The Cleric Quintet: Night Masks
Chapter Five

 
"M-my pardon," Cadderly stammered. "I did not know . . ."
"Does anyone . . . ever?" the large man asked, in a snarling voice. "I do not appreciate your pity, young priest of Deneir, but I'll gladly accept your pittance."
Cadderly clenched his walking stick tightly, mistaking the remark as a threat.
"You know of what I speak," the beggar man said to him, "the coins you inevitably will throw my way to alleviate your guilt."
Cadderly winced at the biting remark, but couldn't deny his pity that one so intelligent had sunk so low. He was surprised, too, that the beggar had discerned his order, even though he wore his holy symbol prominently on the front of his wide-brimmed hat. The large man studied Cadderly intently as the tumult of emotions rolled through the young priest.
"Pig," the man said with a sneer, to Cadderly's surprise. "How terrible that one such as I should have sunk to the level of a street beggar! "
Cadderly bit his lip in the face of such dramatics.
"To wallow in the mud beside the wretches," the man continued, throwing one arm out wide, the other still clutching at his mock-wounded chest.
He stopped suddenly in that pose and turned a confused expression Cadderly's way. "Wretches?" he asked. "What do you know of them, arrogant priest? You, who are so intelligent -  that is the weal of your order, is it not?
"Intelligence." The beggar spat with distaste. "An excuse, I say, for those such as you. It is what separates you, what elevates you." He eyed Cadderly dangerously and finished, deliberately, "It is what blinds you."
"I do not deserve this!" Cadderly declared.
The man threw his hands above his head and blurted a mocking, incredulous shout. "Deserve?" he cried. He jerked the sleeve up on one arm, revealing a row of rotting, bruised skin.
"Deserve?" he asked again. "What, pray tell me, young priest who is so wise, do those kneeling before, and crawling from, the alleys of Carradoon deserve?"
Cadderly thought he would burst apart. He felt an angry energy building within him, gathering explosive strength. He remembered when he had awakened the trees in Shilmista, and when he had healed Tintagel, had held the elf wizard's guts in while a similar energy had mended the garish wound. A page from the Tome of Universal Harmony flashed in Cadderly's head, as clearly as if he held the open book before him, and he knew then the object of his rage. He eyed the bruises on the large man's arm, filled his nostrils with the stench of the disease that had so tormented this undeserving man's soul.
"Pieta pieta, dominus . . " Cadderly began, reciting the chant as he read the words from the clear image in his mind.
"No!" the large man cried, charging ahead. Cadderly halted the chant and tried to throw up his arms to block, but the man was surprisingly fast and balanced for one so tall, and he caught hold of Cadderly's clothing and shook the young priest thoroughly.
Cadderly saw an opening, could have jammed his walking stick up under the man's chin. He knew, though, that the frustrated beggar meant him no real harm, and he was not surprised when the man released him, shoving him back a step,
"I could cure you!" Cadderly growled.
"Could you?" the man mocked. "And could you cure them?" he cried, waggling a finger toward the distant town. "Could you cure them all? Are all the world's ills to fall before this young priest of Deneir? Call to the wretched, I say!" the beggar cried, whirling about and shouting to the four winds. "Line them up before this . . . this . . ." He searched for the word, his dirty lips moving silently. "This godsend!" he cried at last.
A nearby squirrel broke into a dead run along the branches across the path.
"I do not deserve this," Cadderly said again, calmly.
His tone seemed infectious, for the large man dropped his hands to his sides immediately and his shoulders visibly slumped.
"No," the leper agreed, "but accept it, I pray you, as but a small penance in a world filled with undeserved penance."
Cadderly blinked away the moisture that suddenly came into his gray eyes. "What are their names?" he asked quietly.
The beggar looked at him curiously for a moment, then his lips curled up in his first sincere smile. "Jhanine, my wife," he answered. "Toby, my son, and Millinea, my young daughter. None have shown signs of my infection as yet," he explained, guessing Cadderly's unspoken question. "I see them rarely - to deliver the pittance I have gained from the guilty arrogants of Carradoon."
The beggar chuckled, seeing Cadderly's blush. "My pardon," he said, dipping into a low bow. "I, too, am sometimes blind, seeing the well and fortunate in a similar light."
Cadderly nodded his acceptance of that inevitable - and excusable - fault. "What is your name?"
"Nameless," the beggar answered without hesitation. "Yes, that is a good name for one such as me. Nameless-akin to all the other Namelesses huddled in the squalor between the towers of the wealthy."
"You hold such self-pity?" Cadderly asked.
"Self-truth," Nameless answered immediately.
Cadderly conceded the point. "I could cure you," the young priest said again.
Nameless shrugged his shoulders. "Others have tried," he explained, "priests from your own order, and those of Oghma as well. I went to the Edificant Library - of course I went to the library - when the signs first appeared."
The mention of the Edificant Library brought an unconscious frown to Cadderly's face. "I am not like the others," he asserted more forcefully than he had intended.
The beggar smiled. "No, you're not," he agreed.
"Then you will accept my aid?"
Nameless did not relinquish his smile. "I will ... consider it," he replied quietly. Cadderly caught an unmistakable glimmer of hope in his dark brown eyes, and saw a shadow appear atop the man's shoulder, a shadow of the beggar himself, gaily tossing a small form - Millinea, he somehow knew - into the air and catching her. The shadow fell apart quickly, dissipating in the wind.
Cadderly nodded somewhat grimly, suspecting the dangers of false hopes for one in this man's position. Suspecting the risks, but not truly understanding them, Cadderly now knew, for he was not, for all his sympathy, standing in the beggar man's holey shoes.
The young priest tore the pouch from his belt. "Then accept this," he said forcefully, tossing it to the large man.
Nameless caught it and eyed Cadderly curiously, but made no move to return the coin-filled purse. Here was an offering holding no false hopes, Cadderly understood, an offering of face value and nothing more.
"I am one of those arrogants," Cadderly explained, "guilty, as you have accused."
"And this will alleviate that guilt?" the beggar man asked, his eyes narrowing.
Cadderly couldn't hold back his chuckle. "Hardly," he replied, and he knew that if Nameless believed the purse would alleviate his guilt, then Nameless would have thrown it back at him. "Hardly a proper penance. I give it to you because you, and Jhanine, Toby, and Millinea, are more deserving of it than I, not for any lessening of the guilt. That guilt I must carry until I have learned better." Cadderly cocked his head to the side as a thought came to him.
"Call the gold a tutor's fee if that helps you to lessen your own guilt for waylaying one as innocent as me!" he said.
The beggar man laughed and bowed low. "Indeed, young priest, you are not like those of your order who greeted me at the library's great door, those who were more concerned with their own failings to cure me than with the consequences of my ailment."
That is why they failed, Cadderly knew, but he did not interrupt.
"It is a fine day!" Nameless went on. "And I pray you enjoy it." He held up the purse and shook it. His whole body shaking in a joyful dance, he smiled at the loud jingle of coins. "Perhaps I will as well. Tb the Nine Hells with Carradoon's stinking alleys this day!"
Nameless stopped his dance abruptly and stood stock-still, eyeing Cadderly gravely. Slowly, he extended his right hand, seemingly conscious, for the first time, of his dirty, fingerless glove.
Cadderly understood the action as a test, a test he was glad he could pass so easily. Without a thought for superstitious consequences, the young priest accepted the handshake.
"I pass by here often," Cadderly said quietly. "Consider my offer of healing."
The beggar man, too touched to reply verbally, nodded sincerely. He turned about and walked briskly away, his limp more pronounced, as though he no longer cared to hide it. Cadderfy watched him for few moments, then turned and continued away from Carradoon. He smiled as more squirrels scrabbled overhead, but he hardly looked up to see them.
It seemed to the young priest that the day had grown finer and less fine at the same time.
Nameless smiled as a squirrel nearly lost its balance on a small branch, catching hold and righting itself at the last moment. The beggar man tried to use that simple, natural movement as a symbol of what had just transpired between him and the curious young priest, viewing himself as the branch and Cadderly as the creature righting its course. The thought made the leper feel good, valuable, for the first time in a long, long while.
He couldn't brood on it, though, and could hardly hope to meet enough people like this curious Cadderly, who would care to see their arrogance laid out before them. No, Nameless would have to continue as he had for more than a year, struggling daily to gain enough trinkets to keep his wife and children from starving.
He had at least a temporary reprieve. He tossed the purse into the air, caught it gingerly, and smiled again. It was indeed a fine day!
Nameless spun about, prepared to pay Jhanine and the children a long overdue visit, but his smile fast became a frown.
"So sorry to startle you, good friend," said a puny man, his drooping, thick eyelids open only enough for Nameless to make out his small, dark eyes.
Nameless instinctively moved the coin-filled pouch out of sight and kept his arms in front of him.
"I am a leper," he growled, using his disease as a threat.
The smaller man chuckled and gave a wheezing laugh that sounded more like a cough. "You think me a thief?" he asked, holding his hands out wide. Nameless blinked at the man's curious gloves, one white, the other black. "As you can see, I carry no weapons,"the little man assured. '
"None openly," Nameless admitted.
"I see we both wear a mixed set of gloves " Ghost remarked. "Kindred spirits, eh?"
Nameless slipped his hands under the folds of his badly fitting clothes, embarrassed for some reason he did not understand. Kindred spirits? he thought. Hardly. The fine gloves this little man wore, matched or not, must have cost more than Nameless had seen in many months, the young priest's pouch included.
"But we are," Ghost asserted, noticing the frown.
"You are a beggar, then?" Nameless dared to ask. "Car-
radoon is but a mile down the road. I was going there myself. The take is always good."
"But the young priest changed your mind?" the stranger asked. "Do tell me about that one."
Nameless shrugged and shook his head slightly, hardly conscious of the movement. Ghost caught it, though, and the beggar man's confusion told the wicked man much.
"Ah," Ghost said, his arms still wide, "you do not know young Cadderly."
"You do?"
"Of course," Ghost replied, motioning to the pouch Nameless tried to hide. "Shouldn't all those of our ilk know one as generous as Cadderly?"
"Then you are a beggar," Nameless reasoned, relaxing a bit. There was an unspoken code among the people of squalor, an implied brotherhood.
"Perhaps," Ghost answered cryptically. "I have been many things, but now I am a beggar man." He wheezed another chuckle. "Or soon I will be," he corrected. Nameless watched as the man unbuttoned the top of his surcoat and pulled the woolen folds aside.
"A mirror?" the beggar man muttered, then he said no more, transfixed by his own image in the silvery device.
Nameless felt the intrusion. He tried to pull away, but could not, held firmly by the strange magic. He saw nothing except for his own image, lined in black as though he had been transported to some other place, some dark, otherworldly place. Nameless tried desperately to look around at his surroundings, tried to make sense of them, find some familiarity.
He saw only his image.
He heard a clap, then he was moving, or he felt as though he was moving, even though he knew that his physical body had not stirred in the least. There came a brief, sharp pain as his spirit exited his body and floated helplessly toward the effeminate vessel that awaited it.
The pain came again.
Nameless blinked, consciously fighting against the heavy droop of his eyelids. He saw his own beggar's image again, wearing gloves, black and white. His confusion lasted only until he realized that it was no longer a reflected image he saw, but his own body.
"What have you done to me?" the beggar man cried, reaching for the stranger in his body. Every movement seemed to drag; his arms had little strength to convey his fury.
Ghost snapped his fingers, and the black and white gloves disappeared, leaving his newly acquired hands half exposed in the fingerless gloves. Half-heartedly, he pushed the weakling back. How useful that lax body had proven to Ghost. How benign and unthreatening, a body that even a young boy could defeat. With an almost resigned shrug, he advanced on the whimpering and sorely confused wretch and wrapped his dirty hands about the skinny neck.
Nameless fought desperately, as desperately as Ghost's puny form had ever battled, but there was no strength in his arms, no power to loosen the larger attacker's hold. Soon he stopped struggling, and Ghost knew the beggar's resignation was founded in grief for those he would leave behind.
The wicked man contemplated the change with amusement, thinking it curious, even humorous, that one as obviously wretched as this leprous beggar would lament the end of his life.
There was no mercy in Ghost, though. He had killed this body a hundred times, perhaps, and had killed his previous body a like number, and the body he had used before that as well.
The corpse slumped to the ground. Ghost immediately brought back his magical device and called upon its powers to watch the beggar man's spirit step out of the slab form. Ghost quickly pulled off the fine black glove and placed it on his unoccupied body. He closed his eyes and stiffened his resolve against the ensuing pain, for the simple act had transferred a part of his own spirit back into the corpse.
It was a necessary step for two reasons. The body would heal - Ghost had a powerful magical item concealed in one boot to see to that - and if the receptacle remained open, then the beggar man's spirit would find its way back in. Also, if Ghost allowed the body to die, if he allowed the item in his boot to call back a spirit, the item's regenerative powers would partially consume the form. Considering how many times Ghost had made this switch, the item would have burned up the puny form long ago.
But that wouldn't happen. Ghost knew how to use the items in conjunction; the Ghearufu, the glove-and-mirror device, had long ago shown him the way, and he had spent three lifetimes perfecting the act.
Ghost looked both ways along the empty road, then pulled the slender body far from the trail, into some covering brush. He felt the disease in this new form that he had taken. It was an unpleasant sensation, but Ghost took heart that he would not wear this disguise for long - just long enough to meet this young Cadderly for himself.
He hopped back out to the road and wandered along, wondering how much of the day he would have to watch pass him by before young Cadderly returned down the road.
After the thief in the beggar's body had departed, Name-less's spirit stood beside the puny corpse, confused and helpless. If Cadderly, with his new insight, had gazed upon the spirit then, he would have seen the shadows of Jhanine, Toby, and Millinea scattering to the four winds, fading like the images of hope that Nameless had never dared to sustain.
The Maze adderly approached the steep-sided, round hil-lock and the tower of Belisarius tentatively, fully expecting that the wizard, as knowledge-able as he was, would offer him little insight in-to the strange things that had been happening to him. Actually, Cadderly had no idea if the wizard would grant him an audience. He had done some valuable penning for Belisarius on several occasions, but he couldn't really call the man a friend. Furthermore, Cadderly wasn't sure that Belisarius would be home.
The young scholar relaxed a bit when a wide line up the nearly seventy-degree incline transformed from unremarkable grass to a stone stairway with flat and even steps. The wizard was home and apparently had seen Cadderly coming.
Seventy-five steps brought Cadderly to the hillock's flat top and the cobblestone walkway that encircled the tower. Cadderly had to walk nearly halfway around the base, for Belisarius had placed his steps far to the side of the entrance this day. The steps never appeared on the same spot on the hillock, and Cadderly hadn't yet figured out if the wizard created new steps each time, had some way of rotating the grassy knoll under the stationary tower, or simply deceived visitors of the steps' actual location. Cadderly thought the last possibility, deception, the most likely, since Belisarius used his magic primarily for elaborate illusions.
The tower's iron-bound door swung open as Cadderly approached (or had it been open all along, only appearing to be closed? Cadderly mused). Cadderly paused as he started over the threshold, for there came the sound of grating stone and an entire section of the stone wall in the foyer shifted and swung out, blocking the inner entry door and revealing a cobwebbed stairway winding down into the blackness.
Cadderly scratched the stubble on his chin, his gray eyes flashing inquisitively at the unexpected invitation. He re--membered the days when he had come to the tower with Headmaster Avery. Every time, the skilled wizard presented the duo with a new test of cunning. Cadderly was glad for the diversion, glad that Belisarius had apparently come up with something new, something that might take the young man's mind from the disturbing questions the beggar man had raised.
"This is a new path, and a new trick," Cadderly said aloud, congratulating the wizard, who was no doubt listening. Always curious, the young scholar promptly pulled a torch from its sconce on the foyer wall and started down. Twenty spiraling steps later, he came to a low corridor ending at a thick wooden door. Cadderly carefully studied the portal for a long moment, then slowly placed his hand against it, feeling the solidity of its grain. Satisfied that it was real, he pushed it open and continued on, finding another descending stairway behind it.
The next level proved a bit more confusing. The stairway ended in a three-way intersection of similar, unremarkable stone passageways. Cadderly took a step straight ahead, then changed his mind and went to the left, passing through another door (after repeating his pause-and-study test), then another after that. Again he had entered an intersection, this one much more confusing, since each of the ways revealed many side passages, both left and right. Cadderly nearly laughed aloud and he silently congratulated the clever wizard. With a helpless shrug, he let his walking stick fall to the floor, then followed the path determined by the unseeing gaze of the carved ram's head. Any way seemed as good as another as the young priest moved along, left, and then right, right again, and then straight ahead. Three more doors were left open behind him; one passage sloped down at a noticeable angle.
"Excellent!" Cadderly exclaimed when he passed a sharp corner, and found himself back where he had started, at the bottom of the second stairway. His torch was beginning to burn low, but the curious young priest pressed ahead once more, consciously selecting different avenues than on his first time through.
The torch burned away, leaving Cadderly in utter blackness. Calmly he closed his eyes and recalled a page in the Tome of Universal Harmony. He heard a few notes of De-neir's endless song and muttered the appropriate chant, pointing to the tip of his burned-out torch. He blinked many times and squinted against the glare as the magical light came on, much brighter than the flickering torch flame had been. When his eyes at last adjusted, he went on, turning corner after corner.
A scuffling, scraping sound made him pause. It was no rat, Cadderly knew; the animal, if 'A was an animal, that had made the sound was much larger.
An image of a bull came into Cadderly's thoughts. He recalled a day as a youngster, out with Headmaster Avery, when he had passed a pasture full of cows. At least, Avery had thought they were cows. Cadderiy couldn't help but smile when he remembered the image of portly Avery huffing and puffing in full flight from an angry bull. The scuffling came again.
Cadderly considered extinguishing his magical light, but reconsidered immediately, realizing the predicament that act would leave him in. He crept up to the next corner, took off his wide-brimmed hat, and slowly peeked around.
The scuffler was humanoid, but certainly not human. It towered seven feet tall, shoulders and chest wide and impossibly strong, and its head - no mask, Cadderly knew -  resembled the bull in that long-ago field. Wearing only a wolf pelt loincloth, the creature carried no weapon, though that hardly brought a sense of relief to the minimally armed young scholar.
A minotaur! Cadderly's heart nearly failed him. Suddenly he wasn't so sure that this whole trek through the tower's catacombs was inspired by Belisarius. It occurred to Cadderly that something pernicious might have happened to the congenial mage, that some dark force might have overcome the tower's formidable defenses.
His thoughts were blown away, along with his breath, a moment later, as the bull-headed giant scraped one foot on the stone again and charged, slamming into Cadderly and launching him across the corridor. He cracked his shoulder blade as he smashed into the stone, and his torch flew away, though of course the magical light did not diminish.
The minotaur snorted and stormed in. Cadderly took up his walking stick defensively, wondering what in the Nine Hells the minuscule weapon could do against this awesome beast. The minotaur seemed none too concerned with it, striding right in to meet its foe.
Cadderly swung with all his might, but the skinny club broke apart as he connected on the brute's thick-skinned chest.
The minotaur slapped him once, then leaned its horned head in, squashing Cadderly against the stone. The young man freed one arm and punched the beast, to no avail. The beast pressed more forcefully and Cadderly could neither squirm nor breathe.
His estimate of how long he had to live shortened considerably when the minotaur opened its huge mouth, putting its formidable teeth in line with Cadderly's exposed neck.
In that split second, the young priest recognized the 6elds of energy floating about him. He looked down to the floor, to his unbroken walking stick.
Cadderly jammed his free arm into the gaping maw, and plunged his hand down the minotaur's throat. A moment later, he retracted the hand, holding the bull-headed monster's beating heart. The creature fell back a step, not daring to do anything at all.
"I have traveled down two stairways, which actually went up," Cadderly announced firmly. "And through six doors, two of which were illusionary. That would put me in the west wing of your library, would it not, good Belisarius?"
The illusionary minotaur disappeared, but, strangely, Cadderly still held the pumping heart. The scene reverted to its true form, the west wing, as Cadderly had guessed, and Belisarius, a confused, almost frightened look on his bushy-browed, bearded face, stood across the room, leaning heavily on a bookcase.
Cadderly winked at him, then opened his mouth and moved as though to take a bite of the thing in his hand.
"Oh, you!" the wizard cried. He turned away and put a hand to his mouth, trying to keep his stomach's contents down. "Oh, do not! I beg, do not!"
Cadderly dismissed the gruesome image, willed it away, though he was not certain how he had brought it into being in the first place.
"How?" the wizard gasped, finally composed.
"My magic has shifted recently," Cadderly tried to explain, "grown."
"That is no clerical magic I have ever heard of," Belisarius insisted. "To create such perfect illusions..." Just the words made the wizard picture the heart, and he gagged yet again.
Cadderly understood something that Belisarius apparently did not. "I did not create the image," the young scholar explained, as much to himself as to the wizard,
"nor did I collect the magical forces necessary to create the image."
The wizard dismissed any remaining revulsion, too intrigued by what Cadderly was hinting at. He moved quietly across the room toward the young priest.
"I saw the energies gathered," Cadderly went on. "I discovered the trick for what it was and . .. perverted ... your grand imagery."
"Couldn't you have dispelled it altogether, as most priests would have?" Belisarius asked dryly.