us.”
Quarhaun laughed in her face. “You’re right, of course. But I am a master thief, always staying one step ahead of the law, hiding myself behind layers of intermediaries and deception. And you? You’re a master of the smash and grab, utterly lacking in subtlety and technique. Which of us do you think will be caught first?”
Tempest fumed at him for a long moment, then turned and stormed out of the room. With a parting glare at the drow, Roghar followed her out. Left alone with Shara and Quarhaun, Uldane got up and left without a backward glance.
“So much for a plan,” Quarhaun said. He grinned at Shara. “Perhaps we should return to what we were doing before we were interrupted.”
Shara frowned, looking after her friends. What’s keeping me from storming out with them? she wondered. Shouldn’t I be outraged at the things Quarhaun said?
She smiled back at Quarhaun, weighing his suggestion. Not if he’s right, she thought. She stood up and held out her hand to him.
Glass crashed somewhere in the inn, and a scream pierced the quiet night. Shara hurried to the door of the common room and looked around. People were shouting both upstairs and outside on the street, but she couldn’t figure out the source of the commotion.
Then a living flame smashed open the door beside her, and a monstrous face formed of glittering red liquid leered at her from the midst of the fire.
Kri stood and looked down at Albanon’s limp body on the stairs. “Now you understand,” he said. The eladrin didn’t stir. Blank eyes stared upward, seeing nothing at all.
Kri bent his head and lifted Ioun’s holy symbol off his neck. “You taught me to pursue knowledge and understanding,” he said to the symbol. “And so I have.”
He twisted the bottom of the symbol, the crook that extended from the bottom of the stylized eye, and it opened. He slid out the tiny crystal vial that held his miniscule fragment of the Voidharrow. He closed his fist around the vial and felt the two wills at war within it-its own and the Chained God’s.
“I renounce you now,” he said quietly. He let the symbol fall, clattering to the stairs and tumbling down into the darkness below. “Your knowledge is vain and empty. Your understanding is futile. The will of the Chained God is my will.”
He reached into his robes and pulled out the jagged iron symbol he’d taken from the dead priest and put it around his neck.
“I will destroy the Voidharrow and finish what the Chained God commands.”
At last the eladrin moved.
He opened his eyes and tried to figure out who he was. The Doomdreamer stood looking down at him, grinning madly, surrounded by a wreath of leering spirits. The floor beneath him was hard, uneven-stairs, stone stairs.
“Rise, Albanon,” said the Doomdreamer.
He obeyed without thought, then decided that his name must be Albanon. He focused all his attention on the Doomdreamer, eager to learn more of his identity, eager to fulfill his next command.
“Follow me,” the Doomdreamer said, and started down the stairs.
Albanon followed, adding his quiet voice to the babble of spirits surrounding them, flowing in the walls and floor as well as hovering around the Doomdreamer. Seventy-two stairs they descended, eight nines, six dozens, two squares of six. Formulas flitted through his mind and fire danced across his fingers in response, and he emerged into a chamber at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ah, you have remembered your magic.” The Doomdreamer was pleased, and Albanon rejoiced. “Let me see you destroy that corpse.”
Albanon followed the Doomdreamer’s pointing finger with his eyes, and saw the body lying on the floor. Two cubed times three squared. With a flick of his fingers he filled seventy-two cubic feet of the room with roaring flames. A little pressure of his will kept the fires burning until the corpse was a smear of ash on the stone floor.
“Now you know the extent of your power,” the Doomdreamer said. “At last you understand.”
“Yes,” Albanon said. “I think I do.”
“He was a false servant,” the Doomdreamer said, nodding toward the ashes. “He failed, and his death was well deserved. His obliteration was required, so no memory of his failure remains. Together, you and I will succeed where he failed.”
Albanon nodded, but he was no longer sure he understood. He wanted to use his magic again, to turn the numbers and formulas over and over in his mind, to explore every permutation and calculation. Seventy-two was a mystic number to him now, a perfect inversion of exponents and primes, a source of power and an expression of a far greater power. What would it take to pierce the Doomdreamer with seventy-two arrows of pure magical force? He started toying with that calculation.
“We have one more task to complete in this place,” the Doomdreamer continued. “And then we must find Nu Alin.”
“What one task?” Albanon asked.
The Doomdreamer scowled at him. “Such impertinence,” he said. “Expected from the old Albanon, but not from the new.”
What old Albanon? he wondered. He couldn’t remember anything before opening his eyes on the stone stairs a few moments ago.
“Which makes our one task all the more important,” the Doomdreamer said. “We must see the one we serve.”
Albanon stepped closer to the Doomdreamer, curious and anxious. The Doomdreamer moved to stand beside a makeshift altar, decorated with a single candle and an opened manacle. With a word from the Doomdreamer, the candle burst into flame, and a chorus of mad whispers filled the room. Albanon murmured something senseless, adding his voice to the chorus, and shuffled still closer to the table.
The Doomdreamer snapped the manacle into place on his own wrist and wrapped the attached length of chain around his forearm. “Chained God,” he intoned, “Patient One, He Who Waits, my fate is bound to yours. While you are chained, I am chained. When you are free, only then will I be free.”
The whispering chorus grew louder, and here and there a keening wail rose above the other voices. Albanon chanted numbers, factors and multiples of seventy-two, the seeds of arcane formulas that could create or destroy.
“Dark God, Black Sun, God of Eternal Darkness, I bring this candle to your darkness, seeking a glimpse of your majesty.”
The chorus was more wails than whispers. Thirty thousand, three hundred and seventy five was the product of the next two primes with their exponents inverted. That number would produce a much larger burst of flame.
“Anathema!” the Doomdreamer screamed over the unearthly chorus. “Undoer! Ender! Eater of Worlds! Reveal yourself and end our clinging to the false reality of this world.”
The next product was so large that Albanon could barely calculate it, but he was confident that he could scorch the earth across an entire farm by manipulating those numbers. Could he create more than a billion magic missiles to tear the Doomdreamer’s body to ribbons?
The Doomdreamer’s eyes rolled back in his head and he convulsed, dropping to his knees behind the makeshift altar. Albanon dropped to his knees at well, unsure what he was supposed to be doing.
The wailing chorus ceased and the Doomdreamer collapsed on the floor. “One billion, three hundred and thirteen million, forty-six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five,” Albanon said, and then he, too, fell silent.
Panting with exertion, the Doomdreamer lifted himself off the floor. “Did you see, Albanon?” he asked. “Now do you understand?”
“I understand,” Albanon said. You are Kri, he realized suddenly. I understand perfectly.
