Shackled City Epic: "Vengeance" (story concluded)

[Lazybones]

Chapter 555

They ascended upon their magical carpet high into the air above Occipitus, hundreds of feet, until the vaulted sky seemed to press down upon them like the interior of an actual dome. With the plasms gone the hazards of high flight upon the plane had been obviated somewhat, but even so it felt strange ascending so close to the golden firmament that lingered low over the outstretched expanse of the plane. Mole kept reaching up with her hand as they rose, as if the sky were something that she could touch with her fingers. Maybe it was; as the disjointing effect grew more pronounced Cal leveled off the carpet, and they continued on their course, adjusted now to take them toward the cliffs that ringed Occipitus. Even as high up as they were, those black walls still seemed impermeable, a dense barrier keeping them penned in upon the broad bowl of the plane.

Callendes and the Herald’s Voice flanked them, easily keeping pace with the moderate crawl of the carpet. Without their guidance, they might have easily missed the canyon, even had they known it was there. The cleft in the rocks was narrow and twisted quickly as it entered the mountains, the dark opening blending almost perfectly with the surrounding cliffs. Once they had changed course to enter the tunnel the high, jagged peaks rapidly closed in around them, and soon Occipitus was lost behind them, save for the vague image of the mighty skull-fortress that remained visible through gaps in the mountaintops, indistinct in the haze of distance and chaos that continued to swirl around Graz’zt’s seat upon the plane.

The ground below them was as blasted and empty as the rest of the plane, but as they penetrated deeper into the canyon they could hear a faint noise upon the still air. Initially a soft buzz, it rapidly become more distinct, a roar of many voices, infused with dread and the promise of violence. Even had they not been forewarned of what they would find, each of them would have known those sounds to be the cries of demons. Ahead, they could see that the canyon appeared to widen as it passed around another sharp bend.

“We must not hesitate,” the sword archon said. “Stay your weapons, and follow us swiftly to the Bastion.”

“We’d better prepare,” Dannel said. “The celestials might be right in the demons not having many fliers at the moment, but it’ll only take one reaching us to knock a few folks free. And it’s a long, long way down.”

“Wise words,” Umbar rumbled. “Best empower us with flight, gnome, just in case.”

“The wand is nearly out of power,” Cal said. “If I use it on us now, that will be it for flying for us for this trip.”

“And we could be here a while,” Dannel said.

“What about spell powers?” Beorna asked.

“We should be out of range,” Cal said, but then he frowned. “Telekinesis… that can reach out to five hundred feet or more, depending on the potency of the caster.”

“We’re not quite that far up,” Mole said, leaning precariously out over the edge of the carpet; Arun started to reach for her, but then shrugged and sat back on his haunches, adjusting his swordbelt to avoid poking the tip through the carpet. The movement caused the carpet to undulate slightly. Lok grimaced slightly, sitting on the middle of the carpet with his hands wrapped tightly around the haft of his axe. The genasi did not have a fondness for high places.

“If they can knock over the carpet, you’ll wish we had the flight power,” Umbar persisted.

“Very well,” Cal said, drawing out the wand and touching it to each of them in turn. He saved himself for last, but before he could activate it, he frowned. “It is as I feared; the power of the device is depleted.”

“If something happens, I’ll see that you do not fall, uncle,” Mole said.

“Look…” Dannel said, drawing their attention back ahead, where the canyon opened out ahead of them, as they drew around the final bend.

They knew that they were looking upon just a fraction of Graz’zt’s forces, but even so, the sight was an impressive one. The canyon widened and extended more or less straight for about a quarter mile ahead of them, with a few hundred feet separating the vertical lines of jagged black stone to either side. In that intervening space, was crowded a host of demons of all shapes and sizes. At least several thousand of them, jammed together in a tangle that grew denser the further down the canyon one looked. From their high vantage, the demonic force looked like a carpet of swarming insects, crawling over the landscape like a plague.

And at the end of the canyon, they could see what could only be the Bastion.

A wall of pale stone, almost white against the sharp contrast of the surrounding black cliffs, crossed the end of the canyon. Even from this distance, it was obviously a massive fortification, rising at least a hundred feet above the canyon floor. It bowed slightly, curved like a dam laid across the flow of a river; except in this case, the wild surge was without rather than within, as the demons threw themselves against the defenses. They could see demons, tiny specks at this range, crawling upon it; occasionally one would lose its grip and plummet back into the swarming mass below. It was loud, the cacophony of the gathered demons building against the flanking cliffs until if reached them as a wave of rage and hatred.

A mountain loomed up behind the shield wall, with a massive overhang of black stone jutting out until it almost touched the summit of the wall, looming over the citadel like a knight’s shield. The gap between the wall and the overhang was dark, save for in the center, where a bright golden radiance shone from seemingly within the depths of the mountain itself.

“The Bastion,” the Voice said, staring at that bright glow, his calm words dismissing the fearsome, terrible hordes beneath them.

“There’s no way we’re going to get across that unnoticed,” Dannel pointed out. He already had a long shaft fitted to his bow, but knew better than to waste his arrows on this massive array of foes.

“I will do my best to obscure us from their view,” Cal said. “I will need to concentrate upon this for a time.” The gnome sat at the front of the carpet. “Hold on, everyone,” he said. “We’re going in.”



Chapter 556

High above the canyon on their magical carpet, the companions started across the long open space that separated them from the relative shelter of the Bastion. Between them and their goal, spread across the canyon floor, was gathered a horde of hundreds of demons of almost every conceiveable variety.

Below, they could hear a subtle change in the roar of the demonic host that started on their side of the canyon and quickly spread. Mole confirmed their suspicion, as she looked down again over the edge of the carpet. “Company, guys.” A number of hulking, distorted figures rose up out of the press on broad wings, a good dozen of them at least, similar in form but each subtly distinct, colored in sickly olives, ash grays, and burned reds. Some were decorated with horns, others with ridges of spines or stakes, yet others with humps or tails or even a second set of arms jutting from its torso. All were at least partially misshapen, with discongruent symmetries that made their appearance even more jarring than the ferocious horde of demons that surrounded them.

“Hordelings,” Callendes explained, as he fitted an arrow to his white longbow, his wings flapping powerfully as he easily kept pace with the slow-moving carpet. “Be wary… they are unpredictable.”

The noise from below intensified, but as they watched the flying fiends rise up slowly toward them a dark black mist began to take shape between them and the canyon below. The cloud roiled chaotically as it expanded to cover a wide swath of space nearly fifty feet on a side, an intangible barrier that sheltered them from view. Fearsome noises erupted from within that dense bank, ominous sounds of a gathering storm. Cal sat at the fore of the carpet, controlling his major image, drawing it with them as they made their way toward the shelter of the Bastion.

“More ahead!” Dannel warned. Five heads upon the carpet and two flying beside turned to where the elf pointed. A black crag jutted out from the canyon wall ahead to their right, almost of a height with the companions, and from that perch came a half-dozen flying things; fiendish gargoyles, their screeches trailing to them distinctly over the loud roar rising up from the demonic horde.

The companions were not merely waiting for their foes to converge upon them. Arrows and bolts lanced out from the carpet, striking the oncoming attackers. They could not clearly target the hordelings, who were obscured by Cal’s illusory screen, but the gargoyles felt the bite of their assault. Dannel’s first shot tore through the lead gargoyle, exploding out its back in a red haze as he scored a critical hit. The gargoyle’s momentum carried it forward a few yards, but then it dipped forward, plummeting into the gorge into a mass of demons.

Another fell sound that was all too familiar to them drew their attention to yet another threat. A few bulbous figures had rised out of niches in the cliffs on the far side of the canyon, their approach preceeded by the buzzing that lulled the senses, and threatened a deep slumber from which one might never wake. There were only three of them, but the companions knew that this did not make them any less dangerous.

“Chasmes on the left!” Mole said, loading a shock bolt into her crossbow. The gargoyles apparently lacked the immunity to electrical attacks possessed by demons, and one of the creatures already lagged, a bolt jutting from the joint where its wing met its body.

“I see them,” Dannel said, his voice a calm island within the radiance of the melody of his song. To the others, the sound was just an echo lost on the wind, but to the elf, if filled him, binding himself to his bow, and to the arrow that he fitted to the string. He was standing on a moving platform, facing an updraft from the canyon below, firing at targets a few hundred feet distant, but he may as well have been shooting at practice butts on a calm day. Filled by the song, he was one with the bow, and his first three shots all hit, the chasme faltering and finally flittering slowly down a few hundred feet before it regained control and disappeared into a crevice in the nearby cliff. Flying alongside the carpet, the half-celestial avariel added his own missiles to the barrage, and while his shots lacked Dannel’s precision accuracy at range, the second chasme soon had a holy arrow jutting from its grotesque form.

There were attacks from below, as well, as the ground-bound demons contributed however they could. A few arrows with burning heads popped up through Cal’s cloud bank, but they all shot past the companions upon the carpet. Cal continued shifting the bank around slightly, so that their enemies could not hit them merely by targeting the center of the storm. At one point a quasit popped up through the illusory cloud, but when it got a good look at the furious hail of fire coming from the defenders it quickly dipped back down out of sight.

The gargoyles approached to point blank range, shrieking as they eagerly extended their talons to attack. But at that distance, the missile fire from the companions was devastating, even through the damage resistance possessed by the creatures. Lok and Arun punched a pair of arrows into the chest of one as it swooped upon the defenders upon the carpet, their mighty bows adding considerable force to the impacts as the injured gargoyle shrieked and extended its claws toward the archers. The two reached for their melee weapons, but Beorna was there first, her adamantine axe chopping it in two.

Another pair of gargoyles surged upon the sword archon, but the celestial’s semicorporeal slashing blade made quick work of both before either could lay a claw upon him. The last tried to grapple Callendes, but Umbar intercepted it, lifting off from the carpet and laying hard into it with a solid blow from his axiomatic warhammer. The gargoyle turned upon him and tore at the cleric with its claws and teeth, but the creature could not long withstand close-quarters battle against the inquisitor, and within seconds it had joined its peers in plummeting to the ground far below.

The carpet had continued its forward course with its passengers, so the brief melee had caused Umbar and the Voice to fall behind. Callendes continued to pace the carpet, although that came at the cost of volume of arrows launched from his bow.

The two surviving chasmes continued their approach. As they came within a few hundred feet, one paused to fire off an unholy blight that briefly engulfed the carpet and everyone upon it. But the companions were all fixed in their determination, and they emerged from the roiling cloud intact. The other chasme continued to close, perhaps hoping to get close enough to affect the riders with its sleep-inducing drone. But as it pulled ahead, it drew the focus of Dannel. Now that the range was closer, the elf’s shots were even more telling, and the chasme took hit after hit, finally tumbling backward in an uncontrolled, spinning dive.

But even as that threat was dealt with, another presented itself. Announcing themselves with a screech that sounded like the end of days, a knot of hordelings erupted through Cal’s illusory cloud, their misshapen wings pounding violently at the air as they surged upward toward the carpet from below.



Chapter 557

The hordelings almost seemed to crawl over each other as they flew up through the illusory storm, as if fighting to be the first to reach their enemies. None of them were alike, but all shared the same bestial rage, and all had a variety of deadly-looking natural weapons.

Most of them came on toward the carpet, but a few trailers spotted Umbar and the sword archon lagging behind, and instead swept eagerly in that direction. Callendes shouted a warning and spun, sending an arrow down into the face of one of the charging hordelings. The creature, which had a snub face dominated with a jaw fully three feet wide, let out a violent roar and flew straight for the half-celestial, who led the creature away from the ongoing course of the carpet.

A few of the hordelings were intelligent enough to shift their approach to intercept the carpet, while the others trailed after it in pursuit. Those three, the fastest, came up quickly from below, their jaws trailing slaver as they sought to tear their enemies’ means of travel out from under them.

The foremost hordeling—a vulture-faced creature covered in olive green scales—got close enough almost to seize the fabric sheet, undulating slightly with the movements of its passangers above. But even as the fiend extended its foot-wide claws to strike, it staggered in mid-air, dropping ten feet as the beating of its wings lost their powerful rhythm. As it fell, a diminutive form could be seen on its back, clinging to the bony ridge between its wings. The fiend spun as it tried to shake its unwelcome passenger free, but Mole kept her grip with one hand, lifting her rapier to strike again with the other.

The second creature, which resembled a gray bulldog with feathered wings and four long taloned limbs, dove to take advantage of the rogue’s distraction. As Mole’s “steed” continued to try to shake her off, the second hordeling extended its hind claws to snap her up in its grasp in a fly-by attack. It looked like the gnome was too distracted trying to keep upon her perch to see the new threat, but at the last instant, Mole shot upward, avoiding the wild swing from the hordeling’s foreclaws as it tried to adjust. The sudden movement knocked it off balance, and its momentum carried into the first creature, which let out a fierce cry of protest. The first hordeling angrily tore free of the second, knocking it away, and it surged with powerful strokes of its wings toward Mole, who was curving back up toward the carpet—which had already moved on a good twenty paces in the interim, and was continuing on its steady course, Cal’s illusory storm pacing it.

The gnome moved with smooth grace through the air, but the hordeling appeared to be faster, its rage adding to its speed as its broad wings seized the air. Fat gobs of ichor continued to trail down its back from the nasty wound Mole had inflicted on it, and fell to eventually splatter upon the upturned faces of the demons below.

Mole adjusted her course slightly, broadening her curve, but did not otherwise look back at the horror that was rapidly gaining on her.

And then, abruptly, she dove, descending almost to the level of Cal’s illusion. The hordeling adjusted to match her, gaining another fifteen feet on her in the process.

She shifted again, and started rising again.

The hordeling drew closer. Once again it extended its claws…

And Mole suddenly changed course again, coming almost straight toward it.

The hordeling had been waiting for another such trick, and it smashed her with a claw, cutting shallow gashes in her left side. It tried to get a grip on her, but it may as well have been trying to grapple a waterfall. The gnome slid past its claws and darted across its body before ducking under one outstretched limb, and the wing behind it. As she passed, her little knife sliced out in a quick arc. The knobby protrusion where its wing met its body was scored deeply, and the creature screamed as a tendon was severed. Its left wing suddenly stopped beating, and the creature quickly tumbled over to the left.

Right into the face of the second hordeling, which had been closing around the left side of the first, hoping to cut off the prey and catch it for itself.

For a second time the hordelings collided, and this time the two were tangled together, the first unable to control its flight with its damaged wing. Their thrashing cries continued even after they vanished through Cal’s cloud, but they appeared again a moment later as the illusion passed ahead along with the carpet, which had not stopped during the entire exchange, Mole could see the two fiends still tangled together, falling rapidly toward the ground far below.

She smiled, but didn’t stop to see if they would fall all the way to the ground. Spinning in mid-air, she saw that the carpet was a good sixty feet ahead, now, and getting further away with each passing moment. Several hordelings still fluttered around it, engaged in a violent hit-and-run melee with the defenders. Beorna, Arun, and Lok formed a defensive ring around Dannel, who was continuing to unleash holy hell with his longbow. It looks like they’d kept the hordelings off the carpet, thus far.

As the carpet and its shrouding illusion drew further away, the roar of the demons below seemed uncannily directed at her, despite the fact that she could only be a tiny speck in the sky to them. The feeling made her feel quite exposed, and she decided that it might be a good idea to rejoin the others. Almost by reflex, she called upon the power of her ring, and became invisible.

But she wasn’t completely alone. Only about forty feet away, Umbar battled a pair of hordelings, both sides of combatants abandoning subtlety for full attacks designed to simply crush the other. Umbar was doing a good job, and one hordeling’s left arm hung uselessly at its side, crushed by his axiomatic warhammer. Apparently the hordelings were starting to get it through their thick skulls that the dwarf wasn’t going to just be beaten down, for as she floated up the one in front of him tried to grab his hammer. It got a slimy claw on his forearm for a second, but before it could solidify its grip, the dwarf tore his limb free and drove the hammer into the hordeling’s face. Most of the left side of its jaw was smashed in by the blow, but the hordeling refused to die, although the sound that issued from its ruined face was truly terrible.

Umbar turned to deal with the inevitable attack from the hordeling’s fellow, but the creature had already started its gambit. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction offered by its ally’s attempted grapple, it beat its wings furiously, lifting it a few feet above the dwarf. Then it lunged forward, closing its wings around its body, extending its claws to enfold the dwarf, intending to simply let its weight drag the both of them down to the ground below.

It was a simple but effective plan, and it might have worked had not Mole slid the length of her rapier into the spot where the hordeling’s oblong skull ended at the back of its neck. The creature, which never relied much on brains in the first place, was slow to realize that there was a foot of steel jammed into its gray matter, but its limbs quickly ceased their proper operation. The hordeling slammed hard into Umbar, but the dwarf quickly recovered, spinning to halt a few feet away. He looked up at Mole in surprise, who had become visible again with her sneak attack.

“Behind you,” the gnome warned calmly.

Umbar turned to see the first crippled hordeling charging at him, its ruined jaw wide open, revealing ugly rows of mismatched teeth and a long tongue tipped with a slender barb. The creature flailed at him with its remaining functional claw, but the dwarf held his ground, bringing his hammer down in a powerful arc that coincided with the fiend’s vile forehead. All that came from it this time was a strangled hiss, which died along with the monster as it plummeted downward.

“It might be a good idea to go rejoin the others,” Mole said. As she spoke, several arrows shot past them; apparently some of the demons below had missile weapons. At their distance, almost straight up, the shot would have been incredibly difficult, but Mole watched with fascination as an arrow slid past a mere foot from her face. The arrowhead seemed to pulse with ugly red light, and a thin black stream of wispy energy trailed behind it, quickly fading to nothing.

Umbar did not disagree, and the two of them hastened after the others. As the occasional arrows continued to fly past them Mole felt a bit guilty as she became invisible again, but heck, Umbar was armored like a golem, and she was only wearing a light tunic.

They were more than halfway across the canyon now, and as they caught up to their friends Mole could see the massive form of the Bastion more clearly ahead of them. There were black spots upon the vast white spread of the fortress wall, no doubt demons attempting to scale the fortification. She could also see defenders atop the summit, although to her eyes they seemed few and far between.

Overall, the place looked very secure, but Mole was veteran enough to know that once the demons brought up a large number of flyers, that wall would not be worth very much in holding back the assault. Surely Saureya knew that, and Mole wondered what contingencies the deva had in place to hold out here.

If he didn’t have any, then they were going from one bad situation into another.

The celestials, Callendes and the Herald’s Voice, were also returning to the carpet. The avariel looked terrible, with great bloody gashes in his slender form, but he did not falter in the powerful beats of his great white wings. The archon was likewise injured but led the other, its hovering blade of silver energy preceding it as it rushed to the aid of its charges.

The assistance turned out to be unnecessary. By the time that the Voice reached the carpet, Arun and Lok had slain the last hordeling, the fell creature tumbling downward, its torso ripped open from a truly punishing blow from Lok’s axe.

Mole could have shot ahead of Umbar, who was moving more slowly due to his heavy encumbrance, but she decided that the dwarf needed to have an eye kept on him. Without any trace of irony she mused that while the stout folk made good companions, and were great if you needed something hacked to pieces, they weren’t as able to get out of troublesome situations as gnomes, and generally needed supervision.

They were within a few hundred yards of the Bastion now. Cal’s illusion dissolved, as the spell reached the limit of its range. The archmage directed the carpet downward, in a calm descent toward the opening between the top of the shield wall and the overhanging mountain behind it.

Mole was still about fifty feet shy of the carpet, so she was in a perfect position to see the threat. As the illusory storm faded, it revealed a massive fiend, a bloated monstrosity that had to be at least twelve feet tall. Its wingspan could have enfolded a farmer’s cottage, but even so the great wings seemed barely sufficient to keep the creature aloft. Even now, it seemed that the carpet would easily outpace it.

But then the fearsome monster opened its jaws wide—gods, that thing could eat a horse in one bite, Mole thought. “Look out!” she warned, knowing what was coming, although she also knew it was too late for her companions upon the carpet to react.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 558

Having fought through fiendish gargoyles, chasme demons, and a flight of misshapen hordelings to reach the Bastion, now a single huge creature remained to intercept their escape.

Mole saw it all, knew what the giant fiend’s intentions were even before the sizzling sound reached her ears. A great gob of green goop exploded from its mouth, shooting out at her friends. Lok and Beorna took the full force of the acidic spray, but all of them were hit with at least some of the caustic stuff. Worse than that, the entire back half of the carpet was splashed, and black smoke began to waft almost immediately from it as the acid quickly did its work.

Almost without thinking, Mole dove toward the monstrous fiend, although it wasn’t immediately obvious what even sneak attacks could do against it. The thing resembled a lump of stone with arms, legs, and wings, and a tail that extended for a good fifteen feet behind it. A bony ridge rode down its back, all the way down to the end of its tail, which culminated in a broad bony plate like the head of a shovel. Its head was a massive oblong lump, dominated with those huge jaws and hooded slits for eyes. Black spikes jutted from its skull, horns that gave it a vaguely tauran—or draconic—visage.

Gods, it’s ugly, she thought, the sentiment reinforced a second later as she got close enough to smell it.

The carpet, still descending rapidly, began to slow, as the acid began burning away not only at the fabric, but at the magical power that animated it. She saw Arun step to the smoking back edge, his holy sword hissing from his scabbard, surrounding him with a bright golden aura.

Mole saw something slither across the back of the giant hordeling. What in the hells is that? It looked like a splatter of black mud, only it moved, independent of the rhythmic stretching of the muscles that powered the fiend’s wings. For an instant, she caught sight of something that might have been a head, and dark slits that held dim red coals for eyes. Its gaze passed over her for only the barest instant, but it was enough to send a cold chill through her body.

Then it looked up at her companions on the carpet. Something shivered in the space between them, the faintest haze that Mole, no stranger to magic, recognized as a spell or power of some sort.

Even as Arun leapt off the carpet, calling upon Cal’s granted flight to carry him forward to intercept the threat, all of his magical wards and protections, including that provided by Cal’s wand, failed.

Mole watched in horror as the paladin’s leap became a free fall, with nothing to stop his fall but the horde of eager demons waiting three hundred feet below.




Chapter 559

The black dragon Nbrathux was a queen among her kind, favored of the god-dragon Tiamat. The drake was already a blight upon the fading world of Karas-dhun when she was summoned to Avernus, the uppermost layer of Baator, by her mistress to serve in her court of power.

The honor of the appointment was exceeded only by the potential for even greater power, but Nbrathux was a creature of vast ego, a trait which did not serve her well in the court of that most powerful of dragons. Nbrathux had barely served two decades in her post before a rival betrayed some indescreet plottings to Tiamat, and the ancient black was cast out in disgrace. Perhaps as a nod to the black dragon’s chaotic leanings, or maybe as a last ironic punishment, the Queen of Dragons hurled Nbrathux into the Abyss.

Unable to return to the Prime of her own devices—her sorceries were potent, but she lacked the ability to plane shift on her own—the dragon spent a desperate year alone in the Abyss, crossing across several layers via portals or through the assistance of powerful demon princelings who lacked the power to slay the dragon, but likewise did not want her dwelling within their realm. The dragon only narrowly escaped destruction on several occasions. The power of Nbrathux was considerable even in comparison to the demons that other fiends that populated the dark layers of that plane, but she was alone, compared to millions upon millions of fiends that were not adverse to taking on a superior foe with the advantage of numbers.

After the collapse of several temporary alliances with lesser abyssal magnates, the dragon found herself in the company of a fellow band of outcasts, a small company of hordelings that been brought to the Abyss in the service of the dark lord Kotischtche, only to be abandoned when the demon lord’s interest shifted to other matters. The dragon found the creatures pliant enough to fill the role of servants, and the hordelings in turn were delighted at the power that the dragon added to their cause.

If she had chosen to lay low, and given time to establish connections with other powers, the dragon might have been able to survive the Abyss, and even rise to some minor position of notoriety. As it was, however, the dragon did not even survive her own choice of companions. The hordelings, chaotic as they were, bristled at the pretentions of their new mistress, and following an unpleasant instance of chastisement, fell upon her in a rage and tore her to pieces.

But the dragon’s legacy did not end there. Perhaps it was perversion, or merely a recognition that her own line was about to end, but before she was slain the dragon mated with several of the fiends. Hordelings are incredibly fecund; they almost have to be, for their race is prey not only to almost every intelligent and mindless species of the lower planes, but the chaos that they embody also causes them to turn upon themselves as often as not. Some demonologists theorize that this is due to a profound self-hatred experienced by these unfortunate creatures, but as far as it is known no interrogations with a hordeling have ever been able to prove or disprove that hypothesis.

Three children were born of those unions, twisted things that combined the traits of the dragon mother and the unpredictable mutability of the fiendish fathers. The half-dragons were possessed of certain advantages over their cousins, but were given no special exemption to the hazardous lifestyle practiced within hordeling “society”, and two were quickly slain by their bretheren over assorted trifling offenses.

The final scion survived, and even prospered, after a fashion. The creature was known merely as Nax, and as it grew swiftly to adulthood, it developed talents that set it apart from its kin. It spent some time on its own, serving in the hosts of several warring nalfeshnee lords upon a layer of the Abyss that was under contest. This experience allowed it to develop its strength, and soon it was a force to be reckoned with even by the standards of the Abyss. While demons bore a certain resistance to the acid that the young half-breed could already discharge in copious quantities, their durability did not extend to grabbed and ripped in half, a tactic that Nax quickly perfected. Its strength was prodigious, but the creature also made a number of enemies. Its prospects, like those of any unique being in the chaotic Abyss, were quite uncertain.

Soon thereafter, it came upon the creature Yavuv.

Yavuv had been a babau of no great distinction, one of the countless legions of lesser fiends that infested the Abyss like flies upon a corpse. It spent four hundred years in the service of the nalfeshnee J’bok’a, until it displeased its master in a serious instance of negligence, allowing one of its rivals to seize a key advantage in their centuries-long on again, off again war. For a lesser offense, the babau would have merely been obliterated, perhaps to reform as a dretch in a few thousand years, but Yavuv would not be allowed to get off so easily.

Demons are masters at the craft of inflicting torment, but Yavuv was doubly unfortunate in that J’bok’a was the owner of several unique powers in this area. The babau attempted to flee, but was brought before its master, where it was subject to [word]. In other words, the demon’s bones were liquified within its body, leaving it in a permanent state of heaped languor, unable to even rise, and forced to exist in a constant state of intense, penetrating pain. Having thus chastened its minion, J’bok’a opened a portal to a random layer of the Abyss, and hurled Yavuv through.

In this circumstance, a quick demise was the almost certain outcome. But somehow, in defiance of all the odds of fate, the demon persisted. Driven nearly insane by the constant agony in which it faced existence, something snapped inside the babau’s mind. It lost much of what it had been, but in gained something as well, in the form of a rare manifestation of psionic ability. Perhaps it had been latent in the demon all along… but in any case, even with that gift, the demon only narrowly survived by stealth and trickery. Despite surviving its altered condition, it was still virtually unable to move under its own power, and even the simple task of standing upright was forever lost to it.

Yavuv’s fate would have likely emulated that of Nbrathux, but for a chance encounter with Nax. The half-dragon was intelligent enough to recognize the benefits that the crippled fiend could offer it, and so began a symbiotic relationship that allowed both creatures, each unusual in its own unique way, to prosper.

Shortly thereafter both of the warring nalfeshnees were betrayed to a rival balor, and the pair found themselves free agents. Yavuv had heard a report of a charismatic new general in the Blood War who was recruiting mercenaries to his banner, and so the two found themselves tying their fate to that of the once-great Prince Graz’zt.

* * * * *

Dannel knew nothing of this, of course, as he drew an arrow back to his cheek, and took aim at the ascending monstrosity. Before he could loose, Arun was hit by the targeted dispel magic from the parasite Yavuv, and started to fall. The elf immediately aborted his shot and channeled the power of his song into a feather fall spell, which enfolded the paladin a scant instant before he fell out of range.

Arun’s descent immediately slowed to a soft drift, but there was still nothing below him but a wave of demons.

“Cal! Bring the carpet around!” Dannel urged. But the gnome was having difficulty just keeping the magical rug under control, as the acid from Nax’s breath weapon ate away not only at the fabric, but also at the potency of the spell within the device.

Beorna didn’t wait. With wisps of black smoke still rising from the crevices of her armor, she dove head-first off the carpet, plummeting like a stone toward Arun. Thirty feet away, on the opposite side of the creature, Umbar had also seen the paladin fall, and was only a few paces behind her, both converging on Arun’s drifting form.

Mole’s gaze had remained fixed on the parasitic creature clinging to the larger demon’s back, so she saw its head turn, following Beorna’s movement as she dove after Arun. The gnome did not have to stop to think to know what was about to happen. Her hand shot into her bag of holding, closed around something familiar. She didn’t think, she just acted, drawing out the object and hurling it with precision at the demon.

The fat clay flask struck the back of the half-dragon hordeling right along the bony ridge that ran up its back, less than a foot above where the black mass of Yavuv began. The jar exploded in a white-hot flash of alchemist’s fire, spraying down around his body in the backblast of the hordeling’s powerful wings. The demon was largely unaffected by the hot fire, protected by its inherent resistances, but Mole had clearly gotten its attention. As it emerged from the billowing plume of smoke, flames hissing around its misshapen black body, its glowing red eyes fixed hatefully upon the gnome.

Uh oh, Mole had time to think, before the sky suddenly became insubstantial around her, as the magic sustaining her flight dissipated. She knew what it was like to fall, but somehow, with the ground black with crowded masses of demons three hundred feet below her, the sensation that filled her gut as she looked down was just that much worse.




Chapter 560

As gravity started to exert its inexorable hold on Mole, there was no time for casual pondering, only desperate action. The acrobat snapped her body, made a desperate lunge, and grabbed onto the only thing within reach that could possibly arrest her fall.

Arun remained calm despite the still-rapid approach of the ground below. The demons were packing together in a cluster below him, eagerly shrieking in anticipation of tearing him apart. It seemed like all of the occupants of the canyon were focused on the battle raging above them now, and there continued a sporadic barrage from the half-fiend mercenaries whose violated arrows lanced up at the assorted combatants. As Arun drifted downward on the feather fall, he drew more of their focus, and soon arrows were plinging off of his heavy armor, seeking the slightest vulnerability to pierce through to the flesh beneath.

He continued to fall, two hundred thirty feet above the ground, two twenty, two ten, two hundred. The demons could now be individually picked out, masses of skeletal babaus, bar-lgura, black jovocs, half-fiend warriors in red and black plate, hordelings, countless dretches filling ever space between. A few larger beings, greater demons, in the press, reluctantly granted space by their lesser bretheren.

“Arun!” Beorna cried, drawing the paladin’s attention up. The templar shot down like a heavy stone, adding the impetus of Cal’s spell to the natural draw of the ground below, streaking down in a barely controlled dive. Umbar was not far behind her, converging on the paladin’s position.

Arun sheathed his sword, and extended his hand.

But even as the templar extended hers to grasp him, Arun was buffeted roughly to the side. Below, in the crowd, a bar-lgura cackled as the paladin shot thirty feet distant, hovering briefly before he began once more to fall. The telekinesis attack had one silver lining, as an unholy blight hurled by a hezrou missed him, only briefly catching Beorna on the edge of the effect, who shrugged off the dark power with her divinely-granted mettle.

Arun felt more mental thrusts gathering around him, but he gathered his will and resisted the various assaults. Umbar had shifted his course and now reached for him; Beorna was now behind him, but was hastening to adjust.

A chaos hammer hit them, and a moment later Umbar grunted as an evil arrow pierced the calf muscle on his left leg. The cleric ignored both pains, and snapped his hand around Arun’s. A moment later Beorna wrapped her arm around the paladin’s back, the two dwarves cooperating as they lifted Arun toward the summit of the Bastion’s shield wall. The celestials manning the defenses did their best to cover them, firing arrows or hurling pots of holy water into the massed demons below. Those attacks wrought heavy damage, but the defenders were few, while the demons and other assorted fiends numbered in the thousands.

For a few moments it looked like they would make it, despite the furious intensity of the missile and spell attacks. But Arun’s fall had dropped them low enough for the babaus to extend their own power, and the cluster of dwarves were hit by a barrage of general and targeted dispels. Again the flight granted by Cal’s wand was the weakest link, and the spell upon Umbar failed. The dwarf started to fall, but Arun still held his hand. Beorna now found herself supporting both of them, their combined weight overwhelming the potency of the spell upon her, dragging all of them downward.

“Let me go!” Umbar urged.

Far above them, the battle with the half-dragon hordeling and its warped symbiant raged on. The Herald’s Voice dove down to meet Nax as it flew up toward the passengers still upon the stricken carpet. The sword archon let out a clear cry as he challenged the evil thing that was his antithesis, his holy blade taking form before him. Nax eagerly lunged forward to meet him, but at it extended its long claws, the archon darted inside its reach, slashing at its body with the glowing shaft of force. The blow opened a long gash in Nax’s body, a bright cut that spewed forth a deluge of putrid black ichor that steamed as it entered the air and fell in fat droplets to the ground below.

But the archon paid quickly for its attack, as Nax closed its huge arms, enfolding the celestial and pressing it tight against its body. The Voice tried to pull free but was caught as the half-dragon’s claws dug into its torso. One wing snapped, and the creature tore a cry of pain from him as it dipped its massive jaws and bit a chunk out of the celestial’s shoulder.

Arrows slammed into the hordeling’s arms and shoulders, as Callendes and Dannel fired off several shots. The failing carpet was becoming an unstable platform even for Dannel, and he was not able to fall into the rapid-fire sequence of arrows that he typically managed. Callendes, his wings keeping him aloft as he hovered, was less distracted, but by stopping his movement the avariel made himself a more attractive target. Before he could release his third arrow, he staggered as a jagged, red-tipped violated arrow slammed into his torso just below his left breast. The impact, a critical hit, caused the winged elf to falter, and his face twisted with agony with each beat of his wings, as he fought to remain aloft.

Lok had paused on the edge of the carpet, knowing that another dispel would turn him into a burden rather than an aid in the ongoing battle. But it was clear that his bow would not make a significant contribution to this fray, even with his strength, not against foes such as these. Grimacing, he dropped the bow and drew out Coldburn, the potent greatsword he’d recovered in the stronghold of the Cagewrights under Cauldron. The blade was damaged, etched with the marks of babau acid, but there was naught to be done for that now.

Stung by the arrows, Nax hurled the broken celestial aside and surged up again toward the carpet, which was losing altitude quickly as it continued toward the wall of the Bastion. They were still above the level of that fortification’s summit, but they still had more than a hundred feet to cover to reach it, and the carpet continued to smoke as the hordeling’s acidic breath continued its grim work.

Lok disciplined himself to not look down. Commending himself to fate, the genasi lifted his sword and leapt at the onrushing monster.

The hordeling’s powerful movements while it engaged the Voice had caused its tail to lash back and forth wildly. The small form clinging to the spade-like plate at the end of that appendage was hurled left and right, barely holding on with one hand as the wind whipped crazily around her. As it dropped the Voice and surged ahead, Mole was finally able to swing herself up and snap her legs around its tail just above that broad tip. She figured she should do something to hurt it, but at the moment nothing effective seemed to come to mind. Still, it seemed like a good idea to start climbing up the tail; the bony segments at least would make that task easier.

But when she looked up, she found herself staring right into the eyes of the black thing clinging to the hordeling’s back. Malice washed over her like a wave, and she heard a sinister voice sound within the depths of her mind.

Let go, that voice said. The suggestion did not seem to be a very good one, no sirrie, but it was backed with magical compulsion, and she let out a sob as she felt her hands loosening their grip.

Don’t listen to it, Mole! came an echoing voice in her mind, a sound familiar and yet not her own. She shook her head, made an obscene gesture toward the fiend, and with her legs holding her in place, she snapped up her other hand from behind her back, throwing her little knife at it. The non-magical missile caromed off its head, doing no damage, but she did succeed in pissing it off just that much more.

It responded with another mental attack, but rather than another suggestion, this time a wave of pain exploded through the head of the hard-pressed gnome. For a moment everything faded into gray around her, and then a memory returned with startling clarity; she was in the Malachite Fortress under Cauldron. She’d gone there with Zenna and Arun and Ruphos to find the missing children from the orphanage, and she’d climbed up a statue draped with chains. The chains had been some sort of golem creature, and she’d nearly died there. The pain now felt exactly as it had back then, and for a moment she nearly threw herself free, before she remembered where she really was.

Grimacing, she looked up at the demon-thing, and snarled one of Hodge’s dwarven curses at it. She locked her hands around the hordeling’s tail once more, and prepared to climb up to where she could do some damage.

Unfortunately, before she could so much as crawl a foot forward, the world suddenly whipped rapidly around her, and she found herself and her perch flying through space at an incredible speed.

The hordeling battered Lok with an incredible blow that knocked him roughly aside. The genasi recovered and started back toward Nax with his sword trailing streamers of flame and ice behind him. The half-dragon started to turn to face the warrior, but another arrow slammed hard into its shoulder. It looked up at Dannel in time to take a second hit that caromed hard off its angular forehead, opening a gash above its left eye.

Ignoring Lok, the hordeling pounded its wings, and lunged through the sky, covering the last forty feet or so that separated it from the struggling carpet. The maneuver gave Lok a chance to get close enough to swing at its torso, but the wound was minor at best, barely grazing its armored hide. He prepared for an all-out attack, but out of the corner of his eye he saw something sliding across the monster’s back, and caught a glimpse of evil red orbs staring at him that sent a chill down his back.

But before either he or Yuvuv could act, Nax spread his wings and spun in mid air. His left claw swept out and smacked Lok hard across the face, knocking the genasi backward again. At the same time, its tail came around in a deliberate arc, the plate-like end accelerating with whiplike force until it smacked hard into the flying carpet square in the center of what remained of the fabric.

Dannel was standing about a foot from where the tail hit, and went flying like a boulder shot from a trebuchet, his left leg trailing behind him at an obviously unnatural angle. The carpet snapped around the tail and was yanked with it as the hordeling drew it back. Finally the ruined scrap of fabric tore free, no longer animated with even a vestige of magic, and it began fluttering toward the ground below, still trailing wisps of black smoke.

Rid of that trouble, the hordeling turned its full attention upon Lok.

Of Cal and Mole, there was no sign.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 561

The companions, having fought through the initial waves of demons warding the Bastion, now scattered before the assault of the half-dragon monstrosity Nax and its symbiant passenger, the once-babau Yuvuv.

Beorna’s helmet fell from her head as her body tipped downward. She struggled with all her might to maintain her grip on Arun, but with Umbar attached to the dwarf, she was now essentially trying to carry over five hundred pounds of dwarf, armor, and gear forward. She was falling, and the relative safety of the Bastion seemed still too far away.

“Let me fall!” Umbar shouted again. The dwarf was trying to pull himself free of Arun’s grip, but the paladin held his hand like a vice. “I’ll not drag you to your deaths!”

“No…” Arun said, between clenched teeth. He shucked off his shield, which tumbled in the air as it fell, and locked Umbar’s hand in both of his. “Beorna!”

“Too… much!” the templar grunted. An unholy blight struck them, and she nearly lost it, there. Emerging from the explosion of dark power, she fixed her eyes on the battlements of the Bastion’s defensive wall. They were almost level with that line, now, and still losing altitude…

Beorna drew focus from deep within her, calling upon that strength that had served her as an outsider, growing up among people different from her. “HELM!” she said, the syllable startling clear over the chaotic noise of the demons below. She filled herself with the strength of her patron, and heaved herself up, her own will augmenting the faltering power of Cal’s magic. With Arun and Umbar trailing below her, she went straight for her target, a gap in the massive merlons that ran along the summit of the wall like a row of perfect white teeth. More attacks continued to impact them, and several other dispels sought to unravel the tenuous thread of magic that kept them all aloft, and send them plummeting down to certain destruction. But luck, or determination, or perhaps the benevolent eye of some higher power, protected them. Her arms felt like they were being torn out of their sockets; that was nothing, an externality beyond the border of her iron discipline. An arrow pierced her side, sending a wave of nausea through her gut; she ignored it, lost in her solitary focus on her destination. That was all there was in the world, and she drove for it with all of her being.

The gift of Helm’s strength began to fade, but with a final surge she lifted herself and her passengers up and forward, and the three of them passed between the gap, and over the battlement. Umbar’s lower body slammed into the lip on the edge of the wall, and he would have fallen, had not Arun yanked him bodily up and over.

Lok and the hordeling exchanged a violent flurry of blows, each seeking to undo each other through sheer physical, brutish power. Coldburn, backed by the genasi’s phenomenal strength, had opened a pair of gashes in the half-dragon’s body, but in turn Lok’s body had been roughly battered, with several of his armor plates dented seriously in a way that had to be causing him incredible pain with every movement. But he did not falter, lifting himself up over Nax, intending to descend upon him with a two-handed strike to the head.

But that plan was foiled again by Yavuv, who had crept up across the back of its host, and now bent its head up over Nax’s shoulder on its shapeless neck, allowing it to strike the warrior with its power.

Once again, the dispel took hold, and Lok faltered. But the genasi had seen the others fall before him, and as the spell faded, and he started to fall, he shifted his grip and drove Coldburn downward. His own weight combined with the power of his thrust, and the greatsword tore through the half-dragon’s left thigh, and Lok’s fall abruptly ended, with the genasi dangling tenuously from the hilt of the weapon protruding from the fiend’s body.

Nax screamed, and seized the warrior in both of its claws, tearing him from his uncertain perch. Those claws had torn apart demons twice the fiend’s size, and now they crushed the genasi’s already battered body. Lok struggled, tearing one arm free of its grasp, but before he could do more, the hordeling opened its massive jaws again, and blasted Lok point-blank with an incredible spray of conentrated acid.



Chapter 562

Mole’s world was comprised of two things; pain, pain that suffused her entire body, and a vague sense of falling. She couldn’t see anything; she was enfolded in a tight web of fabric that clung to her, wrapping her up tight like a knot of lettuce inside a spring roll.

The comparison was so odd that it shook her out of her mental fugue enough to realize that it might be a very, very good idea to get out of here! She got her hand on her dagger, and drew the magical weapon, cutting away the cloth holding her at key points, giving her additional freedom of movement. The fabric—the flying carpet, or what was left of it, she realized—fluttered in several long trails that trailed above her. Above was the sky of Occipitus. That meant that below…

She slid free, not fully releasing the rug; though depleted of magic, the shredded mass was still slowing her fall, the strands causing friction on the air.

When she looked down, her breath caught in her throat.

Demons, everywhere. She was less than a hundred feet from the ground now, and just a few seconds from an impact that would be decidedly unpleasant for her. Most of them would not be able to see her, perhaps, with her ring cloaking her in invisibility, but enough had the ability to pierce that veil to make escape rather unlikely.

Oh, damn… she thought, her vision momentarily obscured by a blur in her vision. Then she grimaced. Damned if she wasn’t going to go down without a fight, not crying like some kind of… girl!

Her confidence thus restored, she started to move, but her attention was drawn upward by a soft fluttering in the air. There was nothing there, but she grinned nonetheless, and extended her hand, becoming invisible again just as she felt a sudden grip that snagged on her wrist, and she was yanked off the carpet. She watched with rapt fascination as the remains of the carpet fluttered down into the ranks of the demons, which tore it to pieces in violent frustration. She was sad to see the flying device destroyed, but it was definitely better than having her still be on it when it landed.

The grip holding her was tight, and felt like a claw. But even polymorphed, she could still recognize the touch of her uncle, and she smiled.

Lok’s body was burning agony. Enough of the acid blast had torn through the slit in his helm that he was effectively blinded, and the only thing he could smell was the stink of his burning flesh mixed with the caustic odor of the acid. He did not know whether his blindness was temporary, caused by the burning fluid and the sizzling smoke, or whether his eyeballs even now were being transformed into runnels of fluid within their sockets. The pain was too universal to distinguish. But the genasi’s perceptions focused on his free hand, which closed around the familiar haft that jutted out under his left arm, across his back.

His ears, which alone of his senses seemed to still be functioning normally, were his guide. The fiend’s cries echoed within the confines of his helmet, distorting but giving him just enough guidance as he swept his thundering axe up and around. The timbre of that demonic voice changed as he hit something solid, accompanied by the familiar noise of blood gushing from a vicious wound, and the cacophonous pulse that thrummed through his body as the weapon, empowered by his long-time friend, released its power.

And then he was free, and falling.

“Cal!” Mole shouted, pointing with her free hand at the falling figure before belatedly realizing that she was invisible and couldn’t see it. The archmage, changed into the form of a small dragon, was not in a position to intervene, but another individual was. Mole let out a little shout as the Herald’s Voice, his devastating injuries partially healed by his magic, flew up to meet the falling genasi. Lok could not see him coming, but the archon smoothly intersected his path, falling with him for a hundred feet before he spread his wings and rose, the genasi clutching tight to his muscled frame.

The companions and their allies converged on the shield wall of the Bastion. Beorna had landed with Arun and Umbar, the three dwarves staggering wearily to their feet as a pair of hound archons assisted them. Dannel, knocked free of the carpet by the smash of the hordeling’s tail, had recovered enough to fly down to the battlements, assisted by Callendes. He landed awkwardly on his right leg, the left broken in several places from the impact of the tail smash, but even so it was not clear which of the two was lending more support to the other. The avariel’s vicious wound still trailed bright blood, and he looked wan, barely able to hold his bow. Cal and Mole, both invisibile, flew up over the battlement themselves, the gnome dropping free to land easily on her feet. Finally came the Voice, bearing the crippled genasi warrior.

The hordeling was descending on them, injured but still full of fight, Lok’s sword still jutting from its leg. Those celestials manning the defenses fired missiles up at it, but the wounds they inflicted seemed tiny on its massive frame. The battered dwarves pulled themselves to their feet and readied weapons, and Dannel leaned against a merlon and fitted a fresh string to his bow, his face twisting with pain with every slight movement. Mole just looked up in awe, knowing that a colossal collision was about to occur.

Nax spread its wings, and extended its lower legs, claws extended. But a scant second before it would have hit the battlements, it suddenly shrieked and veered off, sweeping aside into a dive that quickly took it out of view.

Stunned and mostly intact, the companions limped, crawled, and walked into a circle behind the shelter of the fortress battlements.

They had arrived at the Bastion.




Chatper 563

Benzan came back to consciousness with a pleasant, warm glow suffusing his body, which was always a bad sign.

Reluctantly, he lifted his head from where it had fallen across his chest, and opened his eyes. He saw what he’d expected to see, and dreaded. Yeela shot him the familiar smirk that he’d learned to hate as she slipped her empty syringe back into its red leather case. His languor was already fading as the substance she’d injected him with did its work. Soon, he knew, she would be ready to begin again; she never brought him around unless she was fully rested for another session. They could last hours, days; by the end he was not in any condition to gauge the passage of time.

“Ready to begin again, my pretty?” the lamia said, as always reading his thoughts with uncanny accuracy. By now, she knew him better than a friend, better than a lover. She knew things about him that even Dana had no inkling of. Benzan had no idea how long he’d been in the creature’s “care”, but he suspected it had been a long time, months or even years, perhaps.

He tore his gaze away from her, and looked around, more as a gesture of defiance than out of an interest in the chamber. He already knew every detail, every dangling tool, ever pore in each one of the wooden and metal constructs situated around the perimeter of the room. He could not see behind him, could not even twist his head beyond a few degrees, but he knew the rack upon which he was currently stretched better than any of them. Even the splinters that touched his bare arms and legs were mapped in his mind, deviant sensations that Yeela allowed him to feel.

The lamia chuckled as she examined her table of implements carefully and deliberately. That meant that she was allowing him his momentary defiance, and that he would pay for it later. Benzan was developing an air of fatalism, but he could not help but feel a sense of cloying dread at that. For all of the ministrations that he’d experienced at the hands of Yeela, she was always able to come up with something new, a new horror that his body and mind could not anticipate, and not adapt to.

The lamia lifted an instrument and turned to him. “Today, I think we will apply ourselves to your manhood.”

Benzan’s heart clenched in his chest.

The lamia came forward, her claws clacking slightly on the bloodstained stone tiles of the floor, but before she could touch him the door to the chamber swung ponderously open. Yeela frowned; Benzan knew that she hated interruptions.

Another creature entered the chamber. Her soft face and slender frame were representations of the ideal of feminine beauty, marred by the charcoal wings that spread out from her back. She was clad in a clinging outfit that left only just enough to the imagination to add a certain something to the aura of raw sexuality that she radiated like heat from a bonfire. Something flickered in her eyes, but it might have only been the reflection of the lanterns that danced brightly in them as she entered the room. Benzan did not know her, but that meant nothing; the succubi changed appearance the way that other creatures changed their clothing. They’d had their turn with him as well, and their torments, while different in nature than those practiced by Yeela, were no less destructive to body, mind, and soul.

But he was helpless to intervene in any case, so he merely observed, grateful for even a few moments of relief from the lamia’s attentions. Yeela shot him a knowing glance, as if to promise him that he would come to regret that feeling, then she turned toward the newcomer.

“Welcome, my dear Kireen,” the lamia said, although Benzan could tell that she was anything but welcoming. Some demons practiced torture as a performance art, but Yeela was different, enjoying the solitary bond that existed between the torturer and victim. “What brings you down to the cells this day?”

“The Great Lord has an interest in this one, Yeela. I was commanded to look in on him, from time to time.”

The lamia flicked her wrist in a gesture of annoyance. “I am following the Master’s mandate to the letter, with this one,” she said. “I do not need anyone second-guessing my skill.”

The succubus spread her hands before her in a conciliatory gesture. “I certainly did not mean to challenge your admirable proficiency in the art,” she purred. “In all honesty, I would as soon attend to my own concerns, but with the Master gone…”

Benzan perked up slightly at that. Graz’zt had left the citadel? He didn’t know whether he considered that good or bad news, but it gave his starved mind something to turn around.

The lamia chuckled. “Your whelp is off at the Master’s side now… He has come far fast, but it should be interesting to see how he fares at the forefront of events. Prestige is a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to the intrigues among the great ones.”

The succubus’s mouth tightened into the barest hint of a scowl, just for a moment. But she quickly mastered herself, and turned to Benzan. “He does not look to be lucid,” she said, examining him with the expert eye of one seasoned to pain.

“Oh, he’s awake,” the lamia said, turning to her tools. The moment she’d shifted around enough to take her eyes off of Kireen, the succubus twisted her wrist, and a short white rod, perhaps two and a half feet in length, appeared in her hand. The demoness pointed it at Yeela and spoke a word of power.

Benzan felt a screaming sound rip through him as a sonic evocation, maximized by the white rod, erupted in the confines of the small chamber. Clinging to consciousness, he saw that Yeela was much worse off; she’d taken a direct hit, and blood poured down her body where blood vessels had exploded through her flesh.

But the lamia was a durable creature. Snarling, trails of bright red blood draining from her nostrils and ears, Yeela snatched a jagged hook-edged blade from the table and lunged at the succubus. Kireen ducked back with superhuman agility, but could not avoid a gash that drew a bright red line across her belly. Yeela lifted the weapon to strike again, but before she could stab the knife down into her attacker’s chest the succubus fired off another sonic at point blank range.

This time, the world exploded in a surge of red, and Benzan lost consciousness.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 564

This time, his return to consciousness was both more gradual, and more painful.

“Wake up,” came a voice, insistent and demanding compliance. There was magic in that voice, and he wanted to obey, but his battered body was resisting.

Benzan could only dimly feel his body, but suddenly the tension holding his arms against the rack disappeared. He fell forward, and would have fallen except for the fact that something caught him, holding him more or less upright.

“Wake up,” came the voice again, accompanied by a flash of pain as he was slapped—hard—across the face.

Summoning a fierce effort, he opened his eyes. He was still in the torture room, being propped up by the succubus. Looking down, he caught sight of an ugly red and brown heap of disgusting wreckage that he realized was Yeela, or rather what was left of her. After what he’d been through, the sight should have been a pleasant one, but he had to fight down a sudden surge of bile that threatened to rob him of what little equilibrium he’d been able to retain.

“You need to get ahold of yourself,” the succubus said. “This bitch is done, but others may come by at any minute.”

His gaze traveled upward, and as he met her eyes, he thought he saw something there, through the fog that was still clouding his senses. “Dana?”

The succubus laughed, but it was a cruel, harsh sound. “If you can think that, you’re more damaged than I expected. No, my little tiefling, I am not your lost love, and while I might enjoy the chance to scour her from your mind and body, you must get up and move, if you wish to survive.” He flinched as she lifted her hand, holding the bloody hook-knife that Yeela had used to much effect upon him, and slammed it into the wooden rack an inch from his bare thigh.

Benzan grabbed the weapon and tugged it free, with some effort. He felt weak, his muscles strained from hours upon hours of being lashed to manacles, or this rack, or any of the other instruments of torment located in the room. He had experienced too much to be anything but suspicious of the succubus’s motives, or even the veracity of this entire episode. He was all too aware that the very substance of reality as he perceived it was mutable in this place. But he was still who he was at the core, and he would not pass up any opportunity, however slim.

He had to saw at the bonds holding his ankles, and nearly fell as he staggered forward off the rack. He had to steady himself against Yeela’s table, but did not relinquish the hook-knife as he turned to face the succubus.

“Why?” he asked, glancing down at the mangled corpse of the lamia.

“There is no time for idle chatter,” Kireen said. “The window of action is extremely limited… we must move.”

“So… you’re saying to trust you?”

The succubus laughed again. “You’d have to be a truly incredible fool to believe that. No, Benzan, I ask not for your trust. But you are free of your bonds; trust that. Your torturer is dead at your feet; trust that. And your freedom is a tenuous thing; you can trust that, indeed. Now, let us go, and swiftly. Be silent, if you do not wish to be returned to your former condition.”

He tried to walk, and found that he could, with difficulty. His legs were stiff, and the little pains that shot through his body with every movement were almost nothing in comparison to what he was used to from Yeela’s hands.

A hangover’s never going to feel quite that imposing, after that, he thought to himself grimly. But despite regaining his mobility, he knew he was far from being at his best.

“Wait,” he said, his eyes turning to Yeela’s red satchel, and the injection capsules he knew lay within.

“I would not recommend that,” Kireen told him. “The drugs restore, but the side effects will impair you significantly. I need you with your full wits about you, such as they are. You are not as harmed as you feel yourself to be right now; Yeela had instructions to keep you mostly intact.” As she spoke, she turned to the door, and pulled it open slightly. “It’s time to go.”

“I suppose clothes would be too much to ask?”

Even in her agitation, the succubus mananged a lascivious glance that slid up his naked body. With his bones jutting from his lean frame, and his skin covered with a slick of old sweat and dried blood, he knew he had to look almost as frightening as some of the demons he’d seen in his time here. “Don’t worry, I’ll do my best to keep myself in check,” she said, dryly.

Grimacing, his hand clutched tight on his makeshift weapon, he followed her.




Chapter 565

The succubus Kireen led Benzan out into a corridor of bare stone, fashioned from massive blocks of rough-hewn black rock. His bare feet felt like they were being stabbed with tiny needles with each step, but he forced himself to ignore the pain. The place was as quiet as the grave, and he neither saw nor heard the faintest hint of activity in the first few rooms they passed.

“Where is everybody?” he whispered, when they paused at a junction.

“Quiet,” she hissed, drawing him hastily into a side corridor a moment before Benzan heard guttural voices from the corridor ahead, and saw shadowy figures appear in the distance, coming their way. Despite his earlier concerns he now had to trust her, as she led him around a bend, and then into a side room that opened so suddenly off the twisting passage that he nearly ran into the door as she slid it open and ducked inside.

The chamber behind was extremely small, and Benzan found himself pressed close up against the succubus in a way that was decidedly uncomfortable for him. She gave off a heady scent that affected his body despite himself, and he drew back, nearly knocking over a black crystal decanter that rested on a narrow table along the left wall.

“Careful, you fool,” she said. “We will need to move quickly.” She took something out of a cabinet of black wood—the color seemed popular in the décor—and handed it to him. It was a compact package of garments apparently fashioned of dark gray woolens. He unfolded the clothes, a simple sleeveless robe with a pair of matching boots and fingerless gloves, and pulled them while the succubus watched without comment.

“I could use a real weapon,” he said, when he was done. The clothes had been designed for someone of slightly larger stature, and the robe scratched painfully against his abused flesh, but he still felt better for having at least some form of protection upon him.

“If it comes to swordplay, then it is already too late for you,” she said. But she made no move to divest him of the small blade he carried. He held it now at his side as he came up to her again, meeting he cold eyes with a determined stare of his own.

“I think it’s time you told me what your game is here. I’m grateful for being let out of Yeela’s cell, but I’m not going to follow you blindly into another one of Graz’zt’s little mazes. I’ve played his sport before.”

For a moment he thought she would refuse to tell him anything again, but then she leaned against him, catching him off guard as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Ah, but you are still playing, Benzan,” she said, her lips mere inches from his. “It is just that your piece has been upgraded, and moved to a different board.”

He poked her slightly in the gut with his blade, enough to get her attention. “And Malad? Is he another piece on this board?”

The succubus chuckled. “I can see why Graz’zt is so perturbed with you,” she said. “And why Athux took an interest in you, after your arrival here. There is not enough time to explain the rules of the game fully, my dear. But let it suffice to say, that if you are returned to the list of active players, it may advance my interests in the game.”

“Did Delem know the rules?”

“Delem thought himself a mouse, but a raging fire burned in his veins,” the succubus said. “That fire burns on in Malad, who is not corrupted by the weakness that you mortals instill in your young, by the pathetic ideals you espouse: mercy toward the weak, tolerance, benevolence. He has come into his power, and he knows it. His day has come, and he will finish the work that his father started.”

“You demons are all alike,” Benzan said, forcing a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Can’t wait to turn on each other, can you?”

She shifted slightly, and he suddenly found his hand caught in hers, pressing the blade between them. The way it was situated, he could not withdraw it without catching himself on the hook-end of the device. She ran her other hand through his hair, her nails scratching his scalp hard enough to bleed him. Her scent was intoxicating, and he found his body responding to her despite the revulsion that twisted in his gut. “Don’t be so judgmental, Benzan. You are, after all, one of us, no matter how hard you try to deny it.”

She held him for a moment to show that she could, reveling in the effect that she had on him, and then released him. He staggered back, upset at himself for his own weakness. His emotions were a storm that threatened to overwhelm him, and which he barely was able to discipline.

“Use it,” she suggested. “The anger and the despair, and yes, even the lust… that may help you get out of here alive.” He had no reply to that, and she moved to the far wall, where a low-handing buttress provided a shadowy nook. Her hand darted in along the wall, and a small portal opened.

The secret passage was narrow and low, forcing Benzan to shuffle forward awkwardly. The succubus seemed to have no difficulty, but she was probably used to sneaking around in these kinds of hidden tunnels, he thought grimly. In a way, it was a relief to be able to press up against the adjacent walls to steady himself. But there was no chance to rest; Kireen moved swiftly ahead of him, and after a few sharp turns she paused to open another doorway in the side of the passage.

“Come on, come on,” she said, holding the door for her. Benzan sensed the change in her demeanor, and his hand tightened on the handle of his weapon.

The room was the largest one he’d seen yet, thirty feet or more across with a high vaulted ceiling that rose up at least twenty feet above. The chamber was irregularly shaped, with deep alcoves and uneven nooks that were lost in shadow. The place was lit by a half-dozen glowing red globes that appeared to be cemented into niches in the walls; each shone with barely more light than a candle’s flame. There were a few exits, doorways warded by tall arches, but it was immediately clear why the succubus had brought him here.

The secret door opened onto a black alcove. The adjacent wall to their right was dominated by a massive gatehouse, a tunnel twelve feet wide and fifteen feet tall, flanked by a large winch apparatus that appeared to be linked by thick cables to the two black iron portcullises that blocked the passage. Benzan did not have to advance all of the way into the room to know that the tunnel led outside; he could feel the subtle shift in the air.

“There should be guards,” he whispered, as Kireen closed the door and came up behind him.

“Do you think that I would not have made preparations for your escape, before releasing you from Yeela?” she said, taunting him, but also finally acknowledging what he’d not been able to believe until now, that he was going to get out of here. What would come next was still unknown, but at the moment he considered that it had to be better than enjoying more of Graz’zt’s hospitality. “The citadel is nearly empty, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t eyes watching. This is a secondary entrance, but a patrol may be by at any moment. Come, let’s go.”

She led him over to the winch. The device looked to be too large for even the two of them together to manipulate, but she ran her fingers along the rim of the mechanism, muttering words of commands in the Abyssal tongue. The thing creaked to life, twisting the cables around it of its own volition. The portcullises creaked slowly upward, making a noise that wasn’t especially loud, but which sounded cacophonous to Benzan’s hyperalert senses.

“What happens after we get outside?” Benzan asked, while they waited.

“Someone will be waiting for my signal,” she said. “You will be delivered to…”

But Benzan never found out the identity of Kireen’s co-conspirator. Facing toward the back of the chamber, he caught the sudden movement out of the corner of his eye; the faintest warning that would not have been enough to save him, had he been its target. He stumbled back as a fiery beam of red-hot energy struck the succubus square across her back, splashing out in a spray of eager tongues of flame that transformed her wings to blackened char, and roasted her soft flesh. She screamed and staggered, but recovered quickly enough to lunge for the exit, still mostly blocked by the portcullis. Benzan, overcome, lost his balance and fell, the hard stone jolting him roughly, and could only watch as his “rescuer” abandoned him.

But the dark shadow that had lurked in one of the alcoves near the ceiling above was quicker. Even as the succubus started to dive forward, her body jerked roughly to the side, and her forward motion was immediately arrested as she was sucked back into the air. Benzan could only stare in stunned terror as she was lifted into the grasp of a huge black thing that clung to the arch above the exit. The succubus, impaled upon one of the creature’s long limbs, struggled feebly, then was ended as several more of the creature’s limbs stabbed into her, piercing her torso and rending her organs. Blood exploded down from her savaged body, splashing crimson upon the iron gate, the bare flagstones, and on the wide-eyed tiefling who watched as his prospects took a sudden and decisive turn for the worse.




Chapter 566

Cal folded the little book in his hands, leaned back in the plain stone chair, and closed his eyes. For a moment it looked as though he intended to drift off to sleep, then he let out a loud breath and looked back down at the book in his hands.

It wasn’t his spellbook, but a much more compact volume bound in blue leather, just the right size for a large pocket. It had the look of a book that had been lovingly prized and read for decades, although it had only been in Cal’s possession for a little over a tenday.

His fingers passed over the binding, which felt as familiar to him as if he’d owned the book all his life. As he’d done a dozen times already, he opened the cover and looked at the message scribed therein, in an elegant script that was both quick and efficient in its march across the page.

Archmage Balander Calloran,

I have been following your efforts for some time. Your pursuit of the higher talents of the Art we share has been admirable; for a time I too had to address how to balance the demands of magic with the needs of the practitioner.

I am sure you do not need any accolades from me to know that you are among the ten foremost students of the mysteries of the Weave extant upon Faerûn. From this point on, your perceptions will continue to expand outward, into new realities that are both fantastic and basic, in a core elemental sense. You will learn much about yourself, but never forget who you were; keeping yourself grounded will help anchor you when the flux of new possibilities threaten to tear you asunder from yourself.

I know that this is not the most convenient time to explore your transfiguration; like many who have journeyed into the realm of the epic, you face a tumult of danger. I do not imagine that you will have the time for study and contemplation that you would desire. I, too, lacked this pleasure when fate took me into her less than tender embrace.

Likewise you do not need me to tell you of the true nature of your foe.

I offer this book as a gift, to ease your way. It is not a book of answers, nor is it a key to the dilemmas you face. Rather, it is a guide, to help you to develop that which you already know lies within.

The message did not have a signature at the end, but embossed into the fabric of the parchment page was a sigil, marked in silver filigree so faint that the slightest movement of his eyes from it caused it to fade from view, as if it had never existed. He knew the symbol, had carried it with him long before he had come to own the book. One finger held up, as if to assert that there was only one truth, at the center of it all.

The book had come to him through mysterious circumstances. He had been studying in the library of the Guild in Waterdeep. Cramming, really, in the manner that young students had pursued since time immemorial. He was no longer young, but the threat that he and his friends faced from the dark Prince of the Abyss drove him more than any mere professor’s final examination could. He still remembered those spells he had forced… yes, that was the only word for it, spells that he’d jammed into his mind, until their formulae popped into his mind during sleep and wakefulness, pushing out more mundane thoughts like the needs of the body. He’d paid a price for those spells, indeed. But even in the short time since then, he’d already grown beyond the power that had seemed so incredible at the time.

He tried to call up the man’s face, but still could not. Perhaps someday, when he had the time for contemplation cited in the message in the front of the book. All he remembered was soft blue robes, a voice that seemed to radiate a calm competence, and the book. Left for him… he must have taken it, and while he remembered reading through it on several occasions, he could not recall actually thinking consciously about it, until very recently. Perhaps he had just not had the time… or maybe, he had not been ready for it, until now.

He turned the pages swiftly. The few spells within were almost absurd in their power. Several already burned within his mind, awaiting release. And there was much more… formulae that he knew he would spend the rest of his life delving, and probably only to understand a small fraction of them. Other bits of lore, fragments, really, each promising more knowledge if he could only tease them together to reveal their secrets. Just skimming the book, he had to fight the urge to fall into the pages again, only to rise many hours later, as weary as if he’d spent a day in hard march.

He did not have many hours, of that he was certain, at least.

He closed the book with some reluctance, and set it upon the desk before him. Like the chair and the bed, it was plain unadorned stone. The Bastion was a stronghold in truth, but it lacked much in the way of amenities. Fortunately Mole had dug out—of all things!—a down pillow from her bag of holding, and since she’d barely spent ten minutes here before slipping out to explore the citadel, Cal had made good use of it.

The candle upon the desk burned very slowly, but Cal judged that they’d been here at least a half-day, as they judged the passage of time. He’d spoke to Dannel briefly a short while ago, long enough to learn that their situation had remained unchanged. For now. The demons continued pressing their assault, but as long as the Warder remained intact, the fortress was probably secure. But Cal knew that the demonic horde gathered in the canyon outside represented only a small fraction of the forces brought here by the Prince. And he knew that while the magic Graz’zt had wrought had to have taken a lot out of him, it was only a matter of time before he unleashed his final assault upon this final safehold.

Their situation here was extremely tenuous. Saureya had known it as well as they; Cal had seen that the minute he’d seen the once-fallen deva. Or was he still fallen? Saureya occupied a unique position that defied classification. Morgan had given over leadership to him, or at least that was how the other celestials perceived it. The deva seemed to accept that role with the same resignation that he regarded the battle for Occipitus. Cal knew, of course, that Saureya had suffered in a way that he could not even begin to comprehend.

He sighed at the memory of it. They had not gotten off to a good start. Saureya had greeted them within a few moments of their arrival, once the hordeling and his weird passenger had veered off from their diving attack. They had the Warder to thank for that; the statue, barely identifiable as anything other than a rough-hewn pillar, was the source of the golden light they’d seen from the far end of the canyon. Cal had not had time to study it long. The figure occupied the rear of the cavern formed between the shield wall and the overhang from the mountain behind, thirty feet tall, a massive warrior whose features had to be left to the imagination. But the glow coming from it was real, as was the potent antipathy effect that blanketed the Bastion, driving away all that was chaotic and evil.

After what had happened in getting here, Cal might have hoped for a general mood of relief, but Beorna had immediately challenged the deva. “I am surprised to see you here,” she had said. “I would have thought that you would have turned your cloak again by now.”

Cal had winced, although the gesture had not been obvious in the silver dragon form he’d polymorphed into. But the deva had not responded to the dwarf’s challenge. He’d merely nodded to himself, as if noting their presence on a tally sheet in his mind, and then handed them over to his adjutants for assignment to quarters within the citadel. Even the dwarves had been too stunned (and beat up) to react before the deva departed with the Voice, the latter delivering his report as they left.

Everything after that was sort of a blur. They’d been fed, bland but nourishing food that satisfied the needs of their bodies. Then rest, at least for him; Mole had headed off almost at once and he suspected that Lok, at least, had probably spent most of the last half-day helping the defenders on the wall. He hoped that Umbar and Beorna had at least had the good sense to get some sleep; they would need the spells of the clerics before this was done. The demons were probably suffering heavy losses in their ongoing low-intensity assault upon the fortress, but he knew that they were just marking time until the main force of Graz’zt’s armies reached them.

At least in that sense, Graz’zt’s lock gave them some respite; if the demons could have teleported, the battle for Occipitus would have been over in a matter of minutes.

Of course, this way it was just a delay of the inevitable. Given the current odds, Cal could not see how it could turn out any other way. With that assumption, there were only a few options left to them, none of them very pleasant. He had some ideas, but he wanted to speak to the others before he made any commitments, even in his own mind.

His musings were interrupted by a potent thrumming, a vibration that momentarily shook the very core of the mountain in which the Bastion lay. So much for the lull, he thought, leaping up and reaching for his gear.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 567

The canyon that culminated in the white shield wall of the Bastion was crawling with demons, a dark mass that surged forward in an all-out attack upon the citadel.

Arrows, hurled stones, and other missiles flew down into the massed demons, accompanied by the occasional flash of a spell. But the defenders were few, far too few, to halt the onslaught. Only a few dozen angels, archons, half-celestials, and inevitables held the wall, slaying demons that were instantly replaced with fresh attackers from the horde.

From within the demonic host came the thrum of a trebuchet, a sinister device crafted of black metal, dragged here from some unknown source by the fiends. The engine was far enough back to avoid counterattacks from the defenders atop the battlements, and every few minutes the evil machine leapt into action once more, hurling a boulder—or occasionally, a demon or two—at the Bastion. The trebuchet was wildly inaccurate, and thus far had inflicted little damage, but several cracks in the shield wall suggested that time and persistence would lead to additional destruction.

Small groups of chasmes made passes above the wall, casting unholy blights and other destructive magics into the ranks of the defenders. Occasionally one would flutter to the ground, pierced by holy missiles, but for the most part the demons were content to flit quickly back out of range, recovering position for another hit-and-run attack. Those few defenders with bows and ammunition, led by the half-celestial avariel, Abrigen and Callendes, targeted the fly-demons when they could, but at the moment other concerns pressed for their attention.

At the base of the wall, a number of hulking forms heaved through the milling mob of fiends. They were goristo demons, seven of them, dominating their smaller cousins with their sheer size and fearsome mien. The huge bull-headed demons reached the wall and immediately started to climb, stabbing black metal hooks carried in their meaty fists into the white stone, using them to pull themselves mechanically upward. Each goristo carried several babau as passengers, the emaciated demons clinging to the larger demons’ backs, screeching challenges at the defenders above.

A hound archon leaning out over the battlements spotted this new threat and shouted a warning to its fellows. Soon large rocks came plummeting over the edge of the battlements, tumbling down the nearly sheer face of the wall. One goristo took a boulder the size of a man’s torso directly to the center of its face, and it lost its grip, falling back thirty feet to smack solidly into the ground, squashing a half-dozen dretches too slow to get out of the way. Several of the other goristos took hits but shrugged them off, continuing their slow but inexorable climb up the wall. Explosions of dark energies erupted along the length of the battlements, unholy blights and chaos hammers summoned by a dozen hezrous near the forefront of the demonic horde, and soon the barrage of rocks ceased, as the defenders fell back slowed and sickened by the fell power unleashed by the fiends.

From a dense cluster in the center of the horde rose a score of vrocks, their wings beating furiously as they each lifted a pair of small, black-skinned demons, jovocs, in their hind claws. The vrocks rose high up into the air, a hundred feet or more above the summit of the Bastion’s shield wall, before cutting into steep dives down at the defenders atop the battlements. They let out terrible shrieks as they encountered the edge of the antipathy field generated by the Warder, and veered off, dropping their burdens with almost casual abandon. The hapless jovocs fell, some of them bouncing painfully off of the massive overhang that shielded the interior of the Bastion before landing hard atop the wall. A few missed even that broad target, and plummeted all the way to the floor of the canyon, another hundred feet below. Those that did manage to land atop the wall and survive the impact were immediately overcome by the antipathy effect, and fell back in disarray, toppling over the edge of the wall, or huddling miserably against the thick merlons of the outer battlement. Most of them were slain at once by the defenders, led by the compact and heavily armored form of a certain genasi warrior, but the jovocs’ auras of retribution ensured that at least some of the damage wrought upon them was returned to their attackers. Lok saw three hound archons and an aasimar fighter go down, crippled by wounds that echoed those being torn in the jovocs. He himself altered the stroke he’d intended for another of the creatures, and instead smacked it hard with the flat of his axe, knocking it over the battlements to fall away into the vast open beyond.

He looked up to see a huge stone arcing almost directly toward him, and he hurled himself aside as the trebuchet stone struck the ground two feet from where he’d been standing, bouncing as it caromed into the cavern beyond the wall, stopping in a crash of stone shards and pulverized dust. Another dark shape followed it, and for a moment he thought that the demons had added a second trebuchet to their arsenal. But no, the figure resolved into the bulbous shape of a lesser demon, a filthy dretch, which flailed its thin arms and legs as it arced up over the wall, landing painfully in a heap only a few feet from him. It was not alone; others were coming now as well, mostly dretches, with a few babaus, rutterkin, and jovocs among them.

Lok could not see what was giving these demons the power of flight, but if he’d had the liberty to look down upon the demon ranks, he would have seen the glabrezu Aborathaz, summoning areas of reverse gravity into densely packed masses of lesser demons. The glabrezu’s power was not enough to lift the demons all the way over the wall, but Aborathaz had a dozen bar-lgura accompanying it, and as their cousins reached the apex of their vertical ascent, twitching as they floated seventy feet above the ground, they gleefully used telekinesis to roughly push them the rest of the way over the obstacle.

All Lok knew was that demons were landing all around him, as he decapitated a second dretch, and then tore into a rutterkin before it could pull itself to its feet. Again most were immediately falling back before the power of the Warder, but here and there a few managed to resist that repulsion long enough to attack, or fire off a spell-like ability against the nearest celestials. More chaos hammers went off, giving cover to those along the edge of the wall, maybe giving them a chance to regroup. A pair of warden archons, bright golden collars and bracers gleaming on their shaggy ursine forms, joined the genasi, tearing into a babau that was able to resist the power of the statue long enough to hold its ground for a moment, its body quivering in rage.

As if that wasn’t enough, Lok glanced up to see at least two groups of vrocks holding position outside of the radius of the antipathy effect, joined in frenetic dances of ruin. A scream drew his attention around, as one of the warden archons, already wounded with an arrow jutting from its shoulder, staggered, clutching its legs where blood poured out from deep gashes into his thick fur. Lok felt the same pang, a hot pain that felt like daggers being drawn across his thighs. There were no demons within reach at the moment, but Lok saw a trio of jovocs huddled between two of the merlons at the edge of the wall. He was surprised and dismayed to see the demons clawing at each other, opening gashes in their own legs that quickly healed, their aura of retribution inflicting the damage they suffered upon the nearby defenders. The demons regenerated quickly, allowing them to continue inflicting wounds upon themselves, and their enemies.

The genasi fighter started toward the demons, but was driven back as a pair of chaos hammers exploded right in front of him, dazzling him for a moment. As he tried to clear his vision, he heard a familiar noise, distinct over the insane cacophony of the demon host, a roar he would not soon forget.

Nax was returning to the fray.




Chapter 568

Demons tumbled off the battlements, falling to their deaths by the dozens, only to be replaced by others lifted by their flying kin, or hurled into the sky by the field of reverse gravity that shifted across the gathered mass. The majority of those failed to even reach the summit of the wall, slipping out of the narrow magical field to plummet back down to a painful impact, or failing to clear the wall and slamming hard into the battlements when launched up by telekinesis. Those that did make it over were almost always overwhelmed by the power of the Warder, or torn to pieces by those defenders of the garrison that still stood. The celestials had lost the edge of the wall, which had been turned into a deathtrap by the ongoing barrage of unholy blights and chaos hammers, and now fell back into a half-circle centered on the softly glowing statue, taking comfort in the reassuring rays of light that emanated from it.

Black arrows with pulsing red-iron heads arced over the battlements, fired from the powerful longbows of Graz’zt’s half-fiend warriors, soldiers of his elite Blood Legion. The vast majority of those shots hit stone, and as many plunged into the bodies of the demons landing atop the wall as into the defenders. But while those that struck fiends inflicted little damage, those few that hit celestials ripped terrible wounds in the bodies of the assorted defenders. The hard-pressed garrison was falling back, now, overcome by the sheer violence of the fiendish assault, even though the fortress itself was still secure, bolstered by the potent aura emmanting from the statue in the back of the cavern beneath the overhang. Another boulder rose up over the wall and slammed into the cavern, hitting a lantern archon that simply evaporated from the force of the impact, and then bounced into the far wall to the left of the statue, near where a pair of massive stone doors bound in brass stood open, the entrance to the interior portion of the fortress.

Out of the press of demons rose the massive form of the half-dragon hordeling Nax, its symbiant Yavuv clinging to the bony ridge that ran down its broad back. The hordeling had regenerated the injuries it had suffered earlier, but still bore scars that testified to the violence of its initial meeting with the companions from Faerûn. Now it spread its broad wings and flew, driving back dretches and other smaller demons with the backblast from its flight. As it ascended into the air, it drew up a framework of metal bars fixed into a half-moon shape, to which over a dozen lesser demons, mostly babaus, clung. The extra weight slowed the hordeling considerably, but sheer hatred fueled it, and soon it was rising toward the battlements of the Bastion. One babau lost its grip and fell back into the press, but it was just another casualty that was more than replaced by the ongoing rush of new demons that continued to pour into the canyon from the far end.

Lok started toward the knot of jovocs again, ignoring the pain that stabbed through his body. He was tired, but he drew upon that deep reservoir of fortitude that had stayed him through so many battles in the past. While several of his companions had spent time with the defenders on the wall, cutting into the ranks of the demons with arrows and spells, he alone had spent the full time—six hours? Eight? Ten?—since their arrival joined with the defense. Unlike the others, he had no spells to recover, and while Cal had urged him to take his rest while the ongoing demon assault had been more moderate in its intensity, he found that he could not simply withdraw while the celestial warriors were fighting and dying on their behalf.

A trumpet archon had restored him at one point, but he’d since used up the fresh energy granted him by the spell. He could not see the celestial among the defenders now, although he had not seen it fall. There had been no shortage of losses on their side; he’d seen a kolyarut inevitable firing off enervation rays from the battlements get hit by six chaos hammers in quick succession, leaving only a smoking heap of gears and rubble. The bodies of other celestials were strewn about the top of the wall. Those were the fortunate ones; a number of the defenders had fallen from the wall, and a few of those had survived long enough to be torn to pieces by the demons pressed up against its base. Everywhere he looked he saw death and destruction; here a zelekhut creaking mechanically on its side, half its body crushed by a glancing blow from a trebuchet stone, there a hound archon that lay where it had fallen, a violated unholy arrow jutting from its left eye socket.

They were few and getting fewer, Lok thought, ducking under the swing of a rutterkin, bringing his axe around into its back as he passed. The demon crumpled, its spine severed, but Lok was already focused on the jovocs. The demons shrieked as they saw him coming, but there was no place for them to run as the genasi barreled hard into them, driving them off the edge of the wall and into the open space beyond. Lok felt a pain jab through his upper body as the reflected force of the impact rebounded on him, but it was just a minor tally against the serious wounds he already bore.

The genasi caught himself well before he would have followed the demons into that void, but was still given a panoramic view of the battlefield that made his breath catch in his throat. Even with the losses they had taken, the canyon was crammed with demons, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. To his left and right, demons continued to mount the wall, as the vrocks continued to shuttle more up to the top, and others rode up on a violent plume of reverse gravity and telekinesis. The wall shuddered beneath him, and he stole forward enough to see the nearest of the goristo climbers just fifteen feet below him, looking up with unconcealed malice shining in its eyes. The babaus riding upon it chortled in glee, their claws tightening in anticipation of rending his flesh.

And then he saw Nax, rising up with its burden of demonic passengers, already almost at eye-level with him, and for a split-second he was overwhelmed by the enormous intensity of it all, the chaos of a siege more dramatic than any he could have imagined upon—or under—the surface of his own world.

“Um, you might wanna, y’know, get out of here,” a voice came, from directly above. He glanced up, but saw only the merlons to either side, and the sky, empty for the moment, directly above.

Then a form shimmered, and Mole appeared for a second atop one of the merlons, winking at him before she became invisible again. “Sheesh, you’re going to draw their fire, clumsy!” her voice came. “Like I said, I’d back it up!”

Almost as if on cue, an unholy blight exploded around him. He fell back, picking up speed, just avoiding a second blight, and then a third, which erupted in close succession where he’d been perched.

More demons dogged his steps. He ignored for now the bulk of them, the ones that were falling back in disarray toward the edge of the wall, overwhelmed by the antipathy effect. A dretch bounced hard on the stone behind him and caromed off his hip, screaming in Abyssal as it tried to arrest its momentum. A lantern archon blasted it with a pair of white beams, ending its torment. He passed the same rutterkin he’d taken down a moment ago; the fiend was dying from his stroke, but it still tried to grab his ankle as he ran past it.

“Behind you!”

He still couldn’t see Mole, but he acted reflexively, weaving to the side as a babau came flying down from the sky, claws extended toward him. The demon landed awkwardly, the snap as its left leg broke under it clearly audible, but still it lunged at the genasi, gibbering madly as the antipathy washed over it. Lok readied his axe, but there was no need, as an arrow buried itself to the feathers in the demon’s throat, and it collapsed in a quivering heap.

“At them!” came a familiar cry, followed by a dwarvish invocation to battle.

Reinforcements had arrived.

Arun, Beorna, and Umbar rushed forward to bolster the line of defenders, their armor hastily strapped to their bodies, but their weapons held at the ready to unleash carnage upon the attacking demons. Dannel fired another arrow from his fiendbane longbow, striking a vrock a moment before it was ready to drop another pair of squirming jovocs. The impact causing it to drop one of the black demons short, to smack into the wall and tumble down to its destruction below.

It was a slaughter, with the demons slain almost as quickly as they could reach the top of the wall. With the majority of them unable to advance against the aura projected by the Warder, the demons could not engage the defenders effectively. However, neither could the garrison advance back to the battlements of the wall, due to the magical attacks from the demons below.

“Where is Saureya?” Cal asked a nearby archon. The canine-headed creature shook its head, not knowing the answer, only that its hated enemies were nearby, needed to be destroyed. With a growl, it rushed at a rutterkin that had actually managed to regain its feet, having landed off to the far left end of the wall.

A hezrou materialized upon one of the merlons atop the wall, having flown up in gaseous form. It alone of its fellows had resisted the antipathy effect to get even this close of its own volition, and it quickly spoke a word of blasphemy. Not all of the defenders were within range of the dread utterance, but a pair of lantern archons were vaporized, and one of the warden archons and an aasimar cleric fell to the ground, paralyzed. The two avariels, who had retreated to the back of the cavern, almost to the feet of the statue, immediately opened fire upon the demon, but it withstood their initial barrage, letting out a triumphant croak at the damage it had wrought. The two paralyzed celestials were dragged back by their fellows, of whom only a little over a dozen remained.

Arun rallied Umbar, Beorna, and Lok, and led a charge toward the hezrou’s perch. Unfortunately, their rush coincided with the completion of a vrock dance of ruin high above, and a twisting storm of unholy energy slammed down into them, inflicting heavy damage. The blast failed to extend back into the cavern, where most of the rest of the defenders were gathered, but the hound archon that had rushed the left flank had been caught in the open, and was scorched into a blackened heap.

The hezrou cackled and hit the beleaguered dwarves with a chaos hammer, but all of them were able to resist the worst effects of the blast. Its glee evaporated as Dannel shifted his aim upon it and unleashed a rapid-fire barrage of arrows that slammed hard into its body. It took the first hit with a grunt, then the second, and a third, and finally a fourth that caused it to stagger back, slipping on the edge of the parapet. It hung there for a moment, off-balance, before a fifth arrow punched square into its chest, and it toppled over backward off the wall.

The respite was only temporary, as a meaty arm appeared over the edge of the wall to the right, followed by a trio of babaus that leapt up, hissing as they reached the edge of the antipathy effect and came to a halt. A second goristo drew itself up to the left, but it too could not advance against the power of the Warder.

The dwarves marked both foes, but before they could respond to the new threat, Beorna lifted her sword and shouted a warning. The combined forces of the garrison saw the huge figure of the hordeling Nax rise up over the wall, its wings beating furiously as it fought for more altitude. Another babau fell from the frame it clutched in its hind legs, but that still left nearly twelve others dangling from the crude conveyance. A few arrows flew out at the creature, but there were mere pinpricks as it lurched forward, swinging the lower half of its body forward, launching the construct and its passengers up over the battlements. One babau was run through by an iron rod as the contraption came apart from the impact, and the others screamed as the golden light from the Warder spread across them. One called upon an aura of darkness that shrouded them, but that did not protect them from the potent antipathy generated by the statue.

Nax, meanwhile, seemed content to hover in mid-air, perhaps kept at bay by the antipathy effect. Dannel shot it in the meat of its left bicep with a shot that had to hurt, but the creature merely roared, fixing all of the defenders with a contemptuous stare.

“What’s he doing?” Abrigen asked. Both of the half-celestial avariel had depleted their supply of arrows, but Dannel paused to toss the nearer of the two his reserve quiver, before returning to his own barrage.

Cal, shrouded within greater invisibility just a few paces from the elves, was thinking the same thing. A dark suspicion clouded his mind. The power granted to him by the god Azuth came to him without conscious thought, and although none of the mortals could see it, his eyes began to glow with a soft blue radiance as his sight extended deep into the realm governed by the Weave.

It did not take him long to see what he’d been looking for. But even as he tried to shout a warning, he knew it was too late. Within the web of glamer that hovered directly behind and slightly above the stationary hordeling, a powerful evocation was taking form. The spell materialized as a stream of intense, concentrated sonic energy that disrupted the air around it as it streaked over Nax’s shoulder, blasted across the cavern, and impacted the solid form of the Warder.




Chapter 569

Sound filled Cal’s ears, the unleashed vibrations stabbing through his joints as he staggered back. In addition to the full force of the blast, which had impacted the chest of the statue, secondary detonations were erupting throughout the cavern. A hound archon simply exploded as the sonic pulse hit him, while Abrigen was flung backward, knocked unconscious as a blast erupted at his feet. Cal himself was fortunate, as the nearby door to the open tunnel beside him partially shieled him from being hit by the full force of the evocation. Even so, he felt a painful ringing in his skull, and could feel a thin trickle of blood draining down from his nostrils.

Sonics, he thought, grimly. Clever. A regular chain lightning would have had no effect on the celestial defenders, he knew, and a skilled caster could easily direct the blast to avoid any allies in the area of effect.

Of more concern was the effect upon the Warder. Cal could see a wide crack across its chest where the sonic blast had hit it, but the golden glow emanating from it seemed to be steady, for now.

Well. No time for half measures, then.

Cal immediately grabbed his rod, but almost at once reconsidered. While a disintegrate could take out the enemy caster, his arcane sight could not pierce the spellcaster’s greater invisibility, only give him a general idea of where he was. Given also that he was partially shielded by the huge hordeling, the chances of a successful hit were balanced slightly against him.

Dannel took careful aim and fired off a seeker arrow, the empowered shaft slicing just over the hordeling’s left ear before it suddenly stopped hard in a point in space. That shot decided him; he knew that one arrow would not do the job, and that it was likely that none of the defenders had the ability to see invisible objects, at least not with augmentative magic.

His greater dispel had the desired effect, ripping away the hidden spellcaster’s magic. Their enemy was revealed as a youthful human, perhaps in his early twenties, with fair skin and fiery red hair pulled tight around his scalp, down into a braid that drifted behind him as he flew. He was clad in a skirt of silvery metal scales that flowed upward over his body as he became visible, reforming until it shrouded his torso and neck. Cal’s spell had clearly not been either accurate enough or powerful enough to completely sunder the youth’s magical wards; the gnome could identify a field of death armor and a shield spell about him, in addition to whatever spell or item gave him the power of flight. An arrow jutted from his hip, although it did not look to have penetrated far through the protective armor.

The youth sneered, and fired off a second chained sonic.

The spell was just as destructive this time, and Cal was expecting it this time, dodging back again behind the cover of the door a split instant before the full force of the secondary blasts hit him. For the celestials, however, the second sequence of blasts was absolutely devastating. Abrigen had barely gotten back up before a burst exploded just over his left eye, knocking him back to the ground with a rough finality. Callendes fell, dead or unconscious, and Dannel avoided a similar fate only by leaping back into the relative shelter of the passageway behind him. The other celestial defenders lacked that avenue of escape, however. Only a handful of the original garrison were left standing; one of the warden archons stood over the blasted body of its fellow, and a chiseled hound archon bearing a flaming greatsword tried to help a crippled equinal guardinal that lay thrashing on the stone floor of the cavern, bright blood pouring in torrents from its ears and nostrils. The lesser archons, lanterns and hounds for the most part, were all down or obliterated, and those few aasimars, guardinals, and inevitables that had joined them had likewise fallen.

The dwarves, along with Lok, found themselves in a no-man’s-land between the deadly sonic explosions and the line of demons repulsed by the power of the Warder. The four of them had not been caught in the eruption of secondary blasts from Malad’s spells, but they were far from intact. In addition to the devastating blast of a vrock dance of ruin, they’d been hit with a number of chaos hammers, unholy blights, and the damage feedback from jovoc auras of retribution. Demons continued to land around them, hurled over the battlements by spell, mechanism, or host carrier, and while few landed in any shape to offer effective challenge to the four companions, they just kept on coming.

“We have to take him out!” Arun urged, pointing up at the comparatively little figure darting around behind the hovering hordeling. Umbar tried to follow the paladin’s command, summoning a flame strike that came cascading down to engulf both the sorcerer and the hordeling. But while Nax’s shriek indicated that the blast had at least inflicted some damage upon it, the flames cleared to reveal both foes holding their position, relatively intact.

Malad spared a contemptuous glance for the dwarf cleric, but it was clear where his focus lay, as he lifted his gaze again at the far side of the cavern, and the statue which continued to defy him. Nax seemd more upset, and actually started to turn toward Umbar and the others, but the sorcerer stopped him with a harsh command in Abyssal.

Cal knew that another blast would be coming, and another, and again until the Warder was destroyed. For all the power in that rough-hewn representation of a warrior, it was still just stone, and could only take so much abuse. And it was the only thing holding back the demonic horde, at this point.

Even now, Cal could see that the power of the Warder was beginning to falter. A goristo surged forward against the golden aura, the ground shaking beneath it as it stomped toward the battered quartet at the forefront of the rapidly collapsing defensive line. Arun did not wait, charging forward to meet it, his blessed warhammer held high above his head. The fiend swung a huge claw around to greet him, but Arun just raised his shield and took the strike hard, barely slowing as he came in under its reach and brought the hammer up in a powerful arc that drove solidly into the center of its pelvis. The demon let out a colossal roar and fell upon the paladin with an incredible series of attacks, laying into him with claw and horn and bite, hitting with such intensity that a blow from its claw that glanced off his shield struck the ground hard enough to open foot-wide cracks in the solid stone.

The goristo was among the strongest among the demonkind, yet somehow Arun Goldenshield held before that onslaught, even as his plate armor buckled beneath the titanic force of those impacts. The demon roared in anger and lifted both hands to smite the defiant knight of Good that defied it. But Arun did not give it a chance to unleash its attack. The paladin’s hammer swung from the left, and then back again from the right, the two blows coming so quickly that the head of the weapon was a soft golden blur. The goristo staggered beneath the force of those hits, and as its head sagged, the hammer came up in a precise arc that culminated in the center of its skull. A loud thunderclap momentarily silenced the gathered foes, and then the demon tottered backward, landing hard and splaying out upon the ground, stone dead.

“Who’s next?” the paladin spat, flecks of blood spraying out from his broken lips.

Cal knew that another chained sonic would utterly overwhelm them. But even though the sorcerer was now visible, he certainly didn’t have an easy shot, especially with the hordeling still providing good cover in front of him. But they were running out of good options.

Cal lifted his wand, and fired off an empowered disintegrate.

For an instant, it looked like a dead-on shot. But then, at the last instant, the hordeling shifted slightly in its flight, as if prodded slightly by the wind, and its head slid into the path of the beam.

The green ray blasted away a swath of flesh, starting from the creature’s left ear, and then passing along its head until it met the creature’s eye. The eye, the surrounding socket, and a part of the skull beneath simply vaporized, transforming the hordeling’s already fearsome visage into a true monstrosity.

Nax screamed, a primal sound of pure agony that was torn from its gut. Blood seeped from severed vessels that had been whole an instant previous, and an ugly gray mass was visible through the gap, almost a foot across, in its skull.

And yet somehow, the creature lived.

But any commitment that the hordeling had possessed to its mission evaporated. Its wings pulsing off-beat, the demon collapsed backward from its position above the wall, diving back into the open air of the canyon. For a moment it looked as though its flight would end in a doomed crash into the demonic horde, but a black shape rippled up its back and covered the terrible wound, and the creature seemed to regain enough control to manage an erratic but controlled flight from this place of ruin and destruction.

Malad, separated from his fiendish shield, hovered there in mid-air, and Cal knew that another evocation was coming. But a faint hiss from the adjacent corridor announced that Dannel was not out of the fray; in fact, the elf had been waiting for this moment to resume his assault. His arrows flew with pinpoint precision at his target, punching through the tiefling sorcerer’s shield and the sentient armor he wore, piercing deep into his torso. He managed only two hits before the sorcerer recovered enough to slide back, with the third shot glancing off of the magical ward to fall uselessly into the canyon below.

But Malad, while possessed of a certain durability hard-won in the trenches of the Blood War, was not a front-rank fighter. The sorcerer spun and dropped, avoiding a fourth arrow that knifed narrowly over his head. In the instant before he fell below the level of the battlements, however, he smiled maliciously, and hurled his hand forward, launching a sonically-substituted fireball directly into the core of the cavern. The missile—a tiny flare of intensely concentrated energy—streaked inches above the heads of the dwarves, over the corpses of the dead celestials, and straight into the legs of the statue, where it exploded in a rush of pure sound.

Cal was blasted back by that impact, and he felt a fresh surge of pain envelop him. But even through that rush of power, he heard another noise that sent a true stab of dread through him.

Stone, cracking, giving way to a loud clatter of falling rock.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 570

The demons that had been cowering among the massive stone teeth of the battlements surged forward, eager for blood as the antipathy aura of the Warder collapsed along with the statue. With the defense of the Bastion in utter disarray, there was little standing in their way.

But that little included four in particular who were not going to do down without a fight.

Arun, Lok, Beorna, and Umbar met the first wave of charging demons, holding their ground, and for the first few seconds it was the latter who gave way, collapsing backwards to flail out the last instants of their lives upon the cold stone. Arun’s hammer crashed left and right like the regular workings of a machine, and with each blow, a demon was crushed. Lok’s sonic axe let out its thunder only occasionally, as the genasi scored a critical hit, but even the lesser blows left demons deeply gashed, or sent a limb flying. Beorna, calling upon the power of Helm, slew fiends with grim abandon, while Umbar swelled with righteous might, becoming a giant who crushed lesser fiends beneath his boot.

Yet even those incredible four could not hold long against the onslaught, and were soon falling back. Of all things it was a dretch that brought Lok low, seizing the genasi’s ankle even as it died, putting him off balance for just a fraction of a second. That tiny interval was just enough to keep him from dodging out of the charging rush of a goristo, which slammed a heavy fist into the warrior’s face. Lok, already beaten, battered, blasted by fiendish energies, crumpled. Arun quickly stepped in to defend the fallen genasi, slamming the goristo with a series of powerful blows that forced it to turn aside and engage him.

A babau leapt at the paladin’s unprotected back, but Beorna was there to meet it, cleaving it in half with a single powerful blow of her sword. But the assault cost her as well, as the adamantine blade, too heavily damaged by the many engagements with the acidic slime covering those demons, snapped off just above the hilt as she completed her stroke.

She barely had time to draw her dagger before a pair of demons, a jovoc and a slavering rutterkin, were upon her.

Umbar’s greater size made him a prime target for arial demons, including a quartet of vrocks that dove eagerly at him, too impatient to continue their assignment of shuttling demons from the canyon floor to atop the battlements. The cleric held his ground, using his enhanced reach to smite the first demon with a two-handed blow with his axiomatic hammer. The vrock was knocked roughly backward, stunned by the force of the blow, and the other three quickly became much more wary, circling above as they summoned mirror images.

Cal pulled himself up, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it of the ringing that seemed to have taken up permanent residence inside his skull. One glance at the ruins of the Warder—now just broken stone, with nothing remaining above the statue’s knees—and at the onrushing demonic horde, was enough to reveal the tactical impossibility of their position.

“Fall back!” he shouted. “To the tunnel!” There was little chance they could hold, but at least the corridor offered a fairly defensible position.

A rumbling announced the approach of another goristo, which loomed large as it charged straight for him, picking up speed as it came. Behind it was a small cluster of demons, babau, jovocs, rutterkin, and dretch, surging forward eager for blood. Cal saw that the demons would reach the entrance long before the dwarves and Lok, even if his friends could instantly disengage and fall back.

“And so here we are, my friend,” came a voice from beside him. Cal looked up to see Dannel, an arrow fitted to his bow. Behind him, the hound archon with the burning sword lay the unconscious Callendes gently upon the stone, before taking up his blade, and coming forward to stand before the two mortals.

The only other celestial still standing, the second warden archon, came barreling into the scene, letting out a guttural roar as its charge intersected that of the onrushing goristo. The bear-like creature was clearly seriously hurt, with one arm dangling uselessly at its side, but the sheer ferocity of its attack unbalanced the larger demon, with both falling to the side, rolling over each other as they struggled for an advantage. The hound archon tried to rush to its aid, but it was forced to defend itself against a pair of leaping babau. One dug a gash in the archon’s side with a sweep of its claws, but it quickly fell, an arrow jutting from its skull, while the second had barely lifted its own claws to attack before the archon took its head off with a powerful two-handed sweep of its blade.

More demons came rushing forward, but several of them were distracted by a diving phalanx of winged men, shining sword archons. The archons split and dove in a sweeping arc around the onrushing demons, drawing off several, including two of the three vrocks hovering around Umbar. The archons refused engagement, instead flying furiously just ahead of the pursuing demons, both the vrocks and those afoot. By the time one actually got ahold of one, its claws passing harmlessly through the insubstantial fabric of the creature, Cal’s illusion had done its work, buying a few precious moments of time.

“Take him!” Arun commanded, spinning to crush a charging rutterkin even as his second goristo fell with a loud crash to the ground. Umbar turned from the vrock he’d been fighting to lift the unconscious Lok with his free hand, using the other with the hammer to keep the vulture-demon at bay. Beorna, holding off her own attackers mostly by virtue of her heavy armor and the considerable resistances granted her by her templar status, took up Lok’s dropped axe, and used it to kill the babau threatening her. The axe smoked, but fortunately held together against the caustic acid covering the creature. She avoided attacking the jovoc, which could only scratch uselessly at her armor. Still, as she turned to cover Umbar’s back as he retreated, she spared it a quick kick that sent it flying. She felt a brief stabbing pain in her shoulder as her boot connected, but she judged it worth the cost as the little black demon splayed out on the stone, momentarily stunned.

The dwarves fell back, the demons threatening them with every step, but wary of the devastating attacks of Arun and Beorna. Cal aided them with a haste spell. Dannel kept up a steady barrage of arrows, dropping demons as they closed to leap upon his companions. The hound archon tried to move to the assistance of the embattled warden archon, ignoring a handful of dretch that tried unsuccessfully to block him. But before he could reach the celestial, the goristo pulled itself up, and seized its smaller foe in both meaty claws. The bear demon still fought on, smashing the bull-demon across the face with its fist. The goristo roared in fury, and lifted the struggling celestial above its head, likely intending to smash it upon the stone at its feet. But before it could finish its foe, the hound archon Avellos leapt in, drawing his blazing sword across the demon’s gut. The archon’s blessed nature empowered its weapon, allowing it to penetrate the demon’s foul resistances, and a great gout of black ichor erupted from the wound, a gash three feet across from which its entrails bulged sick and bloated.

The goristo staggered and dropped its victim, which fell awkwardly to the ground, still dazed from the beating it had taken. Dretch and a rutterkin bearing a dire axe set upon both celestials, but Avellos ignored all, grabbing the injured celestial by the shoulder and drawing it up, using his own strength to bolster the ailing warden. He paid for that, as demons cut into his muscled body, the rutterkin tearing a bloody wound in the archon’s swordarm before the distracted celestial could counter.

And then the goristo reared up, furious and eager for revenge. Eschewing any subtlety, it lowered its head and barreled forward toward them, crushing a dretch that was too slow to get out of its way.

The warden archon tried to pull away from the hound, but it could not stand on its own. Avellos lifted his sword in salute, and took up a ready position.

Arrows slid past the hound archon, whistling mere inches past its ragged and bloodied fur on their way to the charging goristo. One slammed into its shoulder, followed by a second that grazed its left eye, opening the bulb in a gush of white fluid. The demon, now critically wounded, did not falter in its charge, and even as the flaming sword of Avellos slammed down into it, it crushed the archon’s chest with the bony ridge of its forehead, knocking the valiant celestial backward a full fifteen feet, landing half-conscious upon the stone floor of the cavern. The goristo staggered forward and then fell, stumbling as the warden archon seized its ankle in passing. It tried to get up, but another arrow buried itself to the feathers in its throat, and it finally collapsed in a gurgle of blood as it drowned on its own fluids.

The dretch had been scattered by their huge cousin’s assault, but the rutterkin now came forward eagerly, lifting its heavy and awkward weapon to deliver a finishing blow to the helpless warden archon. Focused on its prey, it never saw the hulking shadow that loomed over it, or the hammer that came crushing down into its body, knocking it aside like a discarded rag doll.

The dretch cowered as Umbar shifted the unconscious Lok over his shoulder, then bent to tuck the crippled celestial under his arm. Even with his strength augmented by the righteous might of Moradin, the burden of carrying both was almost too much for him, and he struggled with the weight as he made his way back toward the relative safety of the tunnel entrance. A vrock dove down toward him, but within a range of two seconds it was hit by both an arrow and a ray of searing light from Beorna, convincing it to pause long enough to summon mirror images.

With the shielding aura of the Warder gone, demons continued to surge over the battlements of the Bastion. Another two goristo climbers cleared the barrier, loaded down so heavily with passenger demons that they’d been slowed to a crawl in their ascent. As the huge demons struggled over the barrier, babaus that had clung to the larger demons for the ride up leapt off and rushed eagerly forward. Vrocks flew over, each dumping a few smaller demons on the stone; a few returned for additional passengers, but most, sensing that the battle was coming to an end, screeched and surged forward to join the attack. Dretch, rutterkin, babau, bar-lgura, and jovocs, along with the occasional hordeling or fiendish creature, continued to land atop the wall, hurled by the trebuchet, the reverse gravity surge of the glabrezu, or even by simple virtue of having climbed the sheer face of the Bastion’s shield wall. Most of those arrived in disarray, especially those flung by the trebuchet, and more than a few were killed by the impact of their arrival. But that still left dozens to press the attack. Three gaseous plumes slid through the crenels and took on solid shape; hezrou demons, eager to be in on the kill. Over it all flew a pair of chasmes, their hatred evenly divided between their celestial enemies and the other demons, which they despised.

Only one thing united this discordant, chaotic horde: a lust for the destruction of their enemies. Thus motivated, the demons surged forward in a wave, running, leaping, flying, and even crawling forward to the attack.

With their allies almost entirely wiped out, and their own strength depleted, already battered and exhausted, it was the companions from Faerûn upon which this Abyssal tide descended.



Chapter 571

The wave of demons crashed into the defenders hard. Arun and Beorna were at the forefront, and they were nearly overwhelmed by at least two dozen demons, mostly the smaller and weaker sort, but no less ferocious for it. The babaus in particular were cunning, setting up for sneak attacks, moving around their fellows to gain flanking positions. A bar-lgura leapt over the two dwarves and tried to assail the weakened and incapacitated foes in the second rank, but was momentarily held at bay by Dannel, who fired two shots into it at point-blank range, before ducking back out of its reach.

Umbar’s oversized form shimmered and shrank back to its normal size, his righteous might cancelled by a miscellaneous dispel from within the demonic press. He saw Dannel pressed, but paused long enough to put down his two burdens, and to channel a heal spell into Lok. The hound archon Avellos had regained consciousness, but could barely hold his sword, let alone rush back into the fray. The celestial tried to revive the crippled warden archon, using an aid spell to bring the battered warrior around.

A loud crashing noise announced the arrival of the goristos, accompanied by the shriek of a half-dozen diving vrocks, the leaping hezrous, and at least a score of other demons.

It would have ended right there; even with the power that the companions had accumulated, they had taken too much of a beating to hold out against such overwhelming odds.

A clarion command issued from the passageway, and a grid of bright blue energy appeared that filled a perfect cube before the great doors. The unleashed power of order’s wrath tore into the demons, slaying the lesser breeds, and briefly dazing the stronger. Several vrocks caromed off the cavern ceiling as their dives went off course, and they fell into the mass of demons below, causing more confusion.

A goristo that managed to shake off the power of the blast surged forward, intent on simply overrunning the defenders. But another figure emerged from the tunnel, a tall, scarred figure with black wings, holding a silver bastard sword that shone with a bright inner light. Saureya met the demon’s charge, driving the sword named Aludrial’s Shard into the fiend, darting nimbly under the powerful but clumsy swing of its claws. The sword erupted with holy power as it smote the demon, and it staggered back, staring down at the smoking hole in its chest.

Saureya looked back over his shoulder at the companions. “Back! Now!” he shouted, his voice full of the tenor of command.

The companions needed no additional urging. The demons were already coming forward again, those recovering from the dazing effects of the wrath joined by newcomers that had not been affected by it. Saureya held his ground for a few seconds, slaying fiends with the blessed sword. None could stand before him; for a moment it was as though the fallen deva and the blade were one, a storm of silver that formed a weave through which the demons could not pass.

But the companions knew that was only an illusion, one confirmed as Saureya was hit by a rapid-fire barrage of spells and other attacks. Two unholy blights enveloped him, and a pair of vrocks and a babau fell upon him, tearing at him with their claws. The injured goristo, followed by its companion, now recovered from its daze, lurched in as well, and while the gleaming sword took off one demonic limb at the elbow, a second tore long gashes in the angel’s chest, driving him back.

“Saureya!” Arun urged, from the doorway. The others had fallen back, bringing with them Callendes, Avellos, and the injured warden archon. Lok, restored to health by Umbar’s magic, stood beside the paladin, holding his backup axe in a ready stance.

The Herald’s Voice started forward to join his master, but Saureya, as if sensing the sword archon’s intent, shot him a gaze that froze him in place. The deva smiled to himself, ignoring the demons tearing at his limbs. He rose up in the air, and spun, the Shard cleaving one of the goristos across the face, shattering its skull and driving back into the bodies of the lesser demons behind. Only then did the deva fall back, swooping into the corridor.

The demons were right behind him. The quickest found their way blocked by Arun and Lok, who laid into them with devastating effect. Then the deva turned, and conjured a blade barrier that filled the entry. Lok and Arun, surprised, staggered back just in time to avoid being caught by the blades. The charging demons were less fortunate, and a half-dozen were sliced to ribbons before they could arrest their rush.

“Through the tunnel, swiftly!” Saureya urged. “That will not hold them…” And indeed, the air around the blades rippled, as multiple dispels hit the magical barrier.

The tunnel was about thirty feet long, a cylinder that appeared to be simply blasted through the surrounding rock. Gouges lined the walls and ceiling, dark shadows that might have been irregularities in the construction, or part of the defenses. At the far end stood a pair of doors that were clearly built to last; three feet of stone covered in bronze plates several inches thick, set into the surrounding threshold on massive stone pivots recessed deep into the lintel. The doors were only narrowly open, and the companions headed for that opening now, and the safety if promised.

Saureya drifted behind Lok and Arun, bringing up the rear of their retreat. They’d barely made it halfway down the passage when the blades abruptly vanished, replaced by a wall of demons that surged after them. A chaos hammer exploded around them, but all of them resisted being slowed by the blast.

“Go!” Saureya urged the warriors, turning to meet a bar-lgura’s hop, the demon’s arms spread to swallow the deva up in its embrace. Aludrial’s Shard danced, and the demon fell, its left arm gone up to the shoulder. A vrock came up instantly on its heels, and Saureya gave it the same treatment, cutting into its body with a deep gash. It shrieked, but the deva was not affected by the stunning effect of that cry.

“Saureya, come on!” Arun shouted, holding position at the doors.

The deva glanced over his shoulder, and smiled a cold smile at them. The angel fell back, but slowly, as more and more demons filled the corridor. Even a goristo squeezed into the tunnel, although its bulk barely fit into the passageway. Behind it, over a hundred demons queued up to be next.

A babau leapt onto the deva’s back, tearing with its long claws. Arun started forward at once, but the deva stopped him with an outstretched hand. Ignoring the fiend, the fallen angel fluttered to the ground, where several demons immediately seized hold of him.

“Saureya!” Arun cried. He would have gone forward regardless of the angel’s orders, but several demons had slipped past the deva, and were now rushing toward him, and the door beyond. He lifted his hammer, ready to defend himself.

Saureya’s head came up. The deva smiled again, and this time there was something grim in that look, even without the gashes that marred the creature’s face. A babau tried to claw his eyes out, but even as it tore long red lines across his skull, Saureya’s eyes flashed with something unfathomable to the paladin.

”Neya!” he shouted, a command in Celestial that sounded clearly over the noise of the demonic surge.

Instantly at that call, sprays of liquid exploded out of the narrow slits in the walls and ceiling. Arun flinched as the cold fluid splashed across his face, but it was only water, pure and cleansing.

For him, at least.

The demons screamed as the holy water burned their corrupted flesh, sloughing off flesh and muscles, and even etching the black bones beneath. The demons holding Saureya simply evaporated into ruined hulks, and those behind let out a terrible wail as they tried to get back out. Unfortunately, the goristo was blocking the corridor, and while it tried to back up, splashes of holy water seared its legs and arms, inflicting a terrible agony upon it. A few of the demons tried to squeeze past it, only to be crushed by the larger demon’s struggles against the stone.

Arun lowered his hammer as he looked upon a scene of total carnage. Even with all that he had seen, he felt sick.

Saureya stood, shaking off bits of demonic hide from his body. Covered in blood and bile, his face streaked with garish red lines from his wounds, he walked toward Arun, his face expressionless.

“Come,” he said.

The two passed through the door, which swung ponderously shut, sealing with an iron clang.





Chapter 572

Benzan half-staggered, half-ran through a warped landscape of iron trees and dark shadows. His breath rattled in his chest like a coin in a glass jug, and with each step his stride grew more uncertain, as if his body was just waiting for the right moment to surrender its efforts, and embrace oblivion.

He saw a fallen tree ahead, a long gray log stretching nearly horizontal across the path. Wary, he ducked under it, careful of the razor-sharp edges that pervaded everything in this place. He found a spot bare of dagger-like needles and jagged ridges and paused to recover his breath.

He felt at the crude bandage at his side, and was not surprised to feel a fresh wetness there. He didn’t want to look at the wound, worried about what he might see.

He could not stay here. The only thing that had kept him alive thus far was the fact that his adversaries did not work together. He’d seen at least four different demons that he could recognize, but that meant nothing; one babau or vrock looked much the same as another to his eyes. The forest at least offered some modicum of cover, but against demons that could teleport at will across the landscape, no place could be considered safe for even a few seconds.

He didn’t know why he kept running; there was no place to go, and he already knew that Graz’zt’s citadel was perched on the side of a huge metal cube floating in space, massive but finite. There was no way to get to any of the other cubes he could occasionally see floating in the sky, and short of encountering a convenient planar gate just sitting around unguarded, no way off of this plane, which he now knew to be Acheron.

But even though his body cried for relief, he couldn’t just give up; it was not within his nature. The demons would likely capture him again, or maybe just kill him. Benzan was not sure which outcome he preferred.

He clutched the weapon he’d liberated from one of the many battlefields that littered the cubes of Acheron; a rusty shortsword, with a single-edged blade about two feet in length. He still had Yeela’s hooked knife, as well, but even though the sword was pitted and probably useless against even a lesser demon’s damage resistance, he felt better holding it.

He started to put his hand against the nearby trunk of the fallen tree, but stopped himself. Even a moment’s carelessness here could be lethal, he knew.

He was lucky to be alive at all. When he’d looked up at the monstrosity holding the corpse of Kareen, he’d thought that he was dead as well. The retriever had almost casually tossed the ruined body of the succubus aside, then had turned its full attention on the tiefling. One of its multifaceted, colored eyes had focused on him…

Benzan shuddered at the memory. He’d thrown himself aside a split second before the fiery beam had raked the stone where he’d fallen. The beam tracked him, but instead of intersecting with his defenseless flesh, it had struck the winch mechanism that had continued its slow lifting of the twin portcullises. Benzan had just kept on running, hadn’t looked back even as he’d heard the Abyssal construct drop to the ground and follow him.

Maybe he’d been due some luck. In any case, he’d heard rather than seen the winch give way, and even before he saw the second portcullis falling toward him, he leapt forward and dove. The noise that had followed was cataclysmic, and he’d finally turned around to see the retriever pinned under the first portcullis, the black iron spikes piercing its body across the line of its torso. Its limbs flailed against the surrounding walls, but it could not get enough leverage to lift itself free.

For some reason, he’d stood there dumbly, watching it. The mistake in that was brought home an instant later as a blast of electrical energy shot from one of the construct’s eyes, twisting through the second portcullis directly at him. He’d thrown himself to the side, avoiding the worst of the blast, but he’d landed on a rock with a sharp protrusion, which had pierced his side and left him with the oozing wound that continued to seep the life out of him.

But there had been no time to ponder the rude twists of his fate. Leaving the retriever to thrash against its prison, he’d run fast and far. The demons had started appearing right after he’d reached the borders of the iron forest, and since then they’d been everywhere, teleporting through the sky and through the woods in search of him. So far he’d managed to stay a pace ahead of his pursuers, but he knew that he would not be able to keep it up for much longer. His body was worn down, even without his wounds. Kireen had not offered him food or drink when she’d released him, and there was no apparent source of either in this place. Nor was there any sign of the succubus’s mysterious contact, although Benzan would have been leery of pursuing him, her, or it even if it came down to it being his only option out of this place.

A sizzling noise cut through his musings like a knife, and he immediately ducked down low behind his rough shelter. He heard rather than saw the demon, and waited only until he could confirm that it was not moving toward him before he crouched low and quickly slipped off in the other direction.

He went about another fifty yards further before the path he was following opened onto a clearing, maybe twenty paces across. A metal spire with numerous spear-like branches rose up in the center, decorated by a fringe of rusted armor, assorted bones, and broken weapons lying around its base. The outer ring of the clearing was marked by over a dozen of the smaller metal trees, forming a dense and hazardous web for the traveler.

Benzan spotted what looked like another trail, and headed immediately in that direction. He didn’t get more than a few steps, however, before another sizzling noise drew his attention up. When he saw the source of the sound, his heart froze in his chest.

The babau demon looked down at him from its perch atop the spire, and twisted its ugly features into an evil smile.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 573

Benzan hurled himself aside as the babau leapt at him, its long claws extended. He felt a rush of pain a moment before he hit the ground, his momentum carrying him forward into a roll that brought him up a few feet away, trailing blood from a trio of shallow gashes in his left side.

The babau seemed to be in no hurry, taking enjoyment in the dire situation that the tiefling faced. Benzan held his sword up between them, but the demon only cackled, feinting with a claw, snickering as its foe staggered back.

“All right then, let’s dance, you bastard,” Benzan said, leaping to the attack.

The demon lunged, but Benzan dodged under its claw, sweeping past it, slamming his sword up into its side as he slipped past. The blade hit with a solid thunk, but instead of cutting the babau’s rubbery flesh, the ancient abused metal hissed at it hit the acidic slime coating the demon. Even as Benzan tried to reverse his grip and bring the weapon back down for a backstab, the weapon snapped off just above the hilt. He fell back, but too slow to fully avoid a raking sweep of its claws as it twisted rapidly around. One claw caught on his forehead just above his right eye, tearing a vicious gash that left blood pouring down one side of his face, partially blinding him.

Benzan shifted to focus his good eye on the demon, and tossed down the broken and useless sword, drawing out the hooked knife that was his only remaining weapon.

Except for his wits, perhaps.

The demon came at him, slowly, its casual pace driven less by caution of his defenses than a desire to drink in his foe’s despair. Benzan gave ground, and led his enemy around the pillar in the center of the clearing, avoiding getting close enough to risk getting cut on the jagged edges of the branches that jutted out from the central spire.

The demon danced with him, teasing him with feinting sweeps of its claws. It too avoided getting too close to the spire, wary of exposing itself to a bull rush that could potentially impale it upon the spines.

The two combatants did a full circuit around the spire before the babau seemed to grow weary of its sport. As Benzan dodged another feint, the demon abandoned all pretense of caution, leaping at him in a rapid rush. Benzan leapt to the side, but the demon pressed him, driving him away from the pillar, out into the clearing. It had not chosen the timing of its rush idly; the area it pushed Benzan toward was marked by a surrounding ring of iron bushes and bent trees that erupted with a spiky maze of low-hanging branches, with no trail openings visible for at least a quarter-circuit around the edge of the clearing.

The tiefling realized that he was trapped, and he held his ground, holding his weapon in both hands, ready for a last desperate defense.

The babau fell into a crouch, and leapt, arms outstretched to counter any attempt by its prey to slip past it again.

But Benzan did not try to evade. Rather, he too leapt forward, if only slightly, and as he came down he slid his feet out from under him, coming down onto his back with a jarring impact. The babau drew its claws in to seize the fallen tiefling, its jaws opening wide to deliver a deadly bite with its landing. The demon came down right on top of him, and for a moment it looked as though Benzan’s maneuver had been suicide, leaving him open to the full fury of his foe.

But as the babau reached the apex of its leap and descended upon him, Benzan kicked up with both feet, catching the demon on its chest with both heels. The babau’s claws tore into his arms, but before it could get a good grip on him, he used its own momentum and kicked upward, flipping the demon up over his head. A terrible scream filled the clearing, and he struggled to his feet to see the babau impaled on one of the bushes, hanging upside down with its head a few scant inches above the ground. The demon’s arms and legs thrashed as it tried to break free, but its violent moves only dug the sharp spines deeper into its body. Two long branches had pierced it entirely, jutting from its left side and right forearm, covered in black ichor, hissing as the babau’s caustic gel seared the exposed metal.

Benzan didn’t linger to taunt the creature or attempt to finish it off; he doubted that the bush would hold it long, and he likewise questioned his ability to harm it with the pathetic weapon he still had. Even as the babau continued to struggle to free itself, he was off and running, choosing the nearest trail opening that was opposite the one through which he’d entered the clearing. He had no idea where he was going, and knew that his reprieve was still probably only temporary, but there was no other choice, short of surrendering himself to his enemies.

And that he could not do.

The demon’s cries of anger and pain faded behind him as he ran onward through the metal forest. Several times he heard echoing cries from the surrounding maze, and once something big passed above, the flapping of wings audible though the tangled thicket of branches that blocked out the sky above him. Fortunately whatever it was didn’t appear to have detected him, and he only saw a dark shadow pass over before it was gone.

The battle with the babau had lent him a burst of adrenaline, but it had also added new wounds to his tally. He tried to clear the blood from his face with another piece of cloth torn from his garment, but ultimately had to give it up. His right eye was gummed up with blood, and the best he could do was wind a strip of fabric around his head, covering the new wound with a temporary bandage. His side began to throb too, both the older wound and the new scratches torn by the babau.

He knew that he was reaching the end of his strength, but he tightened his grip on the knife, and kept going.

Finally, he saw another open space ahead, but as he reached it, stepping out of the dense forest to see the open sky again, his heart sank.

This new clearing culminated a mere twenty feet away in a jagged cliff, a solid gray wall that rose up out of the forest to block his way. The cliff was only about thirty feet high, and would have been a trivial obstacle back on Faerûn, were he traveling with his friends and his usual gear. But here, it may as well have been a mile tall. Even with only one eye he could see the jagged edges that were no doubt razor-sharp, waiting for the foolish climber to attempt a summit.

A noise brought him around; creatures, approaching swiftly through the forest.

He looked for another trail, a path along the cliff to either direction, but the spiny brush grew right up to the base of the barrier, forming a dense and impenetrable thicket. He might have been able to make it past, had he been wearing full plate and helm, but even then it would have been a dicey attempt.

He fell back toward the cliff as the noise of pursuit grew stronger.

Once they saw that they had him, the demons slowed, and they came almost leisurely into the clearing. There were three of them; a thick-bodied bar-lgura, some sort of fiendish hound that regarded him with intelligence in its eyes, and finally another succubus, clad in a cuirass of red iron that flowed suggestively around her lithe figure. She carried a whip, which sparkled with occasional surges of evil red energy.

“You led us on quite a merry chase, little precious,” the succubus said. “I always did think that Yeela took it easy on you; I always said that you could withstand more arduous treatment and still… persist. Now we’ll get to see if I was right.”

She flicked her wrist and the whip uncoiled, its barbed head dropping to the ground as she gestured subtly, and the bar-lgura and the hound-demon came forward around her, malice shining in their eyes.




Chapter 574

The mood in the small room was thick with a tangible sense of dread, as cold as the bare stone of the walls and the rough slab table that dominated most of the space.

The companions sat wearily in their seats, sagging under the weight of defeat and exhaustion. At least they were clean, for the most part, although the smell of demons and blood still clung to them persistently like a second skin.

All of them were there, but there wasn’t any idle conversation. It was as if none of them wanted to add reality to the dire circumstances they faced by talking about it. Even Mole looked subdued, as she sat playing with something in her lap that she’d fished out of her bag of holding.

When Saureya entered the room, however, the Herald’s Voice trailing behind him like a shadow, the mood quickly shifted. Perhaps the deva was just a convenient focus for the anger and frustration in the room, or maybe it was the cold look with which he regarded all of them, his eyes a void that somehow fueled the hot passions felt by the others.

Beorna slapped her palm down on the table, as she half rose out of her chair. “Did you have some other obligation that kept you while your forces were being slaughtered? Your presence on the wall would have been… useful. Not that you ever expected us to hold the line.”

The dwarf’s attack did not alter the deva’s calm façade. “A general does not lead from the front line,” he said.

Umbar took up the attack. “General? Is that what you are calling yourself now, Fallen? Some commander, to let himself be shoved back into a corner, to await slaughter…”

“Friends,” Arun said, silencing both of his companions with a raised hand. “This serves no purpose. We knew the danger, when we agreed to come here.” Umbar nodded, deferring to the Chosen, and while the templar’s expression demonstrated clearly her feelings on the issue, she too fell back into her chair with a loud clank of her armor. Arun turned back to Saureya. “What news?”

“The demons have realized that a frontal assault upon the main doors is fruitless. They are tunneling through the rock. It’s only a matter of hours, now.”

“Is there another way out?” Dannel asked.

“No. Beyond the few tunnels that burrow beneath the Bastion, there is only an expanse of dense rock, and then, the void. The boundaries of this place are absolute to one not able to shift between planes. This bolt-hole in which we reside, the Deepest Hold, is the final place on Occipitus not overrun by Graz’zt’s legions. And soon it too, will fall before the inevitable surge of the Abyss.”

“So what would you have us do, deva? Huddle here and await our doom?” Beorna spat.

“Sometimes, one’s fate cannot be avoided,” the deva said, but as he spoke he looked at Mole, who’s eyes rose to meet his. Something sparkled in those celestial eyes, but his expression did not change. Nor did the dwarves appreciate the sentiment.

“I’ll not wait idly for the headsman’s axe to fall,” Beorna said, while Umbar, at the same instant, said, “Let them in, then, and I’ll send a thousand demons back to the pit before I go.”

“You cannot break the dimensional lock?” Dannel asked Cal. The gnome shook his head. “Even if I had a disjunction, the odds would be long. Graz’zt has sealed the effect to the plane, and only a greater power would have a chance at sundering it, even in a localized area, even temporarily.”

“What of the gods?” Lok asked.

“They will not interfere,” Saureya said with a certainty that could not be breached. “The struggle for the fate of Occipitus will be decided here.”

“Why did we come here again?” Dannel asked nobody in particular.

At that point a general argument broke out, with more recriminations hurled at Saureya, and words thrown back and forth across the table. The deva’s calm replies only seemed to fuel the anger of Beorna and Umbar, and even Arun appeared to grow impatient. Dannel made a comment that Umbar took offense at, and soon there was a four-way quarrel raging around the table. Lok was silent, his head bowed, his eyes shut. And Cal did not engage in the discussion, but rather followed Saureya’s gaze, which kept returning to Mole. The gnome’s eyes fell back to what she held in her lap, and for a moment she just looked sad and forgotten, a child in a gathering of elders.

But only for a moment. She put away her toy, and then sprang up onto the table with a suddenness that momentarily broke off the row, drawing attention to her.

“Seems like there’s only one course of action left to us,” she said.

“Save your breath, gnome,” Umbar said. “I know what you would say, but even if we could sneak out of here, there’s no place left to hide. And I will not slink away from that rabble outside, in any case,” he said, hefting his damaged hammer.”

The gnome put her hands on her hips, looking down at the dwarf cleric with a perturbed look. But Cal said, “Go ahead, Mole. Say what you were going to say.”

“As I was about to, before I was so rudely interrupted. It does seem pretty straightforward, if you ask me. Graz’zt has locked the plane, so nobody can come or go. The demons all follow Graz’zt, and they won’t stop until we’re all dead.”

“So?” Beorna asked. “This we know, Mole.”

A sudden look of realization appeared on Dannel’s face. “You don’t mean…”

Mole cut him off, a smug look on her face. “As I said, one course of action. All we have to do is sneak out of here, past a few thousand demons, make our way across thirty or so miles of demon-infested terrain, and visit the skull one last time. And then, we get inside, find the big boss demon, and kill him. Seems pretty straightforward, actually.”

She folded her arms across her chest in triumph, taking some pleasure in the stunned looks that regarded her from around the table.




Chapter 575

“This is crazy. You know that, don’t you?” Dannel said, checking the dark opening in the rock for the twentieth time.

“The dwarves approved the plan,” Cal said, doing his own check of his magical paraphernalia, including the small bags sewn into his belt that held his spell components. The gnome nodded at the three dwarves, leaning against the wall on the far side of the opening. They held their weapons at the ready, and seemed to almost pulse with anticipation. Beorna, her own weapon broken in the siege of the Bastion, now carried a bright silver bastard sword that seemed to drink in the faint light of the tunnel. Saureya had given her Aludrial’s Shard almost casually, saying that he no longer had need of it. The templar had accepted it with equal aplomb, the gift of the artifact apparently unable to overcome the suspicion that she still obviously bore for the fallen entity.

“That only confirms my point,” the elf said.

“If there were another option…” Cal began.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Dannel replied. “While I may not be in your league intellectually—heck, I don’t even think I’m on the same plane as you, intellectually—I have enough smarts to know that your plan is probably the best chance we have. Heck, one in a thousand is better than zero in a thousand, I guess.”

“One in a thousand? I had actually set the odds at about one in four thousand,” Cal said.

The elf looked at the gnome with a wry look, as if trying to gauge whether Cal’s comment was serious. But Cal turned away as they heard the faintest scrape of leather on stone from the adjacent opening.

“Sheesh, I can hear you guys fifty paces away,” Mole said, as she became visible directly before them. Behind her, they could see the slender form of Callendes, his wings folded tight against his back. The half-celestial was very good at moving silently, but Dannel would have bet platinum to copper that the noise they’d heard had come from the avariel’s footsteps, and not Mole’s. “You do know that this part of the plan requires stealth, right?”

“In a few moments, it won’t matter,” Lok said. “Did you find it?”

“Yes, yes, Saureya was right,” the gnome admitted. “They’re close, too; another ten minutes, and this all would have been moot. Is everyone ready?”

“Let’s do it, then?” Beorna said, hefting the Shard in both of her hands.

Everything had been discussed in advance, and there was no need for discussion as the casters quietly and efficiently summoned a few protective wards. Cal had interviewed all of them before, and had offered suggestions on how to maximize their combined abilities. They had worked well in concert in the past, and had fought several desperate battles together already, but each of them knew that the current plan would require flawless execution—accompanied by considerable luck—to even have the slim chances that Cal and Dannel had been discussing.

“Dannel, signal the archons,” Cal said. The elf nodded, falling back a short distance back down the winding, uneven shaft that they’d negotiated to get to this point. “Take us in, Mole,” he said, motioning for the warriors to precede him. They made no noise; the last enchantment summoned by Umbar had been a silence spell, which he focused on a small dirk that the cleric passed to Lok.

Cal saw that Callendes remained close to Mole in the vanguard. Ever since the death of his brother, the avariel had taken on an almost frightening intensity. Cal recognized that the half-celestial was walking a fine line between commitment and insanity, but the fact was that they needed him, needed every resource they could possibly draw upon for this mission. Saureya had agreed to give them whatever they wanted, but he himself would not leave the Bastion. The deva had only a scant handful of surviving celestials left with him, a token force that would barely slow the demons when they broke through into the last few chambers of the fortress interior. If they failed, it would not matter; the fate of those remaining survivors was sealed.

Once the warriors had proceeded far enough for the effects of the silence to pass, Cal followed them. The dark opening gave way onto an uneven shaft that rapidly approached the vertical, but Mole had helpfully strung up a rope to assist their descent. Cal could feel the tension in the line that suggested that his companions were making use of it; the others ahead were barely visible even to his keen eyes. The spell would cover the noise of any of the warriors fumbling with the rock or slipping on the smooth stone, but if one of them lost their grip and fell outside of the range of the effect, then this effort would fail before it had begun. No sense focusing on that, Cal thought; there were any of a thousand ways that things could go wrong, and they’d be better off focused on just dealing with events as they occurred. If someone fell, they’d have to adjust; there was no going back.

But nothing untoward happened, and the shaft suddenly leveled off and bent slightly to the right before culminating in a roughly spherical pocket of open space, a bubble within the mountain. The only exits were tiny cracks and sinkholes too small for even Mole to attempt. It was unlikely they went anywhere; Cal made that deduction by the simple fact that the enemy’s hezrou demons would have likely found any possible entry, no matter how small, by means of their ability to assume gaseous form. None of the toad demons had appeared within the fortress, which suggested that Saureya’s assurance about the interior of the Bastion being completely sealed was likely accurate.

But that was likely to change, and soon, as the gnome heard a faint scratching sound that seemed to pass through the very rock surrounding them. The demons were digging, tunneling through the mountain itself to get to the last few survivors of the celestial inhabitants of Occipitus. The others, enveloped in the silence radiating from Lok, wouldn’t hear it… but that thought was belied as Lok bent for a moment, running his hand along the stone. He looked at Cal, and nodded.

He feels them coming, the gnome thought. The companions exchanged a look. There was no need to share words; all of them knew the plan, knew what they had to do.

They gave Lok some room—but the dwarves did not go far, their weapons held ready—as the genasi crossed to the far side of the cavern. He placed his feet solidly on the uneven ground, and leaned against a slanted plane of rock. He pressed his face against the stone, closing his eyes for a moment. Then he turned back and looked at the others gathered behind him, and nodded.

Everyone tensed.

Lok shifted, and stepped into the stone, vanishing entirely from view.

The companions waited; it could be seconds or minutes now, depending on what Lok found.

They did not have to wait long. Cal barely had time to count ten heartbeats before Lok unleashed another of the powers he commanded, the power of Dumathoin, into the rock. The alien stone of Occipitus obeyed his command, and an opening appeared in the stone, as he shaped it to his will. The area of effect was not great, but Lok had maximized the efficiency of the stone shape by merely weakening rather than removing the stone ahead of him. As the growing portal revealed the genasi, he slammed forward with his whole body, crashing into the seemingly solid stone ahead of him, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

Those fragments collapsed down into the tunnel being dug by the surprised demons, who fell back in disarray. There were over a dozen of the creatures crammed into the narrow space, mostly cowering dretches equipped with leather bags full of stone debris that they were trying to clear from the tunnel. At the forefront, obviously doing most of the work of digging, were a pair of muscled bar-lgura, their foreclaws fitted with vicious metal talons, and a warped hordeling, a misshapen thing with a squat, almost headless body armored in bony chitin. Four thick arms sprouted from its body, culminating in huge black claws that apparently tore through rock as efficiently as softer flesh. It clearly hadn’t been stinting in its efforts; those claws were bloody, and the thing wheezed terribly with every movement, only hatred—of itself, the demons, the celestials it was ordered to find—driving it onward.

The demons were caught off guard by the sudden development, but Lok didn’t hesistate; without waiting for the others, he lifted his axe and leapt forward, landing in the midst of the demons in the crowded tunnel.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 576

The demons in the first rank of diggers were caught off guard by the sudden appearance of foes among them, but they were quick to respond. The two bar-lgura fell upon Lok, trusting in their superior size and weight to simply overbear the genasi, to be torn apart at their leisure.

Unfortunately for them, Lok was far tougher than his size would indicate, and the two ape-demons were repulsed, bouncing off of the warrior. One tried to recoup by grabbing Lok’s weapon arm, but Lok shifted his wrist out of its clumsy grasp, and drove the axe solidly into the demon’s ugly face. The battle was entirely silent, but no less violent for that.

The hordeling lifted its bludgeon-shaped head slowly, white froth erupting from the gash in its face that formed its mouth. With a painful shake of its body, it extracted itself from the litter of stone that half-buried it and started to shift around to face the enemy behind it. The maneuver was aborted, however, as Arun appeared in the gap opened by Lok just a spare second before. The paladin leapt into the fray much like the genasi, but his course brought him down squarely upon the back of the hordeling. The creature opened its mouth wide and let out a silent screech of displeasure at the sudden burden, but its struggles were cut short as Arun brought his blessed warhammer down solidly into the back of the thing’s skull. The hordeling was slammed down hard into the ground by the force of the impact, sending up a plume of stone dust around it. Its multiple limbs splayed out around it, quivered for a brief instant, and then fell still.

The dretch thralls clearly had no interest in remaining in the tunnel, and started to fall back in chaotic disarray, dropping their heavy burdens. They did not get far, however, before a maze of sticky strands appeared to block the tunnel. A half-dozen were caught in the web, and several others dithered before it, trapped between an unhappy choice of trying to force through the barrier, or turning back to face the deadly weapons of the enemy warriors behind them. One that hesitated too long suddenly pitched forward, the feathered end of an arrow jutting from its splotched back. That decided the others, which leapt forward, trying to pick a way through the web.

One dretch, a loathsome little creature named Uzet, had been almost to the front of the web when it had been snared. Doggedly it picked its way forward, focused on the twisting, empty tunnel ahead of it. It heard a squeal, and glanced over its shoulder to see one of its bretheren a few paces back, hopelessly tangled. Then, suddenly the trapped dretch became silent, although its struggles continued.

A dim awareness of the significance of that sudden quiet pierced Uzet’s little mind, and it redoubled its efforts to break free. However, as it lurched forward toward freedom, the webs suddenly vanished, and the dretch toppled forward to land in an ungainly heap on its fat belly. The demon tried to scrabble to its feet, but fear engulfed it and tangled its scrawny limbs. It turned its head to look back, and that fear intensified a hundredfold as it saw the metal warrior coming toward it, its heavy bootsteps utterly silent, an implacable stare fixed in the glowing gray eyes that were visible beyond the slits of the full helm that it wore. Uzet’s gaze fixed on the axe the creature carried, a terrible weapon already drenched in the blood of its kin. Not that it cared about the bar-lgura or the other dretch, but it had a certain attachment to its own hide.

Self-preservation won out over fear, and the dretch leapt clumsily to its feet. It sprang for the safety of the tunnel—let Nax deal with this terror!

The dretch was still within the radius of the silence, and thus did not hear the whistle of the arrow that tore into the back of its head, ending its pathetic existence in a quite decisive manner.

Back behind the radius of the silence around Lok, Cal slid his wand of enervation back into its sheath, seeing that it was not necessary. He knew that Lok and Dannel would make sure that none of the dretches got out to warn of their presence, so he turned to grab Umbar as the dwarf cleric started to move past him.

“This is the point of no return,” he said. “Regardless of whether we succeed, no demons can use this tunnel to get into the Bastion.”

The cleric nodded. “Go ahead. I will see to it.” The dwarf started back toward the tunnel breach, pressing up against the side of the tunnel to allow Avellos and the Herald’s Voice to pass. Part of Cal’s strategy had held the two celestials back in the rear for at least this first part of the plan; while all of them were shielded against causal detection, he was cautious of the demons sensing the presence of their traditional enemies, regardless. And, he admitted to himself, he was worried about the celestials betraying themselves to their foes as well. After all, such beings were not accustomed to dissembling, and deceipt was central to their success.

The sword archon looked at Cal with a calm expression on its face, not even sparing a glance for the wreckage of demon bodies strewn about the tunnel. It was getting cramped, and time was passing; Cal knew that the chances of something going wrong increased with every second of delay.

“Time for our disguises,” he said, just loud enough for everyone to hear. Everyone except Lok, of course; the genasi had taken up a position further down the tunnel at a slight bend, alert for any signs of additional demons.

The spell took only a few seconds to cast; Cal had already prepared a set of mental images based on what he’d expected to find here. He used the forms of the demons around them when possible; Arun and Lok became bar-lgura, while he and Mole took on the form of dretches. The others became a miscellany of typical demons, vrocks and babaus and other types suited to the size and shape of the individual being veiled. One of the principles of effective disguises, Cal knew all too well, was keeping things as simple as possible.

Dannel got special attention; Cal lingered a moment on him, adding a tongues spell to the veil enchantment. Mole grumbled, although there really was no choice; not only was the gnome too small for what Cal had in mind, but she was also far more useful to them as a scout. And while she wouldn’t have admitted such, Cal knew that the elf was about as good at bluffing as his slippery niece.

Cal heard Umbar’s chanting coming from back down at the breach; almost immediately a faint tremor shook the tunnel.

“Let’s go!” he urged, moments before the roof of the tunnel, weakened by Umbar’s soften earth and stone spell, collapsed, sealing the route back into the Bastion behind them.

Now, there was only one way for them to go, and no avenue of escape left to them.




Chapter 577

Nax was not pleased. The massive hordeling spat, the gob of spittle hissing as it hit a nearby boulder. A dretch cowered away from him, acutely aware of the dangers of antagonizing the more powerful fiend.

The narrow valley, settled in between a nest of jagged black peaks, was smaller now then when the demons had found it. Huge mounds of crumbling stone extracted from the tunnel were scattered everywhere. A few dretches carrying empty sacks milled about, careful not to attract the slightest attention.

The hordeling’s skull was a monstrosity, with a gruesome concavity where half its skull had been, half-formed flesh still slowly regenerating over the spot where the mage’s disintegration had hit. The terrible wound had to be causing the creature incredible agonies, but like many fiends, Nax was used to pain, even welcomed it, in a way. The pain meant, at least, that it still existed, that it clung to what it could call a life.

The hordeling’s expression darkened further as a faint rumbling sounded from somewhere deep within the mountain. Well, that might explain the delay. He’d been prepared to messily execute another of the dretch “miners” for dallying; the steady stream of the wretched little demons coming out of the tunnel, dragging their heavy bags of crushed rock, had suddenly ended a few minutes ago. Nax’s first thought was that there had been another clog; the demons were too stupid to avoid getting cluttered up in the narrow twists of the tunnel, and there wasn’t enough space to send in babau overseers to keep them in line. But Yavuv had been suspicious, and the larger fiend had learned to trust the instincts of its symbiant.

The big hordeling gestured, and a quartet of babaus came forward. All bore grievous wounds that in some cases continued to ooze black ichor. The whole valley was like a giant… what?

Convalescent ward, the voice in its mind whispered. Nax nodded. It understood the concept, if not the logic of it; fiends in general and demons in particular didn’t spare much concern for the wounded. In most campaigns it had participated in, such weaklings would have been torn apart after a battle, as old scores were settled… or in some cases, just for the thrill of slaughter. But Malad was unwilling to waste resources, even crippled ones, until the celestials were utterly and fully defeated. And since the sorcerer was the voice of the Prince, his mandate was obeyed. Unfortunately for Nax, that meant that it was saddled with a company of pathetic, injured demons. Fortunately they healed quickly; the cries of pain were really getting on its nerves.

The hordeling lacked the insight to recognize the irony in its feelings, given its own grievous hurts, but it felt a brief chuckle flit across its mind. Annoyed, Nax turned his attentions to the babaus.

“Go into the tunnel and investigate the delay,” it ordered. Yavuv flittered across the hordeling’s shoulder, and the fiend nodded. “You may feel a touch upon your minds; do not offer any resistance. Yavuv will watch through your eyes, and report back to me.”

The demons clearly didn’t like that command, and they offered weighing looks, as if considering their options. Nax did not stir, but simply fixed the four creatures with a cold stare. Even if they had been whole, four babaus were not a threat to him, and if necessary, he would tear these four to pieces and grab others from the milling throng scattered about the valley.

Perhaps the babaus were thinking the same thing, for they quickly skittered off toward the tunnel entrance, sending the dretches scurrying to get out of the way. But before they reached the black opening, a knot of demons emerged.

The reason for the delay was immediately obvious; the demons were covered in stone dust, and bore other obvious marks of a tunnel collapse. Several dretches staggered out and to the side, but only a small handful; from the condition of the larger demons, it appeared that most of them had not survived. As for those bigger ones, there were more of them than Nax had expected…

But the hordeling’s attention was drawn to a certain figure who emerged from the press, and stepped forward. The babaus drew back in alarm, glancing back to Nax, turning the matter over to their nominal leader.

What is he doing here? Nax thought, as the figure looked around before focusing his attention on the hordeling.

“Lord Malad,” Nax said, the words rumbling deep in the fiend’s massive chest. “This is… unexpected.”

Dannel, in the guise of Malad, came forward, exuding a confidence that was considerably bolstered by his cloak of charisma. “The celestials were waiting for us; they collapsed the tunnel. You will have to begin anew.” He waved absently to the demons behind him. “I will take these with me to report.” He started to turn away, as if assuming that his command would merely be followed. And indeed, Nax would have had no choice but to comply, except for the sinuous voice that sounded softly in his mind.

Something is not right…

What is it?

He is shielded… they are all shielded…

“Lord Malad,” the hordeling thundered. “How did you get into the shaft? I have been here watching since you departed last.”

The expression of the “sorcerer” narrowed. All of the demons crowded about the valley were now watching the scene, some no doubt excited at the possibility of witnessing a clash between their liege lord and a not-quite-popular underling. None paid heed to a few dretch that slipped deeper into the center of the gathering.

“Your task is not to question me, hordeling. You will obey.”

The demons behind the sorcerer edged forward, as if eager for a conflict to begin.

But Nax merely dipped his monstrous head slightly. “As you command, lord,” he said. But the motion also revealed Yavuv, the thing that had once been a babau wrapped around the greater creature’s neck. Its eyes flashed red as it looked upon Malad, and it unleashed a tendril of power into him.

The sorcerer snarled, and raised an arm as if to launch a magical attack. But before he could act, the air around him shimmered, and his borrowed form dissolved, revealing the elvish arcane archer in all his natural glory.

Demons shrieked as the deception was unraveled. There were over a hundred in all crowded into the close confines of the valley: dretch, rutterkin, babaus, bar-lgura, jovocs, and even a burning palrethee. Altogether it was a riot of sound and glistening alien bodies. Foremost among them was Nax, who recognized this archer, a foe that had stung it already. The hordeling rose up ponderously, the ground shaking beneath its massive form as it lifted its fists to smite this enemy that had been foolish to confront it for a final time.




Chapter 578

The valley echoed with the roars of demons as they leapt up, their agonies forgotten in the face of an enemy, and surged forward toward Dannel. But none were ahead of Nax, who lifted his clawed fists high above his body before driving them down in an arc that would pulverize the arcane archer into elvish paste. The veiled warriors rushed forward to intervene, but there was no way they could reach Dannel before that blow struck.

But an instant before Nax’s attack landed, Cal cast his first ninth-level spell.

To the companions, all they saw was a haze of insubstantial forms that exploded outward from the gnome. During the exchange between Nax and Dannel, Cal had taken up a position roughly in the center of the compact valley, in the midst of the gathered demons. They ignored him, seeing only a pathetic, simpering dretch.

But now, those same demons saw terrors starker than even the worst nightmares of the Abyss. Demons are bullies by nature, but in their hearts they are motivated by fear as much as by the lust for violence. Their screams redoubled, but now they were cries of stark, unrelenting horror as Cal’s weird took hold.

It lasted only a few seconds. When the images had dissipated, and the cries of the demons had faded, the little gnome mage from Faerûn was surrounded by the wracked bodies of nearly a hundred demons, their faces frozen in terrible rictuses of abject fear, the fear that had killed each and every one of them.

Nax was not slain, but even it had been seriously affected by the spell. The weird hit it in the middle of its attack, and it staggered to the side, its fists smacking harmlessly upon the bare stone several feet to the left of Dannel. The elf darted back from the stunned hordeling, speaking a word of command that caused his magical quiver to eject his fiendbane longbow. He took hold of the weapon and fell back beyond the charging warriors, stringing it with a practiced ease.

Nax recovered quickly, but not before Lok, Arun, and Beorna slammed hard into him, driving their weapons into his huge body. The hordeling possessed an incredible toughness and vitality, even injured as it was, but even it was hard-pressed against that onslaught. Lok’s axe and Arun’s hammer drove hard into its torso, and when it tried to knock them aside with a powerful sweep of its arm, Beorna stepped in with a two-handed swing of Aludrial’s shard, taking the limb off at the elbow.

A few of the other demons that had survived the weird—a half-dozen babaus, and the palrethee—began to stir, shaking off the stunning effect of Cal’s spell. But they were broken, and any thought of continuing the attack fled their still-addled minds as they watched their champion being dismembered. The only routes out of the valley were treacherous, twisting paths up the sides of the valley that led to narrow gaps between the surrounding peaks. The wounded demons made for these exits, pushing each other out of the way when necessary, intent now on escape.

“None of them must get word out,” Cal said calmly, blasting Nax with an enervation from his wand.

Dannel and Callendes nodded, and began plying their bows. The Voice had started toward the greatest foe, the hordeling and its symbiant, but Cal’s words reminded it of its duty, and it flew across the valley to block the escape of a trio of fleeing babaus. The fiends threw themselves upon the celestial with a furious desperation, but the sword archon quickly demonstrated the futility of their efforts.

Umbar and Avellos rushed up to join in the pounding upon Nax, but the hordeling had clearly had enough of this one-sided melee. Its wings pounded as it started to lift into the air, narrowly avoiding a sweep at its legs from Arun’s hammer.

“For Helm!” Beorna cried, as she lifted Aludrial’s Shard in her hand like a spear, and hurled it into the hordeling’s body.

The weapon buried itself to the hilt in the hordeling’s chest. Nax screamed, its remaining claw clutching at the wound. Its wings continued to pound at the air for a few moments, and then the crippled creature plummeted straight down, landing with a colossal impact that shook the ground under the companions’ feet.

The death of the hordeling brought a sudden quiet to the mountain valley. The last babau had fallen, pierced by four arrows, and none of the demons left scattered upon the uneven rocks stirred. Beorna went to recover her weapon, while Cal gestured for everyone to gather quickly around him.

“We don’t have very long… even if they didn’t hear that, these mountains are probably crawling with demons; a vrock or a quasit could fly over at any second.”

They knew their roles, and their assignments; the companions quickly split into two groups, with half gathering around the Herald’s Voice, and half around Umbar. The cleric began casting, and the sword archon closed its eyes as it called upon its own divine power.

Cal was casting as well, and just before the others finished he laid a seeming upon all of them, layered over the veil. Their demonic forms did not change in substance, but took on a pale, almost translucent coloration, and soft white robes appeared draped around them.

“Remember, stay together, and stay focused on the objective,” he said, a moment before the wind walk spells took hold, and the companions began to dissolve into vaporous form. Within thirty seconds the transformation was complete, and the ten of them shot off into the sky, darting in between the gap between two of the rising peaks, and rapidly vanishing into nothing as they sped toward their destination.

For at least a full minute after they departed, the valley was silent. But then, a dark shadow shifted within a cleft in the rocks, half-hidden by the fallen mound that had been Nax. Red eyes gleamed within that amorphous mass, staring with malice at the point where the wind walking heroes had disappeared.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 579

Two tight phalanxes of vaporous forms streaked across the sky of Occipitus, making directly for the plane’s dominant feature, the massive iron mountain created by its new ruler, the Demon Prince Graz’zt.

Cal was only dimly aware of the ground passing by far below them. Thus far they’d made excellent time, leaving the mountains behind and accelerating rapidly to a speed that should get them to destination in under an hour. They’d encountered a few flying demons, a few scattered flocks of vrocks, an occasional lone quasit flittering on some errand, and once a pair of succubi carrying an iron chest between them. None of the demons had spotted them, though in each case they’d shifted their course subtly to avoid coming too close.

The gnome often looked back at the mountains, but so far there had been no signs that their departure had been detected, and that a pursuit had been ordered. To him it seemed inevitable that there would be one; the demons, or at least their tiefling leader, would quickly come to the realization that those who had left the devastation in the valley had not retreated back into the caverns under the Bastion. But without the ability to teleport, their foes would have a difficult time catching up to the ten raiders before they arrived at their destination.

Cal was worried about what they would find when they got there. They passed over a number of large groups of demons, most still moving in the direction of the canyon culminating in the Bastion. It looked as though Graz’zt had deployed the bulk of his army, however, and they saw no massive columns like the one that had assaulted the fortress, and breached its outer defenses. The Voice’s words about the size of the force that the demon prince commanded continued to sound in his mind, and he wondered if they would arrive at the skull to find an impenetrable ring of defenders, including wary fliers equipped with true seeing. Or for that matter, if Graz’zt even now was watching them, preparing for their arrival at his sanctum.

There were defenders, that much was obvious even now, with miles left to go until they reached their destination. This far, all he could make out were tiny specks hovering in the air above the fortress, and black shapes that spread out across the ground at its base like splotches of ink, tremoring slightly with movement.

Well, they would find out what was there soon enough.

Cal’s musings were interrupted by a sudden unexpected to the side. He turned in time to see a wispy form, one of the four traveling behind the Voice, break formation and start descending in a steep dive. He couldn’t quite make out its identity, with the distorting effect of the wind walk, but it was too big to be Mole, and probably not Dannel; the elf would not have broken with them without getting the attention of all of them first.

So it had to be Callendes or Avellos, the hound archon. Cal darted ahead of his group to get the attention of the others, and then pointed down. The other group had slowed as well, uncertain how to react. Already, the lone figure was almost halfway to the ground below, almost invisible against the start backdrop. They were on the edge of one of the fibrous forests that appeared on the landscape of Occipitus like wild tufts of hair, but other than that there were no obvious features to indicate why this section of the plane was special.

Damn it, Cal thought. He was tempted to ignore the break and press on, but before he could make a decision, the Voice spread its insubstantial wings and started down, the others following behind.

Hoping that they weren’t making a big mistake, Cal followed them.

* * * * *

A dozen babaus cavorted the clearing, celebrating a climax of blood and suffering with an enthusiasm that only true demons could muster. The fibrous stalks of the weird Occipitan “forest” surrounded them, some still crusted with dangling gobs of ruined demonic flesh. Some of the slain demons had been strung up from some of the thicker fibers around the perimeter of the clearing, the garish decorations hanging several feet above the ground. A thick stench of battle and ruin absolutely filled the air, like a fog that the demons danced through as they experienced what for their kind passed as joy. Altogether the setting made the place a scene of horror, even if one did not consider the feature that dominated the clearing.

But even the gory scene and its grisly participants paled before the suffering embodied in the figure bound spread-eagled to a cluster of fibers at the far end of the clearing. The demons had lashed together over a dozen fibers to support the captive, but still they sagged heavily with its weight, until its feet dangled a mere pace above the ground. Blood both old and new puddled beneath it, the crusted splatter occasionally augmented by another drop that fell ponderously free from the ruined form. A babau would occasionally break from the circle and rush the dangling form, tearing new gashes in its already ruined legs and body with a sweep of its claws before rejoining the dancers, licking the bloody gore from its claws.

The disfigured captive was no longer identifiable as the leonal Ediir; even one who had known the celestial would have been hard-pressed to identify it. Most of the skin covering the leonal’s legs and arms dangled in long strips, flayed from the limb by babaus careful not to unduly sever the blood vessels beneath. The celestial’s torso had likewise been painstakingly cut open, the flesh and muscles parted layer by layer until the organs beneath glistened wetly in the open air. And the face—that was a sight best avoided, for there was little there now that reflected the strength and quiet dignity that had once been possessed by the noble warrior.

Distracted by their pleasure, the first warning that the demons got of the threat was when a loud cry drew their attention around, and the hound archon Avellos leapt into the clearing. The celestial was still covered by Cal’s veil, giving it the appearance of a muscled humanoid fiend, but its hostile intent was immediately evident. The first babau still had a dumb look of surprise on its face when the celestial’s flaming greatsword crushed into it in a mighty power attack. The demon’s head came apart like an overripe melon, and the fiend fell to the turf in a gory heap.

The babaus shrieked and immediately fell upon the archon from all sides, but even as they rushed Avellos death began to rain down upon them. Arrows shot out from the fibrous forest, burying themselves to the feathers in the emaciated bodies of the demons. An explosion of holy energy erupted in the clearing, the holy smite blinding the fiends with its intensity even as the pure deluge of power seared their corrupt flesh.

Arun, Lok, and Beorna came charging into the clearing on the heels of the archon, but even as they started hacking at the disoriented babaus, Mole’s voice sounded from somewhere, shouting a warning.

“Over on the right… incoming!”

The defenders had just enough time to look in that direction before the thicket of fibers spread open, and another dozen babau surged into the clearing, accompanied by a pair of massive howlers, each easily fifteen feet in length. The newcomers announced themselves with a ferocious roar that accompanied a violent charge, as they leapt across the clearing into the fray.




Chapter 580

Faced now with almost two dozen babau and a pair of oversized howlers, the companions found themselves engaged in yet another desperate battle.

The howlers relied on their sheer size and the momentum of their rush as they bowled into the melee, bearing down enemies and allies alike. The first slammed hard into Beorna, knocking her prone and pinning her under its several thousand pounds of bulk. The second tried to do the same with Lok, but the genasi brought up his shield and stepped aside, taking a hard but glancing hit that separated him from the babau he’d been fighting. He set his feet to counterattack, but before he could strike a pair of babau leapt upon him from behind. Twisting, he shook free the first, but bad luck confounded him and his boot caught in a corpses’s ribcage as he turned. The second babau took advantage at once by dragging the genasi down to the ground.

Arun rushed forward to Beorna’s aid, catching the howler’s attention with a powerful swing of his hammer that caught the creature solidly on the side of the head. The howler responded by lashing out at the paladin with a violent thrashing surge, its movements grinding Beorna into the ground beneath it. The creature’s bite failed to connect, but one of the sharp spines that jutted from its neck impaled the dwarf’s weapon arm. Arun grimaced, but merely tightened his grip on his holy avenger, his jaw tightening in a promise of divine retribution. A pair of babaus recovering from the smite tore at him from his flanks, but he ignored them for now, focused on the larger foe.

Avellos continued to sweep his huge sword about with raging abandon. The babau were resistant to the flames that engulfed the magical blade, but that did not spare them from the edge of the divine steel. But despite the aid from the others, the hound archon was still assailed by five of the foul, cackling demons, which came on him from all sides. Their claws found vulnerabilities that they exploited through cunning sneak attacks, and within just a few seconds the celestial’s fur was matted with its own blood, draining from deep gashes in its arms and torso.

The second wave of babaus came crashing into the melee on the heels of the howler rush; or at least some of them did, for a few found themselves distracted as they crossed the clearing. One suddenly found its legs tangled up beneath it, and it pitched forward to land in an awkward heap upon the ground. One of its fellows turned to see a small figure leap up at its face, darting past before it could react, its rapid passage leaving a reminder in the form of an explosion of pain in its left eye. The demon let out a violent scream and spun around to attack its tormentor, but saw only another of its fellows, likewise twisting around trying to find the streaking foe.

Then a loud whistle drew both demons around, to where a mere dretch stood grinning at them ten feet away.

“Well, you guys coming, or what?”

The demons, joined by the third as it picked itself up off the ground, snarled and rushed toward the veiled Mole.

The last knot of babaus—four of the snarling demons—diverted their rush toward the far edge of the clearing, where the barrage of arrows continued to knife out at their fellows. Hoping perhaps to ambush the archers, they instead found themselves confronted by a dwarf cleric and another archon. Umbar, delayed slightly as he augmented himself with the divine power of Moradin, intercepted the leap of the foremost demon with his axiomatic hammer, crushing its chest and reversing its momentum to land hard on its back. The Herald’s Voice moved forward to join him, its hovering sword materializing in the air before it, but Umbar forestalled it before it could join the melee.

“Help the hound!” he urged. “I’ll deal with these wretches!”

The celestial nodded and lifted into the air, while the babaus, disappointed in losing a shot at one of their hated enemies, took out their frustrations on the dwarf.

Lok’s kept an iron grip on his axe as he pushed his fist into the spongy turf, slowly levering himself up. The babaus grappling him were spurred into a frenzy as they tried to keep him down, but they may as well have been clawing at a stone wall for all the effect that their claws had on his heavily armored body.

Of more concern was the howler, which turned on him with a vengeance. Before it could unleash a full attack, a black beam shot out from the surrounding forest and struck it, weakening it. But that did not stop it from attacking; if anything its furious assault seemed to double its earlier effort. Its jaws closed on Lok’s shield, tearing it from his grip and nearly taking his forearm with it, and a spine lodged in the shoulder joint of his left arm, poking through the layered mail and digging painfully into his flesh.

Lok ignored it all, and placed his feet with deliberation under him. His head came up, slowly.

This was his spot.

Arun felt a pain stab into his left hip as one of the babaus raging on him finally managed to work its sharp nails under his armor. The howler reared up, briefly revealing Beorna’s struggling form under its chest.

“Get this damned thing off me!” she shouted, slicing her dagger out of its scabbard before the thing came down on her again.

The howler opened its jaws and twisted its head around, apparently intending to simply gobble up the defiant paladin.

Arun was waiting for just such an opportunity.

The holy avenger warhammer swept up and down in a blur, striking the howler solidly on the side of its jaw. Bone snapped under the impact; the howler started to rear back, but Arun wasn’t finished. Stepping past the babaus as if they weren’t even there, he drove the head of the hammer into the left front knee of the monster, pulverizing that joint, and causing the howler to tip over onto its side. The thing lifted its head and screamed, a sound that abruptly ended as the paladin brought the hammer up one last time, for a third consecutive power attack that crushed its throat. Now crippled, gurgling as it tried to breath, the howler flopped over backward, sliding off of Beorna. A babau immediately leapt onto her, but she grabbed it and slammed her mailed fist into its face.

“I… am… not… in… the… mood!” she yelled, punching it with every word that tore through her lips.

Arun, seeing that she had the matter in hand, turned to deal with his own enemies. The babaus shared a look, and fled.

Avellos was now in a truly desperate situation. He had slain another babau, but four still threatened him, exploiting his open position to launch nasty flanking attacks. And his greatsword was smoking from more than the burning magic that infused it; the babau acid was having its corrosive effect.

But even as the demons gleefully chortled in anticipation of another fallen foe, the situation abruptly shifted. A long arrow caught one of the babaus in the back of the head, slaying the already-wounded demon. And then the Voice appeared, landing in a flutter of white cloth and soft wings, its sword coming down in a strike that cut another of the demons near in twain. The sword archon took up a protective position adjacent to the stricken hound, preventing either of them from being effectively flanked by the two remaining demons.

But faced with celestials, the demons did their best, and one actually managed to get its claws around Avellos’s throat before the hound broke free, and drove his sword through the creature. Unfortunately the attack was too much for the battered blade, which snapped off just above the hilt.

Lok, meanwhile, met the howler’s rush. The creature slammed into him again, but the genasi had taken up a defensive stance, and the howler’s head was driven up as Lok took its weight upon him. The image of the huge monster, thousands of pounds of abyssal horror, held up by a five-foot warrior, was almost comic. But then, Lok heaved, and the howler’s feet were lifted up off the ground. The creature flailed for a moment, confused by this unexpected turn.

But then, Lok started hacking at its belly.

The melee was already starting to shift, sliding inexorably into a rout. The demons, confronted by the furious power of their enemies, started to fall, first by the handful, then in a deluge. Umbar, facing four babaus, slew two and had started on a third when his magical hammer, almost covered in glistening red slime, finally succumbed. The cleric spat a dwarven curse and grabbed the injured demon’s head, blasting it with an inflict wounds spell that caused it to shudder in agony. Snapping its neck for good measure, he turned to face his last foe.

He was too late, he saw, as the demon was on the turf. It was hard to see the arrows in its chest; only a bit of the feathered ends was visible.

Those facing the dwarves were the first to break. Even as Lok dropped the dying howler to the ground, the two babaus attacking him decided that maybe they’d picked the wrong opponent. They fled, one unfortunately taking a path that led it too close to Arun. The demon went down, its skull crushed like an eggshell beneath an armored boot. The other one got away, disappearing into the fibrous forest, running with an abandon that probably didn’t flag until it reached the far side of the plane.

Mole’s foes were probably the last to realize that the battle was ending. The gnome had led the three of them on a merry chase around the entire far half of the clearing, over and under and around the fibrous stalks, making their swipes look clumsy as they grabbed only air. The gnome barely bothered to attack, managing a few minor swipes with her dagger that poked and prodded the demons into a greater fury. Each time the demons rushed her, they seemed to get just almost close enough to grab her, before she twisted or leapt or tumbled out of reach.

“Ah, it’s been fun, but I think I’ll sit out the next dance,” she said to them, finally, coming to a stop in the middle of the clearing.

Behind her, Arun, Beorna, and Lok stood, covered in demonic ichor, their weapons bare and bloody in their hands.

The demons, enraged beyond the dictates of common sense, leapt to the attack.

And then, it was over.

As silence returned to the clearing, and the companions checked themselves and their gear for damage, Avellos approached the devastated form of his commander. The hound, its wounds forgotten, lowered its gaze, its hand opening to drop the broken sword to the ground.

There was no chance of any other fate, but the Voice verified it anyway, briefly brushing the leonal’s hand with a gentle touch. The sword archon sighed, and lowered its head.

The great warrior Ediir was dead.




Chapter 581

A great sadness hung over the scene of carnage in the clearing within the fibrous forest. But there was also a fair degree of anger.

“What was that all about, celestial?” Umbar said, coming forward. Beorna was only a step behind him, grimacing as she favored limbs crushed by the weight of the howler.

“We don’t have time to delay,” Cal said, coming forward into the clearing, sliding one of his wands into the case at his belt. “More demons will be on us at any moment; don’t think that the ones that got away won’t be back with friends.”

“I think we need to resolve this, and now,” Beorna said, tucking her thumbs into her belt. “If we cannot rely upon a member of the team, we need to know it, before he gets us all killed in a crisis situation.”

“Ediir was one of the great ones,” the Voice explained. “Avellos was his second, and was ordered to leave him when one of the gates opened…”

“We do not question your loyalty, hound archon,” Umbar interrupted. “But greater things are at stake in this than one man. If I were to fall, I would expect you to leave me, without hesitation, for the greater good. I would have thought that an archon, an embodiment of Law… duty… order… would understand this above all.”

A few of the companions shared looks as the dwarf spoke. The archon, however, merely nodded in acquiescence. “Your words speak truth. I have twice failed in my duty,” it said, its eyes falling to the shattered weapon at its feet.

Arun looked at Beorna, and there was a hint of reluctance in the way she met his gaze. “You would leave me behind, Beorna?” he said, quietly.

“Damned straight, paladin,” she said. “And I would expect nothing less from you. I do not often agree with mister high holiness over there, but in this he is one hundred percent correct. Duty trumps all.”

“Oh, for the love of…” Dannel said, coming forward, exasperated. “What is it with you lawfuls? I swear, I’ve seen orc drinking contests that weren’t as competitive as this whole ‘who’s the most noble’ crap! So Avellos spent some time with a leonal, and some independent thinking rubbed off on him. Good! Cripes, loyalty to your friends isn’t a weakness, guys!”

“This is not some fairy elf game we are playing at, archer,” Umbar began, “There is too much at stake…”

Lok interrupted him by stepping forward, and smacking the ground before him with the top of his axe. “Nobody gets left behind. Period. Some of us may not survive this quest, but we abandon no one while they yet breathe.”

For a moment, there was only silence, then the sword archon spoke. “Well said, voice of the Mountain.”

“Yeah, sheesh, what’s with you guys?” Mole said, but the others were already moving on, gathering their weapons, casting healing spells to treat the wounds suffered in the brief but intense battle. Umbar turned around and walked away, grumbling. Avellos had turned back to the slain leonal, and laid a hand gently upon its battered body.

“Go forward in peace, mighty warrior.”

The Voice gestured for the others to fall back, and then called down a flame strike that engulfed the leonal. The holy flame embraced the slain celestial, and although it burned for only a few seconds, the twisting white pillar left behind nothing but ashes and a few stunted stalks when it dissipated.

“Let’s get moving,” Cal prodded.

Beorna and Umbar quickly started healing the warriors damaged in the fray, while the Voice attended to the dire wounds covering Avellos. The others cleaned their weapons as best they could, careful of the damaging secretions that had come off of the babaus. As they were getting ready, Dannel came up to Umbar.

“I see you lost your weapon,” he said to the cleric.

“I do not need an elvish blade,” he said, with a nod to the longsword at Dannel’s belt.

“I had something else in mind,” he said, whispering a word of command to his magical quiver. The device produced his quarterstaff, which he offered to the cleric. “It’s name is Alakast, he said. “It… well, let’s just say that it doesn’t like fiends much.”

The dwarf nodded, recognizing the potent runes etched into the length of the weapon. “I will see that it is put to good use.” Resting the weapon against his shoulder, he went over to confer with Arun.

“A good choice,” Cal said.

Dannel nodded. “I haven’t had much need for it of late. Although I am getting a little worried about arrows.”

“I thought you brought spare bundles in Mole’s bag of holding?”

“Yeah, ten bundles, two hundred shafts. Shot those, and the extra ones in my pack,” the elf said. “And I’ve already borrowed extras from Lok and Arun. I do go through them pretty quickly, and we’ve been in at least six major engagements since we arrived here. I also gave two bundles to Callendes, before we left; he ran out before the end of the battle at the Bastion. I’m down to the ones left in my magical quiver; I’ve got a good fifty or so left, but once those are gone, my combat effectiveness is going to drop significantly.”

“I think Beorna has a few left,” Mole said suddenly from behind him, causing the elf to jump in surprise. “I’ll go ask her.” Smiling innocently, the gnome turned and walked over to the cleric.

Dannel grimaced. “I think she’s gotten bored with just needling the dwarves,” he said. “Bad luck for me, I think.”

“I think maybe we’re due for some good luck,” Cal said earnestly. Dannel nodded, and turned as the others approached, still looking garish in their gore-encrusted armor. “Everyone ready?” Cal asked.

“Let’s go,” Arun said, already starting to become insubstantial as he drew upon the power of the wind walk once again. The companions became insubstantial, and quickly left another gory battlefield behind, speeding off toward the iron mountain in the distance, where ugly red clouds continued to roil in an uncontrolled storm of Chaos.

 

[Lazybones]

Chapter 582

Graz’zt’s Iron Skull dominated the center of Occipitus like a boil upon a scabrous hunk of flesh. In just a few days of subjective time, the slow progress of the plane away from corruption had been undone, at least here, where the power of the Demon Prince reigned supreme. The once-golden sky had been completely obscured by a permanent storm of red and black clouds that spiraled in a wide halo over the pace. Blue lightning flashed within that mass, accompanied by rumblings that sounded like the tremors of a building earthquake. Black specks filled the sky, wings of flying demons that included vrocks, chasmes, succubi, quasits, and fiendish humanoids mounted upon winged creatures that looked like a combination of dragons and giant dire bats. Altogether, it was a scene out of a nightmare.

The citadel itself was a terrible, garish pillar that still bore a rough proximity to its original shape, augmented now by jagged edges, sharp spikes, and leering fiendish faces cast in iron. Some of those decorations were not merely ornamental, as occasionally a fearsome-looking figure that appeared to be cast in black metal would shift position, staring out over the plain below with eyes that glowed an evil red. Every inch of the fortress was covered by the abyssal iron that Graz’zt had conjured with his epic spell, and no means of entrance were visible anywhere, save for the massive doors set deep within its base, surrounded by murder holes and dark slits beyond which shadowy figures occasionally moved. As if that were not enough, a pair of massive glabrezu, each standing nearly twenty feet tall, stood before the doors. The chiseled bodies of these fiends were covered in runes that glowed a feral red, and each wore an open-faced helm of black iron that sprouted a forest of bristling spikes.

Spreading outward from the spire in a chaotic mélange was a massive camp; or rather series of camps, for there was no overarching order or sense to the arrangement of gatherings that covered the plain, nothing other than the presence of the spire in the center to give them any sense of common alignment at all. The camps ranged from small clusters of demons that appeared to have simply stopped at a random point upon the plain, to a more substantial enclosure walled in by a stockade of iron longspears driven deep into the spongy turf of Occipitus. These gatherings combined features of military outposts and refugee camps, and collectively contained over ten thousand fiends, nearly all demons, although a sprinkling of hordelings, yugoloths, daemons, half-fiends, tieflings, and others rounded out the anarchy. Only one thing kept this host together, one thing bound it to this unfamiliar and unforgiving place.

That one thing was the resident of the metal spire, the once-lord of Azzagrat, here to make his bid for a return to the ranks of the great masters of the Abyss.

Demons were what they were, however, and the camp was roiled with a constant din as the pure chaos and evil of its inhabitants played out. Every hour dozens of beings met their end in the camps, as old rivalries exploded and new ones were born, sometimes out of something as casual and stupid as a stray look or a slight bump in passing. Graz’zt’s enforcers were out in the camp, a trio of hulking Nalfeshnees that each commanded a dozen hulking half-fiends encased from head to toe in dark red plate. Their task was to ensure that none of these conflicts exploded into a general conflagration. But these lords of demonkind were nevertheless of a kind with their fellows, and bribes occasionally passed to ensure that the patrol would be elsewhere, when the time for revenge came at hand.

The companions watched it all with stares of horrified amazement. They hovered high above the scene, about a mile out from the citadel, just outside the edge of the huge cloud. This was far enough away from the orbiting fliers so that their insubstantial forms made them virtually undetectable, but that did not give any of them any sense of security. The spell did not give them the power to speak, but no words could have expressed the diverse feelings that passed through them at this point. Each of them, mortal and celestial alike, battled a surge of feeling that combined fear and anger, hatred and resignation.

One of the ten, one of the smallest among them, drifted a bit ahead of the others. Deception and sneaking had brought them this far; from here on out, their approach would be… different.

Cal lifted his hand. The air around the wind walkers stirred, gathering in anticipation.

The gnome lowered his hand, and the ten of them shot forward, heading directly for the skull.




Chapter 583

Seconds passed, each one ticking off loudly in Cal’s mind, like the rattle of the broken Lantanese clock that his aunt had insisted on keeping on the mantle of the Calloran home in Waterdeep. Tick… tick… tick…. At about a mile distant, he figured it would take about a minute for them to cover the distance from their initial vantage to their destination.

It would be the longest minute he’d ever experienced in his life.

Fully ten ticks of the clock had passed, almost enough to give him a giddy hope that they might beat the odds, when the cry of a vrock shattered that musing.

None of the companions shifted from their tight formation, two phalanxes centered around Umbar and the Voice. Well, the formation was mostly intact, Cal saw, as he glanced back and saw that Mole was pacing him, her grin evident even through the wind walk. More seconds passed, as the companions streaked at high speed toward their destination. Several demons had changed course to intercept them, although the vrock that had first spotted them was already behind, and trailing further, unable to keep up with their rapid flight.

An unholy blight exploded ahead of them; gritting his teeth Cal shot through it, followed immediately by the others. None of them had flinched, and most of them, warded by layered magical protections, including circles of protection from evil, resisted the worst of the blast’s effects.

Looking down, Cal scanned the massive camp below. They were still almost three hundred feet above the ground, out of range of most forms of attack, and likely impossible to see against the backdrop of the roiling storm above. With the chaos of the demonic horde, there was no way to tell if they were responding to the general alarm, or if they were even aware yet that an incursion was taking place.

He looked back up to see a pair of succubi swooping down from up ahead. He grimaced, bracing himself for an attack, but instead of assaulting the wind walkers, they drew up just close enough to fire off charms at several of them as they shot past. Cal felt a moment of uncertainty; if one or more of them succumbed, it could throw a wrench in their plan. But again the willpower of the companions, bolstered with magic, prevailed. By the time that the succubi were ready to strike again, they were past.

Another blight erupted, but this one was slightly off to the left, and they easily avoided it. Cal let himself hope that this was because the caster was getting farther away, and could not easily mark their position with the speed with which they were traveling.

The iron mountain was now looming up ahead of them, its jagged spires filling Cal’s vision as they dove straight toward it. Several forms had detached from the structure, lifting into the air on metallic wings, red eyes gleaming as they fixed upon the intruders.

Gargoyles, Cal thought. Bad news; their claws can cut through our damage reduction.

But the incredible speed granted by the wind walk came at the price of maneuverability. And slowing down was not an option; if they eased their speed, then the demons would be on them in moments. And if the mass of ground-based demons mobilized before they were in…

Then there was no more time to think; the gargoyles were upon them.

The companions shot through them in a flash, but not without being blooded. A claw slammed into Cal, penetrating his wispy form as though he were solid, but he was wearing a stoneskin, and the blow had no effect. But Avellos and Umbar were hit hard, the archon slowed momentarily as the impact from the gargoyle knocked it out of formation. But despite their efforts the gargoyle attack could not disrupt their passage, and they were through, with nothing ahead but the sharp spikes jutting from the summit of the skull.

Cal turned the lead position over to Mole, who led them down. Their course shifted into a steep arc as they sped into a powered dive, straightening out into an angled descent that took them within a stone’s throw of the citadel walls. Mole led them into a narrow gap between a jutting tower and the main bulk of the citadel, the others slicing through the space toward the ground that was very rapidly coming up to greet them. They knew where they were going; the lower entrance to the citadel was the same one they had used to access the place long before, when Arun, Dannel, and Mole had come here to confront the Test of the Smoking Eye.

The ground in front of the recessed entry was clear of demons; the nearest camp was a healthy hundred yards or so away from that key location. The demons in the camp were starting to stir, now, although there still wasn’t any clear sign of organization, or an obvious response to the threat. One of the nalfeshnee wardens, accompanied by its ring of armored guards, was moving toward the entry, although it was still a good distance off.

Cal had lost his count, but he knew that only a tick or two remained. He prepared himself…

And saw the two glabrezu guardians step out from the recessed entry, their gazes coming up as one to fix the diving heroes with cold malevolence.

Oh, crap…




Chapter 584

The unexpected appearance of two advanced glabrezu guards threw a twist into Cal’s plan, but with the wind walking companions descending toward the ground at sixty miles per hour, there was no time for anything other than gut reaction.

Within the tiniest fraction of a heartbeat, Umbar and the Voice released their wind walk spells. With a sudden, jarring lurch, the companions materialized fully, still diving directly toward the ground—and the waiting guards—at an extremely rapid pace.

It was up to Cal now, and everything seemed to slow down around him as his magic flowed through him. The plan was for him to invoke the spell immediately after the wind walk ended, but with the glabrezu already starting to react, it was time to take a chance.

He heard a scream behind him, but his brain didn’t have time to register the identity of its source as he invoked the feather fall, barely twenty feet from the head of the first glabrezu. The uncontrolled dive instantly became an easy descent, and Cal slid past the nearer of the two glabrezu to land in an easy crouch upon the turf.

The warriors followed only a second later, and unlike Cal, they had focused their dive directly upon the demon guardian. Arun hit first, although the demon’s longer reach let it slam him with a long pincer-claw that should have sent the paladin flying. Instead, the gold dwarf twisted and took the hit on his shield, shooting past close enough to deliver a solid blow to the demon’s shoulder as he fell. The demon roared as the holy avenger warhammer send a pulse of driving pain through it, but that hurt became all the more intense a moment later as Beorna drove Aludrial’s Shard into its chest, opening a long, terrible gash down its left breast. Lok and Umbar landed behind it, the genasi failing to connect with a swing at the edge of his reach, the cleric striking it across the back with Alakast as he fell.

The group accompanying the Herald’s Voice came down upon the second glabrezu. Dannel and Callendes were firing as they fell, and Mole unfolded her cloak, controlling her descent to swoop down behind it for a sneak attack. Avellos fell too far away to get in an intial attack, but the Voice dove directly at it, its sword materializing in the air before it.

For a moment it looked like they had secured a victory, but then, as it so often did, the initiative shifted against them. The first glabrezu invoked a reverse gravity, the potent magic overwhelming the spell resistance provided by Arun’s hammer as both the paladin and Beorna went streaking back up into the air.

And five paces away, the Voice was likewise overcome as the second guardian hit the archon with a power word. The celestial plummeted hard into the ground at the glabrezu’s feet, stunned.