"I won't let that happen."
"So you say." She points to the arguing newcomers. "How many are they?"
"I can count."
"There are five of them. Measured against thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands who stand to suffer much less merciful demises if we let them blunder on."
"A minute ago you wanted to send them in as decoys."
"If we can control them, perhaps that would still be best. But having had time to weigh the odds ..."
"You'll do it?" Gad asks.
Vitta shifts her outsized halfling feet. "Jerisa will be back soon."
"She won't do it."
"She'll do whatever you ask of her."
"Let's not get into that."
Hendregan sculpts his campfire. As if attached to marionette strings, the fire swirls and twists, forming an undulating tower.
"Hendregan," calls Vitta, "you'd be willing to drop a ball of fire on those wretched waifs over there. Yes?"
"Yes," says Hendregan. "What for?"
Gad grits his teeth. "We're not going to drop a ball of fire on them."
Hendregan creates a miniature army, each soldier a tongue of flame, around his fiery tower. "Give me the word," he says.
"You know I'm correct," says Vitta.
"Not so."
"This is no time to be wise, Gad. It's time to be smart."
Vasilissa breaks from the others to head their way. Gad and Vitta walk to meet her.
"We'll do as you suggest," says Vasilissa.
"I'm pleased to hear it," says Gad.
Chapter Thirteen
The Hunger
Tiberio opens his pack, pulling the stopper on a clay jug of dry batter mix. He pours it into a heavy iron skillet until he has a heaping mound in the middle. He mixes it with water and drops in slivers of preserved meat and chunks of dried apple. Hendregan guides the fire to hug the skillet's underside. The two parties sit in silence watching the fieldcake cook. When the top has crusted brown, Tiberio slides in the tip of a small knife. It comes out sloppy, so they wait a little longer. The half-orc finally pronounces it done. He places the skillet on a rock and cuts the cake into narrow triangles. From another jar he produces white shards of sauerkraut, dropping them onto the cake. The strangers eat first, hungrily chomping at the slices of fieldcake, then meticulously licking each crumb and flake of pickle from their fingers. The other woman, Krasa, seems ready to sob again.
Gad sees that Tiberio is ready to give her his portion. He sidles up behind the big man. "We need you properly fed," he says. Reluctantly Tiberio pops his piece of fieldcake into his mouth.
"Have you found anything to eat here?" he asks the gnome, Maleb.
"No game bigger than a rat. Carrion birds will sometimes land, but they're hard to catch. Once we got a raven. Its wing was bent already. We found a river full of eels but sickened when we ate their meat. There have been no nuts, no berries ..."
Tiberio takes Gad aside. "We're running out of food, too. We planned on foraging, but as Maleb says, nothing's looked safe."
Vitta is behind them. "You tell us this after you feed the strangers."
"We all knew this," says Tiberio.
"What do you suggest?"
"We don't want to eat any of those demon bugs. Rats aren't worth the trouble it takes to catch them."
"You're telling me what we don't want to do, Tiberio."
"There are birds still. They haven't been able to catch any for lack of snares. I say we stop long enough to catch some crows or buzzards. I have salt to make jerky. Depending on our luck, we'll bag enough to survive on for a week or more."
"Will there be food in the tower?" Vitta asks.
"The cultists who wandered into our camp ...no one was feeding them."
"It will be better to be wrong, but we have to assume that we'll have to fend for ourselves," she says.
"Which means we should be prepared going in," agrees Gad. "How much time will it cost us?"
"Hard to reckon," says Tiberio. "A day if fortune smiles on us."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Several days. A week."
"I don't like it," says Gad.
"We'll need our wits about us when we get in there," says Vitta. "Hunger makes you stupid."
"They say we're only a day away."
"What are the three keys to a successful rip?" asks Vitta, prompting him to repeat one of his own favorite sayings.
Gad grimly takes his cue: "Preparation, preparation, preparation."
Vasilissa and her party assemble their few possessions and gather before Gad. "Which way should we go?" she asks.
"To the west lies the cultist camp; you risk capture if you head that way. I'd say reverse course. Find a trail or chokepoint stragglers are most likely to come through. Or maybe a stream with drinkable water. Concentrate on solitary travelers. When you see large groups, hide and let them pass you by. They're hard to persuade: there's always someone who sees himself as the leader, or wants to be. He's always the one who digs in his heels against you and turns the others."
"May Iomedae the Protector grant you luck," says Vasilissa.
"And you as well," says Gad.
They turn and pick their way through the woods. Maleb takes the lead only to stop short when he steps over a fallen log and convulses, clutching his injured leg.
The sun is not much higher in the sky when Calliard and Jerisa appear silently in the trees. They show off their stolen robes and accoutrements, and describe the encampment and the gathering army. Fraton's name is roundly cursed.
"I suppose it's too much to hope," says Vitta, "that he died in that battle."
"Fraton?" Gad scoffs. "He's luckier than we are. If I'd known, I'd have sent Vasilissa and the others to him. Let the paladins look after them."
Vitta tells them about the would-be demon-fighters, omitting the part where she argued for their deaths.
"Fraton might have embraced them," says Calliard. "Or he might have burned them at the stake."
As Tiberio uses the last of the fieldcake mix to fix their breakfast, Gad repeats their deliberations on the matter of the food supply.
"We saw birds in the sky as we came in," Jerisa says. "Over the flatlands, to the northwest."
"A quick detour to hunt," says Gad, "and then the hard part starts."
Birds are all too easy to find. A column of vultures and buzzards whirls lazily in the sky. The creatures dive down to the cracked plain, to be replaced by others flying in from the north, south, east and west. They share the sky with assorted demons who buzz indifferently through their formation, on their way either to or from the Mendevian border.
Walls and pillars of a ruined city litter the plain, providing its only cover. The six make frustrating progress across it. They hide from demons wheeling overhead. For every minute they spend on the move, they lose another nine hunched against a crumbling facade or crouched beneath a marble plinth.
They near the spot that draws the carrion feeders. Dozens of corpses, and the bodies of as many horses, strew a dried-up creek bed. The pennants of warrior orders lie dirtied on the ground. The six flatten themselves to the chalky earth.
Calliard reads their ensigns: the Order of the Emerald Sword, the Guild of Diggers and Sappers, the Knights of the Rampant Dragon.
"You saw these companies under Fraton's command?"
"The Rampants and the Greenswords, yes," says Calliard.
"I saw the banner with the crossed shovels," says Jerisa, referring to the pennant of the Diggers and Sappers.
They do not stop to wonder how the fight was carried so far away from the cultist encampment. It could have happened in a dozen ways.
Buzzards squabble atop the rotting haunches of slaughtered steeds. Raven
s step fastidiously through the carnage, tearing flesh from dead faces. Sleek kites dive strategically into the battlefield, snatching meat from the beaks of vultures.
The six lie there, watching and at the same time not.
"We won't need snares, at least," says Gad.
They fire with bows and crossbows. Each missile kills a bird. When one dies, its living comrades immediately start to peck at it. It too has become food.
"Odds and evens?" Vitta asks.
They throw fingers to decide who will go to collect the game. Jerisa and Hendregan scuttle up, carrying the purloined cultist robes. The live birds take to the air. Using the robes as makeshift sacks, they pile up the dead ones and haul them back.
"Later," begins Calliard, "when we're eating these birds, we must make a pact never to—"
"Leave that sentence where it is," says Gad.
Tiberio paws his way through the game heaped before him. Though the creatures' stomachs are distended with food, the birds themselves are scrawny, with little meat on them. "We need more," he says.
It takes only moments for the hungry birds to return to their feeding grounds. The team harvests two more waves of them before stopping. They retreat to the shelter of a shattered temple, its roof nearly intact. There they strip the birds of feathers. Tiberio cleans the carcasses. With Hendregan's help, he quickly cooks them. Sprinkling an alchemical salt on the morsels of meat, he seals them against mold and rot.
Vitta gets up to move from the cookfire's smoke. It follows her to her new position. She waves it away. "If, when we get there, the demons lay on a great feast for us, I'm never going to let you forget this, Tiberio."
"I promise you, Vitta," says the half-orc, "I already won't."
It is deep in the night before the last of the meat is prepared and packed away. Gad rouses the sleepers. "We didn't see much cover beyond these ruins," he says. "Calliard, do demons fly at night?"
"You might find a few but not many. A demon can see in the dark, but only for about twenty yards. So they'll fly by day when they can, to avoid collisions."
Gad pokes his head out of the temple arch. The swollen moon reflects light across the plain. "We'll have enough moonlight to move by, if the sky stays clear."
"If that's so, the demons might take to the air when they otherwise wouldn't," Vitta says.
"Likely so, but we've seen how many there are by day. Moving by night, we'll be accosted by fewer of them."
"We'll have to start dressing like cultists now," says Calliard.
They don their robes, their horned helmets, their spiked and rusted shoulder plates.
"We look ridiculous," says Vitta.
Gad adjusts her grimacing mask of a helmet. "You can't let that thought show."
"How can I not? I can barely see through this thing."
"Put yourself in the mind of a cultist. Not the ones like Vasilissa and Maleb, desperately clinging to sanity. You're one of the ones who's embraced madness. Who's yearned all her life to wreak vengeance on the petty fools who mocked you and held you down. Who thinks, by placing this helm on your head, you're one step closer to becoming a demon lord."
"A prize idiot, in other words."
"The outfits alone will fool no one. The whole game lies in how you carry yourselves. All of you. As if the robes and armor lend you confidence. Take every step as if you expect others to fear you. As if you're crushing the faces of anyone who ever stood in your way."
"I almost feel sorry for them," says Tiberio, "when you put it like that."
"Make sure it's only almost. They'd be happy to kill you."
"And then dance draped in your entrails," Vitta adds.
"And that," Gad says. "We must each of us let out the part of us that is a killer, a maniac."
"That part of me is gone, Gad," Tiberio says.
"You know what I mean. Let's go. We've only a few hours of darkness left. I'd hoped to be there by now, but the tower isn't even in sight yet."
They plunge, already exhausted, over the moon-swept plain. As they leave behind the field of corpses, they hear strange animals snuffling and crawling across it. Great serpentine maggot-beasts, their undersides lined with reaching feelers, flow across the bodies of the dead. They snap bones and slurp greedily at the marrow inside.
Sickened, the company accelerates its pace.
As the night drains away, they see the occasional silhouette flitting across the face of the moon. Now and then a flapping resounds overhead. They travel without incident until dawn breaks.
A cold unease billows through them. Calliard is first to feel it. He points to a gap in a far-off ridgeline. Through it, they see the protruding tip of a curious structure. It terminates in a series of feathery appendages, like the floating antennae of an aquatic bug. Below it is a conical turret, its grooved surface resembling the abdomen of a scaled insect. The ridge obscures the rest.
Moonlight washes the tower, but is not its only source of illumination. It glows faintly from within, in a glowworm's greenish tinge. This interior phosphorescence pulses as if in time to the beating of a febrile heart.
Chapter Fourteen
The Site
Calliard pitches to the stony ground. His scalp buzzes. A dull tingling afflicts his jaw and limbs. He feels the vial of demonblood inside his pack. Though he has carefully wrapped it in cloth, the vial has nonetheless traveled to the edge of the bag. Through the rough fabric of the pack, through the backplate of his armor, through the quilted layer of padding below, the drug inside the vial resonates. Calliard feels the vial as if it has become a part of him. It throbs like an aching leg.
Tiberio opens Calliard's pack, in search of his waterskin. Calliard jolts and cries out. "No!"
From somewhere nearby comes a lazy flapping sound. A batlike demon flits across the breach in the ridgeline. It interrupts its flight and circles. The group freezes. Hendregan counts under his breath, picturing it swooping toward them, calculating the outside range of his fireball spell.
With taloned feet the demon pushes away from the ridge and flaps away.
"What happened?" Tiberio asks Calliard.
"I don't know," he says. "That damnable tower ..."
On each pulse of the tower's inner light, the six feel a weird heat brush their exposed skin. Nausea roils them.
Jerisa looks away. The image of a soldier, beheaded by a demon at Suma Castle, bubbles up from months-old memory. She wills it away—the gore, the dead man's pleading face.
"Do we need the Salve of Tala already?" she asks.
"We must ration it carefully," says Calliard.
"Can we all hold out a while longer?" Gad asks.
The group murmurs collective assent.
"If it gets bad—if you start hearing or seeing things, or are weakened by sickness, tell us," Gad says. "We should dole it out carefully, but we also have to be on our game when we enter that tower."
The turret puffs out, exhaling a green cloud.
"What have you talked us into?" asks Vitta.
"That's why we're here," says Gad.
"I know you said it was alive, but ...what I had fixed in my mind was more tower, less demon."
"It's too late to go back," says Gad.
She starts walking. "No one wants to go back," she says.
The others follow. For a while, as they tramp closer to the ridge, its angle shields the tower from their sight.
They pass a rift in the earth. Wet, fist-sized eggs bubble up from its unseen depths. A red light shines dimly through them from below. It renders the filmy egg casings translucent. Inside, bat-winged embryos flip and tumble. The eggs number in the thousands. As more are vomited from below, those on the top of the heap tumble down its expanding sides. When the eggs break, the creatures inside either expire, gasping, or shake off a glue
y coating and take to the air. One newborn careens at Gad; he ducks from its path. Hendregan seizes it with a faintly blazing hand. Its bent, manlike face spews out a peeping curse. The sorcerer tightens his grip; it crisps into nothingness.
"Shall I burn them all?" Hendregan asks.
"Wait," says Gad. "What is this?"
"One of the many spurs of the Worldwound," says Calliard.
"And that means what I think it does?"
Calliard nods. "Climb down far enough into that fissure and you'll come out in the Abyss. It's extending itself into our world. Slowly turning Golarion into another layer of the demon realms. The tower of Yath will be yet another spur, likely originating in a different layer. This one is part of a spawning ground."
"These are baby demons?"
"Not the term a demonologist would use, but, yes."
"Then I'll burn them," Hendregan announces.
Gad grabs his elbow. "I said wait. Calliard, if we destroy this spawning ground, will the demons sense it?"
"Possibly. It could explode into a blazing column higher than this ridge."
Hendregan tries and fails to contain his jittering excitement.
"Or," Calliard continues, "every being in that tower might instantly hear the shrieks of a thousand dying demonspawn."
Gad moves on. "Then leave it be."
"Hold on," says Jerisa. "We're looking at a thousand demons, waiting to be born. That's enough to overwhelm Suma Castle. To raze Krega, or Egede."
Gad stops. "That's not the mission."
"The mission is to save Mendev, isn't it?"
"Yes, by destroying the tower. Calliard, does bringing Yath down seal up this breach?"
"It could well. Yath is itself a breach, but such a mighty one that it's likely accelerating the rate at which the Abyss claims this land."
The Worldwound Gambit Page 16
