But they were both out of his reach, and there was nothing he could do in that moment—Brin was right, Tam was right. He had to rely on others and wait.
Mehen grabbed the younger man’s arm, hard enough and suddenly enough to make Brin try and pull away, frightened. Good, he thought viciously.
“You listen to me,” Mehen said. “You find her, you bring her back. You don’t lose her and don’t you hurt her, or I swear on every bit of esteem I have for you now, I will make you wish you left me in that cell.”
“I know,” Brin said. He pulled free. “I don’t want her hurt either.”
Mehen grabbed hold of Brin again, this time in a fierce embrace. “Be careful yourself, lad. Don’t leave me wondering.”
Chapter Eight
19 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) Somewhere North of Waterdeep
Farideh leaned over the strange waters of the so-called fabled Fountains of Memory. A spark of magic arced through the air and popped against her fingertips. She clutched her hand and stepped back. “That’s not a fable I’m familiar with,” she said.
“Would you like to give them a try?” Rhand asked. He laid one hand lightly against the small of her back and pressed her forward. Farideh edged nearer, if only to step out of his reach.
Her reflection looked back, rippled by the magical current stirring the waters. The air around the vessel chilled noticeably and her breath made faint clouds as she looked down into the thick, dark water, waiting for something to happen.
“There’s a trick to it—be specific enough to see what you want, but vague enough to find what you don’t know you’re going to miss.” Rhand reached around her and tossed a scattering of dried blue petals into the water. “Show us when this dear lady’s patron first took notice.”
The waters’ swirl changed direction, the ripples widening as the center of the basin seemed to pull the water inward. Farideh’s reflection broke into a hundred smaller patches of color and light . . .
That reformed, bled together . . . and reflected back not Farideh but an open room, the ground floor of an old stone barn that had been converted before she was born into a home for an outcast dragonborn, come to the hidden village of Arush Vayem. Below Mehen’s lofted room was a circle of chalked runes, and in the center of that circle was Lorcan.
Farideh’s breath caught. She knew enough now to see the frank appraisal in his gaze as he spoke to Havilar, standing in front of him—assessing the tiefling, looking for a warlock to complete his set. Havilar settled herself on the floor, utterly unconcerned with the devil she’d caught instead of an imp or the strength of the binding circle she’d only mimicked.
Farideh watched Lorcan, her heart aching.
He looked up, past Havilar, and something in his demeanor changed, relaxed, as Farideh came into the room. He smiled, showing the faint points of his canines, and Farideh remembered how undone she’d been to see that smile the first time.
She watched as Havilar left, after convincing her nothing would happen if she stayed with the devil in the binding circle. “You’re not like her,” he said, his voice tinny and strange. “Like night and day. Like sweet and sour. Like the ocean and the desert. It’s astonishing.” She watched herself try and fail to ignore Lorcan, falling into the bickering conversation that would change her life, Havilar’s, Mehen’s, and countless others along the way.
“Who could blame you?” he said. “Who wants to be held responsible for something they can’t control? Turned away because of something their foremothers and forefathers did to gain a little power?” She shut her eyes wishing the waters would cut off her protest, but it came anyway: it might have been anything that led her ancestors to mingle with fiends. It might have been love.
And Lorcan laughed. “My darling, let me tell you a secret: devils don’t love.”
She watched herself try to leave, watched Lorcan stop her with all the right words and warnings. “You’ll live in this village for all of your life,” Lorcan said, keeping pace with her along the border of the circle. “You’ll spend every day, trying your hardest to be what they want, and you’ll never meet their expectations, because you were not made for this . . .” She watched him list all the ways she was trapped already, all the ways she couldn’t save herself— couldn’t save reckless Havilar. At least not alone. Watched herself curl into her chest, covering her face, as if she could hide from what was coming.
As much as she regretted the pact in that moment, Farideh felt only pity for her past self. She would have done the same thing over again, she knew, as Lorcan crossed the faulty line of runes to hold her near, whispering promises and coaxing her toward the agreement that would catch her in a pact. She would have taken the magic no matter what—because every word he said was true. She was trapped. She was powerless. She was so afraid. She watched herself look up, horrified, as she realized what she’d done and at the same time, her chest ached. She wished Lorcan were here, were offering her a way to save herself again.
The image vanished in a wall of flames.
“Interesting,” Rhand said, snapping her back to the present. Farideh straightened, wiped her face and realized she’d been crying. Missing Lorcan, but missing, too, the girl in the reflection. She would never be so innocent again. Rhand gave her another unpleasant smile.
“Fascinating things,” he said. “Before the Spellplague, the water formed a number of pools in a cavern here—at least, that is what the deep gnomes say. If pressed. They kept the location a secret, as much as one can keep such a thing secret.” He chuckled. “Harder to hide when the mountaintop was torn off and floated away. The cavern went with the peak—off drifting somewhere over the North, I suspect—but the springs that fed the pools remain. They muddle with the ordinary springs now, so the waters aren’t as powerful if you come upon them naturally.” He dipped a hand in and stirred the waters. “But with a little ingenuity, a little careful magic, a little discipline . . . they can do miraculous things. Even better than before.”
“Indeed,” Farideh said, still rattled. “What do you use them for?”
Rhand sighed. “Originally, I had hoped to use them for their other abilities. Legends hold that the Fountains of Memory would spontaneously open portals to the locations they showed—past and present. You can imagine how useful such a thing would be. I wouldn’t have to identify anything—only send back some eager guards to stop any manifestation before it took hold.”
“Yes,” Farideh said, wishing she’d heard his earlier explanations. Manifestations of what? Devils? Gods? Something worse? She thought back to all the things she had heard, searching for a clue.
But too many of her thoughts were stuck, clinging to the phrase portals to the locations they showed—past and present.
“Alas, I haven’t managed to unlock that particular secret. Portals to elsewhere, yes. But not the past.”
“Do you think you will?” Farideh asked. If Sairché couldn’t undo the past, could he? She met his piercing blue gaze.
“I never pursue things I don’t think I can achieve.”
Farideh didn’t dare look away. “What would it take?”
“If I knew that,” Rhand said irritably, “it would be done. Nevertheless,” he went on, “the Fountains are still useful enough—ask the right questions and it will show where the likeliest candidates are to be found. Set a body before it and ask when their patron took notice, and you can weed out many of the accidental choices. Slow, and not as accurate as I would like. But four in ten is better than two in ten.”
Patron, as in Lorcan, as in pact holder. But patrons might mean devils, Farideh thought. Might mean demons. Might mean gods. Might mean just people. And still, she had no idea what Sairché meant for her to do, or who the common enemy was. The waters shimmered, showing no sign of the scene they’d just reflected.
“At any rate,” Rhand went on, “I hope this becomes merely my own amusement. Lady Sairché has assured me you are capable of vastly improving my rate of succes
s.” With his hand again at the small of her back, he steered her to the open windows.
Beyond the jagged turrets of the fortress, beyond the castle wall, lay scores and scores of square huts with reed roofs leaking smoke from cookfires, aligned on a tidy grid of roads dotted with people. From so high, Farideh could see that the fortress and all the buildings around it sat in an enormous crater—the remains of the sundered peak Rhand had mentioned. On the far end of the village, a large lake lapped a pebble-crusted shore, and over its edge was the peak of another mountain.
“You can just see,” Rhand said, pointing across to the edge of the crater, “in this light, the traces of the Wall.” The low sunlight sparkled nearly seventy feet from the ground, as if catching on the edge of something invisible. “It’s quite impressive,” he said. “Completely impregnable and hides everything within. Keeps everything quite tidy.” He gave her another unwelcome smile. “Nothing gets in or out unless I let it.”
Including Dahl. Ghosts and shadar-kai, Rhand and Sairché and her guilty conscience—she wouldn’t have thought there was anything else that could happen to top those. But if Dahl was trapped inside the magical wall as well, he was in grave danger. She watched the people flowing up and down the narrow streets and wondered if he was among them. “You’ve never had an escape?”
His smile thinned, and he held her gaze a bit too long for comfort. “Never.” He leaned out over the sill, looking down at the ground below. “Ah—it looks as if they’re ready. Come,” he said, taking her arm again. “Let’s see what you’re capable of.”
Through the winding passages of the fortress, Farideh scrambled to pull together the details of Rhand’s experiment she’d managed to hear. Patrons, manifestations, ordinary somethings masquerading as extraordinary somethings? And she could help.
No killing, she told herself. No stealing souls. Rhand led her out onto a balcony with no balustrade, the guards fanning out around them. As they neared the edge, Farideh could see the enclosed courtyard nearly twenty feet below and the dozen people standing in it, staring up at her.
She took an involuntary step back.
Rhand chuckled and urged her forward. “Go ahead.”
The villagers stared up at her, puzzled and maybe repulsed. They all wore the same faded garb, tunics and breeches and skirts. It was like being faced down by an army. Her stomach tightened.
“What is it you’re looking for?” Farideh said. The wizard considered her a moment, and there was no missing his displeasure.
“Your mistress assured me,” Rhand said, “that she could get me someone to assist my efforts. That she would bring me someone who could read their little souls and tell me which of them were . . . special.”
Farideh looked up at him, but he seemed no madder than before. “Special how?”
Rhand spread his hands wide. “You’ll have to tell me.” His piercing gaze speared her in place. “If you can.”
Farideh made herself look down at the crowd of people, her nerves rattling and shadowy smoke seeping off her skin as her pact drew up the powers of the Hells. They were all staring at her, all waiting for something. Good or bad. Someone who could read their souls.
The lights. Farideh caught her breath—the flickering colors and shadows that had come out of nowhere, the strange magic Sairché had infected her with. The lights were souls.
She shut her eyes. The magic was lurking in her somewhere, crouched in the recesses of her mind and waiting to spring forward. She’d been angry the last two times, she thought. The other came when the protection spell had been overstretched.
She drew up the powers of her pact, while thinking of punching Sairché in the mouth for good measure. Again, the pain in the back of her head started to bloom, and then her throat began to itch.
And there in the middle of her thoughts, was a sensation like a dangling thread, waiting to be pulled. She focused on it, opening her eyes.
The lights exploded over her field of vision, crackling across the staring crowd. They lingered on the people, little spots of brightness and color radiating strands of gray and gold and red and more. As she watched, the lights intensified—and around three of the people, the colors coalesced into the blurry shapes of strange runes. A tall man who shone with vibrant green and yellow, a brand of darker emerald thrumming at the core of his chest. A woman whose lights left streamers of violet-red drifting around her, curling at her heart into a sharper glyph. Another woman, much older, whose lights seemed to overtake the whole of her body, shining bright as one of Selûne’s tears come to earth—the symbol there was hard to spot, only a shade lighter than the silver around it.
They were beautiful.
“Nirka,” Rhand said mildly. “Hold. Give her a chance.”
Farideh looked over her shoulder at the shadar-kai guard, her hands on her knives, her cold black eyes on Farideh. Farideh looked back down at the crowd—she stood at the edge of a twenty-foot drop onto paving stones, surrounded by shadar-kai ready to kill her. And Rhand, ready to give that order.
Sairché promised you wouldn’t be killing anyone, she told herself. Wouldn’t be taking their souls. Promised this would turn against a common enemy.
“The tall man in the back,” she said. “The Turami woman on the far right. The old woman in green at the front.”
Rhand smiled. “Well done.” He gestured to the guards below, who seized those three and ushered them through one of the doors. The rest of the people were herded back out the larger gate. An uneasy feeling built in the small of Farideh’s back, and her tail flicked nervously.
“What happens to them?” she asked, watching the old woman hobble after the guard holding tight to her arm.
Rhand did not speak for long moments, until Farideh looked back up at him. He smiled, as if she’d given something away with that question. “Nothing much. I’m merely going to see if you’re right.”
“How will you do that?”
Rhand shrugged and took her arm again. “These things show themselves eventually. Close attention and study. Time. A little carefully applied pressure. If you’re right, though—and I do hope you are—we should be completely certain in a day or so at most. Come,” he said, leading her back into the building, “let me show you the rest of the castle.”
There was little Lorcan hated as much as the feeling of not having any kind of a plan. Even when the world was trying to leap out from under his feet, usually, Lorcan had some scheme, some strategy, some charm in his back pocket that would help him land safe.
But riding ahead of Havilar, now nearly a day out of Waterdeep, Lorcan could hardly form even the most basic plan aside from getting away from Mehen and the Harpers and heading north. Every time he tried his thoughts scattered, driven like sheep before the wolves of his anger at Sairché, at Glasya, at Farideh.
Give me some gods-be-damned space to figure it out, because if you make me choose right here, right now, I choose to be done. He should have expected it. He should have been prepared, not counting on Farideh like some fool mortal would.
“What are you going to name your horse?” Havilar called up to him. Lorcan drew a slow breath and steeled himself. If someone had told him a few hours ago that he would wish she were grousing and moaning about her aching head and upset stomach, he would never have believed it.
“It doesn’t need a name,” he said.
“Of course she does—how else will you call her?” she said. “I’m going to name mine Cinnamon. Or maybe Alusair.”
Lorcan glanced back over his shoulder, at the tiefling astride a placid bay. “That’s a gelding.”
Havilar made a face at him. “Fine. I’ll call him Alusair.”
Lorcan turned back to the road, to the marshy ground surrounding it, and swallowed his speculation about how impressed Brin would be about Havilar naming her gelding after his fabled great-grandaunt. It was too simple a barb, and if Lorcan had made it this far without prodding her unnecessarily, he could certainly hold out until the pact was done. He hoped.
“Are you truly more concerned about your horse than your sister?” Lorcan asked.
“I can care about her and name a horse. I’m not simple. Besides,” she added, “I’m riding out sick as a hound. With you. I think it’s pretty karshoji obvious I do care.”
“Not sick,” Lorcan reminded her. “Hungover. And your sister may be in mortal peril.”
“Fine,” Havilar spat. “She wins. I never said she wasn’t worse off. I said I don’t feel well and it doesn’t mean anything if I want to name a stupid horse. Stop trying to turn everything around.” She hesitated before he heard her add, “Sorry, Alusair. You aren’t stupid. You’re just a horse.”
“You misunderstand,” Lorcan said silkily. “She’s trapped and in danger. You’ve managed nothing more than some drink-sickness—and you’re awfully calm about the whole matter. I suppose,” he added, trying to sound reluctant, “I underestimated you.” He let the silence stretch before glancing back at Havilar. She watched him with narrow eyes.
“Probably,” she said, just as reluctant.
“I sometimes wonder,” he said, turning back to the road ahead, “if I made the right decision. Giving Farideh the pact. It seems to only cause her trouble.”
“Do you think she’s all right?” Havilar asked, after a few moments.
Of course she is, Lorcan thought viciously. Sairché had made it clear how she intended to reward Farideh’s shift of loyalty. He knew better than to believe what Sairché said without question—the idea that Farideh had sought his sister out and asked for her patronage was, on the face of it, madness.
But the hurt and the fury and the desperation in Farideh’s expression—the last thing he’d seen before Sairché brought him around again in the Hells— made it all the easier for Sairché’s version of events to burrow into his brain and make itself at home.
“What did you tell her?” he had asked Sairché.
“What goes on between a girl and her patroness is private,” Sairché said. “Isn’t that right?”
The Adversary Page 16
