The Temple of Yellow Skulls (31 page)

Then, quick as a whim, he hooked his claw into the lizardman’s belly and ripped.

The blackscale’s scream as his guts burst out through his scaly hide was terrible. It ended in a bubbling wheeze as Vestapalk’s claw snapped his ribs and ruptured his lungs. The dragon jerked back and flicked away the scraps of flesh that clung to his talon. A murmur of interest passed through his hulking minions. Those holding the dying lizardman glanced at each other. One showed its teeth and growled, yanking the corpse close like a dog ready to fight for a bone. Raid stared, then swung around, wide mouth open to protest.

Vestapalk snapped huge teeth in front his face before he could even speak. “Vestapalk told you to bring him exceptional individuals,” he snarled. “That one was big, but nothing more.” The dragon lowered his head to look into the eyes of the greenscale. Although clearly as frightened as the blackscale had been, the other lizardman stood his ground, facing Vestapalk as if ready to spit at him. “This one is exceptional. He could become one of Vestapalk’s exarchs.”

He straightened his neck and glanced at the soldiers holding the greenscale. “Hold him for now,” he said, then he looked at the other soldiers. “Collect posts and pillars. Find strong vines and bring them here. There will be others.”

The soldiers scattered, trundling off on muscular legs to carry out their master’s command. Vestapalk turned to Raid. “Vestapalk doesn’t care about ‘worthy.’ Worthy is for the gods. Vestapalk wants commanders who will serve him well and without fear. Go back out into the Vale. Bring me more like that one.”

Anger burned on the human side of Raid’s misshapen head. He glared at Vestapalk as if the dragon’s reprimand had shamed him. Vestapalk’s eyes narrowed slightly but he didn’t move.

Finally, Raid bowed his head. Briefly. “Yes, Master,” he said. His gaze stayed down for no longer than it took to utter the words before he looked up again, though. “There was something else. We were confronted.”

“Confronted? Someone dared attack you and you still only managed to bring Vestapalk a coward?” The dragon turned to stalk back to where Tiktag waited.

Raid’s face tightened. “The ones who attacked us fled from me. One of them was a priest. He used holy light against me.”

Vestapalk paused. “Holy light?”

There was curiosity in his voice. In any other creature, Tiktag might have even said there was concern. Raid didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve had prayers to the gods turned on me before,” he said. “When I was just Hakken … before you blessed me with the Voidharrow.” His face wrinkled. “This was different. It hurt more.”

“Then you deserved it. Learn from this lesson.” Vestapalk looked skyward and Tiktag felt a shiver at the blankness that drifted across his face. That the dragon listened to the Eye
again, even if just for a moment, was a comforting familiarity. “There are those who know about the Voidharrow—or at least believe they do.” He looked back to Raid. “How did this priest find you?”

“I think it was a coincidence. He was traveling with people I knew, friends of one of those who helped me recover the skulls. Apparently that friend wasn’t as dead as I thought. Somehow he escaped the temple. He was hiding near the lizardfolk camp. The others must have thought they were rescuing him.”

The chill that had run along Tiktag’s spine and tail earlier returned.
The halfling
. Raid was talking about Uldane. So that’s why the halfling had been lurking around the temple ruins. And Tiktag had let him escape. More than ever, the wyrmpriest wanted to slink away in to the shadows, to find the deepest, darkest hiding spot he could and jam himself into it.
Close your mouth
, he thought at Raid.
Don’t say anything more!

But Raid didn’t. His face twisted. “They laugh at me. They still doubt my strength. I will hunt them down and show them what I can do. They won’t laugh then. I don’t know the priest—he used his prayers to keep me back and I had prisoners to return to you or I would have gone after them—but I know the others.” He squeezed his fists until blood trickled between his fingers. “Albanon. Uldane. Shara … they will be mine.”

A long hiss broke from Vestapalk as he whirled around. Tiktag wanted to cower. Even Raid had the sense to flinch in alarm. “Shara?” the dragon spat. “Uldane? You’re sure these are the ones?”

The confidence with which Raid carried himself seemed to break at last. “Uldane was the one who escaped from the temple,” he said. “He’s the one who helped retrieve the golden skulls.”

Vestapalk’s hiss rose into a rumbling—rose and kept rising as his body convulsed with rage.

No, Tiktag realized, not rage. Vestapalk was laughing. The red stuff between his scales flared like embers. His strange liquid eyes glowed. His claws clenched and loosened, digging gouges into the ground of the courtyard. Raid looked to Tiktag in confusion but the kobold only felt the same thing himself.

Long devotion to the dragon won out over his fear at what Vestapalk had become. Tiktag moved closer and asked, “Master? Are you—?”

Vestapalk’s laughter ended in a long, hissing draw of breath. “If this is no doing of the Eye’s, then destiny itself favors Vestapalk,” he said. He glanced at Tiktag. “Wyrmpriest, go make sure Vestapalk’s brutes follow his instructions. Inspect any vines they bring back. Make sure they are strong.”

“Master?” asked Tiktag, his confusion only growing—but Vestapalk had already turned his attention to Raid.

“Shara is a human female and Uldane is a halfling male, yes?” the dragon asked his lieutenant. “And this Albanon—a dragonborn? A tiefling?”

“An eladrin,” said Raid.

Vestapalk nodded, his mouth pulling back to bare his teeth. “Yes. A wizard. Vestapalk remembers him.…”

Neither of them paid any further attention to Tiktag, as though he wasn’t there at all. If Tiktag had felt small under the combined gazes of Vestapalk and his creatures, he felt even smaller at being ignored. He moved away and fear crept back over him. Fear and the urge to blame Raid for stealing Vestapalk’s attention from him. But Raid was only part of the problem, wasn’t he? He was only a symptom of Vestapalk’s transformation. The signs that he and Vestapalk had read
together in the guts of animals, and that the dragon had seen in his visions of the Eye, were wrong. The Eye had promised transformation, but whatever the Voidharrow was turning Vestapalk into, it wasn’t something that he was meant to be.

Tiktag clenched his teeth and looked back at the dragon. “I will find a way to save you, master,” he murmured under his breath. “Even if it is from yourself.”

I
oun, All-Knowing Mistress … Ioun, who writes the Book of Insight … Ioun, lady of Kerath-Ald where all knowledge lies.…” Kri swung a small censer in time with his invocation, spreading a haze of fragrant smoke that seemed to glow with its own gentle light. “Ioun, font of lore, your servant begs your aid: Lend your holy strength to Uldane Forden. Take his fever, make whole his body, and rouse his spirit.”

Stretched out on the bed before the old cleric, Uldane groaned and writhed suddenly. His arms thrashed and his legs kicked—coming perilously close to striking the censer. Biting back a curse, Albanon grabbed for the halfling’s ankles at the same time as Shara seized his hands. Kri gave them both a harsh glare, but didn’t for an instant hesitate in his chant. “Ioun, All-Knowing Mistress.…”

Uldane relaxed under Albanon’s grip, and for a moment the wizard felt the same sense of panic he had when they had fled through the night beside the Witchlight Fens. Between one heartbeat and the next, Uldane had gone limp in his arms.
Albanon had felt certain his friend had died and yet they didn’t dare to stop for fear of Raid’s pursuit; they’d ridden for miles more before they could even slow to check on him.

But that had been on the back of a galloping horse. If Uldane hadn’t died then, he wasn’t going to die in his own bed in the Shining Tower.

At least, Albanon hoped he wouldn’t.

Albanon looked up at Shara, only to find her already looking at him. She nodded and he knew she was thinking the same thing as him. Between them, Shara and Kri knew a fair bit about healing. Once back in Fallcrest, they’d ransacked the tower’s supply of healing herbs. The cleric’s prayers were useful for healing the wounds of battle, but against exposure and infection, they were less effective. “Let the body do its work,” he had counseled. “That’s the best healing.”

After a day of watching Uldane burn with fever, his wounds festering and his body growing weaker as they sat by his bed, even Kri had relented. “There’s a ritual I know,” he’d said. “A direct invocation. There’s no guarantee it will succeed—”

“We’ll take that chance,” Shara had said.

Had they waited too long?

Uldane groaned again. This time Albanon was ready. He held on to Uldane’s legs. The halfling had surprising strength for someone so small and so sick. Even Shara struggled to hold his arms. Kri’s chant rose in volume, filling the dim, smoky room. “Ioun, font of lore, lend your holy strength to Uldane Forden! Take his fever! Make whole his body! Rouse his—”

“Aahhhh!”
The shriek that burst out of Uldane seemed to lift him entirely off the bed. Every muscle in his body contracted
at once, bending him into an agonizing arc. He remained stiff for three long heartbeats, his eyes wide and rolled so far back in his head they showed only white, then the seizure ended as abruptly as it had come over him. He collapsed back to the bed, trembling and shaking.

Kri lowered the censer and nodded. Albanon released Uldane’s legs—cautiously. Shara let go of his arms. Kri’s hand went to his holy symbol in silent tribute to his god, then he reached out to lay it against Uldane’s forehead.

The halfling jerked bolt upright at his touch. “Vestapalk!” he yelped. “Vestapalk is alive!”

“Hush!” Shara dropped down onto the bed and gathered him into her arms. “Hush, Uldane. We know.”

Uldane relaxed into her embrace like a child waking from a nightmare. Tears squeezed out of his eyes. They shone in Shara’s eyes, too, as she looked at Kri. “Thank you,” she said.

Kri’s mouth just tightened into a thin line. “I’ll have my thanks when he can tell us what he saw.”

Uldane was out of his bed before nightfall. By the time the moon had risen, it was all but impossible to tell he’d been wounded. A slight gauntness was the only sign that he’d even been sick, and Uldane set about remedying that with gusto. He cleaned out the tower’s pantry and sent Albanon jogging down to the Blue Moon in search of more food.

“I feel like I haven’t eaten in days!” Uldane said as he tore into one of the roasted chickens the eladrin brought back.

“You probably haven’t,” said Shara, sitting beside him at the table in the tower’s kitchen. “The fever will have taken a lot out of you, too.”

Splendid snorted. “You’re forgetting that he always eats like this.” The pseudodragon hopped across the table to glower at Albanon. “And you, going off without me. Look at what happens!”

The refrain was familiar. Splendid had muttered some variation of it since they’d arrived back at the Shining Tower bearing Uldane, except that respect—surprisingly—for Albanon’s worry over his friend had kept her voice quiet. Now that the halfling was healed, it seemed everything was back to normal. “You said you didn’t want to come,” Albanon said yet again. “And we needed someone here in case Uldane came back on his own.”

“You’re right. Someone needs to look after you. If I’d been there, your leg wouldn’t be mashed to a pulp.”

Uldane actually stopped eating and looked up at that. “You got hurt rescuing me?”

“Just a bruise,” said Albanon. “It was nothing.”

“Nothing?” Splendid’s voice rose into a squeal and she turned to Uldane. “Under his robe, his right leg is black and purple from his hip down.”

Heat rushed to Albanon’s face. Before Uldane could say anything, he added, “From when my horse bashed me against the tree you were hiding in.”

The halfling broke into a grin—a grin that faded quickly as his gaze shifted past Albanon. Shara’s expression sobered as well. The wizard twisted around.

Kri stood in the doorway behind him. “I have been patient,” he said.