Shadowrealm - By Paul S. Kemp Page 0,29
understand one another now.” He smiled and inclined his head. “I accept your apology, Prince of Shade. And the matters about which you wished to query Baziel are the matters that I wish us to discuss. Kesson Rel?”
Brennus looked up, his mind racing. He knew all fiends to be liars. If Mephistopheles wished to answer Brennus’s questions, it was because his answer, whether true or false, served the archfiend’s purpose. What stake did Mephistopheles have in matters in Sembia?
“Why make this offer?”
“It amuses me to see you correctly informed.”
Brennus bluffed. “I have no questions.”
Mephistopheles smiled. “You lie poorly.”
The shadows around Brennus swirled.
“You bear an interesting trinket,” the archfiend said, and nodded at Brennus’s chest.
It took Brennus a moment to process the conversational detour. The archfiend meant his mother’s necklace. He tried to keep eagerness from his tone. The necklace suddenly felt warm against his flesh. He could feel his heart pounding against it.
“You know something of it?”
“Now you have questions?”
“Do you?”
Mephistopheles made a dismissive gesture. “Perhaps.”
Brennus took a step toward the summoning circle, the whiff of a revelation drawing him forward.
“Who murdered my mother?”
“Kesson Rel.”
Brennus stopped short. “Kesson Rel?”
“We were discussing Kesson Rel.”
Brennus shook his head. “No, no. We were discussing my mother.”
“Were we?”
“Yes. Yes. Tell me about my mother!”
Mephistopheles crossed his muscular arms across his chest. “No. First things first.”
Brennus realized he was breathing rapidly. The shadows around him whirled and spun.
“Kesson Rel,” he said.
The archfiend nodded. “Continue.”
“We want him dead.”
“He is powerful, infused with the power of a god.”
“A god? Not a goddess?”
Mephistopheles smiled. “Kesson Rel stole his power from the Shadowlord. Shar lays claims to it, now. Of course, how the Shadowlord came by it is … another tale.”
Brennus processed the new information, and would ponder its implications later. He looked up at the crack in the quartz ceiling, at the dusting of ice that still rimed the room, back at the fiend. “Can it be done? Can Kesson Rel be killed?”
The archfiend beat his wings, once, stirring a breeze that smelled of corpses. “Everything dies. Even worlds.”
Brennus did not understand that last. “How then, if he is as powerful as you say?”
Irritation wrinkled Mephistopheles’s high brow, narrowed the orbs of his eyes.
“Because his power is not his own. He came by it as all faithless thieves do. By stealing it. He thinks to have locked it away, but the key yet remains. You will find it in Ephyras.”
“The world from which he came?”
The fiend nodded. Smoke issued from his nostrils.
Brennus considered the information. “You want him dead, too, else you would not have come. Why?”
The archfiend’s face was expressionless. “To collect a debt.”
Brennus knew he would get nothing more. “Tell me how to do it. Then tell me of my mother.”
Mephistopheles chuckled. “I will tell you one or the other. How to kill Kesson Rel or the identity of your mother’s murderer. Which will you have answered?”
Brennus swallowed his anger, his frustration, struggled, and finally said, “Tell me how to kill Kesson Rel.”
The archfiend smiled, and began to speak.
Lifelong habits died only with difficulty and time. As he had for over a decade, Abelar awakened before the dawn. He lay on a bed of wool blankets set on the cold, damp earth in his tent. Elden slept on the cot near him and the sound of his son’s breathing, easy and untroubled, soothed Abelar’s troubled spirit. After a short time, he donned trousers, cloak, and boots, kissed Elden on the forehead, and stepped out of the tent.
The rain had slacked and the faint light of false dawn painted the water-soaked camp in lurid grays. Coughs and soft conversation carried from here and there among the cluster of tents. The smell of pipe smoke carried from somewhere.
He looked east to the rising sun, but saw there only the swirling dark clouds of the magical storm, a black lesion marring the sky. It had grown during the night. It was coming for them, for all of Sembia.
Atop the rise overlooking the camp he saw the men and women of his company, servants of Lathander, gathered for Dawnmeet. His separateness sent an ache through him. He led them now only on the field, not in worship. They looked east, their backs to Abelar, facing the sky where the shadows masked the dawn sun. The sound of their voices carried through the morning’s quiet.
“Dawn dispels the night and births the world anew.”
The words resounded in Abelar’s mind, the echo of the thousands of Dawnmeets when he had spoken the same