The Temple of Yellow Skulls

by Don Bassingthwaite

  “And how many ruins are there in that area?” asked Kri. He glanced at Shara. She raised her eyebrows, looked thoughtful, then wiggled her fingers.

  “Half a dozen, maybe. Spread out. It would take time to check them.”

  “It’s a start.” Kri pushed his ale away. “We’ll ride out tomorrow. Shara, I found a map in the library of the tower. We’ll mark the ruins on it, then we can compare what you know about them to what I’ve learned from Moorin’s books. We may be able to narrow our search—”

  “Wait.” Albanon had a nagging feeling at the back of his mind. He’d wanted Kri and Shara to work together, but the cleric’s abrupt change of heart felt … odd. “A little while ago, you were barely interested in Uldane’s name, now you’re willing to ride across half the Vale to look for him?” He cocked his head at Kri as a suspicion came to him. “Why was it significant that Raid said ‘the eye is on you?’ ”

  Kri’s wrinkled face tightened, and for a moment, he was silent. Then he leaned across the table, gesturing for Albanon and Shara to come close. “Have you ever heard of the cults of the Elder Elemental Eye?”

  Shara shook her head. Albanon dredged up a memory, a reference he’d read years before in a book Moorin had expressly forbidden him from reading. “The Elemental Eye is something dreamed up by madmen. The cults that claim to follow it are full of lunatics intent on causing chaos wherever they can in the name of various elemental primordials.”

  “True,” said Kri, “insofar as followers of the Elder Elemental Eye are madmen intent on causing chaos.”

  “And you think when Raid said ‘the eye is watching you,’ he actually meant this Elder Elemental Eye?” Shara said.

  “I’m certain of it.”

  Albanon spread his hands. “What does that have to do with finding Uldane?”

  “Because before he brought the Voidharrow into the world and became Nu Alin,” Kri answered, his voice dropping even lower, “Albric the Accursed worshiped the Elemental Eye. Except that the cults are actually far more than they seem. The Elemental Eye is only the most palatable of names for the darkest of the gods. A deity so insane and vile that the other gods joined forces to seal him away.”

  Albanon’s ears tingled all the way to their pointed tips. “You said Albric and his followers were trying to free something evil when the founders of the Order interrupted them. Were they trying to free this imprisoned god?”

  “Yes.” Kri’s fingers strayed to his neck and the holy symbol of Ioun. “Some call him the Chained God. Others dare to use his true name: Tharizdun. Some say the cults of the Elemental Eye are his last faltering hold on our world. I … have my doubts.”

  Albanon frowned. “What did Tharizdun do to make the other gods so mad at him?”

  “In the earliest days of creation, he found a seed of utter evil and planted it in the unshaped depths of the Elemental Chaos. The seed grew. Tharizdun created the Abyss.” Kri straightened. “Nu Alin brought the Voidharrow into the world and now that it has been set loose in the Nentir Vale, another follower of the Elder Elemental Eye arrives. My belief in coincidence runs only so far.”

  Shara looked grim. “All the more reason to find Raid.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Energy flooded through Raid. Limitless energy. Limitless, exhilarating energy that drove him day and night. He was stronger than he had ever been. Faster. No one would deny him now. No one would reject him. No one would dare. What the Eye had promised, the Eye had delivered.

  The bliss of his new existence was like a fog over his mind, as welcome as the cool of twilight after the day’s heat. Raid stalked the land wrapped in his own power. He was a wolf. He was a panther. He was a drake.

  He was more than all the most dangerous beasts he had ever hunted. He was perfect. Raid bared his teeth in a smile—a smile that ended in the painful tightness at the right side of his mouth. The smile turned into a snarl and a nearby tree paid the price for his sudden fury. Heavy fingernails gouged deep gashes into the bark.

  He was almost perfect. The new form that the Voidharrow had given to him was beautiful, strong, and savage. A reflection of what Raid had always known was inside him. Only the right side of his face and chest marred his perfection, as if the burned flesh had resisted transformation.

  Under the scars, Hakken—pitiful, pathetic Hakken—remained. If he could have, Raid would have clawed off half his face to be rid of him. He howled and slashed at the tree again. And again. And again, until the trunk, as thick as his thigh, shuddered, splintered, and crashed down. Raid stood over the jagged stump, breathing hard.

  He needed blood. He needed the hunt.

  In the distance, a dog raised its voice in a frenzied baying. Others joined in before the sound faded away. Anticipation tightened Raid’s belly. He turned away from the broken tree and set out in the direction of the baying. “Come,” he called over his shoulder.

  Three hulking figures moved obediently out of the long shadows. The setting sun flashed on heavy plates of red crystal that grew across their shoulders like armor. On a second set of powerful arms that reached around from beneath the crystal armor. The brutes moved stiffly, heavily, especially in comparison to Raid’s own powerful grace—but then he had embraced the Voidharrow willingly.

  “You will gather this one an army,” Vestapalk said. “A horde. Vestapalk must have a horde.”

  The dragon lay in the courtyard of the Temple of Yellow Skulls, limbs drawn close to his body, head weaving at a level with Raid’s own. His red eyes were dull and clouded. The blisters on his body seemed larger, more full, as if whatever afflicted him had seized on his weakness to assert itself. The pain of Raid’s transformation still ached in his joints, but he couldn’t help thinking that if Vestapalk was weak, he might be able to take him. Almost as if he were able to hear the thought, the dragon’s head reared back. He hissed and glared down at Raid. Claws flexed, dragging up stones long buried in the surface of the courtyard.

  Raid felt his anger—not just in his head or in his gut but in his very blood. In the Voidharrow that lingered in his body. Submit, it seemed to urge him. Raid lowered his gaze. “How?” he asked.

  “How, master,” barked the little kobold who stood by Vestapalk’s shoulder. Raid glared at him and bared his new teeth. The kobold flinched and shrank closer to the dragon’s leg. A coward.

  “Enough, Tiktag.” Vestapalk twitched his leg, forcing the kobold away from him. He examined Raid, then pointed a talon. “Your claws. Your bite. Break the skin. The Voidharrow will pass on.”

  The thought of allowing the Voidharrow, the source of his power, to pass to another struck unexpected fear into Raid. He clenched his hands into fists. “No.”

  Vestapalk looked at him as if he was a child.

  For a moment, old anger flared in Raid—no, he reminded himself, Hakken had been weak. People mocked Hakken. They wouldn’t dare mock Raid.

  Vestapalk sneered. “You think it will diminish you? It will make you stronger. Those you mark will suffer as you have. If they pass through the plague, they will submit to your strength.”

  “They will be like me?”

  “They will be what they are. But no, they will not be like you. Vestapalk desires a horde. Those you mark will be his soldiers. His enforcers. His brutes!”

  Vestapalk shook with anticipation as he spoke. The liquid crystal of the Voidharrow welled up around his mouth, running and dripping like saliva. Some of it he licked back with a tongue that bore tiny pustules; some dripped from his jaws to splatter at the dragon’s feet. Raid found his gaze drawn to it as if it were the most precious stuff in the world.

  Where the Voidharrow touched the ground, dirt clumped into stones spiky with sharp red crystals. A beetle splashed with it shuddered and scrambled away, its carapace flashing like a living jewel. Raid stared at the stuff in fascination, then poked a foot at it. For an instant, the Voidharrow seemed to pull back from his touch—then it reached out and clung to him as if recognizing kin. Its touch stung, but t
he pain was almost pleasant, like dipping a toe into icy water.

  The kobold Tiktag stared at it with barely disguised fear. Raid flicked it at him. Tiktag ducked and the Voidharrow landed among a patch of moss, soaking into the green carpet. An instant later, the soft fur of the plant seemed to writhe with hunger.

  Raid understood its hunger. He looked up at Vestapalk. “A horde to aid in restoring the temple of the Elemental Eye,” he said.

  The dragon’s eyes flickered. “Yes,” he said. “To restore the temple. Turn those you mark loose. They will make their way to Vestapalk. Walk the land, Gatherer. Make Vestapalk his horde.”

  Raid looked back up at him. “Master of the Voidharrow, for you and the Chained God, I will strip the Nentir Vale.”

  That first night, not too far from the Temple of Yellow Skulls, he’d found three hunters asleep around a smoking campfire. They had a hound that growled at him as he approached, but Raid had just growled back at it and it had cowered away, one beast dominated by another. The screams of the first hunter as Raid raked claws across his chest had woken the others. They’d fought—or tried to fight. With the power of his new form, it had been like subduing children. It was more difficult not to give into his bloodlust and kill them outright. He had all three bound or unconscious within moments. Then he had crouched and watched.

  The disease took hold swiftly. More swiftly than he might have expected, maybe accelerated by some lingering power of his own infection. The changes were not so quick as his had been, but they looked no less painful. The hunters’ wounds swelled, inflamed as their bodies fought the Voidharrow, but the raw, red flesh sparkled like crystal in the firelight. The inflammation spread and massive blisters formed. His victims thrashed and screeched—Raid was forced to remove the bonds as the hunters’ growing bodies pressed against them, but the men weren’t running anywhere. Blisters burst to reveal plates like crystalline armor and a second pair of powerful arms. Eventually, the hunters’ screams fell silent. Raid suspected that they had somehow moved beyond the ability to feel pain.

  By the time the sun touched the horizon, the hunters had risen as Vestapalk’s first three brute minions. All three had survived the Voidharrow. Raid should have sent them to the dragon, but he kept them and they shambled after him like stupid hulks as he moved on in search of new prey. The hound followed, too, and it wasn’t until they came across an isolated farmstead that Raid realized it had taken to him like a wolf to the leader of a pack. It obeyed his commands, though its appearance had become more feral, as if his presence, enhanced by the presence of the Voidharrow, was drawing out the wild beast inside.

  By the time Raid left the farm, five more brutes of varying sizes—a farmer who brought his family into isolation had no right to cry at his children’s screams—were stumbling in the direction of the Temple of Yellow Skulls. Another, not strong enough to survive infection and transformation, was a twisted corpse on the floor. Two more dogs had become a part of Raid’s pack.

  Vestapalk’s horde had grown by about a dozen since then. Humans, goblins, a dwarf. Once Raid—or, he discovered, one of his own three brutes—had wounded them, they were all the same. Brutes for Raid’s new master. Vessels for the Voidharrow. There was a pressure inside Raid that urged him to make even more. For every being he infected, he want to dig his claws into three more to make Vestapalk’s army grow even faster. The pressure urged him to go to Winterhaven or even to Fallcrest. He would sweep through the town, a plague with a mission. The anticipation made his heart race.

  Raid resisted the urge. Yes, his new form was powerful, and yes, he had three of Vestapalk’s soldiers and his pack to back him up, but was that enough? Could he take on all of Fallcrest’s defenders? The progression of the disease when he wounded another victim was slowing. The onset of the crystal-bearing blisters that seemed to mark the turning point of the infection came slower and slower. Vestapalk’s horde was still growing, but not so quickly now.

  Better to be patient. Build the army, then lead it against Fallcrest and spread the Voidharrow to anyone left alive to build the army even further. For now, he stalked the wilderness, taking whatever—whomever—he found, with the pack roaming ahead to locate suitable prey.

  And from the sound of their howls, that was exactly what they had done. Raid sniffed the air and caught the fetid smell of a marsh. He picked up his pace, silent as a wolf in the dusk. The soldiers followed him, not quite so quiet but with more stealth than their bulky forms might suggest. Just as the ground started to sink toward a reed-filled lowland, the pack came slinking out of the underbrush to join them. The hound that had once been loyal to those first transformed hunters crept up to Raid and nuzzled his shins. Its eyes were red-rimmed and foam flecked its jaws—Raid had a feeling that it might be dying under the influence of his dominating power, but he couldn’t find it in him to care. The beast was a tool, his to use and command.

  “Show me,” he told it.

  The hound whined and turned back toward the marsh. The other dogs went with it. Raid gestured for Vestapalk’s soldiers to hold their positions, then followed, crouching low for cover among the reeds.

  Along the dry edge of the marsh, a party of powerfully built lizardfolk were occupied setting up a camp. A dozen of the reptilian creatures milled around, some building fires, some skinning and butchering a couple of big marsh deer that hung from tall trees. A hunting party, then. Raid’s eyes narrowed as he watched them go about their tasks.

  A dozen lizardfolk … Vestapalk would reward him. Of course, in a group so large, there would be fighting. Two or three lizardfolk might die before being subdued. Raid smiled to himself. He certainly hoped so.

  But there was more. A few of the lizardfolk in particular caught his eye. A tall hunter with a bright red and yellow crest strode among the others, hissing and barking in what Raid thought might be laughter—the other lizardfolk deferred to him. On the other side of the camp, a smaller specimen armed with a blowgun demonstrated his mastery of the weapon in a contest with another, spitting darts at tiny spots of moss on the trunk of a tree. Helping with the butchering, one of the biggest lizardfolk Raid had ever seen—easily as tall as his own transformed height, but half again as broad through the shoulders and with black scales in contrast to the dull green of the others—hacked through thick bones as easily as if they were dry tinder wood.

  “One more task, Raid,” Vestapalk had called to him as he was leaving the Temple of Yellow Skulls. “This one needs more than just brutes. Watch for the exceptional individuals among your prey and do not transform them. Capture them. Bring them back to Vestapalk. A horde needs commanders. You are only the first of Vestapalk’s exarchs.”

  The tall hunter, Raid decided, and the massive blackscale would go back to Vestapalk. They would make powerful exarchs for the dragon. The darter and as many of the lizardfolk as survived would fill the ranks of the horde. Raid gestured for the pack to stay—they sank to their bellies in the moist dirt—then went back to retrieve the other brutes. His chest was already tight with the thought of the fight to come and the praise Vestapalk would heap on him.

  The tree shuddered with every blow that the blackscale lizardman dealt the hanging carcass. High up in the leafy branches, Uldane hugged the trunk and tried not to fall from his perch. Or vomit from the smell of offal. The stink made his already throbbing head spin—and that made him hug the tree even tighter.

  The next person who told him that halflings were a lucky folk was going to get a hard kick in the ankles. If he survived to meet them.

  The wounds that Raid, then Tiktag, had inflicted on him were worse than Uldane had expected. He’d escaped the ruins of the Temple of Yellow Skulls with Vestapalk’s roars ringing in his ears. As he’d pushed his way into the woods he’d chosen as his cover, the roars had been replaced with horrible screams. Raid’s, Uldane thought—or at least hoped. The anger in his heart burned nearly as harshly as Tiktag’s poison magic burned in his wounds. He hadn’t paused but had just kept running unt
il his legs faltered beneath him.

  That was when he first noticed how the trees seemed to be spinning around him and just how strangely warm it had become. Uldane had stopped by a stream and tried washing his wounds, but it hadn’t done much good. Now he really did regret leaving the potions from Tragent’s pack behind.

  He’d staggered on in what he thought was the direction of Fallcrest, only to find himself crossing and recrossing the same stream. Finally he’d given in to whatever message the gods seemed to be sending him and started following the flow of water downstream. If he kept wandering, he reasoned, he might just stumble back to the temple—and that was the last place he wanted to be. All of the streams in the Vale joined up with the Nentir River eventually, though. All he had to do was follow the water and find the river, then make his way up to Fallcrest. And he’d have plenty to drink on the way, which was good considering how thirsty he felt.

  In hindsight, maybe he should have tried striking out to the northeast and finding the King’s Road. He could have followed it to Fallcrest and there would have been travelers to help him. Uldane didn’t mind being on his own, but he was fairly certain that he slipped into unconsciousness a couple of times. Once he sat down in daylight and woke to the stars and moon. Another time, he fell and when he sat up, his face and arms were hot with sunburn as well as fever. Companions would at least have moved him into the shade.

  He was never traveling without Shara at his side again. Or Albanon. Or even Splendid.

  When the stream finally vanished not into the rush of the Nentir River but the still waters of the Witchlight Fens, he’d thought his luck could sink no further. He’d been wrong—he’d barely managed to swarm up the tree he was resting under when the first of the lizardfolk appeared out of the swamp.

  The blackscale lizardman hacked another leg off the deer. The tree shivered. Uldane pressed himself to the rough bark and clenched his teeth against a moan. Night was coming. Maybe he could slip down under cover of darkness and get away. There was one advantage to being up in the tree: He had a good view not just of the camp but the meandering edge of the fens to the north and south as well. Not too far away to the south, on the other side of the lizardfolk’s camp, the broken remains of an old imperial watchtower shone under the setting sun.