Conspiracy tddts-6

by J. Robert King

  Ingrar gasped a breath. "Not in there, Master Entreri. Not in there. We're not going in there." "What? What is it?"

  "Death," said Ingrar. "Our deaths. All of our deaths. The deaths of every creature on this cursed coast."

  Entreri looked at the rest of his party, their faces white and wary. "See? I told you the bloodforge was in here," he said flatly. With that, the assassin strode into the audience chamber of King Aetheric III.

  Noph tugged a reluctant Ingrar. "Let's go. We've signed on this far." Stepping past the fallen guard, they entered the chamber.

  We should have heeded their presence. We should have known this assassin could slay even us. But with fiends flooding the city, bloodforge armies appearing against them, and the smell of death so strong in our gills… with the apocalypse descending around us, Artemis Entreri and his band were no more than cuttlefish splashing in tidal pools.

  We should have known they could slay even us. But we could not have stopped them, anyway-not and fought the fiends.

  The audience chamber of the mage-king was dank, cavernous, and black. The air was heavy. At the far end of the lightless chamber hung thick ebony curtains. The empty darkness in front of the drapes seemed to be swimming with phantasms-tiny crayfish and sea sprites and spineless creatures floating in air. A deep, quiet rumble filled the chamber, and minute water sounds-eddies, waves, vague liquid voices.

  …

  Entreri wasted no time. He rushed with Shar to the curtain and drew back one small edge of it to reveal a triangle of thick glass beyond. He stuck his silvered plate to the glass.

  Within the tank, something enormous stirred. It moved with silent, slippery ease. A broad circle of deeper darkness appeared at the top of the triangle of glass. It descended within the tank and hovered beside the curtain's edge.

  "What is it?" Shar asked, gazing at the circle of night.

  Digging in one of his many pockets, the assassin said, "It doesn't matter. The mage-king can't reach through. His poison can't come through. I placed the portal, and I command it."

  "It's an eye," Shar whispered in realization. She stared at the huge spot. "That's what it is. A wide-open eye."

  Noph led a trembling Ingrar up beside them. "I hope you've got something superterrific up your sleeve, boss."

  Entreri nodded. He extended a clenched hand, and then opened his fingers to reveal a palmful of white pills. "One's enough to purify a lake. Twenty-five will make this tank taste like a mountain spring."

  The others looked confused.

  The assassin tossed the handful of pills into the silver plate. They soundlessly disappeared into it. On the far side of the thick glass, the white tablets emerged and slowly sank, bubbling, toward the unseeable bottom.

  Entreri turned, took Shar's hand, and said, "Let's go."

  "That's it?" Rings asked as he and the others dogged the assassin's heels.

  Entreri herded them toward the double doors. "We'll probably want to be a good distance away when the mage-king shatters his tank."

  "Shatters his tank?" Noph echoed.

  "From what you've told us, he needs salt water and the poisons of his own skin to survive. What sustains him would kill us, and vice versa. What do you think pure water will do to him? It'll burn like acid. It'll make him break out. It'll leave the bloodforge undefended."

  Another voice spoke, a deep, wounded, angry voice.

  "Why have you done this? Why?"

  The mage-king.

  Entreri didn't answer. He headed with a little more speed toward the doorway.

  The voice grew louder. Sounds of boiling came from the tank.

  "We keep the fiends at bay. Kill us, and you kill yourselves, you kill this whole land."

  As the pirates passed through the double doors, Entreri muttered calmly, "The water is completely pure by now."

  The mage-king roared:

  "You, Artemis Entreri, you and yours, are our eternal enemies! You have slain us, and all of Doegan!"

  "Head for high ground," the assassin quietly advised.

  Trandon raised his staff to receive the next fiend. But it was not merely one: a whole wall of the villains rushed toward him. A retreat? Still, by sheer force of numbers, they would sweep all the defenders under.

  "Brace for it!" shouted Trandon to his companions.

  The others looked, and chorused a groan. One by one, they finished off their current adversaries and braced for the new onslaught.

  Trandon stood, staff lifted high to crack the first head that came. "It has been an honor to battle beside you three!"

  "Aye!" came Jacob's reply through bloody teeth. "Let the bards sing Tyr's praises!" Kern added.

  "Aye!" joined Miltiades.

  The demon tidal wave crested as it approached. Fiends tumbled over each other, trampling comrades in their haste. There came a moment of shrieks and blood and flailing.

  Trandon split one head with the tip of his staff and another with the butt; Jacob's sword hewed the back of a skeletal warrior; Kern pounded the bleating foes into messy piles of flesh and bone; and Miltiades stood above them all, eyes gleaming with righteous fury as his hammer slew four, five, six fiends.

  The wave swept onward.

  Behind that sanguine line of fleeing fiends came another wave, mightier than the first.

  Black-armored warriors.

  Black-robed war wizards.

  The conjured defenders of Doegan.

  They advanced relentlessly, chopping into the backs of the fleeing monsters. This line, too, passed the wounded paladins, leaving them to stand and gape after the retreating battle.

  "What was that?" Kern wondered aloud.

  Miltiades's voice was a growl of condemnation. "A bloodforge army, no doubt. Wicked defenders of a wicked regime."

  "Still," Jacob said, patting the dust from his clothes, "they saved us from the fiends."

  Miltiades nodded grimly. "You need healing, Kern."

  The golden warrior looked at his shoulder. "I suppose I do."

  Miltiades drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, placed his hands on the wound, and offered a silent prayer to Tyr. Even as the holy power moved through him, stitching together sinews and muscles and mending cracked bones, Kern glanced at Jacob.

  "I was sure at one point I saw you stuck on the end of a trident," the golden paladin said.

  Jacob blinked back at him and shook his head. "Not me." He gestured at his clothes, dusty but bloodless. "Maybe it was Trandon."

  As Miltiades lifted his hands from the healed shoulder of his comrade, Kern said, "Was it you, then, Trandon?" They turned to see the tall warrior gazing down at his chest.

  Trandon's voice was hesitant, filled with awe. "No blood, here, but something else." The pendant glowed brilliantly. "Eidola is here. She is nearby."

  Kern's eyes grew wide. "My antimagic must have worn off!"

  "Or perhaps the warding magic around Eidola was compromised when the fiends attacked," Trandon offered.

  "Conjuring that army must have taken its toll," Miltiades said. "The mage-king must have diverted power from cloaking his captive."

  "Are you saying-?" Kern began.

  "The only way to find out is to head for the palace, and watch the pendant," Miltiades said.

  Trandon was already rushing up the road toward the abode of the mage-king.

  Though the four paladins ran for the palace, they could not outrun the descending night. Deep darkness had fallen by the time they reached the stair bridge in front of the palace. They paused, panting, and gazed out over the city.

  The distant thunder of battle filled the air. From this high vantage, the warriors could make out the line of defenders, holding fast in most places. Fire and smoke rose in a thick curtain around the city.

  "There," Miltiades said, pointing to a spot a mere quarter mile distant. "They've broken through." The others then saw it, a company of fiends charging past a quickly closing breech. "They'll be here in mere moments."

  "But the pendant is nearly
blinding, now," Kern said, holding hands up before his face. "She must be here, in the palace. We must proceed."

  Miltiades's face was a mask of soot and scars. "I would, but for those fiends. They are after one thing- the bloodforge. For the good of all Toril, we cannot let them have it." He unslung his warhammer and marched grimly up the steps of the stair bridge. "The only way for land-bound creatures to cross the moat is to climb here." He reached a small landing just ahead of the palace facade. "We hold them here, as long as we can. The fiends will pay a dear toll in blood to pass."

  Kern marched up beside him, hammer flashing. "I will take the vanguard and draw them in, slaying with my antimagic."

  Trandon said, "I will be at your one hand, and Jacob at your other. No claw will touch you."

  Even as they arrayed themselves and kicked footholds, the fiends converged on the stairway and charged upward.

  In moments, the villainous horde crashed against them. Kern and Miltiades flung them back with killing blows, alternating like a pair of men driving stakes into the ground. Jacob hacked and hewed. Trandon hurled attackers into the moat. Shorn claws and cracked skulls tumbled bloodily down to stick on the spikes below. The defenders held.

  The fiends bunched up along the stairs and began slaying each other to get by. Those that could fly took to the air, but other defenders in the palace beyond sent whispering shafts into them. They dropped among the other dead in the moat.

  In the air or on the stair, the fight was furious. Some fiends were unmade by the convulsing limbs and acidic blood of their slain comrades. Others merely crowded themselves from the causeway and dropped onto impaling spikes. But many, if not most, fell to the powerful blows of the paladins.

  "We are holding them," Miltiades grunted as his war-hammer pulped the pod-shaped head of a greater fiend. "We are holding back the armies of hell!"

  Then one fiend slipped past-a great anaconda with the head of a boar. Miltiades pounded its slithering side, but couldn't stop it. A second got by, and a third. In time, the tide of fiends flowed once more. For the defenders, all that remained was the grim, bloody work of slaying those they could.

  Miltiades shouted, "May Tyr bless the palace defenders!"

  Chapter 8

  Confluence

  As the pirates fled into the hall, Noph glanced back toward the audience chamber.

  The twin curtains of the mage-king's tank drew slowly aside to reveal a tank glowing with fiery radiance. Orange-red water churned and boiled around a thrashing, titanic creature. Mangled, scaly, tentacular- the mage-king writhed: his torso arched in agony; his tentacles spasmed; his hands clutched into fists; his teeth ground together like rolling boulders. Aetheric thrashed, recoiled, shuddered, but all the while held those tank-bursting fists by his sides. His skin molted away. It sloughed in ribbons in the water. It circled him in tatters. Still, he did not break the glass.

  A sniff and a tug from Ingrar brought Noph back around. "We've got more problems. Brimstone-there are fiends ahead. Tanar'ri. They're pouring up the stairs in front of the palace."

  "Swords! Knives!" Noph called to his comrades. "Fiends ahead."

  "Damn," Belgin swore. He came to a halt and drew steel. "Why don't we escape down a side passage-let the fiends and the mage-king take care of each other?"

  Entreri shook his head. "And let demons have first crack at the bloodforge? No. We stand and fight."

  Noph helped Ingrar to the side of the hall. "You wait here. I'll keep anybody from coming at you." He drew his sword.

  "Sure," Ingrar responded, hefting his cutlass. "Just don't back up into me; Fll stab anything that comes close."

  There was time for nothing more. Shattering glass and splintering wood announced the army's arrival. Fiends smashed through the front facade of the palace and flooded toward the pirates.

  Entreri and his party stood unmoving, a circle of swords against an army of fangs. The onslaught came, unstoppable.

  Noph set his stance and prepared to die.

  Then another, deeper shattering came. The fist of the mage-king smashed the impenetrable wall of his tank. Water blasted through the breach, and cracks ran out from it in all directions. The glass held for one final moment before it all-glass, water, and squid-lordroared out and struck the opposite wall of the audience chamber.

  The wall creaked, then gave way. Ten-ton stone blocks fragmented into flying rubble and scouring sand. Rock sprayed outward. In its midst came one of the king's tentacles, as wide around as an elephant.

  "Down!" Noph shouted. He and Ingrar dropped to their faces.

  The others did, too. A killing hail of stone, sand, and water roared by overhead. It rushed straight into the teeth of the charging tanar'ri, ripping flesh from bone.

  Noph saw no more. The flood arrived.

  A muscular wave hoisted him from the floor and tossed him in its black belly. The breath he held blasted from his lungs. He tried to swim, but the water was omnipotent.

  A great wall of tentacle swept beneath him. His cheek scraped the bossed ceiling. A chandelier surged by. Then he saw it again, that great black circle, that deep, deep darkness.

  The eye of Aetheric.

  Noph kicked out away from the mage-king's face and dropped into a small side eddy.

  He plunged. Down, down. Whirlpool. It emptied water through a doorway and down. It emptied him. Water rushed in a choppy cascade down, down, down. Tumble tumble turn, down. Spiral stairs cracked his knees. Torches glowed lurid before they snuffed, and down, down.

  The stair went black. Chaos. Blunt blows. Panicked roar.

  And down.

  A great roar came from behind the paladins, from the very palace of the mage-king. The battle stilled for a moment as every eye lifted skyward. Stars were suddenly falling from the heavens. Huge chunks of firmament whistled down in a terrific rain.

  "The Day of Tyr," gasped Miltiades, breathless. "The end of time. The Coming of Justice." Suddenly oblivious to the foes before him, he dropped to one knee.

  The other paladins did likewise. Their heads bowed down just as a massive boulder of masoned stone bounced over them and struck the gaping fiends below. The rock splattered the first few beasts. Then it rolled down the stairs, grinding demons to grist.

  "Do you see?" Miltiades cried, elated. " 'And my hammer shall smite the nations of darkness and grind them into bitter meal.'"

  The bowed heads lifted, just in time for them all to witness the next onslaught. A massive flood vaulted over them. It bore in its churning belly the twisted, broken bodies of more fiends. They soared by overhead in a cascade of blood and water.

  " 'And I shall cast them down from on high, as the blacksmith casts down the burrs of iron that cling to his new-forged hammer. They shall fall from the heavens on this, my day, that all peoples of every land will know that the hammer of justice descends.' " As Miltiades spoke these words, a spray of water and blood swept over them. The bodies of fiends plunged down all around.

  Kern cried out, "How could we have doubted you, Tyr? How could we have listened to the profanities of a tentacled beast instead of the precepts of justice?" He turned to the silver warrior. "There is no Fallen Temple. There is only the True Temple-only we, the faithful of Tyr! Let us rescue Eidola, and save Doegan!"

  The ground trembled.

  The skies split open.

  The rain of fiends faltered and ceased.

  The wheels of Tyr's chariot roared thunder.

  Kern and Miltiades turned toward the sound, toward the coming of Tyr in glory. What they saw was not Tyr, though, but his enormous, bleeding apotheosis.

  Aetheric III dragged himself up from the broken dome of his palace. His hands seized and smashed turrets. His tentacles coiled and recoiled in slug paths of steaming slime. His throat, so long filled with poison, roared.

  "Doegan, behold your god!"

  Chapter 9

  Conspiracy

  Noph awoke in the dark palace dungeon. He slouched against a wall of stone, water covering him t
o his chest. He could smell the sullen ash of doused torches, and could hear the gentle drip of wet ceilings. He saw little. The only light in the place sifted faintly down from the spiral stairs at either end of the corridor.

  "Ingrar?" he muttered stupidly. His voice was raw. Coughing spastically, Noph spat out salty foam. "Is anyone else alive down here?"

  A woman's voice came from a nearby cell. "Who's there? Who is it?"

  More water rattled in Noph's lungs. "Who are you?"

  "I am Eidola Neverwinter," said the woman.

  Noph struggled to his feet. "I'm coming. I'm coming." He steadied himself on a wall, then lumbered along the flooded corridor. "I've got to find a key." He dragged the toe of his boot, searching for With a splash, he tripped atop a guard's body. Noph struggled to one side and felt for a ring of keys. Finding it, he ripped it free from the man's belt.

  "I'm coming. I'm coming."

  Noph reached the cell door where he had heard the voice and started fitting key after key into the slot. His hands jangled excitedly.

  The lady is within. I will rescue her, he thought. Another voice stirred in the back of his mind. What if Entreri is right? What if she is an agent of the Unseen? What if she is a monster?

  A key clicked. The cell door swung open. Noph gulped and stepped into the breach. With an effort he quashed his doubts. Surely the paladins were right. Surely Khelben would not have given them this commission if he'd had any doubts of Eidola's bona fides.

  In the deep darkness, he could see little. Then he felt a warm wave of relief wash over him. On the far wall, he made out a feminine outline-long hair plastered to thin shoulders, a curve of hips, lean but strong legs. The woman's arms were held out to either side by massive shackles bolted into the wall, and her legs, submerged in the fetid flow of Aetheric's shattered tank, were bound together by a broad band of iron.

  "I'm Kastonoph Nesher," Noph said stupidly. To make matters worse, he realized he was bowing. "Your husb-your groo-Piergeiron sent me."