The Temple of Yellow Skulls (24 page)

A single big drop of intensely red venom fell, like a liquid ruby, from his mouth on to Hakken Raid’s forehead.

The big man sucked in a sharp breath. His eyes opened very wide. The ruby drop smoked against his forehead for a moment, then seemed to seep right into his skin. Hakken clutched his head and screamed. Staggered. Fell to his knees, then to his side.

Tiktag stared. When Vestapalk had bestowed his blessing upon the kobolds of the tribe, they had seemed to fall ill even before the dragon and his wyrm-priest had departed. The
touch of the silver-red venom had left them wracked with pain and covered in sores—but not like this. Not with such speed.

Hakken’s skin bubbled up as if he were being held over a fire. The blisters spread faster than Tiktag could follow, swelling and bursting so violently that the kobold had to dart back from the foul spray. The raw skin left beneath showed a crystalline shimmer that quickly changed to a red-brown tint, darker than it had been and distinctly ruddier, too. Where the blisters grew and burst across the human’s broad chest and arms, they left patches of hair that was thicker than it had been before; the shaggy hair on his head even seemed to grow longer, a tapering ridge of it sprouting down his back like the hair of a beast.

Something popped and creaked as Hakken writhed under the venom’s influence; it took a moment before Tiktag realized it was the sound of bones and flesh breaking. Hakken was growing. He’d been as tall as two kobolds before. As he stretched and flailed on the ground, he looked to be as tall as three. His muscles swelled, dragging new screams from him. Thick veins pushed up from his skin.

Except they weren’t the purple-blue of veins filled with blood. They were brilliant red and they pulsed with the same glowing crystalline light as the stuff that flowed through Vestapalk. Hakken’s arms and legs twisted and stretched as if the veins were pulling him apart. More blisters formed around his joints—elbows, wrists, fingers—making them thick and knobby. They didn’t so much burst as weep and collapse as something pushed out from within them. When they shriveled back, they left clusters of silver-red crystals behind. Tiktag wondered if there were still bones under the man’s skin or just more clumps of crystal.

Then Hakken threw back his head and screamed once more. Glistening red sweat made a thick sheen on his forehead. Hakken crouched down, bashing his head against the ground as if he could drive the pain away. But there was no escape. Tiktag watched as the entire left side of the man’s skull pushed out, his growing cheekbone stretching the skin along with it.

Horror planted itself in Tiktag’s belly. This was the blessing he had sought?

The dragon’s head dipped over his shoulder. “The plague takes hold rapidly. The strength of the skull empowers it and he embraces the Voidharrow. He will serve well.”

Vestapalk sounded tired. Tiktag tore his eyes away from Hakken to look up at him and was shocked by what he saw. His master’s body sagged, the majesty that had animated him much diminished, the glow that had shone between his scales faded. It was as if all of his strength had gone into the human’s transformation. “Master,” the kobold said automatically, “you must rest.”

His master sneered at him. “Vestapalk will recover,” he said. He stretched out a foreleg and dragged the bag of skulls closer. A thin wailing drifted from the bag. Vestapalk’s sneer turned into a cruel smile at the sound. “Hakken Raid has provided the means for this—and for so much more.”

“There is no Hakken.”

Tiktag whirled around at the deep rumbling voice. The big human—or whatever he had become—was rising unsteadily to his feet. His stance was hunched like an animal’s. He shook his head and wiped at his face with a thick-fingered hand as if he’d just walked through a spider web. His misshapen face twitched and jerked, then he rolled his head and, with a groan, stretched his jaw open.

The skin at the corners of his lips tore to reveal a wide new mouth filled with sharp teeth. Creases in the tortured flesh across the left side of his face split—and
blinked
. On that side of his face, three crystal red eyes opened like wounds, two above and one below the tooth-filled mouth.

Only the right side of his face, where he had been burned, still betrayed hints of the human he had once been.

Hakken caught him staring. Tiktag flinched back from his red-eyed gaze, but Hakken just paused and reached up to feel the burn. His fingers touched the blistered skin and dropped immediately.

“There is no Hakken,” he said again. His face curled into a snarl. “I am Raid and the world will know my strength!” He dropped to his knees in front of Vestapalk. Where the dragon’s blessing had touched him, more red crystals grew in a tight, glowing cluster. “I serve.”

“The first of many,” said Vestapalk. His cruel smile grew wider. “Gatherer, your service is only beginning!”

N
u Alin woke to find his host’s nose bloodied and his face full of grass and dirt. In the back of his mind, Apech the minotaur scratched at the walls of his mental prison, trying to escape while his jailer was unconscious. Nu Alin slapped him down with hardly a thought and rolled over to stare at sunlight filtered through leaves. His head spun with the movement.

The last thing he remembered was the Voidharrow flaring brighter than the sun, brighter than anything Nu Alin could think of. It had exploded out of his awareness with such power that he could imagine he’d actually seen it with Apech’s eyes. It had lit up the distant horizon like a second dawn, so intense it had seemed to turn the trees around him to winter-bare skeletons. So intense it had overwhelmed him.

There was something more to it as well, an additional sensation, though he couldn’t quite name it. An ancient memory returned to him: the moment when a mere human had joined with the Voidharrow and begun the transformation into something else. No, that wasn’t quite right. What he sensed
from the Voidharrow wasn’t like his own transformation—it was like the transformation of those who had followed Albric and likewise been consumed by the Voidharrow.

The Herald was needed. He pushed Apech’s body up and continued his journey to the beacon that was the Voidharrow. With every step, the dizziness left by the surge in the Voidharrow faded a little more, replaced by exhilaration. The Voidharrow was still distant, even at Nu Alin’s tireless pace, but it felt much closer. The time he had waited for so long was almost at hand!

Dizziness and exhilaration together—along with the intensity of his focus on the Voidharrow—contributed to his stumbling into the ambush.

One moment he was alone, striding through the forest. The next, he had the sensation that he was being watched. Nu Alin slowed his pace, but kept moving as he scanned the trees around and ahead. There was nothing to see with his host’s eyes. He extended his own senses outward and discovered half a dozen hidden figures, bandits lurking along the trail he had chosen to follow through the wood. Two up in the trees would be archers while the others, lurking to either side of the path, would be thugs. Nu Alin was still considering whether to stop and deal with them when one of the figures moved from hiding and stepped out on to the path ahead.

The bandit was a tall human, lean and desperate looking. He pointed an old sword with a much notched edge at Nu Alin. “In a hurry, minotaur?”

So that was how it would be. Nu Alin slowed to an easy walk. “The time it will take to deal with you is no delay,” he said.

The bandit’s eyes widened slightly as he looked him over. His gaze flicked to someone out of sight, then back again. Nu
Alin knew the man had seen the wounds Gerar the gnoll had inflicted on his host body, now sealed with his own silvery-red form. The cracks that showed around the eyes of any host body Nu Alin used harshly were probably also visible. He walked a little closer to the bandit.

The old sword wavered, then grew steady. “Stand where you are!”

Nu Alin stopped obediently. The bandit smiled, confidence restored. “You’re a long way from Thunderspire,” he said. “We have you outnumbered. I’ve got four archers in the trees and twice as many men in the woods”—noise rose on cue from the hidden thugs in an attempt to convince their victim of the lie—“so if you want to continue your journey with your life, you’ll throw down everything you’ve got.”

Apech had been carrying a few trinkets when Nu Alin had taken his body. Some loose coins, a pretty stone, a good knife, shiny brass cuffs. Nu Alin pulled them out or took them off, and threw them to the ground. Then he tossed down the empty pouch from the minotaur’s belt and even the belt itself. The crossed harness of leather straps that Apech wore across his chest. The bandit started looking nervous again.

“That’s enough,” he said. He gestured with the sword. “Move away.”

Nu Alin stood his ground. “Come and take them. They’ll do you no good. You’re going to be dead soon enough. You and all your men. You and every living thing in this world.”

The bandit with the sword flinched. There was a curse from the bushes, then a command. “Loose!”

Nu Alin staggered as arrows zipped from the trees and thumped into Apech’s broad chest. He righted the minotaur’s body, looked down at the arrows, then wrapped a fist around
each and ripped them free. The silvery-red crystal of his form bubbled up in the wounds. The bandit stared at him.

The voice in the bushes rose high. “Kill him!”

Waving an assortment of weapons, the remaining bandits broke from hiding and charged. Two more arrows thumped into Nu Alin, then the archers’ shots were blocked as the bandits surrounded Nu Alin. They could still be a nuisance, though. He couldn’t just let them continue to loose arrows into his host body. The first bandit to reach Nu Alin was a slight man wielding a quarterstaff. Nu Alin caught a blow from the staff on his forearm, before wrenching it out of the bandit’s grasp with his other hand. A twist of Apech’s massive shoulders, enhanced by his own flowing form wrapped around the corded muscles, sent the staff whirring through the air. There was a crash and a yell cut brutally short, followed by another crash as the first archer’s body fell out of the tree.

The slight bandit tried to retreat. Nu Alin grabbed him by the throat. Pain blossomed in Nu Alin’s back as another bandit plunged a dagger into Apech’s kidney. Nu Alin pushed himself into the wound, seized the slight bandit with both hands, and flung him into the dagger man. Both men went down, but the dagger man staggered back to his feet—the slight bandit stayed on the ground, choking on a crushed throat. Nu Alin lunged across him for the dagger man. The fallen bandit’s ribs crunched under his hooves and the dagger man screamed as a sharp horn drove into his belly. Nu Alin lifted him up, then twisted his head and hurled him away. Blood and scraps of his guts clung to Apech’s horn. He flicked them off as he turned back to the remaining bandits.

There were no more arrows. The second archer had wisely fled. Only the bandit with the notched sword and another
man, presumably the actual leader of the bandits, with a spear remained. They stood shoulder to shoulder with their weapons pointing at Nu Alin, but not moving, caught halfway between the urge to fight and flee.

Exaltation flooded Nu Alin. “Your kind are too weak,” he told the men. His voice was a rasp in Apech’s broad chest. He could feel his substance pulsing and dripping like tears around the minotaur’s eyes. “You will be easy prey in the age that comes. If you cannot harm the Herald, what hope do you have against his master?”

It was too much for the bandit with the sword. He whimpered and tore away from his leader, sprinting for the concealment of the bushes.

No minotaur should have been able to move as Nu Alin did. He leaped high and felt muscles tear as he did, but just knitted them together with strands of his own being. His jump took him clear over the bandit leader and into the fleeing swordsman. Hooves caught him in the hips, shattering bones as Nu Alin drove him to the ground. The man wailed and squirmed, possibly unaware of what had just happened to him. Nu Alin crouched over him, took his head in Apech’s big hands, and snapped his neck.

When he looked up, the bandit leader had vanished from sight—but not from Nu Alin’s senses. The man ran like a rabbit, ducking and dodging among trees and bushes with scarcely a sound. Nu Alin rose and strode after him.

“The world you know will end in rivers of lightning and seas of blood!” he roared. “Iron forests will sprout leaves like knives and your organs will hang like sodden fruit from their branches.” He increased his pace to a charge. Nothing stood in his way. He ignored the bite and sting of thorns and saplings.
Small trees fell under his hooves. “The sun will look down on deserts of ice, the moon on mountains of bone, and the only stars will be the flash of red crystal wings bringing death to all things!”

His pursuit closed the distance to the fleeing bandit. Even over the crash of his charge, he could hear the bandit leader’s panicked weeping. And though the call of the Voidharrow still burned strong in his mind, Nu Alin did not think it would begrudge him a moment’s sport in his journey.

S
ergeant Murgeddin, the old dwarf in command of the guards at Fallcrest’s eastern gate, waved to Albanon and the others as they rode back into town. “Good journey?” he called cheerfully.

“Not really, no,” said Kri and rode on past the guard without even pausing.

Albanon reined in his horse and paused beside Murgeddin. “Sorry,” he said. “We didn’t exactly find what we were looking for.”

“Few ever do, lad, few ever do.” Murgeddin looked up at Shara as she rode in with Splendid draped across her shoulders. “Are you going to bite my head off, too?”

Splendid answered for her. “Probably not. Dwarves taste bad.”

Murgeddin eyed the pseudodragon and drew a rattling breath as if preparing to spit. Splendid’s eyes went wide and she leaped from Shara’s neck into the air. Hovering safely out of range, she glared down at the grinning dwarf. “You wouldn’t!”

“Probably not. Pseudodragons make easy targets.”

Splendid let out of a whistling hiss of annoyance and swooped around as if to show off her agility. Shara ignored her and leaned over to Murgeddin. “Have you seen Uldane?” she asked.