Brimstone Angels (42 page)

And the warlock had defended her, thinking she was saving her sister. Up until Rohini turned on Farideh herself, she hadn’t suspected a thing. Of course, she’d still knocked her sister unconscious, driving Rohini out of the girl’s body. But whatever had gone wrong
didn’t matter. She was surely dead by now. The Ashmadai were too quick to retaliate, and she would never have left her sister lying on the floor.

Now, she would like nothing better than to return to her normal form, curl her wings around herself, and rest for a good long while. But Invadiah could not wait. Rohini needed to find Vartan and find out whether she needed to possess him too.

“Wait here,” she said to Mehen. “Eat or sleep or whatever you need to do, but wait for me.” The dragonborn glared at her with far more venom than he should have managed. Depths of the Abyss, she was getting sloppy as Arunika. Renew that domination, she thought as she passed from the room and into the greater hall. Yet another task on her ever growing list—

“Good evening, my dear.”

Rohini startled out of her thoughts. Brother Vartan was sitting on one of the empty cots, a cask in his lap made of rough-hewn wood. He stared at her with over-wide eyes, a peculiar smile playing on his mouth.

“I brought you a gift,” he said.

Rohini had to remind herself to smile shyly instead of snapping. She doubted the box contained Invadiah’s precious aboleth—all Rohini ought to want—or an order to eviscerate Invadiah herself—which was all Rohini
did
want. “That’s very kind. You had time to buy a gift after delivering our offer?”

“It took no time at all,” Vartan said, his voice still strangely flat. “Open it.”

Rohini took the ugly box from him, and set it on an empty cot. “Did you bring the orcs to the proxies?” she asked. “You spoke to them?”

“Open the box first. I want to see your face when you open it.”

Lovestruck ass, she thought, a false smile plastered to her face. She hoped it was a necklace so she could strangle him with it later. She wrenched the rusty clasp open and lifted the lid …

The temple around Rohini melted with a shrill scream. Her vision went white, and the senses of her skin were gone, as if she floated in the void between worlds. There was no temple, no Toril, no Rohini.

All she knew was the song. Like a lullaby from her demon youth, the lyrics of the discordance rose, unbidden to her lips.

“
The heir stands divided and the inheritance will crumble,
” she heard herself say, the most perfect music she had ever heard. “
The dragons scrabble at the dregs.
”

She fought against the madness winding itself around her—she was
Rohini
, she was the corruptor, not the corrupted. Her vision crackled, and the temple returned in fits and spurts. Her feet were solid on the ground, the humid air clung to her skin.

More words, more sounds, more images swirled in her head. Rohini clasped her forehead as her head split open and sickly light poured out.

The glistening light crawled over her skin, eating away her disguise. The plain robes became tight leather armor. Her frizzy curls became a vibrant plume of red. Her ruddy skin became coppery and smooth as silk. Veiny wings ripped from her back. Her eyes, she knew by Vartan’s astonished stare, glowed ruby.

Rohini felt her control over him snap, but she could only worry about the power trying with all its might to remake her. “
Spirits surge behind the surface of the world, and they may make the land anew. But a misplaced pebble will cripple the strongest charger.
”

“You’re not Rohini,” Vartan said with a mad giggle. “You’re a devil.”

Rohini laughed, and the sound of her laughter blurred into the prophecies seeping up through her baser brain.

“I
am
Rohini!” she cried. “I am always Rohini.” She bared her teeth in a grin. “And now I am more. Such a gift.”

No, she thought, struggling to maintain herself, struggling to hold her mind together. This is not a gift, this is not Rohini. Not if I can’t control it. She had to control it. Had to think. Had to dominate her own self.

“They will want to know who sent you,” Vartan said. “They will want to know what you’re doing here.”

The words attempted to bubble out of Rohini, much as the prophecy had, but she reined them in, struggling against the force of the alien will perverting her own. She would not be the weak link.

Instead she said, “What benefits us benefits Asmodeus, and what benefits Asmodeus benefits us all.”

A slow, nervous smile curled Vartan’s mouth. “How interesting.”

A
S IT HAPPENED, IT WAS A GOOD THING
S
AIRCHÉ HAD HIDDEN HERSELF
away in the far corners of her mother’s holdings instead of fleeing Malbolge. Glasya’s summons came more quickly than she’d expected, and Sairché was kneeling before the archduchess moments later. The audience chamber was empty but for the two of them and the ever-present hellwasps.

“There are problems with my agents on Toril,” the Lady of Malbolge said. “You will correct them.” Sairché had hardly finished agreeing before the archduchess rattled off a series of peculiar orders and tore a portal open in the wall beside her.

Now Sairché stood in a dank, poorly lit underground room, a little devil made of shadow twining around her ankles. The floor was heaped with bodies—tieflings, humans, an elf or two, and maybe more. Enough blood it was hard to tell. Not so much, though, that she couldn’t see the mark of Asmodeus branded on a few chests, embroidered on more sashes. Sairché pursed her mouth.

The eel-like devil flowed up her arm. “Where go?”

“That one,” she said, pointing at a tiefling male near the top of the stack of bodies. “And
hurry.
” The shadow devil chirruped to itself and flowed over the stack of bodies. It pried apart the dead man’s jaws and wriggled down his throat.

The door at the top of the stairs opened. Sairché stepped back into the darkness and pulled her invisibility close.

Three men and a woman came rattling down the stairs, weapons out. All four wore sashes with the mark of Asmodeus on them. As Sairché watched, they fanned out, searching the basement for some sign of life, for someone they could kill. She stayed well out of their reach, and after a few moments, they sheathed their weapons and turned their attention to the bodies.

“A wonder the alarms didn’t sound sooner,” one, a heavyset tiefling man, said. “Who could have done this?”

A taller tiefling man with gnarled horns leaned over the elf woman sprawled belly down across one pile. “This one’s been blasted,” he said. “One of them was a caster.”

“There’re enough wounds here to mark a caster, a blademaster, and someone with a club,” the woman said. She shook her head. “This is too strange.”

“It’s not a sacrifice,” the thicker tiefling said. “It would be a sacrifice if it were other cultists that did it. And they left the bodies.” He nudged one with a foot. “Won’t be the Thayans then.”

“Do you know any of them?” the human man asked. “Any of you?”

“Bought supplies from Yvon a time or two,” the woman said. “He’s probably in there somewhere.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the thicker tiefling said. “They were Ashmadai. Their deaths are an affront to the king of the Hells, and so an affront to us.”

“All well and good,” the taller one said. “But we have no idea who—”

The body the shadow devil had climbed into threw up a hand to claw at the open air. Together, the living Ashmadai pulled him free, a tiefling man with the insignia of a cell leader, his chest blistering and cracked by magical fire, his face a ruin of shattered bone. He could not stand on his own, and so they settled him on the floor.

“Who did this?”

The man swallowed, blinking his eyes at the world around him, as if he weren’t sure it was really there. “It was the warlock,” the shadow devil said in the man’s voice. “The tiefling. She came from the hospital—her robes were their blue ones. She … and orcs. Orcs with blades and terrible spellscars.”

Sairché had to give the little monster credit: it remembered every line and sold it all well. Spellscars, Sovereignty, and a mad-eyed tiefling. Sairché frowned. She hoped it wasn’t the Brimstone Angel she was setting up.

Don’t be so foolish as to hope, she told herself. You’ll have to deal with that later.

He shuddered, his breath caught, and his last words rushed out of him in a whisper. “She led them here. She said it was at the behest of the Sovereignty. Her powers came from the Chasm. You must stop them before …” The man shuddered and collapsed, dead.

“Well,” the woman said. “That’s a stroke of luck. Hail Asmodeus indeed.”

“Don’t be flippant,” the man said. “We must bring this to the others.” He looked out over the bodies. “I swear we will avenge this slight.” The other three repeated the promise, and Sairché rolled her eyes.

“What of the bodies?” the tall tiefling asked.

“Get Pellegri up here to guard,” the thicker one said. “And round up some fuel. We’ll have to burn the place down before the city guard notices.” They clomped back up the stairs.

Exactly, Sairché thought, as Glasya had ordered. They ate up every word. Though why this was necessary and why the Sovereignty needed to be implicated in the deaths of some cultists still made no sense. People killed Ashmadai every day, and it was no surprise. Why did Glasya care about these? The shadow devil squirmed free of the dead tiefling and flowed across the floor to her.

“Well done,” she said.

“Home now?” the little devil asked.

“In a sense,” Sairché replied, grabbing hold of its neck. It squalled and kicked, but she held it tight and slammed the little thing’s body against the stone edge of a support column. Its neck gave a sharp crack, and the corpse burst into flames.

Her first mission finished, Sairché left the dead Ashmadai behind as she passed through the portal, but they remained on her mind for quite some time afterward.

The last thing Havilar remembered was knowing she ought to be terrified. The almost overpowering calm that pressed on her when she opened her eyes again stirred a momentary storm when mixed with her panic, and she sat up thrashing even harder against whatever might be there.

Nothing. No claws trying to grab her. No devils in the shadows. Just a quiet little temple that she’d never seen before and Havilar, in her bloody, bloody armor.

“Gods,” she breathed. It was an obscene amount of blood.

“Havi?” Havilar looked around and saw her sister—her robes spattered with black gobs of dried blood, her eyes haunted, and her cheeks streaked—nearly running down the short aisle that the benches made. “Havi, are you all right? Are you …” She trailed away and stopped a step from Havilar. “Havi?”

Havilar’s head spun. “Whose blood is it?”

Farideh kneeled down beside her. “People who were trying to kill you,” she said.

“How many?” she asked, and Havilar heard her voice shake. “What happened? What
happened?
” Farideh hugged her tight, and despite the insistent calming magic of the temple, Havilar burst into tears.

M’henish
, Havilar thought bitterly, somewhere under the roiling panic that made her cling to her sister as if there were no better anchor in the world. Now she’d be the delicate one too. But the sobs came in great crashing waves, and she could no more rise above them than she could swim the Sea of Fallen Stars.

“It’s going to be all right,” Farideh said, but she didn’t sound sure at all. “We’re going to be all right.”

“It should have
always
been all right!” Havilar cried, pushing her away. “What
happened?
”

Farideh sat back on her heels. “I did something … unwise—”

“Oh, there’s a surprise—”

“I went back to that shopkeeper. I was looking for … for a way to make Lorcan leave me be. He said he could help. I think he mistook me for something else. A cultist of Asmodeus.”

Havilar blinked at her, hiccupping from the sobs. What did that have to do with anything? “Did you tell him you are from Tymanther?”

“That’s not … They were devil-worshipers!” Farideh shook her head. “They think the hospital is arranged against them—I don’t understand why—but they figured out I was staying there and they were about to kill me and …” She pursed her lips. “You came in.”