The Devil You Know

by Erin Evans

  “Where are you going?” Mehen demanded.

  Show me? “I have to go,” Dumuzi said again, setting eyes on the stairs that led down to the market.

  Halfway down the stairs, he ran into Namshita, and three others—Utu, Amurri, and a woman he hadn’t yet met. The gods on the field of battle bled through his thoughts, as though the Untherans marched up out of that war.

  “Good morning,” Namshita said in Common, with a stiff manner that said she was refusing to look around her, refusing to acknowledge the sidelong stares or whispers. “This is Kirgal,” she said, gesturing toward the woman. “You remember Utu and Amurri.”

  Utu—the god’s voice, the name of the dead god echoed around her voice. The mortal Utu nodded at Dumuzi, no sign of the distrust he’d shown before. Dumuzi hoped Namshita had talked to him. Mehen came to stand beside Dumuzi. Voices raised in alarm in the market beyond. “Karshoj, you four, watch where you’re swinging that ballista!”

  Show me?

  “Good morning,” Dumuzi said, in Untheric, with the slight but proper bow they favored. The languages all jostled around in his head for primacy. “You have to excuse me, I need to see to something urgently.”

  Namshita’s expression tightened. “I see.”

  Karshoj—stopped himself. “Unless of course you wish to see the catacombs first?”

  “The catacombs?”

  “Of course,” Dumuzi said, remembering too late that maunthreki found the catacombs unsettling—or at least Havilar had. Panic for the missing tiefling clutched briefly at his throat, as if it were trying to make up for all the worrying he hadn’t done, and his gaze darted back to Mehen. The older man gave Dumuzi a dark look that said there was no way at all he was going to leave Dumuzi alone with Namshita and the Untherans. Especially not down in the catacombs.

  Show me?

  “I’d like to see it,” Utu said.

  “It is a part of our city and our past,” Dumuzi said quickly, quoting a rather pompous uncle. “To leave it out would be to ignore our history. If you follow me?”

  He walked quickly through the crowded market toward the catacombs entrance—he could show them this part later, once he’d found the tomb in the very deepest parts of the pyramid, once he’d quieted Enlil’s panicked voice. It wouldn’t take long, he told himself, as he came to the bottom of the first set of stairs. It wouldn’t—

  He stopped. They’d entered Shestandeliath’s section of the catacombs, and here where the corridor bent was the room in which Shestandeliath Ravar had fallen to the maurezhi. Dumuzi’s stomach clenched at the memory—the wizard’s last twitching movements, the smell of blood and ash and lightning—and wondered when it would stop doing that.

  Mehen caught up to him. “What’s going on?” He peered down at Dumuzi in the dim light. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I said I’d show them the city. Because they might live here—they ought to live here. They took our place in the other world. They could be allies. Enlil belongs to them as much as to us. Maybe more. I don’t know. But I know I have to do it before word gets back to Narghon, and now he needs to see something, and it’s down in the catacombs, and you all don’t like the catacombs, but he keeps asking—”

  Mehen grabbed hold of his arm. “Take a breath. What does Enlil want to see?”

  “A dead god,” Dumuzi said. “Nanna-Sin, the warrior of Thymara’s Black Axe.” Dumuzi glanced back at Utu, who had a vague sort of smile on his face as they approached. That one is dangerous.

  “The warrior of the moon is a dead god?” Mehen whispered.

  “I think so,” Dumuzi said. “I’m going to find out.”

  Namshita came to a stop beside him. “All of this,” she asked, “for your dead.” She turned to the wall where hundreds of names had been etched. “What does it say?”

  “The Roll of the Lost,” Dumuzi said. “The names of those who were not brought to this world in the Blue Fire, whose bones we couldn’t bury.” He stood quiet beside her a moment. “You said before you were slaves in the other world. Was it the dragons as well?”

  She shook her head. “Humans. The Mulhorandi were our enemies in this world, and in that world they quickly made themselves the favorites of the genasi. So we became the slaves of slaves, until the Son of Victory rose up.”

  Enlil pressed upon Dumuzi, images of another time, grief for another Roll of the Lost. “You were slaves before too,” he said, parsing out the images that flooded his mind, repeating his dreams. “Pulled from another world by powerful wizards, cut off from your gods. They helped you rise up then.”

  “And this time we did it on our own,” Namshita said in a way that closed off any further discussion.

  They were more alike—Vayemniri and Untheran—than either realized. If only Dumuzi could make the elders understand, could quash rumors of secret alliances with the Son of Victory. They wound deeper and deeper down into the catacombs, and with every level, Dumuzi’s gut knotted more tightly around the fear that he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be showing them these things. He pointed out clan names, well-known ancestors, the art that depicted those come before. When Namshita paused to consider a frieze of four warriors attacking a strange creature Dumuzi had no name at all for—something sinuous and leggy and spitting green fluids—Mehen murmured to him, “Does your mother or your patriarch know you’re doing this?”

  “No,” Dumuzi said. “And neither does Arjhani, come to that.” He looked up at Mehen. “I know already, they wouldn’t approve.”

  Mehen’s nostrils flared. “Be that as it may, they cannot say you don’t observe the ways of omin’iejirsjighen. A host to would-be allies, and all of that. Point that out. Just don’t be a fool and give your guests a tour of the barracks.”

  “Just because I talk to a god in my head doesn’t mean I’ve become a madman,” Dumuzi said irritably. But to his surprise, Mehen laughed, startling the Untherans—all except Utu, who studied the strange creatures of Abeir carved into the walls.

  Down, down, down—the same path that had led them to Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani, imprisoned by the maurezhi in the very deepest part of the catacombs.

  “These are newer?” Kirgal asked, tracing a finger along the wall. “Or older?”

  “Older,” Dumuzi said. He glanced back at her. “We dug to make space for every generation.”

  “Do you worry you’ll fill them all?” Utu asked.

  “Utu,” Namshita snapped. She turned back to Dumuzi. “Continue your … tour, please,” she said.

  Dumuzi turned back to the path, tapping the roof of his mouth as he walked. He didn’t point anything else out, until they reached the door he was looking for.

  The resting place of the Warrior of the Moon lay in the very oldest, deepest part of the catacombs. Flaking red and blue paint decorated the tomb door, an old style that later generations had covered over in other cases. The shape of a crescent moon spanned the width of the doorway. Beneath it, the epitaph that echoed in Dumuzi’s dream: Here lies a great warrior of this world. Claimed as clan-kin by Kepeshkmolik and all the Vayemniri of Djerad Thymar, now and forevermore under our protection.

  “What does it say?” Namshita asked. “Who lies here?”

  Dumuzi laid a scaly hand against the tomb door, feeling the faint buzz of far-off lightning in the air. How many Vayemniri had come down to this place? How many had read the epitaph and thought of the warrior? How many times had the story of Thymara and the Gift of the Moon been repeated? A pulse, as if the door were living, thudded through his palm. A kind of worship, he thought. Maybe enough.

  “Is he still alive?” Dumuzi whispered.

  No, Enlil said, sounding intrigued. But neither is he entirely gone.

  “A hero,” Mehen supplied, answering Namshita’s hanging question. “Among those who died in the passage from Abeir to Toril.” Dumuzi looked back, the truth between his teeth—the image of the battle that killed Nanna-Sin burned into his thoughts. It did none of them any good, any h
onor, to diminish him—especially if the tomb had somehow kept him alive.

  Mehen’s gaze wasn’t on Namshita, but on Utu, who was studying the inscription with interest. “We should go back up,” Dumuzi said. “See the rest of the city—the living parts.”

  The Untherans said little as they wound their way up to the market floor. Enlil too kept his thoughts to himself, and between the two silences, an anxious electricity built in Dumuzi’s gut. What did it mean that Nanna-Sin wasn’t “entirely gone”? What did it mean that Namshita said nothing? Where did Utu learn to read Draconic, and should that worry him?

  “Breathe,” Mehen reminded him in low tones.

  “I’ve ruined this,” Dumuzi whispered back. “I should have waited for Uadjit.”

  “You haven’t ruined anything,” Mehen said dismissively. “If a boring tour of the catacombs was going to undercut your mother’s diplomatic gestures, then they were never going to succeed.”

  Dumuzi showed them the market floor, the dwellings that filled the lower walls—avoiding the signs of impending war. He explained the light that poured down the middle of the pyramid and brought the Untherans to his cousin Yehenna’s teahouse, the Horn of Shasphur. Near the middle of explaining the story of Shasphur and the Elders of Raurokh, Uadjit hurried up to their tables. Dumuzi could smell the chill of frost coming off her, and stood reflexively, even as she slowed and greeted his guests with all possible decorum.

  “Would you excuse us for a moment?” she asked, gesturing sharply to Dumuzi and Mehen. When they were out of earshot, she whispered, “Where have you been? We have two very big problems.”

  Mehen’s nostrils flared. “Karshoj. Kallan ran.”

  “I could fix that. Shestandeliath Mazarka has brought her tale of secret Gilgeam worshipers to Arjhani’s ear last night. Now he’s talking up the danger of the Untheran refugees to anyone who will listen, and hammering Fenkenkabradon’s skill defeating the ash giants.”

  “But he can’t win,” Dumuzi said. “They’ll elect Kallan, surely.”

  Uadjit’s dark eyes stayed on Mehen. “My father has withdrawn my nomination. He’s already nominated Mehen in my place, and as you can guess, that’s thrown a great number of votes into the wind.”

  Dumuzi glanced up at Mehen, expecting the other man to sneer and rage and spit lightning. But instead Mehen looked like a man who’d just been given a solution, and the expression chilled Dumuzi down to his core.

  • • •

  THE GIANTS LEFT them to walk once the encampment came into site, the snowy peaks of the Smoking Mountains looming over the Thousand-Dreaming Stone Giants, making them seem small and manageable. Beside Dahl, Farideh stopped as she saw the mountains. Home, Dahl thought. The home that wouldn’t welcome her back. He wanted to tell her it didn’t matter, that whatever her former neighbors said, it didn’t change the truth. That she had homes enough that knew her worth. That he loved her and that she’d saved him down in the Underdark.

  But he could say none of it.

  He couldn’t say why she shouldn’t trust Lorcan, and he couldn’t say he was worried at the distant, flat way she stared at the campfire, at the way she didn’t seem to want to go to sleep. He couldn’t say he thought that bringing Ilstan was a terrible idea—or that bringing Lorcan was worse, or that bringing Adastreia made no sense to him at all.

  “This,” Bodhar said, riding up alongside Dahl and blocking his view of Farideh, “is far wilder than being a secretary. I’m just saying.” He shot an uneasy glance Lorcan’s way. The cambion rode undisguised but for a heavy cloak against the cold, incapable of using those powers. “That devil fellow giving you any trouble?” Bodhar asked.

  “Once again,” Dahl said, trying not to let his irritation show. “Not right now.”

  “Curse works like a flipped copper, heads or tails, I know,” Bodhar said. So long as Lorcan was weakened like this, the unearthly rage that Graz’zt’s gift filled Dahl with only simmered along the edges of his natural temper.

  I still want to punch him, Dahl had written out, not caring that it made Farideh’s mouth tighten. If she knew, if he could just tell her what Lorcan had done …

  “You don’t have to be friends,” she said. “But I can’t leave him—I literally cannot walk more than twenty-six steps from him—and unless you learned to make portals in the Underdark, he’s got a use.”

  Maybe I should stay.

  Farideh fell silent. “If that’s what you want,” she’d said. “But I need you too.”

  And Dahl’s temper shattered. You can’t abandon her again, he thought.

  And you shouldn’t, a dark part of him murmured. Even if Graz’zt’s “blessing” had stripped out Lorcan’s more impressive powers, it left him more vulnerable, less silver-tongued. More trustworthy, it seemed, in Farideh’s eyes. More than once, Dahl had caught her regarding Lorcan with blank concern, and the darkness curled around his heart saw only the path that led from there to something warmer.

  “Your dove there is nice enough,” Bodhar said. “I mean, she’s a mite …” He trailed off as if searching for the right word. The word that wasn’t going to get him socked in the mouth again. “Well, distracted maybe, isn’t she?”

  “She has a lot on her mind,” Dahl said. What exactly he’d imagined this homecoming to be like, he hadn’t expected to find her in worse straits than he’d left her in. Maybe he should have.

  “Didn’t expect the other fella to be a devil.”

  “He’s not ‘the other fellow.’ ”

  Bodhar gave him a skeptical look, his horse pulling ahead. “So you say.”

  Not for the first time, Dahl found himself wishing he’d been able to leave Thost and Bodhar behind. But without them, who would speak to Farideh for him? He wasn’t such a fool as to let it be Lorcan. Gods only knew whether Ilstan could manage. He had no trust at all in Adastreia, and while he’d expected to have to mend fences with Mehen to get the dragonborn’s aid, Farideh’s father wasn’t with them.

  Before they’d left, Mehen had returned, distant and battle-shocked. He didn’t argue with Farideh about her intentions, he gave vague reasons for not coming along, about politics and clan. Something had happened, something that gave him another path—one he didn’t want Farideh to know about. Dahl would have laid all his coin on it.

  It had shaken Farideh.

  But here at least, Ilstan had proven useful. He’d come out of his rooms bearing two stones etched with runes, handing Mehen one, and Farideh the other. “You can make a sending,” he explained. “Once a day, only to the other person holding the stone. But hopefully it should ease the distance.”

  Dahl thought of the stiff, distant words Farideh had spoken to the stone the night before, the awkward reply. Gods books, Mehen, he thought. You better have a good reason.

  The giant nearest him, a male called Jaari, lifted a strange stone rattle. He snapped it three times, smacking the smooth rock at the head with a smaller hammer. A pealing like a great muffled bell rang out loud enough for the stone giants at the edge of the camp to straighten and take notice. Dahl dismounted along with the others, taking the reins of the enormous chestnut beast Verthisathurgiesh had given him. Farideh looked back from beside her bay, the freezing wind catching the fur-lined cloak she wore, and her expression dimmed.

  “A pity, paladin,” came a voice from behind him. Dahl’s fists balled at Lorcan’s words, his pulse picking up. “Not a shadow of privacy to be had. Of course, I don’t suppose you want a translator in the bedroom.”

  He could hear the loss of something vital, something otherworldly in Lorcan’s voice, but still the curse Graz’zt had buried in him itched to tear his silver tongue right out. “We’ll manage.”

  “Oh, for a time,” Lorcan said. “But how long will this suffice? You made the deal, you knew what it meant, and yet here you are, tormenting yourself and her. The longer you drag this out, the more it hurts her, and then what happens when you slip?”

  Dahl looked back at him. “If I slip, t
hat means I’ll be free to tell her every word of the deal.”

  “It means,” Lorcan said, “that I have your soul and I have no reason to keep you alive. Think it through.”

  “You promised her you wouldn’t harm me. Or don’t you keep your word?”

  Lorcan smiled then, and something terrible glittered in his eyes. “Mind your own path, Dahl. You’ve enough stones under your feet to worry about.”

  “Lorcan!” Farideh shouted. “Leave him be!”

  “She knows you’re a miserable bastard,” Dahl said.

  “Does she?” Lorcan tossed back as led his horse past. “I guess she doesn’t mind the company of a miserable bastard then.”

  She’s keeping him from picking at you, Dahl told himself, as he watched Lorcan meet Farideh. She’s trying to keep the peace.

  A cambion against the full might of Asmodeus. The memory of Graz’zt’s taunts uncoiled in his thoughts. For a clever boy, you’re easily duped.

  Adastreia came up beside him, watching Lorcan as well. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that cambion had everything to do with your terrible, terrible deal.”

  Dahl bristled. “I can’t talk about it.”

  She laughed, and the ghost of Farideh’s laugh hid in that sound. “Of course you can’t,” she said. “Word of advice? Don’t kill him. Unless you’re prepared to deal with his inevitable successor.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, dear boy, Brimstone Angels don’t go unpacted. That she has a fairly shiftless cambion for a pactmaster is a blessing on her head, and probably yours—even if his armor is … distractingly snug.” She smirked. “But the next one might be wilier or wickeder. The next one might know more ways around its promises. The next one might happily kill you to keep her head clear, and could easily make you pine for the days of Lorcan.” She patted his shoulder. “Trust me.”

  It was a disquieting thought. If she kept her pact with Lorcan, a shadow would always hang over them, and however Dahl was sure of her, it would chip away at his confidence little by little. If she broke it for him, if she put herself in greater peril—