Ashes of the Tyrant

by Erin M. Evans

  Farideh frowned. She climbed out of bed, crossing to the dressing table, and pulled out her ritual book, a fistful of components: a bottle of ink, a bone-white feather, a fistful of pouches. Murmuring a spell, she poured a silver powder into a square around the bottle, then a second grayish dust into a line across the square. Dumuzi shivered as Farideh dipped the feather into the bottle of ink and then brushed it against her eyes and her ears.

  “Say it again,” she told him. “The words he asks you.”

  Dumuzi hesitated. He didn’t want to know. “Ushumgal-lú-en ur-sag enlil-la-ke?”

  Farideh shut her eyes, the air suddenly denser, thick as if it were full of lightning. Dumuzi’s pulse sped at the sensation. He felt as if his throat were closing shut, as if he might cry or choke or burst with the lightning breath.

  “Dragon-man,” she said, carefully, “Are you the warrior of Enlil?” She opened her eyes, surprised. “Enlil?”

  “Where’s Enlil?” Havilar asked. “Is that a homestead?”

  Farideh shook her head. “No, it’s a person. A god. I’ve heard it before—it was a name in the Supernal book Dahl and I were using to find out what Ilstan’s Chosen mark said. Dahl told me a list of names it wasn’t, and Enlil was one. He’s definitely a god.” She gave Dumuzi a solemn look. “He might be your god.”

  “I don’t have a god!” Dumuzi snapped.

  “Does he say why he’s pestering you now?” Havilar asked. “Handing you amazing axes because you dream too much?”

  Dumuzi let his teeth gap, full of nerves and worry. He could feel the lightning building again, fuzzy in the back of his throat. “He says there’s a storm coming. He says he can’t let it happen again. He doesn’t say when it happened before, so I don’t know if that’s something else, something worse, or if he means the tyrant or if he means Tiamat, who destroyed the old city.” He clacked his teeth. “He didn’t give me the axe in the dream. There was another god this time—another man, a warrior with a boat who sailed the moon across the sky. Then he turned into a woman, an elf maybe? Then she turned into a Vayemniri, a woman with silver scales. She said ‘Not all with power are tyrants; not only blood makes a tribe.’ And she handed me the axe.”

  The twins stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment, before Havilar shivered visibly. “You can have the axe,” she conceded. “Karshoj.”

  “Are there two gods claiming me?” Dumuzi asked.

  “No,” Farideh said. “I promise.”

  That was something. “I think … I think the axe is supposed to help us stop the maurezhi.” He told them about the maurezhi in his dream, Enlil’s curious metaphor about the house. “It might be a sort of overture,” he said. “A gift so I trust him. So I listen.”

  So I yoke myself, he thought.

  “Maybe.” Farideh held out the axe to him. “Ilstan says it’s a scrying surface. But it only works under particular conditions. We think it has to be used in the moonlight.” She held it out to him. “Maybe it has to be you too.”

  Dumuzi eyed the axe, every lesson he’d ever learned insisting he not take it. Vayemniri didn’t yoke themselves to tyrants like dragons or gods. Vayemniri didn’t grasp at easy answers.

  But Vayemniri, he thought, don’t leave their own to die.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said, a compromise, “but you try it first, please. If I don’t need to encourage matters, that will be for the best, I think.”

  Farideh pulled the axe back to her. “Fair enough.” She looked over at Havilar. “Everyone else ready?”

  The sudden pulse of drums echoing through Djerad Thymar, vibrating the very stones, startled Dumuzi, stopping his answer. He jumped to his feet without meaning to.

  “What is that?” Havilar demanded.

  “War drums,” Dumuzi said. “They’re calling the Lance Defenders to attack.”

  EVERY BREATH FELT as if Dahl’s lungs were going to explode. He clutched a hand to his chest where the demon lord had struck him, trying to get his heart to stop beating out of his throat. The cavern spread around them, real and solid, and filled with bodies all angled toward the winged devil woman who’d addressed Graz’zt.

  Graz’zt, Dahl thought, and his lungs seemed as if they were trying to invert themselves again. The tide of violence rose in the cavern, threatened to wash him away with it.

  “Dahl.” Sessaca stood beside him, seemingly unaffected by the demon lord. “That’s enough.”

  He shook his head, hand pressed so hard to his sternum he felt he might crush his own heart back into his spine.

  “You need to think,” she went on. “You need to stop this. What’s he telling you? That you’re special? That there’s the right kind of strength in you?”

  “Yes,” Dahl gasped.

  “Well then prove it, lambkin,” Sessaca said. “Look at all these sheep around you. Look at these godsbedamned dummies waiting for someone to hold their stlarning hands and walk them through this. Piss and hrast, it doesn’t even seem to occur to your brothers that they can fight back. Who in the Hells is going to save them if it’s not you?”

  The scrolls, Dahl thought. Whatever remained unstudied, there was the portal—he could get most of them out of here. There was the teleportation—he could get his brothers free, Sessaca and Mira, perhaps more. Martifyr, he told himself. Think.

  Dahl reached for the scroll again, his fingers fighting him as he slipped it from his belt loop. He’d have to read it, to cast it without the demon lord’s notice. He’d have to keep his head on straight.

  I don’t believe anyone, he heard Graz’zt say. Least of all you, Bryseis Kakistos, child of my loins.

  Oghma’s bloody papercuts, Dahl thought, his blood cold. The Brimstone Angel. She wants a new heir. She wants you on her side. He’d nearly gone with her.

  The man made of night snapped his fingers.

  The pull toward the devil woman nearly brought Dahl to his knees, as his mostly cleared mind fought. Even Sessaca seemed to bow under it, grabbing hold of Dahl’s shoulder with her bony hand.

  The Zhentarim who’d been under Graz’zt’s thrall for the better part of a tenday adjusted their stones, their makeshift shovels—weapons when held another way. Some carried swords still. A Shou woman brandished fistfuls of arrows. They plunged toward the cambion in a ragged mass. Magic coalesced around Xulfaril, and Grathson gave a battle cry. Mira pulled her knives. Bodhar drew his dagger. Thost heaved up a stone.

  “Stop them,” Sessaca whispered. “Hurry.”

  Keep them close together, Dahl thought, riding the compulsion that drew him closer to Bryseis Kakistos. Keep them all in arm’s reach. He grabbed at the scroll with one hand, hooked Mira with the other, yanking her back behind Thost whose stone made him slowest. He unrolled the scroll with one thumb, getting into Bodhar’s way and turning him back toward Mira. Teleportation. Fine—get them away, plan better later.

  Lord of All Knowledge, Dahl chanted to himself. Binder of What Is Known: Make my eye clear, my mind open, my heart true. A warm glow grew in the base of his brain, the presence of Oghma breaking through the demon lord’s aura like the dawn slipping through the thick forest. Give me the wisdom to separate the lie from the truth, Dahl prayed. My word is my steel, my reason my shield.

  Then the air near the devil woman shimmered and split, and there was Lorcan.

  Dahl nearly crushed the scroll in his hand. Whatever plan he’d had was gone—there was only the cambion, only the searing rage in Dahl’s chest, the sureness in his step as he followed the pull of Graz’zt’s power toward his hated enemy.

  And Graz’zt has made of you a most fearsome weapon, he chanted, his prayer perverted. So I may do what must be done.

  MEHEN CLIMBED THE stairs, following behind most of the party where he could watch his daughters, his charges, and give Arjhani a wide berth. Only Zoonie trotted up the stairs behind him, too big to walk abreast. An army to face down a single demon—a demon who’d bested not only Arjhani but Sepah as well.

  Ophinshtalajiir
Sepideh had been older than Mehen by a year, had been the one to show him and Uadjit and Arjhani where the cadets kept their hidden stash of apple brandy and the one to sit back smugly when they’d overdone it the next night. That she’d become career, that she’d become a teacher, surprised Mehen at first, but then, she had the kind of temperament that would have meant letting her cadets have enough rope to hang by, but cutting them down when it happened. Would he have done the same, if he’d stayed?

  If you’d stayed, you might well have taken Anala’s route and made yourself patriarch by now.

  With everything bare before him, the frayed parts of Mehen that regretted leaving all of this had begun to mend, to knit back into the whole of himself. Verthisathurgiesh meant strength and cunning, yes—also ruthlessness and severity. Djerad Thymar meant blending in and belonging to something greater than one’s self, fitting in damned chairs and having food that was properly spiced. It also meant being locked into his clan and his past in a way Mehen found untenable. Especially when it came to his daughters.

  He sped up enough to fall into step beside Havilar. “Anything?”

  She shook her head. “Just nerves. Nothing else.”

  Mehen glanced over his shoulder at Zoonie, who nearly took up the width of the stairway. “You remember those commands?”

  Havilar rubbed her arms. “Some of them.”

  “I don’t know if I’m the last to know about your Lance Defender position—”

  “I haven’t decided anything yet,” Havilar said. Her tail slashed the steps behind them. “I mean, I should. It’s a good position. Better than I’m likely to get somewhere else, right?”

  “Anybody talk coin to you yet?”

  “No,” she said. “I figured when it came to that, maybe I could use some help. I don’t know what’s reasonable here.” She kept her eyes on Brin, walking ahead of them. “Fari says Anala wants to make you Vanquisher. Do you want that?”

  Mehen sighed through his nostrils. “Do you still want to be a brigand princess? That’s a dream for hatchlings and the very determined. And Anala.”

  “So … once we’ve caught the demon, you’re not staying?”

  “We’re not going to abandon you,” Mehen said.

  “That’s not really better,” she said, with a sigh of her own. “I’m still thinking.”

  Someday they’ll be grown enough to leave, he thought. And that would be right and true—a sign more that anything that he’d done well by them. Still, it was hard—he could see all the ways the world had left to hurt them, but he couldn’t stop a one.

  He glanced back at the hellhound again. “Zoonie seems to know you don’t like Arjhani.”

  “She’s smart.”

  “Make sure she doesn’t get him confused with the demon. He’s fast with the glaive.”

  Havilar made a face. “I’ll bet I’m faster.”

  “You’re not,” Mehen said. “But you’re smarter. It’s more than a glaive in your hands at this point—Arjhani’s got a better technique, but he’s always going to fight like a scroll of methods. You’d beat him, not that it matters.” He hesitated. “Don’t challenge him to a fight.”

  Havilar gave him a sidelong look. “Waste of my time.” Then, “You and Kallan seemed … cozy down in the catacombs.”

  “Still not your business.”

  “Then don’t make it my business,” she said. “You don’t want to carry on with him, don’t, but don’t blame me, thank you very much.”

  Mehen tapped the roof of his mouth in irritation, thinking of all the things his daughter didn’t understand. Thinking … perhaps she had a point. “Fine. We’re done talking about it now.”

  This late at night and with the hunt for the demon still on, the Adjudicators’ enclave was less crowded than it had been in earlier days, but the dragonborn who remained behind sprinted back and forth as if to make up for their missing comrades. They looked awkwardly young to Mehen’s eyes.

  “Anything?” he asked Havilar. She shook her head again.

  The sheer mass of their party stopped one of the gold-pierced dragonborn in her tracks—a broad-shouldered gold woman with a sharp scar across one scaly cheek.

  “What’s happened?” she demanded.

  “Well met,” Kallan said. “We’re looking for anyone who’s seen Ophinshtalajiir Sepideh. It’s a matter of extreme urgency.”

  The woman’s teeth gapped briefly. “We’re all looking for her. Any trace. But I’m sorry to say we haven’t found anything.”

  “Who did she attack?” Mehen demanded.

  The woman gave him a curious look. “She was attacked. We fear she fell to the creature when it attacked the Vanquisher earlier today. It killed two of our own as well.”

  “That’s not possible.” Arjhani stepped around Mehen. The Adjudicator’s brow ridges rose in recognition, and Mehen recalled Arjhani had a ranking now. “The demon attacked me, three nights ago. Commander Sepideh intervened, but she was killed then. I was … carried off,” he added reluctantly.

  The Adjudicator shook her head. “The Vanquisher was very clear. Adjudicator Khrish transformed in the Hall of Trophies. It took control of the dragon bones—tore them right off the walls. Tarhun was barely able to fight it off before it overcame Sepideh and fled with her body.”

  “I watched her die,” Arjhani said, and Mehen felt a pang of guilt. “It couldn’t have been Sepideh.”

  “Karshoj!” Farideh swore. She clapped both hands to her mouth, eyes wide. “It’s not Sepideh.”

  “This is not the sort of place for that language,” the Adjudicator admonished.

  “Don’t mind her,” Arjhani said. “She’s excitable.”

  “It’s not Sepideh!” Farideh said more loudly, and Mehen realized what she meant.

  “Tarhun.”

  “It must have gone in as Sepideh,” Farideh said. “Killed one of the guards—or both—and then killed Tarhun.”

  Mehen cursed. “And covered the fact that its attack would absolutely be heard and noticed by setting everyone on a false trail. After all, who can best the Vanquisher?”

  “It’s getting cleverer,” Farideh said. “This isn’t the same maurezhi that left all those hatchlings to be found, that killed the Zhentarim in an obvious place. It planned ahead. It waited until it had its strength back. It gathered the resources it needed to overpower someone like Tarhun and then it set things up to make everyone run a different way.”

  “Where’s the Vanquisher now?” Kallan asked.

  The Adjudicator shook her head. “He said he had to speak with Dokaan. I’ll go and get him.” She sprinted off and returned swiftly with a harried-looking Fenkenkabradon Dokaan. Age had treated Mehen’s old swordwork teacher well—but for the gray edging his scales, the sag around his eyes, he looked just the same, thirty years on. Down to the fierce expression.

  “What nonsense are you spreading?” he demanded of Arjhani. “The Vanquisher is no imposter—I would know him!”

  “Uncle,” Kallan said with all his homestead manners, “to be frank, that is just how the creature works. It mimics like none other.”

  “I watched Sepah die,” Arjhani repeated. “The thing paralyzed me, and I watched it devour her—she was the maurezhi when the Vanquisher went walking. If Tarhun is saying otherwise …”

  “We have ways to be certain,” Mehen added. “If you show us to the Vanquisher.”

  Dokaan shook his head. “He’s not here. He went down to the market, to give orders to the war drummers.” His teeth gapped in agitation. “Chaubask vur kepeshk—what have I done?”

  “What orders did he give?” Mehen asked.

  “They’re sending the bat riders north,” a new voice said. “That’s the rhythm.”

  Havilar looked back over her shoulder—Kepeshkmolik Uadjit stood in the entryway, armored to the edges and wearing enough blades to make Mehen want to turn and tell Havilar not to get ideas. She was flanked by a handful of armed Kepeshkmolik guards.

  “You have a plan?”
she said.

  “Girls?” Mehen asked.

  “I’m fine,” Havilar said.

  Farideh considered Uadjit and the guards, then nodded once. “They’re fine.”

  Uadjit gave Mehen a sour look. “We cannot be too careful,” Mehen said. He looked back at Dokaan. “Have all the riders left?”

  “Most of them. I’ll ground the remainder. Tell the drummers to give the order to land. Do we have any idea where this henish is?”

  “Not yet,” Mehen said. “But that won’t last long.”

  23

  26 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)

  The Upperdark, beneath the Master’s Library

  LORCAN KEPT HIS EYES CAREFULLY OFF THE DEMON LORD. DON’T PAY HIM mind. Don’t pay him mind. He scanned the swarm of enchanted mortals, dodging a shower of thrown stones. Thirty, maybe, forty? All aimed at Sairché.

  This is adorable, Graz’zt chuckled. Two little cambions, playing at archdevils. Each of you thought—all on your little owns—that you’d come to me and leave alive? How droll.

  The power of the demon lord ate at the edges of Lorcan’s thoughts, Graz’zt’s very nature dissolving everything devilish in Lorcan bit by imperceptible bit. The diabolic and the demonic could not coexist. The Blood War had raged too long not to etch itself into their every fiber.

  Speed would be everything if Lorcan was going to snatch a few lambs back from the jaws of this wolf.

  “Sairché!” he shouted, never letting go of the trigger ring for the portal. His sister looked at him, annoyed beyond measure. “You shitting idiot—give me your hand.”

  “You need to get out of here,” she said, calm and measured. “In fact, take the paladin. She’ll be so grateful you might stand a chance. And I’ll have a little less to do.” The first of the charmed humans scrambled up the rocky slope. She pointed a wand at him. A fireball streaked from the tip, and he tumbled into his fellows, a smoking hole in his chest.

  Lorcan grabbed hold of her wrist. “I don’t shitting care what you think you’re doing—you’ve gotten yourself marked and I’m not about to let you damn me—”