Magadon looked into Cale's eyes and said, "Two fathers, Erevis. One a rapist archdevil, one a cripple with a noble spirit. Life is sometimes strange, is it not?"
Cale nodded and looked away into the distance. He could think of nothing to say, though he understood well what it was to serve two fathers. The silence stretched on.
At last, Cale said, "You were going to tell me why you were confiding in me. You had a purpose?"
"So I was and so I do," Magadon said, and adjusted his posture on the log. "Here it is: For years I struggled with what I was. Devilspawn, Erevis. How could I move past that?"
Cale looked at him from under his brows, genuinely curious, and asked, "How did you?"
"That's the question," Magadon whispered. He shook his head and smiled softly, as if amused by a private jest. "I pitied myself. You saw the scars on my birthmark. When I learned what it was, I tried to cut that mark from my flesh a dozen times, but always it returned."
He extended his arm and held his hand fully in the flames. Cale gave a start but Magadon's skin didn't char and the guide did not wince.
He looked into Cale's face and said, "Another gift from the rapist." He pulled his hand from the flames and looked at the unmarred skin. "Everywhere I turned, I was faced with my heritage. With each passing year, my flesh changed to show more and more of my devil sire. I fear how I may appear in my dotage."
He smiled, but Cale saw it was forced.
"So I couldn't move past it, Erevis," the guide said. "Not really." He flexed his unburned fingers. "It's part of me. It's part of what I am. When I accepted that, things became bearable. But-" and here he made a cutting gesture with his hand-"accepting the fact of my blood does not mean that I let it dictate the course of my life. The blood of an archdevil determines what I am in body; it does not determine the nature of my soul. And it's a soul that makes a man, Erevis. Do you see? Your transformation changed your skin, your eyes, but not your soul. You remain who you always were."
Cale heard Magadon's words, heard the echoes of his own protestations in them, but smiled in response only out of politeness. It was what Cale always had been-before the transformation as much as after-that gave him concern. Accepting his nature would not free him from what he feared; it would free what he feared, that part of himself that he kept closely tethered. Unlike Magadon, Cale had no good side to turn to.
He thought of Tazi; her smile, the smell of her skin. . . .
"Well?" Magadon pressed.
"I'll think about what you've said," Cale replied, to placate the guide.
Magadon nodded and said, "Fair enough."
They said nothing for a time. When the silence at last grew uncomfortable, Cale filled it by changing the subject.
"How did you come to know him?" he asked, and indicated Riven. "You seem hardly the type of man who would befriend a Zhentarim assassin."
Magadon's reply came quickly: "How did you?"
Cale took the point. Strange times made for strange alliances.
"Does he know?" Cale asked. "About your ... heritage?"
Magadon shrugged and said, "I've never told him, but he may have learned of it. He has a way of doing that. Why do you ask?"
In truth, Cale did not know.
"Curiosity," he said, and left it at that.
The fire crackled, its smoke lost in the gloom of the forest.
"It's affecting him too," Magadon said at last. "Riven, I mean."
"What?"
"This place; what he's becoming."
Cale looked at Magadon sharply and asked, "What is he becoming?"
"I don't know," Magadon answered. "Neither does he. That's what makes him afraid."
Cale's doubt must have shown in his expression. To Cale, Riven seemed as calm and in control as ever. Magadon must have read his eyes-or his mind.
The guide said, "I know him better than you, Erevis. He has been your enemy, hasn't he?"
Cale nodded.
"You see him through those eyes," Magadon said. "But I've been in his head, and I see him through his own." Magadon paused before adding, "You two are very much alike."
Once, those words would have provoked a sharp denial, but not any more. Perhaps Cale and Riven were more alike than ever. Brothers in the faith if not the flesh. He looked at his regenerated hand and wondered again what he was becoming, or what he had already become. A shade, yes, but what else?
"Get some rest, Magadon," Cale said. "I'll keep watch for a while."
Magadon rose, and said, "Well enough." He hesitated, then extended his hand. "Call me Mags."
Cale took the tiefling's hand and looked into his white eyes.
"Mags it is."
The woodsman had laid down to sleep, pulling his hat down over his eyes. Cale looked down at the tome from the Fane of Shadows, picked it up, and after a moment's hesitation he flipped it open.
For a moment, he could not breathe.
A swatch of black cloth lay within its pages, formerly pressed between the cover and the first page. He stared at it a long while before brushing the silken mask with his fingertips.
A strange prologue, he thought, and placed what he knew to be his new holy symbol into his vest pocket.
Cale refused to admit to himself the comfort its presence brought him, the charge it sent through him.
He began to read, devouring the words as he once had done as a linguistics student back in Westgate. Written by several hands, alternatively in Thorass, Elvish, Infernal, and at least two tongues Cale did not recognize, the tome appeared to be a history of Shar, the Fane of Shadows as it manifested in several worlds, and the Weave Tap. As he read, he began to understand why Azriim-or Azriim's master, the Sojourner-had sought the artifact.
And with that understanding came fear.
CHAPTER 4
NURSING THE NIGHT
Vhostym uttered the words to a spell, waved his hand, and opened a dimensional portal through the smooth stone wall and into the nursery. The moment the aperture materialized, moans of pain hissed through the magical door, the steam of agony escaping a heated beaker. Vhostym tuned out the sounds, though he felt like moaning himself. His affliction grew worse daily, despite his spells and medicaments. His bones throbbed with pain. He imagined he could feel them putrefying within him, one at a time.
Pushing out of his mind an image of himself as a shapeless blob of flesh, Vhostym floated into the chamber.