King of Chaos by Dave Gross

Author:Dave Gross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781601255587
Publisher: Paizo Publishing, LLC
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The Widowknife Chronicle

Varian

Any misgivings I had about letting Radovan scout through the hypocaust vanished when we reached the first guard station. With a scroll I rendered Gemma invisible. The effects would not long endure, but the spell would persist even after she did her work.

Gemma crept around the corner. We heard a muffled grunt, and a moment later the body of a demonblooded sentry came sliding back, dragged by the invisible woman. We concealed the corpse in the furnace chamber and crept along the ground-floor hallway.

Pausing only to allow Gemma to listen at closed doors, we encountered nothing more dreadful than snoring from the guards’ bunkroom. We proceeded up the stairs on the far side of the corridor.

There I heard Radovan scratching a signal from within the walls. If Desna smiled upon us, he would find egress above. Otherwise he would have to retrace his path all the way to the entrance.

Traversing the second floor proved more challenging. Rather than a single straight corridor, a circular passage separated an inner sanctum from a number of outer chambers. Semicircular braziers set into the stone walls glowered with banked coals. Red and yellow light spilled from the outer chambers, some with their doors wide open, others sealed with prison bars.

In more favorable circumstances, I should have liked to search them all. Yet we could tell by the sounds alone that most of the chambers were occupied.

Reluctant though I was to expend one of my last remaining invisibility scrolls, I placed a hand upon Oparal’s shoulders. The others knew the sign; Gemma placed her hand on my shoulder, Alase on hers. I discharged the scroll and we vanished from sight.

Oparal led the way past orgies and tortures, experiments vile and cruel. Nothing I had seen even in the laboratories of the Acadamae could compare. The obscenities we saw perpetrated in those alcoves made the Acadamae’s necromancers and diabolists seem no more malign than boys plucking the wings from insects or incinerating ants with a beam of sunlight focused through a lens. Despite the surgical nature of some of the proceedings, the leering faces of the vivisectionists, human and fiendish, left no question that they took far more pleasure than learning from their experiments. The blood resulting from their violations of their subjects pooled on the floor until it gurgled into drains that carried the effluvium through the basements to run off the falls and pollute the Sarkora River.

Few of the demon cults I had uncovered in Egorian had been half so abominable.

Once the paladin paused before me, and I imagined I could feel her holy blade trembling in its scabbard. For a dreadful instant I feared it might be one of those fabled sentient weapons that could overcome its mistress’s caution and send her berserking into a futile attack.

Whatever the cause of her hesitation, Oparal resumed our course. On the other side of the tower, we ascended an unguarded stair to the third floor. It, too, presented us with a circular path around a central chamber and six more rooms on the outer perimeter.

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