“It looks like it.”
She frowned. “Albanon, I’m not sure plague demons sleep. We’ve fought them during the day before, like the pack that chased Immeral into Fallcrest. So what were they doing down there?”
The tips of Albanon’s ears tingled. He took Tempest’s hand in his and squeezed it, but didn’t say anything.
The last shadow passed the top of the crevice. In the darkness below, dozens of pairs of eyes flicked open in unison. Dozens of mouths grinned at exactly the same moment.
“Yes,” whispered Vestapalk. “Come.”
Somehow they reached the slope of the volcano without encountering a single active plague demon. They did spot more demons piled into other crevices and gullies, but none of them stirred. Shara’s arm and fingers ached from gripping her sword and she hadn’t even drawn it yet. She forced herself to release the hilt and shook out her hand.
“I don’t like this,” she said, looking up at the volcano’s peak. “What are the demons doing? Why aren’t we being attacked?”
“I don’t like it either,” said Quarhaun. “I don’t like any of this, but if you want a spider’s silk, you have to reach into her nest.” He caught her hand and gently rubbed the crooked fingers. “Where will we go after this? Back to Fallcrest? Nera? I’ve heard of a place called the Dragondown Coast that sounds interesting.”
Shara shuddered. “No more dragons.” She pulled her hand away. “How can you think about something like that right now?”
“When you’re somewhere bad, focus on where you’ll go next.”
“Another drow saying?”
“A halfling saying, or so I’m told.” Quarhaun nodded to Uldane then flashed her a smile, his white teeth dazzling against his jet black skin. “Drow wisdom would say when you’re somewhere bad, focus on how you’ll hurt the people who put you there.”
“Why do I love you?”
“Insidious drow charm.” He caught her hand again and kissed her sword-calloused palm.
“If you’re finished,” said Kri, coming up beside them, “we need to find our way inside.”
Quarhaun dropped her hand. Shara frowned at Kri. “I liked you better when you served Ioun. Occasionally you kept your mouth shut.”
“People who call Vecna the god of secrets have never truly known Ioun,” said the priest. “The Chained God shows his followers freedom of all kinds.”
“The kind where I can put a sword through your belly?” asked Shara.
“Perhaps after we’ve dealt with Vestapalk and the Voidharrow,” Kri said mildly before turning to Quarhaun. “How do we find a tunnel that leads inside?”
“In the Underdark, the easiest way is to find a tunnel that local beasts are using and hope that it doesn’t dead-end in a den or nest. I imagine that holds true for the surface as well.”
“So now we need to go looking for a plague demon?” said Shara.
Quarhaun shrugged. “I honestly didn’t think we’d have any trouble with that part.”
“I don’t think we will,” Belen said. “Look.” The Fallcrest guard stood behind them. They all turned.
Back down the way they had come, spindly figures moved at the edges of crevices and gullies. Roghar cursed. “Did they see us?”
“No,” said Cariss, “I’m certain they didn’t.”
“Then let’s try and find a passage to follow before they do,” Quarhaun said. “Any sign of heavy use around a cave mouth will do-a trail, disturbed dirt, broken plants. Look up the slope as well as down.”
“What if we find plague demons inside?” asked Uldane.
Quarhaun’s chuckle was cold. “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if.’ ”
He led them around the slope to the left where a shelf of slumping, crystal-ridden stone would hide them from the demons below. Where the shelf ended, he turned along a trough-shaped ravine that went toward the peak. They were still following the ravine when the shrieks of demons fighting broke out ahead.
Shara guessed there were only a couple of the creatures, but the screams were so strange and angry that were she less skilled, she could have believed there to be half a dozen. She stopped. Quarhaun pressed her onward.
“Are we looking for demons or trying to avoid them?” she muttered to him. “Because if we want a place with a lot of demons, we could go back down to those crevices.”
“Too shallow,” said Quarhaun. “If they ran into the interior, the demons wouldn’t have clustered at the surface. We want signs of them, but not too many actual demons.” He motioned for her and the others to stay low, then crept up the side of the ravine and continued climbing the slope alongside it. When the sounds of fighting were closest, Quarhaun went back to the ravine and peered over the crumbing edge. Shara stayed to one side of him, Cariss to the other.
All of the shrieks came from only two bestial demons as they wrestled back and forth over the corpse of some now unidentifiable small animal. Just above them, a low dark opening pierced the side of the mountain, about as wide as Shara was tall and just high enough that she would be able to crawl into it. Dark soil was strewn before it, but Shara scowled.
“Nothing,” she said. “They’ve just dug out a burrow.” Cariss grunted agreement.
The drow shook his head. “Something might have been living there, but that’s more than just a burrow. You can tell by the shape of it, and the way it’s right at the top of the ravine. I think we’ll find it’s bigger on the inside than it looks.”
He gestured for Albanon to come up and join them, then whispered rapidly to the wizard. Albanon nodded. The drow and the eladrin rose to their knees. Their hands wove in the air and words of magic rippled from their mouths. Before the demons even had a chance to look up, they were engulfed simultaneously by a wave of flame and a burst of writhing darkness. Corpses as scorched and withered as old sticks dragged from a campfire fell to the ground on either side of the demons’ animal victim. Quarhaun nodded in satisfaction. “Let’s go.”
They slithered back down into the ravine and approached the hole cautiously. Quarhaun squatted down and peered inside.
“Yes,” he said, “this looks promising.” Before Shara could stop him, he scrambled through. Words of warning caught in her throat. If the hole really did lead deeper, a shout would only echo and warn any demons of their approach.
Quarhaun was back in moments anyway. “We’re lucky,” he said. “This is exactly what we need. Everyone inside. It’s tight but it opens up.”
He held out a hand for her. Shara didn’t hesitate before accepting it and following him.
The first stretch inside the hole was indeed tight and smelled strongly of both animals and demons. Shara had to drop onto her elbows and wriggle through to get her sword, protruding over her shoulder, past the ceiling. Roghar would have a difficult squeeze. When the ceiling rose, however, she found that there was more than enough space for her to stand. The daylight that came through the hole, broken into moving shafts and shadows by the people following her, revealed a long, smooth-floored gallery. Here and there, the light flashed on red crystals embedded in the walls.
“More Voidharrow,” she said.
“You had to expect that,” said Uldane. He produced a couple of long, thin sticks-sunrods-and rapped the gnarled ends against the tunnel wall. The sunrods burst into bright, steady light.
The veins of crystal they revealed were so thick and twisted that they looked like tentacles reaching down the tunnel toward them. Cariss yelped in surprise and flinched. Even Kri’s face tightened.
“Still no plague demons,” Shara said hopefully, but Albanon waved her to silence and cocked his head, listening. She listened, too, and after a moment, she heard what his sharp ears already had. A whispering drifted along the tunnels, not of voices but of bodies jostling close together. A lot of bodies.
No one said anything. Those with weapons drew them. Uldane kept one of the sunrods for himself and passed the other to Belen. They set off toward the sound. When the tunnel branched, they
paused and listened again. The sound was louder, underscored with an even deeper, more seething hiss, like slowly boiling sugar syrup. The air grew close and thick, but strangely no warmer. The crystal veins in the wall glowed faintly, a light that had nothing to do with the sunrods.
Quarhaun glanced at Kri and Albanon. The priest and the wizard looked at each other, then Albanon nodded toward the tunnel branch that angled more steeply downward. Quarhaun turned down it-only to pause with a grimace on his face and tread lightly in place for a moment. Uldane pointed his sunrod down at the drow’s feet.
The smooth stone of the floor had taken on the same waxy appearance as the rocks outside. It dimpled under Quarhaun’s boots-and sprang back when he raised them. He bounced and it quivered slightly in response. When he rapped the floor with his toe, though, it sounded like kicking solid stone.
“Keep going,” Kri said grimly.
Shara experienced a strange shift in perception as she followed Quarhaun onto the fleshy floor. Suddenly, it seemed to her that she was no longer following a tunnel, but walking inside the guts of some strange, enormous worm. Or inside Vestapalk if the dragon had grown to the size of a mountain. Albanon said Vestapalk was the Voidharrow and the Voidharrow was Vestapalk. Maybe in a way they really were inside Vestapalk.
She took a deep breath and forced that thought away. All the more reason to destroy Vestapalk. All the more reason to make sure the dragon died, no matter who struck the killing blow or how.
Then a deep shudder passed through the tunnel.
All of them froze. “Quarhaun, did you do that?” asked Tempest.
“No.”
The whispering shifted and changed. It swelled ahead of them, like excitement sweeping a crowd, until it echoed in the tunnel. No, Shara realized, it was no echo. The sound coming from behind them wasn’t excited whispering, it was the rapid skittering of claws on stone.
“Demons behind us,” said Roghar.
“Go!” said Kri. “We have to get into heart of the Plaguedeep. That’s the only thing that matters.”
They picked up their pace, moving quickly along the tunnel. The strange floor absorbed the sound of their footsteps. Shara prayed silently that it might be enough to throw off the demons following them. Another shudder passed along the tunnel, stronger than the first. Strong enough to make Kri stumble. Cariss and Belen helped the old priest to his feet. The tunnel branched again up ahead, this time breaking into three passages. One of them made a steep downward plunge. Quarhaun turned into it without asking. Shara, following behind, turned after him-and almost knocked him over as he froze just inside. For an instant, they were a tangle of limbs, then Shara managed to grab the wall and clutch Quarhaun to her before they tumbled down the slope.
The red eyes of plague demons glittered up at them from below. One of the creatures let out a sharp hiss.
Hands from behind seized both her and Quarhaun, hauling them back into the main passage. “Demons coming up from below!” Quarhaun blurted.
“And above,” said Cariss. The shifter crouched with her warpicks ready, facing the main passage where it angled up ahead. More whispering and skittering came from it.
Without a word, Kri took Albanon’s arm and rushed him into the third passage, their robes flapping around them. Shara and the others followed. Another shudder shook the tunnel and this time, Shara felt the floor drop underneath her. She fell hard to her knees, her sword sliding out of her grasp. Between one breath and the next, the distant whispering of the plague demons rose into a deafening cacophony of screeches, cackles, and roars.
When Shara looked up, the passage had broadened into a small cavern and one wall had fallen away entirely. Not five paces from her, the new cavern opened onto chaos, an abyss of shimmering light lined with flashing red crystals. Boulders hung suspended in the air while lightning oozed in sheets. Wind tore through the gap to buffet her.
Plague demons crawled over every solid and semi-solid surface, so thick that it took Shara a moment to realize that the flashing crystals weren’t embedded in the walls-they were actually the bodies of the writhing demons.
Their bodies-and their eyes. Hundreds, even thousands of plague demons stared into the newly formed cavern and screamed with insane fury. Shara snatched up her sword and threw herself back. Her feet hit a chunk of fallen rock and she stumbled, but strong arms caught and held her before she could fall again.
“Quarhaun!” she gasped, but the arms weren’t the warlock’s. They were familiar, but they were encased in a paladin’s heavy armor. Roghar looked down at her, then turned her loose. Shara stared. The last tremor had done more than turn the passage they had followed into a cavern with a window on madness. Sharp drops now divided the former passage. She stood on a platform of rock perhaps a dozen paces across with Roghar and Uldane. On an even smaller section, separated from them by a drop of twice Shara’s height, were Albanon, Tempest, and Kri. Shara turned the other way.
Quarhaun, along with Belen and Cariss, stared down at her from the edge of the original tunnel-at the top of a sheer face of newly exposed rock more than three times her own height.
“Quarhaun!” she shouted again and it looked like he would have called back to her, but at that moment a shadow fell across the cavern. Shara spun around.
The noise of the plague demons went silent as Vestapalk rose up from the pit. Floating stones laced with the Voidharrow shuddered and came together, melting and growing into a bridge that spanned the abyss. Vestapalk settled onto his new perch like an emperor onto a throne. The dragon fixed them with eyes that were swirling pools of liquid crystal-and as he did so, all of the demons looked at them, too. Thousands of eyes staring at them. At her. Shara shivered and fell back a pace.
“Welcome to the Plaguedeep,” said Vestapalk and all of his demons along with him. “Welcome to your tomb.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The last time Albanon had seen Vestapalk, the Voidharrow had already transformed him. His bulk had melted away, leaving Vestapalk skeletally gaunt, his hide stretched tight over muscles and bones. His skull had become longer and narrow. The Voidharrow had oozed out of him, squeezing up between his green scales and staining them red, dripping from his jaws, and filling his eye sockets with shifting liquid crystal. More crystal had flashed like spurs from his joints and his spine. It had taken the place of his talons. It had run in glittering veins across his wings.
Albanon had seen those wings on Vestausan and Vestausir. He’d left them rotting in a valley among the Cairngorms. Yet Vestapalk still had wings-wings that were now entirely crystal, as if formed completely from the Voidharrow. One of his talons, too, was the perfect red of the Voidharrow, replacing the one that lay with Vestagix in Winterhaven.
But Vestapalk had changed in other ways, too. He had grown larger and the red stain on his scales was almost complete. The spurs on his limbs were as big as sword blades. Strength and power flowed off him.
Deep inside Albanon, that small part of him that remembered his own near transformation into one of Vestapalk’s demon exarchs stirred. He could have served this magnificent creature. He could have been one with him.
The part of him Tharizdun had touched rose as well, sweeping over him in a flash of heat and madness. The Voidharrow had been meant to free the Chained God from his eternal prison. Instead it dared to attempt to take this world for its own! It was his enemy. He would destroy it in retribution for its arrogance.
Adoration and hatred, neither emotion truly his own, clashed within him as Vestapalk settled onto his perch. Albanon’s hand sought out Tempest’s. Fear and dread churned in his belly. Those emotions were most definitely his own.
“Welcome to the Plaguedeep,” said Vestapalk and all of his plague demons. “Welcome to your tomb.”
The dragon’s voice still had the same double quality Albanon remembered, one voice deep and rumbling, the other strange and chiming like crystal. His words brought a scream of outrage from Kri. “He knew we were coming!” The old priest turned
on Albanon. His face was flushed and there was spittle at the covers of his mouth. “He knew! Those so-called sleeping demons, the two demons we found arguing in front of the tunnel entrance, the demons that came up behind us in the passage…” Kri turned again and glared up at Vestapalk. “You guided us. You put us exactly where you wanted us!”
Kri’s voice was small in the vastness of the Plaguedeep. Vestapalk smiled at him. “Servant of the Elder Eye, this one knows all your secrets. You come to destroy the Voidharrow. This one will not give you that chance.” His double voice rose to a ringing roar. “Kill them!”
Tempest’s grip tightened on his hand. “Up there!” she cried. Albanon looked where she pointed. High on the wall above them, the dark hole that was all that remained of the passage they’d been following began to glow with flickering, reddish light. Flames appeared within that light-or rather humanoid figures of animated flame appeared, each with a red crystal at its heart.
The fire demons leaped from the hole without hesitation, plunging like streaks of light down to where he stood with Tempest and Kri. Two demons. Four. Six. Eight.
Albanon thought of the gate fragment in his pouch. Maybe he and Kri could still use it, could still work the magic to unravel the Voidharrow. He turned his head and met Kri’s gaze.
For once, the priest’s eyes were hard but calm. Kri almost looked like his old self as he shook his head.
There wasn’t time.
Albanon released Tempest’s hand. The warlock stepped away and readied her rod. Albanon raised his staff as the nearest of the fire demons lashed out at him, its arms stretching and snapping like burning whips.
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