Prince of Lies (21 page)

Jergal took the moonlight parchment from the throne and floated swiftly to the other end of the chamber. He folded the glowing sheet then stuffed it into Chess’s mouth. Cyric was still pacing like a caged beast when the seneschal returned from silencing the severed head. Your Magnificence, Jergal asked, bowing low, would you like me to take a message to any in the pantheon, warning them of your anger?

“I’ll show the bite of my anger with action, not waste its venom on some polished missive to the Circle,” Cyric The Lord of the Dead stomped a few more steps, then stood rigid. “Since my ascension, there have been many powers moving against me. Mystra wants revenge for Kelemvor’s death. Oghma wishes to prevent the Cyrinishad from obscuring what he sees as true knowledge. The faithful of Bane and Myrkul and Bhaal - and now Leira - want to reverse the sands in the hourglass and resurrect their foolish, fallen gods… They’re all coming together now, Jergal. I can sense it. They want to rob me of my throne. They want to rob me of the glorious kingdom I have built here in Hades, the kingdom I will build in the mortal realms.”

Cyric balled his hands into fists and shrieked at the ceiling. “I have two houses, and traitors creep through the halls of both! My denizens will not bring me Kelemvor’s soul, even though it’s hidden somewhere in the City of Strife.” He gestured wildly toward the nobleman’s head. “Zhentil Keep shelters craven sneaks like Chess, though I’ve tried to make that place my home in Faerun, tried to raise it above the rest of the world with my patronage!”

The denizens and mortals cannot see your vision, my love, the glorious dream of the universe united under your rule, Godsbane said, her dark presence soothing the fury in Cyric’s mind. And the pretenders to divinity know you are the only god in the pantheon with a true claim to heavenly power. They fear you, so they cower together like sheep before the thunderstorm.

Jergal wrapped the candles with the holy symbol’s chain. If the gods are banding together, lord, why would they point the finger of blame at the Whore?

“She must not be working with them,” Cyric answered. “Or perhaps Mystra agreed to take the blame, knowing my hatred for her could grow no hotter.” He scowled and shook his head. “I’d be more of a fool than Torm to waste time guessing their motives.”

Turn this intrigue to your advantage, instead, Godsbane offered. Perhaps you can draw the conspirators out of the shadows by seeming to place all the guilt for the Chaos Hound on the Whore.

“Shadows is quite the correct word, too,” the Prince of Lies murmured. He took the candles from Jergal and crushed them. “These intrigues have Mask’s invisible fingerprints all over them -” the waxy fragments fell to the carpet, leaving the silver disk in Cyric’s hand “- no matter whose holy symbol he leaves behind.”

The Shadowlord was your ally, Jergal noted blandly. He helped you hide Leira’s destruction from the rest of the pantheon. After you were denied access to the weave, he sent you those arquebuses to remind you of the Gearsmith’s power.

“It’s clear now that Mask had his own reasons for appearing to be our ally still,” the Prince of Lies said. “He’s ambitious, our Lord of Shadows. Being God of Intrigue suits him well.”

The spirit of Godsbane slithered pleasantly across Cyric’s thoughts. Perhaps his title should be the next you take for your own, she prodded. He may be a talented adept at intrigue, but you are the true master.

“And you are becoming too fond of flattery,” Cyric rumbled. He let the comment hang ominously in the air for a moment then turned to Jergal. “I will rail at Mystra for this outrage, but I need a new force to unleash upon the mortal realms, something to draw the rest of the serpents from their nest. The materials I requested from Gond will do. The consignment has been delivered, has it not?”

The materials you requested from the Gearsmith just arrived, Jergal noted. His minions left nine large crates at the gates.

“Perfect. Have the crates brought here immediately.” Cyric slid back into his throne. Then, squaring his shoulders, he said, “I will need nine shades to power the Gondish mechanisms. I’ll leave it to you to determine which of the False will sacrifice themselves for my cause.”

Jergal bowed his acceptance of the task, but didn’t back out of the throne room as Cyric had expected. The seneschal hovered tentatively before his dark lord for a moment, wringing his hands nervously.

“Well?” Cyric snapped.

Th - There are myriad things that require your attention, Your Magnificence, Jergal began haltingly. Have you turned your mind to the gathering outside Bone Castle recently?

“The groups watching the executions? What of them?”

There is some unrest amongst the denizens. They feel betrayed by the slaying of their kind. The denizens are your faithful, and-

“And should never question my actions. If they wish to end the executions, they should find Kelemvor’s soul,” the Prince of Lies said.

Beware, my love, Godsbane warned. You do not have magic to wield against an uprising in the City of Strife. Do not dismiss such murmurings lightly.

And if Chess is any indication of the traitors to be found amongst your worshipers in the mortal realms, Jergal added, you may find turncoats of equal stature here in Hades.

The Lord of the Dead considered the warnings. He drummed his fingers against the throne, the staccato tap growing louder and faster as he pondered the depths of his predicament.

“Fetch the crates from the Gearsmith, Jergal, but before you do, create a scrying portal for me. I’ll find the shades to animate the contraptions myself, pluck them from the mob watching the executions.” Cyric grinned. “These Gondish artifacts will grant me absolute control over the souls imprisoned in them. Who better to choose than the shades fostering the unrest?”

The seneschal drew the tips of his fingers across his cheek in a quick, straight slash. From the deep wound that appeared, it was clear the nails were as sharp as a dragon’s teeth.

Yellow ichor oozed from the gash and ran down Jergal’s smooth face. In noisome clots, the blood dripped to the floor, creating a small pool. The shiny surface of the slowly spreading liquid held an image of the mob outside the castle.

Cyric stared into that gruesome window, scanning the faces of the assembled shades and denizens as they, in turn, watched their fellows tortured and destroyed. He focused the facets of his unruly mind on the crowd. With a million ears he listened to every word they said. An equal number of unblinking eyes watched every secretive gesture they made.

After a time, the Lord of the Dead drew Godsbane and pointed the tip at a cluster of unsuspecting shades. His voice tight with fury, he whispered, “The inquisition has found its first heretics - and its first inquisitors.”

Skeletal guards lined the top of the wall surrounding Bone Castle, pikes clutched in their bony hands. Savagely they sliced and jabbed the denizens chained to the jagged diamond wall below them. Bits of denizen flesh dropped into the oily black water of the River Slith, winding moat-like around the circular keep. There the fragments burst into flame and sank. Slithering things moved beneath the surface, gobbling up the foul treats before they dissolved completely.

Like the Faithless imprisoned in the great wall around the City of Strife and the False trapped in the realm’s noisy confines, the denizens had been created from the souls of mortals. However, they alone resided in Cyric’s domain willingly. Their reward for mortal devotion to the death god was a painful transformation into a form far less than human in appearance, but possessed of astounding strength and agility. And denizens, like all souls, were almost impossible to destroy. Only three things could annihilate them irrevocably: the hand of a god; an elder, eternal evil like the Night Serpent or the Chaos Hound; or a place of indescribable corruption.

The River Slith most certainly qualified as the last.

Some mortal scholars claimed the Slith had its source in the riven heart of an evil dragon buried far beneath the world’s surface. At first it trickled as a rivulet, but soon other fonts of corruption emptied into its waters - the tears of sacrifices being led to bloodstained altars, the ink spilled in penning assassins’ orders, the slavering of mad dogs, and the bile of savage, power-hungry monarchs. The rivulet became a wide river, slow moving and thick with poison and offal. It wound a tortuous course through the planes, befouling the realms it touched. One drop of its dark waters would kill any mortal; dunking a shade in the Slith would destroy it forever. Of the slimy, seemingly indestructible things that swam beneath the surface of the flow, not even the gods themselves dared utter their names.

From time to time one of the False tried to end its eternity of torture by throwing itself into the Slith. The unfortunate soul soon learned that nothing escaped the Realm of the Dead without Cyric’s approval. Even now, a dozen such shades floated upon the black water. The creatures lurking in the moat had gobbled down the souls’ arms and legs, leaving the agonized torsos to bob and writhe in the murky flow. Every few months, Jergal ordered these souls dredged from the Slith to face more personal torture.

Gwydion watched one of these tormented souls float past. He stood on the riverbank opposite the diamond walls, part of the mob gathered there to witness the executions. Though he and Perdix had tried to find a spot as far as they could from the Slith, the press of the denizens and shades had forced them ever closer to the moat. Now they were barely an arm’s length from the stinking water.

Finally fed up with being trod upon by the crowd, Perdix flexed his leathery wings and hopped into the air. “Tsk. Af’s probably admiring the workmanship of the chains,” he noted to no one in particular. “Probably muttering to the poor sap next to him that he was here when they forged the damned things.”

Gwydion looked across the river at his former captor and shuddered. In choosing the denizens to face execution, Cyric’s seneschal had been surprisingly logical: the doomed would meet their end alphabetically. That decision had put Af very near the front of the line.

The hulking creature dangled upside down on one side of a mammoth set of scales. He was bound in a dozen ways to a huge obsidian disk. Chains linked the stone to an identical twin, and the two teetered vertically over the black water, balanced upon a fulcrum of iron jutting from the diamond wall. Blood and grime hid Af’s wolfish features, and most of his spider legs had been sliced away by the skeletons. The only sign that he still lived was the occasional twitch of his long, serpentine coils. The equine-bodied denizen lashed to the other side of the scales wasn’t moving at all.

“How can you watch this, Perdix?” Gwydion asked.

“You think this bothers me?” the little denizen replied. He glanced at the shade with his one blue eye. “I never really liked Af much. Ours was a friendship of sloth. That’s the only kind down here.”

Despite his brave front, the concern showed on Perdix’s inhuman features, in the nervous fluttering of his wings. It wasn’t concern for Af, though. The winged denizen could see himself tied to the stone, battered and bloody and waiting for the balance to tip, lowering him into the oblivion promised by the murky Slith. As Gwydion looked around at the other denizens crowded on the riverbank, he saw the same badly disguised fear. Discontent lurked in the silent mob, as well. Cyric’s faithful felt betrayed; their narrowed eyes and clenched fists trumpeted their rage like a battle cry before a bloody skirmish.

Gwydion smiled secretively and turned his attention to the other shades scattered amongst the monstrous denizens. Their faces held blank looks or grim scowls of acceptance. In a few eyes, Gwydion saw a desperate joy at the suffering of their tormentors. That spark of life gave him hope. The others might throw off the pall of hopelessness, too, given the right leader or the right example to follow.

The steady clanging of an iron gong drew Gwydion’s attention to the unwieldy contraption holding Af suspended over the river. A particularly tall skeleton clad in a robe of blood-red samite unrolled a parchment and began to read.

“Because the denizens of the Realm of the Dead have yet to complete the holy quest for the soul of Kelemvor Lyonsbane,” the skeleton rasped, its voice like the rustling of ancient cerements, “Lord Cyric sentences these prisoners to be destroyed. Know you all that every denizen will share this doom if the renegade soul is not found.”

No one in the gathered mob paid much attention to the dire warning. The same perfunctory announcement was made at each execution, in each of two dozen sites along the bank of the Slith and in front of the Night Serpent’s cave. Repetition had dulled the impact of the threat, just as it had leached some of the horror from the unsettling executions.

The robed skeleton signaled two other fleshless fiends with a casual wave of its hand. Hefting huge mallets, they knocked the wooden supports away from the massive scales. The stone disks began to tip languidly back and forth, each swing bringing them closer to the oily, turbid river. Af struggled to shift his weight, so the other denizen - still silent and unmoving - would hit the water first. His efforts brought scornful jeers from the skeletons and sped the teetering of the scales.

Since he was bound upside down, Af’s wolfish head sank below the surface first when the stone disk hit the Slith. Then the scales tipped back the other way, and the brutish denizen rose, screaming, high into the air. The dark water streamed from his face, drawing the color away as if it were thin paint. The steely gray bled from his fur, the red from his eyes. His striped mane and the crimson scales on his shoulders all faded to feeble, pallid white.

Each time the denizens sank into the murky water, the river leached the immortality from them. Af’s screams died down to whimpers after his third drenching; the other denizen shrieked only once, as if he had been awakened by the torture. In a few moments, the flesh of both creatures melted away completely. Their seared white bones were quickly gobbled by the things moving beneath the moat’s surface.

As the crowd began to break up, filing back to the necropolis to resume the search for Kelemvor, Gwydion tapped Perdix on the leg. “Has there ever been a revolt in the City of Strife?”