I was too mature to fall for such a cheap provocation, but after a moment of consideration I made a conscious and rational decision, to run faster.
Three seconds later we reached the edge, and jumped.
And that's when I understood why we were doing things this way:
The entire place was packed with Blackguards. The spiral stairs went down, seemingly without end and I could see Blackguards arrayed all down its length.
I looked up and instead of a ceiling, I saw the Devourer.
Or rather, the reforming black sun. The black beam that fed it was right in the center of the stairwell, not too far from us. It disappeared into the distance beneath us.
On the bright side, it seemed I'd meet its source, the god I had come to kill, soon. Sadly, I was now in freefall.
The Hive, which must've been named after the thousands of doors, was the very center of the Temple. All the Blackguards turned to watch as we fell past them.
Sam said.
I couldn't argue with that. Meanwhile, our speed continued increasing. I was confident we should have reached terminal velocity already, but apparently there was no air resistance here.
The doors and stairs had all merged into a blur of darksteel passing by me.
The reality was that, once again I was still alive because of my Dark Archmage title, but they didn't know that.
I couldn't have dreamed of attacking the Devourer without immunity to darkness, but I still hadn't been sure I would be totally immune to divine darkness. Sam, like all the other Blackguard, was immune to divine magic, which is why they were able to survive in here. Everything was going my way, and I would have sighed in relief if I hadn't been falling even faster by the second!
Soon, I saw something unpleasant below us: the walls ended. Beyond them was an endless void as far as I could see.
We were getting close and she said nothing.
Just as we were about to pass the point of no return, she grabbed me, shadowed and pushed off of thin air, which arrested our fall and redirected us so that we landed lightly on the last flight of stairs. I had noticed how her shadow skill negated gravity or otherwise allowed her to pull off impossible aerial maneuvers before, but I had never thought it could be used like this.
Even if I ignored the fact that my brain should have splattered against the inside of my own skull with the sudden deceleration, the sudden change of direction should have at least made me dizzy. Yet, I felt perfectly okay.
Valia was amazing sometimes.
Sam didn't even set me down, but carried me like a sack of potatoes back toward the abyss.
However, we didn't fall. Instead, she carried me across an invisible bridge toward the center, where a purple portal appeared.
She lugged me through the portal wordlessly, reminding me of how she'd been when we first met: and insufferable, bossy know-it-all.
Bear, why aren't you here to annoy Sam so that she doesn't irritate me so much?
37. Old Pal
When we passed the portal, we found ourselves in a huge room made of, surprisingly, lightsteel.
On the ceiling and each of the four walls, the lightsteel was deeply etched with a huge thirteen-pointed star inside three concentric circles. Countless runes covered every surface other than the floor, including thick wreaths of runes between the circles. The etchings were golden and shone so brightly that they eclipsed the hundreds of light crystals suspended in midair along the walls.
And that was the least interesting part of the room, the truly strange thing was that the floor was made of blood.
Well, that may have been an exaggeration, considering were weren't drowning in it, chances were that only a thin layer covered the floor. Still, the room was huge; how many people would have been exsanguinated to gather this much? The blood was vivid red and liquid, without any sign of coagulating or drying out.
Blood magic was a branch of water magic. Supposedly very powerful, but I had never seen it.
Sam advanced three paces, stopped supporting me in my position, slung over her shoulder, and pulled off one of her gloves. She extended the gloved hand, and tendrils of blood slowly rose from the pool and formed a wicked looking dagger in her hand.
She cut her ungloved wrist with the dagger and blood trickled from the cut into the pool. At the same moment, a layer of blood wept out of her cloak and also ran down into the pool.
I vaguely remembered her cloak absorbing blood before. Now, I knew why.
The cut on her wrist closed just as her cloak ran dry, then she put her glove back on.
At times like this, I understood why entering the Underworld required the player to be an adult. How much further could you really take things, than slashing your own wrist to offer your blood and that of your enemies to a God of Darkness?
After her glove was back in place, she dropped the blood dagger, and it reformed as it fell into a perfect sphere. The place it would have touched the pool caved in, repulsed by the sphere to form a hole.
The hole continued to expand, forming a rectangular void in front of us, then continued expanding on one side until a second, deeper void was formed there. And so it continued, until a long, descending stairway of blood had taken shape. That's when I realized the floor wasn't covered in a thin layer of blood; it was Sam, performing a somewhat more macabre version of the famous Biblical act of walking on water.
And with that, I began to wonder what was with all the parallels to Christianity. Why hadn't whoever designed the drow and the specters taken some inspiration from Norse mythology or something?
Sam climbed down, still carrying me. The stairway ended a few dozen steps down into the enormous sea of blood, and I expected it to lead to a secret door or something. However, when we were halfway down, blood began filling in the area behind us as
new steps formed ahead of us.
I was seriously creeped out, totally surrounded by blood, especially as it soon blocked out the light, leaving us in total darkness, but Sam kept moving down and we could still see with our darkvision. We must've descended more than five hundred steps before an opening finally appeared below us, revealing a lightsteel stairway that continued down where the blood steps ended. After that, it wasn't long until we were completely out of the blood, which now formed the ceiling of the chamber.
The room was just like the room up above, with the same golden etchings and hundreds of light crystals, but the similarities ended there.
Thousands of tiny streams of blood flowed out of the pool in the ceiling and wove together into an elaborate cord before exiting the room through a small opening in one of the walls, which unlike the others had no light crystals illuminating it.
Sam set me down as she finally stepped off the stairway onto the floor. Then, she walked to the wall right below the opening the blood was passing through, and touched it. A vertical split appeared, then widened to create a tight passage at least fifty meters long. To think, I'd been impressed to see a five meter thick door back in Edward's Castle.
We headed in, and now the floating blood was gently undulating, directly overhead as it continued onward.
Sam replied.
We came to the end of the corridor and entered another room of inscribed lightsteel, with light crystals lining the walls. The blood tendril wended its way across the room before disappearing through another hole in the far wall.
Seven lightsteel obelisks were arrayed at the points of a heptagram inscribed into the floor at the center of the room, and all of that was enclosed in yet another thirteen-pointed star. A translucent black orb, about two meters in diameter and hollow, was floating in the center of the obelisks.
We were not alone here.
Seven unhooded Blackguards were sitting with legs crossed, their backs to the obelisks, and hundreds of Chosen — the highest rank of the priests —, were standing along the walls.
As one, they all looked at us and I froze.
I raised an eyebrow.
This thing about the drow being the jailers of the Devourer wasn't news to me, but it was the first time I was confronted with the evidence of it.
We walked to the other wall, which also split, creating a narrow passageway, and we proceeded onward
We were almost to the other side, when Sam shadowed and knocked me aside. I could barely see the blur of the projectile that whistled through the space where my head had been. Before I even reacted to that, Sam had already tossed a pair of throwing knives to intercept another incoming projectile. The first dagger missed when, what I was now sure was an arrow, shifted course midair, but the second dagger managed to intercept it.
The arrow exploded, creating a huge fireball which did no damage to me, but threw me back a few paces; it was the only reason the second arrow, which I hadn't even seen, missed my head as well. Sam, still in shadow form, rushed forward into the fire and disappeared.
I waited a moment for the flames to dissipate and followed her.
As I came out of the corridor, I found myself in a massive chamber, nearly the size of the cave which had housed Ter'nodril. The ceiling, floor, and walls were made of lightsteel like the rooms before and the intertwined streams of blood continued forward in a straight line.
However, moving straight ahead was impossible for me, as the room was a veritable forest composed of millions of chains.
They were made of lightsteel and were of all sizes. From thin ones that I could snap with my bare hands, to chains made of links the size of buildings. They were anchored on every surface, and all converged in the middle of the room.
Well, it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to be freeing the Devourer if my plan to kill him failed.
Sam was standing under a chain with links the size of trucks and motioned for me to join her. I didn't, I was staring at the figure standing on another thick chain fifty meters away.
Tardas.
His face was still the ugly decomposed mess appropriate for the ghoul species, and his impressive white elven longbow was in his hands. But that was where the resemblance to his past self ended.
His clothes were now tight leather armor just like the Blackguards used, other than the quiver hanging on his waist, and the cloak which was conspicuously absent. The slave collar he had worn before was gone, replaced by one so tight that it was biting into his flesh, as evidenced by the dried blood along its edges.
"Jack Thorn," he said with the hoarse voice common to ghouls. His tone held a mix of hostility and ennui.
"Hello there, old pal," I said. "Not cool of you to try to kill me. I thought we were friends after our last chat." I didn't really think that, but I did think we had some kind of truce.
"So did I," he replied. "Until you told Manhart everything about our little chat. After I specifically told you not to trust him." He tapped the collar on his neck. "All the right people thought I was dead until you revealed the truth to him. Me being in this position is your fault!."
"That's funny," I said. "I thought you were Marbareus' slave, not Manhart's. Oh, did you manage to revive the vampire? I kind of hope not, after the way you two conspired to have me killed by Daggers here, by framing me for her death."
"I managed, and I was Marbareus' slave," he said. "But when the drow found out Marbareus survived because of me, they told the Father that the vampires must deliver me or prepare for war. Of course the Father didn't hesitate, why protect a mere slave like me? Marbareus was ordered to give me up, and he obeyed."
I sniffed. "Well, no surprise there. Marbareus is just a cowardly little prick."
"Don't!" Tardas growled. "He had no choice," his voice was strained, full of rage. "The Father revived him; he owed the Father a debt of blood."
"And you were the one who hauled his twice dead corpse all the way to the Father, who I'm sure revived him with basically no effort at all." I said. "In my book, it's clear who Marbareus owes more to."
He didn't answer; there was nothing he could say. He had been sold out, plain and simple.
Of course, he had also just tried to kill me, in addition to all the other things he had done to get on my bad side in the past. I wouldn't be satisfied by a simple verbal checkmate; I had to rub some salt in the wound. "It wouldn't have really taken anything for him to save you, he could have just said no. I mean, the Catacombs declared war on the drow before I told Manhart anything. The drow aren't fools, they would have never launched another war while they were already engaged in one."
"You may be right,” he conceded. But a slave simply isn't worth the risk."
I nodded. "So, the supposed abolitionist Marbareus couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to save his most devoted slave? It's pathetic, at this point I've freed more slaves than him."
Tardas stared at me in silence for a long time before speaking again. "This mind control collar is absolute, and the drow ordered me to kill you once you came." I raised an eyebrow at that declaration. "Yes, little fool, they knew you would come. They even know why: you think you can kill the Devourer." Tardas gave a dry laugh at that. "Pitiful."
That shocked me so much that I
couldn't keep it off of my face. "How?" I asked.
"How, indeed?" He smiled. "I already told you the answer. Did you decide to kill the Devourer, or did Manhart send you to do it? The drow are masters of manipulation, but even they lose out to the lich. The drow attacked Manhart's so-called Resistance; of course he would counter-attack."
"Manhart has nothing to do with this," I said firmly. "He even delayed my coming and tried to bribe me to stay away from here, he had other things he wanted done."
"Oh." Tardas said, with a disturbingly wide smile. "And you always do what you're told, right? Or are you a man that when pushed one way, will strive even harder to go the opposite direction?" I frowned as he kept talking. "And, if even I saw this quality in you, there's no way the lich wouldn't be exploiting it; that's exactly what you did in the Great Maze. There was only one thing you were not supposed to do under any circumstances: kill the deathlords. And you deafened yourself by jabbing blades into your own ears, just to have the chance to kill one."
Then it hit me. Manhart had even spoken of my unpredictable nature, all the while pushing me in the direction he wanted! What Tardas said made sense: Manhart would want revenge for the attack on his Resistance. I hadn't even thought about how strange it was that he had made no move to enact his retribution.
In the end, I was his move.
"Well, shit," I said.
What was that I'd thought about Manhart's AI being subpar? I had been outmaneuvered and the reason was simple: lack of information. Manhart and the drow knew the stakes and the factions, while I was just a newcomer with little understanding of what they were capable of. That was almost certainly why Manhart refused to give me political information on Valia even though he fulfilled all the other promises!
"As I was saying," Tardas continued, "I was ordered to kill you. But there was no need for such order, in the case of a worm like you... It'll be my pleasure to end your life."
His hands blurred as he took an arrow from the quiver at his waist, nocked it, drew and let fly.
I barely got my shield up in time to defend myself. The arrow struck it and a thick layer of ice formed all around me, leaving me locked in place and blinded.
Unbound Deathlord_Obliteration Page 49
