The Temple of Yellow Skulls (16 page)

For a heartbeat, the divine radiance was all that Albanon could see, a white brilliance that filled his eyes but was cool on his skin. The kobolds seemed to feel something far different. In the instant that he basked in the light of the gods, they wailed as if they were on fire, then fell silent.

The light passed like a veil. Albanon blinked—there weren’t even any spots left to cloud his vision—and saw that all of the kobolds were either down or staring blind into space. Kri’s hand slipped from his holy symbol. “Finish any that live as quick as you can. You only have a few moments,” he said to Shara, then turned to Albanon with a look of concern on his face.

Concern?
A part of the eladrin wondered.
We’ve won. What is there to be concerned about?
He stepped forward to meet Kri.

The cave turned around him, bringing with it a powerful throbbing in his arm. Albanon looked down.

His left forearm was a torn mess of skin and muscle. Blood dripped in a pattering rain on to the cave floor. “Oh,” he said.

He didn’t remember starting to fall, but suddenly Kri’s hands were supporting him and lowering him more gently to the ground. The cleric examined the wound in his arm, then parted shredded robes to inspect his side as well. He looked into Albanon’s eyes. “I can heal you.”

Albanon nodded. He’d experienced magical healing before. It was comforting, like a warm blanket laid over his wounds. He forced himself to relax in spite of the pain as Kri’s hands moved over his arm and settled above the place where the kobold had bitten the deepest. The old man’s face tightened in concentration and he murmured a prayer. Albanon closed his eyes and drew a deep, slow breath.

The sudden fire that burned through his arm was worse than the kobold’s bite. Albanon yelled and forced his eyes open against the blinding light that flared from Kri’s hands. He tried to pull away, but Kri gripped him tight. One hand moved to his side, tracing fire along the wounds there, then light and pain faded together. All that remained of the wounds were bloodstains and angry, tender scars.

“The wound might have been infected,” Kri said, pushing himself to his feet. “The light of the gods was necessary to cleanse it just in case.”

“You could have warned me!” Albanon sat up. The healing had taken only moments. Splendid was just coming to perch on his discarded pack and Shara was still moving like a whirlwind around the chamber, dispatching the last of the radiance-stunned kobolds. She cut down a final kobold and turned to face them, a grim smile of triumph beneath the blood that spattered her face.

“That was a better fight than I would have expected from kobolds,” she said. “Moon and stars, what happened to—”

If Albanon hadn’t been sitting on the ground and looking up, he wouldn’t have seen the movement in the shadows above her. He wouldn’t have seen the form of one last kobold as it dropped silently from its hiding place.

Quick as thought, he flicked his fingers at it and spat the first spell that came to his mind, the one that had hovered near his lips all day.

The kobold yelped as its fall was cut short, deadly descent turned into a slow drift.

Shara and Kri spun around and stared up at it. The kobold squealed and spat, flailing with arms and legs as if it could swim through the air, but there was nothing for it to push against. It was helpless. Shara’s eyes narrowed and she brought up her sword. The creature just hissed louder.

“Kill you!” it snarled. Its voice was high-pitched, a weird sound coming from a muscular body, and its massive teeth got in the way of the words. “Eat your heart! Eat your eyes!”

“Eat this.” Shara drew her sword back, ready to strike as soon as it was close enough.

“No,” said Kri sharply. “It talks.” He reached down and offered Albanon a hand to pull himself up. “Quick thinking. Can you keep it in the air?”

“Why would you want to?”

“To question it.” The cleric strode to Shara’s side. Wrapping one hand around his holy symbol, he touched the other to the blade of the warrior’s greatsword.

Golden radiance flashed along the length of the metal. As its slow, inexorable fall brought it closer to the shining sword, the kobold’s eyes went very wide. Its struggles increased. Albanon
joined the others, keeping his distance from the thing’s clawed hands and feet.

“What happened to it?” His stomach tightened with fear, but at the same time he felt a strange sense of fascination. He hadn’t made a specific study of disease, but Moorin’s teachings had been eclectic. None of his master’s books described any infection or plague that affected its sufferers as the kobolds had been affected. The drifting kobold had the same silver-red crystal eyes and half-formed crystalline growths as the one that had attacked him. The same, he realized glancing at the corpses that lay around the cave, as the rest of the kobolds. His stomach tightened a little more. The same silver-red crystal as the Voidharrow. “What happened to all of them?”

“A good question to start with.” Kri regarded the kobold. “What happened?”

The creature just hissed at him. Kri nudged Shara’s arm—and her sword—a little higher. A look of discomfort crossed Shara’s face. “Kri, I don’t like this.”

“It will kill you if it has the chance. Slowly, if it has the luxury.” The cleric’s gaze didn’t leave the kobold as he spoke. “Besides, don’t you want your revenge on Vestapalk?”

The kobold’s hissing broke into an open growl at the mention of the dragon. “Will not speak the Great One’s name!” it said. “Not worthy! Great One will slay you!”

“So he lives, then,” said Kri. Shara’s expression hardened and Albanon noticed that when Kri released her arm, she didn’t lower her sword. The cleric circled around the kobold, forcing the creature to keep turning its head to watch both of them. When he spoke again, his voice was unexpectedly soft. “Do you have a name?”

The question seemed to puzzle the kobold. It blinked several times and its mouth quivered around its oversized teeth. Finally it said, “Sistree.”

“Why did you hesitate? Was it hard to remember?”

The kobold flinched and snarled. It lashed out, trying to reach them. Albanon couldn’t help thinking of a wounded dog, snapping at anything that came near and all the more dangerous because of its pain. The spell wouldn’t keep the creature aloft for much longer. The next time it lunged, it might catch one of them. “Kri, the spell …” he said in warning.

The cleric held up a hand. “Did Vestapalk do this to you, Sistree?”

Shara sucked in her breath in surprise. Albanon glanced sharply at Kri. How could Vestapalk have done this? Sistree’s answer was confirmation of Kri’s suggestion, however. “Blessed!” insisted the kobold. “Blessed the tribe.”

“Did he? Kobolds know to run from danger.” Kri swept an arm around the cave. “Why didn’t your tribe run? Why did you attack when you could have remained hidden?”

Sistree’s fierce expression became confused. “Have to.” It looked like the kobold was struggling to form thoughts and words. “Have to kill. Hate you. Hate everything!”

His clawed hands clenched and a burning light returned to his crystalline eyes. Kri’s face tightened. “Where is Vestapalk?”

“Gone,” said Sistree. “Flew up! Flew away.”

Kri stepped close, almost within reach of the claws. “Gone where?” he demanded. “Why did he leave his tribe after he had blessed you?”

Sistree’s shrill voice rose in a howl. “Left us to look for the Gatherer!” Albanon felt the magic of the spell finally unravel. The kobold’s muscular body jerked and uncoiled suddenly
as it threw itself at Kri. Clawed hands drove at the old man’s face. Too many clawed hands—with a wet ripping sound, a second pair of arms ripped out of the blisters on its shoulders. Albanon yelled in shock.

Shara’s sword made a radiant streak that connected with Sistree’s back and slammed the kobold to the ground. Wisps of smoke rose where the blade, still glowing with the power of Kri’s prayer, touched crawling, crystal-tinged flesh. Even with its body broken, the kobold—or rather the thing that had been a kobold—continued to shriek and rake at them. Shara dodged past the flailing arms and brought her sword down on its head. The shrieks ended like a snuffed-out candle.

Kri, however, glared at Shara in a fury. “Why did you do that?”

The warrior scowled. “You’re welcome,” she said. Putting a boot to the back of Sistree’s skull, she wrenched her sword free.

“I could have taken care of myself.”

“Really? I’ve never seen a priest pray with his jaw ripped off.”

Kri stared down at Sistree’s corpse, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he looked up again, his eyes went to Shara. “I’m not used to having other people defend me.”

“Apparently not.” She turned away and looked around the cave. In spite of her swift actions, Albanon could see that she was shaken. The danger might have been past but her knuckles were still white as she clenched her sword. “What kind of disease makes something grow extra arms?” Shara flinched suddenly and released her sword to scrub at the blood spattering her face. “Steel and thunder! Is it something that can spread to us?”

“Only if they’d broken your skin,” said Kri. “Albanon was in danger. You’re fine.”

Shara twisted back toward him. “You know about this, don’t you? What is it? What did Vestapalk do to these kobolds?”

Kri’s lips pressed tight together

The answer burned in Albanon’s mind, though. “He used the Voidharrow on them,” he said. “Look at their eyes”—steeling himself, he bent down and peeled back a corpse’s eyelid to reveal the red crystalline orb within—“or where their growth split their skin, you can see it there. It all looks just like the Voidharrow.” The eladrin glanced up at Kri. “You said the Voidharrow made Nu Alin and that it might have turned Vestapalk into something else, too. You weren’t just guessing when you asked Sistree if Vestapalk did this. The Voidharrow is some kind of disease and Vestapalk can spread it.”

The cleric stood still for a moment. Then he nodded. He looked down at Sistree again and seemed to sag a bit, as if his age was catching up with him. “I don’t think there’s a ‘might’ to Vestapalk’s transformation any longer.”

Shara cursed. “So what has he transformed into, then?”

“I don’t know. Not entirely.”

Albanon exchanged a glance with Shara, then looked back to Kri. “You don’t know. What about these, then?” He gestured to the dead kobolds. “What were
they
turning into?”

Kri just shook his head. Albanon felt a knot of fear return to his belly. “What exactly is the Voidharrow, Kri? You said the Order of Vigilance was dedicated to watching over it.”

“Watching over it,” said Kri, finally breaking his silence. “I didn’t say we understood it. We’ve never known what it was—only what it can do.”

“And what’s that?” asked Shara.

Kri looked at her, then at Albanon, too. “The Voidharrow,” he said, “creates demons.”

The sun touched the rugged horizon by the time they returned to the surface. At Kri’s insistence, they’d searched the cave and the chasm for any remaining kobolds, then burned the bodies of the ones they had killed in a holy fire kindled by the cleric’s prayers. Albanon had never felt more grateful for the wind and fresh air of the land above. They recovered their horses and spent twilight putting some distance between themselves and the buried necropolis of Andok Sur. They’d seen no undead, the kobolds were destroyed, and there was no sign that Vestapalk, wherever he might be, had remained in the area, but among the haunted Old Hills, it was better not to take chances.

Only when they were camped with a bright fire snapping and popping in the wind did they talk.

“The kobolds weren’t really demons, were they?” Albanon asked. The thought had been gnawing at him since their encounter. As they’d collected the bodies of the kobolds for burning, he’d found others that showed the same developing pair of extra arms as Sistree. In others, the crystalline shoulder plates had grown large and thick enough that they might have deflected the blow of a weapon. The way they had hunched forward hadn’t just been because of the weight of the crystal armor—their bodies had actually been reshaped by the Voidharrow. Whatever creatures the kobolds might have become, though, calling them “demons” seemed to go too far. “Isn’t it more likely they were turning into some other kind of monster? They don’t look like any demons I ever read about in Moorin’s books.”

“You wouldn’t have read about them in books. Only a handful of people—all members of the Order of Vigilance—have ever encountered such creatures before.” Kri, turning a thin stick in the fire, shook his head. “But make no mistake. The taint of the Abyss was upon them. If your training lay in that area, you would have sensed it as well. The kobolds were not demons yet, but we’d been another day arriving to investigate, they would have been. Flesh struggles to resist the Voidharrow as it resists any infection.” He frowned at the stick. “It’s just far less successful.”

“Then Vestapalk is turning into a demon, too?” said Shara. She sat with her greatsword across her knees, running a whetstone across the edges of the blade. The
skrrr
of stone on metal grated at Albanon’s ears and made the tension in his neck and shoulders even worse. Shara’s expression was dark. He was certain that with each pass of the whetstone, the warrior was imagining the sword cutting into Vestapalk’s flesh.