Lies of Light (14 page)

Osorkon looked into the first crystal sphere. Marek Rymiit sat in Salatis’s blue-and-white upholstered armchair with its bright red cherry wood accents. On the top of the back of the chair was a cherry wood emblem of three lightning bolts converging on a single spot. The symbol was a clear indication that Salatis had recently converted to the worship of Talos, the Bully of Fury’s Heart.

“Rymiit,” Osorkon whispered, confident that the Thayan couldn’t hear him anyway, “what are you doing there?”

Marek looked up, and Osorkon could swear they made eye contact. A cold chill ran down his spine, and he could feel his face go white.

“Ransar?” Kolviss said, his voice shaking. “Ransar, what’s that?”

He pointed at the other functioning crystal ball. Displayed therein was the empty outer off ice—or at least it was supposed to be empty. Something pulsed in the center of the room. It looked like a cloud of black and purple smoke, formed in a tall oval shape.

“It looks like a door,” Tlaet remarked with a childlike lilt in his voice.

“Ransar?” one of the bodyguards called from the door.

“Be ready,” Osorkon told the two guards. “It’s happening.”

“What’s happening?” asked Thensumkon. He didn’t even sound curious.

Osorkon glanced at the crystal ball that revealed the senate chamber and saw Marek recline in Salatis’s chair and put his sandaled feet up on the desk in front of him. Again, Osorkon could swear he made eye contact, and the Thayan wizard smiled.

“There’s someone,” Kolviss said.

Osorkon’s eyes snapped back to the view of his outer office, and he stood. A man of medium height but sturdy build stepped out of the cloud of black and purple smoke just as if it was indeed a doorway. He held a finely-crafted longaxe in both hands and was dressed for battle in black leather ring mail.

Osorkon watched as five more followed the first man. All of them looked enough alike to be brothers. They appeared of mulan descent with dusky brown skin and eyes that appeared black in the crystal ball. All six of them went to the doors to the ransar’s office. None of them spoke, no orders were given. They all held identical weapons.

“Stand alert, men,” Osorkon told his bodyguards. “They have axes, so they’ll get in, but it should take a while.”

The ransar opened a cabinet behind him and drew out a carved mahogany box that he set on a stack of parchment on his desk.

“Ooh,” Thensumkon said, “what’s that?”

Osorkon looked at him, but didn’t answer. The fool had no idea they were all about to be killed.

Well, he thought, ignorance is bliss.

While he dug in a desk drawer for the key to the box Osorkon kept his eyes fixed on what transpired in his outer office, though the temptation to look back at Marek Rymiit—who continued to stare directly at him from the Chamber of Law and Civility—nettled at his nerves. Two of the six assassins stood close to the double doors, opened their mouths, and for all appearances vomited on them. A

stream of black fluid gushed up from deep in their throats and flowed over the smooth-polished oak. The wood began to dissolve like a sugar cube in a hot cup of tea… actually a little faster than that.

“All right, men,” he warned the guards, “they’ll be through the doors a bit sooner.”

He found the key and blinked sweat out of his eyes as he struggled with the lock on the mahogany box. He didn’t remember feeling so warm before the assassins stepped out of a cloud in the next room.

“Should we be leaving?” asked Kolviss.

Osorkon had to smile at that one, but withheld his reply when he finally got the box unlocked. He opened it with a faint squeak of long-neglected hinges. Inside, nestled in rich green velvet, sat a mace. The weapon, which had been enchanted to contain the concentrated essence of lightning, had been in his family for generations and as a boy he’d been schooled in its use.

He drew it out and looked at the door. The sizzling sound of whatever caustic substance the strange men had vomited onto it grew louder and louder, then a wisp of brown-gray smoke twisted up from a spot a finger’s length from the crack where the two doors met.

“There is another way out of here, isn’t there, Ransar?” asked Kolviss.

“Where are we going?” Tlaet replied.

“Where are we going?” Osorkon asked. “That depends on what god you prayed to last.”

“I always pray to Waukeen,” Thensumkon said. “Don’t we all pray to Waukeen, for gold and whatnot?”

Osorkon shook his head, hefted his heirloom mace, and stepped around his desk to stand in front of it, facing the door. He refused to look at Marek, so instead he let his gaze linger on his map. Painted onto one wall, the huge representation showed everything from the middle of the Nagaflow south to Piresteap Citadel in excellent detail. Ten months before, on the Ninth day of Nightal in the Year

of the Wave, Osorkon had had a thin, straight blue line, running north-to-south, painted in the space between the Nagaflow River and the Lake of Steam.

The door sizzled so loudly his ears began to ring. Palm-sized chunks of wood fell off only to dissolve away to nothing but black blisters on the wood floor. Movement to the side caught Osorkon’s attention and he watched as another figure stepped through the hovering black cloud into the room beyond the disintegrating doors.

“Salatis,” Osorkon whispered.

“Who, Ransar?” one of the bodyguards asked as they both backed into the room with their halberds out in front of them.

“It’s Senator Salatis,” Osorkon said.

“Well,” Thensumkon huffed with sincere disapproval, “he won’t have that title for long.”

“No,” Osorkon said with a wry smile, “he’ll have mine if we don’t fight well.”

“And get damned lucky,” one of the bodyguards grumbled as he watched two more of the six assassins douse the failing doors with caustic secretions.

With a final sizzling, shattering cacophony they were in the room. The two bodyguards dropped back to defend their ransar, stepping past a startled, immobile Thensumkon.

“Well, now,” the advisor started to say, but the words became a gurgle then were lost entirely to the thump of his severed head hitting the floor.

“Goodness!” Tlaet exclaimed.

“Really, now,” Kolviss said, scurrying back in the direction of the ransar and his guards on legs shaking so badly he was obviously on the verge of collapsing, if not shattering, to the floor, “there is a back door out of here, now, isn’t there? A secret door or a trapdoor… a concealed door, maybe? Some of kind of—”

Kolviss stopped talking when one of the bodyguards dropped him with the butt end of his halberd and said, “Sorry, Master Kolviss, but don’t crowd us or—”

And it was the bodyguard’s turn to stop in midsentence. Kolviss’s hair, then scalp, dissolved away in front of their eyes, in just the blink of an eye revealing a dome of brilliant white skull. The advisor put a hand to his head, felt the bone, and fainted.

Osorkon decided that was a good thing—Kolviss wouldn’t be able to feel his eyes melt, then his face. No one should have to be awake while his head was liquefied.

Tlaet squealed like a girl and ran so fast and so suddenly he accidentally avoided a swipe from one of the assassins’ longaxes. Two of the assassins stepped right past him to engage the bodyguards. Osorkon stepped back behind his desk, holding his mace in front of him, his feet wide apart and his knees bent. The reach of the assassins’ longaxes almost matched the bodyguards’ halberds, and the four of them parried and struck, parried and struck.

One of the assassins grunted loudly and stepped back. Angry, bleeding from a huge wound in his chest, the strange man opened his mouth, but before he could launch a stream of black acid at the bodyguard who’d sliced him, his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell backward. The black fluid oozed out from the sides of his mouth and began to dissolve the wood floor under his still head.

Another stepped up in his place, and they were back at it again.

The second bodyguard fell to a disemboweling, low slash of a longaxe. He was at least alive enough to cry out for his mother before the assassin stomped on his neck and cut his plea short with an ear-assaulting crack.

“Ransar,” Kolviss squealed, “let us away!”

“For the last time, Kolviss,” Osorkon said stepping back fast to avoid a stream of black fluid that arced through the air at his face, “there is nowhere to go.”

The acid started working at his desk chair, and Osorkon kicked it away and jumped up onto his desk—kicking the stacks of parchment to the floor. Kolviss, in a blind panic, leaped at him, grabbing at his legs, his face red and tears

streaming from his eyes. One of the assassins stepped up behind Kolviss and brought his longaxe down in a smooth arc to imbed the blade into the top of the man’s head. The blade sank down to the tip of his nose, and there was surprisingly little blood. Kolviss’s eyes still moved, following Osorkon’s, and his lips twitched silently a few times before he managed to say, “Osorkon?” in a voice made both wet and nasal by the bloody ruin his sinuses had become. The assassin twisted the handle of his long axe, choking up on it as he did so, and broke Kolviss’s head open like an egg. Kolviss’s legs collapsed, and he fell in a gory heap.

Two of the assassins crowded the last bodyguard, who bled from half a dozen wounds. The guard growled through gritted teeth and jabbed then swung, jabbed then swung, with his heavy halberd. When he spun the polearm up to parry a downward slash from one longaxe, the other assassin brought his weapon in low and took both of the guard’s legs off at the knees with that one swipe.

“Surrender, Osorkon!” Salatis shouted over the bodyguard’s agonized shriek.

The scream was silenced when one of the assassins took the guard’s head off.

“Surrender!” Salatis called again from the doorway. “It’s over.”

Knowing the new ransar was right, Osorkon let loose an incoherent battle cry and charged the nearest assassin. He managed by pure luck to get inside the longaxe’s reach and he smashed down on the dark man’s shoulder. The carved steel head of the mace crunched the assassin’s shoulder blade and sent a spiderweb of blue-white sparks crisscrossing over his twitching torso. The assassin’s face screwed up in a spasm of agony, and he stood there, quivering under the mace’s enchanted lightning for a heartbeat, then another, Osorkon shouting in defiance the whole time—which was long enough for another of the intruders to step in and take one of his arms off.

The lightning disappeared, and the assassin dropped

to the floor, still twitching, but otherwise dead. Osorkon staggered back, the mace still in the one hand he had left, and watched the blood pump from his open veins.

It doesn’t hurt, he thought. Isn’t that strange?

A dark-skinned assassin charged in, and Osorkon managed to beat his longaxe away with the mace, but he didn’t register the other one standing right next to him.

The fluid was cold on his skin at first, and thick. It felt heavy, and that along with the weight of the mace made him drop his guard. He took a boot to the chest and fell. He tried to take a deep breath from on his back but couldn’t.

Just as well, he thought. Now I can’t give Salatis the satisfaction of a scream.

The acid took his skin and that hurt. Osorkon had never imagined pain like that.

Kill me, he thought, in some way desperate to communicate with the pain itself. Make me pass out, by Loviatar’s bloody scourge.

His eyes slammed shut and his teeth chattered as the acid began to work on the meat of his arm. If he even had a hand anymore, he was no longer holding the mace. He watched it roll across the floor, the haft getting smaller and smaller as acid dissolved even the enchanted weapon.

“What-” he gasped. “What’s that… smell?”

He caught a glance of the bone of his forearm. It was even whiter than Thensumkon’s skull, if that was possible.

He looked up, blinking, the pain making all the muscles left in his body quiver so that he felt for all the world as if his blood had reached a rolling boil. Above him stood Salatis, dressed in a fine blue silk robe with a clean white sash, and one of the dark assassins. Osorkon was lost in the assassin’s eyes. He’d never seen eyes so black—at least not on anything but a shark.

He tried to speak again but couldn’t.

“The Storm Lord be praised,” Salatis said, then glanced at the assassin. “Well done, Captain Olin.”

Osorkon coughed. He couldn’t breathe. The pain was

starting to go away. That didn’t seem like a good sign.

“Well, Osorkon, my old friend,” Salatis said. “By the grace of the Destroyer, by the will of Talos, I must inform you that your services to the city-state of Innarlith are no longer required.” Salatis giggled in a way that made him appear, especially from below, like a drooling idiot. “May Talos eat your wretched soul to break his fast on the morrow.”

Osorkon still couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t get any part of his body except his neck to move, but he could move his neck, and he did, tilting his head away from the gloating, laughing Salatis and his stoic, unamused, silent assassin. He looked at the map, tried to keep his eyes open and on the straight blue line.

Finish it anyway, he thought. Finish it, Devorast. It was never really mine, after all.

And those were the words Osorkon took with him to eternity.

3 Nightal, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) Second Quarter, Innarlith

^Really, Willem, what in the diamond battlements of Trueheart do you have to be afraid of?” Marek Rymiit asked with a sibilant hiss to his accented voice—he pronounced Willem’s name as if it started with a V and not a W. The rotund wizard blinked, almost as though he was batting his eyelashes. “I mean, really. You are well and truly blessed.”

Willem swallowed and nodded, looking around the high-ceilinged room. Scattered about sat a number of crates. Hay had been piled in the corners, and canvas tarps had been spread over the scuffed wood floor.

“Willem?” the Thayan prompted.

“Yes,” Willem replied, still not looking Marek in the eye. “I am well and truly…” He paused to think, then risked:”… cared for.”

Marek laughed, and the sound was so light and so sincere that Willem was forced to smile.