The Eye of the Chained God Read online

  Albanon fed power to his spell, the numbers that composed the long lines of the lightning arcs growing continually. The sparks that played across his body grew in power, too, until each one stung his skin and left a red pinprick of a burn behind. Pain was a small price to pay. The demons had recognized the danger he presented. Many ran before the onslaught of lightning, but a few tried to get close to him. He burned one with a carefully hurled bolt. Others got the message and backed off. A handful, more aggressive than the others, remained. One small creature even capered as if to taunt him. Albanon snarled and flung another bolt. The small demon dodged—and too late Albanon realized that it was a distraction. A big four-armed demon leaped on him from behind, wrapping its arms around him to break his spellcasting as it howled into his ear.

  “Stop, Albanon! Bahamut’s mercy, stop!”

  Roghar’s voice.

  No, snarled his anger. It’s another demon trick. You have to throw it off. Possibilities flowed into his imagination, a way to turn the numbers of his magic back on themselves in a burst of force that would hurl his assailant away.

  “Albanon! Can you hear me?”

  It was Roghar holding onto him, Albanon realized. And the small capering demon was Uldane. His mad fury ebbed, taking the long construction of numbers with it. The last of the lightning and thunder faded like a storm receding in to the distance. Albanon blinked and looked around Winterhaven.

  Looked around what remained of Winterhaven. The plague demons were gone, leaving only their dead behind. Theirs weren’t the only lightning-burned corpses, though. Half a dozen human bodies sprawled—charred and smoking—on the ground. One was only a few paces from Albanon, and he remembered the demon that had tried to get close to him. A terrible hollow grew inside him. He pulled away from Roghar and turned in a slow circle. The walls of Winterhaven bore long scorch marks in many places. Most of its buildings were scarred. Three wooden structures were on fire with the flames spreading fast; one stone wall of the inn was shattered to reveal a growing inferno within. Pale, terrified faces peered out of whatever shelter had been available and stared at him.

  Four of those faces, maybe even more shocked than the others, belonged to Roghar, Uldane, Belen, and Tempest.

  Vestapalk felt Vestagix’s destruction like a sword driven deep into his body. His roar of anguish echoed up the Plaguedeep, sending lesser demons scrambling away and greater demons flinching back. The pool of the Voidharrow splashed and splattered as he thrashed. If a plague demon he was inhabiting died, it was no different than shedding an old, dry scale. The death of Vestagix felt as if a part of him had died as well. Eight foreclaws clenched and gouged stone—seven claws of translucent crystal, plus one of deep red, regrown from the Voidharrow to take the place of what he had sacrificed.

  His agony eased. Thought returned. The death was hardly conceivable. Vestagix had been given only a measure of his power but he had shared all of Vestapalk’s cunning. He should not have fallen.

  But his proxy’s death was not the end. His vengeance might still be salvaged. Vestapalk sent his thoughts out through the Voidharrow. They settled on a plague demon … in flight from Winterhaven. New rage rushed over him. What could have gone so wrong? Vestapalk tore open the demon’s memories of the battle.

  He saw Vestagix struck down by the dragonborn Roghar, felt the demon’s rush of wild ecstasy at being released from Vestagix’s command.

  He saw lightning and heard thunder. A bolt struck close and blew him back. He saw Albanon surrounded by crackling, barely controlled power greater than any mortal wizard should have been capable of wielding. The eladrin’s face was twisted in single-minded fury, but his eyes shone fever bright.

  The fear that swept over Vestapalk surprised him. It pierced his anger and pushed him out of the plague demon, back to his own body. The same fear, as of an old enemy or a newly discovered weakness, seemed to have penetrated the whole of the Plaguedeep. The red abyss was still. Silent. As if the Voidharrow itself was afraid.

  Afraid not so much of the power that had driven back the plague demons as of the all-consuming intensity that had lit Albanon’s eyes—and of what lay behind it. A name rose out of that fear, wrapping around Vestapalk’s mind.

  Tharizdun.

  Vestapalk hissed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On the second day—or so he reckoned after an exhausted, dreamless sleep—of his stumbling exploration of the dark place to which Tharizdun had delivered him, Kri found the lantern. A purple glow in the deep gloom had led him through a room of many low obstructions. When he finally reached the glow, he discovered it came from the heart of a tall, rectangular crystal carved with the most blasphemous depictions of the gods. They were shown at a feast, each devouring their worshipers as well as those things most sacred to them. Ioun held a skewer threaded alternately with books and severed heads over a brazier, her eyes bright with hunger and drool running from her mouth.

  The carvings were exquisitely delicate. Metal fittings and a large ring at the top of the crystal suggested it was meant to be carried. Indeed, when he lifted it, the purple glow grew brighter until, for the first time, he could see his surroundings.

  In the place of his deliverance, only the chamber in which he had escaped from the statue had any light at all. There, light had been transmitted from some distant natural source along what he believed to be veins or tubes of crystal. It gave just enough illumination to allow him to distinguish other statues, some half-formed from blocks of stone, others smashed. It might have been the vast studio of some team of frustrated sculptors except that each statue had the jagged spiral of Tharizdun’s eye somewhere upon it.

  Beyond that chamber, Kri had depended on his other senses, a carefully constructed mental map, and a faith that Tharizdun had sent him there for a reason. Touch helped him find curving, tread-worn stairs and new passages. Sound led him to a slowly bubbling cistern of fresh water that tasted of minerals from a deep spring. Smell identified the ashes of old fires in one chamber and the dry tang of ancient embalming spices in another.

  The room where the lantern glowed was not far from the chamber of ancient spices, and as Kri raised the crystal, he saw why. The low obstructions in the room were stone coffins. All of them were open, the hollows within slightly rounded so that they resembled so many cold cradles. Shroud-wrapped forms lay within many of the cradles, their heads exposed leaving empty eye sockets staring up at the low ceiling. The skulls were those of dwarves, long tresses or thick beards still clinging to their dry scalps and the leathery scraps of their cheeks.

  Kri sensed no malice from the dead, though. This was their sepulcher and nothing more. The central platform where the lantern had rested was a kind of simple unmarked altar. Another dwarf skeleton lay across the stone, and it wore a mantle fashioned of chains, the ends gathered and fastened with seals in the shape of the jagged spiral.

  There was also a pick driven through its back and into the altar beneath. The skeleton’s arm was outstretched as if it had been the last one to grasp the lantern or as if it had died reaching for it. Not all had been peaceful in this place of the dead.

  Kri took the lantern and went back the way he had come.

  The purple glow of the lantern revealed much he hadn’t seen before. In the chamber of ancient spices, jars had been swept from the shelves, spilling their aromatic contents. A stone embalming table showed deep scores in its stone surface, as if some of those laid upon it had been crudely hacked at with an axe or cleaver. The state of disarray matched what Kri had noted in the sepulcher: the entombments farthest from the altar, and presumably relatively more recent, were less sophisticated than those that were older. Some were shrouded, but had not been embalmed. Some were not shrouded at all, merely placed or dumped into the coffins.

  Some coffins contained only ancient stains, scraps of clothing, and bits of broken bone, as if the bodies had been taken elsewhere.

  When he reached the room that smelled of ashes, he found the ovens, big firepla
ces, worktables, and scattered cooking vessels of a large communal kitchen. Peering up the wide chimneys showed no hint of light or open air at their tops. He stirred the ashes with his feet and uncovered charred bones among them. In one fireplace, a large covered cauldron remained where it had been placed untold decades or more likely centuries before. Kri lifted the lid and found exactly what he suspected he would.

  A wide hall nearby might have been a common dining area, judging by the moldered remains of wooden tables and benches. A corridor of many doors was lined with small rooms, each containing the jumbled remains of what might have been a bed and perhaps a small table. The mix of large common spaces and tiny individual quarters told Kri what kind of place this had been. He’d dwelled in a few and visited many cloistered communities in his long life—though never one seemingly inhabited only by dwarves. Or one so completely cut off from the outer world.

  Or one devoted to the Chained God.

  The pinch of his empty stomach reminded him of how long it had been since his own contact with the outer world. He’d find nothing to sustain him in the ancient ruin. A hiss of bitter laughter escaped him. He knew a magical ritual that could conjure food to sustain him, but in the flight from Fallcrest that had saved his life, he had left all of his possessions and gear behind.

  You have the key, Tharizdun had told him. One comes who will help you turn it.

  But what if that one didn’t come quickly enough?

  Kri pressed his lips together, stifling his doubt. Tharizdun had not succumbed to hopelessness in his place of imprisonment. Neither would he. The dwarves must have had some way to get their food, whether they traded for it or harvested it themselves. The cloister had been no short-lived community to judge by the number of dead in the sepulcher. There had to be some exit. And the logical place to find an exit from a dwarf community was up, toward the surface. Toward the vast statue chamber where he had first found himself. He retraced his mental map back to the stairs he had descended and began to climb them once more.

  Where the stairs turned, he found the first runes. Unlike most dwarven inscriptions, they weren’t incised, but rather painted. His fingers, brushing the wall on the way down, had completely missed the subtle changes in texture on the stone surface.

  Kri studied the runes, raising the lantern high so its dim light illuminated as much as possible. The runes ran the length of the stairs in long blocks, as if a long text had been copied onto the wall. In addition to being painted rather than carved, the runes weren’t in the common style of Davek, the dwarves’ script. Although angular at their heart, there was an unusual sinuousness to them, each character curving back on itself. In fact, entire passages seemed to follow the same twisted pattern. Kri had spent most of his life puzzling out writings that would have confounded a lesser mind, so the curious inscription proved little challenge. He had it figured out within two more turns of the stairs.

  It was a prayer to the Chained God, mostly in his incarnation as the Elder Elemental Eye, but invoking all of his epithets: the Patient One, the Black Sun, Undoer, Ender, Anathema, Eater of Worlds. The prayer repeated itself over and over, twisting and regressing as did the characters that spelled it out. It was a meditation on Tharizdun’s message of freedom through the casting down of order—or more precisely, on the freedom brought by change. True change, not merely the superficial alterations enjoined by Avandra, the wanderer’s god installed in Tharizdun’s rightful place. The overthrow of order was only a way to bring the Chained God’s word to the overworked peasant or harassed apprentice who might dream of turning on his master. The truth was more universal: there could be no growth without change and the enemy of change was order. Order, whatever form it took, must be challenged to permit change.

  Kri smiled to himself and murmured the words as he continued to climb the stairs. The words echoed in the stairwell and whispers came back to him, a ghostly chorus reciting the prayer.

  That such a doctrine, generally seen as a path to madness, served as the guiding tenet of a highly disciplined monastic community would have seemed impossible to many. They would have looked at the evidence Kri had found and concluded that the dwarves had courted disaster from the beginning—that they had delved too deeply within themselves and woken something dark.

  Kri would have knocked such fools across the head and forced them to consider the possibility that the inhabitants of the cloister had found exactly what they were looking for. There were many paths to the enlightenment Tharizdun offered. Some followed those paths slowly. Others raced along them.

  Some did not know they followed them at all.

  “You know as well as I do,” said Moorin, “that divinations are useless where the Voidharrow is concerned. Arcane rituals reveal nothing. Prayers to the gods and their servants go unanswered.” The wizard spread empty hands. “Maybe we know all that can be known about it.”

  Kri slammed his palm down on the tabletop, making the dishes and goblets around him rattle. “When did any member of the Order of Vigilance last try to make a serious investigation of the Voidharrow?”

  Moorin’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a question we know the answer to, Kri,” he said soberly. “Tavit Nance opened one of the vials containing the Voidharrow and he died a demon along with three dozen innocents. The Order barely contained the plague he unleashed.”

  The spirit of argument rose in Kri. “That was four generations ago,” he countered. “And before that the Order didn’t even know the name or true danger of what it guarded.”

  The answer to his words came in the hiss of sharply drawn breaths. Around the sides of the table, the other members of the Order of Vigilance—a scant handful of aging men and women of varying races—glared at him. Kri knew immediately that he’d gone too far. He bent his head in acknowledgment. “What happened was a tragedy, but see what came of it. If we do not dare, we will not learn. We’ll sit upon the Voidharrow and tap our fingers until the end of time.”

  “If it pleases Pelor,” said the deva Hania, “that is exactly what we will do and consider ourselves successful by it. You swore the same oath all of us did.”

  “I’m not Tavit Nance. I have no intention of releasing the Voidharrow. I only want to study it.” Kri looked back to Moorin. “You keep the last vial. Let me visit you. Let me examine it.”

  Moorin just shook his head. Kri ground his teeth and touched the symbol of the eye that hung around his neck. “I am a priest of Ioun, god of knowledge. It’s my calling to seek answers.”

  Raven Shirai leaned forward and the shadows seemed to shift with her. “And what does the god of knowledge tell you concerning the Voidharrow?”

  Kri opened his mouth … then closed it as if he could trap the truth. Except that he was a priest of Ioun and he couldn’t.

  “Nothing,” he said at last. “She says nothing.”

  The shock of the impact that broke him out of his reverie was as much mental as it was physical. Kri returned to his senses to find himself stretched on the stone stairs of Tharizdun’s cloister, gasping for the breath that a stumble had knocked from his chest. The shame and frustration of that moment many years ago when he’d first begun to doubt Ioun’s power was so fresh that he felt as if he’d stepped directly out of the past.

  He pushed himself upright, feeling anew the ache of aging the nearly two decades that had passed. The dim light of the lantern made judging distance difficult, but he thought he had perhaps walked a turn and a half of the stairs during his vision.

  Even without his active participation, the whispers of his murmured prayer continued to ripple up and down the curving staircase. The script on the wall seemed to writhe of its own accord. Kri considered the painted characters with new appreciation. “So,” he said, “you draw out the moments of change in my life. Is this a trick of the monks to guard their secrets, or is it Tharizdun’s power, testing the devotion of those who come before him?”

  There was no reply, although Kri half expected the text on the wall to twist into some answ
er, or for the slowly fading echoes to whisper a response. Still, he smiled. “Very well, I will play this game. Words have not yet conquered Kri Redshal, and my devotion is strong.”

  This time, something did answer him, though it could as easily have come from within as from without. Once you said that of another.

  Kri ignored it. With the purple lantern held high, he began to climb once more. This time he chanted the prayer of the Chained God out loud, letting the echoes of it build and wash over him.

  The trees of the valley stretched high. Seen from the valley’s rim, they made an impenetrable, leafy canopy. Seen from below they were pillars rising in a vast green hall. Fortunately, the undergrowth, choked off by the shade above, was sparse. Riding was easy.

  “You wouldn’t guess anything had ever happened here, would you?” said Tabisha.

  “Most of the trees outside the valley are larger and at least a century older than any inside it,” said Kri. “Most of the trees inside the valley are also of a suspiciously similar age, suggesting they all took root at almost the same time. Furthermore, those scraggly vines climbing that tree toward sunlight”—he pointed—“are twining beans, typically a domesticated species. Their presence indicates that the valley was inhabited at one point.”

  “Doesn’t that mean that the Order of Vigilance didn’t scour the valley as thoroughly as the records say? ‘With fire and frost and lightning the area was cleansed, until nothing that walked, crawled, flew, or grew from the soil remained.’ ”

  “Twining beans are notoriously hardy,” Kri told her. “Ancient beans in desert ruins have sprouted when soaked in water. Northern tribes depend on them when winter frosts reach into early summer. Your knowledge of botany is lacking. We’ll address that on the journey home across the Midnight Sea.”