Troy Denning - The Sentinel

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“You’ve already experienced it,” Joelle said. “When Malik showed you the Eye, first you saw a rock. Then, after a moment, you glimpsed its true nature-I saw the horror in your face.”

“That felt like magic to me,” Kleef said. “ Dark magic.”

“What did you expect?” Joelle countered. “That’s how it feels to have a god look at you. Terrifying and magical and mysterious.”

“Maybe,” Kleef said. If there was one thing twenty years of night duty on the Watch had taught him, it was to be suspicious of ready explanations. And Joelle was trying to recruit him-he couldn’t forget that. “Let’s say Big Bone Deep really exists, and that you and Malik actually raided this hidden temple and lived to tell about it.”

Joelle looked hurt. “You don’t believe me?”

“I have a suspicious mind,” Kleef said. “I still don’t see what’s so important about a big ball of quartz.”

Joelle’s smile grew frosty-and Kleef felt crushed.

“I thought I explained that.” Joelle paused, then continued in a tone that suggested she found Kleef a little slow. “The Eye of Gruumsh is a ‘quartz ball’ only in its physical aspect. In its divine aspect, it’s a center of power-the medium through which Gruumsh perceives all of Abeir-Toril.”

“And that’s why you and Malik had to steal it?” Kleef asked, not quite sure why he suddenly felt the need to prove he was smarter than Joelle seemed to think. “To protect the world from orcs?”

Joelle looked confused for a moment. “I suppose ‘protecting’ is how you would perceive our task,” she said. “But it’s more complicated than that. It’s not the orcs we’re trying to stop, and we didn’t actually steal the Eye-at least not the divine one. Luthic gave it to us.”

“Luthic?” Kleef asked. “Gruumsh’s mate?”

“The goddess of caves,” Joelle corrected. “Why do men always assume that when a female beds a male, she becomes his property and loses her identity?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Kleef’s reply came without hesitation, for he had questioned enough scofflaws to know when someone was trying to rattle him. “Why would Luthic give you her mate’s only eye?”

Joelle studied him for a time, then spoke in a soft voice. “There’s no need to make this into an interrogation, Kleef. I’m happy to tell you everything.”

“Thanks,” Kleef said, not changing his tone at all. “Why would Luthic give you her mate’s only eye?”

Joelle sighed. “It’s a gift.”

“For you?” Kleef glanced aft toward Malik. The little bug-eyed man had Elbertina trapped against the port bulwark, engaging her in a conversation she was obviously too polite to end. “Or for Malik?”

“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.”