Brimstone Angels (37 page)

Invadiah eyed her stonily and did not answer, but neither did she slap the teeth from Sairché’s mouth.

“I may have seen Lorcan—in fact, a great many
may
have seen him—the other day, borrowing the Axe of Exigency for an orc he had dragged to Malbolge as punishment for harming that warlock.”

“
My
Axe of Exigency?” Invadiah said.

“I couldn’t say. Though it does seem likely. It was meant to kill some priest or another for him.” Sairché tipped her head. “So you see, though Rohini speculates, she isn’t lying.”

Invadiah scowled and turned back to Rohini and the shimmering portal. “Where is Lorcan now?” she asked, and it wasn’t until her scowling eyes rolled back to Sairché that her daughter realized the question had been meant for her.

“On Toril,” she said quickly. “Last I saw. In Neverwinter.”

“And the warlock?”

“With him. Though,” Sairché added, “she didn’t seem happy to see him. They might have separated.”

Invadiah nodded, and Sairché could see they were all very lucky indeed that Invadiah didn’t slap the teeth from all of their mouths, and luckier still that they were none of them Lorcan.

“Aornos, Nemea,” Invadiah growled. “Fetch your brother.”

“Your wish, Mother,” Nemea said. “Whole or in parts?”

Invadiah’s scowl deepened. “Whatever you see fit.”

Nemea and Aornos grinned at one another, and Sairché schooled her expression to one of indifference. On some level, she certainly pitied Lorcan, but if he was as clever as he seemed to think he was, he would figure out a way to escape Invadiah’s wrath, and if he wasn’t.…

At least I am not so foolish, Sairché thought with a suppressed giggle.

“You can use the Needle to get in,” Invadiah said. “The rings are in the treasury.”

Sairché fingered the pilfered ring on her chain. “I’ll fetch them for you,” she offered, and she scurried out the door before Invadiah could tell her no.

But she hung back and pressed herself to the hard bone wall beside the door, listening as Invadiah said, “You can have the warlock. Consider her a gift for your good work. Do what you need to get things done.”

“Oh,” Rohini said, and the purr had returned to her voice, “I’ll make
very
good use of her.” There was a muted flash as the succubus reactivated the portal, and was gone, followed by a few choice insults from the erinyes.

Sairché pursed her lips and waited long enough to mimic a sprint to the treasury and back. Damn it, gods
damn
it. Rohini didn’t even
know
the value of what she’d been handed, didn’t even care. Sairché’s plans were ruined.

No. The game’s not over, she thought, slipping back into the room, holding the green stone ring.

“There was only one,” she said apologetically. “I suspect Lorcan has the other.”

Invadiah curled her lip and grabbed the ring roughly from Sairché. She stormed from the room and down the hall to the antechamber, her daughters trailing.

Ahead of the door, she stopped. Sairché ducked to peer around her half-sisters’ knees. Hovering beside the door to the Needle of the Crossroads were two hellwasps, smaller than the ones that had been guarding Invadiah’s chambers.

“Invadiah,” one said. “We are to assist you.”

“Assist me in what?”

“In correcting the error that resulted in the deaths of the queen’s worshipers.”

“I have my agents,” Invadiah replied.

“We are to accompany them,” the hellwasp replied. “The queen commands it, and so we must.”

“It is ill-advised to delay in this manner,” the other hellwasp said, its mandibles clicking in agitation. Or something, Sairché thought, wrinkling her nose. Who knew what the hellwasps felt. “We are ordered and we must follow orders.”

Invadiah grit her teeth a moment. “Very well. Move aside.”

The hellwasps parted, and Invadiah entered the room. As Lorcan had before, she activated the mirror. The surface shimmered and cleared to show Lorcan, skulking through the ruined streets of Neverwinter. Invadiah grabbed Aornos by the arm and hauled her in front of the mirror.

“There, that place. Study it. Fix it in your mind.” She stuffed the other erinyes’s finger into the green stone ring. When Aornos turned
away from the mirror, and toward the Needle, it took several long moments of her concentrating to make the portal open.

“Grab hold of your sister’s hand,” Invadiah ordered. “The ring will allow you to carry her through. But no one else.” She turned to where the hellwasps hovered. “And
that
is where your orders cannot be followed,” she said. “There is no other trigger ring left in the Hells. If Aornos ferries you back and forth, she risks disrupting the portal and—worse—alerting Lorcan.”

“We are prepared,” one of the hellwasps said. “The queen has readied us.”

Its mandibles parted and from its soft, center mouth a third green stone ring protruded, thick with mucus.

Invadiah’s rage was a palpable thing, and Sairché stepped back, into the shadows.

“Very well,” she said tersely.

“We have memorized the spot,” the other hellwasp said. It hovered near to its compatriot and landed in the center of its back. “We will follow.”

Invadiah turned to Nemea. “Should you have trouble returning this way,” she said, through her teeth, “make use of Rohini’s portal?”

Nemea raised an eyebrow. “Aye, Mother.” She took hold of Aornos’s hand and with two bright flashes, the erinyes and the hellwasps passed out of the Hells and into Neverwinter.

Invadiah stood before the obelisk, her breath heaving, her teeth bared, for so long that Sairché was both too afraid and too curious to move. Invadiah snapped her gaze to her youngest daughter, and all the fury of the Hells boiled behind her eyes.

“Sairché!” she barked. “Hand me that hammer.”

From the piles of forgotten treasures, Sairché hauled an ancient terror hammer nearly as tall as she was and, trembling, dragged it to her monstrous mother.

Invadiah took hold of it as if it were nothing but a reed, testing its weight with a slow, wicked smile. With a great and terrible cry, she swung the hammer into the Needle of the Crossroads, shattering it with a great cloud of dust and a greater burst of crackling magic. Sairché threw up her hands to protect herself, and when she dared to look again, the ancient artifact was no more than a pile of mundane rubble over which Invadiah stood, panting and triumphant.

“You would do well to remember this moment, Sairché,” she said. “Before you go on dancing on the edges of my good graces.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Sairché walked the halls of Osseia, faintly dazed. The Kakistos heir was lost. Lorcan was doomed. Sairché was very much in her mother’s eye. Things were going to be very trying in the coming days. Perhaps she’d do well to find somewhere else to hole up. Beyond Osseia. Beyond Malbolge. Beyond the Hells even.

And then? she asked herself. She would always be under Invadiah’s thumb if she fled.

An imp popped into the space before her. “You Sairché?”

“What do you want?”

“Her ladyship would like you to know she was impressed with your resourcefulness. This is for you.” The imp handed her an ornate envelope, made of heavy parchment and trimmed in layers of hammered copper. Twitching scarabs struggled in the corners, and a large tassel of … well, Sairché had never been particularly good at identifying skins, but if pressed she would guess it had been a halfling. A bloodred wax seal bore the sigil of Glasya—a scourge with six thongs. She unfolded it and skimmed the contents.

“A conditional summons?” she asked.

“Indeed,” said the imp with a serrated grin. “T’will burst into flames when she’s ready to see you. I suggest you be in court before the smoke clears.”

Lorcan slammed his fist against the barrier of the shrine’s door once more. Every entry point to the temple blocked him as firmly as a brick wall. Even the skylight cut into the roof threw him back when he alighted on it. And Farideh either couldn’t hear him shouting at her, or she was still angry and ignoring him.

The options left to him were unpleasant. He couldn’t solve this himself. He needed to get someone to pull her out of there. He eyed the door once more and cursed.

Lorcan kept to the shadows as he slinked down the roads, keeping an eye out for the massive temple he’d seen in the mirror. If Rohini could put up with working there, surely the spells that barred fiends had worn down enough to slip in and grab Farideh’s sister. He just had to find the temple. And not be seen.

He ducked into an alley as he heard footsteps approaching. A group of humans in rags strolled by, taking far longer than Lorcan wanted to wait. He looked at his hands—there
was
a way he could move more quickly … But Lorcan hated that spell. Something about it made his skin feel like it was peeling off.

It’s fine, he thought. You won’t die of waiting. These fools will pass, you will find the temple, Havilar will be worried enough to help, and you will get Farideh out of that blasted chapel.

And then what? Lorcan hated to admit it but he wasn’t sure. The way she’d looked at him—Hells, the fact that she’d run as if he were a hungry demon … she had never been that angry at him, that afraid of what he would do, that determined to stop him. If he succeeded and pulled her out of Neverwinter, out of harm’s way, she would almost certainly break the pact. She would have never forgiven him if he’d left Havilar behind—he realized that now.

He wondered if Havilar would make him this mad.

He slipped out into the empty street again. Perhaps he ought to have told Farideh everything: the orc, the Ashmadai, Rohini’s naked threats. She wasn’t an idiot. She had to see the danger. If he sat her down and reasoned with her, surely she’d see he was only doing what was best for them both and
listen
to him—

The air suddenly sizzled with magic. Lorcan spun around, reaching for his sword, when the fabric of the planes split, and a path to the Hells appeared.

Nemea and Aornos stepped through the portal, undisguised and heavily armed. Surging out from behind them came a pair of Glasya’s hellwasps.

“Well, well, baby brother,” Nemea said. “Looks as if you’ve finally gotten Mother’s notice.”

“There’s been a mistake,” he said, holding his arms up in a gesture of surrender.

“Has there?” Nemea drawled. “We’ll have to sort that out another time.”

“Exonerate you after death,” Aornos added.

“Or not,” Nemea said. “Whatever you’ve done, Invadiah is furious. She says we don’t need to be careful. She says Rohini can have your little warlock.”

Shit and fire, Lorcan thought. What did Invadiah think he’d done? The orc? Not hellwasps for a bloody orc whose soul Asmodeus couldn’t claim as fast as he wanted.

“And then we can help Rohini finish things.” Aornos grinned, her pointed white teeth as sharp and hungry as any predator’s. “In proper fashion.”

“So thank you, little brother,” Nemea said. “If you hadn’t gotten all those cultists killed, we would still be on guard duty.”

“Cultists?” Lorcan said. He twisted the ring. Nothing. “I haven’t killed any cultists.”

Nemea clucked her tongue. “Seems you might have done something foolish.”

Aornos drew her sword. “Something that gave some Ashmadai the idea they ought to be killing Glasyans. Hmm?”

Lorcan turned the ring again, and still he was standing on Toril, his half-sisters advancing on him with naked blades, and a pair of hellwasps circling them. He let loose a stream of curses, spinning the ring over and over. Nothing.

“Perhaps,” Aornos said, waving her blade, “Asmodeus will resurrect you. Then we can hear the full story.”

“Or perhaps not,” Nemea said drawing her own blade.

“
Adaestuo!
” Lorcan shouted. The sizzling blast struck Aornos, and gave him time to pull his own sword. But in that breath between the casting and drawing his sword, the hellwasps struck.

He was fortunate—not every devil’s blood burned hot enough to temper the poison of a hellwasp, but, even tempered, the pain was excruciating, so bad his arms and legs refused it and went briefly numb. He flung his sword outward, missing the darting hellwasp but forcing Nemea to step back.

He could not defend against all of them. Aornos slipped into the breach and slashed across his back, while the second hellwasp closed
and drove its saberlike arms into his shoulders. Nemea sprang forward again, this time aiming at the joint of his left wing. Lorcan twisted, and her blade struck the hellwasp instead.

The creature screeched as Nemea’s sword smashed through its carapace as if it were no more than an eggshell. The hellwasp’s sharp forelegs slid from Lorcan’s wounds and the devil vanished in a gust of flame.

Lorcan stood no chance against Nemea and Aornos, let alone against a hellwasp. He loosed another dart of fire at Aornos as she broke forward, but it only gave Nemea another chance to crash her sword against his armor, the hellwasp a chance to sting him again.

The poison flooded his veins once more and Lorcan’s knees buckled. He threw his sword up to block Nemea’s, and Aornos’s sword forced past his leather armor and into the muscles of his back.