Трой Деннинг - Prince of Lies

It was the Night Serpent who finally silenced Gwydion's mad laughter. She turned one yellow eye on the shade and said, "Oh yes, dear Gwydion, dream of freedom. But remember; where there are dreams, there are always nightmares."

Wherein the daughter of Bevis the Illuminator

begins a new, and likely short-lived, career

as a scribe for the Church of Cyric.

Rinda owned the entire building, but that really wasn't saying much. The sad, one-story hovel squatted in the poorest part of Zhentil Keep, among the unlicensed brothels, the gin mills, and the broken-down homes of escaped slaves and men too besotted by drink to be of use to anyone. In another quarter, the place would have been condemned. Rats maintained a thriving colony in the rafters. Dry rot had claimed large sections of the floor where the boards had not already collapsed into the foul mud below. On cold Marpenoth days like this, the wind whistled through chinks in the walls, promising four more months of relentless cold.

Rinda barely noticed these blights. She spent as little time as possible in the hovel, using it only for sleeping and eating and sometimes scribing false traveling papers for runaway slaves or assassin-plagued merchants. It made Rinda uncomfortable to do the work there, but with most of the men and women who came to her for help, she had no other choice. Her clients often called darkened doorways home; to keep a steady hand in those dank places was close to impossible.

She'd refused a position in the scribes' guild to help these people, something her father had argued against right up until the instant she walked out of his house, two years past. Rinda didn't miss him. He was a bitter man who hated his lot in life. He could never understand her need to help others, the drive that made life worth living in a bleak place like Zhentil Keep.

Whenever she tried to rest, Rinda found herself troubled by thoughts of those more unfortunate than she. And so she spent most of her waking hours on the streets, helping the Keep's downtrodden as best she could. Some days, this meant arranging temporary shelter for a destitute family or forging letters of passage for a soldier deserting the Zhentilar. On other days, she roamed the inns and taverns, teaching the prostitutes and petty thieves how to read and write.

This particular day had been spent in the marketplace, begging money for bribes. The Zhentarim mages who watched over the slums cared little if Rinda helped a few escaped prisoners slip away down the Tesh. They demanded a price for their silence, though. Now, as she had died against the cold in her hovel, Rinda tallied up the few coins she'd scrounged.

"I don't have nearly enough." She sighed raggedly then counted the coppers again. "Not even close. This will mean trouble for the girls hoping to run away from Madame Februa."

Rinda turned thrillingly green eyes on the dwarf lounging by the door. He tilted precariously in a rickety chair, his heavy boots up on a table. His clothes were unkempt leathers, his beard and hair a tangled mop of black and silver. One gray eye peeked out from under a bushy brow. A brown eye patch circled with silver studs hid the other. "I hear Lord Chess cried himself to sleep when he learned Leira was gone," the dwarf noted. He blew his drooping mustaches away from his mouth and added venomously, that bloated sack of orc dung."

"Hodur, you know I hate it when you ignore me like that," Rinda said angrily. "If you want to talk about something else, just say so."

The dwarf smirked. "All right, then. I want to talk about something else. Anything's fair game, just so long as it ain't how little food there'll be this winter or how the Zhentilar beat up on prisoners or anything else about the riffraff around here." He paused to scratch furiously under his beard. "You're the most depressing person I've ever met, you know that?"

The young woman dropped the copper coins into a chipped teacup. "So why are you always here?"

"Maybe I like to be depressed," Hodur replied. "I've always heard we dwarves are supposed to be melan — uh, meloch — er, unhappy.A streetpreacher in the Serpent's Eye talked about it once. He said it's because we're a doomed race. Not enough little dwarves to carry on our crafts and our wars, so we've got no future." His voice painted the words with emotions he'd meant to hide. "Or maybe I ain't got nothing else to do. No work for a stonecutter with mitts like these," he said, holding up palsied hands. They trembled in fits and starts.

Tactfully, Rinda let the subject drop. She pried up one of the few sound floorboards and secreted the cup in the mud beneath. The ground squelched nastily as she set the treasure in place. "So what's this about Lord Chess?"

"Oh, nothing important," the dwarf conceded. "I just heard he was all tore up when Cyric announced to Leira's priests that the goddess was gone."

Rinda smiled knowingly. "He hasn't been a practicing cleric in years. All he'll miss are the banquets the Leirans threw — masks required, no debauchery too unusual, and no questions asked."

"How would you know?"

With mock sweetness, Rinda held her hands to her cheeks. "Why a dwarf told me," she said. "How else?"

Hodur laughed, his mustaches flapping in front of his mouth with each loud bark. "You know, it must be pretty rotten to be a Leiran right about now. I mean, rumor is Cyric's the one that done her in, right? But if you kill yourself in despair over it, you just end up in the dark-hearted bastard's domain anyway!"

"Careful," Rinda warned. "You don't know who's listening."

"Why is it human gods have nothing to do but plague their worshipers with quests or eavesdrop from the heavens so they can squash anyone who says something bad about them?" The dwarf dropped his feet to the floor. The chair creaked dangerously as he shifted his weight. "You don't find dwarven gods wasting time like that. Moradin and Clanggedin and their lot have better things to do with their time — you know, crushing the orc gods' armies or insulting Corellon Larethian and the other immortal elvish sots."

"It's not the gods I'm worried about," Rinda said. "It's the clerics — and the Zhentilar. Patriarch Mirrormane has asked Lord Chess to make speaking out against Cyric or the church equal to treason. And Chess is coward enough to make the army support Mirrormane's wishes."

"The Zhentarim won't stand for that," the dwarf said, dismissing the notion with one trembling hand. "And they're the ones who really run this place."

Rinda's green eyes grew thoughtful. "We can only hope that's still true," she murmured. "They're a lot less dangerous than Cyric's men…"

"I never thought I'd hear you say a good word about the Black Network," Hodur exclaimed. He clapped his hands together. "Could it be the truth of the world has penetrated that ridiculous armor of good intentions you've hammered out for yourself?"

"I see the world a lot more clearly than you think," she said. "But there's nothing wrong with hoping things might be better than they seem. The-"

A pounding on the door cut Rinda short and startled Hodur to his feet. "Open up in the name of Cyric," a deep voice boomed.

Cursing into his beard, the dwarf rushed to the other side of the room, where a lantern sat upon a long bench. He grabbed it roughly. "Get a flint," he hissed as he dumped oil on a nearby pile of parchment.

Rinda scowled and gestured for him to stop. "If this were a raid," she whispered, "they wouldn't have knocked."

Despite her own reassurances, Rinda overturned a mug of water onto a forged set of identity papers as she moved to the door. No sense taking too many chances.

The two men standing on the threshold were typical of the thugs theChurchofCyricemployed. They leaned against the jamb, idly picking splinters from the rotting wood with shivs. One was fat, with a bristling beard and heavy-lidded eyes. The other was small and lithe. His round-shouldered stoop and the dark rings circling his eyes made Rinda think of the weasels that lived in the river outside the city. Both men wore fur-trimmed cloaks over their shabby clothes. Only their red armbands identified them as churchmen, emblazoned as they were with Cyric's holy symbol — a leering white skull surrounded by a black sun.