expand his mind to encompass it. The power to burn all of Winterhaven if that was what he desired.
It wasn’t. He pulled back. Fire would grow to fill any volume he permitted, but lightning was different. It needed focus. Squeezing his eyes shut, he twisted the numbers in his mind. He forced himself to conceive of the magic as growing not by squares or cubes, but in linear progression.
Glowing lines and crackling angles sprang to life in his imagination, as if a whole plane of magic had lain dormant there, just waiting for him to discover it. He could have reached across the world. He could have touched the Astral Sea and the domains of the gods! If his manipulation of fire spells showed the power of a spell expanded, this spell showed the power of a spell grown and focused. Albanon’s body trembled with it.
His ears itched at some sensation he couldn’t immediately identify. The sound of fighting had stopped, he realized, though something new had taken its place. Something that wasn’t quite a noise and wasn’t quite a touch, but that licked along his skin like a cat’s tongue. He opened his eyes.
The sound and sensation he’d felt was the crackling play of little arcs of lightning across his body. The serpent of his spell had grown. It surrounded him, towering over the entire village of awed people and staring plague demons. It had sprouted more heads, too, making it more hydra than serpent-and each head looked like Splendid. Harsh laughter, half-strangled by tears, bubbled up from Albanon’s throat. He twitched the fingers of his free hand, plucking at the flows of power. The hydra woke.
And struck.
It was as if a thunderstorm had erupted within Winterhaven’s walls. Bolts of lightning smashed down into the horde, scattering the demons and leaving bright lines seared across Albanon’s vision. Thunder shook the ground. Albanon could hear nothing else, not even the sound of his own voice as he screamed his rage. The lightning fell again and again, reducing some demons to smoking cinders and knocking others back. One bolt, as thick as his thigh, fell on Vestagix’s decapitated body. It clung to the corpse as if it had been hooked into the flesh, making the dead limbs twitch and dance.
Albanon fed power to his spell, the numbers that composed the long lines of the lightning arcs growing continually. The sparks that played across his body grew in power, too, until each one stung his skin and left a red pinprick of a burn behind. Pain was a small price to pay. The demons had recognized the danger he presented. Many ran before the onslaught of lightning, but a few tried to get close to him. He burned one with a carefully hurled bolt. Others got the message and backed off. A handful, more aggressive than the others, remained. One small creature even capered as if to taunt him. Albanon snarled and flung another bolt. The small demon dodged-and too late Albanon realized that it was a distraction. A big four-armed demon leaped on him from behind, wrapping its arms around him to break his spellcasting as it howled into his ear.
“Stop, Albanon! Bahamut’s mercy, stop!”
Roghar’s voice.
No, snarled his anger. It’s another demon trick. You have to throw it off. Possibilities flowed into his imagination, a way to turn the numbers of his magic back on themselves in a burst of force that would hurl his assailant away.
“Albanon! Can you hear me?”
It was Roghar holding onto him, Albanon realized. And the small capering demon was Uldane. His mad fury ebbed, taking the long construction of numbers with it. The last of the lightning and thunder faded like a storm receding in to the distance. Albanon blinked and looked around Winterhaven.
Looked around what remained of Winterhaven. The plague demons were gone, leaving only their dead behind. Theirs weren’t the only lightning-burned corpses, though. Half a dozen human bodies sprawled-charred and smoking-on the ground. One was only a few paces from Albanon, and he remembered the demon that had tried to get close to him. A terrible hollow grew inside him. He pulled away from Roghar and turned in a slow circle. The walls of Winterhaven bore long scorch marks in many places. Most of its buildings were scarred. Three wooden structures were on fire with the flames spreading fast; one stone wall of the inn was shattered to reveal a growing inferno within. Pale, terrified faces peered out of whatever shelter had been available and stared at him.
Four of those faces, maybe even more shocked than the others, belonged to Roghar, Uldane, Belen, and Tempest.
Vestapalk felt Vestagix’s destruction like a sword driven deep into his body. His roar of anguish echoed up the Plaguedeep, sending lesser demons scrambling away and greater demons flinching back. The pool of the Voidharrow splashed and splattered as he thrashed. If a plague demon he was inhabiting died, it was no different than shedding an old, dry scale. The death of Vestagix felt as if a part of him had died as well. Eight foreclaws clenched and gouged stone-seven claws of translucent crystal, plus one of deep red, regrown from the Voidharrow to take the place of what he had sacrificed.
His agony eased. Thought returned. The death was hardly conceivable. Vestagix had been given only a measure of his power but he had shared all of Vestapalk’s cunning. He should not have fallen.
But his proxy’s death was not the end. His vengeance might still be salvaged. Vestapalk sent his thoughts out through the Voidharrow. They settled on a plague demon… in flight from Winterhaven. New rage rushed over him. What could have gone so wrong? Vestapalk tore open the demon’s memories of the battle.
He saw Vestagix struck down by the dragonborn Roghar, felt the demon’s rush of wild ecstasy at being released from Vestagix’s command.
He saw lightning and heard thunder. A bolt struck close and blew him back. He saw Albanon surrounded by crackling, barely controlled power greater than any mortal wizard should have been capable of wielding. The eladrin’s face was twisted in single-minded fury, but his eyes shone fever bright.
The fear that swept over Vestapalk surprised him. It pierced his anger and pushed him out of the plague demon, back to his own body. The same fear, as of an old enemy or a newly discovered weakness, seemed to have penetrated the whole of the Plaguedeep. The red abyss was still. Silent. As if the Voidharrow itself was afraid.
Afraid not so much of the power that had driven back the plague demons as of the all-consuming intensity that had lit Albanon’s eyes-and of what lay behind it. A name rose out of that fear, wrapping around Vestapalk’s mind.
Tharizdun.
Vestapalk hissed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the second day-or so he reckoned after an exhausted, dreamless sleep-of his stumbling exploration of the dark place to which Tharizdun had delivered him, Kri found the lantern. A purple glow in the deep gloom had led him through a room of many low obstructions. When he finally reached the glow, he discovered it came from the heart of a tall, rectangular crystal carved with the most blasphemous depictions of the gods. They were shown at a feast, each devouring their worshipers as well as those things most sacred to them. Ioun held a skewer threaded alternately with books and severed heads over a brazier, her eyes bright with hunger and drool running from her mouth.
The carvings were exquisitely delicate. Metal fittings and a large ring at the top of the crystal suggested it was meant to be carried. Indeed, when he lifted it, the purple glow grew brighter until, for the first time, he could see his surroundings.
In the place of his deliverance, only the chamber in which he had escaped from the statue had any light at all. There, light had been transmitted from some distant natural source along what he believed to be veins or tubes of crystal. It gave just enough illumination to allow him to distinguish other statues, some half-formed from blocks of stone, others smashed. It might have been the vast studio of some team of frustrated sculptors except that each statue had the jagged spiral of Tharizdun’s eye somewhere upon it.
Beyond that chamber, Kri had depended on his other senses, a carefully constructed mental map, and a faith that Tharizdun had sent him there for a reason. Touch helped him find curving, tread-worn stairs and new passages. Sound led him to a slowly bubbling cistern of fresh water that tasted of minerals from a deep spring. Smell identified the ashes of old fires in one chamber and the dry tang of ancient embalming spices in another.
The room where the lantern glowed was not far from the chamber of ancient spices, and as Kri raised the crystal, he saw why. The low obstructions in the room were stone coffins. All of them were open, the hollows within
