Farideh looked back over her shoulder and startled at the ebon-skinned man standing not a foot and a half behind her. He grinned at her. “Well met. I see the Harper’s as good as his goals.”
Something seemed to press on Farideh’s thoughts, something small and alien and serious, that made her pulse speed. The drow tilted his head at her, still smiling.
“Knock it off, Phalar,” Dahl snapped. “What do you want?”
“It sounds like you’ve got quite the little conspiracy going on,” Phalar said. “I’m assuming you’re planning to ask for my assistance at some point?”
“Not if I can help it,” Dahl said.
Phalar clucked his tongue. “You wound me, cahalil. After all we’ve been through?”
“You shoved me through a roof!”
“And you told Oota I’d given you up to the guards,” Phalar pointed out. “Well done.”
Farideh squinted at the drow and focused on the thread of power that seemed to wind up her spine and clasp her brain. The lights flared into being—purple and silver and threads of deepest night, twining together to form a sinuous rune that seemed to slip in and out of the light. “Chosen,” she said. She looked back at Dahl—and swiftly set her eyes instead on the dwarf, whose god’s mark shimmered in shades of silver and steel gray. “Is that what these rooms are for?” she asked. “To hide Chosen.”
“Aye,” the dwarf said. “Anybody too obvious.” He glared past her at Phalar. “Or too dangerous. Tharra’s idea,” he added grimly.
She let the lights fade and looked back, past Phalar and down the long, dark corridor, wondering what trick was caught up in the underground rooms. Would they collapse and consume the Chosen? Were there portals to the Hells nestled in the rooms? Or would they just mean that the prisoners were nowhere to be found when the gathering went off—would this flaw of the camp be laid on Sairché’s lap? “How many are there down here?”
“Right now?” the dwarf asked. “A score, maybe. A fair number went up to see what Oota’s about. Those as can pass,” he amended.
“And how many can it hold?”
The dwarf waggled a hand. “Eh—few hundred if they pack in tight.”
Not the whole camp, Farideh thought. So whatever Tharra’s plans were, they couldn’t take everyone. “Can you get those twenty somewhere else on short notice?” Farideh asked. “We need to make sure of something.”
“Most of ’em,” the dwarf said. “Not the drow.”
“If you want my help,” Phalar said, “it will cost.”
“Never doubted it,” Dahl said. “Go back to your room.” He grabbed Farideh’s hand again and started up the stairs. They were nearly to the door when she managed to yank her hand back.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He looked down at his own hand and cursed. “Sorry. It’s . . . His powers get to me. I didn’t mean anything.” He closed his hands into fists, then pushed through the door, out into the low light of late afternoon.
There were, in fact, a great many spellcasters waiting for Farideh to return and grant them the same assistance she had given Armas. The half-elf sat off to the side of the crowded court, one arm around the long-legged Turami boy. Even at a distance, Farideh could see the tension that claimed the boy’s frame when she walked in with Dahl.
“We talk to Tharra first,” Dahl said, and she followed him past the spellcasters, and toward the rear of the space where the two big guards from the night before stood before a door hung in the space between two buildings.
“Oota’s not handling the aftereffects well,” the human man admitted. “She’s been up once to question her, but had to lie back down again.”
“Give me a chance?” Dahl asked.
The big man reached back and pulled the door open. “No secrets, Harper,” he warned.
Tharra sat alone, her arms bound behind her back, her face drawn and puffy. She met Farideh’s eyes as she entered. “I’ve got nothing more to say.”
Dahl reached down and pulled a pin from the inside of her jacket, a round shield the size of a gold coin. “Were you ever a Harper?”
Tharra sighed, as if Dahl were asking all the wrong questions. “Yes. I’d say I still am, but I’m bound to hear you cite the code and call me a traitor, so why bother?”
“We can still set things right,” Farideh said.
“Can we now? And how is that?” Tharra said. “Ask your brightbird—no clemency for Harpers, no matter the circumstances, when treachery comes up.”
Farideh glanced at Dahl, at the cold anger etched on his features. “I’m glad,” he said, “that I was no fledgling of yours. There’s no clemency because the choices are clear.”
Panic raced up Farideh’s core—he didn’t mean her, but he might as well have. And choices could get very murky, very quickly when devils got involved. She pulled him aside, back toward the door.
“Can you leave us alone?” Farideh asked. Dahl gave her a worried look. She rubbed her brand through the fabric of her sleeve. “You don’t want me to peer at your soul,” she said lightly, “I don’t want to discuss my . . . entanglements in front of you.” She looked down at Tharra. “I doubt she does either.”
Dahl stared at her a moment, searching her face. “No secrets,” he warned.
“None that matter,” she clarified. Then added, “I’m not baring my soul or hers, because you don’t trust me to know what’s important and what’s not.” And she wasn’t telling him about being the Chosen of Asmodeus, unless it meant life or death.
He studied her a moment more. “Fine,” he said. “Remember I’m on your side though. She isn’t.” With a quick glance at Tharra, he turned and left the little room.
Tharra looked up at Farideh, warily, as she approached. “You might have figured me out,” she said. “But I’m not like you.”
“Aren’t you?” Farideh asked. “I’m here because I accepted a deal to save two of the dearest people in the world to me, and the price was far more than I expected. What happened to you?”
Tharra’s gaze flicked over Farideh once more. “Fine. We’re all unlucky ones.” She fell into a silence, her eyes shining. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she said after a moment. “I was figuring out a way to make it turn right. I’m not a monster.”
Farideh’s heart ached at her own words coming out of another.
“I always assumed,” Farideh said gently, “that people ended up indebted to the Hells because they sought it out. But they come to you and there are no strings on their lures.”
Tharra laughed once. “Until there are. They like those rumors, I think. Makes it seem like you can’t be caught if you’re clever.”
Farideh settled herself beside the other woman on the cold ground. “Did he tell you what’s happening? Magros?”
Tharra’s lip curled. “As little as he could, of course. Just what I was supposed to do, but never why. He said there was another devil, another player. You.”
“The both of them together were supposed to use this camp to collect Chosen for Asmodeus—to make Shar’s followers collect them, really,” Farideh said. “But Magros and Sairché are also under conflicting orders—they need to make the plan fall apart and lay the blame on the other one, so that Asmodeus doesn’t get what he wants and the other archdevil gets faulted.”
“So you want me to break my agreement?” Tharra asked. “Switch sides and lose my soul.”
“No,” Farideh said. “I want both of us to outsmart these karshoji fiends and find a way to save these people. What were you supposed to do? What were the powers they gave you—you made me want to agree with things.”
Tharra shook her head. “That was the pin. Magros enspelled it, so I could pass for a Chosen and do my job. Keep everyone in line. Keep them calm. Keep as many as I could out of the wizard’s laboratories. That was easier than you’d think until you came along. And then—” Her eyes flooded. “He gave me a ritual—a scroll and components. I knew it would be bad. He told me as much, wi
thout saying it. ‘Make sure you dig yourself a hidey-hole and make enough time to get down to it.’ You don’t say that about anything subtle.”
“He never said what it would do?”
“The agreement did. ‘Gather the Chosen,’ as you said. He means to kill them, maybe all of us.” Tears started falling. “But I owed him.”
“How did he catch you?”
Tharra wiped her face, hesitating. “Seven years ago, a warm Eleint night, a fellow came up to me, out of nowhere. Said there were two folks being held by cultists for a sacrifice near to the village we were standing in, and they’d be dead by morning. Gave me a single clue—‘cowslips’—and vanished. I’d just been given a pin of my own and was looking for my own troubles to right. I knew the meadow he meant, the hollow hill—so I headed in and played the hero. Magros found me the next night—he didn’t bother hiding his horns that time. Thanked me for the assistance—those cultists worshiped someone he didn’t want gaining any power, and wasn’t it nice how we could help each other? I asked why he didn’t just tell me, and he smiled. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ “So that’s how we were for years after. He’d turn up, give me a clue, and I’d save some innocents and end some evils. I’m sure someone better than I would say that helping Magros was tilting the balance—weakening his enemies only meant he got stronger—but I saved a lot of people. I got to be the hero.
“And then, the better part of a year ago, Magros came to me and said there was a Sembian force moving through the Dales. That they were going to sack one of three farmsteads—three families I knew and loved and counted on. And this time, no clue. He would tell me which it was, for a price—my soul. I told him no, made for the nearest farm, and got them packing—down to the little ones. Out of harm’s way.
“I rode hard for the next, but there wasn’t time. Magros came and made me another offer—he’d throw off the Sembians, force them from their path and save my friends. But I’d have to do something for him. I’d have to run his half of this camp scheme. I’d have to trigger the gathering ritual. And if I didn’t, my soul would be his. I thought I could handle it. I thought it was fine. And then it wasn’t. The only thing I could do was agree to this awful deal.”
“But you saved those people,” Farideh said.
“Those, yes. But Magros turned the army into the path of the ones I sent fleeing. Because I’d said no the first time.” Tharra looked up. “I wouldn’t have gathered the children, I swear. I made sure I never promised to catch everyone. I read that agreement, every word.” She chuckled through her tears. “Made that devil spitting mad. And in the end, it didn’t matter.”
“It matters,” Farideh said. “If you don’t break your agreement, you keep your soul. We can make this turn out—”
“That ritual has to go off,” Tharra said. “Even if Oota let me out of here to do that . . . People are going to die. Will you tell me that you’ll let that happen?”
Farideh squinted at Tharra. “Where’s the ritual now?”
Tharra shrugged awkwardly. “The scroll’s buried under my bed. The components are hidden in the thatching. Rotate a poison or two out of them and keep it on me, for safety.”
“That’s where you got the hamadryad’s ash,” Farideh said. “Have you got any more?”
“What’s left is in a pouch in my sleeve,” she said. She met Farideh’s gaze as the warlock fished the pouch out. “What are you going to do now?”
“See if these are secrets Dahl can use,” she said. She bit her lip, not wanting to ask, but knowing she had to. “You read your agreement, and you agreed anyway?”
Tharra lifted her head. “In the moment, there were no other options.”
Farideh left the former Harper in the makeshift cell, not sure whether she was more culpable than Tharra or less, or if it mattered in the end. A soul was a soul, after all, however it landed in Asmodeus’s basket.
She found Dahl just beyond the dais, talking to a haggard-looking Oota. “What did she say?” Dahl asked. Farideh told him about the ritual, about the components hidden in Tharra’s hut.
Dahl frowned. “That’s strange. Destructive magic doesn’t make for very stable rituals.”
“Well, you can tell what it is if you read it, so that’s your task. The devil also told her to dig herself a hidey-hole and get there quick. She was pretty sure that meant the spell wouldn’t penetrate the ground. That’s why she was encouraging the shelter rooms—she was hoping she could save at least some people.” Farideh turned to Oota. “That still might be our best bet. We have to destroy the tower to break the wall. Either the ritual will do it for us, or the ritual will kill the guards and Rhand, and we’ll have a chance to take the tower down ourselves, without being attacked all the while.”
Oota frowned. “You want to carry out this devil’s plans?”
“We need to find a way to destroy the tower,” Dahl said. “That’s the only way we know of to shut the wall’s magic off. This ritual might be the simplest way to carry that out.”
The half-orc didn’t seem convinced. “The shelter rooms only hold a hundred or so.”
“We have to make them bigger,” Farideh said. “Maybe deeper. How many do you have who can move earth?”
“Torden,” Oota said. “A few of the dwarves might come out of the middle ground for this. Maybe others—but we’d have to free the captured ones to get a decent count.”
“Start with who we have out here,” Farideh said. “We need to break in to rescue the rest—even if they can’t dig, they won’t be safe if the tower collapses—but the very breath we do, Rhand’s going to know something’s happening. Then we’re all in danger.”
“Tonight,” Dahl promised. “As soon as it’s dark enough to get Phalar’s help.”
There was a commotion near the doors, and the crowd of caged spellcasters stood aside for a very regal-looking sun elf in rags just as tattered as the rest of them. “We come to parley,” he said in thickly accented Common. He held out his hands. “And to let you prove, tiefling, that you are what the Harper says.”
Oota stiffened and turned to face the elf with her cunning smile. “Well met, Saer Cereon,” she said. “And welcome to my court.”
“Please,” the elf said. “The cages first. Then we talk.”
Farideh drew up the soul lights. Greens and golds and umbers dappled the sun elf, but nothing shaped into the strange glyphs that marked the prize of a faraway god. “You aren’t Chosen,” she observed. The elf tilted his head.
“Will I become so?”
She shook her head. There was no rune, not even disguised in the light and shade of his soul. “I don’t think so.”
“A relief,” Cereon said. “Honoring the gods is difficulty enough. Pleasing a particular in times of trouble, this one wouldn’t wish it.” He held his hands higher. “Can you? Or was that not so?”
Farideh raised her palm. “Assulam.” The cages shattered into dust and Cereon flexed his long hands with a curious smile. “Many thanks, tiefling.” He looked to Oota and inclined his head the barest amount. “Now, we must see how to lay down old anger and aid our people.”
Oota raised an eyebrow and gestured to the dais. “My home is yours, then, eladrin.” Cereon gave her a cold look, but walked ahead.
Farideh looked back at Oota and spied the crimson and green swirl of lights that overtook her, the traces of gold. The lack, again, of any sort of rune. “Are none of their leaders actually Chosen?” she asked Dahl quietly, keeping her eyes off of him.
“Oota is. They call her Obould’s Shieldmaiden . . .” Dahl trailed off. “Are you saying she’s not?”
Farideh looked again, but no—there was nothing there. “Nothing I can see.” She let the powers recede before she turned to Dahl, who was goggling at Oota’s back. “Maybe she can hide them?”
“Maybe she’s just good at what she does,” Dahl said. “Maybe she doesn’t need a god to aid her.” He shook his head. “Don’t tell anyone, all right? I think a fair number of them are fi
ne following a half-orc when they think they have no choice. We have plenty of chaos as it is.”
“Someone’s been this way,” Brin said, examining the brush on the side of the path. A broken fringe of dried fern fronds lay against his palm. “Might be deer,” Havilar said. “Or an owlbear woken up early?”
“It’s too wide a path. This is people, stomping along the trail. Too wide to stick to it.”
Still could be deer, Havilar thought, but didn’t say. “Maybe it’s the Harpers?”
He shook his head. “Could be.” He looked up at her. “Or maybe it’s from the camp.”
Havilar looked up the slope of the mountain, into the thick trees. It might only go up another dozen feet. It might be thousands, right up high enough for the sun to trip over. “I think we ought to start climbing. We’re never going to get there winding around like this. Especially not before something bad happens.”
“It’s not safe,” Brin said, standing and dusting off his breeches. “We haven’t got the tools to climb.”
“We’ll have to eventually.”
“We’ll wait for Lorcan,” Brin said. “If it gets too steep, he can fly us.”
“How about,” Havilar tried again, “we climb until we can’t and then we wait for Lorcan. Otherwise we’re going to be exhausted by the time we even get there.”
“Havi,” he said sternly, “you need to trust—”
“How about you trust me?” Havilar interrupted, her cheeks burning. “I get it—I’m the fool for storming into Farideh’s room without knowing what was in there. But I do know something about tracking and traveling in the woods.” She looked up the mountain’s slope. “Whatever Mehen taught you, he taught me first.”
Brin stood, looking as if he’d been caught between steps, as if the core of him hung off-balance. “I know,” he said.
“Then act like it,” Havilar replied. She started up the slope without him.
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