She looked down at her arms, as if she could see the pulse there, throbbing in time with those of the creatures waiting in the Chasm, ready to be called forth.
“You live,” the proxy said. “We were correct.”
“You are the Prophet,” the second servitor added, bowing. “You are the one who will gather the Choir, to sing the Symphony of Madness into being.”
“I am Rohini,” she said. The Hex Locus buzzed angrily and clenched its powers around her guts. “Your spell cannot change that, whatever it is.”
“It is a fragment of the spellplague,” the proxy said, “made solid and discrete. You held the blue fire.”
She held it still, Rohini knew. The Hex Locus had chained itself to her very being. It thrummed in her blood and in her thoughts. Her secrets were its secrets now. Its powers were hers.
“Most impressive,” the proxy added. “You ought to have died.”
The girl. Rohini looked around. Farideh had burst the box somehow … with Glasya’s magic, she had shattered it.
“Where did she go?” Rohini asked. “Where are the devil and the tiefling warlock?
“Your allies?” said the proxy who remained. “Why do you protect them? They have given you up for lost.”
Rohini didn’t answer. Her mind was reeling. Invadiah had said the erinyes would capture and kill Lorcan, and yet there he’d been. She had herself left the warlock girl to be torn apart by the Ashmadai. And yet there she’d stood, taunting Rohini.… She was the one who’d put the Hex Locus in Rohini’s hands. Using Glasya’s spells.
Invadiah lied, the voice of the Hex Locus said, and it sounded so like Arunika, taunting her. Glasya lied. You were meant to die.
“Not my allies,” Rohini said. “Not anymore.”
“Then prove your loyalty. Tell us why you came.”
Rohini stared at the proxy, the half-formed words of prophecy fighting to break from her lips. She wanted to snarl, to tell him she was no slave of his.
He would die soon. She could see it in the shifting patterns of the fabric of Toril. Her loyalty wouldn’t matter in the end, and it would never matter to those behemoths in the shadows. She was a tool to them—and a tool’s reasons for performing its task did not matter.
A desperate smile tugged at the corners of her lips. It sounded like something Arunika would say, were she not dead and waiting to be reborn under the thumb of the archdevils. The slithering monsters attuned to the Hex Locus’s song, the things waiting in the Chasm—Rohini stared again at her wrists. Would it be so different to command the playthings of the aboleths instead of mortal fools?
You were meant to die, she reminded herself, and the voice in her thoughts might have been hers and it might have been the Hex Locus’s and it might have been her dead sister’s, but it was right. The Hells held no allies of hers. Not anymore.
“I served Glasya, princess of the Nine Hells, Archduchess of the Sixth Layer,” Rohini said. “I answer to Exalted Invadiah, foremost of the erinyes of Malbolge. My orders were to infiltrate the servants of the Sovereignty through Brother Vartan and deliver an offer to your masters. She has in her possession an artifact which she believes they would find most desirable—a portal knife crafted in their Far Realm. I was to deliver the offer, and the meeting place, a warehouse near to the river. She will come only for one of your masters, though. Invadiah believed Glasya would ambush them and use them as she wishes once they are hers.”
“Does she think we are fools?” the servitor asked. “She cannot make servants of the Sovereignty. And now we know of the artifact, what is to stop our masters from breaching the Hells and taking it? What would stop them from agreeing and sending their terrible minions to meet her?”
Rohini hesitated. To say more was beyond treason.
You are already beyond treason, the voice reminded her. If Glasya does not fall, you will.
“Should you or your masters attempt to breach Malbolge, you would fail,” she said. “The Sovereignty is no doubt wise enough to know that. They are also wise enough not to make such a vulnerable gesture for a mere artifact that might or might not even exist.
“But what you miss, to your detriment, is that Glasya is not foolish enough to think you would.”
SAIRCHÉ WAITED OUTSIDE THE DOOR TO INVADIAH’S CHAMBERS, counting the erinyes that entered in full armor: Eretria. Chaeronea. Suessula. Zela. Megara. Sabis. Tanagra. Bibracte. Lutetia. Oenophyta. Noreia. Alesia. With Invadiah a full thirteen armed to the teeth and ready for Invadiah’s command, to kill Lorcan, to kill Rohini, and to finish what had been started in Neverwinter.
The imp she’d sent to Invadiah had predictably not returned, but another imp had brought her a summons to appear before her mother. She took it graciously, and tucked it into her sleeve where she continued ignoring it. Obviously, Invadiah trusted Sairché’s word if she was amassing so many armed erinyes to her side. She didn’t need to hear from Sairché until after she’d returned.
A small part of Sairché wished she could go to Neverwinter and watch everything unfold, but she quashed it: It wasn’t necessary. In fact, it would be extremely foolish. Besides—she had no way to cross the planes anymore, short of asking Invadiah.
Another imp appeared beside her with a soft pop. “Her Highness wishes you to pay her audience.”
Sairché shuddered and pulled her cloak around her. “Tell her I will be with her presently.”
Farideh’s lungs were screaming, her muscles aching as she ran—for the second time that night—as fast as she could along the main roads. And Mehen was gaining on her. Close enough to hear his labored breath—
The crack of his lightning breath rattled the alleyway. The lightning scoured her skin, the sudden pain driving the air from her lungs with a sharp cry. But still she ran, slower now and gasping. Her nerves threatened to overtake her and make her cry like a child, as Clanless Mehen sought to slay his foster daughter.
Farideh drew on the powers of the Hells and split the fabric of the world enough for her to dart through, and come clear around the corner and several buildings farther on. She ducked into an alleyway and flattened herself against the wall. Mehen ran past, but only a short distance before he circled back to the intersection where she’d lost him, tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Farideh drew her breath in such slow, even drafts that she thought she would surely faint.
I’m sorry, she thought. But Lorcan was, as ever, right.
She stepped into the street and pointed the rod at her father. “Adaestuo.”
The bolt of eldritch light slammed into Mehen, and he roared in shock and pain, but he did not fall. He turned jerkily to face her and drew his falchion.
“Mehen,” she said, “don’t do this. You don’t need to do this. Rohini’s not here.”
“She will be there when I …” He stilled, blinked … and then bared his teeth in sudden rage. “When I bring back your head, warlock.”
“Mehen, put your sword down,” she said, holding up the rod and feeling the magical energy of the Hells flooding through her. “It’s me.”
Mehen answered with a vicious swing level with her head. She ducked beneath it and took a step back. She took the rod in her left hand and drew her sword.
The whoosh of Lorcan’s wings as he plummeted brought Mehen’s head up a second before the cambion dropped solidly into his back. Mehen’s head cracked against the cobbles and he went slack.
“Tie him!” Lorcan shouted. “Tie him, damn it!”
“Calm down,” Farideh said. She kneeled down beside Mehen and reached a shaking hand toward his face. He was breathing, but out cold.
Farideh nudged Lorcan off Mehen and jerked the harness off Mehen’s shoulders. She slid it down to his elbows, knotting the loose loops together, so that his arms were bound. “Help me move him.”
She had a perverse sense of satisfaction watching Lorcan struggle as much as she with Mehen’s heavy bulk. They would never have gotten him from the temple into the city. But when his arm brushed
hers, she flushed nonetheless.
They settled Mehen against a wall, behind a pile of rubble. Farideh kneeled down, assessing the dragonborn’s wounds. “He doesn’t look good.”
Lorcan jerked her to her feet. The amulet exploded with a cold, silvery light. Lorcan threw his hands up to ward it off and fell back.
“Godsdamn it!”
“If you don’t like it, don’t shove me around,” she said, her voice shaking. The air was simmering again. “No one said you had to come back.”
He seized his hair in his fists. “Planes and ashes, you do understand Rohini’s not a shitting goblin you can wave your hands and distract?”
“I had to do something.” She gestured at Mehen. “He’s half-dead as it is. She had him …” Her voice caught. “She had him fighting like it didn’t matter. Like he could simply take the cuts and bruises and … whatever her magic does. She would have killed him.”
“She’s going to kill you. She knows you’re alive now.”
“She knows you’re alive too! You should have taken the chance,” she said. “You can’t get to the portal now.”
“So I was supposed to just—” He waved his hands vaguely. “I should have. I should have run past while she was distracted.” He cursed to himself. “You’re not worth this.” He cursed again. “Neither is a bloody aboleth.”
“No it isn’t.” And suddenly things fit together a little better. “Oh.”
It was, ironically, one of Mehen’s favorite tactics: burst onto the battlefields with a great storm and thunder, rattling shields and blades and breathing lightning, looking for all the world like your enemy’s worst nightmare. And while they stared at you and pondered how to take you down, your allies came around behind and cut your enemies throats.
“What if that’s it?” she said, half to herself.
“What in the Hells are you talking about?” Lorcan cried. “What if what’s it?”
“Your mistress,” she said, “do you think she’d go to all this trouble to gain a … a monster from another world’s memories?”
“Yes!” he said. “Think of the power—”
“What power though?” Farideh asked. “If they’re as alien as the Chasm, what good would their thoughts be? They might know ten thousand years’ worth of knowledge, but what good is that if they don’t think like her? That didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.” She held Lorcan’s gaze. “Especially because the Ashmadai never fit. Is it possible that all of this was meant to get the Ashmadai out in the open? To get them to call down Asmodeus? Or even … just to make him notice the Sovereignty? To focus on that? Why else would the Ashmadai be looking for Glasyans in the hospital?”
Lorcan started to answer, but stopped and pursed his lips. “It’s possible,” he said a moment later. “She likes making trouble. Everyone knows she doesn’t get along with her father.”
“So she might start a war, after all, not between the Layers,” Farideh said, “but between the Sovereignty and the god of evil.”
Lorcan shook his head. “She’s an archduchess of the Hells. She’s too clever to antagonize her father like that, now that he’s a god.”
“But if she were clever and angry,” Farideh said, “she might create a chain of events that … don’t look as though she’s trying to antagonize him. That get Asmodeus’s eye fixed on Neverwinter and another, powerful, alien enemy.”
“So she may act elsewhere,” Lorcan finished. He shuddered. “And you and I got in the way.”
“But what is she doing?”
Lorcan reached forward as if he would clap a hand over her mouth again, but closed his hands on the empty air. “Stop asking that. You don’t need to know. You don’t want to know.”
“Don’t—”
“Shut up, darling, just shut up and trust me here, you do not need to know what the archduchess’s plans are.” He rubbed his wrists where the amulet’s fire had burned them. “And you had best hope like you’ve never hoped, that—”
“They matter,” she said, “because it means the Ashmadai’s plan to attack the temple is just as likely her plan. They will come and burn the place to the ground, and kill everyone in it.” She looked at him gravely. “Something has its powers over Rohini—she isn’t on Glasya’s side anymore. And if you’re right and your mother’s erinyes come to clean things up, Rohini isn’t going to go quietly. It will be a bloodbath. Perhaps not one your lady’s planning on. Certainly not one Neverwinter’s expecting.”
Lorcan ran his hands through his hair. “If you are right, if that is Glasya’s plan, then I don’t think Invadiah knows it. What she threatened Rohini with … she will come as soon as she knows Rohini’s been captured. She will bring the pradixikai. And whatever the Ashmadai might do, whatever Rohini and the Sovereignty might be capable of, whatever the shitting god of evil might stir up, the pradixikai loose in Faerûn is reason enough to get far, far away—Hey!” Lorcan shouted.
Farideh looked over her shoulder to see Brin jogging back to the alley’s mouth, his sword unsheathed and his face pale. His eyes were wide and terrified.
“What happened?” Farideh said.
“He took her,” Brin gasped. “The Ashmadai have Havilar.”
“No.” Farideh’s ears were suddenly numb and ringing. She reached behind her to lean on the wall. “Where? When?”
“Outside the shop,” Brin said, still quite out of breath. “The shopkeeper. He came out of nowhere and just … knocked her senseless with some amulet. And that’s not all.”
He explained what he’d heard: the Ashmadai had decided Havilar’s attack was an act of war by the Sovereignty. The shopkeeper seemed to believe that it had been Havilar’s magic that convinced them of the idea, and now the Ashmadai were amassing to attack the House of Knowledge and burn it to the ground.
“Bad to worse,” Lorcan muttered. “You’re right.”
Farideh held her tongue, preoccupied with the repeating images from her nightmares of Havilar being tormented and not being able to save her. She wanted to scream. She wanted to yell at Brin for letting this happen—he’d promised to watch after Havilar.
Brin was watching her, as if he knew all of that. As if he were expecting her ire. Lorcan folded his arms, the smallest of smiles quirking his mouth, as if he knew it too.
She took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut a moment.
“First,” she said, “we need to fix Mehen. He’s wounded and—”
“The moment he wakes he’ll try and kill you again!” Lorcan said.
“And,” she continued, “we have to break the domination. The two of us can’t count on saving Havilar alone. And we need Havilar if we’re going to be able to stop the Ashmadai or Rohini.”
“You need far more than just Havilar,” Lorcan said.
“No one is asking for your opinion.”
“Someone should be,” he said. “If … if you are correct about Glasya, you’re assuring your own death to challenge anyone involved in this nonsense—you don’t even know which pieces are hers. Even if you could defeat Rohini or those stupid cultists or the pradixikai or those servitors and whatever monsters they call up, you are forgetting that the archduchess is watching.”
“For now,” Farideh said, “we’re just saving Havilar.” Even though she couldn’t help but remember all the soldiers from the Wall in their sickbeds and the young and preening acolytes who didn’t deserve to burn alive.
Brin squatted down beside Mehen. He held out one tentative hand, the beginnings of divine magic swirling at the tips of his fingers.
“If you heal him,” Lorcan said, “he might still be dominated.”
“Do it,” Farideh said.
Mehen felt his body stir, and then his mind scramble toward waking. Where was he? What had happened? His eyes opened, letting in hazy shapes—Brin kneeling in front of him, Farideh close by. His vision darkened again, his mind sliding away from the world.
He had been running. Chasing. Farideh, seeping hellfire and miasma, trying to k
ill good people, people like Rohini. In the dark streets of Neverwinter she glowed like a beacon of Hellish magic. He had to stop her.
It was that filthy devil of course, it could only be. She was corrupted, overtaken. Subdue her, subdue her.
No, that won’t work, a voice whispered through his thoughts. She’s too far gone. Do what you must. He’d breathed the lightning.
And then? He couldn’t remember. Didn’t want to remember.
Cool light flared before Mehen’s eyes and the sound of a sword on a whetstone jerked his attention away from the memories. The pain in his head faded, but the fear and adrenaline were still pulsing through him. There again was Brin. Good lad, he thought blinking drowsily at him. He coughed. “Where …”
Be careful, something thought for him and bared his teeth. Right, right—the boy was trouble.
“Mehen.”
He whipped his head around to see Farideh kneeling down beside him, looking worried. Then … no, not worried—cruel. Shadows wafted off of her and her eyes had changed: one red as coals, one black as soot. The devil’s doing. The devil hovering behind her with hateful eyes.
“Mehen,” she said again—a taunt, a slight. He hadn’t stopped her. He tried to reach out, to press the vein that would make her sleep, but his arms were tightly bound behind him, no matter how he struggled. He tapped the roof of his mouth with his tongue: fear, uncertainty, blood. He was as good as dead.
She could have been safe, he thought despairing. She could have been happy.
“Mehen, look at me,” she said. “Please.”
The alley lurched, sharpened. Her eyes were gold and silver again. Brin was nothing but a worried boy. Lorcan still stood behind her, all nerves and irritation.
“I …” He looked off down the alley. “I was supposed to …” He shuddered again and the world blurred.
It’s you’re fault she’s fallen, something whispered, so you have to be the one to stop her. This is the only way to save her.
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