“To what do I owe this unexpected privilege?” she asked, her dark hair rippling in the breeze and a half-mocking smile smeared across her full lips. “My, my, a mere necromancer gets to ride alongside the God of Death. Truly, I am honored.”
“I wanted to ask you a couple of important questions about the upcoming mission in Brakith.”
“Ask away, great god. This poor mortal will attempt to answer, if it is within her limited ability to do so.”
I rolled my eyes at her, making sure she caught the gesture. All that this elicited from her, though, was a smirk. She really had woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning; perhaps with all her dildo work the previous night, she hadn’t gotten enough sleep. And she needed to sleep now, as any mortal did. Rubbing either of these things in her face—as tempting as it was to do so—would be counterproductive though. So, I decided to ignore her obvious baiting and cut straight to the point.
“We need to get into Brakith without being noticed,” I said. “And Rollar says that the Goddess of Charm’s Beauty Mirror might be somewhere in the town. What do you know about this mirror?”
“Ah, Lucielle’s Beauty Mirror,” she purred. “A most desirable object to possess, oh yes, and likely the only vaguely useful thing that vain, arrogant, air-headed goddess ever created. Ugh, what a pathetic fool she was. All anyone needed to do to distract her from anything was hand her a mirror—just a regular one would do. The world could be collapsing around her, and she’d just be staring at her own reflection. Anyway, I digress; the Beauty Mirror is a weapon of charm.”
“Thanks for stating the obvious.”
She paused speaking to glare at me, her lips drawn tight and her jaw clenched with sudden anger. But as quickly as it had flared up, it passed, and an expression of subdued amiability returned to her beautiful face, even if something menacing continued to simmer in her pupil-less eyes.
“What I was going to say, before I was so rudely interrupted, is that the Beauty Mirror can be used for a great number of things.”
“Rollar said it can be used to disguise yourself, even to people who know you well.”
“That is indeed one thing it can be used for, but it has other uses too. Simply carrying it on you vastly increases your natural charm, to the point where you’re able to convince anyone to do almost anything. That is, unless they have a resistance to magic or they are wearing something that has a resistance to magic. And, of course, if they’re Fated, the effect will be greatly weakened. But even so, the effect will still be present.”
“You’re saying that if someone as unattractive as Drok or Cranton slipped this Beauty Mirror into their pocket and hit on someone like, say, Elyse, they’d be able to get her into bed?”
“That fake holier-than-thou whore would jump into bed with anything with a cock,” Isu sneered, “without any need for the charm magic of the Beauty Mirror.”
“That was a serious question, Isu,” I said sternly, “not an opportunity for you to get your bitch on. Now, answer it seriously.”
“Ugh,” she hissed, “If one of those ugly buffoons used the Beauty Mirror on a beautiful woman, then yes, they would be able to achieve the otherwise impossible.”
It was amusing how she refused to say “Elyse” and “beautiful” in the same sentence, and I was enjoying making her squirm. But I didn’t want to push things too far.
“And in that vein, could using the Beauty Mirror convince someone who was a compulsive liar to tell the truth?”
“Absolutely. Again, provided they were not resistant to magic.”
It sounded to me like this Beauty Mirror would be a most useful interrogation tool, and perhaps even something I could use to force my uncle to confess his crimes in front of the population of Brakith. Of course, I would have to find it first, if it even was in Brakith in the first place.
“There’s something else I want to ask you about,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“In the Tree God’s ruined temple, I discovered a new ability, a weird one. I touched the bones of the dead, and I was able to travel back in time and see through their eyes and experience the last few minutes of their lives.”
“Ah. And you felt quite sick after doing it, yes?”
“I felt like a minotaur had kicked me around a bit, yeah.”
“As your divine power increases, you will find that your ability to see through the eyes of the dead becomes less disorienting, as with your other skills and magic.”
“I figured. But I saw something through those dead people’s eyes. I saw what killed them all, the whole population of Kroth. And I was wondering if you knew what it was.”
A strange look came across Isu’s face: half fear, half something else. Was this guilt I saw? Was she connected in some way to the huge monster I’d caught a glimpse of via the eyes of the dead? Whatever it was, she turned away quickly before I could study her expression too closely.
“The Demogorgon,” she murmured, trailing off into silence.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Demogorgon?” I asked. “What the fuck is that?”
Isu released a long, slow sigh, and her shoulders slumped slightly, as if she was carrying a heavy, unseen weight.
“A creature of ancient darkness,” she whispered, “one of the primeval demons. A powerful being who existed before gods, in the time of fire and chaos, long before the coming of men to this world. The Demogorgon is a creature of immense power, and he wields magic of unimaginable destructiveness.”
“Could I take on this Demogorgon?”
Isu laughed harshly and gave me a dismissive wave of her hand. “Not even I, at the height of my powers, could have stood against the Demogorgon and survived. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“I guess that just means I’ll have to get strong enough to squish that ugly piece of shit under my boot like
