James Wyatt - Oath of Vigilance

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.

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.