Plague of Spells

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) West of Nathlan

No food passed Raidon Kane's lips. Every so often he sipped from his waterskin. His eyes were open, but he looked inward. Memory became theater, disgorging his past. He retrieved and relived every event that contained Ailyn. A master of his own mind, Raidon's recollection was extensive.

On the second day, tears brimmed, and then broke from his eyes. Raidon tasted salt.

On the third day, he sighed. He reached into his pouch and produced a ration composed of dried dates, almonds, and apples. He nibbled. Later, he ate the entire close-packed morsel, and then another.

On the fourth day, Raidon levered himself to his feet with the aid of the great, dirt-grimed boulder. Pain knifed through his stiff joints. Physical pain was something to which he was becoming accustomed. Others might have taken the agony as an omen of their own inadequacy. Raidon decided to perceive the new barbs and the lingering aches as evidence of his continued existence. His hurts were a connection to his past he couldn't gainsay. Pain grounded him and held him sane when images of Ailyn bringing him a daffodil during Spring Feast, Ailyn receiving a gold Cormyrean coin from his hand, Ailyn looking for him in a game of sneak-and-hide… these and other poignant memories threatened to crack him wide open, again.

The mountain on the horizon remained steadfastly in the sky, defying nature and perhaps even Silvanus… assuming that one had survived into the present. According to the golem that spoke from nowhere, even the gods were in disarray these days, as their lofty realms buckled and crumbled toward a new balance.

Raidon rubbed his chin, wondering why the sentient effigy had not attempted to renew their conversation. If it lay buried in an extra-planar dungeon, the golem must be lonely. Then again, it wasn't alive-it was a magical construct. Perhaps concepts like loneliness held no meaning for it.

His voice rough from disuse, Raidon addressed the air. "Cynosure, are you near?"

"Of course, Raidon," came the instant reply.

The monk said, "I am glad. The world has moved on without me, it seems. All save for you."

"I was never part of the world, Raidon, at least until you woke. I resigned myself to decades more darkness. Then light broke from the void when you first called on the power of your Sign, and I knew I was not forsaken. Of the two of us, I would hazard that I am the one who feels most glad."

Raidon nodded. Perhaps the construct could feel something like loneliness after all. But could it feel loss? When it recalled past acquaintances now gone, did a hollow cavity in its chest emanate a hopeless tide that threatened mental desolation? He didn't trust himself to reply, fearing his voice would shake.

After a few moments, Cynosure asked, "What do you propose to do, Raidon?"

"I know one thing, golem; I hunger. I need food."

"And after you find sustenance? What will you do?"

The monk shook his head in negation. "Nothing. I propose to exist. That is all. My deeds and past struggles have all yielded nothing. My greatest act of kindness concluded with the death of a child all alone. I'll not make such an error again. Misguided efforts to improve the world only deepen its imperfections. My masters had the right of it: be in the moment; do not shape it."

A high, white cloud edged a limb over the sun, throwing a cooling shadow across the hillside.

Cynosure spoke again, "You have the Cerulean Sign-"

"I would cast it away, for all that it was a gift from my mother, if I could. It has brought nothing but trouble. And the Traitor of Stardeep is released, you tell me. The Sign scars my flesh only to remind me it is a worthless symbol of a failed cause."

"The cause has not yet failed."

"No?"

"The threats the Keepers of the Cerulean Sign formed to fight remain active, perhaps closer to the surface than ever before. In the Dawn Age, monstrosities slipped into the world from sanity-shredding realms. These creatures, great and small, instinctively work toward the day when Faerыn itself is consumed and made anew in their own mad image. As a Keeper, it is your duty to oppose this."

"I am not a Keeper."

"Raidon, though I may be wrong, it is possible you remain the sole, mobile Keeper in all Toril."

"I did not choose that role. I am not a Keeper."

"You fought aberrations whenever you came upon them.

Though you took no oath, you acted as one sworn to the cause. For ten years you did so, nearly without respite, prior to the Spellplague."

Raidon frowned, then he ventured, "What of the other Keepers-Kiril and Delphe? And what about yourself? You are of the Sign, and a potent defender of it, as I remember it."

"Delphe ventured into Sildeyuir fifteen years ago and never returned. With that realm's fall, I do not know her fate or the fate of any of her kind."

Raidon queried, "And the swordswoman?"

"Kiril and the sword Angul left Stardeep. They reentered Faerыn, and continued on much as they had before. Kiril sold her sword arm to anyone with sufficient coin to keep her in drink and lodging. Eventually, she met up with a previous employer, a dwarf named Thormud. I lost track of her in the change-ravaged Vilhon Wilds. She survived the Year of Blue Fire, but afterward plunged into the heart of an active pocket of spellplague, from which she never returned."

The monk grunted. Though not definitive, the construct implied the only two pledged Keepers were missing and likely dead.

Raidon persisted, "You survive."

"At this time, I am cut off from the world. I can only interact with Faerыn through you and your Sign. I can provide you support, advice, and even transportation on occasion, but I cannot personally enter the war."

"A war, you say."

"The conflict has begun. Only skirmishes now, but soon, a wholesale slaughter, when the ancient buried city of Xxiphu emerges."

The monk walked the perimeter of the boulder's weedy edge, one hand trailing along the rough stone. He was not being impolite, walking away from the golem; its attention was always centered on him. He wondered if he could sever the link. But the name Xxiphu sparked alarm somewhere in his memory.

"Cynosure, I recall that name, but neither you, Kiril, Delphe, or anyone else properly described the nature of Xxiphu and this 'Abolethic Sovereignty' to me. Aboleths have long slunk below the world. What, really, is more terrible about Xxiphu?"

"Two things. First and least, regular aboleth colonies are safely ensconced below the earth, immovable. Xxiphu is different. It is mobile. It may indeed breach to Faerыn's surface, as previous divination revealed."

The monk nodded. That was certainly a worry. "And second?"

"Second, Xxiphu contains the original aboleths. These are the progenitors of the race who personally squirmed into the world before it cooled from its creation fires. These aboleths were old when the sun was still young. Xxiphu is the seat of the Abolethic Sovereignty, possessed of a malignancy inconceivable, and ruled by the Eldest, an aboleth of such size its age is incalculable. Certainly it is older than when Abeir-Toril split asunder. If Xxiphu rises and the Eldest wakes, then Faerыn will face yet another catastrophe, this one directed by alien, unfeeling minds that do not perceive the world as you do, or even I."

The monk didn't respond. Instead, he looked to the southern horizon, his pose noncommittal.

"If that occurs, Raidon," Cynosure continued, ''many more children than Ailyn will perish in fear."

The monk sucked in his breath as if a mighty kick had caught him in the stomach. His eyes darkened, and his fists clenched. With no target other than the boulder, the monk balled his hand and assailed it with a thundering strike. The stone cracked, and splinters of rock winged away. His knuckles stung, then went numb.

Raidon hissed, took a lung-filling breath, then dropped both hands back to his sides, outwardly back in control. The pity he earlier felt for the construct was gone. Cynosure was a manipulator first and last, he saw. It said only what it calculated would be most likely to induce the actions it desired. Very well, he would treat it as it deserved.

"You seek to shame me into action, Cynosure?"

"I merely speak the truth."

"Indeed. I wonder. But, for the sake of argument, let us imagine that I do take up this challenge. What can I do to prevent the rise of the Abolethic Sovereignty?"

"You must meditate upon the Sign that is now part of you. You are not trained in its use, but I can guide you. It can show you that which transpires across the land, what threats now gather, and what you can best do to counter them."

"You claim much authority."

Cynosure was silent.

Finally Raidon asked, "Is the Sign I carry up to this task?" The monk dropped into a lotus position, one suited for meditation.

"The Sign is only as potent as its holder."

"Then let us hope my training does not desert me."

The monk supposed the construct attempted a new stratagem with its last statement. As if he were shallow enough to respond heatedly to such an obvious ploy. But Raidon wondered. Regardless of Cynosure's tactics, if anything the sentient effigy said was true, wouldn't it behoove him to help? Unless Raidon chose death rather than continued existence, didn't his honor demand he do as the construct requested? Perhaps he required more information, if only to make a more informed decision.

"Cynosure, I would know more. Tell me how to proceed."

The golem of Stardeep didn't hesitate in its response. "Meditate on the Sign. Wake it with your will. Ask it to show you the danger that gathers."

No novice to meditation, Raidon called upon his focus. He stifled his surprise on discovering his inability to immediately find it. Much had occurred since he'd lost himself in the harmony of a single thought. So he sat awhile, remembering the sensation. A tickle in his brain, becoming smoothness. Distractions dropping away, one by one…

His focus returned. He imagined it as a crystalline lens. He directed its attention upon the unwanted design that blazoned his chest.

He could just discern the symbol's treelike outline, blurry like half-recalled faces of friends long absent. With single-minded deliberation, he compelled it to reveal its secrets.

It revealed nothing.

He was not impatient; he had nothing but time. He continued to observe the image. As they used to say in Xiang Temple, Raidon could stare the paint off the walls, if given the time.

Gradually he noticed discolorations within the lines, smears of gray on black. The blurs became colors; then the colors became shapes. The lines of the symbol pulled away on all sides to become a window onto another place.

Raidon saw a fog-shrouded tower on a small island. Dozens of scaled, fishlike humanoids burst from the water's edge and stormed the tower. Behind them strode two watery crones who chanted obscenities.

The creatures had an aberrant taint. Raidon wasn't sure how he knew that, but he assumed the knowledge was communicated to him by the Sign. Though the creatures were not aberrations themselves, a portion of their spirit was pledged to something abominable.

The fishfolk sought to overpower several defenders who held the tower. The tower denizens included a sea captain in ostentatious dress, accompanied by four humans in ship-scrounged finery; a woman in a body wrap the color of snow; a man with eyes like blood and a cloak so black it seemed more an aura than clothing; a striking young woman as hazy as a dream; and oddly enough, another scaled humanoid touched with the taint of aberration, who stood with the humans instead of its attacking kin.

The young woman with the hazy outline gasped and disappeared before the attackers landed their first blow.

The assault was fierce.

The captain lost his hat in the initial offensive, but his clicking, whirring sword dispensed death each time its damp tip pierced an attacker's scales. Two of the humans in ragged ship's attire fell in the initial blitz.

The cloaked man uttered what seemed more like a plea than a spell. A massive iron crown coalesced upon the head of one of the crones. The prongs atop writhed in metallic agony, and as if stricken mad, the afflicted hag began slaying her own allies. Fishfolk fell dead as her killing eyes raked them.

The woman in white discharged fire and lightning into the invaders' ranks. Her eyes danced, and she yelled with grim jubilation with every enemy she laid low. She destroyed the remaining crone with a blast of fire.

To Raidon's practiced eye, the attackers had woefully underestimated the depth and strength of the tower defenders. The fight was over.

Yet it wasn't over, not really. For Raidon perceived through the Sign-enabled scrying window that the attackers were pawns of something else, something that had not entered the fight. Lines of association ran like fishing lines away into the sea. The fishfolk and sea hags were mere fingers for an entity greater and more terrible. Something perhaps even aberrant or at least something infected with madness most foul.

What was it? He concentrated on the immaterial lines of connection, trying to follow them from the attackers back to their source. He was aware of Cynosure's attention, sharing his conjured view through the Sign. He understood the construct silently aided him, allowing him to use the Sign in such an extraordinary fashion despite his lack of training in its multifarious functions. With the Sign now part of him, he needed to learn to use it consciously and without aid. But for now, he allowed the golem to guide his disembodied travel along the wispy tendrils across the water, flashing west over miles uncounted.

In ten measured heartbeats, the Sign-generated scrying window framed a seamount surrounded by coral protruding from the sea. The small island appeared in the shape of a fat sickle moon from Raidon's aerial vantage. A salt lagoon filled the open central portion of the island, and rounded, jumbled structures sprawled between dry land and soggy marsh.

Even as the monk tried to identify the strange architecture, his viewpoint flashed into the murky depths. The sun's yellow light turned green, and then, as the descent continued, blue. More of the strange, rounded structures he'd noted on top of the island were jumbled around a yawning cave at the seamount's base. Humanoid figures swam among the drowned structures.

"More fishfolk," Raidon murmured.

Cynosure's voice replied, "They are named kuo-toa."

The viewpoint slowed as it approached the dark cave mouth. Disturbed silt hung in the water, making the cave's already dim interior even more difficult to discern.

Inside, something rested back from the opening on the rocky floor, its shape long and cigar-shaped for the most part, though it was thicker at one end. Striatums ran in parallel lines along the thinner portion of the shape, but the bulblike thickening at the other end was smooth.

The silt and lack of reflected light robbed the scene of meaning. Was the shape on the cave floor a natural jumble of drowned rocks? The lines of association the Sign followed terminated with the unmoving, contoured outcrop. The shape itself was not aberrant, but it contained something whose taint was like a bottomless pit.

Suddenly, the great shape shifted.

Raidon's assumptions flipped. He readjusted his sense of scale and nearly lost his focus in surprise. The shape was no jumble of rocks; it was a colossal squid, one of incredible bulk!

Two spots on each side of the bulk opened, revealing shield-sized eyes gleaming with awareness. It knew it was being observed. Its tapered end suddenly separated into a forest of suckered arms: It writhed, and a blanket of silt billowed to obscure all. But not before Raidon saw the true obscenity, clutched firmly in one tentacle.

It was a black stone, roughly the size of a man's head. To his Sign-enhanced sight, it seemed the stone was a vortex of aberration, sucking and drawing down all of the natural world to a nether space where utter abomination lurked.

Pain seared Raidon's temples, and he jerked his eyes wide.

A breeze pushed the grass across the plain in soothing waves of green. Scents of growing things and clean earth were a welcome balm from the vision that still burned in Raidon's memory: whipping tentacles, boring eyes and a relic whose wrongness was so acute, it constantly tore at the world. And for all that, Raidon had the sense, perhaps imparted by the Sign on his chest, that the relic was perhaps only the tip of a much more horrific truth.

"What did we just see?" Raidon asked the air.

"A kraken. A great kraken named Gethshemeth. It holds an artifact somehow tied to Xxiphu itself. The stone it clutched, did you see it?"

"Yes. Who were those people who fought the kraken's puppets?"

"A good question. Something for us to discover, but their identity is not vital to our interests."

Raidon said, "Very well. How is it the kraken came to possess such a relic?"

"I do not know how such an object has been raised to the surface," mused Cynosure. "Perhaps in the earth movements that followed the Spellplague… But that is mere speculation. Regardless of how it happened, a great kraken possesses a sliver of connection to Xxiphu."

"What does a sea squid, intelligent or not, want with such a thing? Power, I suppose, as all creatures seem to desire, as if control over others will somehow bring them greater satisfaction."

"You are likely correct," said Cynosure with a note of appreciation in its voice. "The kraken's mind surpasses even my own cognizance. But with an artifact of Xxiphu under its control, it will learn to channel more and more strength, and become a force not easily withstood. Its reach might swell past all the bounds of reason."

"Cynosure, you need not be coy. You want me to slay it before it attains its peak of power."

"That is advisable."

Raidon nodded, thinking back on the worst creatures he had eradicated in the name of the Sign in the years before the Spellplague. "Illithids are bad enough. Faerыn should not also have to face aberrant-infused kraken."

"You should know that another outcome is also possible, one even worse than an empowered kraken. If we do not take this relic from the kraken soon, the connection it has to Xxiphu will grow broader and more certain. In a short time, the connection could be sufficient to raise the city whole. Then Toril shall really have something over which to weep."

Raidon repressed a shudder. He was suddenly and simultaneously cognizant that, with the scope of the situation before him, he hadn't thought about Ailyn for a great span of daylight…

The monk sighed, clenched his fists, and lost his focus. Of what real purpose was his life? He'd failed the one person who needed him. He'd outlived his own time and survived now only through a fluke of magic and circumstance. He didn't deserve or much care if his own existence continued. He yearned for an end to his struggles, an end to his shame. On the heels of that insight, an idea followed.

He said, "Once your capacity to move me is rejuvenated, transfer me directly into the kraken's presence. It will be caught off guard. I will strike with all the art of Xiang Temple in my fist, and kill the kraken before it knows it is threatened. Its death convulsion will kill me, and if not, I will drown before I reach the surface. I do not fear such an outcome. I would welcome it."

Silence was Raidon's response.

"Did you hear, Cynosure?" demanded the man of the air, his voice infused with uncharacteristic volume. "Send me along now. Let me slay this kraken and be done with it all."

The sun was sinking into the west, and a coolness grew on the plain. Raidon spied a wolf in the valley below, sniffing along the track of some hoped-for twilight meal.

Finally the voice replied, "I appreciate your fervor, Raidon Kane. Were I able to transfer you thus, assuming I could place you so close to the great kraken within its wards, which I cannot, perhaps you could kill Gethshemeth. But in killing it, and yourself, you would alert Xxiphu."

"Surely, I can slay Gethshemeth quickly enough," returned the monk, though with less certitude. "I would have a few moments to catch it by surprise-"

"It has held the relic too long. Even if I could put you in the right place at the right time, which I have just explained I cannot, killing the great kraken is not enough. We need to kill Gethshemeth and simultaneously sever its connection with the relic, and therefore, its connection to the Abolethic Sovereignty. Your Sign alone is insufficient to that task."

Raidon pulled his fingers across his close-cropped black hair, massaging away a germ of annoyance. The construct was becoming more long-winded and circumspect by the moment.

"Then what, Cynosure? What can I do?"

"You must discover the fate of the sentient sword, Angul. It alone, in your hands, can accomplish what must be done."

"Angul. Yes, a powerful blade. But was it not an item infused with its power by the Weave? With Mystra's fall, how could it still function?"

"You ask a penetrating question. A complex answer exists; the simple answer is that it simply does. Will that satisfy?"

Raidon frowned. His emotions were as out of control as they'd ever been. If Cynosure were standing next to him just then, he would have struck the golem.

Cynosure must have sensed something of the monk's mood. It said, "I apologize. Listen, then. Many magical items such as swords, cloaks, boots, and especially relics and artifacts survived the Spellplague and still operate, though sometimes with altered abilities. A magical item's abilities were scribed into these devices when they were created, so even though the Weave was used in their making, the Weave no longer plays any part in their continuing operation. Likewise, though a forge flame is used in the making of a sword, if that forge flame later goes out for good, the sword is no less sharp. Does that answer you fairly?"

Raidon thought on Cynosure's words. He recalled the effects of the Spellplague on a person. The caravan chief, who'd died in its hungry grip, for instance.

The monk grunted. He asked, "Why not tell Kiril all this? She's Angul's wielder. And a swordswoman. While I am proficient with blades, I prefer not to rely on them. You would be better enlisting her than me."

Cynosure replied, "As I said before, I lost track of Kiril after the Year of Blue Fire. She bears no Sign, yet in a dim way I was able to discern her condition. After she left the ruins of Ormpetarr, she and her dwarf employer plunged into something local survivors call the Plague-wrought Land. I have not detected her or Angul's presence since. And, moreover, you are the only person with whom I can converse."

"How do you know Angul lies within the Plague-wrought Land?"

"I do not. But it is the only lead we have. Perhaps you will learn more when you visit. A small settlement lies on its outskirts-you could get yourself a meal when you arrive."

Raidon's stomach spoke up of its own accord. He was still ravenous. His grief-inspired fast had sapped his strength. A sit-down meal… perhaps that was what he needed. With a pot of steaming tea on the side.

"Then send me on to Ormpetarr, when your strength is recovered. I will eat. After that, perhaps I will discover Kiril's fate, and if I decide you are not dealing with me falsely, take up the sword, Angul, as my own."