Prince of Lies (22 page)

“Course there has,” the denizen said, his thin tongue flickering over his pointed teeth. “They were as regular as a clockwork dinner chime when Cyric first took over. None of them ever lasted very long - nasty little brawls, but brief.” He flapped a little higher into the air and gestured broadly at the milling throng. “With the sort of riffraff Cyric has to work with down here, what do you expect?”

A denizen with the head and upper body of a mantis swiped at Perdix with one massive forelimb. “Riffraff? You should talk.”

Deftly Perdix avoided the halfhearted attack and fluttered to the top of a high, twisted metal pole. His bright yellow skin made him stand out against the vermilion sky as he hunched there, a radiant gargoyle.

“Some of my fellows are a bit jealous of my standing with our lord,” the bat-winged denizen said. “When Cyric became a god, I was still mortal. I really knocked myself out proving how devoted I was - murdering, stealing, causing all the strife I could. I took out a whole patrol of Purple Dragons -” he smiled wistfully “- before they lopped my sword arm off. I was one of the first denizens Cyric created.”

Gwydion leaned back against the pole and watched the mantis-headed creature. It shuffled into the crowd on the slow-moving legs of a giant opossum. “What about the other denizens?” the shade asked. “Aren’t they Cyric’s faithful?”

Perdix snorted. “Most of this lot he inherited with the real estate. They used to worship Myrkul, but they converted when Cyric took over.” With surprising agility, he climbed hand over hand down the pole. “Look, slug,” Perdix said, hanging just above Gwydion’s ear, “if you’re hoping for an uprising, forget it. The denizens who didn’t accept Cyric’s rule tried that, and the whole bunch of them ended up at the bottom of the swamp on the other side of the castle. And that place makes the Slith look like a burbling brook in the Moonshaes.”

The crowd had thinned, but many of the shades and denizens still milling near the river had stopped to listen to the conversation. Gwydion felt the eyes of the helpless souls and powerful minions of Cyric upon him, felt the tension in the air at the mere mention of defiance against the Lord of the Dead. But if Perdix were right, even the denizens might turn against the Prince of Lies.

“The Night Serpent said Cyric feared two things,” Gwydion ventured loudly, “a revolt in the City of Strife and the shade of Kelemvor Lyonsbane.” He turned away from Perdix and scanned the crowd. “You denizens don’t want to end up like those others, drowned in the Slith, destroyed forever? Are you shades content to be tortured to satisfy Cyric’s whims? If we rise up, Kelemvor will come out of hiding and lead us. He’s the only one who can stand against the tyrant. Why do you think Cyric is so desperate to find him?”

Gwydion’s words raced through the scattered denizens and shades. Some drew strength from the subversive talk. Others muttered about the shade’s foolishness as they glanced uneasily at the bleached white walls of Bone Castle, looming over them like a headsman’s axe. Yet of all the souls gathered there, only Perdix tried to silence Gwydion.

“That kind of talk’ll get us all destroyed,” the denizen hissed. He clutched his head with clawed hands. “I told you Cyric always deals with-“

A pillar of flame, as thick around as a giant’s leg, dropped from the sky and slammed into the ground near Gwydion. The concussion shook the city all the way to the Wall of the Faithless. The heat charred the flesh of anyone close at hand and made the Slith boil turbidly in its banks. Skeletons tumbled from the diamond wall. They flailed about with their pikes as they hit the water, but one by one they disappeared beneath the murky surface.

Gwydion the Quick was on his feet and running before anyone else. He glanced over his shoulder as he fled. What he saw behind him rivaled any nightmare lurking in the Night Serpent’s hoard of horrible dreams and foul visions.

In the center of the blasted circle of earth, Cyric stood, arrayed in a cloak of flame, Godsbane held aloft in a warlike pose. Burning eyes glared out of a face scorched crimson by some hellish furnace. Lips pulled back in a sneer to reveal twisted yellow teeth. His hands were gnarled like long-dead yew branches, his arms lean, but corded with muscles like steel cable.

With a single stroke of his rose-hued short sword, the Lord of the Dead sliced a cringing denizen in two. Then, as if possessed by some incredible madness, he began to howl at the souls in his path. Anyone frightened enough or foolish enough to stand in Cyric’s way fell before Godsbane. The sword’s glow became brighter with each blow, growing as crimson as fresh-spilled blood.

And most terrifying of all, Gwydion saw Cyric’s hate-filled eyes staring at him.

Frantic, the shade darted over the rubble. Ruined buildings loomed ahead, dark and twisting alleys winding between them. He never considered how absurd it was, trying to outrun a god. In his panicked mind, the City of Strife had become the Promenade in Suzail, Cyric just another challenger in a footrace.

Gwydion dared another glance over his shoulder. He expected to find the Prince of Lies at his heels, but instead, his speed had put Cyric far behind him.

A flash of yellow caught Gwydion’s eye just before something wrapped around his legs. The shade fell facedown onto the hard, packed dirt. His forehead struck a rock, sending colorful pain blossoms across his mind, clouding his vision and muffling the shouts and screams from the riverbank. When the bright spots danced from before his eyes, he saw that Perdix was the one who’d tackled him.

“Sorry, slug, but you was warned,” the denizen said. “‘Sides, if I let you get away, I’d be the one who pays. Cyric always makes someone pay.”

“Most assuredly,” murmured the Prince of Lies, towering suddenly over the captive soul. He reached down and closed a taloned hand around Gwydion’s throat. “I just knew you’d cause me trouble. The ones who die trying to be heroes always do.”

Cyric lifted Gwydion to his knees. “But now it’s time I put your speed to use for my own ends, quickling,” he said. “Still, you should be happy. You’re finally going to get your knighthood.”

The Prince of Lies wiped the gore from Godsbane onto the shade then sheathed the blade. “I dub you Sir Gwydion -inquisitor for Zhentil Keep and unholy knight of Hades. Now for your armor…”

“Help me!” a woman cried, her voice shrill with terror.

Low and gravelly, a man called out, “Make it stop! Don’t let it destroy me!”

Something inhuman, its words humming like the wings of a gigantic wasp, moaned mournfully, “Betrayed! Cyric has betrayed us again!”

Kelemvor sat cross-legged in the center of the swirling madness, his mind’s eye drawn in upon itself. He didn’t see the faces flowing through the rose-hued mist surrounding him. He blocked out the pained screams of the souls as best he could and closed his senses to the pungent tang in the air, the oddly mingled smells of white-hot iron and moldy, overturned grave loam. Nevertheless, images of the tortured spirits insinuated themselves into his thoughts. It was always the same when Cyric wielded the sword.

“I will end this chaos,” Kelemvor whispered, over and over. “I will not allow them to undo the rule of law and reason in the universe.”

There are some who would see that as a noble enough sentiment,” Godsbane purred, “but I think it’s a rather pointless vow, my love. Law and chaos are meaningless, when you come right down to it. They always balance each other in the end.”

The soft, feminine voice came to him clearly, even over the shrieks of the shades and denizens trapped inside the sword.

“Still,” Godsbane added, “once we topple Cyric, you can tell yourself you’ve fulfilled your promise. Overthrowing a madman like him is always a victory for law and order - at least for a time.”

Kel opened his eyes. The spirit of a mantis-headed denizen sped past, warped and twisted on a flowing stream of energy. “Don’t think I mean to stop at Cyric,” Kelemvor muttered. “You’ve kept me prisoner for a decade. I’ll have justice for that, too.”

“You’re hardly in any position to threaten,” the sword replied, full of mock indignation. “Besides, I’ve kept you safe and sound. You’d have gone straight to the City of Strife if I hadn’t captured your soul that day atop Blackstaff Tower. Then where would you be?”

“I’ll ask Midnight to keep that in mind after you hand me over to her,” Kel murmured. His heart ached at the sight of the tortured faces with their wide, pleading eyes. The helplessness he felt at their suffering burned in his chest like a poisoned dirk.

“Our goals really are the same,” the sword said smoothly. “You want Cyric to pay for killing you. I want him to suffer for trying to break my will after he stole me from that halfling village.”

Kelemvor remained obstinately silent. Finally Godsbane spoke again: “I need you as the proverbial carrot at the end of the stick, my love, but once I bring the Lady of Mysteries into my band of conspirators, your usefulness may come to an abrupt end. If you continue to bluster, I may find it necessary to destroy you.”

To prove her power, the sword snuffed out the souls she had gathered in the battle on the banks of the Slith. Godsbane had explained once that she could transfer this stolen life essence to her wielder, store it, or simply drink it in herself. What the treacherous blade had never revealed was how she had kept Kelemvor shielded from Cyric’s prying mind for all those years. When Godsbane contacted her master, Kel could feel the death god’s malevolence all around him, yet Cyric remained unaware of his presence.

Godsbane’s cool, sensuous voice filled the sudden silence. “Let me offer you a little present,” she cooed. “Just to prove there are no hard feelings.”

The imaginary prison walls Kelemvor had marked for himself became real, just as he had set them in his mind. A floor slid into place, and a ceiling, both with the feel of badly set stone. The place even smelled like a Sembian jail in which Kel had spent a month: all stale water and damp, musty earth. A mangy rat peeked out from a hole in the corner. Roaches scrambled around a thin stream of water that meandered from one high, lightless window all the way to the floor.

“There, now,” the sword said proudly. “Those poor souls gave their all for this place. Chaos into order. You should be pleased…”

A woman appeared in the cell with Kelemvor, lithe and young and very beautiful. Her long raven-black hair and pale skin made her resemble Midnight just enough to stir Kel’s interest, but not so much that he immediately turned away from her as an impostor. “I could offer my apologies in other ways,” the woman said, her husky voice full of promised passion.

Kelemvor was tempted by the reassuring touch of the woman’s hand against his shoulder, the solid feel of the stone floor beneath him, but he didn’t give in to the seduction. “You needn’t have bothered,” he said. After pushing himself to his feet, he made a precise half turn and counted his steps to the corner of his imagined room. “What I create with my mind is just as real as what you’re offering - but I never confuse it with reality. I wonder if you can say the same?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, wouldn’t have heard Godsbane if she’d bothered to parry the insult. Eyes fixed straight ahead, Kelemvor began to mark out the walls of his prison. The steady rhythm of his steps echoed through the void like the solid strike of hammer and chisel against stone, cutting grave markers for the souls swallowed by the chaos.

Wherein Gwydion the Quick dons the god-forged

armor of an unholy knight of Hades, and the

Prince of Lies unleashes his clockwork

inquisition upon the mortal realms,

with frightful consequences for Rinda

and her fellow conspirators in Zhentil Keep.

Gwydion had lost all sense of pain long ago, after the workmen had stripped each and every muscle out of his back. By the time the metal spring replacements had been hammered into his spine, the agony had become so great the shade had passed beyond the threshold of his senses. Now his mind had separated from his undying form. He watched the inhuman smiths pound away at his body from a vantage just above the long, dirty trestle table where he was laid out. To either side of his disembodied, floating essence, the ever-burning bodies of failed scribes hung suspended as ghastly chandeliers. The flickering light from the Burning Men cast weird, flowing shadows over the bustling operation below.

A clockwork golem, bronze and burnished like a princess’s favorite mirror, leaned over Gwydion’s body. The mechanical smith slid iron pincers into the flayed forearm and locked them onto the last bone buried beneath the flesh. With a tug, he wrenched the bone free. A smaller golem, wrought of silver instead of bronze, took the gory bone and tossed it into a pile of similar trophies.

This is the last of the core parts,” a burly man mumbled through a beard as tangled as Cyric’s mind. He studied the gold bar in his hands, running greasy, callused fingers over it with affection. “From here it’s easy stuff - aligning the limbs, setting the outer plates…”

The master smith slid the metal rod into the spot left by the bone then ratcheted it in place. The bolts secure, he dropped the ratchet and drew a more delicate tool from his stained and tattered apron. With this he carefully slipped the gears into play at the elbow and wrist. Finally he stepped back, gesturing for his clockwork assistants to hook up the last of the spring-muscles and close the incisions.

“I suppose I should be honored to be here,” the burly workman said. His voice seemed hollow and metallic, almost as if he were talking inside a steel-walled box. “I hear tell you haven’t invited a fellow god into your throne room in quite some time.”

Cyric gave Gond his best deprecating smile, certain the God of Craft would never notice the slight. The Wonderbringer was very much like his worshipers - long on strength and a certain cunning when it came to things mechanical, but short on the sort of devious intelligence the death god found challenging. “I thought you should be the one to put the armor together,” the Prince of Lies said.

“I don’t think any of my minions could have done the job properly.”