“Malik is just the bearer,” Joelle clarified. She set the cloth aside, then began to fish through the sail-mending kit. “The Eye is for Luthic’s lover, Grumbar.”
“Luthic is mating with an earth primordial?” As much as Kleef found himself wanting to believe her, he was growing more skeptical by the moment. Affairs between gods, he could imagine. An affair between a goddess and an earth primordial … well, he didn’t want to imagine that. “Are you sure?”
Joelle looked up long enough to waggle her hand back and forth. “That’s how we Heartwarders perceive it.” She withdrew a hooked needle and a length of sail thread from the kit, then slipped them both in the bucket. “I suspect you Watchers might see the Eye differently-perhaps as a reward for her faithful protector.”
Kleef began to find the explanation a bit more reasonable. “What would Grumbar be protecting her from?”
Joelle shrugged. “From her mate, perhaps. Gruumsh is the god of savagery, after all.” She removed the needle and thread from the still-glimmering water, then added, “But I really wouldn’t know. As I said, that’s how you might see things.”
Kleef frowned. As a follower of Helm’s Law, he had a duty to protect the weak, and the vow was so deeply ingrained that he found himself clenching his teeth in outrage.
“How many ways are there to see this gift?” he asked.
“As many ways as there are faiths,” Joelle replied. “The important thing is that Malik and I are trying to stop the Mistress of the Night.”
“Shar?” Kleef asked. The longer Joelle talked, the stranger this supposed love triangle began to seem. “What does she have to do with Luthic and Gruumsh?”
“You’re forgetting Grumbar.” Joelle began to thread the needle, which had emerged from the water bucket as clean and shiny as a brand new one. “And Grumbar is the key to Shar’s plan.”
She began to close Kleef’s wounds. He watched her sew a cut above his knee for a moment, crisscrossing her stitches in a tight, uniform pattern. To his surprise, her work did not cause him much pain-only a little pressure as the needle pushed through the skin, then a little tugging as the thread was drawn through behind it.
After a moment, he said, “All right. Tell me about Shar’s plan. And maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”
“If you like.” Joelle finished stitching the first cut and moved to one on his thigh. “What do you know of the Cycle of Night?”
“Other than the name you just mentioned, nothing.”
“Then perhaps I won’t start at the very beginning.” Joelle spoke without looking up. “But, surely, you’ve noticed that Faerûn is in a time of great change.”
“Hard to miss,” Kleef said. He glanced back toward the now-distant harbor, where waves were breaking over a shoal of warehouses that had been submerged during the Great Rain. “It feels like the whole world is having a nightmare.”
“In a sense, it is,” Joelle said. “Abeir and Toril are separating.”
“So the doomsayers say.” Kleef had stood watch over enough street-corner sermons to know that most sages believed the world was really two worlds that had been separated at the dawn of time, and then forced back together in a great cataclysm of destructive magic a hundred years ago. “I won’t claim to know if they’re right.”
“Then you need to open your eyes and look at the world around you,” Joelle replied. “The earthmotes are falling, the plaguelands are vanishing, and even magic has returned to the old ways. The ground heaves and rolls like a restless sea, lakes freeze one day and boil the next, and Faerûn is at war from Mirabar to Al Qahara. How can you know all that and doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
“Because I don’t know all that,” Kleef said. “I know only what I’ve seen with my own eyes, inside the walls of Marsember.”
“But even that must be enough,” Joelle insisted. “I was in the city for less than a day, and I saw buildings shake like drunkards.”
“True enough,” Kleef said. With his own eyes, he had seen three different earthmotes plunge into the Dragonmere, and twice he had been nearly been knocked off his feet when the street suddenly writhed beneath his boots. “But even if the doomsayers are right, that doesn’t explain the wars. If the world is coming apart, why should so many people waste their last days fighting over it?”
Joelle shrugged. “Because mortals are the weapons of gods,” she said. “And the gods are fighting to control the world that comes after. That is certainly true of Malik and me-and if we fail, Faerûn will suffer for it. All Toril will suffer.”
“Because of Shar’s plan?” Kleef asked. “She’s causing the worlds to separate?”
Joelle shook her head. “Taking advantage of it, certainly. But what single god could sunder the worlds?” She waved her hand vaguely skyward, as if the shimmering heavens above could encompass all the upheaval that had seized Faerûn in the last two years. “Were Shar that powerful, the Cycle of Night would never have been stopped.”
“What is this Cycle of Night?” Kleef asked. He was starting to wonder how Joelle-or any mortal-could know all she claimed about the affairs of gods. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned it.”
Joelle stopped sewing and looked up. “Oblivion,” she said. “Shar is the Lady of Loss, and her appetite is insatiable. She feeds on her own divine children, and through them gains the strength to devour an entire world. Had her son Mask not tricked her, she would have swallowed all of Abeir-Toril.”
Kleef scowled. “As in, eaten?” he asked. “I’m not sure I believe-”
“You should,” Joelle interrupted. She went back to work, this time closing a cut on his wrist. “You have heard of the Ordulin Maelstrom, I am certain.”
“Who hasn’t?” Kleef said. Once the capital of Sembia, Ordulin had been destroyed a hundred years earlier by a follower of Shar. Since that time, a growing storm of rain and shadow had swirled around an ever-growing void at the heart of the ruins. “What are you saying, that the maelstrom is Shar’s mouth?”
“In a sense, yes,” Joelle said. “Had Mask not stopped her, the maelstrom would have continued to expand until Shar had devoured everything.”
A cold knot formed in the pit of Kleef’s stomach. It was a familiar sensation, the same one he always felt when he caught Tanner or Rathul or another of his men in a lie.
Taking care to keep an even voice, Kleef said, “I don’t see how that can be. Mask is dead.”
“No god is ever truly dead, so long as he lives in the heart of a single worshiper,” Joelle said. She looked up from the wound she was closing on Kleef’s forearm. “You should know that better than anyone else, Watcher.”
Kleef scowled, annoyed by her use of the name once given to Helm’s faithful. “Those are pretty words, but you won’t win my help through lies,” he said. “The Lurking Lord has been dead for a century.”
“And now he is back.” Joelle returned to her work. “As is Lathander, and no small number of other gods-perhaps even Helm.”
“If the Vigilant One has returned, he has not bothered to tell me about it.”
“Hasn’t he?” Joelle asked. She tied off a stitch, then looked up. “You are a fine swordsman. But had you truly been alone today, you could never have held that bridge-not for so long, against so many.”
“I had help,” Kleef replied. “The human kind.”
“Eventually,” Joelle said. “But we both know you should have been killed half a dozen times over before they arrived.”
Kleef thought back to the blue glow that had been shining from the agate in Watcher’s crossguard, then reluctantly nodded. “There may have been some magic,” he allowed. “But that doesn’t mean dead gods are rising.”
Joelle sighed in exasperation. “Then perhaps we should talk about what you will believe,” she said. “Now that Shar has been stopped from devouring the world-however that happened-she has a new plan.”