It was Seren! And … Captain Thoster too.
The wizard unleashed a volley of fire into one of the aboleths advancing upon Raidon. By the spread of smoking, twitching, and nearly cleaved in twain aboleth bodies that spread out from the wizard and pirate, they had obviously been at it for some time. The two had achieved quite a tally, nearly equal to his own. It was almost as if they’d received help—
An acidic slime wave buffeted him, drawing his face into a rictus. Angul burned off the excess goo even as Raidon leaped into the air. As he reached the zenith of his jump, he pulled his elbow up next to his face, then slashed down with it in tandem with his own descending weight, channeling all the force of his body into an aboleth’s brow. The creature stopped moving. It was dazed, stunned, or dead; it didn’t matter. He scribed another glyph.
But curiosity made him scan the room again before he pressed ahead. Japheth was nowhere to be seen. Good. Seren and Thoster must have stopped the warlock and his tainted cargo after all.
In another few moments, his binding circle would be complete. A Seal of Slaying would lance the Eldest, strong enough to end its stony vigil forever.
Japheth uttered the final words of the ceremony. A jolt of energy transfixed him. Purple sparks burst from the Dreamheart, traveled along the rod, and grounded themselves in his drugged brain.
His vantage literally flashed upward, as he was bodily snatched into the air. Like a rag doll yanked by an angry toddler, he was borne to the chamber’s zenith. The sudden acceleration followed by the jerking stop nearly snapped his neck.
He’d avoided meeting the Eldest’s many-eyed gaze before. Now his ritual and the immediacy of the ancient aboleth compelled him to do so.
His proximity and drug-addled perspective showed the Eldest’s skin to be something other than stone. It was a luminous expanse of chaos that churned and seethed. Indescribable forms entwined within that inconstant flesh, surging, billowing, and changing their shape. It was as if the skin was an interface between the world and something terrible. So close, awful sounds scraped at Japheth’s ears too. Keening, bleating, and altogether atrocious.
But the eyes were what dazed Japheth and nearly struck him dead before he could conclude his purpose. Though most were shuttered, the few that caught him in their alien regard burned him with a cosmic malignancy that brought gorge to his throat. The star pact, that terrible oath he’d sworn in Xxiphu’s spawning halls, was the only thing that saved his mind from being instantly blasted. The pact had inoculated him. Though he might later gouge out his eyes in a fit of lunacy, for the moment he retained the barest ability to think.
Japheth averted his vision. He wanted to stop up his ears too, but he had to extend one hand and lay it upon the Eldest.
“Relinquish she whose dream is here with us,” said Japheth, his voice brittle but strong, “she who is called Anusha Marhana. Relinquish Anusha Marhana, and her companion named Yeva.” Japheth wished he still had the strand of hair he’d used before.
“By the power of the natural world, I beseech you. By the power of arcane formulas, I ask you. By the power of your own flesh, the Dreamheart, through which you have allowed your influence into the world, I command you!”
An indefinable period of time passed. Japheth kept his palm pressed against the roiling, repellent flesh. His hand sizzled.
Something tickled the back of his mind. At first he thought it was a passing fancy, perhaps due to remnants of the traveler’s dust not burnt out of his system by the ritual. Then he realized the feeling came from outside.
It was the Eldest. Or actually, a tiny fraction of the Eldest’s still slumbering attention.
The knowledge of what he must do to secure Anusha’s final release bloomed across the warlock’s brain.
He sighed. So it was to be one final bargain?
Yes. Of course.
The warlock’s life was one great tapestry of oaths, pacts, and deals, each balancing him on the knife-edge between achieving his ends and utter ruin.
Despite what it would mean for the world, Japheth nodded his head in agreement. He accepted the arrangement. At least the Eldest didn’t require he swear another pact!
That last thought gave him an idea. Even in the face of a creature whose wrath could well equal a god’s fury, Japheth designed one last deceit.
Anusha thrust her dream sword into the heart of the last aboleth threatening the monk—or at least where she hoped its heart was located. She hit something vital; it leaned over and died.
She stepped away and raised her blade in triumph, though it wavered under the onslaught of her headache.
Raidon glanced in her general direction. The half-elf’s face didn’t betray his thoughts, though Anusha assumed the monk wondered how the creature had suddenly perished. She would have smiled, but with the pain pounding through her, it was all she could do to retain her form.
She’d felt the onset of similar distress once before when she had overextended herself. It seemed the pain had come quicker this time, and more intensely. Was it because she also maintained Yeva’s form too, dreaming the woman real?
The monk didn’t waste any more time looking for invisible allies. With his burning sword, he continued to cut glyphs into the floor, one after the other, and faster now that aboleths didn’t contest his every step. Without the swarming aboleths to obscure the floor, the shape he scribed in blue fire was clearly visible to every creature in the chamber. Raidon swiftly approached the end of this task.
The tone of the chanting creatures overhead warbled and broke, then resumed in a more frantic tone. The aboleths seemed torn between finishing their ritual and abandoning it in order to descend upon the monk.
Then the decision was no longer theirs. Raidon completed the circuit.
The circle of glyphs took fire. A shock wave of force blew the monk away from his own creation. The shock wave expanded in all directions and caught the soaring aboleths underneath. The force tumbled the creatures, great and small, in uncontrolled arcs through the air. Their chant, already on the hysterical edge of failure, collapsed.
The inscribed circle flamed so brightly, Anusha looked away.
A sound came from above. A booming, creaking noise like mountains make when they settle into their foundations. She glanced up.
The few eyes open on the great petrified belly began to squint and close, as if the fire of Raidon’s circle was too bright for them. The Eldest was not rousing. It was falling back into slumber, perhaps even the sleep of true death!
Raidon Kane had killed the Eldest! Could it really be?
Harsh exclamations of fury echoed through the chamber. The aboleths buffeted from their ritual by the monk’s counterworking cried out as one. They lashed their tentacles and writhed in a paroxysm of rage. Their beady eyes found Raidon, Seren, and Thoster, and a few even fixed on Anusha and Yeva.
“Back to the ship!” screamed Seren. “This way!” She turned toward a different passage than the one by which they had entered the throne chamber.
Anusha saw Raidon glance up. She followed his gaze to the screeching, gargantuan aboleths. The creatures were regaining control of their single-minded fury. Malicious red light burst from one of the massive, dark-hued elders. Another gesticulated with its tentacles in wide spirals, from which a green haze began to spread.
Yeva and Thoster darted after the retreating wizard. But Raidon wasn’t moving. He just stood and stared at the great creatures flitting overhead. They no longer flew in their ritual formation, but instead prepared a revenge stroke on the tiny half-elf below, apparently unconcerned with the cerulean fire he wielded.
Anusha looked for Japheth. Still nowhere to be seen.
“Let’s go, Raidon!” she yelled at the monk. He glanced in her general direction and shook his head. Was he crying?
“Is that … Anusha?” said Raidon, his voice raised above the clamor of the remaining aboleths. “So the captain was right. Well, it doesn’t matter. I fulfilled my oath. I tried to kill the Eldes
t. For some reason, I failed. I put it back to sleep, but I did not kill it as I intended.”
She gasped. “Will it wake again?”
“No. At least not fully, and not soon. But it is not dead. I shall stay here and kill as many of the elder aboleths as I can before they consume me.” He shrugged.
The half-elf had lost his bearings. She hastened to him, letting go her dream blade as she did so. Her headache instantly eased.
Anusha grabbed one of Raidon’s wrists, making certain her hand was solid enough to do so. “Come. We need you, Raidon. You’ve bound it; it was bound for millennia before. Perhaps you’ve given us another few thousand years. If so, I call that success!”
She gave a light tug. The monk sighed. “A half measure.”
“Come with me!” she yelled, and pulled.
“Very well.” His voice was not that of a man who’d just potentially saved Toril an age of grief. What was wrong with him?
“This way,” said Anusha, pulling the monk along toward the tunnel exit Seren had departed through.
After a few steps, it was all she could do, even using her dream-twisting advantage, to keep up with him. The man could run when he decided to.
As they left the chamber, Anusha glanced back one last time, searching for the telltale black cloak. Still nothing. But …
A shiver tickled at the nape of her neck. The feeling plunged down her spine into the small of her back. She stumbled, losing her grip on Raidon’s arm. “Go on!” she said, and spun around to see what had grazed her.
The elder aboleths pursued them. But … none were close enough to have grazed her. She summoned her dream blade anyhow.
It was as if a thousand tiny ants with warm feet ran up and down her body. “What’s happening?” Was this the end? Was she—
Darkness engulfed her. The screams of the livid aboleths, the smell of rotting fish, the agony in her temples—all of it went away.
Anusha blinked.
Wan light from the porthole revealed a small room.
The woman gasped and sat up in her open travel chest. With eyes that felt wide as saucers, she soaked in the beautiful, wonderful, cramped cabin on Green Siren.
Tears slid down her cheek. She hugged herself, feeling her own warm, if noticeably skinny, self. A dog whined, then barked. A wagging tail thumped repeatedly against wooden planking. Lucky!
Japheth had done it. She was free.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)
Leaving Xxiphu
Japheth witnessed Raidon Kane complete the binding. He perceived the great shock of negation expanding up from the freshly scribed hundred-foot-diameter seal and penetrating the Eldest. The beast groaned, even in its petrified slumber, as if crying out against the injustice of the world.
But the tendril of awareness that dealt with Japheth insisted the warlock stick to his deal.
Japheth agreed and continued to hold the personality fragment to its end of the bargain, even as the elder servitors of Xxiphu swirling below Japheth’s feet raged at their failure. He maintained his position and shouted, over and over again, even as his voice cracked, “Release Anusha Marhana! Release her!”
And just like that, Japheth felt Anusha’s focus slip free. Yeva’s too!
“Yes!”
Anusha’s focus sped away, seeking its rightful mooring. Yeva’s foundered. He’d expected that and offered the homeless spirit a temporary roost in the dark confines of his rod. Though he couldn’t see it, he felt the spirit of the strange woman take up residence within it.
The ritual concluded. He plunged toward the floor.
He instinctively reached out to grasp for a support where none existed. Wasting time clawing at empty air almost proved his death. But a moment before his brains were dashed out upon the floor of the throne chamber, he plunged into the gaping discontinuity of his cloak.
And stepped out into a rounded tunnel dripping with phosphorescent slime.
A sprinting man avoided colliding with him with a spectacular leap that cleared Japheth’s head by inches.
The man rolled into a landing, was back on his feet a moment later, and turned to regard the warlock. “Japheth,” he said, “you should not have come here.”
“Raidon Kane,” said Japheth. “We can argue that later. Right now about twenty-odd aboleths, each the size of a dragon, are coming down this corridor. We must go!”
The monk regarded the warlock a heartbeat longer, then said, “The woman, your friend, was with me a moment ago in her intangible shape. She seems—”
“I released her, Raidon! I did it!” He raised a fist and grinned. “Now come on! Show me the way to your ship! Seren told me you outfitted Green Siren to bring you here.”
The monk’s face, normally an expressionless mask, wavered between resignation and anger. The half-elf didn’t look well. His wild expression suggested he was on the edge of a mental break.
A scream of abolethic fury and a flash of red light behind Japheth lit the monk’s face. It was enough to engage Raidon once more.
“This way. You will have to keep up with me. Perhaps we can catch up to Seren and Thoster. They went ahead—I haven’t been this way before.”
Raidon sprinted off down the corridor.
Japheth followed. He immediately fell behind.
He hadn’t traversed more than a hundred yards when he detected a change in the timbre of the pursuing aboleths. Perhaps it was the star pact that gave him insight into the sounds. Or maybe it was because he knew why a passel of despairing servitors of Xxiphu, bent on murderous revenge, would suddenly give up the chase. He knew why they exulted instead. He’d given them a gift beyond measure.
Or at least they would initially assume he had.
Right now, they rejoiced that their progenitor wasn’t dead. They rejoiced because they believed they had the key to resuming their rousing chant where they’d left off.
Soon enough, the aboleths and the Eldest’s slumbering, yet all-too-active subconscious would realize his deception. He hoped he could get out of the terrible city and back to Green Siren—where, the stars willing, Anusha waited—before then.
Despite his deception, the warlock had still provided the aboleths a prize that would prove all too useful. He regretted it, but not enough that he would have decided differently if given the chance to do it over.
Japheth ran.
Despite his earlier implication, Raidon did wait up for Japheth. Every so often the monk paused at the edge of a pool of slime where an aboleth yet slumbered. As the warlock caught up, the monk plunged Angul into the cavity, killing the monster before it even realized its peril. An expression of grim satisfaction hardened the monk’s face each time.
When Raidon had his blade out, Japheth stayed clear. With the new pact, Japheth suspected the Blade Cerulean would see him as essentially no different from an aboleth or other aberrant creature. The weapon was insane. And Japheth suspected, the more he watched the half-elf, so was the wielder.
The tunnel spit the gasping Japheth into a cavity whose far side was open to the massive vault that surrounded Xxiphu. Green Siren hung unsuspended in the air just feet from a protruding stone shelf. Seeing it hovering without support, save for a few slack ropes tied to the shelf, gave Japheth a momentary rush of vertigo. Sparkling gold and red points of light swirled around the ship.
Raidon, Thoster, Seren, and several crew were also visible, including the first mate. Raidon was boarding. Seren stood on the deck of Green Siren nearest the shelf. Thoster’s strong voice was directing the crew to cast off. Japheth ran to the gangplank and crossed.
Raidon gave the warlock a hard look as he pounded across the plank. Japheth was glad to see the monk had sheathed Angul once more.
“Let’s get out of here,” Japheth said.
“Cast off!” yelled Thoster.
The crew severed the last lines holding the ship. Green Siren drifted away from the shelf, toward the open air of the hollow.
“Raidon,” said Seren, “will you control the ascent?” She gestured to a ritual circle smeared onto the main deck.
The monk continued to stare at Japheth, but nodded. Then he said, “And you still have the Dreamheart safe, Japheth?”
“I had to give it up.”
“What?” Seren gasped. Her face lost all color.
Raidon snorted, as if he’d already guessed. Japheth tensed, ready to defend himself if the monk went for him.
The tableau held for several heartbeats, until an exclamation by three crew members drew their attention back to the increasingly distant stone shelf.
Two humanoid figures and one shadowy hound stood on it.
Japheth sucked in air. Even at the large and growing distance, he recognized the figures as Malyanna and Neifion.
Malyanna lifted something over her head. A spherical object.
“What kind of boneheaded stunt did you pull out there, lad?” said Thoster. “Is that—?”
“It’s the Dreamheart!” said Seren.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Japheth.
“Why not?” asked Thoster.
“Because I locked up a portion of the Dreamheart’s strength. They can’t use it to its full power.” He didn’t volunteer that he’d switched pacts and had locked up a portion of the stone’s essence within himself. That was what kept him safe from the crimson road. He fancied he detected the tendrils of influence he’d stolen locked in opposition with the demonic power of his addiction, striving one against the other but equally matched. As long as that struggle persisted, neither could muster the strength to claim the warlock. It was a delicate balance.
“Are you mad?” Seren asked. “The stone still has power, no matter how much you’ve drawn off.”
“Perhaps your meddling is the reason the Eldest did not die as I intended,” said Raidon.
“It’s not dead?” said Thoster, his brow crinkled with concern.
City of Torment Page 26
