Brimstone Angels

Mehen answered with a vicious swing level with her head. She ducked beneath it and took a step back. She took the rod in her left hand and drew her sword.

The whoosh of Lorcan’s wings as he plummeted brought Mehen’s head up a second before the cambion dropped solidly into his back. Mehen’s head cracked against the cobbles and he went slack.

“Tie him!” Lorcan shouted. “Tie him, damn it!”

“Calm down,” Farideh said. She kneeled down beside Mehen and reached a shaking hand toward his face. He was breathing, but out cold.

Farideh nudged Lorcan off Mehen and jerked the harness off Mehen’s shoulders. She slid it down to his elbows, knotting the loose loops together, so that his arms were bound. “Help me move him.”

She had a perverse sense of satisfaction watching Lorcan struggle as much as she with Mehen’s heavy bulk. They would never have gotten him from the temple into the city. But when his arm brushed hers, she flushed nonetheless.

They settled Mehen against a wall, behind a pile of rubble. Farideh kneeled down, assessing the dragonborn’s wounds. “He doesn’t look good.”

Lorcan jerked her to her feet. The amulet exploded with a cold, silvery light. Lorcan threw his hands up to ward it off and fell back.

“Godsdamn it!”

“If you don’t like it, don’t shove me around,” she said, her voice shaking. The air was simmering again. “No one said you had to come back.”

He seized his hair in his fists. “Planes and ashes, you do understand Rohini’s not a shitting goblin you can wave your hands and distract?”

“I had to do something.” She gestured at Mehen. “He’s half-dead as it is. She had him …” Her voice caught. “She had him fighting like it didn’t matter. Like he could simply take the cuts and bruises and … whatever her magic does. She would have killed him.”

“She’s going to kill you. She knows you’re alive now.”

“She knows you’re alive too! You should have taken the chance,” she said. “You can’t get to the portal now.”

“So I was supposed to just-” He waved his hands vaguely. “I should have. I should have run past while she was distracted.” He cursed to himself. “You’re not worth this.” He cursed again. “Neither is a bloody aboleth.”

“No it isn’t.” And suddenly things fit together a little better. “Oh.”

It was, ironically, one of Mehen’s favorite tactics: burst onto the battlefields with a great storm and thunder, rattling shields and blades and breathing lightning, looking for all the world like your enemy’s worst nightmare. And while they stared at you and pondered how to take you down, your allies came around behind and cut your enemies throats.

“What if that’s it?” she said, half to herself.

“What in the Hells are you talking about?” Lorcan cried. “What if what’s it?”

“Your mistress,” she said, “do you think she’d go to all this trouble to gain a … a monster from another world’s memories?”

“Yes!” he said. “Think of the power-”

“What power though?” Farideh asked. “If they’re as alien as the Chasm, what good would their thoughts be? They might know ten thousand years’ worth of knowledge, but what good is that if they don’t think like her? That didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t.” She held Lorcan’s gaze. “Especially because the Ashmadai never fit. Is it possible that all of this was meant to get the Ashmadai out in the open? To get them to call down Asmodeus? Or even … just to make him notice the Sovereignty? To focus on that? Why else would the Ashmadai be looking for Glasyans in the hospital?”

Lorcan started to answer, but stopped and pursed his lips. “It’s possible,” he said a moment later. “She likes making trouble. Everyone knows she doesn’t get along with her father.”

“So she might start a war, after all, not between the Layers,” Farideh said, “but between the Sovereignty and the god of evil.”

Lorcan shook his head. “She’s an archduchess of the Hells. She’s too clever to antagonize her father like that, now that he’s a god.”

“But if she were clever and angry,” Farideh said, “she might create a chain of events that … don’t look as though she’s trying to antagonize him. That get Asmodeus’s eye fixed on Neverwinter and another, powerful, alien enemy.”

“So she may act elsewhere,” Lorcan finished. He shuddered. “And you and I got in the way.”

“But what is she doing?”

Lorcan reached forward as if he would clap a hand over her mouth again, but closed his hands on the empty air. “Stop asking that. You don’t need to know. You don’t want to know.”

“Don’t-”

“Shut up, darling, just shut up and trust me here, you do not need to know what the archduchess’s plans are.” He rubbed his wrists where the amulet’s fire had burned them. “And you had best hope like you’ve never hoped, that-”

“They matter,” she said, “because it means the Ashmadai’s plan to attack the temple is just as likely her plan. They will come and burn the place to the ground, and kill everyone in it.” She looked at him gravely. “Something has its powers over Rohini-she isn’t on Glasya’s side anymore. And if you’re right and your mother’s erinyes come to clean things up, Rohini isn’t going to go quietly. It will be a bloodbath. Perhaps not one your lady’s planning on. Certainly not one Neverwinter’s expecting.”

Lorcan ran his hands through his hair. “If you are right, if that is Glasya’s plan, then I don’t think Invadiah knows it. What she threatened Rohini with … she will come as soon as she knows Rohini’s been captured. She will bring the pradixikai. And whatever the Ashmadai might do, whatever Rohini and the Sovereignty might be capable of, whatever the shitting god of evil might stir up, the pradixikai loose in Faerun is reason enough to get far, far away-Hey!” Lorcan shouted.

Farideh looked over her shoulder to see Brin jogging back to the alley’s mouth, his sword unsheathed and his face pale. His eyes were wide and terrified.

“What happened?” Farideh said.

“He took her,” Brin gasped. “The Ashmadai have Havilar.”

“No.” Farideh’s ears were suddenly numb and ringing. She reached behind her to lean on the wall. “Where? When?”

“Outside the shop,” Brin said, still quite out of breath. “The shopkeeper. He came out of nowhere and just … knocked her senseless with some amulet. And that’s not all.”

He explained what he’d heard: the Ashmadai had decided Havilar’s attack was an act of war by the Sovereignty. The shopkeeper seemed to believe that it had been Havilar’s magic that convinced them of the idea, and now the Ashmadai were amassing to attack the House of Knowledge and burn it to the ground.

“Bad to worse,” Lorcan muttered. “You’re right.”

Farideh held her tongue, preoccupied with the repeating images from her nightmares of Havilar being tormented and not being able to save her. She wanted to scream. She wanted to yell at Brin for letting this happen-he’d promised to watch after Havilar.

Brin was watching her, as if he knew all of that. As if he were expecting her ire. Lorcan folded his arms, the smallest of smiles quirking his mouth, as if he knew it too.

She took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut a moment.

“First,” she said, “we need to fix Mehen. He’s wounded and-”

“The moment he wakes he’ll try and kill you again!” Lorcan said.

“And,” she continued, “we have to break the domination. The two of us can’t count on saving Havilar alone. And we need Havilar if we’re going to be able to stop the Ashmadai or Rohini.”

“You need far more than just Havilar,” Lorcan said.

“No one is asking for your opinion.”

“Someone should be,” he said. “If … if you are correct about Glasya, you’re assuring your own death to