by James Lowder
The crowd surged forward, pressing Gwydion up against the closest of the twin gatehouses. The tower’s surface was hard and dark, and it felt oddly warm against the sell-sword’s face. He pushed away to get a better look at the small, roundish blocks. They weren’t stones, he decided, but fist-sized lumps of … something. He peered closer, then recoiled in horror.
“Hearts!” he shrieked. “The tower’s made of human hearts!”
Af snorted. “Bright boy. The gates are, too.” He lowered his snout and stared into Gwydion’s terror-filled eyes. “Bet you can’t tell me what kind.”
“Oh, leave him be,” Perdix said. “He doesn’t look like a priest to me. They’re the only ones who care about such trivia.”
“Cowards’ hearts,” Af gloated, ignoring Perdix completely. “They don’t make as good a wall as heroes’ hearts, but then, we don’t get many heroes here.”
Perdix shook his head in disgust. “Tsk. You’re so proud of the blasted things, you’d think you built them yourself.”
“I did!” Af bellowed. “At least, I was around here when they was first put up!”
Gwydion finally found his voice. “Torm, save me!” he shrieked.
Every denizen in earshot turned to Gwydion, and a webbed hand clamped over his mouth. “None of that, slug,” Perdix hissed. “There’s one god in the City of Strife, and he don’t like his subjects calling out to any of the others. We don’t care if you get in deep with him the first day you’re on your own, but right now you’re our charge. This reflects bad on Af and me.”
“And we certainly don’t need the grief,” the wolf-headed denizen grumbled. He balled one taloned hand into a fist and brought it hard against Gwydion’s jaw. Bones shattered. Teeth spilled from the shade’s mouth like marbles from a torn bag.
Perdix frowned. “You’re our own worst enemy, Af,” he sighed, wrapping one leathery wing around Gwydion to shield him from further blows. “If he can’t speak, they’ll be really miffed at the castle. Remember what happened last time, when you twisted that shade’s head off?”
Af slithered sideways on his coils. “Aw, this’ll heal before he gets in to see him. ’Sides, he was calling on another power. You know the rules about that”
Reluctantly Perdix agreed but was careful to impose himself between Gwydion and Af until the gates opened.
Horns sounded from high in the gatehouses, and the dark doors creaked apart just wide enough for three men to pass through, shoulder to shoulder. Denizens shoved their wards through the gap, then followed close behind. The shades tried their futile best to resist these last few steps into the City of Strife. The matter was always decided by the steady push from the thousands of damned souls milling behind the reluctant prisoners.
A straight boulevard led away from the gates, lined on both sides by hundreds of skeletal guardians wielding pikes and spears. The undead soldiers existed solely to abuse the newly damned and their captors. With their razor-sharp weapons, they sliced off chunks of flesh that were quickly ground into paste beneath the mob’s feet. Along the boulevard, hungry things with haunted eyes waited impatiently in the shadows, hoping to recover some morsel.
Had anyone passing through the gates needed to breathe, the press would have suffocated him before he’d gone a dozen steps. A constant drone filled the air. This wasn’t a tapestry of prayers, as on the Fugue Plain, but a shrill curtain of vile curses and anguished cries. Near the gates, the noise was so great no one bothered to speak below a shout. Thankfully, the twisted, scarred, ten-story brown-stones that made up the skyline muted the sound as the mob approached the city’s center.
Time blurred for Gwydion as he made his way with countless others to the heart of the City of Strife. Only the steady healing of his jaw marked the passing of the hours. He could feel the bones knit, the new teeth pushing through the raw gums. The pain still plagued him, blurring his vision and scattering his thoughts, but it had lessened to a continuous, throbbing ache. Gwydion wondered dully if his capacity to feel such mundane agony had been stunted. After all, the pain from the spikes buried in his wrists had diminished, too. In his heart, though, the sell-sword knew better than to hope he’d be immune to torture after this. The denizens would invent new kinds of pain for him if the old ones wore thin.
Finally the mob crossed the living bridge that spanned the gurgling black ooze of the River Slith, then dashed through the open gates of the great palace at the center of the necropolis. Hemmed in by defensive walls newly built of the purest diamonds, the shades were allowed to rest. Most of the damned collapsed, exhausted by the run. Not Gwydion the Quick. He stood, unfazed by the marathon, staring up at the shadowy heights of Bone Castle.
The keep reached high into the red sky. Its lowest floors were wrought of skulls that looked out sightlessly on the courtyard. Higher up, other bones found their way into the architecture, forming fantastically spiraling frames around windows, sturdy braces for balconies. Winged denizens used these balconies to enter the palace or launch themselves into the mist swirling around the upper stories. Higher still, the tower’s jagged peak disappeared into a thick miasma of smoke and fog.
“Awright,” Af barked. “Time to go.”
The keep’s front door had opened, and the denizens were scrambling around the bailey, roughly rousing the shades. Gwydion was still on his feet, so he was the first to be ushered forward.
“Please,” the sell-sword said miserably. “I think there’s been a mistake.” His jaw clicked painfully with each syllable, and his teeth felt loose, but at least he could talk again.
“See,” Af chimed. “I told you his jaw would heal before we got in to see the prince.”
Scowling, Perdix grabbed the chain between Gwydion’s manacles and yanked him toward the keep. “What kind of mistake? You think you don’t belong here, slug?”
“I don’t even know where here is!” Gwydion shouted.
“Ho ho! One of the Faithless, eh?” Af rubbed his spider legs together gleefully as he slithered alongside Gwydion. “Then it’s into the wall for you.”
“He isn’t one of the Faithless,” Perdix scoffed. “He cried out for the Fool outside the gates. That’s why you busted him in the jaw, remember?” The denizen turned his lone blue eye on Gwydion. “You believe in the gods?”
“Of—of course,” he stammered. “Someone cast an illusion that caused my death. I was a warrior of—”
“Don’t you learn?” Perdix snapped. “Isn’t one crack in the jaw enough? You can’t say any of the gods’ names down here—excepting Lord Cyric’s, of course.” He pulled Gwydion to the threshold of Bone Castle. “You’re in Hades, in the City of Strife. Since you couldn’t pray to any of the other powers out on the Fugue Plain, you get sent here, to be judged by the Lord of the Dead himself. If you’re smart, you’ll keep quiet. Sometimes Cyric goes easy on the first soul of a new lot, but only if he isn’t a whiner.”
“You’re getting soft,” Af snorted. “I say we crack his spine so he ain’t got no choice but to whine at the prince.”
Perdix shrugged. “Be my guest, but don’t forget who has to see the slug’s punishment is carried out. If he gets off easy, we dump him in the boroughs and be done with him.”
Gwydion opened his mouth to speak, but Af silenced him with a vicious snarl. “I guess you’re right,” the denizen grumbled through wolfish teeth. “But it sure woulda been nice to see this slug take a bit of the old man’s wrath.”
Af and Perdix hustled their charge past the massive slab of carved onyx serving as the main door, into an entry hall built upon a floor of seamless crystal. Colored glass fibers spun by the drow of Menzoberranzan had been woven into beautiful tapestries that covered the bone walls. The hangings depicted the atrocities the dark elves regularly visited on the peace-loving people of the North. Yet those scenes were but a child’s dark fancy compared to the things Gwydion glimpsed through the floor.
“In here, slug,” Perdix said, his rasping voice lowered to a respectful whisper.
Light bleeding in through the room’s stained glass windows painted everything the brown of dried blood. Thousands of skulls lined the walls, their mouths open in perpetual, silent screams. Thick rolls of parchment had been stuffed into each maw. Spider webs hung from the skulls like banners in a dining hall, and tiny white eyes peered out from between the decaying skulls in every part of the room. Somehow Gwydion knew these weren’t rats, but something far more malevolent.
The denizens brought their captive to the podium and forced him to his knees. Af and Perdix followed suit, prostrating themselves as much as their twisted forms would allow.
No sooner had the creatures touched their foreheads to the floor than the seneschal of Bone Castle appeared at the podium. The monstrous scribe’s smooth, gray face held no features other than a pair of bulging yellow eyes. His body was nothing more than a shadow-filled cloak, which rose and fell upon a wind Gwydion could not feel. With white gloves supported by unseen arms and hands, the creature produced a quill pen and positioned it steadily over the scrolled parchment.
From every corner of the library, every skull and roll of parchment, cockroaches skittered into the light. The insects dropped to the floor with a patter like a hard autumn rain. Large and small, black and brown and white as bone they scrambled toward the empty chair. Gwydion felt the roaches racing over his legs, across his back, but the denizens grabbed his hands when he tried to swat them away.
The insects scaled the chair’s battered legs, heaped themselves into a hissing pile upon the seat. And then the cockroaches were gone, melted together into the form of a rather mundane-seeming man, lean and hawk-nosed and apparently quite bored. He slouched low in his seat, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms draped loosely at his sides. His clothes were hardly regal—high boots, drab black trousers, leather scabbard, and a shapeless crimson tunic bearing the emblem of a black sunburst and skull. Only his short sword and his circlet of white gold marked him as someone important in Bone Castle, though the crown seemed to be intended less as a show of power than as a device to hold the man’s long brown hair back from his eyes. Yet for all this apparent ennui, an air of tension hung around him like a pestilent cloud. No matter how far he slouched in the chair, he was still a coiled serpent, ready to strike at the slightest provocation.
“Hail, Cyric, Lord of the Dead, greatest of all the powers of Faerun,” Perdix said, kowtowing.
Af repeated the gesture. “Hail, Cyric, Prince of Lies, slayer of three gods.”
The Lord of the Dead fidgeted, as if he were anxious to be elsewhere. Whether the impatience was purely for show or merely the echo of some habit of Cyric’s from his mortal life was unclear, but like all the greater powers, the Prince of Lies wasn’t limited to a single physical incarnation. Even as he held court in Bone Castle, his divine consciousness manifested in dozens of avatars across the universe, answering the prayers of his faithful, sowing strife and discord wherever it would take root.
“Let’s get this over with, Jergal,” the Lord of the Dead murmured.
The seneschal leveled his gaze at Gwydion, and the shade felt something cold and inhuman slither across his mind. It burrowed into his memories, rooting through his life like a rat in so much refuse. Gwydion tried to look away from Jergal’s lifeless eyes, but he found himself paralyzed. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the interrogation was over.
You are Gwydion, son of Gareth the blacksmith. The disembodied voice was as chilling as Jergal’s mental probe. Born in Suzail thirty winters ago, as time is reckoned there. In your life you have been a soldier and a sell-sword, though your only true gift was your fleetness of foot. This you used mostly to win petty wagers. No great happiness touched your life, nor any great pain.
“Wait a minute,” Gwydion sputtered. “What about Cardea or Eri? I loved—”
You believed in the gods of Faerun, but worshiped them only in times of danger. You named the Fool your patron, but displayed neither great courage nor any loyalty to his causes throughout the last years of your lifetime.
Cyric yawned. “Your deeds have branded you one of the False,” the Lord of the Dead said without thought. “No god will accept you into his paradise, so you are my ward. As such—”
Gwydion leaped to his feet. “I died fighting for Torm! He must—”
The name of the God of Duty had barely left the shade’s lips when a short sword pierced his throat. Gwydion hung, impaled on Cyric’s blade, twitching and coughing. A chill unlike any the shade had felt in life or death spread from the wound, leaching his very essence. The short sword pulsed, and its blade darkened slowly from pale red to deep crimson.
The Lord of the Dead turned cold eyes on Af and Perdix. “Someone should have informed him I alone may repeat the name of another god in the City of Strife.”
“We—we did, Your Magnificence,” Perdix said. “But he thinks there’s been some sort of mistake. He claims someone tricked him and—”
“Everyone thinks there’s been a mistake when they end up here,” Cyric noted. “You two will share this one’s punishment for a time, just so you’ll be more diligent in preparing the shades to meet me in the future.” He slipped his sword from Gwydion’s throat and let the shade drop to the floor.
“Thank you, Your Magnificence,” Af said. Both the denizens prostrated themselves before their master.
“As for a fate … We haven’t sent Dendar any souls recently, right, Jergal?”
The Night Serpent would be glad for your generosity, the seneschal agreed. She has not tasted the marrow of a fresh soul in quite a long time.
Cyric slouched back into his chair. “Then it’s decided. Take the shade to Dendar.”
As Jergal scratched notes with careful, precise strokes of the pen, the denizens grabbed Gwydion. The shade, though weakened by the abuse, fought them. He gasped something at Cyric, but the words wheezed from his punctured throat like steam from a hot kettle.
The untempered astonishment in Gwydion’s eyes caught Cyric’s attention. The Lord of the Dead gestured, and the shade’s wounds healed instantly. “You recognize me?” he asked, idly striking the chair’s leg with his sword.
Gwydion pointed to the blood-red blade. “It was you,” he gasped. “You came to me in Thar. You pretended to be—”
The Fool, Jergal prompted. Each god has a name more appropriate to his or her stature in our realm. The God of Duty is known here as the Fool
“You pretended to be … the Fool,” Gwydion said. Speaking the blasphemous name made him wince. “Why? Just to trick me into throwing myself at the giant like a lunatic?”
“Exactly so,” came a deep, booming voice from the doorway to the library. “That is just the sort of petty amusement Cyric makes for himself.”
Jergal, Gwydion, and the denizens spun around to find a massive figure standing before them. His ancient armor was stained dusky purple, with elbow and knee cops wrought of dragon bones. Light glinted like stars on his breastplate, even in the badly lit library. He radiated power, stern and unforgiving.
“Oh no,” Perdix whispered. “Not him. Not now.”
Torm the True strode toward Cyric. His armor clanked as he walked, the sharp sounds echoing off the walls like distant cannonades. At Gwydion’s side Torm stopped and removed his helmet. The shade had never seen such a perfectly handsome young warrior. The light of righteousness flashed in his blue eyes. Unwavering courage set his square jaw.
“Release this soul,” Torm ordered. “You drew him into your realm through illusions and perfidy. You cut short his life through deception.”
The Lord of the Dead sat back in his chair and scowled. “Oh, come now, Torm. You didn’t journey all the way to Hades for this worm. You have bigger giants to slay—isn’t that how the expression goes amongst your Tormites?”
“Tormish,” the God of Duty corrected stiffly. “And Gwydion’s fate alone is enough to bring me to your loathsome court He called upon me. I am answering his prayer.”
A cry of relief escaped Gwydion’s lips. “Thank you, Your Holiness. I knew you wouldn’t let a faithful—”
“Don’t shower him with praise just yet,” Cyric interrupted slyly. “Torm cares nothing for your soul. He has enough power to enter my city uninvited only because you spoke his name aloud. You’ve provided a convenient way for him to make himself unwelcome in my home.”
The anger Torm had been fighting to suppress boiled over. He raised a mailed fist and shook it at the Prince of lies. “I have a duty to my worshipers. Men call me Torm the True because I value loyalty above all else. They call me—”
“They call you Torm the Brave because you are too stupid to cut your losses and abandon a failed fight,” Cyric hissed. “I know the litany quite well. I repeated it rather dramatically to Gwydion in Thar not too long ago.”
Torm took a menacing step toward Cyric, who still had not risen from his chair. “We get to the meat of the matter quickly. That’s unlike you.”
“Ah, you came here to inform me you are unflattered by my impersonation.” The Prince of Lies laughed. “It was quite good, I assure you. Apart from the sword, I had you to a T.” He stood and stretched. “Still, I’ll give you a chance to save this poor, abused soul.”