A cutlass slashed across Cale's back, a blow that would have felled him but for the protection granted by the shadows. Instead, the weapon merely opened a painful gash that his skin soon closed. Cale spun around with a reverse slash from Weaveshear but the slaver parried the blow, snarled, and bounded back. Cale followed up, at the same time mentally commanding his summoned blade to attack the slaver. It streaked in from the side and opened a gash in the man's shoulder. While he screamed, Cale decapitated him with a crosscut from Weaveshear.

From the forecastle, Jak shouted the words to a spell and a white beam of energy streaked into a slaver near Cale. The energy seared the man's skin and drove him to the deck, where he lay prone and unmoving.

"This ship is ours!" Magadon shouted down from the crow's nest. "Flee on the ship's boat or you all die!"

An arrow thumped into the deck, vibrating, near a slaver's feet. Another arrow went through the chest of a second slaver.

With an effort of will, Cale caused a cloud of impenetrable shadows to surround him. Cale could see through the blackness perfectly, but he knew the slavers would be able to see nothing. He took up Magadon's call.

"Run, you whoresons!" he shouted, and advanced on the slavers. "This ship is ours!"

Those who were not still enspelled turned and fled for the ship's boat. Cale slammed his pommel into the heads of those still under the mind-muddling effect of Jak's spell. They fell to the deck, dead or unconscious.

Let them go, Cale projected to Magadon, as perhaps six slavers worked to lower the ship's boat from its rigging. They had it lowered within a few breaths and all of them leaped over the side and scrambled into it. They cursed their conquerors as they rowed away. They would die or not on the sea. Cale did not care.

The ship was quiet.

Cale and Jak stood on a deck littered with corpses, a handful of unconscious slavers, and the still-enspelled helmsman. Jak called on the Trickster and healed himself with a prayer. Cale let his flesh repair the wounds he had suffered.

They watched with disbelieving smiles as Magadon descended from the crow's nest. Just to be certain that Magadon was Magadon, Cale spoke the prayer that empowered him to see magical auras. Magadon showed no aura, though his bow and several of his arrows glowed in Cale's sight. The guide was himself.

Cale and Jak met him at the bottom of the mast, full of questions.

"I felt you die," Jak said.

Cale took the guide by the shoulders and shook him. "As did I. Or so I thought."

"A play," the guide said and smiled. "Riven wanted the slaadi to believe he killed me, so I projected a false sensation to you two and to them."

The guide let the words register with Cale and Jak.

"Riven?" Jak said. "A play?"

"Why?" Cale asked. "If he's with us, why not just help us kill the slaadi here and now? We could have done it had he not interfered."

Magadon looked at Cale and answered, "I asked him the same thing. He said Mask wanted it this way, that Mask wanted the slaadi to escape. This time. He said you would understand."

Cale considered that, finally gave a slow nod. He did understand. The Shadowlord had an agenda that he had not yet seen fit to share with either his First or his Second. Riven was just doing what he thought Mask wanted. Cale had been on that path once.

"The Zhent's playing us," Jak said, and could not keep the hostility from his tone.

Cale knew that it was not Riven but Mask who was making the play.

Magadon shook his head. "I do not think so. I have a latent visual leech on him. He suggested it, so that we could follow. He said he would stay with the slaadi until the time was right. I believe him, Erevis. He's with us."

"Agreed," Cale said softly.

Jak shook his head and muttered, "That Zhent has more angles than a prism. I hope we know what we're doing."

Of course, Cale did not know what they were doing. Mask had directed Riven to help the slaadi escape Demon Binder. Cale could not imagine why.

CHAPTER 8

AGENDAS

Vhostym prepared to leave his pocket plane. He knew that he would not return. He would send for the Weave Tap when the time arrived.

He felt no nostalgia over his departure. The place had served him well as an isolated location from which to put his plan into place, but its utility was at an end. And Vhostym retained nothing that did not have utility.

The binding spells with which he had confined the demons, devils, and celestials he used in his research would degrade over the coming centuries. Eventually, the creatures would be free to slaughter one another or to return to their home planes. Or not. Vhostym did not care what became of them. Their utility too was at an end.

In his mind, he cataloged the threescore spells he had spent the last few hours preparing. He inventoried components for the spells, checked the magical paraphernalia that adorned his person. He reached into a belt pouch and counted the twenty magical emeralds he had personally crafted to prepare for this night. They were all there, with the exception of the one he had provided to Azriim.

He was ready.

His ragged breath sounded loud and wet in his ears. He felt increasingly tired. The pain in his limbs, in his muscles, his bones, wracked him. He reached into his mind and diminished his brain's capacity to register painful sensations. The agony decreased but did not end. He endured it. His illness was advancing quickly, inexorably. He needed events to move just as quickly. He had only a little time remaining, and therefore none to waste.

From the extradimensional storage space within his robe pocket, he withdrew a fillet of jade. Rather than lift his arms to place it on his head-the motion would have caused him added pain-he instead took hold of it with his mind and floated it atop his brow. He then incanted the words to one of his most powerful transmutations, a spell that would allow him to take an incorporeal form. All of his items and components would accompany him into incorporeality, and would remain as solid to him as the real world would seem insubstantial.

When the magic took effect, his flesh tingled, its malleability palpable. He regretted that he would have to once more spend time in a form other than his natural body, but he was not yet prepared to set foot on the surface in his own flesh.

His body dissolved relative to the material world. His flesh, clothing, and spell components turned gray and insubstantial. The world around him lost color. A channel opened between his being and the Negative Material Plane-a necessary element of the spell-and a preternatural cold suffused him. He willed his body to stand on the chamber floor, though he could have floated through it had he wished.

The transformation did nothing to end his pain, which, like his equipment, had followed him into his ghostly form. But the new form did not have the sensitivity to light that was the congenital curse of Vhostym's material flesh.

He incanted another spell and turned invisible. Afterward, he cast again and teleported from his pocket plane to the surface of Faerun, to a mountainous region on the frontier of the realm of Amn.

He materialized where he intended, in a thicket of century-old ash trees, near the bottom of a tree-dotted, steep-sided mountain vale. Darkness shrouded the valley. Mountains walled him in, dark and ominous. A brook wound its way through the vale's trees.

Vhostym's form allowed him to see well even in darkness, allowed him to sense the lifeforces of the animals around him. The creatures perceived the negative energy of his form and cowered in their dens, instinctively terrified of him.

They were wise to be frightened, for he had death on his mind.