Paul Kemp - Shadowbred

"See! You do have a sense of humor. I knew it."

"Who took it?" Cale asked, and thought immediately of the answer. "Kesson Rel?"

Mask's smile disappeared and he nodded. "Kesson Rel. A most disappointing creature. Most disappointing."

"Why should I do it?" Cale asked.

"Do I have to say it? You will do it because you can do nothing else. Two and two are four and all that."

Cale considered. "Then you must do something for me."

"I have already granted you the satisfaction of wounding me."

"I want something more," Cale said.

"You have been too long among Sembians," Mask said. "You haggle even with your god."

Cale waited. Mask waved him on. Cale said, "Tell me where Magadon is."

Mask smiled and Cale saw the maliciousness in it. "If I tell you, you will not be able to save him, and others-many others-will suffer and die. Shall I tell you anyway? If I do not, I think you will learn it…" he smiled, "… in your own time. But Magadon will suffer in the meanwhile."

Cale stared into Mask's face. "You are a bastard."

"Yes," Mask said, and bowed. "Much more than you know. But not how you think. Shall I tell you where Magadon is?"

Cale considered, tempted, but shook his head. Magadon would not want others to suffer in his stead.

"No," he said.

"You still must give me your word," Mask said.

"You have it," Cale said absently.

Mask nodded. "Then I will give you this without additional charge: Magadon's fate is tied to Sembia's. Go back to Stormweather and help the Uskevren, as you planned. It will all lead back to Magadon, eventually, though you may not like where it ends up."

Cale said nothing.

"Done, then," Mask said, his tone satisfied.

Cale was struck by the fact that he had just bargained with a god as if he were a street vendor. Mask was not at all what he had expected. He seemed more man than god. He almost said as much, but thought better of it.

Mask grinned and tapped his temple. "I know what you are thinking, Erevis. But this is just flesh, just one of the… masks I wear when I move among mortals. Here, have a look behind."

Mask held his arms out wide, stripped away the flesh, and unveiled his divinity.

Cale stared into eternity. He saw, but did not comprehend a consciousness that extended back to the beginning of all. He lost himself in it. He could not breathe. His legs weakened. He was falling, falling…

Mask redonned his flesh. "Now you know."

Cale struggled to draw breath. He forced himself to keep his feet, though the alley was spinning. The awe had returned but Cale refused-refused-to abase himself before his god.

Mask smiled. "So stubborn, and so prideful. That is why I chose you, you know. That and… a few other reasons."

Mask's voice sounded far away. Cale feared he was losing consciousness.

Mask said, "In a few hours, this will start to fade. You will tell yourself it was just a dream, or a trick, or a vision. And maybe it was. But your promise stands. And when events start to speed ahead, remember that I did not create any of this. Others are responsible for it. I am just fiddling around the edges, responding to the inevitable. You do not understand now, but you will, a long time from now."

Cale vomited onto the alleyway and heaved until he had emptied his stomach. When he looked up, Mask was gone.

He spit to clear his mouth and reached back for the wall to steady himself.

He took some time to let his head and stomach settle. Something glinted on the ground: the fivestars he had tossed to Mask. Hadn't Mask taken them?

He needed time to think. His head felt muddled. He had just spoken with a god, looked into the unveiled face of the divine.

Hadn't he?

He stared at the coins, unsure. He left them where they lay and walked out of the alley onto the street.

Shadows cloaked him and Cale found comfort in their embrace. He walked the street in silence. The Shadowlord's words remained in his memory, as light as the fragments of a dream, as heavy as an anchor. Cale sensed the same fatalism in Mask's words that he had heard in Sephris's prophecies but refused to surrender to it. He might not be able to change what was coming, but he would fight his damnedest anyway. That was who he was.

The resolution centered him.

Charcoal street lamps dotted the wide, paved avenue, their fuel burning low. The flames danced in the salt-tanged, late autumn breeze that blew off the bay. Brick warehouses and wood-framed storerooms lined the street, one on top of the other, doors closed, windows dark. Livestock lowed or snorted softly in the stockyards. A few abandoned pullcarts and wagons dotted the pavement.

The dung sweepers were running late. Usually they had already cleaned the city's streets, but Cale smelled the day's waste lingering in the open gutters. He spotted transients sleeping in some of the alleys-more than he had remembered.

He knew that his return to Stormweather Towers would have to wait until dawn. He could not knock on the doors of a noble household three hours before daybreak. He decided to spend the time reacquainting himself with the city he once had called home.

Stepping through the shadows, covering blocks at a stride, he headed south and east, toward the center of the city. He crossed the old crumbling stone wall that symbolically separated transients from residents, and entered the Foreign District.

Inns, eateries, taverns, and equipment shops predominated, so many they made a rickety mob. Despite the late hour, a few merchants, teamsters, and caravaneers sat at tables inside the taverns. Smoke and hushed conversation leaked from the unshuttered windows. Here and there Cale noted the usual thugs, whores, and thieves, but the late hour made even those ragged folk look tired. He kept to the dark places and they did not notice him.

As had been true in the Warehouse District, a surprisingly large number of people slept in doorways or under the trees that dotted Selgaunt's roads. Some were the usual drunks but many were not. Cale had never seen the city so crowded. Everywhere he went he saw huddled forms in the streets, heard throaty coughs, smelled the stink of filthy streets.

He found the bazaar quiet but for the snores of peddlers sleeping in their carts and vendors sleeping in their stalls. His keen ears picked up a few murmured conversations that carried through the night but he ignored them.

He left the Foreign District and moved south, to the area near Temple Avenue that housed Selgaunt's artists, scholars, and wealthy merchants. The roads narrowed and the inns grew fewer, replaced by well-tended two-story residences and shops. Fewer people slept on the streets, but some were evident. A pair of city guardsmen, Selgaunt's Scepters, dressed in dark green weathercloaks and wrapped in mail, walked the streets with a lantern. They shone its light into alleys as they passed, shooed along any loiterers they found. Cale sank into the shadows as the Scepters drew near. Even in the light of the lantern, the two men passed him by without noticing, though he could have reached out and touched them.

"… in Ordulin," the shorter one said.

The other shrugged. "Endren Corrinthal? Well, who can say? Damned nobles…"

Their conversation drifted away as they continued their patrol. Cale walked through a plaza and got a clear view to the southeast, where the gray stone walls of the old Hulorn's Hunting Garden dominated the skyline. Glowballs and magical violet fires limned the walls. Peculiar statuary dotted the crenellations. The old hulorn's artistic tastes-he favored depictions of strange hybrid creatures such as manticores, chimerae, and others-had long been a subject of conversation in the city. Mad Andeth Ilchammar, he'd been called, and Cale thought the title fitting.

Cale realized that he did not know who currently occupied the office of hulorn. The last he knew, the members of the Old Chauncel had been squabbling over the prize.