Bruce Cordell: Spinner of Lies

And something cracked. Through that fracture flowed a scream for vengeance.

The lantern light turned red as blood. Jaul’s voice slowed to a bass rumble.

The Sword of the Gods jerked his bruised hand from beneath the trapping heel, ignoring the scraped flesh that resulted. Jaul didn’t react. He couldn’t; he was caught in the regular flow of time. The deva retrieved Exorcessum and stood as shadows congealed around him, drawing close like a second skin, highlighting older, crueler lines in his face. The Veil of Wrath and Knowledge flared behind him like angel wings. Exorcessum’s runes lifted a quarter inch from the blade. The Sword was well past tired of Fossil’s charade. As time tottered toward its resumption, he used the sword’s point to scribe a mark of divine radiance on the mask’s forehead. His oath to destroy Fossil.

The half-mask burned suddenly blue as Jaul flashed into movement. He sidestepped the deva’s blade and circled out to the left. The Sword pivoted, but one of Jaul’s daggers was already arrowing at his kidney. Fossil had sped up Jaul’s reactions, beyond anything the boy should’ve-

The dagger punched through the Sword’s camouflaging shadow, through his coat and leather armor, and scraped across his ribs. It would’ve punctured an organ if one end of the Veil hadn’t whipped forward and slapped Jaul across the face. The kid rocked back and the deva used the distraction to step through shadow to appear on Jaul’s right flank.

But Fossil had already turned his host to face the Sword’s attack, as if it could see into the Shadowfell fringe where the deva could usually evade notice.

Fossil beat aside a disemboweling lunge by Exorcessum . With the same movement, Fossil skimmed one of Jaul’s daggers along the outside of the rune sword and caught the deva’s arm in a twisting lock. The deva reversed his grip and forced Jaul to abandon his ploy.

Fossil was good! The Sword loved it when his foes forced him to walk along that knife’s edge between victory and defeat-it happened all too little. In fact, the Sword couldn’t ever remember losing. Because when he did, the Whorl of Ioun never recorded it.

He laughed. The sound echoed through the room and into the Shadowfell fringe, too, creating a spooky resonance that would usually make mortals gasp in alarm. Jaul just smirked and kept attacking. The young man’s body had become a mere tool, a possessed husk in the angel’s control, windmilling daggers and hurtling back and forth through the air so quickly his clothing threatened to smoke with the friction.

The easiest way to hurt the mask would be to obliterate its host.

The Sword wondered why he hadn’t already slain the young man. Why was he holding back? Because he, the deva … knew Jaul? And … valued him? His father, at least. Hard to believe-an assassin should never form attachments. Better to keep others distant and unimportant. And besides, the little bastard had lied about returning the painting to House Norjah. No, he’d come to betray the deva and his own father and hijack the Whispering Child for Master Raneger. On top of everything else, Jaul had stupidly put on the mask, and when given the chance to take it off, refused. Really, it’d be doing Faerun a favor to eradicate Jaul.

Except …

Except he’d received no divine contract to slay the possessed youth. Certainly he’d killed those who’d tried to prevent him from fulfilling past contracts. But something about his current situation was different, making him hold back even though he’d already decided it wasn’t in his interest to do so.

“Burning dominions, you vex me!” the Sword said. He addressed himself-that annoying part that’d gained a little too much of its own agency lately, the part that thought of itself as Demascus, even though that was the Sword’s name, too. Like Madri, the Demascus part of him didn’t seem to know its role.

He took a single step through a writhing shadow to the top of the stairs. Jaul was already after him. The deva grabbed a fleck of shadow and hurled it at the mask. Jaul flinched back, much farther than the Sword had expected, so much so that the swing he’d planned to intersect the distracted mask wearer at the neckline just whiffed through empty air.

Right. He already knew Fossil could see the echo plane of Shadow, with its twisted, dark swirls of gray and black murk that beat like rain from a leaden sky. Which meant Jaul could, too …

Argent light flashed from the mask’s eyeholes, sweeping the chamber and stairwell. It incinerated the deva’s protective shadows to dust, burned him, and dazzled his sight. He clamped his eyes shut.

“Guide me, Veil,” he muttered, and charged blind down the stairs. His scarf settled across his eyes. The chamber’s dimensions returned to him in smudges of gray and white.

Jaul was visible, but in the fate-strained vision of the Veil he appeared only as a vague outline superimposed on an eight-foot-tall humanoid with metallic black wings. The creature swept across the entire chamber, wearing armor like crusted ice dipped in tar and a face like a blank tombstone.

No wonder I’m getting my ass handed to me, thought the Sword. Jaul’s channeling the revenant of an angel of vengeance, or something worse.

He rolled under another discharge of radiant energy from the mask’s slit eyeholes, holding Exorcessum parallel to the floor in one hand so he didn’t snag himself on its lethal length.

Then he gathered up the swirling umbra of the Shadowfell in his free hand. He’d used shadow as a weapon many times, forming it into implements of death able to cut or sever. But he couldn’t recall ever using it as a distraction.

He loosed the gathered shadow as if shaking out a rug. A wave of gloom rippled toward Fossil, a wave invisible in the world.

But Jaul saw it. He flinched away, uncertain what the discontinuity represented.

The deva was ready. Behind the cover of the collapsing wave front, he stepped between shadow mouths. He heaved Exorcessum around in an arc so swift the air screamed its protest. He began the stroke across the room from Jaul but completed it a few paces from his foe. Already retreating before the gloom wave, the kid still managed to jerk back again, away from the deva’s surprise sword stroke. He flinched just far enough so that instead of taking off Jaul’s head, Exorcessum’s sword tip dragged along the half-mask, snagging it and then stripping it from the young man’s head. The mask smashed against the damp brick wall of the cellar. Fragments exploded across the chamber like shrapnel.

Jaul collapsed. The deva remained poised for a long moment in the quiet cellar, his Veil-enhanced senses alert to every possible threat. But none remained, save maybe for the painting …

He flipped the cover over the fractured visage. The shards of Fossil were devoid of any lingering power. Jaul was halfdead with the strain imposed by the angel’s supernatural strength being ripped away, though the deva judged he’d probably live. The heap of earth glimmered with a threat returning to full strength. And Madri …

Well, she was gone. Back to the dust she’d been for a century or more. The guise of the Sword whispered away.

Demascus cried out and shuddered. He removed the scarf from his eyes and glanced around the room lit by failing lamplight.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Madri.” She’d saved him. She’d sacrificed herself and saved him. “I didn’t deserve you,” he told the blank spot of earth where she’d last stood. Misery reached for him. He pushed it away as best he could. There’d be time for that. First …

Demascus retrieved the damos . His lip curled at a hint of something vile smelling. He secured it to his belt.