The vampire flopped down on top of him and lay motionless. Evidently Bareris had pierced the heart.
He rolled Muthoth off him and clambered to his feet. He felt the hot itch as his wounds began to heal. Peering back the way he'd come, he saw that Mirror had already destroyed one boneclaw and, by the looks of it, was about to dispatch the other.
Bareris stooped, gripped Muthoth by the throat, and dragged him farther into the suite, until they passed beyond the magical silence. By that time, the vampire had reverted to human shape, give or take pointed ears positioned too high on his head and a few patches of fur.
Bareris knelt down, positioning his face in front of Muthoth's unblinking eyes. 'Do you know me now?' he asked. 'I'm Bareris Anskuld, the bard who overtook you on the way to Delhumide. And now I'm going to destroy you as you destroyed me.'
He raised his sword and struck Muthoth's head off. Then he watched the two pieces of the necromancer's body rot and realized he didn't feel anything at all.
Mirror found Bareris standing over Muthoth's crumbling, stinking remains. 'Well done,' he said.
Bareris frowned. 'We fought this battle in silence. With luck, no one else knows it happened. Maybe we have time to look around a little.'
'And carry away something useful,' Mirror said. 'Let's do it.'
Bareris hung Muthoth's amulets around his own neck and picked up his black, gleaming staff. Then they prowled farther into the vampire's apartments.
They soon came to a portrait of a Red Wizard whose cool, crafty eyes and thin-lipped, resolute mouth seemed a mismatch with a rather weak chin. And when they saw the same face depicted again in a painting above the fireplace in a library, Bareris said, 'I know where we are.'
'What do you mean?' Mirror asked.
'A hundred years ago, this was more than a chapterhouse of the Order of Transmutation, it was the residence of Druxus Rhym himself, or one of them, anyway. I never knew the man, but when I was a boy, I saw him once or twice, riding in a procession, and that's him.'
Mirror, of course, had never known Druxus Rhym. He'd been a broken, essentially mindless thing wandering the Sunrise Mountains when Druxus had been alive. But he'd heard his comrades speak of the zulkir whom Szass Tam had assassinated at the very start of the lich's long campaign to become sole ruler of Thay.
'If these books belonged to an archmage,' he said, 'there may be some powerful grimoires here.'
'Let's hope I have the wit to recognize them,' Bareris said. 'You stand watch while I flip through them.' He pulled a volume from a shelf.
And several books later, he whispered, 'By the silver harp!'
CHAPTER TWO
13 Ches, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)
'Well?' demanded Aoth. 'Don't stop now. What did you find?' Across the study, Khouryn mumbled and rolled over in his sleep.
'This,' Bareris replied. He opened the pouch strapped to his belt and brought out a small volume bound in crimson. It didn't look old or in any way special, nor could Aoth feel any arcane power smoldering inside it.
'All right,' said Aoth. 'Do you expect me to sit and read the cursed thing, or are you going to tell me what's in it?'
'I'll tell you,' Bareris said. 'It's just… it's strange, crazy even, and I need you to understand and believe.'
Aoth frowned in perplexity. Never before had he seen his old friend fumble for words. Even after despair and the lust for vengeance ruined him, Bareris had retained the facile tongue of a bard.
'Just spit it out. After all the weird and terrible things the three of us have survived together, of course I'll believe you.'
'Very well. Do you remember the question Malark always used to ask?'
Aoth felt a pang of anger at the thought of the spymaster and false friend who'd betrayed the southern cause. 'Why did Szass Tam murder Druxus Rhym, his own ally on the Council?'
'Yes. After reading this book, I finally know.'
'That's nice, I suppose, but does it really matter at this late date, more than ninety years after the lich pushed us and the rest of his opponents out of Thay?'
'It matters. Do you also recall the story Quickstrike the gravecrawler told me?'
For a moment, Aoth had no idea what Bareris was talking about, and even when he did remember, the question seemed so bizarre that he wondered if decades of loneliness, anguish, and undeath had finally driven his friend completely mad.
'Dimly. Thousands of years ago, there was a kingdom in the Sunrise Mountains. Its greatest wizard and hero was a fellow named… something about digging…'
'Fastrin the Delver.'
'Right. Somebody stole something from this Fastrin, and the loss deranged him. He slaughtered his own people and even mangled the psyches of their ghosts-Mirror here was one such victim-and when he'd destroyed the realm, he committed suicide.'
'That's right,' Mirror said, 'and now I can add to the tale. Recent events have stimulated my memory, even though much is still lost to me.
'My friend Fastrin spent much of his time exploring ancient ruins,' the ghost continued, 'and his stolen treasure was an article he had unearthed on one such expedition: a book from the dawn of time. He claimed it contained 'the death of the world,' and after it disappeared, he was terrified the thief would unleash the power inside it. In his frenzy, he saw only one solution: kill everyone, just to be sure of getting anybody who'd learned the secret, and strip our spirits of reason and memory.'
'It's a sad story,' said Aoth, 'and I don't mean to sound indifferent to your misfortune, but how can it possibly be relevant to anything that's going on today? You're not going to tell me that this volume you brought me is Fastrin's book? If that thing is thousands of years old, I'll eat it with pickle relish!'
'It isn't,' Bareris said. 'Two months ago, we stumbled across a collection of books that belonged to Druxus Rhym. This is one of them, written by Druxus himself. It's a series of scholarly notes and musings on a different volume, which, unfortunately, was missing.'
Aoth shook his head. 'Not the same book Fastrin found?'
'Yes,' Bareris said, 'with Fastrin's own notes appended to the back of it. Somehow it survived to the present day and fell into Druxus's hands. He doesn't say how, and we'll likely never know.'
'What does he say?'
'The original book contains instructions for destroying everything. All life. The land, sea, and sky. The gods themselves.'
Aoth snorted. 'That sounds useful.'
'It could be, because you wouldn't just obliterate them. You'd change them from essence to the pure potential that existed before anything else, even time and space. And then you-'
'I take it that the ritual contains a cheat that allows 'you' to survive unharmed amid all the annihilation.'
'Yes, your soul, at least, if not your body. And then you could seize all that potential and build a new cosmos exactly to your liking, with yourself as master.'
'Ah! And here I thought we were discussing something silly.'
Bareris scowled. 'Druxus saw the ritual as the greatest imaginable work of transmutation, and for that reason, it intrigued him. But he also believed the practical difficulties were insurmountable, and that no wizard could ever perform the experiment even if he was crazy enough to want to try. He regarded the treatise as purely theoretical, an intellectual game, one that Szass Tam too might find interesting. And so, at the end, his notes indicate his intention to pass the book along to the necromancer.'
