by Erin Evans
Once upon a time, Lorcan had made a point of never considering the secrets of archdevils, lest he come under their notice and find himself in terrible danger. The first time Asmodeus had spoken to him in a strange voice, he had tried hard to bury it, to never consider the source or the reason. But whether it was the message or the sheer number of times Lorcan had faced the fact that his king was not what he seemed, as the presence of the highest of the archdevils receded, Lorcan couldn’t help but wonder what it meant that Azuth had managed to seek him out and speak whole thoughts, without Asmodeus ever once interrupting.
At the least, Lorcan thought, it means you’re running short of time..
• • •
BRIN SLIPPED FROM his room in the middle of the night, when the imps had returned to the Nine Hells, and made his way down into the dungeons again. That evening, he’d attempted to make the location spell find the missing staff of Azuth and succeeded only in summoning up a few sparks that nearly ignited the damned feather and knocked it off its precarious perch.
He pressed himself into the shadow of a doorway as one of the lich’s dead-eyed servants walked past, carrying a bucket and mop. Five failures, twenty-five failures, twenty-five hundred—the number didn’t matter, not so long as he didn’t have a sense of the time line. If Bryseis Kakistos took another year to gather her warlock heirs, he could fill every one of those days attempting to find the staff of Azuth that Havilar had forgotten.
If she was down to the last heir, then he needed a new plan.
Brin eased across the dim hallway, too smooth and slow for the servant to notice the motion, then down the hallway toward the dungeon stairs. Creeping through a lich’s fortress in the dead of night, looking for captives, was altogether similar to slipping through a noble house, hunting for documents while a brightstarfeast went on downstairs, albeit with fewer tapestries and statues to duck behind.
And an outcome, he thought, that is more immediately pressing.
He paused at the end of the hallway, in the shadow between glowballs, and drew a long, slow breath. Now was not the time to think about that. But even still, the last words he’d exchanged with Havilar rose up in his mind.
“Even if she says you’ll come back,” Brin had pleaded, “what is there to be sure?”
“Nothing,” Havilar had agreed. “So you’ll figure it out, or you have to beg a miracle from Torm.” And then she’d kissed him and warned him to be careful. And not a moment later, he’d run after her, making himself Bryseis Kakistos’s hostage.
He wondered, as he eased down the staircase, if she knew—wherever she was—if she had any sense that he’d followed after. If she did, likely she was annoyed about needing to be rescued and very, very worried about him.
At the base of the stairs, a basket of glowballs hung on the wall. “Phrenike has trouble letting go of her past,” Bryseis Kakistos had explained to him. “She likes the magic she worked when she was young, whether she has any need of it now or not. Besides,” she’d added in a sneering sort of way, “it’s pretty.”
The glowball’s light pressed the darkness back, but deep beneath the mountain’s slope it had no help. Whispers slithered through the stone corridors. Brin drew his dagger and eased down the hallway toward the sound and the cell he’d seen the heir in. He took a corner and found the walls lined with heavy doors.
Brin peered through the grating on the first door—a tiefling man of middling years looked back at him balefully with lilting eyes of a flat, even gold. His skin was red as Lorcan’s, his hair and beard heavy with gray, and his clothes had a rough, salt-stained look to them. The angry red lines of a warlock brand showed on his calf where his trouser leg had been torn away. A metal collar had been clapped around his neck and it shivered with an angry energy.
“Who the broken planes are you?” the tiefling demanded.
“Uh, checking beds,” Brin said gruffly. One, he thought, moving down the line.
Two was the red-haired woman with the blackened eye. Three was a dark-skinned girl with horns like a ram’s and a smirk, even in her sleep. Four was a snow-haired man, his features far younger than his coloring suggested. Five was an older woman with close-cropped hair and hints of Kara-Tur in her features. Six—
By six, Brin’s thoughts were drifting—every warlock shaved his odds down, every warlock made him wonder who might be looking for them—so when the wiry young woman’s hand shot through the bars and grabbed him by the throat, he had only himself to blame. He pulled the dagger up, close enough to her wrist to startle her and slammed the hilt of it against her wrist to break her loosened grip. The moment her fingers loosened, he scrambled backward, all the way to the opposite wall. She stayed beside the grating, silver eyes fierce and unfriendly. Silver, he thought, like the ghost’s had been.
“Are you … are you the Kakistos heir?” he whispered.
In answer, the girl spat through the bars.
“There is no Kakistos heir down here,” a voice said near his ear. Brin jumped away from the wall, pulling the dagger up again. Through the door beside where he’d landed, an older Durpari man was watching him, his dark eyes faintly amused. His horns were like Farideh’s or Havilar’s, sweeping back from his graying hair in dark curves.
“Aside, of course, from the one serving as the Brimstone Angel’s vessel,” he said kindly. “Karnika descends from Zeal Harper.”
“Why are you talking to him, Nalam?” the girl hissed. “If he’s not the Brimstone Angel’s, then obviously some devil sent him.”
“Perhaps one of ours.”
The girl’s silver eyes narrowed. “And perhaps a stlarning rival sent him to make their heirs more valuable by dagger point.”
“Then we shall have at least the satisfaction of thwarting Bryseis Kakistos as we pass into the next world.” The man turned back to Brin. “So which of these is it? Why are you counting heirs?”
Brin ran through all the covers he could conceive of—he was a servant to the lich checking on her prisoners; he had indeed been sent by a devil, looking for a missing heir that wasn’t here; he was the Brimstone Angel’s apprentice, and then they might just die of laughter because no one would believe these things.
“I need to know how close she is,” Brin said hedging. “I need to know how much time before she casts the ritual. There are seven of you?”
Nalam shrugged. “Depends on how you count. Why do you need to know?”
“She’s missing a piece,” Brin said. “A piece she wants me to find. I want to know how long I have.”
“And you cannot ask?” Nalam said with a chuckle.
“No,” Brin said. “She doesn’t have a Kakistos heir yet. That will be difficult, won’t it?”
“You know enough about warlocks to know that much,” Nalam said. “But not enough to be sure.”
“Hells-lackey,” Karnika spat.
“Not necessarily,” Nalam said. He studied Brin a moment. “You’re here to rescue the vessel, aren’t you?”
Brin blinked, but said nothing. Nalam smiled. “It’s a specific and small amount of knowledge for a person to have. But exactly what a man who loves an unpacted Kakistos heir might know.”
There was no point in being flustered at being unmasked—a lesson the Harpers had impressed upon Brin until it lay a deep memory in his muscles and breath. “How long do I have?” Brin asked.
Nalam pointed to the cells one by one. “Elyria, Margarites, Titus Greybeard, Nicodemus, Lahriman Jarl, Caisys, Zeal Harper”—he ended on himself—“Pradir Ril. Add the lich and she has Phrenike. Add the vessel and she has the Kakistos heir, which makes ten.”
Brin shook his head. “She has other plans for Havilar.”
“Of course she does,” Karnika said. “I’ll bet all her heirs get special treatment.”
“Do not envy them,” Nalam said. “Perhaps this is the difference in our lines, my dear. The children of Pradir Ril all know the extent of the Brimstone Angel’s cruel depravity. Her ‘plans’ for the vessel may well
be a thousand times worse than ours.”
Brin was surprised to find some part of him wanted to defend Bryseis Kakistos—after all she seemed to take no pleasure in any of this. He thought of the way her demeanor had changed when all her memories came back. And it made no difference to him if Asmodeus was brought down or not—even the devils in the Nine Hells seemed keen on that outcome. All he cared about was making sure Havilar returned safely.
“After all,” Nalam added, “we know we will die. She may remain to suffer.”
“Die?” Brin asked.
“Oh yes. The ritual must unmake us, and through each of us, unmake the pact.” He shook his head. “A hundred years ago, Bryseis Kakistos forced my great-grandfather into making the pact, with blackmail and blood magic. Now she wishes to take back that agreement by spilling my blood? Beshaba holds the dice, indeed.”
“Ye gods,” Brin said. “So how long?”
“There are three left,” Nalam said. “Four if you count the Kakistos heirs, five if you count Phrenike’s.”
“Aside from her heir, are they hard to find?”
“You’d have to ask someone with a better knowledge of the pacts,” Nalam said. “Phrenike’s will not be difficult. A Kakistos heir will. The other three are neither common nor rare.”
Brin hesitated. “She also needs the staff of Azuth.”
Nalam’s brows rose. “What does she intend to do with that?”
“She means to destroy the king of the Hells.”
Nalam stared at him, a fraction too hard, a moment too long. He hadn’t known. “You’re in need of help,” he noted after a moment. “You’re not going to defeat Bryseis Kakistos alone.” He ran a brown finger along the edge of a pale metal collar. “Antimagic. She can defeat any one of us, but all eight together?”
Brin shook his head. “I’m no wizard.”
“Pick the locks then,” Nalam said. “I’ll do the rest.”
Brin sheathed his dagger and rifled through his pockets for the scraps of his unsuccessful location ritual. A piece of silver wire, a rusted nail, the fineknife—not the thieves’ tools he would have gone into a Harper mission with, but they’d do. Nalam and Karnika spoke not a word while Brin struggled to manhandle the heavy old lock of the cell door.
At last the latch turned and the door opened. Nalam checked the corridor, then came out as Brin stood once more. “We don’t have long,” Brin started to say. But before he could finish, Nalam’s hand shot out and grabbed the dagger, his other arm wrapping around Brin’s shoulders and pulling him close.
Nalam held the knife to Brin’s throat, the blade tickling the thin skin along his larynx. “Now walk.”
Brin cursed at himself. You are just slipping every chance you get tonight, he thought. “We’re on the same side, goodman.”
“You’re on the side of a Kakistos heir,” Nalam pointed out. “We were never going to be allies. Walk.”
He had half a foot on Brin, maybe a stone of weight. No weapon but the blade, no spells he could cast. Brin took two steps forward, then one hard step backward, slamming his foot down on Nalam’s. The weight of him shoved the tiefling back and off-balance. Brin pulled the fineknife from his pocket and stabbed it backward into Nalam’s thigh. The warlock shouted in alarm and pain, the angle of the dagger slipping enough for Brin to shift, stepping out of his grip and into a better position. He slammed his elbow into the older man’s chin, knocking his head back, and shoving him backward to land on the floor. Brin skipped back a step—
“Enough.”
All at once, the corridor flooded with light. Bryseis Kakistos stood at the bottom of the stairs, staff in hand, a perfect mockery of Havilar with her glaive outstretched. The crystal at the tip glowed red and fearsome. At her heels, Zoonie crouched, ready to attack, and for the first time in a long while, Brin felt very afraid of her.
“Nalam Ril,” she intoned, striding down the corridor. “I should have guessed you’d be the troublemaker.” She gestured at Brin and he found himself shoved to the side, back against the wall beside Karnika’s cell. The heir of Zeal Harper had retreated into the shadows.
Nalam stood as Bryseis Kakistos approached, seething hatred so intense that some part of Brin wanted to jump out, protect Havilar. The man still held the dagger in his right hand. “The trouble started long before I walked this plane,” he said.
Bryseis Kakistos rolled her eyes. “And what? It will end before you leave it? Because honestly, that’s all I wish for. Get back in your cell now. You’ve had your moment.”
“But you will not have yours.” With that, Nalam plunged the dagger into his own chest, sinking it between the ribs deep into his heart. His eyes bulged, as if he hadn’t expected the pain that came with it, but he met Bryseis Kakistos’s gaze without flinching.
For her part, the Brimstone Angel only sighed as the heir of Pradir Ril hit the stone floor. She rolled back the sleeves of her robes, and Brin saw that the bare skin of her arms was marked with tattoos in a purplish ink that had definitely not been there when she was only Havilar. “You, I will deal with in a moment, Lord Crownsilver,” she said without looking at Brin. She pressed her fingers to the tattoo just at the crook of her elbow and uttered a word that echoed like an explosion in Brin’s ears. The corridor became too bright to bear, and for a moment, Brin couldn’t find his breath.
Then a great sucking sound filled the space, followed by the sound of his blade clattering to the floor. The light faded and Nalam Ril sat up, alive once more.
“Parosh renoutaa,” Bryseis Kakistos said. Zoonie sprang forward, nearly filling the hall, to loom over the tiefling man. Nalam’s mouth worked, trying to find words and failing. His eyes welled with tears.
“That,” Bryseis Kakistos said, “was a very expensive spell I had stored for a much more dire use. But I didn’t come this far to be stymied by Pradir Ril’s rebellious leavings. If you’re so eager to die, I have much more productive ways for you to do so.”
“You will not win,” Nalam said, his voice hoarse. “You have no idea what you’re setting yourself against.”
Bryseis Kakistos didn’t so much as blink. “Zoonie.” The hellhound’s ears pricked at the sound of her name. “Throw him in the cell and bite his hands off.”
Nalam threw up his hands to ward off the hellhound—a mistake. For all her bulk, Zoonie was extraordinarily fast and tore first the right hand then the left right off his wrists. She picked him up by the front of his robes and with a toss of her head, flung him back into the cell, splashing blood everywhere.
“Zoonie! Stop! Eshata!” Brin shouted, a moment too late. The hellhound turned from the now screaming man, her muzzle stained, fingers dangling from her mouth, and wagged her tail. She moved nearer to Brin, waiting for another order. He held up his hands, ready to push her away, trying hard not to vomit. Bryseis Kakistos, still ignoring him, stepped around the hellhound. As she passed, flames enveloped her from head to toe, and Brin’s heart suddenly threatened to explode with fear.
The blessings of Asmodeus, Brin told himself. It was nothing Farideh hadn’t done. She reached down and clutched Nalam’s spraying stumps with her burning hands. The air sizzled with the smell of cauterizing flesh. Nalam finally stopped screaming, falling backward, insensate with shock.
“There,” she said briskly, as the flames went out. “That should help him resist the temptation to be a fool.” She shut the door behind her, locking it with the key at her belt. Brin dug his fingers into Zoonie’s fur as Bryseis Kakistos turned to face him.
“Walk with me,” she said.
Brin didn’t move. “Where are we going?”
“Back to your rooms, of course,” she said, striding past him. “Unless you’d rather sleep down here.”
Brin scooped his dagger from the floor, gauging his odds. Zoonie nudged Brin to follow, unhappy to be separated. Brin tried not to think about how much of the tiefling man’s blood the hellhound had smeared onto him, as he moved after the Brimstone Angel. He tried not to think ab
out the possibility that what looked like Havilar was about to kill him.
“Do you know anything about Nalam Ril?” she asked. When Brin didn’t answer right away, she went on, “I assume he told you I bent his grandsire to my will? That I doomed his line?”
“Some,” Brin said.
“Well, it’s not entirely untrue. Pradir was not the most constant of converts. Did Nalam tell you, though, that he himself is one of the Raging Fiend’s greatest devotees in Durpar? In the old ways too—bodies on the altar, blood for the summoning, none of this whispers-in-the-dark and prayers-for-clemency, oh no. He is Ashmadai, make no mistake.” She stopped, looked back at him, and tilted her head. “You and Havilar have tangled with his sort before, I see.”
“In Neverwinter,” Brin said. The memory of the Ashmadai priest dragging Havilar off, of that first time Havilar insisted he run instead of staying, instead of saving her.
“Then you know where this little plan of his would have ended. Blood on the altar, probably yours and hers.” Havilar’s golden eyes pierced him. “You are tenderhearted, which suits my needs, but foolishness does not. Go back to your rooms now. Stay out of the dungeons and keep to your task. Don’t assume I can’t replace you if you start proving more of an impediment than an asset.”
8
1 Hammer, the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant (1487 DR)
Tymanther
WHEN DAHL WOKE AGAIN, EVERY PART OF HIM HURT, AND FOR THE barest of seconds he assumed he’d been in his cups again and wondered what idiot thing he’d said the night before and if he’d cringe to know how he came to be lying face-down in a field. Then he remembered Tymanther and Unther and the Son of Victory. Then he remembered the Kethendan dragonborn plunging from the sky and the giants who cast spells that seemed to take no notice of sense or reality.
“Are you finally up?” He winced at Mira’s voice and rubbed a hand over his hair—hissing as he discovered the lump on the back of his head. “Good,” she said briskly. “That was a bit long for comfort.”
“How long?”
