Diablo III: Storm of Light (44 page)

He screamed in anger and pain as Gynvir’s axe slid off his own blade and caught his shoulder. But the destroyer was too strong to be denied for long. Shanar tried to contain him with a burst of energy, but he broke free and lunged at Gynvir with a move too fast for her to counter. She took his blade across her arm; luckily, she had shifted enough to keep the blow from hitting squarely and doing major damage, but Tyrael could tell it had wounded her. Blood dripped from her fingers as she gripped the handle on her axe and set her feet grimly, parrying the next thrust with her last remaining strength.

Then the Sicarai was upon her. He knocked the axe from her hands. As Gynvir fell backward to the floor, he raised his weapon for the killing blow.

Jacob left the satchel and the soulstone behind and threw himself into the path of the Sicarai’s sword as it descended.

He was close enough for his weapon to deflect it slightly, but the blade sliced deep, spinning him around, where he landed in
a heap against the base of the Column of Tears. Blood began to pool beneath him.

With a cry of inhuman fury, Cullen leaped forward, drawing out the nephalem key. Pure energy exploded from him, running up through the key in a white-hot surge of electricity. The destroyer met it with his own blade, and the two clashed with a tremendous explosion, throwing Cullen backward and shattering the Sicarai’s weapon.

The destroyer roared in rage and pain. He strode forward and lifted Cullen by the throat. The Horadrim dangled helplessly, legs kicking, as the Sicarai studied his face, as if wondering how the little man had hurt him.

Distracted, he did not see Jacob pick himself up from the floor. Blood pulsed wetly down Jacob’s chest, and his eyes were unfocused. But he picked up the key where it lay nearby. Energy crackled through his hands and into the key, making the metal glow white-hot.

He moved in front of the Sicarai and plunged it straight through his chest.

The key sliced through the destroyer’s armor. The Sicarai shrieked, the sound echoing through the room, before he staggered backward, dropping Cullen and clutching at the wound that now bled light from his breast, the key still embedded there. He swayed back and forth, and the light coming from him grew in intensity like a tiny sun. Somehow Jacob’s strike had run straight through to his core.

The Sicarai stood for a moment longer, clawing at himself as the wound became larger, light pouring from him as his ethereal form began to fade. The light suddenly burst forth in a hot and bright flare, and the Horadrim turned away quickly, shielding themselves.

Only his armor remained to clatter upon the stone floor.

Jacob withdrew the key from the Sicarai’s breastplate, studying it in wonder, as if unable to believe what he had just done. And then he collapsed, motionless, to the floor.

With a sob of anguish, Gynvir crouched next to Jacob’s prone form, holding his wound with both her hands as if trying to keep the life inside him. Tyrael’s pride in his team was quickly extinguished by the sight of one of their own deeply wounded, surely dying, with nothing any of them could do. He had expected losses, had known they would come, but he could not bear it now, not after what had happened in the gardens.

By all that is holy, you will pay for this
.

Tyrael turned back toward Balzael, El’druin glowing with righteous fire, but the Luminarei lieutenant was gone. Balzael might let them escape the Heavens for his own purposes, but he would soon be after them and the stone again. As long as he was still alive, the threat to Sanctuary remained.

Tyrael looked at his team gathered around their fallen comrade. “Get back to the portal,” he said. “I will meet you there, if I can.”

And then he ran out of the Courts of Justice, in the direction in which his nemesis had disappeared.

“Oh, no.” Shanar crouched next to Gynvir over Jacob’s crumpled form. Under her fingers, blood still pumped from the wound. The blade had sliced right through his armor. Shanar looked up at where Zayl stood, tears shimmering in her eyes. “Please help him,” she said. “I saw what you did for Tyrael back in the catacombs.
Please!
”

Zayl kneeled next to the two women, removing Gynvir’s hands so he could examine the wound. The barbarian stood and turned away with a cry of anguish, looking at the red liquid coating her skin as if unable to acknowledge what had happened, her own blood dripping down her arm to the floor.

Zayl gently separated the cut edges of armor. Blood bubbled up; the blade had nicked Jacob’s heart and sliced deep into the pectoral muscle below his shoulder. A blade like the destroyer’s did a lot of damage to human flesh, and this wound was worse than the one he had healed for Tyrael. There was little hope. He would have to act quickly if he had any chance at all to save Jacob’s life.

But time was running out for them to get back to Sanctuary, and the stone was doing ever-increasing damage to anyone
in its vicinity. Any moment now, Luminarei would swarm them.

One chance, perhaps
. It was something he had only tried once before, and the necromancer knew that he would have to make a great sacrifice in the attempt.

He removed his materials from his pouch, his fingers trembling slightly as he took Humbart out and put the skull down next to him, then set the candle in place and lit the flame. He had no idea what a healing spell would do here in the Heavens or if it would even work at all.

“Easy, lad,” Humbart muttered. “Remember what it took from you to attach your hand—”

“I am aware of that,” Zayl said quietly. A binding to the darkness that lay between life and death, promises made to things that would be better left to lie still. There were wraiths that had pledged eternal service to the Burning Hells and could be summoned for work such as this, but those who promised to restore some part of the living would, more often than not, end up taking more than their share, their hunger unable to be denied. And he did not believe they could be raised at all in the Heavens.

But one was already here.

Blood continued to well up from the wound. Jacob’s body shuddered. Zayl knew the flesh would not heal unless he reversed the spell of his own making.

“Hurry,” Shanar said. “He’s dying!”

“Use me,” Humbart said. “The spell that keeps me bound to this skull—”

“No,” Zayl said. “I will not sacrifice you for my sins.” He looked at his right hand, hidden under the black padded glove that he had worn for so long it seemed like a part of him. “Keep watch over the satchel,” he said to Gynvir. “You will have to carry it from here. Jacob cannot, and I will be too weak.”
Or dead
, he thought, but did not say it. He stripped his glove off, hearing
the gasps of the two women as they saw the white bone and withered tendon and sinew, the blackened stump where the remains of the hand had fused onto his wrist.

Zayl raised his arm above Jacob’s wound, muttering the binding of blood spell under his breath. He touched his dagger’s tip to Jacob’s flesh. Then Zayl took the blade and inserted it into his forearm just above the blackened skin, yanking downward.

The dagger blazed to life as his own blood spattered Jacob’s chest and shoulder. Zayl gritted his teeth. The pain was all-consuming and immense, a fire raging over his body, but he held strong as he circled his wrist with the razor-sharp blade.

The blood spatter began to reverse. Drips ran back up from Jacob’s wound to the dagger, coating it in crimson. Heat radiated from his bones, flames licking Zayl’s wrist as the hand began to detach from the rest of him, hanging by threads of tendon. The fire singed the stump of his wrist and leaped downward to Jacob’s chest, licking across the open wound as the skeletal hand dropped, bone fingers plucking at the sliced edges, pulling them together.

The necromancer clutched the stump of his arm to his side and slipped his dagger back into its sheath. The pain was so deep and strong he nearly passed out. But he kept his eyes on Jacob’s wound, saw his own hand continue to stitch the flesh together, and for a moment, the flames flickering over it took the shape of a demon with a dragon’s tail and thickly scaled body as they burrowed deep inside.

Zayl’s skeletal hand finally went lifeless and tumbled to the floor next to him, and Jacob’s skin puckered and blackened as the flames consumed it from the inside out. Jacob’s eyes fluttered open, and he gave a guttural groan, reaching up to grab Zayl by the shoulders.

“Hurts . . .” he managed, and coughed. The necromancer held him tightly with his left hand, keeping his right wrist tucked
against his body as the last of the flames died out. Then Zayl rolled over onto his back, his chest heaving, trying to find a balance within himself again as the world turned over and faded to a dull, featureless gray.

Jacob felt himself lifted into the air. “He’s not responding,” he heard Gynvir say. With great effort, he opened his eyes in time to see Shanar help Zayl gather the skull and the candle and something else that looked like bones. She got the necromancer to his feet and slipped his left arm around her waist, where he clung tightly, his head slumping toward his chest. It was as if Jacob were looking through a fog that was slowly lifting, and something was sitting on him, an animal that had burrowed inside his skin and was clinging on for the ride.

“There’s no time to revive him,” Shanar was saying. “We’ve got to move!”

They began to run, Shanar half-dragging the necromancer with her, Gynvir running, too, with Jacob slung over her shoulder. Amazingly, there was no pain, even with him being jostled up and down roughly like this; the wound had healed completely, and strength was already coming back to his limbs. He couldn’t remember what had happened. Everything was blank after the destroyer’s blade had gone into his flesh and he had fallen forward, feeling his life draining away.

Now he was alive again. It was some kind of miracle. “Put me down,” he said, but the barbarian either didn’t hear him or refused to respond. They barreled headlong through an archway carved with two gigantic wings, into the Gardens of Hope. “Put me
down
,” Jacob said again, and this time, Gynvir complied, setting him gently on his feet.

“Are you all right?” Gynvir had him by the shoulders. “You almost died.”

The angels who had been in the gardens had disappeared. There was no time to ponder why; Jacob could feel the tingling energy from the Black Soulstone slung around Gynvir’s waist. “I feel as good as new,” he said. “Better, actually. But you . . .”

Blood dripped steadily down the barbarian’s arm. “I will live,” she said. “Do not worry.” But the barbarian could not hide a wince of pain. “You killed the Sicarai,” she said. “How?”

“I did what?” Jacob shook his head. What she was saying made no sense. And yet pieces began to come back to him, as if from a dream: regaining his feet, a power coursing through his limbs as he picked up Cullen’s nephalem key . . .

Jacob looked at the necromancer, who had extricated himself from Shanar’s grip and stood alone, swaying slightly and hunched over his right arm, which he held against his body as if he had been wounded.

“What about him?”

“The dark wizard saved your life,” Gynvir said. “At much cost to himself.” The barbarian’s gaze seemed to hold some kind of grudging respect.

Jacob took the necromancer’s forearm and gently pulled it away from him to expose the blackened stump where his hand had been. Zayl looked up from beneath his slash of black hair, damp now with sweat. His strange eyes glowed from within dark pits, his pale face even more ghostly than before.

“What have you done?” Jacob said.

“Saved your skin, he did,” Humbart said from the pouch. “Took his own hand to do it! But there’s no time to waste chattering. Come on, move yourselves!”

At the far side of the gardens, they slipped through the line of light trees and onto the wide boulevard that led to the Pools of Wisdom. As they did, Jacob heard a thunderous noise approaching from the other direction, where the boulevard ended at a gigantic set of columns at the entrance to the heart of the Silver
City. Through the opening came Mikulov, running toward them so fast he was little more than a blur, and behind him poured an army of Luminarei in flight, darkening the sky as they spread out above the monk with blazing wings and swords drawn.