“What weapons?”
“We’ll have to see,” Zahnya said. “What I hear is there is unconfirmed.” She looked up the mountain path. “We shall have to see,” she said again. “Take your time, by the way. I doubt you’re the sort of man who needs to be told how long to piss.” She climbed the slope back up to where the palanquin waited.
Mehen tapped the roof of his mouth again, trying to decide what to do next—confront the Harpers, or keep the secret for himself? He froze, the taste of some other human laying on his tongue between the ferns and the moss and the flavor of humus. The nurse log, he thought, turning toward the fern-covered mound of dead tree.
“Which of you is back there?” Mehen said.
Khochen eased around the fallen tree, an impish grin on her face. “I should have guessed you’d be so calm,” she said. “Daranna’s doubts are wearing off on me, I’m afraid.” Her eyes flicked over him. “Are you upset?”
“Not yet,” Mehen said plainly. “Don’t you karshoji cut me out when we get there. I find her, I’ll bring her to you. You find her, you find me and I don’t leave her side. Understand?”
“Fair enough.” Khochen eyed him. “You don’t have a problem with the fact she might be a traitor?”
“She’s my daughter,” Mehen said. “And she can’t betray that.”
“Not even by dealing with devils?”
“Not even by dealing with gods,” Mehen said. “Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Then you have no idea what it would take for me to leave her—you cannot imagine. Don’t ask me to, and I won’t show you why those orphans of the Platinum Dragon want my training.” He rolled his shoulders, as if he could shake the tension from them. His girls might have left him, but he would never leave them. Never.
No word from Dahl. No word from Brin since they’d reached Noanar’s Hold—and broken planes, he was not happy about the boy taking Havilar through a portal as finicky as that one. But they were both safe at least.
“Well,” Khochen said, “we’ll have to see what happens. Incidentally, thank you for keeping her attention. It gave me a chance to peer into her inner sanctum, as it were.” She stood on tiptoe and whispered, “She has a case hidden in there.”
“Probably her wand’s.”
Khochen smiled and shook her head. “Too big for that. Too ornate. A scepter or a rod, I would say. Marked all over with very interesting runes. Nar, by their look.”
Despite himself Mehen was curious. “Can you read them?”
“Not well,” Khochen said. “The crafter seemed enamored of cinnabar and gold. If I had to make a guess, I’d say it makes fire. People are seldom imaginative,” she added, “when it comes to gems.”
Mehen snorted. “Well that’s her business, then.”
“I don’t think so,” Khochen said. “She hasn’t touched it. Hasn’t unlocked it, so far as I can see. I don’t think it’s for her—maybe it’s for the camp, maybe it’s for an ally, maybe it’s part of her nefarious plans to kill us all.” She said all of this so cheerfully that Mehen rolled his eyes. “But I doubt it’s meant for starting campfires.”
“Nothing is simple when I’m with you people.”
“Never.” Khochen hesitated. “By the by, I do apologize for the other day. For finishing your story and getting it wrong.”
“I don’t care. It’s not your business—I don’t want to make it your business—so it doesn’t matter. I am who I am.”
“Somebody,” Khochen said, as if she were agreeing. “Though I still wish I knew the rest of your story.”
Mehen heaved a sigh. “There’s not much to tell. Pandjed told me to marry Kepeshkmolik Uadjit. I told him I wouldn’t—if I had to marry, I wanted a bride who wouldn’t force me to part from Arjhani.” Saying his name still made Mehen’s heart feel as if it were tearing, even after all these years. “Pandjed told me I could marry or be exiled. I chose exile. Arjhani did not.”
Khochen’s brows rose. “You ought to write a chapbook with that tale, goodman.”
The roar of the boneclaw cut off Mehen’s retort. Both Harper and dragonborn scrambled up the slope toward their waiting party and the sounds of a scuffle. Mehen drew his falchion as soon as he had room to, holding it ready to aid the Harper scouts . . .
Whose arrows were all trained on a familiar cambion, one arrow already dangling from his wing.
“Oh, Lords of the Nine pass me by,” Lorcan said, sounding relieved. “Will you tell them to stand down?”
“Aim for his eyes,” Mehen advised. The scouts adjusted their arrows. Zahnya held two wands, the air around both filled with thick, dark magic.
“Gods damn it!” Lorcan shouted, covering his head. “Farideh says to tell you she’s safe! And if you kill me, you won’t find Havilar.”
“Stop!” Mehen bared his teeth in annoyance. “He’s with me.”
The Harpers lowered their weapons—all except Daranna, who stayed, still as a statue, her arrow trained on Lorcan’s throat. Zahnya let the magic dancing around her wands fade and retreated to her palanquin.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Khochen murmured. Mehen ignored her, sheathed his falchion again, and crossed to Lorcan.
“If this is a trick,” Mehen started.
“If this were a trick,” Lorcan said, “do you think I’d be the sort of idiot who just drops out of the sky into the midst of a mass of weapons?” He glanced at Daranna over his shoulder. “Farideh sent me to find you. She wanted me—” He seemed to reconsider his words. “She wants me to send you toward Havilar.” He told Mehen about the necklace Havilar carried, about the bead that would make it possible to cross through the magical wall encircling the camp.
“Take the bead to Farideh,” Mehen said.
“She won’t use it,” Lorcan said. “It won’t let more than a dozen of you pass before it closes. I sent Brin and Havi around the mountain and up a bit. There’s a plateau there, a place where the mountaintop is sheared flat.” He hesitated, then dropped his voice. “What are you doing with Thayans?”
Mehen didn’t so much as blink. “Wartime makes strange allies.”
Lorcan’s eyes cut to the boneclaw, watching them with burning hatred in its eyes. “Indeed. Tell me you don’t trust that thing more than me.”
Mehen held up the amulet. “It comes with a leash.”
Lorcan gave him a wicked grin. “Oh, so do I,” he said. “But your daughter keeps a tight hold on it.”
And whatever resolve Mehen had built up over the last few, terrible days, his rage overtopped it. He slammed his fist into Lorcan’s face, hard enough to knock the cambion off his feet and bloody his nose. Stunned, Lorcan clutched his face and stared up at Mehen, looking too surprised to speak.
“Do you know why I don’t kill you?” Mehen hissed. “Because you’ve proven to me—every time I am on the very edge of taking a blade to your throat, it seems—that you’re better than useless and my daughter is wise enough to know that doesn’t mean you’re any good, even if she forgets to show it. This time, I have no proof, only suggestions, and if you think for a heartbeat I’m so grateful to you that I will sit and let you torment me like some old man sitting in the dust, stand up and let’s see how many bones your pretty face has to break.”
Lorcan daubed at the black blood streaming from his rapidly swelling nose. “Noted,” he said, with a savage tone. Oh try it, Mehen thought, bunching his fists again. Give me another reason. “I meant the damned amulet, by the by, the one Havilar’s carrying still.”
“Of course you did,” Mehen said.
Lorcan pulled himself to his feet once more, still wincing and pressing at his nose. “I wouldn’t dawdle,” he drawled. “The longer you take, the more opportunities to spot you. And I’m not the worst devil you have to contend with anymore.” Before Mehen could make him say what he meant, Lorcan had opened a portal and stepped away, back to the Hells.
Chapter Nineteen
25 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scro
lls (1486 DR) The Lost Peaks
Farideh’s dreams were a soup of night and fear, barely formed shapes rising out of the thick darkness and smothering her with pain and anger and terror. They were endless—I’ll never wake, she thought, I have never woken. The feeling of being watched from every angle, the wrongness hiding where she couldn’t see it . . . When she finally did open her eyes, her thoughts wouldn’t accept it. She lay still, not daring to move for fear of what would bleed out of the dark next.
Then she felt the mat beneath her, the dirt below that. Her eyes adjusted to the shuttered lanternlight warming up the small, earthen-walled room, and picked out the shape of a man sitting against the wall.
“Lorcan?” His name hurt to speak, her throat was so parched.
The man stiffened. “No,” Dahl said, and Farideh was fairly certain if she weren’t so wrung out, she would have died of embarrassment. Dahl opened the lantern a little more, illuminating his face, and all the walls of the cellar she was lying in. She crawled over next to him, leaning against the wall. He handed her a waterskin, and he could have been Asmodeus himself, and Farideh would have been glad for him in that moment.
“You seem fair enough,” he said as she gulped the stale water. He fiddled with a little metal flask as he spoke.
“Depends on what’s fair,” she said. Her head was pounding and her stomach unsettled, and she felt feverish. “Did I throw up on you again?”
“Again?”
Farideh felt her cheeks flush. Of course he didn’t remember, why would he? “At the revel,” she reminded him. “I was sick up your arm.”
He looked embarrassed at that. “Oh. No. You . . . kept it to the gutters every time.” He chuckled softly, nervously, eyes on the flask. “I hope it’s not a recurring thing with you and I. Shady bastards putting things in your drinks.”
“Once more and we’ll have to part for good.” Farideh took another long drink of the water, dimly recalling heaving over-sweet and burning liquor onto the frozen ground several times. “Thank you,” she said. “For getting me down here. And for coming in after us. I suppose I did need saving. This once.”
He smiled. “I think that one should count double.”
“Well good,” she said, smiling herself. “You don’t have so many to make up for then.”
Dahl snorted. “Your count’s off. The shadar-kai, the arcanist—”
“The arcanist was . . .” She hunted for the right word. “Mutual.”
“The watercourse,” Dahl said pointedly.
“The erinyes,” she returned. “The Zhentarim.”
“At the revel?” he said. “Where I was—” He stopped and turned from her, looking down at the flask again. Farideh could almost hear him thinking, Where I was saving you, because I’ d led you into danger.
“The revel is a draw,” she said lightly. “Mutual again.”
Dahl was silent a long moment, still staring at the flask. “I wasn’t in your visions.”
Farideh had no sense of how she ought to reply to that. “No,” she said finally. “Should you have been?”
“You were in mine.”
Farideh’s felt the muscles at the small of her back tighten, her tail trying to twitch with nerves. Things had been so easy a moment ago—was he really going to criticize her for leaving him out of visions she had no control over?
“I’ll try harder next time,” she said a little tartly.
“Gods, that’s not what I meant,” Dahl said. “I just . . .” He hesitated a moment, staring at the lantern. “I haven’t been all that fair to you over the years. You said something once that got under my skin, made me think I knew how to fix . . .” He trailed off again. “I thought maybe I could undo my fall.”
“Oh,” Farideh said when he had been silent another interminable moment. “Did it work out?”
“Do I look like a paladin?” Dahl asked. “It wasn’t so. But so many things happened, made me think you’d said it to vex me or to help me or to doom me to searching for the wrong thing. I thought,” he said with a bitter laugh, “that you might have literally been sent by Oghma in a more desperate moment.”
Farideh thought of the vision of Dahl in Proskur, of the strange man with a voice like a prayer. She thought of the sight of Dahl’s soul.
“And all that time,” he went on, “I realize now, I made you into this . . . symbol of my fall. This symbol of the restoration I couldn’t stlarning find.” He dragged his hands through his hair. “And frankly, seeing your memories—even if Tharra twisted them—made it perfectly clear . . . I’ve made all that up. I was no one to you. You weren’t an angel. You weren’t a devil. You weren’t an enemy or a source of answers. You were just some girl I knew once.” He looked at her again, his gray eyes faintly bloodshot. “I’m sorry for that, even if it didn’t make a damned bit of difference to you at the time. I think I might have been a scorchkettle the last few days because of it.”
Farideh looked down at the waterskin in her lap. It was so uncharacteristic of the Dahl she remembered that she couldn’t help but feel she was suddenly sitting in the dark with an absolute stranger.
“I haven’t been all that gentle with you either.” She wanted to ask what he’d seen of her, what the visions had shown him. What was important enough between them to answer the sort of question Oota and Tharra would have asked. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting down here waiting to tell me that instead of planning.”
“No,” Dahl said. “I didn’t drink as much as you did, but I’ve had my own hangover to sleep off.” He rubbed his forehead. “And I didn’t want you to wake up alone in a hole in the ground, so I stayed. So what did you find?”
Farideh shut her eyes and leaned her head as far back against the wall as her horns would allow. “It’s not good.”
She told him about the other camps, about the tower and the wall. About the carnage it had taken to bring the tower down in the vision. “And there’s another complication,” she said, not wanting to say it, but not daring to leave it out, “the devil I mentioned? Sairché? She’s not the only one involved.”
“Lorcan?” Dahl said dryly.
That burning kiss momentarily rose up in her thoughts . . . chased by the odd moment pressed against the bars of the cage with Dahl. She pulled her knees a little closer. Better to never bring that up.
“I mean,” she said firmly, “a devil set against us. Gods, it’s complicated. It’s like they’re playing a game. Lorcan’s sister and this other devil. They were supposed to make this camp and gather the powers of the Chosen for Asmodeus. Only they don’t want to succeed, but they don’t want to fail either.” She shook her head. “The other devil has an agent in the camp. Whoever that is, they have the means to make the gathering happen—we need to find them and stop them before they manage.” And do it in such a fashion that the other devil was blamed, not Lorcan, she thought.
“Gods’ books,” Dahl swore. “Do you have any idea of who the agent might be?”
“None,” Farideh said. “Apparently the other devil’s been coy. But they’re almost certainly among the prisoners. They wouldn’t be drawing a lot of attention to themselves. They’re probably quiet, not trying to stir things up. If you’ve told people about our plans to escape, they might have stopped them.”
Dahl’s expression hardened. “Tharra.”
Farideh’s memories of the previous night cleared. “Oh gods. She’s a Harper though.”
“She says she is,” Dahl said. He shook his head. “I never checked. I never even thought—” He broke off with another curse and turned the flask in his hands once more. “We need to talk to her. Before Oota decides to make an example.”
“Tell me what you’ve planned while we walk.” Farideh stood and her stomach threatened to invert itself again. She leaned against the packed earth wall. Dahl stood as well, frowning.
“If you need longer—”
“We don’t have longer,” Farideh reminded him. “Tharra’s devil is going to tell her any da
y now to carry out the gathering—if he doesn’t try to sabotage us first. Rhand only expects me to be gone three days. We need to move and a sour stomach doesn’t change that.”
Dahl’s expression was grim, but at least he didn’t insist on holding her up as she shouldered her bag and pulled her cloak on once more. He rolled the flask between his hands.
“Will you do something for me?” he blurted. He thrust the flask at her. “Take it? I can’t . . .” He looked away. “I can’t quite bring myself to throw it out. But I know better than to drink it. Not now.”
“What is it?” Farideh started to open the flask, but Dahl clasped a hand over hers.
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s the shadar-kai drink, the one they use in the wizard’s finest. I took it on the way out of the fortress.”
Farideh looked at him, puzzled, and he scowled under her scrutiny.
“I haven’t drunk it,” he said tersely. “I’m . . . just about fifty ales dry at this point, and I would really like something to dull this edge, and this is just about the only thing I’ve found. But we all know what it does on the way down.”
“And you can’t pour it out?” she asked.
Dahl looked away. “Will you just take it away? Please.”
She tucked the flask into her pocket. She’d pour it out later, away from Dahl. “Tell me what you’ve planned,” she said again.
They slipped through the dark tunnels and up pounded dirt stairs, while he numbered their assets—the weapons they’d stolen, the Chosen they’d retained. The potential aid of the enclave of elves on the farther end of the camp. “You break the cages on their fingers, they might just kiss you on the mouth,” he said.
Farideh flushed deeply. “I’ll settle for having the assistance of more wizards. It’s not going to be easy getting the tower down.”
“Right,” Dahl said, nodding at a male dwarf who stood at the base of the stairs, and handing him the lantern. “Any news?”
“Nothing that new,” the dwarf said. “Last I heard, they got Tharra locked up. Oota’s still out. You got a damned garden of elves up there waiting for yon tiefling’s blessings, and—” He broke off and pointed his sword back the way they’d come. “Hold, drow.”
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