Oath of Vigilance Read online

  “The cultists were trying to free the Chained God,” he breathed. “I never knew.”

  “You have much to learn,” a voice said over his shoulder.

  Kri spun around and let his eyes range over the empty workshop.

  “You must understand your enemies if you wish to defeat them,” came another voice.

  He nodded. “Ask it ask it ask it—I’ll ask it.” He placed the crystal fragment on a table and rooted through the materials stored in flasks and boxes around the workshop until he found a tiny vial filled with a glittering silvery powder. “Residuum,” he said. “Excellent.”

  He carefully opened the vial, the powder left behind from a broken enchantment, like crystallized magic, and tapped out just enough of it to trace a circle around the shard on the table’s smooth surface. As the circle took shape, he began chanting syllables of power, inserting occasional pleas to Ioun into the fabric of the ritual. The voices around him spoke a few times, but he blocked them out, forcing his mind to focus on the words of the ritual. So ignored, the voices left him in disgust, withdrawing to plan their next assault on his mind.

  “Reveal your secrets to me!” he commanded, gripping the shard to complete the ritual.

  The room around him disappeared, and he stood in a dusty ruin. A long wooden staff was held in two wooden braces in the wall beside him, and his hand clenched the head of the staff—the shard—suspended in the crook by a network of woven gut strands. Suddenly the wall opposite him burst open and a man stepped through, a man he recognized as the cult leader depicted in the mural at the top of the tower.

  The man seized the staff, wrenching Kri’s perception as the world turned around him so his perspective on the crystal remained unchanged. He cut the strings holding the crystal in place and cradled the shard in his own hands, oblivious to Kri’s presence and his own hand on the shard.

  And then Kri was the cult leader. “Albric,” he said. “My name is Albric.”

  With his own hands, he killed one of his acolytes for impertinence, obeying the will of the Elder Elemental Eye. Then he used the crystal fragment to trace a circle on the wall where the staff had stood, opening a portal to a crowded city some part of his mind knew as Sigil, the City of Doors. He led his acolytes through the city until they were confronted by three robbers. One of the robbers was seized by the Eye, caught up in an ecstatic trance, revealing the presence and the name of Tharizdun, the Chained God.

  Kri experienced Albric’s thrill of excitement, his religious awe in the presence of his god. It was a perfect expression of what he longed to feel from Ioun but found increasingly difficult to claim.

  And Kri experienced Albric’s madness. He walked through a nightmare vista of liquid flesh and purple flame, and emerged in front of a ring of green flame. He howled in his madness, breaking the minds of those who heard him. And he stepped through a portal into Pandemonium.

  Kri felt his pulse quicken as Albric began his ritual in the heart of the Chained God’s abandoned dominion. He chanted invocations to Tharizdun, the Patient One and the Black Sun. He watched the shard of the Living Gate rise into the air and open the tiniest of portals, a narrow wormhole leading to the prison that held the Chained God bound. And he watched with a mixture of Albric’s elation and his own dawning horror as a red crystalline liquid seeped out through the portal.

  You must understand your enemies if you wish to defeat them, Kri reminded himself.

  Then the vision became more confusing. Kri felt the tug of two different desires. The Chained God wanted him to fuse the red liquid—the Progenitor, he called it—with the shard of the Living Gate, and thereby create the Vast Gate. The red liquid itself, the Voidharrow, wanted him to fuse itself with him. He—or, rather, Albric—tried to follow the Chained God’s will, and he guided the fusion of the Voidharrow and the Living Gate until it grew into the archway depicted in Sherinna’s mural. His acolytes, though, obeyed the Voidharrow, and he saw them transform into demons.

  The Chained God, he realized, had been betrayed. He felt the distant echo of the god’s fury as he—as Albric—fought to carry out Tharizdun’s will … and failed.

  He felt what Albric did as the Voidharrow claimed his body, transforming him from the legs up into a creature of liquid crystal. He felt the tiefling’s dagger slip into his side and end his body’s life.

  But Albric was no longer just his body. His will had fused with the Voidharrow as much as his body had, and he became something else. He became the creature that Albanon had described, a serpentine creature of red liquid.

  “I am Nu Alin,” Kri said aloud.

  “Who are you talking to?” asked a voice in the room.

  Kri’s mind was jolted out of the vision, but he grasped at one last fragment of knowledge and experience. “I am in the Tower of Waiting,” he said.

  “Kri? What are you talking about?”

  Kri saw the crystal fragment on the table in front of him. Sherinna’s workshop came slowly into focus, and he turned toward the voice, fully expecting to see nothing there.

  Albanon stood in the archway, a look of concern on his face.

  “It’s time for us to leave,” Kri announced. Nu Alin was the key, he realized. Nu Alin was present at the beginning of it all. He had tried to fight the Voidharrow’s will, to do instead what the Chained God wanted.

  “What?” Albanon whined. “We’ve barely gotten started here!”

  Kri turned his back to Albanon. “I’ve uncovered some new information,” he said. As he spoke, he lifted the crystal from the table and slid it into a pocket, keeping it out of Albanon’s view.

  “So have I! I think I might be close to finding the dragon. I’ve been analyzing the flow of magical energy through the Feywild and the world alike. It’s like there’s a great vortex—”

  Kri shook his head sharply. “We have another quarry now.” I have to find Nu Alin, he thought. If the demon can be turned against Vestapalk, together we might defeat the Voidharrow at last.

  “What other quarry?”

  Kri grimaced. The urge to blast the annoying young eladrin with so much holy fire that his entire body would be consumed filled him so suddenly that he almost gave in to it.

  “I’ll explain later. Collect your belongings.”

  “Now? It’s the middle of the night.”

  Kri thought he heard lightning crackle around his head, reflecting his frustration. He clutched his temples and drew a slow breath.

  “Kri, are you unwell? You’re acting very strangely.”

  “Not enough sleep, clearly. I’m sorry. Let me try to explain. Come into the stairway.” He shooed Albanon out of the workshop and followed him onto the landing beyond, suppressing a sudden desire to push the young eladrin over the railing.

  Instead, he put a fatherly hand on Albanon’s shoulder and forced a smile onto his face as he pointed to the mural on the dome.

  “I know where Albric is—where Nu Alin is,” he said, pointing to the man in the mural above, standing before the Vast Gate with his legs already transformed into red liquid columns. “He is the key to all of this. He holds the knowledge we seek.”

  Albanon’s eyes widened. “He left the Temple of Yellow Skulls on Vestapalk’s back. Where he is, the dragon probably is as well. But there’s no way he’s going to help us against Vestapalk.”

  “Perhaps not,” Kri said. “But we are not the only ones opposing the Voidharrow. It may be that enough remains of Albric the Accursed to turn even Nu Alin against his master.”

  “Well, where is he, then?”

  “In Fallcrest.”

  Albanon stared at him for a moment, then swore softly in Elven. “Shara and Uldane,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Albanon hurried into the workshop while he adjusted the straps on his backpack. He had decided to bring only the bare minimum of books from Sherinna’s library, things he really couldn’t do without while he and Kri went in search of Nu Alin, but that bare minimum had filled his ba
ckpack almost to bursting. And that was after he’d removed luxuries like rope, sunrods, and food.

  “I can’t find Splendid,” he told Kri. “Have you seen her?”

  “Not in days, now that you mention it. I thought it was pleasantly quiet around here.”

  “I argued with her in the library last week and she slunk away. I think she must have left.”

  “Whatever will we do without her wisdom and perspective?”

  “Please, Kri. She was Moorin’s.”

  “So let her go!” Kri said. “Along with the last remnants of your apprenticeship and your childhood. You’re not in training any more—if nothing else, the way you handled yourself at the Temple of Yellow Skulls proves that. Now you are a man—and more than a man, a wizard. Nothing remains to hold you back.”

  Albanon stood a little taller, but then his face fell. “Except you ordering me around,” he muttered.

  Kri turned away from the arch set in Sherinna’s workshop wall and put a hand on Albanon’s shoulder. “I don’t mean to order you around, Albanon, but we’re pressed for time. I will explain everything when I can, I promise you.”

  Albanon forced a smile for his new mentor. “Thank you. I’ll hold you to that.”

  “You’d better, because I’m sure to forget. The old mind’s not what it used to be, you understand?”

  “Oh, I’ve noticed.”

  Albanon cast a longing look around the workshop. During the week since they reached the tower, he had spent nearly every waking hour in the library, and felt as though he’d only scratched the surface of all there was to learn there. He’d had no time for the workshop, let alone all the other rooms of the tower—the room where Sherinna had displayed trophies from her adventuring life as if they were exhibits in a museum, or the greenhouse at the top of the tower, full of exotic plants. He had even wanted to spend time in the music room, with its dusty harp and collection of wooden flutes, maybe even learn to play those instruments. He’d felt, somehow, that it would bring him closer to the mysterious woman who had been his grandmother.

  “Are you ready?” Kri asked over his shoulder as he made some final adjustments to the arch.

  “Just a moment.” Albanon stepped out onto the landing and looked up and down the entry hall. “Splendid!” he called. “Splendid, I’m sorry for what I said. We’re leaving now, and if you want to come with us you have to come now. Please!”

  He waited until he heard Kri clear his throat in the workshop, signaling his impatience.

  “Splendid!” he called, one last time.

  With no response, he turned and shuffled back into the workshop, ready for Kri’s journey.

  “You’re better off, believe me,” Kri said. “Now, I’ve modified this arch so that it works more like a traditional teleportation circle. That means, among other things, that we’ll be able to use it come back here, without passing through the Moon Door and crossing the Plain of Thorns. After all, you never know when your father will tire of letting us walk across his lands. I have keyed the portal to the teleportation circle in Moorin’s tower.”

  “In Fallcrest?” Albanon said, suddenly excited to return to the town that had been his home for seven years.

  “Did Moorin have another tower somewhere?”

  A thought struck Albanon. “Why didn’t you use that circle before?”

  Kri blinked at him. “What?”

  “When we first met. You said you came to Fallcrest by boat. Why didn’t you just teleport there?”

  “Moorin never shared the sigils of his circle with me. I studied them when we were last there.”

  Albanon frowned, but something about Kri’s tone made him decide not to press the question further. Instead, he turned his attention to the arch. “Are you sure it’s going to work?” He pointed to the top of the arch. “It looks like there used to be something set into the stone at the apex. Maybe it won’t function without whatever it was.”

  “As I said,” Kri said testily, “I have modified the arch so that it will function in its current state.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Are you ready?” Kri asked.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course you do, Albanon. But I thought you wanted to help me root out the source of this abyssal plague.”

  “I do,” Albanon said quickly. “Forgive me. I spoke without thinking.”

  A spasm of fury passed across Kri’s face, and Albanon stepped away reflexively. Then it was gone, and Kri was smiling again. “We’ll leave when you’re sure you’re ready,” he said.

  “I’m ready. I’m sorry.”

  “Very well. To Moorin’s tower!”

  Kri raised his hands before the arch and the columns began to glow, casting the interior into strange shadows. He stepped between the glowing columns and disappeared.

  Albanon took one last look at the Whitethorn Spire, half hoping to see Splendid speeding through the archway on her tiny wings, and followed the priest through the arch.

  For the briefest instant he felt like he was falling, and as if some dark presence nearby was grasping at him. Then his feet stood once more on solid ground. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the candlelit chamber, but he knew it well, and it brought a stab of pain to his heart. It was the very chamber where he had found Moorin’s corpse after Nu Alin—using the unassuming body of a halfling—had torn him to pieces. Blood had been everywhere, and for one horrible moment the memory of the smell—the acrid blood and his own vomit—threatened to overwhelm him.

  “What have we here?” Kri demanded, jolting Albanon’s mind back to the present.

  Magical power shimmered in the air around them, forming a dome over the teleportation circle that was inscribed on the ground. Albanon wasn’t immediately sure, but he guessed the purpose of the dome was to keep him and Kri inside. He was more certain about the intent of the trembling soldiers that surrounded the pair, pointing spears and halberds in their general direction.

  “Intruders!” one of the soldiers shouted. “Get the captain!”

  Another soldier, a young man who looked barely old enough for the militia, broke from the circle and ran down the stairs, presumably to carry out his sergeant’s orders.

  “What’s the meaning of this, sergeant?” Kri asked hotly. “We’re not intruders—this tower belongs to Albanon, here.”

  “Sorry,” the sergeant replied, “but we have our orders. You need to stay here until we can make sure you’re clean.”

  “Fine,” Albanon said, cutting off what he suspected was going to be an angry retort from Kri. “But we’ve been away from Fallcrest for some time. Can you tell us what’s going on while we wait for the captain?”

  “The town’s under siege. The invaders are everywhere in Lowtown and the west bank. Plague is breaking out, mostly among soldiers who have fought the creatures, but it’s starting to spread. Hightown’s crowded with refugees.”

  “So what are you doing here?” Kri demanded. “Don’t you soldiers have better things to do than occupy a wizard’s tower?”

  “The town’s locked down,” the sergeant said. “No one enters Hightown until we’re sure they’re not carrying the plague or working for the enemy.”

  The young soldier returned, breathless from his run. “The captain’s here, sir,” he said with a salute.

  “Thank the gods,” the sergeant breathed.

  Albanon had the opposite reaction as the captain strode in. The captain was a tall human woman, with dark brown skin and eyes that gleamed like amber. Albanon recognized her—she had tried to arrest him after Moorin’s death and had testified at his trial before the Lord Warden where he was finally acquitted. The few times he’d seen her since then, he’d had the distinct feeling that she took his freedom as a personal affront.

  “Well, they don’t look like demons,” the captain announced. “And I don’t see any sores.”

  “No, Captain Damar,” the sergeant replied, “but our orders—”

  “Moorin’s apprentice,”
the captain said, stepping closer to inspect Albanon. “Your dragonborn friend blinded my soldiers and carried you away before we could arrest you.”

  “I’ve faced trial before the Lord Warden,” Albanon said.

  “Indeed. He decided you were innocent. But I still don’t understand why an innocent man would attack my guards and run like a rabbit.”

  “Roghar and I were chasing the creature that did kill Moorin. It had taken our friend Tempest, and we were afraid it might kill her as well, so we were trying to travel fast. We didn’t have time—”

  “Back up,” Captain Damar said. “Who else was present that day, the first time we tried to arrest you?”

  Albanon furrowed his brow. “Who else? Well, the Lord Warden was the one who ordered me to surrender myself. The High Septarch and his apprentice, Tobolar. You and a half dozen soldiers. Me, Roghar, and Splendid, Moorin’s pseudodragon.”

  The captain nodded. “They are who they say they are, sergeant. You may lower the wards.”

  Albanon gaped at her, stunned into silence.

  “If you were an enemy posing as Albanon—well, first, you’d be a damned fool to choose that disguise. But more important, I don’t think you’d know all the details of that day. And I see no sign of contagion.”

  “So you believe I’m innocent?”

  The captain scoffed. “At the time, you were the only suspect that made sense, and your explanation of a ‘foul creature from someplace else’ seemed far-fetched.” She frowned. “Now it’s all too real.”

  As she spoke, her sergeant manipulated some kind of pattern on a nearby table, shifting gleaming stones around on an engraved circle. The shimmer of magic in the air around Albanon and Kri vanished suddenly.

  “So what are these invaders?” Albanon asked, stepping out of the circle. He suspected he knew the answer, but he didn’t want to believe it until he heard the captain say it.

  “They’re not like anything I’ve seen before,” the captain said, and Albanon’s heart sank. “Creatures of blood and fire, some of them, and others are made of shadow and nightmare.”