Brendis braced himself against the stench and kicked open the flimsy door.
“He’s gone,” Nowhere said. The tiefling moved into the tiny room, his eyes darting to every crevice. He stooped over the wretched bed and placed a hand gingerly on the furs. “It’s still warm. We must have just missed him.”
“We could wait for him,” Brendis said. “He’s sure to be back, with all this junk still here.”
Sherinna knelt beside a pile of loose pages beside one wall and began leafing through the papers.
“How can anyone live like this?” Brendis wondered aloud.
“Most people don’t have a choice,” Nowhere said. “We weren’t all born in the sunlight.”
“No, but there must be other options,” the paladin said. “Even the worst parts of the surface city are better than this.”
“Not much better. And where is a lunatic cult leader going to find respectable lodging?”
“Fair point,” Brendis said.
Sherinna stood up, still holding a large sheet of parchment. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think he’s coming back here.”
“Why not?” Nowhere asked.
The eladrin held up the parchment, and Nowhere and Brendis stepped closer to peer at the writing that covered every inch of it. Dense columns of cramped text sent Nowhere’s mind reeling as he tried to absorb the ravings of the mad cultist, the Dreaming Prophet. Images of swarming flies and feasting maggots leaped from the text to assault his thoughts, and the proclamation of the world’s doom ran like a steady drone beneath the maddening melody of the text. But five words appeared over and over, scrawled in the margins and written in a large hand across the page: “Bael Turath. The Living Gate.”
Nowhere sighed. “I suppose we’re going to Bael Turath.”
Bael Turath
“Flee,” the Chained God whispered. “Now.” He filled this thought with the image of the Living Gate, the tiny fragment of its substance that lay hidden in the ruins of Bael Turath, and sent those thoughts through the void, along the fragile connection between himself and his mortal servant. “Now!” he roared.
His voice echoed in the void, and the whispers of the Progenitor rose around him. “Now,” it said, slithering in the utter darkness. “Free.”
The Chained God gazed around at the red liquid crystal that swirled and undulated around him. “You will go before me to become the Living Gate,” he said. “To open my way to freedom.”
He formed a hand from the darkness of his substance and lifted a portion of the Progenitor’s substance. Tiny droplets of the red liquid trailed from his hand, shimmering in their own light. The fluid in his hand coiled around him, seeking something it could infuse and transform, but the Chained God was not flesh or matter. He brought it close and whispered over it, his frozen breath forming patterns of crystals across its surface.
“They will drown in blood,” he whispered, a familiar refrain.
All around him the Progenitor responded, “All will perish.”
Miri walked with her axe clutched in both hands, its thick haft resting on her shoulder, ready to swing at anyone or anything that jumped out at them in the ruins. The jagged spires and crumbling walls of Bael Turath loomed around her like a nightmare landscape, devil faces leering at her from ancient columns. It wasn’t so much the architecture and its grotesquerie that set her on edge, but a less tangible sense, an awareness of the evil history that brooded over the ruined city. It was within its walls, she knew, that the noble houses of the ancient empire that bore the city’s name had struck their fateful bargain with the powers of the Nine Hells, infusing their blood with a diabolical taint that persisted in the descendants of those houses—no longer human, but a race unto themselves, the tieflings. Such monstrous corruption had left its mark on the city, or at least she imagined it had. It made her flesh crawl and set her nerves on edge.
“The sooner we find this thing, destroy it, and get out of here, the happier I’ll be,” she whispered.
“I know,” Demas said, his voice as clear as a trumpet and almost as loud.
Miri flinched at his volume, afraid of what attention it might draw to their presence. She watched as he turned back away from her, his eyes searching the rubble ahead for any sign he might recognize from his strange and haunting dreams. She sighed. Not for the first time, she wished she understood him better, that she had even a taste of whatever it was that made him always so calm, so sure, so at peace. His walk with Ioun had made him more than human, rather like an angel given mortal form. His pale skin, marked with jagged patterns as red as blood, set him apart from more ordinary men, but the grace and calm that suffused his every word, his every movement, seemed like an image of the divine. When he was moved to wrath or compassion, and Ioun’s power flowed through him to smite his foes or comfort and strengthen his allies, she imagined she could see the eyes of the goddess in his beautiful face, and he walked in the paths she laid out for him, confident and trusting.
He continued forward, following the visions Ioun had granted him, and she walked close behind. She wasn’t sure how much his eyes saw of the ruins around them, and how much he was gazing into another world, so she would be his eyes, alert to danger.
His eyes and ears. She put a hand on his shoulder to stop him, and put a finger to her lips to silence the question that rose to his lips. In the stillness, she heard it again, more clearly: the clash of steel.
“There’s a battle going on,” she said.
Demas nodded. “Monstrous creatures haunt these ruins, and worse. Someone could be in trouble.”
“Who? No one lives here any more, right?”
“Treasure hunters, perhaps, or fugitives using the ruins as a hiding place. But even such unsavory characters do not deserve the death that haunts this place.”
Miri smiled at him. “I knew you’d say that.” She started walking toward the sound, just to the right of the course they’d been on. “This way.”
It felt good to lead the way, for a change, to know the right course and be able to guide him as he so often guided her. She had known nothing of battle before she met Demas, but now she was as comfortable with her axe as she’d been with her milk pail before, so long ago. Whatever dangers lay ahead, at least it was a threat she could understand, one she knew how to face. And with Demas behind her, his divine power filling the air around her, she felt ready to face any danger.
The sounds of combat grew louder—steel crashing against steel, the shouts of men, and growls and roars that came from no human throat. Miri hurried onward until she rounded a corner and the battle engulfed her.
A man lay on the ground at her feet, blood spilling from a wound in his throat that might never heal. Three others—two humans and one stout dwarf—stood in a tight ring, beset on all sides by creatures of nightmare. Six of the creatures looked almost like men, clad in armor of black iron plates, but their legs were bent like those of a beast, tipped with great scaled claws, and Miri realized with a start that the horns on their heads were not part of any helmet, but their own monstrous ornament. Reddish-brown tails lashed the air behind them as they closed in on the desperate defenders.
The other creature was a gaunt figure that towered over the others. Leathery skin stretched tight over its bones, from its claw-tipped feet to its strangely warped skull. A thin tail curled up behind it, and an enormous stinger like that of a scorpion hovered near its head, ready to stab downward at its foes.