Oath of Vigilance

by James Wyatt

  “Trying to draw people out from their fortifications,” Shara said, nodding. “And into a trap.”

  “We’d better make sure we don’t get drawn into the trap,” Quarhaun said.

  “Right,” Shara said. “At the top of the bluff, we cut through the woods and around the orchards behind the inn to the bridge.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Roghar said.

  “At least the beginning of one,” Quarhaun added.

  The top of the bluff offered a fine view of the land Shara, Uldane, and Quarhaun had just passed through. Shara explained what they’d seen at Aerin’s Crossing and the outlying farms, and nodded as Tempest described the eerie silence of the forest along the King’s Road. Shara led the group on a path through another small wood, just as quiet, around to the riverside.

  As soon as they emerged from the trees, Shara breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Across the river, Fallcrest’s Hightown was bright with torchlight illuminating the bridge and the opposite shore against the approaching dark.

  “So Fallcrest is not yet lost,” she said.

  “Just under siege,” Roghar said.

  Their path to the bridge along the riverside brought them past the fields of one more farm, and then into the fire apple orchards belonging to the Nentir Inn. Apples hung ripe on the trees, bright red and swollen with juice.

  “Pick me an apple?” Uldane asked Shara.

  “I suppose thieves in the orchard are the least of Erandil’s worries tonight,” she said. She plucked an apple from a low branch and tossed it to Uldane, who caught it and took a hungry bite, making little grunts of delight as he chewed.

  Suddenly hungry, she picked an apple for herself as well and polished it on her cloak. Fire apples were named for their brilliant red color. She lifted it to her mouth, but paused with her mouth half open. Some insect or worm had gnawed at the fruit, tearing the skin and leaving a jagged wound. The blemish in the scarlet skin conjured images in her mind of rough crystal growths and crimson liquid.

  The color of the Voidharrow.

  She didn’t feel hungry any more. Uldane didn’t seem the least bit put out by the color, though, so she handed him her apple. “Here’s one for later,” she said.

  “They’re delicious,” Uldane said, sliding the apple into a pouch at his belt.

  “I’m glad.”

  As Roghar hurried into the northern wood to retrieve the horses, the rest of the group drew steadily closer to both the Five-Arch Bridge and the burning wreckage of the Nentir Inn. Shara kept alert, looking for ambushers hidden near the inn, but no demons leaped out from the trees to attack. Once she thought she saw something moving in the blackened husk of the inn itself—something besides the leaping flames, that is—but no threat materialized.

  And they reached the bridge. About halfway across its fifty-yard span, a dozen bright torches marked the position of the soldiers posted to hold the bridge against the demons.

  “Safety and a warm bed,” Shara said with a sigh.

  “Maybe for you,” Quarhaun said.

  She turned to look at the drow, who was eyeing the bridge uncertainly. “What do you mean?”

  “I think the chances of those soldiers welcoming me to Fallcrest are slim. Is there another way into town?”

  “Why wouldn’t they welcome you?” Shara said.

  “Because he’s a drow,” Uldane said. “It wouldn’t be too much of a problem in normal circumstances. We’d vouch for you, they’d give you a warning not to act up, and that would be the end of it.

  Quarhaun nodded. “But with the town under attack?” he said. “Not a chance.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Shara said.

  “You think so?” Quarhaun asked. “You don’t know your people very well.”

  “My people? I’m from Winterhaven.”

  “We can disguise you,” Uldane said. “Or just cover you up enough that they can’t really see you.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Roghar said, rejoining the group with the horses in tow. “If Shara and Uldane trust you, that’s good enough for me, and I’ll vouch for you to the guards. They’ll heed the word of a paladin of Bahamut.”

  Quarhaun laughed, though there was no joy in it. “You two have seen what’s happening here, right? Everything Shara and Tempest were saying? You saw the demons we fought? As far as those guards are concerned, I’m part of the town’s troubles. I might as well be a demon myself.”

  “We’ll wrap you up,” Uldane said. “Like a mummy!”

  “He’s right, Roghar,” Tempest said. “Even you have encountered your fair share of mistrust, especially in more remote villages where they don’t see many dragonborn.”

  “And that mistrust vanishes when they see my shield and witness Bahamut’s presence in me.”

  “Well,” Quarhaun said, “if people mistrust dragonborn and fear tieflings, they loathe the drow. It’s not that they haven’t seen many drow—it’s that they’ve seen them and learned to hate and fear them. And I don’t have a divine dragon head on a shield to make people like me. What do I have? A warlock’s eldritch blade, carved with symbols of the infernal power I wield. I’m sure that will help my cause.”

  “Then it seems you are reaping the benefits of the life you have chosen, warlock,” Roghar said.

  “Roghar,” Shara began.

  “The benefits of a life lived without divine meddling?” Quarhaun said. “I’ll take them with all their drawbacks, if it means I’m not the pawn or plaything of some supreme machinator with nothing better to do than wreck people’s lives.”

  Roghar drew himself up to his full height, nearly seven feet of scaled fury. “I am not Bahamut’s pawn or plaything,” he said. “I am his champion, his agent in the world.”

  “I fail to see the difference. I’ve seen many champions sacrifice themselves in the gambits of the meddling gods.”

  “Champions of what god? The Spider Queen? Certainly she is a schemer with no loyalty to her agents, but Bahamut—”

  “You know him well? Speak with him personally? You’re so sure he’s better than Lolth?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “That’s enough, you two,” Shara said, planting herself, greatsword in hand, between them. “Theological questions are beyond the scope of the matter at hand.”

  Quarhaun opened his mouth to say something, but bit it back with a visible effort. Roghar slowly relaxed his aggressive stance.

  “Maybe not like a mummy,” Uldane said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Tower of Waiting stood dark and silent against the slowly brightening sky. The ancient doorway stood out as a slightly darker shadow in its side, gaping open and empty, the door long since broken down or rotted away. Albanon led the way into the tower, holding his glowing staff high and scanning the shadows at the edge of its light for more demons.

  The interior of the tower was as different from the Whitethorn Spire as Albanon could imagine. Instead of a spacious, graceful entry chamber that stretched the entire height of the tower, he found a small, dark antechamber that was barely high enough for him to stand. Three more doorways led out of the chamber, each one cluttered with rubble from the tower’s slow collapse.

  “Which way?” Albanon said, glancing back at Kri.

  The old priest started and snapped his head around to look at Albanon. “What?”

  “I said, which way do we go? Is something wrong?”

  “No … no. I don’t think so.”

  “Kri? What is it?”

  “There’s something … do you hear something?”

  Albanon listened, but all he could hear was Kri’s breathing, uneven, a little heavy, nervous. He closed his eyes and extended his other senses to feel the flow of magic in the tower. In contrast to the sense of a fabric or weave he’d noted in the Feywild, or the flow he felt in the river, the tower itself seemed to his senses like a storm, furious but contained, magic churning within the confined space and flashing like lightning in places it was ha
rd for him to pinpoint. Much of the energy seemed angry, perhaps malign or even demonic, but it was much harder to identify any specific source to it, a particular demon or anything else, than it had been in the Feywild.

  “Whispers in the dark,” Kri said, his own voice a harsh whisper.

  Albanon opened his eyes. Kri was half crouched, clutching his morningstar, looking around wildly.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Albanon said. “Kri, what’s wrong?”

  “I … I don’t know. Something’s wrong. Something’s definitely wrong.”

  Albanon’s heart was pounding. He’d never seen Kri like this—his new mentor was usually so calm, in command of himself and of all around him. Even in the grip of the urgency that had propelled them from the Whitethorn Spire to the Tower of Waiting, Kri had been in charge, barking commands and making plans. Now he appeared unable to complete a sentence.

  So I need to take charge, Albanon thought. And why not? I am no longer an apprentice.

  “It’s all right, Kri,” he said. “Just follow me, and we’ll get to the heart of this. We’ll find out what’s wrong.”

  To his surprise, Kri listened to him. The old priest took a deep breath and seemed to steady himself, then nodded his readiness. Albanon tried to look confident and reassuring. He swept his gaze over the three doorways and chose the one directly ahead, stepping decisively to the empty arch and ducking his head to pass through.

  The room beyond had evidently been a guard post—it was equipped with a broken wooden chair, a rack that still held rusting spears, and a large, solid-looking table. No other door led out, so Albanon sighed and shepherded Kri back out the door and through a different one.

  This door led to a spiral staircase stretching both up and down, which Albanon reprimanded himself for not seeing earlier.

  “Up or down?” he asked, looking at Kri but not expecting an answer.

  “Down down down,” Kri whispered.

  Cold fear ran along Albanon’s spine. The priest’s voice was so different, and his demeanor so completely altered, that Albanon started to wonder whether he might have been possessed. “Kri?” he said.

  Kri’s eyes flicked to his and then looked away, back at the staircase. “Down,” he mouthed.

  “Very well,” Albanon said. “Down we go.”

  The stairs twisted down over a hundred steps before Albanon forced himself to stop counting. Without the steady count of numbers in his mind, Albanon started hearing the same sinister whispers that Kri had been hearing upstairs. He started counting again, reaching forty-seven before arriving at the bottom.

  A small stone chamber was lit only by the light of Albanon’s staff. A hallway stretched off into the darkness opposite the stairs, and Albanon saw archways blocked by heavy iron bars. Cells, he thought. A low table in the chamber held an unlit candle and a length of thick chain with an open cuff at one end.

  “An altar,” Kri said.

  Albanon looked at the table again. It bore no symbol he recognized, unless the chain related to the god of imprisonment. “To what god?” he said. “Torog?”

  “Not the King that Crawls,” Kri said. “Not with an open cuff. The Chained God.”

  The Chained God. Albanon had read stories of the god who turned against the other gods, who created the Abyss in his attempt to destroy the planes and all that dwelled in them, and who the gods had bound and imprisoned someplace beyond the planes, outside of reality. The events described in these legends were so ancient that the details were forgotten—perhaps intentionally, long ago. He’d often wondered if they were some kind of allegory, describing not a real god but an impulse toward evil and destruction contained within all the gods, sort of a mythic etiology of evil. Clearly, though, to the mad cults that sprang up in devotion to the Chained God, some element of truth rang out in the myths, something that spoke to their crazed and twisted minds.

  “He was here,” Kri whispered.

  Metal squealed from a cell door down the hallway, making Albanon’s heart leap into his throat. “Who’s there?” a gruff voice called. “Who dares intrude upon the Patient One’s sanctuary?”

  Kri stepped toward the hallway’s mouth. “We seek the last true disciple of the Chained God,” he said.

  A bear of a man stepped into the circle of Albanon’s light. He wore a flowing robe of royal purple, open in the front to reveal a coat of chainmail. His face was hidden behind a full helmet bearing a monstrous visage and topped with sharp horns. He stood a few inches taller than Albanon, and easily weighed twice as much as the slender eladrin. A jagged spiral formed of adamantine hung from a thick iron chain around his neck.

  “I serve the Chained God,” the man growled, “but I am not the last.”

  “Kri,” Albanon whispered, “if that’s the demon we could be in trouble.” In a halfling’s tiny body, the demon had been unbelievably strong. Albanon didn’t want to imagine how that hideous strength might be amplified in this man’s body.

  Kri shook his head. “We seek the demon, Nu Alin, who was once Albric.”

  The man stepped a little closer. “And what business do you have with the demon?”

  “We come to destroy him!” Albanon blurted.

  Kri held up a hand to quiet him. “If necessary,” he added.

  “Then I will kill you for him,” the big man said, spreading his arms.

  Kri muttered something that sounded like “miserable failure,” but Albanon wasn’t sure who he meant—himself, the cultist, or Albanon. Albanon threw up an arcane shield around them just as a blast of black fire washed out from the cultist, spreading around the shield and dissipating harmlessly.

  In answer, Albanon sent a bolt of lightning down the hallway. It sent out tendrils of blazing light to the iron bars in the cell doorways, then exploded around the cultist, knocking him off his feet. Kri followed that with a pillar of fire that roared down over the man as he struggled to regain his feet.

  Kri cackled as the man roared in pain, smoke billowing from his robe and even snaking out through the eye holes in his helmet. Albanon gave him a sidelong glance, increasingly concerned that the priest was not himself. He shook the thought from his head as the cultist roared again, seeming to draw strength from the sound of his own fury, and stood up.

  “You will pay for that,” the cultist said.

  As he strode forward, he pulled a metal-studded club from a loop on his back and rested it on his shoulder. As Kri hefted his morningstar, Albanon stepped back and sent bolts of force down the hall to slam into the big man’s chest, slowing his advance. Kri could handle himself in a hand-to-hand fight if he had to, but Albanon figured that the longer he kept that huge club away from Kri, the better.

  The cultist answered his arcane missiles with another roar—a monstrous bellow that shook the walls around them and the ground beneath their feet. The sound thundered into Kri and knocked him backward like a physical blow. Albanon didn’t feel the force of it so much as a pressure on his mind, as if the man’s howl were tearing at the edges of his sanity. He tried to call another spell to mind, but while the sound continued he couldn’t focus.

  The man’s barrel chest seemed to have a limitless reserve of breath—his roar went on and on, and Albanon’s head started to spin. He staggered back, hoping that with a little more distance he might escape the range of whatever mystic force empowered the scream, but darkness started clouding the edges of his vision and he fell to his knees.

  “Enough,” Kri whispered. Somehow, for all the noise buffeting his ears, Albanon heard the priest’s sharp whisper clearly—and after the whisper was sheer silence.

  Light and fire burst out from Kri, still utterly silent. The merest instant of the most savage heat Albanon had ever known sent him sprawling to the ground in unspeakable agony. He felt his skin char and heard it sizzle, smelled his hair burning, but saw nothing except the incomparable brightness of divine power ravaging him.

  Then the moment passed. He saw the shadow-draped ceiling of the small chamber abov
e him, heard his own ragged breathing and Kri’s panting breath, felt every nerve of his body screaming its pain. He tried to lift his head, but the pain was too great.

  “Albanon?” Kri said, as if noticing his presence for the first time.

  Albanon flinched away as brightness washed over him again, but this time the divine light brought soothing coolness that washed away his pain.

  “Did I …” Kri began, crouching over him. “Did I do that?”

  “You honestly don’t know?” Albanon said.

  “I—I’m not sure. I … it shouldn’t have harmed you. You should have been safe.”

  “I wasn’t.” His body still ached from the memory of the pain, and even the slightest movement sent sharp tingles through him.

  “I’m sorry, Albanon. I’m so sorry.”

  Kri looked so stricken that Albanon couldn’t sustain his anger. He sat up, wincing at the pain, and saw the smoldering remains of the cultist behind Kri. “At least I didn’t end up like him,” he said, trying to smile.

  Kri turned and looked down at the cultist’s corpse as well. He muttered something Albanon couldn’t understand as he stomped over to the body, then crouched down beside it. He reached down and lifted the spiral symbol off the dead man’s chest, pulling the chain over the bulky helmet and hefting the heavy amulet.

  “What is it?” Albanon asked. “The symbol of the Chained God?”

  Kri started, hiding the symbol behind his body. Then he drew it back out and looked back down at it—a little guiltily, Albanon thought. “This? It’s the symbol of the Elder Elemental Eye. Which is the Chained God. Except most of the cultists of the Eye don’t realize it.”

  “They think they’re serving the Eye, but it’s actually the Chained God giving the orders?”

  “Exactly.”

  Albanon got slowly to his feet, his brow furrowed in thought. “Does Ioun give you orders?” he asked.

  “Sometimes.” Kri stared at the symbol. “Mostly I do what I think she would want me to do.”

  “How do you know what that is?”

  “Her teachings are preserved from the Dawn War. ‘Seek the perfection of your mind by bringing reason, perception, and emotion into balance with one another. Accumulate, preserve, and distribute knowledge in all forms. Pursue education, build libraries, and seek out lost and—’ Lost and something. Lore—‘seek out lore.’ ”