Prince of Lies (9 page)

It hadn’t been difficult to win the cooperation of the church hierarchy - a finely polished tale of their goddess’s murder at the hands of Kelemvor had been enough. The truly fervent had been the easiest to convince, the quickest to join the hunt for the renegade soul. The fear of offending the new God of Deception swayed other important clerics, especially the men and women who had dedicated their lives to the art of illusion. Assassins had dealt with those too vocal in their opposition. And once the high priests were brought in line, Cyric could count on the rest of the church to follow them like mindless sheep.

Your Magnificence?

The words echoed inside Cyric’s thoughts. It wasn’t the cool, feminine purr of Godsbane, but a chilling, inhuman voice. Cyric looked out on the long, narrow throne room and found Jergal before him. The seneschal cast his gaze down to the floor. White-gloved hands floated up and folded palms together in a show of submission. I am sorry to disturb your reverie, but emissaries of the Shadowlord are at the gate again. They beg to deliver a gift from their master.

“Kill them all,” Cyric said coldly. “Then send their heads back to Mask, along with their gifts. Sooner or later he’ll give up - or run out of emissaries.”

Godsbane stirred uneasily. You might be able to use his aid, my love, she said.

“He wants to apologize for his cowardice, not buy back an alliance with me. He fears Mystra too much to break his promise to her - not this soon anyway.”

Cyric leaped suddenly to his feet, sending Jergal floating backward to avoid being trampled. The seneschal’s empty black cloak fluttered and danced. “There’s something odd about this,” the Lord of the Dead hissed. “Mask is risking Mystra’s ire just sending messengers to me.”

Perhaps the gifts hold the key, Godsbane suggested.

“Hmmm. Have you examined the gifts, Jergal?” Cyric asked.

The seneschal nodded. Arquebuses, Your Magnificence. All the emissaries have carried arquebuses. No written message, though all the rifles bear the symbols of both the Shadowlord and the Gearsmith.

“Why would Mask offer me Gondish rifles? Gond himself has sent me a dozen such contraptions in the past He thinks they’ll make any army invincible, the dolt.” Cyric snorted. “How can they be any threat at all when they blow up in soldiers’ faces as often as they fire correctly?” The Prince of Lies rubbed his pointed chin. “Anything else special about them? Are they enchanted somehow?”

Jergal shook his head. No, Your Magnificence. I examined them myself. They are simple contraptions of metal and wood, like everything else the Gearsmith builds. The only thing unusual about the gifts is that the bearers had strict orders from the Shadowlord himself to present them to you in this room.

Face rigid with concentration, Cyric paced away from his throne and down the length of the long audience hall. Chained to the pillars along either wall were three hundred and ninety-seven souls that burned without diminishing - the scribes who had failed in creating the Cyrinishad. One other shade writhed in fiery torment: Bevis the Illuminator. He hung from the ceiling halfway between the throne and the doors, suspended spread-eagle by chains of red-hot iron. As they entered the hall, supplicants would hear Bevis’s whimpers. The other Burning Men had long since screamed themselves mute.

Muttering incoherently, the Lord of the Dead stalked through the long shadows warping across the hall. He glanced up at some of the other trophies as he passed them, his mind veering wildly from his consideration of Mask’s strange gifts. Here was a ghastly canvas painted by a worshiper of Deneir, the red and brown pigments nothing less than the blood of her children. Next to it hung an axe used to enforce the judgments of a mad king who ruled in the name of Tyr. A glass case at the base of one pillar held a single silver nail with which a man devoted to Sune had blinded himself after receiving a vision of the goddess, convinced he would never see anything so beautiful again.

In fact, much of the hall had been dedicated to displaying badges of other gods’ shame. Cyric had meant these trophies to unnerve the deities when they visited, but in his isolation, they served only to remind the Lord of the Dead how easily worship could be twisted.

The greatest symbol of that truth was Cyric’s throne itself. The Prince of Lies had built the hulking, grotesque chair from the bones of men and women who died mistakenly believing themselves saints - a worshiper of Chauntea who slit his wrists thinking his blood would make the crops grow faster; a druid devoted to Eldath who drowned everyone who wandered near a certain secluded pool because they upset the peace of the place; a knight of Torm who tortured anyone he caught in even the most insignificant lie…

As he approached his throne once more, Cyric stopped and stood absolutely still. Amongst the other relics was the hand of a Gondish ironsmith. The man had bled to death after lopping off his left arm in hopes of replacing it with a mechanical limb built from blueprints he’d dreamed the night before. As his lifeblood drained away, the smith raved about an army of unstoppable mechanical warriors, men in living Gondish armor greater than any artifact wrought by magic. The idea of Gond’s machines making Mystra’s weave superfluous was near to Cyric’s black heart, and one he had discussed many times with Mask.

“Greater than magic,” Cyric whispered. “Of course.”

The Prince of Lies smiled and gestured to Jergal. “Pen and parchment,” he said impatiently. He took the items that appeared in the seneschal’s gloved hands and scribbled a lengthy note. “Take this to Gond,” he told the phantasmal creature when he’d finished. “No one else is to know of this message. Make it clear to the Gearsmith this is so. Tell him I’ll pay whatever price he asks, but the consignment is to be kept secret. See that the emissaries are killed before you go, but keep one of the arquebuses. That will be answer enough for the Shadowlord.”

Bowing deeply, Jergal took the parchment and backed away, keeping his bulging yellow eyes fixed on the floor until he reached the doors.

The Shadowlord is a worthy Lord of Intrigue, Godsbane said once the seneschal had gone. A novice could learn much from him.

Cyric settled back in his grisly throne. “Actually, I was just thinking how much he’s learned from me…”

A flutter of light appeared somewhere in a remote part of Cyric’s consciousness, causing his mind to race and seek it out. The Prince of Lies found his thoughts drawn to the small section of his mind devoted to hearing the prayers of his faithful. A braying voice called to the Lord of the Dead with a fervor even he found hard to ignore.

“O mighty Cyric, judge of the dead, master of the damned, hear me! I have glorious news from your most holy of churches in Zhentil Keep.”

When Cyric focused on the prayer, the visage of Xeno Mirrormane appeared before his mind’s eye. The high priest’s silver hair was wild around his glowing face. His eyes shone with a mad happiness. “Yes, Mirrormane,” Cyric replied flatly.

“O great Prince of Lies, the priests of Leira have news,” Xeno burbled. He smiled like a drunkard happily lost in his bottle. “Lord Chess himself led their vigil - under my supervision, of course - and they had a most magnificent vision, a most-“

“Get on with it,” Cyric snapped.

“Kelemvor Lyonsbane,” Xeno said. “The priests have divined that his soul is in the City of Strife somewhere.”

“Where in the city?”

They cannot tell exactly. Some power still tries to block their magic.”

Cyric withdrew his consciousness from his faithful priest and focused once again on his throne room in Hades. His voice tight with excitement, he shouted for his denizens. They would scour every inch of the city, burn down every structure if need be. Kelemvor could not escape; no one left the Realm of the Dead without Cyric’s permission. If he was trapped there somehow, all that remained was to flush him out of hiding.

As he formulated his plans for the search, the Lord of the Dead cursed Mystra again for robbing him of magic. But then another thought presented itself fleetingly. Mystra was the one who’d been hiding Kelemvor all along, masking his presence within Cyric’s own realm since she had no way to rescue him. The death god had no doubt of that. But now that she was expending so much power to guard the weave, she’d missed the prying magic of Cyric’s new followers. The Prince of Lies smiled. That had the ring of truth to it…

Cyric’s mind spun away, embellishing the plot he’d just created. He was soon certain there could be no other explanation for Kelemvor’s elusiveness. But now Mystra had let her guard slip, and Cyric would have his revenge. He imagined a thousand new tortures to be played out on Kelemvor’s soul. The fantasies stretched across his mind like a web shimmering silver in the swirling darkness.

“Stop your whining, Perdix,” Af grumbled. “I’m climbing as fast as I can.”

The wolf-headed denizen pushed himself past another level in the Wall of the Faithless. He climbed slowly, planting spider legs between the rows of writhing souls that made up the wall then pulling his long, serpentine coils up the steep face. “I don’t see why you needed my help, anyway,” Af grunted.

Perdix hovered just out of striking range, wings beating furiously against the fetid air. “You’ve never had to get someone out of the wall before, have you?” he puffed. “Tsk. You should know it’ll take at least the two of us. After all, you built the thing single-handed didn’t you?”

“I never said that!” Af shouted over the agonized moan emanating from the wall. “Don’t be so facetious, or I’ll club you one. You need -” With his human hand, Af clamped the mouth of the nearest shade closed. The souls of the Faithless cried out continually; that’s why the wall had been built with the souls facing into the City of Strife, so that, in their torment, the unquiet spirits could serenade the Lord of the Dead. “Damn whiners,” Af said bitterly. “Worse than living downstairs from a banshee.”

“I knew a banshee once,” Perdix said wistfully. “Lovely lass, but you’re right, they are a bit hard on the ears.” He scanned the wall with his single blue eye. “Almost there, Af. Just two or three more levels - well, possibly ten, but that would be the most.”

After passing thirty rows of souls, Af reached the spot where they had left Gwydion the Quick. Like the Faithless stacked around him, the sell-sword twisted and cried out. Some of his agony was caused by the greenish mold that held the souls in place. The living mortar grew between the shades, sending painful rhizoids into any of the unfortunates that stopped moving.

“What do you know,” Perdix exclaimed as he looked at Gwydion’s pale face, “he’s still got a tongue. He learned something after all. I thought for sure he’d try calling out to another god again.” He wrinkled his face in distaste. “Those beetles they use to eat the tongues out of troublemakers… brrr.”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s just get this over with.”

Af placed his human hands to either side of Gwydion’s head and leaned back. Slowly the denizen worked the soul out of the wall, though the Faithless to either side tried their best to hold the sell-sword back. It was Perdix’s task to deal with these jealous shades. The little denizen tore at their arms and hands with gleaming white teeth.

When Gwydion was free of the other souls and the green mold, Af hefted him over one hunched shoulder and started back down the wall. “You’re a lucky boy,” the denizen grunted. “I woulda bet anything Cyric was going to leave you in there forever.”

“W - Why free me?” Gwydion gasped.

Perdix hovered close to the soul’s ear. “Cyric wants all the denizens - that’s us - and the False who aren’t being tortured for something specific - that’s you - to search the city,” he said. “You’re going to help us look for a fellow named Kelemvor Lyonsbane, some old enemy of Cyric’s who’s hiding out here.”

Numbly Gwydion turned his head to look out over the City of Strife. The wall of writhing bodies encircled the hellish place, reaching high into the air. Denizens crawled or flew to the high ramparts. The bestial creatures carried screaming souls to be stacked atop the wall like so much cordwood. As far as Gwydion could see, he was the only one being taken down.

Inside the Wall of the Faithless, ramshackle buildings clustered in decaying boroughs. All these structures had been built on the same pattern: ten stories with square windows and a flat red roof. They only differed now in how ruined they were. In some places, huge fires engulfed whole blocks. In others, denizens tore the buildings down brick by brick, creating huge piles of rubble. Other denizens bombarded the boroughs from the air with javelins of lightning; these darksome beasts soared over the necropolis on massive wings of flame that cut through the choking shroud of fog like shooting stars.

And in the center of this destruction stood Bone Castle. From this distance, the pointed white tower seemed to be nothing more than a distant church spire, a haven of law and peace that might be found in any city in the Heartlands. Yet Gwydion knew that, within its protective curtain of diamond and moat of black ooze, Bone Castle harbored the most dangerous agent of chaos. Thoughts of Cyric and the madness he’d glimpsed in the god’s eyes haunted Gwydion the rest of the uncomfortable way down the wall.

“Awright,” Af said. “End of the line.” The denizen shrugged and unceremoniously dumped the shade onto his face.

Gwydion pushed himself up from the base of the wall, spitting a mouthful of dust. Here, the Faithless were quiet, having long since been crushed into immobility by the thousands of others atop them - and thereby conquered by the mold holding them in place. The sell-sword shuddered as he found himself leaning against the fungus-eaten features of a shade. Only the man’s staring eyes remained free from the green mold covering him.

“Well,” Perdix asked lightly, “now that we’ve got our ward, where do you want to start? The marshes on the far side of the castle?”

Af wrinkled his wolfish snout. “Nah. How about the Night Serpent’s lair? She gets fed about now, and it’ll be easier if we try to talk to her after she’s eaten.”

“She frightens me,” Perdix said bluntly.

“But we have to see her sooner or later, right?”