She hissed, a loss assaulting her like a physical blow. Poor Curampah; his faith had proved too weak.
Then she saw what the illithids had delved so deeply to unearth. The merest edges of something. Something horrible. The mere act of trying to comprehend it was like scraping her naked brain with a trowel. Surely it was an abomination. She turned to swim free, flexing her legs for the first mighty escape stroke…
Nogah blinked, and in that instant, her perception shifted. Curiosity rekindled.
Instead of swimming away as if her sanity depended upon it, she drifted closer through the swirling blood and sediment, hardly realizing she did so. She still couldn't grasp the magnitude of the image. She tried to wrap some mote of comprehension around the object, partly chiseled from stone… from stone whose age dwarfed the mountains above. Which meant the enigma, the massive thing that refused to clearly reveal itself to her understanding, was older than continents.
Blinking, Nogah shuddered. Had the Sea Mother sent her to unbury this artifact, to finish what the mind flayers had started? A head-size stone lay near the greater object yet bound in its stone matrix. It seemed the illithids had broken away a sample from the far more gargantuan object still frozen in the wall, before their dig outside the seal had drowned.
She said a quick prayer to the Sea Mother, asking for guidance. Her inquiry fell into a void of silence.
Her hand moved to trace the spherical artifact. If she couldn't grasp the whole, perhaps the tiny piece would yield up clues.
She picked it up. What was it? A stone bauble? A tiny portion of a… what? A petrified remnant of some long- dead sea beast? Something like that, a strange certainty informed her, though even that notion was, somehow, a failure of imagination. If she grasped a piece of something far larger, that which was in turn only the merest tip of something… monstrous.
The elixir's duration was almost complete. Without giving herself time to weigh the decision, she retained her grip on the loose piece, rough from where the illithids had cut it away from its parent.
Her first impression had been correct-it was essentially round but already seemed lighter in her hands. Though the object was about the size of her head, she was able to carry it without difficulty.
As she kicked back toward the nautilus, past the drifting corpse of her junior whip, her fingers began to tingle, then her arms. Odd notions suggested themselves, like worms insinuating themselves through Nogah's consciousness. Odd, even disquieting.
But so fascinating…
CHAPTER THREE
Eleven Years After the Spellplague The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) New Sarshell, Impiltur
A thin man with a pocked face chalked a flat expanse of gray slate in quick, precise strokes. The sharp scent of limestone grew in the stuffy chamber with each mark.
The scratching chalk grated at Lady Anusha Marhana's ears. She glanced away from the lesson her tutor scribed to gaze out the open window. How she wished she were outside. She hated her lessons. She'd rather be down at the docks watching the ships come in, watching the men unload salvage from other lands.
More notably, she had planned to attend the revelry in the Marivaux mansion this evening. Anusha had bought a new gown, new shoes, had the servants do her hair, sent out a reply confirming her attendance, only to have her half brother dash her hopes. Behroun said Marivaux was of a social stratum lower than her own, and that it wouldn't do for her to mix with them. Rubbish! In fact-
'Lady Marhana.' The reedy voice of her tutor pulled Anusha's attention back to the board.
'Yes?' she said, as if she'd been paying attention all along.
The man gave her an admonishing glare and said, 'Lord Marhana pays me to advance your education. Would you waste his hard-earned coin?'
Anusha's first instinct was to shrug. Her half brother, Lord Behroun Marhana, cared only for appearances. He was all about the facade, and substance only for what it contributed to the image of courtly nobility. The man wanted to cement himself among the reforming aristocracy of scarred Impiltur. In an attempt to gain a seat on the nascent Grand Council forming after the failure of the royal line, Behroun required the family to appear to possess a polite education.
Despite her opinion, she restrained her instinctive, dismissive gesture. Anusha was twenty years old this month, and even without her recent course on high society manners, she recognized a shrug might be perceived as childish. Instead she merely looked her tutor in the eye, trying to appear interested.
The man sighed, shaking his head as he turned back to point at what he'd written on the board. 'What does this say?'
Anusha read aloud, 'I am old and battered and have left a heap of bloody, bitter mistakes behind me high enough to bury empires.'
'Good diction,' murmured her tutor. 'Who said it, and when?'
'Elminster of Shadowdale, of course,' replied Anusha. She had no idea if she was correct, but it sounded like something the old sage might have said. It was just one more quote among the hundreds he was known for. Who cared what year he'd uttered it?
Anyway, the old sage had dropped out of common knowledge after the Spellplague. He'd been affected like everyone else, and some whispered the old man's powers had been stripped in the disaster. She heard one story from a dock-worker, who had it from a Cormyrean merchant, who heard from a Mulhorandi refugee, that Elminster was glimpsed wandering the Planes of Purple Dust, bald and tattooed with spell scars so outre that-
'Good,' replied the tutor. He used the quote as a bridge into another historical fact about Faerыn, a story about how a black arrow was responsible for Imphras the Great's reunification of Impiltur. Three hundred years ago!
History lessons were hard. It was all so dry and… pointless! Everything before the blue fire was irrelevant to how things were today. Anusha had been ten or eleven years old when the Weave collapsed. In Sarshel, the event had come and gone with little to mark it in its first days.
She did recall one particularly lurid account of the event in a report circulated among the sea traders. When Behroun was out of his office, she had slipped in and penned a copy of the report for herself. She could remember it almost by heart: 'Magic goes awry, and the world trembles. Magic, earth, and flesh too, burn beneath veils of azure fire that dance across the skies, day and night. The hardest hit are the mages, who lose their magic, their minds, and sometimes, their souls. Where the blue fire touched down, everything changes. Whole villages are gone, save for a few horribly altered former inhabitants, now monstrosities. It is some sort of spell plague, one that even the gods fear to catch!'
Anusha had several tendays of bad dreams after reading that. Nightmares, in fact, of blue fire burning her flesh away, leaving nothing but a substanceless image behind. Dreams that had returned to trouble her recently, in fact.
In Impiltur, no disasters fell from the sky. But stories of atrocities to the south and east continued to roll in from occasional crazed refugees, and the shoreline began to recede. Worst of all, spellcasters forgot their spells. Local officials were finally convinced beyond all doubt that something very bad was in the offing.
Certainly a sinking Sea of Fallen Stars had seemed disaster enough for a city reliant on the many docks and piers that serviced its sea trade. Then again, she had been too young to appreciate the slow fall of the water's level as something terrible enough to choke a city. Likewise, when magic began to go awry, she didn't personally witness it. Her family's shipping fortune shielded her from seeing wizards melting themselves in the street as they adjusted to magic's new regime. But she had heard all the gruesome stories.
It was during this period that her half brother learned of his inheritance. Marhana Shipping was all his. The same day, Anusha learned that her mother and father perished together on their flagship trading vessel with all hands in Sembia. Something to do with the Shadovar.
It was not something she wished to dwell upon. To Lady Anusha Marhana, the Spellplague was just one more event over and done with, no worse than her own personal history of sad remembrances. The Year of Blue Fire was best relegated to history's boring tomes of who said what and when.
'… so Faerыn is splintered,' continued her tutor, oblivious to Anusha's lapse of attention. 'Communications
