Prince of Lies

by James Lowder

  Gwydion the Quick was on his feet and running before anyone else. He glanced over his shoulder as he fled. What he saw behind him rivaled any nightmare lurking in the Night Serpent’s hoard of horrible dreams and foul visions.

  In the center of the blasted circle of earth, Cyric stood, arrayed in a cloak of flame, Godsbane held aloft in a warlike pose. Burning eyes glared out of a face scorched crimson by some hellish furnace. Lips pulled back in a sneer to reveal twisted yellow teeth. His hands were gnarled like long-dead yew branches, his arms lean, but corded with muscles like steel cable.

  With a single stroke of his rose-hued short sword, the Lord of the Dead sliced a cringing denizen in two. Then, as if possessed by some incredible madness, he began to howl at the souls in his path. Anyone frightened enough or foolish enough to stand in Cyric’s way fell before Godsbane. The sword’s glow became brighter with each blow, growing as crimson as fresh-spilled blood.

  And most terrifying of all, Gwydion saw Cyric’s hate-filled eyes staring at him.

  Frantic, the shade darted over the rubble. Ruined buildings loomed ahead, dark and twisting alleys winding between them. He never considered how absurd it was, trying to outrun a god. In his panicked mind, the City of Strife had become the Promenade in Suzail, Cyric just another challenger in a footrace.

  Gwydion dared another glance over his shoulder. He expected to find the Prince of Lies at his heels, but instead, his speed had put Cyric far behind him.

  A flash of yellow caught Gwydion’s eye just before something wrapped around his legs. The shade fell facedown onto the hard, packed dirt. His forehead struck a rock, sending colorful pain blossoms across his mind, clouding his vision and muffling the shouts and screams from the riverbank. When the bright spots danced from before his eyes, he saw that Perdix was the one who’d tackled him.

  “Sorry, slug, but you was warned,” the denizen said. “ ’Sides, if I let you get away, I’d be the one who pays. Cyric always makes someone pay.”

  “Most assuredly,” murmured the Prince of Lies, towering suddenly over the captive soul. He reached down and closed a taloned hand around Gwydion’s throat. “I just knew you’d cause me trouble. The ones who die trying to be heroes always do.”

  Cyric lifted Gwydion to his knees. “But now it’s time I put your speed to use for my own ends, quickling,” he said. “Still, you should be happy. You’re finally going to get your knighthood.”

  The Prince of Lies wiped the gore from Godsbane onto the shade, then sheathed the blade. “I dub you Sir Gwydion—inquisitor for Zhentil Keep and unholy knight of Hades. Now for your armor.…”

  * * * * *

  “Help me!” a woman cried, her voice shrill with terror.

  Low and gravelly, a man called out, “Make it stop! Don’t let it destroy me!”

  Something inhuman, its words humming like the wings of a gigantic wasp, moaned mournfully, “Betrayed! Cyric has betrayed us again!”

  Kelemvor sat cross-legged in the center of the swirling madness, his mind’s eye drawn in upon itself. He didn’t see the faces flowing through the rose-hued mist surrounding him. He blocked out the pained screams of the souls as best he could and closed his senses to the pungent tang in the air, the oddly mingled smells of white-hot iron and moldy, overturned grave loam. Nevertheless, images of the tortured spirits insinuated themselves into his thoughts. It was always the same when Cyric wielded the sword.

  “I will end this chaos,” Kelemvor whispered, over and over. “I will not allow them to undo the rule of law and reason in the universe.”

  “There are some who would see that as a noble enough sentiment,” Godsbane purred, “but I think it’s a rather pointless vow, my love. Law and chaos are meaningless, when you come right down to it. They always balance each other in the end.”

  The soft, feminine voice came to him clearly, even over the shrieks of the shades and denizens trapped inside the sword.

  “Still,” Godsbane added, “once we topple Cyric, you can tell yourself you’ve fulfilled your promise. Overthrowing a madman like him is always a victory for law and order—at least for a time.”

  Kel opened his eyes. The spirit of a mantis-headed denizen sped past, warped and twisted on a flowing stream of energy. “Don’t think I mean to stop at Cyric,” Kelemvor muttered. “You’ve kept me prisoner for a decade. I’ll have justice for that, too.”

  “You’re hardly in any position to threaten,” the sword replied, full of mock indignation. “Besides, I’ve kept you safe and sound. You’d have gone straight to the City of Strife if I hadn’t captured your soul that day atop Blackstaff Tower. Then where would you be?”

  “I’ll ask Midnight to keep that in mind after you hand me over to her,” Kel murmured. His heart ached at the sight of the tortured faces with their wide, pleading eyes. The helplessness he felt at their suffering burned in his chest like a poisoned dirk.

  “Our goals really are the same,” the sword said smoothly. “You want Cyric to pay for killing you. I want him to suffer for trying to break my will after he stole me from that halfling village.”

  Kelemvor remained obstinately silent Finally Godsbane spoke again: “I need you as the proverbial carrot at the end of the stick, my love, but once I bring the Lady of Mysteries into my band of conspirators, your usefulness may come to an abrupt end. If you continue to bluster, I may find it necessary to destroy you.”

  To prove her power, the sword snuffed out the souls she had gathered in the battle on the banks of the Slith. Godsbane had explained once that she could transfer this stolen life essence to her wielder, store it, or simply drink it in herself. What the treacherous blade had never revealed was how she had kept Kelemvor shielded from Cyric’s prying mind for all those years. When Godsbane contacted her master, Kel could feel the death god’s malevolence all around him, yet Cyric remained unaware of his presence.

  Godsbane’s cool, sensuous voice filled the sudden silence. “Let me offer you a little present,” she cooed. “Just to prove there are no hard feelings.”

  The imaginary prison walls Kelemvor had marked for himself became real, just as he had set them in his mind. A floor slid into place, and a ceiling, both with the feel of badly set stone. The place even smelled like a Sembian jail in which Kel had spent a month: all stale water and damp, musty earth. A mangy rat peeked out from a hole in the corner. Roaches scrambled around a thin stream of water that meandered from one high, lightless window all the way to the floor.

  “There, now,” the sword said proudly. “Those poor souls gave their all for this place. Chaos into order. You should be pleased.…”

  A woman appeared in the cell with Kelemvor, lithe and young and very beautiful. Her long raven-black hair and pale skin made her resemble Midnight just enough to stir Kel’s interest, but not so much that he immediately turned away from her as an impostor. “I could offer my apologies in other ways,” the woman said, her husky voice full of promised passion.

  Kelemvor was tempted by the reassuring touch of the woman’s hand against his shoulder, the solid feel of the stone floor beneath him, but he didn’t give in to the seduction. “You needn’t have bothered,” he said. After pushing himself to his feet, he made a precise half turn and counted his steps to the corner of his imagined room. “What I create with my mind is just as real as what you’re offering—but I never confuse it with reality. I wonder if you can say the same?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, wouldn’t have heard Godsbane if she’d bothered to parry the insult. Eyes fixed straight ahead, Kelemvor began to mark out the walls of his prison. The steady rhythm of his steps echoed through the void like the solid strike of hammer and chisel against stone, cutting grave markers for the souls swallowed by the chaos.

  XI

  INQUISITOR

  Wherein Gwydion the Quick dons the god-forged armor of an unholy knight of Hades, and the Prince of Lies unleashes his clockwork inquisition upon the mortal realms, with frightful consequences for Rinda and her fellow conspirato
rs in Zhentil Keep.

  Gwydion had lost all sense of pain long ago, after the workmen had stripped each and every muscle out of his back. By the time the metal spring replacements had been hammered into his spine, the agony had become so great the shade had passed beyond the threshold of his senses. Now his mind had separated from his undying form. He watched the inhuman smiths pound away at his body from a vantage just above the long, dirty trestle table where he was laid out. To either side of his disembodied, floating essence, the ever-burning bodies of failed scribes hung suspended as ghastly chandeliers. The flickering light from the Burning Men cast weird, flowing shadows over the bustling operation below.

  A clockwork golem, bronze and burnished like a princess’s favorite mirror, leaned over Gwydion’s body. The mechanical smith slid iron pincers into the flayed forearm and locked them onto the last bone buried beneath the flesh. With a tug, he wrenched the bone free. A smaller golem, wrought of silver instead of bronze, took the gory bone and tossed it into a pile of similar trophies.

  “This is the last of the core parts,” a burly man mumbled through a beard as tangled as Cyric’s mind. He studied the gold bar in his hands, running greasy, callused fingers over it with affection. “From here it’s easy stuff—aligning the limbs, setting the outer plates.…”

  The master smith slid the metal rod into the spot left by the bone, then ratcheted it in place. The bolts secure, he dropped the ratchet and drew a more delicate tool from his stained and tattered apron. With this he carefully slipped the gears into play at the elbow and wrist. Finally he stepped back, gesturing for his clockwork assistants to hook up the last of the spring-muscles and close the incisions.

  “I suppose I should be honored to be here,” the burly workman said. His voice seemed hollow and metallic, almost as if he were talking inside a steel-walled box. “I hear tell you haven’t invited a fellow god into your throne room in quite some time.”

  Cyric gave Gond his best deprecating smile, certain the God of Craft would never notice the slight. The Wonderbringer was very much like his worshipers—long on strength and a certain cunning when it came to things mechanical, but short on the sort of devious intelligence the death god found challenging. “I thought you should be the one to put the armor together,” the Prince of Lies said. “I don’t think any of my minions could have done the job properly.”

  Grunting noncommittally, Gond turned his attention to a wickedly horned helmet. He detached the rounded top from the bevor and set about adjusting the thin needles that lined the inside of the helm’s lower half. A sudden clatter of metal on the stone floor brought a flush to his sooty cheeks and a spark of anger to his iron-gray eyes. “Careful with that, you stupid walking safe!” he snarled. One of the golems—a box with long arms and four thin legs—bowed a stiff apology and hefted the fallen cuisses to its more humanlike compatriot, who gracefully secured the armor to Gwydion’s legs.

  The clockwork smiths had almost finished girding the shade in the golden, god-forged armor. They levered him from the table, forcing him to his feet. Gwydion wobbled unsteadily until the largest of the golems supported him with unyielding arms of iron. Even then, the weight and size of the new body disoriented the shade. He was at least half-again as tall as he’d been, with a body bulky enough to belong to an ogre.

  The armor appeared at first glance to be nothing more than an exquisitely crafted set of oversized field plate, though it was far more than that. The breastplate was engraved with thousands of tiny grinning skulls, each rictus face surrounded by a dark sun scored into the metal with acid. Thick spikes coated with poison jutted from elbow- and knee-cops, and razors tipped the sollerets on the shade’s feet. Both gauntlets bristled with dozens of tiny, barbed hooks meant to bite into the heretics the inquisitor would grapple. No straps or buckles held the armor in place; each piece was anchored to Gwydion’s new metal skeleton.

  “The helmet’s the most intricate part,” Gond said, stepping up onto the table. He lifted the bevor, taking care to position the needles over the eyelets he’d driven into the shade’s throat. “To keep it secure, we’ll need to hammer this bit into his mouth. It’s going to make talking kind of tough.”

  Cyric leaned forward, mildly engaged by the transformation taking place before him. “As long as he can manage ‘die, heretic’ I’ll be satisfied,” the death god said facetiously.

  Your Magnificence, Jergal began, hovering closer to the gruesome throne. There is the matter of the final sentencing.…

  “More formalities,” Cyric hissed. “All right. Get it over with.”

  The seneschal unrolled a long sheet of parchment. Know you, Gwydion, son of Gareth the blacksmith, that you have been found guilty of high treason against the rightful lord of Bone Castle and ruler of the City of Strife. You are hereby sentenced to serve said lord for eternity as a holy inquisitor.

  “Sentenced?” Gond scoffed. “He should be privileged to wear this armor. I forged it with my own hands!”

  “I’m certain he’d thank you if you hadn’t jammed that bit into his mouth,” Cyric murmured. “Now, can we just get this over with? My inquisitor has business to attend to in Zhentil Keep.”

  Gond lowered the bevor over Gwydion’s head, guiding the quills into his neck. He anchored the lower half of the helm to the bit in the shade’s mouth, then took up the rest of the headpiece. Like the bevor, the upper part of the helm was lined with needles.

  The long slivers of metal slipped into Gwydion’s skull, and he felt his consciousness being drawn back into his hulking new body. He tried to resist, but it was as if the needles had opened a maelstrom below him. He spiraled down into a place of absolute darkness. Suddenly, cold metal walls loomed on every side. They closed in, pinning his arms to his side and crippling his legs. A scream died in his throat, impaled on pins of gold.

  For a time Gwydion knew nothing but that terrible paralysis. Then a burst of light shattered the darkness around him. He opened his eyes and looked out on Cyric’s throne room.

  The shadows from the Burning Men danced along the walls, playing over the trophies hung carelessly about the room. Gwydion could see each individual bone in Cyric’s throne, each perfectly tooled plate of purest silver or bronze on Gond’s clockwork smiths. The Prince of Lies and the Wonderbringer stood before him, a strange look of pride on both their faces, though for very different reasons. For the first time the shade noticed that their human forms were facades, like costumes worn at a fancy dress ball. Power lurked in their unblinking eyes, radiated from them with every subtle movement. Their tangible forms were nothing more than puppets, no more living than carved husks of wood.

  Gwydion could smell the gods’ power, like the charge in the air before a violent storm. Other odors washed over him then—the stale blood on Cyric’s blade; the musty, ancient bones, encrusted with bits of grave loam, that made up most of the hall’s furnishings; the stench from the burning scribes; and the thin oil from the golems’ gears. His own scent troubled him most. Mixed with the harsh, cold smell of the gold plate armor was an air of decay, of death. They were all a thousand times more subtle, a thousand times more powerful than any scent he’d detected in mortal life.

  Gwydion’s other senses began to take in the chamber, too. The bit crammed in his mouth had a vile, bitter taste, like wine just turning to vinegar. He could feel every bolt, every rivet in the armor, as if they’d always been part of his flesh. Each blow from the Wonderbringer’s hammer had left an almost imperceptible mark on the metal, and for a moment Gwydion lost himself in studying each dent. Other sights and sounds and smells flooded in on him: the hiss of Jergal’s cape as the seneschal floated to Cyric’s side; the warmth from the fires surrounding the Burning Men; the distinctive, fetid odor wafting off the Slith as it meandered just beyond the castle walls.…

  “It’ll take him a bit to get used to the way the helmet boosts what he sees and hears,” Gond said. He tossed a wrench to one of the golems, who snatched it out of the air with surprising agility.
“So when do you want me to do the other eight for you?”

  “Right away,” Cyric said. “I’ve already chosen shades to power the rest of the armor.”

  Gond frowned and dug his fingers into his barbed wire beard. “Hmmm. This takes a lot of my concentration, to do the fitting right, and I’ve got other work to get to back in Concordant.”

  “I need these inquisitors right away,” Cyric noted bluntly, then strolled back to his throne. “Mystra has robbed me of magic, and there’s an insidious subversive turning my church in Zhentil Keep against me. That city holds my largest collection of worshipers. If I lose them, I won’t have the power to control the Realm of the Dead.” With sudden fury, he slammed a fist down on the throne. “Do you know what would happen if this place went into revolt and I couldn’t put it down?”

  Gond shrugged. “No, and I don’t much care, either. I told you before, Cyric, it doesn’t matter to me what you use the armor for, just so long as it ain’t turned against my faithful. Beyond that—” he patted Gwydion on the shoulder “—I just want the world to see that artifice can outdo magic, given the right smith and a good set of raw materials.”

  “Nine clockwork knights will show off your craft better than one,” Cyric replied, ridding himself of his theatrical anger like a snake shedding a dried skin. “Come, Gond. Be reasonable.…”

  The God of Craft rolled his eyes. “From you that’s almost funny,” he said, then held up a beefy hand to stave off the death god’s wrath. “All right. I’ll do them all now.”

  At a nod from Gond, the golems hustled to the eight crates lined up at the other end of the hall and began to unpack them with noisy efficiency. The Wonderbringer turned to Gwydion. “Raise your left arm,” he said gruffly.