something more terrible than himself.
The scent milled indecisively throughout the chamber. Living creatures had only recently vacated that chamber, he felt confident, but which way had they gone? His eyes, functioning perfectly in the absolute darkness, focused on the chamber’s only other exit. A fall of powder, like snow, spilled from it in shallow drifts.
Footprints tracked through the drifts, leading into the exit and through the tunnel beyond. The smell was so intense that Ezekial was certain his quarry was just minutes ahead, maybe seconds. When he heard the slight rustling from the chamber beyond the exit tunnel, he exulted. The quarry was trying to hide. Though the sounds were slight, the vampire’s supernatural senses didn’t miss much.
So strong was the smell, and so certain was Ezekial that the rustling was the furtive sounds of those he sought, that he failed to note the strangely regular pattern of the footfalls and the way they did not make an impression deep enough to carry the weight of a full-grown humanoid or perhaps even that of a child.
Ezekial flitted ahead, bursting into the chamber beyond, a vicious grin on his inhuman features. He had to wade through the sea-salt-sized grains that covered the floor at an increasing depth as he moved forward. The raspy, white powder then reached his shins.
If his quarry hid in the chamber into which Ezekial burst, it was burrowed under the massive drifts of white that covered the floor, shrouded the walls, and dripped from the ceiling in strange stalactite-like formations. Only the center of the chamber was clear.
The central clearing, crater-like, held a nearly-black sphere about one foot in diameter. White lines, the same color white as the strange substance all around them, ran like imperfections through the globe. Without visible mechanism, the globe was slowly spinning on its shallow bed of pale salt.
Ezekial paused. Was the sound of the revolving sphere the sound he’d heard?
A moment later he realized not. The sound was that of the “salt” crystals themselves. Like a ripple sweeping away from a stone cast into water, the white motes first closest to the orb, then those further away, and so on, began to stir. They revealed themselves for what they really were, unfurling, Unfolding, and flexing.
Thousands, millions, maybe, of salt-white, tiny demonlings filled the chamber. They were all drawing sudden animation from the orb, whose eye-like shape peered into Ezekial’s mind.
The vampire had a single moment before the white mass of demonlings encompassed him, closing him into a hermetically sealed sarcophagus of sucking evil from which there was no escape, not even for one such as him. He might have used that moment to slide his. physical body into shifty vapor. Instead, he surprised himself by letting rip with a scream of terrorhis first and last.
A cry, quickly silenced, echoed down the passage. Fallon nearly jumped at the sound’s savage ferocity, its supernatural volume, and its warbling fear. Then he grinned. Fallon had caught something in his trap. He rubbed his left palm where he’d cut himself, just a little, to entice that which hunted him with a smell that he had hoped would make it less attentive to its surroundings.
The Rotting Man had told Fallon, during their unpleasant mental communication, that Damanda would meet him and Ash in Under-Tharos.
While he’d worked for Anammelech, the blightlord had related something of Damanda and her pets.
It didn’t take too much of a leap to guess that Damanda, commanded to collect Fallon, would have her vampires in tow. In fact, the elf suspected that Damanda herself was a night stalker, though one of exceptional skill and mastery. Anammelech had never said.
If one her pets had fallen into the grasp of the horror the elf glimpsed back in the white room, that still left Damanda with three of her four favorites, if what he remembered of Anammelech’s idle talk could be trustedher inner cadre numbered but four. Three now, he corrected himself.
When his thoughts tried to return to the abyssal infestation occupying the white room and what his pursuer’s fate might be, he shook his head. Of the abominations that lay scattered throughout these vaults, he doubted he had yet stumbled upon the worst. Thinking about any one of them for too long was unlikely to prove healthy.
He continued forward again, his gait lighter. The elf retained his grip on the child’s hand. She seemed capable of keeping up with his rapid pace without tiring. As a matter of fact, she didn’t even seem to be making that much of an effort. Again, he wondered what she represented. He knew, based on his experience with her and a feeling that was transmitted merely by touch that, if nothing else, she represented something good, something uncontaminated by poor decisions and something that would not, or could not, recognize the concept of betrayal.
For Fallon, her touch hinted at restitution and perhaps redemption.
When a hint of fresher air brushed his face, he wondered for a moment if his thoughts had conjured a memory of open air. No, he really did feel a faint breeze, issuing from yet another side passage.
Fallon bent, sniffed, held a wetted finger in the air and considered.
“Well, girl,” he finally said, grinning, “I may have found us an exit to the surface.”
CHAPTER 25
Eschar collided with Marrec, knocking the cleric to the side. Marrec nearly lost his grip on the icy token he’d collected from the nine-fold chamber.
The demon squealed in anger. Marrec supposed he survived the contact because his sudden exit caught Eschar off guard. The time it took the cleric to wonder about his survival was too much. Already, Eschar’s hellish eyes tracked him. The demon’s claws moved to make an eviscerating strike. His hand cold on the token of control, Marrec felt his options were down to but one.
The cleric yelled, “Queen Abiding, I release thee! Come, and serve he who gives you freedom!”
Things happened all at once. Eschar’s eyes widened as the import of Marrec’s words penetrated his consciousness.
Ususi yelled “Marrec, you fool.”
The crystal sphere in the cleric’s grasp shattered, sending a spray of ice in all directions.
That which had been caught in the center of the crystal remained, hovering, a blot of nothing the size of a beetle, a breath of winter cold expanded, chilling all.
Eschar mouthed a curse whose vileness surpasses mortal ability to comprehend. Despite his ferocity, he seemed frightened, then he vanished.
The hovering blot expanded, doubling, tripling, quadrupling it size in under a second. It rippled outward and upward exultantly, growing in height and width and dimension until it was at least as large as the white dome over which it hovered. The plunging temperature proclaimed winter’s arrival.
The Queen Abiding was loose.
Marrec, looking into the void of evil above him, said, “Your tormentor flees. Get him.”
Tendrils of darkness instantly grew downward from the hovering mass, reaching for the area where the horned demon stood a few seconds earlier. When the tendrils reached the vacated space, they continued reaching, but not in any dimension Marrec was capable of viewing.
The tendrils retracted. Eschar popped back into existence, tendrils wrapped about his straining torso. The horned demon screamed in defiance.
The pleasant female voice of the queen spoke from the darkness. It said, “I told you you’d pay for your effrontery, Eschar.”
Eschar craned his head back and belched forth a thread of seeking flame, which probed like a fiery lance into the darkness’ underbelly.
The bonds of darkness surrounding Eschar loosened. Taking advantage of the slackened grip, the demon struggled mightily and managed to escape the bonds completely.
Marrec, only a step away from the struggle, uttered, “No.”
He stabbed Justlance into the horned demon’s abdomen. Eschar flinched in pain but tried to make good his escape, ignoring the cleric’s bold attack. The demon began to sprint toward the edge of the cavern.
Eschar made about ten strides before the darkness rippled then ballooned in size again. In the blink of an eye it inflated across the entire roof of the cavern, rose a storm cloud of night. Then darkness fell. Marrec couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. All was cold and utterly quiet. When the darkness lifted a heartbeat later, Eschar
