The Eye of the Chained God (15 page)

“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.

O
n 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 fireplaces, 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.