City of Torment

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Leaving Darroch Castle, Feywild

Mapathious swept a sword of fire through reality, opening a rent as if cutting through tissue paper. Beyond was a tunnel walled in whirling vapor, shadow, and half-seen silhouettes. A constant roar like a waterfall's poured from it. The spinning hollow extended to the vanishing point. The tunnel promised a turbulent passage.

In its other hand, Mapathious clutched an iron chain from which dangled a rune-scribed bell. The bell's weight would have staggered any lesser being of the same size. But Mapathious was an angel of exploration. In pursuit of its task, strength more potent than its frame pumped from its heart and swept through its semidivine limbs.

The bell was ensorcelled to protect those within it from the ravages of travel in dangerous climes. Mapathious disdained the need for such protections. It preferred to explore alone, swooping into unfamiliar territory as a solitary scout, then reporting back to shining commanders. Were foes massed in ambush? Did demon lords ride forth? Was there truly an adamantine fortress lying across the path, and who had the power to build it in a tenday? These were the kinds of quests the angel usually accepted.

Thus, it gave fleeting consideration to dropping the trek bell into Avernus as a way to forcibly demonstrate its objection to the enterprise. The travelers would be treated to the unique vision of red smoke streaming past their view port in the floor as they plummeted toward a desert pocked with lava seas and iron cities. Even if the enchantment of the trek bell preserved its passengers from the fall, Avernus's residents would soon be upon them. But Mapathious was bound to preserve the bell and serve the one who had summoned him. So it would essay this journey with passengers in tow and not drop them into the Nine Hells.

In truth, once its destination was described, the angel was intrigued. Though loath to admit it, the angel might well have embarked on the journey even without being sworn to find Xxiphu. The angel's nature was to locate, to travel, and to explore. Never before had it visited a city of aboleths, let alone the oldest one in the world.

The mere description of an ancient aboleth city hidden deep in the world's mantle wasn't enough direction for even an angel of exploration. But Mapathious had a guide. It wore an iron ring. Wound around the ring was a strand of dark hair-the hair of a human female whose spirit the angel of exploration could dimly feel through the connection.

It wondered, as it lowered the trek bell into the tornadic passage between space and dimensional walls, what relationship Xxiphu had with another place it had recently heard rumor of. A place called the Citadel of the Outer Void. It hoped no relationship whatever.

Then it was in the roaring passage, surfing the discontinuities of unraveled planes and stretched reality. All its conjectures burned away. Its entire concentration was turned to survival.

*****

Japheth rearranged himself on a curved bench that ran along the bell's interior edge. The surface was wide, padded with dark brown leather, and rose to a comfortable backrest that even included neck support. A very cozy seat, if it weren't for the floor. Because there didn't seem to be one.

The trek bell's interior was divided by a straight metallic wall. He claimed one side, and the Lord of Bats occupied the other.

The warlock had considered asking Neifion to remove the partition. He worried the Lord of Bats might get up to no good, unsupervised. Then he imagined himself and the insidious creature sitting across from each other on a journey of who knew how long. The silence. Those red eyes filled with hate. The veiled threats.

No, he was happy to let the Lords of Bats keep to himself. Japheth would have to trust that the oath of alliance Neifion had sworn would prevent fatal mischief.

The warlock's gaze fell to what would have been the floor in any normal conveyance. However, just like normal, far smaller bells, the trek bell had no floor. As with each previous glance, he blanched as his gaze fell into the snaky, howling tunnel. It was like looking down a tornado's throat, he imagined.

Instead of the earsplitting scream he imagined such a violent scene would generate, he heard only a low, constant roar. The noise was somehow muted by the trek bell, he supposed.

Over this narrow abyss, Japheth's boots dangled. A quiver passed up his spine as he imagined what might happen if the trek bell jolted, knocking him off his seat. Was that possible? Handles on the wall offered at least a semblance of security. He grabbed one. He took a breath and leaned farther over the bench's side.

The cavity walled in swirling mist seemed to stretch down to infinity. It reminded him of something. He didn't have to think long, of course. It was like the terminus of the crimson road, toward which addicts to traveler's dust trudged*Japheth had learned the crimson road was more than metaphor.

He sat back and closed his eyes. His fear of the vortex beneath his feet lost its impact in comparison. He wondered, idly, what it would look like after a pinch of dust in each eye.

No.

Not yet, anyhow. He decided to have a bite to eat to distract himself. He produced a pack from the folds of his cloak, the one he'd liberated from Darroch Castle before they'd embarked. He opened it-

"By Caiphon!" he exclaimed as something inside shuddered and shifted. He overrode his instinct to toss the pack into the chasm.

A creature chittered and pulled itself forth-a tiny wrinkled man, one of Neifion's homunculi. It had stowed away inside the voluminous pack.

Once free of the pack it stood, no more than two feet tall, and regarded Japheth expectantly, as if awaiting its next command.

"What… Why did you hide yourself inside this pack, creature?"

The homunculus made high-pitched noises, from which Japheth could only pick out broken word fragments. It pointed at the partition, where the Lord of Bats resided.

"Neifion told you to do it?"

The creature nodded. Japheth snarled. Was the Lord of Bats spying on him? "You take your direction from me, beast, no longer Neifion. I-"

The creature leaped at Japheth. It fastened its mouth on his neck. Pain lanced through him. A bitter stench wafted from the wound.

Japheth seized the homunculus's scruff and tried to pull it away. The creature held to him like a leech, biting and scratching. His fingers tingled with sudden numbness. The bitter smell was poison!

"Assassin, let go your master!" Japheth boomed. Almost without conscious direction, the Lord of Bats's cloak plucked him out of the trek bell. A mere blink of darkness and he was back inside the vehicle, three feet from his former position.

Even as the homunculus was still turning around to find its relocated target, Japheth backhanded it with a tingling arm. The homunculus dropped through the bottom of the bell trailing a forlorn wail.

"That answers one question," he muttered. It was possible to fall out of the trek bell.

Japheth grabbed a handle and leaned to watch the homunculus's progress. Its flailing form dropped two or three long seconds before the twisting wall of vapor bowed inward. When the creature struck the wall, it was instantly pulled out of sight. Gone.

The tingling in Japheth's fingers progressed to his arms. The damned thing had bitten him deep enough to get some of its spittle into his blood. It was a familiar feeling. When Japheth first took control of Neifion's domain, a few of the homunculi had bitten him. This one hadn't got enough venom in him for the tingling to lead to numbness and trouble breathing. He'd be fine.

Far more troubling was what the attack portended. It was more than coincidence that a homunculus would attack Japheth now. Its old master was just across the bulkhead. He wondered if Neifion had sensed the conflict and was even now laughing at the warlock's discomfiture.

His thoughts veered wildly. He was fooling himself that he had any control over the unfolding situation. All his many worries ganged up and pounced as one. The concern leading the pack: Anusha's welfare. Was she even still alive?

And if she was alive, would she ever deign to speak with him again?

It was all too much! His hands moved of their own accord. They plucked the silver compact of traveler's dust from a fold in his cloak. Internal conflict died before it was half begun as he dropped a red crystal into his right eye.

A scarlet curtain washed across his vision.

His roaring thoughts drowned, one by one, beneath an oceanic feeling of oneness.

"Better," he mumbled. What had he been so worked up about?

Anusha, of course. She was on his mind nearly constantly. Her face, her hair, the way she used to smile, the faint hint of her perfume, and her pale skin…

She'd become an obsession, perhaps one nearly as powerful as the traveler's dust. He smiled as crimson currents rocked him.

Safely on the road, he allowed himself to wonder how she regarded him. Their last interaction, when he'd pulled her spirit briefly free of its captivity, suggested the infatuation she'd first shown for him had seen its day.

A vacancy in his chest made itself known.

It was the oddest feeling. A sucking, forlorn sensation of anticipated loss. His breath came harsher for a moment. He wondered if anguish over pending rejection was an emotion fit for a curse-spewing warlock whose powers could pierce the very walls of the world.

Apparently, yes.

His dust-hazed mind tried to spin him away from the pain, but his surroundings were too novel to completely ignore. He directed his gaze back into the vortex. He imagined all his worry being sucked down that roaring throat, leaving him free to act without emotional attachment.

He was on his way to save a woman who had trusted him. A woman who, if events would pause long enough, he might forge a bond with that could last a lifetime. He could mentally deny it all he liked, list all the reasons why it could never be, but his body had already decided.

He loved her. "Anusha," he called, his voice taking on an odd timbre that reverberated through the bell, through his dust — charged mind, and out into the swirling space between spaces. "Anusha, I'm coming to set you free."

*****

The yellow aboleth repeated, What is it?

Anusha hissed in surprise. The yellow monster could speak! More than that, speak from its mind into hers.

She'd heard stories of such marvels. The words seemed to crawl around her brain before each one became intelligible. The sensation sickened her.

The many eyes of the aboleth pulsed. Then all five looked at her.

The insidious voice continued, Is it a stray dream, a failed memory jarred loose from the Elder's wakening?

Unknown. Disperse it, lest it rise to the apex and disrupt the ritual of rousing. Nothing must disrupt the ritual of rousing.

The aboleth's "speech" was harsh and odd. It didn't seem to have a sense of its own identity…

Something like a cobweb seemed to brush Anusha's face. It tickled, then fell away.

"The aboleth has noticed us," Yeva said.

"Yes."

"Can you get us away?" Yeva asked, her voice calm as glass.

Anusha followed the woman's suggestion. She and Yeva jerked backward, directly away from the beast.

The voice called after them, no softer or louder than before and just as devoid of identity, It resists dispersion. It ignores the aura of catching. Dispatch sleepers to eat it. Dispatch dreamcatchers to clutch it Summon overseers to enslave it.

Anusha blinked and everything was different. Instead of Yeva and a threatening aboleth, she saw a roiling tornado of infinite length. Something descended that whirling tunnel-a bell being lowered by a fire-winged angel.

"Anusha!" came Yeva's voice, as loud as if she were right next to Anusha. "We must retreat!"

Anusha blinked free of the vision even as a message issued from the strange, hollow bell. It was a promise.

"Anusha, I'm coming to set you free."

Reality reasserted itself. But her concentration on the rope metaphor holding them in midair collapsed. She and Yeva fell like stones.

Their residual trajectory carried them well clear of the aboleths gathered around the orrery hole. They fell and sprawled onto rough stone. Anusha was on her feet a moment later-uninjured, of course. She helped up Yeva, who was shaking.

Yeva said, "I am unhurt!" The woman was still getting used to her lack of a physical body.

The yellow aboleth with its multiple eyes that could apparently see them swooped down. A cacophony of clicks and low, whalelike moans burst from the mass of aboleths around the circular hole in the floor, but apparently whatever they were doing was more important than chasing down loose memories. They continued their strange ritual.

"Look," said Yeva. She pointed. A school of aboleths fell off the ceiling like a throng of leeches abandoning a corpse. They thrashed in the naked air but didn't fall to the floor. Instead they swarmed for a moment, as if relishing their ability to defy gravity.

It is here. It is vulnerable. Destroy it!

As one, the aboleth school surged toward the yellow-hued aboleth, whose eyes remained fixed on the women.

"Run!" Anusha shouted. She still had Yeva's hand from helping her stand. She sprinted toward the opposite wall of the great chamber, pulling Yeva along.

The five-eyed aboleth continued to descend, but its angle of descent changed to follow their path across the chamber's floor. The others fell in behind the lead creature, creating an undulating line in the air like a yellow- headed snake.

Yeva yanked her fingers free of Anusha's grip.

Anusha yelled, "What are you doing?"

Yeva extended both hands, fingers flared, and leaned toward the approaching aboleth phalanx. Her eyes pulsed with energy-one with fire, the other with leaping sparks. She said, "I think only the yellow one can sense us. If I can hurt it.. " Lightning discharged from Yeva's hands and unerringly speared the lead aboleth. Even as the creature's path through the air faltered, Yeva cupped her palms, reared back, and threw. An orb of translucent gray arced upward. It struck the yellow aboleth. White light pulsed from it, briefly enveloping the creature's body.

The five-eyed aboleth made rasping, clicking shrieks as it dropped out of the air and slammed into the floor.

The aboleths still flying lost their formation and began to dart erratically like mosquitoes searching for prey.

The yellow aboleth smoked, but continued to scrabble for its bearings. The watcher was hurt, but still alive. Not for long, Anusha vowed.

She charged the floundering yellow thing. Her greatsword rematerialized in one hand, shining with the golden light of her desire. One of the creature's wildly searching eyes noticed her at the last moment. The bulk shifted, and Anusha's attack only grazed the creature instead of swiping directly through its blunt head.

The contact was enough to send it into a screaming fit of flailing tentacles, none of which could grasp Anusha.

As her fear drained away, she grinned, waded forward, and plunged the blade carefully down, this time directly into the beast's brain.

It is a threat to the Sovereignty, came the insidious voice, now strained and trailing away, but just as emotionless. But its mind is vulnerable. Watchers can see it, and overseers can catch it It must not interfere with the rousing…

The yellow thing's mental voice ceased. It shuddered once and stopped moving.

Anusha looked up. All of the creatures flitting around above ignored her.

Anusha swung around and raised her sword to salute Yeva.

Yeva was kneeling on the ground, one hand reaching toward Anusha. She was steaming. Dissolving!

Anusha dashed back to her companion, allowing her sword to fade so she could throw both hands around Yeva.

The moment they touched, Yeva sighed, and her image returned to solidity.

Yeva said, "I summoned the storm's lance with psionic will. Apparently to my detriment."

Anusha nodded. It made her stomach convulse to realize Yeva's existence was so tenuous. But she said, "You were incredible! They would have got us if you hadn't knocked the watcher out of the air with your magic."

Yeva allowed herself a social smile at Anusha's words.

She said, "Psionics, not magic. Just like the mental powers you harness, I believe."

"Right," said Anusha, not certain she agreed, but unwilling to gainsay the woman who obviously knew something of the mind's functions. And really, did it matter what the source of their abilities was, so long as they worked?

"We need to find the exit," said Anusha. "Something terrible is going on here. Some sort of rousing. The yellow one was afraid we might interfere. All I want to do is leave. I don't think we want to be here when whatever the Elder is wakes up."

Yeva climbed to her feet, accepting Anusha's help again. Then she pointed, concern widening her eyes.

The swarm of flitting aboleths over the yellow corpse had moved toward the two women while they talked. One aboleth, a gray-green specimen with more tentacles than the others, hovered only twenty feet away, its three crimson eyes scanning.

Anusha clapped a hand over her mouth, then leaned to Yeva's ear. She whispered, "Even if they can't see us, they can hear us. We need to move!"

The women retreated toward a massive opening in the chamber's far wall. They walked rapidly, but quietly. The swarm didn't follow, though the gray-green one surged forward to land only a few feet from where they'd last stood, slapping its damp tentacles around as if hoping to flush out invisible prey.

The opening in the wall wasn't so much a tunnel mouth as an elongation of the chamber, one that began a shallow turn up and to the left like the bottom end of a tightly wound, but thick, hollow coil.

They left behind the aboleth ritual chamber poised over the alien orrery.

A mucous light suffused everything. The rocky floor, walls, and even ceiling were thick with eroded protuberances like granite obelisks worn down to nubs only two or three feet tall, though others reached five or six times that height. Here and there, icy stretches of condensed memory clung to the corridor in ragged patches. Anusha and Yeva gave those a wide berth as they ascended the sloping, gradual curve. Shallow pockets were common in the massive passage, creating hollows some ten feet on a side. Some were empty and dry. Others contained residual slime stinking of rotten fish. Most, however, were filled with a syrupy mass of fluid in which the shape of an unmoving aboleth lay ensheathed.

"Many monsters sleep here, but they are waking," said Yeva. She pointed to an empty but slime-slicked hollow.

Anusha nodded, distracted. Her eyes constantly scanned for an exit. Would she know it if she saw one?

Also, she was conscious of a new sensation.

She turned to Yeva. "Do you feel that? A kind of… I can't quite describe it. A current? As if we're walking in a shallow stream in the direction it's flowing?"

Yeva cocked her head. "Now that you say it… Yes. It is a psychic undertow."

"What's that?"

Yeva shrugged. "It is a force akin to what allows lodestones to draw iron filaments, I suppose. But what we're feeling draws minds."

"Wouldn't the psychic attraction be in the opposite direction, from where we escaped the expanse of frozen dreams?" asked Anusha. "I thought that was where my mind had refocused. If this 'undertow' leads away from the ice, maybe we should allow it to sweep us up? Maybe it'll tumble us out of this nightmare!"

Yeva gave her a doubtful, sidelong glance and said, "I would advise against trying that. Of course, you're right, up to a point. For centuries, stray dreams were swept up and apparently lodged within the expanse we escaped.

However, if the Eldest is waking, then its mind is reintegrating. Which means stray dreams and lost spirits may be falling directly to it now. Whereupon they will be consumed-gone forever."

Anusha's skin prickled, even though she knew full well she had no physical form.

She swallowed and said, "Then let's resist it."

"Agreed."

"Yeva, I just remembered something… When the yellow aboleth tried to snare me with its mind, it triggered some kind of vision. I saw a friend of mine traveling downward. I heard his voice. He said… he said he was coming to rescue me."

Yeva cocked a brow. "Are you sure it was a true vision?" "No. I can't be sure, but it seemed real." The woman shrugged. "Is there any reason to believe your friend-What is his name?" "Japheth."

"Japheth! All right, does Japheth have the means to come to our aid?"

"Actually, yes. He knows spells and swore a pact to an archfey who grants him many odd abilities."

Yeva said, "Hmm. Perhaps your vision is a true one. He swore a pact, you say? I've heard tell of such things."

Anusha nodded. "And he has a cloak that's bigger on the inside than out. I don't really understand how it works."

For the first time, Yeva actually seemed encouraged. "Perhaps he could devise a new body for me… if he's truly on his way."

"Let's act as if he is," Anusha said. "Which is another reason to find an entrance-so we can meet him."

"Either way, our immediate goal is the same," said Yeva.

The women renewed their upward slog. The vast tunnel, roughly tubelike, continued its gradual rise. They wound their way around putrid aboleth burrows and pillars.

A churning, bubbling sound drew their attention. They turned in time to witness a previously sleeping aboleth surge from its hollow, spraying goo in a wide radius. It lay on the floor for several moments, its sides heaving and its tentacles writhing.

"Should I kill it with my sword?" Anusha whispered.

"Let's see what it does. It's not yellow."

The aboleth finally rolled onto its stomach. Its tongue rasped out of its tri-slit mouth and tasted the floor. Then it began to move. Half primeval fish, half enormous slug, the creature skated forward on a bed of mucus, up the shallow spiral.

Anusha got her stomach under control. She whispered, "All right, we'll follow it."

Yeva said, "Not that we have any other way to go."

It was true enough. But Anusha hoped there was more to this city of Xxiphu than a long coil of aboleth- hollowed tunnel from bottom to top. There must be an exit. How else could the creatures come and go?.They paced the aboleth, keeping about a city block's worth of distance between them and it. The creature slid forward like a snail moving nightmarishly fast. Sometimes it paused to touch a tentacle against a protruding obelisk. When it did, purple light flared at the obelisk's tip. Then the aboleth continued, leaving behind a flamelike flicker of purple.

Anusha said, "I wonder what it's doing."

"Perhaps it is setting lights to encourage its still sleeping siblings to wake and join it."

Anusha grimaced. "What else can you tell me about Xxiphu and the Eldest? You seem to know a lot about this place."

"I am not of Faerun, or even Toril. I come from a higher realm where knowledge of ancient things is not wholly forgotten. But even so, Xxiphu is an obscure topic. I know only what I once read in a crumbling scroll during a brief visit to the House of Knowledge."

Anusha had never heard of the House of Knowledge. She glanced forward to make certain their furtive conversation wasn't being noted by the aboleth. So far, so good. She said, "What did the scroll say?"

"I was searching dusty lore to learn more about illithids, not aboleths. Still, it caught in my memory, for its oddness. Written in Deep Speech, the scroll proclaimed an Abolethic Sovereignty once attempted to rule your world but was foiled. The text described a colossal thing sleeping in darkness. A nasty, terrible, many-handed, and manyeyed monster. The passage indicated its massive bulk was the result of great age. It never ceased growing, inch by inch, year by year, and century by century. Even millennium by millennium."

"The scroll was describing the Eldest?"

"Just so."

"How old can it be?" Anusha asked.

"It was old when Sehine cried her glittering tears. Its mind buzzed with a thousand languages when mortals on Toril puzzled out their first expressive grunts. No offense. When it fell into slumber, the world yet rang with the clamor of the primordials' forge hammers. Or so claimed the document."

Anusha prompted, "What did the scroll say about Xxiphu?"

"It claimed Xxiphu's murky and echoing crevices sheltered creatures who worshiped the Eldest as their supreme monarch and divine provider. The scroll described these creatures that teemed Xxiphu as lesser, younger manifestations of the Eldest's quintessential form. They are the Eldest's progeny. Aboleths, of course. The document wrapped up with a warning-the entire vastness of Xxiphu is a city, but also simultaneously a precious seed the Eldest has brooded through the ages "

"Ugh. A seed? What does that mean?"

"No further explanations were written. I suspect it means that one day the Eldest and all its ancient aboleth children will wake from long slumber."

"I think that day has arrived," Anusha said.

The aboleth they followed paused at an intersection. The tunnel split, becoming two lesser paths.

One would have been a continuation of their way, but its character changed drastically. The passage constricted to a third or less in diameter. The mucous light persisted, allowing Anusha to see forward into a twisted, winding maze of irregular tunnels. Attached here and there on naked rock quivered masses of white orbs, gelatinous and pale like fish eggs. That way reeked of brine.

tfA nursery," murmured Yeva.

The other passage was a perfectly circular cavity some few tens of feet in diameter. Like a bore hole, it was smoothwalled and plunged sideways. The passage didn't go far before it ended in a wavering curtain of mist.

The aboleth lit one last obelisk protrusion with purple fire, then slid its bulk into the twisting maze Yeva called the nursery.

Anusha shook her head. "I'd rather not go into the egg tunnels." "Agreed."

They proceeded down the smooth bore hole to the barrier. The watery light caressed Anusha's armor with images of blue-green bubbles. She raised a hand and pressed it into the mist. She didn't feel the least resistance, nor did it feel wet. She retracted her hand. It wasn't any the worse for wear, but…

"I guess that doesn't prove anything," she said. "I can walk through walls as easily as mist."

"Let us go together." Yeva took Anusha's free hand.

They stepped through the barrier.

Anusha saw a massive subterranean vault lit by thousands of tiny purple flames. The air was close, humid, and uncomfortably hot. She was glad she didn't really need to breathe.

They stood on a balcony with a low curb like a halfhearted attempt at a railing. She craned her head and looked around. She saw then the balcony was a tiny part of a far larger structure, one that descended in a clifflike drop below and extended an equally great distance above… it was hard to estimate distances, but certainly many hundreds upon hundreds of feet. The vast space wasn't large enough to hold the object on which they stood-its lower foundations plunged into the cavern's floor, and its heights were clutched within the belly of the cavern's irregular ceiling.

"Look," said Yeva. She leaned far out, pointing down along the face. Anusha obeyed and saw that great patterns were carved on the age-worn exterior of the obelisk, depicting thousands of interconnected images she couldn't quite comprehend. Her stomach flipped when some of the inscriptions flowed and changed their shape even as she watched.

Anusha leaned out farther to get a better look, and an odd sensation fluttered through her. Odd because she'd missed it for so long-it was the feeling she had right before waking back in her body!

But the impression was different, more drawn out. And… the mental current, the psychic undertow as Yeva called it, swelled. The sound of it roared in her ears. Its fervor threatened to yank her from her feet. She was waking, and as she did so, she began to fall upward into the current. Toward the Eldest.