his book.

His eyes had no pupils. They looked like opals set in his skull. He grinned.

Goose pimples rose on Magadon’s skin. He had no idea why. Something about the man. .

“Hey, are you all right?” shouted another of the gathered passersby, a sailor with drink-slurred speech. “You all right, friend? Look at your clothes! Gods man!”

The bald man had gone back to his book, writing, his mouth bent in a secretive smile.

“I said, are you all right?” the sailor shouted again.

Magadon looked at the sailor, raised a hand, and smiled. “I’m fine.”

He was better than fine. He was good as he’d been in a hundred years.