Conspiracy

Chapter 8

As the pirates fled into the hall, Noph glanced back toward the audience chamber.

The twin curtains of the mage-king's tank drew slowly aside to reveal a tank glowing with fiery radiance. Orange-red water churned and boiled around a thrashing, titanic creature. Mangled, scaly, tentacular- the mage-king writhed: his torso arched in agony; his tentacles spasmed; his hands clutched into fists; his teeth ground together like rolling boulders. Aetheric thrashed, recoiled, shuddered, but all the while held those tank-bursting fists by his sides. His skin molted away. It sloughed in ribbons in the water. It circled him in tatters. Still, he did not break the glass.

A sniff and a tug from Ingrar brought Noph back around. "We've got more problems. Brimstone-there are fiends ahead. Tanar'ri. They're pouring up the stairs in front of the palace."

"Swords! Knives!" Noph called to his comrades. "Fiends ahead."

"Damn," Belgin swore. He came to a halt and drew steel. "Why don't we escape down a side passage-let the fiends and the mage-king take care of each other?"

Entreri shook his head. "And let demons have first crack at the bloodforge? No. We stand and fight."

Noph helped Ingrar to the side of the hall. "You wait here. I'll keep anybody from coming at you." He drew his sword.

"Sure," Ingrar responded, hefting his cutlass. "Just don't back up into me; Fll stab anything that comes close."

There was time for nothing more. Shattering glass and splintering wood announced the army's arrival. Fiends smashed through the front facade of the palace and flooded toward the pirates.

Entreri and his party stood unmoving, a circle of swords against an army of fangs. The onslaught came, unstoppable.

Noph set his stance and prepared to die.

Then another, deeper shattering came. The fist of the mage-king smashed the impenetrable wall of his tank. Water blasted through the breach, and cracks ran out from it in all directions. The glass held for one final moment before it all-glass, water, and squid-lordroared out and struck the opposite wall of the audience chamber.

The wall creaked, then gave way. Ten-ton stone blocks fragmented into flying rubble and scouring sand. Rock sprayed outward. In its midst came one of the king's tentacles, as wide around as an elephant.

"Down!" Noph shouted. He and Ingrar dropped to their faces.

The others did, too. A killing hail of stone, sand, and water roared by overhead. It rushed straight into the teeth of the charging tanar'ri, ripping flesh from bone.

Noph saw no more. The flood arrived.

A muscular wave hoisted him from the floor and tossed him in its black belly. The breath he held blasted from his lungs. He tried to swim, but the water was omnipotent.

A great wall of tentacle swept beneath him. His cheek scraped the bossed ceiling. A chandelier surged by. Then he saw it again, that great black circle, that deep, deep darkness.

The eye of Aetheric.

Noph kicked out away from the mage-king's face and dropped into a small side eddy.

He plunged. Down, down. Whirlpool. It emptied water through a doorway and down. It emptied him. Water rushed in a choppy cascade down, down, down. Tumble tumble turn, down. Spiral stairs cracked his knees. Torches glowed lurid before they snuffed, and down, down.

The stair went black. Chaos. Blunt blows. Panicked roar.

And down.

A great roar came from behind the paladins, from the very palace of the mage-king. The battle stilled for a moment as every eye lifted skyward. Stars were suddenly falling from the heavens. Huge chunks of firmament whistled down in a terrific rain.

"The Day of Tyr," gasped Miltiades, breathless. "The end of time. The Coming of Justice." Suddenly oblivious to the foes before him, he dropped to one knee.

The other paladins did likewise. Their heads bowed down just as a massive boulder of masoned stone bounced over them and struck the gaping fiends below. The rock splattered the first few beasts. Then it rolled down the stairs, grinding demons to grist.

"Do you see?" Miltiades cried, elated. " 'And my hammer shall smite the nations of darkness and grind them into bitter meal.'"

The bowed heads lifted, just in time for them all to witness the next onslaught. A massive flood vaulted over them. It bore in its churning belly the twisted, broken bodies of more fiends. They soared by overhead in a cascade of blood and water.

" 'And I shall cast them down from on high, as the blacksmith casts down the burrs of iron that cling to his new-forged hammer. They shall fall from the heavens on this, my day, that all peoples of every land will know that the hammer of justice descends.' " As Miltiades spoke these words, a spray of water and blood swept over them. The bodies of fiends plunged down all around.

Kern cried out, "How could we have doubted you, Tyr? How could we have listened to the profanities of a tentacled beast instead of the precepts of justice?" He turned to the silver warrior. "There is no Fallen Temple. There is only the True Temple-only we, the faithful of Tyr! Let us rescue Eidola, and save Doegan!"

The ground trembled.

The skies split open.

The rain of fiends faltered and ceased.

The wheels of Tyr's chariot roared thunder.

Kern and Miltiades turned toward the sound, toward the coming of Tyr in glory. What they saw was not Tyr, though, but his enormous, bleeding apotheosis.

Aetheric III dragged himself up from the broken dome of his palace. His hands seized and smashed turrets. His tentacles coiled and recoiled in slug paths of steaming slime. His throat, so long filled with poison, roared.

"Doegan, behold your god!"