The Eye of the Chained God tap-3

by Don Bassingthwaite

  “Only a little.”

  “Moorin neglected your training shamefully. If we’re here long, I’ll teach you. There are fascinating inscriptions on the walls here.” He set off down the stairs.

  “Kri,” said Albanon, “how long have you been here?”

  “How long has it been since you sent me through the Vast Gate?”

  “About two weeks.”

  “Is that all?”

  Albanon paused, then added, “What have you been… eating all that time?”

  Kri froze, then swung around and glared at him. With the purple light of the lantern shining up under his face, Albanon looked even paler than normal. His eyes were wide and frightened. Kri could guess immediately what the wizard had thought. He grimaced in disgust. “You think because I mentioned the dwarven tombs that I’ve turned into some kind of bone-gnawing ghoul? I may serve the Chained God, but I’m not a monster.” He jerked his head back toward the hidden door. “Tharizdun showed me the way to the ledges. Perytons lay eggs like birds. I haven’t eaten well, but I’ve eaten enough.”

  Albanon swallowed. “The perytons are dead. We ambushed them in the valley. The one you just killed was the last of them.”

  Kri gave him a cold smile. “Then maybe you should reconsider praying to Tharizdun.”

  The forgotten cloister of Tharizdun stank of madness. Albanon wouldn’t have considered such a thing possible, but it was true. There was something in the air, oozing from the stone and the shadows, that assaulted his nostrils. It couldn’t have been real. Try as he might, he couldn’t identify the odor. Whenever he tried to, it changed. It smelled like dung or ashes or wet stone or roses. It had to have been his imagination.

  It was there, though. Every time he convinced himself that it wasn’t real, it returned with some new and visceral stench so powerful he could feel it sinking into his skin. If he escaped the cloister, he would burn his robes and scrub his skin with sand until it stung.

  When he’d ventured into the lonely Tower of Waiting in Fallcrest with Kri in search of the demon Nu Alin, it had seemed like he was descending into an abyss of madness, where insanity lurked just out of sight. In the dwarven cloister it was on full display everywhere he looked. The farther he followed Kri down the long, ever-circling stairs, the more it seemed to emerge.

  He might not have been able to read the characters of the inscriptions written on the walls, but sometimes there were drawings with them. He tried to avoid looking at them. He tried to avoid looking at the carvings high in the shadows along the sloping ceiling: every kind of creeping, crawling, and writhing beast he could imagine. All carved in flawless detail. All represented mouth to tail as if consuming the one in front and birthing-or excreting-the one behind. He was fairly certain that Kri, with his weak human sight, wasn’t even able to see them beyond the lantern’s purple light.

  The lantern was the worst. Albanon had never considered himself particularly religious, but the scenes of feasting gods carved into the crystal were vile. Even if he didn’t look at the lantern itself, it seemed to him that the carvings caught the light and reproduced themselves in its glimmers. No matter where he looked, ghostly images projected by the lantern floated in the air. Avandra, the wanderer’s god, gnawed on the feet and legs of screaming travelers. Erathis, god of civilization and the cities, ground men and women in a great mortar and pestle. Noble Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon, buried his snout in his worshipers’ entrails. Melora, god of the wilderness and the sea, boiled them in a soup.

  And the whispering voice in his head had returned. Look, it urged him. Look and learn. This is how the gods truly are, devouring the lives of mortals while their worshipers offer themselves up. This is the world, everything prey for everything else. Why do you try to deny it? Embrace it. Embrace the power you have and use it to put yourself at the top of the dung heap.

  “No!” he spat out loud.

  The word echoed along the stairs, crashing back and forth. Kri looked back at him. “Tharizdun’s gaze lies upon this place. You feel it.”

  Albanon ground his teeth and said nothing. He lowered the lantern and conjured his own magical light in the palm of his hand.

  It flashed and dimmed like a dying ember.

  The whisper in his head laughed. You could make it as bright as the sun, you know. Numbers flickered in his mind, equations for volume and brilliance.

  He pushed them away and cupped his fingers around the ember-dim light. “It’s enough for me to see by,” he said to Kri.

  The old priest shrugged and took the purple lantern from him. If he saw the ghostly images, he gave no indication of it. “As you wish. We’re stopping here anyway.”

  Albanon looked up and stared around at a broad chamber full of broken statuary. Dim golden daylight filtered in from high crevices that seemed filled with crystal-dwarven light pipes. In that light, the madness seemed to ebb. Albanon took a slow breath and allowed the light to wink out between his fingers. Kri went over and sat down beneath a statue of a cowled man that looked as if something had broken out of a hollow space within it. Tharizdun’s symbol of a jagged spiral was marked on the palms of the statue’s outstretched hands. Albanon kept his distance. Kri just shrugged and settled himself more comfortably.

  “So, my apprentice,” he said. “Tell me the news of the Nentir Vale. Has the Abyssal Plague overrun it yet?”

  “I’m not your apprentice,” Albanon said harshly.

  “No? It seems to me you’ve grown more in skill and power under my mentorship than with Moorin as your master. I was impressed with your manipulation of the flow of magical energy during our battle.”

  A part of Albanon took pride in the praise. He braced himself against it. “That’s not skill, it’s madness. That kind of power is uncontrollable.”

  “By which you mean you can’t control it. That’s just weakness. Embrace the madness and you’ll find that the power answers to you.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want me to do?” Albanon asked angrily. “It seems to me that when I did, I was able to swat you around like a moth. And right now, old man, you don’t have the dark power the Chained God’s presence gave you!”

  Kri threw back his head and laughed. “Yes! Yes! There you go, that’s exactly what you need to do. Get angry. Let go of your control. Burn something. Melt something.”

  A weird flickering light danced across the cleric’s face, as if Kri sat before a fire. It took Albanon a moment to realize that the fire came from him. Flames he didn’t remember summoning licked around his clenched fists. He held his hands up in front of him and the flames flared like torches.

  Melting something, thought the voice in his head. That’s new. Focused fire, not increased in volume but in density-

  He choked off the voice and concentrated on his hands. The flames flickered and went out. Albanon glared at Kri. “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Disappointing. I would have thought you were capable of more. Tell me how your friends are then. Shara, Uldane, Quarhaun-I think we saw Tempest and Roghar back in Fallcrest briefly, too, or have they gone off again? How’s Splendid?”

  The question tore open a wound. “Splendid’s dead. Vestapalk killed her with some kind of new plague demon that was smarter and faster than the others, almost like Vestapalk had merged himself with a plague demon.”

  “Vestapalk is the Abyssal Plague. The Abyssal Plague is the Voidharrow. The Voidharrow is Vestapalk. When the Voidharrow has consumed enough of the world, there will be very little that Vestapalk isn’t capable of.” Kri leaned back. “I’m sorry to hear about Splendid. I liked her.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t even say her name.” New anger flashed in Albanon. He swallowed it as best he could. “Trying to get here killed her as certainly as Vestapalk did. I know that it was Tharizdun who put the urge to come here into me, but I would have thought even a banished god could come up with someone better suited to killing Vestapalk than you.”

  Kri sat up sharply, eyes flashing. “Killing
Vestapalk is only incidental to what Tharizdun wants. I told you, our mission is vengeance on the Voidharrow, and I hold the key to its destruction.”

  “What’s that?”

  Kri stalked up to him and leaned into his face. “I know what it is.” He stepped back. “I spent my life-yes, and the lives of others-in pursuit of true knowledge about the Voidharrow. That’s what drove me from the Order of Vigilance and Ioun to the worship of Tharizdun. He knows the value of change. He doesn’t keep secrets. After I passed through the Vast Gate and since I’ve been here, he’s shown me everything I need to know.”

  He turned to gaze up at the cowled statue. “We are told that Tharizdun created the Abyss by planting a crystal of evil in the heart of the Primordial Chaos. That crystal wasn’t a seed of evil-it was a seed of change, drawn from another world where one force, one being, had consumed everything until it was the only thing in its world. It called itself the Progenitor. When the other gods discovered that Tharizdun had introduced change into their perfect world, they imprisoned him with the Progenitor in its world. But over the eons, Tharizdun and the Progenitor worked together. They merged part of their essences and found a way to send that merged essence back to our world.”

  “The Voidharrow,” said Albanon.

  “Yes,” said Kri, looking back at him. “And no. The Voidharrow was meant to be used with a fragment of the Living Gate-the same fragment we found in Sherinna’s tower in the Feywild-to forge a new gate, the Vast Gate, and set both Tharizdun and the Progenitor free. But the Voidharrow had been twisted by the Progenitor. It took on a life of its own and began to consume our world just as the Progenitor had consumed his. It only needed a suitable host and when it escaped after centuries as the prisoner of the Order of Vigilance, it found one in Vestapalk. The Abyssal Plague is only the beginning. Together Vestapalk and the Voidharrow will consume everything. Everything. That’s why it laid a trap so that it might consume Tharizdun when he tried to re-enter the world. Imagine Vestapalk enhanced with the power of a god.”

  A chill had worked itself into Albanon. “So how do we stop it?”

  Kri smiled. “The Voidharrow was created by merging the Progenitor’s hunger and Tharizdun’s mighty will. The Progenitor is alien to our world. It can’t exist here-the only reason it does is because Tharizdun’s will holds it together. Extract Tharizdun’s will from the Voidharrow, and it will be destroyed.”

  “And how exactly do we do that?”

  Kri’s smile faltered. “I have the key. Tharizdun said the one who came would help to turn it.”

  “Me?” asked Albanon. “I don’t know anything about Tharizdun’s will. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You have power,” Kri said.

  “Fire. Lightning. If I want to use it. And it hasn’t exactly been predictable so far. How does that help us?”

  “You can manipulate magical flows more directly than that. I’ve seen it. In Moorin’s tower, you fed power back into the prison ward that the Voidharrow formed around Tharizdun and burned the Voidharrow away.”

  “I think this would be subtler than that.” Albanon sat down on a hunk of broken statue. “Why can’t we just burn the Voidharrow with fire or the light of the gods, though? Vestapalk is laired in something he calls the Plaguedeep. Belen-she’s a Fallcrest guard who was possessed by Nu Alin until Tempest and I drove him out-saw the place in Nu Alin’s memories. It’s the crater of a volcano west of the Vale, but Vestapalk has transformed it somehow with the Voidharrow. There’s a concentration of it there, a great pool that Vestapalk wallows in.”

  Kri sucked in his breath. “Then he’s gone further in his consumption of the world than I thought.” He sat down, too. “Burning will only destroy the portion of the Voidharrow your fire or my radiance consumes. Some of it might escape. If Vestapalk has already turned it against the rocks and stones of the world, it could have reached into the Underdark already. We need to destroy it completely. Drawing out Tharizdun’s will should do that. Wherever the Voidharrow is, it will be affected.”

  “What about the Abyssal Plague and the plague demons?”

  “That’s harder to say. Without the Voidharrow’s power, the plague will lose much of its virulence, but the demons are creatures of both worlds now. If they survive the destruction of the Voidharrow, they may still be able to infect others. Though probably not as easily.”

  Albanon blinked. “They won’t be cured?”

  Kri gave him a blunt look. “Those infected have changed, Albanon. The Abyssal Plague has done its work on them. They are what they are now.”

  A sour taste came into Albanon’s mouth. “But they were all people once. Can’t we bring them back? You burned the Voidharrow out of me.”

  “You had just been turned. There was still time. The people that the plague demons were are dead. Could you bring back the dead from any other plague?” Kri held up the crystal lantern. “We feed the gods, Albanon.”

  “Tharizdun is a god, too. Do we feed him?”

  “Even Tharizdun-but the Chained God gives us a chance to fight. Without freedom and change, where would we be? Exactly where the other gods want us.”

  Albanon stared at the old priest for a long moment, then asked, “Do you really believe that?”

  “If I didn’t, I would still be Ioun’s pawn.” Kri looked directly into Albanon’s eyes. “Tharizdun wants the Voidharrow stopped. You want Vestapalk dead. Look into your heart. Has this ever been about the Abyssal Plague? Shara has sworn to kill Vestapalk for what he did to her friends and father. You have sworn to take revenge on Vestapalk for almost turning you into his exarch. If the only way to stop the plague required leaving Vestapalk alive, would you take it?”

  Albanon wanted to say yes, but he couldn’t. All the dead of Fallcrest and Winterhaven. Immeral. Splendid. All those dead and lost beyond the Nentir Vale because of the Abyssal Plague. He laid them at Vestapalk’s feet.

  “Will destroying the Voidharrow kill Vestapalk?” he asked Kri finally.

  “He is its host. It imbues and empowers him. It’s part of him now. I don’t believe he could live without it.”

  “Then I think that’s all I can ask.” Albanon looked at the old priest. “I’ll work with you-assuming we can figure out exactly how to separate Tharizdun’s will from the Voidharrow.”

  “We’ll find a way. We worked well together before.” He held out his hand.

  Albanon shook his head. “We worked well before you betrayed me,” he said. “Before you broke my mind. I’m not going to trust you again, Kri. Don’t act like you’re my mentor.”

  Kri let his hand fall. “Fairly spoken,” he said. “We have a common interest, nothing more.” He sat back once again. “So where do we begin?”

  Kri might have been mad and a traitor, but Albanon had to admit it was good to talk to someone who really understood magic again. Tempest was intelligent, but a warlock’s understanding of magic was different from a wizard’s, received through pacts and bargains with supernatural creatures rather than hard study. And while Kri was a cleric, drawing his magic from divine sources, he had served the god of magic and knowledge for most of his life. Changing his allegiance to Tharizdun had not taken away what he’d learned as Ioun’s priest. It was frighteningly easy to forget that Kri had tried to kill him and bring a banished god back into the world.

  They began with generalities: what resources they had to work with, past instances each had read about that might be vaguely similar to their situation, spells and rituals that might aid in what they needed to accomplish. They moved to specifics: how could two intangibles such as will and hunger combine into a material form in the first place? Kri found chalk or something like it in the ruins while Albanon brushed aside rubble and conjured more light. Soon the floor of the chamber was covered with notations and sprawling diagrams, and Albanon had told Kri everything that he had seen and experienced, including Vestagix and even his own shame at Winterhaven. It reminded Albanon of the happy days of his apprenticeship and long convers
ations with Moorin-or even of the much shorter period when Kri truly had been his mentor.

  None of it, however, got them any closer to an answer. There was always something missing. A gap in the diagrams. A hole in their knowledge. “If the will of Tharizdun is the key to destroying the Voidharrow,” Albanon said finally, “we’re fumbling for the lock like drunks in the dark.”

  “To use the languages of alchemists,” said Kri, “we need a catalyst. Something to facilitate the magic.” The priest rose stiffly and bushed the dust from his hands. “We need elements of an exorcism. And, since the Voidharrow will surely resist having Tharizdun’s will drawn from it, an abjuration to hold the two apart. There has to be something else, though. A wedge to split them. A spindle to wind up Tharizdun’s will.”

  Albanon stared at the complex swirls of the pale inscriptions that surrounded them. They were like the numbers and formulas that had unlocked his magic before. He could almost feel the madness pushing at his mind. For the moment, he let it be. It was strangely energizing. He felt more alive and alert than he had in days. In his mind’s eye, he could picture the threads of magic that Kri would weave, and which he would in turn pluck and twist, empowering the ritual. But it was exactly as Kri said: they needed something more. Something to turn the key.

  He let out a long breath and scrubbed his hands over his face. His mind might have been alert, but his body was weary. Between the excitement of his discussions with Kri and the dark silence of the ancient cloister, it was almost impossible to tell how much time had passed, but his grumbling stomach told him it had been long enough.

  “Do you have any eggs left?” he asked Kri. “Or should we go up and investigate the peryton carcass on the ledge? It looked at least partly cooked when we left it.”

  The priest made a face. “I’m sick of peryton. I’d like a little change before we resort to it. Do you have a scrap of anything else in your pouches? Dry bread? Old cheese? Yesterday’s sausage?”