Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel (35 page)

There was a smell like gangrene in the smith’s small neat hut behind the smithy. His eyes were yellow, and thick black hair had sprouted all over the arm that had been bitten.

She sat by him a long time as he tossed and cried out in his sleep. At one point his lips drew back, and she saw long yellow canines were sprouting from his gums, over his normal, human teeth.

He lunged at her and snapped. She drew back just in time.

Jonhan opened his eyes and looked up at her, startled. Lurid yellow eyes looked back into her gray ones.

Her voice was gentle. “How do you feel?”

“Terrible,” he said. “But I was dreaming, and that felt good.”

“What did you dream?”

He grinned wolfishly. “Killing. Eating.” He looked startled at his own words.

“Killing what?”

“Rosebud. You. Everybody. All meat. All rabbits to be eaten.” He drew a great, shuddering breath, then looked
at her, stricken by what he said. “You’re going to have to kill me.”

“Yes,” she said, and then, “Are you ready?”

He swallowed. “Yes. Can you make it quick?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Yes,” she said, drawing her dagger.

Outside, the donkey’s braying sounded like weeping.

Lakini was floating in the warm waters, each ripple moving her body as if she were composed of water herself. This is death, she thought. It’s not familiar to me, although I’ve done it before.

Something tugged at her right wrist. She ignored it, and it tugged again, insistent.

Blinking her eyes open, she looked down at it and frowned.

There was no sea, no feeling of peace and contentment. Pain lanced through her again. She sprawled against a tree in the middle of the dark woods, cold and alone. The bracelet around her wrist tightened again and, as she watched, one end of it uncoiled from the rest, reared snakelike, and jabbed the skin of her palm.

It wasn’t painful, but her body jerked against it. She no longer felt as if she were dissolving. She was all too corporeal.

A voice, clear and implacable, came from the center of her being.

Your work is not done here
.

Let me go
, she thought, despairing.

Your purpose is unfulfilled. You must remain
.

Reborn, she would be whole again, an unblemished weapon ready to do the will of the gods. She would remember nothing of the sanctuary, of the Houses of Beguine and Jadaren, of Kestrel or the Rhythanko. She might remember Lusk, even if he took a new form. She knew that the beings that were Lusk and Lakini had found each other again and again over the centuries, bound together in a time mortals would consider ancient.

Lusk … He had tried to kill her, at the behest of something outside them both. She knew, with a wisdom older than her Lakini body, that Lusk had begun to walk apart from the path of his deva nature long ago.

Should Lusk die, he would not return as a deva, but as a rakshasa, a tiger-demon, his outer form betraying what his inner nature had become.

If she denied her rebirth, would she take the first fatal step off that path, condemning herself as well?

Outside her, the Astral Sea called on her to let all go, to dissolve. The voice inside her called on her to remain. Lakini herself was trapped between them.

I must decide.

Another vision came to her, this one not of her past lives or the dwelling places of the gods. This was a mortal face; Kestrel’s face, with nothing divine about it. It was a human face, touched with the hands of time.

The thing on her wrist moved again. If she had had the strength to pry it away and cast it aside, she would have.

No
. It was too much. She took everything that remained to her and flung it at the cosmos.
No!

The cosmos struck back with a flash of white light. It erased all her senses. She was blind, deaf, paralyzed. Nothing existed but the light.

Then, slowly, she was aware of her body again. There was no pain. She lay half-curled on her side. She had a sense of a circular chamber, of huge, hand-wrought stones, and of powerful presences standing around her.

She should get up; she knew it. But she couldn’t, whatever the consequences.

One of the presences reached out and touched her mind. It felt cold, slightly alien, but it spoke to her gently.

What are you doing, child? By now you must have learned to accept death
.

I have unfinished business here
. Even to her, Lakini’s thought sounded childishly stubborn. Well, let it be so.

This body is finished, and so, too, all business it may have
.

I … do not agree
.

It cannot be that you refuse your reincarnation
.

But I do
.

She heard another thought-voice, imperious and impatient.

You dare contend that a few mortal creatures and their concerns are more important than the will of the gods? More important than the purpose for which you were created? A deva is more than herself. In you is contained the entire nature of life, death, and rebirth. In shedding your body and its wants, desires, and histories, you symbolize that everything can become pure again. Denying this is blasphemy
.

Let her refuse, and so cease
.

This voice came from something that seemed to coil through the air like thick, greasy smoke, overpowering the senses. It was amused, taking satisfaction in her distress.

She will dissolve into the aether, and it will be as if she never was, all her lambent memories fading
. There was an underlying hunger to the voice.
If that’s what she wishes, let it be
.

She felt it pressing into her, as if it would crush her in its coils. Then something broke it apart, as a fresh breeze clears a smoky room. Lakini felt the new entity kneel beside her and touch her hair gently. She had a sudden vivid impression: green eyes in a pale face, with hair the color of sunset.

Lady
, she thought at the entity.
The human woman has lost everything she loved. Does that count for nothing?

Mortals lose everything, eventually
. The goddess’s thoughts sounded resigned.
Love, even that of a mortal for a mortal, is a spark in the world’s darkness, and a precious thing. Most love, but all die
.

She claims unfinished business
.

A sharp, silver thought; a bright light penetrated Lakini’s blindness, and she both cringed away from it and craved more. This light was hard and white, like the surface of the full moon on a clear night.

It continued.
I may have unfinished business with her
.

Lakini was deeply weary. She couldn’t fight them all.
Shall I die then, Moonmistress?

She felt a cool touch on her face.

As the smith died at your hands?
The thought was like the tinkle of silver chimes in a jeweler’s window.

What could I do? He had become a beast
.

You didn’t give him his chance
.

What chance?

All creatures of the night are mine, to some degree. You didn’t give him his chance to give himself over to my power, to control the beast inside
.

Many are not able, and become dangerous
.

But some can. There is hope for any infected with the curse of lycanthropy, so long as they seek help before they are sunk too deep in their bestial nature. I might have saved Jonhan Smith. You were too arrogant to let him try
.

I thought it was for the best
.

Even as your apostate companion, Lusk, thinks what he does is for the best.

It was Jonhan Smith, shaking with sweat and fever, his mangled arm scarring over unnaturally, his face changing to a beast’s.

It was Jonhan Smith, looking up in mute appeal as he drew her dagger, kneeled, stroked his hair, and slid it into his brain.

It was Jonhan Smith, who could have been saved.

So I have committed murder, thought Lakini
.

She was as guilty as Lusk, slaughtering the innocent.

No
, returned the silver voice.
You did what you thought best. Now you know better
.

Lakini felt them all withdraw from her, the silver presence and the red-haired goddess, and the coiling horror, the imperious one. The first presence, still patient, remained.

If you refuse this, you deny your entire nature. Are you prepared for the consequences?

No, I am not prepared. But I will face them
.

A pause, then came the following words:

Because you understand this, it will be permitted. It will be harder than you know, Lakini, for so you will remain
.

Your path will be difficult
.

She felt a touch between her eyes, and everything exploded into white light.

She kneeled, alone in the clearing. Her shoulder and her ribs throbbed, but when she tentatively touched the wound, she found it had stopped bleeding, and the edges were already beginning to scar. The night was graying as dawn approached. From the shoulder to the hip, her tunic was stiff with dried blood.

The bracelet was still wound tight around her wrist, and she took a moment to contemplate it. The links were narrow, long, and flat, and embedded along the bracelet’s length were three dull red stones—rubies, perhaps, or more likely garnets.

Now she remembered. It was the bracelet Kestrel had given her in the Hold.
Take it away
, she had said.
Don’t let them get it
.

And then Lusk had come, demanding the bracelet.

She remembered tucking it inside her clothing, more to keep Kestrel quiet than for any other reason. How had it come to be around her arm? She had a vague memory of movement against her skin, of it questing like a snake, sometime before she had refused her reincarnation and faced the gods’ judgment. She must have been hallucinating.

But, as she watched, the bracelet flexed again and undid itself, wind by wind. It was very like a snake as it crawled up her arm, the small links tickling her skin.

She felt a wave of inquiry from it, not enough to distinguish words or even feelings, but certainly a sense that it possessed some sort of intelligence and wondered where it was. It was almost the feeling she had at Shadrun-of-the-Snows, that of some invisible presence quietly manipulating everyone it could.

When it got to her shoulder and started to wind around her neck, she tensed. She considered pulling it off and flinging it away, but it had had all night to strangle her, so she let it be. And, indeed, it simply looped around her neck, invisible beneath the neck of her shirt, and lay still.

She could find out more about the artifacts of Jadaren Hold later. Now she needed to concentrate on healing herself. The chill air was growing warmer, and the dull gray light was brightening as the sun rose.

Dawn was coming, and she was Dawnbringer.

As such rapid healings were, it was painful. Lakini used all her powers of meditation to find her still center of grace, and drew the lambent, pulsing Power she found there throughout her body. Now and then she felt a gentle touch to her Powers, a gift, she decided, from the sister goddesses, and the strength and duration of the healing increased.