Prince of Lies - James Lowder [41]
At dawn the next day, Cyric struggled back into the light, hardened like a thrice-tempered sword by the murder and his hunger and the Flamerule heat.
A Sembian vintner named Astolpho, traveling in the poorer sections of the city to sell his wares, discovered the infant Cyric and secreted him away. He had little idea that he'd become the means of the child's escape from a bloodthirsty pack of soldiers and Zhentarim mages. All he saw was a baby, dirty and abandoned. Like many, he could not gaze past the mortal facade hiding Cyric's greatness from the world.
For a dozen years Astolpho the vintner and his wife raised the boy amongst the trappings of wealth so common in the merchantkingdomofSembia. Cyric, ever disdainful of luxury, used their money and power to educate himself, to gather all the knowledge he could about Faerun and the lands he would one day rule as Lord of the Dead. The ever-jealous gods watched the child grow, frightened by his power, yet unable to drive him toward any destiny but the one he had chosen for himself.
Still, the gods Cyric would one day destroy – Bane and Bhaal and Myrkul – attempted to fight his growing strength and wisdom in any way they could. Bane created dark rumors about the boy, isolating him from the wealthy circle in which his parents traveled. Myrkul struck a deal with Talona, Lady of Poison, to plague him with diseases. And Bhaal sent his most subtle assassins to hunt the boy. But Cyric had turned his early suffering into a shield no god could shatter. He destroyed their minions wherever he found them and conquered hardships cast before him as if they were nothing but blunted caltrops strewn before a juggernaut.
The last of Bane's minions that Cyric faced in Sembia were Astolpho and his wife. The God of Strife had purchased their loyalty, promising to end the ill-fortune that had brought the man's business near to ruin. In return for this empty dream of renewed prosperity, they tried to prevent the young boy from leaving Sembia to seek his fortune. Yet the bonds of familial duty and feigned love they wielded were no match for Cyric's razor-sharp mind. He rejected their wealth and comfort, striking out to see the world he had only viewed through the eyes of bards and historians.
Astolpho's corpse was found spiked to the town gates, flayed like the rats that had sustained Cyric in the Keep's sewers so many years before. No one ever found the remains of the vintner's wife, so expertly had the boy hid them throughout the town. To this day, nothing can lessen the smell of death hovering over the place, or silence the ghostly, tortured cries that nightly fill the air.
And so Cyric came to travel the Heartlands, amassing his own hoard of knowledge from the coins of experience he gathered along the way. The fearful gods, certain of their impending doom, tried their best to hold him back, but he was beyond their feeble grasp. He learned to fight as well as any soldier in Faerun and to live off the land in even the most Inhospitable climes.
At last he returned to the city of his birth, for no other place in the world could match the cruelty and everyday horrors of Zhentil Keep. In short, it is a city where the cowardly veil of Civilization is thinnest, where men and women pass each day with the realization that Existence is Pain, and Death is the only water to ease suffering in the wasteland. That knowledge was Cyric's birthright, and the time had come for him to claim it…
VI
SECRET PASSAGES
Wherein the Prince of Lies expounds upon the
motivational uses for fear, and Rinda gains a
very powerful patron who has another version of
Cyric's life to set down on parchment.
As Cyric stepped through the portal, the illusion masking his hideousness melted away. Gone were the humble clothes and roguish good looks. His face hardened into a rigored mask, blood red and gaunt. The flesh vanished from his fingers, leaving them little more than daggers of bone. A robe of darkness cloaked his lithe frame. The shadowy