Kri felt a flush of triumph. He had the solution to the puzzle. “Tabisha!” he said. “Look for a casket with its bones dumped out beside it. If Nance was in a hurry, he wouldn’t have looked for an empty casket-he would have made room by emptying one.”
He went to work without waiting for her reply. The chamber he was in had no telltale heaps of bones. The caskets were all orderly, undisturbed except for the two he had opened. Kri hurried to the next chamber. Again, all was in order. He bit his tongue. He couldn’t be wrong about this. It made too much sense.
“Kri,” said Tabisha, “I think I’ve found something.”
She stood in front of the arch with the broken keystone, outside of the chamber with the sagging ceiling. Her torch, thrust at arm’s length through the dangerous arch, shed just enough light to glimmer on a small casket of white stone against the far wall and the heap of yellow bones in front of it. Kri’s mouth went dry. He would have plunged through the arch, but Tabisha caught his arm and held him back.
“Let me,” she said.
For a moment, blinding rage filled Kri. This was his discovery. He should be the one to open the casket. He pushed the anger back. “You think it’s trapped?” he asked.
“Not deliberately.” She nodded at the ceiling. “But I don’t like the look of that. A lumbering priest isn’t going to get in and out. A light-footed thief can.” Her glance dared him to challenge her.
Kri studied the ceiling and the arch, trying to recall all he knew of the principles of masonry, then nodded at last. Tabisha handed him her torch. “Hold both of them high.”
Under the double illumination, she slipped through the arch and into the chamber. Her eyes, Kri noticed, weren’t on the ceiling, but the ground. At first he thought she was just trying to avoid scattered bones, but then he saw that the stones paving the floor were uneven. Whatever forces had cracked the arch and weakened the ceiling had heaved them up as well. A misplaced foot on a tilted stone could send Tabisha staggering. The impact of her body, however slight, could jar the precarious balance of the ceiling.
But Tabisha reached the far side of the chamber without stumbling. Using her foot, she delicately swept some of the tumbled bones so she could stand directly before the casket. She bent and examined it. “There are claw marks on the stone,” she said, her voice pitched low.
“Nance’s demon claws.” Kri’s heart soared. “Bring out the entire casket.”
Tabisha looked over her shoulder at him. “It would be easier to open it and just bring whatever’s inside. The latch is torn off-”
“ Bring out the casket! ”
The echoes of his voice brought grains of crumbled mortar drifting down from the ceiling. Tabisha looked up, hesitated, then twisted back around and heaved up the casket. Her return across the chamber was slow and ponderous. She placed her feet with even more care, possibly because she couldn’t see the floor over her burden. Kri could see the strain in her face and arms. His hands shifted eagerly on the shafts of the torches. By the time Tabisha was only a few paces from the arch, he couldn’t stand waiting any longer. He thrust the torches in among piles of bones to support them and free his hands.
She froze the instant the shadows started to dance. “Kri, hold up the torches! I need to see.”
“Let me help you.” He moved through the arch.
“Kri, don’t!”
He didn’t see quite what happened-his gaze was on the casket-but Tabisha shifted suddenly. Stones grated under her feet. She swayed to the side, unbalanced by the weight of the casket. Kri, startled, stepped back from her.
His foot came down on a bone. It rolled and splintered under him. He stumbled, falling against the side of the arch. The stones creaked, then groaned loudly. Kri threw himself back. Tabisha cursed and leaped forward as the cracked keystone gave way and the arch came crashing down.
Dust filled the air, extinguishing one of the torches and reducing the other to a guttering orange glow. The sound of the collapse left Kri’s ears ringing. He groped for the remaining torch and waved it gently until the flame rose again. The dust dispersed the light, limiting his vision. Kri groped his way forward.
The casket rested, miraculously upright, on the ground just a handsbreadth from Tabisha’s fingers. Tabisha herself lay stretched out on her belly. Her eyes were closed, but the dust that drifted around her mouth eddied with each slow breath. Stones lay across her legs and hips, both the smaller stones of the arch and larger ones that must have tumbled from the ceiling. Kri reached for his protege.
His gaze, however, slid away from her and back to the casket. Had whatever it contained survived the fall? He should check. It would only take a moment. He shifted and reached for the casket.
Tabisha’s eyes flickered and opened. Her breath quickened. Her voice, when it came, was dull and thick. “Kri…”
He hesitated.
And a voice seemed to slip into his head like a manifestation of his desire. Look inside. You want to.
His hand was on the broken latch. His fingers slipped into the grooves the demon claws had made. On the edge of his vision, he saw Tabisha try to pull herself from the rocks. The attempt ended in a gasp of pain. “Kri!” she called again. He lifted the weight of the casket’s stone lid and leaned forward to peer inside.
Cradled in a nest of crumpled paper, a tiny crystal vial gleamed under the light of his torch. Kri squinted and brought the light closer. There was something inside the vial. Something red and crystalline yet liquid, like blood mixed with honey and shot through with faint specks of gold and silver. The joy of discovery filled him, greater than any he had ever felt.
A sample of the Voidharrow. The last remnants of what Tavit Nance had taken from the Order. No wonder he had hidden it! Kri’s hand actually trembled slightly as he lifted the precious vial from its resting place. He held the very thing the Order had denied him-that his god, by her silence, had kept from him. His mind reeled at the secrets he might be able to learn from those few imprisoned drops.
“Kri, help me!” Tabisha’s plea was sharp with agony. “I can’t get out.”
No one can know about this, said the voice in his head.
“The Order would take it away from me,” Kri replied. He felt a surge of bitter hatred at the very possibility. The Order would probably declare the little vial too dangerous to study and give it to Moorin to lock away. They were too terrified at the potential for change that the vial represented.
Show them, the voice murmured, when the time is right.
Exactly. He would tell them when he was ready to. When he could lay the secrets of the Voidharrow out before the Order and rub their collective faces in them. He rose, clenching the vial in his hand.
Tabisha grabbed for his ankle. “Kri, you have to get these stones off me. Find something to move them. Call on Ioun-”
He pulled away from her and climbed the steep stairs. Tabisha’s voice broke into a scream behind him. “Kri, help me! Kri? Kri! ”
The old man blinked eyes that were unexpectedly wet. “Dark master, chained lord,” he said. “You were with me even so long ago. You guided me. You brought change when I needed it.”
The words made his throat and lips burn like leather stretched in the sun. How long had he been praying? How long had he been climbing? His legs ached. The arm that held the lantern was stiff. The fingers of the hand that brushed the wall were raw. His stomach was a void.
Kri didn’t stop moving, though he began to wonder if somehow he had missed the doorway to the hall of broken statues and kept climbing past it. Dread set claws into him. “Chained God,” he asked softly, “is this retribution for sacrificing Tabisha to keep the Voidharrow a secret?”
The trapped thief’s cries had haunted him for years. Initially he hadn’t even been able to look at the tiny vial without thinking of the cost of gaining it. Slowly the guilt had faded, as had his unease at hiding the vial within the shaft of Ioun’s holy sign where it hung around his neck. The only time recently that he’d thoug
ht of Tabisha at all was when he’d revealed to Albanon that each member of the Order of Vigilance was expected to train one or two others to take his or her place.
“Have you trained new members for the Order?” Albanon had asked innocently.
Kri had mastered his anguish then. It was not so easy to master it in the same darkness that Tabisha had faced, starving slowly as she must have starved. He fell back on the same reasoning that had given him strength all those years ago: if Tabisha hadn’t died, the Voidharrow would have been revealed to the Order. Her death had been the price of knowledge.
That reasoning, he realized, took on new meaning now. The sense of a need for secrecy that had come on him in the crypt had been Tharizdun’s gaze. The Chained God had made it possible for him to find the Voidharrow.
The Chained God had wanted him to find the Voidharrow. He had been a prisoner of Ioun’s way of thinking. Tharizdun’s gift of change had given him the will to break free, just as the Chained God’s will created the Voidharrow as a means to escape his otherworldly prison. It was all about strength of will.
Kri stopped climbing. Understanding swept over him-understanding of what Tharizdun had shown him in the void before depositing him in the dwarven ruins. Tharizdun’s will had made it possible for him to join with the Progenitor and create the Voidharrow. Even if the Progenitor had turned against Tharizdun, the Voidharrow existed because of Tharizdun’s mighty will.
“And it is the key to destroying the Voidharrow and punishing the Progenitor,” Kri said out loud, and once again echoes rippled up and down the stairs. This time, however, they seemed to come back to him with Tharizdun’s voice.
One comes who will help you turn that key.
A tremor shivered through the rock and ahead of him a sliver of brilliant blue light appeared, as if the vibrations had forced open some hidden door. Hope rose in Kri and he sprang up the stairs as fast as his weak and aching legs would let him. It was a door, with brilliant light and cold, fresh air blowing in from beyond. As Kri thrust his head out into the brightness, he realized with a start that he had been wrong about many things.
From the darkness of the stairs came a final echo. One comes. Be ready.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Smoke lay over Winterhaven like a black, choking fog that persisted despite the breeze and the morning sun. All of the buildings on the north side of the market square-Wrafton’s Inn among them-were on fire. Some efforts had been made to fight the flames before they were abandoned in exhaustion and despair. A few glassy-eyed defenders worked to keep the fire from spreading, but others wandered the village, slowly collecting bodies and committing them to the flames. Wrafton’s had become a pyre. Salvana crouched so close to it that the tears that ran down her cheeks dried before they reached her jaw.
Uldane helped to gather the bodies of the fallen, numbly working through his shock. The corpses of villagers were treated with a sort of reverence, rolled in blankets, put on boards, and carried to the consuming fire. The remains of the plague demons went to the flames too, dragged into the fire with hay hooks and pitchforks.
The dead demons outnumbered the dead villagers, but not by much. Only about half of the villagers had died by claw and fang. The rest, like most of the demons, bore the focused scorch marks of a lightning strike.
Albanon’s magic had saved Winterhaven from the plague demons, but at a terrible cost.
As they brought Thair Coalstriker, his hammer still clenched in his lifeless fist, Uldane saw Lord Padraig standing close to the flames with some of Winterhaven’s other senior warriors. Uldane left Thair with a farmer’s two brawny sons who had taken on the somber task of slinging bodies deep into the fire and went to Padraig. The conversation broke off as he approached. One of the warriors glared at him as if Uldane had personally brought destruction to the village.
Padraig nudged the angry man pointedly, then looked down. “What is it, Uldane?” he asked.
His voice was flat and weary. Uldane found words with difficulty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know Albanon didn’t mean to-”
“What’s done is done.”
“If you need help rebuilding or reinforcing the gate…”
Padraig stopped him with a raised hand. “Enough, Uldane. There won’t be any rebuilding. We’ve stood our ground as long as we could. We’ll set out for Fallcrest before noon. Winterhaven is finished.”
Uldane felt a flutter in his chest that he hadn’t felt even during the heat of the battle. “You can’t mean that.”
“Or what?” growled the man on Padraig’s right. “Stay and be picked up off? They’ll be back, again and again. There’re fewer of us than ever thanks to you.”
He took a threatening step toward the halfling, but Padraig staggered and grabbed for his shoulder. Not to stop the other man, Uldane realized, but to support himself. A bloody bandage wrapped Padraig’s thigh.
“You’re wounded,” Uldane said. “Was it one of the plague demons? You could already be infected with the Abyssal Plague!”
“No, not one of the demons, thank the gods,” Padraig said. “A splinter long as a knife driven by a lightning strike on one of the buildings.”
Another jab at Albanon. Uldane set his jaw. “You should have it healed. Roghar can do that.” He turned and scanned the smoky square for the paladin. He found him lowering the curled body of an old man into the arms of the brothers by the inn and called him over. Roghar came, greeting Padraig with a deep nod that conveyed both acknowledgment and regret in silence. Uldane grabbed for Roghar’s hand and pointed at Padraig’s thigh.
Roghar’s face tightened. He pulled his hand away from Uldane. “My lord, I can heal your wound if you require it, but I’ve called on Bahamut’s favor too much tonight.”
Uldane swung around to stare at him. “Really?”
Roghar’s snout wrinkled in annoyance at the challenge, but Padraig only shook his head. “Save Bahamut’s favor for those who need it more than I do.”
“Few enough of those,” said the man at his side. “Unless you can bring the dead back to life.”
Padraig nudged him again, but not too hard. The lord of Winterhaven’s gaze remained on Uldane. “You should go, too.”
“Go?” The flutter in Uldane’s chest turned into a wild flapping like an agitated bird. “Go where? What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s nothing more for you here. You and your friends should leave Winterhaven. Emotions run high after a battle.” Padraig nodded to Roghar. “Paladin, thank you for your service in battle.”
“Bahamut demands no less, my lord.”
And with that, Padraig turned away, leaving Uldane to stare after him in shock. The halfling might have followed, but Roghar shifted to herd him in the other direction. “You heard what Padraig said,” he muttered. “We should be on our way. We’ve outstayed our welcome.”
“Outstayed? This is my home!” protested Uldane. “I lived here until a few months ago.” He tugged away from Roghar. “And what do you mean you’ve called on Bahamut’s favor too much? I’ve never seen you turn away someone who needed help.”
Roghar’s jaw tightened. “Just because you’ve never seen something doesn’t make it impossible. Besides, Padraig himself said he didn’t need my healing.” He looked around, then took a firm grip on Uldane’s shoulder and propelled him onward. “Let’s get to the others.”
There was no question of where they would find Belen, Tempest, and especially Albanon. Toward the gate in the center of the area most heavily scarred by lightning, the eladrin wizard sat with his head in his hands. Tempest and Belen stood by him, not so much to give him comfort as to warn off anyone with thoughts of revenge. They looked relieved at Uldane and Roghar’s approach, though it seemed to Uldane that all they’d had to deal with were angry looks. No one was coming close. Though all the other corpses nearby had been collected, three corpses lay undisturbed: Vestagix, Immeral, and, at Albanon’s feet, Splendid.
Roghar wasted no time. “Padraig says we should
be on our way.”
“He’s right,” said Belen. “When the Winterhaveners stop feeling stunned, they’re going to be angry. We’re lucky-the stable didn’t catch fire and whoever cleared out the inn before the flames took hold threw most of our gear out along with everyone else’s.” She kicked a little pile of packs with her toe. “I don’t think we’d be so fortunate now.”
“Good,” Roghar said. “I’ll get the horses and be right back.”
Anger boiled over inside Uldane. “No,” he said. “We’re not going yet.” He marched up to Albanon. The wizard raised his face-and Uldane slapped it. “By the gods, what happened? What was that?”
Albanon’s head just dropped again. “I told you about the power I felt while I was under Tharizdun’s influence. That was it.”
That gave even Uldane pause. “You called on the Chained God’s power?”
“It’s not Tharizdun’s power. It’s my power. He just showed me how to use it. All of it.” Albanon scrubbed his fingers and palms across his face. “Vestagix killed Immeral, then Splendid. It put me over the edge. I needed to stop him.”
“Vestagix was dead before you summoned the lightning, Albanon,” said Roghar gently. “I killed him.”
Albanon peered at him, the blue orbs of his eyes bright between long, pale fingers. “He was a part of Vestapalk, some kind of extension of him just like the plague demons are an extension of the Voidharrow. You killed a body. I needed to stop Vestapalk.”
He sighed, dropped his hands, then bent over to pick up and cradle Splendid’s body. Her neck was snapped like a chicken’s. Uldane’s friendship with the pseudodragon hadn’t been deep-she’d been too much like a prim spinster for him to really like her-but even he felt she deserved better than that, especially after risking herself to save Albanon.
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