The Godborn

Chapter Two

Magadon walked for a time, thinking. The streets bustled even at the late hour: Mule-drawn wagons of supplies moved toward the barracks, and groups of grim-faced soldiers stood on corners, monitoring the traffic and the passersby. The city was preparing for war. Every day hundreds of soldiers marched out of the city to the parade grounds outside the towering basalt walls that ringed Daerlun, and there drilled for hours. Scouts mounted on veserabs-giant-winged lamprey-like creatures-swooped over the city, carrying messages from Cormyrean nobles to High Bergun Gascarn Highbanner. Rumors had an alliance brewing between Daerlun and Cormyr. Magadon wasn’t sure that would be enough to thwart a Sembian assault, when it came.

He didn’t realize it until he arrived, but his boots had carried him to the east gate. Beyond the dark, basalt wall, the shroud of Sembia’s shadowed night hung across the sky. Lines of green lightning flashed, the veins of Sembia’s sky. He felt the gentle touch of the Source’s consciousness brushing against his own.

Sakkors was out there, floating in the dark. As was Cale’s son. And with that, he knew what he would do.

The gate was closed and the guards stiffened at his approach. But their minds were ordinary and easily manipulated by his mind magic. “I’m on official city business by order of the high bergun,” he said, and pushed acceptance of his statement into their minds. “I need to get out of the city right now. Apologies for the late hour.”

“Of course, of course,” said the gate sergeant, a heavyset bearded fellow whose breath smelled of onion and pipe smoke.

In moments, Magadon stood outside the gates, with the basalt walls of the city behind him. He stared across the plains at the distant wall of shadowed air that blanketed Sembia. He’d walked Sembia in the dark before, with Erevis Cale at his side. They’d braved the Shadowstorm and trekked to Ordulin. The memory made Magadon smile.

“Walking in our footsteps, old friend,” he said, and started off. Using the Source’s mental emanations, he kenned the direction and distance of Sakkors. It floated in Sembia’s perpetual night south of the Thunder Peaks, about halfway between Daerlun and Ordulin. And Riven had said that whatever was to happen must happen in Ordulin.

Riven said he wanted Magadon’s help. But how could Magadon be of assistance to a god? The same way he had assisted in the murder of a god a century before. He would draw on the power of the Source to augment his own. He felt the Source’s mental emanations, answered them with his own. See you soon, he projected.

He avoided the roads-fearing he’d encounter Sembian troops-and instead moved rapidly across the plains. His bow and woodcraft kept him fed and his mind magic and stealth kept him unobserved. Even traveling cross-country he spotted Shadovar patrols from time to time, once including what appeared to be a prisoner-transport caravan. He stayed well south of the Thunder Peaks and the Way of the Manticore, but he still saw signs of the gathered Sembian troops there. Even the perpetual gloom could not hide the light, like faintly burning stars, from thousands of campfires in the distance.

The Sembians had blocked the road between Daerlun and Cormyr on the one hand and the Dalelands on the other. Whatever army the Dalelands had to face, they’d face alone.

Magadon did not take time to investigate any of it more thoroughly.

Riven had asked him to be ready, so he kept moving east, moving directly for Sakkors, for the Source.

The twisted, malformed trees and whipgrass of the Sembian countryside saddened him. He’d walked the plains when they’d been lush with old trees and fields of barley. Now the leafless skeletons of old elms and oaks rattled in the gusty wind. He put a hand on the trunk of any old elms he encountered, a moment of bonding between two living things that had once seen a Sembia under the sun.

He stayed off the roads and skirted wide around villages, although many appeared abandoned, their fields fallow and weedy. Possibly they’d fled as Sembian forces had marched east or possibly something worse had happened to them.

Monsters prowled the plains. From time to time Magadon heard growls and roars in the distance, occasionally caught motion out of the corner of his eye. Often he nocked an energized arrow into his bow, but he never had to fire. The creatures that stalked the darkness left him unmolested. The pull of the Source grew stronger as he covered the leagues. And as he grew closer, he sensed an undercurrent to its pull, a sadness. The Source’s mind seemed dulled and melancholy. He didn’t understand it. As he neared it, as he sensed the full scope of its power, he grew nervous. He feared he could lose himself in it again. But by the time he actually spotted Sakkors in the distance, a dark star hanging in the lightning lit sky of Sembia’s night, he knew for certain he could resist its pull. He could use the Source and still keep himself. He’d been broken once before by using it, shattered, really, but his reassembled self was stronger than the original.

Small, dark figures flitted around the floating mountain on which Sakkors stood. They looked tiny from afar, but Magadon knew them to be Shadovar cavalry mounted on scaly-winged veserabs. The Source seemed finally to sense him fully, and its pull grew plaintive. It wanted him to come closer, to deepen their connection.

He eyed a stand of pine directly under the floating mountain and drew on his reserve of power. A dim orange glow haloed his head, and a mirror of the glow shone in the spot he’d mentally chosen under Sakkors. He activated the mind magic and it moved him instantly to the wooded spot under Sakkors. The mountain floated over him, huge and ominous. And somewhere within its center was the Source.

Magadon opened his mind and let the Source’s touch wash through him, let part of its power, its ancient consciousness, become part of his own. He sensed right away that it had lost no power, but it had lost acuity, and in an instant Magadon understood.

The Source had been calling to him, for a hundred years it had been sending mental energy out into the world in a desperate effort to reach out to him. It missed him. It wanted him near.

Why? He projected, but knew the answer before the Source offered it. The Source was dying, its sentience slowly fading away. Worse, it was aware of its impending demise, the slow erosion of its self-awareness. It was afraid. And it was alone, surrounded by beings that didn’t understand it and could not connect with it.

I’m so sorry, he projected.

The Source’s fear and sadness tightened his chest, caught him up in its swirl, and swept through him. He sank to the bed of pine needles, weeping, and wrapped his arms around his knees.

It had wanted him to come to it, for a century, and he had not answered.

He’d failed it.

Forgive me, he projected.

It did. In fact, it had nothing for him but affection, and his connection with it, and his sympathy, mitigated its sadness and alleviated its fear. It welcomed his companionship the way a thirsty man welcomed a drink, another mind to keep it company as it faded. It had simply not wanted to die alone. I’ll stay with you throughout, he promised. When the city moves, I’ll move with it. I won’t leave you.

He felt its gratitude. He made a place for himself under the city, hidden by his mind magic and the pine trees, and kept company with the oldest consciousness he’d ever encountered. Shadovar patrols came and went, sometimes cavalry on veserabs, sometimes soldiers afoot, but none ever noticed him. Over the days and nights, the Source showed him many things, events from its past, possible futures, jumbles of nonsequential nonsensical things that he could not follow. Time passed oddly for him as he walked in the Source’s dying thoughts. Its consciousness took odd turns, made strange connections, moved from things extraordinary to things mundane. He came to understand that he’d lost himself in the Source the first time not because of the Source’s malice but because of its loneliness. It was a consciousness with no body, and it had wanted mental and emotional companionship so much that its over exuberant consciousness had simply overwhelmed his. He’d been unready then. But one hundred years had passed since, and he was ready now. Magadon experienced months and years in moments, lived lives in hours, laughed and cried and raged. But always he kept a firm hold on himself, on his purpose.

There may come a time when I need your help, he said. Will you help me? The Source answered, in its way, that it would if it still could. Magadon broke his connection with the Source only once, to send a message to Riven through their mind link. He didn’t know if Riven would receive it, but he wanted to try.

I’m ready, he projected, and nothing more.

Then he waited, keeping deathwatch on the Source, his thoughts often turning back to Riven’s words.

Erevis is alive. And he has a son. And his son is the key to everything.

Vasen had never known the father whose blood ran in his veins, but Erevis Cale lived on in him somehow, haunting his dreams. Vasen always saw him as a dark man with a dark sword, a dark soul. In the dreams he never saw his father’s face, and rarely heard his voice. They somehow communed without truly seeing one another, in blindness, in quietude, and over the years through the sense-starved dream connection Vasen believed he’d come to understand what Erevis would’ve wished for him to know-the depths of loss, the pain of regret. Everything he’d learned of his father seemed to circle around regret.

Vasen was dreaming now, he knew. He saw only darkness before him, deep and impenetrable. Frigid air stirred his hair, felt like knives on his skin.

Erevis spoke to him, each word a treasure, his deep voice pushing aside the silence of the dreamscape.

“I am cold, Vasen. It’s dark. I’m alone.”

Vasen knew solitude all too well. He’d spent his life among others, but always apart from them. Vasen tried to move but could not. Something was holding him in place. The cold was growing worse. He was shivering, going numb, paralyzed.

“Where are you?” he called.

“Vasen, you must not fail.”

The words hung there for a time, heavy, portentous, filling the darkness. “Must not fail at what?”

“Find me. Write the story.”

“How? How can I find you? You’re dead!”

Vasen felt colder. He wanted to ask more questions, wanted to see his father’s face at long last, but the darkness receded.

“Wait! Wait!”

Vasen caught a flash of glowing red sky, rivers of fire. He heard the screams of millions in torment.

He awoke on his pallet, shivering, heart racing. He stared up at the cracked, vaulted ceiling of his quarters in the abbey. The gauzy, dim gray of a newly birthed morning filtered through the single window of his quarters. He could count on one hand the number of days he had seen more than an hour or two of sunlight in the past year. He’d gotten used to Sembia’s perpetual shroud long ago, the same way he’d gotten used to many things.

Letting the dream slip from the forefront of his mind, he sat up, his flesh still goose pimpled, and recited the Dawn Greeting, the words softly defiant in the ever-dim light.

“Dawn is Amaunator’s gift. His light dispels darkness and renews the world.” He sat on the edge of his sleeping pallet for a time, bent over his knees, his head in his hands, thinking of Erevis, the legacy he could not escape even when asleep. He’d been dreaming of his father more and more in recent months. He examined his calloused hands, his skin the color of tarnished silver, his veins a deep purple. Shadows webbed the spaces between his fingers and spiraled up his forearms, gauntlets of night. He stared at them a long while, the curves and whorls and spirals, the script of his blood. When he shook his hands, the darkness dissipated like mist.

The light of your faith is stronger than the darkness of your blood, Derreg had often told him, and most of the time Vasen credited the words. But sometimes, after awakening from a dream of Erevis and sitting alone with only his shadow for company, sharing time with the darkness he felt lurking around the edges of his life, he wasn’t so sure. Erevis’s life haunted Vasen’s; Vasen’s heritage occluded his hopes. He sometimes had the feeling that he was doomed to live a history written by someone else, unable to turn the page to get to his own life. The shadows that cloaked him, that he could not escape, were the story of his life.

Write the story.

What did that even mean?

Derreg had told him often that Vasen had to prepare himself, had drilled it into him with such fervor that Vasen’s childhood had been no childhood at all. It had been training of mind, body, and spirit since he’d been a boy. “Prepare for what?” Vasen had asked through the years.

“For whatever comes,” Derreg would answer softly, and the concern in his eyes spoke louder than his words. “And you must not fail.” And now Erevis echoed Derreg in Vasen’s dream. The voices of his two fathers, the one of his blood, the other of his heart, had merged into a single demand.

You must not fail.

He stared at the symbol inlaid into the wall over the hearth, a blazing sun over a blossoming red rose.

“I won’t,” he said. Whatever came, he would bear it. And he would not fail. Hard raps on his door startled him. As always when his emotions spiked, shadows leaked from his skin.

“Hold a moment,” he said.

He stood and the morning chill resurrected his goose pimples. The fire in his hearth had burned down to ash and embers. He pulled on his tunic, his holy symbol on its sturdy chain, splashed water from the washbasin on his face, and padded the few steps to the door of his small chamber. He opened the door and blinked in surprise.

The Oracle stood in the doorway, his red, orange, and yellow robes glowing softly. His eyes were the solid, otherworldly orange of a seeing trance. A shining platinum sun, with a rose raised in relief on the circle of its center, hung from a chain around his thin neck. He stared not at Vasen but at a point just to Vasen’s left.

The Oracle’s guide, a large, tawny-coated fey dog with intelligent eyes, stood beside the elderly seer, tongue lolling, tail upright and entirely still.

Vasen realized that he had never once heard the dog bark.

“O-Oracle,” Vasen said, shock summoning a stutter from his mouth and shadows from his flesh. He had never heard of the Oracle entering a seeing trance outside the sanctum.

The Oracle smiled, showing toothless gums and deepening the web of grooves that lined his hawkish face. Age spots dotted the skin of his scalp, visible through the thin fluff of his gray hair. His skin looked parchment thin and lit with a soft, inner glow.

“His light and warmth keep you, Vasen,” said the Oracle. Despite his age, his voice was the steady, even tone of the valley’s cascades, so different from the voice he used when not in a trance.

“And you, Oracle.”

“You may go, Browny,” the Oracle said to the dog. The creature licked the Oracle’s hand, eyed Vasen, and disappeared in a flash of pale light. Vasen always marveled at the dog’s ability to magically transport itself. Standing face to face with the Oracle, Vasen keenly felt the differences between them. The Oracle’s pale skin, deprived of direct sunlight for a century, but illuminated by the inner glow of his trance, contrasted markedly with Vasen’s dark skin, dimmed as it was by the legacy of his bloodline. The Oracle was lit with Amaunator’s light. Vasen was dimmed by Erevis Cale’s shadow.

“Do you. . wish to come in, Oracle?” Vasen said. He realized the words sounded foolish, but was not sure what else to say.

Again that toothless grin. “Vasen, did you know that Abelar Corrinthal was my father?”

The abrupt conversational turn took Vasen aback, but he managed a nod.

“My father told me.”

“Which father?”

Recalling the dream that had awakened him, Vasen had trouble forming a reply. “Derreg. My adoptive father. I’ve never known another. You know this, Oracle.”

“But you see Erevis. Sometimes. In your dreams.”

Vasen could not deny it. “Yes. But they’re just dreams, and he’s long dead.” “So it’s said.”

Shadows leaked from Vasen’s skin. Once more the goose pimples. “What do you mean?”

“I see him, too, Vasen son of Varra.”

Vasen swallowed the bulge in his throat. “And what do you see when you see him?”

“I see you,” the Oracle said.

“I. . I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. I met Erevis Cale. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t, but I wondered sometimes.”

“Why did you never ask?”

Vasen answered truthfully. “It seemed a betrayal of Derreg. And I was afraid. I didn’t want to. . know him.”

“He was hard to know, I think. I saw him twice when I was a boy. The first time he was a man haunted. The second time, he was no longer a man at all, but he was still haunted.”

“Haunted? By what?”

“Doubt, I think,” the Oracle said, then changed the subject. “Your father, your adoptive father, was the son of Regg, who rode with my father. Did you know that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Vasen could not shake the impression that he and the Oracle were simply reciting words written out for them by someone else. He still did not understand the purpose of the Oracle’s visit.

“You, like your father, and like his father before him, swore to remain here and protect this abbey, to protect me. And you have done so.” Vasen did not answer. He felt humbled by the Oracle’s acknowledgment. “You have been here the longest with me and have done credit to the memory of Derreg and Regg. You have even become the first blade. But change comes to everything.”

“It does,” Vasen said haltingly. “But what’s to change?”

“The world. I see a swirl of events, Vasen, but I cannot make sense of it.

Gods, their Chosen, gods beyond gods, the rules of creation, the Tablets of Fate. Wars, Vasen. We see it already in the Dales. War is sweeping Toril. Something is changing. And in the midst of it all I see shadows and I see a growing darkness that threatens it all.”

Vasen’s head swam. He could make no sense of the Oracle’s words. “I am one hundred and six years old, Vasen,” the Oracle continued. “Where will you go when I die?”

The question startled Vasen. “What?”

“Already pilgrims come only rarely. Traveling the realm of the Shadovar is too dangerous. Monsters walk the plains and, where they do not, Sembian soldiers march. When I die, still fewer will come.”

“They will come to see your father’s tomb.”

“Perhaps some.”

“They will come to see your tomb, as well, to honor your memory, the work you’ve done here. A light in the darkness, Oracle.”

The Oracle smiled and Vasen saw that it was forced. His lined face wrinkled with remembered pain.

“That, I fear, will not be.”

“Are you. . dying?”

“We’re all dying,” the Oracle said. “So I ask again: Where will you go when I go to the Dawnfather?”

Vasen shook his head. He had dedicated his life to service and had never conceived a life for himself outside the valley. He had no family anymore, no real friends. The pilgrims and his comrades-in-arms respected him, but none were friends. His blood and appearance made him different. He lived his life in solitude.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll remain here. This is my home.” The Oracle smiled, as if he knew better. “Indeed it is. Here, there is something you must have.”

From the pocket of his robe, he withdrew a thick silver chain from which hung an exquisitely made charm of a rose. Age had left the silver black with tarnish.

“This was my father’s. .”

Vasen held up his hands. “Oracle, I cannot-”

“Abelar Corrinthal, the Dawnlord of the Abbey, my father, would be pleased for you to have it. This I know.”

Vasen felt himself flush. He could not refuse the Oracle. He bowed his head to allow the charm around his neck. The touch of the symbol, once worn by Dawnlord Abelar, made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. “It is tarnished,” the Oracle said. “But scratch away the tarnish and there is silver and light beneath. Many things are that way.”

Vasen took the Oracle’s point. “I understand.”

“The darkness in you is not born of Erevis Cale.”

Vasen stiffened. “Who, then?”

“You separate yourself from everyone, from everything except your duty because you think yourself bound by the past to a future you cannot change.

And you intend to face that future alone.”

Vasen’s anger kindled in the heat of the truth. Shadows swirled from his skin.

“Is that not true? Isn’t that what you see for me?”

The Oracle shook his head. “No, I see hard choices before you, but I don’t see what you will choose. They’re to be your choices. Remember that. Nothing is foreordained. Nothing is written.”

Write me a story.

“And listen to me carefully,” the Oracle said, continuing. “You do not need to face them alone. You should not face them alone.”

Vasen’s anger dissolved in the face of the Oracle’s concerned tone. He bowed his head again. “I apologize for my outburst. Thank you for your words, Oracle.”

The Oracle smiled softly. “It’s nothing. And you may regret your gratitude someday.”

“Never.”

“Listen to me, Vasen. The light is in you, and burns brighter than the rest of us because it fights the darkness of your blood. Will you remember that?” “I will.”

Smiling, the Oracle said, “Very good. Then be well, Vasen son of Derreg and Erevis and Varra.”

“Wait! Is that. . all?”

But it was too late. The Oracle’s face slackened and the glow left his skin.

The orange light of Amaunator fled his eyes and they returned to the filmy, bleary eyes of an old man. He sagged, his aged body unable to so suddenly bear his weight. Vasen caught him to prevent a fall. He felt like a bundle of sticks under his robes.

“It’s Vasen, Oracle.”

“Vazn,” said the Oracle in his slow, awkward way. “Where Bownie?”

“You sent Browny away,” Vasen said. “I’m sure he’s nearby, though.”

“Bownie!” the Oracle called, alarm in his expression. “Bownie!”

Vasen found it difficult to reconcile the sure, powerful voice of the Oracle when he was in a trance with the childlike voice of the mentally infirm Oracle when he was not.

A soft pop and flash of light announced Browny’s return to the Oracle’s side. The dog nuzzled the Oracle’s hand.

“Bownie came!” the Oracle said, grinning.

“I’ll escort you back to your sanctum, Oracle,” Vasen said.

The Oracle shook his head. “No, Vazn. When the bell calls, have pilgrims sent to me for a seeing. I speak to them, then all leave this day. All. You take them.”

The latest group of pilgrims-the first in months-had arrived less than a tenday earlier, dodging Sembian troops along the way. They would be disappointed to leave so soon.

“They only just arrived, Oracle. And the Dales are wracked by war. We’ll have to take them north through the foothills toward Highmoon. Even that way may be closing. Sembian troops are massed all along the borders of the Dales.”

“I know. But they go, Vazn.”

Vasen knew better than to dispute with the Oracle. “Very well.” The Oracle smiled at him. “Farewell, Vazn.”

“The light keep and warm you, Oracle.”

He watched the Oracle, one hand on Browny, totter off down the corridor.

Vasen closed the door, mind racing. First the dream, then a personal visit and seeing from the Oracle. What did it all mean?

He took the rose holy symbol from his neck. Thin threads of shadow spiraled from his fingertips, around the rose. He imagined Saint Abelar using the symbol to channel the power of Amaunator while facing the nightwalker at the Battle of Sakkors.

He studied its petals, the stem, the two thorns. It was so finely crafted it could have been an actual rose magically transformed into metal, not unlike the rose gardens around the abbey that the Spellplague had petrified. With his thumbnail, he scratched at the tarnish of one petal to reveal a line of shining silver, light under the darkness.

Smiling, he returned it to his neck. He would try to be worthy of it. His eyes fell on the dusty, locked chest he kept in one corner of his chamber and he lost his smile. The chest held the dark, magical blade once borne by Erevis Cale: Weaveshear. Vasen had held its cool, slippery hilt only once, when, as a boy, Derreg had first given it to him. Shadows from the blade had mingled with the shadows of his flesh. The weapon had felt an extension of him, but the familiarity had frightened him and he had never touched it again. And he would not touch it today. Today was a day for light and hope, not shadow and somber remembrances.

Mindful of the Oracle’s words, he donned his padded shirt and mail, his breastplate, slung his shield over his back, strapped his weapon belt with its ordinary sword around his hips, and headed out.

As was his habit, he would commune with Amaunator at highsun, walk the vale, and see his mother’s grave before he took the pilgrims back out into the dark.

Rain fell in straight lines from the dark Sembian sky, beating the whipgrass into a flat, twisted mat. The sky cleared its throat with thunder. The stink of decay suffused the air, as if the entire world were slowly decomposing.

“Quickly!” Zeeahd said, his voice as coarse as a blade drawn over a whetstone. “Quickly! It will come soon, Sayeed.”

Sayeed swallowed, nodded, and kept pace with his brother’s hurried, shambling steps. He would have offered Zeeahd a reassuring touch, an arm to steady him, but Sayeed disliked the way his brother’s flesh squirmed under his hand.

They walked-walked because horses would bear neither of them-under a bleak sky and over sodden, spongy earth. They moved cross country because Sembian soldiers and wagon trains had become too common on the roads.

Sayeed’s rain-soaked cloak hung from his shoulders like a hundredweight, like the burden of the fourteen decades he’d lived.

Beside him Zeeahd sagged under the weight of his own burdens. He wheezed above the hiss of the rain, and the hump of his back was more pronounced than usual. Zeeahd’s wet robes hugged his form, and their grip hinted at the shape of the warped body beneath, the flesh polluted by the wild magic of the Spellplague.

Around them thronged the pack of mongrel cats his brother had summoned when they crossed into Sembia’s shadow-shrouded borders.

“Feral cats?” Sayeed had asked.

“Feral, yes,” his brother had answered, staring at the creatures with his glassy eyes. “But not cats.”

Sayeed counted thirteen of the felines, although the numbers seemed to change slightly from time to time. They held their tails low and the rain pressed their mangy fur to their bodies, showing with each stride the workings of bones and muscles. Their heads looked overlarge on their thin necks, their legs disproportionately long. They seemed composed entirely of black eyes, thick sinew, and sharp teeth.

Dark clouds stretched across the sky, blotting out the sun. It was midday but was as dark as dusk in winter. Sayeed and Zeeahd had been walking through perpetual night for many tendays, avoiding airborne Shadovar patrols and Sembian foot soldiers as they traced a winding path across the ruined Sembian countryside. Rumors spoke of pitched battles in the Dalelands, as Sembia moved against its northern neighbors.

Sayeed and Zeeahd wanted nothing of war. They had come in search of the Abbey of the Rose and its oracle.

“What if this abbey and its oracle are just myth? Then what do we do? Both could be stories the Sembians tell themselves to preserve hope.”

“No,” Zeeahd said, shaking his head emphatically. “They exist.”

“How do you know?”

Zeeahd stopped and turned on him. “Because they must! Because he told me! Because this,” he gestured helplessly at his body. “This must end! It must!”

Sayeed knew who Zeeahd meant by “he”-Mephistopheles, the archdevil who ruled Cania, the eighth layer of Hell. Merely thinking the archfiend’s name caused Sayeed to hear sinister whispers in the falling rain. He took a moment to drink from his waterskin: a habit, nothing more, the ghost of a human need. Sayeed did not need to drink, or eat, or sleep, not anymore, not since he had been changed. If the Spellplague had fouled his brother’s body, it had perfected Sayeed’s, although the price of perfection had been to make him as much automaton as man.

“Why are you slowing to drink?” Zeeahd called. “I said we must hurry!”

Zeeahd’s agitation conjured coughs from his ruined lungs, thick and wet with phlegm. The cats mewled and crowded close to him, their feral, knowing eyes watching with terrible intensity. Between hacks, Zeeahd tried to shoo the animals away with his boot, and Sayeed tried to ignore the unnatural way his brother’s leg flopped at the hip as he kicked at the cats. The coughing fit ended without a purge and the disappointed cats wandered back into their orbits, tails sagging with disappointment.

“The cats disgust me,” Sayeed said.

“Not cats, and they’re a gift,” Zeeahd mumbled, as he wiped his mouth with a hand partially covered in scales. His dark eyes stared out at Sayeed from the deep, shadowed pits of their sockets. His hatchet-shaped faced was dotted with pockmarks, the result of a childhood illness.

Sayeed looked past his brother, across the plains, and his mind moved to old memories. “I can’t picture our mother’s face. Can you? She had long brown hair, I think.”

Zeeahd drank of his own waterskin, swished and spit. The cats pounced on it, saw it was naught but water, and left off.

“It was black,” Zeeahd said.

“I used to dream of her, back when I slept.”

“You’ll sleep again, Sayeed. And dream. When we find the Oracle, we’ll make him tell us-”

His voice cracked and broke into a cough. Sayeed moved to help but Zeeahd waved him off with a hand, and one cough followed another into a wracking, wet fit.

Once more the cats crowded close, mewling, circling, jostling for position as Zeeahd fought the poison the Spellplague had put in him. He hunched over in the rain, coughing, warring with the foulness of his innards.

Sayeed could only watch, disgusted. He looked away and tried to remember his mother, the exercise helping distract him from the shifting swells and lumps that bulged under his brother’s robes, the mucous-filled gasps, the wet heaves.

Sayeed could not recall his mother’s eyes, or even her name. His memory was fading. It was as if he were someone new every day, someone he hated more and more. He remembered with clarity only one day from the distant past, one moment that connected who he was now to who he had been before the Spellplague-the moment Abelar Corrinthal’s men had chopped off his right thumb with a hatchet.

He remembered screaming, remembered the knight who’d cut off the digit apologizing for the mutilation.

Zeeahd’s coughing intensified, turned into a prolonged heave, and the sound pulled Sayeed back into the present. The cats meowed with excitement, circling, tails raised, eyes gleaming as Zeeahd gagged. And finally the felines received what they wished.

Zeeahd’s abdomen visibly roiled under his robes and he vomited forth a long, thick rope of stinking black sputum. The grass it struck smoked, curled, and browned. The cats pounced on the mucous, hissing and clawing at one another, a fierce caterwaul, each lapping at the mucous.

Zeeahd cursed and wiped his mouth.

“Thrice-damned cats,” Sayeed said, stomping a boot on the ground near the felines, splashing them with mud. The cats arched, hissed, and bared their fangs but did not back away from their meal. Sayeed had never seen them eat anything other than the black result of his brother’s expulsions.

“They’re not cats, but damned, indeed,” Zeeahd said. He cleared his throat again and the cats, having devoured the first string of mucous, turned to him, hoping for another meal. When none was forthcoming, they sat on their haunches and licked their paws and chops.

Zeeahd lowered his hood, threw his head back to put his face to the rain. He ran a hand over his thin, black hair. With skin pulled taut to reveal sunken eyes and cavernous cheeks, he looked skeletal, the living dead.

“The purgings only slow the advance of the curse,” Zeeahd said. “I need someone soon, Sayeed. A vessel. Otherwise the curse will run its course.”

Sayeed nodded. Their use of vessels had left a trail of aberrations in their wake.

“Come,” Zeeahd said, and threw up his hood. “We must get to the next village. The urge is strong.” He inhaled as well as his ruined lungs would allow and stared down at the cats. They looked up at him, far too much intelligence in their eyes.

“I can’t let it happen to me,” Zeeahd said softly.

“Let what happen?”

His brother seemed not to hear him and Sayeed was, as always, left to wonder.

The Spellplague had transformed both of them, but differently. Sayeed had been made unable to sleep and increasingly dull to life’s pleasures and pains, his emotions and appreciation of physical sensations had been ground down to nubs.

Zeeahd, on the other hand, had been killed. But the blue fire had not left him dead. Instead, it had somehow filled him with pollution and returned him to life. Sayeed well remembered how Zeeahd looked upon his return: the panicked eyes, the animal scream of terror and pain. He had shivered with cold but, inexplicably, smelled of brimstone, of rot. Zeeahd had pawed frantically at his own body, his breath coming in strained gasps.

“What is it?” Sayeed had asked.

“I’m. . unchanged?” Zeeahd had said, his tone amazed and relieved. “I was torn, Sayeed, burned, flayed. For centuries. I saw the master of that place and he spoke to me, made me promise to seek. .”

Sayeed had thought him mad. “Master? Centuries? You were gone only moments.”

Zeeahd had not heard him. “I’m unchanged! Unchanged!”

But he was not unchanged. His laughter had turned to wheezing, then coughing, then his first purging, and both of them had stared in horror at the squirming black mass expelled from his guts.

“Oh, gods,” Zeeahd had said. He’d wept as if he understood some truth that Sayeed did not. “It’s in me still, Sayeed. That place. It’s a curse, and it wants to come out.”

Only later had Sayeed learned that Zeeahd’s soul had gone to Cania, where his brother had forged a pact with Mephistopheles to seek out someone the archdevil could not find alone. And only later had Sayeed learned what the purging actually meant, what it would require, again and again until Mephistopheles set them free of their afflictions.

“Come on,” he said, hating himself for saying it. “We’ll find you someone.”

They walked on, two men who weren’t men and thirteen cats who weren’t cats, bent under the weight of the rain. In time they came upon a packedearth wagon road.

“Must be a village near,” Sayeed said, scanning the shapeless black expanse of the plains. Wisps of shadow clung to the trees and scrubs, a black mist.

Zeeahd nodded, his head bobbing strangely on his neck. His voice, too, sounded odd when he spoke.

“Let’s hope so.”

Gerak awoke before sunrise, or so he judged. Dawn’s light rarely penetrated Sembia’s shadow-shrouded air, so he relied for timekeeping on the instincts he’d sharpened as a soldier.

He stared up at the ceiling beams of the cottage, listening to the soft roll of distant thunder through the shuttered windows, the patter of rain on the woodshingled roof. He hoped it was ordinary precipitation. Ten days earlier a stinking black rain had fallen, and whatever it had borne in its drops had fouled the soil. Soon after, the barley crop had begun to wither and the autumn vegetables- especially the pumpkins-had browned on the vine. They’d done what they could to minimize the loss, but the whole village keenly felt the absence of a greenpriest of Chauntea. The villagers’ own prayers to the Earth Mother, whispered in small, secret gatherings, as if in fear the Shadovar in their distant cities and floating citadel would somehow overhear, went unanswered. Winter would bring hardship for them all. Another black rain would ruin the harvest altogether.

He and Elle would have to put up as much food as they could before first snow.

And that meant he would have to risk a hunt.

The thought of it sped his heart, although he wasn’t sure if that was out of fear of what he might encounter on the plains or out of fear of Elle’s reaction.

She lay beside him, her form covered in the tattered quilts, her breathing the deep, regular intake of sleep.

Moving slowly, so as not to awaken her, he swung his legs off of the strawstuffed mattress and sat on the side of the bed. He tried to squelch a cough but only half managed. Elle did not stir.

He sat there for a time, his bare feet flat on the cold wood floor, and waited for wakefulness. The damp air summoned the aches that lurked in his joints and muscles, and he massaged first one shoulder, then another. Age was turning him brittle.

He tried to swallow away the foul taste of morning but could not summon the spit. He grabbed the tin cup on the bedside table, swished the leftover tea, and drank it down. Cold and bitter, like the morning.

He rubbed the back of his neck and considered the one-room cottage, lit faintly in the glow of the hearth’s embers: furniture he’d made from the straight, dark limbs of broadleaf trees, bowls and cups and pans that had served three generations. He tried to imagine their baby crawling on the floor, but could not quite do it. He tried to imagine how they would provide for the baby and could not quite do that, either.

Elle’s pregnancy had been a surprise to them both.

Gerak had resigned himself to childlessness long before. Ten seasons of marriage had produced not a single pregnancy, so they had assumed one or both of them was sterile. At the time, Gerak had thought it just as well. The world seemed too dark for children.

And then Elle had told him, her voice quaking.

“I think I’m with child, Gerak.”

The joy he’d felt had surprised him, as if the child were a key to a locked room inside him that held happiness, that held possibility. In a moment, the stakes of his life had been raised-a child would rely on him.

The realization terrified him.

He wondered if they should leave Fairelm. Many of their friends and neighbors had already abandoned the village-the Milsons and Rabbs the most recent. They had braved the darkness, the Shadovar, and the Shadovar’s creatures, and made for the sun. He didn’t know if they’d gone west for Daerlun or north for the Dales. He wasn’t sure it mattered. War or the threat of war seemed everywhere in Sembia. The big cities were the sites of musters, the borders were the sites of battles, and the villages and towns in between were left to fend for themselves. He didn’t know what to do.

Elle was still able to travel, and they owned a wagon, a pack horse. They could sell their remaining chickens, gather up their goods, and head northeast. Gerak knew how to handle a blade and was matchless with his bow. Maybe they could avoid the soldiers, and Gerak could protect them from the creatures that prowled the plains.

He tried to coax another drop of tea from the cup. Nothing. He tried to coax from himself the will to leave. Nothing.

Leaving seemed too dangerous, and felt too much like surrender, like a betrayal, and neither was in him. He had been raised in the cottage, as had his father and grandfather before him. And despite the perpetual shadow that covered Sembia, despite the dire creatures that prowled the countryside, despite the sometimes harsh rule of the Shadovar, his father and grandfather had managed to eke out a living from the land. They had taken pride in it.

And so did he.

He hadn’t always. He’d thought a farmer’s life contemptible in his youth, and had run off to serve in one of the Shadovar’s many wars. He’d killed more than a dozen men with his bow, but only one, the last, with his blade. Killing felt different up close. Gerak had seen his reflection in the dying man’s eyes and that had been all he wanted of war ever again.

He ran a hand through his hair-it was getting long-and scratched at the three-day beard that covered his cheeks. He exhaled, ready at last to start another sunless day. As he started to rise, Elle’s voice broke the quiet and stopped him.

“I’m awake,” she said.

He sat back down. He knew her tone well enough to understand that her thoughts had probably veered close to his own. She, too, was worried about the future. He put his hand on the rise of her hip.

“You’ve been awake this whole time?”

She rolled over and looked up at him. Her skin looked less pale in the light of the embers. Her long, dark hair formed a cloud on the bolster. Under the quilt, she had one hand on her belly, which was just beginning to swell with their child.

“The rain awakened me hours ago. I started worrying for the crop and then my mind whirled and I couldn’t fall back asleep.”

“Try not to worry. We’ll manage. Are you cold?”

Without waiting for an answer, he rose, walked across the cool floor, and threw two logs onto the embers. The logs caught flame almost immediately and he returned to the bed and sat. She had not moved.

“Are you worried?” she asked.

He knew better than to offer her a falsehood. “Of course I am. I worry about how we’ll feed ourselves and the baby, mostly. But then I remind myself that my parents endured difficult years, too, especially after I left to fight, and yet here this cottage stands. The crops will recover and we’ll endure.”

“Yes, but. . do you worry about. . the world?”

He took her meaning and offered her a falsehood after all. “The world is too big for my worry. I’m trying to focus on our bellies.”

“And if the Shadovar come for a quota of the crop to supply the troops? They say there’s war in the Dales.”

The fire caused shadows to dance on the walls, and Gerak flashed on memories of his military service, when he’d served the Shadovar in battle against Cormyreans.

“They say lots of things, and the Shadovar haven’t come for a quota in years. The farms near the cities must produce enough. Or perhaps they eat magic in the cities these days.”

She did not smile at his poor joke but at least it smoothed the worried furrows from her brow. She inhaled deeply, as if to purge the concerns that plagued her, and when she exhaled a playful look came into her eye, the same look he’d first seen on her ten years ago, the look that had caused him to want her as a wife.

“You snore loudly.”

“I know. You should nudge me.”

“No,” she said, and snuggled more deeply into the quilts. “I like the sound sometimes.”

“You like strange things, Sweets.”

“Taking you for a husband seals that ward, I’d say.”

“I’d say,” he agreed with a smile. He bent and kissed her on the crooked nose she’d broken years before when she’d stepped on a rake. He placed his hand over hers, on her belly, so that both of them had their unborn child in their palms.

“We’ll be all right,” he said and wanted her to believe it.

“I know,” she said, and he knew she wanted to believe it.

He stood and stretched, groaned when his muscles protested. “Why’re you up so early?” she asked.

He hesitated for a moment, braced himself, then dived in. “I’m going on a hunt, Elle.”

“What?” Instantly she sounded fully awake. The grooves had returned to her brow, deeper than before.

“We need to put up some meat,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, it’s not safe. We saw Sakkors in the night sky only last month. The Shadovar keep their creatures away from the villages but let them wander the plains. Only soldiers and those with official charters walk the roads safely.”

“Neither the Shadovar nor their flying city will take an interest in a lone hunter. They just want no one in or out of Sembia without their permission, especially during a time of war.”

“No one has come to the village in months, Gerak. Why do you think that is? It’s not safe.”

He could not deny it. Peddlers and priests and caravans had once roamed the Sembian countryside, tending to the villages. But Fairelm had seen nothing in a long while, nothing but old Minser the peddler, who seemed to enjoy spinning tales more than selling wares. But Minser had not returned in more than a month. The village seemed to have been forgotten out in the dark of the plains, all alone and surrounded by monsters.

“There are worse things than Shadovar,” she said. “Don’t go. We can manage-”

“I have to. I’ll be gone not more than two days-”

“Two days!” she said, half sitting up.

“Two days,” he said, nodding, his resolve firming up as he spoke. “And when I return, we’ll have a stag or three to dress and smoke. And that’ll keep us in meat through the winter and then some. You and the baby need more than roots and tubers and we need the chickens for eggs.”

“I need my husband and the baby its father.”

He bent and put his hand on her brow. She covered it tightly and lay back, as if she had no intention of letting go.

“Nothing will happen to me.”

“How can you know?”

“I’m a soldier, Elle.”

“You were a soldier. Now you’re a farmer.”

“Nothing will happen to me.”

She squeezed his hand. “Swear it.”

“I swear.”

“If you see something bigger than a deer, you run away. Promise.” “I promise.”

She gave his hand another squeeze and let it go.

He cleared his throat and went to the chest near the hearth, feeling Elle’s eyes on him. He opened the lid and removed the weapon belt and the broadsword, still oiled and sharp, that he’d earned as partial payment for his military service. He had not worn more than an eating knife and dagger in what felt like a lifetime, and when he strapped on the heavier blade, the weight felt awkward on his waist.

“I used to feel awkward without this on,” he said, and Elle said nothing.

His bow sat in its deerskin case near the chest, his two quivers, both stuffed with arrows, beside it. He undid the tie on the case and removed the yew shaft. He strung it with practiced ease and placed his hand in the grip. It felt as smooth and familiar as Elle’s skin. He imagined himself sighting along an arrow, a stag in his sight.

His talent with the longbow had been a matter of comment among his fellow soldiers, and he had not let his skills atrophy over the years, even after taking up the plow for the sword.

“Wait for the rain to end, at least,” she said.

He strapped the quivers on, did a quick count on his various arrows. “The sooner I leave, the sooner I’ll return.”

“You’ll get sick from the wet.”

“I won’t.”

“Then at least eat something before you go.”

“I can eat when I-”

“Eat, Gerak. The rain and cold is bad enough. I won’t have you out there with an empty stomach.”

He smiled, nodded, went to the small table he’d made, and broke off a large chunk of two day old bread from a loaf. With it, he swabbed yesterday’s stew slop from the bottom of the cauldron hanging near the fire. Elle watched as he ate. There was no meat in the turnip and kale stew and the absence only strengthened his resolve to hunt. He would fill his waterskin in the pond and could forage for additional food in the field, should he need it.

“You eat, too, Elle.”

“I will. The baby’s always hungry. Takes after its father, I suppose.” He went to the bed once more and gave her a lingering kiss.

“There’s ample stew and bread. A few eggs in the coop. I’ll be back before you know it.”

She stayed strong, as he knew she would. “You’re leaving me here with none but the fools and cowards.”

“You manage fools and cowards quite well, Sweets.”

“Again, I think our marriage seals that ward.” She smiled as she spoke and he thanked the gods for it.

“I think I like you better asleep.”

She turned serious. “Be careful, Gerak.”

“I will,” he said, and pulled on his boots and cloak. “Go see Ana while I am gone.”

“A good idea,” she said. “I’ll take her a couple eggs. They’re suffering.”

“I know. See you soon.”

He opened the door and the wind rushed in.

“Wait,” she called. “Take my locket. For good fortune.” She leaned over and took the locket, a bronze sun on a leather lanyard, from the side table.

“Elle, that’s-”

“Take it,” she insisted. “Minser sold it to my mother. Told her it’d been blessed by one of Tymora’s priests.”

He came back to the bed, took the locket, secreted it in a pocket of his cloak, and gave her another kiss.

“I’ll take all the luck I can get.”

She smiled. “You need your haircut.”

“You’ll cut it when I return,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

With that, he headed out into the storm. He opened his mouth to the sky and tasted the rain, found it normal, and thanked Chauntea. The crops would live another day. He stood for a moment, alone in the dark, alone with his thoughts, and eyed the village, nestled amid the elms.

The other cottages sat quiet and dark, each a little nest of worry and want. The dozen or so elms rose like colossuses from the plains, whispering in the wind. The rain beat a drumbeat on his cloak. Gerak had always liked to think that the elms protected the village, wood guardians that would never let harm befall those who sheltered under their boughs. He decided to keep thinking it.

Holding his bow, he pulled up his hood and cut across the commons to the pond, where he filled his waterskin. Then he headed up the rise and toward the open plains.