by Erin Evans
“Don’t be sullen, Phrenike, it doesn’t suit you,” Bryseis Kakistos said. “You are the one I came to, not Caisys.”
“And he’s the one you gave the staff to.”
She looked over at herself, at Alyona who she could just make out standing on the other side of her body. Blushing. A blushing ghost, Havilar thought. Nothing made sense here.
She watched as Brin slipped away, Zoonie and the imps following behind. She followed, unseen, just wanting to be near, wanting to know he was all right. She reached out to touch his shoulder, but her hand slipped through him, as if neither of them occupied the same space. Oh Brin, she said, even though no one heard. You sweet, sweet pothachi.
“What are we looking for?” the darker imp asked, flying up and down the shelves.
“I need a sending ritual,” Brin said. “And a simple scrying—a scroll if you can find it.”
The dark imp narrowed its eyes. “Do you know how to cast those?”
Brin smiled, as if it took all the effort in the world to not swat the imp. “Please find them.” The dark imp flew off along the shelves, but Mot remained behind, arms folded across his tiny chest.
“Is she all right?” Mot asked. “I mean, do you know?”
“What do you care?” Brin asked. “She’s not Chosen anymore.”
“Hey, I didn’t say I cared!” Mot said. “I just asked. I’ve got this new Chosen to worry about, in case you didn’t notice, and she got rid of that stupid bastard Olla, so we’ll get on just fine.” He glowered at Brin for a moment. “You don’t know, do you?”
“No,” Brin admitted. “And to be honest, I don’t know what it is your new mistress thinks I can find. But if she finds that out, at best she’ll throw me out into the snow, and Havilar’s got one fewer person trying to get her free.”
Mot snorted. “Oh, like you’d stop, you dumb mortal.” His stinger-laden tail flicked from side to side. “I’ll help you find out what it is.”
“What’s the price?” Brin asked, and Havilar felt terribly proud of him.
“This one’s free,” Mot said. “Let’s say it’s for her, not for you.” He glanced down the row of shelves to where Zoonie had lain down. The other imp hovered over her, arms folded.
“A hellhound oughtn’t be lying down,” he said. “They’re killers. Everyone knows that.”
“Blistering archlords. This one’s free, but maybe you can help me get a new partner down the line.” He flew off to search the shelves.
Havilar drifted nearer to Brin, close enough she could feel the memory of his warmth. She reached to touch his blond hair—maybe he could feel her stir the air beside him—
All at once, she felt herself snapped back to where Bryseis Kakistos and Alyona’s ghost stood. Her own eyes seemed to fix on her. “You need to go back,” Bryseis Kakistos said. “You’ll just upset yourself.”
Suddenly Havilar felt herself yanked away, back through that fold in the plane, and she was swathed in fog once more. Karshoj, Havilar spat. Fat lot of good that did.
He’s all right, Alyona pointed out. And so is your dog.
Maybe, she thought. And Brin had some sort of a plan—a sending and a scrying. And she knew now that Bryseis Kakistos was looking for a staff, and someone called Caisys who had it.
Who’s Caisys? Havilar demanded.
Alyona blushed all over again. A man we knew, once. He was an ally of Bisera’s, though she never did appreciate … He had the kindest manners. And he was terribly, terribly handsome.
A warlock?
Alyona’s smile wavered. “Yes. Among other things.”
Havilar cursed to herself again. The only person she knew that could give her a better answer about an ancient warlock was several hundred miles away, and sleeping like he’d never done it before.
2
27 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
Djerad Thymar, Tymanther
DEVILS DIDN’T DREAM—AT LEAST NOT SO FAR AS LORCAN KNEW. DREAMS were for conflicted hearts, for minds that didn’t follow a strong and singular path, for souls, and not for the emptiness that filled a devil of the Nine Hells. There was no reason for a devil to dream.
But a half-devil? Lorcan might have dreamed before, the stirrings of something riding along his sire’s bloodline—but never like this. He slept and woke and dreamed and it all blurred and blended into something strange and unreal. A cavern deep in the Underdark. The traitor Graz’zt and a sea of enthralled Zhentarim. The pradixikai stalking him. Farideh smoothing back his hair, leaning close, tucked beside him. Dahl Peredur’s fist striking the center of his chest, knocking something profound out of him along with every puff of air in his lungs.
Lorcan woke or maybe he still slept—how did one tell for certain? He saw the bone devil and Asmodeus and Shetai, the Vulgar Inquisitor, and his mother, Fallen Invadiah. He saw Farideh, standing in the lost library of the Netherese wizard, weeping for him. He saw her hungry and wild and tempting. He saw her standing grimly over him in a dark stone-walled room.
“I need you to wake up,” she said.
Lorcan blinked. Awake, then. He swallowed against a terrible taste in his mouth and winced. He left his eyes shut. “I don’t sleep, darling.”
“You made an exception, clearly.” The bed shifted as she sat down on its edge. “How are you feeling?”
His eyelids felt like lead weights, and every part of him ached. He couldn’t quite separate out the dreams from what had actually happened, and he had the most peculiar urge to turn over and sleep again, maybe pull her back in beside him. He forced himself to sit up instead, to look around the room—stone walls, a protection circle on the floor, a brazier by the wall. Djerad Thymar.
He’d come here after the battle, after …
The cave with the lake. He’d left Dahl in the Underdark.
He’d won.
“I’ve been better,” he said. “But then again, I’ve been worse.” He swallowed again—why did his mouth taste like that? He studied Farideh—she looked exhausted, emptied out, as if waking Lorcan were the very last thing she could manage on her own. Promising, he thought, even as an unreasonable twist of worry came with it.
“You don’t look all that well yourself,” he said. It occurred to him she might know what he’d done to Dahl—somehow—that this might be the source of her grim expression. And then something else came back to him.
I love you. I just don’t love you the way you want, because I am who I am, but I’m not myself now, am I? So what do you do with that?
Beshaba shit in my godsbedamned eyes, he thought. And whatever she knew or didn’t know about Dahl, it was certain she’d heard every word of that confession. He could remember her grief-stricken expression. He could remember the vague sensation of recognizing the words tumbling out of him, washing away every trace of the careful platform he’d built to keep their relative positions in check. He could remember at least a little tenderness in the way she’d helped him to bed, lain down beside him.
There was nothing tender in the way she looked at him now, but at least there was nothing murderous either.
“Are you all right, darling?” he made himself ask. His head felt as if it were buzzing.
“Havi’s gone,” she said flatly. “And Bryseis Kakistos ripped a piece of her soul out of me, which means I’m not the Chosen of Asmodeus anymore. I have to ask you questions about warlocks. So you have to wake up.”
Lorcan struggled to piece her words together. “Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“I mean—” Her voice broke and she pursed her mouth around it. Some part of Lorcan remembered this would be a good time to comfort her, to remind her he was here and he was needed. Another part urged the same, if only to stop her from crying. But instead he sat motionless as a rabbit in the field, as she swallowed her tears and started over, her gaze on her lap.
“Brysesis Kakistos was possessing your sister,” she said, her voice tight. “Apparently Havilar and I were supposed to be the v
essel for her rebirth, but maybe you knew that already. The spell went wrong and she was destroyed, because there were suddenly two of us, not one. But a piece of her stayed behind in each of us. That’s why we were Chosen—Asmodeus honoring his deal with her, nothing else. She tore the pieces out and she left Sairché’s body for Havilar’s.” Farideh looked up at him. “Then she took her.”
Shit and ashes, Lorcan thought. He shook his head slowly. “Darling, I didn’t know—”
“Your sister says that Bryseis Kakistos needs to find the most powerful heirs of the Toril Thirteen,” Farideh went on. “Which means she needs a Kakistos heir, and Havilar and I won’t do. So where are the others, please?”
Bad to worse—he’d rather discuss his godsbedamned feelings (or madness or whatever was making him incapable of keeping his mouth shut) than that. “What makes you think you don’t count?”
“She’s possessing Havilar,” Farideh said. “And … she gave me something else to do. I don’t think she’ll use me, and neither does Sairché.”
Lorcan frowned and eased nearer to her. “Sairché’s alive? Why would you leave her alive?”
“What matters,” Farideh said, “is that she needs another heir. And you said there were only five.”
“Eight years ago there were.”
“If we can collect the other three here, then we can make her come to us,” Farideh said. “Right now that’s the only way I can think of to get Havilar back here before Asmodeus notices that Bryseis Kakistos is running around Toril, plotting his demise in my sister’s body, and he decides to …” She bit her lip. Lorcan slipped an arm around her, but she pushed away. “Don’t. Please.”
His heart seemed to scale his throat. “Are you angry at me, darling?”
“You’re not yourself,” she said. “And I’m not … Just don’t, please. Tell me the heirs.”
Lorcan hesitated. “The five I know of: You. Havilar. Nasmos. Lachs the Yellow. Adastreia Tyrianicus.”
She nodded, eyes still on her lap. “Will they be hard to find? To track down?”
“No,” Lorcan said, a little reluctantly. “You are the only Brimstone Angels whom every collector devil in the Nine Hells cannot name on sight. It will be difficult to approach them, to convince them, surely. But I can tell you where each of them resides. Or resided, eight years ago.”
He waited for her inevitable, terrible question. When she didn’t speak, he said, “I have no notion of who my father is. Even still, I can tell you he is nothing good, nothing special, nothing that detracts from my life as I live it. He is a moment in my mother’s past—that’s all.”
Farideh looked up, and here was a shade of the tenderness that had been missing. “You don’t really believe that,” she said, more an accusation than a plea.
Lorcan shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I? More importantly, why shouldn’t you?”
She turned from him, considering the brazier, but when he edged nearer, she didn’t push him away. “Dahl told me once,” she said suddenly, “that his family’s lived on the same farm for two hundred years. Mehen can name his ancestors back to Abeir, back to before they were even calling themselves Verthisathurgiesh. Brin has a family tree—an actual, written out, illuminated tree with more names on it than I can remember.” She looked back to him. “So why should we believe that?”
“We’re different,” Lorcan said. “Everyone’s past is deep. Some of our pasts ought to be not just deep, but buried.”
“Maybe.” She fell silent, staring at the brazier. He thought about kissing her—she’d let him, he recalled, the night before. But as his hand reached for hers, she spoke. “What about the staff of Azuth?”
Lorcan pulled back as if burned. “What about it?”
“She needs that too. Where do you think it is?”
“I have no idea,” Lorcan said. “That’s the sort of thing I try not to know. Rumors abound—I’m sure Sairché repeated them for you. The bottom of a lava pit. The heart of Levistus’s glacier—”
“Bryseis Kakistos,” Farideh added. “Which makes no sense.”
Lorcan shrugged. “It might. Asmodeus excels at trusting others to the exact point that they fail, wherein he is nowhere to be found. No one can say he didn’t trust Bryseis Kakistos. To a point.”
“So he might have given her the staff, which means we lose another option.” She bit her lip. “But he stopped trusting her—she couldn’t have it now unless she had it somewhere even a god couldn’t reach it.”
“I suppose you can bring it up the next time you manage to sleep.”
Farideh sighed. “I’m not the Chosen of Asmodeus anymore. My nightmares are all my own now.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Lorcan said. “You do realize your plan here is essentially to rescue Asmodeus?”
“It’s to stop Bryseis Kakistos,” Farideh said firmly. “It’s to rescue Havilar before she gets too far and Asmodeus decides to do something to stop her. I don’t care what he gains or doesn’t gain, so long as Havilar is safe.”
Lorcan knew better than to argue with her at this juncture—much like Asmodeus, he’d be better off biding his time until it was clear what Farideh was going to do. But he couldn’t help himself: “You know, whatever it is you plan to do, you can’t pretend that Asmodeus won’t have an opinion about it, and the powers to back that opinion up?”
Farideh regarded him levelly. “Then that’s another excellent reason for you to get well again—no one else is going to be able to go into the Hells.”
Lorcan laughed. “I can’t go anywhere near there. I don’t know that I should leave this circle. I defied the pradixikai trying to save Sairché. I’m hardly a half step above an oathbreaker myself—if I set foot in Malbolge, my half sisters will be waiting to peel answers from my tongue.”
Farideh bit her lip. She pulled a dagger from her belt. “You could do the spell again. The one to share the protection.” She considered him sidelong. “They couldn’t hunt you then. Not in the quickest ways.”
Lorcan raised his eyebrows. Perhaps he hadn’t damned himself so neatly after all—whatever had happened down in the Underdark, whatever left him loose-tongued and sleeping of all things, clearly it had softened her some. With the protection spell around them both, he would be safe from scrying spells, but he would also have to stay close to her. The last time they’d only managed to make the spell stretch twenty steps, and that had been before they’d shared a bed. Lorcan felt sure he could work with such proximity. Gain a little ground back.
He yawned—assuming all this resolved itself. He reached for the knife.
She pulled it back. “Which of them are my parents?”
“Darling—”
“No. There are five. At least one of them had to be involved with Bryseis Kakistos when she tried to come back the last time,” Farideh said. “It stands to reason that she’d go after the ones who she knew she could trust.”
“Trust is … complicated.”
Farideh’s mismatched eyes fixed him, not willing to let it lie. “Those are the ones we gather up first. And if our birth parents are alive, I assume they’re among that group. Who are they?”
Lorcan wet his mouth. She wouldn’t like the answer. “I wasn’t there,” he said. “I can’t say for sure who your parents were …”
“But,” Farideh urged.
“But I have my suspicions,” Lorcan admitted. He took the knife from her and set it down on the bed. “If you want to go after Adastreia Tyrianicus, I have to clear the way first.”
Farideh nodded and sheathed the blade. “All right. You take care of that,” she said, standing, “and then we’ll do the ritual.”
• • •
KEPESHKMOLIK DUMUZI, SON of Uadjit, of the line of Shasphur, stood before the patriarch of his clan, a disappointment in every way. Patriarch Narghon’s eyes beneath their row of moon-chart piercings, never left him. Kepeshkmolik valued order, and there was little more opposed to order than the hatchling who called down a god—of all things!—i
n the middle of the Vanquisher’s Hall. The only other person in the audience chamber was Dumuzi’s mother, Uadjit, still wearing her shining black armor, spattered with the blood of a demon.
And the god in the form of a black-scaled dragonborn, who Dumuzi knew was there but could not see.
“Did you know,” Narghon intoned, “that was going to happen?”
Kepeshkmolik Dumuzi, new-made Chosen of Enlil, did not avoid his grandfather’s gaze. What was done was done, and he could no more run from it than he could from the god that seemed to haunt the edges of his vision. A storm is coming, Enlil had said in his dreams and later in his waking thoughts. And then the wizard, Ilstan, had burst into the chamber shouting about the planes, and Dumuzi had understood: the Blue Fire was coming again. Toril and Abeir would collide.
“I only knew the moment before I called out,” Dumuzi said. “I understood what the wizard meant, what the god had been trying to tell me. So I acted.”
“And so the city was saved,” Uadjit pointed out. “We owe this Enlil a little thanks at least.”
Narghon’s nostrils flared. “ ‘Thanks’—I’m sure that’s what he demands. He couldn’t have made the lightning wall without corrupting you? He couldn’t have saved the homesteads?”
Dumuzi’s chest tightened, and a wave of grief that wasn’t his chased it. The scattering of settlements over the countryside of Tymanther would have been in the path of the Blue Fire. How many survived, how many had been torn away, back to Abeir, the land of the steel sky and the dragon tyrants, was uncertain and might remain uncertain for some time yet. The nearest ones were gone, that much had been established by the score of bat riders who were still alive and in contact with Djerad Thymar’s Lance Defenders.
“We don’t know the full extent of the damage,” Uadjit said smoothly. “Better to wait for all the information before we make rash decisions.”
Narghon snapped his teeth. “You are too old for impertinence, child.”
“Your forgiveness, elder, but we’re both too old for make-believe,” Uadjit said. “The Vanquisher is dead, the Lance Defenders’ command is badly injured, an enemy with an army and the power to send a demon as forward scout sits perilously close to Djerad Kethendi, uncounted homesteads are lost, but thirty thousand Vayemniri are saved—I would think at this point it’s apparent we wait for information to stop rolling in before we move too quickly and dive into the tyrant’s claws.”