Brimstone Angels (13 page)

Then what? He might strip away her powers, just to show he could. He might do something to punish her. He might hurt Mehen or Havilar.

He might leave her entirely.

“Here,” Havilar said, pressing the whiskey bottle into her hand. “Catch up, worrywart.”

Mehen didn’t bother with his own dinner. The food he’d eaten that morning still sat heavy in his belly. No need to add to it. Better to stay sharp than to keep a human’s eating habits for the sake of plenty.

The caravans had been a waste of time. Nobody knew anything or anybody. Nobody had seen the woman from the leaflet, or a woman who looked like her, or any human woman ever for that matter.

“
M’henish,
” he grunted to himself. Three days would get them back to Waterdeep and maybe that was best. Maybe there was some other caravan in need of guards, or some other bounty he could catch and leave the girls out of it. Maybe they should just get lost in the City of Splendors and hope no one ever noticed.

The priest’s offer still weighed on his mind. The coins he’d handed over for a room and food for his girls had lightened their purse significantly. A few more and they could head north enough to catch up with this blasted bounty.

To the Hells and back, he thought. What was he doing considering the offer of a silverstar with a chain that might as well be a third arm, he used it with such casualness? He’d tapped his tongue to the roof of his mouth repeatedly, but there was no taste in the air to suggest the priest was a threat beyond what he’d seen with his own eyes. He’d kept tapping out of nerves.

He imagined Farideh, stiff and swaddled in her cloak as long as the priest was around, and sighed. What was he going to do with her? He’d been so sure she’d been keeping that devil away, and all the while they were creeping around behind briars. At least she wouldn’t dare let the bastard come around while Havilar was with her—he was sure of that. Havilar kept a secret like a sieve kept water.

Not for the first time, he cursed the path that had led him here, mucking around in the wilds of Faerûn, chasing down petty criminals and trying to find two coins to rub together while keeping the twins alive. But it was a path he had made on his own, and given a second chance, he couldn’t say he wouldn’t have made every choice exactly the same way a second time. He scratched the piercing holes again as he came into the taproom.

And if he hadn’t made those decisions, where would Farideh and Havilar be? They were smart, resourceful girls—but were they such because he had raised them up that way, or because it beat in their blood? And resourceful, smart, or utter fools, they would never have made it out of the village that day after the snow had fallen so heavy. He might have been denied his own offspring, but the twins were his legacy.

The taproom had filled up with merchants and mercenaries, refugees to and from the North. He stood in the entryway a moment, sizing up the room with an old soldier’s eye. For the better part of Clanless Mehen’s life—when he had been Verthisathurgiesh Mehen, son of Pandjed, and even after—he’d trained himself to be ready for a fight, just in case.

Three men playing cards on his right. Them first—they were mercenaries. That armor was too nice, and yet mismatched—as if they’d bought a pauldron here, a chain shirt there, as the coin came in. They’d be the most dangerous, if only because they were the most unpredictable.

Dagger in the close one’s back, crack the bottle on the second, the third would be up and drawing his own weapon, but that one was drunk enough, Mehen would have time to flip the dagger into him, and pull his falchion from his back.

The woman standing on his left, waiting for her partner or employer, would be on him quick then with her double swords. Drop
to the floor—she’d expect him to use his size like a brute—cut her with a swing from behind. Finish with the dagger.

He walked to the bar, straight and steady—but his mind was full of quick, dancing slashes and dodges. The barkeep raised an eyebrow at him as he approached.

The barkeep would be a quick thing—not a real threat. The worst that could happen was for him to be a caster with a wand back there, and Mehen doubted that.

Still: aggressive attack, up over the bar, falchion across the front of him.

“Well met,” Mehen said. “I’m looking for someone.”

The barkeep looked him up and down, as he wiped down bottles of wine. “This isn’t Waterdeep,” he said. “Don’t have your sort.”

Mehen growled. He doubted even Waterdeep could boast that variety. He pulled the leaflet free and smoothed it out on the table. “This one,” he said. “Have you seen her?”

The barkeep gave the posting a cursory glance. “Nah. What are you drinking?”

“I’m not. You get a lot of caravans through here?”

“You’re in my tavern, you’re drinking.” The barkeep set a glass down in front of Mehen and started to pour something golden from a bottle beading with moisture. Mehen’s hand shot out and grasped the bottle, halting its tilt.

“You pour that, you’ll be wasting your coin and both of our times. I don’t drink in anybody’s tavern.” He let go of the bottle. “Do you get a lot of caravans through here?”

The man set the bottle down and gave Mehen a stony glare. “Some.”

“One a tenday? Two?”

“Two or three every few days. Sometimes more. Never seen your bounty though.”

“Anybody here come in off one of those caravans?”

“Fair well everybody. Ask who you like, but don’t you start a fight you can’t clean up.”

Mehen drummed his thick nails against the counter. They needed to find this wretched bounty or get themselves another, easier one. Or both, he thought.

“What about orcs?” he said.

The barkeep looked at him as if he were mad. “Don’t get too many in here. The sorts of things Many-Arrows brews either go foul too fast or burn right through a cask before I can sell it all.”

“No. What about bounties on orcs? We took a troop out that attacked a caravan south of here. Anyone paying bounties for them?”

The barkeep shook his head. “I’m certainly not. Swarms of the buggers. Nothing to be done.”

Mehen fought the urge to remind the barkeep he ought to be more deferential. You have no clan to back you, he reminded that angry young voice that told him to pull his daggers out and make his point with steel.

“Anybody paying
any
bounties along here?” Mehen asked. “Or you just live in an easy little world where no one’s any trouble.”

“Try Neverwinter,” the barkeep said. “Full of all the criminals too lazy to make it to Luskan, too weak to survive Luskan, and too scared to try Luskan. And the Lord Protector is wealthy enough and foolish enough to pay people to remedy something as unfixable as
that.
”

The words, Mehen thought, of a man who had never been to a place. He left the bar and tried his luck with a smattering of patrons: the bored woman, the mercenaries in the corner, a merchant here and there. No one knew the woman from the bounty poster.

“
M’henish,
” he grunted to himself as he tromped back upstairs. The priest’s offer was looking better and better. He pushed open the door.

The twins were sitting on the floor with that boy, that Brin from the caravan. Havilar giggled wildly. Farideh had a bottle of whiskey to her mouth, her head tilted back.

“Farideh!” Mehen barked. She pulled the bottle away, spitting liquor down her shirt and coughing.

He couldn’t stop the thoughts that time: If the devil overwhelmed her, he’d have to bring Havilar down first—fast, subdued. Press the vessel on her neck until she fainted and couldn’t attack him. That would give Farideh time to prepare, but he couldn’t believe she’d strike, even poisoned by that fiend, if he held her sister before him. He could still subdue her. But if she did attack, then he’d have to use the breath—

Stop it, he said to himself. Farideh was looking up at him, her cheeks scarlet, her knuckles white around the whiskey bottle, and that awful smoky darkness curling its way around her frame. She was nearly a woman, but crumpled on the floor like that it was hard not to think of her as small and awkward and caught up late with Havilar. Probably trying to convince Havi to go to bed, he thought.

Ah, Fari, he thought. I never thought it would be you.

“Give me that,” he snapped, snatching the bottle from her. He sniffed it—backwater still-shit, harder than it needed to be—and took a swig, despite the fact he knew he’d be flat out and snoring within a half hour because of it. Better than up and thinking about the fact he’d considered how to take out his child. “Where in the Hells did you get this?”

“Downstairs,” Brin said. “It was part of my … room fee.”

Mehen was too tired to reprimand someone else’s orphan—even when clearly he was the one starting all this trouble. He heaved a great sigh and sat in one of the chairs. It creaked under his weight.

“Did you find her?” Havilar asked. “Are we going to get her?”

“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
didn’t
find her,” Farideh said.

“No,” Mehen said. “Which
doesn’t
mean we’ve passed her by. I do know what I’m doing.” Farideh folded her arms over her chest, but didn’t say anything.

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.”

L
ORCAN 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. Sairché wasn’t waiting for him. He let out a breath and stepped away, shutting the portal of the Needle of the Crossroads.

Godsdamned Sairché. 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 Faerûn 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.