Shadowstorm_ The Twilight War Part 42

Tamlin exchanged the cloak with his own and threw up the hood. Rivalen did the same. To his surprise, Tamlin's legs felt st.u.r.dy under him.

"What occurs within Shar's temples is a secret known only to the wors.h.i.+pers who partic.i.p.ate. To breach that confidence is to incur the Lady's wrath. Do you understand?"

Tamlin nodded. His heart beat faster. "I do."

"After you have served as the Lady's instrument this night, you will return to your quarters and pray to the Lady of Loss. You will offer to her a secret known only to you. This will be your Own Secret, thenceforth known only to you and the Lady and never shared with others. This will bind you to her. Do you understand?"

Tamlin nodded. He sweated under the robe. "I do."

Rivalen reached into a pocket and withdrew a thin dagger. Amethysts adorned its crosspiece and pommel. "Take this."

Tamlin stared at the blade. Rivalen held it forth and did not move. The shadows about the Prince roiled. A single strand of darkness emerged from Rivalen's flesh and coiled around the blade.

Tamlin took it. The shadows felt warm against his flesh; the blade felt cool.

Rivalen turned and opened a door. A candlelit wors.h.i.+p hall loomed beyond. "If you walk through this door, there is no turning back. If you enter and do not do what you are here to do, I will kill you rather than let you leave."

Tamlin looked up sharply, took a step back.

"It would give me no pleasure to do so, but I would have no choice. I am not forgiving in matters of faith. Look into yourself and determine if you are willing to shed blood to have what you wish. Are you?"

Tamlin looked at the doorway, the wors.h.i.+p hall, Rivalen. He thought of his family, his friends. They all seemed very far away. But his desires were close. He knew what he wanted. He knew there was only one way to get it. "I am."

A voice from inside sent Tamlin's heart to racing.

"Tamlin?" Vees called, his voice m.u.f.fled. "Is that you? Thank the G.o.ds. Tamlin! Get me out of here. The Prince is mad."

Rivalen raised his hand and Vees fell silent.

Tamlin felt Rivalen's gaze on him, his burning golden eyes. He was studying him, measuring his reaction to Vees's voice.

Tamlin nodded and stepped through the doorway. Rivalen put a hand on his shoulder and followed. "In the darkness of night, we hear the whisper of the void," Rivalen said.

Whispers sounded in Tamlin's ears. He could not make out words, but he knew they represented a promise of power. "I hear whispers," Tamlin said, his voice hushed.

"Heed its voice," Rivalen said.

Six men and women knelt, facing the black altar. Vees was among them. Ropes of shadow bound their hands behind their backs and bound their ankles together. All were nude. All looked upon Tamlin and Rivalen with terror in their wide eyes. They shook their heads, and their mouths opened to plead, but they made no sound. Rivalen must have had them magically silenced. He had allowed Vees to be heard only to test Tamlin.

Tamlin had never felt such power. "Let me hear them."

Rivalen looked at him and nodded. He raised a hand and the silencing magic ended. Tears, wails, and shouts for mercy blended together into a chorus of despair. Tamlin heard Vees's voice among the rest. "Deuce, don't do it! It's me, Vees. Deuce, please!"

"Their despair and regret we offer to you, Lady of Loss," Rivalen intoned.

He moved behind the heretics. Tamlin followed, his breath coming fast, his body tingling, weak.

All six of the heretics struggled against their bonds but to no avail. They pleaded for mercy.

"Do not, Deuce. I am your friend," Vees said.

Tamlin felt outside himself, felt embraced and nurtured by the darkness of the hall. He moved behind Vees but did not see his onetime friend. Memories flashed through his mind: his mother, Tazi, Talbot, all with love in their eyes, but love colored by disappointment, even pity. Other faces flashed, too: his father, with the ever-present stare of disapproval and the frequent, disappointed shake of his head; Mister Cale, shrouded in shadows, with the faint look of contempt and distaste in his eyes; a lifetime of faces that regarded him as a buffoon, a ne'er do well, an unaccomplished fop.

Tamlin had spent his adult life trying to efface those looks. He could do it now, at a stroke.

"Choose your path, Hulorn," Rivalen said.

Tamlin looked to the Prince and saw in his eyes no judgment, no disappointment, no quiet dislike. He saw in Rivalen a friend and mentor.

The Prince nodded and the shadows about him reached out to touch Tamlin. Tamlin nodded.

Vees screamed. "Please, Tamlin! No! Whatever he told you is a lie! Don't, Deuce!"

Tamlin raised the blade high and drove it downward into Vees's back, into his father, into Cale, into the man he had been his entire life.

Cradling the book, hearing the voice of her G.o.ddess, Elyril flew high above Selgaunt. She decided that she would summon the Shadowstorm in the city in which she had murdered her parents and first sworn herself to the Lady of Loss. She intoned the words to a spell and the magic transported her high above Ordulin.

Lights and glowb.a.l.l.s lit the capital's streets. A sea of tents dotted the plains around the city. Even at the late hour, soldiers milled through the camp.

Elyril thought the entire city looked like a lesion. She would excise it, and as eternal darkness fell, she would stand beside Volumvax the Divine One, Shar's Shadow, the Lord Sciagraph.

She was giddy, lightheaded with expectation, more elated than she had ever been from minddust.

The voice of the book fell silent but it began to pulse in her hands like a living thing, like a heart. Shadows coiled around it, around her.

Elyril opened its cover and looked not to the words, but to the words between the words. She gave voice to the empty s.p.a.ces.

She did not understand the full meaning of the words but she spoke them with vigor. As she read, understanding dawned. Elyril was part of a plan that reached across time and worlds. Even the coming cataclysm of the Shadowstorm was but a single step in Shar's plan that had millennia still to unfold. Shar had been plotting since the cosmic war with her sister, Selune, had wrought creation from the pristine emptiness of oblivion. Shar would return to the peace of nothingness and all of existence would return with her.

Power gathered as Elyril moved through the book, p.r.o.nounced the words, summoned the shadows. As she incanted, the pages from which she read dissipated into nothingness. The book was consuming itself, turning to nothingness, as she moved through the ritual.

Below her, the lights in Ordulin dimmed more and more as she progressed. The sky above her darkened. Clouds as thick and black as any thunderhead she had ever seen gathered. Wind picked up, roared in her ears. Her voice gained volume until she was shouting Shar's words into the night sky.

On the darkened streets and in the darkened camp far below her, groups of people started to gather. They pointed at the gathering clouds, the whipping wind. They looked tiny, insignificant.

And they were.

Her voice boomed across the heavens. Darkness blotted out the moon, the stars. Elyril exalted in the ritual, laughed as she cast the spell. She voiced the last words and her voice was a scream.

The wind died. Silence fell. Darkness reigned. Eldritch currents of green fire flared in the air.

Elyril could not breathe in her excitement. She awaited the coming of Volumvax the Divine One, the advent of the Shadowstorm.

A crack that sounded like the breaking of the world shook the heavens. A green line formed an arc in the sky over Ordulin and split the darkness in two. The line expanded, wider, wider, until it formed a door as large as the city.

Voices from the city below carried up into the sky. Elyril heard fear in them.

Another crack sounded and shadows and power boiled out of the doorway in a rus.h.i.+ng wave.

Elyril could not avoid the onrush of power. She grinned as the wave struck her, turned her to flesh, drew the breath from her body, and drove her like an arrowshot toward the ground. As she plummeted toward the earth, she heard Ordulin's citizens scream as one and knew their terror and despair were sweet to the Lady.

She hit the ground outside the city walls and the impact shattered bones. Pain lit her body on fire. Her flesh changed to shadow, to flesh, back to shadow. Her eyes stared upward, fixed on the ever-growing rift in the sky, a rift between Faerun and the Adumbral Calyx.

More and more of the Calyx poured through the glowing green tear and fell onto Ordulin like a black tide. Darkness swirled over the ground like fog, saturated the air, shrouded the city, a.s.similated Faerun with the Calyx. Panicked screams carried through the shadows, distant and delightful. Thunder rumbled and green lightning split the sky.

The gra.s.s and trees of the plains wilted around Elyril, twisted, transformed into horrid mockeries of their normal shapes. Animals emerged from their dens, metamorphing into caricatures of themselves as they breathed the transformative darkness.

The Shadowstorm had come.

Mirabeta raced toward a balcony of her tallhouse. The servants and men-at-arms thronged the halls, panic in their eyes. "What is happening? What is happening? Are we under attack?" she screamed at everyone and no one.

They answered only with screams of terror.

"Obey me! I am the overmistress!"

No one even slowed.

Wearing a nightdress, she pushed open a door and stepped out on the balcony. The wind whipped at her and what she saw drained her of breath.

Darkness cloaked the city, swirled through the air like a fog of pitch. Screams from every quarter cut through the night. She looked up to see a glowing green portal in the sky as large as Ordulin itself. Shadows thronged the air.

At first she thought perhaps the Shadovar had attacked, but this was bigger than that. She thought she heard a voice in the wind, giggling. "Elyril?"

She realized she was suddenly cold. She looked down to see the fog of darkness clinging to her skin, her clothes. Her heart leaped in her chest. She tried to brush it away but it clung to her hands, to her face. She screamed as its cold sank further into her flesh, her bones. "Get off! Get off! Get it off!"

The cold stole her energy and her speech slurred. Exhausted, she collapsed to the balcony while more and more of the fog embraced her. Her dreams of empire faded away and her life went with them.

Elyril laughed through her pain as she listened to Ordulin die. She looked to the city and saw guards falling from the walls, soldiers stepping out of their tents to collapse, die, and rise anew as shadows. Perhaps some of the citizens would escape, or perhaps none would. Tens of thousands died in darkness in a moment's time.

A shriek sounded from the sky and an army of undead shadows from the Calyx boiled through the rift in a black cloud, hundreds, thousands. The transformed dead of Ordulin rose into the sky to meet them. Shadow giants materialized in the darkness, their pale flesh and towering forms one with the dark.

Elyril's laughter turned to a cough and she spat blood.

A shadow formed in the rift, as black as pitch, backlit by the green light. She recognized it as her lord, Volumvax the Divine One. His presence filled her mind, awed her, put her at peace. He had come for her at last. He would make her whole and she would take her place at his side.

She called to him, lifted a shattered arm to beckon him to her.

He paid her no heed as he stepped through the rift and flew down to Ordulin, borne earthward on a cloud of shadows.

The screams in the city ceased. Volumvax perched on the wall and held his arms aloft. Swirling darkness and red-eyed shadows surrounded him. He laughed and the sound shook the heavens.

Elyril realized at once that he was not coming for her. He had betrayed her. She wept, railed, cursed. The darkness around her mirrored her mood. She had been used.

She lay on her back, her dying body somewhere between shadow and flesh. Spasms of pain wracked her. Green lightning split the lightless sky. She reached for her invisible holy symbol, brushed it with her fingertips.

"The Shadowstorm is come," she mouthed, and imagined her aunt's terror as the night came for her. That, at least, brought her pleasure. She giggled, but it gave way to a cough. She rolled onto her side and spat a gob of black phlegm and blood.

She found herself staring at a pair of sandaled feet, female feet with the palest, most flawless skin Elyril had ever beheld. She knew instantly who stood before her, and she buried her face in the earth.

"Lady," she mouthed.

She wanted to ask why she had been misled, why should would not rule at Volumvax's side, but she choked on the words.

"Your bitterness is sweet," the Lady said. "Look upon me, now."

The G.o.ddess's voice was emotionless, devoid of anything recognizably human other than the words. And it held such power that Elyril felt as if a mountain had fallen onto her back. She feared to obey, but she feared more to disobey. She rolled over and lay flat on her back.

A form stood over her, a black-haired woman with skin as pale as alabaster and eyes as dark and deep as the shadows that filled the sky and air.

No, it was the shadow of a woman as tall as the sky that loomed over her. Stars blinked in her form, ancient and dim, and the power she contained threatened to break the world.

Elyril fought to breathe. Her heart pounded and her body changed from shadow to ruined flesh with each beat. Her vision blurred as tears filled her eyes.

She struggled to speak. "It is too much, Lady. Too much."

"It has only just begun," Shar answered. "Your part is done. You have served, priestess, and I am come."

Elyril's body shook at her G.o.ddess's praise, slight though it was. Shar regarded her with frigid eyes, and Elyril's body shook under the G.o.ddess's regard.

"Am I mad, Lady?" she asked, fearing the answer. "Is this real?"

Shar raised a finger to her lips.

"Shh. It is a secret."

She smiled but Elyril had never before seen a colder expression. Shar reached down for Elyril and frigid, unforgiving fingers as old as creation closed Elyril's eyes.

She felt a flash of exquisite agony, followed by revelation, then emptiness, emptiness forever.

I sit at the table in the temple, awaiting Cale and Riven's return. The shadowwalkers observe me but say little. Darkness clings to them, crowds around them.

But darkness is in me. And it is growing.

Words come out of my mouth before I can consider their meaning. Vile words. Feelings that would make a demon blanch well up from some dark place in my soul. The urge to do violence, to kill, is powerful. I try to focus it on Rivalen, on Kesson Rel, but the impulse longs to be expressed indiscriminately.

To kill what is growing in me, we must kill a G.o.d.

I do not know if it can be done. I see doubt in Cale's eyes. He fears for me.

"We must go for a time," says Nayan, the leader of the shadowwalkers.

I nod. I do not wish them to leave, but I cannot bring myself to ask them to stay.

Without a word, they disappear into the twilight. I think of the words my father spoke into my ear on Cania: One of you must die, the shade or you, ere this is done. How will you have it? One of you must die, the shade or you, ere this is done. How will you have it?

I take Riven's knife in my hand, and lay it across my wrist. It would be simple, a single cut. But I cannot. I do not know if it is man or fiend that urges suicide. I drive the blade into the table.

Tears wet my face. I am an observer watching myself sink into evil.