The Sorcerer (20 page)

Unable to do anything else, Malik stared at the monstrous shadow hanging above him. A purple crescent appeared where the traitorous thing’s mouth should have been—a smile. It thought he was going to choke to death.

Malik continued to cough.

“You will convert, Seraph,” Yder said. “All you control is how long it takes.”

“The Hidden One rules all,” said someone behind the prince.

A chorus of whispers filled the chamber as Shar’s worshipers repeated the paean. Had he not been so busy coughing and choking, Malik would have laughed. He might die upon Shar’s altar or even rot upon it, but he

would never convert. That was the one thing he did not control at all.

Malik’s vision narrowed to a black tunnel, then went completely black. Yder’s voice came to him from far away, demanding that he pay attention and not insult the Hidden One by closing his eyes upon her. The prince’s cold fingertips settled on his eyelids and pulled them open, and that was the last thing Malik felt before sinking into a soft bed of unconsciousness.

The next thing was the heel of a large hand slamming him between the shoulders, and the icy fingers of another one dangling him upside down by his ankle.

“Breathe, you craven little ranag!”

The hand struck Malik again. The teeth upon which he had been choking flew from his lips, along with a mouthful of blood and bitter-tasting bile. He started to gasp and cough at the same time, two conflicting actions that left him helplessly hiccupping for breath.

“Did you really think you could escape that easily?” Yder demanded. “The Hidden One will not be deprived of her pleasure.”

Malik opened his eyes and was blinded by the same painful radiance as when he had returned to consciousness before.

“And I am most thankful for that,” Malik said, “though I know it is likely to cost me a month of terrible agony!”

Knowing Yder would interpret his gratitude as progress toward a conversion, Malik would have liked to stop there and enjoy the reward any good torturer would bestow on him as incentive for further progress—but Mystra’s curse would not allow it

“Now I can finish what I have started by converting you and your followers to the Church of Cyric—” Malik tried to bring his hands up to cover his mouth, but found his wrists manacled together behind his back. The words continued to spill out—”so that I may spare my soul the danger of having

to present itself at the Shattered Castle after I have failed to seize control of the Shadow Weave for the One, as he instructed.”

Yder shook with such a rage that the chains binding Malik’s wrists began to jingle. Malik cringed and tried to guess whether he would lose fewer teeth by clenching his jaw or leaving it to hang slack, but the blow never came. Instead, the prince remained silent and continued to hold him upside down, allowing Malik a few precious moments to study his surroundings.

They were, as Malik had guessed from the altar, in a temple to Shar—though it was certainly far from what he had imagined such a place would look like. While the walls were covered with the expected images of mysterious women and dark disks limned in purple flame, the chamber itself was blindingly bright, so much so that the shadows dancing on the walls seemed more real than the worshipers standing motionless in long rows of pews. There were easily a thousand Shadovar there, all submerged to their knees in a glimmering pool of mirror-bright fluid. As thick and viscous as quicksilver, the liquid was slowly flowing out toward the edges of the chamber, where it gathered at the walls and vanished down the drainage pits in lazy whirlpools.

Malik recognized the liquid instantly. It was the same thing that he and his friends had found inside the Red Butte in Karsus, spilling out of the Karsestone that Galaeron had used to summon Shade back into the world.

The prince hoisted Malik by the chain between his manacles, forcing his arms up and back until he thought his shoulders would break.

“In my centuries,” Yder said, “I have learned a few things about pain.”

Malik felt sick to his stomach. Though the One had blessed him with the ability to suffer any amount of agony and still have the strength to perform his duties as Seraph, that did not mean he was immune to pain. Quite the contrary.

It seemed to him that he always felt pain more acutely than those around him—and usually a great deal more of it

As Yder turned back toward the altar, Malik was not all that surprised to find himself looking at a luminous white boulder about the size of a horse. There was a jagged fissure down the center, and from this crack poured a steady flow of the silvery liquid that had filled the temple.

The stream was, Malik knew from his earlier adventures in the Red Butte, the last whole magic in the world. Seventeen centuries earlier, a mad Netherese archwizard named Karsus had tried to steal the godhead of Mystryl, the goddess of magic at that time. It had been a terrible mistake. The Weave had filled Karsus to bursting and killed him on the spot, and it had split into the Weave and the Shadow Weave. The luminous white boulder was Karsus’s heart—all that remained of the mad archwizard—and the silver magic pouring from it was all the remained of the original, unsplit Weave.

Though Cyric’s rancid heart began to slush so hard that Malik could barely hear himself think, he forced himself to remain calm. The Karsestone, as they had dubbed the boulder, was undoubtedly an artifact of untold power, but it seemed to Malik that for Shar’s worshipers to tolerate its bright light inside their hidden temple, it had to be something more—something much more.

“The Karsestone!” Malik gasped as though he had just realized what he was looking at, for it was important to his plan that Yder did not realize how much Malik understood about what he was seeing. That seems an odd altar for followers of the Nightsinger.”

“Shadow is born of light,” Yder said.

The phrase was repeated by a thousand whispering voices as Yder hoisted Malik onto the stone and laid him facedown.

“All the same, so much bright light must be a great insult to your goddess … unless the Karsestone is the source of the Shadow Weave, of course.” Malik swore a silent oath, for

it been Mystra’s curse that compelled him to add such a clumsy probe, then he hastened to add, “Or the one you worship here is not really Shar, but some other Hidden—”

Malik’s face smashed into stone as his tactic succeeded in angering the prince and distracting him from the gaff.

“I told you never to call the Hidden One by name.”

“My apologies,” Malik said. His voice sounded rather nasal, for his nose had been shattered and was pouring blood down over the Karsestone. “I only meant that this is certainly the last place the Most High would look for his stolen Karsestone.”

“What makes you think it is stolen?” Yder asked, not quite able to keep the smugness from his voice.

Ever wary of the Seraph’s ability to escape, the prince pinned Malik’s neck to the stone with one hand while he removed the chain from the manacles and attached it to a ring hanging from an iron post alongside the altar. Malik didn’t know whether to be glad his plan had worked or ashamed it had taken so long for him to see the true nature of things.

For the Shar worshipers to tolerate the Karsestone’s brilliance in their temple—and, more importantly, for the goddess not to strike dead the ones who permitted it to be there—the boulder had to be of inestimable value to the Nightsinger. Malik no longer doubted that much—it was the source of the Shadow Weave, as Mystra’s curse had caused him to blurt out, or something that she wished to keep hidden from the other gods.

More terribly, if Shar considered Shade a safe place to hide such a thing—and if Telamont Tanthul truly had given the Karsestone to Yder for the Hidden One’s temple—then she had to feel secure in her control of the city. For Shar to feel secure in her command of the Shadovar, she had to control the Shadow Weave itself.

“The spiteful hag!” Malik cried. “She has commanded it all along!”

“Curse her now all you wish, Malik.”

Yder spun him around then flipped him onto his back and fastened another chain to his second manacle.

“Before this is done,” the prince added, “you will sing her praises.”

“And you will lick the offal from my boots!” Malik shot back. “The Shadow Weave is Cyric’s by right! Am I not the one who saved the life of that fool Galaeron so he could betray his word to Jhingleshod and steal this stone?”

It was his own anger that compelled him to say this and not Mystra’s curse, but he knew it was a mistake the moment the words spilled from his mouth. Yder’s yellow eyes turned as bright as the sun. He bared his ceremonial fangs and bent so low that Malik feared the prince would bite his nose from his face.

“Is that why you came here?” he demanded. “To steal the Hidden One’s crown?”

Malik said nothing and looked away.

“Answer!” Yder commanded. “Answer, or I will feed you to your own shadow.”

The prince pulled his head aside so that Malik could see his shadow’s hateful eyes glaring down at him. No longer did the monstrous thing seem dependent on Malik for its form. It looked as thick and as solid as any giant he had ever seen. Malik looked away on the pretext of meeting Yder’s angry gaze.

“Do you think I am afraid of my own shadow?” he demanded. “I am favored of the One. I have seen a thousand things that were a hundred times worse… though never any who know all the wretched things I have done in my life.”

“Look!” Yder grabbed Malik’s aching jaw and forced him to stare up into his shadow’s angry eyes. “You have seen the trouble Galaeron’s shadow has brought on him. What do you think yours would do, were I to let it inside you?”

“Why should I fear such a thing?” Malik squeaked. “If a shadow is all the things I am not, this one is undoubtedly as

charitable as I am selfish, as trustworthy as I am corrupt, as brave as I am craven. My shadow would only make me all the things that women desire and men admire.”

“What of Cyric?” It was the shadow that asked this question—and that flashed a brutal purple smile as it did so. “How would he feel about a Seraph who was all those things?”

The blood went cold in Malik’s veins, and he swung his gaze to Yder.

“What was your question again?”

________CHAPTER TWELVE

In the dim light of the cell, the link was easier for Vala to feel than to see, even with skin numbed by cold and calluses. She worked her foot up the chain until she felt pit-roughened metal, then pinched the loop between her toes and lifted it toward her mouth. Even flexible as she had grown over the past couple of months, she could not bring it all the way to her face. Once the chain went taut, she used her leg muscles to pull herself closer. She let her toes slide down one link then spit a mouthful of saliva onto the pitted surface.

Vala had her doubts about whether she could actually spit her way to freedom, but with her hands manacled behind her back and no other tools to work with, it was the best she could do, and it gave her something to focus on when she was not being

abused by Escanor or his retainers. She could not just sit there in the dark, waiting between sessions. She had to keep trying, to know she was at least attempting to escape.

Besides, when she had started, there had been no pits in the link at all. Vala let the chain go slack, then wrapped her toes into it and began to jerk downward against the eye hook that secured it to the wall. A hundred times, then find the link and spit. If she just kept working at it, something would give. The hook would loosen in the wall, or the link would grow rusty and break, or a guard would think she had lost her mind and grow careless enough to let her kill him. Something would happen. It had to, if she was ever to see her son again.

A voice whispered, “Vala?”

Vala hit the end of the chain and was back on the floor before she realized she had jumped. She spun on her seat, her legs cocked for thrust kicks, and found no one there.

Great, she thought. Something has happened. I’ve started to hear things.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” the voice said.

Vala squinted toward the voice and saw nothing but murk, then a tiny man in black robes hopped onto her foot. She wasn’t just hearing things. The man—the delusion, she corrected herself—had an unruly black beard and dark eyes, but his face and arms were too light to be Shadovar.

“No need to cower, my dear,” he said. “We’re friends of—”

Vala flicked the figure off her foot and heard it hit a wall with a real-sounding thud. She was cowering, frightened of her tortured mind’s own phantasms.

“I won’t let this happen,” she said to herself. Vala straightened her shoulders and raised her chin—but she did not lower her leg. “Go away!”

“Softly, child!” This time the voice was female, and it came from over near the door. “Mind the guard.”

Another voice, on her other side, began what sounded like a spell. The bearded figure returned, this time flanked by

two female figures with flowing silver hair, and Vala realized that, phantasms or not, they were all around her. There could be hundreds of them out there in the dark, swarming over the floor. Thousands, maybe, an army of dark little shadow faeries come to feast now that her flesh was suitably battered and bruised. She screamed. She could not help herself, the sound just erupted as she let out her next breath.

The shadow faeries cringed and looked toward the door, and in the next moment Vala was silent. Her mouth remained open and her throat continued to vibrate, but there was no more sound.

The male faerie looked toward the door and asked, “The guard?”

“Still thinking about it,” the female voice whispered. “He’s curious, but not alarmed.”

Vala could see her, another silver-haired faerie down on the floor, peering around the corner of the archway.

“Keep an eye on him,” the male said.

Followed by the two silver-haired females, he circled toward Vala’s head. They were joined by a third female, which fluttered over from behind Vala and settled on the floor next to them. Vala tried to spin around to bring her feet toward them but one of the females made a motion with a sliver-sized wand, and she found herself unable to move.