Realms of the Dead by Bruce R. Cordell

Author:Bruce R. Cordell [Cordell, Bruce R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786953639
Amazon: 0786953632
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 2010-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

A Prayer for Brother Robert

Philip Athans

dagger falls

17Nightal, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)

The girl’s scream tore the cold night air like a knife through canvas. Her mother’s eyes opened before she was fully awake. She’d heard her daughter scream before, but never like that. It was a scream of sheer terror and the sound rippled through the woman’s body, freezing the blood in her veins. She tried to call out to her daughter, but the sound caught in her throat and she choked instead. Still, she was out into the dark corridor before the child screamed again.

The rough wood, so long left unpolished, scraped at her bare feet, but her feet were so cold it registered only as discomfort, not pain. She looked both ways, trying to follow the fading echoes of the last scream, but the darkness was nearly impenetrable. She hadn’t thought to light a candle—hadn’t thought at all—and only a few steps from the door of her bedchamber she was lost in her own house.

When the next scream came—with the substance of a word, a tortured, shrill form oC’Momma….”—the woman screamed back, but was still unable to form her own daughter’s name.

She ran a few more steps, bouncing painfully off a wood-paneled wall, before she finally awoke enough to think through her panic.

“‘Where am I?” she whispered to herself, then called, “Lillia!”

When her daughter didn’t answer, the panic welled up anew. She screamed her daughter’s name again, blinking and waving her hands in a futile attempt to fend off the darkness of the wide, chill corridor.

Her hand came to rest on the cold iron of a wall sconce—a sconce that hadn’t held a candle in months at least, but it helped her get her bearings. She remembered: the sconces had only been set on one side of the corridor. Both aided and hindered by the sound of another scream, one that ended in a whimper, she turned and ran for her daughter’s room.

“Lillia!” she called again as her hand found the doorjamb outside her daughter’s room, which was only next door to hers after all. “Momma’s here, baby. Momma’s—”

Dim light from the dying embers of her daughter’s hearth revealed a scene that made her shriek in abject terror. The scream hurt her throat, burned her lungs, and darkened her eyesight. She blinked, and try as she might, could only exhale—but she knew she couldn’t faint. She knew she had to go into that room, had to take her daughter up in her arms and get her out of there, despite what she saw.

But her body wouldn’t move, her mind wouldn’t think, and her heart wouldn’t beat.

Lillia looked up at her, only one eye left uncovered, and in that one eye, her mother saw everything she needed to gather the fleeting strength necessary to save her daughter from the dusty old bedroom that somehow had coughed up a ragged little corner of rhe unholy Abyss itself.

“I’ve seen Sister Kalia treat mortal wounds with less care,” Sister Miranda said, ending with a spirited giggle that made Brother Robert blush.

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