Still sniffing, the creature got to its hind legs and put distended hands on the tree, as if it would climb. Its tiny eyes, nearly invisible in the flabby folds of its face, started to work their way up the tree trunk.
Gerak tried to shrink into himself, tried to find calm, and failed at both. He moved his hand slowly, so slowly, for his quiver.
As his fingers closed on the fletching, the creature froze, cocked its head, and gave a curious grunt. It dropped back to all fours. An eager snort escaped it, and its sniffing took on a note of urgency. It scrabbled around the bole of the tree, moved away a couple paces, its face to the wet earth. When it reached the pheasants-the pheasants Gerak had dropped in his panic-it let out a roar of pleasure and seized both in its sausage-like fingers, then began shoving them into its mouth, feathers, bones, and all.
The wet slobbering and satisfied grunts of the creature, together with the wet cracking of the bird carcasses, made Gerak nauseous. Still, he took the opportunity to pull an arrow, nock it, and draw. He sighted at the back of the creature’s thick neck, figuring he could sever the spine if not kill it outright. Something on its neck caught his eye: a leather lanyard, like a necklace. He hesitated, struck by the oddness of its presence. The creature bounded a few steps away, perhaps searching for more pheasant, and its movement took it clear of Gerak’s firing line. The boughs of the broadleaf blocked the shot.
Moving slowly, his eyes fixed on the wrinkles of the creature’s neck; he shifted his position. The limb creaked under his feet. The creature’s head jerked up, wide nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air. Gerak froze awkwardly, the muscles of his calf already starting to scream. Sweat oozed from his pores. He still did not have a good shot. He might have to just risk shifting position again.
The creature growled, a deep wet sound. The tone of it, calculating, suspicious, put Gerak’s hair on end.
He’d get only one shot, if that. He sighted along the arrow’s shaft, waited for the creature to move into position.
It held its head cocked, lank hair spilling to the side. It was listening. It shifted on its weight, its feet sinking into the soft earth.
A single loud pop from the right-the wet wood from Gerak’s distant fire, caused the creature to snort and Gerak to start. The creature roared and tore off in the direction of Gerak’s camp, the stumps of its feet puckering the sod as it went.
Gerak did not hesitate. The moment the creature disappeared into the night, he dropped from the tree, bow in hand, and ran in the opposite direction of the camp until he reached a natural ditch. He slid into it, soaking his clothes in mud and organic stink-it would help mask his smell-and remained still.
The creature’s roars carried across the plains. A shower of sparks went up from the area of the campsite, the creature’s form a frenzied silhouette in the dim light of the floating embers. It was destroying the camp.
He cursed, thinking of his lost gear, thinking of Elle’s locket still sitting in the pocket of his cloak.
The creature rampaged through his camp for a time and then the plains once more fell silent. To be safe, Gerak waited another half hour, cold and shivering. All remained quiet. He crept out of the ditch and ran in a crouch for the campsite.
He didn’t care about anything there except Elle’s locket.
Brennus stood in the doorway of his scrying chamber. A tarnished, solid silver scrying cube, two paces wide on each side, situated in the center of the round vaulted room. Shadows curled around the cube in thin wisps. The dim light of the Tears of Selune, their glow diffused by the shadowed air of Sakkors enclave, gleamed feebly through the vaulted, glassteel roof.
His homunculi, tiny twin constructs made from dead flesh and Brennus’s own blood, climbed down his robes from their usual perch on his shoulders and pelted across the chamber ahead of him. They took turns tripping each other, clambering over one another in their haste, a chaotic ball of leathery gray skin, thin limbs, high-pitched expletives, and squeals of outrage.
Smiling, Brennus followed them until he stood before the cube. In his hand he held his dead mother’s platinum necklace. He’d found it a hundred years earlier, and plumbing its mystery had been his obsession ever since. Her ghost haunted his thoughts, her voice whispering two words in his mind over and over.
Avenge me.
Again and again over the decades he returned to his scrying cube, his divinations, seeking a way, any way, to make his brother, Rivalen, pay for the murder of their mother. But always the exercise ended in frustration. Rivalen was too powerful for Brennus to confront.
Brennus had caught hints of a plan by Mask to foil Shar-and anything that hurt Shar would also hurt Rivalen-but they remained only hints. He couldn’t see how things fit together. He’d thought for a long time that Erevis Cale’s son by Varra would play some role, but the son had seemingly vanished from the multiverse. Brennus had watched Varra, pregnant with the boy, disappear from the forest meadow and he’d never been able to locate her. One hundred years had passed since then. Varra and the child would be dead by now. He thought all of it might have some connection to the mysterious Abbey of the Rose, a temple to Amaunator supposedly hidden somewhere in the Thunder Peaks. After all, Erevis Cale had been allied with worshipers of Amaunator at the Battle of Sakkors. But Brennus had never been able to divine the location of any temple in the Thunder Peaks, and now he wondered if the Abbey of the Rose wasn’t a myth.
So, with nothing else to go on, Brennus was reduced to compulsively spying on his brother, waiting and hoping for an opportunity, a moment of vulnerability, that he suspected would never come.
“Look now?” asked his homunculi, their two voices synchronous.
“Yes.”
The homunculi squeaked with delight and clambered up his cloak, their tiny claws snagging but not harming the magical fabric. They took their usual station, one on each of his shoulders, bookends to his head.
“Show, show,” they said.
Brennus put a hand on the smooth, cool face of the scrying cube and uttered the words to a divination. Goaded by the magic, the smears of tarnish began a slow swirl. Abruptly the face of the cube took on dimension, depth. The swirls and whorls of black constituted themselves into recognizable shapes.
“The dark city,” the homunculi said, their tones hushed.
“Ordulin,” Brennus said. “But it hasn’t been a city for a long time.”
Maps called it the Maelstrom, and not even the Lords of Shade set foot within it. None save one.
The scrying cube showed Ordulin from high above. The dark, miasmic air around the ruined city made everything look dull, diffuse, cloudy pigments on a surreal painting. Once-grand buildings lay in shattered heaps, the broken bones of a broken city. Streaks of green lightning split the sky from time to time, ghastly veins of light that cast the ruins in viridian light. Shadows formed and dissipated in the air, wisps of reified darkness.
Undead flitted among the bleak ruins: specters, living shadows, ghosts, wraiths, hundreds of them, thousands, the glow of their eyes like a sky of baleful stars. The hole in the center of the maelstrom-the hole his brother and his brother’s goddess, Shar, had created when they’d loosed the Shadowstorm on Sembia- drew undead the way a corpse drew flies. Ordulin was a graveyard, haunted by its past and ruled by Brennus’s brother, who had murdered their mother.
He held up a hand and intoned a refinement to the scrying ritual. The homunculi mimed his gesture, murmuring nonsense syllables.
The perspective in the face of the cube changed and the arcane eye of the divination streaked toward the blasted ground, wheeled through the shattered stone and wood, and stopped in the center of the ruins, at the edge of what once was a large, open plaza. Chunks of weathered statuary and jagged blocks of a fallen citadel lay scattered across the cracked flagstones, monuments to destruction.