Oath of Vigilance

by James Wyatt

  Tempest’s anger burst its banks and she stood up, leaning over the table to glare at the drow. “We are both thieves, Quarhaun, wielding power that isn’t ours. You can pretend you’re a wizard if you like, couching it all in the language of academic study, but it doesn’t change that fact. Sooner or later, our crimes will catch up with us.”

  Quarhaun laughed in her face. “You’re right, of course. But I am a master thief, always staying one step ahead of the law, hiding myself behind layers of intermediaries and deception. And you? You’re a master of the smash and grab, utterly lacking in subtlety and technique. Which of us do you think will be caught first?”

  Tempest fumed at him for a long moment, then turned and stormed out of the room. With a parting glare at the drow, Roghar followed her out. Left alone with Shara and Quarhaun, Uldane got up and left without a backward glance.

  “So much for a plan,” Quarhaun said. He grinned at Shara. “Perhaps we should return to what we were doing before we were interrupted.”

  Shara frowned, looking after her friends. What’s keeping me from storming out with them? she wondered. Shouldn’t I be outraged at the things Quarhaun said?

  She smiled back at Quarhaun, weighing his suggestion. Not if he’s right, she thought. She stood up and held out her hand to him.

  Glass crashed somewhere in the inn, and a scream pierced the quiet night. Shara hurried to the door of the common room and looked around. People were shouting both upstairs and outside on the street, but she couldn’t figure out the source of the commotion.

  Then a living flame smashed open the door beside her, and a monstrous face formed of glittering red liquid leered at her from the midst of the fire.

  Kri stood and looked down at Albanon’s limp body on the stairs. “Now you understand,” he said. The eladrin didn’t stir. Blank eyes stared upward, seeing nothing at all.

  Kri bent his head and lifted Ioun’s holy symbol off his neck. “You taught me to pursue knowledge and understanding,” he said to the symbol. “And so I have.”

  He twisted the bottom of the symbol, the crook that extended from the bottom of the stylized eye, and it opened. He slid out the tiny crystal vial that held his miniscule fragment of the Voidharrow. He closed his fist around the vial and felt the two wills at war within it—its own and the Chained God’s.

  “I renounce you now,” he said quietly. He let the symbol fall, clattering to the stairs and tumbling down into the darkness below. “Your knowledge is vain and empty. Your understanding is futile. The will of the Chained God is my will.”

  He reached into his robes and pulled out the jagged iron symbol he’d taken from the dead priest and put it around his neck.

  “I will destroy the Voidharrow and finish what the Chained God commands.”

  At last the eladrin moved.

  He opened his eyes and tried to figure out who he was. The Doomdreamer stood looking down at him, grinning madly, surrounded by a wreath of leering spirits. The floor beneath him was hard, uneven—stairs, stone stairs.

  “Rise, Albanon,” said the Doomdreamer.

  He obeyed without thought, then decided that his name must be Albanon. He focused all his attention on the Doomdreamer, eager to learn more of his identity, eager to fulfill his next command.

  “Follow me,” the Doomdreamer said, and started down the stairs.

  Albanon followed, adding his quiet voice to the babble of spirits surrounding them, flowing in the walls and floor as well as hovering around the Doomdreamer. Seventy-two stairs they descended, eight nines, six dozens, two squares of six. Formulas flitted through his mind and fire danced across his fingers in response, and he emerged into a chamber at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Ah, you have remembered your magic.” The Doomdreamer was pleased, and Albanon rejoiced. “Let me see you destroy that corpse.”

  Albanon followed the Doomdreamer’s pointing finger with his eyes, and saw the body lying on the floor. Two cubed times three squared. With a flick of his fingers he filled seventy-two cubic feet of the room with roaring flames. A little pressure of his will kept the fires burning until the corpse was a smear of ash on the stone floor.

  “Now you know the extent of your power,” the Doomdreamer said. “At last you understand.”

  “Yes,” Albanon said. “I think I do.”

  “He was a false servant,” the Doomdreamer said, nodding toward the ashes. “He failed, and his death was well deserved. His obliteration was required, so no memory of his failure remains. Together, you and I will succeed where he failed.”

  Albanon nodded, but he was no longer sure he understood. He wanted to use his magic again, to turn the numbers and formulas over and over in his mind, to explore every permutation and calculation. Seventy-two was a mystic number to him now, a perfect inversion of exponents and primes, a source of power and an expression of a far greater power. What would it take to pierce the Doomdreamer with seventy-two arrows of pure magical force? He started toying with that calculation.

  “We have one more task to complete in this place,” the Doomdreamer continued. “And then we must find Nu Alin.”

  “What one task?” Albanon asked.

  The Doomdreamer scowled at him. “Such impertinence,” he said. “Expected from the old Albanon, but not from the new.”

  What old Albanon? he wondered. He couldn’t remember anything before opening his eyes on the stone stairs a few moments ago.

  “Which makes our one task all the more important,” the Doomdreamer said. “We must see the one we serve.”

  Albanon stepped closer to the Doomdreamer, curious and anxious. The Doomdreamer moved to stand beside a makeshift altar, decorated with a single candle and an opened manacle. With a word from the Doomdreamer, the candle burst into flame, and a chorus of mad whispers filled the room. Albanon murmured something senseless, adding his voice to the chorus, and shuffled still closer to the table.

  The Doomdreamer snapped the manacle into place on his own wrist and wrapped the attached length of chain around his forearm. “Chained God,” he intoned, “Patient One, He Who Waits, my fate is bound to yours. While you are chained, I am chained. When you are free, only then will I be free.”

  The whispering chorus grew louder, and here and there a keening wail rose above the other voices. Albanon chanted numbers, factors and multiples of seventy-two, the seeds of arcane formulas that could create or destroy.

  “Dark God, Black Sun, God of Eternal Darkness, I bring this candle to your darkness, seeking a glimpse of your majesty.”

  The chorus was more wails than whispers. Thirty thousand, three hundred and seventy five was the product of the next two primes with their exponents inverted. That number would produce a much larger burst of flame.

  “Anathema!” the Doomdreamer screamed over the unearthly chorus. “Undoer! Ender! Eater of Worlds! Reveal yourself and end our clinging to the false reality of this world.”

  The next product was so large that Albanon could barely calculate it, but he was confident that he could scorch the earth across an entire farm by manipulating those numbers. Could he create more than a billion magic missiles to tear the Doomdreamer’s body to ribbons?

  The Doomdreamer’s eyes rolled back in his head and he convulsed, dropping to his knees behind the makeshift altar. Albanon dropped to his knees at well, unsure what he was supposed to be doing.

  The wailing chorus ceased and the Doomdreamer collapsed on the floor. “One billion, three hundred and thirteen million, forty-six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five,” Albanon said, and then he, too, fell silent.

  Panting with exertion, the Doomdreamer lifted himself off the floor. “Did you see, Albanon?” he asked. “Now do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Albanon said. You are Kri, he realized suddenly. I understand perfectly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Shara yanked her sword from its sheath as the fiery demon surged forward. “Quarhaun!” she shouted.

  Dozens of tiny flames caught
in curtains and on posts and floorboards as the demon entered the inn and lunged at her. Its entire substance was fire, except the crystalline head in its core, and Shara couldn’t see any difference between the flames left in its wake and the demon itself. It extended a tendril toward her and she slashed at it with her sword, but as the blade passed through the fire she didn’t feel any resistance and it didn’t seem to slow or hinder the attack at all. She followed her blade’s arc, twisting her body out of the tendril’s direct path, but it still seared across her back, igniting her cloak.

  With a muttered curse, Shara loosened the cloak’s clasp and let it fall smoking to the floor. Sweat trickled down her face as the demon’s heat washed over her, and she smiled. “Into the fire,” she muttered, and inched closer to the inferno.

  A bolt of blue-white light whistled over her shoulder and struck near the demon’s leering face, blossoming into a sheet of ice that spread across the surface of the fire, stilling the dancing tongues of flame for a moment. Shara took advantage of that moment and followed the bolt’s path with her sword, striking hard where the demon’s substance had grown solid and—she hoped—brittle. Her blade struck something hard, making a loud crack, and the demon recoiled with a monstrous roar. Its fury seemed to intensify its heat, melting away the coating of frost that Quarhaun’s spell had created, and it curled in around Shara, extending more tendrils of flame to enfold her.

  She ignored the coiling tendrils and drove her sword into the demon’s face. She expected to hit solid crystal, hard as rock, but instead found liquid that flowed around her blade. The demon’s light and heat faltered with the blow, and the tendrils that struck her stung but didn’t burn her. Pressing her momentary advantage, she sliced her sword clean through the demonic face, drawing a trail of crystalline liquid out with her blade. The face dissolved into floating globules of red liquid as the demon’s fiery form contracted. A moment later, the liquid globs fell to the floor, burning like lantern oil, and the demon was no more.

  She bent to pick up her cloak, then used it to swat out the little fires left behind from the demon’s passing. Quarhaun added his own cloak to her effort, then put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You fight like you have nothing to live for,” he said.

  Shouts from the street outside suggested that the threat had not passed, but she clasped Quarhaun’s hand anyway. “If I had killed Vestapalk when I thought I did,” she said, “would these demons be here now?”

  “We are the same, you and I.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him, and he responded with a wink and nodded at the door. “There’s more killing to do,” he said.

  Smiling, she stepped to the wreckage of the door left behind from the demon’s entrance and peered into the street.

  Roghar looked up and down the hall, trying to find the source of the scream that had stopped him in his tracks as he came upstairs. Wisps of smoke snaked out around a door midway down the hall, and another cry for help came from the same direction. He glanced at Tempest, who nodded, and then sprinted to the door. Drawing a deep breath, he kicked the door open, releasing billowing clouds of smoke into the hallway.

  Flames roared in the room beyond, lighting the room in lurid reds. The thick smoke made it hard to see what was happening, but Roghar plunged in without a moment of hesitation, following the sound of a man coughing. He stumbled over something on the floor, looked down, and found a woman’s body.

  “Tempest!” he shouted. “Get her out of here!” He crouched beside the woman at his feet, and a word of prayer sent Bahamut’s power into her, simultaneously strengthening her against the fire and smoke and lighting her like a beacon so Tempest could find her in the smoke.

  As he stood again, a column of fire roared up right in front of him. A demonic face, mouth open in a shriek of fury, floated in the midst of the flames, evidently formed of a glittering liquid similar to Nu Alin’s true substance. Roghar drew his sword.

  “Vile spawn of chaos and destruction,” he said, “you are not welcome in this world. Get back where you came from.”

  He didn’t expect any kind of response, but the demon answered him, in a voice like the crackling of flame. “The Plaguedeep grows, mortal. Soon this world shall be consumed.”

  As long as the demon was willing to talk, Roghar used the opportunity to get his shield off his back and into position on his arm. “I don’t know what the Plaguedeep is, but I’m here to make sure that this world stays as the gods intended it to be.”

  “The Plaguedeep is the place whence I came, and it is in this world. Until it grows to consume the world. As I shall consume you!”

  I guess it’s done talking, Roghar thought, interposing his shield between himself and the demon’s fiery tendrils. His sword erupted with brilliant light as he swung at the demon’s liquid crystal face. It recoiled from the divine light, and his blows seemed to burn the liquid crystal in a way that the roaring flames could not.

  Roghar fought with righteous fury, confident in the knowledge that he was doing Bahamut’s work, helping to defend and protect the defenseless citizens of Fallcrest. His confidence gave strength to his arms as Bahamut empowered his weapon, and in just a moment the demon was gone, its fires extinguished and its crystalline substance shriveling to black residue on the floor.

  Snarling with satisfaction, Roghar turned to check on Tempest. Smoke still clouded the air, but he didn’t see any sign of her. White light still shone near the floor, marking the location of the woman he’d tripped over. Tempest hadn’t retrieved her.

  Another cough, weaker than before, came from the floor near the window, where fire still roared in the curtains. Roghar plunged deeper into the smoke, yanked the curtains to the floor and smothered the flames, then found the suffocating man slumped in a chair. He invoked Bahamut’s healing power as he lifted the man to his shoulder.

  “A more moderate lifestyle would serve you well, friend,” he muttered to the heavy man. “The blessings of food and drink were meant to be enjoyed within sensible limits.”

  He staggered to the woman’s side and dropped to one knee. Groaning with effort, he lifted her under his arm—grateful for a much lighter load—and carried both unconscious people out the door.

  The hallway was in chaos. Smoke billowed along the length of the hall, mostly clinging to the ceiling. Near Roghar, Uldane stood facing one of the nightmare demons they’d encountered on the bluff, standing firm against it though his face was contorted with fear. Behind Uldane, a clump of terrified looking people, mostly clad in bedclothes, huddled together, recoiling from the shadowy tendrils the demon lashed toward them. At the far end of the hall, Tempest stood facing another demon near a broken window.

  Tempest seemed paralyzed with fear, and Roghar could imagine why. These demons used fear as their weapon, taking on the appearance of whatever their foe feared most. And they came from the same source as Nu Alin, apparently, so it was likely a trivial matter for them to draw on Tempest’s terror of Nu Alin and her fear of being possessed again.

  I have to help her, he thought.

  He lowered the two people he was carrying to the floor, as gently as he could, and scanned the clump of terrified bystanders for someone who looked at least vaguely competent. A teenaged girl caught his eye, wearing a look of defiance as she held a younger boy.

  “You,” he called, pointing to her. “I need you to get these people into the middle with the rest of you. I’ll keep the demon busy. Can you do that?”

  Her eyes went wide and flicked to the demon, but when she looked back at him she nodded. He smiled as he drew his sword again. He roared and charged the demon.

  “Fiend of the Plaguedeep!” he shouted. “Your doom is here, in Bahamut’s name!”

  The demon whirled to face him, and it changed. The snaky tendrils of shadow and liquid crystal that served the creature in place of legs lifted up off the ground and became five draconic heads in five different colors. The burning inn fell away until he stood alone on a desolate plain before
Tiamat, god of greed and vengeance, queen of evil dragons.

  “Worship me, dragonborn,” all five heads said in unison. “I am also of the blood of Io.”

  Bahamut and Tiamat were two sides of the same coin, in dragonborn thinking. Both gods had arisen from the corpse of the first dragon god, Io, when he was slain by the Lord of Chaos in the Dawn War. But they embodied opposite extremes of Io’s philosophy, and dragonborn believed that they all had a choice to make in life between the path of Io and the path of Tiamat.

  Doubt gnawed at Roghar’s heart, a doubt he’d never previously admitted or acknowledged. Did I choose the right path? he wondered, putting the doubt into words for the first time.

  The dragon-god roared, five earth-shaking bellows of pain and fury, and Roghar saw Uldane’s dagger stuck into the back of the demon as it turned. Tiamat was gone, and Uldane had taken advantage of the demon’s distraction to deal what might have been a mortal blow, but the demon was reaching out to retaliate. Light flashed around Roghar and he lashed out with his blade. The demon’s horned head toppled from its shoulders and its body began to dissolve into shadow and red liquid.

  Roghar glanced around. The girl had accomplished her mission perfectly, and the two people he’d retrieved from the room were awake, looking around with terror as they huddled with the others. At the end of the hall, Tempest was wrapped in the coils of the other demon’s tendrils, her body limp in its grasp.

  “No!” he roared, pushing his way past the bystanders to reach her.

  Just as he came to her side, an explosive blast of lightning engulfed the demon, and Tempest’s body with it, roaring with thunder that knocked him back into the knot of people behind him. The demon released its grip on her as it staggered backward, too, and Tempest fell on her face onto the floor.

  Roghar pulled himself up and free of the bystanders, and Tempest managed to lift herself to her hands and knees. The demon surged toward her again, but she lifted one hand and spat what sounded like an infernal curse at it. Flames spilled out from her outstretched fingers and over the demon. Roghar stepped up as it reeled back and plunged his sword into its chest.