Well, I did decide to make Cranton one of my Fated followers. Cranton might not have been the best choice, and had I been able to choose between Cranton and Rollar, I might have chosen the latter, but Rollar was a potential threat. Making him Fated could lead to me falling victim to the same event that had turned me into a god and made Isu a mortal once more. No, I would wait and see whether Rollar’s blood oath was actually legitimate, and whether he would actually be willing to serve me.
I told Rami and Elyse to remain behind while Rollar and I walked through the ruined town, much of which was simply piles of stone rubble. It looked like an earthquake had hit this place.
“Tell me,” said Rollar as we walked, “who is the horned woman who rides with you? She has most, um, interesting features.”
“Her name is Isu. You may have heard of her.”
Rollar stopped abruptly, almost tripping over his own feet. “Isu? The Goddess of Death? But then you cannot be—”
“The former Goddess of Death. Now, she’s mortal, and nothing but a necromancer.”
“You dethroned her?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Something like that.” I definitely didn’t want to give Rollar any ideas, so I certainly wasn’t going to detail exactly how I had managed to take Isu’s place.
We reached the entrance to the old temple of the Tree God, and I saw right away why Rollar hadn’t found anything: the whole place was sealed up. The entrance had collapsed in on itself, and the massive stones were piled up in an immovable jumble. Rollar had a team of soldiers digging a tunnel around it, but it didn’t seem like they had had much success.
“My diggers keep running into new walls of stone underground,” he said. “And then we have to stop and start a new tunnel from scratch. I can sense that an object of power lies in there somewhere. It prevents me from getting in.”
“You control a massive dire bear with that helm of yours,” I said. “Why don’t you just get him to move some of these stones?”
“Believe me, I’ve tried, but even my dire bear is not strong enough.”
“What if your bear had a partner of equal strength to work with? I bet he’d be able to move those stones then.”
Rollar chuckled humorlessly. “I was lucky enough to find one dire bear. It’ll take me weeks, maybe months to find another. They’re rare, elusive creatures.”
“Would a giant lizard do?”
His eyes lit up, and a broad grin spread across his bearded face. “Of course! Come, let us fetch our beasts and put them to work!”
A little while later, Fang and Rollar’s dire bear were grunting and growling as they worked together to push the huge stones out of the way. Even with the immense strength of both beasts, it was hard work to get the stones moved, but they were eventually able to shift three of the stones just enough that a gap opened. It was small, only wide enough for a single man to slip through.
Rollar could barely contain his excitement. “Incredible! After weeks, we have achieved what I thought was a futile endeavor.”
“You know that whatever we find in there is mine, right?” I didn’t want to seem ungrateful since his men had already laid the groundwork by removing many of the other stones, but I had to let him know that I was in charge.
“Of course. Still, I’m eager to see what might be found there.”
“If you serve me faithfully, I will make you Fated. You just need to prove yourself first.”
“Believe me, Vance, I’ll serve you as loyally as any good soldier serves his officer.”
“Good. Because we’re about to enter a temple that’s likely filled with traps. I know you’re an experienced crypt diver, and you’ve been in your fair share of temples, but you need to obey every command I give you.”
“Of course,” he answered with a nod.
“I’ll send in a few of my skeletons first. I have enough of them to use a few as trap fodder. It wastes far less time to just have them trigger the traps and die than us pussyfooting around the place, checking every fucking tile for triggers.”
I raised a number of skeletons from Rollar’s dead and sent a handful into the crypt. What I found after a few minutes of vicarious exploration via the skeletons was not what I expected at all. I sensed death—death everywhere. Mass death. It saturated the temple, filling every nook, cranny, and crevice of it, every cubic inch of air.
“I think I know what happened to the former inhabitants of Kroth,” I murmured.
“You do?” Rollar asked.
“Get me a few torches. I need to look inside the temple with my own eyes.”
“What about the traps?”
“There aren’t any. At least none that are live. All the traps in there were triggered long ago. My skeletons discovered as much.”
I was pretty confident of this, confident enough to go into the crypt first, before anyone else. Isu still hadn’t returned, and her timing seemed oddly suspicious. Still, I didn’t have the time to consider what she might be scheming. I needed to enter the temple and have a look around.
Rami and Elyse were in the camp, though, and I sent a skeleton to bring them to me. I highly doubted that there would be any enemies in the temple to fight, but it would be good to have those two and Rollar by my side nonetheless. As for Drok, the mere thought of his stench being concentrated in a place like that turned my stomach, and I thought it best to leave him outside.
The four of us crawled through the gap in the stones, each carrying a burning torch to light the way. Once we made it to the other side, we emerged into what was once the temple’s main hall. Like the outside, much of the interior had partially collapsed,
