Spinner of Lies

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANUL

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

"Hello,” Jaul said. “I never get tired of it, how vivid the world is through living, mortal eyes.” The mask’s mouth was moving, but the voice was not Jaul’s.

“Fossil?” said Madri, her voice quavering. “Is that you?”

“Just so,” Jaul’s mouth quirked, in perfect lock step with the half-mask’s rubbery contractions.

Madri whirled to fix a scared gaze on him. “Demascus, the mask was a dead angel; I thought I destroyed it!”

Jaul-no, Fossil-shook its host’s head. “You almost did. But you should have destroyed all the pieces.”

“What’ve you done with Jaul?” Demascus asked. If anything happened to Chant’s son … Demascus didn’t want to think about it. His friend would never forgive him.

“Jaul?” said Fossil. “He’s not far, nor as pure as you assume. I can see right into his mind.” A hand rose and tapped Jaul’s forehead. “In fact, why don’t I let him tell you what he’s been up to?”

Jaul spoke again, but this time in something much closer to his regular voice. “Hey, Demascus. Yeah … I’ve been sort of a bad boy.” Then he giggled.

It sounded like Jaul … but a Jaul hyped up on about five kettles of tea. “Take off the mask!”

“Nah. I don’t think so. I’m seeing things a whole new way.”

“Because you were stupid enough to put an evil relic on your face. It’s messing with your perception. Take it off!”

Madri interrupted, “Jaul, what did Fossil mean when he said you’re not so pure?”

Jaul laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Fossil meant the Necromancer. I wasn’t actually going to return the painting to House Norjah. I just said that because you caught me. No, I’ve been keeping Master Raneger apprised of everything you’ve been up to. See this tattoo?” Jaul pointed with one hand at a tattoo on his opposite wrist, depicting a dagger suspended in a crashing wave. “It’s Raneger’s sign. Means I’m pledged. I told Raneger about the Whispering Children while you were off chasing drow in the Demonweb. He was delighted to learn about the Necromancer. So he sent me to steal it. And you know what? I was happy to do it. Serves the old man right if House Norjah comes looking for him.”

Disappointment on Chant’s behalf stabbed Demascus. It was plausible … and explained how Jaul had found his way here. Raneger’s sizable criminal network had supplied the address. The little snot had betrayed them. And now Jaul had been snagged by something even worse than Raneger.

“Fossil, let Jaul go!” Demascus said.

“Fossil isn’t doing anything I don’t want it to do,” said Jaul. “I’m the one wearing the mask, you dolt.”

“Try to take it off then, and we’ll see who’s got who.”

“You think I’m that stupid? Go piss in a dragon den.”

Demascus had hoped Jaul would at least try. He edged forward. If he could jump the kid, maybe he could wrench the mask off him …

“Hey, watch it. With this thing on my face, I don’t miss a thing. And I can tell you’re going to do something stupid. Don’t, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Sorry how?”

“Sorry that you didn’t learn all the secrets this relic mask knows about you because you made me too angry to share. Fossil said it could see into my head? Well, I can see into what passes for its mind, too. And you figure prominently.”

Jaul raised his hands in a gesture of reconciliation. “I know things you need to know.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the true origin of …” Jaul cocked his head, as if trying to recall a half-forgotten fact. “… of Kalkan Swordbreaker. He wasn’t always your nemesis, you know. He was created after you manifested in Toril.”

“How do you know that name?”

“Fossil knows,” Jaul said, smiling like the drake who ate the cat.

Madri murmured, “Demascus, Fossil is a liar and works for a liar. Anything he says might be-”

“Created by whom?” interrupted Demascus. Madri scowled at him. Anger made him not care about her feelings-she should have warned him about the mask!

“By the gods,” said Jaul … but the voice was no longer that of Chant’s son. The intonation had returned to that of the relic angel. Fossil continued, “They feared you, a creature with a mortal’s mind-set from another continuum. An entity who’d been granted more power than a being of your station should ever possess. So they fashioned a keeper, one who could manage you, and then snuff you out whenever your power grew too great. To reset you, as it were, and rub out any particularly embarrassing memories you might carry that could implicate even a god.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Is it? The pantheon of Toril faced enough problems-the last thing they needed was an assassin whose power, at its height, might be sufficient to remove a god from the holy rolls. Or whose intimate knowledge of their private vendettas could be used to shake up earthly temples.”

Demascus shook his head. He couldn’t imagine that a version of himself could ever be so powerful that the gods would fear him. Although …

In several visions of former incarnations, he had to admit he’d felt … calm, sure, and at peace with what was essentially an unstoppable capacity to harm others. He’d been more than human, like a demigod given mortal form. His pale skin, marked with jagged patterns, set him slightly apart from others, but the grace and certainty that suffused his every word, his every movement, might as well have been … divine. When he was moved to action, godlike power had flowed through him to smite his foes, and sometimes it felt as if the eyes of a god looked out from inside his skull …

“They’re using you, Demascus!” pressed Fossil. “They don’t care about you. You’re a tool to them, one they deliberately keep blunt. They don’t deserve your service.”

He recalled his attempt to contact Oghma, and how he’d been rebuffed. Already angry, new resentment burned like a fire in his belly. “What’re my options?”

“Don’t listen to it!” Madri protested. “It’s a servitor of the Prince of Lies!”

Prince of Lies? That was dramatic. The name sounded familiar, though. But she’d had her chance to tell him herself. She hadn’t. “I’ll hear it out, nonetheless.”

Madri gave an exasperated sigh. “Don’t be an idiot, Demascus!”

Jaul smiled. “Your best option,” said Fossil’s voice, “the most ethical option, really, is to learn all the terrible things the gods of Toril have asked you to do over the centuries. I am the doorway through which you can gain that knowledge. All you must do is join me. Do you think murdering Madri was the worst thing you’ve done in the name of divine justice? You’d be wrong, Demascus. So very wrong.”

A chill ran across Demascus’s limbs and some of his anger evaporated. “Join you? What does that entail?”

Demascus reflected that the mask probably didn’t have his best interests at heart. Its very first act in the deva’s presence had been to mentally dominate Chant’s son. And the title, Prince of Lies … something about that name swam forward in his memory, trying to break to the surface. Something to do with skulls.

“It’s simple, really. You’re a deva. When a deva decides to seize his own destiny and break free of the moral shackles that so many bear, he gains a great boon. Such a deva takes on a new, fiercer visage.”

Demascus felt his jaw literally drop. He knew what Fossil was getting at: when a deva renounces his moral code, at his next incarnation he returns as a fiend, not a man. He comes back as a rakshasa!

“More important,” continued Fossil, “such a deva finally remembers all his previous lives, all his triumphs, and all the abilities he’s learned through the ages. If you join me, Demascus, I’ll give you all your memories back and all your power. Kalkan will no longer be your nemesis but your ally. And you’ll be able to take your vengeance on the gods who’ve reduced you to such a sad, forgotten cinder of your former glory.”

Demascus slowly nodded …

“Why’re you nodding?” Madri said, her tone incredulous.

“Actually, I just remembered where I’d heard the title ‘Prince of Lies’ before,’ ” he said. “The Prince of Lies is the formal title for a god named Cyric.” The floor seemed to drop beneath his boots.

The painting stirred again. “Cyric, the Prince of Lies, god of Strife, seeks to court your next death … Just as his deceits caused you to kill where you would not have otherwise …”

Madri interrupted. “You killed me because of a lie, Demascus.” Her eyes shimmered with unwept tears.

Oh, no. It would be nice to think the Necromancer was mistaken. But that was the logic of a three-year-old. Close your eyes and hope the scary things go away. He tried one more time, anyhow. “Fate is a power greater than the gods.” Wasn’t it?

The painting kept speaking. “… you imagine gods and men writhe in equal futility against Fate’s decree … but Fate is only inertia … one may always change one’s own destiny, or another’s, if one tries hard enough …” And then the Necromancer’s awful tones faded to nothing. Was it possible? Could Cyric have denied Fate by contracting the Sword to slay Madri with a lie? Was such a thing possible, even for a god? Maybe not all gods, but possibly one whose sphere of influence was duplicity. A liar god could probably bluff the universe itself …

Demascus felt raw and sick with the sudden certainty of it. All the lives he’d ended, all the bodies discarded to rot-how many had been true selections of Fate? And how many had been murders he’d been duped into committing? His brain convulsed around the name: Cyric. He saw a jawless skull on a purple sunburst. Then another piece of former knowledge surfaced: The Prince of Lies was trapped!

He protested, “Faerun’s pantheon imprisoned Cyric in his throne. He’s bound. How can he lie to me, or to anyone?”

The Necromancer’s tombstone voice rang out again. “Demascus killed Madri a lifetime ago, before the Prince of Lies was so chained … Cyric foresaw his own captivity … he set in motion a plan to forge a key, a weapon with powers that eroded in each cycle of death, powers so deadly even a god might fear its reach … Cyric sought to turn you to his own ends and make the Sword of the Gods that weapon with a lie …”

“That’s one way to look at it, painting; the wrong way,” said Fossil. “But sometimes a lie is a tool, a means to an end. In this case, it was a gift. A gift designed to return to you all your forgotten power and full self-knowledge. The lie made you kill Madri unwittingly. But now you know. And if you embrace what you’ve done, now that you possess full knowledge of the significance, you can cast off your manacles.”

Horror made Demascus’s scalp tingle. He knew what Fossil was going to suggest. It was terrible. And yet …

“Claim the act, make it your own without remorse! Then return in your next incarnation as a rakshasa, with power beyond imagining, knowing all the gods’ secrets in this world and in others. Join Cyric, and you’ll shake the foundations of the cosmos!”

The raw power Fossil offered woke something in Demascus: the echo that lived like a splinter in his soul. The Sword had heard the angel’s offer. It wanted to return in full measure, clothed in its old glory but not yoked by the Whorl of Ioun to the gods’ will. He was halfway there already-he’d already lost the Whorl. All he had to do was to embrace his dishonorable deeds. A rush of grim joy sparked up his spine, and he grinned. His eyes fastened on the heap of earth. Under there lay the seed of the Swordbreaker’s new body.

“What of Kalkan?” he said.

“Having achieved his end, he’ll trouble you no more.” said Fossil.

“You can’t be considering his offer!” accused Madri.

Demascus ignored her. He-or was it the Sword of the Gods? — wouldn’t allow Kalkan to get off so easily. The rakshasa had killed him more times than he knew. And once Demascus regained all that had been stripped from him, he’d remember every death. He doubted he’d be feeling generous toward the Swordbreaker then. His grin stretched wider. Then he imagined the furred, bestial monstrosity of Kalkan. And of the bodies Riltana had once shown him upstairs, stripped of flesh, hanging to rot as if in a madman’s larder.

Is that what he wanted for himself?

Yes, answered the echo. His hands worked as he imagined loosing bolts of heavenly ruin and shadowed glory in equal measure. As he wielded Exorcessum in every one of its configurations, even the last, the configuration that could burn everything to ash …

The sour odor of the dirt heap drew his eyes again to Kalkan’s makeshift chrysalis. Madri made a quiet sound of negation.

He blinked rapidly and took a quick breath. Merciful lords, what was wrong with him? He would never submit to becoming a monster.

Never.

The specter of the Sword trembled, then folded itself away like a soot-winged moth in the recesses of his being.

Demascus cleared his throat. “Rakshasas are fiends. They might as well be devils.”

“Don’t belittle what you haven’t tried,” said Fossil’s voice. But Jaul’s mouth pulled down in a worried frown.

“It’s telling that you want me to trade my flesh for something like that. Forget it. I’d never willingly become like Kalkan. Your plan has failed.”

Jaul’s frown grew thunderous. He stared at Demascus for a long moment. Then he said, still in Fossil’s voice, “So be it. I hoped you’d choose wisely. But no matter. The hook is well set. Ignorance of your crimes doesn’t guarantee a pardon. If you die now, with the knowledge of your lover’s murder a fresh stain on your soul-”

Jaul’s body leaped into action, daggers suddenly in hand. He thrust one at Demascus’s abdomen, the other at his face. The half-mask cackled with glee. Jaul’s glee, not the mask’s!

Shadow take it, thought Demascus as he stumbled back, I’m not-

Madri interposed herself. Jaul flashed through her like smoke. But he reacted as if he’d thought she was real. He flailed, and landed clumsily at Demascus’s feet.

He was up again a half-heartbeat later, daggers already thrusting again.

But the deva used the moment’s grace to raise Exorcessum. He deflected the new attacks, then push-kicked Jaul.

Jaul gave ground, but only grudgingly. Demascus smashed the flat of his sword on the kid’s head. He didn’t want to kill Chant’s son, only stun him. The impact vibrated up the hilt, and he worried that even though he’d turned the blade, it’d still been too hard. That blow had probably brained the-

“Is that all you’ve got?” said Jaul. “I’m not going down. The mask’s given me resilience and speed-I’m as powerful as the angel it once was! You’ll have to call up the echo of the Sword, Demascus. Then we’ll discover if he agrees with your decision!”

Was Jaul correct? If I take on the visage of his old office, will my choice be overturned? The Sword knew little of remorse and hardly cared for repercussions. It might decide to join with Fossil and Kalkan. Demascus recognized the incipient glimmer of the Sword’s abilities trying to subsume his thoughts. He clamped down on the feeling. No, you’re not getting out.

Jaul advanced, calm as a snake. Blood dribbled from his scalp into one eye, staining it scarlet. But it didn’t seem to bother him. Demascus backed up, blade raised in guard. Jaul followed. A wall touched Demascus’s shoulder. Jaul slashed with the dagger in his left hand at the same instant. Demascus ducked into what he hoped was a blind spot of blurred vision caused by the pooling blood in the youth’s eye. Exorcessum cut into the meat of Jaul’s left arm. The hand holding that dagger spasmed and a red-handled dagger clattered to the floor. More blood flowed. Demascus used the moment to sidle away from the wall.

“That one’s going to leave a scar!” crowed Fossil. “Not that I care. You’re going to have to kill this body, Demascus.”

“Wait, what?” came Jaul’s near instantaneous response from the same mouth. “That’s going a little too far, Fossil.”

Fossil replied, “Don’t worry, it won’t come to that. With my help, you can defeat the deva, if he doesn’t call his office.”

“Yeah, the way I feel, I doubt anything can stop me. But what were you saying about Demascus having ‘to kill this body?’ ”

“If Demascus does not raise the Sword, you’ll kill him with the power I’ve given you,” explained Fossil. “If he does raise the Sword, the Sword can probably kill you … but the Sword will decide to join us instead. Do you see?”

Jaul slowly nodded. “I do, Fossil. Let’s end this!”

Gods of shadow, thought Demascus, Jaul and Fossil had him by the privates!

If he could just-

Jaul head-butted him. The sharp mask edge gouged Demascus’s forehead. His heel caught a chair leg. He cursed his ineptitude as he toppled, reflexively letting go of his weapon to catch himself. He came down like a collapsing accordion, ducked a knife swing, and reached for the hilt of his sword-

Jaul stamped on his hand. Pain swarmed up his nerves like fire ants. The boot ground his palm into the floor, fixing him in place. The masked face regarded him. “Where’s the Sword? He wouldn’t put up with this sort of nonsense.”

Demascus flinched as something terrible beat at the gates of his mind, trying to emerge. Fossil was right. The Sword of the Gods didn’t like being humbled. He grunted with the pressure of holding the figurative door shut.

“Are you keeping him bottled?” came the dead angel’s voice. “Yes? That means I’ll just have to cut your throat and bleed you like a pig. When you see me next, it’ll be through different eyes. But you’ll remember me. Keep that in mind when you come into your true power, Demascus. I was the one who birthed you!”

“Fossil, Jaul, over here,” came Madri’s voice. She stood on the earth heap, which was disturbed as if a human-sized gopher had been digging in it. Something lay revealed there, like matted fur …

Madri waved a dirt-encrusted metallic disk that dangled from a leather strap.

The boot’s pressure eased. “Put that down,” Fossil said, its voice emotionless.

“Let Demascus go,” she replied. “Or I’ll flicker to the middle of the Sea of Fallen Stars and drop the damos into its depths.”

Damos? thought Demascus.

“You’ve one chance, Madri,” said Fossil. “Do as I say.”

“You better do what it says,” Jaul agreed. “Fossil’s not messing around.”

Demascus tried to snatch his hand from under the boot. But the mask continued to lend Jaul’s mortal sinews angelic strength. Strength he couldn’t hope to match without calling up the power clinging to his soul.

“Not happening, Fossil. Let Demascus go. Now.”

“You should have listened,” said Fossil. “I release you, spirit. Be gone. The binding I summoned you with is dissolved!”

“Wait,” said Madri. “I don’t …”

The woman shuddered. She reached a hand to Demascus, as if in supplication or a plea for aid. Then she blew away like smoke from a snuffed candle.

The damos thunked onto the mound.

Jaul laughed. “That was easy. Stupid woman. I warned her.”

“You killed her,” Demascus said, the words mushy in his mouth.

Madri was gone. Sorrow like a glacier pinned him on its face. He gasped, trying to catch his breath. He forgot the pain in his hand; the cold despair that engulfed him was heavier, and threatened to crush him.

Jaul’s throat chuckled with Fossil’s glee. “She was already dead. Though I admit, she had more agency than I expected for a ghost. Something to do with Exorcessum, I expect. Ah, well. She’s out of the picture. As you’re about to be. I look forward to dealing with the incarnation that follows this one.”

Demascus wasn’t really listening. The forlorn way Madri had reached for help … It tore at him, pulling him out of the numbing regret.

And something cracked. Through that fracture flowed a scream for vengeance.

The lantern light turned red as blood. Jaul’s voice slowed to a bass rumble.

The Sword of the Gods jerked his bruised hand from beneath the trapping heel, ignoring the scraped flesh that resulted. Jaul didn’t react. He couldn’t; he was caught in the regular flow of time. The deva retrieved Exorcessum and stood as shadows congealed around him, drawing close like a second skin, highlighting older, crueler lines in his face. The Veil of Wrath and Knowledge flared behind him like angel wings. Exorcessum’s runes lifted a quarter inch from the blade. The Sword was well past tired of Fossil’s charade. As time tottered toward its resumption, he used the sword’s point to scribe a mark of divine radiance on the mask’s forehead. His oath to destroy Fossil.

The half-mask burned suddenly blue as Jaul flashed into movement. He sidestepped the deva’s blade and circled out to the left. The Sword pivoted, but one of Jaul’s daggers was already arrowing at his kidney. Fossil had sped up Jaul’s reactions, beyond anything the boy should’ve-

The dagger punched through the Sword’s camouflaging shadow, through his coat and leather armor, and scraped across his ribs. It would’ve punctured an organ if one end of the Veil hadn’t whipped forward and slapped Jaul across the face. The kid rocked back and the deva used the distraction to step through shadow to appear on Jaul’s right flank.

But Fossil had already turned his host to face the Sword’s attack, as if it could see into the Shadowfell fringe where the deva could usually evade notice.

Fossil beat aside a disemboweling lunge by Exorcessum. With the same movement, Fossil skimmed one of Jaul’s daggers along the outside of the rune sword and caught the deva’s arm in a twisting lock. The deva reversed his grip and forced Jaul to abandon his ploy.

Fossil was good! The Sword loved it when his foes forced him to walk along that knife’s edge between victory and defeat-it happened all too little. In fact, the Sword couldn’t ever remember losing. Because when he did, the Whorl of Ioun never recorded it.

He laughed. The sound echoed through the room and into the Shadowfell fringe, too, creating a spooky resonance that would usually make mortals gasp in alarm. Jaul just smirked and kept attacking. The young man’s body had become a mere tool, a possessed husk in the angel’s control, windmilling daggers and hurtling back and forth through the air so quickly his clothing threatened to smoke with the friction.

The easiest way to hurt the mask would be to obliterate its host.

The Sword wondered why he hadn’t already slain the young man. Why was he holding back? Because he, the deva … knew Jaul? And … valued him? His father, at least. Hard to believe-an assassin should never form attachments. Better to keep others distant and unimportant. And besides, the little bastard had lied about returning the painting to House Norjah. No, he’d come to betray the deva and his own father and hijack the Whispering Child for Master Raneger. On top of everything else, Jaul had stupidly put on the mask, and when given the chance to take it off, refused. Really, it’d be doing Faerun a favor to eradicate Jaul.

Except …

Except he’d received no divine contract to slay the possessed youth. Certainly he’d killed those who’d tried to prevent him from fulfilling past contracts. But something about his current situation was different, making him hold back even though he’d already decided it wasn’t in his interest to do so.

“Burning dominions, you vex me!” the Sword said. He addressed himself-that annoying part that’d gained a little too much of its own agency lately, the part that thought of itself as Demascus, even though that was the Sword’s name, too. Like Madri, the Demascus part of him didn’t seem to know its role.

He took a single step through a writhing shadow to the top of the stairs. Jaul was already after him. The deva grabbed a fleck of shadow and hurled it at the mask. Jaul flinched back, much farther than the Sword had expected, so much so that the swing he’d planned to intersect the distracted mask wearer at the neckline just whiffed through empty air.

Right. He already knew Fossil could see the echo plane of Shadow, with its twisted, dark swirls of gray and black murk that beat like rain from a leaden sky. Which meant Jaul could, too …

Argent light flashed from the mask’s eyeholes, sweeping the chamber and stairwell. It incinerated the deva’s protective shadows to dust, burned him, and dazzled his sight. He clamped his eyes shut.

“Guide me, Veil,” he muttered, and charged blind down the stairs. His scarf settled across his eyes. The chamber’s dimensions returned to him in smudges of gray and white.

Jaul was visible, but in the fate-strained vision of the Veil he appeared only as a vague outline superimposed on an eight-foot-tall humanoid with metallic black wings. The creature swept across the entire chamber, wearing armor like crusted ice dipped in tar and a face like a blank tombstone.

No wonder I’m getting my ass handed to me, thought the Sword. Jaul’s channeling the revenant of an angel of vengeance, or something worse.

He rolled under another discharge of radiant energy from the mask’s slit eyeholes, holding Exorcessum parallel to the floor in one hand so he didn’t snag himself on its lethal length.

Then he gathered up the swirling umbra of the Shadowfell in his free hand. He’d used shadow as a weapon many times, forming it into implements of death able to cut or sever. But he couldn’t recall ever using it as a distraction.

He loosed the gathered shadow as if shaking out a rug. A wave of gloom rippled toward Fossil, a wave invisible in the world.

But Jaul saw it. He flinched away, uncertain what the discontinuity represented.

The deva was ready. Behind the cover of the collapsing wave front, he stepped between shadow mouths. He heaved Exorcessum around in an arc so swift the air screamed its protest. He began the stroke across the room from Jaul but completed it a few paces from his foe. Already retreating before the gloom wave, the kid still managed to jerk back again, away from the deva’s surprise sword stroke. He flinched just far enough so that instead of taking off Jaul’s head, Exorcessum’s sword tip dragged along the half-mask, snagging it and then stripping it from the young man’s head. The mask smashed against the damp brick wall of the cellar. Fragments exploded across the chamber like shrapnel.

Jaul collapsed. The deva remained poised for a long moment in the quiet cellar, his Veil-enhanced senses alert to every possible threat. But none remained, save maybe for the painting …

He flipped the cover over the fractured visage. The shards of Fossil were devoid of any lingering power. Jaul was halfdead with the strain imposed by the angel’s supernatural strength being ripped away, though the deva judged he’d probably live. The heap of earth glimmered with a threat returning to full strength. And Madri …

Well, she was gone. Back to the dust she’d been for a century or more. The guise of the Sword whispered away.

Demascus cried out and shuddered. He removed the scarf from his eyes and glanced around the room lit by failing lamplight.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Madri.” She’d saved him. She’d sacrificed herself and saved him. “I didn’t deserve you,” he told the blank spot of earth where she’d last stood. Misery reached for him. He pushed it away as best he could. There’d be time for that. First …

Demascus retrieved the damos. His lip curled at a hint of something vile smelling. He secured it to his belt.

He turned his attention to the pile of dirt. With bare hands he began uncovering a corpse. A corpse that was becoming a bit less dead each day.