He charged, and Rivalen did not even move. Cale crosscut with Weaveshear, but the blade rang against the shadows swirling around Rivalen as if they were made of steel. Rivalen grabbed Cale by the face with one hand, spoke a word of power, and discharged unholy energy from his palm. Ordinarily the shadowstuff in Cale allowed him to resist the effects of magic, but not when the magic came from the hand of a god.
Pain pulled a muffled scream from Cale. His skin blistered and popped. Bones cracked. Casually Rivalen cast him aside. Cale hit the stone of plaza in a heap, rolling over, groaning while the shadowstuff in his body undid the damage Rivalen’s spell had caused.
“I wasn’t sure I’d see you again, Cale,” Rivalen said. “I didn’t know if your son would succeed. It’s good that he did, though. You’ve arrived here alive only to die.”
Rivalen grabbed Orsin and Gerak by their cloaks and lifted them in one hand, then grabbed Vasen in the other. He carried them all toward Shar’s eye, and Cale feared he would throw them into the eye.
Cale rolled over, gritting his teeth at the pain, and rose to all fours. The shadowstuff in him reknit his bones, closed the blisters on his skin. He watched Rivalen toss the three men on the cobblestones, near the prone man.
Cale rose, stepped through the shadows, and materialized behind Rivalen with Weaveshear raised for a decapitating strike. Rivalen turned, a contemptuous expression on his face, and intercepted the strike with his bare hand. It didn’t even cut his flesh. He tore the weapon from Cale’s grasp and tossed it aside.
Cale growled, lunged forward, drove the top of his head into the bridge of Rivalen’s nose.
He might as well have struck a stone wall. Rivalen sneered, grabbed Cale by the throat, and lifted him from his feet.
“You’re just a man, Cale. These events are beyond you.”
Cale gagged, choked, kicked Rivalen in the chest, but the blows did nothing. Rivalen, too, was beyond him.
“Listen to the words of your son,” Rivalen said.
Rivalen kneeled, still holding a struggling Cale at arm’s length, and touched Vasen.
Vasen’s eyes snapped open, widened when he saw Rivalen and Cale. He reached for a blade, but his scabbard was empty. Rivalen grabbed him by the arm, pulled him upright, and slammed him down by the figure hunched before Shar’s eye.
“Read it,” Rivalen commanded. “You came here to read it, didn’t you?”
Vasen looked back at him, at Cale, his eyes glowing yellow in the shadows.
“You thought I didn’t know why you came? You think I didn’t know Mask’s plan? I knew all along. I knew it all. You gambled everything to come here and read the Leaves. So let’s hear it read.”
Rivalen shook Cale as he spoke. Cale, unable to breathe, started to see sparks. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, and at the end of it was his son.
“Read it!” Rivalen said. “Read it aloud.”
Magic infused the phrases, turning the command into a compulsion.
Vasen turned and in a slow monotone began to read the words written on the back of the hunched figure, the words of The Leaves of One Night.
Rivalen shook Cale again. “Listen. Hear what your son says, Cale.”
Compelled by Rivalen’s spell, Vasen uttered blasphemous words dictated by Shar herself. The sound made Cale wince, hurt his ears. As Vasen intoned the black syllables, Shar’s eye began to spin faster. It emitted an unsettling, discordant hum.
Desperately, Cale kicked and punched at Rivalen, blows that would have left a human insensate or dead but that had no effect on Rivalen. Cale could scarcely breathe. He was fading.
He had to get away. Before he lost consciousness, he let himself feel the shadows around him, in the plaza. He grasped at them, pulled them around him, and rode them across the plaza, to the darkness behind a fallen sculpture. He collapsed there, gasping, blinking. Darkness leaked from his skin. The shadowstuff in him began to heal the damage Rivalen had done to his windpipe.
He peeked around the statue to see Rivalen with his arms held out, shouting into the dark sky. “Watch then, Cale! Watch as your son ushers in the end! There’s no moment of weakness written in the Leaves! I’ve read it! Do you hear me? There’s only her moment of triumph! Do you hear, Cale! Do you!”
Shar’s eye expanded, spun faster, and the hum turned to a roar like rough surf. The ground of the plaza began to vibrate. For all Cale knew, all of Toril might have been vibrating. The power emanating from the eye charged the air. Little balls of lightning exploded all over the place. Acrid smoke mixed with the shadows, all of it an echo of a world Cale had once visited, a world destroyed by Shar.
He’d survived his own death only to watch the world die.
Riven regained his bearings in moments. He let divine power explode outward from him in all directions. The force of it blew the devils a spear cast away from him, like dry leaves in an angry wind. He stood, shadows coiled around him, and faced Mephistopheles.
The archfiend alit on the battlefield twenty paces from Riven, his eyes glowing red with hate, his hands aglow with power, his wings beating a slow promise of Riven’s death.
“Couldn’t wait any longer, eh?” Riven said, his tone mocking. He sheathed his sabers. “Overreached, did you? Asmodeus has grown unhappy with his lapdog, eh?”
Mephistopheles’s brow furrowed in anger. “You know nothing, mortal, and you don’t deserve the power you stole. You don’t even know how to use it. It’s right that I tear it from your flesh while you scream.”
Riven sneered, shadows boiling around him in an angry cloud. “That’s a high-pitched bark you have, lap dog. Yap, yap.”
Mephistopheles roared, beat his wings, and bounded toward Riven. Power crackled around the archfiend, buckling the earth as the archfiend closed in.
Riven waited, waited, braced himself, and at the last moment threw himself at Mephistopheles. Instead of dodging the archfiend’s grasp, he clutched Mephistopheles’s hands in his own. The two of them spun, each gripping the other, vying for advantage. Dark power surged into Riven, blistered his skin. He grimaced against the pain, the shadows whirling around man and devil darkening, deepening.
“Hey,” Riven said through the pain.
Mephistopheles looked into his face, a question in his red eyes.
Riven sneered. “Let’s go for a ride.”
The shadows turned black as ink and pulled both of them across the plains and to Ordulin.
Chapter Fifteen
Abruptly the sound emitted from Shar’s eye changed pitch to a hungry whine. Vasen continued to recite the words of The Leaves of One Night. He spoke the words only slowly-he was resisting Rivalen’s compulsion-but the spell forced him to speak the unspeakable, them clearly, loudly.
Rivalen cocked his head, as if listening for something far off. “Here they come at last,” he said, and faded into the shadows. A churning cloud of deep shadow formed in the plaza, sparking with energy, and out of it tumbled Riven and Mephistopheles. Shadows and baleful energy swirled around devil and man. They gripped each other by the hands, shadows and unholy power sizzling between their palms as they struggled.
Mephistopheles roared, beat his wings, and shoved Riven back, the effort raising veins and sinew in the black skin of his chest and arms. Riven stumbled backward. Mephistopheles extended his arms and shot a column of swirling hellfire from his palms. It burned through the shadows that protected Riven, slammed into his chest, and drove him backward, his cloak and flesh charring. Riven rolled out of the path of flames, grimacing against the pain, and put a hand to his temple.
“Riven!” Cale shouted, and started to draw the shadows around him.
Riven looked at him sharply and Cale felt the weight of his gaze, the power in his regard.