Spinner of Lies

CHAPTER TEN

THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANUL

18 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

The Gatekeeper was gone. a swirl of sand, black on black, was all that remained of the ebony golem. The windsoul and deva were alone in the courtyard, bleeding freely from dozens of slashes and ragged cuts. Riltana’s consternation was mirrored on Demascus’s face. He held two swords, twin to each other save for the color of their pulsing runes.

Chant waited until he was certain the sand wasn’t about to swirl back into solidity. Then he broke cover. He motioned Jaul to follow. They walked into the courtyard of the structure, which looked like an internment house for the dead.

Demascus glanced at Chant. “What do you make of these?” he said, twirling the swords for effect.

“Gaffing blue!” said Jaul. The expression was new to Chant.

“Yeah, nice trick,” Chant said. “How’d you break your sword and come out with two?”

Demascus shrugged. “Inspiration?”

“Accident, you mean,” suggested Riltana.

The deva laughed. “The golem had two hearts. Well, not hearts, but as good as. I needed something that could pierce both at the same time. And-”

“And naturally, you split your sword,” Chant finished.

Riltana said, “Surprised me as much as it did the golem.”

“Caught me off guard, too, honestly,” Demascus said. Then his brow furrowed. He peered at the sword with the white symbols.

“What?” said Chant.

“Each rune holds a specific stored enchantment. These blades hold the same runes as Exorcessum did. Except a couple I used earlier are still faded. Do you think they’re gone for good?”

“Sharkbite, how would I know?” asked Chant. Though he had to admit, he’d like to. The deva and his sword, scarf, charms, and other missing implements of his previous profession fascinated the pawnbroker. Demascus was a veritable trove of secrets, made all the more so by his missing memories.

“Go easy on the runes, then,” said Riltana. “Though if you’ve got any left for wounds, you and I both could use it.”

Demascus glanced at the webwork of blood dripping from his arms and frowned. “Now that you mention it, I do feel a little … unsteady.”

“Sit down!” said Chant. He waved at a stone block low enough to serve as a bench. “I have something the two of you can share. Riltana, didn’t you once tell me you were always going to carry a vial or two with you?”

The windsoul shrugged. “Yeah, well, I didn’t exactly get around to restocking. Not all of us take coin from that leech-fondler Master Raneger to sit on our butts all day.”

“Hey!” said Jaul. “Take that back! What’s wrong with Master Raneger?”

So ends Jaul’s imaginary romance, thought Chant. The pawnbroker was used to the thief’s vernacular, but he had to admit, her comment was a bit below the belt. He agreed with her assessment of Raneger, even if Jaul didn’t. She knew Chant was ashamed to be taking pay from the crime lord, and now she’d thrown it in his face.

But Chant swallowed a biting retort. Instead, he approached Demascus first with the glass vial from his belt pouch. He whispered, “Take a little more than half, why don’t you?”

“Thanks, Chant,” Demascus said. “Let’s sit awhile, then, before we push through into the portal. I don’t want to run smack into Pashra and Chenraya until I’ve caught my breath.”

Chant took a seat. He packed his pipe with some particularly noisome tabac he’d acquired a few weeks ago. Now, if he could just find a coal … where’d he put his pot? It was especially enchanted to keep a fire halflit for days without tending.

“We should see how it works,” said Jaul.

The young man walked across the courtyard to the misted archway.

“Jaul, don’t mess with that!” Chant said. He stuffed his pipe away and went to his son at the arch.

“Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot, Pa,” said Jaul, his voice quiet.

“Sorry. The Gatekeeper rattled me. And with Demascus and Riltana still hurt, I’m a little overexcited. I didn’t meant to-”

Jaul waved his hands. “Whatever.”

Chant felt the headway he’d been making with his son pull back like a retreating tide. “No, you’re right, Jaul. Let’s have a look at this and see if we can figure it out together.”

The pawnbroker lifted a finger and began to trace the line of symbols decorating the arch. He knew a fair bit about secret alphabets.…

“Do you know what it says?” said Jaul.

“Something about this portal leading to worlds other than our own,” he lied, though he expected it was true enough, anyway.

“Gaffing,” Jaul replied, his voice awed.

Chant nodded. “Exactly.”

“How do we activate it?”

Sharkbite, Chant thought. How should I know? Probably just walk in … Except that this entrance could be part of a network, not a direct link to someplace else. Raneger had suggested such might be the case. If they just walked in, who knew where they’d end up? They should try to figure out how to specify an endpoint.

He glanced back across the courtyard where Demascus and Riltana were trading friendly insults. “Hey, take a look at this, will you?” he called. “The arch seems straightforward enough. Jaul and I think we’ve got it under control, but we’d like a second …”

Something wasn’t right. Gray mist carpeted the entrance tunnel, low and dark, spreading toward his friends. “Demascus!” Chant yelled.

The deva glanced up at Chant and Jaul, looking away from the fog. Chant frantically gesticulated and said, “Behind you!”

The deva glanced back to the courtyard entrance, just in time to see a figure resolve in the mist. A woman with red fingernails like daggers and colorless eyes with tiny voids instead of irises. The red-nailed woman leaped, smashing into him before the deva could get to his feet, and bore him to the sand-strewn floor. She clasped the deva’s head in both hands and tried to bite his neck.

Behind her, dozens of humanoid shapes popped up like mushrooms after a rain. They charged into the courtyard, a flood of pale flesh. Their thrashing limbs blocked Chant’s view of Demascus. From their throats issued jubilant howls.

Waukeen’s empty purse, he thought. We’re trapped! Unless …

“Jaul, through the portal!” he yelled. “Now!”

Chant’s crossbow was in his hand. He didn’t remember drawing it. He aimed at a black-skinned genasi with blood-colored szuldar looking his way. He fired. The single bolt became three, multiplied by the wizardry forged into his weapon. The wooden bolts struck home, and the vampire howled as it burned to ash.

A half-dozen vampires on the periphery turned to look at him and Jaul. His son, meanwhile, stood slack-jawed, too surprised to be properly afraid.

“Through the portal, Jaul!” Chant shouted again. “I’ll cover you.”

“We … we don’t know where it goes! It might-”

“Anywhere’s better than here. Don’t worry, I’m right behind you!”

He hip-checked his son. His girth against Jaul’s lean frame was no contest. The young man tumbled into the mist and was gone. Chant slapped another bolt into his hand crossbow, cranked it back with practiced speed, and fired another three-shot salvo at the advancing, leering vampires. Two went up with satisfying whooshes of flame. The other three paused, expressions of concern flitting over their features.

A voice, possibly female, bellowed, “Where are the paintings, thief? Norjah has sent me to collect them.”

Demascus was suddenly next to Chant, as if he’d been there all along but just edged out of an obscuring shadow. Several of the wounds closed by the healing elixir were laid raw and dripping again, with several new ragged red scrawls.

“Demascus, through the portal!” Chant said. He fired another bolt. This time he dusted three vampires, but only because they were so thickly clotted in the courtyard it would have been more remarkable had he missed.

Demascus took a deep breath and did not go through the portal. Of course not, the damn deva had a hero streak that ran a mile deep. Which was even more evident when he wasn’t channeling the residue of his former glory.

“There’s Riltana!” yelled Demascus, pointing with the tip of his red-runed sword.

The windsoul was running toward them from the far corner of the room, using the heads of the massed vampires like stepping-stones. It was so ridiculous that Chant half gasped, half laughed at the sight.

And then a black iron blade nearly skewered him, barely stopped by a parry from Demascus to a viperquick strike by a vampire in a ragged leather jacket. With a whirl of swords too quick for Chant to follow, the deva disarmed the vampire with one sword and lopped off the creature’s head with the other. Tar-colored blood spattered them both.

“Get her!” screamed the red-nailed leader of the horde. Fanged faces turned in confusion. Of the three or four dozen enraged vampires in the crush, only a few thought to look up. By then the windsoul was past, and more than a few got a heel to the face for their trouble. She reached the arch and dove through. Gone, just like Jaul.

“I hope this goes someplace,” said Demascus, “and doesn’t just disintegrate us, like that green devil face.”

“Devil face? What-?” said Chant.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Damascus, as he fell rather than stepped into the mist.

“Great,” muttered the pawnbroker, stepping through. Vapor, the hue of summertime blooms, swamped his vision.

When the mist cleared, Jaul, Demascus, and Riltana were waiting for him.

“Not disintegrated,” said Demascus, and chuckled.

“Waukeen’s empty purse!” Chant said. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, and you go putting notions like that in my head.”

“Well, it was a concern,” said the deva. His mouth twitched on the edge of a grin.

“Where are we?” asked Jaul. The corridor in which they stood was built from the same stone blocks as the courtyard on the other side of the portal. Chant glanced behind him and was relieved to see a misted arch. He’d worried they’d entered someplace without an exit. The naked stone of the corridor stretched only a few tens of feet before it was overrun with a layer of thick gray spiderwebs. Chant couldn’t tell if webs covered the corridor surfaces or actually subsumed it-he suspected the latter. Instead of a square-cut corridor, the path forward was a spiraling woven tunnel.

“A passage only a drow could love,” said Demascus. “We might not be in the world any more, my friends. And if we step into that web tunnel … but I can’t be certain.”

“We should move,” said Riltana, glancing back at the arch. Blood slicked her scalp, and her eyes were tired. “If we can step through without any special key, the vampires will be able to do the same.” Demascus nodded.

“Excuse me, but no one mentioned vampires before,” said Chant. “Why are they chasing us? What paintings were they talking about? And how’d they know where to find us?”

Riltana looked at the floor. The woman vampire had said something about a thief. So it was the windsoul who had provoked them! He should have known.

“Something to talk about once we find someplace safer,” said Demascus. “Let’s move.”

They hustled down the corridor. Under Chant’s feet, the woven floor was only slightly adhesive-sticky enough to notice, but not so bad that it hindered movement. He wrinkled his nose as the air changed from bracing to acidic.

After a few hundred yards, the corridor opened into a large, vaulted chamber resembling a temple’s transept and nave, woven in webs. Gray columns lined the walls, and the distant ceiling arch was lit with a scattering of firefly gleams. Directly below the highest point on the ceiling stood a dais, easily ten feet high. A litter of bones was strewn over the top of the dais and spilled down the sides. Some of the bones were humanoid. And all were rough at the ends, as if the marrow had been gnawed and sucked from them.

“Stop,” said Demascus. As if he’d had to say anything, thought Chant. He really didn’t want to get any closer to the chewed leftovers of whatever butchery had occurred there …

“What’re those?” Jaul pointed to the walls, between the columns. The webbing was pocked with closed doors intricately carved with spiders and geometric designs.

“Exits,” said Demascus. “Each door leads to another place in the network, I suspect. Maybe places halfway across Faerun. Or farther.”

“Or deeper,” said Chant. “Like subterranean cities of dark elves …”

“On the other hand,” Demascus continued, “they could lead to an empty storeroom, or down another leg of webbed tunnel.”

“Which one did the arambarium thieves go through?” said Riltana.

Demascus shook his head. “We should be able to pick up their track-it’s fresh. And then choose someplace they didn’t go, because I need to rest. I’m exhausted.”

“There you go again!” said Riltana. “Always napping.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Plus, you know my rule about fighting too many vampires before bedtime. That always makes me cranky.” She laughed.

Chant said, “So, let me get this straight. The vampires have nothing to do with the drow?”

“No,” said Demascus. “Well, they didn’t before they tracked us into the Demonweb.” He frowned. “Speaking of dark elves, we should check to see if I’m right about us being able to track them. Care to take a look?”

“Sure,” said Chant. He bent and examined the ground. Demascus was correct-because the floor was slightly adhesive, any appreciable pressure applied to the floor shifted the threaded webs composing it. Once he got the hang of how a disturbed patch of web reacted, he figured it would be easy to track creatures through it. Although it seemed like the webs were naturally inclined to return to their original position over time.

Chant followed what might have been a trail to the dais and grabbed a femur bone. It was cool and smooth in his hands, but the rough part near the chewed end … Don’t think about that, he told himself. He experimentally prodded the floor with the jagged end of bone. Thousands of individual strands, maybe more, formed the ground. And each strand was probably made up of hundreds or thousands of even smaller threads. Could be why they weren’t as sticky as they should be. But still enough to hold an impression!

Although … He bent closer. Were the webs moving on their own? Was that a … face?

“No!”

He jumped back and pointed at the floor. His stomach was making a serious effort to crawl into his throat. “The-this entire chamber-is haunted! I saw a man’s face, screaming. Made out of webs.”

“This place was created by drow,” said Demascus, “It’s probably woven as much from webs as from souls sacrificed to the dark elf goddess.”

Chant swallowed.

“I didn’t need to know that,” Jaul said.

The pawnbroker empathized.

Just then, a howl tore into Chant’s brain. Were the faces in the webs coming to life? His fingers suddenly went numb and dropped the bone as he stared at the webs.

“Vampires!” said Jaul. “They’ve come through the portal!”

Oh, right, the vampires. Chant cleared his throat. “Where to?”

“No time to choose,” Demascus said. He jounced across the web floor, scattering human remains. He stopped before one of the side doors between the columns. Chant didn’t have time to note the symbol carved on the door’s face before Demascus shoved the door open.

“Everyone inside,” the deva whispered. No one argued.

Chant found himself in a room with a hard floor, not a web, thank Waukeen’s stingy mercies! The air was musty, like a damp basement that had suffered several floods. The sunrod’s light had noticeably dimmed, as if it was working twice as hard to shed even half the amount of light it was normally able to …

Demascus slammed the door on the webbed corridors. The moment it closed, the door melted into the wall and was gone. Or maybe disappeared into the inky shadows.

“Where are we?” said Jaul.

“Shh,” said Demascus. The deva laid his head against the wall to listen where the door had been. Why was it so dark? Chant stepped closer to one wall, and was barely able to tell that it was painted a dreary gray and decorated with chipped and peeling wainscoting. Two exits were visible.

“I feel like I’ve gone blind,” murmured Jaul. He rubbed at his eyes. Chant felt the same-it was almost as if a grainy film covered everything.

Demascus flashed the kid a look, then motioned to Chant. The pawnbroker brought the rod closer. He saw the door hadn’t exactly disappeared, though it had suffered some kind of transformation. A line drawing defaced the wall and wainscoting, penned by a quill dipped in charcoal ink, and traced a square only half as large as the opening they’d come through. The line wasn’t even particularly neat or straight-it looked like it had been scrawled by a determined though not particularly talented child.

“Can we get back through?” he whispered to Demascus.

“Hope so. Now’s not the time to test it. We wouldn’t want to step through into our pursuer’s laps. I can hear their screams on the other side, faintly. They sound angry.” Chant shuddered.

“I don’t think we’re in Faerun anymore; the light falls differently,” said Demascus. “So we shouldn’t stray too far from this entrance. Who knows what kind of place this is? On the other hand, if our pursuers look through from the other side, I’d rather they not immediately see us camped here.”

The deva approached one paneled door hanging ajar on the opposite wall. Chant followed, holding the sunrod at head height in one hand and his crossbow in the other.

The room beyond contained torn and rotting divans. Deep claw marks scored the hardwood furniture. Two walls were wainscoted and held a door apiece, but the longest wall was a mortared, slightly curved expanse of stone. Snuffed candles littered the floor near a fallen candelabra. Faint sparks glittered through a single narrow aperture in the curved wall.

“Arrow slit?” Chant said, pointing. When Demascus shrugged, he advanced and looked through the vertical opening. It was night. And-

“We’re in a tower!” he said. They were in one of several turreted fingers rising from a labyrinthine castle that sprawled across the slope of a mountain range. Only a handful of stars burned red in the night sky, barely bright enough to illuminate the tallest mountain peaks. His breath steamed as it escaped out the gap. Out on the battlements, things fluttered just at the edge of perception, whispering and creeping, waiting to pounce on anyone foolish enough to go out into that endless night …

“We’re in some kind of old fortress,” he announced, his voice hoarse. “One larger than I’ve ever heard tell of. And it looks … haunted.” The others crowded around to see. Chant stepped away and closed his eyes. Seeing those unfamiliar stars … it viscerally shook him in a way that the deva’s declaration, that they had left behind the world he knew, had not.

He looked down at the golden yellow light of the sunrod and drank it in for solace. He needed it. Fear had taken root. Fear for his son and, indeed, for himself. A pack of vampires had chased them into a web of portals and from there into the first side-exit they’d found, which resembled a deformed echo of the real world-a practice model that’d been tossed aside but not completely destroyed by the lords of creation. A failed attempt that lingered in some forgotten corner of existence, attracting ghosts, vengeful vampires, and foolish creatures like Chant Morven, who should have stayed home selling pawned silver.

Chant wondered if he’d ever see sunlight again. Waukeen, you have much to answer for. Then he forced a smile for his son and put strength into his voice for Demascus and Riltana. “Let’s try one of these rooms away from the window, what say? I don’t like the cold air it’s letting in.”