The servitors stood quietly by, watching her stir. Vartan hovered over her, holding the bronze coffer she’d kept possets in. Only now … now Rohini was in it.
No-she fought to press that thought back into a more secure place. It wouldn’t budge. She was in the box because the Hex Locus was in the box. They were entwined now, united. Its song pulsed in her ears, demandingto be spoken, but when she hushed it, it coiled deeper, deep as the heartbeats in the bottom of the Chasm. Waiting.
She looked down at her arms, as if she could see the pulse there, throbbing in time with those of the creatures waiting in the Chasm, ready to be called forth.
“You live,” the proxy said. “We were correct.”
“You are the Prophet,” the second servitor added, bowing. “You are the one who will gather the Choir, to sing the Symphony of Madness into being.”
“I am Rohini,” she said. The Hex Locus buzzed angrily and clenched its powers around her guts. “Your spell cannot change that, whatever it is.”
“It is a fragment of the spellplague,” the proxy said, “made solid and discrete. You held the blue fire.”
She held it still, Rohini knew. The Hex Locus had chained itself to her very being. It thrummed in her blood and in her thoughts. Her secrets were its secrets now. Its powers were hers.
“Most impressive,” the proxy added. “You ought to have died.”
The girl. Rohini looked around. Farideh had burst the box somehow … with Glasya’s magic, she had shattered it.
“Where did she go?” Rohini asked. “Where are the devil and the tiefling warlock?
“Your allies?” said the proxy who remained. “Why do you protect them? They have given you up for lost.”
Rohini didn’t answer. Her mind was reeling. Invadiah had said the erinyes would capture and kill Lorcan, and yet there he’d been. She had herself left the warlock girl to be torn apart by the Ashmadai. And yet there she’d stood, taunting Rohini.… She was the one who’d put the Hex Locus in Rohini’s hands. Using Glasya’s spells.
Invadiah lied, the voice of the Hex Locus said, and it sounded so like Arunika, taunting her. Glasya lied. You were meant to die.
“Not my allies,” Rohini said. “Not anymore.”
“Then prove your loyalty. Tell us why you came.”
Rohini stared at the proxy, the half-formed words of prophecy fighting to break from her lips. She wanted to snarl, to tell him she was no slave of his.
He would die soon. She could see it in the shifting patterns of the fabric of Toril. Her loyalty wouldn’t matter in the end, and it would nevermatter to those behemoths in the shadows. She was a tool to them- and a tool’s reasons for performing its task did not matter.
A desperate smile tugged at the corners of her lips. It sounded like something Arunika would say, were she not dead and waiting to be reborn under the thumb of the archdevils. The slithering monsters attuned to the Hex Locus’s song, the things waiting in the Chasm-Rohini stared again at her wrists. Would it be so different to command the playthings of the aboleths instead of mortal fools?
You were meant to die, she reminded herself, and the voice in her thoughts might have been hers and it might have been the Hex Locus’s and it might have been her dead sister’s, but it was right. The Hells held no allies of hers. Not anymore.
“I served Glasya, princess of the Nine Hells, Archduchess of the Sixth Layer,” Rohini said. “I answer to Exalted Invadiah, foremost of the erinyes of Malbolge. My orders were to infiltrate the servants of the Sovereignty through Brother Vartan and deliver an offer to your masters. She has in her possession an artifact which she believes they would find most desirable-a portal knife crafted in their Far Realm. I was to deliver the offer, and the meeting place, a warehouse near to the river. She will come only for one of your masters, though. Invadiah believed Glasya would ambush them and use them as she wishes once they are hers.”
“Does she think we are fools?” the servitor asked. “She cannot make servants of the Sovereignty. And now we know of the artifact, what is to stop our masters from breaching the Hells and taking it? What would stop them from agreeing and sending their terrible minions to meet her?”
Rohini hesitated. To say more was beyond treason.
You are already beyond treason, the voice reminded her. If Glasya does not fall, you will.
“Should you or your masters attempt to breach Malbolge, you would fail,” she said. “The Sovereignty is no doubt wise enough to know that. They are also wise enough not to make such a vulnerable gesture for a mere artifact that might or might not even exist.
“But what you miss, to your detriment, is that Glasya is not foolish enough to think you would.”
Sairche waited outside the door to Invadiah’s chambers, counting the erinyes that entered in full armor: Eretria. Chaeronea. Suessula. Zela. Megara. Sabis. Tanagra. Bibracte. Lutetia. Oenophyta. Noreia. Alesia. With Invadiah a full thirteen armed to the teeth and ready for Invadiah’s command, to kill Lorcan, to kill Rohini, and to finish what had been started in Neverwinter.
The imp she’d sent to Invadiah had predictably not returned, but another imp had brought her a summons to appear before her mother. She took it graciously, and tucked it into her sleeve where she continued ignoring it. Obviously, Invadiah trusted Sairche’s word if she was amassing so many armed erinyes to her side. She didn’t need to hear from Sairche until after she’d returned.
A small part of Sairche wished she could go to Neverwinter and watch everything unfold, but she quashed it: It wasn’t necessary. In fact, it would be extremely foolish. Besides-she had no way to cross the planes anymore, short of asking Invadiah.
Another imp appeared beside her with a soft pop. “Her Highness wishes you to pay her audience.”
Sairche shuddered and pulled her cloak around her. “Tell her I will be with her presently.”
Farideh’s lungs were screaming, her muscles aching as she ran-for the second time that night-as fast as she could along the main roads. And Mehen was gaining on her. Close enough to hear his labored breath-
The crack of his lightning breath rattled the alleyway. The lightning scoured her skin, the sudden pain driving the air from her lungs with a sharp cry. But still she ran, slower now and gasping. Her nerves threatened to overtake her and make her cry like a child, as Clanless Mehen sought to slay his foster daughter.
Farideh drew on the powers of the Hells and split the fabric of the world enough for her to dart through, and come clear around the corner and several buildings farther on. She ducked into an alleyway and flattened herself against the wall. Mehen ran past, but only a short distance before he circled back to the intersection where she’d lost him, tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Farideh drew her breath in such slow, even drafts that she thought she would surely faint.
I’m sorry, she thought. But Lorcan was, as ever, right.
She stepped into the street and pointed the rod at her father. “Adaestuo.”
The bolt of eldritch light slammed into Mehen, and he roared in shock and pain, but he did not fall. He turned jerkily to face her and drew his falchion.
“Mehen,” she said, “don’t do this. You don’t need to do this. Rohini’s not here.”
“She will be there when I …” He stilled, blinked … and then bared his teeth in sudden rage. “When I bring back your head, warlock.”
“Mehen, put your sword down,” she said, holding up the rod and feeling the magical energy of the Hells flooding through her. “It’s me.”
