Prince of Lies (19 page)

From the Cyrinishad

When Cyric had conquered the dangers of Zhentil Keep and brought the masters of its thieves’ guild to their knees, he struck out into the wilderness again. Though the disgraced guildmasters murmured threats against the young man’s life, he cared not, refusing to let their vague night terrors unsettle an instant of his slumber. Though only sixteen winters old, Cyric knew once he bowed before the idol of Fear, that dark altar would command his fealty forever.

For eight years Cyric traveled, learning the ways of far-flung peoples, deciphering their myths in search of the gods’ true faces, true weaknesses. The fearful deities and the guildmasters joined forces and sent assassins against him in that time. Each and every one of them tasted the deadly steel of Cyric’s blade and were sent screaming down to Hades.

By then it had become difficult for Cyric to move unnoticed through the cities of Faerun. The constant battles against the Zhentish agents sent by Bane and Myrkul drew too much attention to him. So he returned to Zhentil Keep one final time. The young man was intent on killing the guildmasters and the patriarchs of both gods’ churches. In the depth of the year’s darkest night, he crept over the Keep’s black walls. The nine master thieves were found the next morning, their throats slit from ear to ear. The following night, the same fate befell the corrupt high priests of Bane and Myrkul.

Yet there was one last task Cyric had to complete before leaving Zhentil Keep: the dark gods who so wanted him dead had sworn to protect his true father, who had aided them against his son in the past. He had served those cowardly pretenders well, but Cyric wanted to prove that nothing could shield a sworn foe from his blade.

The magical wards Bane and Myrkul had erected around Cyric’s father were intended to warn them of anyone who sought to harm their trusted agent. In their foolishness, though, they failed to realize that without the heavy chains of Fate around his throat, Cyric could move silently, invisible to them. He slew his father and left a mark for the gods to know him by - the skull within the dark sun, the symbol that would one day be his holy symbol.

Cyric’s war against the gods had begun.

His freedom from Fate made him invisible to the gods, just as his freedom from Fear made him an unvanquishable foe. Yet Cyric knew he would need weapons to topple the pretender powers from their heavenly thrones. So it was that he went in search of one of the most powerful artifacts known to mortals: the Ring of Winter.

To the Great Gray Land of Thar, home to dragons and other dire beasts, Cyric came. Armed only with a sword of mundane steel and the cunning of a dozen elves, he sought the ring in the caverns of the frost giants. There, he found himself cast in the role of rescuer to a party of sell-swords and cutthroats who had ventured into the giant’s domain seeking treasure.

After Cyric slew five of the monstrous giants, they called upon their god, a powerful elemental from a frost-wracked layer of the Abyss. The ice creature, like the gods of Faerun, could not see Cyric the Fateless. Of this weakness the young warrior took the fullest advantage, wounding the ice god sorely before it finally retreated to the cold halls of its Abyss-palace. The remaining giants fled at the defeat of their inhuman master, which taught Cyric to strike always at the leader of his enemies first.

Though the Ring of Winter was nowhere to be found in those caves of ice and stone, Cyric gained the use of another sort of weapon that day - the warrior Kelemvor Lyonsbane. Of the sell-swords he had rescued, only Kelemvor survived the battle with the giants. For years this brutish mercenary followed at his savior’s heels like a devoted hound. Though Cyric was loath at first to accept the worship of this fool, he came to realize Kelemvor’s strength would cause others to rally to him like a flag on a smoky battlefield.

For a time, the warrior earned his keep by catching food and keeping watch for assassins, but he proved blind to Cyric’s vision of the world. Dozens of fears chained him to mediocrity. Had Kelemvor been wise enough to stand aside, Cyric would have traveled on, forging his destiny alone, but the cursed sell-sword proved more treacherous than the pretender gods themselves.

So it was that Kelemvor Lyonsbane, who was the first mortal to worship Cyric, also became his most bitter foe on earth…

The Chaos Hound searched the abandoned halls of Lyonsbane Keep, snuffling the ground noisily with his black snout. It was just a matter of time before he found the beginning of Kelemvor’s life trail. Then he could get this hunt over with and raid the verdant pastures of some deity’s heaven. Elysium would be a good place to start, in Chauntea’s domain. The Great Mother’s druids were always a well-fed lot, and never very proficient at defending themselves. Too busy hugging trees to practice swordsmanship, the Hound snarled to himself.

A sharp tang in the air caught Kezef’s attention. He crouched low against the rubble. Here it was - the beginning of one life and the end of another. Cyric had said Kelemvor’s mother died in childbirth.

Howling madly, the Chaos Hound started along the life trail.

Kezef tore through Lyonsbane Keep, following the path of Kelemvor’s early years. Had any mortals still inhabited the ruined castle, they would have seen the Chaos Hound as nothing more than a fleeting shadow. Kezef became insubstantial when he ran, a ghostly blur that left a lingering smell of decay and a vague dread of darkened corners and howling in the night.

In a matter of hours, he traveled the boy’s first thirteen years. The trail crossed a few others in that time - older brothers, servants, and a father growing fatter and more unpleasant with each passing day. The Hound could tell much from the violent meetings between the paths and the heavy, staggering pace of the old man’s long-vanished tread. Even after more than four decades, those small clues could not remain hidden from Kezef’s astounding senses.

One clash in particular blazed in the trail, stinking of hatred. It was a welcome odor to the Chaos Hound, and he paused to savor it. Kezef’s body became substantial again as he stood there. His maggoty paws burned prints into the floor.

Kelemvor had battled his father here, in the musty library. The old sot had been beating some wench not much older than his son. The boy leaped to her rescue, but was no match for the warrior. Kelemvor had gained a few blows for himself. Then something frightening had occurred…

A sharp smell of terror hung over the scene like the aroma of a sun-bloated corpse. Kezef’s ratty tail curled in appreciation as he inhaled deeply.

Some new trail replaced the boy’s. It was musky and feral, like the scent of a wild cat. A tiger? The Chaos Hound sniffed the decaying shreds of carpet left beneath the long-broken window. No, a panther. Kelemvor Lyonsbane had been a werebeast, a lycanthrope. The spot where the transformation had taken place bore the touch of ancient sorceries, of a curse laid upon the Lyonsbanes long ago - a fatal curse, too, if Kezef read the ending of the old man’s trail correctly. The Hound pulled tattered lips back from black teeth in an obscene smile; there were still spatters of blood soaked into the floorboards.

The trail led out of Lyonsbane Keep then and never returned. Kezef gladly followed the winding path as it drove farther and farther afield from the claustrophobic old castle, into the twilight-shrouded countryside. The panther scent soon disappeared. It was replaced by the trails of the boy and a group of adults - adventurers, by the cold smell of chain mail and sword blades - who had obviously taken him in. Kezef grew nauseated from the cloying, reckless happiness that lay over the trail, but that miasma ended soon enough. One of Kelemvor’s brutish older brothers crossed paths with the group; when the fighting had ended, only Kelemvor loped away, wounded, in beast form once again.

After the battle, the young man visited many of the larger cities in the Heartlands, lingering but a few tendays in each. He’d become a wandering mercenary, and from the weight and steadiness of his tread, the Hound could tell his strength had easily rivaled that of his bestial alter ego. Kelemvor’s life trail told of unremarkable adventures and long bouts of loneliness, hard winters in the wilderness and sweltering summers in crowded, teeming cities. Kezef followed him to these sites and thousands more.

For days after, the cities Kezef visited in his search were filled with fearful murmurings. Even the fiercest warriors found themselves shrieking awake as the Chaos Hound passed beneath their windows. More often than not, however, the nightmares caused by Kezef remained elusive - much to the delight of the Night Serpent, coiled in her cave in Hades.

It wasn’t until the chase brought the Chaos Hound to the Great Gray Land of Thar, and a cave atop a steep-sided plateau, that he slowed his lightning pace. The trails of many humans, elves, and dwarves led to this isolated cavern, far too many for it to be a mundane shelter in the icy wilderness. The sweet stench of ancient death lingered there, and the flocks of carrion crows in the sky overhead told of fresh corpses, as well.

The cavern itself was huge, with stalactites and stalagmites of ice glistening everywhere. Kelemvor had entered with eight men, armed and armored for battle. The cave, then as now, was home to a clan of frost giants. As Kezef slipped unnoticed into the cavern, a dozen of the monstrous brutes were gathered around a crystalline altar. A squat statue atop the rough-hewn stone pedestal glowed blue-gray in the midnight gloom. The giants shouted prayers to some inhuman god from the Abyss, a frost elemental Kezef had faced once or twice long ago.

Kelemvor had battled giants here, and the frost elemental, too. The conflict had been fierce, violent, and bloody, with the warrior’s eight companions being slaughtered in short succession after some heated exchange between the men and the giants. Only Kelemvor weathered the fight unharmed, felling three of the hulking brutes on his own. By fleeing, he survived to fight again. A ragged human, freed from the giants during the battle, followed in the sell-sword’s wake.

Kezef sniffed the prisoner’s trail and barked feral laughter. Cyric! The thin, starving man who’d run from the cave at Kelemvor’s side was the Prince of Lies - mortal then, of course, but Cyric nonetheless. Howling in mirth, the Chaos Hound darted from the cave and headed south.

One of the giants turned away from the altar, scanning the darkness with glittering blue eyes. He raised a callused hand to his lips, mostly hidden by a dirty beard, and said, “Quiet. Something’s in here.”

“What is it, Thrym?” one of the giant’s fellows asked. Like a driving wind, his whisper blew whorls of powdery snow from a nearby ledge. “More Venturers?”

Thrym reached slowly for his massive axe. “No, not warriors. Something else… some creeping thing. I heard laughing, and now I smell something, too.”

“All you smell is the bodies,” a dark-haired giant complained. He stuffed a blunt finger in his ear and scratched, squinting the eye on that side of his face. “You let them sit near fire too long. No good to eat now.”

Thrym swatted the dark-haired giant with the flat of his axe blade. The blow echoed out of the cave, resounding over the frozen midnight land of Thar like thunder. “This not good,” Thrym ventured after a time. The greasy hair stood up on the back of his tree-trunk neck, and a vague, gnawing fear made his stomach churn as if he’d eaten a yew bush. “Something powerful spying on us.”

“Just more Venturers. A mage or something.” The dark-haired giant dug into his other ear. “Maybe Zzutam heard our prayers and is gonna show up again.”

Thrym got to his feet and carefully searched the corners of the cave, though he felt an unusual fear at venturing too close to the darkest of them. He found nothing, which was both relieving and troublesome.

“Here,” the black-haired giant said when Thrym returned to the prayer circle. “Maybe you need to eat. This meat still good.” He smiled his best conciliatory smile for the chief and offered him the last strips saved from the mad human Thrym himself had slain a few tendays ago.

Later, after finishing the prayers to Zzutam and devouring the last of the salted meat, Thrym dreamed of a terrible, unsettling conflict. A lean, hawk-nosed man led a hundred hell hounds, all belching flame. The beasts drove the giants from their home and cornered them against a black wall. The enchanted stones were too high to leap over and too slick to scale.

A vague memory of the dream haunted Thrym for days, filled with the hawk-nosed man’s cruel laughter and the snarls of the hell hounds as they tore into the trapped frost giants…

Waterdeep boasted many magnificent buildings, both ancient and modern, but few were the subject of as much gossip as Blackstaff Tower. Home to the wizard Khelben Arunsun, the tower often hosted visiting royalty and explorers of great renown. Many throughout Faerun sought Khelben’s advice on matters of state and matters of sorcery, and for that reason Blackstaff Tower sported no doors, no windows. The featureless facade discouraged would-be mages and young adventurers from calling at all watches. After a few cups of mead, however, Khelben was wont to admit he kept the doors hidden mostly because he liked the air of mystery it gave the place.

As dawn spread warm and rosy across the horizon, events were taking place upon the tower’s flat, circular roof that would lead to new tales and wild rumors. A spell far beyond the skill of Khelben - and most mortal wizards - masked the eerie flashes of light and shouted incantations emanating from the high vantage. The powerful, complicated wards Khelben had set upon the tower offered no hint of the dangerous intruder’s presence. Unaware, the archmage pored over a musty tome of forgotten lore in his library.

Even if Khelben had shaken off the enchantment and stumbled upon the mysterious stranger, he wouldn’t have believed his eyes. Most well-traveled people in Faerun could recognize Lord Chess at a glance; the foppish ruler of Zhentil Keep had a penchant for getting his likeness printed on everything from customs stamps to sheet music. If a trade good originated in, or merely passed through, the city he ruled, an image of Chess could be found on it somewhere, smiling inanely over a thick double chin.