by James Wyatt
A landslide would obliterate his entire, pathetic army in one blow.
“You did this to us,” a dead soldier said, clawing at his eyes.
Roghar whirled his sword around him in a wide circle, trailing light like a comet. Steel and radiance bit into the walking corpses that threatened him and they recoiled, allowing their true demonic faces to show through for a moment.
“Hurry!” he yelled to the soldiers behind him. “Landslide!”
The demons in their dead-soldier guises closed around him again, and the rumbling of the earth grew louder. His sword exploded in light as he slammed the blade into the middle demon’s shoulder, cutting through red crystal and shadowy flesh until nothing remained but dust. He spun to face the two remaining demons and roared his triumph, punctuating his roar with a blast of dragonfire from his mouth. As he conquered his fear their faces with their haunting eyes melted away-and he realized with a start that the rumbling of the earth stopped as well.
There was no landslide-it was just another weapon of the demons, playing on his fears.
But it might have been their most effective weapon yet. In his fear, he had shouted an order to his soldiers that had instilled the same fear in them. Fear could turn an army of soldiers into a panicked mob in an instant, and a glance behind him confirmed that his warning had done exactly that.
“Halt!” he shouted, but he had no confidence that his voice would be heard over the tumult of the panicking soldiers. And before he could do anything more, the other two demons redoubled their assault.
“I’ve heard a lot of lies and excuses in my career,” one demon said, taking on the appearance of the commander on the bridge and glaring at Roghar, “but never so bold a lie from a paladin of Bahamut.”
The other stood back and seemed to grow. Its face was a mirror of Roghar’s own, and great leathery wings spread from its shoulders.
“Kuyutha,” he murmured, awe and fear seizing control of his thoughts. Kuyutha was an exarch of Bahamut, a dragonborn who had been a paladin like him in life, but ascended to his god’s right hand. Dragonborn revered Kuyutha as Bahamut’s particular emissary to them, who had shepherded the scattered clans after the fall of the empire of Arkhosia centuries ago. He was said to train the bravest and purest dragonborn paladins personally, in his halls in the celestial mountains.
“You have failed Bahamut,” the exarch said. “I share our god’s disappointment.”
Roghar glanced between the two figures expressing their condemnation, and he knew the exarch’s words were true. He was a failure as a paladin, a disappointment to Bahamut and a mockery of all his god’s ideals. He fell to his knees and bowed his head, feeling unworthy even to look at Kuyutha. The commander stepped closer and drew a sword, as if to carry out a sentence of execution.
“For Fallcrest!” came a shout from somewhere behind him.
“For Bahamut, and for glory!” more voices cried.
Roghar looked up just as the commander swung his sword at Roghar’s neck. A reflex brought his shield up to block the blow, and he sprang to his feet.
A wave of soldiers was about to break around him. As he stared, trying to remember what was happening, the first soldiers reached the commander, hacking him with swords and prodding him with spears. He made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a roar and changed, his human face transforming into a blank, alien visage of leathery black skin and red crystal.
Roghar spun to face Kuyutha-or rather, the demon that had adopted Kuyutha’s visage and presumed to speak with his voice. “Blasphemy!” he spat. “You dare to speak with the voice of my god!”
“You are the one putting words in your god’s mouth,” the demon whispered.
Roghar’s sword flared with divine light as he drove its point through the demon’s gut. Kuyutha’s face faded as the demon crumbled into dust and ash. “For Bahamut,” he muttered, looking down at the scarlet residue left in its wake.
A cheer erupted from the soldiers as the other demon fell under their blows. Roghar turned to survey the scene. Tempest and Uldane had led an assault on the demons on the other side of the road, and they stood in the midst of another clump of cheering soldiers.
“Our first victory is won!” Roghar shouted, and another round of cheers erupted from the soldiers. Four demons, he thought. How many more do we have to face?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Albanon stared at the Vast Gate as Kri pulled at him, peering through the billowing blackness at the dry landscape that had appeared in the archway. He thought he saw a tiny speck in the crystal blue sky beyond the gate, but it was too far to be of help.
I have to face Kri on my own, he thought.
An effortless gesture sent a bolt of arcane force hurtling at Kri-a weak attack, but it was all he could manage as his spine creaked and popped, sending waves of agony through his body. The bolt glanced off Kri’s shoulder, but it was enough to make the grip of the slimy black tentacles weaken just slightly. Albanon used that moment to slash with his dagger at the tendril that held his neck. It relinquished its hold and he dangled from his ankles again, gasping for air.
“Why do you struggle?” Kri mused. His voice had grown larger-deeper and stronger, and with a resonance that defied the acoustics of the stone chamber, as if he were speaking in some other space. “Do you not see the power I wield? I am the exarch of Tharizdun, the extension of his reach into this pathetic world. You cannot resist me.”
“And yet I do,” Albanon said, slashing at the tentacles that held his feet. Other tendrils batted at his arms, deflecting his blows.
“Because all mortals are born to futility. Mortal life itself is a futile exercise, a vain struggle against an inevitable doom.”
Albanon stretched out the fingers of one hand and engulfed Kri in a roaring blast of fire even as more tendrils coiled around his legs and arms. Kri roared in pain, but this time his grip didn’t falter. A thick tentacle wrapped around Albanon’s waist and squeezed, forcing the breath from his lungs.
A distant sound like the baying of many hounds wafted through the Vast Gate. Albanon roared with the last breath in his chest, and a clap of thunder erupted between him and Kri, drowning out the sound from the gate. The force of the blast pushed Kri backward and knocked away the tendrils that held Albanon, sending him sprawling onto the floor near the gate.
Please hurry, Albanon thought, willing his thoughts to travel through the gate.
“What are you doing?” Kri said. “You’re waiting for something, trying to buy time. What feeble hope are you clinging to?”
“I can beat you,” Albanon said through gritted teeth, climbing slowly to his feet.
Kri laughed. “I admit that your power has grown since you left that fool Moorin’s tutelage,” he said. “And the shattering of your mind seems to have expanded your power even more. But you have no idea what you’re facing.”
“Moorin was no fool,” Albanon said.
“He held you back, kept you from the full extent of your power.”
“He trained me in the responsible use of my power. He gave me all the tools I needed to make use of it, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.”
“Oh, you’ve found it in your heart to forgive the old man, have you? How touching, in the last moments before your own death. And in the same room where he met his grisly end, no less.”
That gave Albanon an idea. He glanced around the room again, his eyes darting over the arcane pattern formed by Moorin’s blood.
“What are you doing?” Kri demanded. A thick tendril of inky blackness darted at his head, but Albanon ducked it and slid a few steps to his right.
Formulas danced through his mind and lightning shot from his fingertips. He saw Kri recoil, but the lightning coursed all around him, tracing the eldritch lines in the chamber, forming a net of deadly power that surrounded him.
“No!” Kri screamed. His flesh seared and some of the inky substance that formed his lower body burned away to greasy smoke as the lightning net closed ar
ound him. But he raised his arm and swept it in a wide arc, trailing darkness behind it. As the darkness spread it stifled Albanon’s lightning and extinguished the fire.
“I will not suffer any further indignity at your hands, whelp,” Kri growled, surging closer to Albanon on his liquid mass of tentacles. He raised his arms over his head-and paused.
The baying of hounds had grown much louder, and Kri hesitated as he looked around to find its source. His eyes settled on the Vast Gate and he frowned.
“Your father’s demesne,” Kri said. He made a dismissive gesture that hurled Albanon out of his path, and he slid over to the gate. “Thought to call for help, did you? So that’s what you were waiting for.”
As Kri lifted his hands to the Vast Gate, Albanon sent another bolt of force hurtling into him, delaying him just an instant-and just enough. As Kri reeled back from the arcane attack, the first hound leaped through the gate and sank its teeth into Kri’s arm.
The hounds of the fey hunts were no ordinary dogs. Their pelts naturally manifested patterns of arcane power, whorls and lines of lighter or darker hue than the surrounding fur. Their eyes glowed like emeralds lit by fire from within, and bright green flames licked from their mouths as they barked and yelped, launching themselves at their quarry. These hounds had held their own against the demons at the Whitethorn Spire, and they showed no fear as they navigated the writhing mass of tentacles that had taken the place of Kri’s legs.
Immeral was the first eladrin to follow the hounds through the gate, his slender sword shining with eldritch light that sliced through the darkness even as his blade bit into Kri’s flesh. Another half dozen fey knights appeared through the portal and took up positions surrounding their foe.
“This changes nothing,” Kri said. A slimy tentacle yanked one of the fey hounds off him and hurled it against the wall as another tendril batted Immeral away. “You have summoned this hunt to its doom.” His tentacles were everywhere, batting at hounds and coiling around the ankles of knights, weaving in the air and emitting their constant stream of dark vapors.
Albanon felt his head spinning again, his grip on his thoughts slipping and madness threatening to claim him again. Kri was no longer human, and what he had become was … it seemed impossible, like something from a nightmare or a lunatic’s visions. Albanon caught himself counting tentacles instead of casting spells, marveling at the fractal division of what seemed like coherent liquid strands, and tried to force his mind back to the threat Kri posed-both to him and to the allies he had summoned to help him.
“You still hear the call of the Chained God, Albanon,” Kri said, staring into his eyes. Even from across the room, his gaze was intense, and it amplified Albanon’s sense of vertigo. “Heed it. Release yourself to it.”
Albanon felt himself falling, and the room dissolved around him. Instead of stone and mortar, he saw the tower as endless expanses of crystalline structures. The Vast Gate was a hole in space, and the Feywild beyond disappeared from view. The eladrin and their hounds were blobs of amorphous flesh and glowing spheres of magic and soul, coexistent but not united. He himself was much the same, except that his magic swirled around him in great glowing arcs, like comets hurtling through the void of space.
Only Kri seemed unchanged from his new perspective. He remained a thing of madness and nightmare, an intrusion into this reality from somewhere else. He reached a slimy tendril out past an eladrin globule and dipped it into one of the circles of Albanon’s power and siphoned off some of his magic, turning it into a blast of fire that leaped at him and washed over hounds and eladrin in its path.
Albanon had no hand to raise in warding, no mouth to give voice to a spell that might counter Kri’s attack, no mind to channel his magic at all-but he had will, somehow, some ability to desire and to effect that desire. And the slightest exertion of that will caused a whirling circle of magic to flare into life as the fire crossed it. The fire dissolved back into the magic that made it, reabsorbed it into Albanon’s own power.
“That’s not possible,” Kri said. “Your mind should be broken by now, your power shattered.”
Shaping his will into pure defiance, Albanon reined in his mad perceptions and reshaped his sense of reality, forcing his mind to see stone and eladrin and hound and Albanon again in place of the abstractions he had created. One more figure emerged from the Vast Gate, a tiny dragon-Splendid! The dragonet swooped in and perched atop the gate, surveying the scene.
With a jolt like an arrested fall, Albanon began to think again, and suddenly he realized what Kri’s weaving tentacles were accomplishing-more than fending off attacks and tangling footsteps, they were feeding, sipping from each glowing orb of life and magic, the soul and power of each eladrin and hound arrayed against him. The more opponents he faced, the stronger Kri became.
So Kri had been right. Albanon had summoned Immeral and his hunt to their doom, because their presence only made Kri stronger. Unless …
Albanon loosed his grip on his thoughts just slightly, let them wander where they had begun to stray earlier, and let his mind fill with seemingly random patterns-the branching and weaving of Kri’s shadowy tendrils. He sank back against the wall as dizziness overcame him, but he saw the patterns, like looking down onto a network of streams and rivulets flowing into a river and feeding the sea. Seeing, he understood, and his understanding gave him power.
An eldritch word, an effort of will, and the focus to keep the patterns and equations fixed in his mind cut off the flow of energy. A second word reversed it, and the backlash was so enormous that every other creature in the room-eladrin and hound and dragonet alike-was hurled away from Kri and sent sprawling to the floor. Albanon screamed a third word to moderate the flow, but it was too late. His allies were reeling from the sudden influx of energy, energy that carried some taint of Kri’s madness with it.
Albanon’s own mind was nearly overwhelmed by the power flowing into him from Kri, and his perceptions fluctuated back and forth between normal vision and the mad abstractions of crystal, flesh, and magic. His thoughts were a flow of formulas and patterns that sometimes seemed like a stream circling the quivering orb of his flesh. In a way, the mad view of things was helpful, because he could separate himself from that flow of thoughts-it became a resource he could draw upon, instead of a torrent that overwhelmed him.
What his eyes showed him only served to create a current of fear that churned the stream of his thoughts. Kri had erupted in fury at the loss of so much power, and he retained enough might to wreak havoc among the hounds and hunters surrounding him. Three hounds and a huntsman lay dead or dying on the floor, blood pooling around them. Kri was pulling the slimy tentacles back to himself, trying to contain the leakage of his power, and lashing out all around him with bolts and blasts of dark energy and thundering booms.
Power spun around Albanon in ever-widening circles of blinding light, fueled by the energy he’d stolen from Kri, the touch of his dark god. He drew a deep breath and watched the eddies of air and magic around him as he stilled his thoughts, he dipped his mind into the current of patterns and numbers, and he spoke a string of arcane syllables. All the fury of a summer thunderstorm erupted around Kri-lightning crackled over his skin, thunder buffeted him from every side, and wind whipped around him with a furious howl.
To Albanon’s mad-sight, Kri seemed to diminish, to get smaller without changing in any other regard. His eyes saw flesh scorched and torn, inky tendrils dissolved into smears of residue on the stone.
Kri’s hand fell on the archway of the Vast Gate, and Albanon’s heart pounded a warning. The image within the archway flickered and changed-the texture of the hole changed in his mad-sight, in a way that defied description-and then Kri slid through the portal.
No no no, Albanon thought, a beat of denial in the river of his consciousness. He stretched out a hand and extended his will, trying to pull Kri back through the gate, but his magic couldn’t reach through to whatever world Kri had entered.
But Kr
i was not all the way through. Tentacles coiled around the crystalline archway as his body hung suspended on the other side of the gate. His face was contorted with hideous effort, as if his physical exertion was keeping him from passing fully through the portal. A loud crack signaled the fracture of the arch, and the Vast Gate went blank.
Kri was gone, carried off to some other place, and the Vast Gate was just a dead archway, a door to nowhere standing in the midst of Moorin’s tower. Albanon stood before the arch, staring through it to the blank stone floor and walls beyond.
“Where did he go?” Immeral said, appearing at Albanon’s side, the Elven words flowing like a clear stream from his tongue.
Albanon shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“To the Feywild?”
“I don’t think so. He changed the focus of the gate before he passed through it, and it was still changing as he hung there.”
Albanon turned around and surveyed the wreckage of the room. It seemed strangely normal, after the madness of the past hours-quiet and stable and sane, just a room in a tower in a perfectly normal town.
The other eladrin were tending to the dead, and even the hounds stood solemnly in a vigil for their lost pack mates.
“It appears another journey to Moonstair is in my future,” Immeral said. “And with a rather larger entourage this time.”
“Not as large as the one you brought with you, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”
“The riders of the hunt know the danger they face. Eshravar died bravely.”
“I’m grateful for your aid, Immeral.”
The huntmaster bowed. “I am at your service, my prince.”
Albanon smiled. “In that case,” he said, “I have one more request before you ride for Moonstair.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Roghar’s army reached the bottom of the bluffs without further incident. Once they were off the narrow trail, they could spread out more, sweeping like a wave through the streets of Lowtown. Almost immediately, a group of three fiery demons appeared, and just as quickly scattered before the combined fury of Roghar and his soldiers. One demon was badly wounded, perhaps mortally, but mostly it seemed they lacked the will to make a stand and hold their territory.
