Child of a Dead God (52 page)
Leesil heard an angry grunt as the heavy vampire rolled off his back. Before he could twist and slash at its legs, the woman beneath him latched her hand about his throat.
Her mouth widened with lips pulled back from long fangs and sharpened teeth.
Leesil slammed his left blade point through her side.
Her head arched back, eyes clenching shut, but her grip on his neck didn’t break. Leesil couldn’t get any air.
He levered his blade through her torso, until the point ground through her to the stone floor. When he lurched upward, her arm snapped straight, and he raised the right blade and fell on her.
The blade’s outside edge sank into her throat. Leesil shoved down hard.
Black fluids welled over his hand and forearm, and then his blade cracked through her neck bones. Her head rolled away to one side, and Leesil turned over, ripping her limp hand from his throat.
Leesil gasped in air—just as he looked up to see Wynn ram her dagger into the back of the stocky vampire grappling with Osha.
Wynn scrambled in as Osha caught the muscular undead’s wrist.
He pulled the man’s swing aside but barely avoided the iron bar. As he slashed the bone knife at the undead’s throat, Wynn ducked in and rammed her dagger into its back.
The undead twisted sharply and jerked Wynn around by her grip on the hilt. A sharp crack sounded as something narrow and solid whipped down across her thigh.
Wynn’s leg gave way, and she crumpled with a sharp whimper. She fell, and the dagger ripped downward a few inches.
Something rancid and oily spattered across her face.
Wynn tightened her grip, and the blade came out. She quickly turned over, pushing up with one hand. The dagger was coated in dripping black.
Osha slid down the wall near the passage.
Blood seeped from the side of his mouth below one clenched eye. Before Wynn could call to him, the large undead whipped around above her and raised its iron bar.
A long split ran from its throat down its upper chest. Osha’s knife had struck true, but the undead did not even notice. Wynn shrank away, raising the dagger to shield herself.
A snarling howl echoed through the chamber.
The undead lifted its head and froze, staring beyond Wynn.
“Don’t let it get out!” Leesil shouted from somewhere behind Wynn.
The muscular undead spun and bolted down the passage.
Magiere stepped out behind Li’kän into a landing hollow on the edge of a vast cavern.
The glowing orange light was strong in here, filling a space nearly as large as the underground plateau where the “burning” one had crawled from the fiery fissure. But the hot air was far more humid here. Vapors misted off the near and more distant walls, as if the snow and ice above seeped down through the earth to be eaten by the cavern’s heat.
“I am here,” Magiere whispered, but the cavern’s silence made her voice seem loud.
She stepped forward to the landing’s edge.
A long and narrow stone walkway stretched out over a round chasm, so deep that Magiere couldn’t see the bottom. The orange glow rose from below.
That one bridge joined three others, all reaching out from the distant cavern walls. They connected at a center point and blended with a stone platform suspended over the chasm. Looking around, Magiere saw pock-marks on the nearer cavern walls.
No, not marks, but more burial hovels carved in the stone—and more bone figures so old they resembled the color of the surrounding rock. Skeletons crouched and cowered with their heads and eyes cast down. They filled the cavern walls halfway up to its domed top.
“Who are they?” Magiere asked.
She didn’t expect any answer, but Li’kän let out a voiceless hiss that grew too loud in the cavern’s silence.
Li’kän looked at Magiere, the same way she had at Wynn, as if fascinated that anyone spoke to her. But the white undead never glanced at the walls.
A trace of disdain crossed her pure features, like one who saw nothing of any interest. Not even for those centuries-old dead, who still bowed before this ancient one—and whatever it served.
“Did you lock them down here . . . once they finished making this place?”
Li’kän didn’t respond.
Magiere felt no rage at such injustice. What more could she expect from a monster?
A lightening sensation had washed through her from the moment she’d stepped into the tunnel. The deeper she had gone, the more it had taken away her hunger, but it also kept her dhampir nature at its peak. Yet anger, the source of all her strength and will, felt smothered.
Even the loss of that did not matter.
Magiere looked to the meeting point of those narrow stone walkways— to the landing hovering above the chasm’s depths. Something stood upon it, barely visible through the misty air.
Li’kän stepped onto the narrow walkway.
Magiere followed, and waves of humid heat rose around her.
In the long depths below, she saw clouds gathered above a glow of orange-red. Water trickling down the chasm’s walls met with severe heat somewhere below, and vapor collected in thick mist, obscuring the depths.
Vertigo filled Magiere, and she quickly turned her gaze on the walkway’s narrow stone.
What was she doing here, following a voice in her dreams and an instinctive pull she couldn’t name? That visitor hidden in her slumber hissed its words, and all she’d seen of it were writhing black coils.
This same voice had whispered to Welstiel—and to Ubâd, instructing him in Magiere’s creation using the blood of five races. But it had abandoned the necromancer.
Had it abandoned Welstiel as well? Was that why he’d never found this place on his own—and had tried in Bela to get her to join him?
Magiere knew she had followed the whispered urgings of some
thing
that couldn’t be trusted. And now she was passively following a mad undead across a chasm to seek . . . what?
thing
that couldn’t be trusted. And now she was passively following a mad undead across a chasm to seek . . . what?
She saw the three other bridges leading off to three other hollows in the cavern walls. Perhaps above there were other barred stone doors. The burial hovels around the cavern and in the winding passage suggested that hundreds had labored here, perhaps hauling up excavated stone to build the immense fortification above.
Li’kän blocked Magiere’s view of the platform, but when the undead reached it, she stepped aside.
A four-legged stone stand rose smoothly from the platform. A perfectly round opening had been carved through the center of its top.
In the wide hole rested a globe, slightly larger than a great helm.
It was made of a dark material Magiere couldn’t name, as dark as char and faintly rough across its round surface. Atop it, the large tapered head of a spike pierced down through the globe’s center—and the spike’s head was larger than her fist. When she crouched to peer through the stand’s four legs, she saw the spike’s tip protruded a hand’s width through the globe’s bottom.
Magiere saw no mark of separation to indicate that the spike could ever be removed. Both spike and globe appeared to have been chiseled from one single piece.
Was this the “orb” she had come for?
All Magiere’s doubts slipped away. It was trapped here, and she had to free it—protect it—keep it from all other hands. This was why she had come. And still all trace of her hunger was gone.
Magiere rose from her crouch and looked at Li’kän. “This is how you’ve survived. It . . . sustains you.”
Li’kän just stared at the orb, as if she had not seen it in a long time.
Magiere saw grooves around the spike’s head. Looking closer, she found that they ended in notches on opposing sides of the spike, and she glanced back at Li’kän.
The undead raised her slender hand, and her fingertips brushed the circlet around her neck. Like the one Magiere wore, its open ends were adorned with inward-pointing knobs.
Magiere’s eyes widened as she looked down upon the spike’s grooves and notches.
“How do I—”
“This is not what I expected,” said a refined voice.
Magiere whirled about.
Welstiel stood halfway across the narrow stone bridge.
Leesil had barely crawled to his knees when Sgäile and Chap leaped past him.
But the last robed undead was already gone. Panic hit him as he scrambled up and grabbed the back of Wynn’s coat.
“Come on!” he growled, pulling her up. “Welstiel and Chane are already after Magiere, and now that big undead!”
Then he saw the state of his companions.
Chap’s neck was matted with blood, and a split in Sgäile’s cowl collar and the shoulder of his tunic were soaked in dark red. Wynn favored one leg, though she stayed on her feet, but Osha was slumped unconscious against the wall. Blood trailed from his hair across his temple, and more leaked from the side of his mouth.
Leesil wavered, desperately wanting to find Magiere.
“Wait,” Sgäile said.
He held one of Leesil’s old blades in hand and looked to the first undead Li’kän had left broken near the wall. It did not move, but its body was intact. Without hesitation, Sgäile walked over and hacked the winged blade through the undead’s throat.
A wet and muffled crack sounded as the blade severed its spine.
Leesil watched Sgäile with a flicker of surprise. Apparently the man had overcome his revulsion of dismemberment. Sgäile returned and gripped Osha’s limp arm, and Leesil helped lift the younger elf over Sgäile’s good shoulder.
“The library,” Sgäile said.
Leesil took Wynn’s arm, steadying the limping sage as they headed down the passage. When they reached the vast library and turned toward its far end, they saw that the iron beam now lay on the floor.
The stone doors were partly open.
Sgäile lowered Osha, and Wynn caught the young elf’s shoulders, helping ease him onto the floor.
“I will tend him,” she said. “Go after Magiere—hurry!”
“I can’t just leave you here!” Leesil shouted in frustration.
“Yes,” she insisted. “You heard Welstiel tell those mad undeads, ‘Protect my way.’ He commands them. That is why the large one ran to assist him when the others were destroyed. Now go!”
Leesil looked uncertainly to Sgäile, standing before the doors and cradling the arm below his wounded shoulder.
“I can still fight,” he said flatly. “Now come!”
Chap loped past Sgäile through the space in the doors.
Leesil’s instincts screamed for him to run to Magiere, but another part railed against leaving Wynn alone.
“What if . . . ,” he began, but hesitated to say the name aloud. “What if another undead comes back past us?”
Wynn cocked her head at him. “No matter what has happened here, Chane would never harm me . . . and I will never allow him to harm Osha.”
Her reckless confidence infuriated Leesil. “Chane’s not the only one down there!”
Wynn turned her serious brown eyes on Sgäile. “Then make certain no one else gets past you.”
He nodded to her. “We must hurry.”
Leesil hated that Wynn was right. Gripping both blades, he slipped between the heavy doors, whispering sharply, “No one gets past us.”
Magiere turned and faced her half-brother, his sword in hand.
As always, her dhampir instincts never picked up his undead presence.
In a somewhat tattered cloak and scuffed boots, his hair was slicked back from his forehead and his white temples were tinged ocher in the cavern’s dull glow. He was still as poised as when she’d first met him in Miiska—and as arrogant as when he’d revealed his nature to her in the sewers of Bela.
He didn’t look surprised to see her.
That should have puzzled Magiere, but it didn’t.
Welstiel had followed her.
In all the years he had desired the orb, he’d never found it—never could—which was why he’d toyed with her. He needed her, and for more than just bypassing the guardians he’d believed were waiting in this place.
But he had nothing to say now that Magiere wanted to hear.
All his manipulations of her had left a trail of innocents, dead and butchered, in his path, from her own mother, Magelia, to the first owner of her Sea Lion Tavern, and on to Chesna, torn and bleeding to death on her father’s porch. Welstiel was a monster, regardless of their sharing a father— who’d given neither of them a choice in what they were.
Magiere hesitated with a quick glance at Li’kän.
The white undead gave Welstiel no notice, gazing only at the orb with her fingertips poised on the metal hoop about her throat.
Magiere didn’t care to face Welstiel out on the narrow bridge above the chasm. She had to either lure him to the platform or drive him back to the hollow of the cavern’s entrance.
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