multiverse, his power and presence as rooted in reality as the celestial spheres. Shar was older, but not Mask. Cale understood the archfiend’s full power for the first time.
Understood, too, that he was a match for it.
Perhaps.
The archfiend’s pupilless white eyes, so like Magadon’s, pierced Cale, saw within him.
“You have brought only a piece of what you owe.”
Cale nodded.
“A piece satisfies my promise.”
Mephistopheles considered, nodded. “So it does. And so is my plan brought to fruition.”
Cale summoned Riven’s sneer, laughed, and the sound cracked ice. “Your plan? You have been played, the same as me, the same as him, the same as all of us.”
Mephistopheles frowned and the gelugons clicked, their uncertainty manifest.
“You are mistaken.”
“No,” Cale said. “You are.”
Mephistopheles smiled. “And yet I will have what I covet, despite the machinations of godesses, gods, and archwizards.”
“And I will have what I want,” Cale said, and the pronouncement separated him from himself, split him in two. He felt outside his body, distant, an observer in events rather than a participant.
He found his mind focused not on the present, but on the past. Memories flooded him, the small, quiet moments he had shared with Thazienne, Varra, Jak, the mere hours he’d had with his mother, Tamlin, Riven, the bonds of his life born sometimes in laughter and embraces and sometimes in tears and blood.
“You are without your toy,” the archfiend said, and nodded at Cale’s empty scabbard.
Mephistopheles’s voice seemed far away, a whisper, the faint calling of a fool in the night. Cale floated above the plain, above the devils, above himself, looking down on it all like a ghost haunting his own death. The image was blurred, as though seen through poorly-ground glass. His life, however, played out before him in clear, bright tones, the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, here, now, when he would die.
“That is because I have not come to fight you,” he heard himself say. “I have come to pay what I owe, and to collect what is due.”
Riven sensed Mephistopheles’s arrival, felt the sudden surge of power, malice, the eternal and unrepentant darkness. The shadows around him spun in slow spirals. Knowing what would come, what must come, Riven focused not on his sadness, not on the surprising sense of loss that turned his stomach into a hole, but on the job.
He was an assassin, as ever he had been. And he was working. He sheathed his grief, and put his hands on the hilts of his blades. He heard his heartbeat in his ears, as loud as a wardrum, each thump keeping time, counting down the moments left in Cale’s life.
“To collect what is due,” he said, echoing the words of his onetime enemy, now his friend, now his brother.
Mephistopheles stepped toward Cale, eyes blazing, bleeding power, malice, trailing gelugons eager to see a god’s blood shed.
Cale, filled with power of his own, gave no ground, but increased his size until he stood eye to eye with the archfiend, until the gelugons were as children gathered for a story.
Dark power flared from Mephistopheles. Cale’s shadows swirled in answer. The wind gusted, screamed. Glaciers groaned. The damned shrieked.
“There is only one way for it to come out of you,” Mephistopheles said.
Cale knew. “I will pay what I owe.”
Eagerness flashed in the archfiend’s eyes, greedy hunger. He licked his lips, beat his wings once. The gelugons shifted on their clawed feet, clicked their fearsome mandibles in anticipation.
“First, what you owe,” Cale said.
Mephistopheles blinked with surprise, as if he had forgotten, but recovered himself quickly. He smiled, showing pointed teeth. His eyes were as hard as adamantine. “Haggling like a Sembian to the last. Very well.”
The archfiend backed up a step amidst the gelugons. He stopped, looked to Cale.
“You have what you have and yet are willing to give it up for my son, a man?”
Cale simply stared, but that was answer enough.
The archfiend shook his head. “I do not understand the minds of men. But here is the greater part of your friend.”
The archfiend bent at the waste, put his hands on his knees, and began to gag, heave. Presently he vomited a gout of steaming blood and other unidentified lumps of gore onto the ice, turning it into a soup of carnage that smelled of tenday-old corpses.
Cale gagged and swallowed bile. The gelugons clicked in amusement.
In the center of the gore, slick with blood, lay the translucent remnant of Magadon’s soul. It did not move.
“What did you do?” Cale said and