Free Conspiracy by J. Robert King Page A

causeway and dropped onto impaling spikes. But many, if not most, fell to the powerful blows of the paladins.
    “We are holding them,” Miltiades grunted as his warhammer pulped the pod-shaped head of a greater fiend. “We are holding back the armies of hell!”
    Then one fiend slipped past—a great anaconda with the head of a boar. Miltiades pounded its slithering side, but couldn’t stop it. A second got by, and a third. In time, the tide of fiends flowed once more. For the defenders, all that remained was the grim, bloody work of slaying those they could.
    Miltiades shouted, “May Tyr bless the palace defenders!”

Chapter 8
Confluence
    As the pirates fled into the hall, Noph glanced back toward the audience chamber.
    The twin curtains of the mage-king’s tank drew slowly aside to reveal a tank glowing with fiery radiance. Orange-red water churned and boiled around a thrashing, titanic creature. Mangled, scaly, tentacular— the mage-king writhed: his torso arched in agony; his tentacles spasmed; his hands clutched into fists; his teeth ground together like rolling boulders. Aetheric thrashed, recoiled, shuddered, but all the while held those tank-bursting fists by his sides. His skin molted
    away. It sloughed in ribbons in the water. It circled him in tatters. Still, he did not break the glass.
    A sniff and a tug from Ingrar brought Noph back around. “We’ve got more problems. Brimstone—there are fiends ahead. Tanar’ri. They’re pouring up the stairs in front of the palace.”
    “Swords! Knives!” Noph called to his comrades. “Fiends ahead.”
    “Damn,” Belgin swore. He came to a halt and drew steel. “Why don’t we escape down a side passage—let the fiends and the mage-king take care of each other?”
    Entreri shook his head. “And let demons have first crack at the bloodforge? No. We stand and fight.”
    Noph helped Ingrar to the side of the hall. “You wait here. I’ll keep anybody from coming at you.” He drew his sword.
    “Sure,” Ingrar responded, hefting his cutlass. “Just don’t back up into me; Fll stab anything that comes close.”
    There was time for nothing more. Shattering glass and splintering wood announced the army’s arrival. Fiends smashed through the front facade of the palace and flooded toward the pirates.
    Entreri and his party stood unmoving, a circle of swords against an army of fangs. The onslaught came, unstoppable.
    Noph set his stance and prepared to die.
    Then another, deeper shattering came. The fist of the mage-king smashed the impenetrable wall of his tank. Water blasted through the breach, and cracks ran out from it in all directions. The glass held for one final moment before it all—glass, water, and squid-lord— roared out and struck the opposite wall of the audience chamber.
    The wall creaked, then gave way. Ten-ton stone blocks fragmented into flying rubble and scouring sand. Rock sprayed outward. In its midst came one of the king’s tentacles, as wide around as an elephant.
    “Down!” Noph shouted. He and Ingrar dropped to their faces.
    The others did, too. A killing hail of stone, sand, and water roared by overhead. It rushed straight into the teeth of the charging tanar’ri, ripping flesh from bone.
    Noph saw no more. The flood arrived.
    A muscular wave hoisted him from the floor and tossed him in its black belly. The breath he held blasted from his lungs. He tried to swim, but the water was omnipotent.
    A great wall of tentacle swept beneath him. His cheek scraped the bossed ceiling. A chandelier surged by. Then he saw it again, that great black circle, that deep, deep darkness.
    The eye of Aetheric.
    Noph kicked out away from the mage-king’s face and dropped into a small side eddy.
    He plunged. Down, down. Whirlpool. It emptied water through a doorway and down. It emptied him. Water rushed in a choppy cascade down, down, down. Tumble tumble turn, down. Spiral stairs cracked his knees. Torches glowed lurid before they snuffed, and down,