CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Shara yanked her sword from its sheath as the fiery demon surged forward. “Quarhaun!” she shouted.
Dozens of tiny flames caught in curtains and on posts and floorboards as the demon entered the inn and lunged at her. Its entire substance was fire, except the crystalline head in its core, and Shara couldn’t see any difference between the flames left in its wake and the demon itself. It extended a tendril toward her and she slashed at it with her sword, but as the blade passed through the fire she didn’t feel any resistance and it didn’t seem to slow or hinder the attack at all. She followed her blade’s arc, twisting her body out of the tendril’s direct path, but it still seared across her back, igniting her cloak.
With a muttered curse, Shara loosened the cloak’s clasp and let it fall smoking to the floor. Sweat trickled down her face as the demon’s heat washed over her, and she smiled. “Into the fire,” she muttered, and inched closer to the inferno.
A bolt of blue-white light whistled over her shoulder and struck near the demon’s leering face, blossoming into a sheet of ice that spread across the surface of the fire, stilling the dancing tongues of flame for a moment. Shara took advantage of that moment and followed the bolt’s path with her sword, striking hard where the demon’s substance had grown solid and-she hoped-brittle. Her blade struck something hard, making a loud crack, and the demon recoiled with a monstrous roar. Its fury seemed to intensify its heat, melting away the coating of frost that Quarhaun’s spell had created, and it curled in around Shara, extending more tendrils of flame to enfold her.
She ignored the coiling tendrils and drove her sword into the demon’s face. She expected to hit solid crystal, hard as rock, but instead found liquid that flowed around her blade. The demon’s light and heat faltered with the blow, and the tendrils that struck her stung but didn’t burn her. Pressing her momentary advantage, she sliced her sword clean through the demonic face, drawing a trail of crystalline liquid out with her blade. The face dissolved into floating globules of red liquid as the demon’s fiery form contracted. A moment later, the liquid globs fell to the floor, burning like lantern oil, and the demon was no more.
She bent to pick up her cloak, then used it to swat out the little fires left behind from the demon’s passing. Quarhaun added his own cloak to her effort, then put his hand on her shoulder.
“You fight like you have nothing to live for,” he said.
Shouts from the street outside suggested that the threat had not passed, but she clasped Quarhaun’s hand anyway. “If I had killed Vestapalk when I thought I did,” she said, “would these demons be here now?”
“We are the same, you and I.”
She arched an eyebrow at him, and he responded with a wink and nodded at the door. “There’s more killing to do,” he said.
Smiling, she stepped to the wreckage of the door left behind from the demon’s entrance and peered into the street.
Roghar looked up and down the hall, trying to find the source of the scream that had stopped him in his tracks as he came upstairs. Wisps of smoke snaked out around a door midway down the hall, and another cry for help came from the same direction. He glanced at Tempest, who nodded, and then sprinted to the door. Drawing a deep breath, he kicked the door open, releasing billowing clouds of smoke into the hallway.
Flames roared in the room beyond, lighting the room in lurid reds. The thick smoke made it hard to see what was happening, but Roghar plunged in without a moment of hesitation, following the sound of a man coughing. He stumbled over something on the floor, looked down, and found a woman’s body.
“Tempest!” he shouted. “Get her out of here!” He crouched beside the woman at his feet, and a word of prayer sent Bahamut’s power into her, simultaneously strengthening her against the fire and smoke and lighting her like a beacon so Tempest could find her in the smoke.
As he stood again, a column of fire roared up right in front of him. A demonic face, mouth open in a shriek of fury, floated in the midst of the flames, evidently formed of a glittering liquid similar to Nu Alin’s true substance. Roghar drew his sword.
“Vile spawn of chaos and destruction,” he said, “you are not welcome in this world. Get back where you came from.”
He didn’t expect any kind of response, but the demon answered him, in a voice like the crackling of flame. “The Plaguedeep grows, mortal. Soon this world shall be consumed.”
As long as the demon was willing to talk, Roghar used the opportunity to get his shield off his back and into position on his arm. “I don’t know what the Plaguedeep is, but I’m here to make sure that this world stays as the gods intended it to be.”
“The Plaguedeep is the place whence I came, and it is in this world. Until it grows to consume the world. As I shall consume you!”
I guess it’s done talking, Roghar thought, interposing his shield between himself and the demon’s fiery tendrils. His sword erupted with brilliant light as he swung at the demon’s liquid crystal face. It recoiled from the divine light, and his blows seemed to burn the liquid crystal in a way that the roaring flames could not.
Roghar fought with righteous fury, confident in the knowledge that he was doing Bahamut’s work, helping to defend and protect the defenseless citizens of Fallcrest. His confidence gave strength to his arms as Bahamut empowered his weapon, and in just a moment the demon was gone, its fires extinguished and its crystalline substance shriveling to black residue on the floor.
Snarling with satisfaction, Roghar turned to check on Tempest. Smoke still clouded the air, but he didn’t see any sign of her. White light still shone near the floor, marking the location of the woman he’d tripped over. Tempest hadn’t retrieved her.
Another cough, weaker than before, came from the floor near the window, where fire still roared in the curtains. Roghar plunged deeper into the smoke, yanked the curtains to the floor and smothered the flames, then found the suffocating man slumped in a chair. He invoked Bahamut’s healing power as he lifted the man to his shoulder.
“A more moderate lifestyle would serve you well, friend,” he muttered to the heavy man. “The blessings of food and drink were meant to be enjoyed within sensible limits.”
He staggered to the woman’s side and dropped to one knee. Groaning with effort, he lifted her under his arm-grateful for a much lighter load-and carried both unconscious people out the door.
The hallway was in chaos. Smoke billowed along the length of the hall, mostly clinging to the ceiling. Near Roghar, Uldane stood facing one of the nightmare demons they’d encountered on the bluff, standing firm against it though his face was contorted with fear. Behind Uldane, a clump of terrified looking people, mostly clad in bedclothes, huddled together, recoiling from the shadowy tendrils the demon lashed toward them. At the far end of the hall, Tempest stood facing another demon near a broken window.
Tempest seemed paralyzed with fear, and Roghar could imagine why. These demons used fear as their weapon, taking on the appearance of whatever their foe feared most. And they came from the same source as Nu Alin, apparently, so it was likely a trivial matter for them to draw on Tempest’s terror of Nu Alin and her fear of being possessed again.
I have to help her, he thought.
He lowered the two people he was carrying to the floor, as gently as he could, and scanned the clump of terrified bystanders for someone who looked at least vaguely competent. A teenaged girl caught his eye, wearing a look of defiance as she held a younger boy.
“You,” he called, pointing to her. “I need you to get these people into the middle with the rest of you. I’ll keep the demon busy. Can you do that?”
Her eyes went wide and flicked to the demon, but when she looked back at him she nodded. He smiled as he drew his sword again. He roared and charged the demon.
“Fiend of the Plaguedeep!” he shouted. “Your doom is here, in Bahamut’s name!”
The demon whirled to face him, and it changed. The snaky tendrils of shadow and liquid crystal that served the creature in place of legs lifted up off the ground and became five draconic heads in five different colors. The burning inn fell away until he stood alone on a desolate plain before Tiamat, god of greed and vengeance, queen
