Depths of Madness

by Erik Scott De Bie

  His lover looked horrible. She stood as though stretched by an unseen rack, her blouse and breeches shredded and soaked with red. Blood—there was so much blood—ran from wounds, nose, and mouth. Her right arm hung limply at her side, burned red and black, and her legs looked none too steady. Her black hair had become a tangled jungle of smeared, caked curls.

  Light rippled around him, and he could perceive, out of the corners of his eyes, beams and latticework, as though something was peeling back the walls of reality, unveiling true order. The world seemed to fall into perfect balance—symmetry. Liet couldn’t explain the feeling any other way.

  “’Light?” he asked. “Are …”

  As he looked upon the pale, streaked face, his heart roiled in a mixture of bewilderment, confusion, and tragic, hopeless love. Anger was coming—why was he angry? Oh, gods—why … He stared unwittingly into the face of his betrayer.

  Twilight could not manage words before the air between them shimmered and the room exploded in edifying golden light. The spell binding Twilight’s body abruptly failed, dropping her unceremoniously to the floor.

  “No!” she shouted. “I’ve changed my mind! No!”

  Liet flew backward in a tangle of flailing limbs as the golden distortion shifted into a hulking black body with three heads and six massive arms, a gigantic sword clutched in each hand. Ruukthalmuramaxamin was already in the midst of a spell, one that would devour Gestal’s body as he stood, and the swords darted out to rend the demon priest’s flesh.

  “Twi—!” Liet screamed. His voice, halfway through her name, was suddenly that of Gestal once more. “—light,” it finished. The change swept through him almost instantly, the demonflesh hissing across his skin like blood. His eyes were bathed, once more, in chaos.

  Ruuk’s swords cut into Gestal and blood flew. The demon thrall cursed and sputtered and dodged back. A slaying spell came from the sharn, bearing down upon the demon thrall, and struck him solidly in the chest. In a heartbeat, he started to fall apart.

  But even as the sharn’s spell ruined him, Gestal screamed a single word of power. It was a word of absolute anarchy and madness, a word sprung from the depths of the primordial chaos that had existed before the Realms had ever known light. Even as the moisture evaporated from his body, his flesh withered, and the blood running from his lips hardened before it touched the ground, Gestal uttered the word of chaos.

  To Twilight, it was merely a discordant cacophony of sound and fury in a set of twisting syllables. It signified nothing more than a crude limerick, a foul jest, or a random distortion of a tale told by an idiot.

  To Ruukthalmuramaxamin, cursed as it was, it was doom.

  Had any mortal spoken a parallel word of dictum in the presence of a sane sharn, it might have shrugged off the effects. But the curse that the High Arcanist Nega had left Ruuk, which chained its alien soul tightly within the bonds of law and order, had caused a single weakness: pure, unadulterated chaos.

  The sharn screamed, bubbled, and shifted colors. It became a tree; a three-limbed dog; a tiny elf girl with angelic features; a shattered, crackling sword; an apple; and a hangman’s scaffold. Then it exploded in a burst of burning power and brackish gore.

  The room was silent for a heartbeat. Twilight gaped at the remnants of Ruuk drenching her body and at Gestal, staring with murder in his mad gaze.

  “You,” he said, voice like weathered rock, stealing Twilight’s focus.

  The spell had ravaged his body, sucking the blood and juices from it like a century in the desert condensed in a single heartbeat. The flesh on his bones lay withered and black, drier than white sand. He coughed and gagged, though nothing would come, and struggled to his knees.

  “You,” he cursed.

  Though he looked weak, Twilight made no move toward him. The power she had just witnessed rendered her speechless and paralyzed with fear, more firmly than any compulsion Gestal could have cast. If he had struck down a sharn—mad as it might be—with a single word, Twilight could do nothing.

  What a fool she was to face him. Gestal was far beyond her—far beyond anyone.

  Then he raised his hands, intoning the words to a new, fouler ritual, demanding Demogorgon to strike down this hateful traitor who knelt before him.

  Twilight tried to lever herself up, but she slipped on the sharn’s blood and went down hard. Wincing with agony from her wounds, Twilight climbed to her feet and took up her sword, shakily. Betrayal hardly seemed hers any longer, not with its gray surface burned away to white. The handle was slick and scalding; she dropped it with a curse.

  She tried to pick it up again, but when she bent down, her legs crumpled, her feet lost their grip, and she fell, face first, to the floor.

  Gestal continued his long, complex invocation to Demogorgon, and Twilight knew beyond a doubt that its conclusion would mean her death. From the flames of his scrying bowl and the twin pits, his shadow loomed out, long and fierce.

  “What do I do?” she sobbed, calling upon Erevan, demanding that he help her, cursing his name when he was silent. She could shadowjump away, but not far. She was in no position to flee—she could hardly walk. “How do I—?”

  Then her right hand brushed something hard on the floor and her heart almost stopped. The answer had come to her. Not from Erevan, not from experience or instinct, but from her own mind. She rose slowly, her fingers white-knuckled.

  “No,” she cried. “No!”

  She ran, limping, toward Gestal, trying to get to him as fast as she could.

  The demon priest pronounced the final syllables of his spell just as Twilight ran, brokenly, toward him. Burning, fiendish power filled the room as the magic took hold, and black fire burned between Gestal’s hands. It shot forth in a line of red toward her heart, and Twilight felt more than heard the very air vanishing, destroyed, and the surrounding humidity rushing into the blast’s wake. Briefly, Gestal’s shadow vanished, but reappeared when the flame came at her.

  Running at approaching death, Twilight did not even attempt to dodge.

  Instead, she danced into the disintegrating shadows barely a pace from the roaring, slaying spell and reappeared in Gestal’s own shadow. She threw herself into his arms, hideous and desiccated as his demonfleshed body had become, caught his face in her left hand, and locked her lips to his. His spell tore into the cavern wall, boring a hole more than two paces wide and ten deep.

  His hands, warped and withered into claws, flexed impotently for a heartbeat, then closed, tenderly, around her waist. Twilight clung to him and kissed with all her strength, spending herself entirely in that exchange, as though her existence would cease the instant she broke away.

  The stillness stretched. They stood in the eye of a magical storm, the wrath of the Abyss raging about them, but neither looked away. Gestal’s power faltered and faded, and they heard two dimly audible hisses echoing around them—hisses that became roars.

  Liet pulled away from Twilight’s lips then, and his blue eye shone like the rising sun in the sky after a storm at dawn, the green like the seas of the west. His flesh might have been blasted, his health stripped and torn away, but there was more love in those eyes than Twilight had ever known or dreamed. And when he reached up and caressed her face, his touch was soft despite his petrified skin.

  Twilight knew she had saved him—that he was free of Gestal forever—that he understood, and more than that, accepted all. And for a heartbeat, all was perfect.

  For a heartbeat.

  His eyes shifted to confusion, then to pain. He looked at Twilight, his lips forming a question that would never come. He coughed, and blood splashed from his desiccated lips to strike Twilight’s face. Then, with a sigh, he staggered and fell, his fingers whispering down her cheek and leaving a scarlet trail.

  “Daltyrex,” he murmured as he slumped to the floor.

  “Why?”

  Twilight could not move her left hand, which had been touching his face, nor her right, until the man she had known alternate
ly as Liet and Gestal lay crumpled at her feet.

  Then, as though a bolt of lightning struck her, the elf raised her scarlet-drenched right hand. Holding Davoren’s stiletto up to her face, she collapsed to her knees.

  She smeared Liet’s blood across her cheek and sobbed. Then she hurled the deadly blade aside, cradled his body in her arms, and wept into his chest.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  She sat there for a long time. Then, after what seemed days, or years, a shadow loomed at the door, making panting and wheezing sounds.

  If the elf heard the shadow, she made no sign. She merely sat there, cradling her friend in silence. The blood had ceased to flow, and the places where it had drenched the elf’s garments had hardened into a firm hold. They might have been bound together, she and the corpse, their blood and flesh and hearts linked.

  Not that it would matter to the creature stalking her.

  It was ravaged: battered, bruised, broken in arm, leg, and rib. A withered left arm, formerly muscular and sleek, flopped uselessly at its side. The cracked and poorly mended legs propelled it at a ponderous gait, half-limping, half-sliding. The once smooth body had been ruined beyond repair.

  The thing loomed over Twilight where she sat, near the pit full of dying flames and beneath menacing, stained spikes. It reached for her shoulder with one arm.

  “Gargan …” she murmured.

  It growled low. She turned her head and looked up without comprehension.

  “Kill you! Kill you, pretty elf!” the troll spat, showering the elf’s face with ribbons of bile and spittle. His mad eyes streamed tears and blood in equal measure. The troll raised the splintered warhammer high in his spindly arm. “You no kill Tlork! Tlork kill you! Tlork kill you!”

  A black blade burst from his chest and Tlork froze. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then blood and acid leaked from the wound, hissing down to the ground, where they spattered only a thumb’s breadth from the elf’s bare feet. She seemed not to notice.

  Then, without a word, Tlork stumbled back, wrenched away.

  The troll gave a shriek as he went, his slowly reknitting limbs flailing on all sides, but to no avail. The blade ripped free and scythed about, cutting Tlork’s torso in two. Over the edge the halved troll went, shrugged from the blade, into the twin pits of Demogorgon’s throats. The troll screamed and roared and babbled all the way down, until the beast thudded to a rest, shaking the chamber. There he lay coughing and retching, impaled on a dozen man-high spikes.

  Foxdaughter blinked up at her savior.

  “Should not,” said Gargan, fighting for breath, “gloat.”

  At the lip of the tunnel that led out of Demogorgon’s depths, Twilight shut her eyes against the fearsome desert wind. Gargan, bruised and bleeding from dozens of wounds, limped at her side, his arm wrapped protectively around her slim shoulders. His face, despite a single eye that had swollen shut, shone with serenity, as always.

  How Twilight envied that, and always would.

  “You pause,” the goliath said, looking away. “Come.”

  “Where?” Twilight asked softly, tonelessly.

  “I do not know,” said Gargan. “But we must go.”

  Twilight’s eyes closed. “Ever onward,” she whispered. “Ever away.”

  Even when they had climbed the stones and stood at the edge of the desert, with nothing around them for as far as they could see, the elf could still feel him—still taste his lips, sense his fingers tracing her spine, hear his loving whisper. Twilight wanted to struggle, to break away from Gargan’s grasp and run back down that tunnel.

  “You set him free, Foxdaughter,” said Gargan, as he embraced her tightly.

  Twilight bit her lip, uncertain.

  “Why did you come for me?” She looked at him. “Your pattern? Your fate?”

  Gargan shrugged. “You are the Fox.”

  Then he began to hum—a song of goliaths, she realized—and sing. His voice carried her away, far from darkness and blood, toward the distant, white horizon.

  He put out his hand.

  She smiled.

  EPILOGUE

  At the bottom of the deepest shaft, broken into thousands of pieces, impaled on dozens of gnarled spikes, the fiend-stitched troll slowly, painfully regenerated.

  Yes, it would take days before the bits of torn, greenish flesh could find their way back to each other and grow together once more, but as Tlork lay neither in acid nor in flame, he would eventually be reborn. Only a few universes of pain awaited him in the meantime, but Tlork was used to it. With stoic, brute will, the troll would endure.

  For when it was done, Tlork would find that gray-faced thing and his little elf pet and smash them both. Yes, that’s what he would do.

  If only he could remember what they looked like.

  Standing at the top of that shaft, the new master watched the agonizing process, his thoughts dwelling upon this labyrinth built over the fallen Negarath—the halls Demogorgon blessed, the darkness in which vileness dwelt, the depths of madness.

  “The Depths of Madness,” he said, his voice no longer slurred from missing teeth—teeth that had regrown, thanks to his fiendish powers. “A fitting name, perhaps.”

  His crimson and black robes were torn, but his wounds had largely healed. His fingers had grown back, too. Even his hair, formerly wild and tangled beyond the hope of redress, lay slicked back about his temples, except for a few stubborn spikes that hung over his eyebrows. His hands ached, but they would function fully with time, thanks to the potions he had found in Gestal’s chambers.

  More important was the red-purple flame that brewed around his fist—a reminder of enduring power. The gift of a devil, bought at the price of a soul.

  Davoren Hellsheart allowed a tiny smile to play across his gray face. He could still hear the brute Gargan and the cruel Twilight shuffling, leaving the Depths of Madness behind them for the desert. Well, he was rid of them; they had served their purpose by destroying not one, but both of the Depths’ former masters.

  “I don’t need them,” he said to himself. “I don’t need anyone.”

  Despite his faith in his lord Asmodeus—his confidence in success—Davoren was a bit relieved at the demise of both Gestal and Ruukthalmuramaxamin. He had thought for certain that he would have to challenge one or the other—preferably Gestal, he had thought until he had seen the powers of chaos triumph over the sharn. But the murderess and her thrall had secured for him a victory beyond his expectations. Somehow, he convinced himself that it had been his victory—that he’d manipulated them. He had won the spoils, had he not? This dungeon—the Depths.

  As for Twilight and Gargan, he hoped the desert would kill them—he did not relish facing either again. Not because they could beat him—oh no—but because he hated them both so much.

  “They are weak,” he assured himself. He did not need them. “Let them die if they will. They shall not return.” He had other concerns.

  Asmodeus demanded power, influence, and worship, and he intended to give the devil lord all that and more. His first sacrifices would be the servitors of Demogorgon that had survived Lord Gestal’s fall—the lizardmen. Then he would enslave the golems that had survived the sharn. They would make excellent servants. The grimlocks, as well, even if they did not understand order. As for the abeil—sacrifices.

  And by the time he used up all the eligible sacrifices, Davoren intended to have reasoned out the magical operation of the portals that led into this place. Why waste good slaves when innocent, naïve, goodly treasure hunters could so easily be had?

  They deserved this. They all did, for what they and their kind had done to him.

  “M-M-Master?” an echoing voice came from the shaft.

  The troll had pulled himself together sufficiently to speak, though Davoren found that unpleasant. Soon enough, Tlork would be whining for food.

  Davoren thought. Food was not a small matter. He was not about to stoop to the sludge the lizardfolk ate. The abeil, he doub
ted, would do any better. But Gestal had survived in this place, so there had to be some source of food and water. Davoren hoped he would not be forced into cannibalism. That turned his stomach. Perhaps the strange mushrooms he had glimpsed deeper in the city, with Twilight …

  Davoren winced. Twilight. His groin still ached where she had kneed him.

  How cruel she had been. She’d always thought herself better than him, never recognizing his talents, never even admitting his usefulness. Instead, she’d used him, like the spiteful bitch she was. And there had been nothing he could do about it. Nothing.

  They would have laughed at him. All of them. His mother, his sisters, the other children, but Davoren didn’t fear that. He’d made sure they would never laugh again. All of them. The stilettos he carried in his gauntlets still smelled of that blood—the one he had left, anyway. The other …

  “Come to think of it,” the warlock mused, “what happened to that knife? Shouldn’t leave something like that lying around where …”

  Then it occurred to him. Davoren had always possessed a quick and powerful mind, and it was a credit to the depth of this mystery that he hadn’t reasoned it out.

  It all made sense to him then, following a single key: Twilight’s Shroud.

  If Liet had been Gestal, it would have been a simple matter to arrange ambushes as they walked, but Gestal had vanished when the sharn’s forces attacked—surely escaped to await Ruukthalmuramaxamin’s next move. But if he had been gone, how had Gestal known when and where Twilight approached from the Depths to challenge him?

  He could not have scried Twilight through her amulet. How had he still followed their every move after “Liet” had disappeared?

  For that matter, how had he defeated Slip’s truth scrying? It did not seem that Gestal had been able to cast his spells through the miserable Liet.