by Tim Waggoner
As she moved toward Osten, she couldn’t resist sneaking a quick glance at the portal hovering in the air above the Overmantle. It was two feet long and nearly a foot wide, and Lirra could see through to what lay on the other side. But what she saw didn’t make any sense. Swirling images, some blurry and indistinct, some so clear and sharp that it almost hurt to look at them. Things that appeared to be geometric shapes one instant, only to shift into amorphous blobs the next, and then into something so nightmarish it defied description after that. Sounds came through as well—mad laughter, grating low-pitched words spoken in a language she’d never heard, cries like those of exotic animals from deep within the darkest jungles of Xen’drik. Smells filtered into the chamber through the portal too—the foul stink of swamp gas, the cloying odor of thick perfume, the rank stench of decay, the oversweet smell of fruit on the verge of spoiling, and the coppery tang of blood.
The Realm of Madness, indeed, and Lirra found herself almost giggling at the thought. She immediately clamped down hard on the urge.
Careful, soldier, she told herself. The influx of disorienting sensations coming through the portal was starting to affect her mind, and she needed to maintain control of her thoughts. Otherwise, she risked succumbing to madness.
She started to tear her gaze away from the portal, but just as she did she caught a glimpse of a pair of hands reaching through—inhumanly long fingers covered in hard gray armor that reminded her of an insect’s shell with pulsing red muscle visible between the segments. The sight of those alien hands filled her with fear and loathing so strong that for an instant she wanted nothing more than to drop her sword to the floor and flee the lodge in terror. But she kept a tight rein on her emotions and forced herself to look away from the portal. The fear subsided then, though it didn’t entirely leave her. She didn’t know what the creature reaching through the portal was, and she didn’t want to know. Hopefully, Elidyr would find a way to close the portal before the damned thing could make it all the way through into Eberron. In the meantime, she had a job to do.
She started toward Osten.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Osten’s head turned toward her as she approached, and eyes that no longer contained even a shred of humanity focused on her. Osten’s lips stretched into a cruel smile, and Lirra felt a cold pit open in her stomach as she realized the tentacle whip recognized her.
She didn’t waste time on words. The fastest way to stop the symbiont was to weaken it, and to do that, she needed to deprive it of its blood supply—Osten. She rushed forward, sword in her right hand, dagger in her left. The symbiont was intelligent in its own way, and if nothing else it possessed a certain amount of animal cunning. But one thing it didn’t have was battle experience, and Lirra intended to use that failing against it. As she drew near, she raised her sword, feinting with the weapon to draw the symbiont’s attention while she struck with her dagger.
Sorry, Osten, she thought.
The tentacle whip did nothing, and for an instant she felt a surge of hope. Perhaps the aberration was still too mesmerized by the portal to react in time to stop her.
But as her sword arm came around in its feint, Osten grinned, stepped aside, and the tentacle whip lashed out and wrapped its coils around the wrist of her dagger hand. The whip yanked her off balance, and Osten reached out with his free hand, grabbed hold of her other wrist and twisted. His grip was inhumanly strong, and she felt bones grind and a sharp pain shot through her arm. Her fingers sprang open, releasing their grip on her sword, and her weapon tumbled to the chamber floor. Next the tentacle whip squeezed the wrist of her dagger hand, forcing her to drop that blade as well.
Her right wrist blazed like fire, but she grabbed hold of the tentacle whip, grimacing at the warm, greasy feel of the thing’s flesh, planted her feet solidly on the floor, and hauled backward with all her might. The whip was taken by surprise, and Osten’s body stumbled toward her. Lirra lashed out with her foot and swept the man’s left leg out from under him. Osten fell onto his side, hitting the stone floor hard. With the tentacle whip joined to him, the impact wouldn’t do much to slow him down. What she’d wanted was to get Osten’s head—or more specifically, his throat—within striking distance of her boot. She kicked out hard and crushed the man’s windpipe.
Osten’s body stiffened, and she felt the tentacle whip vibrate, as if it were reacting to the blow as well. Osten’s mouth gawped open like a fish’s as his body struggled to draw in air, but the soft wet clicks that emerged from his throat indicated that Lirra’s blow had had the desired effect. He could no longer breathe and would rapidly lose strength and die, rendering the tentacle whip, if not helpless, than greatly reduced in strength. Hopefully weak enough that Lirra would be able to deal with it then. As if its host’s plight were already having an effect on it, the whip released its hold on her wrist and fell to the floor. Lirra decided to take the opportunity to retrieve her weapons. Keeping an eye on the tentacle whip in case it decided to strike again, she reached down and grabbed both her sword and dagger. Osten’s face had turned red and was beginning to shade toward purple. His eyes bulged as he fought a losing battle to breathe, and though Lirra knew that she’d had no other way to stop the symbiont possessing his body, she found herself unable to watch the man’s face as he died. The whip itself still lay limply on the chamber floor, and she decided to risk a quick glance to see how the others were faring.
Vaddon had dealt with the crawling gauntlet in the most expedient way possible—by cutting off the arm of its host at the elbow. The man sat on the floor, white-faced and grimacing in pain, bleeding stump jammed against his midsection to staunch the flow of blood, while the crawling gauntlet—still attached to his severed arm—scuttled across the stone floor searching for somewhere to hide, leaving a trail of crimson in its wake.
Ksana stood before the woman possessed by the stormstalk. The serpentlike creature unleashed a bolt of lightning at the cleric from its overlarge eye, but the cleric raised her hand and the energy discharged harmlessly inches before striking her. Ksana then stepped forward and swung her halberd like a staff, striking the woman on the side of the head with the end. The woman took a stagger-step to the side, and before she could react, Ksana—moving with a savage speed and grace that seemed at odds with her rational, accord-seeking personality—reversed her strike and struck the woman in the side of the neck with her halberd’s axe blade. Blood fountained from the wound and the woman fell onto her hands and knees. Ksana then flipped her halberd around for a new strike and brought the axe head down upon the juncture where the stormstalk had buried its tail into the base of its host’s skull. The stormstalk had no mouth with which to scream, but the way its body quivered told of the pain it suffered from the blow, and the aberration immediately yanked itself free of its host and began frantically slithering away before Ksana could strike at it again. Once the symbiont had left, Ksana dropped her halberd to the floor and rushed forward to place her hands upon the wounded woman and begin healing her.
Rhedyn stood before the woman possessed by the tongueworm, his body cloaked in shadow, sword in his right hand. The worm had attempted to strike at him, but he’d managed to grab hold of the aberration with his left hand before its barb could sink into his flesh and paralyze him. The tongueworm writhed in obvious pain, and Lirra knew that Rhedyn was using the corrupting touch of his shadow sibling to hurt the creature, and through it, to hurt the host body as well. Maintaining his grip on the tongueworm, Rhedyn yanked hard and pulled the host body toward him. When she was close enough, he rammed the sword into her stomach, seeking the spot where the tongueworm was anchored. The woman’s eyes flew open wide and a gout of dark blood spilled past her lips. It was followed by the length of the tongueworm as it abandoned the wounded body of its host. Its mouth end whipped toward Rhedyn’s face, as if it intended to seek him as a replacement host. But Rhedyn cast aside the worm and it fell to the floor in a blood-slick coil and began rapidly slithering away. Rhedyn
withdrew his sword from the woman’s body and she slumped forward onto the floor, a pool of blood spreading out from beneath her. Rhedyn didn’t once look at her. His gaze swept the room, searching for more symbionts to deal with.
Rhedyn was a soldier doing a soldier’s work—Lirra knew this. Hadn’t she dealt just as ruthlessly with Osten and the tentacle whip? But there’d been a brutal efficiency to Rhedyn’s motions, along with a casual cruelty she’d never seen in him before, and she found herself wondering how much of that had come from him and how much from the symbiont he was bound to. She thrust the thought aside for later contemplation and looked to the center of the chamber, where Elidyr continued to struggle with the Overmantle.
The artificer had pulled out all three of the device’s trays, and his hands were blurs as they moved back and forth across the crystals. Whatever he was doing was having some effect—no longer did streams of energy stretch from the Overmantle to the crystalline rods attached to the steel beds, and while the obscene insect-shelled hands still gripped the inner edges of the portal to Xoriat, the opening in space itself had shrunk significantly since Lirra had looked upon it last. She had the impression the portal might’ve been closed by now if the creature on the other side, whatever it was, hadn’t been struggling so hard to keep the doorway open.
Sinnoch continued to stand next to Elidyr, but the dolgaunt still did nothing to help her uncle. Instead, the creature was laughing wildly, taking mad delight in the chaos surrounding him.
She gripped her sword tighter and started walking toward the center of the chamber. She doubted there was anything she could do to help Elidyr, but she could stop Sinnoch from making the situation any worse and, if nothing else, see to it that he paid for his betrayal … assuming, that is, her uncle managed to close the portal. If whatever those insect-armored hands belonged to made it through to their world, Lirra had the distinct feeling that none of them would survive very long after its arrival.
But before she could do more than take two steps, she felt something grab hold of her ankle. She looked down and saw a hand clasping her boot—a hand that belonged to Osten. The man lay prone on the ground, arm outstretched, holding onto her ankle with an iron grip. He grinned up at her, and she saw the ragged, bloody hole at the base of his throat, and she realized what had happened. She’d seen the technique performed on the battlefield before when a soldier’s airway was obstructed and no cleric was available. Cutting a hole in the throat, like a tiny second mouth, allowed air to bypass the obstruction and make it into the lungs. The soldier would then be able to breathe until such time as he could be seen to by a cleric and healed. But the last time she’d looked at Osten, he’d seemed on the verge of losing consciousness. How had he managed to perform the procedure on himself? And then she realized that he hadn’t. The tentacle whip had used its barbed tip to dig into the tender flesh at the base of Osten’s neck and create a crude opening. It seemed the aberration was more intelligent than she’d given it credit for.
She glanced toward Osten’s left arm where the symbiont was attached, but as she did so, its length unfurled toward her, and its coils wrapped around her throat. She instantly tightened her neck muscles before it could squeeze too hard, yanked her boot free from Osten’s hand, and spun around, intending to bring her sword up and strike at the aberration. But before she could do so, she watched in horror as the tentacle whip’s mouth detached from Osten’s arm, anchor tendrils tearing free from his flesh with tiny sprays of blood. Then, using its grip in her neck for leverage, the whip flexed, bringing its mouth end swinging toward Lirra’s left arm. It happened so swiftly that she had no time to react, and then the beaked mouth bit into the inner flesh of her forearm and its anchor tendrils burrowed into her skin, seeking purchase in the muscle beneath.
Lirra screamed.
Elidyr’s terror was eclipsed only by his confusion. This couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t!
He was dimly aware of the separate battles taking place around him—the volunteers going mad, the guards dying, Vaddon and the others engaging the symbiont-controlled hosts—but his attention remained fixed on the portal that had opened in the air above the Overmantle. The portal was supposed to be there, of course, its chaos energy fueling the dragonshards in the Overmantle, but it was supposed to be so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. This portal was hundreds, no, thousands of times larger, and Elidyr simply could not account for that. Nor, unfortunately, could he do anything to reverse the portal’s growth. He frantically tried to recalibrate the crystals’ energy matrices, but it seemed that his efforts only made matters worse.
Inhuman hands gripped the insides of the portal and began to widen it. Which was yet another impossibility. One couldn’t physically touch a hole in space, let alone make it larger through sheer physical effort. But that’s exactly what appeared to be happening.
Xoriat is on the other side, he reminded himself. The rules of existence are different there. If such a word as rules could even apply.
But the artificer forgot all about whether or not a dimensional portal could be grasped by hands when he realized exactly who—and what—those hands belonged to: a daelkyr lord.
Nausea ripped through his gut and pain like a white-hot dagger seared his brain, as the presence of the daelkyr lord assaulted his sanity. He had to retain hold of his faculties at least long enough to shut down the portal and prevent the daelkyr from coming through, even if doing so cost him his sanity in the end.
He turned to Sinnoch. The dolgaunt was looking up at the daelkyr’s carapaced hands with wild joy. Elidyr opened his mouth, intending to call for the dolgaunt’s help, but the sounds that emerged from his lips in no way resembled human speech, and all they did was make Sinnoch laugh. Realizing he was on his own, Elidyr focused his attention back on the Overmantle and did his best to hold off the burgeoning insanity roiling within his mind.
In the end, he didn’t know whether he managed to figure out the right combination or if he stumbled upon it by accident, but when he finished touching the last dragonshard, the portal to Xoriat stopped growing and slowly began to close. The daelkyr fought to hold it open, but as powerful as the lord was, he couldn’t keep the rift open without the Overmantle’s help. As if the daelkyr realized this, he withdrew his hands, and Elidyr felt a moment of elation that he’d succeeded in preventing the foul creature from emerging into their world.
But even as the portal rapidly closed, the daelkyr shoved his arm through, hand stretching toward Elidyr until the claw tip of the index finger gently touched the artificer’s forehead. And then, just as swiftly, the hand withdrew and the portal snapped shut and vanished.
Elidyr stood frozen for a long moment, staring up at the spot where only an instant before a doorway had been open upon the Realm of Madness.
“Of course,” he whispered. “It’s all so clear now.”
And he began to laugh.
Vaddon was furious with himself for giving into his brother yet again. Though he hadn’t admitted it to the others, he’d been just as upset that Bergerron had ordered the Outguard to cease operations and vacate the lodge. Not that he cared about proving the worth of using symbionts in warfare, but he hated leaving a job undone. So when Elidyr had told him they might have one last chance to salvage a victory, Vaddon had decided to gamble on his brother a final time. Unfortunately, it was rapidly becoming clear that this was one gamble Vaddon had lost.
The guards were dead, and the four others who’d volunteered to be subjects of the experiment were either wounded or, in one case, dead, and the symbionts that had possessed them were running loose in the chamber. Worse yet, there was some kind of distortion in the air above the Overmantle, and while Vaddon was no expert in magic, he’d witnessed enough to recognize that whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.
Vaddon turned toward Lirra and was about to inform her of his orders, when he saw the tentacle whip wrap around his daughter’s throat, then detach itself from Osten and latch on to her. Lirra sc
reamed as the symbiont fused with her flesh, and Vaddon thought he hadn’t heard a sound so awful since the dying scream of his wife when she fell at Jaythen’s Pass.
Osten slumped to the floor, unconscious. Lirra still held her sword in her right hand, and she raised the blade, clearly intending to bring it slashing down upon the tentacle whip, but the instant she began to swing the sword, the muscles in her arm locked, freezing the blade in place. The aberration was exerting control over Lirra’s body in order to protect itself, and though his daughter fought valiantly, Vaddon knew with every passing second the tentacle whip was solidifying its hold on her. If there was any chance to get the damned thing off her, it was now.
Vaddon moved forward, sword gripped tight, his soldier’s mind—honed from years of training and decades of battle experience—rapidly calculating the best way to attack. There were really only two choices: cut the symbiont off Lirra or kill it while it remained attached to her. Neither was without risk for Lirra. Given that she was now physically and mentally joined with the tentacle whip, she would feel the aberration’s pain as if it was her own, and she’d suffer the same shock to her system as it did. But Vaddon knew his daughter’s strength. She could withstand whatever he did to her—assuming he could find the strength to do what needed to be done.
The contest of wills between Lirra and the tentacle whip continued, sweat running down the sides of Lirra’s face as she fought to regain control of her sword arm, the tentacle whip lazily, almost mockingly, undulating in the air as it continued to prevent her. Vaddon knew he had no chance of making a stealthy approach—the enchanted armor prevented him from moving silently—but he hoped that the contest of wills Lirra and the symbiont were locked into would occupy them both long enough to give him the opportunity of getting in close.