Brey shook her head. “Everybody won, or everybody lost, depending on how you look at it. Cyre was destroyed by some kind of magical disaster, and the remaining nations made peace.”
Egen looked confused.
“Destroyed?” he echoed. “So where are we now?”
“In Karrnath,” she answered. “The renegades were hiding close to home, yet nobody found them.”
A murmur rippled through the surviving rangers, who were at the bars of their cells, hanging on every word.
“I’ll tell you more later,” Brey said. “But now, we’ve got to get you out of here.” Grasping the door of one cell in both hands, she pulled it off its hinges and tossed it aside. The rangers gasped, their eyes wide.
“Oh, yes,” said Brey, “I was one of their experiments. I’ll explain it all later, but for now let’s just say I’m no longer a paladin. Or alive, as the Church defines it.” She went to the next cell and pulled off the door, repeating the process until all the rangers were free. They crowded together in the guard room, looking at her with frightened eyes.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m not quite a monster yet—not most of the time, anyway. But I won’t be able to come home with you.”
“Oh, Captain!” said Egen, almost in tears. “Surely—you weren’t willing—couldn’t someone in the Church help?” He seemed quite overcome by Brey’s fate, and slumped over, wracked by sobs.
Tarrel opened the door of Dria d’Cannith’s cell, and she stepped out to join her rescuers. A slightly built woman with thin features and fine, fair hair, she looked as though she belonged at an embassy ball rather than on a dangerous mission in hostile territory.
She opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted by a sudden gurgle from Egen. He dropped to the floor, writhing in agony, and Brey stood helplessly over him.
“Can’t you heal him?” she demanded, turning frantically to Haldin.
The gnome looked at the thrashing ranger sharply. “Perhaps,” he said, “if I knew what was wrong.” He took half a step toward Egen, and the ranger’s body exploded.
Blood, bone shards, and scraps of flesh flew across the room. The offal burned whatever it landed on, sizzling like an acid. Everyone turned away and covered their faces, but no one could avoid being sprayed with the vile rain.
The other rangers fell to the floor, screaming and trying to brush the stuff off them. Some were apparently close to madness from the strain of their long confinement, and this fresh horror seemed to push them over the edge of hysteria. Brey stood watching helplessly as their screams turned from revulsion to pain, and their thrashings became wilder.
“Get down!” yelled Tarrel, pressing on her shoulder. The others were already diving to the floor. As if in a dream, the vampire woman knelt and covered herself with her cloak, and the lives of the remaining Inmistil Rangers were snuffed out in the same grisly fashion as Egen’s.
The explosions were as deadly as they were disturbing. Brey’s cloak was shredded by flying debris, and only her armor saved her from further injury. The others were all bleeding from numerous small cuts, although it was impossible to tell which blood was their own and which came from the unfortunate rangers. But worse was to come.
The wreckage of the rangers’ corpses began to move. Intestines snaked forward, ribs crawled like multiple legs—and behind them they dragged sightless, staring heads, their faces frozen in the unspeakable horror of their death-agonies. In the midst of each ruined body pulsed a sac of fluid, almost the size of a head. Before the blood-spattered companions could recover from their shock, they found themselves under attack.
Brey found limbs, guts, and tendons snaking around her legs as the bodies converged on her. Already wracked by emotion from finding her troops and losing them in such a fashion, she found the blood and flesh that clung to her was too much for her vampiric nature to bear. Her eyes blazed red, her face distorted, and her fangs bared themselves as she struggled, ripping and tearing the animated flesh and forcing chunks of bloody offal into her mouth.
Dria d’Cannith flattened herself against the back wall, her eyes wide with horror and her homunculus uttering sharp cries of distress as it clung to her neck. Mordan stabbed at one of the loathsome things with his rapier, puncturing the great cyst at its center. A vile-smelling pus oozed from the wound; the creature writhed and shook on the floor for a moment, and then was still. Tarrel had pulled out his wand but couldn’t loose a fireball because of the close quarters.
Haldin held up his blue dragon statuette and began to chant, but a pale, translucent object flew into the room like an arrow, striking him on the chest. As it stopped, the companions saw it was a bony hand, glowing with an eerie green light. Haldin’s face slackened, and he stumbled to one side, almost dropping the holy symbol. He seemed to have forgotten what he was about to do.
