City of Torment

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR), Xxiphu

Anusha's feet lost contact with the balcony. Someone was screaming. She realized it was herself. Terror ruled her.

Her thoughts loosened and evaporated like dew in the morning sun. Anusha's form too, starting with the golden armor, began to unravel into a mist of nothing.

A hand found hers and squeezed. Anusha grasped back with desperate strength. It was an instinctual response, her identity was peeling away, and-with it-reason. Horrified, she was aware of each memory as it smoked up and away toward a waking monstrosity hungry for minds.

Yeva jerked her down, off the balcony and once more into the slimed tunnels of brooding Xxiphu.

The moment she passed the threshold, Anusha's dream form solidified. She gasped, Tin Anusha!" She'd nearly forgotten. Yeva dragged her another twenty or so paces down the tunnel, away from the balcony exit.

Moisture filled Anusha's eyes. Dream tears, anyhow, as understanding washed over her at how narrowly she'd just escaped her end. She'd almost awakened from her dream. But the focus of her mind was now centered on the Eldest instead of her physical body or even the center of the orrery below. Waking would entail her mind and soul being eaten by and incorporated into an ancient horror. She'd have been consumed, gone forever.

Her situation was unbelievable. She was still alive, but how was she going to escape? Anusha couldn't leave the cursed city. If she did, she would start to wake up again. She couldn't stay either. Sooner or later one of the aboleths capable of seeing her would find her. Or the Eldest would fully rouse and call her to itself in an instant.

Tm doomed," she whispered from where she lay on the tunnel floor.

Yeva shrugged and said, "We're all doomed. Some of us just struggle at the end of fate's thread longer and harder than others before it is yanked. Beyond that, eternal nonexistence is everyone's destiny."

Anusha shook her head, gazing out through the false hope the tunnel exit offered. "I don't think that's true."

Yeva said, "What else, then?"

"When we die, we go to a better place." The yellow-hued woman said, "Many things are possible."

Anusha nearly screamed. "But I'll be denied finding that out if the godsdamned monster on top of this godsdamned city eats my soul!"

Yeva blinked, then said, "True. The same holds true for me. If your mind falters, my mind dies too. I haven't even the hope of a body to return to. A moment ago, before I pulled you back, I faded too."

Anusha wanted to throw herself down and give up. Or run in a random direction screaming away her concerns and sanity in a blind panic. If her fate was death, it would be so much easier to get it over with.

A deeper, dispassionate part of her knew she wouldn't do any of those things. There was no one to surrender to.

That same, stark knowing reminded Anusha that giving in to fright was guaranteed not to lead to a happy outcome. She wouldn't consciously betray herself so. And it wouldn't be dignified!

She half smiled at herself and felt better for it. She said, "Thank you for pulling me back, Yeva. You did save me. Sorry to fall apart like this."

"I reacted very the same earlier, remember? You calmed me. I'm glad to return the favor."

Anusha replied, "Maybe I should-"

Something fiery and swift passed the balcony, sweeping highlights of orange and yellow illumination down the tunnel. Anusha had the distinct impression the object she'd glimpsed possessed wings of molten fire.

*****

Mapathious drew near the end of its journey and, with it, the term of its current contract. The unstable passage it traveled, composed of briefly unraveled planes and stretched reality, began to fray. The ring on the angel's finger pointed to a great cavity in the earth. The hollow vault was many miles deeper than any other subterranean passage it had ever visited. Mapathious was intrigued.

The angel sheathed its sword. The interdimensional tunnel collapsed. Mapathious flashed into the cavern whose lower third was filled with an ancient sea. An obelisk was caught in the space like a spike hammered askew. A frieze writhed on the age-worn exterior. The inscriptions shifted and changed even as Mapathious drew closer. The angel recognized the style to be similar to those of its order, and it nearly dropped its burden in realization. Its earlier fear was prophetic.

This was a fragment of the Citadel of the Outer Void. A fragment lying below the world like a seed waiting to germinate. By the way the exterior images crawled as if half alive, the angel guessed the seed was sprouting.

The ring guiding Mapathious's exploration vibrated with proximity. She to whom it was connected lay within one of the balcony-like cavities along the obelisk's side. The angel altered its course.

It would drop the trek bell upon that very balcony. That would conclude the terms of the expedition. Then it would flee back to the higher domains, where it would warn its order of Xxiphu's existence.

Mapathious passed the balcony once, bleeding off velocity with its wings open wide. As it circled back to drop the bell on the narrow ledge on the obelisk's vast face, something emerged from the ancient sea far below.

Something big, with too many arms by far.

*****

The curved interior of the bell tilted and bucked without warning. Japheth clutched for a handle but banged his hand instead. A massive jolt threw him off the bench. The warlock's vision skewed sideways, and his head rapped against something unyielding. Stars exploded and his body went limp. He fell out of the opening in the bottom of the trek bell.

Smears of white light resolved, showing that he lay on a stone balcony. He was grateful not to be falling through a planar vortex.

A crash and a thump pulled his head to the left. The bell he'd been riding in was fetched up against a stone archway. Cracked pieces of the arch rained down. An odd luminescence glowed in the passage beyond the arch, though the trek bell obscured half of the opening.

A recent dose of traveler's dust yet hazed Japheth's perceptions. Plus his head rang with pain from his violent introduction to the floor. He tried to piece together the events that led to him lying limp and dazed there, wherever "there" was…

A shout jerked Japheth's attention in the opposite direction. The warlock saw that if he'd landed a few feet more to his right, he'd have fallen off the balcony into a vast cavern partly drowned in water black as tar. Nausea added its own sickly note to the pain in his head and the blurred confusion from his drug. A light flared below, and with it another shout, this one a cry of challenge. Japheth saw a creature with burning wings and sword.

"The angel of exploration," he breathed. It all came back to him. Anusha, the Lord of Bats, the journey via the trek bell down to Xxiphu… That must be where I am now, he thought. Japheth struggled to his hands and knees to get a better vantage on Mapathious.

The angel's wings worked frantically, but something held it in place. Its sword fell again and again on a length of black tentacle that reached up from the darkness of the ancient waters. Tracing the tentacle down to its source, he saw that it emerged from a nest of at least a dozen more slithering arms reaching upward. Hideous eyes glared upward too.

"Gethshemeth!" hissed the warlock. Japheth knew with drugged certainty what and who the creature was holding the angel. It was the great kraken from whom he'd stolen the Dreamheart. The Dreamheart that lay nestled somewhere within his cloak's extra dimensions.

Japheth rolled away from the edge, hoping the great kraken was too far away and so distracted by the angel that it hadn't noticed him. The warlock briefly considered helping Mapathious with a curse or two but thought better of it. He'd have to expend power to descend to the level of the fight. Gethshemeth had nearly won the last time Japheth faced it, and he'd had the aid of several more allies then. Japheth was in Xxiphu to save somebody, but it wasn't the angel.

He frowned. He realized the angel had the ring he needed-

Anguish pierced Japheth, a pain so pure that at first he didn't recognize it as soul — shredding torment. He convulsed on the stone balcony as something tore away from him, something part of him for so long he'd forgotten it belonged to another.

A shadowy figure burst from Japheth's skin, tearing his flesh as it left. It hovered over the quivering warlock a moment, an indistinct silhouette with night-dark wings. Though tearing pain threatened to obliterate his reason, he knew the traveler's dust pulsing in his blood allowed him to see the image. The figure represented the power he'd taken from the Lord of Bats. That power, and more.

Japheth's deal with the fey creature he'd discovered in the dusty tomes of Candlekeep was concluded.

"My pact stone!" Someone had shattered it. He could guess the sniveling worm who'd broken it. "Behroun, I'll have your skin as a curtain," he hissed through his pain.

Except… he knew the threat was idle. His loss wasn't merely of the extra power he'd seized from his patron. The hovering shape represented all his powers, every spell, and even the minor abilities he used for simple conjuration. It was all gone.

He was no longer a warlock. He was just a man. A man who'd made several powerful enemies. A man who was stranded in a hideously perilous aboleth lair. A man with only a little time left to bemoan his fate.

The shape above him flashed away as if fired from a bow. It pierced the trek bell's iron side like a ghost, into the half where Neifion traveled.

A scream burst from the conveyance, overpowering and jubilant. The cry didn't subside, instead, it swelled, sending a crack shivering through the trek bell's iron walls. Neifion was reclaiming all that Japheth had taken.

The discordant noise raised the hair on Japheth's nape and arms. In that howl of victory was a promise. Neifion had made it often enough from his chair set before the Feast Never Ending.

Would the Lord of Bats craft a homunculus from Japheth's corpse?

The image of such a transfiguration broke through his loss and the traveler's dust. Japheth rolled onto his knees, gritting his teeth against complaining muscles. Sweat broke on his brow. He heaved himself to his feet.

The sideways bell vibrated like a cage restraining a rabid wolverine. He could see into the bell from its wideopen bottom, but the side Neifion had claimed was obscured by a haze like hundreds of flapping leathery wings. At any moment the Lord of Bats would emerge, without pacts or oaths to restrain him. He'd appear in the full flush of his strength…

"No," mused Japheth, anot all his strength." He still wore Neifion's lesser skin.

The Lord of Bats's freedom shriek redoubled in volume. The trek bell exploded like a hobgoblin's wall — breaker mortar. The shock wave punched Japheth into the waiting folds of his cloak, and he was gone.

*****

"What was that?" Anusha said. She craned her head to look down the tunnel toward the balcony. The molten- winged creature she'd glimpsed was gone. "I saw a light," said Yeva.

"It had wings. I think it carried something. It went by the balcony too quickly for me to tell."

Yeva took a step closer to the exit, then paused. "Are you sure it wasn't an aboleth?"

"It wasn't an aboleth," Anusha replied. "Well, I only saw it a moment. I guess it could have been."

"Let's go," Yeva decided.

Then the fiery light returned. This time Anusha clearly saw a manlike figure with wings of fire. It brandished a flaming sword in one hand. In the other was a ridiculously large temple bel l.

The creature's enormous wings thundered as it lowered the bell onto the balcony. Yeva grabbed Anusha's arm and tried to pull her down the corridor. "We need to get back," she whispered.

"No, wait!" Something about the bell was familiar.

The odor of rotting fish hit Anusha. A tentacle wide as a tower squirmed over the balcony. Its black length entwined the fiery-winged humanoid, who cried out in surprise. The tentacle yanked, and the creature was snatched out of sight.

The bell fell freely a silent instant until it smashed onto the balcony, bounced onto its side,and caromed across the floor.

Yeva hauled Anusha back with surprising strength. A boom hammered the air.

Despite Yeva's insistence, Anusha's eyes remained locked on the exit. "Look," she said. "The bell is near the arch."

Yeva let go of Anusha's arm. The woman's face lost some of its agitation. She said, "It doesn't look like something the aboleths made. Maybe you're right, Anusha. Let's take a closer look."

Anusha nodded.

A scream burst from the bell caught in the tunnel mouth. The iron shell vibrated with… fury? No, exultation.

"Nor does that sound like an aboleth," said Yeva, her voice raised over the ecstatic bellow.

Anusha nodded. What was it about the bell that tugged at her memories? Something that should have been obvious to her. Had the Eldest stolen away her memory of why the bell was familiar?

The ecstatic call didn't fade after several moments-it swelled.

They both flinched when a dozen splintering lines cracked across the bell's face.

Bats poured from the fissures like smoke. The iron object burst apart like a peeled fruit, revealing a creature Anusha had last seen sitting at a table in Castle Darroch.

"Oh no," Anusha said.

When she'd seen Neifion in the castle, he'd been harmless, trapped, and quiescent. Now he was transformed. An aura of needle-toothed bats veiled him. He seemed physically larger, and muscle visibly rippled beneath his formal black clothing. The scream of demented joy emerging from him had just burst an iron vessel. If it hadn't already, the noise would draw the attention of every lesser aboleth already roused from slumber.

A pocket of nothing opened only paces from Anusha, and a man stepped through. His eyes were red as a demon's-or as the eyes of someone walking the crimson road.

"Japheth!" Anusha gasped.

"I found you," he replied. A sad smile brushed his lips. He swayed, then fell unconscious at her feet.