He stepped closer, and her pulse sped. “And I save you plenty. I could still get you out of here. You know I’m right-you are not a match for archdevils and aboleths.”
“Maybe I’m not,” she said. “But I’m not a coward.” She walked away. “Besides,” she said, reaching for the handholds in the broken wall, “you don’t have your portal.”
He grabbed her arm. “I could fly. Carry you out of here. I could fly you to the House of Knowledge if you’re really set on this mad plan.”
Whipping through the cool rain, dozens of feet above the slick roofs of the city, the cobbled roads, with only Lorcan to keep her from falling-Farideh shuddered. He’d go where he wanted and she’d be stuck, clinging to his neck.
“Take your hand off me before the amulet makes you.” She climbed down the wall to the lower level. If he was going to be difficult, that was not her problem at all. Much as she found herself hoping Lorcan would help, she knew perfectly well it wasn’t in his nature. Changing Lorcan would be as impossible as saving him. Let it go, she told herself as she clambered over the ancient lava flow.
He dropped through the open stairwell and landed in front of her, holding up a hand to ease her down. She didn’t take it.
“You trust me enough to hear your plans when I could easily go over to Rohini,” he said. “I think you don’t really care how it turns out, you just want to be seen to make the effort. And who would blame you? Mehen never appreciated all you were. He shouldn’t be surprised if you leave him to his fate.”
She bore it, only watching the cracks in his facade. Something had changed. It was so much like Havi, upset and not sure why she was upset-only lashing out because it wasn’t coming clear. Waiting for Farideh to puzzle it out.
“I don’t have time to coddle you,” she said after a moment. “So help me, or go to Rohini-whatever your plans are.”
“Fine!” he snapped. “But don’t blame me when you end up dead!”
“You’re afraid, aren’t you? You’re afraid you won’t make it home alive.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t make you a coward. We’re all-”
“I am not a coward!” he seethed. “And how dare you imply it, after I defended you from my sisters, rescued you from Sairche, without as much as a ‘many thanks’ from you.”
“Many thanks,” she said. But still he had that uncomfortable, frustrated look. He flexed his wings in a fidgety way, but wouldn’t say any more. After a moment, Farideh left the building. Lorcan could fix himself.
But in short order he was beside her again.
“You could have let that sword fall,” he said. “I know you were thinking of letting it.”
“I didn’t want you to die,” she said, growing annoyed. “And besides, you did the same thing as me-pushing me away like that, telling me to run. If saving you is such a slight, then you were just as bad.”
“That’s not the same!”
“It’s exactly the same. You would have died.”
“I would have died anyway-they wanted to kill me, you stupid girl. You could have run and escaped their notice!”
“And you could have flown away and found some other heir!” she shouted. “But you didn’t!”
“I …” Lorcan trailed off, surprised, and Farideh realized he hadn’t been baiting her: it had not occurred to him to flee. The clearest, simplest action-the one thing selfish Lorcan should have found obvious to his very core-and he hadn’t done it. Because he’d been afraid that she would be hurt.
She wasn’t just a piece in his collection, and he didn’t know what to do with that. Suddenly she couldn’t quite look at him.
“Or maybe I wanted you to owe me,” she said, though it was a lie, though it was in no way what she would have done, though it made no sense even if she had done it. It was less complicated than what threatened to be true. “And now you do. So you’ll help me face Rohini?” she asked, turning the topic.
But Lorcan was still agitated. “Darling, she is going to kill you!” he said with sudden earnestness. He took her arms-gently; the amulet didn’t react. Farideh wondered if it could tell at all what was dangerous and what was safe. “What do I have to say to get you to understand that? You will be dead, and there is nothing I can do to fix that. Nothing.” He let her go. “Even your little paladin isn’t going to be able to save you.”
There, that was the Lorcan she knew. That raw moment might never have happened, and they might go back to what they always were: her sword, his treasure. “If you don’t want to lose your set, you should help me.”
For the barest of seconds, she thought he might storm off. She turned to walk away, only to find herself scooped up in Lorcan’s arms, and vaulting into the empty air. His wings flapped heavily, gusting the air around him as he sought the new balance of their combined weight. Farideh glanced down once, at the street below and the buildings growing smaller and smaller. Her stomach turned and she wrapped her arms around Lorcan’s neck tight enough to choke him and shut her eyes.
“Now,” he said firmly, “I don’t owe you anything.”
Sairche sat in a dark corner and listened to the garrulous mortals arguing the same points over and over again. For the most part, the Ashmadai didn’t possess secrets worth hearing. She fought the urge to sigh and listened as a warty little man with watery eyes again ran down the list of cultists who had not come to their impromptu meeting, the interminable planning session that would lead to revenge.
By the look of things, most of the Ashmadai were just as antsy as Sairche.
“An insult this great,” the warty little man said in a smooth, slippery voice, “is an insult to us all, and worse, an insult to Asmodeus himself.”
Sairche rolled her eyes. One tended to live a great deal longer if one didn’t attempt to put motives in the king of the Hells’s mouth.
“Simply listen,” Glasya said. “Make certain they are coming to amenable conclusions. If they do not, feel free to guide them.”
Sairche was prepared to, but once they were past the point of laying blame on their absent comrades, the assembled Ashmadai spat out information and cobbled it together more quickly than Sairche would have ever given mortals credit for:
The shadow devil had blamed “the Sovereignty.” The Sovereignty was spoken of on the Sea of Fallen Stars. It was a sailors’ tale. It was a true and terrible threat. It was the ruler of the creatures of the sea and spellplague. It was the origin of all madness.
They strung rumors together like pearls on a necklace-the nightmares of the Chasm, the hospital that ministered to spellscarred soldiers and the secret experiments everyone knew were carried out there, the smug priest who ran things, the visits he paid to a certain peculiar gentleman who lived on the edge of the river. The Abolethic Sovereignty. The fearsome aboleths. The Chasm’s monsters, and the strange way they all mimicked one another-the lashing tentacles, the poisonous slime, the reminders of the nightmares everyone knew came with proximity to the Chasm-and didn’t, as if a mad sculptor built them one by one, the Ashmadai mused. As if something was crafting and sending them out. It would be easy, and clever too, to send them out in the guise of the Ashmadai’s known enemies, to harry and winnow them while they in turn harried and winnowed the ranks of other cults. They thought they were clever, these aboleths-well they had not yet met the followers of the Raging Fiend.
As Sairche watched the Ashmadai circling up for the sacrifice that would call up Asmodeus’s emissary to pass along the information of this new and eldritch threat, her mouth pulled down in a frown of puzzlement.
Sairche knew, as well as anyone knew, that getting too clever around the schemes of an archdevil could easily lead to an early death. Or worse. But as she watched the Ashmadai pin down a struggling half-elf woman, she couldn’t help but wonder at Glasya’s intentions. She’d gleaned from listening to Invadiah and Rohini that Rohini’s mission was to infiltrate the Sovereignty and get Invadiah access to an aboleth. Sairche had assumed that Glasya wanted to capture one of the interplanar monsters for one reason or another, and didn’t wonder too hard about why.