Plague of Spells Read online

  Her childish crush on Japheth grew cold. If he walked the crimson road, he was not a man of honor.

  Honor or not, Japheth led her directly back to Marhana Manor. So convenient; another reminder she dreamed. Which meant Japheth wasn’t really a traveler—she’d merely invented it! Her thoughts were more cogent, more precise than any dream she’d previously experienced, and she kept forgetting what she saw now must all be pure fiction.

  Her quarry entered by the main gate with his own key. He walked around to the South Wing of the manor, where Behroun conducted his shipping business. A lamp in the main office beckoned.

  Japheth entered, and Anusha remained his shadow.

  Her half brother, Behroun, was seated in his white leather chair behind a desk bestrewn with parchment, quills, and small devices useful for plotting nautical routes.

  Behroun was surprised to see the cloaked man suddenly appear at the edge of his desk. “Japheth! You are quick! I sent a courier at dusk.”

  The warlock inclined his head. “I have eyes in many places, as you know. If you had merely placed my symbol on your manor door, as I instructed, I would have appeared even sooner.”

  Behroun shook his head as if in disgust, but said, “You’re here, that’s what matters. I’ve got something special lined up. Something vital to Marhana. I need my most potent and trusted agent to serve as my envoy.”

  “You’ll turn my head with all your praise,” responded Japheth, his tone indicating just the opposite. Anusha was familiar with Behroun’s verbal tactics—flattery came first, followed by demands. When he set his mind to it, Behroun could charm the nose off a troll. But he only applied his charm to people he couldn’t manipulate any other way.

  The warlock said, “Tell me what you want.”

  “You’re setting sail two days from now with Captain Thoster on the Green Siren. He—”

  “No,” interrupted Japheth. “He’s a freebooter. And his bloodline is tainted. I’ll have nothing to do with him.”

  “Your own bloodline is none too pure, warlock. Besides, you’ve dealt with Thoster all along.”

  “Incorrect.”

  “Don’t delude yourself,” sneered Behroun. “From where do you suppose all the Cormyrean coin I pay you in has come? Thoster.”

  “If you deal with pirates, that’s hardly a concern of mine.”

  Lord Marhana snorted. “No one pays as well as I, you’ve said it yourself. Gold coin, pure and unalloyed. And you need all you can get, don’t you? Otherwise, the crimson road will sweep you all the way to its final destination.”

  Japheth glanced sharply at the shipping magnate but didn’t correct him.

  “So, will you sail with Thoster as I’ve asked? I need you on board to keep me informed on a daily basis of his activities. He’s apparently uncovered some vast opportunity. It could be the break Marhana needs. He says his alliance with a creature of the sea is about to pay fantastic dividends. Perhaps more than just gold: influence. Power. I need you on site to act as my proxy.”

  “… I’ll consider your offer.”

  All pretense of cordiality fled Behroun’s eyes. He snapped, “Don’t consider too long, or I’ll break your pact stone. Then, no matter how far you flee down the crimson road, the wrath of your Lord of Bats will find you.”

  Anusha was already anxious, witnessing the conversation between her half brother and Japheth. A stress headache blossomed behind her eyes. When Behroun’s cruel visage uttered his odd, incomprehensible threat, Anusha took an involuntary step backward, directly into an artfully stuffed osprey mounted on a slender rod.

  The display toppled with a crash. Japheth and Behroun jerked around. The warlock’s eyes focused past her, but they widened anyway. He exclaimed, “A phantasm!”

  Japheth could see her! Lord Marhana was looking over the warlock’s shoulder, but his eyes were not focused on her either, but at the wall behind her. Behroun yelled, “An assassin! Sent by a rival house—disperse it, Japheth!”

  Anusha glanced back to see what Behroun and Japheth saw. Was there an assassin behind her?

  They were looking at the silver-framed mirror Behroun purchased from a Calimshan trader. In the mirror’s glossy pane stood a ghastly shape of shadow. She knew immediately it was a reflection of her dream shape! She raised a hand, and the image mimicked her action. She saw that her fingers, her arm, her entire body was like a shadow outlined in ethereal white and blue fire.

  Japheth raised his arms, palms facing Anusha. His cloak flared of its own accord, revealing a void of absolute darkness within its folds. And from that darkness, a swarm of black motes winged forth.

  Anusha wrenched herself backward, mentally demanding, Wake up! Wake up! Wake—

  Her eyes snapped wide. A bedside candle revealed she lay twisted in her coverlets. In her bedroom. Her gaze wandered the serene, quiet expanse of her walls, the ceiling, the furnishings in her room. She raised her hand, saw it normally. The dream was concluded.

  “What a nightmare!” she exclaimed, sitting up. She wondered how long she’d slept—darkness still reigned outside.

  Standing, she shrugged into her nightrobe. She tied its belt securely around her waist before exiting her bedroom into the darkened hall. Water. Water was what she needed. Her headache, the one from her dream, persisted.

  She wandered into the upper story of the manor, then down a curving flight of steps into the front hall. As she was about to pass into the back hall that led to the kitchens, Anusha saw a glint of light out the windows. She moved to the glass and saw that the lights in the south wing of the manor were lit.

  Two men were illuminated in the glow of the strong lamps.

  Anusha immediately recognized them. Her half brother, Behroun, and the warlock, Japheth, argued in Behroun’s office.

  Tiny wings seemed to pat and flutter in her stomach. The feeling accompanied a mad inkling. Could it be?

  A chill swept from her brow down her spine, tingling as if with vertigo.

  Her dream had come true.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Near the Ruins of Starmantle

  Darkness defined the length and breadth of the world, forever.

  Timeless intervals passed. Ages and epochs, or days and tendays, no consciousness persisted to measure the void’s period. Other worlds were born, matured, grew old, died, and passed away in that interlude. Or had the darkness lasted the duration of an eyeblink? Or somewhere in between …

  The void’s edges wavered, blurred, then peeled away. Behind was exposed a pale, misted light. The darkness contracted upon itself, becoming a dome, then a sphere, then a blot as it lifted up and away to nothing.

  A cloud-shrouded sky of gray, lit with occasional flashes of distant lightning, was revealed.

  Eyes slowly integrated elements, as if assembling pieces of a puzzle. Concepts of sky, time, and cloud leisurely assembled within a man’s fragmented, subconscious mind.

  The man’s brow furrowed. A sudden disorientation collapsed his blank observation of the heavens.

  Where was he? And …

  Why couldn’t he remember his own name?

  The man turned his head. Or tried to. Some force resisted. His gaze rotated less than an inch. Scanning with only his eyes, he saw he was surrounded in some cold, unyielding substance. He was caught like a bug in some sort of greenish material.

  Anger’s flame woke. He tried to suck in a deep breath. He failed—he was completely isolated, apparently, even from air. A sliver of his mind wondered why he hadn’t already suffocated. The greater portion of his attention focused on the crisis at hand. He must break free, or he would die. Whatever had kept him alive prior to this moment was failing. Already, lack of air made dark spots dance on the periphery of his vision.

  A subconscious instruction surfaced: Shout! Scream a single syllable of concentrated desire with the last of your stale breath, and hope it is enough.

  The man focused on his diaphragm, then expelled the fina
l vestiges of air from his lungs with an explosive, guttural, “Kihop!”

  The material surrounding his head shattered like dry adobe struck with a maul. Cool air suddenly caressed his face. He was still caught, but at least he could breathe.

  He sucked in a long, deep breath, expanding his chest so much that the material surrounding him cracked.

  He wrenched his body with a violent strength his limbs remembered, even if he did not. Pain knifed through his left shoulder, and the man loosed a surprised yell.

  His left arm throbbed with a twinge so intense that blackness threatened to rob him of consciousness again. Was it broken? No way to tell while he remained trapped.

  The man deliberately isolated his left arm while thrusting with his legs and remaining arm. It was difficult to accomplish, and agony spiked through his body once more.

  What options did he have? He rested a moment, considering. The problem of his imperfect memory swam once more to front and center. It was maddening. He had to get free!

  He wrenched his body again, sucking in his breath against the hurt. And again. Each time he tensed and thrust with his arms and legs, he gained a sliver of additional clearance. Each effort was accompanied with a sound not unlike splintering ice. With unflappable determination, the man struggled in the grip of the strange substance.

  When his right arm broke through, extricating himself from the remaining brittle, honeycomb-like stuff suddenly seemed an actual possibility instead of a wild hope.

  Finally, the man wrenched completely free. A powder of greenish material still clung to his body.

  He examined his erstwhile prison, cradling his left arm in his right. He’d been encrusted in a cocoonlike material thrust from the earth. It wasn’t mineral, or at least, if it was, it was particularly brittle. The portion from which he’d freed himself was a hollow space, still partly molded to the shape of his body.

  The man looked around and saw he stood on a grassy plain. Here and there, other mineral encrustations broke to the surface, rising only a few feet in most cases. A few spires were larger, and reached dozens of feet into the morning light. Between the strange outcrops, prairie grass waved to the western horizon.

  A forest, apparently partly dead of some blight, lay to the south. Skeletons of trees still remained mostly vertical, though newer growth was thick beneath the dead canopy. An ocean of saplings reached up through old, dry underbrush. The man was surprised a wildfire hadn’t cleared out the detritus already. Rain and lightning seemed particularly thick in that direction. He wondered if he would witness a lightning strike touch off a blaze even as he watched.

  He returned his gaze to the strange outcrops nearer at hand. At first the man thought the extrusions must be quite old. He saw dozens of instances where greenish spires had cracked and collapsed. Other outcrops, like the one he’d just emerged from, had weathered and broken into fragments.

  Of course, as brittle as the mass he had emerged from had proved, perhaps the extrusions were not actually that old, in the geological sense.

  He stood in place and slowly rotated, looking for something or someone recognizable. His own name seemed just on the tip of his tongue … but he couldn’t dredge it up.

  He looked east to the line of the horizon. Something in the texture of the landscape, the color of the sky, a scent in the air seemed familiar …

  Bumps prickled across his arms and back as if with a chill. Something terrible had happened there. A monstrous calamity—

  The man suddenly remembered.

  Raidon Kane remembered.

  His breath came harsh. His eyes tried to spin in his skull. Nausea threatened to bend him over.

  Raidon clapped his hands to his brow, the pain in his left elbow nothing in that moment.

  The world had ended. How could he have forgotten?

  The fire. The pillar of blue fire had reached up over the horizon.

  He saw again the pillar’s fat crown of molten sapphire, tumbling and boiling upward. Closing his eyes merely brought the memory into sharper focus.

  And the blast! That awful, land-erasing storm front that had swept out from the burning spire.

  He remembered horrors: His horse, stumbling and disappearing in the azure turbulence. The woman who’d grown wings of fire, only to be incinerated. The awful, twining hair pulling a goblin’s head along the ground—

  His amulet! It had burned away.

  The wind tousled his hair, bringing scents of spring flowers and grass.

  “By the Ten Tenants, have I gone insane?” bellowed Raidon, his voice hoarse.

  He closed his eyes. He calmed his breathing. A monk of Xiang Temple did not comport himself thusly. Raidon searched for his mental regimen. He was a master of meditation. Images of a pillar of blue fire could not haunt him if he did not wish it.

  He visualized his legs, his arms, his head, and that immaterial part of himself that recognized itself as his working mind. He visualized his thoughts as lines of energy. Normally serene arcs, now they were tangled and disordered. His confusion was a vibrating knot, a nest of snakes, preventing him from achieving clarity. He imagined an unseen force smoothing those lines, untying the knot, releasing the hissing snakes. Slowly, his higher will overcame his body’s adrenal turmoil.

  Tension leaked from his shoulders, and an incipient headache faded.

  Such was the training of Xiang Temple. Like all who graduated from that monastery in Telflamm, Raidon was a master of his own body. His techniques for visualization allowed him to control natural processes within himself normally beyond conscious control.

  He looked deeper, and saw where other lines, the lines representing his wholeness of body, were strained and even broken in the vicinity of his left elbow. He applied his focused clarity to the severed lines. The snapped cords of visualized energy merged, fused, and relaxed.

  The pain in his shoulder faded.

  He could see all the lines representing himself, vibrating with vitality, forming a shape in three directions: breadth, width, and height.

  Furrowing his brow, the monk began tracing his identity lines in the fourth direction, in time. Perhaps he could discover some clue as to what had happened to him.

  An oddity in the wire-frame model of his own body snatched his complete attention. A pulse of a color he couldn’t describe slowly glimmered across his upper torso. Something blue, like the ember of some slumbering fire.

  Raidon opened his eyes and looked down at his chest. His shirt, silk jacket, and overcoat were mere tatters, burned away, revealing a broad tattoo etched into his flesh. Overlapping inscriptions in a lost language, tiny and crabbed, radiated outward from the symbol, like stylized flames drawn around the image of a tree.

  It was the Cerulean Sign from his destroyed amulet—now scribed on him!

  How could that be? He ran a hand across the tattoo. The image possessed a palpable texture on his skin. It was real.

  The vision of his amulet consumed in blue fire assaulted him. He recalled in those final moments how the symbol itself had persisted, as if liberated, while the substance on which it was inscribed dissolved. He had reached toward the crumbling amulet, ached for it … and the Sign had flashed into him. That was the very last thing he recalled, try as he might.

  A tracery of the Cerulean Sign decorated his flesh. Had the reality-smearing blue fire transferred it from his amulet to his body? Why … how? And then, having so marked him, sealed him within a pillar of brittle mineral? It made no sense.

  “Too many unknowns vex me,” he verbalized, then he coughed. His throat was sandpaper, unused to speech. He swallowed, shook his head. Spinning unsupported scenarios based on guesswork would avail him nothing except the creation of unwarranted assumptions. To comprehend what had happened, how he had survived, and how much time had passed since the blue fire storm, he would have to investigate.

  He turned east toward Starmantle and fell into a light run. Unless he was misplaced in space too, it shouldn’t take him too long to reach the port
city, or what remained of it in the aftermath of the blue fire. As a monk initiate of Xiang Temple, and exemplar of its code, few things could long eclipse his extravagant martial prowess and conditioning, even long miles of travel. A false comfort? Perhaps.

  The brittle extrusions grew thicker the farther he traveled. Once, he saw a humanoid shape silhouetted in a large, green mineral outcrop. He stopped, thinking perhaps he’d discovered some other prisoner held timeless within, just as he had been.

  It was a woman, but one whose flesh was half burned away. An expression of pure agony made her face a demonic mask. She was completely encased in the extruded, greenish sap.

  If the woman in the amberlike stuff was still alive, but held in a strange stasis, it would be cruel beyond words to release her to suffer the pain of her burnt flesh.

  Raidon turned away, his expression tight. He resumed his eastward run.

  He didn’t investigate any other half-glimpsed shapes preserved in green.

  The monk reached the edge of Starmantle, or at least the hints of its foundations. The city itself was no more.

  Starmantle was gone, replaced with a madman’s fancy. The emerald outcrops, akin to the one he’d emerged from, were thicker than ever as he approached the ruins. Perhaps the blasted city was their locus and origin? No longer brittle like the one that had trapped him, these were gemstone hard. Worse, this close to the city, each hummed a single, flutelike note. In sum, thousands of spires produced atonal melodies that clawed at Raidon’s ears.

  Between the spires gaped fissures that harbored a flickering blue glow, the same blue he recalled from the original firestorm. Raidon backpedaled a dozen yards.

  Obsidian masses slowly drifted on the open ground between spires and ravines. In shape they were like irregular chunks of black stone. A palpable animosity emanated from them. Whether merely animate or actually alive, Raidon couldn’t tell with the distance. Not that he particularly wanted to know. His eyes ached as they scanned the insane vista.