Lorcan cursed. “Not fast enough. How long has—” He broke off in a sharp gasp as something struck him across the back, and he hit the floor. Brin stood over the cambion, holding Havilar’s glaive in an awkward grip.
The corner of Mehen’s mouth twitched upward. He might be forced to reconsider his opinion of Brin as well.
Lorcan reached back and cast a bolt of foul magic at the boy. Brin darted aside, but his feet caught on the length of the glaive and he tripped. Well, Mehen amended, not too much.
The energy started to swell in Lorcan’s hands again, but spotting Brin, he seemed to rein himself in. He regarded Brin with the same distaste and uncertainty he’d favored Mehen with, and ultimately sighed and shifted to his feet.
“The not-quite paladin. Good. Get your holy self in here and wipe the domination from Mehen. Then I need you to get Farideh out of a church.”
Brin blinked owlishly at him. “I’m … sorry? Where’s Farideh?”
“What is so hard about this? She’s holed up in a church on the other side of the city,” Lorcan said, his temper rising. “I obviously can’t go in. I need someone to go in and convince her to come out. Mehen, preferably. So hurry up.”
“Who …” Brin squinted at him in the dim light. “Lorcan?”
Lorcan scowled. “Who else? Hurry up, before she does something foolish.”
“Why does she need to leave a church?” Brin said. He came to his feet, a little unsteadily, but managed to scoop up Havilar’s glaive at the same time. “And what did you do to Mehen?” He squinted at Lorcan again. “And why would you think I’d help you?”
“You’re not helping me,” Lorcan said, steering him over to the dragonborn. “You’re helping Mehen. He’s under a domination which I had nothing to do with, I’ll thank you to notice; that is Rohini’s doing. And he’s probably beaten to the Ninth Layer and back. That arm doesn’t look good.”
Brin kneeled in front of Mehen, looking at his injuries and waving a hand in front of Mehen’s eyes. “Why can’t he talk?”
“Part of the spell,” Mehen snapped.
“Just do your magic,” Lorcan said, “and fix it.” He glanced back at the doorway. “Where’s Havilar?”
“I don’t know,” Brin said, pulling a silvery medallion from his pocket. “I was hoping she was with Farideh.” Lorcan said nothing, but Mehen didn’t miss the sudden tightness of the cambion’s expression.
“Afraid?” Mehen managed.
“Never, if I can help it,” Lorcan retorted. “Do the damned prayer.”
Brin took a deep breath. “Loyal Fury, aid this servant of your justice.”
Nothing happened.
Lorcan covered his face with his hands. “Have you actually managed to fall in the last two days?”
“No!” Brin laid his hand again on Mehen’s battered arm. “It just … It doesn’t always work. I’m not a paladin. Loyal Fury,” he intoned, “aid this servant of your justice.”
This time there was a weak ringing sound, and a flash of light from the medallion spread over Mehen’s broken arm. The bones knitted with a crack and a pain that made Mehen wish he could cry out. It was still swollen, still tender, but the worst was fixed.
Lorcan peered down at Mehen. “You’re still dominated, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Mehen said irritably.
“Do it again.”
Brin began to speak the words of the prayer yet again, when Mehen felt the magic of the domination slowly begin to surge. Rohini was returning. He fought to speak, but his tongue wouldn’t move. He fought to stand, to push the young men aside, but his legs refused. He fought to shake his head, to signal them to stop, but only managed to twitch to one side.
A burst of light exploded out of Brin’s hands and over Mehen’s skin, and for a moment, the dragonborn couldn’t breathe, there were so many ghosts and promises choking off his heart. When the light cleared, he saw Brin standing unsteadily, one hand pressed to his forehead.
“That … I shouldn’t …”
The part of the spell that bound Mehen’s voice snapped, weakened by Brin’s magic or perhaps just Mehen’s determination. The power of Rohini’s magic pressed against him like a wave, ready to overtake him.
“Flee, damn it!” Mehen roared. “She’s coming!” The domination swelled again, silencing him and forcing his mind down under Rohini’s.
Coalescing into herself, the disembodied fragments of Rohini’s awareness realized first that she had no sense of how much time had passed; second, that her head ached as if it were ready to split.
The room came next, and the hand she pressed to her temple. The darkness. She sat up from the cot she lay on and made her form flow into the shape of the kind-faced hospitaler once again. The rain spattering the windows.
She remembered the rain starting. She couldn’t have lost too much time.
Rohini rolled her shoulders and stood. Killing the Ashmadai had probably not been exactly what Invadiah had planned—but that was Invadiah’s fault for not being clearer. Along with a hundred other slights. When Glasya had ordered her to serve under Invadiah, Rohini had—of course—not voiced her horror, but there had not been a second that she hadn’t suspected the arrangement was some sort of punishment for one or both of them.
She ought to be rewarded for waiting this long to lash out, she thought. If anyone got angry, she could just point to Lorcan. Simple and clean.
Almost. She was still furious with herself for picking the wrong twin. She’d held the rod, but she should have been certain. She should have been careful. She swept into the disused cell where she’d left the dragonborn, silent and waiting.
“How are you feeling?” she asked Mehen.
“Numb,” he said. She chuckled.
“Tell me, did Lorcan come by yet?”
The dragonborn gave her a jaundiced look. The domination was wearing thin. “I saw a young man,” he said. “A human, wearing black armor. I saw another who—”
“Enough,” Rohini said. “I don’t need to hear about your day.” Lorcan would come looking soon enough, and she’d be very happy to report she’d left his warlock standing outside an Ashmadai safe-house, holding Invadiah’s precious implement, and waiting for the alarm spells to call more Asmodean cultists to the dead Ashmadai’s aid. Delightful.
Mostly. There had been the embarrassing moment where she’d pointed the rod and the body hadn’t reacted. She knew how to cast from another’s body, but nothing worked. Not even the simplest spells were in her grasp at first. Because, she realized when Farideh’s spell had blasted past her and into an Ashmadai cultist, she had taken the wrong damned twin.
The body she’d taken had known how to defend itself, how to turn the rod into a bludgeon, how to twist weapons out of her victims’ hands. Admirable reflexes, she mused, remembering how she’d dodged between a pair of particularly nimble young women with very sharp blades, tripping one into the other and finishing the survivor. While Rohini worked to channel her own magic through the girl, it had been a minor thing to keep the twin’s body fighting.
And the warlock had defended her, thinking she was saving her sister. Up until Rohini turned on Farideh herself, she hadn’t suspected a thing. Of course, she’d still knocked her sister unconscious, driving Rohini out of the girl’s body. But whatever had gone wrong didn’t matter. She was surely dead by now. The Ashmadai were too quick to retaliate, and she would never have left her sister lying on the floor.
Now, she would like nothing better than to return to her normal form, curl her wings around herself, and rest for a good long while. But Invadiah could not wait. Rohini needed to find Vartan and find out whether she needed to possess him too.
“Wait here,” she said to Mehen. “Eat or sleep or whatever you need to do, but wait for me.” The dragonborn glared at her with far more venom than he should have managed. Depths of the Abyss, she was getting sloppy as Arunika. Renew that domination, she thought as she passed from the room and into the greater hall. Yet another task o
n her ever growing list—
“Good evening, my dear.”
Rohini startled out of her thoughts. Brother Vartan was sitting on one of the empty cots, a cask in his lap made of rough-hewn wood. He stared at her with over-wide eyes, a peculiar smile playing on his mouth.
“I brought you a gift,” he said.
Rohini had to remind herself to smile shyly instead of snapping. She doubted the box contained Invadiah’s precious aboleth—all Rohini ought to want—or an order to eviscerate Invadiah herself—which was all Rohini did want. “That’s very kind. You had time to buy a gift after delivering our offer?”
“It took no time at all,” Vartan said, his voice still strangely flat. “Open it.”
Rohini took the ugly box from him, and set it on an empty cot. “Did you bring the orcs to the proxies?” she asked. “You spoke to them?”
“Open the box first. I want to see your face when you open it.”
Lovestruck ass, she thought, a false smile plastered to her face. She hoped it was a necklace so she could strangle him with it later. She wrenched the rusty clasp open and lifted the lid …
The temple around Rohini melted with a shrill scream. Her vision went white, and the senses of her skin were gone, as if she floated in the void between worlds. There was no temple, no Toril, no Rohini.
All she knew was the song. Like a lullaby from her demon youth, the lyrics of the discordance rose, unbidden to her lips.
“The heir stands divided and the inheritance will crumble,” she heard herself say, the most perfect music she had ever heard. “The dragons scrabble at the dregs.”
She fought against the madness winding itself around her—she was Rohini, she was the corruptor, not the corrupted. Her vision crackled, and the temple returned in fits and spurts. Her feet were solid on the ground, the humid air clung to her skin.
More words, more sounds, more images swirled in her head. Rohini clasped her forehead as her head split open and sickly light poured out.
The glistening light crawled over her skin, eating away her disguise. The plain robes became tight leather armor. Her frizzy curls became a vibrant plume of red. Her ruddy skin became coppery and smooth as silk. Veiny wings ripped from her back. Her eyes, she knew by Vartan’s astonished stare, glowed ruby.
Rohini felt her control over him snap, but she could only worry about the power trying with all its might to remake her. “Spirits surge behind the surface of the world, and they may make the land anew. But a misplaced pebble will cripple the strongest charger.”
“You’re not Rohini,” Vartan said with a mad giggle. “You’re a devil.”
Rohini laughed, and the sound of her laughter blurred into the prophecies seeping up through her baser brain.
“I am Rohini!” she cried. “I am always Rohini.” She bared her teeth in a grin. “And now I am more. Such a gift.”
No, she thought, struggling to maintain herself, struggling to hold her mind together. This is not a gift, this is not Rohini. Not if I can’t control it. She had to control it. Had to think. Had to dominate her own self.
“They will want to know who sent you,” Vartan said. “They will want to know what you’re doing here.”
The words attempted to bubble out of Rohini, much as the prophecy had, but she reined them in, struggling against the force of the alien will perverting her own. She would not be the weak link.
Instead she said, “What benefits us benefits Asmodeus, and what benefits Asmodeus benefits us all.”
A slow, nervous smile curled Vartan’s mouth. “How interesting.”
AS IT HAPPENED, IT WAS A GOOD THING SAIRCHÉ HAD HIDDEN HERSELF away in the far corners of her mother’s holdings instead of fleeing Malbolge. Glasya’s summons came more quickly than she’d expected, and Sairché was kneeling before the archduchess moments later. The audience chamber was empty but for the two of them and the ever-present hellwasps.
“There are problems with my agents on Toril,” the Lady of Malbolge said. “You will correct them.” Sairché had hardly finished agreeing before the archduchess rattled off a series of peculiar orders and tore a portal open in the wall beside her.
Now Sairché stood in a dank, poorly lit underground room, a little devil made of shadow twining around her ankles. The floor was heaped with bodies—tieflings, humans, an elf or two, and maybe more. Enough blood it was hard to tell. Not so much, though, that she couldn’t see the mark of Asmodeus branded on a few chests, embroidered on more sashes. Sairché pursed her mouth.
The eel-like devil flowed up her arm. “Where go?”
“That one,” she said, pointing at a tiefling male near the top of the stack of bodies. “And hurry.” The shadow devil chirruped to itself and flowed over the stack of bodies. It pried apart the dead man’s jaws and wriggled down his throat.
The door at the top of the stairs opened. Sairché stepped back into the darkness and pulled her invisibility close.
Three men and a woman came rattling down the stairs, weapons out. All four wore sashes with the mark of Asmodeus on them. As Sairché watched, they fanned out, searching the basement for some sign of life, for someone they could kill. She stayed well out of their reach, and after a few moments, they sheathed their weapons and turned their attention to the bodies.
“A wonder the alarms didn’t sound sooner,” one, a heavyset tiefling man, said. “Who could have done this?”
A taller tiefling man with gnarled horns leaned over the elf woman sprawled belly down across one pile. “This one’s been blasted,” he said. “One of them was a caster.”
“There’re enough wounds here to mark a caster, a blademaster, and someone with a club,” the woman said. She shook her head. “This is too strange.”
“It’s not a sacrifice,” the thicker tiefling said. “It would be a sacrifice if it were other cultists that did it. And they left the bodies.” He nudged one with a foot. “Won’t be the Thayans then.”
“Do you know any of them?” the human man asked. “Any of you?”
“Bought supplies from Yvon a time or two,” the woman said. “He’s probably in there somewhere.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the thicker tiefling said. “They were Ashmadai. Their deaths are an affront to the king of the Hells, and so an affront to us.”
“All well and good,” the taller one said. “But we have no idea who—”
The body the shadow devil had climbed into threw up a hand to claw at the open air. Together, the living Ashmadai pulled him free, a tiefling man with the insignia of a cell leader, his chest blistering and cracked by magical fire, his face a ruin of shattered bone. He could not stand on his own, and so they settled him on the floor.
“Who did this?”
The man swallowed, blinking his eyes at the world around him, as if he weren’t sure it was really there. “It was the warlock,” the shadow devil said in the man’s voice. “The tiefling. She came from the hospital—her robes were their blue ones. She … and orcs. Orcs with blades and terrible spellscars.”
Sairché had to give the little monster credit: it remembered every line and sold it all well. Spellscars, Sovereignty, and a mad-eyed tiefling. Sairché frowned. She hoped it wasn’t the Brimstone Angel she was setting up.
Don’t be so foolish as to hope, she told herself. You’ll have to deal with that later.
He shuddered, his breath caught, and his last words rushed out of him in a whisper. “She led them here. She said it was at the behest of the Sovereignty. Her powers came from the Chasm. You must stop them before …” The man shuddered and collapsed, dead.
“Well,” the woman said. “That’s a stroke of luck. Hail Asmodeus indeed.”
“Don’t be flippant,” the man said. “We must bring this to the others.” He looked out over the bodies. “I swear we will avenge this slight.” The other three repeated the promise, and Sairché rolled her eyes.
“What of the bodies?” the tall tiefling asked.
“Get Pellegri up here to guard,” the
thicker one said. “And round up some fuel. We’ll have to burn the place down before the city guard notices.” They clomped back up the stairs.
Exactly, Sairché thought, as Glasya had ordered. They ate up every word. Though why this was necessary and why the Sovereignty needed to be implicated in the deaths of some cultists still made no sense. People killed Ashmadai every day, and it was no surprise. Why did Glasya care about these? The shadow devil squirmed free of the dead tiefling and flowed across the floor to her.
“Well done,” she said.
“Home now?” the little devil asked.
“In a sense,” Sairché replied, grabbing hold of its neck. It squalled and kicked, but she held it tight and slammed the little thing’s body against the stone edge of a support column. Its neck gave a sharp crack, and the corpse burst into flames.
Her first mission finished, Sairché left the dead Ashmadai behind as she passed through the portal, but they remained on her mind for quite some time afterward.
The last thing Havilar remembered was knowing she ought to be terrified. The almost overpowering calm that pressed on her when she opened her eyes again stirred a momentary storm when mixed with her panic, and she sat up thrashing even harder against whatever might be there.
Nothing. No claws trying to grab her. No devils in the shadows. Just a quiet little temple that she’d never seen before and Havilar, in her bloody, bloody armor.
“Gods,” she breathed. It was an obscene amount of blood.
“Havi?” Havilar looked around and saw her sister—her robes spattered with black gobs of dried blood, her eyes haunted, and her cheeks streaked—nearly running down the short aisle that the benches made. “Havi, are you all right? Are you …” She trailed away and stopped a step from Havilar. “Havi?”
Havilar’s head spun. “Whose blood is it?”
Farideh kneeled down beside her. “People who were trying to kill you,” she said.
“How many?” she asked, and Havilar heard her voice shake. “What happened? What happened?” Farideh hugged her tight, and despite the insistent calming magic of the temple, Havilar burst into tears.
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