Prince of Lies - James Lowder [10]
Light bleeding in through the room's stained glass windows painted everything the brown of dried blood. Thousands of skulls lined the walls, their mouths open in perpetual, silent screams. Thick rolls of parchment had been stuffed into each maw. Spider webs hung from the skulls like banners in a dining hall, and tiny white eyes peered out from between the decaying skulls in every part of the room. Somehow Gwydion knew these weren't rats, but something far more malevolent.
The denizens brought their captive to the podium and forced him to his knees. Af and Perdix followed suit, prostrating themselves as much as their twisted forms would allow.
No sooner had the creatures touched their foreheads to the floor than the seneschal ofBoneCastleappeared at the podium. The monstrous scribe's smooth, gray face held no features other than a pair of bulging yellow eyes. His body was nothing more than a shadow-filled cloak, which rose and fell upon a wind Gwydion could not feel. With white gloves supported by unseen arms and hands, the creature produced a quill pen and positioned it steadily over the scrolled parchment.
From every corner of the library, every skull and roll of parchment, cockroaches skittered into the light. The insects dropped to the floor with a patter like a hard autumn rain. Large and small, black and brown and white as bone they scrambled toward the empty chair. Gwydion felt the roaches racing over his legs, across his back, but the denizens grabbed his hands when he tried to swat them away.
The insects scaled the chair's battered legs, heaped themselves into a hissing pile upon the seat. And then the cockroaches were gone, melted together into the form of a rather mundane-seeming man, lean and hawk-nosed and apparently quite bored. He slouched low in his seat, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms draped loosely at his sides. His clothes were hardly regal-high boots, drab black trousers, leather scabbard, and a shapeless crimson tunic bearing the emblem of a black sunburst and skull. Only his short sword and his circlet of white gold marked him as someone important inBoneCastle, though the crown seemed to be intended less as a show of power than as a device to hold the man's long brown hair back from his eyes. Yet for all this apparent ennui, an air of tension hung around him like a pestilent cloud. No matter how far he slouched in the chair, he was still a coiled serpent, ready to strike at the slightest provocation.
"Hail, Cyric, Lord of the Dead, greatest of all the powers of Faerun," Perdix said, kowtowing.
Af repeated the gesture. "Hail, Cyric, Prince of Lies, slayer of three gods."
The Lord of the Dead fidgeted, as if he were anxious to be elsewhere. Whether the impatience was purely for show or merely the echo of some habit of Cyric's from his mortal life was unclear, but like all the greater powers, the Prince of Lies wasn't limited to a single physical incarnation. Even as he held court in Bone Castle, his divine consciousness manifested in dozens of avatars across the universe, answering the prayers of his faithful, sowing strife and discord wherever it would take root.
"Let's get this over with, Jergal," the Lord of the Dead murmured.
The seneschal leveled his gaze at Gwydion, and the shade felt something cold and inhuman slither across his mind. It burrowed into his memories, rooting through his life like a rat in so much refuse. Gwydion tried to look away from Jergal's lifeless eyes, but he found himself paralyzed. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the interrogation was over.
You are Gwydion, son of Gareth the blacksmith. The disembodied voice was as chilling as Jergal's mental probe. Born in Suzail thirty winters ago, as time is reckoned there. In your life you have been a soldier and a sell-sword, though your only true gift was your fleetness of foot. This you used mostly to win petty wagers. No great happiness touched your