“Right,” Dahl said, nodding at a male dwarf who stood at the base of the stairs, and handing him the lantern. “Any news?”
“Nothing that new,” the dwarf said. “Last I heard, they got Tharra locked up. Oota’s still out. You got a damned garden of elves up there waiting for yon tiefling’s blessings, and-” He broke off and pointed his sword back the way they’d come. “Hold, drow.”
Farideh looked back over her shoulder and startled at the ebon-skinned man standing not a foot and a half behind her. He grinned at her. “Well met. I see the Harper’s as good as his goals.”
Something seemed to press on Farideh’s thoughts, something small and alien and serious, that made her pulse speed. The drow tilted his head at her, still smiling.
“Knock it off, Phalar,” Dahl snapped. “What do you want?”
“It sounds like you’ve got quite the little conspiracy going on,” Phalar said. “I’m assuming you’re planning to ask for my assistance at some point?”
“Not if I can help it,” Dahl said.
Phalar clucked his tongue. “You wound me, cahalil. After all we’ve been through?”
“You shoved me through a roof!”
“And you told Oota I’d given you up to the guards,” Phalar pointed out. “Well done.”
Farideh squinted at the drow and focused on the thread of power that seemed to wind up her spine and clasp her brain. The lights flared into being-purple and silver and threads of deepest night, twining together to form a sinuous rune that seemed to slip in and out of the light. “Chosen,” she said. She looked back at Dahl-and swiftly set her eyes instead on the dwarf, whose god’s mark shimmered in shades of silver and steel gray. “Is that what these rooms are for?” she asked. “To hide Chosen.”
“Aye,” the dwarf said. “Anybody too obvious.” He glared past her at Phalar. “Or too dangerous. Tharra’s idea,” he added grimly.
She let the lights fade and looked back, past Phalar and down the long, dark corridor, wondering what trick was caught up in the underground rooms. Would they collapse and consume the Chosen? Were there portals to the Hells nestled in the rooms? Or would they just mean that the prisoners were nowhere to be found when the gathering went off-would this flaw of the camp be laid on Sairché’s lap? “How many are there down here?”
“Right now?” the dwarf asked. “A score, maybe. A fair number went up to see what Oota’s about. Those as can pass,” he amended.
“And how many can it hold?”
The dwarf waggled a hand. “Eh-few hundred if they pack in tight.”
Not the whole camp, Farideh thought. So whatever Tharra’s plans were, they couldn’t take everyone. “Can you get those twenty somewhere else on short notice?” Farideh asked. “We need to make sure of something.”
“Most of ’em,” the dwarf said. “Not the drow.”
“If you want my help,” Phalar said, “it will cost.”
“Never doubted it,” Dahl said. “Go back to your room.” He grabbed Farideh’s hand again and started up the stairs. They were nearly to the door when she managed to yank her hand back.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He looked down at his own hand and cursed. “Sorry. It’s. . His powers get to me. I didn’t mean anything.” He closed his hands into fists, then pushed through the door, out into the low light of late afternoon.
There were, in fact, a great many spellcasters waiting for Farideh to return and grant them the same assistance she had given Armas. The half-elf sat off to the side of the crowded court, one arm around the long-legged Turami boy. Even at a distance, Farideh could see the tension that claimed the boy’s frame when she walked in with Dahl.
“We talk to Tharra first,” Dahl said, and she followed him past the spellcasters, and toward the rear of the space where the two big guards from the night before stood before a door hung in the space between two buildings.
“Oota’s not handling the aftereffects well,” the human man admitted. “She’s been up once to question her, but had to lie back down again.”
“Give me a chance?” Dahl asked.
The big man reached back and pulled the door open. “No secrets, Harper,” he warned.
Tharra sat alone, her arms bound behind her back, her face drawn and puffy. She met Farideh’s eyes as she entered. “I’ve got nothing more to say.”
Dahl reached down and pulled a pin from the inside of her jacket, a round shield the size of a gold coin. “Were you ever a Harper?”
Tharra sighed, as if Dahl were asking all the wrong questions. “Yes. I’d say I still am, but I’m bound to hear you cite the code and call me a traitor, so why bother?”
“We can still set things right,” Farideh said.
“Can we now? And how is that?” Tharra said. “Ask your brightbird-no clemency for Harpers, no matter the circumstances, when treachery comes up.”
Farideh glanced at Dahl, at the cold anger etched on his features. “I’m glad,” he said, “that I was no fledgling of yours. There’s no clemency because the choices are clear.”
Panic raced up Farideh’s core-he didn’t mean her, but he might as well have. And choices could get very murky, very quickly when devils got involved. She pulled him aside, back toward the door.
“Can you leave us alone?” Farideh asked. Dahl gave her a worried look. She rubbed her brand through the fabric of her sleeve. “You don’t want me to peer at your soul,” she said lightly, “I don’t want to discuss my. . entanglements in front of you.” She looked down at Tharra. “I doubt she does either.”
Dahl stared at her a moment, searching her face. “No secrets,” he warned.
“None that matter,” she clarified. Then added, “I’m not baring my soul or hers, because you don’t trust me to know what’s important and what’s not.” And she wasn’t telling him about being the Chosen of Asmodeus, unless it meant life or death.
He studied her a moment more. “Fine,” he said. “Remember I’m on your side though. She isn’t.” With a quick glance at Tharra, he turned and left the little room.
Tharra looked up at Farideh, warily, as she approached. “You might have figured me out,” she said. “But I’m not like you.”
“Aren’t you?” Farideh asked. “I’m here because I accepted a deal to save two of the dearest people in the world to me, and the price was far more than I expected. What happened to you?”
Tharra’s gaze flicked over Farideh once more. “Fine. We’re all unlucky ones.” She fell into a silence, her eyes shining. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she said after a moment. “I was figuring out a way to make it turn right. I’m not a monster.”
Farideh’s heart ached at her own words coming out of another.
“I always assumed,” Farideh said gently, “that people ended up indebted to the Hells because they sought it out. But they come to you and there are no strings on their lures.”
Tharra laughed once. “Until there are. They like those rumors, I think. Makes it seem like you can’t be caught if you’re clever.”
Farideh settled herself beside the other woman on the cold ground. “Did he tell you what’s happening? Magros?”
Tharra’s lip curled. “As little as he could, of course. Just what I was supposed to do, but never why. He said there was another devil, another player. You.”
“The both of them together were supposed to use this camp to collect Chosen for Asmodeus-to make Shar’s followers collect them, really,” Farideh said. “But Magros and Sairché are also under conflicting orders-they need to make the plan fall apart and lay the blame on the other one, so that Asmodeus doesn’t get what he wants and the other archdevil gets faulted.”
“So you want me to break my agreement?” Tharra asked. “Switch sides and lose my soul.”
“No,” Farideh said. “I want both of us to outsmart these karshoji fiends and find a way to save these people. What were you supposed to do? What were the powers they gave you-you made me want to agree with things.”
Tharra shook her head. “That was the pin. Magros enspelled it, so I could pass for a Chosen and do my job. Keep everyone in line. Keep them calm. Keep as many as I could out of the wizard’s laboratories. That was easier than you’d think until you came along. And then-” Her eyes flooded. “He gave me a ritual-a scroll and components. I knew it would be bad. He told me as much, without saying it. ‘Make sure you dig yourself a hidey-hole and make enough time to get down to it.’ You don’t say that about anything subtle.”