Azriim knew that Dolgan had entered the Fane under cover of one of the rings provided to the brood by the Sojourner. Dolgan's ring rendered him invisible, silent, and undetectable to divinations.
Remain unseen until the moment is right, Azriim ordered. The caretaker cannot observe you.
Dolgan sent a mental acknowledgement.
Azriim returned his attention to the mage and watched, mildly curious, as black, arm-thick tendrils erupted from the hole in the spinning sky-ceiling and squirmed down toward Vraggen. The human tensed as they approached, screamed when they pierced his skin, and sighed in ecstasy as they began to throb, drawing away his mortal lifestuff and replacing it with that of shadow. The process was unstoppable.
Unless the participant was killed.
Here, Serrin's mental voice said.
Azriim blocked out the sounds of Vraggen's transformation and turned to see his broodmate standing before the representation of the tree-the Weave Tap. Serrin cautiously traced his fingers along its bark.
Azriim attuned his vision to see magic. Other than Serrin, nothing near the representation glowed in his sight.
Where? the half-drow asked. I do not see it.
Serrin tapped the image of the tree with a finger and sent back, You do see it, but it is masked. Look again, as though you were looking from the corner of your eye.
Azriim did so and-
There. The representation was no representation at all! It was a small alcove aglow with magic, in which stood a sapling tree, in appearance the same as that of the illusionary representation. Shadow magic, magic that Azriim's senses could not easily detect, had hidden the Weave Tap in plain sight by disguising it as a representation of itself. Ingenious.
The best lies always contained a hint of truth, he thought with a smile.
The Weave Tap seemed to hover in the air. While it didn't have roots that Azriim could see, he knew it did in fact have roots of a sort. Those invisible roots could grew anywhere, entwined as they were in the weft of the Weave itself.
It is warded, Serrin said, unnecessarily, for Azriim could see the magic plainly.
The Sojourner had provided Azriim with the tool for that. He pulled from his cloak a straight, finger-thick rod of duskwood. An opalescent pearl capped its tip. Instilled with the power of the Sojourner's magic, the wand could destroy the spells of virtually any other mage on any world.
He pointed it at the alcove and willed the wand's power to dispel the wards surrounding the Weave Tap. One after the other, the wards fell. The Weave Tap lay exposed.
Azriim couldn't help but smile. The Sojourner would be pleased, and might consider his transformation into gray as a reward. Also satisfying, he knew that he no longer needed Vraggen. The seeds sown years before had finally birthed a harvest. Serrin looked a question at Azriim. Azriim nodded, and Serrin took the living artifact in his hands. He held it away from his chest, as though its touch would drain him.
To Dolgan, Azriim projected, We have located the Weave Tap.
Dolgan's excitement was tangible. He too hoped for a transformation to gray.
I wish to kill one before we return to the Sojourner, Dolgan sent.
Azriim eyed the mage and considered. As of that moment, the shadow adept, whose arrogance Azriim had endured for far too long, had become superfluous. With his magic-sensing vision attuned to shadow magic, Azriim saw that Vraggen was aglow with protective spells.
He pointed the Sojourner's wand and willed it to destroy the spells on Vraggen's person. Soundlessly, unnoticed by Vraggen, they winked out.
Well? Dolgan asked.
Azriim grinned. How could he deny Dolgan the same pleasure that he was himself about to take?
Kill one then, he projected, and he and Serrin began to change back to their natural forms.
Vraggen felt the strands of shadow drawing away his mortality and pumping him full of shadowstuff. Immortality; regeneration; agelessness. All of those words danced through his brain. All of those words were made manifest in his rapidly transforming flesh.
In his mind's eye, he was already planning his next steps. He would take Cyric's war to the Banites in Selgaunt. After disposing of them, he would do the same in Ordulin. Cyric and his servants would rule the underworld in all of Sembia! He-
Huge, leathery hands took his head between them and lifted him from his feet. Claws as long as a man's thumb sank into his cheeks, scraped against his skull. He tried to scream but the hands kept his mouth clamped shut.
He uttered a muffled wail of agony. Through the pain, he realized that his protective spells, including his teleportation contingency, had not functioned. He could cast no further spells without the ability to speak. He squirmed and kicked futilely.
A voice sounded in his head-Azriim's voice, Cease your struggles, fool. Even you must realize that this is at an end.
Terror ran up Vraggen's spine. Azriim! It dawned on him then.
Azriim was not Azriim.
Incoherent images raced through his brain. Azriim's grin. His perfect teeth. His wild eyes. His sly comments. His manipulation.
Azriim was a shapeshifter. He had never seen it.
Ah, Azriim's voice said, and Vraggen could hear the satisfaction in it. You see it now, don't you?
Vraggen saw it all clearly. He had been a pawn, and the realization hit him that he had failed, both himself and his god. Despair washed through him, soaked him to his soul. He stopped even trying to fight. He felt as though he might cry. He went limp in Azriim's inhuman grasp. Mindlessly, the strands of shadow continued to fill him with shadowstuff, but Vraggen knew the transformation would never finish.
See me now, before the end, Azriim said, and turned him around.
Vraggen caught a flash of green skin, muscle, teeth, and mismatched eyes. A slaad, his mind registered distantly, Azriim was a slaad.
Why? he thought. Why?
But Azriim provided him with no answers.
Pray that your mad god is merciful to fools, Azriim said, and he opened his mouth wide.
A tremor shook the Fane as Cale and Riven jerked open the double doors. For an instant, the entire temple seemed to waver, to grow as insubstantial as a phantasm. Cale knew then that the Fane would not long remain in Faerun.
Cale and Riven stepped into the sanctum. Cale took in the scene in only a heartbeat.
In the center of the circular sanctum stood a dark altar. There, a hulking green slaad stood. It clutched Vraggen's headless corpse in its clawed hands. The slaad shot them a grin and swallowed whatever it held in its jaws: Vraggen's head, probably. Blood darkened its shark's teeth. Cale noticed the slaad's eyes then: one blue and one dark. It was Azriim.
'Dark,' Riven cursed, and Cale knew he was angry because he wouldn't be able to kill the mage.
In the ceiling directly above Azriim was a circle of darkness about which spun a sky full of stars. The whole reminded Cale of a child's pinwheel, but its motion nauseated him. Shimmering, pulsing tendrils of shadowstuff reached from the hole, feeling for Vraggen, feeling for anything. Cale felt the pull of those tendrils on his sword.
In a flash of insight, Cale understood it all. Azriim had duped Vraggen into opening the Fane then murdered the mage in the midst of his transformation to a shade. But why?
Near the back of the sanctum stood another slaad. Leaner than Azriim, with eyes of gray, it was the slaad who had tortured Jak. In its hands, it held a tree-a sapling with black bark, gray leaves, and small silver fruit the size of walnuts. Strangely, the tree had no roots, though it somehow suggested roots.
Intuitively, Cale realized that it had all been about that tree-the Weave Tap. The slaad with the tree held in its other hand the brass teleportation rod. Without even looking at Cale and his comrades, he twisted it once, twice,
