“Kri, help me!” Tabisha’s plea was sharp with agony. “I can’t get out.”
No one can know about this, said the voice in his head.
“The Order would take it away from me,” Kri replied. He felt a surge of bitter hatred at the very possibility. The Order would probably declare the little vial too dangerous to study and give it to Moorin to lock away. They were too terrified at the potential for change that the vial represented.
Show them, the voice murmured, when the time is right.
Exactly. He would tell them when he was ready to. When he could lay the secrets of the Voidharrow out before the Order and rub their collective faces in them. He rose, clenching the vial in his hand.
Tabisha grabbed for his ankle. “Kri, you have to get these stones off me. Find something to move them. Call on Ioun-”
He pulled away from her and climbed the steep stairs. Tabisha’s voice broke into a scream behind him. “Kri, help me! Kri? Kri! ”
The old man blinked eyes that were unexpectedly wet. “Dark master, chained lord,” he said. “You were with me even so long ago. You guided me. You brought change when I needed it.”
The words made his throat and lips burn like leather stretched in the sun. How long had he been praying? How long had he been climbing? His legs ached. The arm that held the lantern was stiff. The fingers of the hand that brushed the wall were raw. His stomach was a void.
Kri didn’t stop moving, though he began to wonder if somehow he had missed the doorway to the hall of broken statues and kept climbing past it. Dread set claws into him. “Chained God,” he asked softly, “is this retribution for sacrificing Tabisha to keep the Voidharrow a secret?”
The trapped thief’s cries had haunted him for years. Initially he hadn’t even been able to look at the tiny vial without thinking of the cost of gaining it. Slowly the guilt had faded, as had his unease at hiding the vial within the shaft of Ioun’s holy sign where it hung around his neck. The only time recently that he’d thought of Tabisha at all was when he’d revealed to Albanon that each member of the Order of Vigilance was expected to train one or two others to take his or her place.
“Have you trained new members for the Order?” Albanon had asked innocently.
Kri had mastered his anguish then. It was not so easy to master it in the same darkness that Tabisha had faced, starving slowly as she must have starved. He fell back on the same reasoning that had given him strength all those years ago: if Tabisha hadn’t died, the Voidharrow would have been revealed to the Order. Her death had been the price of knowledge.
That reasoning, he realized, took on new meaning now. The sense of a need for secrecy that had come on him in the crypt had been Tharizdun’s gaze. The Chained God had made it possible for him to find the Voidharrow.
The Chained God had wanted him to find the Voidharrow. He had been a prisoner of Ioun’s way of thinking. Tharizdun’s gift of change had given him the will to break free, just as the Chained God’s will created the Voidharrow as a means to escape his otherworldly prison. It was all about strength of will.
Kri stopped climbing. Understanding swept over him-understanding of what Tharizdun had shown him in the void before depositing him in the dwarven ruins. Tharizdun’s will had made it possible for him to join with the Progenitor and create the Voidharrow. Even if the Progenitor had turned against Tharizdun, the Voidharrow existed because of Tharizdun’s mighty will.
“And it is the key to destroying the Voidharrow and punishing the Progenitor,” Kri said out loud, and once again echoes rippled up and down the stairs. This time, however, they seemed to come back to him with Tharizdun’s voice.
One comes who will help you turn that key.
A tremor shivered through the rock and ahead of him a sliver of brilliant blue light appeared, as if the vibrations had forced open some hidden door. Hope rose in Kri and he sprang up the stairs as fast as his weak and aching legs would let him. It was a door, with brilliant light and cold, fresh air blowing in from beyond. As Kri thrust his head out into the brightness, he realized with a start that he had been wrong about many things.
From the darkness of the stairs came a final echo. One comes. Be ready.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Smoke lay over Winterhaven like a black, choking fog that persisted despite the breeze and the morning sun. All of the buildings on the north side of the market square-Wrafton’s Inn among them-were on fire. Some efforts had been made to fight the flames before they were abandoned in exhaustion and despair. A few glassy-eyed defenders worked to keep the fire from spreading, but others wandered the village, slowly collecting bodies and committing them to the flames. Wrafton’s had become a pyre. Salvana crouched so close to it that the tears that ran down her cheeks dried before they reached her jaw.
Uldane helped to gather the bodies of the fallen, numbly working through his shock. The corpses of villagers were treated with a sort of reverence, rolled in blankets, put on boards, and carried to the consuming fire. The remains of the plague demons went to the flames too, dragged into the fire with hay hooks and pitchforks.
The dead demons outnumbered the dead villagers, but not by much. Only about half of the villagers had died by claw and fang. The rest, like most of the demons, bore the focused scorch marks of a lightning strike.
Albanon’s magic had saved Winterhaven from the plague demons, but at a terrible cost.
As they brought Thair Coalstriker, his hammer still clenched in his lifeless fist, Uldane saw Lord Padraig standing close to the flames with some of Winterhaven’s other senior warriors. Uldane left Thair with a farmer’s two brawny sons who had taken on the somber task of slinging bodies deep into the fire and went to Padraig. The conversation broke off as he approached. One of the warriors glared at him as if Uldane had personally brought destruction to the village.
Padraig nudged the angry man pointedly, then looked down. “What is it, Uldane?” he asked.
His voice was flat and weary. Uldane found words with difficulty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know Albanon didn’t mean to-”
“What’s done is done.”
“If you need help rebuilding or reinforcing the gate…”
Padraig stopped him with a raised hand. “Enough, Uldane. There won’t be any rebuilding. We’ve stood our ground as long as we could. We’ll set out for Fallcrest before noon. Winterhaven is finished.”
Uldane felt a flutter in his chest that he hadn’t felt even during the heat of the battle. “You can’t mean that.”
“Or what?” growled the man on Padraig’s right. “Stay and be picked up off? They’ll be back, again and again. There’re fewer of us than ever thanks to you.”
He took a threatening step toward the halfling, but Padraig staggered and grabbed for his shoulder. Not to stop the other man, Uldane realized, but to support himself. A bloody bandage wrapped Padraig’s thigh.
“You’re wounded,” Uldane said. “Was it one of the plague demons? You could already be infected with the Abyssal Plague!”
“No, not one of the demons, thank the gods,” Padraig said. “A splinter long as a knife driven by a lightning strike on one of the buildings.”
Another jab at Albanon. Uldane set his jaw. “You should have it healed. Roghar can do that.” He turned and scanned the smoky square for the paladin. He found him lowering the curled body of an old man into the arms of the brothers by the inn and called him over. Roghar came, greeting Padraig with a deep nod that conveyed both acknowledgment and regret in silence. Uldane grabbed for Roghar’s hand and pointed at Padraig’s thigh.
Roghar’s face tightened. He pulled his hand away from Uldane. “My lord, I can heal your wound if you require it, but I’ve called on Bahamut’s favor too much tonight.”