The Temple of Yellow Skulls Read online

  “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. Fl
esh 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.

  Kri was silent for a moment before he said quietly, “If we’re lucky, yes.”

  The sound of the stone stopped. Even Splendid, stretched out close to the heat of the flames, lifted her head to look at Kri. “If we’re lucky?” Shara asked.

  Albanon’s jaw clenched so tight his teeth hurt. “You need to tell us everything, Kri.”

  “Ioun teaches that we can tell only what we know; all I know comes from the histories of my order, and those are thin.” The cleric tossed his stick into the fire and sat back. “In a time when the Empire of Nerath was still at the height of its glory, two groups of heroes found their quests coming together—much as the search for Moorin’s killer and the search for revenge on Vestapalk brought you two together. Both groups sought a mad man, one for what he had done, the other for what he would do. When their quests led them from this world into the silver wastes of the Astral Sea, the groups joined forces to hunt down the mad man and his followers. That mad man’s name was Albric—Albric the Accursed, as he is remembered in the histories.”

  “Nu Alin,” said Albanon. “You said that was his name before he became … what he is.”

  Kri nodded. “In the Astral Sea drift the domains of the gods, as well as the remains of shattered domains destroyed or devastated during the Dawn War between the gods and the Primordials. Albric and his followers traveled to one of these empty realms and there attempted to break open the prison of one of the great evils locked away during those ancient times. The heroes arrived and interrupted their plans, but not before something had slipped through: a quantity of red, crystalline liquid. And that was when the heroes witnessed the power of what they would come to know as the Voidharrow.”

  “Albric and his followers were in the throes of the plague when the heroes caught them—still partly mortal beings, already changing into something else. I can’t do justice to the words of the histories, but they became grotesques. As the heroes fought them, they transformed into creatures of tremendous power. Albric became the bodiless creature we know as Nu Alin. The others who were exposed to the Voidharrow changed in different ways. The heroes managed to defeat them all, though not without cost to themselves. One of their number was lost through a portal opened by Albric as part of his scheme. Another was possessed by Nu Alin but gave his life so that the monster might be contained. In the end, however, the heroes were left in possession of the last of the Voidharrow carefully collected into three crystal vials—but with no knowledge of what it truly was. No sage they consulted had ever seen or heard of such a substance. The servants of the gods, called on through the most powerful of rituals, were silent. The Voidharrow was a mystery save for what they had witnessed themselves. They didn’t even know what to call it. The surviving heroes knew it was dangerous and so they became the Order of Vigilance, sworn to protect the mysterious substance and keep it from any who might attempt to misuse it. For generations, the Order kept the vials safe while we searched for clues to what it was, where it came from, or even what sort of demons Albric and his followers were transformed into. Curiosity overcame the fear that nagged at Albanon. “Did you find any?”

  “If we had, do you think we would be sitting here today?”

  “Ah.” Albanon felt his face turn warm with embarrassment. “Right.”

  “If it was so dangerous, why didn’t they just destroy it?” asked Shara.

  Kri bent his head toward her. “A more sensible question. They tried—and discovered that when the gods themselves have nothing to say, wise mortals should remain silent as well. Do you know the red ebarri plant? The leaves are irritating on their own, but burn them and the smoke will sicken anyone who breathes it and the ashes are a deadly poison.” His expression grew taut. “When it seemed that all possibilities for investigation had been exhausted, a member of the Order named Dravit Nance proposed attempting to destroy a quantity of the Voidharrow. After much debate, his proposal was approved. Dravit took one of the vials into the wilderness, removed a portion of its contents, and attempted a ritual that he believed would safely incinerate the Voidharrow.”

  “It didn’t,” Shara guessed.

  “It didn’t. Nor was Dravit so isolated as he thought. His ritual only vaporized the Voidharrow and it drifted on the wind—right into a small settlement.” Kri touched his holy symbol. “In trying to destroy the Voidharrow, Dravit unleashed it. He tried to summon the Order for help, but it was too late. All the Order could do was keep the village quarantined and watch as the disease spread from person to person. We gained valuable insight into the effects of what we had so carefully guarded—its name at the very least, babbled by the villagers in their suffering—but at the price of more than three dozen innocent lives. And Dravit’s. He died a demon, infected in the final cleansing of the village. The Order ruled that it was safer to preserve the Voidharrow than make any further attempt to destroy it. The two remaining vials were separated. One went into the distant east with its keeper. The other, passed from guardian to guardian, ended up with Moorin.”

  The cleric sighed. “And now Vestapalk has been exposed to the Voidharrow. A dragon. There’s no indication in the histories of the Order of how the Voidharrow might affect a creature of such power. That Sistree considered exposure to the plague a blessing is a bad sign. It suggests that he knew something was happening and that Vestapalk deliberately infected the kobolds.” Kri steepled his fingers before his face and rested his forehead on his fingertips. “The histories of the Order say that the disease passed easily from person to person through wounds, but there’s no indication that infection was intentional. Vestapalk is acting differently from those infected with the Voidharrow in the past.”

  “Could he be trying to carry on what Nu Alin started, releasing that imprisoned evil?” Albanon asked. The words were hardly out of his mouth before another thought occurred to him. “Nu Alin! We drove him off, but we weren’t able to kill him. If he’s still alive, maybe he’s the one Vestapalk went to find. Maybe he’s the Gatherer.”

  Kri’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps,” he said, “but keep an open mind. The Gatherer could be someone else. A third being. As for your first question, I don’t know. It’s possible, as anything is possible. There have been some among the Order who suggested that Albric’s intention in the Astral Sea was never to free the imprisoned evil. He only wanted to obtain the Voidharrow. If that’s true, he succeeded long ago.”

  “What do we do now then?”

  The cleric looked into the fire, silent for a moment before he said, “Our mission hasn’t changed; it’s just become more urgent. We do what we came here to do. We find Vestapalk and learn what changes the Voidharrow has wrought in him.” He looked up at Shara. “I assume you don’t have a problem with that.”

  “Whatever Vestapalk is doesn’t change what he’s done.” Shara swung her sword over her shoulder and guided it into its sheath. “I’m with you.”

  Kri nodded and looked to Albanon.

  The eladrin felt his mouth go dry, but he nodded and asked “Where do we start?”

  “We return to Fallcrest and Moorin’s tower,” said Kri. “Vestapalk could have gone anywhere, but we have to begin somewhere. Fallcrest is as good a place as any.”

  “We can find Uldane,” Shara said. “He’ll want to join us—and I want him at my side.” She stood up and stretched. “And if we have to travel anywhere else, I want four people to split the night watch instead of three. I’ll take the third watch. Who’ll take the first?”

&n
bsp; Kri took it. As Shara and Albanon banked the fire for the night and settled into their bed rolls, the cleric moved a little way off to better see in the night. Before he gave himself over to a restful trance, Albanon watched Kri for a time. Watched the old man look to the heavens, one hand rubbing the holy symbol around his neck, and wondered what it was like to spend a lifetime preparing for something terrible and then have it come to pass.

  With a tremble, Albanon hoped that he’d have the chance to live so long.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Raid eased his head over the edge of the stone railing that separated the gallery from the larger hall below. A massive statue depicting a powerful man with the head of a tiger and backward-facing hands—a rakshasa—dominated the hall. The carved stone shone with the soft, red light of some ancient magic. Under that ruddy glow, slim figures worked at shifting the remains of one collapsed wall. The light made skin black as night seem even darker, rendered white eyes gleaming red, and turned white hair into blood-colored manes above gracefully pointed ears.

  “Drow,” murmured Raid.

  “I told you so,” said Uldane. The halfling’s tone was careless but his voice was no louder than Raid’s. He had to stand on his toes to look over the railing. “You know, I’ve always wondered why people call them dark elves—with eyes and hair like that, they look much more like eladrin.”

  “They’re both originally creatures of the Feywild,” Raid said without thinking, then immediately clenched his teeth and grimaced. Just five days of travel and he’d grown far too accustomed to the halfling’s fleeting attention span and endless babble. He forced his eyes back to the drow below. “They’re not supposed to be here.”