The Eye of the Chained God Read online

  In an instant the elder peryton turned and plummeted toward the ground. The dive was silent. No calls, no wild screeches, just a sudden, sharp descent. The other airborne peryton rose as the elder came down. Shara would have leaped to her feet right then, but Turbull seized her wrist under her cloak. “Hold!” he commanded as instinct checked her movement.

  Fortunately the trio out on the knoll didn’t hold back. The false campsite exploded in a whirl of action as Albanon and Quarhaun threw aside their cloaks and jumped up. With a scream of fury, Quarhaun hurled a blast of crackling black energy at the diving beast, while Albanon thrust up his staff and sent a spray of fire toward the perytons on the ground.

  The elder screeched as she twisted aside. Quarhaun’s blast missed her by less than a swordslength. The grounded perytons likewise threw themselves away from Albanon’s fire. He only managed to catch one, the edge of its wing trailing through the flame. Feathers singed and smoking, the monster whirled up into the air with an angry scream.

  Even if they were startled by the counterattack, none of the perytons fled. They spun around Quarhaun, Uldane, and Albanon in an angry, bloodthirsty storm, forcing them apart with darting feints and buffeting wings. The ropes and stakes that were intended to keep them safe hampered them as they tried to dodge. Quarhaun loosed another blast without hitting anything. The peryton he had been aiming at turned in the air and plunged for him—

  Additional titles in the

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® novel line

  The Mark of Nerath

  Bill Slavicsek

  The Seal of Karga Kul

  Alex Irvine

  Oath of Vigilance

  James Wyatt

  The Last Garrison

  Matthew Beard

  Also by Don Bassingthwaite

  LEGACY OF DHAKAAN

  The Doom of Kings

  Word of Traitors

  The Tyranny of Ghosts

  THE DRAGON BELOW

  The Binding Stone

  The Grieving Tree

  The Killing Stone

  The Yellow Silk

  The Mistress of the Night

  (with Dave Gross)

  THE ABYSSAL PLAGUE TRILOGY

  The Temple of Yellow Skulls

  THE EYE OF THE CHAINED GOD

  The Abyssal Plague Trilogy, book 3

  ©2012 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Hasbro SA, represented by Hasbro Europe. Stockley Park, UB11 1AZ. UK.

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, Wizards of the Coast, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by: Wayne Reynolds

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-5998-3

  620-38726000-001-EN

  For customer service, contact:

  U.S., Canada, Asia Pacific, & Latin America: Wizards of the Coast LLC, P.O. Box 707, Renton, WA 98057-0707, +1-800-324-6496, www.wizards.com/customerservice

  U.K., Eire, & South Africa: Wizards of the Coast LLC, c/o Hasbro UK Ltd., P.O. Box 43, Newport, NP19 4YD, UK, Tel: +08457 12 55 99, Email: [email protected]

  Europe: Wizards of the Coast p/a Hasbro Belgium NV/SA, Industrialaan 1, 1702 Groot-Bijgaarden, Belgium, Tel: +32.70.233.277, Email: [email protected]

  Visit our websites at www.wizards.com

  www.DungeonsandDragons.com

  v3.1

  ORIGIN

  The Gates of Madness

  James Wyatt

  The Mark of Nerath

  The Abyssal Plague Prologue

  Bill Slavicsek

  THE PLAGUE STRIKES

  The Temple of Yellow Skulls

  The Abyssal Plague Trilogy, book 1

  Don Bassingthwaite

  Oath of Vigilance

  The Abyssal Plague Trilogy, book 2

  James Wyatt

  The Eye of the Chained God

  The Abyssal Plague Trilogy, book 3

  Don Bassingthwaite

  THE PLAGUE SPREADS

  Sword of the Gods

  Bruce R. Cordell

  Under the Crimson Sun

  Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Shadowbane

  Erik Scott de Bie

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books in the Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  In the shadow of empires, the past echoes in the legends of heroes. Civilizations rise and crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and nature claim what the higher races leave behind, while chaos and darkness fill the void. Each new realm must make its mark anew on the world rather than build on the progress of its predecessors.

  Numerous civilized races populate this wondrous and riotous world of Dungeons & Dragons. In the early days, the mightiest among them ruled. Empires based on the power of giants, dragons, and even devils rose, warred, and eventually fell, leaving ruin and a changed world in their wake. Later, kingdoms carved by mortals appeared like the glimmer of stars, only to be swallowed as if by clouds on a black night.

  Where civilization failed, traces remain. Ruins dot the world, hidden by an ever-encroaching wilderness that shelters unnamed horrors. Lost knowledge lingers in these places. Ancient magic set in motion by forgotten hands still flows through them. Cities and towns still stand, where inhabitants live, work, and seek shelter from the dangers of the wider world. New communities spring up where the bold have seized territory from rough country, but few common folk ever wander far afield. Trade and travel are the purview of the ambitious, the brave, and the desperate. They are wizards and warriors who carry on traditions that date to ancient times. Still others innovate, or simply learn to fight as necessity dictates, forging a unique path.

  An extraordinary few master their arts in ways beyond what is required for mere survival or protection. For good or ill, such people rise up to take on more than any mundane person dares. Some even become legends.

  These are the stories of those select few …

  PROLOGUE

  The first time Vestapalk, as a young dragon, had flown high, he’d felt like the world belonged to him. Not in the sense of boundless opportunity, the way lesser races seemed to mean it, but in a way that woke something in his dragon heart. The world belonged to him. From horizon to horizon, everything below was his to possess, nurture, or destroy as he saw fit. And the higher he flew, the more the distant horizons expanded and the more his territory presented itself.

  Oh, he had been a naïve wyrmling. His quest for power in the years since had nearly killed him more than once. But he was still flying
and his territory was still growing. Soon the world would truly belong to him.

  In distant Nera, a human woman fled from him down a dark alley. She did not realize he only drove her into a trap. Vestapalk shifted his focus so that the woman ran toward him, lurking near the alley’s end.

  Outside the gates of a shadowed dwarf town, he gripped a struggling guard with four wiry legs and chewed on his shoulder with sharp teeth. The dwarf screamed. Other guards appeared. Vestapalk leaped from his original prey straight into the midst of the would-be rescuers. He bit a second and raked claws of red crystal across the face of a third. None of them would die, not as such. They had his saliva and fragments of his claws in their wounds, though. They were infected.

  In a hut in a lush, wet forest, he stared in horror at the spindly, gnarled horror his arm had become. Four fingers had fused into two thick digits. The pus had drained from his red sores to reveal lumps of crystal that couldn’t be scratched away—when he tried, his skin just tore to show more crystal and something hard and black like living stone beneath. He could feel more sores all over his body bursting whenever he moved. There was something in his mind, too. Some presence, watching him. Watching through him.

  “More than watching,” Vestapalk said through those distant lips, and the man in the hut screamed at the words that were not his own. No one responded to his cry. The village was empty, its other inhabitants fled.

  Find them, Vestapalk said directly into the mind of his new minion. But do not kill them—not all of them at least. Bite them. Cut them. Open wounds. Make them as you are.

  “Yes,” said the creature in the hut. It rose on thick legs, the last rags of its humanity sloughing off with every step.

  On a ship three days from the nearest port, Vestapalk listened as sailors who had nowhere to flee to whispered of murder and mutiny. The captain was sick with the plague. Maybe not just any plague—there had been rumors in the last port of a sickness that transformed sufferers into monsters. Demons. They were calling it the Abyssal Plague. If they wanted to reach their next port, the mutineers said, they had to act now. Throw the captain overboard. Aye, and anyone who showed signs of sickness. Vestapalk smiled to himself. It was too late for that. Shadows clung to him as he drifted into the circle of mutineers, touching each sailor with light, darting taps. Eyes went wide and color drained from faces. Vestapalk didn’t know what visions of fear filled their minds, but it didn’t matter. The demon that had been their captain flexed its taloned fingers and lashed out at the would-be mutineers.

  When the vessel arrived at its destination, it would be a plague ship. Vestapalk’s horde would continue to grow.

  From a marsh where lizardfolk fled from a horde of crystal spiders with humanoid eyes, to a forest village where elves battled creatures formed of living flame around crystalline crimson hearts, to an ancient city whose inhabitants hid while juggernauts big as houses stalked the streets—Vestapalk roamed the world that would soon be his in both name and substance. Just a thought was enough to extend his awareness to any of the multitude of demons his plague had birthed. His horde shared the touch of the alien Voidharrow that had transformed him from a mere dragon to something far, far greater. They were of the Voidharrow. He was the Voidharrow. Where they were, he was. And he was everywhere.

  Except the one place from which he had so far been thrown back.

  The scope of his perception collapsed with that thought. Vestapalk tumbled back into his own body.

  The noise of the Plaguedeep returned to him first. The chittering, shrieking, and roaring of hundreds of plague demons gathered at the heart of his power, all traces of the beings they had been gone. The soft, seething hiss of the Voidharrow as it ate into the bones of the world—less of a sound and more of a sensation at the edge of his awareness. The irregular boom and crackle of the unbound elements upon which the Voidharrow had already done its work. Vestapalk let the sounds wash over him for a moment, then he opened his eyes.

  Not so long ago, the Plaguedeep had been the crater of an active volcano, where tubes of magma stretched like arteries deep into the world. But the Voidharrow transformed more than just living flesh, and Vestapalk had spewed vast quantities of it into the roiling molten rock. Until the crater had become a great shaft, where boulders and columns of stone floated like air, lightning oozed like mud, and wind howled in gales so furious they were thick as waves of water.

  At the very bottom of the Plaguedeep, the Voidharrow collected in a pool of liquid crimson crystal shot through with ribbons of silver and flecks of gold. Vestapalk rode the surface of the pool, embraced and supported by it. Sluggish ripples spread across the surface, deceptive in their motion—they didn’t radiate out from Vestapalk, but instead stirred slowly toward him. The Voidharrow knew its master.

  So did the plague demons. As if they could sense the anger and frustration within him, they grew quiet. Where they lurked in niches and tunnels, along ledges, and clinging to the softened rock of the shaft walls, they went still. The incessant fighting, the constant struggling to establish position in an ever-shifting hierarchy stopped. Eyes of a hundred varieties set in heads of all shapes and sizes turned to Vestapalk. For a moment, he saw himself as they saw him: still draconic in form but lean, all hide and muscle, his flesh contracted around his bones. Scales that had once been brilliant green carried a tinge of red. Red showed too in the spurs of crystal that had erupted around his joints and in the translucent spikes that rose along his spine.

  When he flexed, Voidharrow flashed between his scales like embers in a fire. It was within him, dripping like venom from his jaws and filling his eyes. It consumed him. It sustained him. When dry scales sloughed from his hide, it welled up to form glittering new scales in their place, as the old scales squirmed with brief pseudo-life on the shifting surface of the pool.

  The plague demons looked at him with hunger and desire. And fear. When he snarled at them, they flinched as one and dropped their gazes in submission. Or rather, most of them dropped their gazes. On the far side of the pool, a bulky figure stood tall. It met Vestapalk’s gaze, then stepped out from among the plague demons clustered around it.

  Most of the demons were bone thin, as if their flesh had been fuel for the transformation wrought by the Abyssal Plague. A few were muscular and solid. Churr Ashin was bigger even than them. Plates of crystal armor spanned his shoulders, running down his arms and along his spine. His movements were ponderous. Each slow jump as he made his way along the rough, crystal-studded rocks that formed a kind of stepping stone pathway out into the pool threatened to dump him into the Voidharrow. A few demons watched him, hope for a spill naked and malicious on their faces.

  Churr disappointed them. The massive creature was one of Vestapalk’s exarchs, anointed with the Voidharrow by Vestapalk’s own tongue. He had the strength and power to crush any lesser demon’s skull in one meaty fist. He’d done it more than once.

  His voice, when he spoke, was a rumble. “Fallcrest.”

  Vestapalk regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Yes,” he said after a long moment. His own voice had changed along with his body. He could hear two voices in every word he spoke. One belonged to the dragon he had been. The other, sharp and crystalline, belonged to the Voidharrow. “Fallcrest.”

  It was not so much that he had been denied by the town, that his plague demons had been killed, that the town had resisted the plague. Other towns had resisted—for a time. Demons had been killed. Fallcrest was different. It was personal. The folk of the town had done very little. It had been the same small band that had countered him time and time again. He knew their names. Albanon. Uldane. Shara. Tempest. Roghar. Quarhaun. Kri. And he knew they were in Fallcrest, lending their swords and spells—and their improbable luck—to the town.

  They’d tried to kill him, although they’d succeeded only in uniting him with the Voidharrow. They’d killed Raid, the first of his exarchs, and two of them had even resisted his attempts to make them into exarchs as well. But most recently,
they’d killed Nu Alin, the ancient bodystealer who had been herald to Vestapalk and Voidharrow alike, as he led an attack on Fallcrest. Vestapalk had sensed his destruction as a human might have experienced the sudden loss of a finger.

  Had Churr sensed it as well?

  He shifted in the Voidharrow, reversing the course of the slow ripples across the pool. “Why?” he asked.

  A look of concentration crossed Churr’s small-eyed face, as if he was trying to remember what he had planned to say next. Few of Vestapalk’s demons had much intelligence. The transformation seemed to burn it away, leaving most with only a feral cunning. Churr had the size and strength of a juggernaut, but the muscles might have filled his head for all the wit he showed. “Send me,” he said at last. He thumped his chest hard. “Crush!”

  “You think you could crush Fallcrest?” said Vestapalk. The Plaguedeep remained silent as the other plague demons watched the exarch confront his master.

  “Nu Alin failed,” the big demon said.

  “You wouldn’t?”

  Churr straightened, squeezing a massive fist tight. “Kill who killed him.” He pumped his fist in the air. “Kill who killed Nu Alin!”

  His voice rose in an echo through the Plaguedeep. The watching demons responded, a few at first, then more, hooting and howling their enthusiasm. But not all of them were caught up in the madness. Vestapalk looked around at those who remained silent. Once again, they turned away from his gaze. Vestapalk drew back his neck so that he glared down at Churr.

  “No,” he growled.

  “No?” Churr demanded. He pounded his chest with both fists. “Small things kill Nu Alin. Churr Ashin crush small things.”

  So that was how it was, Vestapalk realized. In the never-ending struggle for primacy among the plague demons, slow-witted Churr had come to believe that only by killing those who had killed Nu Alin could he assert his own power. For a moment, he was tempted to loose the huge demon on Fallcrest just to see what Albanon and his band would do.

  But it was possible Churr Ashin might actually kill them. The continued existence of those who dared think of themselves as his enemies nipped at him like a mite burrowing under his scales. Against the great wave of the Abyssal Plague sweeping over the world, their resistance meant nothing. Vestapalk was still dragon enough, however, that hate gathered, rolling and stinging, in his belly. When the time came to destroy his enemies, he would do it himself.