The Gates of Madness Page 2

  Nowhere sighed. “I suppose we’re going to Bael Turath.”

  BAEL TURATH

  Flee,” the Chained God whispered. “Now.” He filled this thought with the image of the Living Gate, the tiny fragment of its substance that lay hidden in the ruins of Bael Turath, and sent those thoughts through the void, along the fragile connection between himself and his mortal servant. “Now!” he roared.

  His voice echoed in the void, and the whispers of the Progenitor rose around him. “Now,” it said, slithering in the utter darkness. “Free.”

  The Chained God gazed around at the red liquid crystal that swirled and undulated around him. “You will go before me to become the Living Gate,” he said. “To open my way to freedom.”

  He formed a hand from the darkness of his substance and lifted a portion of the Progenitor’s substance. Tiny droplets of the red liquid trailed from his hand, shimmering in their own light. The fluid in his hand coiled around him, seeking something it could infuse and transform, but the Chained God was not flesh or matter. He brought it close and whispered over it, his frozen breath forming patterns of crystals across its surface.

  “They will drown in blood,” he whispered, a familiar refrain.

  All around him the Progenitor responded, “All will perish.”

  Miri walked with her axe clutched in both hands, its thick haft resting on her shoulder, ready to swing at anyone or anything that jumped out at them in the ruins. The jagged spires and crumbling walls of Bael Turath loomed around her like a nightmare landscape, devil faces leering at her from ancient columns. It wasn’t so much the architecture and its grotesquerie that set her on edge, but a less tangible sense, an awareness of the evil history that brooded over the ruined city. It was within its walls, she knew, that the noble houses of the ancient empire that bore the city’s name had struck their fateful bargain with the powers of the Nine Hells, infusing their blood with a diabolical taint that persisted in the descendants of those houses—no longer human, but a race unto themselves, the tieflings. Such monstrous corruption had left its mark on the city, or at least she imagined it had. It made her flesh crawl and set her nerves on edge.

  “The sooner we find this thing, destroy it, and get out of here, the happier I’ll be,” she whispered.

  “I know,” Demas said, his voice as clear as a trumpet and almost as loud.

  Miri flinched at his volume, afraid of what attention it might draw to their presence. She watched as he turned back away from her, his eyes searching the rubble ahead for any sign he might recognize from his strange and haunting dreams. She sighed. Not for the first time, she wished she understood him better, that she had even a taste of whatever it was that made him always so calm, so sure, so at peace. His walk with Ioun had made him more than human, rather like an angel given mortal form. His pale skin, marked with jagged patterns as red as blood, set him apart from more ordinary men, but the grace and calm that suffused his every word, his every movement, seemed like an image of the divine. When he was moved to wrath or compassion, and Ioun’s power flowed through him to smite his foes or comfort and strengthen his allies, she imagined she could see the eyes of the goddess in his beautiful face, and he walked in the paths she laid out for him, confident and trusting.

  He continued forward, following the visions Ioun had granted him, and she walked close behind. She wasn’t sure how much his eyes saw of the ruins around them, and how much he was gazing into another world, so she would be his eyes, alert to danger.

  His eyes and ears. She put a hand on his shoulder to stop him, and put a finger to her lips to silence the question that rose to his lips. In the stillness, she heard it again, more clearly: the clash of steel.

  “There’s a battle going on,” she said.

  Demas nodded. “Monstrous creatures haunt these ruins, and worse. Someone could be in trouble.”

  “Who? No one lives here any more, right?”

  “Treasure hunters, perhaps, or fugitives using the ruins as a hiding place. But even such unsavory characters do not deserve the death that haunts this place.”

  Miri smiled at him. “I knew you’d say that.” She started walking toward the sound, just to the right of the course they’d been on. “This way.”

  It felt good to lead the way, for a change, to know the right course and be able to guide him as he so often guided her. She had known nothing of battle before she met Demas, but now she was as comfortable with her axe as she’d been with her milk pail before, so long ago. Whatever dangers lay ahead, at least it was a threat she could understand, one she knew how to face. And with Demas behind her, his divine power filling the air around her, she felt ready to face any danger.

  The sounds of combat grew louder—steel crashing against steel, the shouts of men, and growls and roars that came from no human throat. Miri hurried onward until she rounded a corner and the battle engulfed her.

  A man lay on the ground at her feet, blood spilling from a wound in his throat that might never heal. Three others—two humans and one stout dwarf—stood in a tight ring, beset on all sides by creatures of nightmare. Six of the creatures looked almost like men, clad in armor of black iron plates, but their legs were bent like those of a beast, tipped with great scaled claws, and Miri realized with a start that the horns on their heads were not part of any helmet, but their own monstrous ornament. Reddish-brown tails lashed the air behind them as they closed in on the desperate defenders.

  The other creature was a gaunt figure that towered over the others. Leathery skin stretched tight over its bones, from its claw-tipped feet to its strangely warped skull. A thin tail curled up behind it, and an enormous stinger like that of a scorpion hovered near its head, ready to stab downward at its foes.

  Miri glanced back at Demas as he rounded the corner and took in the scene. He smiled at her, then bent to intone a prayer over the dying man. Miri had all the reassurance she needed. She charged the towering devil, running forward and putting all her strength and momentum into one great swing of her axe.

  The blade bit deep into the creature’s side and erupted in blinding white light—the product of Demas’s blessing. The devil howled as it turned to face her, its flesh burning away from the wound as pale green ichor spilled out. As its eyes fell on her, Miri’s confidence faltered. Fear surged in her chest, sending her heart hammering against her ribs and a chill into the pit of her stomach. Some part of her mind tried to assert that the fear was just a trick of the devil’s magic, but the rest screamed at her to flee. One of the devil’s enormous claws came swinging at her and she scrambled backward, just out of its reach. She wanted nothing more than to keep going, to turn around and run as fast as her legs would take her.

  Then a column of white flame streamed down from the slate-gray sky and engulfed the battlefield. The radiant flames danced over the towering devils’ body, licking at its leathery skin, and it howled in rage and agony. The smaller devils shrieked in pain as well, and three of them rolled to the ground in a desperate, futile attempt to stifle the holy fire before it consumed them. To Miri, though, the flames were soft and comforting, banishing her fear. She could feel the warmth of Demas’s smile in the flames.

  The three men looked bewildered as the flames washed down around them, searing their foes but leaving them untouched. Miri noticed that they did not seem to draw comfort from the divine power as she did, and she wondered briefly who they were and what business had brought them into the ruins of the tiefling capital.

  Then the bony devil’s stinger stabbed into her shoulder, and agony like nothing she had ever known coursed through her body.

  Nowhere had dreamed of Bael Turath, especially in his childhood. In his dreams, though, he’d seen stately mansions and soaring towers, the city as he imagined it had stood at the height of its empire—proud, majestic, and deadly. In every dream, he walked unnoticed through bustling streets until he came to a certain manor house, dark and squat in contrast to the towering buildings around it. As soon as he opened the manor�
��s door, the city fell into ruin and fiends of the Nine Hells assaulted him from every side, waking him from his dream in a surge of terror.

  Echoes of that terror shook his resolve as he and his companions strode through the crumbled gates of the city. His eyes darted around, peering into every crevice and shadow, half-expecting some creature out of nightmare to leap out and attack. He could see tension in Brendis’s shoulders and how tightly the paladin gripped his sword, and wondered whether Brendis were also haunted by old nightmares.

  Sherinna, though, seemed completely undaunted by the ancient ruins—or completely unaware of them. She’d been holding the cultist’s parchment inches from her nose for most of the journey, as if by sheer force of will she could command it to reveal the secrets hidden behind the words. She somehow managed to glide over the rubble with her customary grace, even with her eyes fixed on the parchment.

  “Sherinna,” Nowhere whispered, “what have you learned? Have you figured out what we’re looking for?”

  “Cultists,” she said, not looking up from the parchment. “Or a fragment of the Living Gate.”

  “I thought maybe after all that reading you had picked up something more than what the big words said.”

  Sherinna shot him a withering glance before returning her gaze to the parchment. “You asked two questions. I chose to answer the second.”

  “Then you have learned more?”

  “Nothing good.” She sighed and lowered the parchment, looking around as if noticing for the first time that they had reached the ruins. “They’re looking for a fragment of the Living Gate so they can use it in a ritual designed to pierce the barrier between worlds. The bulk of this writing is the formulas of the ritual. They intend to pierce the walls of the Elder Elemental Eye’s prison so it can free itself.”

  “Will it work?” Brendis asked.

  “That’s just it. The ritual seems coherent, from what I can make out. But some of the components and formulas don’t make sense if the place they’re trying to reach is a primordial’s prison somewhere in the Elemental Chaos.”

  “So maybe the ritual will work, but not as they plan,” Nowhere said. “Maybe they’ll bring something else through their portal, instead of the primordial they intend.”

  “Something else,” Sherinna said. “Something worse.”

  “Worse?” Brendis said. “What could be worse than a primordial? The gods themselves joined in bands of three or five to bring down a single primordial in the Dawn War.”

  “Most primordials are much weakened since the Dawn War,” Sherinna said. “And some forces are even stronger than the primordials were at the height of their power.”

  Nowhere frowned. “Get to the point, Sherinna. What are we facing?”

  She glared at him. “The cultists plan to take this fragment of the Living Gate to Pandemonium and perform their ritual there. Pandemonium was the dominion of a god so evil and so powerful that all the other gods banded together to imprison him. I believe that can mean only one thing: These cultists hope to free the Chained God.”

  Brendis’s eyes went wide. “That’s madness.”

  “Of course it is,” Nowhere said. “Just like the cultists serving the Fire Lord in Nera were mad. It just means we’d better make sure we stop them.”

  Miri stared up at the gaunt devil’s leering face as the venom seared through her veins. Darkness closed around her vision until its visage was all she could see. It shifted, reaching one of its enormous claws toward her.

  Brilliant light engulfed her and the devil, casting stark shadows across its angular face as it howled in pain. The fire in Miri’s veins became a refreshing warmth washing through her, Demas’s divine power repairing the damage the poison had caused.

  She gripped her axe and swung with all her might at the devil’s bony leg. The blade bit deep, spraying green ichor and splintering bone, knocking the creature’s leg out from under it and sending it sprawling to the ground. She stepped clear of its flailing tail, glancing around to get a sense of the field.

  Two of the smaller devils were circling around her, either moving in to attack from her flanks or trying to get past her to Demas. The other four lay dead on the ground. She saw no sign of the three men she’d been trying to rescue, and she frowned.

  No time to worry about that now, she told herself. She threw herself in the path of one of the smaller devils, lashing out with a mighty swing of her axe. The blade glanced off the creature’s heavy armor, but the force of the blow sent it staggering across the crumbling cobblestones and it crashed into its companion. Demas sent another burst of divine radiance to consume the devils, and they were gone.

  The larger one gingerly got to its clawed feet, favoring the leg Miri had struck. Its tail weaved in the air behind it like a snake ready to strike, and it roared in pain and fury.

  The devil’s eyes were tiny points of yellow light sunk deep in gaping black sockets, and it fixed them on Demas. “Your god will not protect you where you are going, cleric,” it called.

  “Silence!” Demas answered, his voice charged with divine authority. “My god is the weaver of fate and the voice of prophecy. Do not think that your knowledge surpasses my own.” He lifted his staff in both hands over his head, and the pure light of the sun washed out from him.

  The devil recoiled, shielding its eyes from the divine light, and Miri rushed forward again. With one swing, she swept the devil’s feet out from under it again. She spun with the momentum of her axe, then brought it down to cleave the monster’s head from its bony neck.

  “Well done, child,” Demas said.

  Miri’s heart swelled with pride, even as tears pricked at her eyes. Why couldn’t he see her as something more than a child?

  “It appears that our rescue attempt was successful,” the cleric continued. “Even the one who was dying—they all escaped.”

  Miri frowned. “Why did they take off like that?”

  “You felt the fear the bone devil inspired,” Demas said.

  “True. Maybe they’ll come back to thank us once the fear wears off.”

  “I wouldn’t stand around waiting.”

  Miri sighed, irritated. “That thing could have killed me. I can still taste the poison.”

  “We did the right thing. They needed our help and we gave it. “

  “Is it still the right thing even if they’re ungrateful wretches?” Miri said.

  Demas smiled, and her anger melted away. “Even then.”

  Gharik ran with his hand to his throat, as if he still couldn’t believe that his head was still attached to his body. When he caught up with the others, Haver clapped him on the shoulder.

  “I thought you were dead,” Haver said.

  “So did I,” Gharik growled. He didn’t meet Haver’s gaze. “The cleric healed me.”

  “We’re still half the number we were when we came to this wretched place,” Albric said, glaring at his three acolytes. “The Elder Elemental Eye expects more from its servants.”

  All three bit their tongues and bowed their heads, though Albric caught a flash of anger in Fargrim’s eyes. He would have to watch the dwarf—his stubborn pride would be an obstacle to his service of the Eye.

  “While those bold and foolish heroes deal with the devils,” Albric said, “the Eye will lead us to the object we seek.” He reached beneath his heavy mantle and pulled out the golden spiral symbol he wore, his connection to the Elder Elemental Eye. His fingers tingled as he touched the warm metal, and his head swam at the edge of dream. “Follow me wherever I lead, but be on your guard.”

  He closed his eyes and lost all connection to the world around him. The ruined city fell away, and he stood in a vast silver sea. Stars glimmered in the midst of a fine silvery mist that swirled around his legs. He turned around, looking for a path, and a stream of midnight blue formed from his feet, stretching off into the hazy distance.

  He walked along the stream, letting its flow carry him as the silvery dream around him turned into a nightmar
e. The misty sea on either side fell away into a swirling maelstrom flashing with fire and lightning. The stream became a narrow bridge, and the reek of death wafted up from the abyss on either side, making him dizzy with nausea. He clutched the Eye’s symbol to his chest and put one foot carefully in front of the other.

  Shadows drifted up from the maelstroms alongside his path, and he heard, as if from a great distance, the shouts of his acolytes, sharp with terror. The shadows—great winged forms like demons or dragons—menaced but did not attack, and though he felt the acolytes draw in closer to him, they did not try to rouse him. One foot in front of the other, he followed the path the Elemental Eye set out for him.

  The path began to descend, and darkness rose up around him on all sides. Some kind of obstacle stood before him, but he reached out a hand and felt the Elder Elemental Eye’s power coursing down his arm, erupting in a spray of vitriol that washed the barrier away. He stepped through the broken remnants of the door or wall and saw a blinding glow, blood-red and cold as Stygia’s icy sea. He threw his arms up to cover his eyes and woke from his dream.

  Albric stood in a tiny alcove cluttered with ruined masonry. His three acolytes clustered behind him, wide eyes fixed on him in awe and terror. He allowed the hint of a smile to touch his lips. They should fear him and the power that flowed through him. He turned back to find the source of the glow that blinded him in his dream, the object of his quest.

  A gnarled staff stood against the far wall of the small chamber, supported by two wooden braces attached to the wall. The staff itself was unremarkable, nothing more than a length of yew branch worn smooth from the touch of many hands. At the heavy head, a lattice of gut strings held a long, slender shard of reddish crystal suspended in place—a shard of the Living Gate.

  Albric seized the staff in triumph, and felt a surge of joy that was not entirely his own. The Elder Elemental Eye was pleased.