"Run, you whoresons!" he shouted, and advanced on the slavers. "This ship is ours!"
Those who were not still enspelled turned and fled for the ship's boat. Cale slammed his pommel into the heads of those still under the mind-muddling effect of Jak's spell. They fell to the deck, dead or unconscious.
Let them go, Cale projected to Magadon, as perhaps six slavers worked to lower the ship's boat from its rigging. They had it lowered within a few breaths and all of them leaped over the side and scrambled into it. They cursed their conquerors as they rowed away. They would die or not on the sea. Cale did not care.
The ship was quiet.
Cale and Jak stood on a deck littered with corpses, a handful of unconscious slavers, and the still-enspelled helmsman. Jak called on the Trickster and healed himself with a prayer. Cale let his flesh repair the wounds he had suffered.
They watched with disbelieving smiles as Magadon descended from the crow's nest. Just to be certain that Magadon was Magadon, Cale spoke the prayer that empowered him to see magical auras. Magadon showed no aura, though his bow and several of his arrows glowed in Cale's sight. The guide was himself.
Cale and Jak met him at the bottom of the mast, full of questions.
"I felt you die," Jak said.
Cale took the guide by the shoulders and shook him. "As did I. Or so I thought."
"A play," the guide said and smiled. "Riven wanted the slaadi to believe he killed me, so I projected a false sensation to you two and to them."
The guide let the words register with Cale and Jak.
"Riven?" Jak said. "A play?"
"Why?" Cale asked. "If he's with us, why not just help us kill the slaadi here and now? We could have done it had he not interfered."
Magadon looked at Cale and answered, "I asked him the same thing. He said Mask wanted it this way, that Mask wanted the slaadi to escape. This time. He said you would understand."
Cale considered that, finally gave a slow nod. He did understand. The Shadowlord had an agenda that he had not yet seen fit to share with either his First or his Second. Riven was just doing what he thought Mask wanted. Cale had been on that path once.
"The Zhent's playing us," Jak said, and could not keep the hostility from his tone.
Cale knew that it was not Riven but Mask who was making the play.
Magadon shook his head. "I do not think so. I have a latent visual leech on him. He suggested it, so that we could follow. He said he would stay with the slaadi until the time was right. I believe him, Erevis. He's with us."
"Agreed," Cale said softly.
Jak shook his head and muttered, "That Zhent has more angles than a prism. I hope we know what we're doing."
Of course, Cale did not know what they were doing. Mask had directed Riven to help the slaadi escape Demon Binder. Cale could not imagine why.
CHAPTER 8
Vhostym prepared to leave his pocket plane. He knew that he would not return. He would send for the Weave Tap when the time arrived.
He felt no nostalgia over his departure. The place had served him well as an isolated location from which to put his plan into place, but its utility was at an end. And Vhostym retained nothing that did not have utility.
The binding spells with which he had confined the demons, devils, and celestials he used in his research would degrade over the coming centuries. Eventually, the creatures would be free to slaughter one another or to return to their home planes. Or not. Vhostym did not care what became of them. Their utility too was at an end.
In his mind, he cataloged the threescore spells he had spent the last few hours preparing. He inventoried components for the spells, checked the magical paraphernalia that adorned his person. He reached into a belt pouch and counted the twenty magical emeralds he had personally crafted to prepare for this night. They were all there, with the exception of the one he had provided to Azriim.
He was ready.
His ragged breath sounded loud and wet in his ears. He felt increasingly tired. The pain in his limbs, in his muscles, his bones, wracked him. He reached into his mind and diminished his brain's capacity to register painful sensations. The agony decreased but did not end. He endured it. His illness was advancing quickly, inexorably. He needed events to move just as quickly. He had only a little time remaining, and therefore none to waste.
From the extradimensional storage space within his robe pocket, he withdrew a fillet of jade. Rather than lift his arms to place it on his head-the motion would have caused him added pain-he instead took hold of it with his mind and floated it atop his brow. He then incanted the words to one of his most powerful transmutations, a spell that would allow him to take an incorporeal form. All of his items and components would accompany him into incorporeality, and would remain as solid to him as the real world would seem insubstantial.
When the magic took effect, his flesh tingled, its malleability palpable. He regretted that he would have to once more spend time in a form other than his natural body, but he was not yet prepared to set foot on the surface in his own flesh.
His body dissolved relative to the material world. His flesh, clothing, and spell components turned gray and insubstantial. The world around him lost color. A channel opened between his being and the Negative Material Plane-a necessary element of the spell-and a preternatural cold suffused him. He willed his body to stand on the chamber floor, though he could have floated through it had he wished.
The transformation did nothing to end his pain, which, like his equipment, had followed him into his ghostly form. But the new form did not have the sensitivity to light that was the congenital curse of Vhostym's material flesh.
He incanted another spell and turned invisible. Afterward, he cast again and teleported from his pocket plane to the surface of Faerun, to a mountainous region on the frontier of the realm of Amn.
He materialized where he intended, in a thicket of century-old ash trees, near the bottom of a tree-dotted, steep-sided mountain vale. Darkness shrouded the valley. Mountains walled him in, dark and ominous. A brook wound its way through the vale's trees.
Vhostym's form allowed him to see well even in darkness, allowed him to sense the lifeforces of the animals around him. The creatures perceived the negative energy of his form and cowered in their dens, instinctively terrified of him.
They were wise to be frightened, for he had death on his mind.
Neither Selune nor her tears were visible above the mountains, but a window of stars shone down from a cloudless sky. The wind stirred the ash leaves, but his form felt nothing but the pain of his illness. He longed to smell the air, feel the breeze.
Soon, he reminded himself.
Vhostym knew that a single, twisting pass behind him was the only nonmagical means of entering or exiting the vale. He knew too that mages and priests in service to Cyric kept the pass hidden with illusions and spell traps to protect the vale's secret-a tower hidden within the ash trees. Vhostym could mark the tower from where he stood only because he knew where to look.
The windowless, square spire of gray stone stood in the center of the vale, near the brook, barely visible through the trees. The crenellated top, silhouetted in the starlight, looked like a mouthful of broken teeth. Four soldiers armed with glaives and armored in mail stood watch on the ground before the temple. They were all human, so Vhostym assumed they must have some magical device that allowed them to see in the dark.
A raised drawbridge lay flat against the tower's face. The drawbridge did not rest at ground level, but about a troll's height up the wall. Vhostym knew that the double doors behind the drawbridge opened onto the second floor of the tower.
Vhostym floated forward through the trees, toward the tower, an invisible harbinger of doom. Nothing visible on the tower's exterior bespoke its dark purpose but Vhostym knew it to be a temple of Cyric the Dark Sun, one of two towers built in hidden vales in the Small Teeth, a mountain range that made up the southern border of Amn. Though a distance of a few leagues separated the two temples, a secret underground tunnel wormed under the mountains to link them.