“Believe,” the Prince of Lies intoned. “Believe.”

  Cyric repeated the word over and over. The chant echoed through the corrupted void, growing louder and more insistent with each repetition. A vortex formed in the air around the book, and it drew in the captive shades. The souls struck the book one after another. Their ghostly forms scattered into thin wisps of fog, which drifted like dead leaves to the mire. Godsbane shuddered as each soul settled into the ooze, their essence lost to her forever. Their cries lived on after them, ringing faintly through the mist.

  The death god’s image began to laugh.

  Kelemvor stalked forward and lashed out with a fist. His blow scraped his knuckles raw, but also knocked a hole in the book’s cover. Kel glanced up, certain he would see the death god’s face contorted with anger. Instead, flakes of dried ink showered down around him as the wall quivered and shook with Cyric’s mirth.

  This is what’s twisting Godsbane, Kel realized. The book is warping her somehow, causing all this chaos in her mind.

  Bracing his feet as best he could, Kelemvor pressed a shoulder against the massive Cyrinishad. The monolith teetered for a moment then toppled backward like a door knocked from its hinges. The air displaced by its fall drove the mist away, so Kel had a clear view as Cyric’s face struck the ooze.

  The book shattered on impact with the mire. Some pieces floated for a time. Most were swallowed quickly by the mire. Cyric’s cruel mouth remained intact, laughing until the ooze flowed in to choke off the grating sound. Kelemvor tried to gather some of the larger shards together in hopes of creating a makeshift raft, but each time he tested the platform’s strength, it broke apart under his weight.

  “You bastard, Cyric,” Kel grumbled. “Couldn’t even leave me that much, could you?”

  Spattered with slime and grimy with dirt, Kelemvor trudged off. The cries of the annihilated souls echoed faintly over the quagmire. Yet the wailing didn’t frighten him; it only made him that much more impatient to join the battle against Cyric, to make the Lord of the Dead and his treacherous blade pay for all the injustice they’d heaped upon him and the prisoners in the City of Strife.

  When the ball of blue-white light appeared on the horizon, filling the sky with its brilliance, burning away the ooze and the everpresent blood-red mist hanging in the air, Kelemvor was certain he was seeing the fiery face of his doom.

  “Midnight,” he whispered. “I-“

  The rest of the vow was lost, drowned out by Kelemvor’s scream and the roar of the inferno as it engulfed him.

  Cyric retreated to the massive slab of onyx that served as Bone Castle’s main door. He backed against the stone, swinging Godsbane furiously. The short sword cut a gory path through a shade, but gained no sustenance from the soul. Despite all the carnage, she remained as pale as a bleached skull, her voice thin and rasping in the death god’s mind. The work of Mystra, no doubt. Somehow the Whore was preventing Godsbane from digesting the souls she swallowed.

  Cyric cursed the thought of the goddess as he slashed another shade across the face.

  The diamond walls had been taken, the denizens routed from their posts by spectral night-terrors. Even now the death god’s bestial minions writhed in pitiful fear before the phantasms. Denizens cowered in every corner, hid beneath anything that could offer them shelter. It did them no good; the nightmares slipped into their minds, driving the valor from their corrupted hearts.

  These are Dendar’s brood, Jergal said as he floated to Cyric’s side. A shade charged the seneschal, but he opened his cloak wide to embrace the attacker. The damned soul vanished into the darkness with a short gasp of surprise.

  “Of course they’re Dendar’s!” Cyric snapped. “Why shouldn’t she be in on this conspiracy, too?”

  The Prince of Lies held his left hand out and spread the fingers wide. A sudden gale blew across the bailey, the wind stripping the flesh from both armies. One of the armored shades, leading the battle from atop the wall, tumbled backward at the blast. He sank into the Slith, where the creatures lurking there drew him out through the slits in his helmet, one piece at a time.

  Cyric slumped back against the door, momentarily weakened by casting the powerful spell. He had no doubt that the war proceeded as Mystra and the others had planned. His worshipers in Zhentil Keep were deserting him in droves - just as he needed their devotion most to drive the damned from the gates of Bone Castle. And through it all, Cyric’s other churches, the needy faithful of all his disparate offices, tugged at his mind. Their calls for aid and guidance threatened to draw too much of the death god’s fragmented consciousness away from the City of Strife, but to deny their prayers would be to risk sacrificing their worship.

  The battle quickly swelled to fill the bailey once more as denizens retreated from the damned. When they saw their master, Cyric’s minions did not rally. They stumbled toward him, over the windswept bones of their brethren. “Save us, great lord!” they cried. “The Chaos Hound is loose in the city! Kezef fights on the side of the False!” Come, my lord, Jergal said.

  The seneschal dared to lay a gloved hand on the god’s form. When Cyric didn’t object, Jergal guided him away from the battle, into the castle’s entry hall. The drow-spun tapestries fluttered nervously against the bone walls, as if they could sense the threat to their fragile hideousness. The darksome things that lurked below the crystal floor cowered at Cyric’s passing. During their eternal captivity, they’d witnessed the downfall of other gods; now they could see the blade of doom poised over the Lord of the Dead.

  “Ah,” Cyric muttered. “The gods show their true colors now, forging pacts with Kezef.” He began to howl with sudden fury. “They wear facades of purity and honor, but underneath they’ve got the faces of assassins.”

  Godsbane stirred weakly in his mind. Yes, my love, but you will reveal them for what they truly are.

  The soothing words passed into the tangle of Cyric’s thoughts unnoticed. His mind was caught up in a firestorm of rage, which blew from one fragment of his consciousness to another, turning them away from their vital tasks. Bloody revenge was all Cyric could consider. Mystra and Mask, Torm and Oghma, they would all be forced to grovel before him. He’d turn the Circle against them, have them humiliated, stripped of their offices - and then he would murder them one by one…

  As the Prince of Lies lingered in his fancies of divine carnage, cracks began to snake across the crystal floor, and the walls of bone began to tremble and sway. Jergal hurried Cyric through the skull-lined judgment hall, only to find the Rolls of the Dead tumbling from their carefully ordered places. The parchment scrolls, upon which the seneschal had recorded the fate of every soul imprisoned within the City of Strife, crumbled to dust before his unblinking eyes. The doorway to the throne room, once concealed by powerful enchantments, gaped in midair like an open wound.

  Magnificence, you must turn your mind back to this realm, Jergal pleaded. You must give over just a little of your power to maintaining the castle.

  “Traitor!” Cyric shouted as they entered the throne room. “There must be a traitor in my ranks.”

  Yes, Godsbane echoed numbly. A traitor…

  A few of the Burning Men reached out for the Lord of the Dead as Jergal hustled him toward his gruesome throne. Like everything else maintained by Cyric’s godly power, the chains that held the tormented scribes to the walls and ceiling were decaying. The three hundred ninety-eight burning souls, all men and women who had failed to create the Cyrinishad, hung precariously by an arm or a leg or rolled about on the floor in a vain attempt to douse the fires that tortured them.

  “Perhaps you can tell me something about the treachery in my court, Jergal,” Cyric said. He turned on the seneschal and gripped him by the face. “What did Mystra offer you - a new title, perhaps? Do you aspire to godhood yourself?”

  Certainly not, Your Magnificence, Jergal said, shaking free of the death god’s grasp. I exist to serve the master of Bone Castle.

  A sinister lucidity settled in Cyric’s eyes, and the room ceased trembling. “If you would serve anyone who sits this throne, you cannot be loyal to me only.” He grinned. “Therefore you must be the traitor.”

  The Lord of the Dead drew Godsbane and advanced a step toward the seneschal. The short sword looked sickly in the shifting light cast by the Burning Men, its bone-white pallor darkening to the gray of twilight shadows. No, my love, she whispered. I cannot allow you to slay your only loyal minion.

  “What?” Cyric roared. He held the blade up to his eyes, as if he could look inside its steely depths. “You cannot ‘allow’ me?”

  There is a traitor at your side, my love, but it’s not Jergal. Godsbane’s voice quavered, straining to form each painful word. Not everything is as it seems.

  Jergal hovered close. Please, Your Magnificence. Rest yourself in the throne for a time. Gather your thoughts so you can drive the-

  “Get out!” Cyric shouted. He spared the seneschal a brief, anger-filled glance. “Now!”

  I will see to the defense of the entry hall. Jergal bowed formally and retreated from the throne room.

  The Prince of Lies stared at the short sword, turning it over in his hands, examining it from every angle. “What have you been keeping from me, Godsbane?” he rumbled. “The identity of the traitor?”

  Yes, the spirit of the blade replied. Her voice had become more masculine, slick with sibilants. I see now how wrong I was to do so, but I’ve helped the other gods plot against you.

  “Impossible,” Cyric shouted. “I broke your will after I stole you from Black Oaks. I was only a mortal then, and I defeated you in mental combat. You couldn’t turn against me.”

  You never bested me.

  “Lies!” Cyric held the sword high over his head, one hand on the hilt, the other on the tip. With a scream of anger, he snapped Godsbane in two.

  A blue-white ball of light formed around the break in the blade. For an instant, the glow hovered like faerie fire in front of Cyric, dancing along the sword’s edges. Then it swelled, filling the throne room with its brilliance. The explosion crushed the death god’s trophies to dust, splintered his throne of misguided martyrs.

  When the light subsided, a shadow-wrapped figure lay before the Prince of Lies, its back broken, tears welling in its rose-red eyes. “Ah, my love, I was a fool to betray you.” Cyric dropped the sundered blade. “You.” The black mask had fallen away from the Shadowlord’s face, revealing features that shifted and warped like the cloak of darkness that hid its form. A soft, feminine visage coarsened into a man’s. An aquiline nose blunted into bulbousness, flattened, then narrowed and turned up daintily at the end. Only two features on Mask’s face remained constant: the god’s glowing red eyes and the pale fangs extruding from his lips. “If I had read the Cyrinishad sooner, realized your greatness before it was too late.” The Shadowlord slumped to the floor. “I never would have kept him hidden from you.” Mask’s form melted away into a pool of darkness, which merged with the death god’s own shadow. The voices of Cyric’s myriad selves shouted out their dismay, chorused their anger. The Prince of Lies stared, unseeing, at his shadow, trying to make some sense of the bizarre scene. He couldn’t. There were too many things clawing at his thoughts, hoarding bits of his attention. In Yulash, an assassin offered up a halfhearted prayer to the God of Murder, her words as empty of devotion as her heart was of pity. A peddler, down on his luck and starving amidst the opulence of Waterdeep, bitterly cursed the God of Strife. His insults flew up like arrows into Cyric’s mind. And then there were the Zhentish. Thousands of women and men shrieked Cyric’s name, as if that act alone could earn his aid. Their pleas streamed across the death god’s consciousness, scattering his thoughts in their wake. He was lost, his consciousness torn in a million directions at once. The blow caught Cyric in the face. He barely noticed the physical pain, but the surprise dragged his attention from the maelstrom of racing thoughts back to his realm in Hades. The Prince of Lies looked out on the ravaged throne room, but what he saw there only confused him more.

  The Burning Men, loosed from shattered chains, writhed across the floor in pain, unable to douse the fires consuming them. The explosion from the attack on Godsbane - no, Mask - had charred the walls and scorched a huge hole in the carpet. Cyric’s throne had been shattered, the bones strewn about. All these things seemed right somehow, appropriate to the setting. Yet there were other objects, other people in the room as well, bits and pieces from all the vistas taken in by Cyric’s incarnations. They all superimposed themselves over the reality of Bone Castle, creating a strange jumble of images.

  Liquid shadows played upon the columns, blackened and broken, from the temple in Zhentil Keep. Near the fragments of the throne, a young novitiate to Cyric’s church in Mulmaster kneeled in prayer. The silver bracelets signifying his enslavement to the death god reflected wan torchlight; his blue-black robes smelled of sweet incense. Assassins crept along the walls, silently stalking unseen quarries. Three Zhentilar soldiers huddled near the door, just as Cyric was seeing them in the Citadel of the Raven. Standing but an arm’s length away from the death god, Kelemvor Lyonsbane raised a martyr’s bone like a war club…

  Some part of Cyric’s mind shrieked a warning, and he lashed out. The back of his left hand snapped the makeshift weapon from Kel’s grasp as the palm of his right connected with the shade’s chin. Grunting in pain, Kelemvor flew backward. To the Lord of the Dead, the shade seemed to pass right through the devout young priest in Mulmaster, coming to rest at the feet of a dark-cloaked assassin.

  “Capture him!” Cyric shouted madly. With twitching fingers, the Prince of Lies gestured at the phantom murderer, directing him toward the bruised and grimy shade rising up before him. When the assassin continued to skulk along the wall, the death god smiled. “Are you a nightmare, then? Has Dendar dispatched you to haunt me like those feeble terrors that attacked my denizens on the walls?”

  Kelemvor brushed the dust from his tunic. “You’re going to wish this were a bad dream, you backstabbing cur.” He rushed forward, roaring like a bear.

  Cyric called an enchantment to mind, but the undertow of his thoughts sucked the incantation away. Another part of his mind suggested he transform to avoid the blow. The Prince of Lies willed himself into the guise of a poisonous cloud, but he remained in that form for only an instant before a purring voice demanded he take on his rightful shape again, the form described in the Cyrinishad. The Lord of the Dead found himself trapped in his mortal-seeming avatar when Kelemvor struck.

  They tumbled together, Cyric flailing wildly to defend himself, Kelemvor landing blow after blow with his hammerlike fists. When they came to a stop, the death god shrugged off his attacker and struggled to his feet. For the first time in a decade, Cyric felt pain. Though the ache came from nothing more profound than a blackened eye and cracked ribs, he found himself trembling.

  The pantheon must have given Kel some power, the death god decided. Mystra and the others must be animating him with their might, just like one of the Gearsmith’s mechanical men. The shade couldn’t harm me otherwise.

  The voices in Cyric’s head murmured their agreement: Better to flee such a direct battle. Strike from the shadows until your strength returns, until you discover what strange spell Mystra has placed on you to dampen your strength.

  Kelemvor gripped the hilt of Godsbane and started toward Cyric again. “This’ll do to cut out your black heart. That’ll be my trophy. The rest I’ll leave for these poor souls.”

  With the broken blade, Kel gestured to the Burning Men. The scribes crawled with painful slowness toward the death god. They moaned and clutched the air with sizzling fingers as they dragged their agony-stiffened bodies across the throne room.

  Cyric backed away from Kelemvor, toward the center of the room. He kicked one of the Burning Men out of his way and ducked the awkward lunge of another. “I’m a god, Lyonsbane. And if I killed you when I was mortal, think of the agony I can put you through now.”

  “So why are you running?” Kelemvor murmured.

  Cyric didn’t answer. He attempted to focus his mind on teleporting away from Hades, but too many things were drawing his consciousness away from the enchantment. The voices in his head had become a chorus of discord offering five dozen opinions on even the slightest matter. And there were his faithful all across Faerun, of course, invoking the death god’s name to resolve every petty conflict in their lives. In Bone Castle, Cyric could hear the sound of battle ringing out in the antechamber and the soft tread of Kelemvor’s boots as he stalked closer.

  Beware, Your Magnificence, Jergal cried from outside the throne room. The damned have broken into the castle!

  The Prince of Lies abandoned the enchantment. Obviously Mystra was denying him access to the weave, or hobbling his ability to concentrate on magic. As he turned toward the door, Cyric silently vowed to gouge out her blue-white eyes when next they met.

  A shade blocked the doorway, a mystic blade sparking starlight in his hands.

  “I am called the True because I value loyalty above all else.” Gwydion leveled the point of Titanslayer at Cyric’s heart. “I am called the Brave because I will face any danger to prove my respect of duty.”

  “Fool,” the Prince of Lies muttered.

  He took a step toward Gwydion, but got no farther before a fierce pain shot up his leg. One of the Burning Men had locked his fiery hands around Cyric’s ankle, and no matter how hard the death god kicked him, he would not release his hold. Another of the scribes wrapped searing arms around Cyric’s neck and hung over his back like a cloak.