Read Online The Eye of the Chained God by Don Bassingthwaite - Free Book Online Page B

and scrapes. He pushed himself onto his knees and looked behind him. The tall stone statue of a man, its chest broken and ruined to expose its hollow interior, stood over him. A deep cowl hid its face, but its hands were outstretched, the upturned palms carved in the pattern of two jagged spirals. Kri rose, his old bones and joints protesting.
    The last thing he remembered—in the mortal world at any rate—was leaping through the Vast Gate and shattering it behind him so that Albanon could not follow. His destination had been random, his only glimpse of it empty darkness. Everything he had once learned as a priest of Ioun, the god of knowledge, told him that such a thing was not possible. Every gate led somewhere. Something had held him between worlds.
    He put his hands on the palms of the statue. “Chained God,” he said. “I thank you.”
    The voice that answered him was a faint echo of what it had been in the dark place.
Destroy Vestapalk. Destroy the Voidharrow
.
    Kri bent his head. “How?”
    You have the key. One comes who will help you turn it
.
    “How will I know him?”
    There was no answer. Kri looked up into the cowl of the statue, but found it had been carved without a face. A blank oval of stone looked back at him. Kri removed his hands from those of the statue and went to explore his new surroundings.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T hey left Fallcrest the next morning. A week of Albanon dragging his feet had given the rest of them more than enough time to prepare for their eventual journey. Supplies were scarce in the crowded town, but horses were surprisingly easy to come by. Tempest suspected that many of the refugees who had brought them into Fallcrest found them to be more of a burden than an asset. Immeral, the most experienced among them in dealing with horses, very nearly had his pick of what was on offer.
    “Some good mounts,” he said as he checked the tack of his chosen steed, “but the people here drive a hard bargain considering they may never have the chance to ride these animals again.”
    “I don’t imagine they were thinking about riding them,” said Tempest. She put her foot in the stirrup and swung a leg over the back of her horse. “Food shortages haven’treally set in yet. In another week, maybe two, you would have paid a lot more.”
    “That’s barbaric,” said Belen.
    “Not as barbaric as starving to death.” Tempest shook the reins and urged her horse along the road.
    They crossed the Nentir River above the falls and descended the steep switchbacks of the Trade Road down the bluff on the other side. All of them were alert. There might not have been plague demons in the lower town for some time—until the day before, at least—but the defenders of Fallcrest had all but abandoned the western shore of the river. The morning sun cast long shadows across the road and made pits of darkness in the hollows of the bluffs. The road was an ideal place for an ambush. They covered each other as they made their way down, but there was no hint of waiting demons.
    Their morning’s ride passed in near silence. The sight of empty farms along the road, crops left to rot in the fields, drove the urge to talk out of them. Tempest studied each one they passed. She couldn’t help herself. It was like watching a public execution, only without the carnival atmosphere. Unlike Fallcrest’s lower town, few farm buildings had been destroyed. Some showed broken windows or doors, but in many the door simply swung loose on its hinges. If she looked closely, she sometimes saw bloody smears, but there were no bloated corpses in the farmyards, no bones in the long grass. The Abyssal Plague didn’t kill. Neither did the plague demons, at least not always. They wounded, they maimed, but moreoften than not, they left their victims alive to become demons themselves.
    Sometimes, it seemed to Tempest, the creatures would rather have killed but were restrained from it as if by some greater power eager to see the plague