Don Bassingthwaite - The Eye of the Chained God

He gestured for Albanon to come up and join them, then whispered rapidly to the wizard. Albanon nodded. The drow and the eladrin rose to their knees. Their hands wove in the air and words of magic rippled from their mouths. Before the demons even had a chance to look up, they were engulfed simultaneously by a wave of flame and a burst of writhing darkness. Corpses as scorched and withered as old sticks dragged from a campfire fell to the ground on either side of the demons’ animal victim. Quarhaun nodded in satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

They slithered back down into the ravine and approached the hole cautiously. Quarhaun squatted down and peered inside.

“Yes,” he said, “this looks promising.” Before Shara could stop him, he scrambled through. Words of warning caught in her throat. If the hole really did lead deeper, a shout would only echo and warn any demons of their approach.

Quarhaun was back in moments anyway. “We’re lucky,” he said. “This is exactly what we need. Everyone inside. It’s tight but it opens up.”

He held out a hand for her. Shara didn’t hesitate before accepting it and following him.

The first stretch inside the hole was indeed tight and smelled strongly of both animals and demons. Shara had to drop onto her elbows and wriggle through to get her sword, protruding over her shoulder, past the ceiling. Roghar would have a difficult squeeze. When the ceiling rose, however, she found that there was more than enough space for her to stand. The daylight that came through the hole, broken into moving shafts and shadows by the people following her, revealed a long, smooth-floored gallery. Here and there, the light flashed on red crystals embedded in the walls.

“More Voidharrow,” she said.

“You had to expect that,” said Uldane. He produced a couple of long, thin sticks-sunrods-and rapped the gnarled ends against the tunnel wall. The sunrods burst into bright, steady light.

The veins of crystal they revealed were so thick and twisted that they looked like tentacles reaching down the tunnel toward them. Cariss yelped in surprise and flinched. Even Kri’s face tightened.

“Still no plague demons,” Shara said hopefully, but Albanon waved her to silence and cocked his head, listening. She listened, too, and after a moment, she heard what his sharp ears already had. A whispering drifted along the tunnels, not of voices but of bodies jostling close together. A lot of bodies.

No one said anything. Those with weapons drew them. Uldane kept one of the sunrods for himself and passed the other to Belen. They set off toward the sound. When the tunnel branched, they paused and listened again. The sound was louder, underscored with an even deeper, more seething hiss, like slowly boiling sugar syrup. The air grew close and thick, but strangely no warmer. The crystal veins in the wall glowed faintly, a light that had nothing to do with the sunrods.

Quarhaun glanced at Kri and Albanon. The priest and the wizard looked at each other, then Albanon nodded toward the tunnel branch that angled more steeply downward. Quarhaun turned down it-only to pause with a grimace on his face and tread lightly in place for a moment. Uldane pointed his sunrod down at the drow’s feet.

The smooth stone of the floor had taken on the same waxy appearance as the rocks outside. It dimpled under Quarhaun’s boots-and sprang back when he raised them. He bounced and it quivered slightly in response. When he rapped the floor with his toe, though, it sounded like kicking solid stone.

“Keep going,” Kri said grimly.

Shara experienced a strange shift in perception as she followed Quarhaun onto the fleshy floor. Suddenly, it seemed to her that she was no longer following a tunnel, but walking inside the guts of some strange, enormous worm. Or inside Vestapalk if the dragon had grown to the size of a mountain. Albanon said Vestapalk was the Voidharrow and the Voidharrow was Vestapalk. Maybe in a way they really were inside Vestapalk.

She took a deep breath and forced that thought away. All the more reason to destroy Vestapalk. All the more reason to make sure the dragon died, no matter who struck the killing blow or how.

Then a deep shudder passed through the tunnel.

All of them froze. “Quarhaun, did you do that?” asked Tempest.

“No.”

The whispering shifted and changed. It swelled ahead of them, like excitement sweeping a crowd, until it echoed in the tunnel. No, Shara realized, it was no echo. The sound coming from behind them wasn’t excited whispering, it was the rapid skittering of claws on stone.

“Demons behind us,” said Roghar.

“Go!” said Kri. “We have to get into heart of the Plaguedeep. That’s the only thing that matters.”

They picked up their pace, moving quickly along the tunnel. The strange floor absorbed the sound of their footsteps. Shara prayed silently that it might be enough to throw off the demons following them. Another shudder passed along the tunnel, stronger than the first. Strong enough to make Kri stumble. Cariss and Belen helped the old priest to his feet. The tunnel branched again up ahead, this time breaking into three passages. One of them made a steep downward plunge. Quarhaun turned into it without asking. Shara, following behind, turned after him-and almost knocked him over as he froze just inside. For an instant, they were a tangle of limbs, then Shara managed to grab the wall and clutch Quarhaun to her before they tumbled down the slope.

The red eyes of plague demons glittered up at them from below. One of the creatures let out a sharp hiss.

Hands from behind seized both her and Quarhaun, hauling them back into the main passage. “Demons coming up from below!” Quarhaun blurted.

“And above,” said Cariss. The shifter crouched with her warpicks ready, facing the main passage where it angled up ahead. More whispering and skittering came from it.

Without a word, Kri took Albanon’s arm and rushed him into the third passage, their robes flapping around them. Shara and the others followed. Another shudder shook the tunnel and this time, Shara felt the floor drop underneath her. She fell hard to her knees, her sword sliding out of her grasp. Between one breath and the next, the distant whispering of the plague demons rose into a deafening cacophony of screeches, cackles, and roars.

When Shara looked up, the passage had broadened into a small cavern and one wall had fallen away entirely. Not five paces from her, the new cavern opened onto chaos, an abyss of shimmering light lined with flashing red crystals. Boulders hung suspended in the air while lightning oozed in sheets. Wind tore through the gap to buffet her.

Plague demons crawled over every solid and semi-solid surface, so thick that it took Shara a moment to realize that the flashing crystals weren’t embedded in the walls-they were actually the bodies of the writhing demons.

Their bodies-and their eyes. Hundreds, even thousands of plague demons stared into the newly formed cavern and screamed with insane fury. Shara snatched up her sword and threw herself back. Her feet hit a chunk of fallen rock and she stumbled, but strong arms caught and held her before she could fall again.

“Quarhaun!” she gasped, but the arms weren’t the warlock’s. They were familiar, but they were encased in a paladin’s heavy armor. Roghar looked down at her, then turned her loose. Shara stared. The last tremor had done more than turn the passage they had followed into a cavern with a window on madness. Sharp drops now divided the former passage. She stood on a platform of rock perhaps a dozen paces across with Roghar and Uldane. On an even smaller section, separated from them by a drop of twice Shara’s height, were Albanon, Tempest, and Kri. Shara turned the other way.

Quarhaun, along with Belen and Cariss, stared down at her from the edge of the original tunnel-at the top of a sheer face of newly exposed rock more than three times her own height.