The Eye of the Chained God

by Bassingthwaite, Don

  Without looking a second time at either the trees or her friends, she whispered her suspicion to Albanon. His brow creased. “You’re likely right,” he murmured back. “But what are the demons waiting for? They have us surrounded. Why don’t they attack?”

  “I don’t know,” Splendid whimpered. “Just pray that they don’t. There are too many of them!”

  Now that she knew the demons were there, Tempest started watching out of the corner of her eye. Over to one side, where a slow breeze stirred the leaves of a tree, she spotted something dark pressed against a branch. And on the ground, she caught sight of a misshapen head peering past a broken stump. A heap of leaves shivered when it shouldn’t have. She swallowed.

  “Splendid’s right,” she said. “And Immeral has the right idea, too. We need to keep riding. Whatever reason they have for not attacking, we should make the most of it.” She bit her lip. “But Roghar and the others need to know or they could provoke an attack.”

  “I can warn them.” Albanon twisted around in his saddle and reached for his saddlebag as if fishing for something. His gaze, however, went to their friends. Albanon’s eyes narrowed in concentration and one finger flicked back toward the others.

  “Don’t react,” he whispered. “Plague demons are watching us. We’re going to keep riding unless they attack. Carry on as if nothing is wrong. Roghar, if you understand, start singing.”

  It was all Tempest could do not to look back herself. She kept her eyes on Albanon and the next three heartbeats seemed to stretch on forever.

  Then Roghar’s voice rolled along the road. “Oh, there was a knight of fair Belarn and a mighty knight was he—”

  “They’re warned,” said Albanon. He pulled a small bundle from his saddlebag and sat upright. “I think Immeral figured it out, too. He nodded at me.”

  Tempest looked at Albanon appraisingly. “You didn’t hesitate to use your magic.”

  The wizard blinked, then one side of his mouth crooked up in a smile. “It was only a cantrip, hardly a spell at all,” he said modestly, but she could tell he was pleased. He unwrapped the bundle to reveal some cheese. “Something to eat? We’re likely going to be riding for a while.” He broke off a chunk of cheese, but it slipped from fingers that betrayed his nervousness and tumbled to the ground. He cursed heavily, clenched his teeth for a moment, then tried again. “Why aren’t they attacking us?” he muttered.

  This one sees them. Visions welled up of a party of travelers, a hundred images gathered from a hundred watching eyes. Eager hunger came with the visions, but it was a hunger suppressed at his command. Vestapalk held a tight grip on his gathered minions. He spun the images in his mind. A kind of triumph rose in him. He’d known his enemies couldn’t remain holed up in Fallcrest like rats in a wall.

  He plucked their location from the bestial minds of the demons that watched them, not in words but in a sense of space and direction. He pictured it as if he were flying overhead. Here they are. He considered them for a moment, then swept across the Nentir Vale in his mind to hover over an insignificant village. This is where their road will lead them. Winterhaven. This one knows it.

  Across the vast web that was the Voidharrow, another voice answered him. This one hears. Their road leads to death!

  In the depths of the Plaguedeep, Vestapalk smiled. In the heart of the Cloak Wood, a hundred demons grinned and watched the travelers pass.

  The remainder of their ride through the Cloak Wood became a seemingly unending march. When Roghar’s song finally ended, they rode in silence. The paladin didn’t start another. Even Uldane fell quiet.

  Albanon thought about talking to Tempest, but attempting conversation felt forced and false. He tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t. Even their earlier discussion, as uncomfortable as it had been for him, would have been preferable. The afternoon became a slow progression between trees that he dared not look toward, at a pace he dared not alter. Sweat gathered on his back and dripped down the curve of his spine.

  One question kept returning: Why didn’t the plague demons attack? They had him and the others outnumbered. They had them surrounded. From the glimpses he caught out of the corner of his eye, the demons were moving with them. Several times, Albanon saw them shifting silently among the trees to take up new positions. He was certain there was one demon with a white scar across its misshapen face and a particular inability to hide itself as well as the others that he saw three or four times.

  Why were they holding back? The demons were creatures of raw fury. Even when a greater demon commanded them, they didn’t show such discipline and silent patience. In fact, only once had he seen them so restrained—and that was at the Temple of Yellow Skulls when Vestapalk himself had been present. The tension in Albanon’s back crept up to his scalp. Vestapalk could project his awareness into any demon. He’d done it during the attack on Fallcrest to taunt them. He could be among the watching demons at that very moment. The dragon might be the reason they kept to the trees.

  But why? Why?

  He tried to force his mind to stillness. The rhythm of the horses’ hooves measured out the leagues, the slow passage of the sun as afternoon sank toward dusk. Clip-clip-clip-clip-clip. One, two, three—

  Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three. Prime numbers, the keys to unlocking unlimited arcane power if only he could wrap his thoughts around numbers large enough. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one—

  He jerked in his saddle. Around his neck, Splendid hissed in alarm and dug needle claws through his robes and into flesh. Albanon yelped at the pain, but it brought his wandering mind back into focus.

  It also brought a sharp look from Tempest.

  “I’m fine,” he lied in answer to her unvoiced concern. He cursed himself for letting his guard down. Had he really been so proud of himself for casting a simple cantrip? He tugged gently on his reins. “Slow down,” he said. “Let the others catch up to us. I’ve had enough of riding apart.”

  “We’ll present a more compact target if we’re all riding together,” said Tempest.

  “I don’t care.”

  It took a few moments—long, excruciating moments—for first Roghar, Belen, and Uldane, then Immeral, to join them. Albanon could see the tension in all of them. “How much farther?” he asked Uldane. The halfling knew the road better than all of them.

  “You see that bend ahead? The trees continue for about a bowshot on the other side, then the countryside is clear on either side of the road.”

  “It’s not that far,” said Belen. The woman’s voice was hoarse. The tension and the lurking presence of the demons seemed to have worn on her more than the others. Her hand was locked around the hilt of her sword and her lips were white where they pressed together. “We could run it. If nothing else, the horses are rested.”

  “No.” Immeral shook his head. “That bend is too perfect for an ambush. They could already be waiting for us—and the ones around us now would only have to close in to cut off our retreat.” He looked to Albanon. “Stay the course, my prince.”

  Albanon found the others looking at him as well, even Roghar. He tightened his jaw for a moment as he considered their options, then nodded. Belen cursed under her breath, but made no move to ride any faster.

  Knowing that the way out of the woods was close didn’t make the bend in the road approach any more quickly, however. Albanon felt as if he were conscious of every sound their group made and equally conscious of the deep silence that surrounded them. Birds should have been calling as the sun sank lower and the shadows stretched out across the road. But all was quiet. Even the horses seemed to realize something was amiss. They became harder to control, their hoofbeats irregular as they danced and shied. Their nervousness brought back Albanon’s. He fixed his eyes on the bend in the road. It came closer. Closer. Closer …

  Then they were around it and the late afternoon sun painted the road. A bowshot away lay open countryside.

  Albanon glanced at Immeral. The hu
ntsman took his time studying the trees ahead so that they’d covered a third of the distance before he twitched his head in the slightest of nods. Albanon’s stomach rose into his throat. He glanced around at the others and drew a deep breath. “Hold tight, Splendid,” he murmured—then he kicked his heels into his horse’s side and shouted, “Hyah! Hyah!”

  All six horses leaped forward in unison and their hooves became thunder on the road. The edge of the woods swept toward them. Albanon leaned low over his mount’s neck, urging the beast to greater speed. He imagined plague demons pouring out of the trees in their wake and didn’t dare turn his head to look.

  They burst out of the woods and sped along the road like bolts flung from a crossbow. No one suggested slowing down. They must have run ten or twelve bowshots before Albanon glimpsed Tempest, riding at the head of their pack, rise slightly in her stirrups and glance back. Her eyes widened slightly, and Albanon risked looking back himself.

  Nothing moved between them and the dark blotch of the Cloak Wood. The demons had not pursued them. He looked to Tempest again. The tiefling only shook her head and he knew she felt the same confusion he did.

  They rode on after the sun had set, pushing the horses as hard as they dared and trusting to the sharp low-light vision of Albanon, Tempest, and Immeral as darkness gathered. The demons were still somewhere behind them. No one was willing to trust that they would stay in the woods. Sometime around midnight, they found an old ruined watchtower a little way off the road and made camp without lighting a fire. When the sun broke the horizon again, they continued on their way.

  There was still no sign of pursuit by the demons from the Cloak Wood. Albanon even caught himself wondering if they’d just imagined the lurking creatures, fashioning illusions out of fear and shadows. That only lasted as long as it took him to suggest the idea to Splendid. She gave him a withering glare. “It takes more than shadows to frighten me. Fool yourself if you want to. They were there.”

  They reached Winterhaven in the middle of the afternoon. As at Fallcrest, the outlying farms had suffered the most. Unlike Fallcrest, however, the farms of Winterhaven did not look simply abandoned. Roghar studied them as they rode past, then left the group to take a closer look at one farmstead. Albanon and Tempest held spells on their lips, ready to defend the paladin if anything leaped out at him. Nothing did, and Roghar cantered back to them.

  “This farm was looted,” he said grimly. “It’s been stripped of anything portable that might be of any use.”

  “Survivors from Winterhaven scavenging what they could?” suggested Immeral.

  “I don’t think so. There were a lot of footprints—human, not demon—but no hoofprints or cart tracks. Whoever carried goods away from here did it on foot.”

  “The Winterhaveners will know more,” said Uldane, but he sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as them. Albanon worried about what they might find in Winterhaven itself. He’d visited the village once or twice during his apprenticeship to Moorin, but never for long. He had rough memories of it as a compact little community, snug behind a good stone wall. In his imagination, he saw that wall stained with soot and blood, its strong gates hanging loose.

  His fears were unfounded. Winterhaven’s walls were unblemished, its gates scarred by deep claw marks but still whole and tightly shut. The buildings immediately outside of the walls were empty but they didn’t look like they’d been raided by plague demons or anyone else. From inside the wall, three or four plumes of white smoke rose cheerfully into the sky.

  Uldane let out a sigh so deep it seemed like it should have come from a much larger body. “They’re all right,” he said, then he screwed up his face. “Although normally the gate stands open during the day.”

  “Are you surprised they’re keeping it closed these days?” asked Roghar. He adjusted his shield so the symbol of Bahamut was more visible and rode closer. “Ho! Gatekeeper! Travelers wish—”

  “I see you,” called a gruff voice from atop the wall. Sunlight glinted on the steel of a crossbow aimed at the paladin. On the other end of the crossbow, his head just visible over the parapets, was a dwarf. “What do you want?”

  “Thair?” Uldane urged his horse closer to the gate. “Let us in! These are my friends.”

  The dwarf lowered the crossbow and peered down, squinting. “Uldane, is that you?” His face broke into a wide, brilliant smile. “By Moradin’s hammer! How about that? Hold on. We’ll get the gate open for you.”

  He disappeared from the wall and Albanon heard him calling out to someone. There were sounds of activity from the other side of the gate. Uldane turned back to Albanon and the others. Instead of the confident smile that Albanon expected to see, however, the halfling’s expression was taut.

  “Thair is a blacksmith,” he said. “He shouldn’t be watching the gate.”

  Belen shook her head. “If Winterhaven is anything like Fallcrest, they’ll have pressed anyone who can hold a weapon into watch duty. Any regular garrison will be exhausted—or dead.”

  Half of the big gate swung open and a human man dressed haphazardly in piecemeal armor waved to them. “Inside, quick. We don’t like to keep it open for long.”

  It seemed to Albanon that he looked at them and their weapons longingly as they rode past, not with greed or desire so much as with desperation. He gave Albanon and Tempest especially long looks. “Spellcasters?” he asked. Albanon nodded. The man’s eyes opened wide. “A priest?” he added hopefully.

  “A paladin,” said Tempest, nodding at Roghar.

  The man looked positively giddy as he pushed the gate closed and lowered a massive, ingeniously counterweighted beam across it. Albanon leaned a little closer to Tempest. “I think the people here will be disappointed when we say we’re not staying long.”

  “Is our destination still beyond Winterhaven?”

  Albanon nodded. He didn’t even have to think about it.

  Thair shouted down. “Uldane, go to Wrafton’s! I’ll meet you—my shift is done soon. You’ll find everybody there anyway.”

  Uldane answered him with a salute, then gestured for the others to ride with him. “Wrafton’s is Winterhaven’s inn,” he said. “We’ll find answers there. It’s the busiest place in the village.”

  Albanon doubted that even the busiest place in Winterhaven was all that busy. After the crush of refugees in Fallcrest, Winterhaven seemed deserted. The smoke they had seen from the other side of the wall rose from only a handful of more than a dozen buildings. There were few people abroad and those who were stared as if frankly surprised that anyone had come to their village. All of them went armed. There were no children and no noises that might have suggested children at play in any of the buildings. In fact, the entire village was eerily quiet.

  Even Uldane looked unsettled. He pointed across at a market cart that stood abandoned on one side of a wide square of beaten earth. Spiderwebs had gathered in the corners of the cart’s frame and patchy grass grew around its wheel. “That’s Delphina Moongem’s stall. She sold wildflowers out of it. She’d never let it look like that.”

  None of them had anything to say in response.

  Wrafton’s Inn was a long stone building with a high slate roof. No stableboy emerged to take their horses. Uldane showed them to the stables himself. Somewhat to Albanon’s surprise, there were several other horses in the stalls, a curious mix of good riding mounts and big beasts of burden. Uldane’s uneasy expression deepened. “I know these horses,” he said. “This one belongs to a farmer who lives just outside the walls. This one belongs to the local lord. Both of them have their own stables.”

  “They could have ridden them here,” said Immeral.

  “Both of them live within easy walking distance.” Uldane shook his head and led them out. “Come inside—we need to talk to whoever’s here.”

  The interior of the inn was as grim as Albanon had imagined it would be. The big common room was as silent as a tomb and nearly as dark, the windows shuttered and t
he shutters secured with heavy bolts, the latter a recent addition by the look of them. There were people present, but nearly all of them lay asleep across benches or draped over tables. Early in the day to be passed out drunk, Albanon thought, then he realized that the sleepers wore various forms of armor and slept with weapons close to hand. The inn had become a kind of barracks.

  The only conscious people huddled in a small knot around the bar, deep in discussion. Several moments passed before one of them looked up and noticed that the newcomers weren’t Winterhaveners. He nudged an older woman next to him. She practically jumped at his touch, then saw them and came over. “How can I help you, travelers—”

  Her voice died as she laid eyes on Uldane and for an instant she froze. Then she rushed forward, dropping to her knees and wrapping her arms around the halfling, hugging him and crying. Uldane, a little smothered, did his best to soothe her. “Easy, Salvana,” he mumbled. “Easy. It’s all right.”

  “I can’t help it,” said the woman over his shoulder. “It’s just that with so many people gone, seeing someone I know again—” She broke into a fresh round of sobs.

  The door behind them opened. Albanon looked back to see Thair coming through. The dwarf’s eyes fell on Uldane and Salvana and he winced.

  “Aye, sorry,” he said. “I should have warned you. Things can get a little emotional around here. You should have seen her when Shara came by.”

  He might as well have pulled out a bucket of water and drenched them. Albanon blinked and stared at him. So did Roghar, Tempest, and Belen. Uldane pulled himself out of Salvana’s hug to turn and face Thair. “Shara’s been here? Recently?” he asked, his voice cracking a little bit.

  Thair’s eyebrows rose. “Just three days ago.” He looked around at all of them. “You mean you didn’t know?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It’s been hard around here lately,” said Thair. The dwarf sat at the center of one of the inn’s long tables, with Albanon, Uldane, and the others gathered close. The sleepers at the table had been cleared away to give them some room, but Salvana and the rest of those who had been gathered around the bar kept their eyes and ears on them. Albanon was fairly certain that more conversations would follow once Thair was done with them.