The Temple of Yellow Skulls (36 page)

Vestapalk grined sudenly and laughter rolled up from his belly, as dry and hard as his flesh. His claw slammed back to the ground. “Yes!” he said. “Yes, he is exceptional. Well done, Raid. A wizard—he will serve very well. Put him with the others.”

Before Albanon had time to do more than wonder what others the dragon could mean, Raid had him by the arm again. The demon paused before he led Albanon away, though. “Vestapalk,” he said, looking up, “how many more do you need?”

“As many as you can provide.” Vestapalk cocked his head. “Why?”

“Hunting grows scarce. Perhaps I should wait before I go back out. Otherwise if you want me to find more exceptional individuals for you, I will need to go where there are more people. Into Winterhaven. Or Fallcrest.”

Albanon’s gut leaped in new fear. Fallcrest? He could only imagine Raid sweeping through the town. A groan escaped him—a groan that the demon must have misinterpreted as protest, because his free hand swept around to crack across Albanon’s face.

The blow was enough to put Albanon’s already exhausted mind into a spin. Splotches of darkness threatened to rise up against him, but he was quite certain that he saw Vestapalk smile slyly at Raid. “You don’t want to leave the ruins,” the dragon said. “You want to be here when Albanon’s friends try to rescue him.”

Raid hesitated, then nodded silently. Vestapalk laughed again and settled back, curling his tail around a leather bag
that held the hints of gold. “Granted! Now take him away, then prepare to welcome his friends!”

The grin that split Raid’s face stretched almost from ear to ear. He thrust an arm into the air and howled. The crowd of four-armed demons roared in response, the sound rolling through the ancient ruins and through Albanon’s throbbing head. This time when darkness rose, it was all too easy to let himself slide into it.

Tiktag waited until night had fallen completely before he made his move. Lugging a heavy skin of water, he strode up to a pair of Vestapalk’s brutes and addressed himself to one of them. “Water for the new prisoner,” he said boldly.

The brute just looked back at him and blinked its beady red eyes as if a fly had come buzzing around its head. The other brute gave no reaction at all. Tiktag waited a moment, then added, “I’m going into the pit.”

Still nothing. He edged forward and down the ramp that lay between the two creatures.

What the pit—deep as five kobolds, large enough to make a very spacious den, with the narrow ramp at one end and carvings of dancing fiends adorning its crumbling walls—might have been used for when the ruins made up a temple, Tiktag had never figured out. For Vestapalk, however, it made an excellent place to keep his special prisoners.

Two more brutes moved around the pit. Unlike the guards at the top of the ramp, they glanced at him immediately. One of them bared teeth in a snarl of challenge. Tiktag had heard Vestapalk give them their orders: guard the prisoners and do not allow them any opportunity to escape. The prisoners were
well-bound but the brutes took their charge seriously. Tiktag had seen them fight one of their own kind if it wandered into the pit. The kobold almost faltered but braced himself. Remember, he thought, you do this for Vestapalk. He puffed out his chest and met the brute’s gaze. “Water for the eladrin. Raid commands it. Challenge me and you challenge Raid. Don’t make me summon him!”

The brute seemed to consider that. Its lips closed over its teeth and it moved aside.

Tiktag scurried on among the prisoners Raid had collected for Vestapalk. A human woman cowered in a corner with wild fear on her face, eternally under the starvation-sharpened gaze of a heavily bound ogre. The greenscale lizardman who had been Vestapalk’s first prisoner huddled against a wall, his scales dulled. Another human lay nearby, gaunt and gray as if trying to will himself to death rather than face his fate. A dragonborn. A hobgoblin. Two orcs. A halfling, bound up to his neck. An old dwarf. A third human. Enough moonlight entered the pit that all of them looked up to watch Tiktag as he moved through the pit, searching for the only prisoner that interested him.

Raid had dumped the eladrin at the pit’s far end. Albanon sat slumped, the hood replaced over his head. His chest rose and fell in irregular, twitching rhythms. Tiktag looked over his shoulder at the wandering brute guards, then set down his water skin and lifted the hood slightly. Albanon was so lost to exhaustion that he didn’t even move.

Tiktag slapped him sharply. Albanon jerked back to wakefulness and the kobold grabbed his face with both hands. “Call out or struggle,” he said, “and I take your eyes.”

He pressed the sharp claws of his thumbs against Albanon’s lower eyelids for emphasis. He felt the lids flicker and widen in
response. Albanon stiffened, but he didn’t try to move. A sense of relief rushed through Tiktag. “Good. Now you answer my questions.” Keeping one hand under an eye, he slid the other down to loosen the gag in Albanon’s mouth. The fabric was tight and he had to fight to get it out from between Albanon’s cracked lips.

The first words out of the eladrin’s mouth, however, startled him. “You’re Vestapalk’s wyrmpriest!”

The words were little more than a groan, but Tiktag flinched, dropped the gag, and jammed both thumbs back under Albanon’s eyes. “Quiet!” he spat. “Quiet!” He glanced over his shoulder but no one seemed to have noticed. He looked back to Albanon. “Yes, I am Tiktag. Don’t draw the attention of Vestapalk’s brutes.”

“Brutes?” Albanon’s voice was a creak. His blue eyes flicked from side to side as he took in the pit, the other prisoners, and the hulking figures that moved among them. Tiktag felt him shiver. “The … things with four arms—”

“Vestapalk’s creatures,” said Tiktag. “Raid builds him a horde. This is what comes of what you did to him!”

Albanon’s gaze came back to him. “What
I
did to him?”

Tiktag dug his nails into the eladrin’s flesh until Albanon gasped in pain and blood welled up. “Do not pretend! Vestapalk sought a transformation into something great, but after your human friend wounded him, it all went wrong. What you saw isn’t what he was meant to be. Tell me how to turn him back!” Albanon sucked in air and tried to pull away, but Tiktag pressed close. “Tell—”

“A guard is coming!” Albanon gasped.

Tiktag’s heart jumped. He released Albanon and grabbed for the water skin before he even looked around to see if the
eladrin was telling the truth or just trying to distract him. It was no distraction. One of the brutes had turned and was coming their way, its red eyes fixed on them. Tiktag hastily pulled the stopper from the skin and splashed water over Albanon’s mouth.

“You see?” he called to the brute. “Raid’s orders. Water for the prisoner.”

The guard stopped and stared at him for a moment longer, then turned away. Tiktag sighed and looked back to Albanon. The eladrin was lapping frantically at the water that poured from the skin, straining to reach the neck. Tiktag pulled the skin away, but paused and studied him. “You warned me.”

Albanon sat back, chest heaving, and licked his lips. Blood from the wounds under his eyes mixed with the water running down his face. “Did Raid really order you to bring me water?”

Tiktag narrowed his eyes and thought about how best to answer that question. “No,” he said finally. “Raid is no friend of mine.”

“We have that in common, then.” Albanon looked at him with desperate eyes. “Tiktag, what happened to Vestapalk wasn’t our doing.”

Anger flared in the kobold’s chest. “You tried to kill him.”

“He tried to kill us!” Albanon squeezed his eyes closed and grimaced, then said, “Do you know about the Voidharrow?”

Tiktag twitched. A little voice inside told him that he shouldn’t be talking to Albanon—he should be forcing the wizard to answer his questions, not the other way around. But then so much of what had taken place recently was not what it should have been. He swallowed and brushed the little voice aside. “How do you know about it?”

“It was stolen from my master. When Shara wounded Vestapalk, it got into his body. It’s some kind of disease,
an infection. It’s what’s transforming him—and Raid. Did Vestapalk bite or scratch Raid?

The wyrmpriest shook his head as he recalled the silver-crimson drops of venom falling from Vestapalk’s jaw to Raid’s forehead. “No bite. No scratch. He anointed Raid. Vestapalk made him his exarch.”

“His
exarch?”

Albanon looked sickened. Tiktag hesitated, wondered for a moment how much more he should tell the eladrin, then added, “Vestapalk will anoint you, too.” He swept a hand around the pit. “Raid gathers for him: exceptional individuals to become other exarchs, commanders for his horde. All of you will serve.”

Albanon’s eyes opened even wider in shocked silence. The kobold leaned closer to drive the wedge of a whisper into his fear. “Save yourself. Tell me how to undo what the Voidharrow did to him. I want my master back!”

But Albanon’s mouth only opened and closed for a moment, then he slumped down. “I don’t know if it can be undone.”

“What?” Heedless of whether any soldier might see him, Tiktag struck Albanon. “You just said you put the Voidharrow into him!”

“By accident, not on purpose. We really don’t know anything about the Voidharrow.” Albanon’s expression tightened. “Except what it does. Vestapalk, Raid, the brutes—they’re not what they used to be. The Voidharrow has turned them into demons.”

The anger that Tiktag had felt melted into confusion and he sat back from Albanon. “Demons? No, that’s not … Vestapalk can’t be a demon. The visions and omens sent by the Eye promised he would be transformed—”

“The Eye,” said Albanon. “The Elder Elemental Eye?” Tiktag blinked and nodded. Albanon grimaced. “The Voidharrow
came into the world under the guidance of the Eye. Tiktag, this
is
the transformation that the Eye promised Vestapalk. This is what was
supposed
to happen to him.”

Tiktag stared at him. His guts felt as though they had been ripped out. His heart felt as though it had fallen though the hole where his guts had been. If all of this had been the Eye’s plan for Vestapalk all along, then his mighty master had just been a pawn.

“Why?” he asked. “It can’t be. I read the omens from the Eye, too. Vestapalk would take a new form and a new age would come to the world.”

Albanon’s eyes opened wide and he sat up. “A new age? What kind of a new age?”

“An age of chaos—an age that Vestapalk would rule in his new form.” Tiktag curled his tail around his body and scratched at the scales. “This is wrong. The omens said nothing about demons!”

The color had drained out of Albanon’s face. “Did the omens say anything else about this new age, Tiktag?”

Tiktag clenched his jaw and found himself trying to shake his head and nod at the same time. “No. Yes. Not the omens I read, but when Vestapalk woke after his transformation had begun, he said that the Voidharrow”—Tiktag tried to recall his master’s words—“that the Voidharrow would transform him and he would transform the world.”

“Transform the world,” Albanon repeated. “Moon of the Feywild, that’s why he’s spreading the disease of the Voidharrow.” He looked at Tiktag sharply. “Do you know what he’s planning to do next?”

Tiktag left off scratching his tail. “I don’t know what he plans anymore. Raid wants him to use the power of the golden
skulls to restore the temple of the Elemental Eye. I don’t think he will. Vestapalk doesn’t talk about the Eye as much. He says it served its purpose and its only role now is to watch. He only talks about the Voidharrow now.”

Albanon wrinkled his nose, then asked, a little more softly, “Do you know when he’s going to try turning the Voidharrow against his prisoners?”

The wyrmpriest shook his head again. “I think he wants Raid to gather more first.”

“Well, that’s something.” Albanon let out his breath in a sigh, then looked at him. “Tiktag, my friends are trying to stop the Voidharrow from spreading. They need to know what Vestapalk has planned. I don’t know if they’re coming to rescue me, but if they do, Raid’s going to be waiting for them. He’ll kill them. Or capture them and infect them with the Voidharrow, too.” He dropped his voice to the barest whisper. “Will you help me escape?”

Tiktag froze at the suggestion. “I serve Vestapalk,” he said—but as soon as the words left his tongue, he knew that his heart was no longer behind them. He had stood by Vestapalk as the Voidharrow ravaged him, only to have his master turn to other servants. He had stayed with Vestapalk when it seemed his transformation was a curse, only to be ignored. It was blasphemy to admit it, but deep inside he knew that what Albanon had told him about his master was true. The Voidharrow had turned Vestapalk into something other than a dragon.

Hadn’t Raid taunted him with the same words?

Vestapalk might rule over the age that was to come, but it would be an age without room for wyrmpriests and kobolds.

Unless Tiktag accepted the blessing Vestapalk had once offered him and became like his master. He had followed
Vestapalk into the gaze of the Elemental Eye. Why not continue to follow him? Because he had seen what Raid had gone through. Because he didn’t want to become like Raid or the brutes. Or Vestapalk.