by James Lowder
A terrible grating of stone against stone drowned out Xeno’s praise.
To either side of the patriarch stood huge marble statues of Cyric. With heroically chiseled features and grandly carved robes of stone, the twin gods scowled at the gathered throng. Now, both marble deities were slowly drawing short swords carved of solid ruby from diamond-studded sheaths; the sound was like the earth splitting open across the entire horizon.
“No one in Zhentil Keep has served our lord well,” the statues shouted in unison. They turned cold eyes on Xeno. “No one.”
The patriarch stammered a prayer for mercy, but the statues had already returned their unblinking gazes to the gathered priests. “Know you all that the Lord of the Dead has withdrawn his beneficence from this place—until such a time as the entire city proves itself worthy of his most divine favor.”
Stiffly the statues raised their swords. All across the nave, the silver bracelets worn by the priests to symbolize their enslavement to Cyric opened and dropped to the black stone floor. “You no longer serve the God of Strife and Master of Tyranny,” the statues proclaimed in dead men’s voices.
Some priests wept at the sentence; others merely stared in shock at the silver shackles lying open before them. They’d worn the bracelets for a decade, as the bands of pale, chafed flesh on their wrists showed. They could no more imagine moving without them than they could losing an eye or a hand.
“Please,” Xeno Mirrormane shrieked as he tried in vain to fit the cuffs back over his wrists. “There must be some way for us to prove our worthiness.”
The statues stepped off their ebon bases. They turned to either side of the temple and walked with ponderous steps from the apse to the aisles. There they each raised their swords once again, this time gesturing to the huge stained glass windows that ran along either wall. “There is one way, and one way only,” the marble deities chanted. “Obey these commands before the army of his wrath descends upon you, and salvation may yet be yours.”
All along the walls the tracery began to glow with a sickly crimson hue, as if the ruby swords had lit the decorative stonework around the windows on fire. Then light bled away from the dark stone, running down the stained glass like blood. The liquid fire burned away the gorgeously twisted images captured there—scenes of slaughter and strife perpetrated by the Prince of Lies and his minions—and replaced them with written rituals to be performed in Cyric’s name. Each of the six gruesome rites demanded a different list of gory components and detailed a sinister use for the gathered tongues and eyes and hearts.
“This is your only hope.” With that, the statues stomped back to their pedestals, sheathed their swords, and became stone once more.
Xeno Mirrormane broke the heavy silence in the temple with a hymn to Cyric’s glory, and soon the whole congregation had joined him. Their god had turned away from them, but there was still a chance to win back a place in his kingdom. And regain the death god’s patronage they would, even if it meant slaughtering everyone else in Zhentil Keep.
XVI
MIND GAMES
Wherein Rinda and the Prince of Lies have their final meeting—at least in the mortal realms—and Mask outsmarts everyone, even himself.
A chorus of fifty priests shuffled down the center of the twilight-shrouded street, croaking out a hymn to Cyric. They strained to form the words as best they could, but the charred stumps of their tongues choked them with every syllable. Their eyes, glazed with pain and rimmed red with exhaustion, stared blankly at the squalid surroundings. Xeno Mirrormane had allowed the priests little rest in the past three days, but such were the demands of the Fourth Service: Maim the voices of two score and ten of my faithful and send them to sing my praises along every alley, every path in the city that would be my holy refuge.
Rinda shook her head and continued down the street, away from the chorus. Gruesome spectacles such as this had become commonplace in the Keep since the Day of Dark Oracles, as Xeno Mirrormane and his priests struggled to complete the six rituals Cyric had inscribed upon the windows of his temple. Each of the rites demanded blood and pain, as if they alone could prove the city’s holiness. Sometimes the priests themselves suffered the awful mutilations. More often, the rituals required the agony of innocents and the screams of the unsuspecting.
At some other time, the Zhentish not devoted to the Prince of Lies might have risen up against the tyranny. Now, though, there was more at stake than the ephemeral matter of the Keep’s spirituality. Outriders from the city had spotted a vast army of giants and goblins and other wild creatures moving purposefully out of the northern wastes. The mystics knew their visions of doom were coming true as news of the advancing army spread through the city. Others guessed the horde to be the work of some god or goddess intent on turning Cyric’s anger with the Keep to his or her advantage. Simple fear silenced the debate in the end; no matter what force drove them on, the giants obviously intended to strike while the city was weak.
The fear blossomed into panic when it became clear that no help from the Keep’s outposts was forthcoming. A flight of white dragons had taken up a wide perimeter around the city, slaughtering any caravans or soldiers they encountered. A force of three hundred Zhentilar from the Citadel of the Raven had been wiped out within sight of the Keep’s walls. Now, with the giants less than a day away, the wyrms had tightened their ring. From the highest gatehouses you could see them in their patrols, dark specks circling in a cloudless blue sky.
In the twisted alleys and streets of the city, no one could see the wyrms, only the terror they inspired. The frantic haste of the priests as they conducted their bloody rites, the violent skirmishes for what little food remained after the church and the merchant houses had taken their fill, the futile prayers to the Prince of Lies—it all reeked of desperation. To a man, the Zhentish had the look of wild animals, wounded and cornered by a royal hunt.
As she passed the weathered facade of the Serpent’s Eye, Rinda noticed three of the Keep’s more openly feral denizens: soldiers lurking in the tavern’s shadowy doorway. The swaggering arrogance in their movements as they stepped toward her, the predatory glints in their eyes, told Rinda the Zhentilar were on press-gang duty. The straight razors and pitch-soaked ropes in their hands meant they were collecting parts of young women for the Second Service.
“Don’t bother,” the scribe said coldly. She flipped her cloak back, revealing the black leather armband that marked her as a protected servant of the church.
Two of the Zhentilar turned away. The remaining soldier—a young woman with a jagged scar running from the corner of her mouth to her ear—snarled at Rinda. “One o’ Xeno’s whores.” She spit on the ground, then joined her fellows in the shadows of the doorway.
The scribe didn’t bother to correct the woman, merely hurried on toward her home. Despite herself, she said a silent thanks to Cyric for giving her the armband; it had saved her life more than once in the past three days.
Rinda was forced to step aside as a horse-drawn cart clattered into the alley. The wagon rumbled to a stop a few doors up from hers, and the driver dropped to the cobbles where a corpse lay in the gutter. It was Johul the fletcher, Rinda realized, a wave of sadness washing over her. The fletcher’s clothes had been shredded in some terrible brawl. One of his hands dangled, almost severed at the wrist. The H gouged into his bloated face declared his crime and the reason for his death: heresy.
“Not likely,” the scribe muttered. Once, before Cyric’s church took total control of the city, she’d heard the fletcher say he wouldn’t have been able to tell the gods apart if they all sat down at the Serpent’s Eye to dice with him. He would have worshiped whatever deity his customers favored, for all that it mattered to him.
Rinda glanced at the window above the fletcher’s workshop, only to find Johul’s son watching the corpse being dumped unceremoniously onto the cart. The boy had hated his father. That was certainly no secret in the neighborhood. And like many others in the Keep, the boy had used
the church’s frenzied search for heretics as an excuse for murder. The pyre called for by the First Service required a constant supply of corpses. Where the bodies came from mattered little, just so long as they were branded with the H before death. Unsurprisingly, heretics had become as plentiful as mice in a granary since the Day of Dark Oracles.
In three days, Zhentil Keep had become a grim reflection of Cyric’s realm in Hades—at least as he’d described the City of Strife in the Cyrinishad. The Prince of Lies had dictated the last chapter in that cursed tome in the hours before the temple statues came to life. In it, he described his dream of a world with no other gods. More than any section of the Cyrinishad, the words from this chilling fancy had burned themselves into Rinda’s mind:
The chains of Hypocrisy will fall away, and man will be free to act upon his instincts, the only trustworthy guides in this world of strife and despair. The prison whose four walls are Honor, Loyalty, Philanthropy, and Sacrifice will be shattered by the sword of Self-Interest and the mace of Creed. Even now the warriors who take up these weapons first and wield them with the surest hand triumph over all others. Loosed from the fetters of Righteousness, all men will be set on a level battlefield, made free to cut their own destiny from the bleak cloth of life.
Cities will burn and rivers run crimson with the blood of those too foolish to see the truth. Pyres of unbelievers will color the sky yellow with their greasy smoke, and the wind will carry the stench of death to every corner of the globe. But those who follow me will build new cities upon the ruins of the old, places where anyone can be king—so long as he has the temerity to take up a blade against his brother and demand everything owed him by the world.…
Though the warp and weave of Cyric’s brutish tapestry stayed with Rinda, she’d distanced herself from his foul vision with a firm belief that civilization wouldn’t fall so easily. After all, she herself had taken a stand against the death god. And there were others battling Cyric—both mortals and immortals. Once they distributed The True Life of Cyric, perhaps even more would flock to their banner of Truth and Freedom.
As she pushed open her front door, the scribe was wondering what Oghma had in mind for The True Life. Like the death god’s tome, the Binder’s history had been completed on the Day of Dark Oracles.
All thoughts of the God of Knowledge and The True Life of Cyric fled to the deepest, most guarded part of her mind when she saw the two men awaiting her return.
“My dear,” said Cyric. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t tell me one of my minions followed me from home.”
“N-No, Your Magnificence,” Rinda stammered. She adopted the facade of unquestioning, somewhat dimwitted loyalty she used whenever she was in Cyric’s presence. “It’s just that—uh, one of my neighbors was murdered—I mean, he was marked as a heretic and—”
“Yes, the fletcher,” the Prince of lies drawled. “His son is an exemplary citizen, don’t you agree?” He waved the question away. “Of course you do. You know you really shouldn’t be surprised to find people in your living room, not when you leave your door unlocked in a neighborhood like this.”
“So I’ve been told,” Rinda said numbly.
The death god turned to the other man in the room. “I didn’t tell you to stop reading, Fzoul.”
The red-haired cleric looked up at Rinda, fear making his hard mouth twitch. He sat at her desk, a thick volume open before him. The lantern at his side cast long shadows across his features, masking his eyes and mouth with dark bands. “The woman deserves an explana—”
Cyric tapped Fzoul sharply with Godsbane, as if the sword were a pointer and he a stern lecturer at some temple school. “I’ll decide what the woman deserves,” he murmured.
“The illuminators and binders finished your book already?” Rinda asked. She wavered for a moment on the doorstep, then decided it would be foolish to run. She closed the door behind her as she stepped into the room.
“It’s your book, as well, my dear,” the Prince of Lies said. “And yes, it’s complete. I had the other craftsmen working on the pages as you completed them.” He smiled wickedly. “I’m just fulfilling an old promise to Fzoul here, allowing him to be the first mortal to read the finished draft”
“The first mortal?” Rinda asked. She slipped her cloak off and let it drop carelessly to the floor. “Have you read it, then?”
Cyric resumed his nervous pacing around the cramped room. “From cover to cover,” he replied breathlessly. “A magnificent job. You captured my brilliance on every page.”
The Lord of the Dead dragged the tip of Godsbane along the floor as he walked, scoring a deep furrow in the creaking boards. “We need the illuminations for the rubes who can’t read, of course, but the drawings have never been much of a problem. We had them right after the third or fourth version.”
Cyric paused when a floorboard rattled loose, and Rinda’s heart skipped a beat The manuscript of The True Life was hidden on the ground there, wrapped tightly in leather. The Lord of the Dead didn’t bother to look into the crack, though. He pushed the board back into place with a boot heel and stomped it tight.
“But you’ve been the only one to get the words down—well, at least that’s the way it seemed to me after I read it. Fzoul here will be the real critic.”
Rinda fought back the urge to call out in her mind for Oghma, to send a silent prayer to the God of Knowledge. Cyric would surely hear any such plea and deal with them harshly. Besides, the Binder knew the death god had her trapped, at least he did if he were still watching over her.
“Where were you?”
The scribe looked up, only to find Cyric standing at her side. His red cloak flowed around him like flame, swirling and dancing on the cold eddies that shot up from the floorboards. The lantern light made his eyes glitter. His breath held the slightest hint of brimstone as he whispered, “Aiding the church in their hunt for traitors, perhaps?”
Rinda felt the color drain from her face. “Food,” she blurted. “I was looking for food.”
“But you came back with nothing? Ah, yes: wartime shortages.” Cyric spread his hands wide as the realization came to him. “Sieges are like that. The rich eat venison, and the poor eat each other.”
At a gesture from the death god, a mound of food appeared on a table: a jug of sweet cider, a steaming leg of lamb, piles of strawberries, and a still-warm loaf of bread. “There you are,” the Prince of Lies said. “You only need to ask.”
Her stomach rumbled and tightened at the sight of so much food. There was little enough gruel and stale water to be had in the Keep, especially in the slums, and this was a feast suited to a nobleman’s table. Rinda glanced at Cyric, who nodded his patronizing approval.
As Rinda ate, the death god continued to pace around the room. He idly chipped away at furniture with Godsbane and thumped the rafters, sending rats scurrying for better cover. The vermin seemed to recognize the God of Strife. They paused and deferentially nodded their mangy, pointed snouts to him before scampering off.
The scribe finished eating quickly. A few mouthfuls of bread and a strawberry or two filled her to contentment, and she fell to watching the Lord of the Dead. After every few steps Cyric would look anxiously at Fzoul or gift Rinda with a deprecating smile. There was a tension in his movements Rinda hadn’t seen before, a tick at the corner of his mouth when he forced away the grim scowl.
So focused was Rinda on watching Cyric that Fzoul’s piercing scream made her leap to her feet. The jug of cider rolled from the table. Its sharp crash underscored the priest’s long wail of despair.
“Please,” Fzoul cried. He pushed away from the desk and got to his feet. “Don’t make me finish it I can feel the words eating into my brain.”
Fzoul lurched drunkenly toward Rinda. “Stop him,” he whispered. The priest’s knees folded beneath him, and he collapsed. His nose broke as his face slammed into the floor.
“Set him back at the desk,” Cyric said. “Bu
t use one of those rags to clean him off first. We wouldn’t want him leaving his blood all over the pages. No, I’d better take care of that.…” He gestured at Fzoul, and the blood stopped gushing from his nose, disappeared from his hands and face.
Rinda helped Fzoul to his feet. The priest’s nose bent awkwardly at the bridge, and bruises circled both eyes like a highwayman’s mask. At first he accepted the scribe’s help. When he saw the pity in her eyes, though, Fzoul savagely shoved her away. Alone, he staggered the last few feet to the desk.
“He’s always been an ungrateful lout,” Cyric said as he gently lifted Rinda from the floor. He turned to the red-haired priest. “And don’t think of skipping a single word,” he rumbled.
Petulantly Cyric lashed out with Godsbane. The flat of the blade struck Fzoul on the ear; the short sword pulsed brightly, hungrily, then calmed to its normal rosy hue. “He’s not for you, my love,” the Prince of Lies cooed as he sheathed the blade. “Not unless the book fails to convince him of my greatness.”
Fzoul had a single gathering left to read, the section devoted to Cyric’s final vision of the world. The panic had fled his features, replaced by a stoic resignation to his fate. Like a cobra mesmerized by a charmer’s pipes, he began to sway as he read the tome’s final words: This is the immutable word of Cyric, lord of the Dead and Prince of Lies. Long may he reign on earth and in Hades.
The priest slumped forward onto the book, bringing Cyric to his side in three hurried steps. Fzoul didn’t resist when the death god pulled him from the chair. His eyes seemed unable to focus, and he returned Cyric’s intense stare only vaguely. Yet that pall slipped from Fzoul’s face almost as swiftly as it had settled there. It was as if he had recognized the Prince of Lies for the first time.
“Your Magnificence,” Fzoul cried, dropping to his knees. He folded his hands together in supplication and bowed.