EDGE and Tesseract are imprints of Hades Publications, Inc.

Chapter One

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The Chalice of Life A Novel by
Karen Webb

Chapter 1

“Heroes,” mused the Sage. “What’s happened to all the heroes? And where in the name of Ereb are they when you need them?” He took a long drag on his pipe, then leaned his chin on his staff and went back to staring into the fire.

Not wanting to rush him, the Chronicler waited patiently. However, as the silence dragged out the space of many heartbeats, she began to wonder if he had forgotten her. Had he wandered into that realm where dream meets memory and so become ensnared? Or had he merely fallen asleep?

“That remark is not one I would ever have expected to hear escape your lips,” she prompted at last. “Master,” she added, as if the concept of master and pupil went beyond her ken.

But when the Sage lifted his eyes from the flames, his glance looked as keen and focused as ever. He regarded her for a long moment: an observer might have thought he was trying to peer into her heart, her soul, into the corners of her being for which she had no name. Then, with sudden good humor, he spoke. “For your people,” he commented, “the mindscape exists
as a waking reality: an effect, I think, of your ability to don and shed a physical form as need dictates. For those like Tuhl mired in a physical body—” Here he thumped his small chest. “—the paths of the mindscape constitute a twisty mazework. You must forgive an old fool for getting lost in them! It was not aimless rambling but a sincere attempt to guide your
footsteps.”

She smiled kindly. “I think you have only ever intended me good. You do not need to apologize for the way you go about achieving it.” And you are about as much a fool as I am a Lemurian, she thought.

“I do not need to apologize,” he chuckled, “but perhaps I do need to explain. I was following the trail of my own memories back to the beginning. What you cannot glean from speaking with the questors themselves or from watching their story unfold in the Flames, I must try to make clear for you myself so you can write this great chronicle—and already I’ve muddled your thoughts by doing no more than thinking aloud! That remark was neither curse to hurl at the gods from Tuhl’s own lips nor idle musing. Tuhl was quoting, quoting someone you already know and will come to know better hereafter. Those were the words of Mistra herself.”

“Mistra!” the Chronicler gasped. Hastily, she flipped back through the reams of notes she had scribbled. “But I have heard from your own lips that of all the servants of the One in Creation, she was the most loyal, the most true, the most—” She shrugged in a show of helplessness and offered up the thick wad of notes as evidence. “By every god in the Pantheon, when we struggled our sorry way back to peace and faith on Thalas, it was she even more than the King who set us our example! Was it not the gods themselves who took her and set her above all others to—?”

Tuhl slapped a finger to his lips to quiet her, then touched it to the side of his nose and winked. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, young Peri. You will only confuse your history if you insist on calling the adventurers King this or Princess that. Their given names will do.” He sighed. “The gods know each of those fine people did his own name great honor by taking up
the burden of that quest of quests when the Call came, and greater honor yet by staying true to their collective purpose. And none rose higher in the test than Mistra of Caros.”

He puffed a moment, framing his thoughts before he went on. “Mistra is, to my mind, the brightest star in the firmament of the Royal House of Caros—strong she is and skilled, brilliant and brave. When her patroness, Minissa, marked her for the quest, Mistra submitted with as much grace as any I have ever seen or heard tell of—no crying, no screaming, no shouted
recriminations. I did not misspeak: she is devoted to Minissa and the rest, as devoted as if the whole lot of them were her family rather than her gods.

But devotion has consequences, and even our best-loved gods make demands of their most devoted servants. Because devotion demanded she acquiesce to those demands, she was quiet and pale and withdrawn when she arrived here, and her heart was broken nearly in two. In the end, it was the waiting that did her in.” He shook his head. “Still, that one outburst
about heroes was all I ever heard on the subject. Angry it was, but not without reason.”

He shifted his gaze into the middle distance; his eyes took on the bright yet hazy focus of the diviner watching a scene obscured from all eyes but his own unfolding across an expanse of time and space. “As a light Mistra was to her companions, a fire blazing on a mountaintop in the blackest night. And there was light waiting for her at the end of the tunnel she entered on that day so long ago—light so magnificent it would have blinded a lesser soul. But that tunnel had so many twists to it that she herself remained in darkness till she had come nearly through to the other
side. On the day she came to me and I understood all that had been asked of her, all that she had willingly sacrificed, even I wept. I searched in it all for the wisdom of Caros or the justice of Ereb or the compassion of sweet Arayne.” He let out a ragged breath. “But my search proved vain.” He shook his head again and poked at the fire with his staff.

Peri had remained absorbed by his discourse, but now she pouted a little. “Hmph. None of my people was even chosen for this quest, though every other race in the Union was represented. Goddess bless! Complete outworlders were chosen! We would not have been so easily grieved had one of us been selected.”

Tuhl smiled sympathetically, but there was the memory of pain about his eyes. “Oh, I think Minissa knew exactly what she was doing when she chose them for that task and you for this. The questors were sprinters, however difficult and dangerous the course they ran. Your course will be longer—less difficult, maybe, but one whose end only those who possess the
attribute of endurance will see. And you will endure. You will labor even as Tuhl does; this Chronicle will be only the beginning. Your station, like Tuhl’s, will be that of the hero who remains ever in the background yet performs deeds as valorous as those of the bravest knight. A mysterious figure you will be, like Tuhl; many will regard you as no more than legend,
and most will discount you as no better than myth: they are of the foolish. But your business, like Tuhl’s, will be with those who thirst after knowledge, and they will come to fill your days and nights soon enough.”

The old bearded lips parted in a serene smile. “The Pantheon, and beyond them the One whom they serve, have ordained in their wisdom a place in Creation for both the sprinters and the distance runners.”

She nodded, satisfied. When she returned to her notes, though, her brow puckered into a small frown. “Waiting?” she muttered, then addressed Tuhl. “You said it was the waiting that did her in?”

“Hmmm?”

“What waiting?”

He chuckled. “Ah, yes, I understand the bards are already hard at work making mincemeat of the quest’s details. I can hear them now, casting it all into verse and saying that blessed Minissa struck the ground with her Rod of Plenty—” Here he gave the ground near the fire circle a good, solid whack with his staff. “—and up popped all seven questors, provisioned and in full battle array, all ready to launch themselves through the first Portal the instant she gave the word.” He underscored his verbal irony with a histrionic flourish.

“Well,” Peri asked in a small voice, “isn’t that true -er- in essence, if not in substance?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her as if he would either snap her head off for the stupidity of the remark or ask if the minds of her folk were as flimsy as their natural form.

“I mean,” she stumbled on, “even if Minissa did search them out from among the living rather than creating them from scratch, isn’t the point that she got them here, and they entered the first Portal as one?”

He kept the eyebrow cocked a moment longer, then relented: it may have been the way she looked so desperate to melt back into the Ether to avoid his glance. “Mistra was chosen long before the others,” he finally said.

“She had to be! There were so many intricacies to unlocking the power of the one artifact potent enough to free the King, the artifact she bore alone for all those months, and she had to learn them all! She always was a quick study, but this one time her talent played her false. She was left with many empty hours to fill before the others began to arrive. A good month it was
until all of them gathered here. Some came from far away.” He chortled.

“And some, it turned out, had been lurking unknown under our very noses for years...”

He reached into the small urn at his feet and drew out a pinch of grey dust. “Watch!” he commanded as he cast it into the fire. The flames blazed up as if they would blot out the night sky above them, then burst into a shower of sparks that descended back to earth like a veil of red and silver lace.

And from that lacework, images began to form...

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