the hateful, desperate moans of the specters. Dust and darkness swirled.
“Cale?” Riven asked.
“If this goes wrong,” Cale said to Riven, and nodded at Rivalen. “Kill him.”
With that, he lifted the chalice, let the cool, greasy liquid touch his lips, and drank.
Brennus lived in the space between the betrayal of his mother and the betrayal of his father. He could not long hold that ground. Either he honored his mother’s memory by exacting payment from her murderer, or he did as his father instructed.
He didn’t know if he could live with himself if he did nothing to avenge his mother.
But if he acted, Sembia could be lost and his father would kill him.
He ran his fingertips over his mother’s necklace, the necklace that had been brought to him as if by providence. He recalled the moments he had shared with her, the joy. He had experienced little of either since her death.
He made up his mind, nodded to himself, and activated the communication ring.
Rivalen, when Kesson Rel is dead, the divine power in him will flow to the empty vessel, Kesson’s successor, the Chosen of Mask who drank from the chalice. Here are the sequence of spells you must cast, using the chalice as a focus, to take that essence for yourself.
He recited a series of incantations and abjurations.
Thank you, Brennus, Rivalen returned. You have done well.
Brennus cut off the magic of the ring. The darkness around him deepened.
He had just murdered his brother. The spells he had named for Rivalen would not capture Kesson’s divine power for Rivalen. They would cause the power to consume him.
He put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. He didn’t know how long he sat there before a tug on his cloak caused him to look up.
His homunculi sat on the table near him, the leathery skin of their brows creased with worry.
“Master sad?” one asked.
Brennus inhaled, sat up. The darkness around him was a shroud. “No.”
Both of them smiled and held out their hands. “Treat, then?”
He smiled tiredly, took two paper-wrapped sweetmeats from his cloak, and handed them to his creations. They squealed with delight and ate with vigor.
His mother would have laughed. She would have said, That is quite a family you have, Brennus.
Indeed it was.
Power entered Cale, wormed its way through him completely, hollowed him out. In an instant he lost whatever humanity remained in him and became a shell, the temple at the edge of nothing made flesh, intact but empty.
And as much in danger of crumbling.
He dropped the chalice and fell to his knees. His scream mingled with that of the wind and the specters. The hole yawned in him, an emptiness that needed filled. His mind spun. Jumbled thoughts ricocheted around his brain.
He struggled to get his intellect around what had happened, what was happening. The chalice did not contain divinity. It contained revelation, realization, the possibility of divinity that skulked about in the silence of the human soul. But the possibility was so large, so consuming, that a mortal form awakened to it could not long bear the truth before it simply disincorporated.
Unless it realized its potential.
Shadows whirled around him, angry appendages of darkness lashing out at the world. He threw his head back in another scream and saw that the entire dome of the temple had not collapsed. A small portion remained intact—the black image of Shar, the Lady of Loss, looked down on him.
His scream died. His humanity died. And Riven was at his side.
“Are you all right?”
Cale clutched at Riven and shook his head. “No.”
“What happened?”
“It gave me nothing,” Cale said. “It just … prepared me to receive the power.”
Riven cursed and looked back at Rivalen. “There’s no weapon here!”
He started to rise, his hand on a saber.
Cale stayed Riven’s hand, shaking his head. “This is not his fault.”
Rivalen leaned forward, his eyes aglow, his brow furrowed. “What do you feel?”
“Empty,” Cale said, and leaned on Riven as he stood. He felt heavy, thick, weighed down by what he might become. “We need to get to Kesson. We can separate him from the divinity, take it back.”
“But we have to kill him to get it, Cale,” Riven said. “We faced him already. You saw—”
“You did not have me with you, then,” Rivalen said.
“Who are you again?” Riven spat at the Shadovar.
“We have to find a way,” Cale said. “If we cannot kill him, and soon, this will kill me.”
Riven cursed again.
“The Saerbians pass over the river,” Cale said to Rivalen.