Diablo III: Storm of Light

by Kenyon, Nate

  “I might suggest you send a messenger to Bramwell for help and another to our remaining Horadric brothers in Gea Kul, asking them to come to Westmarch,” Thomas said. “Not knights but people who can blend in and are less likely to be taken on the way. If the nephalem stronghold is here and the phantoms are close by, I suspect that we will need as many fighters as we can get very soon.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Assault on the Templar

  Tyrael was introduced to the general and his acting commander in a private room outside the king’s palace two hours before the knights advanced upon the Church of the Holy Order. The general was a fairly large man who kept himself fit, although he was entering his later years. His hair was swept away from a handsome face that had grown rough over time, icy blue eyes still sharp above a slightly scarred cheek, a long, hooked nose, and a neatly trimmed gray beard.

  Commander Barnard, by contrast, was smaller and far less imposing, and he deferred to Torion whenever the two men were together. Tyrael suspected the men under Barnard’s command would have preferred Nahr to return from Bramwell to lead them, if given the choice.

  Zayl had already prepped the men on their story, and Tyrael outlined what they had seen inside the Church of the Holy Order. Torion appeared to trust the necromancer enough to let the Horadrim ride along. He had seen what Zayl was capable of when the necromancer had taken down the spider demon Astrogha years before. A mage like that was a valuable asset; several of them at once were enough to turn the tide if things got rough.

  The forces of the Knights of Westmarch gathered near the cathedral in the early hours of the morning. The moon was mostly hidden behind clouds, and the streets were nearly deserted, but General Torion and Commander Barnard took no chances, keeping rigid order, their men silent as the dead and lookouts watching carefully at strategic locations for templar spies.

  Torion was even more impressive in full armor, his wolf’s head helmet glinting in the faint light from above. The sour-sweet smell of refuse rose like a noxious cloud from the gutters. At this hour, the lanterns were extinguished, candles out in bedroom windows, people tucked into their beds. Torion directed Barnard to take men around the back of the cathedral, while he led the approach from the front. “We will move decisively and with overwhelming force,” he said. “I want as little hand-to-hand combat as possible. The people of Westmarch must wake up tomorrow knowing nothing of what happened while they were sleeping. But make no mistake: none of these templar is innocent, and they will not hesitate to take your life if given the chance. You may recognize a few faces. But if they were your brothers or neighbors, they are no longer those men. They have been trained to kill, and what they have planned for this city is far worse than you can imagine. This is a preemptive strike—”

  A cry split the silence from somewhere near the cathedral, followed by the clash of swords. Someone had been discovered, the alarm raised.

  Torion swore loudly, gesturing at Barnard. “Move, now!”

  The commander rushed forward, but Lorath paused briefly at Tyrael’s side. “Do what you can to get in,” he said quietly. “Now is your chance.”

  Lorath took the men under his own command and darted away. More swordplay rang out in the deserted streets above shouts of men and the cry of someone badly wounded.

  “I can get us in,” Zayl said at Tyrael’s side. “A simple spell.”

  Tyrael nodded. “Do it, and quickly,” he said.

  Zayl raised a spell that descended over the closest templar, deadening sound and dimming light, surrounding them in a sphere of silence and darkness. The group ran directly past three templar near the cathedral’s entrance. Nobody saw them or heard their passage. Other templar were stationed at openings high in the walls, ready to loose arrows at any knights who got too close. Someone has tipped them off, Tyrael thought. But the enemy was struck blind; the necromancer’s spell would let the Horadrim cross the open square to the cathedral’s front door without any trouble.

  The problem was getting inside. Surely the door had been barred. They might be able to take it off its hinges and storm in, but the fighting would be fierce, and the archers could be dangerous from above once their vision returned. The spell kept the Horadrim hidden temporarily, but did not protect them from harm.

  Tyrael held up a hand, and they stopped just before the front steps. “A special curse should do the trick.” Humbart spoke up from the pouch. “Remember that time at the Black Ram, lad?”

  Zayl nodded. He concentrated for a long moment, speaking under his breath, and a startled shout came from inside, along with the sound of fighting. A few seconds later, something crashed to the ground, the door flew open, and a man came stumbling out, screaming and clawing at his own face with both hands, nails digging into his flesh and pulling rivers of blood across his cheeks. The templar guard shrieked again, babbling like a madman about demons; he turned, waving his arms at invisible attackers, and went tumbling down the wide stone steps, landing in a broken heap at Tyrael’s feet.

  The Horadrim wasted no time, racing up the steps toward the open door. A large man in armor, one of those who had stood at attention earlier during their meeting with Norlun, was stumbling blindly forward. Tyrael slashed his neck with El’druin, feeling a twinge of regret as he pushed the dying man aside. Torion had said these men had been tortured into believing they were on the right side of justice. But Norlun was not the kind of man who would hesitate in ordering the Horadrim’s heads separated from their shoulders, and there would be much more bloodshed to come if they did not act now. Weigh the consequences of failing to act. Two lives in exchange for many more . . .

  Then they were all through and into the antechamber. Tyrael rapidly sheathed his weapon. Zayl’s spell held as they ran by more templar, who were seemingly oblivious to the group of invaders in their midst. That was good; they could have attempted to take on the templar here, but their true purpose was to get to the barred door down the hall as quickly as possible.

  Tyrael led the way through the worship room, remaining close to the wall and avoiding the main part of it, which was full of templar shouting orders. Norlun was nowhere to be seen. Tyrael entered the rear hallway past the room where they had met the templar leader earlier. The door at the end of the hall was still guarded by two templar, their weapons out. Zayl’s magic was fading; Tyrael could see the men’s eyes grow wide, and one charged forward.

  Jacob met him with the Hallowed Destroyer.

  The weapon flashed brilliantly as it crashed down to meet the templar’s spear, shattering it and continuing through the man’s chest, nearly cutting him in two. Blood gushed from the gruesome wound as the guard’s body toppled in pieces. The other guard cried out in alarm before Jacob silenced him with another mighty blow, slicing off his head.

  More shouts came from inside the worship room, along with the sound of running feet. Shanar and Gynvir turned back to distract the templar while Thomas removed a set of keys from one of the dead guards, unlocking the heavy clasp that held the iron bar across the door in place as Shanar’s magic crackled to life, energy cascading from her fingers.

  The door swung open, revealing a set of stone steps lit by lanterns attached to the rough-hewn walls. An echoing scream rose from below as Tyrael led the rest of the Horadrim into the cavernous spaces beneath the cathedral.

  The steps ended in a long room with a barrel ceiling made of brick, support columns holding up the massive weight of the structure above their heads. Torches had been set into metal clasps, sending firelight flickering across their faces. Farther down, doors with iron bars lined both sides of the room. There were men inside the cells. Some of the prisoners came to the bars and shouted to be let out, while others remained motionless in the shadows. Those who showed their faces were badly bruised and beaten, and some were cadaverously thin.

  Several templar in the room sprang forward at the sight of the Horadrim, but they were no real threat. Mikulov made short work of the three closest guards, easily
avoiding their spear thrusts and stunning them into submission with massive blows of his fists and feet. The two who were left dropped their weapons and went down on their knees, begging for mercy. Thomas found an open cell, spattered with dried blood and with iron shackles secured to the walls. He put the guards inside and slammed the door shut.

  They were in a torture chamber.

  Tyrael looked around at the stretching rack, hooks stained with blood; an iron maiden with spikes jutting out like jagged teeth; thumbscrews and blades. This was no place of light and justice, no peaceful order fighting back the darkness. Norlun would pay for this.

  A commotion on the stairs was followed by Shanar’s and Gynvir’s appearance. The two women came down fast, clashing with a flood of templar that threatened to overwhelm them through sheer numbers.

  “We will hold them off,” Tyrael said. He gestured to Thomas and Mikulov, then looked at Cullen. “Go find out what lies beyond this room!”

  Cullen’s breath was loud in his ears, and his heart beat hard and fast. Images of splattered blood played through his head, and the screams of the wounded followed him as he ran.

  Although he would fight when necessary, he was no warrior. Violence had always been a horror to him; he was not built for it, as his mother had said when he had taken a beating from another boy or kept to himself while others were playing with wooden swords and dreaming of going to battle. His father had never understood him, but his mother was more forgiving. You are a sensitive soul, my Cullen, she would say, stroking his hair. Your world is full of books, and you have a thirst for knowledge. Don’t lose sight of that. It will save us all someday.

  He had promised her he would not. When he was twelve, she had died of complications giving birth to a second child, and he had vowed to honor her. He had seen the blood between her legs then, and it had stayed with him all these years. His promise and his intellectual curiosity were what had drawn him to the Horadrim in the first place, and in that, he thought, he was as much like Deckard Cain as he could hope to be.

  Cullen hurried through the large chamber, trying to ignore the cries of the imprisoned begging to be set free. He thought through the artifacts they had found, Korsikk’s journal, all the signs that pointed here. The entrance to the nephalem stronghold was somewhere below this cathedral—he was certain of it.

  The vaulted space led to a stone archway and another room. The last torch did not cast its light inside, and Cullen removed it from its slot on the wall and carried it with him to illuminate his way.

  The adjoining room was much older, the ceiling lower and crumbling under the weight of the streets far above. Its former use was a mystery, but the dust that lay over everything was undisturbed. It had not been visited for some time.

  He waved the torch around the room. At the far end was an ancient iron grate. He could hear the sound of trickling water. The sewers, perhaps; the smell of them was strong enough to make his eyes water. But that was not what had captured his interest. On his right along the wall, there was a small panel or door set into the stone. It looked like an access door for maintenance, rather than anything people would use regularly. It was low enough that he would have to duck to enter.

  Cullen moved the flame closer. The door was created with some kind of metal, but it did not look like anything man-made. Its surface was perfectly smooth and unmarked. There was no handle or sign of any way to get it open. He rapped on it and heard nothing at all; the metal deadened sound, and the door was as solid and immovable as a mountain. Cullen ran his hand along the surface, and to his surprise, he felt a raised pattern of some kind. When he took his hand away, the door rippled, and a circle with a strange slot in the center appeared.

  The circle and slot looked familiar to him.

  Cullen stuck the torch into a large crack in the floor and fumbled through his rucksack for Korsikk’s journal. He flipped through the pages, his heart beating faster. There. Near the end of the journal, on a page filled with notes scrawled in the margins, Rakkis’s son had drawn a crudely shaped circle with a slit across the middle.

  He peered at the page, moving his spectacles lower on his nose until it came into better focus. The handwriting was barely legible, but one entry stood out loud and clear.

  Daoril is dead, burned away from the inside out. But we are beyond the door now. I have learned a valuable lesson from many foiled attempts: only a true nephalem shall possess the key to open it.

  Cullen sat back, his mind spinning. The door was protected in some way; that much was certain. It also seemed clear that Korsikk had gotten inside somehow and that it had to do with the powers the nephalem were capable of wielding. Perhaps Shanar or Zayl could find a way in. But Cullen was no nephalem warrior, and he had no hope of breaking the protective spell.

  Shouts and the sounds of weaponry echoed from beyond the arch and through the empty room. The battle was moving closer. He flipped through the journal again, frantically scanning the spidery script. There must be something more here, he thought, a key phrase, a spell of some kind . . . but there was nothing. The final pages beyond the drawing were empty.

  He needed to rethink everything, come at the problem from another angle. Perhaps the key to opening the door wasn’t some special skill or a spell.

  Perhaps the key was a physical one.

  The idea hit him like a thunderbolt. With trembling fingers, he pawed through his rucksack once again and found the ancient dagger from the nephalem temple on the mountain. A strangely shaped dagger, to be sure, with a broad, stubby, dull blade and a flat end rather than a point. Not much of a weapon at all, in fact.

  A key.

  Cullen took it by its jeweled hilt. He felt the power thrumming from deep within the strange object, warming his hand and running up his arm as if something alive had taken hold of him with gentle teeth, and the door responded with a thrumming power of its own. The fit of the grip was familiar in a way he could not explain. Images began rushing through his head: his father, a farmer who worked the fields from dawn to dusk and had been distant and cold, disappointed in such a bookish boy; his mother’s face filled with love for him; the library where he had spent so many hours during his early years. These memories dissolved into moments in time he had never experienced and yet recognized as if they were his own, thousands and thousands of shared moments he watched through the eyes of others as they lived and loved, struggled and died. They moved faster and faster, blending together as they raced through his mind, until he began to relive the stories of the ancients he had studied in Horadric tomes—the nephalem of old who walked these lands when they were barely formed—not as he had read them but as if he had actually experienced them.

  Cullen fit the flat blade into the slot in the door. It slid home with a click, and he turned the key to the right, rotating the circle with it.

  A tremendous surge of power ripped through him, nearly knocking him off his feet. He held on as the energy continued to build, and he felt as if he had begun to burn with a cleansing fire and would be consumed and turned to ash. And then the energy was met with his own that began deep within him, growing stronger each moment until it pushed the other back, radiating outward and bringing strength to his limbs. He thought he cried out but wasn’t sure; the world went gray and then surged to a brilliant, all-consuming white, before slowly fading to a gentle, constant hum that remained with him, filling his soul with light.

  Cullen came to himself once again with a feeling of peace and strength that he had never known before. He was still holding the key in its slot, but now the door was ajar.

  He gently pulled on the key, and the door swung open without a sound, revealing a set of steps descending into darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Lost City

  The templar had come down fast behind Shanar and Gynvir, but what had appeared to be an offensive move had actually been a retreat as they fought for their lives from the forces above. The knights had since broken through the front door and taken the cath
edral, and the fighting there had been fierce. Pressed from the rear by the Horadrim and under siege at the front by the knights, the templar were outmanned. They chose to make a stand in the underground chambers.

  The Horadrim did not allow them to stand for long. Shanar’s staff flared brightly, sending bolts of fire through their ranks, and Gynvir’s axe drew blood. Norlun shouted orders at his men and kept them in front of him. “Do not let them protect the snake any longer!” Tyrael shouted. He pointed at where Norlun hid behind the largest templar, and Mikulov raced through a thicket of waving spears, disarming as many as he could without harming them.

  But most of the templar would not surrender, fighting with their bare hands. A dozen more died on the steps before Norlun threw down his weapon and ordered the templar to give up.

  The knights surrounded the remaining men, disarming them quickly, and the templar leader proved to be a coward in the end. The sniveling little man was on his knees when Tyrael approached him. Norlun’s hands had been lashed together behind him by Gynvir.

  “I thought we might meet again,” Tyrael said. “Under different circumstances.”

  “Please,” Norlun began, “spare my soul—”

  Tyrael took the man by his shirt and lifted him to his feet. He glanced at the instruments of torture along the walls. Anger flooded through him, and he thought of tearing Norlun’s head from his shoulders for what he had done.

  “Let him go,” a voice said. General Torion crossed the stone floor to Tyrael’s side. “I would end his life now,” he said, “but he deserves to hang in the square, where the citizens of Westmarch can see him.”

  Tyrael dropped Norlun to the floor. “Put him in with the others,” Torion said. The knights led the templar leader to the cell where the guards were being held, as Lorath Nahr, a scratch on his face and blood on his armor, came forward to stand at Torion’s side.