The Sword and the Sorcerer (22 page)

For the first time since he had abducted her, Alana had a chance of observing his face at close range. His normally swarthy complexion now seemed pasty and there was almost a reptilian cast to the way his heavily hooded eyes unwaveringly stared at her. Strange. She had never noticed the unpleasant shape of his eyes before.

“What now?” she asked with forced flippancy, in an effort not to let him see how terrified she was.

Machelli released one of his hands from her back to point a finger at himself. “This door leads to power, Alana! You can be part of it—or a victim of it. In other words, my desirable wench, I invite you to become my lady!”

With this totally surprising proposal to her Machelli pressed his thick cold lips on her neck while pushing his rigid member against her. She was as appalled as she was bewildered. First her beloved rescuer tried to seduce her, next the king tried to rape her, and now Machelli! What was there about her that made men think she would spread her legs the moment they expressed desire for her? The anger at such demeaning presumption overrode her fear of Machelli. Though it could conceivably cost her her life she felt compelled to teach the now panting chancellor a lesson. The lesson she had in mind had worked twice before, and why not a third time?

“Power excites me so!” she moaned, relaxing now wholly into his arms.

Machelli’s ego responded exactly as she had expected it to. He was smacking his lips and smirking, utterly convinced his charm had stirred her.

She adopted her most seductive voice. “Without your help Mikah’s rebellion would never have gotten off the ground. And to a woman, Machelli, power and cunning are the most potent of aphrodisiacs—and you are both incarnate! I’ve always lusted for you from afar! Whatever your cause—take me with you!”

Disgustedly, Alana could feel his member straining to burst through his cockpiece.

“You are wiser than your tender years, Alana.”

She bit him gently on the neck and then blew hot breaths into his ears, all the while subtly positioning her knee under his crotch.

Machelli started to unfasten the back of her temptingly revealing wedding gown. Through the material his shaft was poised. “You will promise to obey my every wish—in and out of bed?”

“Oh, yes, master!” Alana ecstatically moaned. “But you must obey
this
!” She plowed her knee into his balls as hard as she could. But instead of screaming out with pain—as any normal man would have done—Machelli did not so much as wince. Terror gripped every fiber of her being. If Machelli’s responses were not normal human responses—then what in God’s name kind of creature was he?

He continued to clutch her in his arms a moment longer, sneering. So the bitch had been playing with him. Well, if she was not aroused by the swarthy form of Machelli, perhaps she’d warm better to his real visage.

A low, inhuman growl emerged from the bowels of his being, and he hurled her against a natural stone pillar that protruded from the wall on the other side of the chamber. When Alana recovered from the impact of the throw she found herself riveted to the pillar with invisible bolts that seemed to emanate from Machelli.

Slowly, with a studied solemnity and evil grandeur, he took long, measured strides toward her and began speaking in a low, raspy subhuman voice that she never heard before.

“Your brother botched the plans I had woven for Cromwell with such infinite care. But I will not let you, my saucy virgin, get away with botching the plans I had in mind for you!”

Still stuck to the pillar like steel shavings to a magnet, Alana watched Machelli approach her with horrifying disbelief. Before her very eyes she was witnessing a transformation that was as hideous as it was mindboggling. First the alteration of voice and now his very features grew fluid and rearranged themselves, twisting, stretching and reshaping. Where there were once teeth there were now fangs. Skin that had been human became leathery, yellow, reptilian. And his limbs under the black tunic were suddenly so loose of movement she would not have been surprised to discover his body hung on coils rather than bones. She was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the grotesque creature Machelli had become. His bulbous head and serpent’s face were now only inches from her own.

“See me, Alana, as I truly am . . .” He rested a scaly hand on her bare shoulders and she shivered with disgust. She started to scream at the top of her lungs, still magnetized to the pillar. Her screams seemed to please him and he smiled, exposing the teeth of a saber-tooth tiger or wolf.

“You could have been my queen, stupid girl. My sow to ravish and give unheard of pleasure to. But your treachery will make you my victim instead!”

He tilted his mouth to sink his teeth into the soft whiteness of her throat when the door suddenly burst open and Cromwell charged into the chamber, slashing at the air like a maniac.

One look at the familiarly slimy creature wearing Machelli’s clothes told him at once his colossal mistake. It was not the form of the steel-handed warrior that housed the sorcerer’s spirit—but Machelli’s! He felt like dashing his head against the walls. Stupid ass that I am, he silently ranted at himself. “Xusia! So it’s Machelli’s body in which you’ve been hiding these many years!”

Xusia laughed from the bottom of his throat.

Alana remained hanging from the pillar, limp and speechless from the grotesque wonders she had seen.

To have had killing access to Xusia so easily in Machelli’s form, and not know it, was a scalding humiliation that he could not brook another second. He released a drawn-out hiss of total hate and lunged for Xusia with the accumulated fury of eleven years of frustration.

But though Xusia was swordless and standing directly in line with the thrust of Cromwell’s sword, instead of slicing through the sorcerer’s gelatinous shape, his blade hit and bounced off a field force surrounding Xusia that was like an invisible wall of stone. “Ahhhh!” he shrieked, rubbing his sprained wrist. When he glanced from Alana’s look of total shock to Xusia again—marking those malevolent eyes burning like hot red coals—he suddenly remembered what had happened to the witch Ban-Urlu on Tomb Island so long ago. He began to quake with fear. Was he too to suffer her horrible fate? He would not wait to find out. He dashed for the smashed open door. But even as he ran Xusia started chanting demonic affirmations that resulted in Cromwell being lifted off the ground by a giant unseen hand and pitched to the slippery stones, where he was forced to lie, again, as if an invisible hand or weight held him down.

“My body is a temple wherein all demons dwell!” Xusia droned, shuffling toward the prostrate king.

“A pantheon of many souls and demons under one flesh am I!” As he inched closer and closer to the king his eyes bulged with stark terror. When the sorcerer lifted and pointed one of his power-charged hands at Cromwell he began to froth at the mouth because he knew the end was near.

“The time has come for the world to be rid of your vileness, Cromwell—for there can only be one Lord of the Universe, and that one is me—not you!”

Cromwell’s gums began to bleed and blood leaked out of his nose and ears.

Xusia was too busy enjoying Cromwell’s suffering and the king was too much in agony for either of them to notice the thirty-foot snake slithering out of the turbid water and creeping toward Alana. Try as she could, Alana could not release the screams locked in her constricted throat. In the silent paralysis of terror she watched and then felt the serpent’s langorous, almost amorous body coil around her own. And when its bulbous head weaved and bobbed in front of her face—its forked tongue darting in and out of its ruby-red mouth—she fainted.

“Eleven years ago, Cromwell,” Xusia rasped, in funeral tones, “you stuck your blade in this sorcerer’s flesh and assumed him to be dead! But it takes more than cold steel to slay a real sorcerer, you fool—and now you will die a death that only a sorcerer can provide!”

“Spare me!” Cromwell pleaded for his life. But Xusia ignored his cries and knelt beside him. He raised his taloned fingers over the king’s chest and, without so much as touching him, demonic energy poured from his fingers, and the brittle bones of Cromwell’s chest cavity began to bend and crack. The king screamed in sheer agony as he vainly tried to rear himself up off the floor.

His bones would have fatally cracked had not Talon come charging into the chamber, wielding his mighty tri-bladed sword. His sudden appearance deflected Xusia from the slow, bizarre, agonizing murder of Cromwell.

One absorptive sweep with Talon’s eyes registered the situation in the chamber. There was Cromwell with a fiend that could only be the Xusia he kept confusing him with. They were surprised and vulnerable to a swift attack. But, horror of horrors, there was also Alana wrapped in the contracting coils of a monster serpent, as it carried his sweet darling into the turbid stream. There was no second thought regarding what task he had to accomplish first.

Talon raced past Xusia and the prostrate king when the sorcerer bolted to his feet and blocked his way.

“Move, dog!” Talon shouted. “I have no quarrel with you!”

But Xusia bobbed left and right in front of Talon every time he tried to go around him.

Talon had no time to play games. He hoisted his sword high above the sorcerer’s head and brought it down with a force that could have split a rock in two. But the same thing happened to him that did to Cromwell; his blades came up against an invisible shield protecting Xusia and the sword bounced back in painful recoil.

“Stay put, mercenary!” Xusia rasped, his reddish orbs gleaming daggers. “The sow Alana is mine—not yours!”

“Now we do have a quarrel!” Talon roared in Xusia’s face, while helplessly watching the snake slide out of the water with Alana tied to its tail, as it crawled into a dark cave within the chamber.

Once again Talon tried to hack his way through the unseen shield protecting Xusia and again his sword recoiled so high that he nearly severed his own head. Before he could swing again or tackle Xusia with his bare hands, the sorcerer drove Talon down on his knees with supernatural mind-power, holding him on his knees without any physical contact whatsoever. Talon used his own willpower and concentration of energies to repel Xusia’s mantric forces—but he was only human, while Xusia was half-man, half-demon and a wizard to boot.

“Thou dost loll alone in wanton sloth and crimson halls of dissipation!” Xusia once again droned, while he manipulated occult powers.

The words made no sense to him. But with each word Talon felt his life’s sap being sucked out of him a little more, as if Xusia had fastened a vampire bat to his jugular vein. And when he experienced the sensation of blood seeping out of his gums, ears and nose—as it was for Cromwell lying petrified beside him—Talon realized he might very well die ignominously in these macabre environs, leaving his Alana to the crushing coils of that loathsome serpent in the cave.

“Die pig!” Xusia exclaimed, turning on his death-wish for Talon full force.

A pathetic, muffled cry from Alana in the cave turned Xusia’s head for a moment—but just long enough for Talon to raise his tri-bladed sword and fire the middle, spring-loaded blade.

The flashing missile ripped through the flesh and meat of Xusia’s right shoulder, taking him utterly unaware. He staggered and whirled around in pain. “Vile boy!” he hissed and then crashed to the ground, alive but gushing blood from a massive wound in the shoulder.

With the collapse of Xusia the force that pinned both Talon and Cromwell to the stone floor snapped, and they both rushed to their feet, anxious to finish the death-duel they had started earlier. Though still wobbly and dazed from Xusia’s pummeling magic, they approached each other with renewed appetite for one another’s blood. Cromwell pointed to Talon’s tri-bladed sword. “Of course you’ve got the advantage. I’ve one blade—you’ve three.”

Talon fired the second spring-loaded blade onto the floor of the chamber, where it skittered clangorously along the wet stones.

“There. Does that make you happy, outlaw king?”

Cromwell sneered, taking his first fierce whack at Talon, missing his ear by inches. “I shall never be happy until I run my sword through your pretty face, sir!”

Their swords relentlessly bit, hammered, thrust, swung and sliced at each other, causing a continuous dazzle of bright metal in the shadowy chamber. Every lethal trick, technique and stratagem at their disposal was played out, but still neither grunting and cursing swordsman could best the other.

Then Talon remembered the serpent with his pretty catch in the cave. “My God—Alana!” He tried to sidestep Cromwell and raced for the cave. But the agile king jumped in front of him, hoping to capitalize on Talon’s distraction.

“Out of my way!” Talon roared again, slicing wildly at Cromwell’s head, but the king blocked the assault.

“Help!” came the choked cry from the cave.

Alana’s plight triggered a renewed flurry of flying sword cuts from Talon, and they were so swift and constant that Cromwell felt he was beset by a hundred swooshing and flashing blades instead of just one. Talon’s love’s sweet life was in danger and he had no time to dally or engage in the subtleties of swordsmanship. He brought this now decidedly one-sided contest to a swift and deadly finish by dropping to his knees when the king’s sword swirled over his head and rammed his own blade straight through Cromwell’s middle. “Ugh!” the king grunted, doubling over and toppling to the ground on his back. A fountain of blood spurted from the ugly gash in his stomach. His royal white and gold wedding vestments were quickly soaked in blood.

Talon leaped over the king’s convulsing body and bounded toward the cave.

“A last request,” Cromwell gasped. “Who are you?”

“Talon, son of the good king you murdered!” he shouted over his shoulder, never looking back.

“I almost forgot about you.” His voice was fading.

“Never have I forgotten about you!” he rejoindered to a dead man.

Just before Talon crossed the threshold of the cave he retrieved the second blade from his sword off the ground. With the blade remounted, he plunged into the dark belly of the cave, never having noticed that Xusia was nowhere in sight.