completely foreign to them. The hellish sound was one the survivors would hear echoing through their trances all the rest of their days.
Nis was in Telarian's hand a moment later, dashing his rising panic as water to a flame. Logic, cold and untethered to emotion, become his only companion. As Knights pulled their weapons and began to slash at the stoic undead that rose as a pale tide all around them, Telarian made for the throne. Clearly, even if a few Empyrean Knights were to survive the next twenty or thirty heartbeats, the puppeteer of this ghastly city had to be eradicated.
A dozen stony hands, blunt with erosion, pulled his screaming mount from under him. Telarian leaped free, his ebony blade pulling him up and away from the sounds of ripping horseflesh. Then he was on the central mound, dashing up the steep slope of solidified carrion, even as it began to shudder and separate. Each unit of the cone- shaped structure became a screaming zombie whose flesh was hard as bedrock.
He stepped on a writhing arm, a yowling head, and into a palm and out of it before the hand could clutch and hold him. He batted away a face whose gaping mouth threatened to bite him, turning the pallid stone into so much sand. Then he reached the apex, just as the perpetrator of the uprising surmounted the opposite side. Unlike his own uneven ascent, the energy-wreathed lich was raised securely in the hands of its newly animated followers.
Telarian and the relic lich faced each other from across the crystalline throne. The diviner looked into a countenance so weathered that only a shallow concavity faced him, incapable of displaying the least hint of feature.
The obscene crater that once housed a mouth worked, and it somehow spoke without tongue to shape its words. 'The mechanism requires fresh infusion. Blood is too sticky and prone to clotting. Souls serve best.' Telarian's spell of translation allowed him to understand the creature's supernatural utterances, but the lich's allusion to a mechanism escaped him. In any event, the context implied nothing pleasant for him and the Empyrean Knights.
Telarian swung Nis down and around from where it lightly rested on his shoulder, in a vicious cross-body swing. His foe easily blocked with its staff of blazing light. The contact jolted through the Keeper's arm, but Nis steadied him despite the flexing, heaving slope on which he stood.
My presence, or perhaps my twin's, Nis projected into his mind, has awakened a thing that lay quiescent in Stardeep's basements since before Stardeep was delved. Splintered desires fuel this ancient shell, desires so potent they bleed out from the host and share animation with petrified remains of a murdered species.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Stardeep, Underdungeon
The demon gauntlet snuffled and coughed, straining forward, following the fading scent of those who'd gone before. Gage was pulled along in the fiend's wake, his gloved hand held forward and down, slinking from tree to silvery tree. His quarry's path had steered wide of chill mist rivers that sliced through the nighted landscape. He was happy to avoid intersecting the impenetrable vapor-even his bound demon shuddered and bucked when he'd tried to insert it into the first standing bank he'd passed.
At length he came to the forest's edge. A margin of dead rock lay beyond, decorated with craggy boulders and narrow fissures. Beyond that lay a sea of colorless fog, chill and endless. He drew in a quick breath when he saw several corpses littering the beach, the decaying bodies matching those he'd dispatched earlier. One group of dead monsters lay near the edge of the fog, though several marked the perimeter of a large boulder about thirty paces from the mist's edge. The demon gauntlet bleated and tried to pull forward. Kiril and the other two had come this way. Had they entered the mist?
Gage studied the scene a moment longer, then moved.
The boulder was splashed with green and black ichor-the thief counted at least six of the loathsome creatures, battered, burnt, and..
An opening! A rectangular portal pierced the boulders overhanging side that faced the fog sea. A massive iron gate lay torn from its hinges, scratched and partially crumpled. The lower portion of the cavity was choked with monsters, all dead, many showing signs of flashburn. Blasting magic had separated many of these from their putrid lives. He didn't see evidence of any blade-work. Kiril had not drawn her Cerulean sword to defeat these beasts. Or was the slaughter the work of someone else? Impossible to say without a witness to describe what had occurred.
His demon glove strained toward the portal. Gage spent another ten heartbeats examining the doorway before darting forward, diving to clear the sprawled bodies at the last moment. He tucked his shoulder and rolled to absorb the impact of his quick entrance. The steep stairs beyond made this tricky feat even more difficult, but Gage executed the maneuver with panache.
At the stair's foot a tunnel led off, its downward slope noticeable. The tunnel's rock walls were streaked with deposits of white stone, but the light from the entrance topping the stairs didn't reach far. Gage produced a clear glass vessel and shook it vigorously. The chemicals within were inimical to each other, and given time, slowly separated. When mixed, the hostile essences fought, producing light.
His gauntlet yanked forward with surprising strength.
Gage grunted and resisted. His glove muttered, 'Never forget, your soul is forfeit.'
'I quaver in my boots,' the thief replied. 'Behave. Don't forget, acid burns. Remember what happened last time?'
The glove muttered something too quietly for Gage to hear. 'Better. Now lead on. Quietly.'
Gage advanced down the tunnel, surrounded by a dim sphere of light, his eyes wide for any evidence of his quarry.
Gage gave his light another vigorous shake to rejuvenate its intensity. How long had he walked these strangely smooth tunnels?
'More importantly,' he muttered aloud, 'how'd Kiril and her friends get so far ahead of me?' He gave his gauntlet a suspicious squint.
Ahead, a hole in the floor gaped nearly the entire diameter of the tunnel. His light picked out individual strands of thickly intertwined webs that obscured the hole's sides, but opened into a twisting funnel at the hole's center. A cold, dusty wind blew from the gap, as did a rushing, full-throated roar of moving water.
His eyes lit on a papery scrap that lay ensnared in the web about two body lengths down the funnel. Though stuck, its outer edge wavered in the chill breeze.
'I am on the right trail,' he whispered, relief washing over him. The chance of the glove misleading him wasn't out of the question. It had grown more willful since the other glove, with the eye, was burnt to ash by Angul.
Gage stared into the webbing, wondering who had dropped the scrap of paper-Kiril, or one of the other two? Vellum was expensive. In fact. .
The thief removed his pack. From it he produced an elven rope, a selection of iron spikes with eyeholes, and a battered mallet. He selected a point on the wall and sunk the spike with three strikes. The echoes of the malletfalls made him wince. Too late for second thoughts!
He threaded the rope in the anchored spike, tied one end into his belt, and let himself over the edge of the webbed hole. Hand over hand he lowered himself until he was close enough to snatch the lone vellum scrap from the sticky strands. It took a little careful tugging to extract his prize without ripping it. It was blank. Unpenned and already-spent spell scrolls possessed the same sense of limitless possibility in their clean expanse. They seemed eager for the next spell, the wilder and more potent, the better. Of course, they also represented a tidy sum of gold. He stowed his prize, worth a tenday's lodging in the finest festhall in Laothkund.
As Gage hauled himself out of the hole, he heard the unmistakable cry of a wailing infant below.
'What in Akadi's name. .?' He glanced down. A many-limbed white bulk filled the web tunnel beneath him. Dozens of pale, stone-hard eyes fixed on his own. From its mandibled mouth came the pitiful mewls of a crying
