Brimstone Angels

her.

“Mehen knows what he’s doing.”

But Farideh had watched Mehen’s drill her entire life-this Mehen was slower, not caring if he left his guard open, not caring if his strikes brought him to a better counterattack. The only thing this Mehen did well was protect Rohini.

Farideh had to get him away from her.

“Adaestuo!”

The blast of energy struck Brother Vartan, hurling him back away from the doorway. Farideh shoved her elbow into Lorcan’s chest and broke free of his grasp. She cast a second bolt into the room, into the cluster of orcs attacking Mehen. Whether due to luck or the frailty of the orcs from their transformation, the bolt exploded with a spray of blood, and one of them fell.

“You!” Rohini cried, the strange blue magic surging up through her unruly mane. She shuddered and looked for a moment as if she would fall from her perch. “You’re supposed to be dead, the dead will swarm the gates of the city of skulls.” She broke into a string of infernal curses.

Farideh answered with a blast of fire. It washed over Rohini with no more effect than a gust of wind. But now eyes were on her-the slime-skinned men, the remaining two orcs … and Mehen. She took a step back, into another body, into hands that grabbed hold of her hair and pulled her backward. Brother Vartan’s blank eyes looked down at her-

Lorcan struck Vartan hard with the pommel of his sword and the half-elf collapsed with a sickly crunch of bone. “Not fire,” he ordered as she regained her balance. “We and she are of a type.”

“And Lorcan,” Rohini snarled. She spread her hands and flames built in them. The sickly light of a hundred colors suffused the fire, and Rohini’s body gave a violent jerk. The flames exploded across the room, but what struck Farideh and Lorcan only singed them and didn’t burn as hot. The unprotected orcs, the men, and Mehen on the other hand-their skin blistered and the hair on the orcs burned, sending up a stench like nothing Farideh had smelled before.

“The dead walk,” Rohini said with a laugh. “Or were your sisters not up to the task?”

Lorcan smiled, a slow cunning grin. “Oh, they’ve failed all right. They were to meet me here-or didn’t they tell you?” He slashed at the encroaching orc. “I’ve been exonerated … and now they come for you, traitor.”

“Liar!” Rohini’s wings spread as if she would take off. “I have done all the archduchess has asked, all your bitch mother has ordered. I am no traitor.”

“You are no devil either.” Lorcan sneered. “Foulspawn demoness.”

Rohini shrieked in rage, and as if to underscore Lorcan’s insult, the scintillating magic crackled over her again: she was no longer simply a devil. Farideh felt the course of Hellish magic thrumming through Rohini, but the crackling light was something else, something stranger.

Farideh kept her rod high, ready to cast, but gods, she wished to run. Rohini was more dangerous than Lorcan, the orcs, Criella, the man from the inn, and the mad shopkeeper combined. Even maddened by that alien power, even clearly angry and beset on at least two sides, she was deadly. Farideh cast a bolt of fire toward the orcs-it burst outward and set fire to one of the slimy men.

You do not get to be a coward, she thought. Especially when Lorcan isn’t. She cast another bolt at Rohini.

“Deny it all you like,” she said, mimicking Lorcan’s cruel and haughty tones. “But it won’t save you from the erinyes’ blades.”

Rohini’s focus trained on her. “How did you escape that nest of Ashmadai, little mouse?”

Farideh smiled, though she felt sick under the succubus’s ruby gaze, and let the shadows curl around her as she drew her powers up to cast again. “Did you never suspect you were only leaving your mark on someone else’s dirty work? I was never meant to die.”

Rohini’s eyes widened at that, as if Farideh had struck her physically. She most definitely had all the succubus’s attention. Lorcan cast another bolt at Rohini, but when she recovered, she was still focused on Farideh.

“Mehen,” she said. The dragonborn froze, letting two of the orcs strike him while he awaited Rohini’s orders. She stepped down and laid a hand on his shoulder, and a jolt of magic went through Mehen. “Kill the warlock. She’s ever so much trouble, don’t you think?”

Mehen’s yellow eyes were full of hatred. It’s not him, Farideh told herself, taking a step backward. It’s Rohini.

But it wasn’t only Rohini: it was Clanless Mehen, eyeing his daughter like a dire enemy. He curled his lip, baring his long sharp teeth.

“Yes,” he said. “Trouble.”

Stay calm, she told herself as Mehen scooped up his falchion. She edged toward the door, sparing a glance for Lorcan. He was still fighting back the orcs, and looked as if he’d like to strangle her. Rohini stalked toward her, following Mehen.

Farideh needed to slow her down. The slimy-skinned man holding the box hadn’t moved-had only watched as Farideh and Lorcan burst into the room. As Rohini drew near to him, Farideh pointed at the box.

“Assulam!” she cried. The box shattered into a cloud of splinters, forcing Rohini back with a shriek of surprise. Something bright and horrible burst free. Mehen didn’t notice. She turned to run, catching Lorcan’s eye. He could still find the portal if he ran now.

“Farideh!” he shouted after her.

Farideh led Mehen away from Rohini and hopefully into the safety of Neverwinter. As she bolted out the side doors and across the broken remains of the city so close to the Chasm, she wondered if it would be any sanctuary at all.

Rohini’s hands closed on the thing out of impulse, instinct. What her hands touched … there were no words in the languages of mortals. Only the secret parts of Rohini’s brain, the parts that still stoked a demon spark of madness, knew the words to describe what she held.

The Hex Locus froze her hands colder than the blessings of the chapel, colder than the blood of the Stygian general-but blisters erupted allover her palms and up her arms as if she held the sun itself. She was screaming-she could feel her throat tearing and the power of the Hex Locus snaking down, down into her very core. Tendrils of magic seized her limbs, her neck, and squeezed as if to crush the life out of her. As if to bury themselves in her flesh. All she saw was blue as the heart of a glacier, blue as the heart of a flame. The Hex Locus’s tendrils plunged into her eyes, into her nostrils, into her ears, all the while singing the maddening prophecy that already boiled her mind.

Her breath failed. Her lungs sucked into themselves. Her screams echoed into a thin, high vibration and the world swirled-shadows and blue magic fighting for supremacy.

Out of the depths of her dying vision, strange shapes swam closer. The same shapes, perhaps, she had glimpsed when the Hex Locus first insinuated itself into her thoughts. Monstrous shapes that dwarfed Rohini-even though, here, there was no Rohini. There might not even be a Rohini in Toril any longer.…

The creatures moved closer, great behemoths that swam through the nightmare ether she drowned in. Their tentacles encircled her. Their great ruby eyes pierced every layer of her being, through the artifice and the carefully crafted barriers, into what remained: ambition and the demon spark of madness.

The aboleths’ thoughts tore through her like a hurricane wind, exposing that demon spark to the winds of the Far Realm. Coaxing a fire from her as the images of a world reformed, reborn into shifting, shapeless powers that would drive a lesser devil mad.

She had served madness. She had served ambition. She had served chaos and order and destruction and hierarchy. Now Rohini could serve this nameless entity that sought something unnameable which was all this and more.

Rohini returned to her bones and her breath, the sudden grossness, the abruptness more a violation than anything she had ever experienced. She did not belong in a succubus’s skin … and she realized why.