In that instant, it disappeared inside her nostril, and she screamed.
Like the howl she’d unleashed before, her scream was girded with supernatural force that sent him staggering away from her, clutching his ears and trying to keep his mind from splitting apart. But it lasted only a moment as her body writhed in agony and started to change, then the scream died with a gurgle in her throat.
“What in Bahamut’s name?” Roghar said, stepping away.
“Roghar, what’s happening?” Travic appeared in the entry, trying to keep an eye on his prisoners as he peered in to see what all the screaming was about.
“I don’t know,” Roghar said. “I think she might be possessed.”
“Roghar, kill her,” Tempest shouted. “Kill her now!”
“She’s tied up-”
With a roaring howl, Gaele yanked her hands free of the rope Roghar had tied around her wrists. At the same time, shards of red crystal tore themselves free of her shoulders, forming a jagged cowl around her neck. The rope around her ankles, which had already proven useless in keeping her immobile, snapped as her legs thickened, the skin turning into a smooth, black armor.
“Kill her!”
Roghar fumbled for his sword, slid it from its sheath, and brought it down in a mighty arc toward her neck. A massive claw batted his sword away, and it took an instant before Roghar realized it was Gaele’s arm.
“She’s not possessed,” he called. “She’s changing!”
With a nervous glance down the hall, Travic ran into the room, pulling his mace free from its loop at his belt. “We’ve got to kill her before she finishes,” he said. “She’s only getting stronger.”
Roghar drew in a breath and felt Bahamut’s power welling in him. Even in that moment, he saw Gaele grow larger-her shoulders were now as broad as she was tall, and her head was turning into something alien and horrible. He swung his sword with all his might, biting deep into one of her tree-trunk arms. One of its arms, he thought-he couldn’t possibly conceive of this monster as Gaele anymore. Divine radiance erupted around them both as his blow struck true, and the demon that had been Gaele howled in pain and rage.
Then Travic was beside him, and his mace crashed into the crystal growths on Gaele’s shoulder, erupting in a similar flash of light. Travic recoiled as the crystals splintered and razor-sharp shards flew around him, but he seemed unharmed-until the demon’s claw lashed out and fastened around his neck, lifting him off the ground.
“Gaele-” Travic gasped.
The demon hesitated just an instant, and Roghar used that instant to cleave its skull open with one more mighty blow. Its body writhed and changed a little more before finally lying still, and Roghar stood over it with his sword ready in case the red liquid oozed out, like the thing that possessed Tempest had done.
The room was still and silent. Though the demon bled, nothing flowing from its wounds seemed to have a life of its own.
“The danger appears to be over,” he said at last, looking up at Travic. The priest nodded.
All at once, voices in the hallway started shouting. Roghar heard pieces of the same phrases Gaele had been repeating. “All will perish,” “so it shall be,” “open my way,” and “the Chained God says” rang out over and over. Travic ran to the hall, but a moment before he reached the doorway the shouting stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. Travic stepped into the hall, peered intently at the prisoners, and cast a fearful glance back at Roghar.
“What is it?” Roghar said.
Travic didn’t answer, but started down the hall. Roghar hurried to the door and watched him crouch beside one of the cultists-Marcan. He shook the man’s shoulder, called his name, and felt in his neck for a pulse.
“He’s dead.” He repeated his efforts for each of the other three prisoners and stood, shaking his head. “They’re all dead.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Roghar said. A sudden fear struck him, and he spun around to check on Tempest. To his relief, she was still on her feet, slumped against the wall and curled in on herself. He hurried to her side and clasped her shoulder.
Her eyes shifted to look at him, but she didn’t otherwise move.
“Let’s get you out of here, my friend,” he said softly. “Our work here is finished.”
She closed her eyes. “They’re all dead?” she whispered.
“Yes. I don’t know what killed them.”
Tempest sighed, and her long tail unfurled from around her legs. “Let’s go, then.”
Roghar helped her stand upright and guided her to the doorway. She didn’t open her eyes until they were past the cultists’ bodies in the hall, past the headless stone knight frozen in its death throes, and most of the way back to the start of the hall. After she did open her eyes, she never once looked back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eight slender windows at the top of Sherinna’s tower, just below the gallery, let in moonlight that spilled down the grand entrance hall. Kri closed the door to his bedchamber as quietly as he could manage, not wanting to disturb Albanon’s rest. The young wizard had spent precious little time in his trance since they’d arrived at the tower. Eladrin didn’t sleep, but without at least a few hours spent in a peaceful reverie, they started to show the same signs of fatigue, irritable moods, and even hallucinations that plagued sleep-deprived humans.
Kri could understand the young man’s excitement. He even shared it, to some extent. Here he was, after all, creeping to the library in the middle of the night to follow up a lead he’d encountered earlier in the evening. The thrill of discovery, of learning what had long been forgotten, was almost an experience of the divine for him. Sometimes he even imagined that he was waging war against Vecna, the god of secrets and Ioun’s most hated foe, by unlocking the mysteries of things and expanding his own knowledge.
He made his way up the steps toward the library, but found himself diverted along the way. Between the library and the living quarters, the fourth-floor archway led to Sherinna’s workshop. It was sparsely furnished and not half as interesting as the library for his purposes, but one item in there had caught his eye earlier, and he had resolved to investigate it further.
No better time than now, he said to himself.
He stepped through the slender arch and into the workshop. To his left, an identical arch, carved with the same gracefully curving lines, decorated a section of the wall. Had it been an actual archway, it would have opened into the empty air outside the tower, forty feet above the ground. But between the white marble columns was blank stone wall.
At the peak of the arch was the thing that had caught his eye before-a jagged piece of red crystal set into the stone.
“What is your story, crystal shard?” Kri whispered, peering up at the gleaming mineral. He closed his eyes and reached out with his other senses, the way he had taught Albanon. He saw it immediately-the stone was charged with magic, far more intense and wild than the focused energy that flowed through the columns of the arch. A glance at the overall flow of energies confirmed what he had suspected. The arch was a teleportation portal, serving basically the same function as the more common circle engraved on the floor and inlaid with silver. Properly attuned to a destination, it would allow instant transportation.
But how would one attune the portal? With an engraved circle, attuning the portal was a relatively simple matter of drawing a sequence of sigils into the circle’s edge, sigils that matched those at the destination. With this portal, there was no obvious place to write those sigils, and he suspected the crystal was instead the key.
If the crystal is what I think it is, he thought, it’s the key to a lot more than this portal.
He slid a dagger out of its sheath at his belt and stretched up to reach the blade to the stone. He pried it free from its setting with the merest effort, and fumbled to catch it before it clattered to the ground.
Peering into the crimson heart of the fragment, he left the workshop and climbed the next ring of stairs to the library.
“Ioun, guide me,” Kri whispered, stretching out his hands as he stood before the shelves in the library. He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes as he held it, listening for Ioun’s presence.
“Seek the Chained God,” a voice said.
Kri opened his eyes, and his gaze fell on an unlabeled scroll on the shelf. He lifted the heavy scroll and
