The Eye of the Chained God (34 page)

Uldane and the others kept themselves apart, but Belen was in thick with the Tigerclaws, apparently enjoying every brief taste of this side of her heritage. Maybe because of her knowledge of their traditions, the barbarians seemed to accept her. At least, most of them did. Uldane saw Turbull watching the woman from Fallcrest carefully. A large number of hostile glares were also directed at Kri, presumably for his manipulation of the Tigerclaws’ fears. Uldane had been on the receiving end of similar looks
often enough to recognize trouble simmering on the edge of a boil. He nudged Albanon. “We shouldn’t stay long.”

The wizard nodded and went to talk to Turbull, who in turn called over Cariss. Soon joy and grief alike had turned into leave-taking, all of the humans and shifters of the barbarian tribe crowding around to say good-bye to Cariss. Belen, excluded once more, came back over and joined the others. Her face was set, but her eyes were sad. Uldane slipped his hand into hers. “Better that we go now,” he said. “They would have found out. Turbull already looked suspicious.”

“Maybe my mother taught me too well,” said Belen. She shook herself and stood straight. “Let’s get going. Vestapalk is waiting.”

The sun was halfway down in the western sky before they had their gear gathered and the supplies provided by the Tigerclaws loaded on their horses. No one suggested staying with the barbarians for the night, however, even though smoke from Tigerclaws’ fires was still visible in the distance as the sun set and they made camp.

“Sleep well tonight,” Cariss told them. “Our patrols still guard this area. We’ll be protected. After this, the journey will be more dangerous.”

Except that it wasn’t. In fact, if there was anything remarkable about their journey south and west from the Tigerclaw camp, it was the relative tranquility of it. When they had headed north from Winterhaven, there was no sign of plague demons either. At the time, Uldane had assumed that was due to Albanon’s routing of the horde
in the village. But there had still been a sense that they were around somewhere. This time there was nothing. The land was quiet. For the first couple of days, Uldane enjoyed the peace. Then it started to wear on him. Where were the demons? They stayed west of the remains of Winterhaven as they passed from the Cairngorm Peaks into the rolling hills of the Gardbury Downs. The camps and farms in the valleys of the Downs had experienced the first ravages of the Abyssal Plague. If there were any places the demons might have been lurking, Uldane would have expected them to be hiding there. Instead, it seemed even the demons had abandoned the valleys.

He wasn’t the only one to feel that way. The others grew irritable, as well. Cariss was the worst. “Pah!” she grumbled. “Why did I even bother to come? There’s nothing to hide from.”

“There will be,” Roghar said cheerfully. “Don’t doubt it. When we reach the Plaguedeep, there will probably be so many demons, we’ll need to carve our way through.”

The dark cloud that had hung over the dragonborn had melted away overnight. By the time they’d arrived in the Tigerclaw camp that first day after their battles in the valley, Roghar had been back to himself again. Uldane wasn’t exactly sure what to make of that. On the one hand, it was good to see Roghar happy again. On the other, it was odd how quickly his mood had reversed. After a day or so spent exchanging glances and shrugs with the others, Uldane raised the subject of the change with Roghar himself.

“A clean fight,” the paladin had said. “A simple victory. In Winterhaven, we won the battle but lost the village. That affected me more than I realized. In the valley, we triumphed. We killed the perytons, then Vestausan and Vestausir, and we came away with the means to destroy Vestapalk. Bahamut shows us his favor.”

“But we almost lost Albanon and now that Turbull knows about Tharizdun’s cloister, he doesn’t want the Tigerclaws in the valley,” Uldane had pointed out.

“If we hadn’t discovered the cloister, they would have lived under the Chained God’s gaze without knowing it. Another triumph!”

Uldane had almost forgotten how relentlessly optimistic Roghar could be—but then, that was another sign that he was back to normal. On the whole, Uldane was just happy to have the paladin in a good mood again. Roghar was a bright spot in the tension that had settled over the rest of them, a reminder that optimism was still possible when things looked bleak.

On the morning of the eighth day after they’d left the Tigerclaw camp, they turned the horses loose and cached the bulk of their gear near the site of the night’s camp. A bare minimum of food and tools, including ropes and spikes in case they needed to climb, went into light packs. If they didn’t come back for the rest of the gear, they’d never have need of it again. Then Albanon led them up the stony ridge that had sheltered the camp and they
all stared at the wide, flat-topped mountain that rose in isolation to the west.

A thin wisp of smoke rose from its summit into the morning sky. In Albanon’s imagination, the plume glittered, as if tiny red crystals rose along with the smoke and steam.

“It doesn’t look like much,” said Uldane. His words died on the cool air.

Albanon looked at Quarhaun. “Can you get us inside?”

“Find me a tunnel or a crevice,” said the drow, “and I’ll get us to the heart of the thing.”

“That’s all we need. That and the luck of the gods.” The plan they’d worked out over the last couple of days was simple, partly by design and partly by necessity. In the memories that Belen retained from her possession by Nu Alin, Vestapalk wallowed in a pool of the Voidharrow at the bottom of the volcano’s shaft, surrounded by hordes of plague demons. If the gods were on their side, they would be able to slip into the Plaguedeep and find a sheltered spot close to the Voidharrow pool. Kri and Albanon would work the magic to draw out the will of Tharizdun, while the others held off the plague demons—and Vestapalk—by any means.

The “by any means” had produced a great deal of soul-searching among the group. Their circle around the previous night’s campfire had been a silent and somber gathering.

Albanon took a deep breath, then raised his staff as if it were a battle standard and pointed at the smoking mountain. “Let’s go.”

The land between the ridge and the volcano wasn’t impassable, but it was rough. Cracks and gullies opened unexpectedly, growing larger and deeper as they approached the mountain’s slopes. Shara and Cariss took the lead, guiding their band across or around the worst of them. Uldane, however, was the first to notice that more than just the surface of the land was changing. As they skirted one large crack, the halfling slowed. “Look at this.”

Albanon saw what he was pointing at immediately: thin veins of red crystal snaked through the dark rock that the crack exposed. Anywhere else, he might have taken it for a concentration of some unusual mineral. But so close to Vestapalk’s place of power, he knew better.

“Voidharrow,” he said.

“I told you, Vestapalk will transform the world,” said Kri. He kneeled down for a closer look at the rock, then narrowed his eyes and pulled a clump of grass up from the thin soil.

Among the roots of the grass, fine red filaments twined like some strange fungus—except that as Albanon watched, the broken filaments slowly writhed and withered. Kri grimaced and hurled the clump away.

As they walked on, Albanon began paying more attention to what was around him rather than just what was ahead. The veins of crystal exposed in the cracks became thicker and more plentiful, never entirely dominant in the rock but certainly eating away at more of its substance. The exposed rock changed in texture, too. Its sharp edges faded away, not merely as if it had experienced long weathering, but as if it had been washed around in
the sea for a few hundred years. Some rocks sticking up aboveground looked as though they had been carved out of wax and left to sit in the sun.

Yes, he thought to himself, wax. Or tallow. Something soft and yielding instead of cold and hard. Something that was on the verge of turning from stone into a kind of … flesh. He lifted his staff to poke at a particularly veiny looking blob of stone.

Quarhaun caught his arm. “Best not to disturb things that may be only sleeping,” he said.

Albanon blinked, feeling like someone had just woken him from a dream. Kri’s eyes were on him, but the moment Albanon looked at him, he dropped his gaze. The wizard clenched his teeth. He let his staff fall and said to Quarhaun, “Thank you.”

“Have you noticed how quiet it is?” asked Belen. “Like the Cloak Wood when we rode through it.”

“Too much like it,” said Roghar. He drew his sword. “Shara, Cariss—watch for plague demons.”

“Where?” asked Cariss, gesturing around them. Albanon could see her point. The scattered trees had grown even more scattered. Their thin trunks provided no cover—in fact, they drooped almost as if they were formed of the same almost-fleshy stuff as the rocks. If a plague demon had appeared in this silent, almost alien landscape, they would have seen it instantly.

Then Shara, a few paces ahead, froze on the edge of a crevice. She took a long step back before turning her head just enough to mouth a word at them:
here
.

Albanon crept forward and peered over the edge. The crevice was one of the deepest ones yet. The sun hadn’t risen high enough yet to cast its rays more than a couple of paces into the shadows, but that was enough. Plague demons, the first they’d seen in days, were packed into the crevice like bees in a hive.

They appeared to be mostly the smaller, beastlike demons, but it was hard to tell. They pressed against each other, their spindly limbs so still and intertwined so closely that they resembled the veins of red crystal in the stone walls. They could almost have been continuations of the veins, and Albanon was struck by the frightening idea that Vestapalk might be growing his demons now, spawning them like maggots from the rock.

He took a slow breath and forced himself to remain calm. The demons hadn’t grown in the crevice—they were transformed beings just like all the others. He could distinguish other body shapes among them, including a couple of the four-armed brutes. They had more likely just taken shelter there against the daylight. Their angled, crystalline eyes were all closed. Their chests moved with slow breathing. Did plague demons sleep?

Shara touched his arm. She pointed into the crevice, then made a sharp slicing motion across her throat. Albanon understood.

Kill them now
.

It was tempting. Dozens of plague demons removed from the world. Dozens of demons that wouldn’t trouble them again. Coordinated spells from him, Quarhaun,
and Tempest … Albanon pressed his lips together and shook his head, then pointed at the volcano looming close above and touched his eyes.

Vestapalk will see
.

It was a danger they had discussed over and over again. It was inevitable that a demon would see them, and through its eyes Vestapalk would discover their presence. Albanon was determined to delay that moment for as long as possible. Shara’s face tightened but she nodded and jerked her head at a way around the crevice. They moved past the sleeping demons in silence, the others also glancing into the crevice as they slipped by. Once they were away from it, however, Tempest leaned close to him. “They were sleeping for the day?”

“It looks like it.”

She frowned. “Albanon, I’m not sure plague demons sleep. We’ve fought them during the day before, like the pack that chased Immeral into Fallcrest. So what were they doing down there?”

The tips of Albanon’s ears tingled. He took Tempest’s hand in his and squeezed it, but didn’t say anything.

The last shadow passed the top of the crevice. In the darkness below, dozens of pairs of eyes flicked open in unison. Dozens of mouths grinned at exactly the same moment.

“Yes,” whispered Vestapalk. “Come.”