Brimstone Angels (48 page)

The tall, lanky man drove his shoulder hard, as if his body didn’t matter, into Mehen’s lower back. It didn’t fell the dragonborn, but it took his attention and gave the other servitor a chance to pull his blade.

And Rohini a chance to escape. Her flesh shifted again, dwindled, as the bones of her arms tapered into the thin limbs of a young elf girl. She wriggled out of the restraints and worked her feet free of the manacles, only stripping the first layer of her skin away, the blood making it easier to slip free. She didn’t feel anything except a rush of glee as she retook her own form, the madness curling itself around her mind.

“Stop him,” one of the servitors said.

“Stop,” Rohini repeated, her tongue turned traitor. Mehen froze, his sword raised over the servitor now lying on the floor. The corruption settled on her mind in an uneasy truce.

“Your resources are impressive,” the wounded servitor said.

“I can bring him to bear again,” she said. “Him and more.”

“We are pleased to hear it,” the other said. “It is a skill we covet dearly.”

“You think to convert me as you did Anthus,” she said.

“After a fashion,” the servitor said mildly. “We had thought Brother Anthus would suit, but in the end he proved himself less ideal than we had previously assumed. You are much preferable. For one, you have resisted the powers of the Hex Locus like no other has. You are too willful to be a singer, and we are pleased to have found you.”

They sounded like the sort of things she found herself blurting out. The strange phrases were bubbling up in her thoughts again, and Rohini clenched her jaw until they subsided, her tongue flicking around her mouth trying to shape the words. “What are you talking about?” she said once she was sure she could say it.

“You are the Prophet,” the servitor said, bowing. “You are the one who will gather the Choir, to sing the Symphony of Madness into being.”

Rohini wavered, the blur of the corruption surging through her, twisting her thoughts into a sort of pleasure at the opportunity. She could spoil a hundred Anthuses and Vartans with the power of the
Sovereignty, it told her. You can bring Arunika back from the grave tomorrow. Power like she could never gain in the Hells. Power to unmake those who’d treated her as if she were disposable.

Rohini laughed, a high, mad sound. “You want me to trade one master for another and thank you for it. Fool.”

The servitor smiled. “It is too late for that. The Hex Locus has blessed you. The mark of the Far Realm is on you. You have already been granted a new master.”

“It does not mean I will serve.”

“It is your nature to serve,” the servitor said. “It is in all of our natures. But put yourself in the yoke of the Sovereignty and we promise you a longer lead than that of the Hells. You will be a queen.”

“Among slaves,” Rohini snarled.

The servitor shrugged, almost beatifically, his slimy palms turned up. “Is that not better than what you have now, devil? We are not privy to the current state of the Nine Hells, but our masters know what your kind gave up. Is it worth it, Asmodeus’s bridle? Your former enemies now your mistresses, your reward the dissolution of your true form?” The servitor stepped toward her. “If you tell us who sent you, and why you are here, we can help you destroy them.”

Arunika would have relished such an offer, the voice reminded her, and not so long ago, Rohini would have relished it too—they’d been raised from the cradle to corrupt and undo. The murmuring of the Hex Locus’s infection sang to her of the unparalleled pleasures of careful unmaking, of bringing down such complex schemes as the one she now lay tangled in. To hand over Glasya and Invadiah when they least expected it—the demon in her would have reveled in their falls.

The servitor was watching her expectantly.

I am not Arunika, she thought.

“What benefits Asmodeus, benefits us all,” she said again, as the prophecy bubbled up to her lips once more. Even though it wasn’t true in the least.

Sairché crept through her mother’s apartments to the treasure room and slipped inside. Someone had sliced the damaged door away and cleared the rubble of the Needle of the Crossroads. The faintest shadow of its interwoven spells still disturbed the air—otherwise not a pebble remained.

She slid the ring she’d shaped and enchanted from one of the iron curls of the scrying mirror’s frame onto her finger. Not a piece she’d wear to court, but it did the job. As she waved it before the mirror, the surface shimmered, hiccupped, then solidified on the temple of Oghma, the House of Knowledge in Neverwinter. And did not move.

Sairché cursed. She’d spent good, long hours adding to the mirror’s spells, pouring holy water with heavily gloved hands and painting monstrous bloods onto the mirror with a stolen angel’s feather, for
just
such an occasion. It should have circumvented its previous limitations. She seized the frame and shook it on its hook. Still nothing.

“Piece of rubbish.” She pursed her lips. Fine. Rohini could have her privacy a little longer. She’d warm the mirror up to breaking through the temple’s protections. Spy on someone less interesting and easier to get at.

Sairché waved the ring again and bade the mirror show her Aornos. The mirror swirled and formed an empty street under a dark, drizzling sky. Neverwinter again. But there was no sign of red-haired Aornos. Sairché peered at the image, but as she did, the image blurred and wavered and reformed into the plains of Malbolge. Into the Birthing Pit, where the damned became devils and the devils killed out in the world incubated.

Sairché raised her eyebrows, and felt a small smile sneaking its way across her lips. “Oh no.”

She pressed the mirror to find Nemea, and again it showed her the same twitching images that settled, resolutely, on the boiling pit of souls. No doubting its message: Nemea and Aornos were dead.

Had Aornos and Nemea been stupid enough to pick a fight with Glasya’s hellwasps? Sairché shook her head sadly at the bubbling pit. Why did she even ask? Poor stupid Nemea. Poor stupid Aornos. They were exactly the sort to take Invadiah’s rage as an exhortation to kill the hellwasps.

With luck they would emerge as erinyes once more, though Sairché doubted their luck was that good. If
Sairché
was lucky, they wouldn’t remember her at all when they were reborn.

Hellwasps, she ordered the mirror. It snapped but flowed more smoothly, forming a window into Glasya’s audience chamber, where the hive of hellwasps swooped and swarmed around the throne of their chosen queen. Sairché frowned.

The ring, she remembered, and directed the mirror to find the hellwasp which carried the green stone ring in its mouth. The mirror’s surface dissolved into wavering light, as if the request were too difficult to manage, but then, abruptly, it cleared to show another rainy street. Then the Birthing Pit. Sairché’s eyebrows went up again.

As if for good measure, the mirror changed to the street again, then a wide, ancient wall, under the same drizzling sky. Nestled in a crack in the poorly repaired mortar sat the green stone ring—the second hellwasp must have snatched it up when the first was destroyed. Organized little beasties, Sairché thought. She would have liked a swarm of her own.

But then the mirror shimmered again and returned to the pit.

Sairché took a step back from the mirror. Both hellwasps dead. Both erinyes dead.

Lorcan, she ordered the mirror, her throat tightening. Show me Lorcan.

The mirror moved smoothly this time, but when it stopped, it showed her Lorcan launching up from a city street, a woman clinging to his neck as he took to the air. She peered at the woman—the Brimstone Angel.

Sairché grinned. Not one part of Invadiah’s retaliation had come out right.

She stirred the scrying mirror once more, and this time her adaptations worked. The mirror parted the temple’s forbiddances and obliged her—for only scant seconds, but still—with a glimpse of how Rohini’s end of the plan was going.

Rohini stood, exposed, unglamored, traces of tainted blue magic squirming over her dusky skin. She swayed on her feet like a drunk. Four people stood arrayed around her—a dragonborn and a man she had clearly charmed, and two empty-eyed, slime-skinned slaves of the aboleths. There was no question that they knew what she was. There was no question, in Sairché’s view, that Rohini was under their control.

Delicious, she thought again. And Invadiah was out on her training field without an inkling that everything was falling apart. Heads
were going to roll this time. Starting with Rohini or with Lorcan? she wondered.

Starting with the messenger, she thought grimly. Sairché wet her lips, and racked her brain for a devil who was foolish enough or desperate enough or indebted enough to deliver such a message to Invadiah. If she wrote it down, they didn’t have to know the contents.…

Or, she thought, perhaps
not
Invadiah.

The Neverwinter mission, after all, was a disaster, and such disasters led to dramatic shifts of power. If Sairché played her hand right, she could gain some of that power. She had Glasya’s ear, after all. Invadiah would call her traitor, but that wouldn’t matter if Invadiah fell.

Both, she decided. She would find a stupid imp to carry her message to Invadiah and then find a way to get an audience with the archduchess.

Because regardless of whether Glasya thought Invadiah had ruined things right now, things would start to crumble when Invadiah inevitably went blazing into Neverwinter.

The moment Lorcan’s feet were solidly on the ground, Farideh untangled herself from him, falling to her knees as if to reassure herself the ground was solid beneath her. Lorcan unwound her tail from his knee where it had wrapped itself.

“You know,” he said, “most people literally dream of flying.” He helped her to her feet, still smirking. “I rather enjoyed it.”

She swatted him away. “Never again,” she vowed. But at least he had gotten them there quicker than the streets would have, and far ahead of the Ashmadai. “Thank you,” she added. She pulled the rod from her belt and scanned the empty courtyard. “Where’s your portal?”

He drew his sword and wand, ignoring her question. “You’d do well to get that sword out,” he said pointedly. “Who knows what’s waiting for us.”

“Acolytes,” she said, “who will panic when they see you with a bare sword. Show me where you left Mehen at least.”

They crept through the dim corridors, Lorcan leading the way. Farideh’s heart was in her throat, and at every turn, she expected to find herself facing one of the acolytes or new-marked Brother Vartan or Rohini herself.

“You do know,” Lorcan murmured, “that if Mehen doesn’t break free of his domination, you’re going to have to break it for him.”

Farideh nodded. “I’ll just tell him Havilar’s in trouble.”

“No,” Lorcan said, “I mean I hope you’ve learned enough about swordwork from him because you’re going to have to subdue him, and I’d rather you didn’t get hit with that cleaver of his.” He glanced back at her. “Still certain you don’t want to come with me?”

Farideh bristled at that. “If I’m killed, you can always go make a pact with Havilar. Get yourself a Kakistos heir who knows her bladework.”

Lorcan muttered a curse under his breath. “Look, don’t start this now. You … 
I’m
going to get upset and you don’t want me to get us both killed by doing something like shouting at you not to be so stupid as to listen to bloody Sairché.” He started moving again. “I hope you are not such a fool as to believe she has your best interests at heart.”

“And you do?”

He spun on her again. “No,” he said. “But your interests are closer to mine than any other devil in the Hells. I guarantee you there is not a one among them willing to venture into a shitting temple to help you rescue a man that hates him above all others.”

She returned his glare. “What were you going to do with Havilar? She’s just as valuable.”

For a long tense moment, Lorcan didn’t speak. His mouth twitched as if he were choking on the words, and a muscle in his jaw pulsed as he bit down on them.

“You want to talk about this, fine,” he finally said. “We will. Not now. She’s safe,” he added. “Nobody knows there are two of you. No one’s going to find her.”