Twilight Falling by Paul S. Kemp

Author:Paul S. Kemp [Kemp, Paul S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780786929986
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Riven hurried through the streets, his left hand on a saber hilt, heading for the Foreign District. After he’d left the Zhents a few months earlier, he’d purchased a nondescript flat there. It still felt strange to him to have somewhere to go, somewhere he considered his home. While in the Network, he had made a habit of changing the location in which he slept at least twice per tenday, more out of a sense of professional caution than genuine fear. Riven rarely left enemies alive, and the dead didn’t often carry grudges.

After he’d left the Zhents, he hadn’t seen the point of moving around so often. In truth, after he’d resigned he hadn’t seen the point of much at all. He had saved enough coin to keep him in whores and luxury for years, but that kind of life didn’t appeal to him. If he’d been a weak man, he might have turned to a weak man’s vices—drink and drugs—but those things had never held a draw for him either. So for a time, he’d felt aimless.

To his surprise, that had changed the day he found his girls, and changed still more when he had heard the Lord of Shadows’s Call in his dreams.

Riven reached under his tunic to touch the onyx disc that hung from the chain around his neck. He had taken it from the corpse of the last hit he’d performed for the Network: a fat merchant who had run drugs into Cormyr for the Zhents, but had compromised an operative when he was captured by the Purple Dragons. For Riven, the disc symbolized two things: the end of his relationship with the Zhents, and the beginning of his relationship with Mask.

While he wasn’t a priest like Cale—Nine Hells, the mere thought of that made him sneer—he also wasn’t the man he once was. His mind was opening, he knew; something was happening, though he didn’t yet know what. He knew only that he served Mask, and for the time being that knowledge was enough. That his service made Cale uncomfortable only made it more satisfying. Riven respected Cale, but didn’t like him.

Still, Riven knew the Lord of Shadows had a purpose for Calling him and Cale almost simultaneously. Mask whispered that purpose in his dreams. Riven understood it when he first awakened, when his skull felt as though it was filled with squirming snakes, but the basis for that understanding fled from memory as the dreams faded out of his consciousness. Still, the understanding remained, the certainty, and Riven didn’t question further.

He supposed it was faith, and that thought made him laugh.

For most of his life, Riven had thought that faith made men weak, made them dependent upon the divine rather than their own resources. He had held men of faith in contempt, even those in the Zhents. Especially those. In fact, the return of the Banites to authority in the Network had been the very reason he’d left it. The Zhents under the resurgent Banites would not be the Zhents in which Riven had flourished.

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