by Erin Evans
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
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
©2016 Wizards of the Coast LLC.
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Cartography by: Mike Schley
Cover art by: Min Yum
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6594-6
ISBN: 978-0-7869-6604-2 (ebook)
620B6775000001 EN
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v3.1
For Kristen and for Julia, the very best sisters.
For Idris and for Edmond, the very best brothers.
And for Kevin, the only one.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Part I: An Urchin
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part II: The Night Merchant
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part III: The Pact
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part IV: The Devil
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part V: The Price
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part VI: Hierarchy
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part VII: Blood
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part VIII: Ascension
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part IX: Faithless
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part X: Betrayal
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part XI: Escape
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part XII: The Vessel
Chapter 27
Part XIII: Renewal
Acknowledgments
PART I
AN URCHIN
113 Mirtul, the Year of the Weeping Moon (1339 DR)
Darmshall, Vaasa
• • •
Where there was one little tiefling on the streets of Darmshall, the other would be close by—everyone knew that. Bisera waved her twin back out of sight. If anyone so much as spotted Alyona, she wouldn’t be much of a lookout. Alyona bit her lip, but tucked herself deeper into the bunch of lilac bushes that had yet to bloom beside the side entrance of the temple.
Eight-year-old Bisera turned her attention to the three corpses laid out behind the temple of Selûne. Adventurers, dead in a tavern brawl, no one to claim them. The watch had taken the best things off them—blades, jewels, anything magical. A big human man, a half-orc woman, and an elf, who was one or the other or something in between. Didn’t matter, they were all dead.
Bisera slipped her little hands quickly through their pockets—adventurers always had pockets enough that the watch missed a few coins, a few trinkets. Silver on the woman, and a little whistle shaped like a sparrow. Just copper on the man, but a lot of it, and a dagger tucked deep into his boot. The elf had only a bunch of junk—pouches of powders and cobwebs and dried leaves and inks. She shoved her hand deep into the pocket inside the elf’s robe, all the way up to her armpit—that wasn’t right. Her hand closed on something heavy and thick and flat.
A book. Scorch-marked and dog-eared and chased with flaking gold leaf. She opened it, and a faint breeze of soot and wintergreen stirred the spring air. Bisera shivered.
“Oy, demonspawn!” Bisera dropped the book, kicked it under the corpse’s cot with one heavy hoof. She turned to see a trio of human boys storming toward her from the market street—Vainen, Marko, and Torger. She balled her hands into fists.
“Where’s your shadow?” Marko demanded. None of them would be called boys for long, but Marko was by far the biggest, the one she ought to be most afraid of.
“She didn’t want to help,” Bisera lied. “Too much of a risk.”
“Here’s your risk,” Torger said. “What you get? Hand it over.”
Bisera grit her teeth and thought about head-butting him, right in the stones. “I need it. I’m hungry.”
Vainen grabbed hold of her by one sharp horn and gave her a little shake. “You hand it over. This is our street and so these are our pickings, demonspawn. Thief.”
“You know what we do to thieves?” Torger chimed in. Marko cracked his knuckles in a way that was only half as menacing as Bisera was sure he meant it to be. Vainen let go of her and she fell to her knees on the dirty ice.
“Fine.” She reversed her pockets, dumping out two silvers and four coppers. She held them out to Vainen as though they were a weapon she could pierce him with. He snatched them, testing the weight in his hand.
“All of it.”
Bisera bit her lip, as if she were going to cry. She reached into her shirt and took out the whistle that looked like a sparrow. She held it a moment—pretty little thing. She hadn’t even gotten to play it. Torger snatched it out of her hand and blew sharply on it. “Dross,” he said. He dropped it on the cobblestones and crushed it into an unrecognizable lump. Despite herself. a flutter of sadness like a little bird taking off went through the tiefling child.
“Your cooperation is appreciated,” Vainen said. “Stlarn off before we change our minds.”
Still on the cobbles, Bisera wiped her face. While the boys circled up, arguing over who got the silvers and who got the coppers, she hooked the book with one arm and shoved it under her shirt, bundling her cloak around her. She stomped off toward Alyona’s hiding place.
One of the priestesses, a silverstar with her dark hair cropped close under a pale fur cap, stood in the doorway, considering Alyona as she spoke rapidly and animatedly. “That’s just what they say, the priests of Tempus,” Alyona finished, her voice rising with anxiety. “Is it so? Or does Selûne say different?”
The priestess looked up at Bisera and raised a thick eyebrow. “All things that seek the light in the darkness. Even the shadowed. Whatever the light of the moon touches, she protects. Now—”
“Some boys are messing with those dead people,” Bisera said. “I told them not to, but they didn’t stop.”
The priestess’s expression da
rkened, too shadowed for even Selûne, Bisera thought. She nudged Alyona aside, storming toward the rear of the temple.
“Come on,” Bisera hissed, pulling on her sister’s sleeve. They hurried up the street, away from the boys and the priestess and anyone who would bother them.
“I’m sorry,” Alyona said. “She came out and asked what I was doing, but then I heard Torger and I didn’t know how to keep her away and warn you too … Oh, tell me you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.” Bisera tucked her arm around her sister. “You did your job. She would have been more trouble than those idiots.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“Not badly.” They ducked under the wall of the baths, beside where the fire to warm the water was kept. Bisera snuggled up against the toasty wall while Alyona kneeled opposite her.
“Did they take it all?” she asked.
Bisera smiled and reached into her shirt for the book and for the little pouch she’d sewn under her arm. “One silver and fifteen copper. And a book. Best yet. Those three are such dummies—I just happened to find one silver fewer than there were boys?” She snorted. “They’re probably still trying to figure out if you can clip a silver into thirds.”
“You have to be careful,” Alyona said gently. “They’re more dangerous than you think.”
“So long as they keep being as stupid as I think, I don’t mind.”
“Do you want to go buy some food?”
“It’ll be cheaper later,” Bisera said. They’d learned already that if they looked like they could afford too much, people got suspicious and tried to call the watch. But some little beggar children with a few coppers buying bony dried fish and potatoes full of eyes didn’t gain much notice—and sometimes you could pocket some sweets while they weren’t noticing.
Bisera pulled the book onto her lap. Her fingertips tingled as she turned the gilt-edged pages. She could read, albeit slowly, but this was like nothing she’d ever seen. Magic. Spells. Which of them would give those bully boys something to fear? she wondered. How long would it take her to figure it out?
Alyona curled up next to her, considering the spells. “Who do you think they were?”
“Who?”
“The dead ones. Do you think they were friends?”
Bisera turned another page. Friends, enemies, acquaintances—it didn’t matter, they were dead, and alive they would have been so much less useful to the tiefling twins. Crueler even, perhaps. But Alyona studied the page with such sadness, the loneliness of life in Darmshall etched on every sigh. Bisera put her arm around her sister. “Whoever they were, they’re our heroes now,” she said, pulling the book closer. “We’ll never forget them.”
• • •
1
27 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
Djerad Thymar, Tymanther
NONE OF THIS IS REAL. THAT THOUGHT CHASED FARIDEH’S EVERY WORRY, every plan, every panic. Her mind felt as if someone had peeled it away from her numb, mechanical body and her heart, which could only scream and scream and scream. None of this is real.
“I have to go,” Havilar said, with a firmness that didn’t match her trembling voice. “It should be me.”
Farideh shook her head. “No. I can’t let you.”
Farideh shut her eyes, trying to clear the memory from her mind, but it hung there as if suspended in cobwebs, and Sairché still sat in the center of Havilar’s unmade bed instead of Havi. The cambion prowled her nightmares often enough, but never like this—wounded belly newly bandaged, pallid and hollow with blood loss. Still, her gold eyes regarded Farideh with cunning. Farideh didn’t trust Sairché and Sairché returned the sentiment.
“You can talk,” Farideh said, “or I can break the circle.”
The cambion’s golden eyes flicked over the tiefling warlock as if she would evade the inevitable—it was only the protective circle Farideh had laid around Sairché that shielded her from the effects of the cursed dagger that had been buried in her gut. If the circle were so much as smudged, her erinyes half sisters would pour out of the Nine Hells and strike Sairché down, killing the oathbreaker marked by their dead mother’s blade.
Sairché glanced once at Mehen standing behind Farideh’s left shoulder, once at Ilstan positioned at her right. One unswervingly devoted to Farideh, one too mad to claim. No comfort to be had, no play to make—even Sairché had to recognize she was cornered, Farideh thought.
“Where do you want me to start?’ Sairché said.
Bryseis Kakistos looked out of Sairché’s eyes: “I need a body. Just temporarily. I’ll give it back, perhaps in better shape than I found it … It needs to be one of you. You were made for me. It won’t be so difficult to maintain control. It won’t damage you so badly. But you have that barrier on you. You have to be willing. You have to ask me in.”
“Where have they gone?” Mehen demanded.
“I don’t know,” Sairché said. “You want to find out for certain, you need to scry the lordling. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s headed for a fortress owned by one of her former followers. Up in the Snowflake Mountains, near Erlkazar.”
Havilar said, “It’s the only thing that makes sense. You know what’s going on better than I do. You’re the smart one—you’ll find a way to stop all of this. To fix it. And I’m the strong one. I can … I’ve done this before.” Havilar’s hand squeezed her own tight. “Just figure it out, all right?”
“A lich is a matter of some difficulty,” Ilstan Nyaril said. “They are wicked and tricky and not to be trusted, but oh, the magic they remember, the spells they can speak …”
“You should know the weaknesses of the ghost,” Farideh said.
Sairché scowled. “I thought I did. But as you may notice, she managed to overtake me, get me cursed, and leave me here for dead. I assume she’s taken a different strategy with your sister.”
There are two pieces still trapped inside you from that moment of error, buried in the layers of your own souls, Bryseis Kakistos had said. That’s what makes you interesting to the devils. That’s what makes you interesting to Asmodeus.
In Farideh’s mind, every awful moment came again and again: Sairché’s arrival in Djerad Thymar as the vessel of Bryseis Kakistos, the Brimstone Angel—Farideh and her twin, Havilar’s, great-great-grandmother. The threats. The terrible revelations. The moment when Havilar volunteered to be the one the ghost possessed, to save their loved ones and buy Farideh time to solve this puzzle. The feeling of having a part of her soul—albeit an alien part, a fragment of Bryseis Kakistos—torn away. Watching Havilar—no longer Havilar—vanish with her lover, Brin, and Zoonie, Havi’s hellhound, in tow.
Do you know what happens when the king is stolen out of the Nine Hells?
How could you have let this happen? Farideh thought, at Sairché, at herself.
“Bryseis Kakistos made it sound as if she had a plan for Asmodeus,” she said instead. “What exactly is she doing?”
Sairché cleared her throat. “Bryseis Kakistos is collecting heirs of the Toril Thirteen, the most powerful and potent ones available. That’s the core of her ritual. Through them, she can make the purest link to Asmodeus and the Nine Hells’ power.”
“How many has she found?” Farideh asked. How long do I have?
“In her possession?” Sairché asked. “One. And that’s stretching things. One of the original Toril Thirteen, the warlock Phrenike, persists as a lich—it’s her castle Bryseis Kakistos must have fled to. Given she’s still alive—for certain definitions of the word anyway—she’s the surest link. She’s found four others—the heirs of Caldura Elyria, Pradir Ril, Margarites, and Titus Greybeard.”
“Five,” Farideh said. “She has Havilar.” And me, she thought, and she knew in that moment if she could save Havilar by agreeing to Bryseis Kakistos’s ritual of revenge—the powerful magic she meant to use to destroy Asmodeus, the king of the Hells, once and for all—Farideh would go to her grave without question.
/> But Sairché gave her a withering look. “You’ll recall she has things for the both of you to do.”
“What things?” Mehen demanded.
“She needs another body,” Sairché said. “Another heir. And your daughter’s workshop is in perfect working order, so to speak.”
Farideh blushed scarlet. That is your task, my dear—difficult and simple together, the ghost had said as though she were a commander handing down tasks to her subordinates. A body for herself to be reborn in, a body for Havilar if something should go awry. Just as she and Havilar had been made, a vessel to hold her reincarnated spirit, twenty-seven years ago. It’s what you are for. You have the cambion. He would do. If I can free the Harper, all the better. Not as handsome, but steadier.
The reminder of Dahl’s absence slipped through her. However it grieved her, too many other things hammered cracks into her heart.
“It’s not the worst idea,” Sairché pointed out. “She’d be a lot less trouble in a newborn babe’s body. And it means you’re not number five.” She looked at the door. “Where is Lorcan?”
“How long is it going to take her to find the other heirs?” Farideh asked.
Sairché shrugged. “I don’t know. Yourself and your sister excluded, it isn’t terribly difficult to track down warlocks. The need for the most potent connection might force her to search a little more. What’s going to be trickier is that she hasn’t discovered the focus.”
“What does that mean?”
“Something for the ritual to affect,” Ilstan said, in the dreamy way he spoke. “Something to give the power to—it must go somewhere, that is the nature of things—like a river or a wind or a path, it must lead to something.”
Sairché looked at Farideh as if Ilstan were not to be believed. “The ritual inverts the warlock pact and pulls power out of the Nine Hells beyond what it normally should,” she said. “That alone is meant to weaken Asmodeus. But the power has to go somewhere, otherwise it’s liable to loop itself back through the warlocks.” She waved a hand. “The specifics aren’t important. She needs somewhere to force the power to go.”
