The twins were sitting on the floor with that boy, that Brin from the caravan. Havilar giggled wildly. Farideh had a bottle of whiskey to her mouth, her head tilted back.
“Farideh!” Mehen barked. She pulled the bottle away, spitting liquor down her shirt and coughing.
He couldn’t stop the thoughts that time: If the devil overwhelmed her, he’d have to bring Havilar down first—fast, subdued. Press the vessel on her neck until she fainted and couldn’t attack him. That would give Farideh time to prepare, but he couldn’t believe she’d strike, even poisoned by that fiend, if he held her sister before him. He could still subdue her. But if she did attack, then he’d have to use the breath—
Stop it, he said to himself. Farideh was looking up at him, her cheeks scarlet, her knuckles white around the whiskey bottle, and that awful smoky darkness curling its way around her frame. She was nearly a woman, but crumpled on the floor like that it was hard not to think of her as small and awkward and caught up late with Havilar. Probably trying to convince Havi to go to bed, he thought.
Ah, Fari, he thought. I never thought it would be you.
“Give me that,” he snapped, snatching the bottle from her. He sniffed it—backwater still-shit, harder than it needed to be—and took a swig, despite the fact he knew he’d be flat out and snoring within a half hour because of it. Better than up and thinking about the fact he’d considered how to take out his child. “Where in the Hells did you get this?”
“Downstairs,” Brin said. “It was part of my … room fee.”
Mehen was too tired to reprimand someone else’s orphan—even when clearly he was the one starting all this trouble. He heaved a great sigh and sat in one of the chairs. It creaked under his weight.
“Did you find her?” Havilar asked. “Are we going to get her?”
“What would you have done if I had?” he said. “You two are in no shape now to take down anyone.” Havilar squinted at Mehen.
“I think I could.”
“Of course you do,” Mehen said. “That’s the whiskey talking.”
“But you didn’t find her,” Farideh said.
“No,” Mehen said. “Which doesn’t mean we’ve passed her by. I do know what I’m doing.” Farideh folded her arms over her chest, but didn’t say anything.
He set the whiskey bottle on the table and considered his girls for a moment. His clever, strong, dangerous girls. “But I did find another job for us.”
THE PALACE OF OSSELA, MALBOLGE,
THE NINE HELLS
LORCAN STEPPED THROUGH THE PORTAL INTO A SMALL ROOM dominated by a green obelisk as tall as he was and enclosed by fleshy walls that oozed a sickly, yellow fluid. A polyp of glowing tissue hung from the ceiling, casting the orderly piles of Exalted Invadiah’s treasure in a cold light.
He held still while the portal swirled around the base of the Needle of the Crossroads and scanned his mother’s treasure room. Nothing. Sairché wasn’t waiting for him. He let out a breath and stepped away, shutting the portal of the Needle of the Crossroads.
Godsdamned Sairché. What was she playing at?
A large iron mirror hung on the wall beside the Needle. As Lorcan stepped close, the spells woven into a matching iron pin on his sleeve stirred the reflection on the surface, and his reflection became that of a young tiefling man, laboring over a book in the candlelight. Lorcan waved his hand and the image slipped away, replaced by a middle-aged tiefling woman with striking silver hair looking out a window. The brand that marked her as Lorcan’s warlock was prominently displayed, framed by a series of cut-outs along the back of her dress.
The scrying mirror slid from one tiefling warlock to the next. Thirteen warlocks—each descended from the original thirteen tieflings in Faerûn who had made the Pact Infernal with Asmodeus himself, trading the admixture of fiendish blood in their veins for the king of the Hells’ own.
Or so they say, Lorcan thought.
Regardless of history, a full complement of the tiefling heirs was rare and difficult to come by. Lorcan only knew of three other devils who had managed it, all further up the cutthroat hierarchy of the Hells than he’d ever be.
The trouble was, when a warlock was so invested in channeling the powers of the Hells as to make a pact with the king of the Hells himself, they didn’t tend to spend much time raising offspring. The men of the original thirteen tieflings had mostly scattered their offspring, making the lines difficult to trace. The women had only bothered with one or two as experiments or heirs to raise. After a hundred years, their living descendants totaled in the mere dozens. The rarest heirs—those of Bryseis Kakistos, the Brimstone Angel, leader of the thirteen—had been widely numbered at three, until he found Farideh.
If anyone asked, Lorcan would say that it had been his keen intellect and dogged research that had led him to a lost heir of Bryseis Kakistos. But it had been, in fact, bare luck, and even Lorcan had to admit that to himself.
On his smallest finger, he’d worn a ring which could sense the blood of Bryseis Kakistos—a handy little trinket he had bought off a devil who claimed it was infallible … despite the rival’s lack of a Kakistos heir. Lorcan had been skeptical, but he had also been desperate and frustrated at the incompleteness of his warlock set. Had he not—had he cared less, had he chosen a different group of warlocks to gather, had he put his efforts to stealing his rivals’ Kakistos heirs—he might have killed Havilar, left her sister to take the blame, and been on his way, never realizing what he’d briefly found.
When Havilar had cast her ritual to summon an imp she could practice her blade skills on, he had merely been nearby, strangling the imp for shitting on his boots. Angry and ready to strangle the person who had opened a portal practically on top of him, he had stepped through and seen a gangly tiefling girl.
The Kakistos ring had turned to ice as he stood there, naming the Brimstone Angel’s heir. No one with such an innocent sense of the world had ever summoned him before. Twelve pacts in his hands, and Lorcan knew he wasn’t going to gain the thirteenth from this guileless girl in love with her blade. She did not need him and she did not want him But then Farideh came through the door. Havilar’s twin, her pretty face scowling, shifting expressions as if she were having an angry conversation in her own thoughts. The book was a good sign, the lack of weapon even better. But that expression—ah, gods, that expression. Here, he thought, is a girl who wants something she cannot get.
She had stared at him, like a mouse before a cobra, like she was fighting with herself to stay away. He had smiled and the ring had gone cold as ice again.
Everything had fallen together. Mostly. He wouldn’t pretend she was the simplest one to handle. Not by a long shot. She was afraid of him, but not so far as to be cowed by him. She wanted the powers, but not so much as to do his bidding to get them. Her pulse raced in very interesting ways when he got close enough, but not so interesting as to overcome her good sense and keep her from slipping out of reach.
Not so interesting, he thought irritably, that she didn’t pipe up with strange questions like how old was he.
Lorcan had been careful as he could not to let on about Farideh’s identity—he knew it drove his rivals fairly mad, and more than one didn’t believe he had made the set. If Sairché was stalking his warlocks, it was only his Kakistos heir she could be after and there was no way she could be sure that was Farideh, short of having the ring he had made a point of destroying once he had his heir.
But as he checked each of the other twelve in turn, he saw no signs of Sairché scrutinizing them. Perhaps she was only following Lorcan. Perhaps she’d give up if he didn’t check up on any of them. He ran a hand through his hair. Clever Sairché was his only full-blooded sister, and the only one he had never learned to predict.
What was she playing at? he wondered.
He fingered the scourge-shaped pendant he wore and the mirror slid to Farideh. She was still in the room, sitting on the floor beside Havilar and some human boy Lorcan couldn’t place. Th
ey were laughing and Farideh took a bottle of some brownish liquor from the boy, her cheeks flushed. Even through the scrying glass, Lorcan could sense the tendrils of divine magic that swirled around the boy.
He narrowed his eyes—the boy from the caravan. The one Farideh had saved.
And he was a godsbedamned priest.
Or not, Lorcan thought. He’d assumed the traces of divine magic among the caravan’s members were coming from a pair of priests, but the boy had no mark of who he served on his person. Maybe a priest, but not necessarily …
It didn’t matter whether the boy was a priest, a paladin, or just particularly devout—the blessing of some god wafted off him like a pall of incense.
Sairché and her meddling would have to wait.
Bad enough Mehen was at Farideh to break the pact, Lorcan didn’t need some pious little nit tugging on his warlock’s already all-too-principled heartstrings.
“You ought to come with us,” he heard Havilar say, the magic of the mirror adding a warble to her voice. “We’re heading in the same direction.”
Lorcan seized the iron frame of the mirror in both hands. The hard edges cutting into his hands kept his head clear. To go back to Farideh would be foolish. To go back would give Sairché a path to follow again, would give Farideh something to be afraid of or angry about, would give Mehen more targets for his campaign against Lorcan. She wasn’t in danger. Her pact wasn’t in danger. Yet. He could fix this.
The boy in the room took the bottle back. He would be very simple to get rid of. So simple, that perhaps Lorcan could get rid of Mehen too.
Lorcan turned back to the Needle and held the image of the road where he’d surprised Farideh behind the brambles in his mind. So simple. So clean. She’d never question it.
Lorcan made his way up the dark road and through the brush a ways before he found what he was searching for. The last breathing orc from the caravan attack lay spread-eagled on the ground, his midsection thick with blood and charred from the spell Farideh had cast. Lorcan rolled his eyes; a very good thing she hadn’t realized the damage she’d done. She’d probably have tried to nurse him back to health.
“End it,” the orc half-cursed, half-prayed at the darkening sky. The stars stared back, uncaring, watching the paralyzed orc weep blood from a hundred wicked burns. “Gruumsh, what have I not devoted to you?” he muttered. “Take my bloody soul.”
“Those sound like the words of a man ready to die,” Lorcan said. He called a ball of light into being, cupped in his palms. The orc startled—or would have if he could have moved, Lorcan suspected. As it was, only his face twitched.
“Arghash.” The orc sneered. “Leave me be.”
“I think,” Lorcan said, ignoring the epithet, “that you don’t want to die. I think if you did you would have gotten on with it a long time ago. I think you want to live.”
“Not for your price, devil,” the orc wheezed.
“You haven’t heard me out,” Lorcan said, squatting down beside him. “You ought to. I’m terribly reasonable and more than a little astute. There’s only one thing you want badly enough to treat with me: vengeance.”
The orc paused at that. “The bitch who burned me and left me here?”
“In a way. You can’t have her, but I want the boy and the dragonborn she travels with dead. Kill them, spare the warlock, and you’ll live out your days however you please.”
The orc’s face contorted in pain and he coughed, dark blood spattering his lips. “Not worth it,” he managed.
“Do you really think Gruumsh will take up your soul after a little tiefling girl laid you low?” Lorcan asked. “My offer’s far better than the one he’s making you.”
“I want the witch.”
Lorcan scowled. “I’m not bargaining,” he said. “Take what I’m offering, or go to your god and see what he says.”
The orc hesitated. “Why not her?”
“Because she and I have an understanding,” Lorcan said. “Trust me that she’ll agonize over that brat’s death though. The dragonborn’s far more so. And you’ll be alive. Better, don’t you think, than being hunted in the afterlife by Gruumsh One-Eye, and those who have not disappointed him?”
He could see the orc considering that. For all Lorcan knew, the vicious god of the orcs would think falling to a warlock in an ill-conceived supply raid was the most honorable death imaginable. But what was true didn’t matter. Only what the orc feared might be true mattered.
And, Lorcan thought, watching the orc’s breathing grow more labored still, this much is true: whether this orc is in for such a hunt or not, that death would be the worse fate. He hadn’t lied.
The orc’s silence drew on, and Lorcan’s temper started to fray. Perhaps he needed to make the orc’s situation worse—
The orc wet his lips. “I’ll take your deal, devil.”
“Lovely,” Lorcan said, his anxiety abating. Now it was business. Nothing else. He stood and produced a piece of parchment, a glass flask of a green and vile fluid, and a small bag. “Then we are entered into what we call the Pact Certain. Your soul is mine upon death, regardless of its disposition, and you get to live for the moment. Agreed?”
The orc’s eyes were starting to glaze. “Yesss …” The letters on the parchment flashed then faded, as the agreement was made.
“Good. Well met …” Lorcan skimmed the page. “… Goruc.” He rolled up the parchment, and flicked the cork out of the flask.
Lorcan poured half the fluid over Goruc’s wounds, then roughly tilted the orc’s head back and poured the remainder down his throat. The orc coughed and thrashed—Hells-brewed potions tasted like coals going down, Lorcan knew. He watched unconcerned as the orc’s face flushed again, as he stopped fighting, as he sat up, looking down at his bloody, burned, and tattered hide.
“That’s it?” Goruc asked. “A healing draft?”
“What did you expect?” Lorcan asked, standing. “A swim through the River Styx? You’ll find I’m a practical patron, Goruc. And—as I said—reasonable, as long as my terms are met.” He held out the parchment. “The details of our agreement. Your assent suffices and is binding, there is no need to sign. You want to read it, just ask.” He pinched a charm on his wrist between forefinger and thumb, and sent the contract to a safe place. Whether Goruc wanted to read the contract or not, it was all but impossible. The Supernal letters would look like nothing more than corby tracks to the orc.
“And this,” Lorcan said, holding out the small velvet sack, “is to help you complete our agreement.”
Goruc teased the package open. Inside lay a vial of dark red liquid and a wad of herbs tied with a dried piece of sinew.
“Take the liquid,” Lorcan said, “coat your blades in it and your enemies will suffer and die. The leaves are wyssin. When you find their trail, light the end and inhale the smoke. It will make you spot things quicker and give strength to your limbs like you’ve never had. Don’t waste it. Take a little when you’re ready to leave and a little before you go for the kill. That’s all you need.”
Goruc gave him a far cannier look than Lorcan ever expected. “Why do you want the boy dead?”
Lorcan narrowed his eyes. “Personal reasons.”
“Personal like he’s claiming your girl?”
“Personal like he’s getting under my skin and promising to make trouble. Not that it matters to you,” Lorcan said. “Just kill him and the dragonborn, and I’ll ask nothing else for the rest of your days.”
Goruc sniffed, but kept his mouth shut.
Lorcan eyed him, wishing he could hear the orc’s thoughts. It was Lorcan’s bad luck the only available orc was one Farideh had injured. But surely even an orc was not so stupid as to break a promise to a devil. Even if he were, chances were excellent that the orc would kill the boy and then find himself halfway up Mehen’s oversized sword. And Lorcan still could make certain Farideh was protected.
Nevertheless, the orc had a sly look about him.
“Remember, G
oruc,” he said, reopening the portal. “Kill who you like, but you don’t touch her.”
“Aye,” he heard Goruc say as Lorcan passed into Malbolge. “Don’t touch the witch.”
The hallways of the palace of Osseia throbbed ever so gently as Lorcan walked along them, leaving a trail of bloody footprints where he stepped. Fleshy pink walls trembled with the tortured ghosts of the previous ruler’s thoughts. He brushed too close and a bloody mucus smeared across his sleeve. He grimaced and wiped it on a bit of bone that jutted out of a corner.
The barely living halls did nothing to deaden the piercing screams echoing through the skull palace as Lorcan made his way through his mother’s apartments. He pressed a finger to his ear—they were particularly loud today. Someone must have displeased Glasya, the lord of the Sixth Layer herself, to warrant such a torture session.
“May I never be so stupid,” he muttered.
Lorcan approached the drawing room where his mother had retreated earlier that morning, waiting for a guest, and slowed his pace. He heard Invadiah’s sharp voice as he approached and heard someone else’s muffled answer.
Like most of the items in her treasury, Invadiah found the Needle of the Crossroads—a singular artifact that opened a temporary portal that could be tied to anywhere in Toril—better suited to lording over her rivals than its intended purpose. Lorcan didn’t know if Invadiah had any idea he used it, but with Invadiah there was always a difference between what you did, and what she caught you doing while she was in a bad mood.
Fourteen of his dozens of half-sisters—all erinyes from before the Ascension—had died for that seemingly minor distinction.
Between the irritated tone of his mother’s voice and the fact that two of his half-sisters were certainly guarding the larger treasury and armory, Lorcan knew it was no time to play the odds. He needed Invadiah to give him permission. He lingered in the doorway a moment.
Exalted Invadiah, champion of Glasya and leader of the pradixikai—the erinyes who carried out the archduchess’s justice—sat in a chair made of burnished bones, her mane of deepnight hair cascading nearly to the floor. Instead of her usual char black armor, the erinyes wore a gown of chain and hard, carapace-like plates of such a vibrant gold they seemed to smolder. Her black nails tapped a beat that made the screams that lilted through the window seem musical. He could see her face in profile, her jaw as it ground.
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