Prince of Lies - James Lowder [74]
Since he was bound upside down, Af's wolfish head sank below the surface first when the stone disk hit the Slith. Then the scales tipped back the other way, and the brutish denizen rose, screaming, high into the air. The dark water streamed from his face, drawing the color away as if it were thin paint. The steely gray bled from his fur, the red from his eyes. His striped mane and the crimson scales on his shoulders all faded to feeble, pallid white.
Each time the denizens sank into the murky water, the river leached the immortality from them. Af's screams died down to whimpers after his third drenching; the other denizen shrieked only once, as if he had been awakened by the torture. In a few moments, the flesh of both creatures melted away completely. Their seared white bones were quickly gobbled by the things moving beneath the moat's surface.
As the crowd began to break up, filing back to the necropolis to resume the search for Kelemvor, Gwydion tapped Perdix on the leg. "Has there ever been a revolt in the City ofStrife?"
"Course there has," the denizen said, his thin tongue flickering over his pointed teeth. "They were as regular as a clockwork dinner chime when Cyric first took over. None of them ever lasted very long – nasty little brawls, but brief." He flapped a little higher into the air and gestured broadly at the milling throng. "With the sort of riffraff Cyric has to work with down here, what do you expect?"
A denizen with the head and upper body of a mantis swiped at Perdix with one massive forelimb. "Riffraff? You should talk."
Deftly Perdix avoided the halfhearted attack and fluttered to the top of a high, twisted metal pole. His bright yellow skin made him stand out against the vermilion sky as he hunched there, a radiant gargoyle.
"Some of my fellows are a bit jealous of my standing with our lord," the bat-winged denizen said. "When Cyric became a god, I was still mortal. I really knocked myself out proving how devoted I was – murdering, stealing, causing all the strife I could. I took out a whole patrol of Purple Dragons -" he smiled wistfully "- before they lopped my sword arm off. I was one of the first denizens Cyric created."
Gwydion leaned back against the pole and watched the mantis-headed creature. It shuffled into the crowd on the slow-moving legs of a giant opossum. "What about the other denizens?" the shade asked. "Aren't they Cyric's faithful?"
Perdix snorted. "Most of this lot he inherited with the real estate. They used to worship Myrkul, but they converted when Cyric took over." With surprising agility, he climbed hand over hand down the pole. "Look, slug," Perdix said, hanging just above Gwydion's ear, "if you're hoping for an uprising, forget it. The denizens who didn't accept Cyric's rule tried that, and the whole bunch of them ended up at the bottom of the swamp on the other side of the castle. And that place makes the Slith look like a burbling brook in the Moonshaes."
The crowd had thinned, but many of the shades and denizens still milling near the river had stopped to listen to the conversation. Gwydion felt the eyes of the helpless souls and powerful minions of Cyric upon him, felt the tension in the air at the mere mention of defiance against the Lord of the Dead. But if Perdix were right, even the denizens might turn against the Prince of Lies.
"The Night Serpent said Cyric feared two things," Gwydion ventured loudly, "a revolt in the City ofStrifeand the shade of Kelemvor Lyonsbane." He turned away from Perdix and scanned the crowd. "You denizens don't want to end up like those others, drowned in the Slith, destroyed forever? Are you shades content to be tortured