The Eye of the Chained God

CHAPTER THREE

Albanon stood with the cold fireplace of the sitting room at his back and all his friends gathered before him. “I haven’t told you,” he said, “everything that happened while Kri held me in Tharizdun’s power.”

None of the others moved, not even Uldane. Albanon felt the urge to shift where he stood or maybe even to walk around the room. He forced himself to remain still, to focus the way Moorin had taught him to. “You know I saw Shara and left her to face plague demons without helping her. You know I helped Kri fashion the gate he tried to open for Tharizdun. What I didn’t tell you”-he hesitated, the words catching in his throat-“was that I liked it.”

That brought movement. Nothing drastic. His friends seemed to understand that he did not take this lightly. A frown from Roghar. A creased brow from Immeral. Uldane bit his thumb, Belen twitched, and Splendid raised her head as if he’d only just captured her attention. Only Tempest didn’t move at all. Albanon kept his attention on her face and her eyes. A warlock bargained for power with dark and alien entities. If any of the others truly understood what he had to say, it would be her.

“I was mad,” he continued. “Nothing made sense-or rather, everything made sense. I saw things I’d never seen before. I understood things I’d never even wondered about. But most of all, I knew how spells worked. It all became numbers. Mathematics. Volume. Distance. Space.” His heart started to beat a little faster. His head started to whirl. Even talking about the magic of numbers that he had so casually contemplated during those dark hours was almost intoxicating. Albanon took a deep breath and concentrated on Tempest. “By manipulating numbers, I knew I could scorch the fields across half a farm or freeze the Nentir River solid. It was terrifying. It was incredible.”

He swallowed. “I still feel it. I know that if I’m not careful, it could overwhelm me. Part of me wants to just give in and use the magic to its fullest potential. That’s why I’ve been so cautious with my spells.” He glanced at Roghar. “That’s why I resisted when you told me to set fire to the inn. And why I screamed after I cast the spell. You were right, Tempest. I was resisting something.”

The tiefling nodded and a corner of her mouth twitched into a smile. “I thought the way the inn exploded was a little too spectacular for a half-trained wizard.”

She was baiting him, trying to lighten the mood. Another time Albanon might have risen to her taunt. Not now. He shook his head. “So much has been happening,” he said. “Vestapalk almost turned me into a plague demon-I still wake up sometimes feeling like the Voidharrow is in me, reshaping my flesh and bones. Then Kri made me a thrall of Tharizdun. Sometimes I think I’m not quite right anymore.” He swallowed again and looked around at them once more. “Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m still a little bit mad.”

The others were still and silent for a moment longer-just long enough for Albanon to wonder if his confession had truly frightened them. Then Roghar stood up. “I’d be more worried if you weren’t afraid.” He smiled warmly and held out open arms. “If you’re wounded, we’re here to help you heal. This is why you’ve been delaying going after Vestapalk? You could have told us any time.”

Albanon stepped back from the paladin’s embrace. “It’s not the only reason. There’s something else.” He looked at Belen and spoke the words he hadn’t dared speak aloud before. “If we go west after Vestapalk, we’re heading the wrong way.”

Roghar froze, a confused look on his face. Belen’s eyes opened wide, then narrowed. “What do you mean? Vestapalk is west. The Plaguedeep is west. I see it in the memories Nu Alin left in my head. I described the volcano to hunters and scouts who know the land west of the Ogrefist Hills. They recognize the place. They gave me directions.”

“I know,” Albanon said quickly. “I know. I trust you. I’m sure that’s where Vestapalk is. But we need to go north.”

“Why?” asked Tempest.

He pressed his lips together for a moment before answering. “The morning after the attack on Fallcrest, I woke up with a strange feeling right here.” Albanon touched fingers to his chest, just below his breastbone. “I thought it was just my imagination or maybe a bruise, but it’s nothing physical and it’s not imaginary. It’s like being homesick. Somewhere up there”-he pointed and knew in his gut that he pointed absolutely unerringly-“is a place I’ve never been, but somehow I feel like I need to go back there.” He grimaced. “ We need to go back there. All of us.”

“Before we go looking for Vestapalk,” said Roghar. Albanon nodded. “How do you know that?” the dragonborn asked.

“It’s like a splinter in your finger. When you first look, all you see is the end of it, but if you poke and squeeze it, you see more.” Albanon abandoned his attempts to stand still. His nerves were twitching inside him and he started to pace back and forth in front of the fireplace. “I focused on it as if it was a spell I was trying to master. Whenever I thought about confronting Vestapalk, it got so intense I felt sick. But if I thought about going north, especially if I thought about all of us going north, it was easier.” He glanced up at the others. “I think that whatever’s out there is something that will help us defeat Vestapalk and the Voidharrow.”

“You said that’s what you were looking for in your books!” Belen growled.

“Because I’d rather have reliable guidance than some weird feeling I can’t explain,” Albanon snapped back at her. The fragment of the gate was still in his hand. He clenched his fist around it, finding something reliable in its hard shape. The others fell silent again. Albanon could hear his own rasping breath.

After a long moment, Uldane raised his voice for the first time. “Halflings have a saying: when the river takes your barge pole, there’s nothing to do but ride the current until you find a new one. Maybe we should follow Albanon’s feeling and see where it leads.”

“But you know where a river goes,” said Tempest. “We don’t know where Albanon’s feeling goes. Or where it comes from.” She met Albanon’s gaze. “Don’t you find it odd,” she said, “that this feeling came on after Kri used Tharizdun’s power against you?”

“No,” said Albanon quietly. “I don’t find it odd at all. That’s the other reason I didn’t mention it to anyone.” He shoved the gate fragment deep into his pouch and took a chunk of half-burned wood from the fireplace. With the charred end, he drew on the wall of the sitting room. “When I search my feeling for understanding, this is what I see.”

He stepped back so that everyone could see what he’d drawn; a jagged spiral spinning into an empty circle. Roghar recognized it before anyone else and hissed.

“The sign of Tharizdun. The eye of the Chained God.”

“Yes.” Albanon dropped the stick back into the fireplace and wiped his hand. “Kri told me something about the origin of the Voidharrow. It’s connected to Tharizdun’s previous attempts to escape his imprisonment-but it sounds as if Tharizdun has lost control of the Voidharrow since then. Maybe helping us defeat Vestapalk is Tharizdun’s attempt to regain control.” He turned to face his friends.

“I know where my feeling comes from,” he said. “The question is whether we follow it north.”

“Do you have any idea what’s waiting for us?” Tempest asked.

Albanon shook his head. “None at all.”

He floated in darkness. There was no sound. No sensation. No hot, no cold. No up or down. If it were not for the feeling of his own hands touching his face and body, there would have been no way of telling where he ended and the darkness began.

Is this what it is like for you, Chained God? He couldn’t tell if he thought the question or spoke it out loud. There seemed to be no difference. Is this what it was like when the other gods shut you away from creation?

Another idea occurred to him, one that sent a thrill of possibility from his head to his unseen toes. Am I with you now?

The answer came upon him in a burst of brilliant light that dazzled him yet somehow did not penetrate the darkness. By its radiance, he saw entities of vast and perfect power come together in judgment against one whose only crime was marring their perfection. He cried out at the majesty of the scene. Or maybe he cried out because he knew it was only a dim reflection of true events and that if he had seen the entities in their full glory, his eyes would have burned in their sockets because he was just a man. Or maybe he cried out at the injustice committed by those too blinded by their own vision to recognize the strength a seed of imperfection might bring to the world.

In any case, he cried out, then cried out again as the one entity that had dared defy all the others was shut away, his vast power chained. And the place where the Chained God was imprisoned was much like the darkness in which the man floated, but with one important difference: the Chained God was not alone. Tharizdun shared his prison with the very source of the imperfection he had planted in the world.

It called itself the Progenitor. Once there had been other things in that imprisoning darkness, an entire world and more. But soon there was only the Progenitor, infinite in scope, assimilator of what had been before, the sum of all things.

He passed eons in the blink of an eye. Both Tharizdun and the Progenitor hungered for release, but the gods had crafted well. The walls of the prison were unbreachable, the prison itself all but forgotten. Tharizdun could only cast his gaze upon the world to which he had given the gift of change and where he was remembered as nothing more than the god of madmen.

But mad is not powerless, murmured the man in the darkness.

No, it was not. The light that wasn’t light shifted and changed and the man saw more. Tharizdun accepted the worship that was offered to him by those who rejected the perfect lies of the gods’ creation. Tharizdun whispered truths to them in their dreams and under his guidance they scoured the world and beyond for the means to break the chains that bound their lord.

They found it in a forgotten fragment of the Living Gate, long shattered, through which Tharizdun had first brought the seed of imperfection into the world.

The man in the darkness shuddered as he felt the excitement of a god. If his mind was not already broken, such eagerness would have shattered it. The fragment was not large enough to permit the escape of Tharizdun and the Progenitor, but the Chained God saw that it might be empowered. He and the Progenitor joined a portion of their beings to create something that might be a vehicle for them both.

When the human priest Albric used the fragment of the Living Gate, the Voidharrow slipped from the Chained God’s prison into the world. But even the schemes of the most patient of gods do not always go as planned. As the product of the union of Tharizdun and the Progenitor, the Voidharrow shared the qualities of both. It had Tharizdun’s desire for escape, but also the Progenitor’s rapacious need for assimilation and dominance. Albric attempted to use the Voidharrow as it was meant to be used-to create a new gate with a reach vast enough to cross all existence and pierce the borders of Tharizdun’s prison-but the Voidharrow rebelled. It took Albric and his followers and made them a part of it. They became the first plague demons.

The Abyssal Plague would have started its spread that day if slaves of the other gods had not intervened. Of the newly created demons, only Albric, now called Nu Alin, survived. The Voidharrow was destroyed except for three small vials. But the other gods still kept their secrets. They would not reveal the nature of the Voidharrow and so their slaves stood guard over it, trying to find their own way over the centuries to the truth of its nature.

They could have asked you.

The Chained God didn’t answer the man in the darkness except with another shift of the lightless light. In his prison, Tharizdun meditated on the mistakes that had been made with the Voidharrow and decided a stronger servant was needed, one who might master the Voidharrow before it mastered him. He fashioned one with dreams and whispers, guiding a dragon along the paths of madness. When the time was right, he brought the dragon and the Voidharrow together. The slaves of the gods tried to stop the union again. They could not. Tharizdun’s plans were subtle, woven in layers upon layers of deception. A seemingly chance sword thrust was actually guided by the Chained God’s intent. The Voidharrow was joined with Vestapalk. He compelled the dragon to a source of greater power and once more the gods’ slaves tried and failed to stop his plans.

But Tharizdun failed, too. The draconic greed that he had inflamed to madness found kinship in the Voidharrow. Vestapalk turned from him, shunning the power offered by Tharizdun in favor of the transformation offered by the Voidharrow. He saw only the world, not what lay beyond. Still, there were layers to Tharizdun’s plans and another priest came closer than ever before to setting him free. Kri Redshal-the man floating in darkness knew the name, though he could not place it-had taken advantage of Vestapalk’s spread of the Abyssal Plague to reconstruct the Vast Gate and open the way for Tharizdun’s return.

Except that Tharizdun had been betrayed. In his moment of triumph, the Progenitor sought to assimilate him, laying a trap that would have bound them together if he’d succeeded in passing through the Vast Gate and back into the world. The substance that was the Progenitor could not survive in the world without binding to something. And what but the power of a god was great enough to permit the Progenitor to make that crossing? Perhaps that had been its secret plot down through all the ages of Tharizdun’s imprisonment: to use him to gain access to a new world and new opportunities for growth. Only ignoble defeat at the hands of a mortal had saved the Chained God.

In the isolation of their shared prison, Tharizdun could do little to avenge himself on the Progenitor. The weight of his gaze on the world beyond, however, had increased. Infinitesimally, perhaps, but it had increased. His vengeance could extend beyond his prison.

The man in the darkness understood. Destroy Vestapalk. Destroy the Voidharrow. More than anything else, that would hurt the thing that had betrayed Tharizdun by denying it the opportunity to expand. He trembled a little. But Chained God, your way to freedom will be destroyed, too. Without the Voidharrow, the Vast Gate can’t be reopened.

The light vanished and a hollow roar filled the darkness-a roar that had no sound, just as the light had no brilliance. Out of the roar came a voice so enormous it rolled through the man’s body like a blow.

Tharizdun might be a prisoner, but he will never be a thrall!

The silence that came after those words was so profound that the man in the darkness could hear his heart beating and the breath that rasped in his throat.

It took him a moment to realize that he could actually hear these things, that they weren’t just tricks of his imagination. Once he realized that, he was suddenly aware of other things as well. Weight. Cold. The slightly sour stink of his body. He was no longer lost in darkness. He’d returned to the world.

It was still dark, though. He tried raising his hands and found them blocked. Cold stone surrounded him at less than a finger’s length on every side. His heart beat faster and he threw himself against the sides of his rocky prison.

The stone answered with a hollow sound.

Something came back to him, some measure of discipline. He was intelligent. More would be gained by thinking through his problem than attacking it blindly. He forced himself to be calm, then began tapping the stone around him with fingers, wrists, elbows, knees-anything he could move. The same sound came back from all surfaces, as if he had somehow been placed in a shell. He experimented with his range of motion and found that twisting his torso offered the greatest possibility.

Taking a shallow breath of the already stuffy air around him, he slammed his shoulder against the stone. His prison shivered. He did it again, putting as much of his weight as he could into the blow. His shoulder ached, but he was rewarded with a faint cracking sound. He struck again. And again. The sound of the stone changed, becaming duller. The cracking noise followed every blow. It turned into a grating as stone scraped against stone.

Then abruptly the stone broke altogether and his shoulder breached open space. Fresh air flowed into his prison. He sucked it in, then focused and drove his entire body forward.

Stone splintered along hidden stress lines and the man tumbled out into freedom. The space beyond was lit only by distant light that peeped like moonglow from high crevices, but to eyes accustomed to utter darkness, it was merely a little dim. The man registered bulky, unmoving shapes around him, a musty odor in the air, the sharp pain of stone shards under his body-then realized he was no longer just “a man.” He had a name.

Kri Redshal looked down at his hands, the dark, wrinkled skin broken by nicks and scrapes. He pushed himself onto his knees and looked behind him. The tall stone statue of a man, its chest broken and ruined to expose its hollow interior, stood over him. A deep cowl hid its face, but its hands were outstretched, the upturned palms carved in the pattern of two jagged spirals. Kri rose, his old bones and joints protesting.

The last thing he remembered-in the mortal world at any rate-was leaping through the Vast Gate and shattering it behind him so that Albanon could not follow. His destination had been random, his only glimpse of it empty darkness. Everything he had once learned as a priest of Ioun, the god of knowledge, told him that such a thing was not possible. Every gate led somewhere. Something had held him between worlds.

He put his hands on the palms of the statue. “Chained God,” he said. “I thank you.”

The voice that answered him was a faint echo of what it had been in the dark place. Destroy Vestapalk. Destroy the Voidharrow.

Kri bent his head. “How?”

You have the key. One comes who will help you turn it.

“How will I know him?”

There was no answer. Kri looked up into the cowl of the statue, but found it had been carved without a face. A blank oval of stone looked back at him. Kri removed his hands from those of the statue and went to explore his new surroundings.