Erin Evans - The Adversary

Lorcan daubed at the black blood streaming from his rapidly swelling nose. “Noted,” he said, with a savage tone. Oh try it, Mehen thought, bunching his fists again. Give me another reason. “I meant the damned amulet, by the by, the one Havilar’s carrying still.”

“Of course you did,” Mehen said.

Lorcan pulled himself to his feet once more, still wincing and pressing at his nose. “I wouldn’t dawdle,” he drawled. “The longer you take, the more opportunities to spot you. And I’m not the worst devil you have to contend with anymore.” Before Mehen could make him say what he meant, Lorcan had opened a portal and stepped away, back to the Hells.

25 Ches, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR) The Lost Peaks

Farideh’s dreams were a soup of night and fear, barely formed shapes rising out of the thick darkness and smothering her with pain and anger and terror. They were endless-I’ll never wake, she thought, I have never woken. The feeling of being watched from every angle, the wrongness hiding where she couldn’t see it. . When she finally did open her eyes, her thoughts wouldn’t accept it. She lay still, not daring to move for fear of what would bleed out of the dark next.

Then she felt the mat beneath her, the dirt below that. Her eyes adjusted to the shuttered lanternlight warming up the small, earthen-walled room, and picked out the shape of a man sitting against the wall.

“Lorcan?” His name hurt to speak, her throat was so parched.

The man stiffened. “No,” Dahl said, and Farideh was fairly certain if she weren’t so wrung out, she would have died of embarrassment. Dahl opened the lantern a little more, illuminating his face, and all the walls of the cellar she was lying in. She crawled over next to him, leaning against the wall. He handed her a waterskin, and he could have been Asmodeus himself, and Farideh would have been glad for him in that moment.

“You seem fair enough,” he said as she gulped the stale water. He fiddled with a little metal flask as he spoke.

“Depends on what’s fair,” she said. Her head was pounding and her stomach unsettled, and she felt feverish. “Did I throw up on you again?”

“Again?”

Farideh felt her cheeks flush. Of course he didn’t remember, why would he? “At the revel,” she reminded him. “I was sick up your arm.”

He looked embarrassed at that. “Oh. No. You. . kept it to the gutters every time.” He chuckled softly, nervously, eyes on the flask. “I hope it’s not a recurring thing with you and I. Shady bastards putting things in your drinks.”

“Once more and we’ll have to part for good.” Farideh took another long drink of the water, dimly recalling heaving over-sweet and burning liquor onto the frozen ground several times. “Thank you,” she said. “For getting me down here. And for coming in after us. I suppose I did need saving. This once.”

He smiled. “I think that one should count double.”

“Well good,” she said, smiling herself. “You don’t have so many to make up for then.”

Dahl snorted. “Your count’s off. The shadar-kai, the arcanist-”

“The arcanist was. .” She hunted for the right word. “Mutual.”

“The watercourse,” Dahl said pointedly.

“The erinyes,” she returned. “The Zhentarim.”

“At the revel?” he said. “Where I was-” He stopped and turned from her, looking down at the flask again. Farideh could almost hear him thinking, Where I was saving you, because I’ d led you into danger.

“The revel is a draw,” she said lightly. “Mutual again.”

Dahl was silent a long moment, still staring at the flask. “I wasn’t in your visions.”

Farideh had no sense of how she ought to reply to that. “No,” she said finally. “Should you have been?”

“You were in mine.”

Farideh’s felt the muscles at the small of her back tighten, her tail trying to twitch with nerves. Things had been so easy a moment ago-was he really going to criticize her for leaving him out of visions she had no control over?

“I’ll try harder next time,” she said a little tartly.

“Gods, that’s not what I meant,” Dahl said. “I just. .” He hesitated a moment, staring at the lantern. “I haven’t been all that fair to you over the years. You said something once that got under my skin, made me think I knew how to fix. .” He trailed off again. “I thought maybe I could undo my fall.”

“Oh,” Farideh said when he had been silent another interminable moment. “Did it work out?”

“Do I look like a paladin?” Dahl asked. “It wasn’t so. But so many things happened, made me think you’d said it to vex me or to help me or to doom me to searching for the wrong thing. I thought,” he said with a bitter laugh, “that you might have literally been sent by Oghma in a more desperate moment.”

Farideh thought of the vision of Dahl in Proskur, of the strange man with a voice like a prayer. She thought of the sight of Dahl’s soul.

“And all that time,” he went on, “I realize now, I made you into this. . symbol of my fall. This symbol of the restoration I couldn’t stlarning find.” He dragged his hands through his hair. “And frankly, seeing your memories-even if Tharra twisted them-made it perfectly clear. . I’ve made all that up. I was no one to you. You weren’t an angel. You weren’t a devil. You weren’t an enemy or a source of answers. You were just some girl I knew once.” He looked at her again, his gray eyes faintly bloodshot. “I’m sorry for that, even if it didn’t make a damned bit of difference to you at the time. I think I might have been a scorchkettle the last few days because of it.”

Farideh looked down at the waterskin in her lap. It was so uncharacteristic of the Dahl she remembered that she couldn’t help but feel she was suddenly sitting in the dark with an absolute stranger.

“I haven’t been all that gentle with you either.” She wanted to ask what he’d seen of her, what the visions had shown him. What was important enough between them to answer the sort of question Oota and Tharra would have asked. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting down here waiting to tell me that instead of planning.”

“No,” Dahl said. “I didn’t drink as much as you did, but I’ve had my own hangover to sleep off.” He rubbed his forehead. “And I didn’t want you to wake up alone in a hole in the ground, so I stayed. So what did you find?”

Farideh shut her eyes and leaned her head as far back against the wall as her horns would allow. “It’s not good.”

She told him about the other camps, about the tower and the wall. About the carnage it had taken to bring the tower down in the vision. “And there’s another complication,” she said, not wanting to say it, but not daring to leave it out, “the devil I mentioned? Sairché? She’s not the only one involved.”

“Lorcan?” Dahl said dryly.

That burning kiss momentarily rose up in her thoughts. . chased by the odd moment pressed against the bars of the cage with Dahl. She pulled her knees a little closer. Better to never bring that up.

“I mean,” she said firmly, “a devil set against us. Gods, it’s complicated. It’s like they’re playing a game. Lorcan’s sister and this other devil. They were supposed to make this camp and gather the powers of the Chosen for Asmodeus. Only they don’t want to succeed, but they don’t want to fail either.” She shook her head. “The other devil has an agent in the camp. Whoever that is, they have the means to make the gathering happen-we need to find them and stop them before they manage.” And do it in such a fashion that the other devil was blamed, not Lorcan, she thought.