Prince of Lies (3 page)

One glance at the shades nearby told Gwydion he was alone in this. The others had turned their backs on him, leaving him to his two hideous captors. The Faithful close by formed a wide circle. They had their faces turned to the sky, their hands clenched together in white-knuckled devotion or crossed devoutly over their unbeating hearts.

Gwydion cursed them wordlessly and struggled against Af’s implacable grip. His panic had subsided to a slow-burning dread, allowing him to think a bit more clearly. The endless hours of drill on Suzail’s parade grounds came back to him then, his training in hand-to-hand combat. He laced his fingers together and pounded Af in the jaw. At the same time, he drove both heels down on the creature’s snaking coils.

Af growled in annoyance at the blows, but silently reminded himself there would be trouble if he twisted the prisoner’s head off. Instead, the denizen bit down on Gwydion’s hands as he raised them to strike again, clamping his jaws just hard enough to pierce the flesh.

In that instant, Gwydion realized the giant’s axe hadn’t liberated him from pain.

“Tsk. Isn’t that always the way?” Perdix sighed. “No matter what I say, you slugs try to fight anyway.” He hopped high off the ground and clamped the manacles onto Gwydion’s wrists.

As the iron rings clanked shut, their spiked interiors bit into flesh. Then, as if the taste of the shade’s essence had suddenly woken them from rusting slumber, the spikes twitched to life and burrowed deeper still. They dug into bones, twisted sharply, and shot straight up Gwydion’s arms. Blinded by the pain, the shade screamed a long, yowling wail of agony.

For the first time since Gwydion’s arrival on the Fugue Plain, the sounds from his throat rang clear and true.

When the haze of pain cleared from his eyes, Gwydion found himself in a noisy crowd gathered outside a great walled necropolis. His whole body ached terribly, but the manacle spikes seemed to have stopped driving into his arms. Af had a clawed hand clamped on one of Gwydion’s elbows. Perdix held the other in cool, webbed fingers. A charnel house stench hung over everything. Gwydion found tears streaking down his cheeks, not from the pain in his wrists, but from the choking smell of death and decay seeping into his nose and mouth.

The gates towering before him would have dwarfed Thrym or any other giant in Faerun. Dark and foreboding, they reached up into a sky swirling with red mist. To either side, past the hulking gatehouses, high, pale walls stretched to the horizon. He was too far away to be certain, but Gwydion thought the walls were moving. It was almost as if each brick were shifting constantly, writhing as though it were alive.

All around the sell-sword, the crowd of whimpering, bawling shades pushed closer to him. Each had been bound at the wrists by manacles, and, like a reluctant steer before a slaughterhouse, every damned soul was herded along by a pair of monstrous denizens. The creatures were kin to Perdix and Af, but only in their sheer grotesqueness. They’d been formed by insane mixings of animals and men, plants, or even gems and metals. They flew, slithered, and crawled along, prodding their prisoners with suckered fingers or jabbing them with sharp spines.

The crowd surged forward, pressing Gwydion up against the closest of the twin gatehouses. The tower’s surface was hard and dark, and it felt oddly warm against the sell-sword’s face. He pushed away to get a better look at the small, roundish blocks. They weren’t stones, he decided, but fist-sized lumps of… something. He peered closer then recoiled in horror. “Hearts!” he shrieked. “The tower’s made of human hearts!”

Af snorted. “Bright boy. The gates are, too.” He lowered his snout and stared into Gwydion’s terror-filled eyes. “Bet you can’t tell me what kind.”

“Oh, leave him be,” Perdix said. “He doesn’t look like a priest to me. They’re the only ones who care about such trivia.”

“Cowards’ hearts,” Af gloated, ignoring Perdix completely. “They don’t make as good a wall as heroes’ hearts, but then, we don’t get many heroes here.”

Perdix shook his head in disgust. “Tsk. You’re so proud of the blasted things, you’d think you built them yourself.”

“I did!” Af bellowed. “At least, I was around here when they was first put up!”

Gwydion finally found his voice. “Torm, save me!” he shrieked.

Every denizen in earshot turned to Gwydion, and a webbed hand clamped over his mouth. “None of that, slug,” Perdix hissed. “There’s one god in the City of Strife, and he don’t like his subjects calling out to any of the others. We don’t care if you get in deep with him the first day you’re on your own, but right now you’re our charge. This reflects bad on Af and me.”

“And we certainly don’t need the grief,” the wolf-headed denizen grumbled. He balled one taloned hand into a fist and brought it hard against Gwydion’s jaw. Bones shattered. Teeth spilled from the shade’s mouth like marbles from a torn bag.

Perdix frowned. “You’re our own worst enemy, Af,” he sighed, wrapping one leathery wing around Gwydion to shield him from further blows. “If he can’t speak, they’ll be really miffed at the castle. Remember what happened last time, when you twisted that shade’s head off?

Af slithered sideways on his coils. “Aw, this’ll heal before he gets in to see him. ‘Sides, he was calling on another power. You know the rules about that.”

Reluctantly Perdix agreed but was careful to impose himself between Gwydion and Af until the gates opened. Horns sounded from high in the gatehouses, and the dark doors creaked apart just wide enough for three men to pass through, shoulder to shoulder. Denizens shoved their wards through the gap then followed close behind. The shades tried their futile best to resist these last few steps into the City of Strife. The matter was always decided by the steady push from the thousands of damned souls milling behind the reluctant prisoners.

A straight boulevard led away from the gates, lined on both sides by hundreds of skeletal guardians wielding pikes and spears. The undead soldiers existed solely to abuse the newly damned and their captors. With their razor-sharp weapons, they sliced off chunks of flesh that were quickly ground into paste beneath the mob’s feet. Along the boulevard, hungry things with haunted eyes waited impatiently in the shadows, hoping to recover some morsel.

Had anyone passing through the gates needed to breathe, the press would have suffocated him before he’d gone a dozen steps. A constant drone filled the air. This wasn’t a tapestry of prayers, as on the Fugue Plain, but a shrill curtain of vile curses and anguished cries. Near the gates, the noise was so great no one bothered to speak below a shout. Thankfully, the twisted, scarred, ten-story brown-stones that made up the skyline muted the sound as the mob approached the city’s center. Time blurred for Gwydion as he made his way with countless others to the heart of the City of Strife. Only the steady healing of his jaw marked the passing of the hours.

He could feel the bones knit, the new teeth pushing through the raw gums. The pain still plagued him, blurring his vision and scattering his thoughts, but it had lessened to a continuous, throbbing ache. Gwydion wondered dully if his capacity to feel such mundane agony had been stunted. After all, the pain from the spikes buried in his wrists had diminished, too. In his heart, though, the sell-sword knew better than to hope he’d be immune to torture after this. The denizens would invent new kinds of pain for him if the old ones wore thin.

Finally the mob crossed the living bridge that spanned the gurgling black ooze of the River Slith then dashed through the open gates of the great palace at the center of the necropolis. Hemmed in by defensive walls newly built of the purest diamonds, the shades were allowed to rest. Most of the damned collapsed, exhausted by the run. Not Gwydion the Quick. He stood, unfazed by the marathon, staring up at the shadowy heights of Bone Castle.

The keep reached high into the red sky. Its lowest floors were wrought of skulls that looked out sightlessly on the courtyard. Higher up, other bones found their way into the architecture, forming fantastically spiraling frames around windows, sturdy braces for balconies. Winged denizens used these balconies to enter the palace or launch themselves into the mist swirling around the upper stories. Higher still, the tower’s jagged peak disappeared into a thick miasma of smoke and fog.

“Awright,” Af barked. “Time to go.”

The keep’s front door had opened, and the denizens were scrambling around the bailey, roughly rousing the shades. Gwydion was still on his feet, so he was the first to be ushered forward.

“Please,” the sell-sword said miserably. “I think there’s been a mistake.” His jaw clicked painfully with each syllable, and his teeth felt loose, but at least he could talk again.

“See,” Af chimed. “I told you his jaw would heal before we got in to see the prince.”

Scowling, Perdix grabbed the chain between Gwydion’s manacles and yanked him toward the keep. “What kind of mistake? You think you don’t belong here, slug?”

“I don’t even know where here is!” Gwydion shouted.

“Ho ho! One of the Faithless, eh?” Af rubbed his spider legs together gleefully as he slithered alongside Gwydion. “Then it’s into the wall for you.”

“He isn’t one of the Faithless,” Perdix scoffed. “He cried out for the Fool outside the gates. That’s why you busted him in the jaw, remember?” The denizen turned his lone blue eye on Gwydion. “You believe in the gods?”

“Of - of course,” he stammered. “Someone cast an illusion that caused my death. I was a warrior of-“

“Don’t you learn?” Perdix snapped. “Isn’t one crack in the jaw enough? You can’t say any of the gods’ names down here - excepting Lord Cyric’s, of course.” He pulled Gwydion to the threshold of Bone Castle. “You’re in Hades, in the City of Strife. Since you couldn’t pray to any of the other powers out on the Fugue Plain, you get sent here, to be judged by the Lord of the Dead himself. If you’re smart, you’ll keep quiet. Sometimes Cyric goes easy on the first soul of a new lot, but only if he isn’t a whiner.”

“You’re getting soft,” Af snorted. “I say we crack his spine so he ain’t got no choice but to whine at the prince.” Perdix shrugged. “Be my guest, but don’t forget who has to see the slug’s punishment is carried out. If he gets off easy, we dump him in the boroughs and be done with him.”

Gwydion opened his mouth to speak, but Af silenced him with a vicious snarl. “I guess you’re right,” the denizen grumbled through wolfish teeth. “But it sure woulda been nice to see this slug take a bit of the old man’s wrath.”

Af and Perdix hustled their charge past the massive slab of carved onyx serving as the main door, into an entry hall built upon a floor of seamless crystal. Colored glass fibers spun by the drow of Menzoberranzan had been woven into beautiful tapestries that covered the bone walls. The hangings depicted the atrocities the dark elves regularly visited on the peace-loving people of the North. Yet those scenes were but a child’s dark fancy compared to the things Gwydion glimpsed through the floor.

“In here, slug,” Perdix said, his rasping voice lowered to a respectful whisper.

The room beyond the ghastly entry hall was large, but sparsely furnished. A podium stood in the center, a wide ribbon of parchment hanging from its top and curling down its single leg. To its right sat a bulky chair. The ancient throne had been weirdly beautiful long ago, with scrollwork carved in hypnotic patterns over much of the night-black wood. In recent years, some vandal had chipped away at the arms and legs with a blade. Rubies had once formed a circle on the back that would appear as a crystalline halo to anyone looking at the man seated there. Half the gems were missing now, the crimson circle broken and ragged.

Light bleeding in through the room’s stained glass windows painted everything the brown of dried blood. Thousands of skulls lined the walls, their mouths open in perpetual, silent screams. Thick rolls of parchment had been stuffed into each maw. Spider webs hung from the skulls like banners in a dining hall, and tiny white eyes peered out from between the decaying skulls in every part of the room. Somehow Gwydion knew these weren’t rats, but something far more malevolent.

The denizens brought their captive to the podium and forced him to his knees. Af and Perdix followed suit, prostrating themselves as much as their twisted forms would allow.

No sooner had the creatures touched their foreheads to the floor than the seneschal of Bone Castle appeared at the podium. The monstrous scribe’s smooth, gray face held no features other than a pair of bulging yellow eyes. His body was nothing more than a shadow-filled cloak, which rose and fell upon a wind Gwydion could not feel. With white gloves supported by unseen arms and hands, the creature produced a quill pen and positioned it steadily over the scrolled parchment.

From every corner of the library, every skull and roll of parchment, cockroaches skittered into the light. The insects dropped to the floor with a patter like a hard autumn rain. Large and small, black and brown and white as bone they scrambled toward the empty chair. Gwydion felt the roaches racing over his legs, across his back, but the denizens grabbed his hands when he tried to swat them away.

The insects scaled the chair’s battered legs, heaped themselves into a hissing pile upon the seat. And then the cockroaches were gone, melted together into the form of a rather mundane-seeming man, lean and hawk-nosed and apparently quite bored. He slouched low in his seat, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms draped loosely at his sides. His clothes were hardly regal-high boots, drab black trousers, leather scabbard, and a shapeless crimson tunic bearing the emblem of a black sunburst and skull. Only his short sword and his circlet of white gold marked him as someone important in Bone Castle, though the crown seemed to be intended less as a show of power than as a device to hold the man’s long brown hair back from his eyes. Yet for all this apparent ennui, an air of tension hung around him like a pestilent cloud. No matter how far he slouched in the chair, he was still a coiled serpent, ready to strike at the slightest provocation.

“Hail, Cyric, Lord of the Dead, greatest of all the powers of Faerun,” Perdix said, kowtowing.