"He's lost his wits," Jak said. "Probably from speaking that Black Speech. I'll try a spell, but...."
Riven smiled, and his expression lost its faraway character.
"Save your spell, Fleet," he said. "I've lost nothing. I've found something."
The assassin sat up and shook his head as though to clear it.
"What do you mean?" Cale asked, but thought he already knew the answer.
Riven smiled and said, "Watch."
The assassin spoke eldritch words and moved his hands in a complex gesture. As he did, he pulled wisps of shadow from the air and twisted them around his hands. When he touched his charged palms to his flesh, the wounds remaining on his chest closed entirely.
"Trickster's toes," Jak softly oathed. "Drasek Riven is a priest?"
"No," Riven replied cryptically, and left it at that.
Cale tried to keep the dismay from his face. Drasek Riven could heal himself by touch, perhaps he could cast spells. Cale had thought Mask would never favor Riven with spellcasting. That the Shadowlord had done so felt like a betrayal.
But the assassin had denied that he was a priest. Then what?
Riven appraised his hands the way a veteran campaigner might evaluate a new blade. When he looked at Cale, his one good eye fairly shone.
"He's given you something, First of Five, but now he's given his Second something too. The Dark Speech. This-" he held up his hands for Cale to see-"and still more."
Despite himself, Cale could not hold back a frown. He remembered the exhilaration he'd felt when he first had learned to cast spells, and imagined Riven must feel much the same now. But he also thought of a Sembian proverb: "Only a fool thinks a gift is free." Cale had learned that lesson well. No doubt Riven soon would too.
Cale scabbarded Weaveshear, slow enough so that Riven would get a good look at the transformed blade.
He stared into Riven's good eye and said, "Everything comes with a cost, Riven. Make certain you know the asking price."
Riven only sneered.
Cale said to Magadon, "Get him up. Let's get out of this swamp."
CHAPTER 3
DISCLOSURE
Gradually, Magadon led them out of the swamp. The muddy ground grew firmer, and the reeds, tall grasses, and cypresses gave way first to thorny undergrowth then to brooding stands of trees akin to willows, but darker-leaved, more ominous. It seemed that one moment they were surrounded by marsh, the next by trees. The transition from bog to forest was sudden enough to be eerie, almost as though the woods had walked to them.
And perhaps they did, Cale thought.
Leaving the bog behind did little to raise their flagging spirits. The trees of the forest seemed to glare down at them as they passed. Limbs reached out to snag clothes, and the rustle of the wind through the leaves seemed to promise violence. High above, bats wheeled in the canopy, feasting on the large, black flies and other insects that plagued the plane. Some other creature that Cale could never quite see, hidden high up in the trees, howled at them as they passed.
After a few hours of travel, Magadon came to a sudden halt, cocked his head, and asked, "Does this terrain seem familiar to any of you?"
To Cale, the whole of the plane seemed familiar-uncomfortably so-but he had assumed the feeling to be a result of his transformation.
"What? The trees?" Jak asked, holding his bluelight wand aloft. "I've never seen anything like them-or bats that big."
"No," Magadon replied, shaking his head. "I don't mean the particular trees. I mean the topography."
"Should it?" asked Cale.
"What are you getting at, Mags?" Riven growled.
Magadon grabbed a tree limb and yanked it downward. For a moment, Cale thought for certain that the tree would attack the guide in response.
"It's twisted here, dark," Magadon said, "but think about it. On Toril, the Moonmere was in a dried bog surrounded by a forest. The bog here, albeit larger and wetter than the one on Toril, is surrounded by this forest."
"And?" Riven prompted.
"A planar correspondence," Cale said, taking the guide's meaning right away.
He and Jak had once experienced something similar when they had been in the Abyss hunting the Lord of the Void.
Jak pulled his pipe and chewed the end, thinking.
Riven shifted his stance and took a swig from his waterskin. Above them, the howling creatures continued their harangue.
"All right," the assassin said after wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "There's a correspondence. So?"
"So, Drasek," Magadon said, as though lecturing a student, "if the correspondence holds, it suggests the lay of the land. It may mean that-"
"Starmantle is nearby," Cale said, finishing for the woodsman. "Or its equivalent here."
Magadon nodded, smiling.
"Burn me," Jak oathed, twirling his pipe. "That place was a pit on Toril. Here .. ."
He whistled and trailed off.
Cale eyed Magadon and said, "If you're right, and if there's a way out of this plane, a city seems as likely a place as any."
Before the guide could respond, Riven spat and stared at Cale with his one good eye.
"You're our way out, Cale. But until you accept that, I've got nothing better to do to pass the time. Show the way, Mags."
Magadon adjusted his pack and said, "Since the swamp was larger than its correspondent on Toril, we should expect the forest to be likewise. Two days and we should reach the plains. From there, three or four more days to reach whatever passes for Starmantle on this plane. Let's move."
Having a goal lent them speed, and they made rapid progress through the brooding woods.
That night, they made camp under the enshrouding boughs of a shadow-willow. They started a fire but the night remained chilly, the light still dim. Alien sounds filled the forest-squeals, roars, and the ubiquitous howling. Cale couldn't sleep. Despite the day's exertion, despite his fatigue, rest would not come. In his mind's eye, he kept seeing that dragon-that enormous, majestic, terrifying creature, enshrouded in souls-lowering its head in respect.
Looking up through a break in the leaves, he stared at the featureless black sky.
What have you done to me? he thought to Mask, but immediately answered his own question with: What have I done to myself?
Sephris had named him the First of Five. So too had the caretaker at the Fane of Shadows, and the shadow dragon. He didn't know what that meant. He felt exhilarated and disquieted all at once.
Riven and Jak slept nearby under one of Magadon's tents. Moving quietly and slowly so as not to wake them, Cale rolled over on his side and removed the starsphere from his pack. The map of the celestial heavens had started the whole recent chain of events. To his surprise, Cale saw that it had become a featureless orb of gray quartz, where before it had been an image of Toril's night sky, flecked with diamonds, emeralds, and other gemstones. He wondered if the sphere changed its appearance depending upon the plane in which it found itself. Perhaps it changed on each plane to show the time at which the Fane of Shadows would next appear there. If true, the blank sphere in his hands told Cale that the Fane never materialized on the Plane of Shadow. The Shadow Deep was the source of its magic, but it never manifested there. The Fane reserved its pollution for the realms of light.
For an instant, he felt a temptation to hurl the sphere into the woods, to leave it there forever, but he resisted. It had done what it was designed to do.
Two and two are four, he thought.
He slid it back into his pack, shaking his head. He could not figure it all out, but he decided then and there that he would keep the sphere for the purpose for which he had first intended: as a memento of his former master and lost friend, Thamalon Uskevren.
Knowledge you seek, said the caretaker in his head.