Nayan, I need you and the others to remain here and watch over Magadon.”
Nayan’s expression did not change, but the shadows around him surged. “You are leaving?”
“For a time. With Riven.”
“We would accompany you. Serving the Right and Left hands of the Shadowlord is what brought us here.”
“You will be serving me by watching my friend. He cannot be left alone. But he cannot come with me.”
Nayan studied Cale’s face, and finally nodded. “Where are you going?”
Cale thought about the answer for a moment. “To kill a god,” he said, and exited the hall to find Riven. He found the assassin in the central hall on the second story, his two dogs in tow. They wagged their tails at Cale but did not leave their master’s side.
A question lodged in the lines of Riven’s brow, then smoothed into an answer.
“Found something, after all, I see.”
Riven could read him.
“Something,” Cale acknowledged, thinking of Mask, of Magadon, of Jak.
“What next, then?” Riven asked.
The shadows around Cale swirled. “We tell Abelar the nature of the Shadowstorm so he can get the refugees out of its path.”
“Then?”
“We kill Kesson Rel. Or die trying. Mags is nearly gone.” Riven inhaled, nodded. “Plan?”
“Go to Ordulin. Find him. Kill him.”
Riven chuckled through his goatee. “Must have taken you a while to come up with that.”
Cale smiled despite himself. He still found the rare demonstrations of Riven’s humor as incongruous as beardless cheeks on a dwarf.
“That double of him that we fought back in the Calyx,” Riven said. “The real him will be stronger than that.”
Cale nodded. “I know.”
Riven looked away, nodding, finally bent down and pet his dogs, the gesture one of farewell. He stood.
“There’s nothing for it. Let’s gear up.”
CHAPTER FOUR
4 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms
Brennus held his mother’s platinum necklace in his palm. The facets of the large jacinths caught the dim light of the glowballs and sparkled like flames.
“Pretty,” said the homunculi perched on his shoulder.
He nodded. His father had given it to his mother thousands of years earlier, on the night she died. Her body had been found in her chambers that night, as though she had died in her sleep, but the missing necklace suggested something else—murder. Despite a magical and mundane search of first the palace then the city, the murderer and the necklace had never been found.
Until recently.
Brennus had found the necklace buried in the soft earth of a meadow in a Sembian forest while he had been trying to determine the whereabouts of Erevis Cale’s woman, Varra. Varra, pursued by living shadows, had inexplicably disappeared from the face of Faerûn. Brennus had scoured the meadow from which she’d vanished. He’d found no clue to Varra’s fate, but had found one to his mother’s.
The find unnerved him. He recalled Rivalen’s words about the involvement of Mask and Shar in the events unfolding in Sembia. Like Rivalen, Brennus did not accept coincidence.
He turned the necklace over, eyed the inscription on the charm, the words of another age resurrected from a shallow Sembian grave: For Alashar, my love.
He had mentioned the necklace to no one, not Rivalen or his other brothers, not his father. The necklace had torn open the scab of long forgotten grief, returned to him memories and feelings buried with his mother’s body centuries ago. Perhaps that was why he had not shared his find with his brothers or father. He saw no reason to raise their grief from the dead.
He had cast numerous divinations on the necklace to ensure its authenticity, used it as the focus for other divinations, all in an effort to determine his mother’s true fate, and all to no avail. Thousands of years had passed since her death. He knew the murderer was dead. But he still had to know the truth. He owed his mother that much.
He had been closer to his mother than any of his brothers. She nurtured his love of constructs, clapped with delight at the first gear-driven wood and leather automatons he had built as a boy. He mastered the art of divination only later, at his father’s urging, to learn the truth of his mother’s fate.
But the truth had eluded him then, as it did now, and now the inquiry must wait still longer. He needed to turn his Art fully to Erevis Cale, to Kesson Rel, to the Shadowstorm. He and Rivalen needed information if they were to fulfill the Most High’s charge to annex Sembia and make it the economic workhorse of the reborn Empire