The Grimoire Returned

Book Two

The Grimoire Returned

Chapter 29

The Empty Place

Vegon had spent most of the previous three days thinking about a book he was not allowed to open.

The agreement had been sensible when they made it. The Grimoire of Orozon was ancient, unquestionably magical and written in a system none of them understood. They were still several days inside the Great Swamp, where dry ground was a luxury and an uninterrupted hour was apparently too much to ask. Opening the book merely because Vegon wanted another look at it would have been reckless.

Knowing that did nothing to improve his mood.

The Grimoire remained wrapped in oilcloth and secured inside Deacon's pack, protected from the rain and from anyone who might decide that curiosity justified experimentation. Vegon suspected he had been included in that second category. Jandar certainly had. He had already suggested twice that perhaps the mysterious script would become comprehensible if they held the book upside down, and once that Mills might try singing to it.

Vegon had stopped answering him.

The problem was not simply that he wanted to read the Grimoire. He wanted to understand what he had already seen.

Those brief pages in Orozon's hidden chamber had contained diagrams that resembled the blue crystals beneath Tavalon and in the gnoll caves. There had been structures that looked almost like spell notation but obeyed none of the conventions Vegon knew. The book might contain nothing more than the private studies of a dead Scourge Lord, but it might also contain the first real explanation of the ancient mechanisms that had been waking around them.

Somewhere inside Deacon's pack could be the answer to why Tavalon had moved, how the crystals carried creatures across impossible distances and why four-century-old systems still possessed enough power to reshape the present.

Vegon could not read any of it.

That offended him on several levels.

The swamp, at least, had begun behaving normally again.

Zook noticed the change first. Within hours of leaving the Temple of Orozon, the gnome had stopped hesitating over tracks and animal calls. Birds returned to the canopy. Small creatures moved through the brush. Once, something large slipped into black water ahead of them, leaving a wake broad enough that Jandar suggested they take a different route without waiting to learn what had caused it.

The strange emptiness surrounding Orozon's temple had not followed them.

Vegon found that almost reassuring.

Normal for the Great Swamp still meant mud deep enough to steal boots, clouds of biting insects and rain that seemed capable of approaching from several directions at once, but those were ordinary miseries. They belonged to the world as he understood it. After the Temple's moving rooms and false walls, there was something comforting about a tree simply being a tree and a puddle being dangerous only because something might live in it.

Rain returned halfway through their third day.

It began softly, ticking against leaves overhead, then thickened until the jungle around them blurred behind curtains of water. Deacon pulled his hood forward without comment. Xil did the same. Zook continued ahead as though weather were merely another kind of terrain.

Mills suffered more dramatically.

“I used to like rain,” the minstrel said from somewhere inside the oversized cloak he had wrapped around himself.

Jandar glanced back. “Rain is pleasant.”

“You have complained about it since we entered the swamp.”

“That has nothing to do with whether it is pleasant.”

Mills pushed his hood far enough back to look at him. “How?”

“You'll understand eventually.”

“He won't,” Deacon said.

Jandar gave the fighter a wounded look. “I was trying to teach him something.”

“That is what worried me.”

Mills laughed, though the sound still broke halfway through. His voice had improved since Xil's work in the cave, but the poison and whatever else had touched him had left damage behind. Speaking no longer exhausted him. Singing did.

He had tried the night after they left Orozon.

Only once.

The first note had been rough. The second failed entirely. Mills had cleared his throat, made some joke about the swamp ruining his range and put the subject away.

No one had believed him.

Vegon had expected Jandar to say something. Instead, Jandar had changed the subject so quickly that Mills might not even have realized what he had done.

There were moments when Vegon suspected the former pirate understood people better than any of them.

He tried not to encourage the thought.

Ahead, Zook stopped.

The gnome's raised hand silenced them faster than any command could have.

Vegon heard nothing at first beyond the rain, but then a distant crashing carried through the trees to the north. Something substantial was moving through the undergrowth, breaking branches rather than passing around them. A second series of impacts came from farther east.

Deacon already had his crossbow in hand. “Two.”

Zook nodded, his attention fixed on the jungle ahead. “At least.”

Jandar drew his new rapier. Even beneath the gray daylight the blade carried a faint silver gleam, pale as moonlight beneath water. He had spent an embarrassing amount of the past three days pretending not to admire it.

“Perhaps,” Jandar said quietly, “we could allow whatever they are to continue on their way.”

Deacon looked at him.

“What?”

“You want to avoid a fight?”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You challenged a grung to single combat.”

“It made a gesture.”

“It scratched itself.”

Jandar frowned. “In hindsight, yes.”

Zook pointed toward the remains of an old structure half hidden beneath vines. Only one wall still stood at anything close to its original height, but the broken stone offered better concealment than the trees. They moved behind it, Mills going willingly into the deepest cover while the others spread far enough apart that one charge would not catch them all.

The first creature burst through the jungle before Vegon had settled into place.

He recognized the broad shoulders and long arms immediately. It was one of the great ape-like beasts they had seen deeper in the swamp, powerful enough that fighting it would have been unpleasant even with everyone fresh.

It did not so much as look toward them.

The creature crashed past the ruin and disappeared south.

A second followed moments later, coming from another angle and moving with the same desperate speed. Mud flew from beneath its limbs. It struck a sapling hard enough to break it and did not slow.

Vegon watched until the jungle swallowed it.

“They're running from something,” Zook said.

No one needed to ask how he knew.

The five of them remained behind the ruined wall while the rain filled the space the animals had left behind. Vegon listened for another crashing approach.

Nothing came.

Whatever had frightened them either changed direction or had no need to hurry.

Jandar slowly returned the rapier to its sheath. “I preferred not knowing that.”

“So did I,” Mills said.

They waited several more minutes before continuing south.

By evening they had found a rise where the ground was merely wet instead of submerged. A narrow waterfall spilled over a shelf of dark rock nearby, feeding one of the countless streams that wound through the swamp before joining the river. Huge trees crowded around the clearing, their roots rising from the earth in tangled walls that offered some shelter from the wind.

It was not a good campsite.

They had stopped expecting good ones.

Deacon and Zook chose the most defensible patch of ground while Jandar helped Mills clear water from a shallow hollow beneath a fallen tree. Xil checked everyone's wounds and declared them irritating rather than dangerous. Vegon tried briefly to improve the shelter with magic until the taint answered with the familiar wrongness that accompanied even simple spellwork—a metallic bitterness on his tongue and a pressure behind his eyes that lingered after the spell itself was gone.

He abandoned the attempt.

The rain remained.

“That seems unfair,” Jandar said.

Vegon looked at him. “What does?”

“You have magic.”

“Yes.”

“And we're still wet.”

“That is not what magic is for.”

Jandar glanced toward the rain. “Then magic needs better priorities.”

Vegon considered explaining the limitations of defensive abjuration, then saw Jandar's expression and stopped himself.

Progress.

They set watches.

Vegon took the second.

By then the rain had weakened to a steady dripping through the canopy. Deacon slept with his crossbow close enough that his hand rested beside the stock. Zook had curled into his cloak near the roots of one of the larger trees. Jandar lay on his back beneath a makeshift cover of branches, one hand resting near the hilt of the moon-touched rapier even in sleep.

Mills had disappeared almost completely into the hollow beneath the fallen trunk.

Vegon sat alone and listened to the swamp breathe.

He disliked admitting that he could sense the Grimoire from where he sat.

Sense was probably too strong a word. He knew where it was. He knew exactly how many paces separated him from Deacon's pack, and once that knowledge became fixed in his mind he found it difficult not to imagine some faint pressure accompanying it.

The book might have been doing nothing at all.

That possibility did not make it less interesting.

He thought of Eticus.

For most of his life, discovering something he could not immediately understand had felt like a personal challenge. Magic was generous that way. It did not care about rank, blood or expectation. A rune either yielded to study or it did not. A spell worked or failed according to principles that could be tested. The answer might be difficult, dangerous or obscure, but an answer existed.

The Grimoire had reminded him how much he did not know.

For once, Vegon wanted another scholar looking over his shoulder.

Eticus would be insufferable about it.

Vegon found himself almost looking forward to that.

A branch snapped in the darkness.

The thought vanished.

Vegon rose slowly and listened.

Something moved beyond the camp.

Not with the careless violence of the animals they had seen earlier. This sound was quieter. A wet step. The faint scrape of something passing across stone. Another step.

“Deacon.”

Vegon did not raise his voice.

He did not need to.

Deacon opened his eyes and reached for the crossbow in one movement. Jandar stirred next, alert before Vegon could decide whether to wake him. Zook emerged from beneath his cloak moments later.

Xil sat up and looked toward the trees.

Mills remained hidden.

“Stay there,” Jandar whispered toward the hollow.

“I was planning to.”

The sound came again, closer now.

They separated into the same pattern that had become natural after weeks together. Deacon found a clear firing lane without being told. Zook moved low through the roots toward the flank. Xil stayed close enough to reach either side of the clearing. Jandar disappeared behind a tree with a competence he would undoubtedly boast about later.

Vegon moved toward the rear and waited.

The creature entered the edge of the clearing almost cautiously.

At first he could make out only its shape: low, broad and wrong in its proportions. It moved on several powerful limbs, its dark hide slick with rain, head hanging close to the earth. The mouth dominated the front of the skull.

Then the creature lifted its face.

Its mouth opened.

Vegon saw the eyes inside.

There were too many.

Small, luminous orbs glimmered among folds of flesh within the enormous maw, each moving independently. Some fixed on the camp. Others rolled toward Zook's position. One seemed to look directly at Vegon.

The creature made a low crooning sound.

It was not loud. It did not need to be. The sound slipped through the rain with the intimacy of someone humming in the next room.

Vegon felt the skin between his shoulders tighten.

Zook's arrow struck the creature before it had fully entered the clearing.

The shaft drove into its flank. The beast recoiled, then turned toward the gnome's hiding place.

Deacon's first bolt arrived an instant later.

The fight began.

Vegon raised his hand and reached for magic.

The creature opened its mouth wider.

Every glowing eye turned toward them.

Something swept across the clearing.

Vegon had no better word for it because there was no sensation to describe. No wind touched him. No force struck his body. There was simply a before and an after.

Magic was there.

Then it wasn't.

Vegon stood frozen.

The spell he had been shaping had not failed. Failure had texture. The corrupted weave might resist, twist or tear unpredictably when he reached for it; even a spell collapsing beneath the taint left some remnant of the connection behind.

This was absence.

He reached again.

Nothing answered.

Across the clearing, the silver glow vanished from Jandar's rapier.

Xil had raised one hand toward Zook. He stopped with it extended, his expression changing in a way Vegon had never seen before.

Even divine magic had gone silent.

“What did it do?” Deacon demanded.

Vegon tried to answer, but the thing in his chest where magic had always lived seemed to have taken his voice with it.

Zook moved.

The gnome sprinted sideways across the clearing, away from the creature's open mouth. Halfway behind a thick tree root he stumbled as if something had struck him.

Then his head snapped up.

“I can feel it again!”

Vegon understood.

Not a disappearance from the world.

A boundary.

He ran.

The instant the tree placed him beyond the creature's gaze, magic returned so suddenly that he almost lost his footing. The connection flooded back through him along with the taint: metallic taste, pressure, a faint wrong heat beneath his skin.

He welcomed all of it.

Vegon turned and released the spell before the monster could face him again. Arcane bolts crossed the rain and struck its side. Each flash left an afterimage against the darkness, and the creature shrieked.

Its head swung toward him.

The world went empty again.

Vegon backed behind the tree.

“It's where it looks!” he shouted. “Stay out of its gaze!”

Jandar understood first. He moved in from the creature's flank just as Deacon fired from the opposite side, forcing the beast to choose between them. The moment its eyes followed the crossbow bolt, Jandar's rapier brightened. He lunged, the moonlit blade cutting deep along one forelimb.

The creature twisted.

The sword went dark in his hand.

Jandar looked at the suddenly ordinary blade. “I dislike you.”

He stabbed it anyway.

Under other circumstances Vegon might have appreciated the simplicity of Deacon's contribution. The fighter needed no magical connection, no arcane structure, no divine favor. He needed line of sight and a loaded weapon. While the others maneuvered around the creature's strange field, Deacon simply continued putting bolts into it whenever flesh presented itself.

The tactic worked until the creature reached Zook.

The gnome had drawn it away from Xil and almost escaped the first claw. Almost was not enough. The blow caught him across the side and threw him into the mud. Before he could recover, the creature came down on him again.

Vegon saw the bite.

He also saw Zook's reaction.

The gnome screamed and clutched his head, his body folding around pain that the teeth alone could not explain.

Xil ran toward him.

The creature turned.

Xil stopped as though he had struck a wall.

Vegon knew what had happened without asking.

No magic.

No healing.

“Move it!” Xil shouted.

Deacon fired, the bolt burying itself near the creature's shoulder. Jandar attacked from behind. The beast twisted toward them, and Xil lunged the final few steps to Zook.

Divine light flared around his hand.

For an instant the glow looked wrong, the taint crawling through it in dark-edged distortions, but Xil forced the power into Zook before the creature's gaze swept back.

The healing stopped abruptly.

It had been enough.

Zook rolled away and dragged himself behind a root.

The beast followed.

Jandar intercepted it.

He did not try to overpower something twice his weight. He stepped inside the angle of its first strike, cut at the joint and was already moving before the claws came back. The moonlit blade brightened whenever the creature looked away and became ordinary steel whenever those terrible eyes found him, but Jandar adapted without hesitation.

The fight had become a contest of attention.

Vegon saw the pattern.

Deacon fired from one side. Jandar pressured the other. Zook, wounded but still moving, attacked whenever the creature committed itself elsewhere. Xil remained close enough to reach whoever fell outside the field.

Vegon waited.

The creature turned toward Deacon.

Magic returned.

Vegon began his spell.

The taint resisted him, a sick pressure pushing backward through his hands, but he held the structure together.

The creature moved.

Its mouth swung toward him.

The spell vanished.

Not failed.

Erased.

Vegon swore and ran.

Jandar laughed somewhere behind the creature. “Having trouble?”

“This is not amusing.”

“It is a little.”

The beast turned toward Jandar.

Vegon's magic returned.

He cast again.

This time the spell struck.

The creature reeled, and for several seconds the party controlled it. Not easily. Not cleanly. But there was method to what had initially been chaos. They made it turn. Each shift of the head restored one companion while robbing another. The creature's strength remained terrifying, yet its strange power demanded focus. It could deny magic in only one direction at a time.

That was a weakness.

Vegon could work with weaknesses.

He moved farther around the clearing, looking for a position that would force the creature to expose itself if it faced him. Deacon noticed and adjusted without instruction. Another bolt struck from the opposite side.

The creature turned.

Vegon reached for power.

Then it abandoned Deacon entirely and charged him.

He had misjudged the distance.

The realization came with irritating clarity.

Vegon tried to move, but the creature was faster than something that size had any right to be. He saw the first claw sweep toward him and managed to twist aside. The second missed only because his foot slipped in the mud.

For half a heartbeat he thought the mistake had saved him.

Then the jaws closed.

Pain overwhelmed everything else.

Teeth drove into his body. At the same time another force punched through his skull, a pressure so violent and intimate that he could not tell whether he had screamed.

The clearing disappeared.

It returned at the wrong angle.

Vegon was on the ground.

He could hear rain striking leaves and someone shouting his name, but the sounds had lost meaning. He tried to move his hand and could not determine where it was.

Magic.

He reached for it instinctively.

There was nothing.

He could not tell whether the creature still faced him or whether his own mind had simply lost the ability to find the connection.

Darkness gathered at the edges of his vision.

The Grimoire came to him then.

Not Eticus.

Not his companions.

The book.

He had found a text written by one of the greatest magical powers of the ancient world, carried it out of a lost temple, and might die before reading a single sentence.

It was such an absurdly Vegon thought that under different circumstances he might have laughed.

The darkness closed before he could.

He returned to pain.

That was followed by rain, then by a voice.

“Vegon.”

Xil.

Vegon opened his eyes.

The cleric was kneeling over him with one hand pressed against his chest. Divine light spread beneath Xil's fingers, faint and uneven, carrying the same corrupted edge all magic now seemed to possess.

Vegon had never found the taint beautiful before.

He did now.

The connection was there again.

Not his own magic yet. He could barely think clearly enough to form his name. But he could feel power existing in the world around him.

The empty place had closed.

He drew a painful breath.

Jandar appeared above Xil's shoulder. His hair was plastered to his face by rain and there was blood on his coat.

“You look terrible.”

Vegon closed his eyes again. “I preferred unconsciousness.”

Jandar smiled. “He's fine.”

“He is not fine,” Xil said.

“But he is insulting me.”

“That is not a medical diagnosis.”

“It has proven reliable.”

Vegon opened his eyes again.

The creature lay partly submerged in the black water at the edge of the clearing. Crossbow bolts protruded from its side and neck. One of Zook's arrows remained buried near the mouth.

Deacon stood nearby, watching it with his crossbow still raised.

“Dead?” Vegon asked.

“I've shot it several times since it stopped moving.”

“That was not my question.”

“It hasn't complained.”

Good enough.

Zook sat against one of the great tree roots, pale beneath the mud and rain. Xil had already worked on him, though one arm remained wrapped across his ribs.

Mills cautiously emerged from the fallen trunk.

“I heard screaming.”

Jandar glanced toward Vegon. “Mostly him.”

Vegon lacked the strength to object properly.

Xil helped him sit up but prevented him from standing. Vegon's body felt as though several important pieces had been put back in approximately the correct places. He could sense magic normally now, if anything connected with corrupted magic could still be called normal.

The memory of its absence remained more vivid than the wounds.

“What was that?” Zook asked.

Vegon looked toward the dead creature. Its many eyes had gone dark.

“I don't know.”

Jandar drew the moon-touched rapier a few inches from its sheath.

Silver light ran along the exposed blade.

He watched it for a moment before sliding it back.

“It made that stop.”

“Yes.”

“It made all of it stop,” Xil said.

Vegon looked at him.

The cleric's expression was controlled, but Vegon understood the unease beneath it. Whatever distinction scholars made between arcane and divine power, the creature had apparently cared about neither.

Deacon rested the crossbow against his shoulder. “Didn't stop this.”

Jandar looked at him.

“No. We noticed.”

Deacon's mouth moved slightly.

Vegon might once have found the observation irritating. At that moment he found it oddly comforting.

There were things magic could not solve.

Apparently there were also things magic could not complicate.

Xil turned back to Vegon. “You almost died.”

Vegon looked toward the place where he had fallen.

There was no accusation in Xil's voice, only fact.

He remembered the jaws. The darkness. The inability to move.

More than anything, he remembered reaching for magic and finding nothing there.

“I know.”

It was the only answer worth giving.

The others grew quiet.

Vegon looked toward Deacon's pack.

The Grimoire remained inside, dry and untouched.

A dead Scourge Lord's book they could not read. Blue crystals carrying creatures across distances they could not explain. A Temple built around magical principles that refused ordinary geometry. Now an animal—or monster, or something between the two—that could deny magic simply by looking at it.

For months Vegon had been treating each discovery as a piece of a puzzle.

That assumed they all belonged to the same puzzle.

Perhaps that was the mistake.

The ancient world had contained powers they no longer understood because too much knowledge had died with it. The Sundering had not merely destroyed cities and killed armies. It had broken continuity between one age and the next.

Vegon had spent his life studying magic.

He was beginning to understand how much of magic had been lost.

That frightened him more than he wanted to admit.

By dawn, the rain had weakened.

Xil had restored enough of Vegon and Zook that both could travel, though neither was permitted to pretend the previous night's injuries had vanished. Deacon took the front with Zook beside him rather than ranging ahead alone. Mills remained in the middle.

Jandar stayed near Vegon.

He never announced that decision and Vegon chose not to mention it.

They reached the river late the following day.

The sight of open water beyond the trees brought a surprising sense of relief. The Great Swamp still stretched behind them, and the river itself was hardly safe, but it marked a boundary. Ilbus waited on the other side. Beyond Ilbus were roads, settlements and eventually Windmarch.

Eticus.

Vegon stood on the muddy bank while Jandar negotiated passage with a fisherman who regarded all six of them with deep suspicion.

“You're staring at the pack,” Deacon said.

Vegon realized he was.

“The book is still there.”

“I know.”

“You've checked three times.”

“I have not.”

Deacon looked at him.

Vegon reconsidered.

“Perhaps twice.”

“Three.”

Jandar called from the boat. “Are you two coming, or has Vegon decided to marry it?”

Vegon started toward him.

“Do not be absurd.”

Mills climbed into the boat ahead of him.

“I could write that song.”

“No.”

“The Wizard and the Grimoire.”

“No.”

Jandar took the line from the fisherman and grinned. “Needs work.”

Vegon stepped aboard.

For once, even the prospect of several hours in a small boat beside Jandar did not trouble him.

They were leaving the swamp.

They had the Grimoire.

Soon Eticus would see it, and perhaps the old wizard would understand something Vegon had missed. Perhaps he would recognize the script. Perhaps he would know what the diagrams meant.

Vegon wanted answers.

He still believed that.

As the boat pushed away from shore, however, he looked back toward the dark line of trees and thought of the moment the creature had opened its mouth.

For a few terrible seconds, the world had contained no magic at all.

Vegon had always believed ignorance was a problem solved by knowledge.

He had never seriously considered that some knowledge might begin by showing him how little of the world he understood.