smile and in the end he says nothing, nods, and melts back into the shadows.
The moment he disappears, I stand, find my mental focus. The exercise reminds me of the damage my father did, renews my desire to have vengeance. I avoid the broken mental connections, the sharp emotional shards, the gaps in cognition.
I reach out for one of the shadowwalkers I know by name. I put power into my words.
Vyrhas, when the others leave, you are to remain.
My suggestion worms its way into the regimented construct of Vyrhas’s will. I feel him resist, feel the reinforcement of his training bolstering the mental walls. He is strong. I fear my plan may die stillborn.
All at once my power pierces his resistance and he is mine.
Act as though you will leave for Cale’s side with the others, but instead meet me in the dining hall.
On the way to the dining hall, I retrieve my bow, my blade, my leather armor. When I reach the large dining chamber, I see no one.
“Vyrhas?” I say to the darkness.
The shadowwalker steps from the darkness along the far wall. He is taller than Nayan, leaner. His long black hair is tied into a rope that falls halfway down his back. Shadows curl around his hands, his head.
“Mindmage. The Right and Left have called. I remained only out of respect for our friendship.”
My power has so scrambled Vyrhas’s mind that he regards us as longtime friends, though we have rarely spoken before this moment. Still, his will is slippery. I must trod softly over his mindscape so as not to dislodge the compulsion.
“Cale and Riven called me, too,” I lie. “They need you to take me somewhere.”
Vyrhas looks relieved at the revelation. “Where?”
“I will show you. Open your mind.”
Vyrhas opens his mind to me without hesitation. I picture in my mind the vaulted, hemispherical chamber deep within the floating mountaintop on which Sakkors stands. I picture the faceted stone walls, designed to reflect and amplify the Source’s power. And floating in the center of the vault, slowly turning about its lengthwise axis, I picture the giant, crystalline form of the Source.
I push the image into Vyrhas’s mind.
“There,” I say. “I am to go there.”
Behind him, Cale heard the Lathanderians assembling. Armor chinked, shields rung, and orders carried through the still air. Cale held his mask and continued his spell.
The shadows swarming the air behind and around Kesson began to keen, the discordant whine of doomed souls. The shadow giants, darkness bleeding from their forms, beat their swords on their shields, the sound like the heartbeat of the world.
Cale continued the spell, felt the power gathering, the borders between worlds weakening.
Above, Furlinastis completed his turn, roared his rage at the theurge who had forced him into service thousands of years before.
“Whatever you’re doing, Cale,” Riven said. “Do it now.”
Kesson Rel rose into the air, raised his hands.
The keen of the shadows reached a pitch that hurt Cale’s ears. The beat of sword and shield by the giants grew more rapid.
Kesson lowered his hand and thunder boomed. Hundreds of lightning bolts formed a green net in the sky. The rain resumed, poured from the black clouds. And Kesson’s servants swarmed forward The shadows formed a black cloud that swirled, parted in two. One half sped toward Furlinastis, one half toward Cale, Riven, and Rivalen. The shadow giants rushed forward, blades bare.
A clear, piercing note on a clarion sounded from the line of Lathanderians.
“The light!” they shouted as one.
Cale completed his spell, used Weaveshear to slice a gash in the veil between planes. He widened it and darkness streamed from the wound in reality. Beyond, he saw the Plane of Shadow and the haunted ruins of Elgrin Fau, once the City of Silver on Ephyras, now a wraith-haunted ruin. He saw the necropolis in its center, the dead core of a dead city.
Kesson Rel had bound Elgrin Fau’s dead to the city’s locale, but Cale knew the shadows of Elgrin Fau were the same as those of the Adumbral Calyx, and that those of the Calyx were the same as those of the Shadowstorm.
“You are unbound!” Cale shouted. “Emerge to face Kesson Rel!”
His words summoned moans through the rift. Black forms rose up from ancient graves, hundreds, thousands, the denizens of an entire city. Cold poured through the gash torn between planes. The wraiths’ red eyes, so like those of the shadows’, focused on Cale. He saw numbers to match those of Kesson’s army of shadows.