by Erin Evans
… Unnatural depends on where you stand … A chill ran down Ilstan’s spine. That was not the voice of Azuth, but that was not the careful cadence of Asmodeus. Breathless, frantic … Order is not natural, but it is right … to determine what is out of order and what is in good order … all depends on how you are willing to look at the matter.
Ilstan held perfectly still. First, Azuth speaking clearly, then Asmodeus speaking madly. He knotted his hands together. What did it mean?
A rapping at the door startled him badly enough that he scrambled backward, behind the bed, a spell on his lips and magic in his hands. “Ilstan!” Farideh called through the door. “Ilstan! Can I come in?” A man’s swearing voice came after and Ilstan’s racing heart urged him to burn down the door—she’d turned, she’d changed, there were only enemies here.
No, a part of him said. He saw the shackles lying on the floor, the bindings meant to keep him from casting if he got too mad. She’d undone them, left him to his own devices as he poured the excess magic into object after object. He picked the shackles up, cold and dead.
“Ilstan? I’m coming in.”
The door opened a handspan, and he took another step back, calling spells up into his thoughts. Farideh—seething angel, shining devil—and a man he’d seen before behind her. Gray-eyed, dark-haired … the Ready Sword. The man from the catacombs. The man who he’d nearly sacrificed in his madness, along with all his fellow war wizards. He hugged the shackles to his chest. Two against one, but he had these … these bindings …
Thost!” the Ready Sword shouted. “Thost get in here, please!”
“Please,” Ilstan echoed. “Don’t come too close.”
“It’s all right,” Farideh said, reaching out a hand. “Do you need to cast before we talk?”
He shook his head—he didn’t dare release even a scrap of magic, didn’t dare weaken himself. She watched him warily, creeping into the room. The Ready Sword grabbed hold of her arm, but she shook him off. “Dahl, stop it.”
Magic cannot be stopped … cannot be ended … can only be changed and channeled and divided … or strengthened …
A mountain of a man, with a thick brown beard and the stolen eyes of the Ready Sword filled the door frame. He glanced around the room. “Problem?”
“Tell her not to do this,” the Ready Sword said rapidly. “Ask her what the stlarning Hells is he doing here? Ask her if she’s lost her godsbedamned mind!”
“Well I’m not saying that,” the Mountain answered.
Farideh eased closer. “Ilstan, give me your hand. It’s getting too strong again and we need your help.”
A wizard forgets it is not always about strength … it is about control … it is about discipline … Ilstan started muttering an incantation, recognizing the words only after they were spoken—fire. Fire: enough to melt the very Hells—
“I think we can find the staff of Azuth,” she said. “I need your help.”
Abruptly the voices in Ilstan’s head fell silent and the spell on his lips died. She reached out her hand again, and this time Ilstan grabbed it as a drowning man grabs a rope. All at once the Weave seemed to tighten, sharpen all around him, magic pouring through him and through her. The veins of her arms suffused with shadow, the magic of the Nine Hells tainting her. Control, Ilstan reminded himself. The stream of magic tightened, eased. Farideh blinked, pointed two fingers at the ink pot on his desk. “Assulam!”
It exploded so completely that the ink evaporated, the glass vaporizing into a burst of colored lights that filled the room and dazzled even Ilstan’s eyes, as if they were all drowning in rainbows. When it faded, he looked down at his hands.
You are still here, he thought. You are still whole.
You are still needed, a wispy voice shimmered in his thoughts.
Panting, wild-eyed, Farideh straightened. The dark streaks of her veins faded back into her skin. “All right,” she said, sounding manic, frantic. “All right. All right.” She turned back to the two men—the Mountain and the Ready Sword.
Thost, Ilstan thought. And Dahl.
Thost had run back out of the doorway and only now peered around the frame, while Dahl had flattened himself against the wall, out of the spell’s reach. Farideh’s cheeks flushed. “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot the last time you saw him was in the tunnels. It’s better now, if we plan ahead. It helps him stay sane—that’s what … that’s why I …” She trailed away, flushing deeper, and Ilstan recalled, as if remembering an old dream, the surge of missiles that had burst out of her hands in the tunnels. The missile striking Dahl.
Dahl looked as if he would have liked to strangle Ilstan. “Thost, will you tell her she needs to warn us next time?”
“I’m not telling her a damned thing,” Thost said, sounding stunned. “Certainly not suggesting a next time.”
Farideh scowled. “I know you have to do that, but it’s really annoying. I’m sorry. I’ll warn you.”
“I’m sorry as well,” Ilstan called. “You haven’t fared well under my situation, and I regret it.”
“You tried to kill me,” Dahl corrected.
“I did,” Ilstan agreed. “I don’t plan to do it again.”
Farideh turned back to Ilstan. “I had a question to ask you: Where can we find a portal to Abeir?”
Ilstan shook his head. “I don’t know that you can. Others have tried. The planes slip and break. They are not meant to touch.”
“But if someone did?” she asked. “If you can’t make one just anywhere, where would you look? How would you do it?”
Ilstan frowned at her. “As I said, you would not.”
“Plaguelands,” a voice said. Behind Thost, another tiefling woman stood, slight and silvery and soulless. Not Havilar, not the Knight of the Devil, but a Masked Lady, a Dark Star. Ilstan blinked, but she remained. “Where the Spellplague lingers,” she said, “wouldn’t that imply the planes are thinned?”
“Perhaps,” Ilstan said slowly. “But all indications are the plague pockets are receding. And what remains is too dangerous to venture into. Besides, the best minds have found neither form nor function in their placement—that suggests there is no connection, as the planes force no pattern.”
“Or,” the woman said, “you are too small to see the pattern.”
“Dahl thinks he knows someone who might know if the staff exists in Abeir,” Farideh explained. “I think I might know where the person who took it there was last seen. If we find it …” She wet her mouth. “Well, I think we’re going to need a lot of help and that you should come.”
A wizard is often alone, and so it must be that a wizard seeks allies in the strongest of his peers … for a time at least …
“This is what I was Chosen for,” Ilstan said simply.
PART VII
BLOOD
14 Alturiak, the Year of the Shadows (1358 DR)
Vaasa
• • •
Given the way Alyona’s ghost yanked toward the door, Bryseis Kakistos knew before he called out that Caisys had returned. She focused all her attention on the dish before her, pulling Alyona nearer.
“Bisera? Are you in?”
Bryseis Kakistos pursed her mouth at the name. She had stopped using it half a decade ago, but five years of telling Caisys to stop had thus far had no effect. Change the name, Shetai had said. Change who you are. Bisera was a girl, an innocent. Bryseis Kakistos might reshape the world.
She didn’t look up from the pool of blood in the silver dish before her. “What did you find?”
His boots scuffed the floor as he entered her study. “Rakshasa. A fairly potent one. But I don’t think he’s all too keen—”
“They don’t need to be keen,” Bryseis Kakistos said. “They need to be accessible.” Caisys sat down on the stool beside her, leaning against her worktable with a carelessness belied by the way he didn’t so much as brush any of her equipment.
“Whose is that?” he asked, nodding at the blood in the dish.
&
nbsp; “Titus’s.”
“He came around? That’s surprising. Who’d he come from?”
“A devil by the looks of it. My guess is Eighth Layer, perhaps even Mephistopheles, but a long way back. I’m still narrowing it down.”
Caisys gave a low whistle. “Well that’s good news. Another link down. What’s left?”
“If I’m right? Rakshasa,” she said. “Yugoloth. Demodand. And an evil god’s avatar, although I’d rather have at least two. We’re close, very close.” She had six other tieflings, six other bloodlines. Titus made the seventh—she the eighth. She added three drops of a tincture to the blood, sending dark swirls through the redness.
Demons, devils, night hags, rakshasas, fiends of all stripes—every one of them bred tieflings eventually. Regardless of the ways their traits differed, the way their ancestors repelled one another, the way their blood would sometimes boil when spilled into another’s, they were all called tieflings and they all suffered for their ancestors’ indiscretions or ill luck. They all were forced to hide, to separate themselves, to suffer the punishments that other races felt that they’d earned, just for being born.
“Are you ready to give me yours?” she asked Caisys.
He smiled at her, and despite herself, Bryseis Kakistos felt a flood of warmth pour through her body. Her sister’s ghost leaned nearer, as if trying to touch Caisys’s face. “What if I don’t want to know?”
“Telling you isn’t a necessary step,” Bryseis Kakistos said. “Besides, you can’t possibly pretend we don’t all already know what the answer is.”
He leaned a little nearer. “What’s that?”
Alyona’s embarrassment fluttered through the edges of her thoughts as Bryseis Kakistos cast a sidelong glance at the so-called merchant. “If you aren’t descended from a succubus—and fairly recently—I will eat your wagon.”
He smiled, baring bright, even teeth. “I do hope that’s a euphemism. You never told me what you found in your blood.”
In the silver dish, Titus’s blood deepened, darkened, a pool of shadows. Closer, she thought. An archdevil would be precious, terribly precious. When Asmodeus had nudged her back toward Titus, she had doubted. Even if the old man had descended from a rare pairing, surely there had to be tieflings in the world who would come more easily to her side and Asmodeus’s far-reaching plans.
A fortunate thing demons were so inconstant, she thought, adding a few drops of a second, yellow tincture—this one infused in the melted ice of Cania. Titus had lost his powers when his succubus turned on him and he’d had no choice but to kill her.
“Am I to take it that you haven’t put your own blood to the test?” Caisys asked.
“I have,” she said. “I just don’t think it much matters. Mine is clearly far off.”
“Is it?” Caisys asked, reaching to tap her horn.
Her hand shot out, catching him by the wrist, and she scowled. “Don’t touch me.”
Caisys only smiled. “Fair enough. I suppose it won’t matter in the long run, if you succeed.” She let go of him and he rubbed his wrist, still smiling at her. “Tell me: You think this will change things, that it will save us in the long run. But if you change our blood, are you sure you won’t change us? If I don’t carry the blood of a succubus anymore, how can I be sure that I’ll still be my charming self?”
“Because blood’s not as critical as you think,” Bryseis Kakistos said, watching the blood thicken and flocculate as the mixture of otherworldly solutions made it swirl under its own power. “You’ve lived your whole life being a promiscuous trifler, I doubt any spell could force you to change tack now. If you have to work a little harder to be convincing, I doubt that’s something outside your skills.”
Caisys chuckled. “At least I’m honest about what I want and I make my own way. What happened to Bisera ‘I am no one’s slave’? Was Asmodeus too convincing?”
The blood stopped swirling, great clots of it sinking to the bottom of the bowl—for a moment, a perfect moment, a trident piercing a ring, the sigil of Mephistopheles, hung in the liquid, as clearly as if it had been etched upon glass. Bryseis Kakistos let out a breath. Another down.
“This isn’t slavery,” she said, eyes on the symbol as it broke apart into blood and soil and water. “This is a partnership.”
• • •
15
5 Hammer, the Year of the Rune Lords Triumphant (1487 DR)
Tymanther, near the Smoking Mountains
DUMUZI HIKES UP THE GHOST OF A MOUNTAIN, ITS SLOPES MISTY AND INDISTINCT, scattered with ruins that seem less destroyed and more forgotten. Shadows slip in and out of the corners of his vision, alive but only just, and the air is cold and dry against his skin. It isn’t until he crests the peak that he can see the stars and Enlil surveying everything beyond.
“What is this place?” Dumuzi asks.
What remains of Zigguraxus, Enlil said. I have this much power now, to find it again. But not yet to pull it back. He looks up at the sky, clear and endless. Once this was a kingdom unto itself. The resting place of all my children. The seat of every god who followed me to this world. He points to the edges of the world, like the points of a many-armed compass. Inanna. Ki. Gurru. Nanna-Sin. Marduk. Nergal. Ramman. Tiamat. Utu. Assuran. Ishtar. Gilgeam.
“Gilgeam was your ally?” Dumuzi asks, surprised. Enlil looks down at him, puzzlement in his golden eyes.
Gilgeam was my son, Enlil said.
An heir, a scion, a tyrant—somehow Dumuzi has never drawn the lines back to what that must mean. Why would he? he supposes. Gods are not like mortals. “And Tiamat?”
A point of balance in the beginning, Enlil said. If there is order, then, too, must there be chaos. But this plane fed her worst nature, merged her with something too great to be balanced by us alone. Enlil looks to the stars again, his black scales nearly the shade of the night sky. We are constant and we are changeable. It is difficult to explain.
Dumuzi considers Enlil, once a great bearded human, now a Vayemniri warrior. “You are what we need you to be. Is this Gilgeam the same? Is he your son too?”
Enlil shakes his head. I don’t know. If he is, he is weakened, he is reshaped by death and exile. If he is not … he has some measure of my son’s power and more than a little of his pride.
“Will he come here too?” Dumuzi asks, nodding at the ghostly slopes.
That depends, Enlil says, on which of us gains the necessary strength first. He snaps his teeth—a gesture Dumuzi’s never seen him make, but one that looks wholly natural. The souls of the Vayemniri have no plane?
“I don’t know,” Dumuzi says. “I’ve never died.”
But you care for your dead, Enlil said. You shelter their bones from the threats of dark magic. You remember the tale of Hazor and the Jet-Boned Tyrant.
Once we laid our dead upon the stones, Dumuzi thinks, the music of the ancestor story singing through him. Once we gave them back to the wilds. Then came Daelfyrthimachian, the Jet-Boned Tyrant, a dracolich of ponderous horror, who made the dead to rise against their loved ones, and everything had to change.
“In death we are freed,” Dumuzi said. “Better oblivion than apart from our clans. Better an end than perpetuity in bondage.” Enlil only nods, as if he’s still considering all the pieces, as if he’s still trying to find who he’s agreed to become. Dumuzi considers the plains below. “What happened to the others? The gods you named?”
Dead, Enlil says. He waves a hand, and a battle sprouts out of the ground, gods battling among armies of their followers, brown-skinned humans and gray orcs. He watches as a woman in a chariot drawn by seven lions is cut down by an enormous orc man, even as her axe shatters his armor. A man wreathed in flames falls to the terrible claws of an orc woman who seethes darkness. A man seething that same sort of darkness, hollow-eyed as a skeleton, bashing the orcs aside with a midnight shield, even as an orc general plowed toward him with his long sword swinging.
The silver-skinned man with the black axe, driv
ing his boat down into the battle, dying at the reaching hands of an undead-looking orc man, his eyes seeping eerie light.
The battle fades. Dumuzi fingers the axe at his belt. “Who was the warrior with the black axe?”
Nanna-Sin. The Night’s Light. Dumuzi recalls the dream wherein Enlil first changed into a Vayemniri. Where the boat that held the moon dipped low, and a silver-skinned man gave him the axe he wears on his belt now. He thinks of the tomb, deep in the catacombs. “Here Lies a Great Warrior of this World.”
“Is he the one sleeping in the catacombs?”
Enlil frowns. All were buried in the god’s tombs. The ziggurats.
The ziggurats, Dumuzi thinks, that crumbled in the Spellplague. “Djerad Thymar’s bones are the bones of the ziggurat. The body of the warrior whose tomb this was is in the catacombs.”
Suddenly, Enlil’s eyes blaze like fires, and Dumuzi’s heart nearly explodes with the hope pouring from the god.
Show me?
Dumuzi woke with a start to someone shaking him and found Mehen standing over him, looking worried. He was sitting on a bench near to Kepeshkmolik’s enclave entrance, waiting for Namshita and her seconds. The market beyond the stone balustrade echoed with shouted orders, directing clan armies through the shuttered stalls.
The god’s last words echoed through his thoughts—show me?
“What are you doing out here?” Mehen demanded. “Did Narghon turn you out? Where’s your mother?”
“Ninth Linxakasendalor, form at the west gate!” a bellowed voice echoed through the pyramid.
Dumuzi blinked hard, trying to clear his eyes. “I just fell asleep. He had to show me something.”
“Who, Narghon?”
Show me?
“West gate! West gate!”
“Enlil.” He stood, his vision still muddled as if he were half dreaming. “I have to go.”
