The double doors closed behind the raiding party and the drawbridge clicked its way back up.
The ringing of the raiders' mail and the stomp of their boots sounded loudly in the night as they picked their way through the trees. The priest gazed about alertly as he walked but his eyes passed over Vhostym without hesitation. The party walked along the path near Vhostym and marched on toward the pass. Within moments, the night swallowed them and their red light.
Vhostym stared after them, pondering the capriciousness of the multiverse. Had the patrol been scheduled to move out only a quarter hour later, it never would have left at all. Vhostym was reminded again of the utter randomness, the absolute meaninglessness of the multiverse. He might have wished that existence had a greater purpose but he knew better and refused to deceive himself. It simply was. Of course, an existence without external purpose was also an existence without boundaries, at least for one of Vhostym's power. The reminder spurred him to action.
He turned back to the tower and spoke aloud a word of power.
Time stopped, at least subjectively. The world froze, except for Vhostym.
The spell would last only a short while, but he could cast it again if necessary.
Taking his pouch of enchanted emeralds in hand, he spoke a stanza of arcane words and teleported into the first floor entry hall of the tower. Torchlight lit the room but the brightness did not trouble Vhostym's incorporeal form. Two soldiers and one of the temple's wizards stood within, frozen between breaths. The drawbridge winches stood in alcoves to either side. Two closed wooden doors awaited in the opposite wall.
Without hesitating, Vhostym dropped one of the emeralds on the floor-the gem took corporeal form when he released it-and spoke a command word. At his utterance, the jewel shattered into a rain of shards and left in its wake a green glow that encompassed the entirety of the entry hall and extended through the wooden doors. The abjuration embodied in the glow restricted any form of extradimensional magical travel, including teleportation, into it or out of it.
Vhostym's hastening spell augmented the already-rapid flight granted him by his spectral form and he passed rapidly through the wooden doors. A wide stairway led down. Murals depicting the Dark Sun stained the walls. The corridor linked with several rooms as well as the watch stations set in each corner of the tower. Vhostym dropped a gem, and another, until a green glow covered the entire first floor. He noted the location of those within as he moved-the guards armed with long bows at the watch stations; the servants asleep in their beds.
He floated downward through the floor and did the same on the ground floor, where most of the guards were quartered, and in the dungeon, where a few guards kept watch over prisoners. Then he floated up through the floor and did the same on the third floor, which featured a large central room around which lay the chambers of underpriests and lesser mages. In moments, that entire floor too was cloaked in green. He moved up to the next floor and repeated the process, this time painting in green the rooms of the senior priests and wizards.
A sudden rush and blur of sound told him that time had resumed. He was in the uninhabited, large central room on the fourth floor. Other than an endless series of wall murals depicting the Dark Sun reading the Cyrinishad, the room featured nothing other than several doors, four pillars, and two stairways, one leading up and one down.
He imagined the surprise the inhabitants of the tower must have felt-between blinks, the rooms they occupied had lit up with a green glow. From below, he heard alarmed shouts. No doubt someone was rushing for one of the tower's many alarm bells.
A door to his left flew open and a priest in his night clothes, but with a blade clutched in his hand, burst out. He looked through and past Vhostym and padded toward the stairway.
Vhostym put the priest out of his mind, repeated the word of power, and again stopped time. The priest froze in mid stride. Vhostym floated up through the floor to the fifth story. There, he found almost the entire level to be a single, open chamber dedicated to the wretched rites of Cyric the Dark Sun. Inlaid tiles formed a sunburst in the center of the chamber, on which sat a pedestal of white stone shaped like a jawless skull. Vhostym could feel the magic in the room as a tingle on the nape of his neck. Wrought-iron braziers with skull motifs stood in each corner. A score or so of skeletons in plate armor lined the walls. Vhostym ignored it all and placed his abjuration gems.
He floated to the only room off the ceremonial chamber-the bedchamber of Olma Kulenvov, the highest-ranking cleric in the tower. The embers from a dying fire lit the chamber, and Olma slept comfortably in her opulent, carved ash bed. Vhostym dropped a binding gem, activated it, and exited through the roof.
Each corner of the tower's roof featured an external observation ledge. Vhostym cast a holding ward on the doors that led to each of the posts. Three guardsmen stood on each ledge, immobile between moments. Vhostym rapidly cast a series of spells that conjured a cloud of noxious green fumes over each post. The clouds of gas appeared over and around the guards. The men were dead but did not yet know it. They existed between the last two breaths of their lives. When time resumed, the men would inhale the choking fumes and die painfully.
Vhostym flew down to the ground and cast a spell at the feet of the guards on the exterior of the tower. The evocation summoned a small, spinning ball of potential energy that would explode after a delay, the length of which Vhostym chose as he cast: a fifteen count. Then he cast another holding ward on the drawbridge and double doors.
No one would be allowed to escape the tower.
He sank below the surface of the vale, blind while he traveled through solid rock, until he reached the beginning of the broad, earthen tunnel that linked the western tower with the eastern. Timbers set at even intervals supported the ceiling. A simple incantation twisted the wood of the score or so timbers near Vhostym. They shattered, shooting splinters and chunks of jagged wood in all directions. Several passed through Vhostym's form.
The sudden loss of support caused the roof of the tunnel to sag, crumble, finally to collapse. There would be no escape through it either. Vhostym returned to the surface and examined his handiwork.
He had turned the temple into a tomb. Those outside it would be dead when time restarted, and those within could not escape.
He waited, eager to begin.
After less than a ten count, the blurry rush of sound and motion told him that time had resumed. It was time to kill.
* * * * *
Cale, Jak, and Magadon stood on the maindeck of Demon Binder, looking at one another.
They had a ship, still cutting through the sea, but had no one to man it.
"What now?" Jak asked.
Cale thought about it and made his decision.
"We take a moment to free the slaves, then find the slaadi and kill them. Right now." To Magadon, he said, "You have a link with Riven?"
Magadon nodded. "Erevis, are you certain? Riven said he would signal us when the time was right."
"Mags," Cale said, "Mask wanted the slaadi to escape and they escaped. That's all I am going to give Riven and that's all I'm going to give Mask. We want the slaadi dead for our own reasons. Mask's are ... incidental to those."
Jak's eyebrows raised but he held his tongue.
Magadon blanched and shook his head. "I should have such nerve when it comes to speaking of my own father."
Cale knew that Magadon was born of Mephistopheles, an archdevil. The guide did not even care to speak his father's name.
"Mask isn't my father," Cale said.
"No," Magadon agreed, though the word sounded more like a question than a statement.