Thomas M. Reid
The Crystal Mountain
CHAPTER ONE
Black unconsciousness became… buzzing. Joints ached. Muscles quivered. A body convulsed with pain.
It lay upon hard, frigid stone that quaked one moment and rippled and melted the next, blistering skin with intense heat.
The stone vanished, and the body floated without any bearings at all.
A voice groaned, sounding odd. Distant.
An intense crackling filled the air, and the tingle of electricity raced across the body's skin. Loud, staccato pops, roars of wind, and high-pitched whines interspersed themselves amidst the charged crepitation.
A head throbbed, threatening to split open.
A whiff of sulfur, mingled with something charred, wafted past. In rapid succession came the scent of flowers, blood, sewage, and old ice.
A thought formed.
Aliisza.
I am Aliisza.
She realized she was not breathing. Her lungs ached. She drew a deep, ragged breath and exhaled in relief. She dared to open her eyes.
Color flashed in the half-demon's vision. Not merely light from somewhere else, not some rainbow effect reflecting off walls or furniture or landscapes. A million hues filled the veil of her sight.
Nothing but color.
Washes of it swirled and fractured, split by the void of blackness. They reformed, became a haze, then a swarm of light points, then an undulating sea. All of it assaulted the alu, crashed against her, made the pounding ache behind her eyeballs grow.
With a gasp, she clenched her eyes shut again and retched.
For long moments that stretched on and on, the half-fiend squirmed and whimpered as the cacophony of sounds, textures, and scents pummeled her. She feared it would last forever.
The world has gone mad, she thought. Or perhaps it has ended, and I just don't know I'm dead.
Sometime later-she was not sure how long-the universe popped around Aliisza. She felt her body react, as though an immense pressure had been released. The torrential storm abated. The snaps and roars faded. Everything returned to normal.
The pain coursing through the alu's body diminished, and she felt solid, unyielding stone beneath her. The scents had nearly vanished, though she could still detect the faint odor of something foul, a mixture of stale sweat and singed flesh.
She realized she could sense light through her closed eyelids. Not the crazy multi-hued swirl from before, but a persistent, stable glow. Though her mind told her it was safe, she was afraid to open her eyes again, afraid of becoming inundated by the insane sea of color.
Taking a deep, slow breath to calm herself, Aliisza let her eyelids flutter the slightest bit, ready to clamp them shut again if the color-storm bombarded her. When it did not, she opened them wider and took in her surroundings.
The half-fiend lay on her back, sprawled upon cool paving stones, staring into the face of a handsome man with long, flowing black hair and a matching mustache. The thick, dark locks fell in a disheveled mess about his neck and shoulders. The glow that had penetrated the alu's tightly clenched eyelids emanated from him like the dim, flickering gleam of a firefly. Dressed in robes of black and gold, he struggled to remain upright on unsteady hands and knees.
'Well met,' the man said, smiling warmly. 'Are you all right?'
Fear and hatred slammed into Aliisza. 'Bastard,' she snarled before she even realized the word was out of her mouth. 'You should be dead!' She couldn't remember why she thought that, but it didn't matter.
She reached for the man's throat to strangle him.
Her hands scrabbled at his neck, at his silken tunic, but her limbs had no strength and could not gain a firm grip.
A name blossomed in her mind.
Zasian Menz, priest of Cyric.
She wanted to claw his eyes out, but her weak limbs groped fruitlessly.
Aliisza sobbed and let her arms drop to her sides in exhaustion. 'Bastard,' she cried again. Do it, she thought. Just kill me. Finish it!
But Zasian did not. At her vehemence, his eyes grew wide and he retreated from her, staggering a bit and falling on his side. 'I… I'm sorry,' he said. 'What did I do?' His gaze did not convey the cunning of the priest she remembered. A mixture of innocence and confusion filled his eyes.
Aliisza stared at the man. You take me for a fool? she thought. What did you do, indeed! But his troubled, blinking expression never changed, never gave any hint of duplicity. He seemed perfectly sincere.
She groaned and stared past the priest at the rest of her surroundings, trying to understand.
The only illumination came from Zasian. Darkness cloaked the rest of the chamber. Aliisza lay near the center of a circle of stone columns rising toward a domed ceiling engulfed in shadows. Deeper gloom filled the spaces between those marble sentinels, hinting at vastness beyond the feeble light. The remains of her retching spattered the floor near her head, and Aliisza felt chastened for a moment, guilty at her own disheveled state in the austere chamber.
The alu turned her head to one side and spotted a body lying near her, a dark-clad figure in plate armor crumpled beneath one of the columns, facing away. The hilt of a slender blade jutted up from the figure's torso.
Dread filled the half-fiend anew as she remembered. The angel Micus had driven the blade-her blade-deep into the knight.
A knight of Torm.
Kael.
Her son!
No!
Aliisza struggled to get to her hands and knees, to crawl to Kael. She had no strength. She dragged herself across the paving stones toward him.
I didn't mean to. I was a fool!
Aliisza had almost reached her son when reality around her flickered, unstable, like some half-effective illusion. A wrinkle passed through the room, making the walls and columns of the rotunda ripple like a flag snapping in the breeze. Aliisza thought she would be sick again.
The ripple was gone.
The alu felt stronger, enough that she could finish the journey and reach her son's side. She pressed her hand on him and peered at the half-drow's face.
He still breathed, but barely.
Aliisza crumpled against him, succumbing to her relief.
From behind her, in the direction of the unsteady light, a soft murmur reached Aliisza.
She gingerly rolled back over, her joints and muscles still aching.
Zasian loomed over a second figure sprawled near another column.
Tauran, the fallen angel of Tyr.
For a heartbeat, Aliisza thought the priest meant to do Tauran harm, but she realized Zasian was instead tending to him, being quite gentle. The priest's eyes were closed and he chanted softly. When he opened them
