by James Lowder
“But we’re his servants,” Af said to no one in particular. He shook the denizen’s skull until it broke. “Cyric can punish us or torture us, but we’re not supposed to be destroyed. The levy should be drawn from the False!”
“How can you destroy a soul?” Gwydion asked. “I mean we’re already dead.”
“There are ways to pass beyond death,” Dendar hissed with smug self-satisfaction. “But your denizen friends would have no reason to seek out oblivion. They’re happy with their lot in death. As for the False or the Faithless—well, Cyric has absolute command over their fates. They can’t die unless he wills it, and he only sends shades to oblivion after he tires of torturing them.”
“Let’s talk about this on the way to the marsh, all right? We don’t need to bother Dendar with it.” Tugging on one of Af’s spider legs, Perdix hopped toward the cave mouth.
“No!” Af barked. “There’s a pact. I was there when it was signed. Cyric himself told us—”
Sudden, bitter laughter filled the cavern. “And you believed him?” Gwydion scoffed.
Perdix and Af glared at the shade with hate-filled eyes. When he didn’t stop laughing, they beat him viciously, but even their blows and threats couldn’t stop him.
The look of helplessness on Af’s lupine features had shown Gwydion that the denizens had no more power than he, that they, too, were victims of Cyric’s madness. With that realization, the shroud of despair slipped from his soul and a giddy dream took root in his thoughts: the False and the denizens were brothers in damnation. Why couldn’t they rise up and free themselves from suffering?
It was the Night Serpent who finally silenced Gwydion’s mad laughter. She turned one yellow eye on the shade and said, “Oh yes, dear Gwydion, dream of freedom. But remember, where there are dreams, there are always nightmares.”
V
AGENT OF HOPE
Wherein the daughter of Bevis the Illuminator begins a new, and likely short-lived, career as a scribe for the Church of Cyric.
Rinda owned the entire building, but that really wasn’t saying much. The sad, one-story hovel squatted in the poorest part of Zhentil Keep, among the unlicensed brothels, the gin mills, and the broken-down homes of escaped slaves and men too besotted by drink to be of use to anyone. In another quarter, the place would have been condemned. Rats maintained a thriving colony in the rafters. Dry rot had claimed large sections of the floor where the boards had not already collapsed into the foul mud below. On cold Marpenoth days like this, the wind whistled through chinks in the walls, promising four more months of relentless cold.
Rinda barely noticed these blights. She spent as little time as possible in the hovel, using it only for sleeping and eating and sometimes scribing false traveling papers for runaway slaves or assassin-plagued merchants. It made Rinda uncomfortable to do the work there, but with most of the men and women who came to her for help, she had no other choice. Her clients often called darkened doorways home; to keep a steady hand in those dank places was close to impossible.
She’d refused a position in the scribes’ guild to help these people, something her father had argued against right up until the instant she walked out of his house, two years past. Rinda didn’t miss him. He was a bitter man who hated his lot in life. He could never understand her need to help others, the drive that made life worth living in a bleak place like Zhentil Keep.
Whenever she tried to rest, Rinda found herself troubled by thoughts of those more unfortunate than she. And so she spent most of her waking hours on the streets, helping the Keep’s downtrodden as best she could. Some days, this meant arranging temporary shelter for a destitute family or forging letters of passage for a soldier deserting the Zhentilar. On other days, she roamed the inns and taverns, teaching the prostitutes and petty thieves how to read and write.
This particular day had been spent in the marketplace, begging money for bribes. The Zhentarim mages who watched over the slums cared little if Rinda helped a few escaped prisoners slip away down the Tesh. They demanded a price for their silence, though. Now, as she huddled against the cold in her hovel, Rinda tallied up the few coins she’d scrounged.
“I don’t have nearly enough.” She sighed raggedly, then counted the coppers again. “Not even close. This will mean trouble for the girls hoping to run away from Madame Februa.”
Rinda turned thrillingly green eyes on the dwarf lounging by the door. He tilted precariously in a rickety chair, his heavy boots up on a table. His clothes were unkempt leathers, his beard and hair a tangled mop of black and silver. One gray eye peeked out from under a bushy brow. A brown eye patch circled with silver studs hid the other. “I hear Lord Chess cried himself to sleep when he learned Leira was gone,” the dwarf noted. He blew his drooping mustaches away from his mouth and added venomously, “That bloated sack of orc dung.”
“Hodur, you know I hate it when you ignore me like that,” Rinda said angrily. “If you want to talk about something else, just say so.”
The dwarf smirked. “All right, then. I want to talk about something else. Anything’s fair game, just so long as it ain’t how little food there’ll be this winter or how the Zhentilar beat up on prisoners or anything else about the riffraff around here.” He paused to scratch furiously under his beard. “You’re the most depressing person I’ve ever met, you know that?”
The young woman dropped the copper coins into a chipped teacup. “So why are you always here?”
“Maybe I like to be depressed,” Hodur replied. “I’ve always heard we dwarves are supposed to be melan—uh, meloch—er, unhappy. A street preacher in the Serpent’s Eye talked about it once. He said it’s because we’re a doomed race. Not enough little dwarves to carry on our crafts and our wars, so we’ve got no future.” His voice painted the words with emotions he’d meant to hide. “Or maybe I ain’t got nothing else to do. No work for a stonecutter with mitts like these,” he said, holding up palsied hands. They trembled in fits and starts.
Tactfully, Rinda let the subject drop. She pried up one of the few sound floorboards and secreted the cup in the mud beneath. The ground squelched nastily as she set the treasure in place. “So what’s this about Lord Chess?”
“Oh, nothing important,” the dwarf conceded. “I just heard he was all tore up when Cyric announced to Leira’s priests that the goddess was gone.”
Rinda smiled knowingly. “He hasn’t been a practicing cleric in years. All he’ll miss are the banquets the Leirans threw—masks required, no debauchery too unusual, and no questions asked.”
“How would you know?”
With mock sweetness, Rinda held her hands to her cheeks. “Why a dwarf told me,” she said. “How else?”
Hodur laughed, his mustaches flapping in front of his mouth with each loud bark. “You know, it must be pretty rotten to be a Leiran right about now. I mean, rumor is Cyric’s the one that done her in, right? But if you kill yourself in despair over it, you just end up in the dark-hearted bastard’s domain anyway!”
“Careful,” Rinda warned. “You don’t know who’s listening.”
“Why is it human gods have nothing to do but plague their worshipers with quests or eavesdrop from the heavens so they can squash anyone who says something bad about them?” The dwarf dropped his feet to the floor. The chair creaked dangerously as he shifted his weight. “You don’t find dwarven gods wasting time like that. Moradin and Clanggedin and their lot have better things to do with their time—you know, crushing the orc gods’ armies or insulting Corellon Larethian and the other immortal elvish sots.”
“It’s not the gods I’m worried about,” Rinda said. “It’s the clerics—and the Zhentilar. Patriarch Mirrormane has asked Lord Chess to make speaking out against Cyric or the church equal to treason. And Chess is coward enough to make the army support Mirrormane’s wishes.”
“The Zhentarim won’t stand for that,” the dwarf said, dismissing the notion with one trembling hand. “And they’re the ones who really run this place.”
Rinda’s green eyes grew thoughtful. “We can only hope that’s still true,” she murmured. “They’re a lot less dangerous than Cyric’s men.…”
“I never thought I’d hear you say a good word about the Black Network,” Hodur exclaimed. He clapped his hands together. “Could it be the truth of the world has penetrated that ridiculous armor of good intentions you’ve hammered out for yourself?”
“I see the world a lot more clearly than you think,” she said. “But there’s nothing wrong with hoping things might be better than they seem. The—”
A pounding on the door cut Rinda short and startled Hodur to his feet. “Open up in the name of Cyric,” a deep voice boomed.
Cursing into his beard, the dwarf rushed to the other side of the room, where a lantern sat upon a long bench. He grabbed it roughly. “Get a flint,” he hissed as he dumped oil on a nearby pile of parchment.
Rinda scowled and gestured for him to stop. “If this were a raid,” she whispered, “they wouldn’t have knocked.”
Despite her own reassurances, Rinda overturned a mug of water onto a forged set of identity papers as she moved to the door. No sense taking too many chances.
The two men standing on the threshold were typical of the thugs the Church of Cyric employed. They leaned against the jamb, idly picking splinters from the rotting wood with shivs. One was fat, with a bristling beard and heavy-lidded eyes. The other was small and lithe. His round-shouldered stoop and the dark rings circling his eyes made Rinda think of the weasels that lived in the river outside the city. Both men wore fur-trimmed cloaks over their shabby clothes. Only their red armbands identified them as churchmen, emblazoned as they were with Cyric’s holy symbol—a leering white skull surrounded by a black sun.
“Let’s see,” the small one said. He unfolded a ragged scrap of paper. “Brown hair. Medium height. Slender build.” Wrinkling his face, he squinted up at Rinda in the failing afternoon light. “Yeah, green eyes, too. This is her, Worvo.”
“You Rinda, daughter of Bevis the Illuminator?” the fat one asked. Even his words were bloated, full of round vowels and slurred consonants.
Rinda crossed her arms over her chest. “And if I am?”
“Just answer the question, awright?” The weaselly thug spit onto the street and looked around. “We ain’t got all day on this.”
Like a barricade being rolled into place, Hodur swaggered between Rinda and the thugs. “You got the wrong place. There ain’t no Rinda here.”
Worvo blinked a few times, then let his mouth hang open in an idiot’s gape. “We do? There ain’t? Hey, Var, if this ain’t—”
“Of course it’s her,” Var snapped. “She’s supposed to be smart, right? A scribe.” He gestured to Hodur’s eye patch with his dagger. “Even a blind old gin-head like this could see she ain’t like anyone else around. Her clothes are clean. She’s even bathed this month, from the looks of her.” He licked his thin lips. “And she’s even awake during the daytime. Probably the only woman within a mile of here who don’t wake up at sundown—unless her little one-eyed friend here just got her out of bed.”
Hodur balled one trembling hand into a fist and grabbed the front of Var’s tunic with the other. Both thugs leveled their knives at the dwarf, but Rinda pulled him back from the door before trouble could start. She’d seen Hodur fight. Despite his infirmities, he was more than a match for the two scruffy churchmen—and five more like them. But if a scuffle broke out, the watch might show up, and that meant trained killers. Probably mages, too.
“It’s all right, Hodur,” she said calmly. The hard look in her eyes cowed the dwarf, and he stepped back into the room.
“So are you Rinda or not?” Worvo asked.
“Yes. What business does the church have with me?”
“Like I said before, you’re a scribe, right?” Var nodded for her. “The church needs your services. That’s all you need to know.”
Rinda frowned. “But I’m not a member of the guild. They can’t hire me if I’m not—”
“I didn’t say you was going to get paid for this,” Var said. He turned to his fat companion. “Did I say this was a paying job?”
“Uh, no, Var.”
“See, I thought I was being perfectly clear.” He reached out and took Rinda by the arm. “The church wants a scribe with some smarts, and you fit the bill. So, let’s get going, awright?”
Rinda reached around the doorjamb and grabbed the thin cloak that hung by the door. “Stay here until I come back, Hodur. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”
Flanked by the churchmen, she hurried away from her home, through alleys shrouded with the lengthening shadows of twilight. “Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“Not far,” Var replied. His beady eyes darted back and forth, taking stock of every figure huddled in a darkened doorway, every drunkard weaving in his path.
He’s no fool, Rinda noted. This part of the Keep often proved a deathtrap for those unfamiliar with the things that stalked its night—the press gangs and assassins and lurking creatures hungry for human flesh. Worst of all, though, were the naug-adar, the Zhentarim wizards who roamed the alleys in search of subjects for their sadistic experiments. No one was safe from these “devil dogs,” not even men wearing Cyric’s holy symbol.
“Er, we was supposed to tell you he’s dead,” Worvo blurted. “Your father, I mean. Three nights ago.”
“Yeah,” Var added. “Right after he recommended you, he had a accident in the crypts below the temple. The church buried him there as a martyr.”
“How nice,” Rinda said flatly. She swallowed hard to drive down the lump in her throat—not of sadness, but of rage. Betrayal was nothing new to her, especially from her father. What infuriated her now was the thought that Bevis had given over his only child to the Church of Cyric, and he hadn’t even saved himself by doing it.
* * * * *
Rinda smelled the parchment-maker’s shop long before she saw it. The stench of animal skins and fetid barrels of standing water wafted from the place, making the whole alley stink like an abattoir. From the amount of activity on the street, though, it was obvious the neighbors had gotten used to the unpleasant odor long ago.
In darkened doorways, scantily clad girls called out to anyone sober enough to walk on his own. And if a passerby happened to stumble, they descended on him like crows on a battlefield, taking everything of the slightest value. The body picked clean, the women hurried back to their cold, lightless perches, hacking and coughing from long-untreated maladies.
A pack of grubby children poured out of a rookery at one end of the street. They howled like wolves and overturned everything in their path not nailed down. Before that horde of flying feet and unwashed faces, men and women scattered. The prostitutes slammed their doors closed, waiting for the mob to pass, and Rinda and her escort pressed themselves against a wall. The churchmen drew their daggers to warn away the urchins. Fortunately, the pack seemed more interested in making noise than preying on anyone in particular.
As the children passed and the howling died down, a drunken chorus of bawds took command of the night air. At a tavern down the way, they belted out a paean to Loviatar, punctuating the end of each verse with a loud clattering of mugs on tabletops. Rinda thought she heard the sharp crack of a whip, too—a common enough sound at dusk in Zhentil Keep.
“This way,” Var murmured through the handkerchief braced against his mouth and nose. He tugged her toward a small shop crushed between two higher buildings.
Light bled out through thick, latticed windows on the lower floor, pooling in the street. That revealed enough of the place for Rinda to see it was a one-story workshop, with two floors of living quarters over it. The upper windows were either boarded up or dark. As she had suspected from the smell, the sign above the door proclaimed it the abode of a parchmenter.
Six Zhentilar stood before the shop, a wall of chain mail and bared swords. These were elite soldiers, Rinda guessed, maybe even part of
Lord Chess’s personal bodyguard. They stood at attention, watching the passing prostitutes and drunkards and feral children.
Var lowered his handkerchief as he approached the Zhentilar, then batted Worvo’s down as well. The soldiers greeted him in return with a picket of raised blades. “Scribe for Patriarch Mirrormane,” Var said to the nearest soldier.
After a moment, the man nodded his square chin and let them pass. Rinda shuddered as the light played off the soldier’s face. The long scars marring his cheeks announced to the world that his tongue had been removed.
The shop door creaked open. Patriarch Mirrormane appeared on the stoop, wreathed by light and rubbing his hands together nervously. “Ah, at last,” he said, then fished two silver coins from the pocket of his long purple clerical robe. “Well done.”
Var and Worvo took the coins eagerly, their disgust at the alley’s smell driven away by greed. “Our thanks, Patriarch,” Var offered. He bowed grandly and kissed the death’s-head ring the high priest wore. When Worvo lumbered forward to do the same, Mirrormane waved him away.
“One of the Zhentilar will escort you out of here,” the patriarch said as he pulled Rinda into the shop. The door slammed closed on the thugs’ further exclamations of gratitude.
From the steel in Mirrormane’s eyes, Rinda knew that Var and Worvo would be dead before they made three blocks. It was a common practice for Cyric’s church: hire a messenger, then kill him once he’d completed his task.
The patriarch’s face was a mask of wrinkles, his silver-white hair a nest of snakes. He smiled in a poor imitation of warmth and gestured for the scribe to move into the room. They were alone amongst the tilting shelves and rolls of finished parchment.
“You are to be blessed with a rare opportunity to serve the church,” the patriarch began. “Lord Cyric has need of your skills as a scribe.”