When the Heavens Fall (75 page)

Parolla looked across to where the battle between the tiktar and the Huntsmen still raged, saw the combatants were far enough from the vortex to resist its tug. Only four of the riders remained in their saddles, among them the leader. Even now, though, he was being dragged to the ground by two of his erstwhile companions. His ax caught one of them a blow to the helmet, shattering its antlers. Then one of the tiktar's flaming swords punched through his jaw, dislodging his helmet.

As the elderling turned in search of another opponent, Parolla sent a wave of sorcery crackling toward it. Caught unawares, the creature shrieked as the death-magic struck. It swung to face her and tried to take a step forward, but was prevented from doing so by her sorcery.

Got you.

“Closer,
sirrah
!” Parolla cried to Mottle. “Bring the storm closer! The tiktar!”

Giggling, the old man nodded.

The whirlwind came roaring in. A bank of cloud rolled first over the Huntsmen, then over the tiktar itself, and the elderling was lifted from the ground. It unfurled its wings with a crack and began beating them swiftly in an attempt to control its ascent.

In vain.

Parolla saw flames amid the gray as the creature spiraled upward into the belly of the storm. Mottle whooped his delight, spinning round and round as he tried to follow its path.

In the blink of an eye the tiktar disappeared.

*   *   *

Romany felt herself supported to the ground. A dagger slipped from Danel's hand and clattered to the floor. The blade was covered with blood.

Her head cradled on Danel's lap, the priestess looked into her servant's eyes.
No, not my servant. Mayot's all along.
Somehow over the course of the past few days Romany had managed to lose sight of the thread of death-magic jutting from the girl's chest. Enslaved by the Book, Danel was no less a creature of Mayot's will than the hundreds of hapless souls who threw themselves beneath the blades of Shroud's disciples.

When Danel spoke, the hollowness of her voice was in marked contrast to the sorrow in her eyes. “I tried. I tried to warn you.”

Yes, you did,
Romany realized, thinking back on their conversation. “And if the strike aimed at you is also unseen?” the girl had said. “I have my orders.” Romany, though, had long ago stopped seeing Danel as one of the undead. Instead the Vamilian had become, what? A confidante? A companion? Romany's soft laugh brought blood frothing to her lips. How the Spider would scold her now if she were here.

“Mayot's first command,” Danel went on, “was that I should kill you if you attempted to leave. His second, to say nothing of the first. The Book … I tried to resist…”

Romany patted the girl's hand. “Hush, my dear.”

Her sleeve was lying in water again, but she did not have the strength to move it. It seemed Mayot had not, after all, been ignorant of the threat she posed. It was quite flattering, really, for even with so many powerful enemies closing in the old man had kept her at the forefront of his mind. Had he feared she might ally with Shroud's minions to bring him down? Perhaps try to take the Book for herself?

A memory came to her then of a discussion she'd had with Danel by the burial ground at the edge of the city. The girl had been unusually loquacious that day, and the priestess now wondered whether her questions had in fact been Mayot's. Something Romany had said came back to her: “When Mayot falls you will be freed from his grasp.” “
If
he falls,” Danel had replied. “No,” Romany said. “When.” She'd spoken the words to give the girl hope. Instead perhaps all she had done was reveal her hand to Mayot, and in hindsight Danel's answering look of sadness had borne testimony to Romany's mistake. What other unguarded comments had she made during her time with the girl? What other clues had she given as to her plans?

“The dome…” she whispered. “I was going … to free you…”

Danel looked away. “I know.”

Romany coughed. “I … did not mean…”
To make you feel worse than you already do,
was what she had intended to say, but the words would not come. Every breath now gurgled in her chest and sent a stab of fire through her back. A sob escaped her lips.

“The pain will not last long,” Danel said, raising a hand to her chest. “I still carry the memory.”

The Fangalar blade that killed you, yes. I had not forgotten.
Romany shifted uncomfortably, expecting another throb of pain. Instead she found Danel was right—the agony was already fading to be replaced by numbness. She felt cold, too. Heartbeats ago the room had seemed stiflingly hot, but now Romany's teeth were chattering, and Danel shrugged out of her cloak and laid it across her.

The Spider would not step in to save her, Romany knew. The goddess's power had to be channeled through the priestess herself, and she was in no condition to work sorcery. Nor would the Spider risk setting foot on the mortal realm.
My risk, I said.
Romany looked past Danel at the dark, stormy skies. Was the goddess watching her even now? Was she aware of Romany's ignominious fall from grace, or had she already moved on to the next game?

Danel stroked her hair. “I'm sorry.”

“Nonsense,” the priestess said. “Not your fault … Just a pawn…”
A pawn in a game initiated by my own hand.
Strangely, the thought lifted her spirits—to think that in some way she, and not Mayot, had ultimately been the architect of her own downfall.
Perhaps in the end I outwitted even myself.

Danel was speaking again, but Romany could not focus on the words. Darkness hovered at the edges of her vision, and each of her breaths was shallower than the last. There remained one move left to her in the game, and that was to take her spirit beyond Mayot's reach. True, it would mean oblivion, but the magic of that cursed Book could not work on her if there was no soul to call back to her body. It would be a small victory over Mayot, all things considered, but Romany hoped the old man lived long enough to know of it nonetheless.

It was hard to concentrate through her discomfort, but eventually she succeeded in freeing her spirit from her body. Rising into the air, she paused to look down on herself. Her face was now as pale as Danel's, and her lips were tinged blue, yet even in death there was a striking dignity to her expression, a nobility to her features.

The world, Romany decided, would be a poorer place without her.

With a sigh she fled along the threads of her web until she came to the end of the longest remaining strand.

There, to her surprise, she found the Spider waiting for her, smiling wryly as she opened her arms to welcome Romany into her embrace.

*   *   *

As it turned out, Luker did not have to carve a way through the undead to Mayot—the mage did that for him. Mayot had shuffled to the edge of the dais, his face twisted with fury at the loss of his undead champions. With one arm he clutched the Book to his chest; with the other he pointed at Luker. The aura of darkness about him expanded, swallowing the line of Vamilian girls behind the throne. The Guardian watched as they burst into flames, feeling glad he wasn't on Mayot's side—right now the old man was doing more damage to his own servants than he was to the enemy.

Then, from the mage's fingers, a wave of blackness came speeding toward Luker, incinerating the undead between them.

Gathering his Will, the Guardian hit back.

Their powers clashed with a thunderclap that shook the dome. Death-magic sprayed in all directions, tearing into the Vamilians round the dais and shearing through the trunk of one of the flaming trees.

It toppled.

The slightest pressure from Luker's Will changed the course of its descent, and it plummeted toward Mayot.

The old man gestured. A burst of sorcery smashed the tree to splinters before continuing upward to strike the roof of the dome. Luker heard a crack, felt thuds through his boots as masonry came crashing down to his right. A pity none of those stones had come down near Mayot else the Guardian could have tried to land them on the mage's head as he had with the tree. Rain fell about him, driven on the wind that still whistled through the building.

The tree had distracted Mayot long enough for Luker to launch a counterattack. Cleaving a path through the waves of the old man's death-magic, he drove against the wards surrounding him.

He might as well have been slapping his hand against a cliff face for all the effect he had.

Laughing, Mayot increased the ferocity of his assault. The air trembled again as his power collided with Luker's, but this time the Guardian's defenses withered before the onslaught. If he could shunt the attacks to one side he might ease the pressure that was building, but if he did so he risked deflecting the sorcery into the path of Merin or one of the Sartorians. From the sounds of fighting behind, the consel and his soldiers had given up on trying to escape and were now battling for their lives. Whether they survived or not mattered nothing to Luker, but as of this moment they were the only ones guarding his back.

The wall of darkness loomed closer.

Did Shroud's sword hold the answer? If Luker hurled it at Mayot would the sorcery invested in the weapon protect it from the Book's death-magic? He adjusted his grip on the hilt. It would be a difficult throw. Mayot's outline was little more than a shadow through the waves of blackness, but then Luker was fast running out of options, his defenses unraveling before him with alarming swiftness.

He drew back his sword arm.

*   *   *

Galea's intervention had sealed the passage against the wall of flames, shielding Ebon and—inadvertently, he suspected—Vale as well. Now Ebon stood at the end of the walkway, the sound of crashing waves in his ears. The inside of the dome was lit by a number of roving fires, and it took him a moment to recognize them as blazing undead. The flames guttered as rain swept down from two holes in the roof.

Ebon took in the piles of corpses scattered across the floor, the ranks of faceless spirits standing motionless like discarded shadows, the exchange of sorcery between an old man on a dais and a younger man below him—one of a small knot of fighters surrounded by Vamilians.

Then he saw the consel.

“Vale,” he said, but the Endorian was already moving. He crossed the dome in a ripple of motion, cutting into the ranks of undead.

Drawing his saber, Ebon ran to keep up. The goddess's power flowed cold in his veins, and he knocked from his path an undead warrior that tried to intercept him. A spear flashed for his head, and he raised his saber to parry, but the impact never came, the weapon glancing off his wards. The Sartorians were fivescore paces away. The consel was fighting between two of his soldiers, an expression of controlled rage on his face. To his left, a grim-faced stranger with the look of a veteran about him wielded a sword and longknife with cool efficiency. A pile of motionless corpses was forming in front of the man, yet still more of the Vamilians were scrambling over their fallen kin to attack him. Ebon picked up his speed.

Fifty paces.

Vale was a blur at the edge of his vision. The king saw him decapitate a brown-robed monk with flaming eyes before passing from sight again. Ahead the consel's sword had snagged in the chest of an undead spearman. Abandoning the weapon, Garat kicked his assailant away and reached behind him. “Sword!” he shouted. His companions, though, were too hard-pressed to obey. Cursing, the consel seized an undead warrior's wrist and pulled him into a head-butt, then wrestled his sword from his grasp and spun him into the path of a woman behind.

Suddenly Ebon was directly in front of him. Garat's blade flashed for his neck, only to strike his defenses and bounce off. The consel's look of recognition was followed by a frown. Ebon nodded to him. No doubt that attack had been an accident, yet still he felt a prickle between his shoulders as he stepped past and drew level with the man battling Mayot.

Flames from those of the Vamilians still ablaze threw a flickering light on the stranger's scarred face. His features were a mask of concentration. In one hand he held a sword that throbbed with power.

“Fool!” the goddess hissed in Ebon's mind. “An attack from the flank would have caught Mayot off guard.”

Sheathing his saber, Ebon gestured at the man on his left. “How long can he hold?”

“What does it matter? We must use this diversion—”

“You have a short memory, my Lady,” Ebon cut in. “Or have you forgotten the Fangalar already? Mayot is more powerful than their leader, is he not? I cannot bring him down on my own.”

“You, mortal? You are nothing! Without my help—”

“Enough! How do we defeat the old man?”

“The Book gives Mayot power, but he wields it indiscriminately, without craft or refinement.”

“Meaning he is vulnerable to a focused attack.”

“Focused, yes.”

The scarred stranger's defenses were buckling beneath Mayot's assault. A few more heartbeats and they would fail completely. “Let's finish this,” Ebon said.

At that moment the stranger drew back his sword arm.

*   *   *

The force of the sorcery battering Luker diminished abruptly, and he let out a groan. A new power had joined its will to his, driving Mayot back. He became aware of a figure beside him, and he looked right to see a shaven-headed man. He was shorter and more slightly built than Luker, and the lines about his eyes gave him the look of someone older than he no doubt was. Waves of magic poured from his hands with a chill that steamed the air. Luker had never seen him before.

“You took your bloody time,” he said.

A tight smile was Baldy's only response.

Luker lowered his sword arm. Risking a look behind, he saw that Baldy had come alone. No, not alone, there was a second stranger fighting the undead, moving so fast that eyes other than Luker's might not have seen him. The Vamilians were being hacked to pieces by his whirling blade.