The Cleric Quintet: Night Masks

 

Rufo stammered the beginnings of several words, not realty knowing where to begin this unexpected conversation. Dozens of questions and fears assaulted him, stealing his voice. How much did Cadderly know or suspect? he wondered. Where was the young wizard, or the rest of the killers?



"The assassins are no more," Cadderly told him confidently, as if reading Rufo's thoughts. "And the young wizard, too, is dead."



"Got that one good," Ivan whispered to his brother, and Pikel gave the great axe, strapped to Ivan's back, a respectful pat.



"Dead," Cadderty reiterated, letting the word hang in the air ominously, "like Avery."



Rufo's chalky, sharp-featured face paled even more. Again he started to reply, to concoct some fie about the headmaster's fate, some tale that would allow him an alibi for his crimes.



"We know," Danica assured him before he got the first words past his thin, dry lips,



"I did not expect this of you," Cadderly said, hooking his walking stick into the crook of his elbow. "Even after the events at the library and in Shilmista, I trusted that you would find a better path to tread."



Rufo ran his bony fingers through his matted black hair. His beady, dark eyes darted all about.



"I do not know what you are referring to," he managed to say. "When Avery was found dead, I decided that I, too, would not be safe at the inn. I searched for you, but you were not to be found, so I came here, to be among my friends of Umater"



"You were afraid?" Danica asked sarcastically. "Did you fear your cohorts would cheat you?"



"I do not understand " Rufo stuttered.



Danica slapped him across the face, knocking him to a sitting position on his bed. The monk started forward, her expression an angry grimace, but Cadderly quickly intercepted her.



"Why else would you be afraid?" Cadderly asked Rufo, to clarify Danica's last statement. "If not for your cohorts, then who would threaten you?"



"He knew we'd catch him," Ivan put in, grabbing Rufo's arm with an ironlike grasp.



"You err!" Rufo stammered desperately. All the world seemed to be closing in on him. Ivan's clenching hand felt fike the jaws of a wolf trap. "I did - "



"Silence!" The command from Cadderly quieted the blustering man immediately and turned his friends' incredulous stares to him. Rufo slumped in his seat and lowered his eyes, thoroughly defeated.



"Tfcra ted Avery to his death," Cadderly accused him bhuitly. "You betrayed me in the library, your friends in the forest, and now Avery. Do not expect forgiveness this time, Kierkan Rufo! The headmaster is dead - his blood is on your hands - and you have crossed into an area from which there is no return." Images of those awful, growling shadows assaulted Cadderly. He dosed his eyes and took a few deep breaths to steady himself but found himself imagining Rufo's impending fate, of the hungry, evil things that would drag the fallen priest down to eternal torment.



Cadderly shuddered and opened his eyes.



"Hold him," he instructed the dwarves.



"What are you doing?" Rufo demanded as Pikel grabbed the arm opposite the one Ivan held and the two locked him steady on the bed. "My friends will hear! They will not allow this!"



"Dmater?" Ivan queried. "Ain't them the ones dedicated to suffering?"



"Yup," his brother answered.



"flfell, with the hollering ye're about to do," Ivan snickered to Rufo, thoroughly enjoying the angular man's distress, "they're likely to build a statue to ye."



Rufo bit Pikel on the arm, but the tough dwarf just grimaced and did not let go. Danica was around the bed in an instant. She grabbed Rufo's hair and jerked his head back viciously. Between that strong hold, and the dwarves at either side of him, Rufo could only watch and listen.



Cadderly was chanting quietly, his hands moving through specific motions. He extended one finger to point toward Rufo, its end glowing white with heat.



"No!" Rufo cried. "You must let me explain!"



"No more lies," Danica hissed from behind.



Rufo screamed and twisted helplessly as Cadderly's enchanted digit branded his forehead, burned the curse of Deneir - the likeness of a single, broken candle above a dosed eye - into the man's skin.



It was over in mere seconds, and Danica and the dwarves let Rufo go. He slumped forward, whimpering, not so much for the continuing pain (there was fittle), but for the knowledge of what Cadderly had just done to him.



Branded. He smelled the foul odor and knew it would follow him, would magically ward people away from him, for the rest of his days.



"You must never hide your mark of shame," Cadderly said to him. "You are aware of the consequences."



Indeed, Kierkan Rufo was. To hide the lawful brand of Deneir caused the lingering magic to burn deeper into one's forehead, to burn to the brain, resulting in a horrible, agonizing death.



Rufo turned an angry gaze up at Cadderly. "How dare you?" he growled with every ounce of defiance he could muster. "You are no headmaster. You have no power - "



"I could have given you over to the city guard," Cadderly interrupted, the simple logic cutting Rufo short. "Even now I could tefl them of your crimes and let them hang you in the street. TO>uld that be preferable?"



Rufo looked away.



"If you doubt my ranking in the order," Cadderly continued, "doubt that I have the power to cast such judgment over you, then simply cover the brand. >fe will learn soon enough if you are correct." Cadderly removed his wide-brimmed hat and held it out to Rufo. "Let us see," he prompted confidently.



Rufo shoved the hat aside and staggered to his feet.



"Highest Priest," he said hopefully when his door opened and a thick-jowled, bald-headed priest, wearing the red skullcap denoting high rank in the Ilmater order, peered in. Behind the man stood a dozen or more disciples of the temple, aroused by Rufo's agonized screams.



"They beared his yells and thinked he joined their order," Ivan whispered to Danica and Pikel, and the three, despite the gravity of the situation, could not hide their chuckles.



The Ilmater priest sniffed the air, his face twisting against the foul smell. He looked hard at Rufo, at the brand, then turned to Cadderly and asked, no anger in his tone, "What has transpired?"



"They have betrayed me!" Rufo cried desperately. "They - he" - he pointed to Cadderly - "led Headmaster Avery Schell to his death! And now he tries to blame me, to divert attention from himself!"



Cadderly did not grow excited at the ridiculous claim. "W>uld Deneir have granted me the magical brand if the tale rang at all of truth?" he asked the Ilmater priest.



"Is it authentic?" the lean priest asked, motioning to the wicked mark.



"Do you care to test it?" Cadderly asked Rufo, again extending his hat. Rufo stared at it for a very long time, at the Deneirian holy symbol set in its front center, knowing this to be the critical point in his life. He could not accept the hat and put it on - to do so would bring about his death. But refusing strengthened Cadderfy's claims, showed Rufo to be an honestly branded outcast. He paused for a long moment, trying to concoct yet another excuse.



His hesitation cost him,any chance of explaining.



"Kierkan Rufo, you must be gone from here," the Ilmater priest demanded. "Never again shall you be welcomed in any hall of Ilmater. Never again shall any priest of our order show you any kindness or respect."



The finality of the words sounded like a peg in Rufo's coffin. He knew there would be no point in arguing, that the decision was final. He turned, as if to move for his chest of belongings, but the Ilmater priest would brook no delays.



"Now!" the man shouted. "Your possessions will be dumped into the alley. Be gone!"



Ivan and Pikel, always ready to lend a hand, grabbed Rufo by the arms and roughly heaved him forward. Of the many witnesses, not a single one offered a word of protest.



Branded priests had no allies.



Cadderly had only one more task to complete before he would consider his business in Carradoon at its end, and he found assistance from a local cleric residing outside the lakeside city's tall walls. The aged priest led Cadderly and his four companions - with %nder traveling in his magically reduced state, as a red-haired and red-bearded barbarian warrior - to a small grave in the churchyard.



Cadderly fell to his knees before the grave, not at all surprised, but filled with pity and grief.



"Poor dear," the gentle old priest explained. "She went out in search of her lost husband and found him, dead, on the side of the road. Alas for Jhanine and her children." The priest waited a few moments, then nodded to the companions and took his leave.



"You knew this man?" a perplexed Danica asked, crouching beside Cadderly



Cadderly nodded slowly, hardly hearing her.



Danica took Cadderly's arm. "Will you go for him?" she asked, a bit sourly, but with all sympathy.



Cadderiy turned to her, but his eyes were looking to the past, to his exchange on the road with the unfortunate leper. Could you cure them aU? Nameless had asked him. Are all the world's ills to fall before this young priest of Deneir?



"This makes no sense, and borders on irreverence," Danica remarked, misconstruing Cadderly's silence. "Where next after here? To the graves of the unfortunate farmers and the city guardsman?"



Cadderiy closed his eyes and withdrew from Danica's stinging logic. He had already tried to resurrect the formers, and the unfortunate guardsman, privately, before they had left the farm. The spirits of the farmers were not to be found, and the guardsman would not come to Cadderly's call. The effort had cost Cadderiy dearly, exhausted him and taken, he knew, a little bit of his life energy forever.



"How many thousands will Cadderly recall to populate the world?" he heard Danica ask. He knew her sarcasm was not intended to be mean, only practical.



He knew Danica could not understand. This act of resurrection was not as simple as it had seemed when Cadderly had brought Brennan back from the dead. Cadderly had come to learn, painfully, that resurrection was a god-given blessing, not a magical spell. Whatever powers the young priest possessed, he could not defeat ultimate fate. Many conditions had to be met before resurrection could be granted, and many more before the spirits of the dead would heed the call and return to the world they had departed. So many conditions, and Cadderty couldn't even begin to sort through them, couldn't begin to question the divine decisions beyond his mortal understanding.



Wisely, he did not ask Deneir to grant him this act.



"My powers are for the living," he whispered, and Danica quieted, confident that he had come to understand what must be. He said a prayer for Nameless, a plea to whatever gods might be listening to judge the lost man fairly, to grant him the peace in death that had been so unfairly stolen from him in life.



Cadderly never did learn the beggar man's real name -  and he preferred it that way. He and his friends went back to the priest who had shown them the grave, bearing a fair amount of gold they could spare for the deserving Jhanine, but it was Finder who threw in the largest gift: Aballister's purse of gold, the advance sum given the Night Masks for Cadderly's execution.



"Do you mean to cure the ills of the world?" Danica asked Cadderly again, after the companions had left the priest's small house beside the graveyard. She looked to him pleadingly, fearful for her love, fearful that this new weight of responsibility would break him.



"I will do what I can," Cadderly replied stubbornly. "It is the most that can be asked of us, and the least that any of us should be willing to give."



A chill breeze blew in from the west, a reminder that winter was not far away. Cadderly looked into it, sought the lines of trails on the distant Snowflake Mountains, the paths that led to the Edificant Library.



Maybe it was time to go home.



in the rogue made his way carefully through the dark avenues of Menzoberranzan, the city of drow. A renegade, with no family to call his i own for nearly twenty years, the seasoned fighter knew well the perils of the city, and knew how to avoid them.



He passed an abandoned compound along the two-mile cavern's western wall and could not help but pause and stare. Twin stalagmite mounds supported a blasted fence around the whole of the place, and two sets of broken doors, one on the ground and one beyond a balcony twenty feet up the wall, hung open awkwardly on twisted and scorched hinges. How many times had Dinin levitated up to that balcony, entering the private quarters of the nobles of his house, House Do'Urden?



House Do'Urden. It was forbidden even to speak the name in the drow city. Once, Dinin's family had been the eighth-ranked among the sixty or so drow families in Menzoberranzan; his mother had sat on the ruling council; and



he, Dinin, had been a Master at Melee-Magthere, the School of Fighters, at the famed drow Academy.



Standing before the compound, it seemed to Dinin as if the place were a thousand years removed from that time of glory. His family was no more, his house lay in ruins, and Dinin had been forced to take up with Bregan D'aerthe, an infamous mercenary band, simply to survive.



"Once," the rogue drow mouthed quietly. He shook his slender shoulders and pulled his concealing piwafwi cloak around him, remembering how vulnerable a houseless rogue could be. A quick glance toward the center of the cavern, toward the pillar that was Narbondel, showed him that the hour was late. At the break of each day, the Arch-mage of Menzoberranzan went out to Narbondel and infused the pillar with a magical, fingering heat that would work its way up, then back down. To sensitive drow eyes, which could look into the infrared spectrum, the level of heat in the pillar acted as a gigantic glowing clock.



Now Narbondel was almost cool; another day neared its end.



Dinin had to go more than halfway across the city, to a secret cave within the Clawrift, a great chasm running out from Menzoberranzan's northwestern waU. There Jarlaxle, the leader of Bregan D'aerthe, waited in one of his many hideouts.



The drow fighter cut across the center of the city, passed right by Narbondel, and beside more than a hundred hollowed stalagmites, comprising a dozen separate family compounds, their fabulous sculptures and gargoyles glowing in multicolored faerie fire. Drow soldiers, walking posts along house walls or along the bridges connecting multitudes of leering stalactites, paused and regarded the lone stranger carefully, hand-crossbows or poisoned javelins held ready until Dinin was far beyond them.



That was the way in Menzoberranzan: always alert, always untrusting.



Dinin gave one careful look around when he reached the edge of the Clawrift, then slipped over the side and used his innate powers of levitation to slowly descend the chasm. More than a hundred feet down, he again looked into the bolts of readied hand-crossbows, but these were withdrawn as soon as the mercenary guardsmen recognized Dinin as one of their own.



Jariaxle has been waiting for you, one of the guards signaled in the intricate silent hand code of the dark elves.



Dinin didn't bother to respond. He owed commoner soldiers no explanations. He pushed past the guardsmen rudely, making his way down a short tunnel that soon branched into a virtual maze of corridors and rooms. Several turns later, the dark elf stopped before a shimmering door, thin and almost translucent. He put his hand against its surface, let his body heat make an impression that heat-sensing eyes on the other side would understand as a knock.



"At last" he heard a moment later, in Jarlaxle's voice. "Do come in, Dinin, my Khal'abbil. Tfou have kept me waiting far too long."



Dinin paused a moment to get a bearing on the unpredictable mercenary's inflections and words. Jarlaxle had called him Khal'abbil, "my trusted friend," his nickname for Dinin since the raid that had destroyed House Do'Urden (a raid in which Jarlaxle had played a prominent role), and there was no obvious sarcasm in the mercenary's tone. There seemed to be nothing wrong at all. But, why, then, had Jarlaxle recalled him from his critical scouting mission to House Vandree, the Seventeenth House of Menzoberranzan? Dinin wondered. It had taken Dinin nearly a year to gain the trust of the imperiled Vandree house guard, a position, no doubt, that would be severely jeopardized by his unexplained absence from the house compound.



There was only one way to find out, the rogue soldier deckled. He held his breath and forced his way into the opaque barrier. It seemed as if he were passing through a wall of thick water, though he did not get wet, and, after several long steps across the flowing extraplanar border of two planes of existence, he forced his way through the seemingly inch-thick magical door and entered Jarlaxle's small room.



The room was alight in a comfortable red glow, allowing Dinin to shift his eyes from the infrared to the normal light spectrum. He blinked as the transformation completed, then blinked again, as always, when he looked at Jarlaxle.



The mercenary leader sat behind a stone desk, in an exotic cushioned chair, supported by a single stem with a swivel so that it could rock back at a considerable angle. Comfortably perched, as always, Jarlaxle had the chair leaning way back, his slender hands clasped behind his clean-shaven head (so unusual for a drow!).



Just for amusement, it seemed, Jarlaxle lifted one foot onto the table, his high black boot hitting the stone with a resounding thump, then lifted the other, striking the stone just as hard, but this boot making not a whisper.



The mercenary wore his ruby-red eye patch over his right eye this day, Dinin noted.



To the side of the desk stood a trembling little humanoid creature, barely half Dinin's five-and-a-half-foot height, including the small white horns protruding from the top of its sloping brow.



"One of House OWodra's kobolds," Jarlaxle explained casually. "It seems the pitiful thing found its way in, but cannot so easily find its way back out."



The reasoning seemed sound to Dinin. House Oblodra, the Third House of Menzoberranzan, occupied a tight compound at the end of the Clawrift and was rumored to keep thousands of kobolds for torturous pleasure, or to serve as house fodder in the event of a war.



"Do you wish to leave?" Jarlaxle asked the creature in a guttural, simplistic language.



The kobold nodded eagerly, stupidly.



Jarlaxle indicated the opaque door, and the creature darted for it. It had not the strength to penetrate the barrier, though, and it bounced back, nearly landing on Dinin's feet. Before it even bothered to get up, the kobold foolishly sneered in contempt at the mercenary leader.



Jarlaxle's hand nicked several times, too quickly for Dinin to count. The drow fighter reflexively tensed, but knew better than to move, knew that Jarlaxle's aim was always perfect.



When he looked down at the kobold, he saw five daggers sticking from its lifeless body, a perfect star formation on the scaly creature's little chest.



Jarlaxle only shrugged at Dinin's confused stare. "I could not allow the beast to return to Oblodra," he reasoned, "not after it learned of our compound so near theirs."



Dinin shared Jarlaxle's laugh. He started to retrieve the daggers, but Jarlaxle reminded him that there was no need.



"They will return of their own accord," the mercenary explained, pulling at the edge of his bloused sleeve to reveal the magical sheath enveloping his wrist. "Do sit," he bade his friend, indicating an unremarkable stool at the side of the desk. "Ws have much to discuss."



"Why did you recall me?" Dinin asked bluntly as he took his place beside the desk. "I had infiltrated Vandree fully."



"Ah, my Khal'abbQ" Jarlaxle replied. "Always to the point. That is a quality I do so admire in you."



" Uln'hyn? Dinin retorted, the drow word for "liar."



Again, the companions shared a laugh, but Jarlaxle's did not last so long, and he dropped his feet and rocked forward, clasping his hands, ornamented by a king's hoard of jewels - and how many of those glittering items were magical? Dinin often wondered - on the stone table before him, his face suddenly grave.



"The attack on Vandree is about to commence?" Dinin asked, thinking he had solved the riddle.