“What would you have done if I had?” he said. “You two are in no shape now to take down anyone.” Havilar squinted at Mehen.
“I think I could.”
“Of course you do,” Mehen said. “That’s the whiskey talking.”
“But you
“No,” Mehen said. “Which
He set the whiskey bottle on the table and considered his girls for a moment. His clever, strong, dangerous girls. “But I did find another job for us.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Palace of Ossela, Malbolge, the Nine Hells
Lorcan stepped through the portal into a small room dominated by a green obelisk as tall as he was and enclosed by fleshy walls that oozed a sickly, yellow fluid. A polyp of glowing tissue hung from the ceiling, casting the orderly piles of Exalted Invadiah’s treasure in a cold light.
He held still while the portal swirled around the base of the Needle of the Crossroads and scanned his mother’s treasure room. Nothing. Sairche wasn’t waiting for him. He let out a breath and stepped away, shutting the portal of the Needle of the Crossroads.
Godsdamned Sairche. What was she playing at?
A large iron mirror hung on the wall beside the Needle. As Lorcan stepped close, the spells woven into a matching iron pin on his sleeve stirred the reflection on the surface, and his reflection became that of a young tiefling man, laboring over a book in the candlelight. Lorcan waved his hand and the image slipped away, replaced by a middle-aged tiefling woman with striking silver hair looking out a window. The brand that marked her as Lorcan’s warlock was prominently displayed, framed by a series of cut-outs along the back of her dress.
The scrying mirror slid from one tiefling warlock to the next. Thirteen warlocks-each descended from the original thirteen tieflings in Faerun who had made the Pact Infernal with Asmodeus himself, trading the admixture of fiendish blood in their veins for the king of the Hells’ own.
Or so they say, Lorcan thought.
Regardless of history, a full complement of the tiefling heirs was rare and difficult to come by. Lorcan only knew of three other devils who had managed it, all further up the cutthroat hierarchy of the Hells than he’d ever be.
The trouble was, when a warlock was so invested in channeling the powers of the Hells as to make a pact with the king of the Hells himself, they didn’t tend to spend much time raising offspring. The men of the original thirteen tieflings had mostly scattered their offspring, making the lines difficult to trace. The women had only bothered with one or two as experiments or heirs to raise. After a hundred years, their living descendants totaled in the mere dozens. The rarest heirs-those of Bryseis Kakistos, the Brimstone Angel, leader of the thirteen-had been widely numbered at three, until he found Farideh.
If anyone asked, Lorcan would say that it had been his keen intellect and dogged research that had led him to a lost heir of Bryseis Kakistos. But it had been, in fact, bare luck, and even Lorcan had to admit that to himself.
On his smallest finger, he’d worn a ring which could sense the blood of Bryseis Kakistos-a handy little trinket he had bought off a devil who claimed it was infallible … despite the rival’s lack of a Kakistos heir. Lorcan had been skeptical, but he had also been desperate and frustrated at the incompleteness of his warlock set. Had he not-had he cared less, had he chosen a different group of warlocks to gather, had he put his efforts to stealing his rivals’ Kakistos heirs-he might have killed Havilar, left her sister to take the blame, and been on his way, never realizing what he’d briefly found.
When Havilar had cast her ritual to summon an imp she could practice her blade skills on, he had merely been nearby, strangling the imp for shitting on his boots. Angry and ready to strangle the person who had opened a portal practically on top of him, he had stepped through and seen a gangly tiefling girl.
The Kakistos ring had turned to ice as he stood there, naming the Brimstone Angel’s heir. No one with such an innocent sense of the world had ever summoned him before. Twelve pacts in his hands, and Lorcan knew he wasn’t going to gain the thirteenth from this guileless girl in love with her blade. She did not need him and she did not want him But then Farideh came through the door. Havilar’s twin, her pretty face scowling, shifting expressions as if she were having an angry conversation in her own thoughts. The book was a good sign, the lack of weapon even better. But that expression-ah, gods, that expression. Here, he thought, is a girl who wants something she cannot get.
She had stared at him, like a mouse before a cobra, like she was fighting with herself to stay away. He had smiled and the ring had gone cold as ice again.
Everything had fallen together. Mostly. He wouldn’t pretend she was the simplest one to handle. Not by a long shot. She was afraid of him, but not so far as to be cowed by him. She wanted the powers, but not so much as to do his bidding to get them. Her pulse raced in very interesting ways when he got close enough, but not so interesting as to overcome her good sense and keep her from slipping out of reach.
Not so interesting, he thought irritably, that she didn’t pipe up with strange questions like how old was he.
Lorcan had been careful as he could not to let on about Farideh’s identity-he knew it drove his rivals fairly mad, and more than one didn’t believe he had made the set. If Sairche was stalking his warlocks, it was only his Kakistos heir she could be after and there was no way she could be sure that was Farideh, short of having the ring he had made a point of destroying once he had his heir.
But as he checked each of the other twelve in turn, he saw no signs of Sairche scrutinizing them. Perhaps she was only following Lorcan. Perhaps she’d give up if he didn’t check up on any of them. He ran a hand through his hair. Clever Sairche was his only full-blooded sister, and the only one he had never learned to predict.
What
He fingered the scourge-shaped pendant he wore and the mirror slid to Farideh. She was still in the room, sitting on the floor beside Havilar and some human boy Lorcan couldn’t place. They were laughing and Farideh took a bottle of some brownish liquor from the boy, her cheeks flushed. Even through the scrying glass, Lorcan could sense the tendrils of divine magic that swirled around the boy.
He narrowed his eyes-the boy from the caravan. The one Farideh had saved.
And he was a godsbedamned priest.
Or not, Lorcan thought. He’d assumed the traces of divine magic among the caravan’s members were coming from a pair of priests, but the boy had no mark of who he served on his person. Maybe a priest, but not necessarily …
It didn’t matter whether the boy was a priest, a paladin, or just particularly devout-the blessing of some god wafted off him like a pall of incense.
Sairche and her meddling would have to wait.
Bad enough Mehen was at Farideh to break the pact, Lorcan didn’t need some pious little nit tugging on his warlock’s already all-too-principled heartstrings.
“You ought to come with us,” he heard Havilar say, the magic of the mirror adding a warble to her voice. “We’re heading in the same direction.”
Lorcan seized the iron frame of the mirror in both hands. The hard edges cutting into his hands kept his head clear. To go back to Farideh would be foolish. To go back would give Sairche a path to follow again, would give Farideh something to be afraid of or angry about, would give Mehen more targets for his campaign against Lorcan. She wasn’t in danger. Her pact wasn’t in danger. Yet. He could fix this.
The boy in the room took the bottle back. He would be very simple to get rid of. So simple, that perhaps Lorcan could get rid of Mehen too.
Lorcan turned back to the Needle and held the image of the road where he’d surprised Farideh behind the brambles in his mind. So simple. So clean. She’d never question it.
