Brimstone Angels (31 page)

“I know you’re in Neverwinter,” he countered, stepping back, “and I know Mother’s very unhappy with you. And I don’t want to know more.”

“I think you’re waiting to see how things fall out so you can swoop in and grab the glory.”

“To what end? I have more to lose and nothing to gain. I’m not playing your games, succubus.”

She leaned in close, baring her teeth before speaking in barely a hiss. “Then why are your toys all over my board?”

He shrugged, trying to look insouciant. Trying to look like the careless, accidental son of the most powerful erinyes in Malbolge and nothing more. “As I said: coincidence.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I expect you’ll believe anything I tell you to believe,” he said, harder. “Because I’d hate to tell my mother you destroyed one of my … ‘toys.’ ”

Rohini narrowed her eyes at him. Lorcan’s stomach turned to ice, but he kept his smirk. Rohini had to know Invadiah would let her take the blame if things went awry. She had to know Invadiah was waiting for the merest excuse to cast off the skulking and infiltration Rohini favored for a frontal assault. She had to know—

Rohini slapped her hand down in the center of Lorcan’s chest, sending a wave of agony coursing through him. He gasped and before he could stop her, she did it once more. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground.

“You understand,” she said, “that it would take nothing—
nothing
—for me to convince you to go find the biggest, most ill-tempered pit fiend in Malbolge and pick a fight? To waltz up to Glasya herself and call her treasonous? To throw yourself into the midst of your squabbling pack of sisters and let them tear you limb from limb?”

Lorcan kept his mouth shut. Whether she could or couldn’t, he wasn’t stupid enough to test her further. This was Rohini after all.

She kneeled down beside Lorcan and clucked her tongue. “You all think I’m just a tool, when I could kill you without a moment’s breath. You, Invadiah, all her pretty little erinyes.” She chuckled to herself. She leaned in and whispered into his ear, “If you know what’s best, Lorcan, you’ll do what I tell you. Either get your warlock out of my way, or give her to me.”

“I’ll get her out,” he panted. “Give me some time, though. I can’t scry her. The mirror is fighting—”

Rohini stood. “You have until I return to the temple.”

He waited until she’d left, until the worst of the pain and the nausea had passed, before pulling himself up on the bone spurs of the room’s corner. Bloody Rohini. He’d try a few more times, and surely Farideh would get out of the way of whatever was blocking the mirror. He’d call her through the brand, get her someplace secluded, and then travel to Neverwinter and make her leave. He waved the ring in front of the mirror.

A shop. A street. The shop again, and Farideh hurrying out from the alley beside it, glancing back at the front door, over which hung a sign that read “Claven’s General Goods and Armory.”

“Oh, shit and ashes,” he whispered.

Forbiddances positively haloed the shop. Those spells had been what kept the mirror from scrying her—powerful magic that had no place at all around a random storefront. Lorcan’s pulse hammered unpleasantly at him: nestled in the crook of one of the runes in the store’s sign was a trio of black triangles.

The sign of Asmodeus.

Farideh had just left an Ashmadai lair.

He grabbed ahold of the mirror as if he could shake her through it. Stumbling into Rohini’s way was bad enough, but this could make everything so much worse. He pulled hard on the tethers that
connected to her brand. She had to get someplace quiet. Someplace he could get to her.

In the mirror, Farideh stopped in the middle of the crowded street, clasped her arm, and flinched. Lorcan pulled again and again.

Listen to
me
this time, he begged.

Farideh was threading her way through a crowd of people in front of a fishmonger when Lorcan pulled on her scar. It flared so hot and sharp she gasped and clapped a hand over it.

A woman in front of her, a human with large knobby hands, grabbed hold of her shoulder as she stumbled. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Thank you,” Farideh said. But then the pull came again, so sharp it made her eyes water and again she gasped the fishy air. She pushed past the woman and out of the crowd, hurrying toward the House of Knowledge.

He called again, but if he wanted her attention he could come and ask for it. After days of leaving her alone, leaving her wondering what had happened to him, and, of course, what made him take notice of her was finding out she’d spoken to someone else about him and how to leash him better. She should have expected it.

The key is not to hand over the reins too easily
, Yvon had said.

Again Lorcan pulled on the scar hard enough to take her breath, and Farideh stopped walking. Around her, the road was still busy with passersby, and off to the right a fountain in the shape of a wyvern swarmed with citizens and children and more than a few gulls.

Mehen often told her she was stubborn, a complaint Havilar often repeated. Farideh headed for the crowded fountain. For once, Lorcan would see exactly how stubborn she could be. She sat down on the edge of the fountain, resolutely ignoring the insistant pain of her scar.

Mehen dreamed.

He was following the redheaded woman from the temple through a forest. Not a forest like Tymanther’s scraggly mountains—heavy evergreens interspersed with bone white birches and monstrous oaks. Around their feet, ferns swished and shushed as they passed. The world smelled damp and resinous, like wet pine.

He remembered waking in the temple, preparing to go haul stone. He remembered the redhead—Rohini, that was it—coming to find him. He must have fallen asleep, though, since he couldn’t make himself ask her where they were or what they were doing. He couldn’t do much at all but follow along after the hospitaler. He hated the dreams he knew were dreams yet couldn’t wake from. But at least Arjhani and Uadjit hadn’t made an appearance yet, to drag up everything that had happened so long ago.

Rohini turned to him.

“Stop,” she said, and he did. In his dream, she looked strange—stronger, fiercer, almost bestial. She grinned at him, but it looked more like she was baring her teeth.

“We’re going to fight some of those orcs you mentioned,” she said. “But I need you to avoid killing them. I want as many as possible alive.”

“Of course,” he said.

“And another thing,” she said. “I won’t look like myself. So mark me—if you hurt me, Mehen, I will hurt you back.”

Confused, he regarded her. He didn’t want to hurt Rohini. He couldn’t hurt Rohini. He drew his falchion, and bowed over it to her, his new commander.

“Good,” she said. Her form wavered and for a moment, she seemed to have wings and talons, her hair a cloud of bloodred. He blinked and he found himself looking instead at a lean and muscular male orc, his face crazed with deliberate scars, his dark hair tinged red. Her face? Her hair? No, it was simpler to call the orc as he looked—young, male, and oddly handsome.

Somewhere deep in his mind, Mehen sighed. This was going to be a long, strange dream.

“Lead on,” he heard himself say.

The Rohini-orc strode through the brush, making no effort to dampen the sound of his passage. Even in his dream, Mehen knew
where to step and how to slide around the densest brush. Even if Rohini didn’t care, it was his way.

The squad of orcs crouched around a low fire, finishing the remains of a midday meal. Twelve of them. Half nursing wounds that could not be more than a few days old. All males, but one—a shaman decked in totems and packs of herbs. She was as big as the males though.

At the sight of the Rohini-orc, those who could took up their weapons. At the sight of Mehen they leaped to their feet and Mehen recognized them—it was the remnants of the same group they’d clashed with on the road. Judging by the biggest one’s bellow, they remembered him too.

The Rohini-orc said something in a language Mehen didn’t know, and the big orc cut short his war cry. A few more words and he regarded the Rohini-orc cautiously and curiously. The shaman stared openly and eagerly.

To kill them would be simpler. Clustered like this, if his falchion could reach one, it could reach them all. If they attacked the way they had on the road, there’d be no discipline in the rush—if any of them were archers they’d forgo the bow for the swords and axes that lay at hand, instead of scurrying into the brush. He wondered how hard one could punch an orc before one might kill it.

The Rohini-orc noticed the shaman’s attentions and chuckled. He turned to her and murmured something. The shaman blushed, and Mehen wished he could snort or roll his eyes.

The shaman abandoned her fire and took a place beside the Rohini-orc. Two others of the group also rose to stand beside him. The big leader stomped and howled as they did, baring his big tusks and beating the face of his shield with his sword.

“Now,” the Rohini-orc said in Common, “is where you aid me.”

The leader lunged forward, and suddenly Mehen found himself standing between the Rohini-orc and the leader’s sword. He brought his falchion up to block. The orc’s rough blade caught against the hilt, and Mehen threw him off.

Two more orcs stood, one with his arm in a sling, one with a bandage over his forehead, but neither too wounded to defend their commander. The first’s axe clanged against Mehen’s breastplate,
knocking his breath from him. The second was a little smarter with his sword—the blade dipped in behind the plate and cut a deep gash under Mehen’s stronger arm.

The leader roared again, but Mehen slammed his good elbow into the orc’s chin, armor crashing into bone. The orc’s head snapped back and he stumbled. Mehen swung his fist, the falchion’s grip still in it, forward and into another’s sternum, then swept the blade of the weapon across the third, shearing through the hide armor and into his belly. That one probably wouldn’t make it.

The world shifted again and once more he was between the Rohini-orc and another blade, but this time the attacker moved too fast and the blade slid up toward Mehen’s face, cutting a line across his cheek and ear frill. Mehen roared in sudden pain, but his exhalation came with a burst of lightning.

The lighting leaped from the attacking orc, to a pair of wounded seated on the ground, and up to the orc he’d attacked before. The two wounded collapsed, as did the orc he’d first attacked. He hoped they weren’t dead. Rohini would be displeased.

The only orc still standing was the one with the sword who’d stabbed Mehen behind his breastplate—a wound which was steadily bleeding and making it harder and harder to hold his heavy falchion.

Mehen dropped the blade and pulled a pair of daggers from his belt. The swordsman grinned—with those little blades, Mehen would have to get right up close to do any damage.

“Come on then,” Mehen growled.

With a bellow the orc pulled his sword up and swung it down, aiming for—no doubt—the gap in Mehen’s pauldron. Instead, Mehen threw up his arm and stepped into the strike.

The swordsman’s blade came down hard on Mehen’s wrist guard, and the impact shook the dagger from his hand and rattled his arm all the way to the shoulder. But Mehen kept his focus: for that split second, the swordsman’s focus was on his victory and not on protecting himself. Mehen’s off-hand dagger darted in and plunged up to the hilt in the swordsman’s ribs, with the soft hiss of a punctured lung. The orc goggled at Mehen, and then slid to his knees. Mehen wrenched the blade free, and sliced it across the orc’s neck—a quick death for a quick warrior, he thought.

“Three dead,” the Rohini-orc said. Even as an orc, his voice was musical. “I expected better.” He shook his head. “I hope for your sake, Mehen, that they take well to the Chasm.”

“Your forgiveness,” he said. Why was he apologizing? He shook his head. Pain radiated up his arm and across his chest.

This wasn’t a dream. “My wrist is broken,” he said, regarding the awkward angle in a dazed sort of way. His breastplate was full of blood too.

“Don’t think I don’t appreciate it—” The Rohini-orc stopped as Mehen hefted his falchion once more and pointed it at him.