Prince of Lies

by James Lowder

  Gwydion stood for a moment, transfixed by Torm’s gaze, by the unwavering light of loyalty and truth that radiated from the God of Duty. “I’ll try,” he said.

  Torm nodded. “That’s all I can ask.”

  “The shadows of morning are on their way to Zhentil Keep,” Mask crowed, slithering up behind Torm. “Time for our knights to go to war.”

  The God of Intrigue reached down and pinned two corners of his own shadow to the ground with daggers. He backed up a few steps, stretching the darkness into a wide black pool. “One at a time, please. No pushing in line.”

  The knights gathered up their helmets, stepped into the shadow, and disappeared one by one. Gwydion was last, and as he entered the darkness, he found Mask at his side.

  “A present for you, just to show there’s no hard feelings for our little scuffle.”

  The Shadowlord handed a fat tallow candle to Gwydion. As the knight took the gift, a feral growl rumbled from deep within the wax.

  “Don’t mind the noises,” Mask said. “They’re just a side effect of an enchantment Mystra put on the wick. Light the candle as soon as you get the signal to begin the revolt, and it’ll release a little creature that should help you deal with Cyric’s faithful.”

  Mask merged with the blackness around him, leaving the shade to fall through the void.

  Gwydion considered dropping the candle; he’d been tricked enough times since that day at the giant’s cave to instantly mistrust someone like Mask. Still, he was certain the fight for the City of Strife would be hard.

  As he emerged from the portal, deep within the necropolis, Gwydion slipped the candle into his sword belt. He still doubted the Shadowlord’s motives, but he knew that to bring Cyric low they’d need all the weapons they could muster.

  * * * * *

  Fzoul Chembryl entered the nave of Cyric’s main temple, a huge leatherbound tome clutched reverentially to his chest, his features screwed into his best imitation of divine bliss. As always, the temple stank of sour incense and sweaty, unwashed priests. The awful smoke from the pyre of heretics in the courtyard only added to the miasma. Fzoul’s mustaches bristled at the smell, but he fought down the urge to wrinkle his nose. To be utterly enamored with Cyric would place him above such mundane concerns. With Xeno and all the other fanatical clerics watching him carefully, he’d need to keep up the show, at least until he got to the altar.

  The six guards surrounding Fzoul marched in step down the black marble aisle, their boots ringing out over the drone of Xeno Mirrormane’s sermon and the worried murmur of military speculation from the stalls. The six services had been completed. The army of giants and the vengeful flight of dragons seemed poised, ready to strike with the dawning of the new day. This final test of devotion, this plea to Cyric for salvation, was all that stood between the city and a terrible battle.

  Xeno Mirrormane finished his sermon with a prayer to the Lord of the Dead, though no one joined him. Only at the close of Fzoul’s reading would the city offer up its worship to Cyric. And with that burst of faith, Zhentil Keep would win back the favor of its god. At least, that was how the patriarch had planned things.

  With no prelude, no greeting to the high priest, Fzoul took the steps up to the altar and laid the book on the podium there. The six guards followed in his wake. With military precision, they formed a semicircle behind the speaker’s platform. Their pikes gleamed in the light of ten thousand votive candles, which formed the altar’s backdrop this bitter morning.

  “I bring to you a reading from the Cyrinishad,” Fzoul began.

  All over the city of Zhentil Keep, a ghostly, flickering image of Fzoul Chembryl came to life. The church hierarchy knew that a reading of Cyric’s own words by a man recently converted to faith in the death god would prove inspirational, especially in this time of need. With the help of the few wizards who hadn’t fled the city, they set a powerful enchantment upon the speaker’s platform. When Fzoul addressed the temple, he would be seen and heard by every worshiper within the Keep’s high walls.

  Fzoul felt a wave of panic wash over him as he considered just where he was, exactly what he was about to do. Blaspheming Cyric was dangerous enough, but in his holiest temple, at the black altar itself? The priest smiled grimly at the boldness of the challenge.

  With hands trembling only slightly, Fzoul opened the tome set before him. He flipped past the blank pages set in the binding to make the volume look more impressive, to the few gatherings that made up The True Life.

  “ ‘In this, the Year of the Banner, the people of Zhentil Keep lost their true beliefs, and an army of monsters arose out of the wastes to punish them. Little did they suspect that their god had gathered this army together for the sole purpose of terrifying the Zhentish into slavery.’ ”

  At a nod from Fzoul, the guards rapped their pikes against the stone floor. A wall of force sprang up, its borders marked by the rigid polearms. The crimson radiance from the arcane shield colored Fzoul and his faithful soldiers in bloody hues.

  “Heresy!” Xeno Mirrormane shrieked. The patriarch leaped to his feet and pounded his fists raw against the transparent magical wall. But neither the high priest’s shouts nor the arrows of the temple guards could penetrate the barrier.

  Fzoul went on to detail Cyric’s twisted plot, how the death god intended to use the Zhentish as pawns, how he cared little if such minor minions were destroyed. The angry shouts in the temple became gasps of astonishment, then murmurs of dissatisfaction. By the time Fzoul’s short reading was over, the only cries of dissent came from a few of the more fanatical priests and the rich converts who feared a loss of social status should the church be disgraced. Even the temple guards had dropped their bows.

  “His Magnificence will have your soul for this!” Xeno shouted. He pounded the wall with bruised fists. “I’ll send you to him myself!”

  “Let him through,” Fzoul murmured.

  The guards rapped their pikes on the floor again, and the arcane wall lowered. Xeno charged forward. The high priest clawed the air wildly as he barreled toward the heretic.

  One kick sent Xeno sprawling across the platform, two broken ribs biting into his lungs.

  “Where’s your god now?” Fzoul shouted. He turned to the packed nave. “Why hasn’t Cyric struck me down?” When no bolt of lightning lanced from the heavens, the red-haired priest grew bold. “Come down and face me, you coward! I’m here, in your temple.”

  As if in answer to Fzoul’s challenge, the first rays of dawn burst through the church windows, the light stained crimson by the services writ large on the glass. At the same moment, golden haloes formed over a few in the crowded temple. The soldiers and merchants and thieves bathed in the warm radiance rose above the throng, suddenly insubstantial. Then, one by one, the ghostly men and women vanished.

  Silent explosions of rainbow-hued light marked the passing of the innocents. And from each swirl of color dropped a single, small medallion. Disks of silver and pale red wood, golden medals marked with the scroll of Oghma and the eye-and-gauntlet glyph of Helm. Holy symbols, one for each of the faithful rescued from the doomed city.

  On the altar platform, Xeno Mirrormane struggled to his feet. Clutching his side, he staggered forward. “This cannot go … unpunished,” he gasped, foam flecking his lips. He drew a dagger from his purple robes.

  Laughing, Fzoul swaggered forward. “As Cyric won’t answer my challenge, I’ll have to send you to Hades with a message for him, old man.” In his mind he sent out a call to Mask, promising his devoted worship if the Shadowlord would grant him the power to cast down Cyric’s patriarch.

  Nothing happened.

  “Bastard,” Fzoul hissed. He stepped toward Xeno, ready to deal with the high priest without the Shadowlord’s aid.

  That’s when the pillar of flame shattered the temple’s roof. The column of writhing fire struck Xeno Mirrormane, and for an instant the patriarch’s fleshless bones danced a wild dance of agony in the inferno.

  Fzoul
fell back, his mustaches and eyebrows singed, his face scorched. He spared the time for one gloating look at the ruined altar, the charred remains of the high priest, before he drew his sword and fell in behind his men. Together they cut a wide, corpse-strewn path to the door and the freedom that lay beyond.

  The magical fire spread through Cyric’s most holy temple until it engulfed even the stone walls and black marble floor. The priests trampled their brethren as they rushed for the exit, but there were simply too many of them to press through the doors in time. The flames caught the mob before half of the death god’s minions had escaped.

  The screams from the temple were horrifying, but those who managed to flee the inferno were greeted with far more frightening sounds.

  The cold morning air thrummed with the harbingers of Zhentil Keep’s doom: the thud of huge, double-bladed axes biting into the city gates and the screech of white dragons tearing the archers from the battlements and toppling the high black stone towers.

  XVIII

  THE DEAD

  AND THE QUICK

  Wherein the Lord of the Dead tries to shore up the crumbling ruins of his twin kingdoms, Gwydion returns to the City of Strife, intent on winning back his lost honor, and Rinda begins her new life as Guardian of the Book.

  The Prince of Lies sat unmoving at the heart of the void, alone except for his memories of Kelemvor Lyonsbane. Images of the warrior flashed through his consciousness: the young braggart Cyric had rescued from the frost giants in Thar; the boastful sell-sword who’d dragged them both into drunkenness and poverty; the man who’d feigned friendship, only to attempt to steal the Tablets of Fate. The Prince of Lies grew furious at the memories, though they held no more truth than any other corrupted remembrance in the mire that was his mind.

  “I’ll find you,” Cyric whispered. “Then Mystra will pay.”

  The Lord of the Dead had isolated himself from both his mortal and immortal realms, as the ancient spell had demanded. Now, though, he was finding the seclusion more than a little tedious. Cyric longed to put his dark plans into action, to find Kelemvor’s soul and begin his eternity of torture.

  The death god fidgeted mentally, and a rush of scattered, unfocused thoughts flashed across his divine intellect. He pushed them away as best he could, irritated suddenly at his worshipers in Zhentil Keep. Wasn’t it time yet for their final prayer?

  The delay was Godsbane’s fault, of course. Cyric had charged the sword with the vital task of drawing him out of the trance the instant the Zhentish raised their voices in desperate devotion. But surely the time had come for him to receive the prayers of the city. Surely dawn had risen over Zhentil Keep.

  A terrible thought occurred to Cyric then. Perhaps something had gone wrong.…

  The Prince of Lies let the smallest possible fragment of his mind gaze down upon his holy city. At first only a shrieking pain, red and pulsing, washed across his perception. The frantic, frightened demands of sixty thousand priests and worshipers reached up from the mortal realms like hooks, biting into the god’s essence. The pleas for rescue, for magical might to slay the reavers of Zhentil Keep, dragged his mind from the confines of the trance. Cyric tried to steady himself and sort out the cacophony in his head, but he found himself spiraling down from his place on high. Then the chaotic scene in the city became clear.

  The sky yellowed like an old bruise as the sun climbed past the horizon. Above Zhentil Keep, a pillar of smoke pushed steadily into the bitter morning air. A conflagration was consuming the huge temple that had been the center of Cyric’s worship. The magical fire devoured stone and steel as readily as it took wood and cloth and paper. The priests’ homes surrounding the church had fallen before the blaze, as well, and the work of the bucket brigades seemed unable to stem its fiery advance.

  At the western gate, fifty frost giants worked at widening a breach in the high black walls. The gate itself had already fallen, riven to splinters by the giants’ axes. The magical wards on the iron-braced doors had done their work; the first three giants to lay their blades upon the wood had turned to stone. But that powerful sorcery no more slowed the siege than did the scattered flights of arrows whistling gnatlike around the titans. The handful of giants who fell to these attacks were shoved aside or hurled over the walls like mammoth gunstones.

  Dragons screamed over the towers and gatehouses, their icy breath paralyzing the archers who raced along the ramparts. Now and then a ballista would tear a dragon’s wing with a huge bolt or momentarily stun a wyrm with a boulder. Such victories proved more costly for the Zhentish than the monsters, since the dragons dealt with the offending ballistae quickly and savagely. Covered in ice, the men and women companying the engines held to their posts, their death screams trapped forever in their throats.

  A few wyrms hovered over the fields beyond the city. If they watched for Zhentish reinforcements, their wait would be long and pointless. The city had been cut off from the thousands upon thousands of Zhentilar garrisoned up and down the Long Road and in the Citadel of the Raven. Had any sizable force managed to break through the dragons’ blockade, they would have found themselves outnumbered one hundred-to-one by the vast army of goblins and gnolls now milling to the north and west of the Keep, waiting for the giants to bring down the walls.

  Cyric slowed his descent and pulled his mind away from the destruction of the city. For an instant he considered granting his priests the sorcerous powers they demanded. That would allow them to drive a few of the giants from the gates, perhaps stall the siege long enough for the death god to take on an avatar and wade into the fight himself. Yet the Prince of Lies could feel his own strength draining away. With each death, each worshiper who gave in to despair and abandoned his faith, Cyric lost more of his divine power. No, better to muster supernatural aid from the Realm of the Dead than risk opening himself to the vortex of his faithful’s demands.

  At the merest of thoughts, Cyric traveled to his throne room. The scene that greeted him there was just as chaotic as the one he’d witnessed in Zhentil Keep.

  An angry mob of denizens filled the long hall. They pressed toward the throne, shouting curses and threats at Jergal, trying to reach for Godsbane. The sword leaned against the throne, lifeless, pale as the martyrs’ bones supporting her.

  “If Cyric’s run away from the fight, at least let one of us use the blasted sword,” a goat-headed denizen bleated. He bowed his horned head low, threatening to charge the seneschal.

  Jergal held his ground. He hovered defiantly between the mob and Cyric’s throne, his cloak billowing around him like a dark angel’s wings. When any of the denizens got too close, he swirled his cape over their grasping hands. The darkness that was his body swallowed the creatures’ limbs, devoured the hands and arms greedily, leaving only seared stumps behind.

  Furious at the violent confusion before him, Cyric lashed out. At a wave of his hand, a black globe appeared at the room’s center. Inky tentacles slipped from the orb, curled around the rioting creatures, and drew them screaming into the Abyss. Their shouts echoed from the globe as it shrank to a pinpoint of darkness, then vanished. For a moment, only the soft moans of the Burning Men could be heard in the hall.

  Cyric reached for Godsbane, but a momentary wave of dizziness overcame him. He dropped the sword and fell back against his gruesome throne. “Explain yourself, Godsbane,” the death god hissed as he pushed himself back to his feet. “Why wasn’t I told about the attack on the Keep?”

  The spirit of the sword may not be able to answer, Your Magnificence, Jergal murmured, his cold voice ringing through the death god’s mind. Someone has struck a killing blow against her. Perhaps the Whore used her sorcery to—

  “The pantheon planned this,” Cyric rumbled. “They crippled Godsbane so she couldn’t tell me the Keep was under siege.” Gently he lifted the blade from the floor and cradled it in his palms. The sword pulsed with a faint pink glow.

  My love, Godsbane whispered. I failed you.…

  “They’ve
not beaten us yet,” the Prince of Lies said. “Jergal, muster the denizens, unleash the hell hounds. We’ll drive the dragons and the giants from Zhentil Keep. I’ll lead the charge myself.”

  This realm needs your valor first, my liege, the seneschal replied. The denizens you just banished—

  “Yes, yes. Part of another petty uprising, no doubt,” Cyric scoffed. “I’ll deal with them after I’ve slaughtered the creatures storming my holy city. Now be quick about gathering up a suitable force, Jergal, or I’ll use your yellow blood to give Godsbane back a little life.”

  The denizens had no part in a revolt. They came here seeking your protection. Jergal bowed his head. This time the souls of the False and the Faithless rise up against you, Magnificence—and they are led by the dead men you imprisoned in the Gearsmith’s unholy armor.

  * * * * *

  The City of Strife was burning. Blankets of flame wrapped themselves around the weird, ten-story structures that dominated the city’s skyline. Thick clouds of soot wafted over the fields of rubble, blinding everything that came in contact with them. The River Slith bubbled and steamed in the furnace-hot air.

  Atop a huge pile of debris, Gwydion the Quick faced a dozen skeletons wielding razor-bladed pikes. The skulls of fifty of their kind, the broken shafts and twisted blades of an equal number of weapons, lay heaped before the undead soldiers, urging caution. Though he appeared too heavily armored to move quickly, the knight had proved time and again that his plate mail was far less encumbering than it might seem. And so the skeletons advanced slowly up the slanted mound of bricks and riven metal. Their prudence didn’t help them in the least.

  One skeleton, braver or more foolhardy than the rest, stabbed at Gwydion with its pike. The armored shade sheared the blade off the pole with a single stroke of Titanslayer, then lunged forward to shatter the soldier’s rib cage. The shattered bones tumbled back down the hill, clattering like stones rolling off a tin roof.