The chaos in his mind sent the image in the Vast Gate spinning dizzily from world to world. Albanon lurched out of the magic circle and emptied his stomach onto the floor, falling to his hands and knees as his gut contracted again and again until nothing remained to heave up.
When he looked up, the archway of the Vast Gate was filled with utter darkness. Kri stood transfixed before it, gazing into the void, a look of bliss on his weathered face.
“Tharizdun,” he whispered.
“No,” Albanon gasped. “Kri, wait!”
“Patient One. He Who Waits. Chained God.” Kri’s voice grew slowly louder as he intoned the appellations of Tharizdun.
Albanon’s throat burned and his head was pounding, but he staggered to his feet. “Kri, remember your oath! The Oath of Vigilance!”
“Your waiting is over and your freedom is at hand!”
The darkness in the Vast Gate changed subtly. It remained an inky black that repelled all light, but red liquid flowed behind and beneath it, too, gleaming here and there like tiny, dim stars in an awful night sky. Albanon had the fleeting sense of something poised and waiting in the darkness, ready to spring.
And then it erupted through the gate and emerged into the world.
First was a wave of sheer power, like a blast from a furnace but without light or heat, just raw energy that washed past him, overwhelmed him, battered him to the floor, and left him for dead. He was nothing to it, utterly insignificant, like an ant beneath the foot of a titan. It filled the tower and extended farther, probing into the world beyond.
Albanon’s mind reeled from trying to take it in, unable to comprehend the vastness of what he perceived and what was perceiving him. Somehow whatever was left of his mind understood that it was the eye of Tharizdun-the mere attention of the Chained God, extended from his prison in the void into the world on the other side of the Vast Gate. None of the god’s power or substance had yet passed through, but the simple fact of his glance passing over Albanon had left him wrecked and teetering at the brink of madness.
Kri had already plunged over that brink, and he babbled and wailed long strings of nonsense syllables as Tharizdun’s gaze seemed to focus upon him. He stood with his arms spread open to the gate, eyes open but rolled back in his head, his body arched in ecstatic torment in the sight of his god.
Next through the gate came a slow seepage of liquid red crystal, more of the Voidharrow probing through the gate. Albanon gasped as the first snaky tendrils surged out toward him, but they passed him by, coursing out along the pathways that Nu Alin had laid with Moorin’s blood.
Once more Albanon perceived the pattern of the whorls and arcs of blood, the channels that directed both the flow of magic and the movement of the Voidharrow. Arcane formulas gave structure to his thoughts again, and he understood what had escaped him until that moment, what Kri still had not grasped. The Voidharrow was forming a lattice, a net that would catch and bind whatever emerged through the Vast Gate.
Even the Chained God.
A moment before, Albanon would have found it impossible to conceive of anything worse than the Chained God emerging through the gate that he and Kri had opened. Then he tried to imagine a demon like Nu Alin, or like the monster at Sherinna’s tower, but infused with the power of the Eater of Worlds.
“No no no,” he murmured.
He staggered across the room to the place where Moorin’s body had lain, slumped on the floor against the far wall. Tears stung his eyes as he fell to the floor, just as he had done on the night of Moorin’s death. It had never before occurred to him to wonder who had cleaned the tower and what had become of the body, and he was stung with guilt as he realized that he should have ensured that Moorin was properly laid to rest. But he shook the feeling from his thoughts, putting himself in the position Moorin had occupied, the focus of all the lines and whorls of energy in the room.
He felt the Voidharrow coursing toward him along dozens of different pathways. Hundreds of wordless, whispering voices pressed against his mind, overwhelming him with a sense of eager hunger. Terror set his whole body quivering. The red liquid of the Voidharrow gleamed like blood on the walls, floor, and ceiling.
Is this what Moorin saw as he died? Albanon wondered.
He fought back his terror and focused on the magic. Numbers and formulas danced in his mind. He felt power welling up in his heart like a sun, then his body started to glow. He spread his arms wide and felt the magic course out from him, sending light flowing like pure water back along the channels that laced the room to meet the approaching Voidharrow. Where the flow of light met the red liquid it flared into white fire, and in a moment the room was lit with a hundred stars where his light burned the Voidharrow.
The Voidharrow’s fury was a palpable pulse in the air of the room, but it was an impotent rage. The light burning out from Albanon filled the channels, and the Voidharrow seemed unable to flow outside the lines that had been prepared for it. All it could do was inch slowly back the way it had come, back to the Vast Gate, until the room was filled with an intricate lacework of Albanon’s light.
Then the Voidharrow was gone entirely, but the attention of Tharizdun, which had diminished to a mere brooding presence in the room, surged outward again, as if it had been waiting for the Voidharrow to get out of its way. Albanon rehearsed the formulas in his mind, focused his power to keep his own lattice in place, thinking perhaps he could hold the Chained God back.
He quickly realized how foolish a hope that had been. With eagerness born of untold ages of imprisonment, a flow of shadowy slime began to pour out from the Vast Gate. A dark mist rose up from the slime, and Kri stood in a billowing cloud of it, breathing deeply as if to draw the Chained God’s power into himself. The dark slime flowed out into the channels of Albanon’s light, and all his exertion couldn’t stop its flow or even slow it down. It ran like a surging river along every channel at once, converging around him before he could move from his position on the floor.
Soul-numbing cold gripped him as the liquid shadow surrounded him on every side. His body convulsed with what would have been agony if the cold hadn’t deadened his every nerve. His mind reeled once again, driving away all sense of purpose, shattering his memory and robbing him of his power.
He watched dumbly as Kri drew in more and more of the shadowy mist, gathering it in a dark nimbus around himself. The old man seemed to grow younger, stronger, and even taller as the power flowed into him. He strode through the eddying mist to stand beside Albanon’s inert body, and Albanon stared up at him without managing to form a coherent thought.
Kri crouched down and seized Albanon’s shoulders, lifted him effortlessly from the floor, and stood him on his feet. Albanon’s head swam but his feet stayed under him somehow. Kri stared into his eyes and smiled, but there was no hint of humor or kindness on his face.
“The Chained God is chained no more, Albanon,” he said. “He emerges from his prison. And you are a witness. You will be my right hand in the new temple of Tharizdun.”
The words washed over Albanon without registering any meaning, but they left a foul taste behind. Billowing shadow loomed up around him, threatening, but Albanon could feel the promise of power beneath the threat-power that could destroy him or exalt him. Kri wielded that power already, and slowly Albanon understood that Kri was offering to share it with him.
Not offering, he realized-Kri presented him no option to refuse.
His mind grasped at the last word he’d heard, Tharizdun. Three syllables, nine letters, three threes. Each third was a microcosm of the whole, and the whole could be expanded into an ever-growing geometric formula …
Albanon’s body shook with building power and he let it out in a flash of lightning and roar of thunder that hurled Kri away from him and across the room, shook the Vast Gate, and even seemed to push back the billowing mist for a moment. In that moment, he threw himself at the gate.