Bruce Cordell: Spinner of Lies

I need to leave Airspur. Maybe find someplace in Faerun where none of my previous selves ever visited. Throw away the Veil, the sword, and start over completely-

Something dropped from the storm, tumbling out of control. It smashed right through the skylight he’d spent a small fortune installing. As the bark of shattering glass cut the air, he realized the shape had worn a black leather mask. It was Riltana!

Five figures arrowed down from the night, hot on the windsoul’s trail. Four crashed through the shattered skylight, amid falling pieces of glass, rain, and his friend, landing in the living room. The fifth landed on the rooftop as easily as Riltana normally would, no worse for wear from a plunge off some higher city cliff or mote. The figure was gaunt, with colorless eyes. He gripped a black blade and wore gray leather without insignia or decoration.

“Who the Hells are you?” said Demascus.

“Your end.”

THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANUL

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

The gaunt man advanced across Demascus’s roof.

Demascus sighed in relief. Sometimes fate was kind. He couldn’t have asked for a more perfect distraction from the maelstrom battering his mind.

He relinquished confusion and regret; he wasn’t even sure what he should feel guilty about. It was easier to let go. A familiar spike of joy in the face of drawn weapons shattered his doubt. This newcomer was about to discover the only ending on this night would be his.

The world slowed, making it seem like each raindrop was a distinct globule suspended in air. Even as Demascus’s adversary tensed to attack, he seemed to freeze in place. The deva’s hands itched for Exorcessum , but he’d had no reason to bring his blade to the roof. It was locked in a trunk under his cot. He really should keep his sword closer, especially after all the trouble he’d gone through to find it. But the weapon was so unwieldy. Even sheathing it on his back was awkward. How had his previous selves managed it? No matter. His current weapons included his Veil, which seemed to function only about half the time; and the single scroll-shaped charm woven into his hair-useful in conversations where lies were flying like crows-but not so much against swordplay.

And by the way the newcomer’s tar-colored blade seemed to eat light, the weapon was enchanted with some kind of nasty surprise. Demascus swiveled side-wise toward his foe to bring one of his favorite weapons into play. His heel lashed, once into the man’s stomach, a second time into his neck, and finally where the stranger’s fingers wrapped around the hilt of his blade. It was like kicking a bag filled with sodden earth, not flesh. But the sword came free. Demascus snatched it out of the air even as his foe’s eyes dilated with pain. Or maybe just surprise. It didn’t matter; Riltana was squaring off against four foes by herself in his living room.

A row of ghostly runes faded onto his borrowed blade in pale imitation of Exorcessum’s designs. He hewed the intruder with the man’s own sword, and the man dropped like a limp rag from the force of the blow, though no blood came. Demascus dismissed the attacker and gazed into the gaping hole in his skylight. A jagged shadow thrown up from a glass splinter offered a convenient path, so he stepped into its embrace. His next step was out of a different shadow, this one thrown by an overturned divan one level down.

Riltana was on her feet. Four adversaries ringed her, menacing the genasi with black iron weapons. One intruder was huge, another tiny, the third dressed all in yellow, and the last was a woman with painted red fingernails as long as daggers … they all had the same feral, hungry look and colorless eyes with only tiny black circles to mark their irises. When the one in yellow screamed and leaped at Riltana, Demascus saw long incisors in her mouth. Vampires? He swallowed. He hoped not. He’d faced vampires before. At least, a previous version of himself had. Probably. Uncertainty made him hesitate.

Riltana dove beneath her opponent. Her adversary managed to score the back of her armor, but the windsoul came to her feet in one piece. She’d exchanged places with her attacker; the vampire stood in the center of the wrecked living room and Riltana’s back was to a wall. Time jerked back to its too-rapid pace as he unwound the Veil from around his neck. The black iron weapons made him nervous. What if the one in his hand decided to betray him? The Veil of Wrath and Knowledge would serve as a backup weapon if it came to it.

“Demascus, when you’re done standing there like a beer-addled tosser, maybe you could help?” Riltana yelled.

Oops. “You should’ve let me know you were bringing guests,” he replied. “I would’ve set more places.”

The woman with red dagger nails spun at the sound of his voice. Before she’d half turned, he stabbed her. The sword plunged to its hilt in her side, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. She snarled, “The thief has a friend. Kill them both! Retrieve what she stole!”

Demascus realized Riltana had filched from the wrong household. He wanted to tell the woman that he’d had no part in Riltana’s thievery. But before he could say anything, the red-nailed woman blurred forward and grabbed Demascus’s wrist. He gasped; her fingers were like ice. He released the sword and jerked back his hand. But she didn’t let go, and her eyes blazed with hypnotic power.

She whispered, “Blood. It tastes like danger. So sweet and thick …” She bent her head to his neck. He elbowed her in the face. If anything, she was more solid than the man on the roof, and her grip was a glacial manacle sucking away his body’s warmth, his vitality. If he didn’t get away, he’d collapse, drained of life. She wasn’t a pushover like the vampire on the rooftop.

With a cry of command he summoned a flare of divine light from his skin and clothing. The vampire flinched at the radiance, and he stepped across the room and down the hall within the woman’s wavering shadow. She’d feel differently once he retrieved Exorcessum-

“Watch out!” came Riltana’s warning from down the hallway.

Something bit him on the shoulder. He spun, spattering his own blood on the walls. The man he’d dispatched on the rooftop crouched there, his mouth red with Demascus’s flesh. Burning dominions, the thing had actually bitten him! That couldn’t be good. He fought back the urge to shrug off his coat and examine the wound then and there in the hallway mirror. He wouldn’t know what to look for anyway-two holes where the incisors had gone in? Discoloration?

The female vampire stood a few steps behind him. When his eyes skittered across hers, she tried to catch him in a hypnotic trap. He averted his gaze.

The woman’s touch had hollowed his stomach like he’d eaten bad fish, and the expanding burn on his shoulder was worrisome. A regular bite would ache just the same, right? He realized … he was sort of afraid of vampires.

Stop it, he commanded. Remember who you are. Or, anyway, who you once were.

Demascus stood with one foot in light and one in shadow. He recalled how his friend Chant remarked awhile ago that a deva could draw his strength from either, and that on the whole, Chant preferred the light.

Demascus, however, reveled in the dark. He shook out the Veil, throwing a shadow into a plane few could see. That gloom fell across the vampire like an immaterial shroud, and through its gauzy lens all of the vampire’s strengths and weaknesses were made plain. Seven points of pale light flickered through the creature’s body. Their gleams revealed to him a creature animated by necrotic vigor. An undead was stronger, faster, and more resistant to hurt than living flesh, and its wounds would mend supernaturally quickly. But it wasn’t invulnerable. The root of the vampire’s power lay in the bottommost point of illumination, which pulsed red like spilled blood. In that flicker, Demascus discovered what he should have known all along.