Queen of the Depths (12 page)

In any event, the important thing was that the human sprawled in the intersection wasn’t Kassur or Chadrezzan. He was too short and pudgy and dressed in grubby, nondescript clothing, not vestments decorated with jagged stripes and spangles or a cloak adorned with serpents. She was just about to turn her attention elsewhere when he heaved himself up into a sitting position.

She saw then that the thing wasn’t plump but rather bloated with the progress of decay. Sores, the marks of the sickness that had ended its life, mottled the puffy, discolored face. The mouth hung open, and dark fluid had oozed forth to stain the chin. The glazed eyes were empty.

It was a corpse, surely reanimated by Kassur’s magic. He probably hadn’t even needed to kill it or dig it up. The inhabitants of Immurk’s Hold could be lackadaisical when it came to disposing of their dead.

The cadaver gripped a dented tin pot in one swollen hand and a black iron skillet in the other. It fumbled them over its lolling head and banged them together. The clanking seemed preternaturally loud in the empty predawn streets.

Anton snatched his cutlass from its scabbard. No doubt he meant to silence Kassur’s sentinel by cutting it to pieces, but Tu’ala’keth had a faster way. She gripped her amulet and willed forth a blaze of

spiritual power. The corpse finished rotting in a heartbeat, corrupt flesh eroding away in strips, bones crumbling to powder.

Still the dead thing’s sudden action had taken her by surprise, and she knew she hadn’t acted quickly enough. She turned to Anton and said, “Kassur and Chadrezzan surely heard that.”

“I know. We need to get under cover.” He cast about.

By making for the edge of town, they’d distanced themselves from coquina mansions, solidly constructed warehouses, barracoons, chandleries, and the like. The structures on the perimeter were a motley collection of shacks pieced together from driftwood, logs harvested from the interior of the island, and whatever other materials came to hand. Tu’ala’keth saw little reason to prefer one to another.

“There,” Anton said and led her to the flimsiest of all. It looked as if the builder, though initially intending to erect a proper cottage, had grown slothful partway through the process. The facade and one other wall were made of wood, but the remaining two and the roof were simply flapping canvas stretched over a frame, thus creating a structure half house and half tent.

Anton tried the door and found it fastened. He whispered his spell of opening—Tu’ala’keth found it marginally encouraging that he hadn’t squandered all his magic resisting the effects of dissipation—and on the other side of the panel, a bar squeaked as it slid in its brackets. That noise sounded jarringly loud as well, but she knew it was just because of her nerves.

She and Anton scrambled into the house—all one sparsely furnished room, with rushes strewn on the dirt floor—and he shot the bar behind them. A human mother and two small, snaggletoothed boys

of mixed blood sat up from their pallets to goggle at the intruders. Perhaps the children’s ore father was away at sea.

Anton pointed his cutlass at the family. “Stay where you are, and don’t make a sound,” he said.

White-faced, the woman gave a nod.

The windows facing the street were made of canvas as well, so as to admit a little light. Anton cut a peephole in one then knelt behind it. Tu’ala’keth crouched beside him.

“You must realize,” she whispered, “this structure is no refuge. Chadrezzan can blast it apart with a flick of his fingers.”

“I know,” he said, “but first he and Kassur have to find us, and that’s the point. With luck, they’ll need to get close, and we’ll have a better chance than we would with them lobbing flame and lightning from a hundred paces away.”

“I understand.”

“Then hush and use your ears. We may well hear them coming before we’re able to see them.”

He was right. After a few moments, something hissed out on the street. At first she couldn’t see it, but then Anton tore the peephole larger, expanding their field of vision.

It was fire making the sibilant sound. Shrouded in yellow flame, turning his head from side to side, Chadrezzan stalked along with a look of intense concentration on his face. Kassur followed behind, spear at the ready. He too had cast some sort of defensive enchantment, revealing itself as an outline of scarlet phosphorescence around his body.

“They are not peering into doors or windows,” whispered Tu’ala’keth. “They must be seeking us with magic. My guess is Chadrezzan has given himself the ability to read minds. He is sifting through all the thoughts in the area, trying to pick out ours, while

Kassur labors to sense the enchantments in your cutlass and my silverweave.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too. Here’s what we’ll do: I’m going to go out the back and circle around. Give me a few seconds then start thinking, Umberlee, help me, over and over again. If Chadrezzan is listening to thoughts, that should point him at you. You should cast spells, too, to snag Kassur’s attention—defensive magic, if you’ve got some prepared. The Grandmaster knows, you’re likely to need it.”

“I am to distract the Talassans while you take them from behind.”

“Right. As soon as I do, you hit them, too.” He turned toward the rear of the home.

“Wait.” She murmured a prayer and wrote a glyph on his brow with her fingertip. It glowed blue for a moment then faded. “A ward against flame… I’ve had them ready for the casting ever since we first quarreled with the Talassans.”

“Thanks.” He scuttled to the rear of the cottage, slashed through the canvas wall, and disappeared.

She counted to ten then started doing as he’d instructed her, invoking the goddess and shielding herself in a structure of interlocking enchantments like the components of a suit of plate. Before long, it had the desired effect. Kassur whirled in her direction and pointed with his spear.

“Yes, storm priest,” she called, “we see you, too, and we are ready for you. Flee before I call the wrath of Umberlee down on your heads.”

Kassur laughed. “Such threats might be more intimidating if you weren’t cowering behind a wall. As if that could save you.” Declaiming rhymes in some grating, infernal language, he raised his lance over his head, and the weapon flashed bright as lightning. Chadrezzan planted the butt of his iron staff on the ground, and the soil writhed at its touch. Power pulsed

from the two humans, blurring Tu’ala’keth’s vision and cramping her guts. Gripping her drowned man’s hand, she commenced her own spell.

Then a shaft of force, visible as rippling distortion in the air, shot from the shadows behind the Talassans. It slammed into the center of Chadrezzan’s back and knocked him stumbling forward, spoiling—Tu’ala’keth hoped—his silent conjuration. Anton instantly charged out into the open to continue the work his spell had begun.

Kassur surely realized what was happening, but didn’t permit it to distract him from continuing his own conjuring. He and Tu’ala’keth finished simultaneously.

Glare and heat blazed at her. The stained, torn cloth in the window frame burned to ash in an instant, but that was the second she needed to save her sensitive deepwater vision. She frantically twisted away from the flash, and though the magic seared and blistered her skin, afterward, she could still see. She pulled her goggles back on—stupid not to have replaced them before—and peered out the opening.

The flying trident of luminous force she’d conjured jabbed at Kassur. He had two bloody grazes on his arm where it had gored him already. He parried with the lance and shouted words of power at it, trying to dispel it.

Meanwhile, Anton rushed Chadrezzan. But the wizard didn’t rely solely on his burning aura to protect him. Instead, he sneered and soared up into the air. Tu’ala’keth had wondered how the Talassans had arrived on the scene so quickly, and now she knew at least a part of the answer. Chadrezzan had empowered himself with the ability to fly.

She chanted a counterspell to strip the enchantment away, but before she could reach the end, a wave of sickening terror assailed her. She faltered in her

recitation, and the botched magic wasted itself in a feeble flickering.

Kassur had exerted his power to chastise the denizens of the sea. Shuddering, Tu’ala’keth silently cried out to Umberlee, praying for the strength to shake off the crippling fear. A measure of the deity’s own inexhaustible wrath surged into her and washed the dread away.

In her fury, she yearned to kill Kassur up close, with her hands. Unfortunately, on Dragon Isle, her stone trident was too conspicuous a weapon to carry if she hoped to walk abroad incognito, so she’d left it behind in Vurgrom’s mansion. But her magic could arm her. She whispered a prayer, the air seethed green, and sharp, bony spines extruded themselves from her skin. It hurt for a moment, but the pain didn’t balk her. It only served to heighten her rage.

She strode to the door, unbarred it, threw it open, and found herself facing Kassur, now rid of the harassment of the disembodied trident. Judging from the way he held his spear, he’d planned to use it to force his way in. He gaped at Tu’ala’keth in surprise, no doubt because he’d expected to find her still crippled with fear.

She shouted a shalarin battle cry and sprang at him.

Her first blow ripped open his face to the bone, snatched away the patch that was a part of his regalia, and revealed what appeared to be a normal, functional eye underneath. She drove in again, trying to grapple, so dozens of the spines jutting from her body could pierce him all at once.

He scrambled back and swung the spear into line to threaten her. She struck at it and knocked it away from her heart, but the point still slid into her biceps. The lance flashed and sizzled, and her body shook. The odor of her burning flesh mingled with the smell of ozone.

The spear went dark, its power expended until the

next thrust. Kassur yanked it back out of her arm. Her knees buckled, dumping her on the ground. Blooding streaming from his shredded profile, the storm priest lifted his weapon for a killing stroke.

Tu’ala’keth kicked at his lower leg, the only part of him she could reach. Thanks to the paralyzing effect of the lightning pent in the spear, it was a spastic, floundering attack. But she still had her goddess-granted fury to lend her strength, and the thorns on her foot sliced deep into the limb. Kassur gasped and toppled down beside her.

Now she had her chance to wrestle, to pull and grind him against her and let the blades cut. She clambered on top of him.

The spear, though deadly, was too long to wield at such close quarters. He dropped it and snatched a dagger from somewhere. The point banged against her silverweave, surely bruising her ribs but as yet, not piercing the coral armor.

He was all bloody gashes and punctures now, yet fought on with a ferocity akin to her own. He gasped out the opening syllables of a spell.

She resolved to silence him short of the conclusion, cut the tongue from his mouth or mangle the larynx in his throat if necessary. But then, as they thrashed and rolled, she caught a glimpse of Anton and Chadrezzan.

Still suspended in the air, the mute pointed the wand stolen from the Red Wizards at the foe below his feet. Jagged flares of shadow exploded from the tip of the arcane weapon, while Anton lunged back and forth, trying to dodge. When a discharge caught him anyway, he convulsed.

It was plain he had no chance, not while Chadrezzan hovered above his reach. Tu’ala’keth gathered her spiritual strength and screamed, “Fall!”

The magical command smashed through the wizard’s psychic defenses, and momentarily helpless to

disobey, he allowed himself to plummet. He slammed down hard enough to snap bone but evidently not to kill or even stun him, for he immediately rose once more. Supported solely by his gift of levitation and not his flopping, shattered legs, he resembled a marionette hauled upward by its strings.

Despite the punishment he’d taken, Anton somehow found the strength to charge and, when Chadrezzan soared above his head, to leap. He caught hold of the burning wizard’s garments with his free hand, and his foe carried him aloft as well. He slashed and stabbed with his cutlass, and Chadrezzan—who must have lost the wand when he’d fallen—jabbed and battered with the butt of the serpent-wrapped staff.

At which point, agony ripped through Tu’ala’keth’s body. By diverting her attention to Anton and Chadrezzan, she’d given Kassur the chance to complete his spell, a blast of malignancy that savaged her from the inside out.

For a moment, the pain made her spastic. Kassur broke free of her spiked embrace and scrambled to his feet, nearly fell again when the torn leg threatened to give way, but shifted his weight to compensate. He snarled an incantation, and a fan of flame exploded from his outthrust hands.

Flame. Thanks to her wards, she was in some measure immune to it. But Kassur presumably didn’t know that.

Though she might have tried to roll aside, she let the hot, hungry flare wash right over her. Its kiss seared her, but it was bearable. She screamed and flailed as if it weren’t then lay shaking, to all appearances incapacitated, or so she hoped.

Kassur scrutinized her then looked about for his spear. He surely didn’t mean to take his eyes off her, and only did so for an instant. Still it was the opening she needed.

She reared up onto her knees, flung herself forward, tackled him, and carried him back to the ground. He banged his head, and perhaps that finally jolted some of the fight out of him, for she landed a slice across the throat, ripped his eyes away, and hammered her fists on his chest, driving her spikes between the ribs and into the heart and lungs.

Some time after that, her fury abated sufficiently for her to comprehend it was impossible to hurt him any further. She looked around for Anton and Chadrezzan then froze in dismay.

The spy and the wizard, his corona of flame now extinguished, lay tangled together on the ground. Neither was moving, and it was impossible to tell if either was alive.

She tried to stand. The world seemed to tilt, and she flopped back down. She was on the verge of passing out and would have to help herself before she could aid another.