Midnight's Mask by Paul S. Kemp
The last thing he saw before he passed out from the agony was the sun emerging fully from behind Selüne’s tear.
Cale awoke. He lay on his back on the beach, broken, twisted, in agony. His chest felt heavy; blood was filling his lungs. His arms and shoulders were shattered, immovable. The pain nearly caused him to lose consciousness but he held on doggedly. The sun was directly overhead. No shadows lay anywhere near him. His shade flesh could not regenerate in the direct light of the sun. He would be dead soon, long before the sun set.
He listened to the surf, watched in amazed horror as the Sojourner’s cracked moon grew larger in the sky. Without the spell to hold it in place, it was plummeting toward Toril. He could not imagine the destruction it would wreak. He thought of Tazi, of Varra. He hung on to the memory of their faces. He wondered if Tazi was watching the sky fall.
Beside him, the Sojourner’s broken body smoked and burned until it was nothing more than ash. The surf washed the ashes into the sand, pulled at scraps of robes, trying to draw them out to sea.
The moon caught fire as it fell, grew a long tail of flame. Its size quickly doubled as it approached. Cale could hear it pelting through the sky, sizzling.
It would destroy kingdoms.
He thought of Jak, of Sephris, and closed his eyes.
He snapped them open when an explosion thundered across the sky.
Selüne’s tear had separated into five large chunks, each cutting a flaming path through the sky. Even as he watched, those chunks broke apart into smaller pieces, and those into smaller. Soon, thousands of tiny pieces of the tear blazed their way through the heavens.
He smiled, laughed, choked on his own blood.
It was beautiful.
Consciousness started to slip from him again. He sank into an oblivion of pain, watching a swarm of fireflies dart across the sky.
He awoke an indeterminate time later to the sound of boots crunching against the sand. Someone stood over him, a dark form—Riven.
“We split up to find you,” Riven said. The assassin stared down at him but did not move to help. Riven shaded his eyes and looked up at the sun. “Light’s bothering you, eh?”
The assassin looked down at Cale, his expression hard. Cale saw Riven’s internal debate writ clear in the hard set of his jaw, the hole of his eye. Riven could kill Cale; the Second could kill the First.
The surf beat against the sand. Cale and Riven stared at each other, saying nothing. The silence stretched.
Cale tried to speak but his dry throat could not form words. He managed only a defiant snarl before pain assailed him and his vision went black. He fought his way back to consciousness. He would look Riven in the eye when he died.
When he regained focus, he saw that Riven had drawn his blade. The assassin gave a hard smile and jabbed downward.
Not at Cale, at the remains of the Sojourner’s robes.
“He didn’t like the sun much either, I see.”
Riven laughed harshly, kneeled, and retrieved a handful of items from the pile of ash and bones that had been the Sojourner. He pocketed them as he stood. Cale assumed they were the magical stones that had circled the Sojourner’s head.
Riven stood over him again, blade bare. He cocked his head to the side, considering. Finally, he sighed and said, “Look where we are, Cale. Look what we’ve become.” He stepped around Cale until his body shielded Cale from the sun.
The darkness energized Cale. Covered in Riven’s shadow, Cale’s flesh began to regenerate. Bones and organs slowly reknit. Agonizing jabs of pain coursed through his body. He could not contain a hiss of pain. Riven stood by and watched it all in silence, like a Sembian wallman—a bodyguard—of old. Riven was Cale’s wallman, his right hand.
When Cale’s wounds had healed enough to allow him to stand, he climbed to his feet. He and Riven stared at each other for a moment.
Cale nodded his thanks. Riven nodded in acknowledgement. They did not need to say anything more.
“Let’s find Mags,” Cale said, squinting uncomfortably in the sun. “There’s one more thing left to do.”
“Fleet,” Riven said, nodding. Cale was surprised to see Riven’s expression soften as he spoke Jak’s name.
“Yes,” Cale said.
“He won’t do it,” Riven said.
The assassin did not need to say whom he meant by “he,” or what he meant by “it.”
“He will,” Cale said. “I’ll make him.”
Together, Cale, Riven, and Magadon entered the Sojourner’s tower. As they walked the halls, Cale noticed for the first time the images on the defaced murals. He noticed too the jawless skull motif that appeared on some of the door handles.
“This was a temple to Cyric,” he said. “Or at least part of a temple.”
Riven nodded and rubbed the black disc he wore on a chain around his neck. “That was why he did it, Cale. He arranged all of this to spite Cyric. To steal one of the Dark Sun’s temples for his own.”
Cale did not credit Mask as being that skillful a schemer. He said, “Or maybe he just got lucky. Either way, he did not do it—we did. He owes us.”
To that, Riven said nothing.
They made a pilgrimage to Jak through the curving corridor. Riven and Magadon had placed Jak’s body on the floor in a small, unused chamber off the central corridor on the second floor. The room bore no sign of having been used in Cyric’s rites.
A wool blanket covered Jak up to his chin. He looked as if he were sleeping. Seeing his friend’s body reopened the scab of Cale’s grief. He donned his mask to cover his tears.
He sat on the floor next to his friend but did not touch him. After a moment, he reached under the blanket and took Jak’s hand in his. The little man’s hand was cold, rigid. Emotion flooded Cale.
“You owe me this,” he said to the vaulted ceiling, to Mask. He raised his voice. “You owe me this!”
The Shadowlord had asked him again and again to sacrifice, and again and again he had—his family, his blood, his humanity, and his best friend. It was too much. He wanted repayment.
“Do you hear me?” His voice rang off the ceiling. “You owe me. And now you are going to pay.”
It was not midnight but Cale nevertheless bowed his head, closed his eyes, and began to pray. Not for multiple spells, as was typical, but for a single spell. A spell that would bring Jak back from the dead. He knew it was possible. He had heard tales.
He sent his thoughts, his need to save his friend, flying through the planes to Mask. He knew the god heard him. He had to have heard him.
No response.
Cale’s anger grew. He demanded that Mask listen, demanded that he answer.
Nothing came. Jak lay beside him, limp and cold.
A hand on his shoulder—Magadon’s.
“Erevis …” the guide began.
Cale shook the guide’s hand free. “No. No, dammit, Mags. He’s going to answer me.” He looked up and shouted, “You will give me this or I walk away from you forever. And if I do that, I swear on the soul of my best friend that I will hunt down and kill every one of your priests that I can find. Every godsdamned one! And I’ll be able to find a lot. You’ve given me too much. Trained me too well. No one will be able to stop me. No one.” He looked back over his shoulder to Riven.
The assassin stared at him, nodded.
Cale turned back. “No one will stop us.”
He waited.
Nothing.
He waited longer, growing increasingly angry.
“Have it your way,” he said softly, and started to stand. He would start in Sembia, then Cormyr, then the rest of the Heartlands, then—
Knowledge filled his brain, knocked him back to his knees—the words to a prayer that performed the greatest of miracles. It could bring the dead back to life.
He felt a surge, could not contain a fierce grin.
“I can do it,” he said to the room. “He’s answered.”
Cale put his palms on Jak’s chest and recite
Jak sat at the table of his mother’s cottage, listening to the chatter of his family, inhaling the warm smells of his mother’s cooking. He could not stop smiling.
“You’ll fill your bowl more than that, Jakert Fleet,” said his mother, while she buttered a piece of flatbread. “Look at you. You’re a bag of bones. Eat. Eat.”
“Yes, mother,” Jak said. He knew better than to dispute his mother at the table.
As usual, his father offered him a consoling smile but said nothing.
“Pass the honey,” Jak said to his brother.
Cob made as though he would throw a dripping honeycomb down to Jak, but his mother said, “Cobdon Fleet, if that comb leaves so much as a drop on my new tablecloth, not even Yolanda Warmhearth will be able to spare you my wrath.”
Cob froze in mid throw and said sheepishly, “I was just funning Jak, mother.”
“Of course you were, dearheart,” his mother said, and took a small bite of her buttered bread. “Now put that comb back on its plate and pass the plate to your brother.”
Cob did exactly that and Jak grinned at his brother’s discomfiture. Jak dribbled honey from the comb onto a piece of bread and took a bite. It was as sweet as he remembered. Probably his father—a beekeeper—had taken it from one of his hives that morning. When Jak had been a boy, Mal Fleet’s apiary and the honey it produced had provided well for his family. Of course, it also had resulted in more stings to the Fleet boys than Jak cared to recall. Still, he had long missed his father’s honey at table, and his mother’s soup. It was good to be home.
He set to his mother’s potato soup, dunking his honeyed bread in the bowl between spoonfuls. His mother sat at the head of the table and looked on with approval.
“The soup is wonderful, moth—”
From outside, somewhere in the distance, he heard someone call his name. He could not quite place the voice—a friend’s voice, he knew, but the name escaped him.
“Did you hear that?” he asked his brother, his father.
All of them kept their heads down.
Cob spoke around a mouthful of soup. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Nor I,” said his father, soaking his bread in honey. His mother always said of his father that if his nature had been as sweet as his sweet tooth, he could have married better. “There is not better,” had always been his father’s reply, and it had always earned him a smile from his wife.
“Eat your food, Jak,” said his mother.
The voice called him again.
Jak pushed back his chair and rose. “There it is again.”
Power filled Cale. He had never before cast a spell so demanding. His entire body shook. Sweat poured from him.
But it was working.
A rosy glow suffused Jak’s body. The wound in his throat closed to a pink scar, to unmarred skin; the bruises on his arms and face healed. The spell remade his flesh, providing a complete and whole vessel for the returning soul. The spell then created a conduit between Jak’s body and whatever plane to which his soul had traveled, opening a door that otherwise always remained closed. Cale put himself in the door, held it open, and called Jak’s name.
Cale’s voice grew in volume until it boomed, reverberated through the room, carried from the Sojourner’s tower into the planes. He called Jak’s name, trying to pull his soul back from its rest to re-inhabit his body.
“Jak!”
An unwelcome memory surfaced—Sephris Dwendon, changed after his forced resurrection, filled with bitterness. The memory of Jak’s words surged back to Cale. When I’m dead, leave me that way.
Cale’s voice faltered.
Was he doing the right thing? Was he acting to help Jak or satisfy his own desire to have Jak back? He did not like what he thought was the answer. But Jak had told him that friends, not places, were home, and Cale needed him.
His doubt caused the spell to start to unravel.
He remembered Sephris’s bitter words, his admission that he had returned only out of a sense of duty. Jak would do the same. Cale could not bear to think of an embittered Jak.
Tears of guilt flowed down his face. He controlled the sob that threatened to burst from his throat.
He realized that he could not ask Jak to return. He would not. Wherever Jak was, that was home now.
He ceased the invocation and the power went out of him. He put his hand on Jak’s forehead.
“Goodbye, my friend.”
He reached into one of Jak’s pouches, took his ivory-bowled pipe, and put it in a pouch at his own belt. He would keep the smell of Jak’s pipeweed near to him—always.
Jak cocked his head and listened. The call did not repeat. For a reason he could not explain, profound sadness struck him. He had lost something, he knew. But he did not know what.
“Finish your soup, son,” said his father. “You’re free to stay now.”
Jak did not know what that meant and his father did not explain. His father smiled and said, “Cob and I have taken care of the hives for the day. We can all go fishing at dusk, if you’d like. There’s pond nearby, stuffed with longfin.”
That sounded grand to Jak. The sadness diminished in the glow of his family’s love. He sat back down at the table with his family and ate his mother’s soup.
Magadon, Cale, and Riven stood looking at one another in a central chamber of the tower.
“What now?” Magadon said at last.
“I will take Jak and you both back,” Cale said. “I have some things I need to do.”
Magadon nodded.
“I’m staying,” Riven said.
“Why?” Magadon asked.
“There are things I need to do also,” Riven answered.
Cale looked around the temple, once Cyric’s, now Mask’s, and understood.
“This has only just begun,” Riven said to Cale. “You realize that?”
Cale thought of Sephris, of the Source’s call across Faerûn. He nodded. He knew that Mask was not through with them yet. But for now, he had his own matters to address.
“You can leave Jak here,” Riven said. “With me. You’ll have a reason to come back.”
Cale looked Riven in the eye. He thought again of Jak’s words to him on the streets of Selgaunt—friends are home.
He nodded. “You’ll see to him?”
Cale could not put Jak’s body in the ground, could not be there when it happened.
“I will,” Riven said.
Cale looked Riven in the face. Riven returned the stare.
The moment stretched. As one they stepped forward and embraced, briefly. A warriors’ farewell.
Cale stepped back, pulled the shadows around him, and said, “Let’s go, Mags.”
EPILOGUE
The surf roared far below them. The foam dancing in the shoals was barely visible in the pre-dawn light. A cool breeze rustled Cale’s cloak. The glow from a cluster of lights far up the coast could only be Urlamspyr, one of Sembia’s largest cities. Cale had never seen it. Perhaps now he would. He had no reason to return to Selgaunt. He had no reason to do anything.
Varra looked around, unable to see much in the darkness but the fading stars. Cale had convinced her to let him temporarily take her from Skullport. He could not yet commit to a we—he agreed with Riven that Mask was not done with them—but he wanted to do something for her, and at least for the moment, he did not want to be alone.
“It’s been a long while since I’ve seen the sky,” she said, her voice soft.
“I know,” Cale replied. He held Jak’s pipe in his fist.
She must have heard the tightness in his voice, the barely controlled grief. He did not seem able to make it go away.
“What’s wrong, Vasen?” she asked. She did not touch him.
For a moment, he could not speak. Finally, he said, “I lost my best friend recently.”
He was not certain how long ago it had been. One day seemed to bleed into another.
She stared at h
Quiet lay between them. Only the surf spoke.
Cale looked straight ahead, out on the whitecaps of the Inner Sea. He felt Varra looking at him, staring at him. He wondered what she was thinking. Cale still did not know why he had returned to her rather than Tazi, rather than staying with Magadon in Starmantle. They had shared little; they had exchanged only a few sentences. Still, he felt … drawn to her. He supposed everyone needed someone to whom they could confess.
“Tell me something about yourself,” she said, and he thought she had read his mind.
“Like what?”
She did not hesitate. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.”
Cale’s heart thumped hard in his chest. He still did not look at her.
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Yes, I do. Tell me.”
He swallowed and turned to look at her. Her expression contained no judgment. He held her gaze. She waited, saying nothing.
“I’ve killed men for no reason other than coin,” he said, and once he started, he could not stop. “Lots of men. I’ve killed many others for what I thought were good reasons. I serve a god who lives in the dark and now I think the dark lives in me. I’ve spent almost the entirety of my adult life doing violence. I’ve had only two close friends.” The admission pained him distantly, but it was true. “Both of them are dead now.” His voice broke but he recovered and finished. “I’ve done many, many evil things in my life. And now I’m alone.”
She stared at him in silence with such sympathy in her brown eyes that he could not hold back tears—tears for Jak, for Thamalon, for himself, for everything. He squeezed the ivory-bowled pipe and put it back into his vest pocket.
She reached up and touched his face. “Oh, Vasen….
He turned his face away from her and stared out at the sea. He gulped down the knot in his throat.
“Call me Erevis. Erevis Cale. Vasen Coriver died a long time ago.”