The Chaos Curse Read online

  It was only partly true. Tuanta Quiro Miancay was more than a simple potion, it was magic driven to destroy. Tuanta Quiro Miancay wanted to be found, wanted to be out of the prison the priests had wrapped around it. And to that end, the concoction’s magic had attacked the glyphs, had worked against them for many months, weakening their integrity.

  Rufo didn’t trust Druzil, and rightly so, but it soon became plain that he couldn’t ignore the pull on his heart. He must have felt his forehead’s brand keenly in that place and suffered a severe headache merely from being near a structure dedicated to Deneir. At least wanting to believe Druzil’s words, he moved inevitably toward the cabinet and reached for the cloth.

  There came a blinding electric flash, then a second, then a tremendous burst of fire. Fortunately for Rufo, the first explosion had launched him across the room, clear over the altar and into an overturned bookcase near the door.

  Druzil shrieked as the flames engulfed the cabinet, its wood flaring brightly—obviously it had been soaked with oil or enchanted by some incendiary magic. Druzil didn’t fear for Tuanta Quiro Miancay, for that concoction was everlasting, but if the flask holding it melted, the liquid would be lost!

  Flames never bothered Druzil, a creature of the fiery lower planes. His bat wings sent him rushing into the conflagration, eager hands pulling the cabinet’s contents free. Druzil shrieked from a sudden burst of pain, and nearly hurled the bowl across the room. He caught himself, though, and gingerly placed the item on the altar. Then he backed away and rubbed his blistered hands together.

  The bottle holding the chaos curse had been placed in a bowl and immersed in the clearest of waters, made holy by the plea of a dead druid and the symbol of Silvanus, the god of nature, of natural order. Perhaps no god worshiped on Toril evoked more anger from the perverse imp than Silvanus.

  Druzil studied the bowl and considered his dilemma. He breathed easier a moment later when he realized that the holy water was not as pure as it should be, that the influences of Tuanta Quiro Miancay acted even upon that.

  Druzil moved near the bowl and chanted softly, using one of his claws to puncture the middle finger of his left hand. Finishing his curse, he let a single drop of his blood fall into the water. There came a hissing, and the top of the bowl clouded over with vapor. Then it was gone, and gone, too, was the pure water, replaced by a blackened morass of fetid and rotting liquid.

  Druzil leaped back atop the altar and plunged his hands in. A moment later, he was whimpering with joy, cradling the precious, rune-decorated bottle, itself an enchanted thing, as though it were his baby. He looked to Rufo, not really concerned if the man was alive or dead, then laughed again.

  Rufo had propped himself up on his elbows. His black hair stood on end, dancing wildly, and his eyes twitched and rolled of their own accord. After some time, he rolled back unsteadily to his feet and advanced in staggered steps toward the imp, apparently thinking to throttle the creature once and for all.

  Druzil’s waving tail, its barbed end dripping deadly poison, brought Rufo to his senses, but did little to calm him.

  “You said …” he began to roar.

  “Bene tellemara!” Druzil snapped back at him, the imp’s intensity more than matching Rufo’s anger and startling the man to silence. “Do you not know what we have?”

  Smiling wickedly, Druzil handed the flask to Rufo, and the man’s beady eyes widened when he took it, when he felt its inner power throb within him.

  Rufo hardly heard Druzil as the imp raved about what they might accomplish with the chaos curse. The man stared at the swirling red liquid within the bottle and fantasized, not of power, as Druzil was spouting, but of freedom from his brand. Rufo had earned that mark, but in his twisted perception, that hardly mattered. All Rufo understood or could accept was that Cadderly had marked him, had forced him to become an outcast.

  All the world had become his enemy.

  Druzil continued to ramble. The imp talked of controlling the priests once more, of striking against all of Erlkazar, all of Faerûn, all of Toril, of uncorking the flask and …

  Rufo heard that last suggestion alone among the dozens of ideas the imp spewed. He heard it and believed it with all his heart. It was as if Tuanta Quiro Miancay called to him, and the chaos curse, the creation of wicked, diabolical intelligence, was indeed. It was Rufo’s salvation, more than Deneir had ever been. It was his deliverance from wretched Cadderly.

  This potion was for him, and for him alone.

  Druzil stopped talking the moment he noticed that Rufo had uncorked the bottle, the moment he smelled the red fumes wafting up from the potion.

  The imp started to ask the man what he was doing, but the words stuck in Druzil’s throat as Rufo suddenly lifted the bottle to his thin lips and drank of it deeply.

  Druzil stammered, trying to find words to protest. Rufo turned to him, the man’s face screwed up curiously.

  “What have you done?” Druzil asked.

  Rufo started to answer, but gagged instead and clutched his throat.

  “What have you done?” Druzil repeated loudly. “Bene tellemara! Fool!”

  Rufo gagged again, clutched his throat and stomach, and vomited violently. He staggered away, coughing, wheezing, trying to get some air past the bile rising in his throat.

  “What have you done?” Druzil cried after him, scuttling along the floor to keep up. The imp’s tail waved ominously. If Rufo’s misery ended, Druzil meant to sting and tear him, to punish him for stealing the precious and irreplaceable potion.

  Rufo, his balance wavering, slammed into the doorjamb as he tried to exit the room. He stumbled along the corridor, rebounding off one wall then the other. He vomited again, and again after that, his stomach burning with agony and swirling with nausea. Somehow he got through the rooms and corridors and half-crawled out the muddy tunnel, back into the sunlight, which knifed at his eyes and skin.

  He was burning up, and yet he felt cold, deathly cold.

  Druzil, wisely becoming invisible as they came into the revealing daylight, followed. Rufo stopped and vomited yet again, across the hardened remains of a late-season snow bank, and the mess showed more blood than bile. Then the man staggered around the building’s corner, slipping and falling many times in the mud and slush. He thought to get to the door, to the priests with their curing hands.

  Two young acolytes, wearing the black-and-gold vests that distinguished them as priests of Oghma, were near the door, enjoying the warmth of the late winter day, their brown cloaks opened wide to the sun. They didn’t notice Rufo at first, not until the man fell heavily into the mud just a few feet away.

  The two acolytes rushed to him and turned him over then gasped and fell back when they saw the brand. Neither had been in the library long enough to know Kierkan Rufo personally, but they had surely heard tales of the branded priest. They looked at each other and shrugged then one rushed back into the library while the other began to administer to the stricken man.

  Druzil watched from the corner of the building, muttering, “Bene tellemara,” over and over, lamenting that the chaos curse and Kierkan Rufo had played him a wicked joke.

  Perched high in the branches of a tree near that door, a white squirrel named Percival looked on with more than a passing interest. Percival had come out of his winter hibernation that very tenday. He’d been surprised to find that Cadderly, his main source of the favored cacasa nuts, was nowhere to be found, and was even more surprised to see Kierkan Rufo, a human Percival didn’t care for at all.

  The squirrel could see that Rufo was in great distress, could smell the foulness of Rufo’s illness, even from a distance.

  Percival moved near his twig nest, nestled high in the branches, and continued to watch.

  TWO

  DIFFERENT PATHS TAKEN

  The three bearded members of the company, the dwarves Pikel and Ivan Bouldershoulder and the red-haired firbolg Vander, sat off to the side of the cave entrance, rolling bones, placing bets, and
laughing among themselves. Ivan won a round, for the fifteenth time in a row, and Pikel swept off a blue, wide-brimmed hat with an orange quill on one side and the eye-above-candle holy symbol of Deneir set in its front, and whacked laughing Ivan over the head with it.

  Cadderly started to protest. It was his hat, after all, simply loaned to Pikel, and Ivan’s helmet was set with deer antlers. The young priest changed his mind and held the thought silent, though, seeing that the hat had not been damaged and realizing that Ivan deserved it.

  The friendship between Ivan, Pikel, and Vander had blossomed after the fall of Castle Trinity. Gigantic Vander, all twelve feet and eight hundred pounds of him, had even helped Pikel, the would-be druid, re-dye his hair and beard green and braid the bushy tangle down his back. The only tense moment had come when Vander tried to put some of Pikel’s dye in Ivan’s bright yellow hair, something the square-shouldered, more serious Bouldershoulder did not like at all.

  But the exchanges were ultimately good-natured—the last few tendays had been good-natured, in fact, despite the brutal weather. The seven companions, including Cadderly, Danica, Dorigen, and Shayleigh, the elf maiden, had planned to go straight from the victory at Castle Trinity to the Edificant Library. Barely a day’s hike into the mountains, though, winter had come in full force, blocking the trails so that not even Cadderly, with his divine magic, dared to press on. Even worse, Cadderly had fallen ill, though he insisted that it was simple exhaustion. As a priest, Cadderly served as a conduit for the powers of his god, and during the battle with Castle Trinity, and the tendays of fighting before that, too much of that energy had flowed through the young priest.

  Cadderly was exhausted, and the young priest had taken an emotional beating as well. In Castle Trinity, Cadderly had seen his past, and the truth of his heritage.

  In Castle Trinity, Cadderly had killed his own father.

  Danica held faith that Cadderly would overcome that trauma, confident in the depth of the young priest’s character. But though he was devoted to his god and to his friends, and they all were beside him, Cadderly wasn’t so sure.

  With the trails closed and Cadderly ill, the company had gone east, out of the mountains and their foothills, to the farmlands north of Carradoon. Even the lowlands were deep with a snow that the Shining Plains had not seen in decades. The friends had found a many-chambered cave for shelter, and had turned the place into a fair home over the days, using Danica’s, Vander’s, and the dwarves’ survival skills and Dorigen’s magic. Cadderly had aided whenever he could, but his role was to rest and regain his strength. He and Danica both knew that when they returned to the Edificant Library, the young priest might face his toughest challenge yet.

  After several tendays, the snows had begun to recede. As brutal as the winter had been, it was ending early, and the companions could begin to think about their course. That brought mixed feelings for young Cadderly, the priest who had risen so fast through the ranks of his order. He stood at the cave entrance, staring out over the fields of white, their brightness stinging his gray eyes in the morning sunlight. He felt guilty for his own weakness, for he believed he should have returned to the library despite the snows, despite the trials he had faced, months ago, even if that meant leaving his friends behind. Cadderly’s destiny waited at that library. But even then, feeling stronger once more, hearing the song of Deneir again playing in the background of his thoughts, he wasn’t sure he had the strength to meet that destiny.

  “I am ready for you,” came a call from inside the cave, above Vander and the dwarves’ continuing ruckus.

  Cadderly turned and walked past the group, and Pikel, knowing what was to come, gave a little, “Hee hee hee.” The green-bearded dwarf tipped the wide-brimmed hat to Cadderly, as if saluting a warrior going to battle.

  Cadderly scowled at the dwarf and walked past, moving to a small stone, which crafty Ivan had fashioned into a stool. Danica stood behind the stool, waiting for Cadderly, her beautiful daggers, one golden-hilted and sculpted into the shape of a tiger, the other a silver dragon, in hand. For anyone who didn’t know Danica, those blades, or any weapons, would have looked out of place in her deceivingly delicate hands. She was barely five feet tall—if she went two days without eating, she wouldn’t top a hundred pounds—with thick locks of strawberry blond hair cascading over her shoulders and unusual almond-shaped eyes a light but rich brown. On casual glance, Danica seemed more a candidate for a southern harem, a beautiful, delicate flower.

  The young priest knew better, as did any who had spent time beside Danica. Those delicate hands could break stone, and that beautiful face could smash a man’s nose flat. Danica was a monk, a disciplined fighter, and her studies of the ways of ancient martial masters was no less intense than Cadderly’s devotion to the wisdom his god. She was as perfect a warrior as Cadderly had ever seen. The monk could use any weapon, and could defeat most swordsmen with her bare hands and feet. And she could put either of the enchanted daggers she held into the eye of an enemy twenty paces away. Cadderly took his seat, pointedly facing away from the boisterous gamblers, while Danica began to softly chant.

  Cadderly found a meditative focus. It was vital that he remain absolutely still. Danica broke into motion, her arms weaving intricate patterns in the air in front of her, her feet shifting from side to side, keeping perfect balance. The impossibly sharp blades began to turn in her fingers.

  The first one came around in a blinding flash, but Cadderly, deep in concentration, didn’t flinch. He barely felt the scrape as the knife’s edge brushed his cheek, barely had time to smell the oiled metal as the silver dragon whipped in under his nostrils and shot down to his upper lip.

  It was a ritual that the two performed every day, one that kept Cadderly clean-shaven and Danica’s finely honed muscles at their peak.

  It was over in a mere moment, Cadderly’s stubble swept away without a nick to his tanned skin.

  “I should chop this tangle away, too,” Danica teased, grabbing a handful of Cadderly’s thick, curly brown hair.

  Cadderly reached up and grabbed her wrist and pulled her around and down, over his shoulder so that their faces were close. The two were lovers, committed to each other for life, and the only reason they had not yet been married in open vows was that Cadderly no longer considered the priests of the Edificant Library worthy of performing the ceremony.

  Cadderly gave Danica a little kiss, and both jumped back as a blue spark flashed between them, stinging their lips. Both turned to the entrance to the chamber on the cave’s left-hand wall, and were greeted by the joined laughter of Dorigen and Shayleigh.

  “Such a bond,” remarked Dorigen sarcastically. She had been the one to cause the spark—of course it had been the wizard. Once an enemy of the band, indeed one of the leaders of the army that had invaded Shilmista, Dorigen, by all appearances, had turned to a new way of life and was going back with the others to face judgment at the library.

  “Never have I seen such a spark of love,” added Shayleigh, shaking her head so that her long, thick mane of golden hair fell back from her face. Even in the dim light streaming in through the cave’s eastern door, the elf’s violet eyes sparkled like polished jewels.

  “Should I add this to your list of crimes?” Cadderly asked Dorigen.

  “If that was the greatest of my crimes, I would not bother to return to the library beside you, young priest,” the wizard replied easily.

  Danica looked from Cadderly to Dorigen, recognizing the bond that had grown between them. It wasn’t hard for the monk to discern the source of that attraction. With her black hair showing lines of gray, and her wide-set eyes, Dorigen resembled Pertelope, the headmistress at the library who had been like Cadderly’s mother until her recent death. Pertelope alone seemed to understand the transformation that had come over Cadderly, the god-song that played in his thoughts and gave him access to divine powers to rival the highest-ranking priests in all the land.

  Cadderly could see some of the same perce
ptive characteristics in Dorigen. The wizard was a thinker, a woman who weighed the situation carefully before acting, and a woman not afraid to follow her heart. Dorigen had turned against Aballister in Castle Trinity, had all but gone over to Cadderly’s side despite her knowledge that her crimes would not be forgotten. She had done it because her conscience had so dictated.

  Cadderly couldn’t say he’d grown to like the woman over their tendays of forced hibernation, but he did respect the wizard, and did, to some extent, trust her.

  “Well, you’ve been hinting at this for many days,” Dorigen said to Cadderly. “Is it time for us to be on the road?”

  Cadderly looked back to the door and nodded. “The passes south to Carradoon should be clear enough to travel,” he replied. “And many of the passes back into the mountains will be clear as well.” Cadderly paused, and the others, not understanding why the mountain passes should be of any concern, watched him carefully, looking for clues. “Though I fear that the melt might bring some avalanches,” the young priest finished.

  “I do not fear avalanches,” came the firbolg’s voice booming from the door. “I have lived all my life in the mountains, will live the rest of it there, and know well enough when a trail is safe.”

  “Ye’re not going back to the library?” piped in Ivan, eyeing his giant friend with suspicion.

  “Oo,” added Pikel, apparently not too happy about it either.

  “I have my own home, my own family,” said Vander. He, Ivan, and Pikel had discussed the matter many times over the last few tendays, but not until that moment had Vander made a decision.

  Ivan obviously wasn’t thrilled with it. He and Vander were friends, and saying farewell was never an easy thing. But the sturdy dwarf agreed with the firbolg’s decision, and he had promised that he would one day travel north to the Spine of the World and seek out Vander’s firbolg clan.