“I don’t like this,” she said, looking up at the volcano’s peak. “What are the demons doing? Why aren’t we being attacked?”
“I don’t like it either,” said Quarhaun. “I don’t like any of this, but if you want a spider’s silk, you have to reach into her nest.” He caught her hand and gently rubbed the crooked fingers. “Where will we go after this? Back to Fallcrest? Nera? I’ve heard of a place called the Dragondown Coast that sounds interesting.”
Shara shuddered. “No more dragons.” She pulled her hand away. “How can you think about something like that right now?”
“When you’re somewhere bad, focus on where you’ll go next.”
“Another drow saying?”
“A halfling saying, or so I’m told.” Quarhaun nodded to Uldane then flashed her a smile, his white teeth dazzling against his jet black skin. “Drow wisdom would say when you’re somewhere bad, focus on how you’ll hurt the people who put you there.”
“Why do I love you?”
“Insidious drow charm.” He caught her hand again and kissed her sword-calloused palm.
“If you’re finished,” said Kri, coming up beside them, “we need to find our way inside.”
Quarhaun dropped her hand. Shara frowned at Kri. “I liked you better when you served Ioun. Occasionally you kept your mouth shut.”
“People who call Vecna the god of secrets have never truly known Ioun,” said the priest. “The Chained God shows his followers freedom of all kinds.”
“The kind where I can put a sword through your belly?” asked Shara.
“Perhaps after we’ve dealt with Vestapalk and the Voidharrow,” Kri said mildly before turning to Quarhaun. “How do we find a tunnel that leads inside?”
“In the Underdark, the easiest way is to find a tunnel that local beasts are using and hope that it doesn’t dead-end in a den or nest. I imagine that holds true for the surface as well.”
“So now we need to go looking for a plague demon?” said Shara.
Quarhaun shrugged. “I honestly didn’t think we’d have any trouble with that part.”
“I don’t think we will,” Belen said. “Look.” The Fallcrest guard stood behind them. They all turned.
Back down the way they had come, spindly figures moved at the edges of crevices and gullies. Roghar cursed. “Did they see us?”
“No,” said Cariss, “I’m certain they didn’t.”
“Then let’s try and find a passage to follow before they do,” Quarhaun said. “Any sign of heavy use around a cave mouth will do-a trail, disturbed dirt, broken plants. Look up the slope as well as down.”
“What if we find plague demons inside?” asked Uldane.
Quarhaun’s chuckle was cold. “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if.’ ”
He led them around the slope to the left where a shelf of slumping, crystal-ridden stone would hide them from the demons below. Where the shelf ended, he turned along a trough-shaped ravine that went toward the peak. They were still following the ravine when the shrieks of demons fighting broke out ahead.
Shara guessed there were only a couple of the creatures, but the screams were so strange and angry that were she less skilled, she could have believed there to be half a dozen. She stopped. Quarhaun pressed her onward.
“Are we looking for demons or trying to avoid them?” she muttered to him. “Because if we want a place with a lot of demons, we could go back down to those crevices.”
“Too shallow,” said Quarhaun. “If they ran into the interior, the demons wouldn’t have clustered at the surface. We want signs of them, but not too many actual demons.” He motioned for her and the others to stay low, then crept up the side of the ravine and continued climbing the slope alongside it. When the sounds of fighting were closest, Quarhaun went back to the ravine and peered over the crumbing edge. Shara stayed to one side of him, Cariss to the other.
All of the shrieks came from only two bestial demons as they wrestled back and forth over the corpse of some now unidentifiable small animal. Just above them, a low dark opening pierced the side of the mountain, about as wide as Shara was tall and just high enough that she would be able to crawl into it. Dark soil was strewn before it, but Shara scowled.
“Nothing,” she said. “They’ve just dug out a burrow.” Cariss grunted agreement.
The drow shook his head. “Something might have been living there, but that’s more than just a burrow. You can tell by the shape of it, and the way it’s right at the top of the ravine. I think we’ll find it’s bigger on the inside than it looks.”
He gestured for Albanon to come up and join them, then whispered rapidly to the wizard. Albanon nodded. The drow and the eladrin rose to their knees. Their hands wove in the air and words of magic rippled from their mouths. Before the demons even had a chance to look up, they were engulfed simultaneously by a wave of flame and a burst of writhing darkness. Corpses as scorched and withered as old sticks dragged from a campfire fell to the ground on either side of the demons’ animal victim. Quarhaun nodded in satisfaction. “Let’s go.”
They slithered back down into the ravine and approached the hole cautiously. Quarhaun squatted down and peered inside.
“Yes,” he said, “this looks promising.” Before Shara could stop him, he scrambled through. Words of warning caught in her throat. If the hole really did lead deeper, a shout would only echo and warn any demons of their approach.
Quarhaun was back in moments anyway. “We’re lucky,” he said. “This is exactly what we need. Everyone inside. It’s tight but it opens up.”
He held out a hand for her. Shara didn’t hesitate before accepting it and following him.
The first stretch inside the hole was indeed tight and smelled strongly of both animals and demons. Shara had to drop onto her elbows and wriggle through to get her sword, protruding over her shoulder, past the ceiling. Roghar would have a difficult squeeze. When the ceiling rose, however, she found that there was more than enough space for her to stand. The daylight that came through the hole, broken into moving shafts and shadows by the people following her, revealed a long, smooth-floored gallery. Here and there, the light flashed on red crystals embedded in the walls.
“More Voidharrow,” she said.
“You had to expect that,” said Uldane. He produced a couple of long, thin sticks-sunrods-and rapped the gnarled ends against the tunnel wall. The sunrods burst into bright, steady light.
The veins of crystal they revealed were so thick and twisted that they looked like tentacles reaching down the tunnel toward them. Cariss yelped in surprise and flinched. Even Kri’s face tightened.
“Still no plague demons,” Shara said hopefully, but Albanon waved her to silence and cocked his head, listening. She listened, too, and after a moment, she heard what his sharp ears already had. A whispering drifted along the tunnels, not of voices but of bodies jostling close together. A lot of bodies.
No one said anything. Those with weapons drew them. Uldane kept one of the sunrods for himself and passed the other to Belen. They set off toward the sound. When the tunnel branched, they paused and listened again. The sound was louder, underscored with an even deeper, more seething hiss, like slowly boiling sugar syrup. The air grew close and thick, but strangely no warmer. The crystal veins in the wall glowed faintly, a light that had nothing to do with the sunrods.
Quarhaun glanced at Kri and Albanon. The priest and the wizard looked at each other, then Albanon nodded toward the tunnel branch that angled more steeply downward. Quarhaun turned down it-only to pause with a grimace on his face and tread lightly in place for a moment. Uldane pointed his sunrod down at the drow’s feet.
The smooth stone of the floor had taken on the same waxy appearance as the rocks outside. It dimpled under Quarhaun’s boots-and sprang back when he raised them. He bounced and it quivered slightly in response. When he rapped the floor with his toe, though, it sounded like kicking solid stone.
“Keep going,” Kri said grimly.
Shara experienced a strange shift in perception as she followed Quarhaun onto the fleshy floor. Suddenly, it seemed to her that she was no longer following a tunnel, but walking inside the guts of some strange, enormous worm. Or inside Vestapalk if the dragon had grown to the size of a mountain. Albanon said Vestapalk was the Voidharrow and the Voidharrow was Vestapalk. Maybe in a way they really were inside Vestapalk.
