A cliff face on which the Sea of Fallen Stars lashed its rage.
A floating obelisk, cratered and crusted like a fossil dug from the living rock of Toril and set adrift in the sky. Tentacles hundreds of yards long slithered down its sides. What? Was she even in Akanul any-
Darkness and the smell of loose earth. The odor, despite its sour tang, was a welcome one. She was back. Madri mumbled a charm. A light caught in the lantern mantle. The glow revealed a small side table and chair. A silvery mask, blank but for two shadowed eye openings, lay next to the lantern on the table.
She dropped into the chair. It was the one comfortable piece of furniture down here. She eyed the mask, wondering if it had a comment or instruction for her. When the mask remained quiescent, she turned to look at the stone wall opposite her. The surface possessed a couple of notable features-a narrow flight of stairs leading up to a secret door and a painting.
Red velvet draped the painting, hiding the visage scowling beneath it. The first time she’d locked eyes with the entity called the Necromancer, illustrated on the canvas, it had spoken words of horror to her. She’d fallen to the floor as her body spasmed out of control. Afterward she’d retched, but nothing came up. The image she’d seen, a face composed of broken pieces of reality, screaming in frozen unending agony at its splintered flesh and mind … Gods!
That event further sustained her hope that she wasn’t a ghost. Ghosts didn’t have fits, did they? Or try to puke up their guts?
After she’d collected herself, Madri had procured a drape for the painting. She had a feeling that, no matter her status, too much undirected exposure to the Necromancer could permanently damage her.
She glanced away. There were two more interesting features in the room. The first was a fissure across the floor that dropped into darkness. She’d made no attempt to plumb it, other than throwing a single pebble into the cavity and failing to hear it strike bottom.
The second was a heaped pile of grave dirt. Madri pushed herself out of the chair and approached the black mound. Close up, the sour odor was mixed with the reek of a rotting carcass. Beneath the dirt lay the shell of Kalkan Swordbreaker. Kalkan who, one day soon-far sooner than Demascus could hope to be ready for-would be reborn. When this self-styled nemesis of the Sword of the Gods woke, he’d help Madri exact vengeance against Demascus. So the mask promised, at any rate.
Her nose wrinkled with the odor. But she patted the waist-high pile of soil like it was a pet. “You’d better actually be in there, Kalkan, slouching back to the world to live again. Because sometimes I worry I’m imagining all this as I spin in my own grave …”
“Kalkan is real enough,” said the mask on the table.
She turned. “You’re awake?”
“Evidently.”
Madri hated the mask. It had found her flickering around Airspur, afraid and alone. It gave her purpose and promised revenge on the one who had killed her. But it also toyed with her, sometimes telling her minor falsehoods as if it enjoyed tripping her up. As if it couldn’t help but weave falsehood with truth, despite her allegiance to it.
“Fossil,” she said, for that’s what she sometimes called the mask for lack of any better name, “is your master any nearer to waking on his own?”
“What makes you believe I serve Kalkan?” came the cold, androgynous voice.
Her lips thinned. “You told me Kalkan Swordbreaker was divinely appointed to keep Demascus in check-”
“Correct, lest he grow too powerful on Toril,” the mask interrupted, only to fall silent again.
She waited for the mask to continue. Of course, it did not. It was just like Fossil to speak in riddles, when it wasn’t making outright fabrications. So be it, she thought, I’m a champion riddle solver.
“You once described how Kalkan, like Demascus, was doomed to return to the world again and again.”
The mask lifted off the table to hang in the air, facing her. She had piqued its interest. “You also referred to yourself as a reanimated angel remnant who once served a god of Toril who had been wronged by all others,” she continued. “You made it sound like that was in the past, that the deity was dead or imprisoned … But now I think it’s possible you still serve that one and not Kalkan at all. Which is it?”
The mask didn’t speak for so long that she was readying herself to shout at the obstinate thing when it said, “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that our purposes are aligned. You seek to punish Demascus. Kalkan is the vehicle by which that shall be accomplished. Be glad you’ve been brought into this at all, figment.”
Figment? That was a new one. She stored that away for later reflection. “You still haven’t described how it’s going to work. Punishing the deva as he deserves will be tricky, since he’s guaranteed to return from the dead.”
“The Swordbreaker has pursued Demascus down through the centuries. He has a plan.”
“Of course,” Madri said. “In fact, I saw him again today. He seeks to charter a ship.”
“As Kalkan predicted,” the mask stated.
Everything she did was predicated on some sort of scheme devised by Kalkan. A scheme so tangled that it could’ve been drawn up only by someone with impossibly precise foreknowledge of the future. As a plenipotentiary, she had some experience with the divinatory school of magic. She’d always found divination imprecise at best, and useful for only a few hours of forward-gazing. Whatever magic Kalkan possessed, it was something that defied all the theory and teaching she’d received in Halruaa.
Then again, Kalkan was a rakshasa, a creature with access to secrets few others knew. Upon its death, a rakshasa was guaranteed eventual reincarnation. When it did reappear, it retained all the memories and knowledge of each and every one of its former selves. A rakshasa had lifetimes to learn from its mistakes, and each rakshasa had the cumulative wisdom of a thousand lives, giving it firsthand knowledge of history and the experience from tens of thousands of schemes. During his existence, Kalkan had apparently gathered many powerful secrets.
The sooner she and Fossil could move forward with the ritual, the sooner Kalkan would return to the world and take up after the deva once more. She’d once asked why just she and Fossil couldn’t go after Demascus themselves. The mask simply refused to answer. Which told her it was more concerned with Kalkan’s return than her own vengeance. She was just another tool, one that would gain satisfaction when Kalkan’s plan finally saw the deva to the end he deserved.
“Demascus can’t go the island immediately,” she said. “Not today, probably not for several days. A storm has all the ships held in port.”
“A storm? I don’t recall that being part of …” The mask trailed off.
“So, what other ingredients does the ritual require? I’ve gotten you the whispering painting, the one called the Necromancer. And you said the last ingredient could be gathered when Demascus visits this mysterious island. What must I do when that happens?” She waited for the thing to continue.
Silence.
She approached it and tapped a fingernail on its smooth face. “Anyone home?”
The mask settled back down next to the lamp. It’d lapsed back to sleep, or whatever it did when it wouldn’t talk. If it was a spirit bound to an object, perhaps it ceased continuity for a while. Like when she experienced her own episodes of time loss-
She waved the thought away like an annoying gnat. Anyway, Fossil had called her “figment.” Though it probably only did so to make her wonder-she’d made the mistake of mentioning her latest fear about her status to the mask.
Just to be sure, she tapped Fossil again. Nothing. She was tempted to pick it up and toss it down the chasm, just to see if anything would happen. No. She had a more pressing need to take care of while Fossil was “out.”
She faced the draped picture. If Necromancer could provide instructions to Fossil on how to resurrect Kalkan early … it could damn well do something for her, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
