The Devil You Know

by Erin Evans

  Sairché remained, perched on the oversized bed like a castaway on a raft, looking bleak and uneasy. Lorcan stood at the foot of the bed with an unpleasant smirk on his face. Shadow-smoke began to drift off Farideh’s arms as she took in the tension in the room. “Is everything all right?”

  Lorcan turned to her, his expression shifting into something lighter. “Oh just fine, darling. Did you get a chance to acquaint yourselves?”

  “A little,” Farideh said. “I don’t think either of them knows about the staff.”

  “Never mind that.” Sairché’s golden eyes pinned Farideh, blazing and wild. “How far off is that army?”

  “A few days,” Farideh said. “Why?”

  “What are your assets?” Sairché demanded. “What’s keeping this city intact?”

  “I’m not the karshoji Vanquisher,” Farideh said. “It’s massive, it’s extremely defensible, especially from aerial attack. Most everyone in the city has weapons training—”

  “Weapons training isn’t military training,” Sairché said. “And how many people live in this city? Fifty thousand? What about these giants?”

  “Where did you hear about the giants?”

  “Please, that dragonborn you travel with might be soft-footed, but he can say nothing quieter than a roar,” Sairché said. “Has he gone off to battle them, or to ask for assistance?”

  “He’s gone to see what they’re doing here,” Farideh said. “Why do you care?”

  “Because you need some reinforcements if you’re going to stand against an army of demons!” she said, growing agitated. “You’re going about this in a terribly slapdash way. An army of demons isn’t something you ought to underestimate.”

  “The djeradi are well defended,” Farideh began.

  “And completely dependent on just a few lines of supply,” Sairché said. “Oh, you’ll last long enough—make the Hells nod in appreciation for how long you can stretch a battle. But you’ll lose in the end. You have solid defense and nothing to attack with.”

  “Why in the world do you care?” Farideh cried.

  “Because,” Sairché said savagely, “I’m bored to the eyeteeth with this place, and if I have to sit here for an eternity, I’d rather it not be rubble.”

  “Don’t mind Sairché,” Lorcan drawled. “She’s only just realized she should have stayed out of our business all those years ago. Maybe saved herself a little trouble.”

  Farideh sighed. As much as she might have appreciated seeing Sairché punished—after everything she’d done, the cambion certainly deserved some sort of consequences—there was nothing about Sairché’s circumstances that didn’t make Farideh’s problems harder to solve. Except, perhaps, that she was no longer aiding Bryseis Kakistos, if she ever really had been.

  “At least we have all the heirs here,” Farideh said. “Except Havilar. If she wants a Kakistos heir, she has to come to us.”

  Sairché’s graceful brows shot up, her limp wings suddenly erect. “Oh. Oh shitting Lords. Was that your plan?”

  Lorcan turned, his expression still and calculating. “What did you do?”

  Farideh’s chest squeezed tight as Sairché bit her lip, as if trying to will back in whatever secret she’d let out. “I may,” she allowed, “have forgotten to mention the Brimstone Angel I hid away.”

  • • •

  THE SCRYING APPARATUS sat upon the table, feather finally balanced precariously over the shallow bowl of snowmelt. Perfect to the specifications of the spell—and absolutely inert. Even knowing that Bryseis Kakistos expected him to track down the staff of Azuth, Brin could not fathom where to begin.

  “She said I need blood,” he said.

  “We can get you blood,” Bosh chirped from beside the brazier where he was stirring up the coals. “Of course, you should have said something sooner—usually we get it from this cultist in Chult, and he’s definitely not in Chult right now—”

  “Whose blood do you need to scry a staff?” Mot interrupted. He hovered over the scrying apparatus, trying to be helpful and succeeding only in making Brin feel as if he were banging his head against the stone walls of the fortress.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he said.

  “Probably the one who held it,” Bosh said.

  “The one who held it was a god, idiot,” Mot said.

  “Gods have blood,” Bosh returned, indignant. Then, “Some gods have blood. Otherwise people wouldn’t swear about it.”

  “Nobody swears by Azuth’s blood.”

  “Maybe you need his beard then,” Bosh said.

  “Both of you shut up,” Brin snapped. “Go back to the Hells.”

  “We can’t,” Mot said. “Not unless she dismisses us.”

  “Then sit on the sill and give me a little peace.” He dragged his hands through his hair. Bryseis Kakistos wanted him to find the staff. She had some reason to think he knew where it was, which suggested Havilar knew where it was. Havilar hadn’t told him. He needed blood to scry it. It was plausible Zoonie could track it.

  Which meant it existed—or Bryseis Kakistos believed it did. It meant that it was likely somewhere Havilar had been. It meant that it was somewhere Brin hadn’t been—or at least somewhere she hadn’t had him to talk to.

  Akanûl. The road to Waterdeep. The Nine Hells.

  “Arush Vayem,” he whispered to himself.

  The only place Havilar had been long enough to have noticed a divine artifact one way or another—but where Brin wouldn’t have been, and where she might not have told him so—was Arush Vayem, the village on no one’s maps. Tucked deep in a valley in the Smoking Mountains, small and secretive and hidden away. Where Havilar and Farideh had grown up. Where Mehen had fled his father.

  It wasn’t the worst place to hide something, he reasoned.

  “Are you thinking?” Bosh called.

  It didn’t explain the blood. It didn’t tell him who he ought to scry, or what.

  No, he thought, not scry. He turned back to the worktable, the assortment of components he’d collected together out of Phrenike’s stores. The dried blood of a formian, salts of copper, powdered silver—all laid in neat lines. Risky, he thought, setting up the spell as carefully as possible. But if the answer lay in Arush Vayem, the best and only way to know.

  He fished the little scroll out of his boot where it had ridden with him for years. A few short words and it caught with flames that were not fire, pulling magic from the Weave and opening a passage between himself and Farideh in far-off Djerad Thymar. The air cracked faintly. Brin took a deep breath.

  “She’s looking for the staff of Azuth,” he whispered. “She thinks I know where to look—‘where is it’? Which means Havi thinks I know. In Arush Vayem?” The magic snapped and crackled as the message sped across the plane, back to Farideh, wherever she was. A moment later, the softer crackle of breath and Farideh’s voice rang through the room.

  I don’t know, she said, sounding surprised, and Brin cursed. We’re tracking down the Kakistos heirs, also Caisys—he brought us to the village. He might have known more. She paused as if counting the words. Stay safe, Brin.

  “Oh, if anyone knows about the staff of Azuth, it’s Caisys.”

  Brin leaped to his feet, reaching for a sword at the sound of Phrenike’s voice. She shook her head, the violet lights of her eyes rolling skyward. “Watching Gods, you are ridiculous. And a fraud—I knew it. Are you even the princeling she thinks you are?”

  “I don’t know what you think you heard,” Brin began.

  The lich strolled past him, to the scrying apparatus, waving him off. “Please. I’m not some snooping noblewoman you can scare off. I heard you fine.” She eyed the bowl, the brass arm, the feather. “She’s so busy imagining a little family of her own that she’s taken leave of her senses and trusted you’re on her side, all the while forgetting she’s walking around in your true love’s skin. Makes a man willing to take very foolish risks.”

  “I never imagined she trusted me,
” Brin said. “Do you think she trusts you?”

  Phrenike looked back at him and grinned. “Yes and no. I suppose we’re in the same straits, you and I. Bryseis has a way of trusting others without trusting them at all. It’s rather amusing, don’t you think, how similar that makes her to Asmodeus? She wouldn’t like to hear you say that, though. I’d hold my tongue.”

  Brin didn’t let go of his sword—for what little good it would do him against a lich. “What do you want, saer?” he asked. “Are you planning to tell her about the sending?”

  Phrenike chuckled. “Let me tell you a story about the Brimstone Angel: When I met her, she was nothing but a thief. A quick-fingered rogue with a knack for traps and an absolute obsession with gathering magic. I was the wizard. She was the one wishing for my skills.”

  “But you wound up serving her?”

  Phrenike’s face shifted, and it took Brin a moment to realize she was pursing what was left of her lips. “I never said she wasn’t hideously clever. And ambitious. You can fall into lichdom, but to bargain with the king of the Hells and survive … Regardless: thief, dabbler. That’s how it was, and that’s how it would have kept on going, do you know why?”

  The lich reached over and plucked the feather from the apparatus, inverting it so it curved downward over the brass arm. “Because she had only one impediment—her sister.”

  “She had a sister?” Brin asked.

  Phrenike looked back at him again. “Oh, you didn’t know about Alyona? Chaste little thing. Well, chaste-acting. She was always mooning over Caisys—absolutely pathetic.” She rotated the bowl a quarter turn and ran a finger down one line of copper salts, tidying it up. “Let’s call her … sanctimonious. But Bryseis would have done anything for her—and then Alyona got fed up with how the rest of us stayed ahead of death, threw a fit, and stormed off. That was the last time I ever saw Bryseis Kakistos give a care for her own.” She pulled the book of spells nearer, pushed the candle away. “That was the last I could ever call Bryseis Kakistos nothing but a thief.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Brin asked, as calmly as he could.

  Phrenike considered her handiwork, nodded once, then turned to face Brin again. “Because you’ve made a very embarrassing mistake, and I want to be sure you’ve been cured of any assumption that might have led you to it.”

  Brin frowned. “What mis—”

  Phrenike’s skeletal hand shot out and grabbed him by the arm, so fast Brin hardly had time to swing his sword at her, slashing a rent in the lavender robes as she stepped back. It was too late—a numbing chill spread through him, his arm falling dead beside him, the blade clattering to the ground as his hand went slack. Phrenike smiled and took him by the arm again, pulling him toward the prepared ritual.

  “We all make mistakes,” she said, taking a pinch of the dried flowers and sprinkling them over the water. “We all meet people and read them exactly wrong. I thought she was nothing, and she proved she was my better—at least for a time.” She turned Brin’s hand over with one hand, cold upon his skin. With the other, she drew a black-handled dagger and slashed his wrist. Blood spurted from the painless wound, and Phrenike held his arm high over the bowl so that the blood dripped down the feather, taking on a strange glow as it did.

  “You assume,” she said, “that she’s like you. Or perhaps because she’s clearly got it into her mind to resurrect into a child of yours, you assume she cares about her own blood.”

  The pool of snowmelt shivered as the drops of blood hit it—one, two, three. As it stilled, the refection changed. Not Brin’s room … but a child. A little tiefling boy, with golden skin, blue eyes, and blond curls. His nose had a curve to it, the hints of a more elegant face to come; his mouth a stubbornness that seemed it must run down to his very bones. He leaned on a herder’s crook, his gaze distant and dreamy.

  While Brin watched, frozen, the child turned and walked across a far-off field, a scaled-down, softened version of Havilar’s swinging, swaggering gait—Brin knew that walk as surely as he knew the difference between Havi’s grin and Bryseis Kakistos’s sly smile.

  Seven years old, Brin thought. Maybe eight.

  “She knows,” Phrenike said, “about all the heirs. The twins have their use, the others are weaker—this is the Kakistos heir she wants. This is what you lost that she couldn’t find.” She let Brin’s slack arm fall. “I’ll leave it to you to let Bryseis know that you’ve finished your task.”

  11

  2 Hammer, the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant (1487 DR)

  Djerad Thymar, Tymanther

  MEHEN SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY IN HIS SADDLE—THEY HAD RIDDEN hard and far enough into the plains the day before to make certain there was no way he’d sit easy the next day. The wide-backed horse, a hot-blooded Ishen-Charac probably descended from his father’s own warhorse, flattened its ears in annoyance, and Mehen tried to settle himself. Uadjit rode ahead, followed by Dumuzi and two other young Kepeshkmoliks—Saitha and a boy called Persegor. Dumuzi’s first converts.

  “Is it just me,” Kallan muttered, “or does this business with Enlil start making your scales itch when you’re faced with three hatchling priestlets?”

  Mehen shifted in the saddle. “Older you get, more likely children are going to start making proclamations at you.”

  “We are not that old.”

  “Then you’d better find Dumuzi some grown converts,” Mehen said. “I don’t see this stopping anytime soon.”

  Mehen tapped his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He’d gone to sit beside Dumuzi at the fire the night before. “I have a question for your god,” he’d said.

  Dumuzi had folded his hands nervously, never at ease with Mehen. “All right. What is it?”

  Mehen clenched his teeth together to fight the nervous urge to tap his tongue. “Is she alive? Is Havilar still alive?”

  Dumuzi went quiet for a moment. “He doesn’t know.”

  “How can he not know?” Mehen demanded. “I thought he was a god. ‘Soldier of all the lands, father of all children’? He can’t karshoji tell me if my daughter is dead?”

  Dumuzi flinched, but a moment later he spoke. “He says there are some barriers even a god cannot breach. He says it isn’t definite, but given how weak he is right now, if he knew anything definitely, it would be that her soul had passed into the Fugue Plane.” He swallowed, noisy against a tight throat. “He says he understands. When he came back, he could not find his children. It’s a difficult thing to feel powerless.”

  At that, Mehen had stood, strode off into the grasslands, too full of the words he didn’t dare say to sit still any longer. In the bright light of day, Dumuzi would not so much as meet his eye. Mehen wasn’t powerless. There were a thousand things Mehen could have been doing, and he wasn’t, because everything was so tangled up in planar nonsense.

  As they rode, they passed swaths of land where the dirt was churned and wild, as if some invisible farmer had plowed it up and mixed in other soils, red and black, then sprinkled it with unfamiliar rocks. Mehen eyed a jagged, rust-colored boulder with a vein of crystal as green as new leaves running through it, and wondered what the world on the other side must have looked like.

  Uadjit called back, “When we come to the rise, fall back. I’ll scout ahead.”

  “You did the last one!” Kallan shouted back. “Give the rest of us something to—”

  A ripple in the air—as if a gust of wind had blown across Mehen’s eye, distorting his vision—and suddenly a great, gray-skinned giant stood beside the line of their horses, club in hand. Mehen pulled his falchion as the Ishen-Charac broke left, fighting against the pull of Mehen’s reins. A second giant appeared there, hemming in their horses. She put out a hand, fingers outstretched. Across the skin of her right forearm and hand, blue light flooded channel lines, flowing up toward her palm. She spoke a word, soft as grass crunching underfoot.

  Immediately the horses calmed.

  “Chaubask bur kepeshk,” Mehen spat, but no a
mount of spur would make the gelding move.

  “They are dreaming,” the giant said. “It won’t last long.”

  “Have you come for Dahl Peredur and the others?” the man with the club said. “We have come to meet you.”.

  • • •

  BRIN SEARCHES THE room—the Griffon Room, portraits of Obarskyrs lining its walls. King Foril is here—not dead, but playing chess against Tam Zawad, the High Harper of Waterdeep, with ponderous care, as if he has no idea what perils are raging outside the palace. Beyond the windows, everything is on fire. Brin locks the door and starts throwing the pillows from the settee, the curtains from the wall.

  “Aubrin, what are you doing?”

  “Your Majesty,” Brin says. “I can’t find the baby.”

  Foril doesn’t look up. “Again?”

  Brin starts yanking pictures from the walls, flipping rugs from the floor—if he doesn’t find the baby, the demon will. A moment before, it had been in his arms, wrapped in swaddling—and then he’d set it down, just for a moment. Where?

  “Brin?” He turns and Havilar is standing there—utter dread swamps him. He doesn’t want to tell her what he did, but then she of all people will understand the seriousness. He has to.

  “I lost the baby!” he says, all panic. “I didn’t mean to, but he’s gone.”

  She frowns at him, puzzled. “All right. That’s the dream. There isn’t actually a baby.”

  “No, there is.” Brin yanks the drawers from a cabinet, spilling silver spoons and arrows and snakes onto the floor. “A baby. A boy—our boy. Only … only he’s not a baby.” He stops, shuts the last drawer. “He’s eight. Or so.” He turns and looks at Havilar. “This is a dream.”

  A grin breaks over her face, a smile of utter relief. “Yes! Holy gods, you don’t know how long it took me to get Farideh to realize that. She is so karshoji stubborn, even when she’s asleep.”

  Brin looks her over. “It’s a dream,” he says slowly. “But you’re not. You’re here. You’re here.” He throws his arms around her, holds her tight. “Blessed Torm, I … Oh thank the gods.” She clings to him in return, as real and solid as if she were beside him again. “Havi, I’m trying, but things are getting—”