Depths of Madness (35 page)

Her senses returned soon after the hands released her to rest and recover against the stone wall. Twilight coughed, pointedly aware of the trickle of salty blood that ran over her split chin. Broken ribs. She hoped nothing bled inside… much. Her right arm was useless, splintered by the troll’s fury. She needed to catch her breath.

“Thank you, Davoren,” she murmured. “I never expected you to save me.”

The warlock, scanning the darkness they had just left with

his fiendish eyes, grunted. The sounds of Tlork’s roars and squeals had vanished, presumably down the pit, but he would return. They both knew it.

Slowly, as she panted and groaned, Twilight climbed to her feet with Davoren’s help. She leaned against the wall, her head still aching and the respective agonies in her stomach and breast biting at one another. Her fingers itched for Betrayal; it lay just visible a dagger’s cast distant, at the end of the tiny crawl tunnel through which the warlock had dragged her. She started that way. She had to save Gargan—she had to…

“It’s appropriate how you word your thanksgiving,” Davoren said behind her, the chill of his words freezing her in mid limp. “I did save you—for myself.”

As Twilight turned, Davoren’s shoulder slammed beneath her breast, crunching the broken ribs and crushing her against the wall, and the warlock rammed the poisoned stiletto into her side.

Twilight had time only to gasp before she felt the freezing venom course through her blood. Her eyes widened—and stayed that way.

“A taste of your own trickery, then,” Davoren said. “I couldn’t let some brute kill you—not when I have blessed you with my oh-so exquisite hatred for so long.”

Twilight’s mouth hung open as though to scream. His wound had not been a fatal stroke, but a stab in the gut. It would take painful hours to expire. Especially…

Especially with that milky potion Davoren dangled teasingly before her eyes—exactly the same way she had dangled her poison vial what seemed so long ago.

“Death is yet a ways off,” he said redundantly. “We shall enjoy its process, no?”

He must have misinterpreted the undying rage in her eyes as terror—Davoren had never been good at reading others—for he continued. “Do not fear, filliken—it isn’t for your flesh I have reserved you, but for a higher purpose.” His eyes roved her body. “Though, if my will overcame your decrepitude, I might reconsider…”

Silently, Twilight wondered if she truly looked so old and decayed, or Davoren meant something different. Somehow, it didn’t seem like something she should point out.

“You always thought yourself better than me, but no more,” the warlock said. “Perhaps I will leave you, as you would have left me—food or prey, or worse. Perhaps you’ll be lucky—perhaps the troll won’t be the first to find you.”

Twilight’s throat contorted with fury.

“How does it feel now, Shrew-at-Twilight? To be helpless before me? To know that there is nothing—absolutely nothing you can do to stay my hand?”

The edge of Twilight’s lip twitched. Then she brought her good knee up between his legs. Hard.

“Except that,” she said.

With a soprano moan, Davoren crumpled into a quivering heap. Twilight fell on him, unable to stand on her broken leg. She slapped away his feeble hands and took the healing potion he had taunted her with. She jabbed an elbow into his face, stunning him once more.

Twilight crawled away and uncorked the flask. She drained the sweet liquor, letting it spread to her broken limbs and ribs. It did not heal her entirely, but the pain receded. With a little exertion, she could stand again.

And as soon as she did, she kicked the warlock in the gut, just to stifle any spells, curses, or whatever else he might have mustered.

“H-how?” Davoren managed as he pawed at her without strength.

“Typical Davoren,” Twilight said brokenly. “You may be strong… you may be crafty, and you may be powerful… but you don’t know the first rule of poison. Never carry one that can harm you.”

The warlock’s face twisted in a mixture of agony and fury. Dark, perverse words started to form on his lips.

Twilight put a stop to that with her boot. “You’d be surprised the tolerance a wench can build with a century on her hands.”

In reply, Davoren spat a pair of incisors.

“What biting wit,” Twilight noted. Then she coughed and almost fell. The healing helped, but there was little enough a single potion could do for ribs as broken as hers.

Without the fear of the warlock striking her down from behind, she limped toward Betrayal. Where it lay, shadows flickered along its edge, and she remembered its former wielder. Her eyes grew bleary for a heartbeat, but only for a heartbeat.

“Thtop!” Davoren commanded, with Asmodeus’s authority.

But Twilight was unmoved. Of her own will, she stopped and turned halfway to look.

“You neeth me,” he said through blood and spittle, his voice slurred without some of his teeth. “My power—to ethcape thith plathe. You’ll never make it witho’w help!”

“A good point.” She pulled the amulet over her head—so it could find her. “Ruukthalmuramaxamin!” she called. “Hear me! I have a new bargain for you.”

As gold energy began to circle around her, Davoren’s face sank. “Whore!” he spat. “You had beth watch over your thoulder—my mathter never forgeth a foe! I’ll take pleathure in watching you die, like I did with that gold weathel and her corpth of a mate.”

Twilight paused. “Hold, Ruuk,” she said, dropping the chain back to her neck. The magic faded, and Davoren chuckled—with a cough.

As the elf limped to where Davoren’s stiletto lay, gripping her bleeding side, she listened to Davoren laying out his plans for her humiliating demise. She was amused.

As she crossed into the hall, her shadow broke from its spell and hissed back around her, its touch like a chilling caress. Twilight almost took comfort in it.

“Filliken! Trollop! Thuccubuth!” he roared. “I’ll thow you! I’ll burn a hole in your thull—an keep you alive, begging! Athmodeuth will have hith due tribute by my hand! Your trickery ith nothing to my art!”

Twilight slipped the bloody stiletto up the sleeve of her good arm. Then she tipped up Betrayal with her toe. Tilted,

it sparkled hotly in the torchlight. She thought about running him through, but every way she looked at it, it just seemed too honorable.

She settled for stabbing him in the gut.

Davoren’s jabbering turned frantic. “Juth like them. Juth like them all! I’m better than you!” Twilight heard the madness in his voice. Blood poured from his lips and his arm reached for her. “I’ll kill you—I’ll kill you—/W/you!”

Then she bent, not without effort, and selected a nice, heavy rock. She smiled. “Not if I crush all your fingers first.”

Surrounded by candles of human fat, kneeling on blankets of skin, Lord Divergence prayed to the demon prince. He demanded power rather than begged. Demogorgon would give nothing to the weak.

And the fiend was pleased with its servant, granting greater powers than it had before. A new skill, a new talent came into Gestal’s mind, and his jaw dropped. It was a complex ritual, calling upon his patron in a lengthy invocation, but when it was done…

If Twilight did not respond as he wished by her own will, certain powers could be brought into play from which not even her trivial trickster god could save her.

Some time later, sharn magic deposited Twilight just outside the temple of Amauntor, Netherese god of the sun. Once Twilight had found it odd that a sharn would make its home in such a place—in order and in the dark—but now she found it fitting.

Golden light sparked and hissed around her, matrices and lattices of Art that served their purpose, then were gone. She felt the touch of order, so foreign to her free spirit, sliding away from her. The light flickered off the sapphire pendant hanging from her fist, then left her in darkness—not a barrier to her darksight.

She slipped her amulet back on, settling into its false security.

Twilight shivered, but would not allow something tiny like discomfort to stay her. Too many had died—too many friends had left her, stolen by Gestal.

And yet within that murderer, that horrible monster, she had glimpsed a spirit like hers. Abused, hated, and confused, surviving by lies. Like her, and like Davoren, too.

Seemingly of one mind, the doors to the temple ground open, scraping against the cavern floor as over bones. They thundered against the walls like the tolling of doom. As hesitant as if she were signing a death warrant, Twilight walked through that mighty portal.

As she did, she casually wiped Davoren’s blood from Betrayal. A gleam of white shone through the gray, as though the troll’s burning blood had eaten away a casing of rust, revealing a pure heart.

Twilight found that amusing. It certainly would not describe her.

Twilight went quickly through the caverns, her only companion the shadow she had summoned. They moved as one, silent as death, fleeting as the darkness itself.

To avoid the fiendish lizatds and other perils of the depths, Twilight did not hesitate to call upon the powers Erevan granted. With his power to silence her moves and keep herself shrouded, she descended to Tlork’s dungeon, then ascended past the limits of the mythallar.

“I see, Chameleon,” she said. “You know what I want, and you are with me—whether I ask for your aid or not. Guide me through this, and I won’t curse you again. I might even speak well of you—only in private, of course.”

No response came, and though Twilight had never expected one in the past, now she wondered.

Her shadow could not speak, but its eyeless gaze could convey emotions and thoughts just as well as words. It sent Twilight a wry, bemused glance, then flitted off into the darkness ahead. Twilight could only see it thanks to the darksight Neveren had taught her.

Darkness ahead and darkness behind, Twilight thought. No light to cast a shadow. She wondered if the absence of light meant the absence of hope—not that it mattered. Life for Twilight had never been a matter of hope.

Twilight reached the hall with the perverse murals, at the peak of Gestal’s domain. The tunnel she and Gargan had come through from the surface beckoned just a few paces to her right, cunningly hidden behind stalagmites just so, where one could find it only if one knew where to look.

She saw no one in the chamber so she went in, her shadow flickering at her feet. The crevasse into which Gargan and Tlork had fallen tore the chamber in two, leaving a small ledge on the far end. A little trickle of red light, from flames, bled from a crease in the wall—a door.

Twilight assumed this was the entrance to Gestal’s chapel. Now she just had to get there. She kept to the walls of the chamber and edged close to the crevasse. Moonlight filtered in through the crack overhead, and sand trickled down.

Gestal’s magic had split the hall from wall to wall, and the gap was near to two long dagger casts in width. Perhaps Gargan could have jumped the distance, but Twilight could do nothing of the sort, even with the leaping “boots.

A twinge. Gargan…

A simple matter, Twilight reasoned. The other side wasn’t far—she could simply shadowjump across. Except, of course, that the chamber was black as pitch. She could see only with the darksight. Other than the opening where she and Gargan had come down, there were no shadows—not here, not on the other side.

Twilight sighed. “Radiant.”

She sent her animate shadow across to keep watch, then searched along the wall. Indeed, there were handholds and footholds, and a small section of rock still connected the two parts of the chamber. The crevasse had torn its way into the wall as well, and most of the rock Twilight could have climbed across had disintegrated and fallen off into darkness. To her right, the gap extended thirty hands up before coming together for about the length of Twilight’s forearm and ending at the ceiling.

“Quite radiant,” Twilight mused as she unbuckled her sword belt. No use complaining about fate. Unless she wanted to turn

back now, that span of rock was her only chance.

Twilight tossed Betrayal across the crevasse. It clattered and rolled to a rest against the wall. Then she took off her leather glove and boots, which she sent over as well. The crossbow was too fragile to toss, so she looped its sling around her neck. She thought to throw Davoren’s stiletto across as well, but a better use occurred to her. She wiped it on her bloody blouse and put it between her teeth. Then she retrieved some dust from the floor and ground it between her hands.

Ready.

With skills that predated her service to Erevan, predated her apprenticeship—and affair—with Neveren, and even predated her name, Twilight made her way up the wall as deftly as a spider. Her barely healed arm hurt, but she could stand it. Climbing up was easy. Getting across would be more complicated.

She reached the top of the wall and looked for a handhold on the narrow pass below the broken ceiling. She found one, wedged her fingers in, and looked for another handhold. There. She jammed her left hand in, ignoring the pain. That was nothing. She looked at the next handhold—a pace and a half distant. This was really going to hurt.

She took a deep breath, bit the stiletto, and let go with her right hand.

Screaming around the knife, Twilight swung, held aloft only by her ravaged arm, and grabbed for the handhold. If she missed…

But she didn’t miss. She caught the crack and jammed her fingers in. They split, and blood ran, but she held.

Wiry muscles stood out on het arms as Twilight hung backward from the piece of wall, friezelike with its filthy scrawls, nearly at the broken ceiling. Her bent legs dangled over a chasm into which even her penetrating darksight found nothing.

If an attacker had come upon her dangling from the stone, she would have been unable to defend herself. Her shadow, still detached, kept watch, but it was unlikely Gestal, or those fiendish lizards with spears, would have had trouble knocking her to

her death. But no such foe came upon her, and she swung along to her next handhold.

Hand over hand, Twilight made her way across the gap. Eleven or twelve handholds would get her to the end, she guessed.