Prince of Lies - James Lowder [48]
"Why me?" Rinda asked, her mind struggling to stay above the swells of confusion. "What do you want from me?"
The same thing Cyric wants from you – your skill as a scribe, as a writer of tales, the voice explained calmly. I, too, wish you to set down the story of Cyric's life, but I will tell you the truth. And with this true life of the Prince of Lies, we will show those who worship him just how deluded and dangerous he can be.
The room warped before Rinda's sleepy eyes. The piles of rags, the rickety chairs and tables, the gathered conspirators – all these twisted and flowed like images in an imperfect mirror. When at last they stopped, the people and objects disappeared in a flash of unreality. Behind this crumbled facade lay the dark tower of hopelessness built of Cyric's plans for her. Now, however, it was no longer a lone spire in an open sea of possibilities. A thousand other spires, just as black, just as foreboding, jutted up around it. They filled the world from horizon to horizon.
"When do we begin?" Rinda heard herself say. It was what she was supposed to ask, she knew, just what the mysterious god had expected.
The reply, too, was eerily familiar. Right now, the god said, the voice filling her mind with long-hidden truths about the Lord of the Dead. Of course, we shall begin at the beginning…
* * * * *
From The True Life of Cyric
Though men may try to wrest the reins of their destiny from the gods, they are all born at the mercy of Nature, bound in a hundred ways to those around them. This is how the gods insure mortals are tied to their world of toil and sorrow. Cyric of Zhentil Keep was no exception.
In the hottest Flamerule to ever grip the Keep, Cyric was born to a destitute bard, so lacking in skill she could not earn a copper singing on street corners. Like many desperate women in the slums, she got what little money she could selling her body to the officers in the Zhentilar barracks. Thus was Cyric's paternity sealed in shame, and his fate set for the next decade.
Hoping to gain pity from the Zhentilar who fathered her child, Cyric's mother went to him and pleaded for a few silvers to feed his son. The man, a low-ranking lout of little substance and less ambition, denied ever having bedded the wench. When she persisted in her claims, he threatened to kill her and sell the child into slavery.
In the days that followed, the mother and child lived off the kindness of others – tavern keepers and scullery maids, street singers and pickpockets, who all gave what they could to keep the two alive. Yet the gods had not finished casting lots for Cyric's future, or the story may have ended there. Driven by greed and hatred, Cyric's father returned to the slums. He killed Cyric's mother, taking the screaming, mewling child as payment for his inconvenience.
Sold into slavery before his first step, before his first word, Cyric was transferred like so much veal to the merchant-kingdom of Sembia. There, childless families often purchased babies, since fortunes went to state coffers if not passed from father to child. Astolpho the vintner bought Cyric for a middling sum. In the years to come he would curse the purchase as the worst Investment he ever made.
Cyric grew up in the lap of luxury, wanting for nothing. For a time, he seemed content and even happy. As the years went on, though, he became aware of the subtle scorn of his fellows and their parents. It wasn't until he was ten winters old that he learned the reason – his birthright was not the cultured palaces of Sembia, but the back alleys of Zhentil Keep, feared throughout Faerun as a city of great evil and corruption.
Torn by shame and desperate for his parents to prove their love for him, Cyric made a show of running away. Before his parents could