The Scepter of the Sands (Book 3 of the Vicelord Chronicles)

Memnon, Calimshan

(6th of Alturiak, 1380 Dalereckoning)

Adir woke with his wife pressed against him. He inhaled, smelling her hair, and smiled, despite the day he faced. She stirred, groaning, turned to face him with a weary smile to match his.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” she parroted, blinking, “Progress?”

“Somewhat. Yourself?”

“Kimmuriel and Bregan D’aerthe will be ready when we need them. The price will be high.”

“It always is with the best.”

“Mmph.”

Rising from bed, his wife went towards the cabinet. Or tried to, before he pulled her back in, planting a long, deep kiss. She tensed, only for a moment, before melting against him, reciprocating.

“We won’t get far today like this, husband.”

Smirking, Adir otherwise gave no answer, savoring her a few moments more before allowing her to clothe, considering the meal left for them in the doorway. A cucumber and tomato salad, with flatbread and oil for dipping. He’d kill for a breakfast more in the northern custom; something with meat. His studies left him drained in such a way that only heavy protein could fix.

Eating quickly, and pausing only to share his discoveries of planar travel, he donned his robes and turban, and together they met Ormat and a retinue of a dozen men-at-arms in a small chamber. Amara and Durrah, Vala’s handmaidens, were not present, free hirelings due to his wife’s abrupt and irritating streak of generosity, Adir thought bitterly. A circle of powder replete with intricate runes surrounded them, save for a two foot length that was missing. “The safehouse is just outside the city proper.” Ormat told them, completing the line of powder around their retinue as they took their positions, “A small, walled-off cavern. I’ve had it cleared of undesirables. All here will remain with you as you prepare your infiltration. Everything you’ve requested has also been delivered.”

Nodding, Adir prepared himself, when suddenly Vala tensed.

As the portal magic enveloped them, drawing the powder, runes, and the floor itself, they set down in a very different environment. Not a cave, but a house, crafted more of wood than stone, its windows boarded up. By the dimensions of the room, perhaps thirty paces by twenty, Adir assumed it to be a lounge, though bereft of furnishings as it was it could have doubled as a storeroom. Opposite to them, before the reinforced door and backlit by torch-fire, was Amon Silasar.

“My gratitude, Ormat.”

As he brandished a pair of wands, Adir felt the bindings hidden on his person deactivate; the doing of Amon’s wards, no doubt. Unfortunately for him, those bindings weren’t protective wards, but instead served to conceal the elementals he’d secretly inserted into the teleportation circle. A trio of fire elementals sprang into being, incinerating the men Ormat had brought with them. Adir held his wife close, and due to the connection between summoner and minion, the flames never touched either of them.

Ormat lunged towards them, unharmed by the flames due to his priestly protections, scimitar in hand, but Vala was ready, and a field of ectoplasm engulfed them, turning it’s deadly edge. Amon began a spell of disjoining, hands assuming swift, mystic passes. Adir began the threads of his own spell, only to find his concentration inexplicably scrambled.

“We need to move.” he told her, drawing a silver-edged rapier, well-worn thanks to the denizens of the hells. Nodding, Vala assumed a distant expression, then blinked, “Something is disrupting my powers. I can’t feel the connections to make a dimensional door.”

“You can’t become intangible, either.” Amon noted dryly, completing his spell and banishing Adir’s elementals in a cloud of noxious smoke, “I’ve prepared for that.”

Tendrils of ectoplasm emerged from the mass protecting them and thrust at Amon like spears, all of which turned against an invisible barrier.

“That’s a new trick.” he added, summoning a pair of Displacer Beasts, “Still a perfect time for these.”

Not unlike panthers in figure, the demons were nonetheless distinguishable by their glowing green eyes and barbed, scourge-like tails. Able to travel between planes of existence, they’d bypassed his wife’s ability to shift into the astral plane. Here, they would likely pass through the ectoplasm and attack them inside.

Intuiting this, Vala struck first, tendrils of ectoplasm hardened into psicrystal shafts. Two shifted planes, and were unharmed, but another was struck and pinned to the floor, its body already disintegrating into putrid smoke. Amon, scowling, brandished a rod, a scepter, Adir noted, and a tangible weight settled on him. His concentration wavered further, and the threads of a spell he was painfully scouring his mind for twisted and guttered out.

Ormat pressed his attack, but able to interact through the ectoplasm as he couldn’t, Adir parried with some difficulty with the rapier, a much lighter weapon. The guard served, and he even nicked his traitorous friend on the wrist, drawing blood. The Genasi backed away, surprised.

“It’s been an enjoyable venture, my friend.” Ormat said jovially, “I will remember my time with you fondly, as I come to rule Memnon.”

“You always were a terrible liar.”

Hu’um had not expected the scepter to appear so quickly, and nearly dared blasphemy by praising Tymora for its luck. But luck, like all immaterial things, were mere illusions. Invisible, intangible, and undetectable, the Illithid probed the artifact for its sentience, and received frantic pleas of distress. ”We have not forgotten you." Hu’um assured the being within, ”And now you are within reach.”

Relief. Elation, even.

How far this entity had strayed from its nature. No matter. ”You will return with us, the better to deliver your full report. Then, we can work to add you to the collective of the Elder Brain."

Acquiescence.

The wizard’s wards might affect, even disrupt, psionic abilities, but beyond its reach, behind the caster, Hu’um simply co-opted its strength with the scepter to transport it below, where it could be recovered and transported back with them.

Amon, suddenly clutching at empty air, snarled, “You wretched Elves and your tricks!”

A cloud of wretched energy bled from his body, and Amon discharged a pulse of it into Vala’s ectoplasm field. Smoking, the material held, if barely, but the Displacer Beasts leapt through without resistance, their claws raking Adir as he defended the mindslave. His rapier plunged into one, but it darted out of reach, intangible once more, and its fellow planted its teeth in his arm.

More annoyed than dismayed, Hu’um bombarded the demon with confusing stimuli and it backed away, yelping pitifully. Vala struck again, rebounding against Amon’s defenses, but this time the wizard flinched, eyelid twitching as his barrier weakened. Hopefully.

The Genasi pressed the attack, maneuvering around Vala’s psicrystal appendages, cutting and thrusting with focused abandon, punctuating his strikes with gouts of flame or disjoining magic. Her ectoplasm shield wavered uncertainly, threatened to break. Willing its mindslave to greater focus, Hu’um focused its attention not on the wizard and its demons, but rather the wards restricting Adir’s casting. The less the Illithid intervened, the better.

Adir felt the weight over him lessen, saw a few of the runes inscribed into the floor gutter out.

Unwilling to question his fortunes, he hastily began summoning elementals, and completed just as Amon filled the room with dozens of Mezzoloths. Covered in chitin plates, they looked like a conjoining of Goblins and Wasps, long, narrow arms clutched crudely fashioned weaponry, pincers snapping as their membranous wings carried them, crashing, into Vala’s barrier. His elementals, living pillars of flame, had no effect on the fiends, and he cursed. Discharging a narrow shaft of green energy, he banished one to the realm of fire, then another, before cursing and orienting on Amon.

Dimensional doors opened all around them, swallowing a few Mezzoloths before they adapted their courses to avoid them. But more and more opened, thinning their numbers. Vala snarled, an inhuman, bestial sound, and turning to her he noted fearfully the change that had settled over her. Her eyes, still their lustrous blue, were ringed in red like blood, and thickly pronounced veins lined her eyelids, pulsating. Her Ajna chakra burned like a hot coal, and her skin went gooseflesh. Teeth bared, her entire body stood rigid, bleeding frigid vapor and sprouting psicrystal.

He had to finish this quickly.

Summoning another trio of Displacer Beasts, Amon commanded them to attack, and Adir sent his elementals to intercept them while calling up another pair to orbit Amon, striking again and again against his barrier. Troubled only somewhat by the temperature, the demons charged him, their bodies rippling as they moved through the planes. All of them rebounded off a sheet of psicrystal that burst from the floor, existing perhaps in multiple planes at once.

“Kill...” Vala snarled, “...you...”

Amon completed another spell, and a wave of disjoining banished his elementals. Amon had not the strength to call more. Another banishment struck his barrier, and it flickered away, spent.

Vala fell to her knees, weeping blood. Adir stood between her and Ormat, who sliced through her ectoplasm field.

“And now it ends, my friend.”

Smirking, the Genasi lifted his sword high, then turned, and hurled it into Amon’s, planting it deep into his chest. Whatever spell he’d begun died stillborn.

The demon binder blinked, started to turn, to speak, only to spit blood, and double over. His Displacer Beasts, unmindful of their master’s injuries, obeyed his last command and lunged. Still unable to cast, Adir flinched as a hasty disjoining cast by Ormat immolated them in golden fire borne of his clerical magic, and banished them back to their foul dimension.

Vala, visibly bewildered, wiped the blood from her eyes, panting.

“Close call.” Adir said coldly, “I guess having his men posing as yours was a nice way to get them all in close proximity. He probably thought he was going to have them restrain me. Idiot.”

Nodding, Ormat retrieved his sword, twisting it in Amon’s corpse, “Poor fellow had considerable protection against conventional magic and psionimancy...but he forgot priestly spells. All the while I was testing his barrier, probing it for weaknesses. His loss.”

“Could someone explain what just happened? Please?” Vala snapped, still emitting vapor.

“Good question.” Adir conceded, eyeing Ormat, “I wasn’t entirely sure what you would do when we dropped in. Had to make the surprise genuine, right? Glad you decided against profit this time.”

“You sure?” the Genasi asked with a laugh, “If I betrayed you in earnest, I doubt Sashelas would keep providing me spells. And my afterlife in his blissful realm would have likewise been imperiled. I was thinking profit in the long term, silly.”

Shrugging, Ormat briskly searched Amon’s body, located several magical talismans and a spellbook.

Motioning for it, Adir caught it from an underhand toss, and briefly perused its contents, “Fascinating. This will give me some interesting future opportunities. The portal back to his estate will prove much more valuable in the meantime.”

“Until the king discovers what happened and has it destroyed on the other end.”

“I intend to be in Almraiven before that happens.”

If Hu’um were capable of laughter, it certainly would have done so. Ormat, against all odds, choosing to side with his friend. Hardly.

Ormat had intended to betray Adir for profit. Were it not for Hu’um’s silent insistence, having wormed its way into the Genasi’s subconscious, that’s exactly what he would have done. In twisting his intentions indirectly, rather than dominating him outright, Ormat would retain his god-given spells, making the influence near-impossible to detect. Everything was going perfectly. The only complication was...-

Netal confirmed his suspicions, having observed the exchange in a shadowed corner of the room, forgotten the moment the teleportation took effect. He wasn’t nearly as powerful as his daughter, but born in Menzoberranzan, among some of the finest and most insidious Wizards in Faerûn, he’d learned long ago how to slip through and around magical barriers. Likewise, he’d learned to mask his presence; not true invisibility, it simply made others forget he was there unless he directly acted in their field of view.

And so, unobserved, he could clearly tell Ormat had suffered telepathic attack, but not from his daughter. In fact, her mind had also been altered before she’d returned the night prior. Naturally, Netal assumed the same person was responsible for both.

Knowing he didn’t dare probe the mind of another Psion, he instead inserted himself into Ormat’s, hoping the person or group that had meddled with it wasn’t still there. They weren’t. Surreptitiously reviewing his list of available prayer spells, Netal found what he was looking for, and implanted an urge to cast it.

The Genasi, frowning, began a soft chant under his breath. Noticing his peculiar shift, Adir tensed, calling out his name.

Completing the prayer, a bright light tinged with blue flared from his fingertip, and smote his daughter. She convulsed, then collapsed in Adir’s arms.

“What did you just do?!”

“I...don’t know.” Ormat sputtered, helping Adir lower her to the floor.

Looking up, Adir’s gaze passed over the spot on which Netal stood, and his alertness penetrated the shroud of concealment.

“This is your doing?!”

“Yes.” Netal said, cursing under his breath, “I had him cast a prayer of fortitude. It was among his active repertoire.”

“Fortitude? Then why did she collapse?”

“On someone impaired by magic...” he explained, “For instance, restraints or incapacitation, it could loosen the magic’s hold on that person. In the case of someone altered by mind magic, it can call up dormant aspects of their psyche, allowing them to resist.”

“Altered? What-”

His answer was forthcoming, as an Illithid emerged from the floor, his body made intangible by mind magic.

"You will suffer greatly for this inconvenience.” a bubbling, otherworldly voice echoed in his mind.

In the brief moment before the telepathic attack that followed, which disabled both Adir and Ormat, Netal hoped his daughter was as strong as he hoped...

Swirling, tenebrous motes of light.

Two spheres, ever orbiting.

One blue, one red.

Shadow.

Pain.

Visions of a male Elf with pale skin and kind eyes.

A city aflame.

Are you the one?

Vala?

No.

There was a Vala.

There was another.

Screaming. No longer Silent.

Pushing toward the surface, buried deep. So close. So close.

Chains, strained, ready to break.

She felt herself pushed the rest of the way.

Opening her eyes, she smelled blood. Adir, and Ormat, holding her. Questions.

No time. She stood up, felt a presence. She didn’t fight it, and instead focused on that smell.

Hu’um turned to its acquisition, infuriated. But as it began to probe her psyche, it found only a singular focus. His intrusion blunted, and was turned away.

"What is this?” It wondered, ”You always use the Iron Tower. You were never confident in the Empty Mind maneuver."

Heedless, Vala attacked. Hu’um felt a crushing telepathic attack simultaneous with her lunging towards it. The sheer ferocity, not the flailing of the recently enthralled but the concentrated, singularly murderous intent of a cornered animal, opened a brief but exploitable gap in its defenses. While its body remained intangible, it shuddered as her telepathic spike burrowed into its brain, and shattered apart, breaking its concentration. Its own offensive crumbled.

Rather than attack with a whipblade, Vala slashed with hands coated in psicrystal like gnarled, crystalline talons, unmindful of her ineffectiveness upon its incorporeal flesh. Snarling, beyond thought, her psychic attack nonetheless intensified. Daunted, but determined to recover its asset, Hu’um called out to several of its peers to converge on its location. The response was immediate; pens of slaves were prepared for just such an occasion. The scepter appeared in its hand, bolstering its defense.

There was a whoosh of displaced air, as multiple dimensional doors opened in the large chamber, gaping voids that vomited forth such unseemly hosts; dozens of Goblins, armed with crudely fashioned weapons, towering Bugbears, and an Ogre, forced to hunch lest it strike the ceiling.

Hu’um didn’t think the force would delay her for long, but fellow Illithid followed, more discreetly, their doors admitting them, intangible, into the floor and ceiling. Coordinating their efforts, several bursts of disorienting telepathic stimuli reverberated through the floor. Intangible, Hu’um was unaffected, but anything smaller than a Dragon would quickly incapacitate.

Not so; for some impeccable reason, Vala stood unabashed, and shrieked, her voice empowered by her powers into an ear-splitting peal that shook the very foundations of the house. The slaves cowered, and shrank away.

"How are you able to resist us?!” Hu’um asked, mystified. Its confusion turned to horror, as its body began to vibrate. Her shriek, not unlike a banshee, was vibrating the very particles of its body simultaneously.

Despite her incessant telepathic attack, it penetrated her consciousness enough to determine two disparate beings before its world exploded in pain.

Adir blinked, and found himself staring at a ceiling. His ears rang, and a peculiar vibration wracked his body. There was a wet popping sound, and the ringing stopped. Blinking again, he rolled onto his side, and found himself eye-to-eye with a pudgy goblinkin. He started to recoil, but noted the lack of awareness in its beady yellow eyes, and determined it to be quite dead.

Sitting up, he found himself beside a menagerie of goblinkin, all dead, bleeding from their ears. Other than that, they bore no obvious injury. Ormat and Netal were a few paces distant, equally disoriented but alive and seemingly unharmed. Amon’s body had disappeared. Vala, his wife, stood over a revolting mound of purple flesh, its original form crushed beyond recognition. Her body was a host of crystal and frigid vapor.

She kneeled over, picked up an object, Amon’s scepter, he realized dimly.

Ahriman’s scepter.

She looked back to him, and her expression, so unlike her, took him aback. There was no measurable sense to this incongruity; it was nothing he could explain rationally, but he instinctually knew something was very, very out of place.

Then he noticed something physically different; around her eyes remained a flare of red, like a corona of fire the color of blood.

“What happened?”

She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before.

A suspicion formed; she’d been altered, Netal had said. By how much?

“Who are you?” he asked, dreading the answer.

Looking for all the world like he’d just asked her the most puzzling riddle, all she could reply was, “Somebody.”

Waiting expectantly as his Cornugon servant hauled its catch through the dimensional door he’d erected, Bazrulnorganon tapped his clawed fingers against his sleeves. Assuming his Tiefling form, the better to navigate the cramped space comfortably, the Hellfire Wyrm nonetheless exhaled blistering smoke when Amon’s lifeless body was laid at his feet.

The Cornugon, also known as a horned devil, groveled for a few moments, then departed where it would wait to receive its reward. If Bazrulnorganon were feeling generous, that was...

Calling upon his hellish powers, the Wyrm beckoned Amon’s soul from its resting place in Cania, up through the layers, to his estate in Avernus. Dark, putrid shadows collected about the human’s slight frame, his wounds cauterizing with hellfire, blistering and leaving gruesome scar tissue.

Amon inhaled, his eyes opening wide as coins. Breathing irregularly, he scrambled a moment before Bazrulnorganon snatched him up with strength his humanoid form shouldn’t have possessed.

"I hold my end of our bargain complete.” he said in Infernal, ”One death, undone, and free passage back to Toril. My payment...”

Nodding, Amon beckoned with his hand, summoning a hidden talisman, and from it manifested the Sword of Bahamut.

“You will feel much safer in you station now.” Amon said hastily, “It will prove the bane of many of your peers, since I’ve altered its enchantment to be wielded by you alone. As we agreed.”

Nodding, for he was pleased with his continuing returns of investment, the Wyrm held Amon a little tighter, “If you want another escape from death, you will have to provide me something equally as valuable.”

“Ahriman has no shortage of rare artifacts...”

“I care not for his control over sea and sand.” Bazrulnorganon snapped, “It’s all mountains here, and the only rivers are of molten rock. I want something far more delicious.”

“What?”

“A soul.” the Wyrm said greedily, “A pure soul of a goodly weal. There’s a ritual I intend, that will require it.”

“You will have it. I know just the one.”