Midnights Mask

THE EVERIS CALE TRILOGY, BOOK THREE

MIDNIGHT’S MASK

BY PAUL S. KEMP

PROLOGUE: SSESSIMYTH

The darkness of the deep enshrouded Ssessimyth. Ponderous currents caressed his body, flowed over and past his bloated, pained bulk. In a lazy, distant way, he remembered long ago swimming those currents, hunting in them. Then, fear at his approach had emptied the sea before him for a league. But, no longer. He had not left the bottom in centuries; he had hardly stirred at all since he had found the Source.

Centuries ago the Source’s plaintive cries had welled up from the depths and filled Ssessimyth’s mind, drawn him to the ruins piled on the sea floor at the base of an underwater cliff. Even that slight initial touch-a mental brushing, little more-had stimulated his brain and sent pulses of pleasure through his limbs. He had been addicted from the first. He had swum down into the dark, torn feverishly at the cast-offs of the ruined city, dislodging stones, pillars, buildings, and mud, until…

He had found it buried beneath the sediment-covered ruins of the ancient city in which it had been born, partially embedded in the rock of the sea bed. Its sparkling facets had hypnotized him. Their soft orange light was the sole illumination in the depths, and the Source’s soft, hypnotic voice was the sole illumination in his soul.

He had extended two tentacles to touch it and the contact changed him forever. Almost instantly, the outside world became vague and unimportant, while the world of his mind, and the mind of the Source, their mind became his universe.

Ever since, he lay in the mud and drank, contented.

Over time, the Source had ceased calling to the outside. Ssessimyth swallowed its cries until it had surrendered to a hopeless, dozy slumber. Now it spoke only to him. He had its universe to himself.

The real world intruded upon his perception only distantly. He felt upon his body the pressure of the ruined temples, shops, academies, columns, and broken statues that lay in a towering heap around and atop him. He had burrowed into the ruins over the years, to get nearer the Source. He lay at the root of a desolate city. The humans who had built the city were dead, destroyed by the foolishness of one of their greatest. When the Source had called for them there had been no one to hear, no one but Ssessimyth. Their city had become their graveyard, his paradise.

Ssessimyth lay unmoving in the ruin’s embrace, at the center of creation. Silence reigned; darkness ruled. He and the Source were one. Nothing need ever change.

He lay in the mud and drank, contented.

In the tunnels around him he sensed the movement of his minions. They had found him a few centuries after he had bonded with the Source. Thinking him a god, they worshiped him. He sometimes thrilled them by using the Source to communicate with the minds of their priests. The tribe made him offerings, bringing meat for his beak and cleaning the open wound in his head.

The wound and the chronic pain were Ssessimyth’s offering to the Source, his self-mortification. In return, he received a universe.

Over the centuries, he had driven the soft flesh of his head against the Source until his brain had touched it. That physical contact, coupled with the mental oneness, had expanded his consciousness and transformed him into something more than mortal, though perhaps less than divine.

He did not open his eyes to see his minions, though he knew the priests were about to perform some ritual near his body. In truth, he had not opened his eyes in decades. Everything he wanted to see he saw in his mind, in the dreaming mind of the Source. He felt his minions’ thoughts around him only as distant echoes.

He lived through past ages in his mind. He felt the elated, terrifying moment when the Source was born, felt it rise from nothingness to sentience on the strength of an arcanist’s spell; he saw a city built on a mountaintop that floated through the sky; he saw the arts and sciences of surface-dwellers rise to glorified heights. He lived and died the lives of thousands, alternating experiences as his whim took him.

He saw, too, the death of the city. The magic holding it aloft had failed—for a time, all magic had failed-and the city had plummeted into the sea, leaving the Source as its only survivor, alone in the dark. That part he had relived only once, and never again.

He squirmed his enormous bulk harder against the Source and it sank a miniscule degree deeper into his brain. Pain knifed through his head, but ecstasy too. His tentacles spasmed slightly. The ruins shifted with a grating sound, and he knew his movement had cast up a cloud of mud and sediment.

Ssessimyth sensed the alarm and delight among his minions. They considered any movement of his body to be a propitious sign. No doubt they considered his movement a response to their ritual. Likely the priests would organize a hunt that night and bring him what they slew as an offering.

The acute pain in his head passed, leaving only an ache, ecstasy, and wonder. He let his tentacles fall once more into their places on the sea floor as another mental vista opened before him. He was an arcanist, plumbing the subtleties and mysteries of the Weave; he was a courtesan serving the peculiar tastes of the highborn; he was a priest of Kozah the Thunderer whose sermons sent thousands into battle.

He drank the Source’s dreams eagerly-living and dying a hundred times in an hour, eating, drinking, copulating, vomiting, loving, laughing, hating, crying, killing, all within a mental universe in which only he and the Source existed.

Meanwhile, his great body lay quiescent in the cold dark.

He was content. Things need never change.

Plummeting from the tower, Cale perceived the moment stretching. Air roared past his ears. Shadows poured from his flesh, no doubt trailing after his fall like the tail of a comet.

Above him sounded the despondent, furious wail of the Skulls and the crack of breaking stone. The cavern was falling to pieces, smashing the ruined Netherese city on the cavern floor. Lightning and a baleful green beam split the air beside him-ill-aimed spells from the Skulls.

Beside him, Magadon and Jak shouted as they fell. He clutched each of their cloaks in one of his hands. They clutched at him, whatever they could grab. The shadows leaking from his flesh coalesced, enshrouded them.

The floor of the collapsing cavern rushed up to meet them. The moment was stretched to its limit; it was ending. Cale had to act or die alongside his friends.

Cale felt the darkness around him the same way he felt the air-a tangible sensation on his skin. Its touch was as light and seductive as that of a lover. He always felt the darkness now.

Opening his mind, he attuned himself to the correspondence between the Prime Plane and the Plane of Shadow, the link that lived in every shadow. He reached for it, took it in his mental grasp and willed them all to move from one plane to the other. At the same time, he consciously dispelled the inertia of their fall.

Sound fell away. Darkness swallowed them. In the span of a heartbeat they moved between worlds.

They found themselves lying face down on the cold, damp stone of the Plane of Shadow. The Skulls were gone; the ruins were gone. They were alone in the dark, but alive.

The breath of his friends came in ragged gasps. The slow drip of water sounded from somewhere. The air smelled dank, pungent with some vague foulness.

Cale remained still for a moment as stabs of pain shot through his body—the regenerative properties of his shade flesh closing the wounds Riven had inflicted on him.

Riven.

Cale sat up, and as he did he remembered it all, or thought he did. Riven’s betrayal had been planned, or at least Cale thought it had. Unless he had dreamed it

Beside him, Magadon rolled over with a groan, still breathing hard.

“Demon’s teeth,” the guide swore, and his voice echoed loudly, jarring in the silence.

Beside Magadon, Jak sat up with a groan of his own. He looked around blindly, eyes wide. “I can’t see a thing. Cale?”

Cale had become so accustomed to his ability to see perfectly in darkness that he forgot that others could not. The chamber was as dark as a devil’s heart, thick with the black air of the Plane of Shadow.

“Here, little man,” he answered, and reached out a hand to touch Jak’s shoulder. The halfling clutched his hand and gave it a brief squeeze.

“I will get a light,” Magadon said. He unstrapped his pack and searched for a sunrod. Cale remembered that Magadon’s fiendish heritage allowed him to see in the darkness, probably not as well as a shade, but well enough.

Cale stood, wincing as the last of his wounds closed. “Can the Skulls track us?” Magadon asked as he searched his pack.

Cale had not considered that. “I don’t see how,” he said after a moment’s thought. As far as he knew, his ability to walk the shadows between worlds left no footprints.

The guide nodded, found the sunrod he sought within his pack. He struck it on the chamber floor and the alchemical substance on its tip flared to life. He held it aloft and lit the cavern-dimly. The darkness gave ground only grudgingly.

Jak and Magadon blinked in the sudden illumination, but Cale felt a part of him boil away in the sunrod’s light. He refused to cover his eyes despite the sting. His shadow hand, he was pleased to see, had not disappeared. Perhaps only real sunlight could cause that.

“The Plane of Shadow,” Jak observed, eyeing their surroundings. “But where this time? This is not where we were before.”

A large natural cavern opened around them. Loose stone and stalagmites covered the uneven floor. Irregularly shaped holes in the walls opened onto tunnels that led into darkness. An oily black substance clung in patches to the stone. It shimmered in the sunrod’s light like polished basalt. Water dripped from the stalactite-dotted ceiling to fall into a dark pool in the center of the chamber. The pool was as black as jet. The air felt heavy and still, threatening.

“Something akin to the Underdark but on the Plane of Shadow, I would guess,” Magadon offered as he stood. “Do not use the water to fill your skins and do not touch the walls. That’s some kind of lichen, but I’ve never seen its like before.”

Jak nodded, his eyes thoughtful. He looked up at Cale. “Are you are all right? The wounds, they’re healed?” When Cale regarded him to answer, Jak recoiled slightly but masked it quickly.

“Dark, but I cannot get used to the way your eyes look here,” the little man said.

Cale felt himself flush.

“I’m all right,” he said. He extended a hand and pulled Jak to his feet. Cale put his fingers through the hole Riven had made in the front of his cloak and armor. He had similar holes in the back. The holes in his flesh were closed. “What about you two?”

Both Jak and Magadon were pale, exhausted, and obviously wounded. Claw rakes had opened cloaks, rent armor, and torn flesh.

“I’m well enough,” Magadon said, and moved to the edge of the pool. The guide knelt and stared at the water. He dipped his fingers, smelled them, and wiped them clean on his breeches.

Jak said, “I am all right, too. We killed one of the slaadi, Cale. The small one. The other one….”

Magadon stood and finished for Jak. “In our hurry to get to you, we left the other alive but enspelled. He may have died in the cavern’s collapse.”

Cale doubted it, but kept his thought to himself.

“We should have killed him,” Jak said, and reached into his belt pouch for his pipe. “Just to be sure.” He came out with a wooden pipe, the one he had given to Riven, the one Riven had thrown back at him atop the tower. He must have picked it up before they fled. He eyed it for a

moment, then threw it past Magadon and into the pool, where it vanished. He withdrew his other pipe-the ivory bowled affair-and popped it into his mouth. He chewed its end in agitation, but did not light up. Around the pipe stem he said, “I’m personally going to drive an armspan of steel into Drasek Riven’s gut for what he did.” For Magadon’s benefit, Jak added, “I’ve done it before, you know. Treacherous Zhent bastard.”

Cale thought the little man’s anger might be misplaced. To Magadon, Cale asked tentatively, “Do you… remember what happened between you, me, and Riven, last time we were on the Plane of Shadow?”

Jak looked up, a furrow in his brow.

Magadon started to speak, stopped, finally nodded. “Erevis, I thought I had dreamed it all, or conceived it in a meditation. Sometimes my mind manifests wishes as reali-” He stopped and smiled. “Never mind all that. I do remember. It started to come back to me shortly after I saw him atop the tower with the slaad.”

“What came back to you?” Jak asked.

Cale nodded, pleased to have his own hazy memory confirmed. Magadon had set Riven’s betrayal-itself the product of a latent psionic compulsion-as the trigger that would allow the guide and Cale to remember the stratagem they had developed.

“So what next, then?” Magadon asked.

Jak took his pipe from his mouth and regarded them with narrowed eyes.

“What are you two talking about?”

Magadon’s question sent Cale’s mind racing. He thought first of Riven and of Varra. He made up his mind.

“A return to Skullport,” he announced. “Just me. For only a moment or two.”

He wanted to determine if the city still stood. He needed to see if Varra was all right.

“Skullport?” Jak asked. “Why would we return there? Again, what in the Seven Heavens are you two-“

Magadon stared into Cale’s face and shook his head. “We cannot go back to Skullport, Erevis. Not right now. Riven is relying on us.”

“Riven!” Jak exclaimed.

“Because of what we did, the cavern could be collapsing,” Cale said. “We’ve only been gone moments. I am going back, Mags. I can get her out.”

Magadon did not ask who Cale meant by her. Instead, he shook his head and said, “I understand what you want to do, Erevis. But if it was going to collapse, then it already has. She’s either alive or… not, and you won’t be able to affect which it is. But wherever Riven is right now, he will soon remember what happened, too. That makes him vulnerable. The slaadi have displayed telepathy, and we think they can read minds.”