Spinner of Lies frotg-1

by Bruce R Cordell

  “It is not recorded. More than two. An assassin’s weapon must be versatile. Kalkan Swordbreaker once claimed even gods should fear Exorcessum’s final configuration.”

  “Why?”

  “Only one thing is as strong as that explosive configuration: the flame that burns at the heart of a star.”

  Oh. Madri imagined a celestial fire touching down in the heart of Airspur, a blaze so hot it would melt even a god’s flesh from its bones. Such potency, once unleashed, would race out in all directions, burning even the air …

  She put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes. No one should have that kind of power. “But that would kill Demascus, too.”

  “Only for a time.”

  “It’s madness-what demented deity gave such a weapon into one man’s hands?” she demanded, suddenly angry at the incongruity of it all.

  “Gods, not those of Toril, fabricated the implements for the deva Demascus. When he came to Toril, the gods here created a counterbalance-Kalkan Swordbreaker. Though what we propose to do now goes beyond Kalkan’s original remit. We shall permanently deal with Demascus.”

  Being permanently dealt with was what Demascus deserved. How many other innocent people had he killed, deluded by the same force that had turned him against her? If she had any second thoughts about her vendetta, learning about the “final configuration” convinced her that the deva must be put down for good. She didn’t know exactly how Kalkan planned to do it, but apparently her involvement was somehow important. Maybe even critical … something Fossil had said earlier, about having to “start over” with her, as if having the help of just any half-ghost, half-figment wouldn’t do. Kalkan and the relic angel needed her. Someone who’d been betrayed and killed by Demascus himself. Curious. She promised herself to give it more thought.

  “You have a task to perform,” Fossil said.

  “I don’t recall-”

  “It was predicated on whether Demascus split his sword, which was uncertain. Now he has accessed the dual-blade configuration, and you must do as Kalkan decreed. Are you ready?”

  “What else do I have to fill my hours? Get a manicure at the salon? Have tea with the noble ladies of Airspur? Just tell me.”

  Fossil studied her for a moment, perhaps wondering if the time had come to erase her after all. But then it said, “Go to House Norjah. Tell them where they can find the thief, Riltana, with her accomplice. Tell them the thief who stole one of two paintings missing from their gallery stands at the newly connected threshold of the Demonweb.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANUL

  18 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

  The Gatekeeper was gone. a swirl of sand, black on black, was all that remained of the ebony golem. The windsoul and deva were alone in the courtyard, bleeding freely from dozens of slashes and ragged cuts. Riltana’s consternation was mirrored on Demascus’s face. He held two swords, twin to each other save for the color of their pulsing runes.

  Chant waited until he was certain the sand wasn’t about to swirl back into solidity. Then he broke cover. He motioned Jaul to follow. They walked into the courtyard of the structure, which looked like an internment house for the dead.

  Demascus glanced at Chant. “What do you make of these?” he said, twirling the swords for effect.

  “Gaffing blue!” said Jaul. The expression was new to Chant.

  “Yeah, nice trick,” Chant said. “How’d you break your sword and come out with two?”

  Demascus shrugged. “Inspiration?”

  “Accident, you mean,” suggested Riltana.

  The deva laughed. “The golem had two hearts. Well, not hearts, but as good as. I needed something that could pierce both at the same time. And-”

  “And naturally, you split your sword,” Chant finished.

  Riltana said, “Surprised me as much as it did the golem.”

  “Caught me off guard, too, honestly,” Demascus said. Then his brow furrowed. He peered at the sword with the white symbols.

  “What?” said Chant.

  “Each rune holds a specific stored enchantment. These blades hold the same runes as Exorcessum did. Except a couple I used earlier are still faded. Do you think they’re gone for good?”

  “Sharkbite, how would I know?” asked Chant. Though he had to admit, he’d like to. The deva and his sword, scarf, charms, and other missing implements of his previous profession fascinated the pawnbroker. Demascus was a veritable trove of secrets, made all the more so by his missing memories.

  “Go easy on the runes, then,” said Riltana. “Though if you’ve got any left for wounds, you and I both could use it.”

  Demascus glanced at the webwork of blood dripping from his arms and frowned. “Now that you mention it, I do feel a little … unsteady.”

  “Sit down!” said Chant. He waved at a stone block low enough to serve as a bench. “I have something the two of you can share. Riltana, didn’t you once tell me you were always going to carry a vial or two with you?”

  The windsoul shrugged. “Yeah, well, I didn’t exactly get around to restocking. Not all of us take coin from that leech-fondler Master Raneger to sit on our butts all day.”

  “Hey!” said Jaul. “Take that back! What’s wrong with Master Raneger?”

  So ends Jaul’s imaginary romance, thought Chant. The pawnbroker was used to the thief’s vernacular, but he had to admit, her comment was a bit below the belt. He agreed with her assessment of Raneger, even if Jaul didn’t. She knew Chant was ashamed to be taking pay from the crime lord, and now she’d thrown it in his face.

  But Chant swallowed a biting retort. Instead, he approached Demascus first with the glass vial from his belt pouch. He whispered, “Take a little more than half, why don’t you?”

  “Thanks, Chant,” Demascus said. “Let’s sit awhile, then, before we push through into the portal. I don’t want to run smack into Pashra and Chenraya until I’ve caught my breath.”

  Chant took a seat. He packed his pipe with some particularly noisome tabac he’d acquired a few weeks ago. Now, if he could just find a coal … where’d he put his pot? It was especially enchanted to keep a fire halflit for days without tending.

  “We should see how it works,” said Jaul.

  The young man walked across the courtyard to the misted archway.

  “Jaul, don’t mess with that!” Chant said. He stuffed his pipe away and went to his son at the arch.

  “Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot, Pa,” said Jaul, his voice quiet.

  “Sorry. The Gatekeeper rattled me. And with Demascus and Riltana still hurt, I’m a little overexcited. I didn’t meant to-”

  Jaul waved his hands. “Whatever.”

  Chant felt the headway he’d been making with his son pull back like a retreating tide. “No, you’re right, Jaul. Let’s have a look at this and see if we can figure it out together.”

  The pawnbroker lifted a finger and began to trace the line of symbols decorating the arch. He knew a fair bit about secret alphabets.…

  “Do you know what it says?” said Jaul.

  “Something about this portal leading to worlds other than our own,” he lied, though he expected it was true enough, anyway.

  “Gaffing,” Jaul replied, his voice awed.

  Chant nodded. “Exactly.”

  “How do we activate it?”

  Sharkbite, Chant thought. How should I know? Probably just walk in … Except that this entrance could be part of a network, not a direct link to someplace else. Raneger had suggested such might be the case. If they just walked in, who knew where they’d end up? They should try to figure out how to specify an endpoint.

  He glanced back across the courtyard where Demascus and Riltana were trading friendly insults. “Hey, take a look at this, will you?” he called. “The arch seems straightforward enough. Jaul and I think we’ve got it under control, but we’d like a second …”

  Something wasn’t right. Gray mist carpeted the entrance
tunnel, low and dark, spreading toward his friends. “Demascus!” Chant yelled.

  The deva glanced up at Chant and Jaul, looking away from the fog. Chant frantically gesticulated and said, “Behind you!”

  The deva glanced back to the courtyard entrance, just in time to see a figure resolve in the mist. A woman with red fingernails like daggers and colorless eyes with tiny voids instead of irises. The red-nailed woman leaped, smashing into him before the deva could get to his feet, and bore him to the sand-strewn floor. She clasped the deva’s head in both hands and tried to bite his neck.

  Behind her, dozens of humanoid shapes popped up like mushrooms after a rain. They charged into the courtyard, a flood of pale flesh. Their thrashing limbs blocked Chant’s view of Demascus. From their throats issued jubilant howls.

  Waukeen’s empty purse, he thought. We’re trapped! Unless …

  “Jaul, through the portal!” he yelled. “Now!”

  Chant’s crossbow was in his hand. He didn’t remember drawing it. He aimed at a black-skinned genasi with blood-colored szuldar looking his way. He fired. The single bolt became three, multiplied by the wizardry forged into his weapon. The wooden bolts struck home, and the vampire howled as it burned to ash.

  A half-dozen vampires on the periphery turned to look at him and Jaul. His son, meanwhile, stood slack-jawed, too surprised to be properly afraid.

  “Through the portal, Jaul!” Chant shouted again. “I’ll cover you.”

  “We … we don’t know where it goes! It might-”

  “Anywhere’s better than here. Don’t worry, I’m right behind you!”

  He hip-checked his son. His girth against Jaul’s lean frame was no contest. The young man tumbled into the mist and was gone. Chant slapped another bolt into his hand crossbow, cranked it back with practiced speed, and fired another three-shot salvo at the advancing, leering vampires. Two went up with satisfying whooshes of flame. The other three paused, expressions of concern flitting over their features.

  A voice, possibly female, bellowed, “Where are the paintings, thief? Norjah has sent me to collect them.”

  Demascus was suddenly next to Chant, as if he’d been there all along but just edged out of an obscuring shadow. Several of the wounds closed by the healing elixir were laid raw and dripping again, with several new ragged red scrawls.

  “Demascus, through the portal!” Chant said. He fired another bolt. This time he dusted three vampires, but only because they were so thickly clotted in the courtyard it would have been more remarkable had he missed.

  Demascus took a deep breath and did not go through the portal. Of course not, the damn deva had a hero streak that ran a mile deep. Which was even more evident when he wasn’t channeling the residue of his former glory.

  “There’s Riltana!” yelled Demascus, pointing with the tip of his red-runed sword.

  The windsoul was running toward them from the far corner of the room, using the heads of the massed vampires like stepping-stones. It was so ridiculous that Chant half gasped, half laughed at the sight.

  And then a black iron blade nearly skewered him, barely stopped by a parry from Demascus to a viperquick strike by a vampire in a ragged leather jacket. With a whirl of swords too quick for Chant to follow, the deva disarmed the vampire with one sword and lopped off the creature’s head with the other. Tar-colored blood spattered them both.

  “Get her!” screamed the red-nailed leader of the horde. Fanged faces turned in confusion. Of the three or four dozen enraged vampires in the crush, only a few thought to look up. By then the windsoul was past, and more than a few got a heel to the face for their trouble. She reached the arch and dove through. Gone, just like Jaul.

  “I hope this goes someplace,” said Demascus, “and doesn’t just disintegrate us, like that green devil face.”

  “Devil face? What-?” said Chant.

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Damascus, as he fell rather than stepped into the mist.

  “Great,” muttered the pawnbroker, stepping through. Vapor, the hue of summertime blooms, swamped his vision.

  When the mist cleared, Jaul, Demascus, and Riltana were waiting for him.

  “Not disintegrated,” said Demascus, and chuckled.

  “Waukeen’s empty purse!” Chant said. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, and you go putting notions like that in my head.”

  “Well, it was a concern,” said the deva. His mouth twitched on the edge of a grin.

  “Where are we?” asked Jaul. The corridor in which they stood was built from the same stone blocks as the courtyard on the other side of the portal. Chant glanced behind him and was relieved to see a misted arch. He’d worried they’d entered someplace without an exit. The naked stone of the corridor stretched only a few tens of feet before it was overrun with a layer of thick gray spiderwebs. Chant couldn’t tell if webs covered the corridor surfaces or actually subsumed it-he suspected the latter. Instead of a square-cut corridor, the path forward was a spiraling woven tunnel.

  “A passage only a drow could love,” said Demascus. “We might not be in the world any more, my friends. And if we step into that web tunnel … but I can’t be certain.”

  “We should move,” said Riltana, glancing back at the arch. Blood slicked her scalp, and her eyes were tired. “If we can step through without any special key, the vampires will be able to do the same.” Demascus nodded.

  “Excuse me, but no one mentioned vampires before,” said Chant. “Why are they chasing us? What paintings were they talking about? And how’d they know where to find us?”

  Riltana looked at the floor. The woman vampire had said something about a thief. So it was the windsoul who had provoked them! He should have known.

  “Something to talk about once we find someplace safer,” said Demascus. “Let’s move.”

  They hustled down the corridor. Under Chant’s feet, the woven floor was only slightly adhesive-sticky enough to notice, but not so bad that it hindered movement. He wrinkled his nose as the air changed from bracing to acidic.

  After a few hundred yards, the corridor opened into a large, vaulted chamber resembling a temple’s transept and nave, woven in webs. Gray columns lined the walls, and the distant ceiling arch was lit with a scattering of firefly gleams. Directly below the highest point on the ceiling stood a dais, easily ten feet high. A litter of bones was strewn over the top of the dais and spilled down the sides. Some of the bones were humanoid. And all were rough at the ends, as if the marrow had been gnawed and sucked from them.

  “Stop,” said Demascus. As if he’d had to say anything, thought Chant. He really didn’t want to get any closer to the chewed leftovers of whatever butchery had occurred there …

  “What’re those?” Jaul pointed to the walls, between the columns. The webbing was pocked with closed doors intricately carved with spiders and geometric designs.

  “Exits,” said Demascus. “Each door leads to another place in the network, I suspect. Maybe places halfway across Faerun. Or farther.”

  “Or deeper,” said Chant. “Like subterranean cities of dark elves …”

  “On the other hand,” Demascus continued, “they could lead to an empty storeroom, or down another leg of webbed tunnel.”

  “Which one did the arambarium thieves go through?” said Riltana.

  Demascus shook his head. “We should be able to pick up their track-it’s fresh. And then choose someplace they didn’t go, because I need to rest. I’m exhausted.”

  “There you go again!” said Riltana. “Always napping.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Plus, you know my rule about fighting too many vampires before bedtime. That always makes me cranky.” She laughed.

  Chant said, “So, let me get this straight. The vampires have nothing to do with the drow?”

  “No,” said Demascus. “Well, they didn’t before they tracked us into the Demonweb.” He frowned. “Speaking of dark elves, we should check to see if I’m right about us being able to track them. Ca
re to take a look?”

  “Sure,” said Chant. He bent and examined the ground. Demascus was correct-because the floor was slightly adhesive, any appreciable pressure applied to the floor shifted the threaded webs composing it. Once he got the hang of how a disturbed patch of web reacted, he figured it would be easy to track creatures through it. Although it seemed like the webs were naturally inclined to return to their original position over time.

  Chant followed what might have been a trail to the dais and grabbed a femur bone. It was cool and smooth in his hands, but the rough part near the chewed end … Don’t think about that, he told himself. He experimentally prodded the floor with the jagged end of bone. Thousands of individual strands, maybe more, formed the ground. And each strand was probably made up of hundreds or thousands of even smaller threads. Could be why they weren’t as sticky as they should be. But still enough to hold an impression!

  Although … He bent closer. Were the webs moving on their own? Was that a … face?

  “No!”

  He jumped back and pointed at the floor. His stomach was making a serious effort to crawl into his throat. “The-this entire chamber-is haunted! I saw a man’s face, screaming. Made out of webs.”

  “This place was created by drow,” said Demascus, “It’s probably woven as much from webs as from souls sacrificed to the dark elf goddess.”

  Chant swallowed.

  “I didn’t need to know that,” Jaul said.

  The pawnbroker empathized.

  Just then, a howl tore into Chant’s brain. Were the faces in the webs coming to life? His fingers suddenly went numb and dropped the bone as he stared at the webs.

  “Vampires!” said Jaul. “They’ve come through the portal!”

  Oh, right, the vampires. Chant cleared his throat. “Where to?”

  “No time to choose,” Demascus said. He jounced across the web floor, scattering human remains. He stopped before one of the side doors between the columns. Chant didn’t have time to note the symbol carved on the door’s face before Demascus shoved the door open.