Easy Betrayals (4 page)

“How far off?” Rings asked, scrambling to his feet.

“Not far,” Miltiades answered. He glanced over his shoulder at the ruddy glow along the western horizon, the only hint of the sun they’d seen in hours. “If we move fast, we can confront the doppelganger before darkness falls.”

The four glided through the ruins, intent on their goal. They trailed quietly down a narrow alleyway drifted knee-deep in soft sand, crossed the shell of an old barracks house, then padded across an open boulevard lined with shattered columns. The stump of a round tower rose ahead of them, above the low rooftops and dunes. Miltiades raised his hand and crouched low behind a ruined colonnade. The others followed his lead.

He nodded at the tower and whispered, “In there.

Remember, she’s caught by Noph’s magical rope. If you can lay hold of it, she’ll be powerless to resist, and we can take her back to Waterdeep.”

Rings glanced at Belgin. The sharper returned his gaze without expression, and the dwarf silently nodded in agreement, drawing his axe from his belt loop. She won’t be standing trial if Rings or I have anything to say about it, he decided. They weren’t being paid to pass judgment, only to execute the judgment their unknown employer had decided upon.

“We’re ready,” Belgin said.

Miltiades stood and vaulted over the stone block, dashing for the splintered doorway as if his armor of silver plate was a light cloak. Belgin and Rings ran after the paladin, while Jacob brought up the rear at a more cautious pace, keeping an eye on the dismal ruins and howling sand behind them. The great paladin stormed the dark tower like a righteous hurricane, the pirates only a step behind him.

They caught Eidola in her natural shape. Gray and gaunt, she was a skeletal creature draped in loose, leathery flesh. The lariat still circled her neck, although she’d carefully coiled the trailing end and secured it by her side. Hissing in rage, she crouched like a monstrous spider and whirled to face Miltiades as the paladin charged straight at her.

“Insolent human! What must I do to teach you to stay out of my path?” she howled.

“Surrender, monster! We have you trapped!” Miltiades shouted. He leaped forward, attacking in a deadly hail of hammer blows. Lithe and quick, the gray creature eluded the first rush, and then there were two Miltiades, identical to each other, flailing away with silver hammers.

Belgin checked his own rush, Rings hesitating as well. “Which one is real?” the dwarf roared in frustration.

“I am!” cried one Miltiades.

“Don’t listen to him!” answered the other.

The sharper looked at the dwarf and said, “Don’t tell me you didn’t expect that.”

Scowling, he circled the battling paladins, rapier at the ready. Rings grunted and followed his lead. Behind them, Jacob filled the doorway, watching the fight as he tried to gauge which one to strike at. Belgin glanced around the room, measuring the arena. The tower’s floor was choked with rough rubble; its stone walls rose only twenty or thirty feet before ending in a jagged stump. The walls above them glowed orange with the last rays of the sunset. One Miltiades stumbled but parried the other’s attack and drove his reflection back toward Rings. “Think, lad, think!” Belgin muttered to himself. “Which one’s real?”

The dwarf raised his axe but held his blow, cursing. “I don’t know which one to hit!”

“I know a way to find out,” Belgin said, smiling grimly. “Miltiades, don’t say anything. Eidola? Which one are you?”

“I am,” said the Miltiades with his back to Rings.

Instantly the dwarf swung his axe in a low, vicious cut, but Miltiades-Eidola leaped over the blow and quickly grappled with the real Miltiades, spinning around. Belgin slashed at the imposter as the two reeled close to him and was rewarded with a hiss of pain. Dark blood stained his sword blade, and the battling paladins moved away again, locked in their deadly embrace.

From the doorway, Jacob surged forward. “I’ve got her!” he cried. He raised his mighty war blade for a monstrous stroke certain to cut the doppelganger in two.

“No, Jacob! That’s the wrong one!” Belgin shouted in alarm.

Undeterred, the Tyrian warrior lashed out, the blade flashing like a gleam of doom in the dusk. At the last instant, the Miltiades he struck dropped to one knee and used his hammer to turn the blade aside, though not before the tip of Jacob’s sword cut a long, shallow gash down his face. Bright red human blood splashed the sand.

“Jacob!” Miltiades cried. “You almost killed me!” Miltiades-Eidola stepped forward to strike at her foe’s back, but Belgin and Rings moved in from the flank, driving her back. Suddenly they faced the gray doppelganger again as she abandoned her imitation of the paladin. She bared her fangs in a fierce snarl, then whirled and leaped high into the air, catching hold of the worn stone of the tower’s wall. Like a great insect she scuttled upward, fashioning hooks and loops from her hands to speed her climb. In the blink of an eye she’d vanished over the wall’s broken parapet, thirty feet above.

“She’s fled outside!” Belgin called. “Come on! She’s wounded!”

Shaken, the real Miltiades rose, one hand pressed to his bleeding face. He glared at Jacob, then pushed past the fighter without saying a word. He paused in the tower’s door and scanned the darkening city. “She’s moving,” he stated flatly, then vanished into the street beyond.

Belgin quickly followed, keeping Miltiades in sight. Behind him, Rings caught Jacob’s arm and spun the fighter to face him. Despite the difference in their stature, the dwarf forced the fighter to meet his eyes. “You idiot,” he snapped. “We had her! Have you got rocks between your ears?”

Jacob’s face whitened, and the warrior tore out of Rings’s grasp. He angrily slammed his mailed fist against the ancient wall, flailing at his own mistake. “I know what I did,” he retorted. Then he bolted out the door after the other two. Rings lowered his head and charged in pursuit, refusing to be left behind.

They ran through the dusty streets, following the silver gleam of Miltiades. The paladin halted in a stone plaza before an old palace, closing his eyes to sense the magical lariat. Belgin skidded to a stop beside him, scanning the plaza with his eyes. There! A dark shape slipped up the weathered stairs of the palace.

“Forget your divination,” the sharper said, catching Miltiades’s arm and pointing. “She’s gone in there!”

“After her!” Miltiades sprinted across the plaza and up the steps. Belgin loped after him. Jacob and Rings, a short distance behind, altered their course and ran toward the palace.

On the horizon, the red crescent of the sun slid beneath the earth. In that moment, everything changed. The wind, quiet and sad, instantly returned with a screaming, stinging gale of hard-driven sand, catching their cloaks with ghostly talons. Driven dust and sand obscured the square in the space of moments, blinding and disorienting paladin and pirate both. The temperature of the air dropped abruptly, as if they’d waded into a stream of icy water. And the watchful, mournful presence Belgin had sensed earlier suddenly seemed tangible and malevolent, a cold and hateful thing that closed on them with the fall of darkness. “Miltiades!” he shrieked, though his words were torn away by the wind.

The paladin stumbled on the steps. Belgin scuttled toward him, keeping low to the ground. He turned once to shout encouragement to Jacob and Rings, but the return of the storm plunged the Netherese temple into impenetrable gloom. The fighter and the dwarf were nowhere in sight—but the more he looked, the more certain he became that something was moving towards him in the roiling murk. Coughing, he drew a silken scarf from his collar and pulled it up over his nose and mouth.

“Do you feel it, paladin?” he called to Miltiades, a few feet away.

“I feel it, Belgin,” Miltiades answered. His voice was distant and faint, even though he shouted to raise his voice above the storm. “The evil of this place sleeps no longer!”

“What is it?”

“I know not!” The paladin scrambled to his feet, spinning to search the ruins with an arm raised to shield his eyes. “Where are Jacob and Rings?”

They were thirty or forty yards behind me, in the middle of the square. They can’t be far!”

They must have gotten turned around in the dust,” Miltiades said. He stood, buffeted by the vicious wind. Sand hissed from his armor like the sound of rain falling on a hot skillet. For the first time, Belgin saw human hesitation, human frailty, in the paladin’s face. He glanced toward the empty storm behind them, up to the dark doorway at the top of the steps, then toward the square again. “Jacob!” he cried. “Rings! Are you out there?”

They’ll never hear you in this,” Belgin said. “Do we look for them, or do we stay put?”

“We’re all blind in this Tyr-cursed dust storm. We could spend the whole night blundering around looking for each other.”

“Split up, then? You pursue the doppelganger, while I wait here for the others?”

“No, that’s too dangerous. You said yourself that we can’t be caught alone by her, and there’s something else here, Belgin, something that awoke when the sun vanished below the sands. I can feel it seeking us. If I left you here alone, I don’t think I’d ever see you again.”

Then let’s leave Eidola to whatever it is that watches this place, find our comrades, and get out of here,” Belgin said, raising his voice to carry over the wind. “We can return at sunrise to see if the doppelganger’s still alive.”

“No,” said Miltiades. “No monster, no fiend, no force in this world will sway me from my course.” He turned back to the crumbling palace and battled up the steps, “Come on; Eidola is somewhere within. Jacob and Rings know our quest. They must fend for themselves.”

Night and chaos descended like the fall of a titan’s maul. Trotting across the ancient square a few feet behind Jacob, Rings could see Miltiades and Belgin racing up the broken steps of an old palace, darting toward a gaping, shadowed archway. Then the sight was erased by a gust of wind powerful enough to spin him half around and blind him with an eyeful of grit. His world narrowed to a dimensionless sphere of dust, sand, and the old flagstones under his feet. “What now?” he growled aloud, even though the wind stole his words away.

He caught a glimpse of a dim, metallic gleam off to his left and moved toward it. He bared his teeth in anger and drove his stocky frame through the storm, until a tall, ragged shape appeared suddenly from the mist. Jacob whirled to face him, greatsword at the ready. “Who goes there?” the human challenged.

“Who do you think?” Rings answered. “Hold your blade, numbskull.”

Jacob scowled fiercely but lowered his sword. “Where did this come from?” he shouted, waving one hand to indicate the brown gloom that surrounded them.

“I think that Belgin’s guardians have finally taken note of us,” Rings answered. “Maybe they were waiting for the sun to go down. Can you see or hear the others?”

“I can’t see my hand in front of my face. The last I saw, Miltiades and the dandy ran into a building over that way.”

Rings eyed Jacob’s choice of direction. “Are you sure? I thought it was over there.”

The fighter nodded. “I’m sure of it. I was looking right at them when darkness fell.”

“Okay, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s get out of this damned dust.”

Jacob glanced around once more to fix his bearings, then moved off into the murk, leaning into the wind. Rings followed, one hand resting on the fighter’s pack. They seemed to walk for a long time before they encountered a low, stone parapet that ran until it vanished in the gloom to either side.

“This can’t be right,” Rings said. “The building we seek had a long colonnade and a big staircase in front of it.”

“I think I saw this wall on the left side of the square. We need to follow it toward the right to get to the palace.”

“I don’t remember any damned wall at all,” Rings snorted. “I think this is going to be a lot harder than we thought.”

“Well, do you want to lead?” Jacob snapped. “At least I know when I’m lost. Try it your way; maybe you’re right after all.”

Jacob looked left, then started along the wall toward the right, trailing his left hand along the old stone. Again, they seemed to walk a long time. The world ceased beyond the five or ten feet they could see around them, but Rings began to suspect that something or someone trailed them just out of sight, moving in and out of the corners of his perception like a half-remembered nightmare.

“My eyes are beginning to play tricks on me,” the dwarf said, as quietly as he could over the roaring of the wind.

“Mine, too,” Jacob said. He halted and moved a step from the wall, giving himself space to wield his two-handed sword. “Show yourselves!” he shouted in challenge. “Come on!”

Rings automatically turned and put his back to the tall warrior, guarding his flank. At the fringe of his vision he saw them now, brown and withered figures that approached in fluttering tatters of cloth and flesh. They were long dead, of course, silent phantoms with cruel talons and eyes that burned like witch fire. Rings balanced his fighting axe in his right hand and crouched, ready to strike. “How many on your side?” he asked.

“Enough,” Jacob answered. “And you?”

“More than enough,” Rings answered. The first mummy reached him, clubbing its knotted fists down at his head. He twisted aside and took the corpse’s leg off at the knee with one swift stroke, then ducked under the swing of a rust-flaked sword that broke on the wall beside him. He hewed the ancient warrior’s arm from its body, then stumbled to the ground as the first one he’d felled tripped him with its grappling talons. Cold, bony claws raked deep into the flesh of his thigh, and Rings gagged in pain and revulsion. He smashed the creature’s skull with one blow of his axe and pried its talons from his leg while the next one advanced to attack. “Jacob!” he called.

There was no reply. Rings staggered back a step, drove off the next dead one with a flurry of slashes, then risked a glance over his shoulder. Half a dozen of the ancient dead lay in the sand, hacked limb from limb, and in the swirling darkness he thought he saw a gleam of white movement as the Tyrian warrior danced and spun among the relentless horde, blade flashing. “Jacob! Stay close!” Rings shouted. Then he had to turn back to defend himself from an ancient priest-thing that attacked him with a heavy bronze sceptre. When next he looked, he could see nothing of Jacob at all.