The Temple of Yellow Skulls

by Don Bassingthwaite

  They finished knotting the ropes together and lowered them over the edge of the chasm. Shara tied a dagger to the end as a weight, listening closely as the rope went down. There was still some slack in the rope’s combined length when Albanon heard the dagger clink as it reach a solid surface. Shara dragged the rope back and forth a few times, then nodded. “We’re at the bottom.”

  “You go first,” said Kri. “I’ll follow. Albanon, give us light and be ready with your spell in case anyone falls.”

  Albanon swallowed, tucked his staff securely between his pack and his body, and nodded.

  The descent went faster and more smoothly than he would have expected. The chasm wall was mercifully clear of large projections—maybe because Vestapalk had broken many of them away when he’d fallen. Albanon spotted several points where areas of broken stone were smeared with the dark remains of blood. Green scales as big as his palm glittered here and there where they’d become wedged among the rocks. Vestapalk’s descent had not been easy.

  He felt the rope shake and heard the ring of a drawn sword as Shara leaped to the chasm floor. Glancing down, he saw her take up a guard position. Splendid hovered near her shoulder, pointing out the direction of the unseen cave. Shara kept watch in all directions, though. Kri joined her, his morningstar at the ready, then it was Albanon’s turn. He kicked away from the wall and landed as softly as he could manage. Kri put a long, thin stick into his hand without looking. Albanon recognized it as a sunrod and understood what Kri wanted. He struck the rod’s gnarled end against the rock wall.

  Light brighter than any he could summon flared from the rod. He held it high, illuminating the chasm around them.

  Splendid had been right. The remains of a camp littered the chasm floor. Rough blankets, crude pots, baskets, and gear had been torn and broken. The ashes of fire pits covered wide areas in black and gray dust. Shara pointed at tracks through the ashes. “Kobolds,” she said.

  “What happened here?” Albanon asked quietly.

  Kri seemed to pay no attention to either of them. Morningstar set aside briefly, he gripped the holy symbol of Ioun around his neck with one hand while the other stretched out, fingers spread wide. His eyes were narrow with concentration, darting back and forth around the chasm. He pointed and Albanon shifted the sunrod. A patch of darkness he had taken for shadow on the stone refused to move. Dried blood—a big patch of it. Shara looked up to the chasm’s edge high above, then back down.

  “I think that’s where Vestapalk fell,” she said.

  “I’m sure of it.” Kri’s finger traced a path and Albanon saw more dried blood smeared across the chasm floor underneath the remains of the camp. “The kobolds moved him,” Kri said. “Dragged him. That way.”

  “That’s where the cave lies,” whispered Splendid.

  “And that’s where we have to go.” Taking up his morningstar, Kri moved off through the camp. Albanon and Shara glanced at each other, then went after him. Splendid hung back behind them all.

  “Why would the kobolds have dragged Vestapalk around?” asked Shara. “Do you think they were trying to make a tomb for him?”

  Kri’s face tightened. “If we’re lucky.”

  The cleric still gripped his holy symbol with his free hand. His eyes still scanned the shadows beyond the sunrod’s light. “You can sense the Voidharrow, can’t you?” Albanon said to him. “Is Vestapalk in there? Is he dead?”

  “Dead or he would have come charging out at us,” Shara answered.

  “Perhaps,” said Kri. His eyes were on the deeper darkness taking shape in the shadows ahead—the cave mouth. The long streaks of dragon blood went right into it. “Perhaps not.”

  Shara growled in frustration at the cryptic answer, but it caught Albanon’s imagination. What did Kri mean? That perhaps the dragon was dead? Or that perhaps he would not charge? Or perhaps that the great beast wasn’t dead but was too injured to attack? Albanon had seen Vestapalk’s wounds when the dragon fell out of the air and down the chasm. He couldn’t have made it down the rocky shaft without sustaining more injuries.

  Or perhaps there was some fourth option. The Voidharrow had turned Nu Alin from a man into a monstrosity. Kri had hinted that something similar might have happened to Vestapalk. What if it already had? Suspicion nagged at him. “Kri,” he asked, “what exactly is the Voidharrow?”

  Kri said nothing, just strode on toward the cave. Suspicion turned into fear in Albanon’s belly. He grabbed Shara’s arm, but from the look on her face, she shared his concern. She pushed his arm away. “Kri—,” she began.

  The old man stopped in the mouth of the cave and turned. “Bring the light,” he said.

  “Give us an answer,” demanded Albanon.

  “Bring the light!”

  There was compulsion in his words. Albanon’s feet betrayed him and he crossed the last few paces to stand beside Kri. The cleric seized his arm, shoving it and the sunrod up to throw light into the cave beyond.

  It was empty. Gouges showed where talons had dug into the stone and there was a bitter tang to the still air, a smell Albanon remembered from the battle with Vestapalk. The dragon had been here, but he wasn’t any longer. Shadows clung to the ceiling and to the fringes of rocky chamber, but they weren’t deep enough to hide a creature of Vestapalk’s size. Kri’s expression was blank. Shara came to stand beside them. Unlike the cleric’s, her face was alive with anger.

  “He’s gone,” she spat. “He’s alive and he’s gone.” She turned to Kri. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know!” Kri spun around. “Healed and left because you didn’t finish him. Because you exposed him to the Voidharrow. Now it’s gone, too. The cave crawls with the remains of its presence, but it’s lost to us.”

  Shara leaned into his face. “Enough about the Voidharrow! You won’t even tell us anything about it. I have a score to settle with Vestapalk. He killed my father and the man I loved. What is this Voidharrow that it’s more important than that?”

  Albanon took a step away from the shouting pair and bumped into Splendid. The pseudodragon’s feet grabbed for purchase on his shoulder and she huddled close to him, her tail wrapping around his neck. “Albanon,” she said softly, “listen.”

  She looked up at the unseen roof of the cave. Albanon tilted his head back and tried to ignore Kri and Shara.

  Something scraped on stone. A hand. A claw. Albanon’s heart leaped into his throat.

  The shadows weren’t deep enough to hide a dragon—but they could hide something smaller.

  “Kri! Shara!” he yelled, jumping back. “The kobolds!”

  It was already too late. Shrieking and grunting as if his warning had been the signal to attack, dark figures dropped from the unseen ceiling.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Albanon’s world dissolved into the chaos of battle. The diminutive forms of the kobolds dropped fast. Barely thinking, the wizard flung out his hand and screamed the arcane words of a spell.

  Fire roared from his spread fingers, banishing the last of the shadows. The shrieks of four falling figures rose into howls of agony. They slammed hard into the ground, three of them already dead, the fourth flailing at the flames that clung to it.

  But that was only four of the figures. Others landed with startling grace and leaped for him. Albanon gasped and stumbled.

  A sword blade whipped through the air and cut the first of the creatures down in midleap. Shrieking like one of their attackers, Shara put herself between them and Albanon. Kri moved to her side, morningstar swinging, a prayer on his lips. “All-Knowing Mistress, shield us!”

  Albanon could almost feel the power of the cleric’s faith surround them. For just a moment, everything seemed still and he got his first good look at the kobolds that had ambushed them.

  The sight made him recoil in horror and disgust.

  The kobolds looked as if they were suffering from some kind of disease. Their scales hung in patches and strips from raw, oozing flesh. Boils bulged across their bodies—e
specially across the backs of the shoulders, some so huge the kobolds who bore them hunched forward as if trying to escape their weight. Other kobolds carried massive swellings that seemed to engulf their faces from brow to long snout.

  But sores and boils weren’t the only things afflicting the kobolds. Whip-lean bodies that should have stood no higher than Albanon’s waist had become thick, gnarled, and up to a head taller, like strange reptilian dwarves. The growth must have been sudden, he realized—much of the kobolds’ peeling skin marked where flesh had been stretched and torn by the changes in their bodies. Heavy, curved talons forced their way from hands and feet. Thin tails hung limp and shriveled like dying vines. Pain and madness blazed in the eyes shot through with red.

  The moment of grace vanished like a soap bubble. The wave of kobolds crashed into Shara and Kri.

  And Shara and Kri crashed back. Greatsword and morningstar moved in deadly arcs, cutting and crushing, slicing and slamming. They fought well together, a wall of steel holding back the diseased kobolds.

  But they were doing no more than holding the creatures back. The cleric and the warrior made a short wall, and though they had the kobolds’ attention for the moment, they wouldn’t hold it for long. Albanon took a couple of swift steps back and shrugged off his pack, prompting a squeal of dismay from Splendid as she tried to cling to it.

  “Hide!” he ordered her, tearing his staff free of the pack’s straps and wedging the sunrod upright in its place. The pseudodragon half-jumped, half-flew into the nearest rocky crevice—and vanished, cloaking herself with defensive invisibility. Albanon wished he could do the same. He spun back to the fight and snapped a word of power as he thrust the staff at a kobold grabbing for Kri’s arm.

  Magic flowed through the staff, a bolt of silvery force that blasted the kobold back. Albanon turned and hurled another bolt at a second kobold, then yet another at a third, trying to open up some space around his companions before they were overwhelmed. The magical missiles weren’t as effective as the burst of flame, though. The first kobold was already staggering back to its feet.

  “You can’t take down more than one at a time?” Shara called over her shoulder. She swung her sword and separated a clawing arm from a kobold. The creature just screamed and grabbed for her with its other arm. Shara’s backstroke bit through its torso.

  “Not without catching you in the spell!” Albanon shouted back. He flung a second bolt at the staggering kobold. This time it went down like a sack of flour.

  Unfortunately, it fell against one of the other kobolds—one who fixed Albanon with a red-eyed glare. Hissing, it grabbed another kobold and charged at the wizard. Two more, their attention drawn from Kri and Shara, followed. Kri snarled and caught the slowest a heavy blow from behind that sent it sprawling, but Albanon’s gut still flipped over in his belly.

  He choked on a curse and swept his free hand at the charging creatures. Bright blue-white magic hissed over the first two kobolds. Frost whitened their scales and froze the flesh beneath, for an instant binding them in place.

  The third vaulted right over them, mouth wide and talons spread. Albanon brought his staff up and tried to knock the thing out of the air, but it was quicker than him. Bashing the staff aside, it sank teeth that seemed far larger than they should have been deep into Albanon’s left arm.

  Agony ripped through the eladrin. He tried to focus on the words of a spell, but he couldn’t. He only barely had the presence of mind to jam the end of his staff into the kobold’s ribs, holding it back so that its talons raked his skin but dug no deeper. Shara cried out but the remaining kobolds surged around her and Kri both, pinning them down. The kobold on Albanon’s arm almost seemed to grin at him as it chewed into his flesh. Above its tooth-filled snout, below a forehead grown thick and bony, its tiny eyes glittered.

  Glittered like liquid red crystals shot through with streaks of silver. Albanon’s breath caught in his throat. Up close, he could see the weeping sores where blisters had burst. At the center of each grew a red crystal. More crystals, hand-sized plates like crystalline armor, grew within the massive blisters across shoulders. The raw flesh that showed beneath its peeling scales glittered, too, as if something were crawling through it, corrupting the creatures before Albanon’s eyes.

  He stiffened in shock and the kobold grabbed his arm, opening its mouth to get a better bite.

  “No!”

  A winged blur streaked past Albanon and fastened itself onto the kobold’s back. “You will not hurt him!” Splendid shrieked. “You will not hurt him!” Her small claws dug into the kobold’s skin. Her wings battered its head. Far more dangerous, however, was her tail as it darted at the kobold’s exposed torso again and again, repeatedly jabbing with the poisonous stinger at its tip.

  The kobold howled and let go of Albanon to slap at Splendid, but she slid aside from its awkward blows and took to the air. Still shrieking, the pseudodragon darted at the other kobolds. Some ducked. Others grabbed for her. The one who had attacked Albanon, flesh already swelling from Splendid’s stings, bowled through them as it clawed for her.

  For a moment, all of them forgot Shara and Kri. Shara turned with a howl and went after them, swinging her greatsword in an arc that sheared right through two of the creatures. Kri, however, stood his ground. His morningstar fell to his side as he reached up to touch his holy symbol with one hand. He closed his eyes and his lips moved in a whispered prayer. Albanon watched as a radiant glow seemed to suffuse the old cleric’s face.

  Then Kri opened his eyes and the light exploded from him.

  For a heartbeat, the divine radiance was all that Albanon could see, a white brilliance that filled his eyes but was cool on his skin. The kobolds seemed to feel something far different. In the instant that he basked in the light of the gods, they wailed as if they were on fire, then fell silent.

  The light passed like a veil. Albanon blinked—there weren’t even any spots left to cloud his vision—and saw that all of the kobolds were either down or staring blind into space. Kri’s hand slipped from his holy symbol. “Finish any that live as quick as you can. You only have a few moments,” he said to Shara, then turned to Albanon with a look of concern on his face.

  Concern? A part of the eladrin wondered. We’ve won. What is there to be concerned about? He stepped forward to meet Kri.

  The cave turned around him, bringing with it a powerful throbbing in his arm. Albanon looked down.

  His left forearm was a torn mess of skin and muscle. Blood dripped in a pattering rain on to the cave floor. “Oh,” he said.

  He didn’t remember starting to fall, but suddenly Kri’s hands were supporting him and lowering him more gently to the ground. The cleric examined the wound in his arm, then parted shredded robes to inspect his side as well. He looked into Albanon’s eyes. “I can heal you.”

  Albanon nodded. He’d experienced magical healing before. It was comforting, like a warm blanket laid over his wounds. He forced himself to relax in spite of the pain as Kri’s hands moved over his arm and settled above the place where the kobold had bitten the deepest. The old man’s face tightened in concentration and he murmured a prayer. Albanon closed his eyes and drew a deep, slow breath.

  The sudden fire that burned through his arm was worse than the kobold’s bite. Albanon yelled and forced his eyes open against the blinding light that flared from Kri’s hands. He tried to pull away, but Kri gripped him tight. One hand moved to his side, tracing fire along the wounds there, then light and pain faded together. All that remained of the wounds were bloodstains and angry, tender scars.

  “The wound might have been infected,” Kri said, pushing himself to his feet. “The light of the gods was necessary to cleanse it just in case.”

  “You could have warned me!” Albanon sat up. The healing had taken only moments. Splendid was just coming to perch on his discarded pack and Shara was still moving like a whirlwind around the chamber, dispatching the last of the radiance-stunned kobolds. She cut down a final ko
bold and turned to face them, a grim smile of triumph beneath the blood that spattered her face.

  “That was a better fight than I would have expected from kobolds,” she said. “Moon and stars, what happened to—”

  If Albanon hadn’t been sitting on the ground and looking up, he wouldn’t have seen the movement in the shadows above her. He wouldn’t have seen the form of one last kobold as it dropped silently from its hiding place.

  Quick as thought, he flicked his fingers at it and spat the first spell that came to his mind, the one that had hovered near his lips all day.

  The kobold yelped as its fall was cut short, deadly descent turned into a slow drift.

  Shara and Kri spun around and stared up at it. The kobold squealed and spat, flailing with arms and legs as if it could swim through the air, but there was nothing for it to push against. It was helpless. Shara’s eyes narrowed and she brought up her sword. The creature just hissed louder.

  “Kill you!” it snarled. Its voice was high-pitched, a weird sound coming from a muscular body, and its massive teeth got in the way of the words. “Eat your heart! Eat your eyes!”

  “Eat this.” Shara drew her sword back, ready to strike as soon as it was close enough.

  “No,” said Kri sharply. “It talks.” He reached down and offered Albanon a hand to pull himself up. “Quick thinking. Can you keep it in the air?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  “To question it.” The cleric strode to Shara’s side. Wrapping one hand around his holy symbol, he touched the other to the blade of the warrior’s greatsword.

  Golden radiance flashed along the length of the metal. As its slow, inexorable fall brought it closer to the shining sword, the kobold’s eyes went very wide. Its struggles increased. Albanon joined the others, keeping his distance from the thing’s clawed hands and feet.

  “What happened to it?” His stomach tightened with fear, but at the same time he felt a strange sense of fascination. He hadn’t made a specific study of disease, but Moorin’s teachings had been eclectic. None of his master’s books described any infection or plague that affected its sufferers as the kobolds had been affected. The drifting kobold had the same silver-red crystal eyes and half-formed crystalline growths as the one that had attacked him. The same, he realized glancing at the corpses that lay around the cave, as the rest of the kobolds. His stomach tightened a little more. The same silver-red crystal as the Voidharrow. “What happened to all of them?”