6 Kythorn, the Year of the Dragon (1352 DR)
Aglarond
• • •
“I found this for you.”
Bisera looked up from sharpening her daggers. Phrenike, the wizard they’d taken on back in Sarshel, stood over her holding out a book, part of her take from the haul. Bound in a veiny sort of leather and decorated with beaten copper, it would fetch a few silvers at least.
“What is it?” Bisera asked.
The wizard’s deep blue eyes twinkled as she sat down beside Bisera. “A little bird told me you might be interested in fiends.”
Phrenike, like Caisys, hid her ancestry well, but there was something foxlike in the taper of her face, her perpetual smirk that suggested something darker in her blood. The wizard had joined them only a few months prior, but she’d proved a decent investment after the last caster to join their party of adventurers had disappeared in the night, halfway to Tsurlagol, along with half their treasure.
“Stlarning sorcerers,” Jefensi had muttered, and swore if they took up another one, he and his axe would be the next to disappear. So a wizard it was.
A mediocre wizard, Bisera thought, with the kind of jealousy she’d never, ever let show. When she’d at last swallowed her pride a few tendays back and asked Phrenike if she could teach Bisera some midlevel spells, the brown-haired woman had shrugged.
“I don’t teach,” she said simply. “Don’t have the knack for it.”
What had first felt like a slap soon revealed itself to be an unfortunate truth: Phrenike was as mired in her circumstances as Bisera. She might become a better wizard—if, much like Bisera, she could find the right teacher—but she would never be brilliant.
Bisera flipped through the pages. Illustrations of fiends snarled at her, prodded into imaginary motion by the firelight. Here, a spell to summon a devilish familiar. There, a circle to bind a devil in place with promises. Bisera ran a light hand over the ink work, studying the wicked-looking creature in the circle, all bat wings and horns and muscle.
“Caisys told you that,” she said. “About the fiends.”
“Alyona,” Phrenike said. “So to be fair, it wasn’t so much that she said I should give you the book, as that I shouldn’t.” Her eyes glittered. “Trade for keeping me from treading on that godsbedamned pressure plate.”
Bisera looked across the fire at Alyona, bandaging Jefensi’s arm and wearing a grim expression. The symbol of Selûne around her neck shone with an unnatural light, as her attention was on the wound. But Bisera knew her sister was acutely aware of Phrenike beside her and the book in her hands.
“Don’t use any of that too close to the rest of us, eh?” Phrenike said. “Nobody wants to find out great-grandpa owed a debt to the Nine Hells.”
Bisera looked down at the book again. Not demons this time—devils. Less fickle. Maybe less demanding. Maybe more. She could manage a protective circle at least—though not much beyond that. Not enough that Bisera could be their caster.
“Why’d you take this one?”
“It had some lovely cabochons on the cover. I popped them off first—there’s a jeweler in Furthinghome that I know. He can make the ruby ones into earrings, and sell the rest.”
“You never thought about using the book?”
Phrenike shrugged. “Why bother?”
Alyona finished her ministrations and stood, heading for the edge of the clearing. Bisera watched for a moment, then glanced at Caisys, still sitting beside the fire and Jefensi. He raised an eyebrow. Bisera ignored him and excused herself, the book of devils still under her arm.
Alyona had retreated to the edge of a cliff near their campsite, where Selûne, her face just beginning to turn away, shone down on the sisters. Alyona held her face in her hands.
“Are you all right?” Bisera asked.
For a long moment, Alyona said nothing. Bisera moved closer to her, rubbing a hand over her twin’s back. “Is it Caisys?”
“I think we should go back to Darmshall,” Alyona said.
Bisera snorted. “Why in the world would we go anywhere near that shithole?” Alyona lifted her head but wouldn’t look at Bisera. A knot of worry looped itself around her stomach.
“These aren’t good people we’ve fallen in with,” Alyona said quietly. “I mean … I understand why—the world can be a cruel place. I don’t … maybe I don’t blame them. But I wish … I just think we shouldn’t poison ourselves so willingly.”
“Are you including your brightheart in that?” Bisera asked.
“ ‘The Priestess and the Turncoin.’ Sounds like a bawdy tavern tale.”
Alyona’s cheeks turned scarlet. “We’re friends. And whatever Caisys is—”
“He is literally a whore.”
“It’s better than your new bosom companion the lazy wicked wizard!” Alyona said. “She’s the worst of them—completely without morals and she dived right in grabbing up treasure despite the fact that she hardly lifted a damned finger clearing that tomb.”
“So which is it?” Bisera said. “She ought to cast the wicked spells or she oughtn’t?”
Alyona stood. “This is what I mean,” she said sadly. “This isn’t the right life for us, don’t you see? I miss … I miss us being a pair, a team. This is driving us apart. Even Caisys.”
Bisera looked away, up toward the moon. If anything was driving her from Alyona, it was the damned moon goddess and her edicts, the way her priestesses fed Alyona’s worst fears and tried to pull Alyona down, and Bisera with her.
“We are not going back to Darmshall,” she started.
“Then where?” Alyona said. “I’ll go, but it can’t be with these people. Not anymore.”
Bisera shook her head. “You’re upset. We can talk about this in the morning.”
“No,” Alyona said firmly. “Now. Decide.”
“I won’t,” Bisera said. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow. It will all be all right, I promise.” She embraced her sister, Alyona stiff and unyielding in her arms.
Bisera didn’t return to the camp but worked her way deeper into the woods, to a sheltered spot beside some tumbled ruins, the remains of some elven village. Alyona would calm down—if nothing else, she was too smitten with Caisys to mean it when she said she’d leave. Give her time to cool off and there would be better options out there than Darmshall and weakness.
Settling down beside the stone remains of a granary, Bisera broke a sunrod and began to read.
• • •
By an hour before dawn, Bisera had finished, stolen back to the camp, and swiped a few components from Phrenike’s pack. Alyona was right about one thing—Phrenike wasn’t dedicated enough to care too much at the loss of a little silver and such, so long as she got her share. She went back to the ruins, to a nice flat place, and cast her first summoning, her brain boiling with old ideas and new. Whatever Alyona thought, she wasn’t making choices rashly. Not tonight anyway.
The creature in the circle reminded her of the succubus she had faced down in the cavern of gray-bearded Titus all those years ago. Feminine, with skin the color of a stone and feathery blood-red wings. She wore armor, though, and a helm that looked like a skull. An erinyes, Bisera thought. Battlemasters of the Nine Hells.
“You summoned me?” the devil seemed annoyed more than anything. Bisera lifted her chin.
“I did. What’s your name?”
The erinyes smiled. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you there’s power in knowing a thing’s name?”
“I’ve heard it,” Bisera said. “I don’t see it, though. What’s to stop you from changing it?”
“There’s the power,” the erinyes said. “Change the name, change who you are. What do you want, little demonborn?”
Bisera swallowed. “Once upon a time, I was brought to the presence of a demon in the hopes I’d make a warlock pact with them. A succubus,” she added. “In service to Graz’zt.”
“But you didn’t. So why does this matter?”
“I didn’t,” Bisera went on, “because the pact they offered was a slave’s agreement. I’m not going to live long enough to make trading my soul for spells worthwhile, and nothing that warlock did would convince me of that.”
The erinyes stared at her, unblinking. “You sound terribly clever,” she drawled.
“No,” Bisera said, “just not blisteringly stupid, which—to be frank—the more I read of demons and their methods, the more I’d say their intelligence doesn’t recommend them. You all on the other hand …”
“You simplify things.” The erinyes’s blood-red wings twitched. “Maybe too much.”
“Maybe,” Bisera said. Even the way the devil spoke to her was preferable to the demon—the slow unfolding was surely meant to lull her into a place where she felt as though she had the upper hand, but it gave her time to think, to stay calm and focused and listening. “Do you serve a greater master?”
The erinyes’s dark eyes gleamed beneath her helm. “Don’t we all serve a greater master? In one fashion or another? In the Nine Hells, every devil has its rank—and its master.”
“My studies”—Bisera selected the word carefully—“say you come from the Sixth Layer. Which means you serve Malagarde, the Hag Countess.”
The erinyes smiled like a razor blade. “True.”
“She’s not a devil.”
“She’s a curiosity,” the erinyes said by way of agreement. “Do you intend to stand here chatting until dawn?”
“Enough of a curiosity she might be interested in my offer,” Bisera said. “A pact for a soul is a dire thing—unnecessarily so. You can’t possibly claim many souls that way, and a person can’t possibly gain much power without going mad of it. It’s a terrible agreement for everyone.”
“And you have a different offer.”
“You give me the same sort of power,” Bisera said. “You trade me for potential—to begin. But there must be roads where our interests align, and while I’m no fool, the world is filled with the gullible and the grasping. I could get you other souls, to be sure.”
“But you’d be safe?”
“My soul would remain my own business,” she corrected.
“You’ll not find many gods interested in the soul of a tiefling who would pact with devils and sell others to the Nine Hells for a little power.”
You’d not find many gods that care about a tiefling in the streets, Bisera thought. “There are a lot of folks in the world that I suspect the gods would be happy to be rid of, and the devils would be happy to take. That’s between me and them. As for the magic, you’d keep a rein on it. It would have to be a sword that cut both ways for this to work.”
Cold, unblinking eyes watched her, the erinyes a statue of patience and vengeance. For a moment, Bisera saw the danger in the creature, the peril she was facing. The erinyes was not mortal, would not think like a mortal. Bisera would have to learn to think like a devil. Assuming it worked.
“It would be a lie to say your offer wasn’t intriguing,” the erinyes said. “Quite enterprising. Malagarde might well be interested in such an … arrangement. But first”—her dangerous smile spread—“you have to let me go.”
“I will,” Bisera said. “Would you let me sample the wares, so to speak? A small spell. I’ve cast wizard’s magic for long enough—I want to make sure this is similar.”
The erinyes chuckled. “You might like it too much. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Maybe,” she allowed. “But it serves you just fine.”
“Quite.” The devil came to the edge of the circle. “Step in.”
Bisera nearly protested, but she knew that the circle couldn’t take her back, not without the erinyes meeting the conditions she’d carefully set. And if the erinyes killed her, she’d never find out the condition and would remain trapped until she did. The tiefling stepped over the chalked circle of runes, standing hardly a foot from the erinyes. The devil was both desirable and repugnant in equal measure, like a beautiful corpse. She laid one delicate-seeming hand on Bisera’s chest, twisting the fabric of her shirt in a fist, the other cupped her cheek.
Darkness flooded Bisera’s vision, a torrent of magic poured across her senses. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe, and then the flames chased the darkness, and she was breathing too much, the air cold despite the fire that consumed her from the inside out. The erinyes’s red eyes danced.
In a moment, it was over and a second pulse seemed to throb in Bisera’s veins. She pressed a hand to her chest, stumbling back a step, remembering at the last moment to move carefully, lest she smear the circle and let the devil out.
“How’s it taste?” the erinyes asked. Bisera straightened carefully, examining her hands. They felt as if they were burning, as if a stream of virulent flames ran down her wrists, down her spine, and deep into the ground.
“You tap into it,” the erinyes said. “Say adaestuo. That should trigger something interesting.”
Bisera pointed both hands toward the ruins. “Adaestuo.” A sphere of magic, the deep color of a bruise, sizzled into being before her hands and rushed across the gap, splashing into the stones and sending shards of rock scattering into the forest. “Not bad,” she said, flexing her hands.
The erinyes smiled at her. “So we’ll have more to discuss. Now: What’s the circle’s condition?”
Bisera matched that wicked grin. “Tell me your name.”
The erinyes tilted her head. “What if I’d told you that when you asked the first time? I’d be gone in a flash, and you’d have nothing to show for it.”
“Then I’d know how to find you,” Bisera pointed out. “Names have power, remember.”
That, at least, seemed to impress the erinyes a little. “Shetai,” she said, and a column of light streaked up from the circle of runes, carrying her and Bisera’s offer back to the Nine Hells.
Bisera blew out a tense breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. A far cry better than Titus’s succubus. Maybe it would come to nothing, but here, perhaps, were the beginnings of the kind of power that could keep her safe—keep Alyona safe—and make them comfortable for once besides.
Alyona—she’d be worried back at the camp. It had been long enough that whatever anger she’d built at her twin would surely have dissipated. Bisera scuffed the runes back into the dirt, dusted herself and her book off, and headed back.
The sun was just rising over the hills beyond. Caisys sat at the fire’s edge, drinking from a mug. Bisera imagined how she must look—flushed and puffy-eyed and excited. He raised an eyebrow.
“There you are,” he said. “I was about to go searching.”
“I’ve been busy,” she said, feeling not a little triumphant. She’d call the devil back that night, and see if the seeds of her plan had born fruit. It was closer than she’d come so far. “Is Alyona up yet?”
Caisys gave her a curious look. “Alyona left. Last night. No one could convince her to stay.”
All Bisera’s triumph evaporated. “Did … Did she say why?”
He shook his head. “She said this wasn’t the life for her. Said you hadn’t decided if you were staying behind or following her. But to tell you she loves you and she knows you’ll make the right choice.”
Bisera balled her hands into fists. The right choice—which was Alyona’s choice, Selûne’s choice. “She went back to Darmshall?”
Caisys nodded. “You can catch up to her, surely. Maybe convince her to come back.”
Alyona likely thought the same—she’d head for Delthuntle and the port and wait, and Bisera would be along a day behind at most, all apologies and changed heart. But if returning to Darmshall was the answer, Bisera would rather have the problem.
“I think this time,” Bisera said, sitting down beside the fire to pick pebbles from beneath her hooves, “I’ll let Alyona catch up to me.”
• • •