The Eye of the Chained God

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

They found the Tigerclaws’ camp undisturbed when they reached it the next day. Those left behind had glimpsed the two-headed dragon high overheard, but the beast had paid no attention to them. Forewarned by Hurn and the warriors who had gone on ahead, the camp greeted the returning heroes with a mix of joy-which was eagerly returned by warriors finding their loved ones safe-and grief for those who had died in the valley.

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.”

Somehow they reached the slope of the volcano without encountering a single active plague demon. They did spot more demons piled into other crevices and gullies, but none of them stirred. Shara’s arm and fingers ached from gripping her sword and she hadn’t even drawn it yet. She forced herself to release the hilt and shook out her hand.

“I don’t like this,” she said, looking up at the volcano’s peak. “What are the demons doing? Why aren’t we being attacked?”

“I don’t like it either,” said Quarhaun. “I don’t like any of this, but if you want a spider’s silk, you have to reach into her nest.” He caught her hand and gently rubbed the crooked fingers. “Where will we go after this? Back to Fallcrest? Nera? I’ve heard of a place called the Dragondown Coast that sounds interesting.”

Shara shuddered. “No more dragons.” She pulled her hand away. “How can you think about something like that right now?”

“When you’re somewhere bad, focus on where you’ll go next.”

“Another drow saying?”

“A halfling saying, or so I’m told.” Quarhaun nodded to Uldane then flashed her a smile, his white teeth dazzling against his jet black skin. “Drow wisdom would say when you’re somewhere bad, focus on how you’ll hurt the people who put you there.”

“Why do I love you?”

“Insidious drow charm.” He caught her hand again and kissed her sword-calloused palm.

“If you’re finished,” said Kri, coming up beside them, “we need to find our way inside.”

Quarhaun dropped her hand. Shara frowned at Kri. “I liked you better when you served Ioun. Occasionally you kept your mouth shut.”

“People who call Vecna the god of secrets have never truly known Ioun,” said the priest. “The Chained God shows his followers freedom of all kinds.”

“The kind where I can put a sword through your belly?” asked Shara.

“Perhaps after we’ve dealt with Vestapalk and the Voidharrow,” Kri said mildly before turning to Quarhaun. “How do we find a tunnel that leads inside?”

“In the Underdark, the easiest way is to find a tunnel that local beasts are using and hope that it doesn’t dead-end in a den or nest. I imagine that holds true for the surface as well.”

“So now we need to go looking for a plague demon?” said Shara.

Quarhaun shrugged. “I honestly didn’t think we’d have any trouble with that part.”

“I don’t think we will,” Belen said. “Look.” The Fallcrest guard stood behind them. They all turned.

Back down the way they had come, spindly figures moved at the edges of crevices and gullies. Roghar cursed. “Did they see us?”

“No,” said Cariss, “I’m certain they didn’t.”

“Then let’s try and find a passage to follow before they do,” Quarhaun said. “Any sign of heavy use around a cave mouth will do-a trail, disturbed dirt, broken plants. Look up the slope as well as down.”

“What if we find plague demons inside?” asked Uldane.

Quarhaun’s chuckle was cold. “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if.’ ”

He led them around the slope to the left where a shelf of slumping, crystal-ridden stone would hide them from the demons below. Where the shelf ended, he turned along a trough-shaped ravine that went toward the peak. They were still following the ravine when the shrieks of demons fighting broke out ahead.

Shara guessed there were only a couple of the creatures, but the screams were so strange and angry that were she less skilled, she could have believed there to be half a dozen. She stopped. Quarhaun pressed her onward.

“Are we looking for demons or trying to avoid them?” she muttered to him. “Because if we want a place with a lot of demons, we could go back down to those crevices.”

“Too shallow,” said Quarhaun. “If they ran into the interior, the demons wouldn’t have clustered at the surface. We want signs of them, but not too many actual demons.” He motioned for her and the others to stay low, then crept up the side of the ravine and continued climbing the slope alongside it. When the sounds of fighting were closest, Quarhaun went back to the ravine and peered over the crumbing edge. Shara stayed to one side of him, Cariss to the other.

All of the shrieks came from only two bestial demons as they wrestled back and forth over the corpse of some now unidentifiable small animal. Just above them, a low dark opening pierced the side of the mountain, about as wide as Shara was tall and just high enough that she would be able to crawl into it. Dark soil was strewn before it, but Shara scowled.

“Nothing,” she said. “They’ve just dug out a burrow.” Cariss grunted agreement.

The drow shook his head. “Something might have been living there, but that’s more than just a burrow. You can tell by the shape of it, and the way it’s right at the top of the ravine. I think we’ll find it’s bigger on the inside than it looks.”

He gestured for Albanon to come up and join them, then whispered rapidly to the wizard. Albanon nodded. The drow and the eladrin rose to their knees. Their hands wove in the air and words of magic rippled from their mouths. Before the demons even had a chance to look up, they were engulfed simultaneously by a wave of flame and a burst of writhing darkness. Corpses as scorched and withered as old sticks dragged from a campfire fell to the ground on either side of the demons’ animal victim. Quarhaun nodded in satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

They slithered back down into the ravine and approached the hole cautiously. Quarhaun squatted down and peered inside.

“Yes,” he said, “this looks promising.” Before Shara could stop him, he scrambled through. Words of warning caught in her throat. If the hole really did lead deeper, a shout would only echo and warn any demons of their approach.

Quarhaun was back in moments anyway. “We’re lucky,” he said. “This is exactly what we need. Everyone inside. It’s tight but it opens up.”

He held out a hand for her. Shara didn’t hesitate before accepting it and following him.

The first stretch inside the hole was indeed tight and smelled strongly of both animals and demons. Shara had to drop onto her elbows and wriggle through to get her sword, protruding over her shoulder, past the ceiling. Roghar would have a difficult squeeze. When the ceiling rose, however, she found that there was more than enough space for her to stand. The daylight that came through the hole, broken into moving shafts and shadows by the people following her, revealed a long, smooth-floored gallery. Here and there, the light flashed on red crystals embedded in the walls.

“More Voidharrow,” she said.

“You had to expect that,” said Uldane. He produced a couple of long, thin sticks-sunrods-and rapped the gnarled ends against the tunnel wall. The sunrods burst into bright, steady light.

The veins of crystal they revealed were so thick and twisted that they looked like tentacles reaching down the tunnel toward them. Cariss yelped in surprise and flinched. Even Kri’s face tightened.

“Still no plague demons,” Shara said hopefully, but Albanon waved her to silence and cocked his head, listening. She listened, too, and after a moment, she heard what his sharp ears already had. A whispering drifted along the tunnels, not of voices but of bodies jostling close together. A lot of bodies.

No one said anything. Those with weapons drew them. Uldane kept one of the sunrods for himself and passed the other to Belen. They set off toward the sound. When the tunnel branched, they paused and listened again. The sound was louder, underscored with an even deeper, more seething hiss, like slowly boiling sugar syrup. The air grew close and thick, but strangely no warmer. The crystal veins in the wall glowed faintly, a light that had nothing to do with the sunrods.

Quarhaun glanced at Kri and Albanon. The priest and the wizard looked at each other, then Albanon nodded toward the tunnel branch that angled more steeply downward. Quarhaun turned down it-only to pause with a grimace on his face and tread lightly in place for a moment. Uldane pointed his sunrod down at the drow’s feet.

The smooth stone of the floor had taken on the same waxy appearance as the rocks outside. It dimpled under Quarhaun’s boots-and sprang back when he raised them. He bounced and it quivered slightly in response. When he rapped the floor with his toe, though, it sounded like kicking solid stone.

“Keep going,” Kri said grimly.

Shara experienced a strange shift in perception as she followed Quarhaun onto the fleshy floor. Suddenly, it seemed to her that she was no longer following a tunnel, but walking inside the guts of some strange, enormous worm. Or inside Vestapalk if the dragon had grown to the size of a mountain. Albanon said Vestapalk was the Voidharrow and the Voidharrow was Vestapalk. Maybe in a way they really were inside Vestapalk.

She took a deep breath and forced that thought away. All the more reason to destroy Vestapalk. All the more reason to make sure the dragon died, no matter who struck the killing blow or how.

Then a deep shudder passed through the tunnel.

All of them froze. “Quarhaun, did you do that?” asked Tempest.

“No.”

The whispering shifted and changed. It swelled ahead of them, like excitement sweeping a crowd, until it echoed in the tunnel. No, Shara realized, it was no echo. The sound coming from behind them wasn’t excited whispering, it was the rapid skittering of claws on stone.

“Demons behind us,” said Roghar.

“Go!” said Kri. “We have to get into heart of the Plaguedeep. That’s the only thing that matters.”

They picked up their pace, moving quickly along the tunnel. The strange floor absorbed the sound of their footsteps. Shara prayed silently that it might be enough to throw off the demons following them. Another shudder passed along the tunnel, stronger than the first. Strong enough to make Kri stumble. Cariss and Belen helped the old priest to his feet. The tunnel branched again up ahead, this time breaking into three passages. One of them made a steep downward plunge. Quarhaun turned into it without asking. Shara, following behind, turned after him-and almost knocked him over as he froze just inside. For an instant, they were a tangle of limbs, then Shara managed to grab the wall and clutch Quarhaun to her before they tumbled down the slope.

The red eyes of plague demons glittered up at them from below. One of the creatures let out a sharp hiss.

Hands from behind seized both her and Quarhaun, hauling them back into the main passage. “Demons coming up from below!” Quarhaun blurted.

“And above,” said Cariss. The shifter crouched with her warpicks ready, facing the main passage where it angled up ahead. More whispering and skittering came from it.

Without a word, Kri took Albanon’s arm and rushed him into the third passage, their robes flapping around them. Shara and the others followed. Another shudder shook the tunnel and this time, Shara felt the floor drop underneath her. She fell hard to her knees, her sword sliding out of her grasp. Between one breath and the next, the distant whispering of the plague demons rose into a deafening cacophony of screeches, cackles, and roars.

When Shara looked up, the passage had broadened into a small cavern and one wall had fallen away entirely. Not five paces from her, the new cavern opened onto chaos, an abyss of shimmering light lined with flashing red crystals. Boulders hung suspended in the air while lightning oozed in sheets. Wind tore through the gap to buffet her.

Plague demons crawled over every solid and semi-solid surface, so thick that it took Shara a moment to realize that the flashing crystals weren’t embedded in the walls-they were actually the bodies of the writhing demons.

Their bodies-and their eyes. Hundreds, even thousands of plague demons stared into the newly formed cavern and screamed with insane fury. Shara snatched up her sword and threw herself back. Her feet hit a chunk of fallen rock and she stumbled, but strong arms caught and held her before she could fall again.

“Quarhaun!” she gasped, but the arms weren’t the warlock’s. They were familiar, but they were encased in a paladin’s heavy armor. Roghar looked down at her, then turned her loose. Shara stared. The last tremor had done more than turn the passage they had followed into a cavern with a window on madness. Sharp drops now divided the former passage. She stood on a platform of rock perhaps a dozen paces across with Roghar and Uldane. On an even smaller section, separated from them by a drop of twice Shara’s height, were Albanon, Tempest, and Kri. Shara turned the other way.

Quarhaun, along with Belen and Cariss, stared down at her from the edge of the original tunnel-at the top of a sheer face of newly exposed rock more than three times her own height.

“Quarhaun!” she shouted again and it looked like he would have called back to her, but at that moment a shadow fell across the cavern. Shara spun around.

The noise of the plague demons went silent as Vestapalk rose up from the pit. Floating stones laced with the Voidharrow shuddered and came together, melting and growing into a bridge that spanned the abyss. Vestapalk settled onto his new perch like an emperor onto a throne. The dragon fixed them with eyes that were swirling pools of liquid crystal-and as he did so, all of the demons looked at them, too. Thousands of eyes staring at them. At her. Shara shivered and fell back a pace.

“Welcome to the Plaguedeep,” said Vestapalk and all of his demons along with him. “Welcome to your tomb.”