Prince of Lies

by James Lowder

  “I can count time as well as steps,” Kelemvor said. He stopped again and crossed his brawny arms over his chest. “Look, you should know by now none of this will work. If I could stand up to torture when I was alive, why should it be any different now that I’m dead? I don’t get hungry. I don’t need to sleep. If you were intent on trying to rack me or burn my eyes out, you would have done that by now.”

  “I thought you’d want to know about Kezef.”

  “There’s no need for me to know if you intend on stopping him,” Kel murmured. “As for Cyric, I’ll talk about him in a little less than an hour. That’s my schedule. You should know it by now.” With that he once more resumed his march.

  Kelemvor measured the rest of the wall undisturbed. At the final corner, he took a half-turn and walked to the prison’s center. There, he carefully straightened his clothes. He paused in brushing off his high leather boots and rough leggings, sleeveless white tunic and brown woolen cloak, only long enough to marvel—as he did every day—that a dead man should find himself clothed in the afterworld. When he’d been alive, Kel had never wondered if souls went around naked or not. Such philosophical minutiae hadn’t held the slightest importance to him, not when he spent his days fighting giants for their treasure or guarding caravans from marauding gnolls. That was the sort of useless trivia pointy-headed priests like Adon worried about.

  Kelemvor sighed. Now it was the very stuff of his everyday existence.

  With the same care he’d taken with his clothes, the shade ran his fingers through his long black hair and smoothed out his mustache and muttonchop sideburns. His features were rugged beneath his course touch. Some women had considered him handsome in his day; at least Midnight had seemed to think him so. As always, Kelemvor allowed himself to dwell on a memory of the lovely mage’s face, her lithe body, but only for a moment.

  Finally, he swept his cloak over one shoulder. With tentative fingers, the shade reached back to his right shoulder blade to feel the ragged hole in his tunic and the gaping, bloodless wound beneath. As always, the slightest touch sent a throbbing ache through his whole being. Kelemvor didn’t mind the pain in the least. It had become a signal of sorts to him, a prompting to a part of his spirit he kept carefully reined at all other times.

  Through the opened floodgates of his mind, images of Kelemvor’s final moments poured like a flood of dark, poisonous water: the battle against Myrkul atop Blackstaff Tower; the defeat of the Lord of Bones at Midnight’s hands; the joyous return of Adon, who they’d all thought slain by Cyric; and Cyric’s sudden, treacherous attack.…

  The ache spread, sending swells of pain through Kelemvor’s body. A single memory, clearer than all the rest, rode atop the crest of the bitter flood—Cyric, laughing as he drove his sword deep into Kel’s back.

  “The hour’s up,” Kelemvor rumbled. “I’m ready to talk about that black-hearted bastard, and about revenge.…”

  IX

  NOTHING TO FEAR

  Wherein Cyric adds another chapter to his book of lies, the Chaos Hound tracks along the winding trail of Kelemvor’s life, and Blackstaff Tower once more becomes the topic of much gossip and speculation in both Waterdeep and the heavenly realms.

  Rinda rubbed the sleep from her eyes and propped her chin up on her elbow. At first Cyric had called her to the parchmenter’s shop at highsun every day. Now he was demanding her presence at more and more unusual hours—twilight, midnight, and now dawn. Days lapsed between visits, too; he hadn’t dictated another chapter for the Cyrinishad in almost a tenday.

  Weighed down by exhaustion and depression, the scribe let her head sink once more to the oaken writing desk. The foul smell of the poorly ventilated shop, the fetid water and rotting hides, didn’t bother Rinda in the least. She’d grown accustomed to such unpleasantries, just as she’d grown accustomed to church spies following her every move, or Fzoul and the other conspirators appearing unheralded in the middle of her house.

  With little enthusiasm, Rinda drove thoughts of treachery and The True Life of Cyric from her mind. She wondered for an instant what chaos would result if the Lord of the Dead uncovered those dangerous notions. Would the harp-voiced patron of Fzoul and the rest come to her aid? More likely the mysterious deity would strike her dead before Cyric could gain any information from her. She’d never worshiped any one particular god, though, so her soul would land squarely in Cyric’s domain, and he would get the information he wanted anyway.

  Sighing raggedly, Rinda closed her eyes. The cool desktop felt good against her forehead. She thought only of that feeling as she drifted nearer and nearer the precipice of sleep.…

  “We shall begin whenever you’re ready.”

  Rinda bolted straight in her high-backed chair. Cyric stood at her side, a smirk on his gaunt features, his arms folded casually over a surcoat emblazoned with his own holy symbol. “I can wait if you need to rest,” he added with just a trace of sarcasm. “It’s no good to either of us if you forget to cross a T or dot an I. This book needs be perfect, remember?”

  “I—I’m sorry, Your Magnificence,” she blurted. “It’s just that—”

  Cyric held up a long-fingered hand. “No need. I may seem to have no sense of the time when I summon you, but I do remember what it’s like to need sleep.”

  Rinda watched the Lord of the Dead stroll to the padded chair from which he always dictated his story. With a flourish of his blood-red cloak, he sat. His chain mail shirt rattled brightly as he lolled one elbow over an overstuffed arm and slung one booted foot over the other. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

  “No,” the scribe replied too quickly. She took up her penknife and pinned down the corner of a gruesome parchment sheet wrought of human skin. Vigorously she rubbed the page, then blew away the leavings. “Ready, Your Magnificence,” Rinda noted, rolling up one silk sleeve and dipping her quill.

  “This won’t do at all,” Cyric said. “Something distresses you, dear Rinda, and that may well affect how you take down the tale I have to tell this fine morning.” He dropped his feet to the dirty floor with a thump and leaned forward. “My good humor disturbs you?”

  “Surprises me,” Rinda offered meekly.

  The Prince of Lies clapped his hands together. “Ah, but I have reason to be glad,” he chimed. “A decade-long quest ends today. By sunset the soul of Kelemvor Lyonsbane shall be mine.” His eyes grew vague as he drifted into a mad reverie, picturing a thousand horrible ways to greet the long-lost shade.

  Rinda sat in silence, waiting for the god’s mind to wander back to the parchmenter’s shop. When she noticed the mischievous spark had returned to Cyric’s eyes, the death god was staring at her. “There’s something else,” he said. “Something else is wrong.”

  Fear made Rinda’s heart thud in her chest “I’m—” She swallowed hard, trying to clear her throat, but she couldn’t. The lies came painfully, as if the very words were spiked with nails. “I’m just tired, Your Magnificence, and feeling … overwhelmed by the task.”

  A slow, smug smile crept across Cyric’s thin lips. “Feeling powerless, are we?” He stood and walked to her side. With one finger he raised her chin until their eyes met. “Is that it—do you feel like a pawn?”

  Her soul froze beneath that gaze. “Yes,” she whispered, though she knew not how she’d managed it.

  Cyric laughed, the harsh sound full of mockery. “You have no one to blame but yourself,” he said, then swept back to his chair. “You’ve given in to Fate, Not once have you voiced an objection to penning this tome.”

  “B-But you’ve already said you’d destroy me if I didn’t scribe the book for you.”

  “Of course,” the Prince of Lies said. “But you’ll be a pawn as long as you’re afraid of dying.”

  Rinda nodded and once more took up her pen.

  “Freedom from fear will give you power over every force in the universe,” he noted pedantically, cleaning his fingernails with a thin dirk. “Except me, of course. Fear is based
mostly on terror of the unknown, and you’ll never be able to catalogue all the horrors I can visit upon you after I’ve killed you. Still, I think you need to pay more attention to the stories I’ve been telling. As I have shown time and time again, fear has never ruled my life.”

  * * * * *

  From the Cyrinishad

  When Cyric had conquered the dangers of Zhentil Keep and brought the masters of its thieves’ guild to their knees, he struck out into the wilderness again. Though the disgraced guildmasters murmured threats against the young man’s life, he cared not, refusing to let their vague night terrors unsettle an instant of his slumber. Though only sixteen winters old, Cyric knew once he bowed before the idol of Fear, that dark altar would command his fealty forever.

  For eight years Cyric traveled, learning the ways of far-flung peoples, deciphering their myths in search of the gods’ true faces, true weaknesses. The fearful deities and the guildmasters joined forces and sent assassins against him in that time. Each and every one of them tasted the deadly steel of Cyric’s blade and were sent screaming down to Hades.

  By then it had become difficult for Cyric to move unnoticed through the cities of Faerun. The constant battles against the Zhentish agents sent by Bane and Myrkul drew too much attention to him. So he returned to Zhentil Keep one final time. The young man was intent on killing the guildmasters and the patriarchs of both gods’ churches. In the depth of the year’s darkest night he crept over the Keep’s black walls. The nine master thieves were found the next morning, their throats slit from ear to ear. The following night, the same fate befell the corrupt high priests of Bane and Myrkul.

  Yet there was one last task Cyric had to complete before leaving Zhentil Keep: the dark gods who so wanted him dead had sworn to protect his true father, who had aided them against his son in the past. He had served those cowardly pretenders well but Cyric wanted to prove that nothing could shield a sworn foe from his blade.

  The magical wards Bane and Myrkul had erected around Cyric’s father were intended to warn them of anyone who sought to harm their trusted agent. In their foolishness, though, they failed to realize that without the heavy chains of Fate around his throat, Cyric could move silently, invisible to them. He slew his father and left a mark for the gods to know him by—the skull within the dark sun, the symbol that would one day be his holy symbol.

  Cyric’s war against the gods had begun.

  His freedom from Fate made him invisible to the gods, just as his freedom from Fear made him an unvanquishable foe. Yet Cyric knew he would need weapons to topple the pretender powers from their heavenly thrones. So it was that he went in search of one of the most powerful artifacts known to mortals: the Ring of Winter.

  To the Great Cray Land of Thar, home to dragons and other dire beasts, Cyric came. Armed only with a sword of mundane steel and the cunning of a dozen elves, he sought the ring in the caverns of the frost giants. There, he found himself cast in the role of rescuer to a party of sell-swords and cutthroats who had ventured into the giant’s domain seeking treasure.

  After Cyric slew five of the monstrous giants, they called upon their god, a powerful elemental from a frost-wracked layer of the Abyss. The ice creature, like the gods of Faerun, could not see Cyric the Fateless. Of this weakness the young warrior took the fullest advantage, wounding the ice god sorely before it finally retreated to the cold halls of its Abyss-palace. The remaining giants fled at the defeat of their inhuman master, which taught Cyric to strike always at the leader of his enemies first.

  Though the Ring of Winter was nowhere to be found in those caves of ice and stone, Cyric gained the use of another sort of weapon that day—the warrior Kelemvor Lyonsbane. Of the sell-swords he had rescued, only Kelemvor survived the battle with the giants. For years this brutish mercenary followed at his savior’s heels like a devoted hound. Though Cyric was loath at first to accept the worship of this fool, he came to realize Kelemvor’s strength would cause others to rally to him like a flag on a smoky battlefield.

  For a time, the warrior earned his keep by catching food and keeping watch for assassins, but he proved blind to Cyric’s vision of the world. Dozens of fears chained him to mediocrity. Had Kelemvor been wise enough to stand aside, Cyric would have traveled on, forging his destiny alone, but the cursed sell-sword proved more treacherous than the pretender gods themselves.

  So it was that Kelemvor Lyonsbane, who was the first mortal to worship Cyric, also became his most bitter foe on earth.…

  * * * * *

  The Chaos Hound searched the abandoned halls of Lyonsbane Keep, snuffling the ground noisily with his black snout. It was just a matter of time before he found the beginning of Kelemvor’s life trail. Then he could get this hunt over with and raid the verdant pastures of some deity’s heaven. Elysium would be a good place to start, in Chauntea’s domain. The Great Mother’s druids were always a well-fed lot, and never very proficient at defending themselves. Too busy hugging trees to practice swordsmanship, the Hound snarled to himself.

  A sharp tang in the air caught Kezef’s attention. He crouched low against the rubble. Here it was—the beginning of one life and the end of another. Cyric had said Kelemvor’s mother died in childbirth.

  Howling madly, the Chaos Hound started along the life trail.

  Kezef tore through Lyonsbane Keep, following the path of Kelemvor’s early years. Had any mortals still inhabited the ruined castle, they would have seen the Chaos Hound as nothing more than a fleeting shadow. Kezef became insubstantial when he ran, a ghostly blur that left a lingering smell of decay and a vague dread of darkened corners and howling in the night.

  In a matter of hours, he traveled the boy’s first thirteen years. The trail crossed a few others in that time—older brothers, servants, and a father growing fatter and more unpleasant with each passing day. The Hound could tell much from the violent meetings between the paths and the heavy, staggering pace of the old man’s long-vanished tread. Even after more than four decades, those small clues could not remain hidden from Kezef’s astounding senses.

  One clash in particular blazed in the trail, stinking of hatred. It was a welcome odor to the Chaos Hound, and he paused to savor it. Kezef’s body became substantial again as he stood there. His maggoty paws burned prints into the floor.

  Kelemvor had battled his father here, in the musty library. The old sot had been beating some wench not much older than his son. The boy leaped to her rescue, but was no match for the warrior. Kelemvor had gained a few blows for himself. Then something frightening had occurred.…

  A sharp smell of terror hung over the scene like the aroma of a sun-bloated corpse. Kezef’s ratty tail curled in appreciation as he inhaled deeply.

  Some new trail replaced the boy’s. It was musky and feral, like the scent of a wild cat. A tiger? The Chaos Hound sniffed the decaying shreds of carpet left beneath the long-broken window. No, a panther. Kelemvor Lyonsbane had been a werebeast, a lycanthrope. The spot where the transformation had taken place bore the touch of ancient sorceries, of a curse laid upon the Lyonsbanes long ago—a fatal curse, too, if Kezef read the ending of the old man’s trail correctly. The Hound pulled tattered lips back from black teeth in an obscene smile; there were still spatters of blood soaked into the floorboards.

  The trail led out of Lyonsbane Keep then and never returned. Kezef gladly followed the winding path as it drove farther and farther afield from the claustrophobic old castle, into the twilight-shrouded countryside. The panther scent soon disappeared. It was replaced by the trails of the boy and a group of adults—adventurers, by the cold smell of chain mail and sword blades—who had obviously taken him in. Kezef grew nauseated from the cloying, reckless happiness that lay over the trail, but that miasma ended soon enough. One of Kelemvor’s brutish older brothers crossed paths with the group; when the fighting had ended, only Kelemvor loped away, wounded, in beast form once again.

  After the battle, the young man visited many of the larger cities in the Heartlands, lin
gering but a few tendays in each. He’d become a wandering mercenary, and from the weight and steadiness of his tread, the Hound could tell his strength had easily rivaled that of his bestial alter ego. Kelemvor’s life trail told of unremarkable adventures and long bouts of loneliness, hard winters in the wilderness and sweltering summers in crowded, teeming cities. Kezef followed him to these sites and thousands more.

  For days after, the cities Kezef visited in his search were filled with fearful murmurings. Even the fiercest warriors found themselves shrieking awake as the Chaos Hound passed beneath their windows. More often than not, however, the nightmares caused by Kezef remained elusive—much to the delight of the Night Serpent, coiled in her cave in Hades.

  It wasn’t until the chase brought the Chaos Hound to the Great Gray Land of Thar, and a cave atop a steep-sided plateau, that he slowed his lightning pace. The trails of many humans, elves, and dwarves led to this isolated cavern, far too many for it to be a mundane shelter in the icy wilderness. The sweet stench of ancient death lingered there, and the flocks of carrion crows in the sky overhead told of fresh corpses, as well.

  The cavern itself was huge, with stalactites and stalagmites of ice glistening everywhere. Kelemvor had entered with eight men, armed and armored for battle. The cave, then as now, was home to a clan of frost giants. As Kezef slipped unnoticed into the cavern, a dozen of the monstrous brutes were gathered around a crystalline altar. A squat statue atop the rough-hewn stone pedestal glowed blue-gray in the midnight gloom. The giants shouted prayers to some inhuman god from the Abyss, a frost elemental Kezef had faced once or twice long ago.

  Kelemvor had battled giants here, and the frost elemental, too. The conflict had been fierce, violent, and bloody, with the warrior’s eight companions being slaughtered in short succession after some heated exchange between the men and the giants. Only Kelemvor weathered the fight unharmed, felling three of the hulking brutes on his own. By fleeing, he survived to fight again. A ragged human, freed from the giants during the battle, followed in the sell-sword’s wake.