James Wyatt - Oath of Vigilance

“No no no,” he murmured.

He staggered across the room to the place where Moorin’s body had lain, slumped on the floor against the far wall. Tears stung his eyes as he fell to the floor, just as he had done on the night of Moorin’s death. It had never before occurred to him to wonder who had cleaned the tower and what had become of the body, and he was stung with guilt as he realized that he should have ensured that Moorin was properly laid to rest. But he shook the feeling from his thoughts, putting himself in the position Moorin had occupied, the focus of all the lines and whorls of energy in the room.

He felt the Voidharrow coursing toward him along dozens of different pathways. Hundreds of wordless, whispering voices pressed against his mind, overwhelming him with a sense of eager hunger. Terror set his whole body quivering. The red liquid of the Voidharrow gleamed like blood on the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Is this what Moorin saw as he died? Albanon wondered.

He fought back his terror and focused on the magic. Numbers and formulas danced in his mind. He felt power welling up in his heart like a sun, then his body started to glow. He spread his arms wide and felt the magic course out from him, sending light flowing like pure water back along the channels that laced the room to meet the approaching Voidharrow. Where the flow of light met the red liquid it flared into white fire, and in a moment the room was lit with a hundred stars where his light burned the Voidharrow.

The Voidharrow’s fury was a palpable pulse in the air of the room, but it was an impotent rage. The light burning out from Albanon filled the channels, and the Voidharrow seemed unable to flow outside the lines that had been prepared for it. All it could do was inch slowly back the way it had come, back to the Vast Gate, until the room was filled with an intricate lacework of Albanon’s light.

Then the Voidharrow was gone entirely, but the attention of Tharizdun, which had diminished to a mere brooding presence in the room, surged outward again, as if it had been waiting for the Voidharrow to get out of its way. Albanon rehearsed the formulas in his mind, focused his power to keep his own lattice in place, thinking perhaps he could hold the Chained God back.

He quickly realized how foolish a hope that had been. With eagerness born of untold ages of imprisonment, a flow of shadowy slime began to pour out from the Vast Gate. A dark mist rose up from the slime, and Kri stood in a billowing cloud of it, breathing deeply as if to draw the Chained God’s power into himself. The dark slime flowed out into the channels of Albanon’s light, and all his exertion couldn’t stop its flow or even slow it down. It ran like a surging river along every channel at once, converging around him before he could move from his position on the floor.

Soul-numbing cold gripped him as the liquid shadow surrounded him on every side. His body convulsed with what would have been agony if the cold hadn’t deadened his every nerve. His mind reeled once again, driving away all sense of purpose, shattering his memory and robbing him of his power.

He watched dumbly as Kri drew in more and more of the shadowy mist, gathering it in a dark nimbus around himself. The old man seemed to grow younger, stronger, and even taller as the power flowed into him. He strode through the eddying mist to stand beside Albanon’s inert body, and Albanon stared up at him without managing to form a coherent thought.

Kri crouched down and seized Albanon’s shoulders, lifted him effortlessly from the floor, and stood him on his feet. Albanon’s head swam but his feet stayed under him somehow. Kri stared into his eyes and smiled, but there was no hint of humor or kindness on his face.

“The Chained God is chained no more, Albanon,” he said. “He emerges from his prison. And you are a witness. You will be my right hand in the new temple of Tharizdun.”

The words washed over Albanon without registering any meaning, but they left a foul taste behind. Billowing shadow loomed up around him, threatening, but Albanon could feel the promise of power beneath the threat-power that could destroy him or exalt him. Kri wielded that power already, and slowly Albanon understood that Kri was offering to share it with him.

Not offering, he realized-Kri presented him no option to refuse.

His mind grasped at the last word he’d heard, Tharizdun. Three syllables, nine letters, three threes. Each third was a microcosm of the whole, and the whole could be expanded into an ever-growing geometric formula …

Albanon’s body shook with building power and he let it out in a flash of lightning and roar of thunder that hurled Kri away from him and across the room, shook the Vast Gate, and even seemed to push back the billowing mist for a moment. In that moment, he threw himself at the gate.

A snaky tendril caught his ankle and sent him sprawling. Black slime crept toward him on every side, and he felt the full brunt of the Chained God’s awareness focused on him. That more than any physical restraint kept him pinned to the ground, straining to keep a hold on his fragile mind. The physical manifestation of the god, he realized, was just the tiniest extrusion of Tharizdun’s power, like a fingertip poked through the little hole between worlds created by the Vast Gate.

Then Kri was beside him again, looking down and shaking his head. “Albanon, you fool,” he said. “You could have become one of the mightiest beings in all the worlds. Instead, you will be the first thing destroyed when the Eater of Worlds makes his return. The first of many.”

Albanon felt himself lifted up, like an insect pinched between the fingertips of a mighty giant, and drawn toward the Vast Gate. Tendrils of black slime held him aloft, dangling upside-down, as wafting shadow swirled around him. With a jolt of fear, he realized that the tendrils holding him were part of Kri now-the old priest’s legs were gone, replaced or fused with the sickening mass of sludge that extended out to cover the room.

Albanon hung before the Vast Gate and stared into the void beyond. The vastness of nothingness threatened to unhinge his mind again, but he forced himself to consider the curvature of the gate’s archway and the crystalline structure of its substance, which he had helped Kri to form and to focus.

Focus. With the power of the Chained God still flowing through the gate, its focus was fixed in place, the connection between the world and the god’s prison firmly established. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be changed, though.

He had no time for thought, not with the Chained God’s eye fixed on him. Swinging in the grasp of Kri’s snaky tendrils, he planted a hand on the crystal of the Vast Gate and exerted his will to change its destination.

Kri yanked him away from the gate and the smooth crystal fell away from his hand, but too late. The blackness within the arch blinked and vanished, and the power and will that had filled the room was gone. Slimy tentacles still writhed everywhere, and a cloak of misty shadow still surrounded Kri like a manifestation of the power that churned within him, but the Chained God was cut off. Where there had been inky blackness and roiling malice on the other side of the portal, now there was only a dry plain.

“Damned fool,” Kri said. “You are wasting my time. I will kill you, then, and refocus the Vast Gate myself.”

Another inky tendril wrapped around Albanon’s neck, and Kri began to pull from both ends of his body, as if to tear him apart.

Roghar stepped out of the Silver Unicorn and was greeted by a cheer-a handful of ragged voices raised in his honor after too much to drink in the local public house. Their acclamation had seemed much louder in the confined space of the inn’s common room, and their numbers had looked greater as well. He looked around the cluster of soldiers and counted about a dozen, all clutching torches and weapons, stamping their feet and clanging steel against their shields.