With unsteady hands, Cale donned his mask and sat on his knees beside Sephris. The sphere sat on the floor beside him, sparkling in the candlelight. Cale placed his fingertips on the loremaster's chest and forehead, took a breath, and began to chant the prayer that would open the door between the realm of the living and the planes of the dead. The words poured from his lips as though eager to be spoken, and his voice gained volume as he went on. A roar filled his ears, a sound like the crashing of Uktar waves in Selgaunt Bay. Cale continued the chant, bent against an invisible spiritual storm that he could not see but could sense.
A soft, violet glow suffused Sephris's corpse. It took all that Cale had to keep his fingertips on the loremaster's body. The glow grew brighter. Brighter. Cale could feel a space opening up. The line between the living world and the dead opened with a soft pop. Cale's flesh went cold.
Sephris's ghost, his soul, rose up from the corpse.
To Cale, Sephris seemed both there and not there, surrounded by a gulf that was not so much seen or felt as it was implied.
He was staring into eternity, Cale realized. He felt tiny.
And somewhere in that gray limitlessness that extended forever behind Sephris's shade lurked the souls of the men that Cale had killed, ghosts haunting a ghost. Cale couldn't quite see them, but he could sense them, could feel the heavy accusations contained in their empty eyes. There were many, he knew. Too many. Some of them had deserved death, but many had not. As a young man, Cale had never cared to make the distinction, and that failure haunted him. He kept his gaze on Sephris and tried not to think of his past, though it literally stared him in the face.
Sephris's soul, translucent and limned in violet light, hovered in the air above his body. With disturbingly empty eyes, the loremaster looked down on Cale.
"We led them to you, Sephris. I'm sorry for that."
Sephris smiled enigmatically. His empty sockets made it threatening.
"Two and two are four, Erevis Cale."
"I understand that now," Cale said softly, and thought he actually did.
"Do you?"
Cale realized then that Sephris seemed calm. His gaze was steady, his mind focused. Death seemingly had stripped Sephris's soul of Oghma's "gift." For the first time, the loremaster seemed at peace. Cale saw before him the man Sephris must have been before losing himself in his faith. He realized then that service to a god effected a metamorphosis in the believer so gradual that the believer himself couldn't see it.
He wondered how much his own service to Mask had changed him.
With effort, he put all of that out of his mind. He knew that he didn't have much time. His spell couldn't keep Sephris in the living world for long. And the eyes of those he'd murdered, still lingering at the edge of his perception, bored holes into him. He wanted to end it.
"We have the sphere, Sephris," said Cale. "The whole sphere." Cale held it up for the spirit to see. He felt as though he was a supplicant making an offering. "Tell us the time."
Sephris's empty gaze focused on the glittering sphere.
"This is the dominant variable of your life, First of Five," the ghost said. "By this, you will be changed."
Cale didn't like how much those words echoed his own thoughts.
"It bespeaks the time of the appearance of the Fane of Shadows," Sephris said. "A temple that journeys through the worlds on the currents of the secret Weave." Sephris studied the sphere for a few moments then added, "The Fane will appear in the deepest darkness of the night twelve days from now."
Cale found that he had been holding his breath. He blew it out in a gust.
"Thank you, Sephris."
"There are more variables in this equation than you now see, First of Five."
That alarmed Cale. Things already seemed complex enough.
"What variables?" Cale asked.
But Sephris provided nothing further.
"Release me now, Erevis Cale," said the ghost. "My time on Toril is complete. It has not summed to zero."
Cale tried to find the sense of that, then nodded and said, "Find peace, loremaster."
He let the magic of his spell unravel and the door between realms closed. The library stood silent.
Assuming good weather, the Dragon Coast was eight days away by ship. Cale would have to arrange their passage and leave a message for Tamlin telling the lord of Stormweather that he was leaving Selgaunt. He gathered himself, stood, and looked Jak and Riven in the eye.
"We've got twelve days to reach the Dragon Coast."
"Close," Riven growled.
"Other variables?" Jak asked, with one eyebrow cocked. "What do you suppose that means?"
"Who in the Hells knows," Riven said. "He didn't make sense when he was alive."
Cale smiled despite himself while he returned the sphere to his pack.
"We'll find out soon enough, little man," said Cale. "In the meantime, we've got a ship to catch."
CHAPTER 13
THE DRAGON COAST
Brine covered Cale's clothes in powdery patches, but he didn't care. The clean smell of the Dragonmere and the brisk westward wind made him smile. He stood with his hands on the aft rail of Foamrider and watched the deep blue of the sea trail behind them. He had lingered there most of the trip, listening to the crying gulls, the drone of the waves, and the snap of the ship's sail. To his right, barely visible above the line of the horizon, rose the grassy plains of the Dragon Coast. Behind them, only a dark line on the horizon, stood the pines and cedars of the Gulthmere Forest. The merchant cog Foamrider and her captain, Mres Liis, had carried them all the way across the Inner Sea.
Looking thoughtfully at the calm sea, Cale realized that he had probably sailed over those very same waters over a decade before, when he had fled Westgate for Selgaunt. While Foamrider hadn't sailed far enough west for Cale to have caught sight of the Dragon Coast's largest city, seeing those seas and thinking of his time there brought back a host of memories—some good, some bad. Literally and figuratively, he felt that he was returning to his roots.
It felt surprisingly good. It felt honest. And the truth was, Cale enjoyed being aboard ship. He remembered a favorite saying among Inner Sea sailors: A wild sea calls only wild souls. He supposed that he must possess a wild soul, because despite the open-sea squall of three days before, the sea spoke to him.
Not so for Jak, he thought with a smile. Or if the sea did speak to the halfling, it didn't say anything the halfling wanted to hear. Jak had spent the first five days of the journey sending puke over the railing. The squall had made the seasickness worse. Only when their journey was near its end did he seem to have found his sea legs at last. That, or his stomach simply had nothing more to offer Umberlee and her waves.
Unlike Jak, the voyage hadn't bothered Riven. Cale thought that he probably had been aboard ship before. The assassin had spoken little during the journey. Instead, he had daily donned his aloof sneer and his holy symbol, and practiced his bladework on deck. The challenge of maintaining his combat balance on a listing deck seemed to interest him. Cale and he had sparred twice, both to a draw. Even the hard-bitten sailors had watched those combats with admiration. They had hung from the rigging and hollered encouragement to one or the other. Other than that, though, the crew had kept their distance from the three comrades and asked no questions.
Exactly as Cale wanted it.
"Starmantle to fore!" shouted the boy from the crow's nest above.
Reluctantly, Cale turned from the sea and made his way off the aft deck to forward. From there, even without a spyglass, he could see Starmantle's spires and towers rising above the horizon line. The features of the cityscape grew clearer as Foamrider drew closer.
It was far smaller than Selgaunt, Cale saw, but seemed to have a lot of temples. Strange for a city with Starmantle's reputation.
Jak must have heard the call of the sailor announcing Starmantle. He emerged from below deck, hopped up on the foredeck, and followed Cale's gaze across the sea.
"So that's Starmantle, eh?"