Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(49)

An empty vessel, at peace and contented, and the outside world didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter, and didn’t register to him.

Just the rise and fall of his belly, the cool emptiness.

Then he felt the twinge.

It was not a memory, not an internal thought, not a question needing to be answered.

His belly rose softly, and the cool darkness of his mediation saw a flash, a flicker, an intrusion.

Brother Anthus had seen this before, of course, and now he fought hard to maintain his detachment, to mute the noise. This was a state of reception, with his involuntary filters and noise shut down. But it wasn’t that easy, for he had felt this type of twinge before and he knew what it meant, and knew its source, generally, at least.

He had to stay in his purely receptive state to keep hearing it, he knew, but how could he, given the implications that he had heard it at all?

And if he followed that line of reasoning on those implications, and the potential, he would lose it all.

You are deceiving yourself, his thoughts scolded. You want it too badly. But no, it was there, one more time, and he knew what it was. The Sovereignty.

An aboleth!

Brother Anthus’s belly rose and fell more quickly, then, as he began to gasp for breath. His eyes opened wide and he unwound his legs and quickly scrambled to his knees, hands coming before him in a motion of supplication.

Give me this, he silently prayed to his god, for he wanted the Sovereignty back, needed it back.

Mentally he reached out for the signal, but now his thoughts were spinning again, full of implications and possibilities.

Many heartbeats passed, and so desperate was Brother Anthus to hear the creature’s telepathic music once more that he couldn’t even register the pain the stones of the floor were causing to his bony knees.

“Please,” he whispered aloud, then more insistently and loudly, “Please!”

He shook his head vigorously in denial against his growing fear that he had wanted this to happen so badly, he had tricked himself into hearing it. He struggled to his feet, his knees popping, and he staggered stiff-legged for the doorway to exit the small chamber.

He burst out into the temple’s main chapel, holding the door jamb for support, his gaze wildly darting around the dimly candlelit room as if expecting a visitor to be waiting for him.

But it was just him in the chapel. And now, too, it was just him, alone in his thoughts.

Denying that obvious reality, with his eyes wet with tears, Anthus rushed for the outer door. “Please!” he said over and over again, and he stumbled out onto the street, wearing nothing but his loincloth, in the cold air and sparkling stars of a late autumn Neverwinter night.

Brother Anthus wandered the streets aimlessly, begging and pleading, crying and wailing, shaking his fist and shouting of betrayal, and whether out of fear that the man had gone mad, or simply through lack of care, not a shade or a citizen went to retrieve him.

More than once, he thought he heard the sweet sound of an aboleth’s voice again, though it seemed to be about him and not directed at him, and Anthus folded up and fell to his knees once more, right in the middle of a wide, four-way intersection.

Apparently oblivious of his surroundings, of the many curious gazes that came his way, Brother Anthus began to chant.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.





“I need more,” Herzgo Alegni implored the red blade. He had felt a sensation, a flicker, a feeling that his assassin was somewhere around, not too far. Claw’s hold on the man known as Barrabus was, in truth, limited, and was curtailed even more by distance. Fortunately for Alegni, the dangerous little man had never caught on to this truth.

In those situations that truly mattered, where Barrabus wanted to strike out against Alegni, Claw was quite effective. It could warn of, and react to, Barrabus the Gray’s strikes before Barrabus the Gray ever made them. The span of time between thinking of a strike and executing it was exceedingly small to an outside observer. But Claw observed from the inside, and those fleeting fractions of a heartbeat were much longer within the universe of thought in which Claw resided.

The sword didn’t answer Alegni’s call just then, and that brought a frown to the hulking tiefling’s red-skinned and devilish face.

“Where is he?” the warlord asked directly. “Where is your slave?”

In reply, the tiefling was given the impression that Barrabus was near, but he felt something else, then, something more.

In the distance, Alegni heard screaming, a desperate plea of “Please!” shouted over and over again in the Neverwinter night. He dismissed it as unimportant— likely one of the new shade soldiers had encountered one of the pathetic citizens, to bad end for the citizen. He focused once more on the red-bladed sword and this other sensation.

There was energy in the air, he understood. Telepathic energy.

Herzgo Alegni leaned back in the chair on his balcony, suddenly concerned. The idea of Barrabus—Artemis Entreri—coming back into the city didn’t bother him at all, even if the man was accompanied by Dahlia and that drow ranger who had joined by her side. To Alegni, they might prove an inconvenience, but more likely an opportunity. Not Dahlia, of course. She would have to be captured and tortured, and likely killed, but as long as he held this sword, Barrabus couldn’t hurt him. Of that Alegni was sure.

But what of this other power? He was sensing it now because Claw was sensing it. What might it be? Who or what was coming to threaten his hold on Neverwinter?