Prince of Lies (32 page)

“You’re interpreting the dream wrong,” Cyric lied. “I will lead my hell hounds here if you don’t destroy the city.” He looked meaningfully to Zzutam.

Enthusiastically the frost creature nodded its great, spiky head. “You will do as the death god asks,” he wheezed. “His word is my word.”

“Very dramatic,” Cyric said snidely. “Have you been taking lessons from Torm or Tyr? That’s the sort of pompous drivel I’d expect from them…”

The death god gestured to Thrym. “I want you under way tonight. The trip will take you a few days, and I want this over with as soon as possible. The rest of the army will fall in with you as you travel.” He drew Godsbane and tapped the kneeling giant on both shoulders. “I dub you General Thrym. Keeping order will be your responsibility - and that means no fighting amongst yourselves, do you understand? For every soldier killed before you reach the city. I’ll cut off a part of your flabby, lice-infested body, starting with your fingers and working up in size from there.”

Thrym did the only thing he could, burdened with a command from Zzutam and the threats of an even more powerful being: he dropped to the floor in an awkward bow then hurried to gather his meager gear. In less time than it had taken him to kill Gwydion and his companions, the frost giant had packed his belongings and started on the long march south to Zhentil Keep, the rest of his newly formed army in tow.

After the giants had gone, Zzutam bowed his spiky head subserviently. “Great lord, I fear for my worshipers.”

“No need to worry,” the death god said. “The fate of the army is already sealed.” He walked to the mouth of the cave and watched the giants trudge through the snow to the plateau’s edge. Their battered helmets and grimy axe heads reflected the pale moon in soft flares of light. “I’ve already begun to send oracles to the diviners in the Keep - even the fakers. As we speak, frantic rumors tell of a monstrous army on the move.”

“But then the city’s defenders -” The frost elemental exhaled with a sound like wind whistling through a high mountain pass.

“You can always bully another bunch of stupid beasts into worshiping you,” Cyric offered blandly. “Though why you bother is beyond me. You’re not even a true deity. You don’t get power from their devotion.” He turned back to Zzutam. “I trust you will be wise enough to let events unfold without sticking your icy nose into the matter. I will take any interference from you as a personal affront.”

The Prince of Lies didn’t need to see the elemental’s weird eyes or hear his murmured acquiescence to know that fear would keep him from saving Thrym and the others. Certain of his victory, the death god withdrew his consciousness from the cave and sent it off to his holy city. The night was young, and thousands upon thousands of sleeping minds awaited the dire news that doom was stalking Zhentil Keep with the thunderous tread of giants’ boots and the leathery hiss of dragons’ wings.

Nightmares plagued everyone within the raven-black walls of Zhentil Keep that evening, though the Night Serpent got no sustenance from them. The following morning, the horrible dreams remained vivid in the minds of every priest, every soldier and beggar and merchant in the city. And those brave enough to describe the terrors that had chilled their sleeping hearts found their neighbors had been visited by the same apocalyptic visions,

Some diviners and dabblers in the magical arts tried their best to attach a meaning to the dreams; others, like Elusina the Gray, closed off their newly gained magical sight and refused to look into the bleak future at all. In the end, the sages and wizards could only agree that something strange was happening, that some power was sending the city a message from beyond the mortal realms.

At highsun, in a speech before the gathered hierarchy of the Church of Cyric, Patriarch Xeno Mirrormane translated that message for the people of Zhentil Keep.

“Our lord and protector is displeased with us,” the high priest shouted at the congregation kneeling before him in the black-floored nave. “We have failed to purge the heretics from our city, even with the help of the master’s inquisitors. The dreams that have haunted us, the revelations uncovered by our mages all tell us that a great army is coming. They are the agents of Cyric’s wrath.”

Xeno pounded the wooden lectern so hard it cracked beneath the blows. “If we do not accept Cyric into our hearts, if each and every citizen of this holy city does not put his will aside and take on the role Cyric has forged for him, this army will tear down the walls and raze the Keep to the ground.”

A shout went up in the temple, angry cries demanding the death of all heretics. The patriarch stared out over the crowd with wild eyes, huge with panic and righteous fervor. “Cyric does not doubt that we have served him faithfully. We, his priests-“

A terrible grating of stone against stone drowned out Xeno’s praise.

To either side of the patriarch stood huge marble statues of Cyric. With heroically chiseled features and grandly carved robes of stone, the twin gods scowled at the gathered throng. Now, both marble deities were slowly drawing short swords carved of solid ruby from diamond-studded sheaths; the sound was like the earth splitting open across the entire horizon.

“No one in Zhentil Keep has served our lord well,” the statues shouted in unison. They turned cold eyes on Xeno. “No one.”

The patriarch stammered a prayer for mercy, but the statues had already returned their unblinking gazes to the gathered priests. “Know you all that the Lord of the Dead has withdrawn his beneficence from this place - until such a time as the entire city proves itself worthy of his most divine favor.”

Stiffly the statues raised their swords. All across the nave, the silver bracelets worn by the priests to symbolize their enslavement to Cyric opened and dropped to the black stone floor. “You no longer serve the God of Strife and Master of Tyranny,” the statues proclaimed in dead men’s voices.

Some priests wept at the sentence; others merely stared in shock at the silver shackles lying open before them. They’d worn the bracelets for a decade, as the bands of pale, chafed flesh on their wrists showed. They could no more imagine moving without them than they could losing an eye or a hand.

“Please,” Xeno Mirrormane shrieked as he tried in vain to fit the cuffs back over his wrists. “There must be some way for us to prove our worthiness.”

The statues stepped off their ebon bases. They turned to either side of the temple and walked with ponderous steps from the apse to the aisles. There they each raised their swords once again, this time gesturing to the huge stained glass windows that ran along either wall. “There is one way, and one way only,” the marble deities chanted. “Obey these commands before the army of his wrath descends upon you, and salvation may yet be yours.”

All along the walls the tracery began to glow with a sickly crimson hue, as if the ruby swords had lit the decorative stonework around the windows on fire. Then light bled away from the dark stone, running down the stained glass like blood. The liquid fire burned away the gorgeously twisted images captured there - scenes of slaughter and strife perpetrated by the Prince of Lies and his minions - and replaced them with written rituals to be performed in Cyric’s name. Each of the six gruesome rites demanded a different list of gory components and detailed a sinister use for the gathered tongues and eyes and hearts.

“This is your only hope.” With that, the statues stomped back to their pedestals, sheathed their swords, and became stone once more.

Xeno Mirrormane broke the heavy silence in the temple with a hymn to Cyric’s glory, and soon the whole congregation had joined him. Their god had turned away from them, but there was still a chance to win back a place in his kingdom. And regain the death god’s patronage they would, even if it meant slaughtering everyone else in Zhentil Keep.

Wherein Rinda and the Prince of Lies have their

final meeting - at least in the mortal realms -

and Mask outsmarts everyone, even himself.

A chorus of fifty priests shuffled down the center of the twilight-shrouded street, croaking out a hymn to Cyric. They strained to form the words as best they could, but the charred stumps of their tongues choked them with every syllable. Their eyes, glazed with pain and rimmed red with exhaustion, stared blankly at the squalid surroundings. Xeno Mirrormane had allowed the priests little rest in the past three days, but such were the demands of the Fourth Service: Maim the voices of two score and ten of my faithful and send them to sing my praises along every alley, every path in the city that would be my holy refuge.

Rinda shook her head and continued down the street, away from the chorus. Gruesome spectacles such as this had become commonplace in the Keep since the Day of Dark Oracles, as Xeno Mirrormane and his priests struggled to complete the six rituals Cyric had inscribed upon the windows of his temple. Each of the rites demanded blood and pain, as if they alone could prove the city’s holiness. Sometimes the priests themselves suffered the awful mutilations. More often, the rituals required the agony of innocents and the screams of the unsuspecting.

At some other time, the Zhentish not devoted to the Prince of Lies might have risen up against the tyranny. Now, though, there was more at stake than the ephemeral matter of the Keep’s spirituality. Outriders from the city had spotted a vast army of giants and goblins and other wild creatures moving purposefully out of the northern wastes. The mystics knew their visions of doom were coming true as news of the advancing army spread through the city. Others guessed the horde to be the work of some god or goddess intent on turning Cyric’s anger with the Keep to his or her advantage. Simple fear silenced the debate in the end; no matter what force drove them on, the giants obviously intended to strike while the city was weak.

The fear blossomed into panic when it became clear that no help from the Keep’s outposts was forthcoming. A flight of white dragons had taken up a wide perimeter around the city, slaughtering any caravans or soldiers they encountered. A force of three hundred Zhentilar from the Citadel of the Raven had been wiped out within sight of the Keep’s walls. Now, with the giants less than a day away, the wyrms had tightened their ring. From the highest gatehouses you could see them in their patrols, dark specks circling in a cloudless blue sky.

In the twisted alleys and streets of the city, no one could see the wyrms, only the terror they inspired. The frantic haste of the priests as they conducted their bloody rites, the violent skirmishes for what little food remained after the church and the merchant houses had taken their fill, the futile prayers to the Prince of Lies - it all reeked of desperation. To a man, the Zhentish had the look of wild animals, wounded and cornered by a royal hunt.

As she passed the weathered facade of the Serpent’s Eye, Rinda noticed three of the Keep’s more openly feral denizens: soldiers lurking in the tavern’s shadowy doorway. The swaggering arrogance in their movements as they stepped toward her, the predatory glints in their eyes, told Rinda the Zhentilar were on press-gang duty. The straight razors and pitch-soaked ropes in their hands meant they were collecting parts of young women for the Second Service.

“Don’t bother,” the scribe said coldly. She flipped her cloak back, revealing the black leather armband that marked her as a protected servant of the church.

Two of the Zhentilar turned away. The remaining soldier - a young woman with a jagged scar running from the corner of her mouth to her ear - snarled at Rinda. “One o’ Xeno’s whores.” She spit on the ground then joined her fellows in the shadows of the doorway.

The scribe didn’t bother to correct the woman, merely hurried on toward her home. Despite herself, she said a silent thanks to Cyric for giving her the armband; it had saved her life more than once in the past three days.

Rinda was forced to step aside as a horse-drawn cart clattered into the alley. The wagon rumbled to a stop a few doors up from hers, and the driver dropped to the cobbles where a corpse lay in the gutter. It was Johul the fletcher, Rinda realized, a wave of sadness washing over her. The fletcher’s clothes had been shredded in some terrible brawl. One of his hands dangled, almost severed at the wrist. The H gouged into his bloated face declared his crime and the reason for his death: heresy.

“Not likely,” the scribe muttered. Once, before Cyric’s church took total control of the city, she’d heard the fletcher say he wouldn’t have been able to tell the gods apart if they all sat down at the Serpent’s Eye to dice with him. He would have worshiped whatever deity his customers favored, for all that it mattered to him.

Rinda glanced at the window above the fletcher’s workshop, only to find Johul’s son watching the corpse being dumped unceremoniously onto the cart. The boy had hated his father. That was certainly no secret in the neighborhood. And like many others in the Keep, the boy had used the church’s frenzied search for heretics as an excuse for murder. The pyre called for by the First Service required a constant supply of corpses. Where the bodies came from mattered little, just so long as they were branded with the H before death. Unsurprisingly, heretics had become as plentiful as mice in a granary since the Day of Dark Oracles.

In three days, Zhentil Keep had become a grim reflection of Cyric’s realm in Hades - at least as he’d described the City of Strife in the Cyrinishad. The Prince of Lies had dictated the last chapter in that cursed tome in the hours before the temple statues came to life. In it, he described his dream of a world with no other gods. More than any section of the Cyrinishad, the words from this chilling fancy had burned themselves into Rinda’s mind:

The chains of Hypocrisy will fall away, and man will be free to act upon his instincts, the only trustworthy guides in this world of strife and despair. The prison whose four walls are Honor, Loyalty, Philanthropy, and Sacrifice will be shattered by the sword of Self-Interest and the mace of Greed. Even now the warriors who take up these weapons first and wield them with the surest hand triumph over all others. Loosed from the fetters of Righteousness, all men will be set on a level battlefield, made free to cut their own destiny from the bleak cloth of life.