Rhedyn was a soldier doing a soldier’s work-Lirra knew this. Hadn’t she dealt just as ruthlessly with Osten and the tentacle whip? But there’d been a brutal efficiency to Rhedyn’s motions, along with a casual cruelty she’d never seen in him before, and she found herself wondering how much of that had come from him and how much from the symbiont he was bound to. She thrust the thought aside for later contemplation and looked to the center of the chamber, where Elidyr continued to struggle with the Overmantle.
The artificer had pulled out all three of the device’s trays, and his hands were blurs as they moved back and forth across the crystals. Whatever he was doing was having some effect-no longer did streams of energy stretch from the Overmantle to the crystalline rods attached to the steel beds, and while the obscene insect-shelled hands still gripped the inner edges of the portal to Xoriat, the opening in space itself had shrunk significantly since Lirra had looked upon it last. She had the impression the portal might’ve been closed by now if the creature on the other side, whatever it was, hadn’t been struggling so hard to keep the doorway open.
Sinnoch continued to stand next to Elidyr, but the dolgaunt still did nothing to help her uncle. Instead, the creature was laughing wildly, taking mad delight in the chaos surrounding him.
She gripped her sword tighter and started walking toward the center of the chamber. She doubted there was anything she could do to help Elidyr, but she could stop Sinnoch from making the situation any worse and, if nothing else, see to it that he paid for his betrayal … assuming, that is, her uncle managed to close the portal. If whatever those insect-armored hands belonged to made it through to their world, Lirra had the distinct feeling that none of them would survive very long after its arrival.
But before she could do more than take two steps, she felt something grab hold of her ankle. She looked down and saw a hand clasping her boot-a hand that belonged to Osten. The man lay prone on the ground, arm outstretched, holding onto her ankle with an iron grip. He grinned up at her, and she saw the ragged, bloody hole at the base of his throat, and she realized what had happened. She’d seen the technique performed on the battlefield before when a soldier’s airway was obstructed and no cleric was available. Cutting a hole in the throat, like a tiny second mouth, allowed air to bypass the obstruction and make it into the lungs. The soldier would then be able to breathe until such time as he could be seen to by a cleric and healed. But the last time she’d looked at Osten, he’d seemed on the verge of losing consciousness. How had he managed to perform the procedure on himself? And then she realized that he hadn’t. The tentacle whip had used its barbed tip to dig into the tender flesh at the base of Osten’s neck and create a crude opening. It seemed the aberration was more intelligent than she’d given it credit for.
She glanced toward Osten’s left arm where the symbiont was attached, but as she did so, its length unfurled toward her, and its coils wrapped around her throat. She instantly tightened her neck muscles before it could squeeze too hard, yanked her boot free from Osten’s hand, and spun around, intending to bring her sword up and strike at the aberration. But before she could do so, she watched in horror as the tentacle whip’s mouth detached from Osten’s arm, anchor tendrils tearing free from his flesh with tiny sprays of blood. Then, using its grip in her neck for leverage, the whip flexed, bringing its mouth end swinging toward Lirra’s left arm. It happened so swiftly that she had no time to react, and then the beaked mouth bit into the inner flesh of her forearm and its anchor tendrils burrowed into her skin, seeking purchase in the muscle beneath.
Lirra screamed.
Elidyr’s terror was eclipsed only by his confusion. This couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t!
He was dimly aware of the separate battles taking place around him-the volunteers going mad, the guards dying, Vaddon and the others engaging the symbiont-controlled hosts-but his attention remained fixed on the portal that had opened in the air above the Overmantle. The portal was supposed to be there, of course, its chaos energy fueling the dragonshards in the Overmantle, but it was supposed to be so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. This portal was hundreds, no, thousands of times larger, and Elidyr simply could not account for that. Nor, unfortunately, could he do anything to reverse the portal’s growth. He frantically tried to recalibrate the crystals’ energy matrices, but it seemed that his efforts only made matters worse.
Inhuman hands gripped the insides of the portal and began to widen it. Which was yet another impossibility. One couldn’t physically touch a hole in space, let alone make it larger through sheer physical effort. But that’s exactly what appeared to be happening.
Xoriat is on the other side, he reminded himself. The rules of existence are different there. If such a word as rules could even apply.
But the artificer forgot all about whether or not a dimensional portal could be grasped by hands when he realized exactly who-and what-those hands belonged to: a daelkyr lord.
Nausea ripped through his gut and pain like a white-hot dagger seared his brain, as the presence of the daelkyr lord assaulted his sanity. He had to retain hold of his faculties at least long enough to shut down the portal and prevent the daelkyr from coming through, even if doing so cost him his sanity in the end.
He turned to Sinnoch. The dolgaunt was looking up at the daelkyr’s carapaced hands with wild joy. Elidyr opened his mouth, intending to call for the dolgaunt’s help, but the sounds that emerged from his lips in no way resembled human speech, and all they did was make Sinnoch laugh. Realizing he was on his own, Elidyr focused his attention back on the Overmantle and did his best to hold off the burgeoning insanity roiling within his mind.
In the end, he didn’t know whether he managed to figure out the right combination or if he stumbled upon it by accident, but when he finished touching the last dragonshard, the portal to Xoriat stopped growing and slowly began to close. The daelkyr fought to hold it open, but as powerful as the lord was, he couldn’t keep the rift open without the Overmantle’s help. As if the daelkyr realized this, he withdrew his hands, and Elidyr felt a moment of elation that he’d succeeded in preventing the foul creature from emerging into their world.
But even as the portal rapidly closed, the daelkyr shoved his arm through, hand stretching toward Elidyr until the claw tip of the index finger gently touched the artificer’s forehead. And then, just as swiftly, the hand withdrew and the portal snapped shut and vanished.
Elidyr stood frozen for a long moment, staring up at the spot where only an instant before a doorway had been open upon the Realm of Madness.
“Of course,” he whispered. “It’s all so clear now.”
And he began to laugh.
Vaddon was furious with himself for giving into his brother yet again. Though he hadn’t admitted it to the others, he’d been just as upset that Bergerron had ordered the Outguard to cease operations and vacate the lodge. Not that he cared about proving the worth of using symbionts in warfare, but he hated leaving a job undone. So when Elidyr had told him they might have one last chance to salvage a victory, Vaddon had decided to gamble on his brother a final time. Unfortunately, it was rapidly becoming clear that this was one gamble Vaddon had lost.