Lesser Evils

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Lorcan ought to have counted himself lucky. Bound from knees to chest in a chain devil’s restraints, dragged across the hungry nightmare landscape of the Sixth Layer of the Hells-still, the half-devil son of Fallen Invadiah was not dead.

He was not dead, and he would soon be locked away in his sister’s newly claimed domain, far from their vengeful mother’s weakened reach, far from the notice of the archdevils, and farthest of all from those mortals who knew better than to let Lorcan slip the noose, after what had happened in Neverwinter. Lucky, indeed.

But that luck only counted for these few breaths.

All my life, he thought, watching the skull palace of Osseia recede as the chain devil hauled him toward the fingerbone towers, leaving a trail of raw, oozing ground in their wake. All my life avoiding the hierarchy and this is how they catch me. Beshaba shit in my eyes.

The goddess of ill luck could count herself proud of this mess: the only reason he was alive was that he had been caught in the tangled interplay of the Lord of the Sixth, Glasya, and her father, Asmodeus, king of the Hells and the risen god of evil. Their schemes and counter-schemes made a knotted net that trapped devils in every layer. Lorcan had long made an art of staying out of the cutthroat hierarchy they created. And now he was square in the middle of it.

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