“Numb,” he said. She chuckled.
“Tell me, did Lorcan come by yet?”
The dragonborn gave her a jaundiced look. The domination was wearing thin. “I saw a young man,” he said. “A human, wearing black armor. I saw another who-”
“Enough,” Rohini said. “I don’t need to hear about your day.” Lorcan would come looking soon enough, and she’d be very happy to report she’d left his warlock standing outside an Ashmadai safe-house, holding Invadiah’s precious implement, and waiting for the alarm spells to call more Asmodean cultists to the dead Ashmadai’s aid. Delightful.
Mostly. There had been the embarrassing moment where she’d pointed the rod and the body hadn’t reacted. She knew how to cast from another’s body, but nothing worked. Not even the simplest spells were in her grasp at first. Because, she realized when Farideh’s spell had blasted past her and into an Ashmadai cultist, she had taken the wrong damned twin.
The body she’d taken had known how to defend itself, how to turn the rod into a bludgeon, how to twist weapons out of her victims’ hands. Admirable reflexes, she mused, remembering how she’d dodged between a pair of particularly nimble young women with very sharp blades, tripping one into the other and finishing the survivor. While Rohini worked to channel her own magic through the girl, it had been a minor thing to keep the twin’s body fighting.
And the warlock had defended her, thinking she was saving her sister. Up until Rohini turned on Farideh herself, she hadn’t suspected a thing. Of course, she’d still knocked her sister unconscious, driving Rohini out of the girl’s body. But whatever had gone wrong didn’t matter. She was surely dead by now. The Ashmadai were too quick to retaliate, and she would never have left her sister lying on the floor.
Now, she would like nothing better than to return to her normal form, curl her wings around herself, and rest for a good long while. But Invadiah could not wait. Rohini needed to find Vartan and find out whether she needed to possess him too.
“Wait here,” she said to Mehen. “Eat or sleep or whatever you need to do, but wait for me.” The dragonborn glared at her with far more venom than he should have managed. Depths of the Abyss, she was getting sloppy as Arunika. Renew that domination, she thought as she passed from the room and into the greater hall. Yet another task on her ever growing list-
“Good evening, my dear.”
Rohini startled out of her thoughts. Brother Vartan was sitting on one of the empty cots, a cask in his lap made of rough-hewn wood. He stared at her with over-wide eyes, a peculiar smile playing on his mouth.
“I brought you a gift,” he said.
Rohini had to remind herself to smile shyly instead of snapping. She doubted the box contained Invadiah’s precious aboleth-all Rohini ought to want-or an order to eviscerate Invadiah herself-which was all Rohini did want. “That’s very kind. You had time to buy a gift after delivering our offer?”
“It took no time at all,” Vartan said, his voice still strangely flat. “Open it.”
Rohini took the ugly box from him, and set it on an empty cot. “Did you bring the orcs to the proxies?” she asked. “You spoke to them?”
“Open the box first. I want to see your face when you open it.”
Lovestruck ass, she thought, a false smile plastered to her face. She hoped it was a necklace so she could strangle him with it later. She wrenched the rusty clasp open and lifted the lid …
The temple around Rohini melted with a shrill scream. Her vision went white, and the senses of her skin were gone, as if she floated in the void between worlds. There was no temple, no Toril, no Rohini.
All she knew was the song. Like a lullaby from her demon youth, the lyrics of the discordance rose, unbidden to her lips.
“The heir stands divided and the inheritance will crumble,” she heard herself say, the most perfect music she had ever heard. “The dragons scrabble at the dregs.”
She fought against the madness winding itself around her-she was Rohini, she was the corruptor, not the corrupted. Her vision crackled, and the temple returned in fits and spurts. Her feet were solid on the ground, the humid air clung to her skin.
More words, more sounds, more images swirled in her head. Rohini clasped her forehead as her head split open and sickly light poured out.
The glistening light crawled over her skin, eating away her disguise. The plain robes became tight leather armor. Her frizzy curls became a vibrant plume of red. Her ruddy skin became coppery and smooth as silk. Veiny wings ripped from her back. Her eyes, she knew by Vartan’s astonished stare, glowed ruby.
Rohini felt her control over him snap, but she could only worry about the power trying with all its might to remake her. “Spirits surge behind the surface of the world, and they may make the land anew. But a misplaced pebble will cripple the strongest charger.”
“You’re not Rohini,” Vartan said with a mad giggle. “You’re a devil.”
Rohini laughed, and the sound of her laughter blurred into the prophecies seeping up through her baser brain.
“I am Rohini!” she cried. “I am always Rohini.” She bared her teeth in a grin. “And now I am more. Such a gift.”
No, she thought, struggling to maintain herself, struggling to hold her mind together. This is not a gift, this is not Rohini. Not if I can’t control it. She had to control it. Had to think. Had to dominate her own self.
“They will want to know who sent you,” Vartan said. “They will want to know what you’re doing here.”
The words attempted to bubble out of Rohini, much as the prophecy had, but she reined them in, struggling against the force of the alien will perverting her own. She would not be the weak link.
Instead she said, “What benefits us benefits Asmodeus, and what benefits Asmodeus benefits us all.”
A slow, nervous smile curled Vartan’s mouth. “How interesting.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As it happened, it was a good thing Sairche had hidden herself away in the far corners of her mother’s holdings instead of fleeing Malbolge. Glasya’s summons came more quickly than she’d expected, and Sairche was kneeling before the archduchess moments later. The audience chamber was empty but for the two of them and the ever-present hellwasps.
“There are problems with my agents on Toril,” the Lady of Malbolge said. “You will correct them.” Sairche had hardly finished agreeing before the archduchess rattled off a series of peculiar orders and tore a portal open in the wall beside her.
Now Sairche stood in a dank, poorly lit underground room, a little devil made of shadow twining around her ankles. The floor was heaped with bodies-tieflings, humans, an elf or two, and maybe more. Enough blood it was hard to tell. Not so much, though, that she couldn’t see the mark of Asmodeus branded on a few chests, embroidered on more sashes. Sairche pursed her mouth.
The eel-like devil flowed up her arm. “Where go?”
“That one,” she said, pointing at a tiefling male near the top of the stack of bodies. “And hurry.” The shadow devil chirruped to itself and flowed over the stack of bodies. It pried apart the dead man’s jaws and wriggled down his throat.
The door at the top of the stairs opened. Sairche stepped back into the darkness and pulled her invisibility close.
Three men and a woman came rattling down the stairs, weapons out. All four wore sashes with the mark of Asmodeus on them. As Sairche watched, they fanned out, searching the basement for some sign of life, for someone they could kill. She stayed well out of their reach, and after a few moments, they sheathed their weapons and turned their attention to the bodies.
“A wonder the alarms didn’t sound sooner,” one, a heavyset tiefling man, said. “Who could have done this?”
A taller tiefling man with gnarled horns leaned over the elf woman sprawled belly down across one pile. “This one’s been blasted,” he said. “One of them was a caster.”