Mortal Consequences (26 page)

Caught in the hellish tide were the dozen orcs who’d guarded the One King, their lord and master. They died writhing, seared by acid, suffering inside, knowing they’d been betrayed.

Courtiers stumbled and ran, pushing the ambassador Polaris toward the flying ships. But the lady stood firm. She was horrified and outraged by this base deception. Now she remembered how Sysquemalyn had coveted her power, beauty, and position, and plotted to gain it any way possible. How Sysquemalyn had insulted her mistress behind her back, then laughed at her own cleverness. That arrogance and presumption had driven Polaris to consign her chamberlain to hell. But now the archwizard saw that she’d made a mistake. Better to have killed Sysquemalyn outright, than let her harness the cabalistic conjurations of hell.

She’d remedy that mistake immediately. A fiend from hell would hate the cold. Polaris shrilled, “By Veridon, feast on this, traitor!”

The air around the monster shimmered, thickened, and frosted, sucking moisture from the air. In seconds the spell formed a block of ice as big as a house around Sysquemalyn. Dead and dying soldiers were crushed as the ice mass solidified and settled, pressing them deeper into the black ooze. A grinding like icebergs colliding resounded as ice cracked and refroze. The flint monster was obscured behind an ice wall until she looked like a shadow.

But the ice block didn’t last long. The shadow within flitted like a fish under a frozen river. Then, from the depths, a hole bored through the ice, then flashed hellfire that scalded ice to steam. The weeping hole was matched by a second, then a third, until the ice block was shot through, fragile as spun glass. With a shriek, the trapped flint monster shattered the block. Chunks of ice tumbled, threw sprays of water, spun crazily. Revealed—dripping wet, dark and dangerous as a storm-lashed mountain—was Sysquemalyn.

The monster-mage unleashed more hellfire as if hurling hatred from her heart. Snapping an arm, Sysquemalyn flung a flaming gobbet at Polaris that sizzled like a meteor. Only the archwizard’s personal shield stopped it a foot from her face. Polaris even flinched as hellfire engulfed her, and raised the temperature inside the shield enough to wilt her silver-white hair.

The pool of black ooze, now studded with bones and helmets, caught fire at Sysquemalyn’s feet, snapping and gouting around her skinny waist. But a fiend who’d endured real hellfire could ignore this pale imitation. With a curse, the monster raised her hands to spread pain and terror and death.

People had panicked at the first sign of trouble, their first impulse to quit the mountaintop. Soldiers and courtiers stampeded aboard the three landed ships. The six hovering ships, unsure how to help, dropped to pick up anyone they could. Sysquemalyn aimed to destroy them all.

Screeching, she windmilled her arm until it caught fire, convulsed in a giant fireball that burned to her armpit. With an oath, she whipped the arm and let the fireball fly. It struck the middle ship’s gangway where people mashed to get in. Screams erupted as the hellfire ignited hair, clothes, leather, and parchment. The boat caught fire, paint and wood blistering and smoking. Sailors recoiling from the heat screamed and toppled from the upper decks, some crashing their heads on stone, others falling scores of feet down the mountainside. As the fire consumed the magical ship, it lifted, a floating coffin of charred dead and dying that sagged in the air. Its stern crunched on rocks. Flaming, smoking, it tilted, then plunged over the mountainside. A rending crash bespoke death on an outcrop far below.

The fiend struck again and again. Airboats battered by flaming gobbets burned immediately. Neither water hurled on the fires nor beaten blankets could extinguish it. Any attempt to put it out only spread it further. Two ships tried to rise but crashed. A third, burning from end to end, with flaming sailors spilling like ants, collided with its neighbor and turned that one into a torch as well.

Blinking sweat in her eyes, Lady Polaris cast about, saw only dead as attendants, and sucked wind. Rarely had she seen such power, and never directed at her. She’d better unleash some awful spell, and soon, or she might actually be harmed. Racking her brain, she mumbled words to a spell read long ago but never uttered, even as her fingers and thumbs, inverted, formed a square to box the monster.

Sysquemalyn spun two fireballs on her arms, the flames flickering eerily on her granite, mineral-shot hide. Now the monster chirped as a square of blackness appeared under her feet. No, nothingness. A portal to a negative energy plane. It gaped under her splayed, horny feet like an open trapdoor that could drop her back into hell.

Yet Sysquemalyn had been to hell, and the portal did nothing but rob her feet of dweomer. With a harsh croak, she shook off the fireballs, and called to Polaris. “I can withstand anything, you pathetic bitch! Can you say the same?”

And stepping off the gaping void, she planted her foot against the hole’s edge and kicked.

Lady Polaris balked as the fearsome portal skidded across the ground like a dinner plate, aimed straight at her. She barely jigged aside before the cavity sailed by, revolving slowly. Near the edge of the cliff, soldiers racing for an intact ship failed to see the rocketing threat. The portal clipped off their feet as neatly as a spinning saw blade. Men and women fell shrieking and spilling blood. Those who fell on the portal were sucked within, some disappearing, some cut in half to tumble across rocks in red chunks. Traveling on, the portal reached the cliff and winked out.

Lady Polaris stared in disbelief. Sysquemalyn gargled a laugh. “Fool! Taste this!”

Forking clawed fingers, the fiend hurled a spray like hard water at the archwizard, a whirlwind of steel like a flying buzz saw. Polaris brushed it aside, so it sped on and disappeared over a cliff. But in the meantime, Sysquemalyn invoked a spell by whistling and keening like a shrike’s call.

Lady Polaris’s first inkling of danger was a crinkling, crackling noise. She turned, found a crystalline structure towering over her, reaching with diamond claws. The giant insect tilted to one side like a malformed scorpion. Its body was indistinct, a moving column of jewels. Blue dots like multi-faceted eyes fixed her with sapphire brilliance: for a second, the greedy archwizard wondered if they really were sapphires. Then triple jagged, glittering claws snapped. Polaris’s diamond brooch, the clasp fastening her cloak, was torn off. Her cape slithered off her shoulders and crumpled behind her.

Polaris burbled, retreating in shock. The creature had penetrated her personal shields, something an ogre’s arrow couldn’t pierce! The gem beast must be an elemental, an earth spirit, but not of this plane. And coming from another plane, it could stab through her shields in this plane! And now the jewel claws weaved, bobbed, and grasped at her robe. It wanted her silver embroidery!

Bleating, Polaris staggered backward, tripped on her fallen cape, and almost fell. The elemental shifted its massive bulk, sunlight glistening in its diamond depths, and crunched after her.

Laughing at the archwizard’s discomfit, Sysquemalyn glanced at Polaris’s entourage. At the cliff, the last two ships gathered frantic passengers. One lifted with the gangplank still down and people still clinging to it. The fiend’s mind was crowded by a thousand evil spells, but one amused her. With wry humor, she pointed at individuals on the escaping ship with a finger like a stone stalactite.

“Befriend! Befriend! Befriend!”

Immediately, the people pointed out changed, distorted. Eyes blazed hatred, mouths gaped in a rictus, hands clenched. They ground their teeth, bit their own tongues so blood flowed. And, battle-mad, berserk, attacked everyone within reach. Drawing knives or swords, or plying their bare hands, they stabbed, slashed, tore, bit, battered. A screaming clerk grabbed his neighbor’s hair and bit the man’s ear off. A soldier jammed her sword through her comrade’s belly, then twisted and shoved to spill his guts in a gory pile. A third stamped on the fingers of a woman clinging to the gangplank. Broken-fingered, the woman plunged to her death. One berserker was pushed bodily over the side by three men, but the mad one yanked a victim to tumble along with him. Sysquemalyn cursed others with berserk rage, hoping one would chop or loosen ropes and so drop the sail, make the ship veer into the mountainside, but the cursed folk savaged humans, not a wooden ship. They ran punching, kicking, biting, strangling.

Finally the flint monster shrugged, balled her fist, then blew it open. A wind vortex gathered strength, engulfed the ship, knocked the hull at a steep angle so people pitched overboard, and shredded the metal foil sail. Stricken, the ship sank. But Sysquemalyn knew that safety devices might kick in and bring the ship to a safe, though ungainly landing. She needed more destruction.

Pointing fingers that chilled, she flicked them. Icicles six feet long sailed like arrows and thudded into the ship. They punctured wood and people, sheared rigging, crunched gunwales to splinters, and exploded deep inside like giant ballistae. Something broke, for the listing ship dropped from the sky like a shot goose. No safety devices spared it from hitting the desert floor.

Lady Polaris had outrun the crysmal elemental, for the thing was slow. Yet her gown was torn at the hem, slashed on one sleeve, and she was actually bleeding from a razor-slice on her shoulder. Her gorgeous hair was disheveled, spilling around her golden face, a novel sight for Sysquemalyn. The monster laughed like rocks splitting in frost. “A simple elemental, Polaris?” the monster-mage chided. “You can’t stop that? How about this? The best for last!”

Polaris panted spells, but nothing worked. Her anger was gone, washed away by terror. Never had she fought anyone so fearsome. She might even be killed! And now, cornered on this mountaintop, rattled so badly she couldn’t think straight, her repeated shift spell failed too. Somehow, without anyone suspecting, even those idiot mages employed to spot traps, Sysquemalyn had ringed the mountaintop with an anti-shifting sphere such as protected floating enclaves. Polaris despaired, ready to run for the first time in her life, but couldn’t! And now—

She shrieked as something warm and wet slithered down her back. It tingled and burned as it touched her skin, and for a second she feared the black ooze. Then tentacles slimed her neck. Grasping, screaming, she caught the slippery pod in both hands and yanked. The thing clung to her skin. She glimpsed it, a bright golden color, and instantly knew it. A laraken, a swamp parasite that fed on magical energy. And Polaris was charged with magic like a mythallar engine!

Sight of the parasite blotted out as a squirming tentacle covered her eyes. A tentacle tip bored into her ear like a slimy tongue. Another slid down her shorn gown, and oozed between her breasts to fasten on the skin over her heart. The thing would suck her dry of magic and life like a golden leech. She shrieked, voice cracking, “Get it-t o-off! Get it off!”

“You didn’t say please!” crowed Sysquemalyn. The archfiend laughed so hard she almost fell. In three years of suffering hell, she’d imagined this revenge a million times, but reality was far sweeter than any dream. To have Polaris scream and beg for mercy was utterly delicious!

From the corner of a bulging eye she caught movement. The last ship yanked its gangplank to lift off. Its commander was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, for he’d waited to scoop up everyone still living. Sysquemalyn fixed that.

She clapped stony hands, arched the fingers to a point, and thrust toward the ship. Before her, a dent creased rock. Like an invisible knife, the crease enlarged as it slashed stone like cheese. The phantom plow was nine feet wide when it struck the ship. Wood splintered, copper-riveted boards split and sprung loose. People were either chopped in half or pulped with bone-crushing force. Screams echoed within as the magic cleaver chopped the keel, a curve of oak fourteen inches thick, and broke the back of the ship. As the ship died, so did the magic. The shorn hull fetched on a spur of rock, then, with a grinding roar, slid down the mountainside on a path of blood before tumbling out of sight.

The fiend from hell surveyed her work. In a black pool fragments of soldiers dissolved. The stone mountaintop was furrowed as if by giant carpenter tools, yet pools of ice water remained, and someone had drowned face down. Two burning hulks gave off greasy smoke from charred flesh. Blood, shorn limbs, dropped weapons, and splinters littered the ground. A hole showed where the elemental crysmal had burrowed away.

A frenzied squirming and mewling was the only action left. Lady Polaris lay on her back and wrestled with the laraken. Thriving on her personal dweomer, the parasite had expanded as large as a wolf, and now engulfed Polaris’s torso like a giant ball of snot. Tentacles flailed for her arms and legs like some grotesque dance. Voice broken, she whimpered pitifully.

Plucking thorny feet from black ooze, Sysquemalyn loomed over Polaris. The archwizard’s beautiful face was scratched, sweaty, scraped. Her hair was dirtied and dull, her eyes wild and bloodshot with fright.

“That’s better,” cooed the monster in a rasp like a file. “No longer high and mighty? Afraid? Suffering? Worried about dying? Oh, believe me, Great White Cow, Greasy White Sow, Gorgeous White Mistake, there are worse things than dying. Much, much worse. Having your skin peeled from your body, for one. Would you like that?”

A claw like an iron nail lovingly touched Polaris’s cheek. She recoiled, but the throbbing laraken pinned her tight. With ease, Sysquemalyn drove the nail through Polaris’s cheek. The archwizard screamed, but a thumb and finger like pliers snagged her tongue, pierced it, yanked. Polaris had to spit out blood or choke.

“We could do this all day. We might yet,” crooned the fiend. “But I want you whole, to feel the touch of your pet.” With a snaky hand, she caressed the laraken. It perked up, sensing more mystic energy, but Sysquemalyn flicked aside a questing tentacle. “Stone skin has advantages, see? I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. This laraken grows by consuming your dweomer. You’ll weaken to a shell, utterly helpless. Then the laraken will move to its next task. You see, they don’t mate, but reproduce themselves when they find plentiful magic. You’ll serve nicely. The laraken will open a cavity in your body, plant an egg, and wait while it hatches. It will keep you alive while the offspring grows inside you, feeding off you. Slowly. Over months, or years. Oh my, I expect it’ll hurt terribly! You’ll feel yourself consumed from within! That almost pays us back, dear Lady Polaris, but come with me.”