Oath of Vigilance tap-2

by James Wyatt

Every few paces, as Kri caught his breath, Albanon threw back one hand and summoned another surge of thorns to slow the hunt. Slowly-painfully slowly-they drew nearer and nearer to the tower, and their pursuers remained at bay. Each step stretched to an agonizing eternity.

  Somehow that eternity drew to an end, and they stood before the mithral-bound doors to the Whitethorn Spire. Albanon glanced over his shoulder and saw two riders circling around the end of his thorny barrier, spurring their horses for a charge.

  “Open the doors!” he urged Kri.

  Exhausted as he was, the old priest tugged with all his remaining strength on the mithral ring that hung from one door. The door didn’t budge.

  “Is it locked?” Albanon asked. “Do you have a key?”

  “No! There’s not even a keyhole.” Kri raised his staff and chanted a few arcane syllables Albanon recognized as a simple charm of opening, but again the doors showed no hint of movement.

  “They’re coming!” Splendid chirped in Albanon’s ear.

  Albanon put his back to the door and clenched his own staff. The lead rider was about twenty paces away, but riding hard and fast. Albanon called up another surge of thorns to slow them, simultaneously trying to prepare his mind to unleash a spell of fire or lightning on the riders. Panic and his pounding heart shattered his concentration, making both efforts ineffective.

  The door suddenly slammed hard into Albanon’s back, knocking him to his knees as Kri yelped and staggered back. Albanon twisted around to see what had opened the doors.

  His guts wrenched in fear as he recognized the monster in the doorway-a hulking brute, almost like some kind of beetle, standing upright but hunched forward. Four arms tipped with heavy claws sprouted from its torso. Its red eyes glowed in the shadow inside the tower, set above a mouth full of sharp teeth. A massive carapace of reddish crystal covered its shoulders and back and rose in two sharp spikes above its head. It was one of Vestapalk’s minions, but larger than any he’d seen before. A plague demon, born of the Voidharrow.

  Smaller demons swarmed behind the one in the doorway. So Vestapalk’s corruption had already spread as far as the Feywild, to the very tower that Kri believed held the secret to defeating them. Albanon scrambled to his feet, his eyes darting between the demons in the tower and the charging fey hunters.

  On one side, the claws of the demons held the promise of torture and death, or worse. On the other, the hounds of the fey charged forward, ready to tear him to shreds, and the spears of his kin were aimed to pierce his heart. But the thought that came to mind was Tempest’s face, smiling in her determination. She would have gone down fighting. He could do no less.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The demons shrieked as Shara’s sword cut into them. The arrival of Quarhaun and his lizardfolk allies had thrown them into confusion, and Shara’s whirling fury broke their resolve completely. Those that could turned and fled back the way Shara and Uldane had come. The rest were trapped between Shara and Quarhaun, and a hint of her old exultation coursed through her as she hacked and stabbed a path to where the drow stood.

  He came back, she told herself, singing the words to the rhythm of her blade.

  A quieter voice in the back of her mind kept reminding her, the way Jarren can’t.

  In a matter of moments the demons were all dead or dispersed, and Shara leaned on her blade beside Quarhaun. Her exhaustion couldn’t keep the grin from her face, and Quarhaun returned the smile, a little sheepishly. Their eyes met for a moment, which did nothing to calm her pounding heart.

  One of the lizardfolk nudged Quarhaun’s arm and he looked away, reluctantly, to answer some question in their sibilant language, pointing to the demonic corpses that littered the hall.

  “Ow,” Uldane said.

  Shara turned to find the halfling, pale and frowning, slumped against the wall behind her. He was picking at the torn scraps of leather armor that had covered his chest, pulling strips of it from a bloody wound.

  “Nine Hells, what happened to you?” Shara said, dropping to her knees beside him.

  “You missed it!” Uldane said, the beginnings of his smile turning into a wince of pain. “One of the demons had me in its mouth and it was shaking me back and forth, and I stabbed it in the eye!” He drew a ragged breath and forced a smile to his face. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get it in the eye when it was shaking me like that?”

  “I can imagine,” Shara said. She tried to keep the concern from showing on her face as she helped him pull the armor away from his wound. His cut had the same angry red swelling along the edges that her wounds had. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”

  “You were busy protecting Quarhaun.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but there was an edge of disapproval in his eyes.

  Shara frowned. “We need to put both of you in heavier armor. I’m not sure I can keep every enemy away from the two of you.”

  “I don’t like wearing heavy armor,” Uldane said. “It slows me down.”

  “I know, Uldane.” Shara brushed a long braid of dark hair out of his face. “I’ve got a potion in my pack that should take care of this wound. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “It feels even worse than it looks.”

  “I’ll be right back.” She stood and picked her way through the demon corpses back to the room where she and the halfling had holed up. Quarhaun was waiting for her at the door.

  “You came back,” she said quietly.

  “That was the plan, right? Kill them all?”

  “You risked your life to save us.” The words had a hard time escaping past the lump in her throat. “That was foolish. You said it yourself.”

  “You did it for me.” Quarhaun touched her chin softly with his gloved hand, and a shiver went through her. “And if you did it, it must be worth doing.”

  Her thoughts a jumble, she squeezed past him into the room and grabbed her pack. “And you found friends,” she said.

  “A hunting party. They were following our tracks into the ruins, actually. I convinced them to help me kill the demons.”

  “How did you do that?”

  Quarhaun shrugged. “By convincing them we could, I guess. They fear the demons and hate them for thinning the prey. I showed them an opportunity to give up one hunt in order to get better hunting in the future.”

  “Give up one … they were hunting us?”

  “Prey is scarce in the fens.”

  Shara found the potion she needed and stepped back to the door. “Quarhaun … thank you.”

  The drow scowled, speechless.

  Shara went back in the hall to find Quarhaun’s lizardfolk friends crouching there, their glassy eyes fixed on her, and she wondered if they were assessing her ability to fight back if they decided to make a meal of her. She looked down the hall and saw one of them crouched beside Uldane, prodding at his wound with a feather-bedecked length of bone.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  The lizardfolk turned its head slowly and its eyes fluttered open to stare at her. It opened its mouth and hissed something low and rumbling.

  “Quarhaun!” she called. “What’s it saying?”

  “Shara,” Uldane said. “Don’t worry. I think it’s helping.”

  Shara stepped closer and saw that the color had returned to Uldane’s face. She dropped to her knees and took his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said to the lizardfolk. “Please go on.”

  Quarhaun spoke in the lizardfolk’s hissing tongue and the healer or shaman or whatever it was turned its attention-and its bone totem-back to Uldane. The halfling winced and squeezed her hand, but the wound began to knit itself closed and the angry red color faded from his skin. Uldane’s bright eyes opened again and a smile spread across his face.

  “What an interesting feeling!” he announced, trying to sit up. “I felt like I was swimming.”

  Shara looked at her friend’s chest. Water soaked his clothes and had washed the blood away from the wound, which was still a bit pink but otherwis
e completely healed.

  “Looks like you were,” Shara said, smiling at the halfling.

  “Oh! I’m all wet.” He looked up at the lizardfolk. “How did you do that?”

  Quarhaun hissed a few words, and the shaman responded in kind.

  “He says the water spirits healed you. He just brought them where they needed to be.”

  Uldane sprang to his feet, all the pain of his injury forgotten. “Ooh! Do you think I could learn to do that, Shara?”

  Shara just smiled and wished that she could learn to recover so quickly and so completely from her wounded heart.

  “We should leave this place,” Quarhaun announced. “The demons might come back in greater numbers.”

  “You’re right,” Shara said. “We should hit them before they can regroup.”

  “Hit them?”

  “Of course.”

  “Shara,” Uldane said, “just a few minutes ago you were saying you didn’t want to die here. You want to have your revenge on Vestapalk before you die, right?”

  “I have no intention of dying,” Shara said. “We’re stronger than ever, and the demons are on the run. We need to root them out of here.”

  Quarhaun caught her gaze with his blank white eyes. “Why?”

  Shara’s face flushed and her words were heated and fast. “You’ve seen them. Whatever has changed Vestapalk, whatever he tried to do to you-that same substance is here. It made these demons. They’re all part of the same … the same disease. For all we know, Vestapalk could be here, somewhere in these ruins, spreading his plague from here.”

  Quarhaun held her gaze for a long moment until she looked away, uneasy.

  “You are quite a warrior,” he said at last.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s not our way, you see? Among the drow, women hold sacred positions, ordained by the Spider Queen. They’re the matron mothers and priests, generals at times, but not warriors. I’ve never known a woman like you.”

  “Does that mean we’re going to explore these ruins some more?” Uldane asked.

  “I suppose it does,” Quarhaun said.

  “Well, that’s a bright side to it. I wonder how far down the tunnels go? It can’t be too far, or they’d be full of water, wouldn’t they?”

  “It depends. Sometimes stone tunnels jut up all the way from the Underdark, solid and dry even when they touch the surface in swampy areas like this.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s rare, but it does happen.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  Shara let Uldane pester Quarhaun with questions as she tried to sort through the feelings the drow’s words had stirred up in her. It’s natural that he’d respect a skilled warrior like me, she told herself. And the fact that I’m a woman makes me … a curiosity. That’s all.

  And the way he touched my chin … the memory of it brought echoes of the shivers it had sent through her. Who knows what that means to a drow like him? Maybe it’s a warrior’s sign of respect.

  She felt a grin creep into the corners of her mouth. I wonder what else drow warriors do as a sign of respect …

  She shook her head to dispel the thought. “Are we ready to move on?” she asked.

  Uldane stepped closer to her and looked up at her seriously. “Are you sure about this, Shara?”

  “Of course I am. Vestapalk might be here. How could I live with myself if revenge was within my grasp and I let it slip away?”

  “Do you think he’s here?”

  “We’ve seen more demons here than anywhere else in the Vale. Remember what Quarhaun said earlier? It’s like a lava flow.”

  Uldane nodded. “We’ll find the source where the lava is thickest.”

  Quarhaun turned from the lizardfolk shaman and put a hand on Shara’s shoulder. “Kssansk says his people will continue to help us until we’ve rooted the demons out of here.”

  “And they won’t eat us?” Shara asked, smiling.

  “No promises, but I think we’re safe at least until the demons are gone.”

  “No promises?” Uldane said, his eyes wide.

  “If Kssansk had wanted to eat you, he had the perfect opportunity while you were passed out on the floor.”

  The shaman cocked his head, presumably recognizing the sound of his name, and Quarhaun said a few words to him.

  Kssansk responded with a short exclamation and two chomps of his enormous jaws.

  “Two bites, he says,” Quarhaun translated.

  Shara laughed as Uldane’s eyes widened further.

  “Where did you learn their language?” she asked the drow.

  “They speak a dialect of Draconic, same as troglodytes.”

  “And dragons, I take it.”

  “Yes. But my house had troglodyte slaves, not dragons. Some of my people think it’s beneath them to speak in the languages of their slaves, but it’s hard to argue that it’s very useful to be able to understand it.”

  Something in his grin suggested that the most useful thing about understanding the language of slaves was the ability to quell any uprising before it took root and spread. Such a vivid reminder of the very different world he came from made her uncomfortable. She turned away from him to shoulder her pack.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “We follow the ones that fled,” Quarhaun said. “They’ll lead us to the heart of their lair.”

  “Maybe,” Uldane said, “by the most roundabout path imaginable. More likely, they’ll just lead us outside.”

  Quarhaun arched an eyebrow. “You know so much about the behavior of these demons?”

  “It’s common sense, and the way most animals would behave. They don’t want us to find their lair.”

  “They do if that’s where they’re strongest. That’s what I’d do-pull all the survivors back to a defensible location.”

  “They’re a pack, not an army,” Uldane insisted. “I don’t think that’s the way they think.”

  “Shara, help me here,” Quarhaun said.

  “I think Uldane is right,” Shara said. “I think they’d try to lure us away. They know they can outrun us and make their way back to their lair by a back route.”

  Quarhaun scowled, and for a moment Shara thought he might lose his temper. The air thrummed with his gathering power, and dark energy coalesced around his hands before he took a deep breath and made a visible effort to calm himself.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “We go the way they didn’t go. Lead on, sir halfling.” He gave an exaggerated bow.

  Uldane frowned at him and started down the hall, in the direction he and Shara had been going before they ducked into the room. Shara took up a position just behind him and to the left, which allowed him a chance to notice any traps or other dangers before she blundered into them, while keeping her close enough to step in and protect him if anything leaped out to attack. It was their established procedure, and at that point Shara was happy to ignore Quarhaun and the lizardfolk.

  Let them protect each other, she thought.

  Uldane wasn’t trained as a tracker, but he noticed details that most other people would miss-a bloody print on the floor here, there a scratch in the wall gouged by one of the crystalline growths that sprouted from the demons’ backs. In each case, he chose the path the demons had not taken, and soon they were heading down a damp, moss-covered stairway.

  “Looks like we’re reaching the water level,” Shara said.

  “That’s really interesting,” Uldane said. “But this isn’t an Underdark tunnel like Quarhaun described.”

  “I think this whole structure used to be above ground,” Quarhaun said. “The swamp has slowly swallowed it up.”

  No hint of his earlier anger tainted the drow’s voice, and Shara felt her own fading. So he doesn’t like being contradicted, she thought. Or he just doesn’t like being wrong-who does?

  As she walked, Shara’s foot slipped out from under her on the stair, and she hit the stone hard, with a clatter of armor. As sh
e tried desperately to get hold of something solid, she slid down a dozen more stairs, each one raising a new racket as her sword and pack jangled against her armor and the stone beneath her. Her helmet slammed against the stairs several times as well, sending shocks through her skull. By the time she caught herself, her ears were ringing from the noise.

  She looked up and saw Quarhaun bending over her, offering a hand to help her to her feet. She tried to grab his hand, but her hand didn’t find it where her eyes told her it was. She held up a finger and tried to make her head stop swimming.

  “Don’t move!” Uldane whispered suddenly, a step or two above her.

  Shara peered into the darkness below her, but her eyes still weren’t cooperating. “What is it?” she whispered.

  “There’s something moving down there,” Uldane said. “Something big.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Travic barely dodged the stone knight’s sword. As the animated statue pulled its weapon back, Travic slipped behind Roghar and shot a ray of divine light from his hand to erupt in the statue’s face.

  “That’s one of the things that takes longer as I get older,” he said.

  Roghar laughed as Tempest hurled a blast of eldritch fire over his shoulder. “Good thing you’re not that old yet,” he said. He raised his shield as the stone knight’s sword sliced down at him, blocking the blow. He staggered under the force of it, and his shield arm tingled furiously. “Oh, that would have hurt.”

  His own sword clattered against the knight’s stone armor, to little effect. The statue’s perfectly sculpted eyes bored into him, unmoving and unblinking. It reminded him of the stone guardian he and Tempest had encountered in the Labyrinth beneath Thunderspire Mountain-except that Tempest hadn’t been herself at the time. During that fight, Erak had stabbed Tempest in the gut, letting the demonic possessor spill out with her blood. And their companion Falon, a cleric of noble ancestry, had discovered that he could command the stone guardian.

  “Stop!” he ordered the knight, in his most authoritative voice.

  In answer, the stone knight thrust its sword forward, right at his heart. Dodging to the left and parrying the blade to the right, he managed to avoid the stab, but it was too close.