by Erin Evans
Darkness flooded Bisera’s vision, a torrent of magic poured across her senses. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe, and then the flames chased the darkness, and she was breathing too much, the air cold despite the fire that consumed her from the inside out. The erinyes’s red eyes danced.
In a moment, it was over and a second pulse seemed to throb in Bisera’s veins. She pressed a hand to her chest, stumbling back a step, remembering at the last moment to move carefully, lest she smear the circle and let the devil out.
“How’s it taste?” the erinyes asked. Bisera straightened carefully, examining her hands. They felt as if they were burning, as if a stream of virulent flames ran down her wrists, down her spine, and deep into the ground.
“You tap into it,” the erinyes said. “Say adaestuo. That should trigger something interesting.”
Bisera pointed both hands toward the ruins. “Adaestuo.” A sphere of magic, the deep color of a bruise, sizzled into being before her hands and rushed across the gap, splashing into the stones and sending shards of rock scattering into the forest. “Not bad,” she said, flexing her hands.
The erinyes smiled at her. “So we’ll have more to discuss. Now: What’s the circle’s condition?”
Bisera matched that wicked grin. “Tell me your name.”
The erinyes tilted her head. “What if I’d told you that when you asked the first time? I’d be gone in a flash, and you’d have nothing to show for it.”
“Then I’d know how to find you,” Bisera pointed out. “Names have power, remember.”
That, at least, seemed to impress the erinyes a little. “Shetai,” she said, and a column of light streaked up from the circle of runes, carrying her and Bisera’s offer back to the Nine Hells.
Bisera blew out a tense breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. A far cry better than Titus’s succubus. Maybe it would come to nothing, but here, perhaps, were the beginnings of the kind of power that could keep her safe—keep Alyona safe—and make them comfortable for once besides.
Alyona—she’d be worried back at the camp. It had been long enough that whatever anger she’d built at her twin would surely have dissipated. Bisera scuffed the runes back into the dirt, dusted herself and her book off, and headed back.
The sun was just rising over the hills beyond. Caisys sat at the fire’s edge, drinking from a mug. Bisera imagined how she must look—flushed and puffy-eyed and excited. He raised an eyebrow.
“There you are,” he said. “I was about to go searching.”
“I’ve been busy,” she said, feeling not a little triumphant. She’d call the devil back that night, and see if the seeds of her plan had born fruit. It was closer than she’d come so far. “Is Alyona up yet?”
Caisys gave her a curious look. “Alyona left. Last night. No one could convince her to stay.”
All Bisera’s triumph evaporated. “Did … Did she say why?”
He shook his head. “She said this wasn’t the life for her. Said you hadn’t decided if you were staying behind or following her. But to tell you she loves you and she knows you’ll make the right choice.”
Bisera balled her hands into fists. The right choice—which was Alyona’s choice, Selûne’s choice. “She went back to Darmshall?”
Caisys nodded. “You can catch up to her, surely. Maybe convince her to come back.”
Alyona likely thought the same—she’d head for Delthuntle and the port and wait, and Bisera would be along a day behind at most, all apologies and changed heart. But if returning to Darmshall was the answer, Bisera would rather have the problem.
“I think this time,” Bisera said, sitting down beside the fire to pick pebbles from beneath her hooves, “I’ll let Alyona catch up to me.”
• • •
7
30 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
Fifth of the fingerbone towers, Malbolge
The Nine Hells
ONCE MORE, AS LORCAN STEPPED INTO THE NINE HELLS, HE FOUND himself overtaken by an animalistic panic that nearly forced him to his knees. This time the room at the top of the fingerbone tower was empty, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, trying to quell the shaking. It will pass, he told himself. It will pass.
It might, but Lorcan could no longer wait for whatever Graz’zt and Dahl had done to him to pass. What had happened with Kulaga couldn’t be allowed to be repeated. Even if some part of him weighed the dangers of other devils finding out he was impaired, against Farideh’s hand stroking his.
One of these is going to kill you, he told himself. The other is not worth that.
He unlocked the sinew-bound door to the room at the top of the fingerbone tower. An erinyes was on the other side. Lorcan shouted and leaped back a step, trying and failing to pull fire into his hands.
Neferis sneered at him. “You’re in trouble.”
“How so this time?” Lorcan straightened, as if he could shrug off the pounding fear. “Did Zela come back?”
“The archduchess was looking for you.”
Lorcan’s pulse squeezed around his breath. “What did you tell her?”
“The truth,” Neferis said, giving him a puzzled look. “I told her you were on Toril. That you bolted there after the pradixikai tangled with Graz’zt and lost Sairché on ‘warlock business.’ She isn’t happy.”
“How shocking,” Lorcan fought to keep his voice flat.
“There’s more,” she said. “Everybody knows Zela and the others are gone—or at least that Her Highness counts them lost. They want you to name a new leader and advance four more to fill the ranks of the pradixikai.”
“They want to kill me and they want me to tell them what to do. Wonderful.”
“You still control Mother’s holdings,” Neferis said. “Which means you’re still master of the pradixikai whether we like it or not. As much as some of us would like to kill you and claim the oathbreaker curse, everyone wants to know who’s in charge. So?”
“So, what?”
“Who replaces Zela?”
Once, Lorcan might have relished this power over his terrible, violent half sisters. But only one thing mattered now, and that was undoing whatever curse had been placed on him. “I’ll think about it. Anything else?”
“Shetai sent a couple of its own erinyes to collect you,” Neferis pointed out. “They’re camped just past a bowshot from here. Said you are testing the Vulgar Inquisitor’s patience. Said it knows about Kulaga. Said you’d best come now.”
“Beshaba shit in my godsbedamned eyes,” Lorcan hissed.
Neferis shifted on her hooved feet. “You ought to name a leader before you go. Or at least a successor.”
At least it meant a brief reprieve from Glasya, he told himself as he walked, surrounded by erinyes, to the caverns Shetai held deep in Malbolge. He should have considered the paelyrion would hear about his meeting with Kulaga. He should have prepared. He should have stayed on godsbedamned Toril and waited.
Instead he found himself walking into Shetai’s cavern, trying not to vomit with nerves he had no business having.
The paelyrion loomed over Lorcan, a mountain of flesh bound in leather armor, its mouth a lurid slash of magenta, punctuated by razor teeth. For once, the Vulgar Inquisitor did not smile at Lorcan, as though it knew something amusing were coming along to destroy the cambion. It looked at him as though it might devour him itself.
“Is this about godsbedamned warlocks?” Shetai demanded. “Has this all been about a shitting collection?”
Lorcan blew out a careful breath. “I don’t want your Brimstone Angel.”
“That’s not what Kulaga says. And Incus”—the paelyrion leaned closer, its fetid breath a hot wind through Lorcan’s hair—“Incus told Kulaga that someone murdered her heir, right in the middle of his …” Shetai broke off, searching Lorcan’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”
Lorcan swallowed. “Perhaps I’m overcome by Incus’s loss—”
“Shut up,” Shetai sai
d. It tilted its great head like a moon turning on an off-kilter axis. “Kulaga said you were a fool. But beyond what he expected—there’s a reason, isn’t there? What is it? Has Asmodeus’s rumored madness seeped into you?”
Lorcan willed a lie to his lips—but what would make sense? If Shetai could spot this change in him, what could he possibly excuse it with that wouldn’t let the paelyrion take advantage? A curse? A curse that he would pass on if killed, not cured? An illness that might spread?
The sudden hum of hellwasps nearly stopped his heart dead in his chest and every thought in his head. Shetai’s expression froze.
“You tangled with the Dark Prince,” a mellifluous voice said. “I’d know that curse anywhere.”
Lorcan dropped to his knees to the sound of Shetai lowering its enormous body into a bow. The archduchess Glasya’s coppery feet paced around the cambion, between him and the paelyrion. All around, the hellwasps buzzed, too numerous to count.
Lorcan’s breath started to outpace him, so he caught it, held it tight until he grew dizzy. Shit and ashes, he thought. Shit and ashes.
“I will grant,” she said, “that your attempts to thwart Graz’zt were most admirable, considering your station. Admirable but foolish—you are not a resource to waste, Lorcan. Not with my lord father so … invested in you. I am likewise displeased to find myself short Sairché, Invadiah, and ten of my erinyes.” Her terrible, beautiful voice built and built, like the roar of a flooding river. “And now I find you here, not in my presence, and it sounds an awful lot like you’re wasting my godsbedamned time, Lorcan!” She yanked his head up, her eyes blazing like comets, her teeth bared and sharp.
“Forgive me, Your Highness,” Lorcan managed.
“I don’t want your apologies,” Glasya said. “I want answers. Where is your sister?”
Lorcan pursed his lips around the lie he already knew he had to tell. This time, it came more easily. “Dead.”
“By the pradixikai?”
“By Bryseis Kakistos.”
All the air seemed to go out of the cavern at once. Glasya stopped her pacing and came right up to Lorcan. “I beg your pardon?”
He did not dare look at Shetai. “It is where I have been, Your Highness: the ghost of the Brimstone Angel has returned. She possessed Sairché and killed Invadiah—not realizing Invadiah’s true strength and getting marked by the oathbreaker dagger for her crimes. She fled to Toril, to make a deal with the Dark Prince Graz’zt.”
“A deal for what?” Glasya demanded.
Lorcan thought of the true answer: the spell to divide the fragments of her soul from Farideh and Havilar. “To dethrone His Majesty, I believe. By the time I got there, she had already made the agreement.”
“And you were bound to protect your sister.”
“My sister,” Lorcan agreed. “But not Bryseis Kakistos. Between the erinyes and the … misdirected attacks of the demon lord’s allies, she succumbed to her wounds.”
Glasya narrowed her eyes. “Where is the Brimstone Angel now?”
Not a question Lorcan wanted to answer—it was no secret at all that Glasya craved her father’s crown. She would cheerfully find a way to ally with the Brimstone Angel if it meant Asmodeus’s downfall and her own ascension. Which could only lead to Lorcan’s death, by one archdevil’s hand or another.
So he only shook his head. “I don’t know. I discovered the ghost sought out my warlock, her descendant. I’ve since found out that another of the heirs, a warlock called Nasmos, once held by Incus of the Second Layer, was murdered quite suspiciously.”
“I told him that, Your Highness,” Shetai said. “What about Adastreia? What about Kulaga’s heir?”
Lorcan nodded solemnly. “She’s spoken with the Brimstone Angel as well.”
Glasya turned to Shetai. “You have a pact with one of the Kakistos heirs. What of that one?”
Shetai frowned. “That is what Lorcan came to ask. I shall have to seek Lachs out.”
This did not satisfy the archduchess. “What does she plan?”
Lorcan shook his head again. “We are still unraveling that, Highness. But my warlock is fearful for her sister’s sake. She’s very motivated to uncover Bryseis Kakistos’s plans before the ghost realizes there is an unclaimed heir.”
“An unclaimed heir!” Shetai burst out.
The buzzing of the hellwasps rose in pitch. Glasya turned her dark gaze on the paelyrion. “We are not talking of warlocks, Shetai. We’re discussing the collusion of great traitors.” She faced Lorcan. “What of Graz’zt?”
“To my knowledge, he remains on Toril,” Lorcan said. “Separated from the Abyss and the greater part of his forces.”
“But he had enough to curse you.” She tilted her head. “Poor little cambion. He’s stripped everything devilish right out of you. You’re just a human in a devil’s skin right now.”
A shudder ran through Lorcan—the sleeping, the fear, the sweating, the lies, and the godsbedamned feelings. The pact magic he couldn’t channel. Graz’zt had made him human. No—Dahl had made him human. What an irony.
“Please, Your Highness,” Lorcan said. “If that’s it, surely you can repair it.”
Glasya’s piercing eyes fixed upon him. The nine-tailed scourge whipped across his chest, breaking the skin even through his leather armor. But that pain was nothing compared to the sudden, shocking blow of magic that came with it. As if his body had fallen from a great height, flat into a pool of lava. He might have screamed—there was no being sure in that moment as something essential and fearful intruded onto himself again.
He drew a great gasping breath and the cavern returned, Shetai returned, the Nine Hells all returned to his awareness. Glasya was gone, but so was the frantic fear he’d had to fight so hard to master and the fatigue he couldn’t quite sweep from his bones.
“How very interesting,” Shetai said. “How much of that was true?”
“More than was not,” Lorcan said. “I wouldn’t guess if I were you.”
“The Brimstone Angel is certainly not gone,” Shetai said. “She was always wilier and luckier than anyone gave her credit for. Kulaga says you kidnapped Adastreia.”
“It would be wise,” Lorcan said carefully, “for all the Kakistos heirs to be somewhere safe. Somewhere safe and … easily controlled.”
Shetai raised one ink-line eyebrow. “Like a trap.”
“One might make the comparison.”
The paelyrion said nothing for several moments. “Whose side are you on, Lorcan?”
“My own,” Lorcan said. “Same as anyone. My heir is going to insist on speaking to Lachs. Will you provide him, or is she going to take matters into her own hands?”
“And the unclaimed heir?”
“Truth, but I wouldn’t try for her. Not at the moment.”
Shetai shifted like an avalanche. “Is she really Adastreia’s daughter?”
“I don’t know,” Lorcan said testily. “I wasn’t there. Lachs?”
Again, Shetai fell silent. “I will speak with him,” it said finally.
Returning again to the fingerbone towers, Lorcan felt far hardier, far more at ease than he had leaving them. Still, as he reached the room at the tip, he thought of Farideh’s hand on his, the moment of hesitation when he’d asked her to bed. It wouldn’t be hard to mimic that weakness, he thought. Surely. He could convince her that he was still no longer devilish.
The lies he’d told Glasya stirred up his thoughts. They weren’t enormous lies, but they were greater and more easily told than anything he’d ever managed before. Being human—or mostly human, at any rate—might have meant a great deal of weakness … but it had been much more free as well. He could have walked away from the hierarchy and not felt unmoored, if he’d stayed like that. He could have lied about anything he wished, or been baldly honest and damn the consequences.
He could tell Farideh he loved her and it might even have been true.
A curse befitting fickle Graz’zt, Lorcan thought. It inju
red him and, for all appearances, benefited Dahl. But by making Lorcan act more human, by taking away the devilish things that tended to get in the way of Farideh’s fond feelings—the tendencies that had saved them both but led her to throw Lorcan over when he’d infected her so as to keep her out of harm’s way the one time—well … Graz’zt had made things all the more complicated. After all, if Lorcan wasn’t a devil, then what could Farideh hold against him? What could Dahl possibly offer that she didn’t already have in Lorcan?
Lorcan stopped before the scrying mirror. What is it she has that you want so badly? he thought. What is it you even want anymore?
But before he could even begin to think of an answer, a presence filled the room, turning the air hot and electric. Lorcan’s knees buckled under him and he slammed down on the ground prostrate and blind. Even returned to its normal state, his heart threatened to burst—
And then … the pressure lifted. Not entirely, enough for Lorcan to lift his head a few inches from the bone-tiled floor, to glimpse the edge of a brocade robe through one blurry eye.
So, said a voice that shouldn’t have been in the mouth of the king of the Hells. This is the path you choose? Or this is the path they choose for you?… I know … I’m sure I said it before—you will determine which of them succeeds … which of us dies … You think your path is made, cambion, but there is no such thing, not when one carries a soul within them … you could choose … you could be free … In that, a soul is a surety …
Lorcan lay still, listening to his breath rush against the tile floor, afraid to do anything more. He shut his eyes tight and waited for Asmodeus to speak, to see if the god of sin had heard the Lord of Spells speaking through him. To see what fate Azuth’s notice had decided for Lorcan.
Stay by her side … You know how to make certain … You might even know how to be certain …
One heartbeat Lorcan lay pressed to the floor, the next, the god—or gods—were gone. He stood, carefully, cautiously, but no one else was in the room with him. He shuddered.