A curious expression crossed Cale's face, and Jak thought he might have been struggling for words.
Finally, Cale said, "Precautions, little man. Let's leave it at that."
To that, Jak said nothing. Cale obviously wanted Jak ignorant of what had transpired. Jak hoped his friend knew what he was doing.
With nothing else to do, Jak removed his holy symbol and uttered prayers of healing over each of his companions. Even Riven, perhaps still too disoriented to protest, accepted the spell. The warm energy flowed through Jak and into his comrades. It seemed to bring each of them back to themselves, at least somewhat.
None of them spoke of what had just transpired. To Jak, each of them looked at though they had just awakened from a deep sleep.
* * * * *
When Cale had drained the last of his waterskin and recovered himself as fully as seemed possible, he looked around, eyed his friends, and said to them, "Let's leave this place."
Jak said, "We're just waiting for you to tell us how, my friend."
Cale didn't bother to explain that he had an intuitive feel for the overlap between Toril and the Plane of Shadow.
Instead, he simply said, "Watch."
He concentrated for a moment, attuning himself to the correspondence between the two planes. When he had his mental hands around the connection, he opened his eyes and traced a glowing, vertical green line in the air with his forefinger. At any moment in time, he knew, the Plane of Shadow and Toril were separated by a planar barrier as thin as the cutting edge of an elven thinblade. Cale could slice open that barrier at will.
Putting his palms together and making a knife of his hands, he poked them through the center of the glowing line and drew them apart, as though he was parting draperies from before a window in Stormweather Towers's great hall. The line expanded after his hands to become a rectangular curtain of ochre light hanging in the air-a gate back to Toril.
The appearance of the gate evoked a grin from Jak.
"After all this," the halfling said, shaking his head, "and it was just that easy."
Cale didn't bother to tell his friend that it hadn't been easy at all, that the transformation back in the Fane had changed his body, but it was only a short time ago that the place had transformed his soul.
Instead, he nodded at the portal and said to Jak, "That's home. You're the first, little man."
Jak hesitated for only an instant. He beat his hat on his thigh to free it of mud, donned it with verve, smiled broadly, and hopped through the gate.
Magadon followed.
"Well done, Cale," he said, and stepped through, bow held at his side.
Before Riven stepped into the gate, the assassin stopped and looked Cale in the face.
"I had to do it, Cale," the assassin said. "I'd seen it."
"Maybe," Cale said.
Riven frowned, then said, "You're the First, Cale." He nodded at the gate. "And that's not home anymore. Not for us."
"Go through, Riven," Cale said.
Just as the assassin was about to step through, something registered with Cale. He grabbed Riven by the arm.
"The teleportation rods," he said. "They didn't crumble to dust, did they?"
Riven looked him in the eye and replied, "We had to go through this, Cale. I know what I saw. You had to be our way out."
In his mind, Cale heard Sephris say, Two and two are four.
"We all could have died," Cale said.
Riven shrugged.
"Where are the rods now?"
"I threw them in the bog," the assassin said with a smile, "the moment I understood the vision."
"Afraid you couldn't have resisted temptation?" Cale asked.
Riven grinned.
Cale released Riven's arm and said, "Go through."
Riven did.
Cale lingered for a moment in the glow of the gate and spared one last glance around the Shadow Deep. Its darkness seemed familiar to him, comforting, like the companionship of an old friend. Its gloom felt more protective than oppressive. He knew that Riven had spoken the truth. The gate to Toril did not lead home, not for him, not anymore.
But for a moment at least, he would turn his back on the darkness.
He stepped through the portal. It felt like slipping into warm water.
CHAPTER 8
THE CITY OF SKULLS
An immense, complicated network of caverns and tunnels honeycombed the rock below Faerun's surface, stretching for leagues in all directions-the world below the world, the sunless expanse of the Underdark. To Azriim, it felt much the same as the Sojourner's pocket plane, itself simply a pinched-off portion of the Underdark.
In the endless night of that oppressive realm, a quarter-league below the city of Waterdeep, Skullport squatted in an immense L-shaped cavern carved from the rock by the slow but inexorable flow of the dark waters of the Sargauth, the underground river that fed Skullport a steady diet of ships and fresh water. The unsupported vault of the cavern's soaring but stalactite-dotted ceiling would have collapsed of its own weight long ago if not for the mantle magic that supported it.
Even in his current, vulgar form, Azriim could feel the subtle currents of magic moving through the still, dank air of the city. The mantle's magic touched everything, and it remained powerful, even after the death of its creators many centuries before.
Millennia earlier, Azriim knew, the cavern in which Skullport stood had been part of a much larger complex of caverns used by Netherese arcanists for magical experimentation-Sargauth Enclave, it was called, or so the Sojourner had explained to Azriim. It was the Netherese who first crafted the magical mantle that blanketed the caverns, an attempt by the human arcanists to secure the safety of their new city and to mimic the highest achievement of elven high magic, the mythal. But when the most powerful of the Netherese archwizards, Karsus, temporarily unraveled the Weave in a failed bid to achieve godhood, the enclave's mantle temporarily ceased to function. Those few heartbeats during which magic was dead in Faerun were as catastrophic to Sargauth Enclave as they were to the rest of the Empire of Netheril. Most of the caverns in which the enclave had stood, no longer buttressed by the magic of the mantle, collapsed in a hail of stone, crushing hundreds.
But a few caverns, by sheer happenstance, suffered only partial collapses. Centuries later, in one such cavern, Skullport squirmed from the corpse of the ruined Netherese outpost like an infestation of maggots. There it crouched, flourishing in the darkness and damp, a great fungus hiding in the shadows.
Bordered on three sides by trade tunnels stretching away into the Underdark, and on one side by an underground bay formed by the dark, pooling waters of the Sargauth, Skullport gradually grew into an important trade link in the chain of the Underdark's unsteady economy. Beings of all races came to the Port of Skulls to trade in wares and flesh.
With limited space in which to build, the city's inhabitants filled the cavern's L-shaped floor and grew upward. Dilapidated homes, shops, and vice-dens-most built of salvaged shipping lumber washed down to the Sargauth by the currents of the surface sea-hugged the walls and ceilings of the cavern like lichen, or lay stacked one upon another, layer after layer, like a human child's blocks. The roof of a brothel might be the floor of the eatery built above it.
An intricate network of catwalks, recycled ships' rigging, tightropes, swings, and unstable bridges connected the buildings that stood above floor level. Strung from structure to structure, or spiked to the stalactites that pointed down from the vaulted ceiling like spear tips, the "hemp highway" made for an effective, if precarious set of airborne streets.
To Azriim, looking up from the floor, the hemp highway resembled the web of an insane spider, vibrating with the movement of hundreds of struggling flies going about their business. With a frequency bordering on clockwork-at least once every twelve hours or so-someone would fall to a screaming, splattering death on the streets below. Sometimes a bridge or catwalk gave out, but just as often it was a creditor's or enforcer's patience that finally came to a violent end.