The Viper's Fangs (Book 2) (33 page)

19

Sardach was furious with himself.

He had become so absorbed in getting Typhus that he had forgotten
about the menace—until it returned and its frozen form sent waves of pain through
him as it passed by. But when he turned to defend himself, it didn’t attack. Instead,
it went for one of the others, the injured one hiding in the corner. The menace
was vulnerable, but Sardach didn’t have time to deal with it. He was too close
to Typhus, too close to unraveling the intricate network of knots linking him
to Angus. But he couldn’t finish separating them here, not with the menace so
close, not with its frozen touch sapping his strength.

He made a tendril of smoke and solidified it as much as he
dared. He wrapped it around Typhus and Angus and flew away from his mortal
enemy, even though every other part of his being wanted to turn and rend it
apart.

But Argyle had given a command, and he was bound by the
magic to obey it. No matter how much he wanted to, he was too close to fulfilling
that command to stop now. He flew far enough away that he could no longer feel
the foul presence of the menace’s cold breath, and then came to a stop. He
hovered and looked back, but he saw nothing except the dim little glow of the wizard’s
spell. It was little more than a wisp, and it was moving about. He kept
watching it as he turned back to his task and gradually, carefully unraveled
the rest of the spell that bound Typhus to Angus. He would have done it more
quickly, but he wasn’t going to repeat his mistake; the menace was still close and
could easily return to attack him.

Typhus was alive, and he fought against him. It didn’t
matter; there was nothing he could do to harm him.

Angus was shifting position, and he had something in his
hand, something wrought from magic, something wrought from
bad
magic,
the kind that could hurt him.

Argyle wanted him to bring Typhus back. Alive.

He could do what he wanted with the others, but there was no
time for sport; his mortal enemy was too close at hand.

When he finished untangling the threads of the spell, he let
the other go….

20

As the lift lowered, Hobart removed his axe from its saddle
sheath and moved to the center of the platform. They would need light to see
what was below them, and a torch would be useless. It would fizzle and burn out
almost as soon as it struck the snow. But Angus’s spell—

He looked again to the east and wondered if the wizard was
still alive and half-expecting to see him flying toward them. But there was
nothing they could do for him now; he had to focus on Giorge. He
needed
to focus on what could be done for Giorge, but his mind kept coming back to his
infectious grin, his quirky sense of humor, his—

He knelt down, squinting in the glare of the spell, and
chopped around it with his axe. It bit deep into the wood, and he struggled to
pull it out. His next strike was little more than a soft tap, but it went deep
enough. As he worked around the spell, he hoped it would stay attached to the
wood the way it had when Angus attached it to the rope at the well. If it did,
he would tie a rope around the wood block and lower it over the sided where
Giorge had fallen. If he was close enough—

The axe bit too deeply again, and he angrily wrenched it
back out, again. He wished there was something else he could bury it in, some
flesh-and-blood foe that he could vanquish, but there wasn’t, and it was
useless against elementals.

What the hell were elementals, anyway?

He completed the first full circle and then adjusted his aim
at a shallow inward angle. He didn’t want to chop a hole all the way through
the platform—it was at least a foot thick—he just wanted to pry up a few inches
at the surface. It would leave a ragged dip, but the wood should still be thick
enough to support them and their horses if they walked on it. He would taper
the edges to make it less likely that they would trip on it if they forgot it
was there; he didn’t want anyone else to go over the edge like Giorge—

He set the axe aside, gripped the edges of what he’d cut
out, and pulled upward, stopping only when the wood began to crumble through
his thick fingers. He shook his head; he would have to cut all the way through,
but the axe didn’t fit well enough into the opening he had made to do it. He
could make it larger, but that would weaken the flooring in too wide an area. He
took out his knife and began to saw at it. The wood was old and offered little
resistance to the sharp edge, and in less than a minute, the little piece of
floor popped up with the magic ball of light still attached to it.

He picked it up and went over to Sam, who skittered away
from him. He shifted the little block of wood to cradle it in the crook of his
left elbow and reached out with his right to pat the gelding’s neck a few
times. “It’s all right boy,” he said, his tone soft, somber. “We’ll get through
this soon enough.” He slid his hand down to the saddle horn and lifted one of the
ropes from it.

He moved away from the horses and toward Ortis. “Loop this
around the block,” he said, holding out the rope to him. “I want to see what’s
down there.”

Ortis nodded. “The moon is reflecting off the snow,” he said.
“But it isn’t bright enough to see anything clearly.”

Hobart held the block of wood out and waited for Ortis to
wrap the rope around it once, then he turned it so the next loop crossed over
the first and around the other two sides of the block. He tensed a bit when the
rope passed easily through the light without igniting.

Magic,
he thought, shaking his head.
I’ll never
understand it, no matter how many times the wizards explain it to me. Give me a
sword and shield any day; I can hold onto them!

Ortis pulled the rope tight, and it bit sharply into the edges
of the block.

“That should be enough,” Hobart said. “It doesn’t weigh
much.”

Ortis held onto the rope and Hobart gently lowered the block
until it was dangling on its own. After waiting a few seconds to make sure it
wasn’t going to crumble or come loose, he took the rope from Ortis and went to
the south side of the platform, near where Giorge had fallen. The rope railing
was gone, and the platform was slick with fresh ice. He paused, turned, and was
about to say something to Ortis, but he already had another rope in his hand.
He nodded and waited for Ortis to loop one end around Hobart’s waist and the
other around Sam’s saddle horn.

Hobart took a breath and stepped gingerly forward, skirting
the margins of the ice until he was close enough to the edge of the platform to
kneel down and look over the side. He held the spell behind him, first, to see
what he could in the dim, dark-blue, almost black reflection of the moonlight
on the expanse of snow. Ortis was right, though; it was too far away for him to
see any details; it was all a sheet of the same color that stretched out from
the cliff face into the darkness of the valley for as far as he could see.

He pulled the block around in front of him and squinted in
the sudden glare as he let the rope slide quickly through his fingers. The
light dropped quickly, but it was still high above the floor of the valley—and
it did no good at all. The only thing he saw clearly was the magic ball of
light, and when it reached the end of the rope. He swung it back and forth and
called, “We’ll need more ropes.”

Ortis was already bending over to tie a second rope to the
first, and there was a third coiled up next to him.

Hobart nodded. The light swayed back and forth, and he tried
to peer through it at the landscape below them. But that landscape was all in
shadow, and the glare of the light blocked most of his view.

He frowned, He needed that thing to act like a lantern, one
that could direct its light in whatever direction he wanted. But it wasn’t a
lantern, and only Angus could change the way it glowed. There was one thing he
could do, though, and he reeled in the rope to do it. When it reached the top, he
grabbed the block and turned it over so the light was facing down. He held it
out over the side of the platform, and the snow below them brightened
noticeably, and the impeding glare was gone. It was still too far for him to
see any details, but at least he could see
something
.

“You need to tie this so the light is on the bottom,” he
said, holding it out to Ortis.

As Ortis began working the knot free, a sudden, brief, clap
of thunder sounded from far to the east.

Hobart’s head snapped toward it, and he felt his shoulders
tense for action. He had heard that sound before.

A few seconds later, there was another short peal of thunder.

21

After an initial wave of dizziness, Angus’s head cleared and
he opened his eyes. He was surrounded by acrid smoke that burned into his
lungs, his eyes, and even with the robe, he felt a warm tingling all through
his body.

His breath caught as his spine ruptured, the bones splitting
apart like the two halves of a log cleft by a heavy blow from an axe. But the
bones didn’t break; they became
two
spines, and they were being pulled
away from each other.

He turned his head and scowled at the face he saw. It was
similar to his own, but there was a long scar arcing from his left ear to below
his neck, and it was as clean shaven as a newborn babe. The hair—

Typhus
, he thought in disgust.

The head turned toward him, and the grey eyes, so like his
father’s, were as frantic as a cornered rat trying to escape his Firewhip. But
there was no escape here, and he knew it.
They
knew it.

The arms separated and became four. It was a peculiar
sensation, one that wasn’t quite painful, wasn’t quite comfortable. It was a
sort of light tugging on the skin of his cheek, only it went deeper, far deeper,
and didn’t let go.

Sardach was separating them. How was he doing that?
Why
was he doing it? Could he stop him? Did he even want to? He had never agreed to
let Voltari merge him with Typhus; it was too risky. Now—

A horrid screech reverberated through his mind, and pain
shot through his right thigh.

Typhus tried to pull away from him, but their lower legs
were still connected.

Sardach lifted them up, carried them away from the platform
and out over the valley. He flew quickly—more quickly than Angus had ever
flown, judging by the wind passing over his skin—and then came to a sudden
stop.

The smoke left his lungs, left his head, and swarmed around
his legs, his ankles. His arms were free, and he completed the third movement
of the wand. All that remained was the movement directing the conical wave. He
waited.

His thighs separated from Typhus, peeling downward, toward
the knees. He waited.

His knees were his own again. His shin. His ankle….

He began the movement as his foot snapped free from Typhus
and—

Sardach let him go—

As he fell, he tried to compensate for the sudden shift in
trajectory—

A clap of thunder—

A pain-wracked scream in his mind—

It was Typhus….

22

“How far do you think it was?” Hobart asked as he lowered
the rope.

“Hard to tell,” Ortis said. “But it had to be the wand. It’s
a cloudless night, and I see no sign of an avalanche or volcanic eruption.”

Hobart nodded. “Do you think he’s alive?”

Ortis frowned. “Possibly,” he admitted. “He can fly.”

Hobart stopped lowering the rope and began twirling it. “You
saw what was happening to him, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Ortis said. “It was as if he were budding a new
version of himself.”

Hobart shook his head. “No,” he said. “They were different.
One was smaller and had a scar on his neck.”

The rope was swinging well, and the spell rotated beneath
them in a broad circular motion as it dangled at the end of it. He was beginning
to see details, but they were mostly just the contours of drifts, shadows in
the snow, or an occasional rock sticking up through it.

“What do you think it was?” Hobart asked.

“Magic,” Ortis replied at once. “Whatever that thing was
doing to him wasn’t natural.”

Hobart decided they had seen all they would from where they
were and carefully moved to the southeast corner of the platform.

“What are we going to do?” Ortis asked.

“Find Giorge,” Hobart said at once. “If he’s alive, we’ll
help him. If not….” He didn’t want to think about that. Instead, he watched the
looping whirl of the light on top of the snow.

“And Angus?”

“After Giorge,” Hobart said. “That thunder was a long way
off. Giorge has to be closer.”

The light passed over the edge of an impression in the snow
and Hobart moved it a little further east. On the next pass, he saw a rough
indentation about the size of two large horses standing side by side. It was deeper
in the center, as if something had fallen through the snow, but he couldn’t see
what was buried in its center.

“Giorge!?” Hobart yelled, knowing it would be pointless from
so far away. There was a chance, a very slim one, that he could have survived such
a fall if the snow had cushioned his landing. But not with that snowstorm
pummeling him all the way down.

“We’ll be able to reach him with snowshoes,” Ortis said.
“I’ll get them out.”

Hobart nodded, waited until the magic light was coming
around again, and then let it go to mark the spot as best he could. It landed well
right of the crater and didn’t quite reach out far enough from the cliff face,
but it would do. He could follow the rope to it, and he knew what direction to
take from there.

“We’ll need torches,” he called over his shoulder. Then he
turned and asked, “Can you lower the lift any faster?”

“I don’t think we should,” Ortis said. “The horses are
skittish enough as it is.”

Hobart frowned and looked at them. In the moonlight, they
were little more than shadows milling around each other, nickering and
snorting. He scowled at them. If Giorge was still alive, what did they matter?
Then he picked out Leslie’s familiar silhouette. She held her head high at the
end, pressing against the others as if she were corralling them. She had been
with him since he started training….

He turned away and stared at the half-buried light far below,
his grip tightening on the rope as he reeled in the slack while they descended.
It was Giorge’s lifeline—if he had one.