Ashes of the Tyrant
Page 1
ALSO BY ERIN M. EVANS
…
Ed Greenwood Presents Waterdeep:
THE GOD CATCHER
…
The Brimstone Angels Saga
BRIMSTONE ANGELS
LESSER EVILS
THE ADVERSARY
FIRE IN THE BLOOD
ASHES OF THE TYRANT
©2015 Wizards of the Coast LLC.
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Cartography by: Mike Schley
Cover art by: Min Yum
First Printing: December 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6573-1
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6583-0 (ebook)
620B2372000001 EN
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v3.1
To Kevin and all we can do as one.
To my boys, and all we can do better.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Part I: Kepeshkmolik - The Deaths of the Elders in Raurokh
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II: Yrjixtilex - The many Esham-Ana
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part III: Verthisathurgiesh - The Tale of the Crippled Mountain
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
PROLOGUE
15 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
Djerad Thymar, Tymanther
IN EVERY ANCESTOR STORY LAY THE TRUTH. WHETHER YOU HEARD THEM IN the stolen language of the Vayemniri or from some human rattling on about “dragonborn” tales in the common tongue, it could not be denied that the sacrifice and honor, bravery and cunning of the ancestors of Djerad Thymar bore powerful lessons to all who would listen.
And indeed the means to live those stories out, for those brave enough, Shestandeliath Zaroshni thought, watching her cousin pour lines of mithral dust through her trembling, scaly hands. The handful in the ancient crypt would be bold enough to make ancestor stories of their own.
Parvida’s hands shook too hard to finish the circle. Zaroshni stepped forward and took the mithral dust into her own scaled palms and gestured for the younger dragonborn to step back, to rejoin the others along the wall of the ancient Clan Verthisathurgiesh crypt. In the flickering light of the torches, a dozen other faces watched, waited.
“It must be perfect,” she heard Baruz whisper as Parvida came to stand beside him. Zaroshni poured the rare powder into the shapes of strange runes. A second dragonborn, Versvesh, made the farther edge of the circle. Baruz was right: the runes had to be perfect, or they wouldn’t make the portal. Ravar’s notes had been quite clear about that.
It can be nothing less, Zaroshni told herself. So it will be perfect. And then we can return home.
15 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
The Upperdark, beneath the Earthfast Mountains
SO FAR FROM the sun, the dark was nearly complete. Only the fluorescent dots of strange fungi traced the passages’ walls, the shining lines of otherworldly insects hanging from the cavern’s ceiling like strands of stars. A person could go mad there, and the Underdark went so much farther down.
Louc never took his hand off his weapon when he stood guard by the Zhentarim outpost, just ahead of the line of torches. If it didn’t give him the crucial few seconds that saved his life when gods-only-knew-what burst out of the dark tunnels, all teeth and tentacles and madness, then at least the familiar feeling of the sword’s hilt in his hand warded off the creeping sense that the Underdark was devouring his thoughts, morsel by morsel, singing in the strange wind that whistled down the passages and stirred the glowing strands of insects high above.
“Stlarning wind,” muttered the guard beside him, a woman called Feiyen. She kept her bow out, an arrow already poisoned and nocked. They’d both been at the outpost a tenday, already too long.
The wind picked up, a keening note in the soft wailing, and Louc shuddered.
THE RUNES SHONE silvery blue against the smooth granite floor. The crypt was Baruz’s family’s, the list of names—those lost and left behind when the dragonborn were torn away from Abeir a century before—taking up most of one wall. Clan Verthisathurgiesh’s matriarch—Baruz’s mother—would not mind its use, he insisted.
And if she did, then she ought to be ashamed for the sake of those names.
Zaroshni hadn’t bothered to make such entreaties to her own parents, her own patriarch. She knew they would cite tradition, precedent, and eventually the fact that they were her elders, and she must therefore listen. Parvida had dared and been told under no uncertain terms that her association with a group like the Liberators was bound to cause her and the clan harm. Zaroshni had reassured her—their rebuke meant little in the long run.
Of the dozen of them there that night, three had been cast out from their clans and another six had been threatened with exile. What had happened was a tragedy for those left behind, that much even the hardest of elders would agree to. But there was no going back, not now.
The elders thought because they were all young that they didn’t understand, that they didn’t appreciate the gift in the sacrifice. That they didn’t understand what Abeir had been like.
“Neither do they,” Zaroshni had pointed out to her friend, Dumuzi, as they walked through Djerad Thymar’s winding passages, down to the base of the pyramid city and the entrance to the crypts. “They’re only afraid of angering their elders, of being too soft to stand up and fix things. We don’t belong here. You can’t say we do.”
“Do you believe that?” Dumuzi had asked. And she’d said she did. But curled in the center of Zaroshni’s heart was the hope that they would return to Abeir, that their success tonight would serve to convince people like Dumuzi and their elders that there were other ways of doing things, other sources of strength and honor and throtominarr. She hoped, as she finished the circle, that she would see Dumuzi again, and be able to prove she was right. That Abeir held possibilities they would nev
er have in Djerad Thymar.
That faraway plane where the dragonborn had been created, a land where they would not be strangers, where their ancestors had risen up, thrown off the shackles that the dragon lords weighed them down with, and birthed the civilization of Tymanchebar. “A world,” she’d said, “where we can rule ourselves and not make unwelcome overtures to elves and genies.”
“A world,” Dumuzi had said, “where dragons and titans and strange monsters wait to wipe you away.”
“What of the Lost?” Zaroshni had said. “If it’s so bad, shall we leave them there?”
Dumuzi had shrugged. “If you think you can bring them back, then bring them. But you should stay on Toril. We should all stay on Toril. This is our world now.”
He doesn’t know, Zaroshni thought, watching Baruz scatter a pungent powder over the space. It caught fire in tiny motes as it floated down. None of us know.
Yet, she amended, as magic began to fill the Verthisathurgiesh crypt.
“PISS AND HRAST!” Feiyen shouted as the wind howled higher. Sparks snapped in the dark. Louc took a step back, not meaning to, as the wind suddenly filled his mouth with the taste of salt and ashes, the stink of brimstone and thick perfume. Louc gripped his sword. The air turned cool and thick, as though a rainstorm were coming, and the wailing rose in pitch. Feiyen’s arrows clattered into the darkness—there was nothing for her to hit.
Louc’s pulse raced like a rabbit’s, suddenly flooding him with fear and rage, flight and fight. This outpost was his to guard, and damned if he was going to let the wind steal it away—He caught himself within the wild scramble of those thoughts.
Something was coming.
BARUZ SPOKE THE incantations over the hovering sparks, a sound that made Zaroshni’s scales shiver. Soon, the portal would open. Soon, Abeir would appear. Soon, she would see the place where her ancestors had shaped all their futures. She checked her haversack, her short sword in its scabbard. Parvida took hold of her arm, all nervous excitement.
Within the circle the light brightened, and the sudden smell of cherries and bracing ashkarhz leaves hit Zaroshni’s nostrils. The air shivered, like heat upon the horizon.
The light flashed, popped, and flashed again—golden and green this time. The sudden smell evaporated, replaced by a tang of blood, a stink of sulfur, and a cloud of dense perfume. The air turned cold, and a different sort of shiver ran over Zaroshni’s scales. Her mouth tasted of ashes and salt. She pushed her younger cousin back, away from the portal, and reached for her sword.
The portal tore open, but the land Zaroshni glimpsed was not a plain beneath a steel sky. A blue sun, a line of violet flames, a burst of chilly, rain-soaked wind—the portal had failed to lead them to Abeir.
The air cracked as if the stones of Djerad Thymar had broken.
And then, the brief, inane thought that Parvida’s parents were right after all—they had somehow brought the worst upon themselves, their clans, their city.
After, it was only teeth and claws and screaming.
THE DARKNESS WAS complete, and then it wasn’t. Miles from the sun, untold distances from the Abyss, two eyes as bright as stars opened in the cavern and looked down at the Zhentarim outpost from a face as black as night, as handsome as the Morninglord—a face, a body that was suddenly there.
Louc’s heart was ready to burst out of his chest as the eyes fell upon him, as a voice as musical as a blade upon a whetstone threatened to retune his pulse to suit its meter.
Someone, it said with a patience that Louc knew down to his marrow it didn’t have, has a lot of explaining to do. Let’s begin with you.
PART I
KEPESHKMOLIK THE DEATHS OF THE ELDERS IN RAUROKH
Let us sing of one who brought wisdom and honor to the blood of the Kepeshkmolik clan: Shasphur Who-Would-Be-Kepeshkmolik. Let us sing of the deaths of the elders in Raurokh, the Citadel of Endings.
Under the claw of Raurokhymdhar the Golden, where Kepeshkmolik’s first bones are buried and first shells are dust, Shasphur Who-Would-Be-Kepeshkmolik hatched and came of age. Strong-limbed and quick of mind, scales as green as emeralds, Shasphur was a prize for Raurokhymdhar the Golden, set as the wyrm was on gaining an army of slaves. Seven elders watched over their bloodlines in that prison—called Nazari, Baishiria, Rahishu, Hurashum, Zerath, Ana-Mashhal, and Qinnaz. Shasphur gave them all the devotion that was possible in that place of evil, and their wily wisdom protected many.
In the dark times of Raurokh, Shasphur saw that the lesser dragons who served the Golden would travel to and from the Citadel of Endings through a hole cut into the roof, carrying messages to other tyrants and bringing water and gems to Raurokhymdhar. One day he came to the seven wise elders with a heavy heart, and Nazari Who-Would-Be-Kepeshkmolik, wisest among them, asked “What troubles you so?”
“Oh my elders,” he said. “I have found a hole in the Golden’s grip. Three foolish ausiri carry her messages and weapons to the northern citadels. They do not watch as the slaves load their cargo. They do not mind when the load is uneven, and they do not check to see what they carry. Many could flee on their backs. Many could be saved. But as I thought this, I realized it would be folly indeed. Not all could be saved, and especially not the elders. It would take great strength to cling to the harness, great stillness not to catch the eyes of even a foolish ausir. Forgive me, I forgot myself.”
Nazari went away with the other elders, and when they returned, she said to Shasphur, “You are among our wisest and most honorable. Prove it now. Raurokhymdhar the Golden plans to keep you in her claws for all time, to better breed strong-limbed slaves. You must flee. Take as many of the young ones, as many of the eggs as you can, onto the backs of the ausiri. Bring them down as they fly, and flee into the mountains.”
“You will be killed,” Shasphur said.
“We will die so you may live,” Nazari said. “Listen to your elders.”
Shasphur obeyed, and on the day he and the beginnings of Kepeshkmolik would flee, the elders came one by one into the presence of Raurokhymdhar the Golden, in place of the young ones. Each tested her patience with tales of other dragons’ follies. Each died beneath her claws. By the time the last of the elders had been slain, Raurokhymdhar the Golden hurried to check on her slaves, sure of a trick. But Those-Who-Would-Be Kepeshkmolik had listened to their elders, and with Shasphur they were gone, into the mountains with the blood of three foolish ausiri warming their claws.
They never forgot the Seven Wise Elders, whose names are foremost on the rolls of the lost, and when we became the Vayemniri, the Citadel of Endings was among the first to fall.
1
16 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
One day from Djerad Thymar, Tymanther
CLANLESS MEHEN NEVER SPOKE OF DJERAD THYMAR TO HIS DAUGHTERS except by accident, and so the shadows of a thousand half-spoken memories implied the shape of the City-Bastion in Farideh’s mind. She had been raised with its language in her ears, its customs in her home, its stories lulling her to sleep as a child, but the city of the dragonborn itself remained little more than a legend, until now. The pyramid city of her father’s birth loomed on the horizon, as real and gleaming red as spilled blood in the sunset. It left Farideh uneasy, and she wasn’t alone.
“Is there anything I can do?” Clanless Mehen asked.
Farideh glanced back at her adoptive father, standing on the ridge of the riverbank, shifting from one foot to the other. The faint steam of his breath curled around his scaled nostrils in the evening chill.
“You can stop watching,” Farideh said, and smiled wanly at the dragonborn. “I don’t want you to see.”
“I’ve seen it,” Mehen reminded her, looking down his snout. “It doesn’t bother me.”
It should, Farideh thought.
She looked down into the River Alamber brushing the tips of her boots, its muddy waters painted by sunset. Kuhri Ternhesh, she thought, the name of the river in Tymantheran Draconic. The Ri
ver of Stone. Her reflection looked back—one silver eye, one gold beneath a ridge of horns—broken by the ripples of the water. Does a thing change when you change what you call it? Or do the names just uncover other layers, other truths, other ways of seeing something?
Farideh, she thought. Or Chosen of Asmodeus.
Both, she thought. There’s no running from it, and you know that.
She shut her eyes, turning her attention to the roiling powers of Asmodeus, the god of sin, that tugged on her nerves like a pack of wild hounds, threatening to break what control she had over them. Four days of holding on so tightly and it felt almost impossible to loose that grip.
But if she didn’t now, the powers that came from being a Chosen of Asmodeus would pry it loose for her.
The dark horror of Asmodeus burst out of Farideh, a corona of fear, just before the flames raced over her bronze skin, gathering and unfolding from her back in wings of fire. Anger burned through her—she didn’t want this, she didn’t ask for this, any of this. She steeped in it for a moment—the fury was hers, and yet it wasn’t. She had to remember that.
A few breaths later, she let the flames die.
“Better?” Mehen said, as if Farideh had only thrown up in the river. She climbed up the bank, taking Mehen’s hand to pull herself up over the rise.
“For now.”
Mehen hesitated, then embraced her with a suddenness and strength that crushed the air from her lungs. She hugged him back.
“It scares you,” Farideh said. “Don’t pretend it doesn’t. Not to me.”
“The whole business scares me,” he said. “But karshoj to that burning-angel nonsense. Just a conjurer’s trick when you get down to it.”
The blessings of Asmodeus couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be undone, and every time she tapped into them, the wave of fear took hold of everyone around her, friend or foe, family or stranger. Or lover. She shied from that thought and wondered what the dragonborn would make of it.