The Shattered Mask s-3

by Richard Lee Byers

  *****

  As Tamlin, Talbot, and Thazienne swung themselves onto their horses-destriers, Shamur noted approvingly, not palfreys, her children hadn't ridden out into the night completely unprepared for trouble-warriors in mufti came trotting down from the north. More of Marance's henchmen, joining the battle as expected.

  Drawing her long sword, Tazi grinned at the approaching force. "Let's charge them," she said.

  The wild, reckless part of Shamur's nature cried out in assent, but the portion that had loved and protected these children since their births demurred. "Not a wise idea," she said. "The guards will be receiving conjured reinforcements any second."

  "All the more reason to punch through them now," Tazi said, "get within sword range of the masked wizard, and-"

  "Your mother's right," Thamalon rapped. "We're getting the three of you out of here. Ride for home." Thazienne sneered, but when he turned his mount south, she, like her brothers and Shamur, did the same.

  For a moment, as Shamur urged her war-horse into motion, she dared to hope they might escape without further difficulty, for the warriors behind them wouldn't be able to keep up with their mounts, and except for one or two survivors of the skirmish just concluded, the southern half of the bridge lay open before them. Then patches of soft violet light shimmered and swelled on the cobblestones ahead, and she realized that she and her family had run out of time.

  "I suppose now we have to charge," Tamlin drawled. Even with enemies hurrying to engage him, he'd clung to his wine cup as he climbed into the saddle, and now he took a final sip, tossed the goblet away to clink on the pavement, and readied his sword.

  "Insightful as usual," mocked Talbot. "No wonder you're the heir." Ahead, the purple lights died, leaving in their place a number of long, low, crouching shapes.

  "Enough chatter!" Thamalon said. "Concentrate on the task at hand. Charge on my word, and… go!"

  The Uskevren hurtled forward. One of the conjured creatures, ophidian but for the several short legs on either side of its scaly body, pointed its snout at Shamur.

  She judged that she was still out of the beast's striking distance, but instinct warned her that it was about to attack her somehow, and she yanked on the reins and swerved her destrier to the side. A dazzling, crackling thunderbolt leapt from the reptile's head.

  Shamur would have sworn that the flare of power missed her cleanly, but for an instant, her muscles clenched in agony. Evidently similarly afflicted, the war-horse stumbled, then balked. She kicked the steed, forcing it on at the behir, whose species she had belatedly recognized once the creature employed its extraordinary means of offense.

  White radiance flickered and rattled on either side as other behirs assailed the rest of Shamur's family. The air reeked of ozone. The noblewoman's mount carried her into striking distance, and, unable to discharge a second lightning bolt just yet, the reptile that had attacked her reared up, its neck craning to place its head on a level with her own. Its crocodilian jaws gaped wide enough to snatch her from the saddle and swallow her whole. She thrust the point of her broadsword into the behir's neck, and, blood spurting from the wound, it fell.

  A second behir scuttled into her path, running amazingly fast on its stunted legs. She disposed of that one with a cut to the skull, and then a pair of gnolls-hyena-faced warriors a head taller than a tall man-stalked out of the darkness, their poleaxes at the ready. Her eyes widened in surprise, for she'd been so intent on killing the behirs that she hadn't even noticed a second wave of Marance's agents materializing.

  She rode toward the closer of the gnolls. When it thrust its weapon at her horse, she knocked the spiked head of the poleaxe out of line with her broadsword, then dispatched the shaggy warrior with a rib-shattering chest cut.

  Even as the gnoll fell, its compatriot rushed in and swung its poleaxe in a chop at Shamur's head. She barely managed to lift her sword in time for a high parry, and the impact jolted her entire body.

  The problem with a weapon as long and heavy as a poleaxe, however, was that even a fighter as big and strong as a gnoll needed a moment to heave it back into a position for a second attack when an initial effort failed, and Shamur intended to exploit that. She grabbed hold of the poleaxe just beneath the wickedly curved blade.

  Snarling, the gnoll yanked on the shaft of the weapon. Brawny as it was. it doubtless thought it could free the poleaxe from her grip with little trouble, and in fact, she shared its confidence. But she hadn't intended to immobilize the implement for long, just long enough to flummox the gnoll while she leaned out of the saddle and drove her point into its breast. The brute's pulling actually facilitated the action.

  The gnoll dropped, and Shamur looked about. For the first time since the conjured creatures had begun appearing, she wasn't facing an immediate threat. She could spare a moment to look and see how her companions were faring.

  For one ghastly moment, she felt a pang of fear, for she only saw three horses besides her own plunging and wheeling about the bridge. Then she discerned that although one steed had been lost, its rider had not. Tazi now sat behind Talbot on the latter's huge paint destrier, wielding her long sword to lethal effect despite the impediment of the broad-shouldered youth immediately in front of her. So far, except for superficial cuts and bruises, everyone in the family appeared to be all right.

  Grinning, Shamur turned her horse toward the next foe blocking the path to safety.

  *****

  Peering through the invisible eye, Marance watched the battle with growing incredulity.

  His summoned creatures scurried among the corpses, human and otherwise, littering the cobbles. Nuldrevyn's troops, a pack of ill-trained dolts no braver than Avos the Fisher's hooligans, advanced warily from the north. Bileworm's leadership notwithstanding, they had yet to charge in among the wizard's more exotic agents. The astonished residents of the houses on either side of the roadway, roused from their beds by the clamor of combat, gawked from doorways and windows. At the center of the tumult, the Uskevren cut their way toward the south bank of the Elzimmer.

  A fair-minded man, even with regard to his estimation of his most hated enemies, Marance would have freely conceded that each of the Uskevren was a formidable combatant in his or her own right. Now he saw that the five of them fighting in concert were little short of awe-inspiring. One foe after another fell beneath their bloody swords, until the wizard recognized that, impossible as it seemed, if he didn't undertake measures to hinder them, Thamalon and his family were likely to get away. Marance had better decide on his tactics forthwith.

  He would cast the rest of his ordinary summoning spells, of course, but he couldn't assume that additional conjured servants would fare any better than those already sprawled and lifeless in the Uskevren family's wake. The same long, relatively narrow structure of the bridge that had made it seem a fine site for a trap likewise made it impossible for too many opponents to come at the riders simultaneously, and thus he couldn't count on overwhelming them with sheer numbers. Something extra was required.

  Should Marance dive into the thick of the fray himself, throwing blasts of fire and the like? The memory of Tha-malon's long sword ripping open his belly three decades before flashed unbidden into his mind, and his mouth tightened. Not that he was afraid, of course, for his death at the Owl's hands had been a fluke. He was confident of his ability to handle any man at close quarters. Still, it was foolish to fight in that manner unnecessarily. A spell-caster gave up much of his natural advantage when he allowed his foes into striking range, or, to some degree, even permitted them to lay eyes on him.

  Of course, Marance could armor himself against ordinary arrows and the like, then fly above the Uskevren well out of reach of their blades, but even that might not be prudent. He had no idea what Thamalon and Shamur had been up to since he'd seen them last. He didn't know what sort of surprises they might have prepared for him, or what manner of puissant allies, wizards and priests, belike, might even now be speeding hard on their heels
to the bridge.

  No, all in all, it seemed best to destroy the Uskevren from a genuinely safe distance. Marance would do it with one of the great spells he carried in his memory, and never mind the drain on his vitality. After this encounter, he shouldn't need it any longer.

  Should he then conjure the corrupt earth elemental? Perhaps not. Perched so high over empty air and running water, he might find it difficult to evoke and control the giant. Besides, somehow, Thamalon and Shamur had foiled the creature once already.

  Smiling slightly, Marance decided another option was superior. Unless the Uskevren got off the High Bridge quickly, an improbability with the wizard's minions attacking them, the magic would inevitably kill them, yet, the true beauty of the scheme was that if he knew Thamalon, his old enemy might well stop even trying to depart.

  Swinging his staff in intricate passes, the wizard turned widdershins and chanted in a rasping, grinding tongue never devised for a human throat. A knowledgeable observer might have recognized certain similarities to a spell employed by mortal wizards to invest themselves with the capacity to move objects by thought alone. But Marance's version, a secret he'd wrested from an ancient baatezu adept in Maladomini, the Circle of Ruins, was vastly more powerful. It could shift masses unthinkable for any earthly wizard.

  The sky flickered red for a moment, and voices wailed and groaned from the empty air. Marance's body burned with purple flame as the power flowered inside him, and he stumbled with the glorious agony of the sensation.

  The fire faded, or rather, withdrew inside him. In control of himself once more, he poised his hand above one of the fishmonger's cleaver-scarred tables. A toy-sized simulacrum of the High Bridge, made of violet phosphorescence, wavered into being between his fingers and the butcher-block beneath. After a second, he sensed that his creation had become palpable enough to touch, whereupon he took hold of it and began to shake it back and forth.

  The bridge lurched, and Shamur's destrier staggered. Tamlin's mount lost its balance altogether, and the elegant young man, rather less elegant now that his lovely clothes were torn and soiled with the blood of his enemies, frantically kicked his feet out of the stirrups and flung himself clear to keep his leg from being smashed between the horse's flank and the roadway.

  A second jolt followed hard upon the first. Shamur's terrified mount stumbled again. Realizing the impossibility of riding under these conditions, she scrambled out of the saddle and released the animal to look after itself. Talbot and Thazienne did the same. Thamalon, however, had to slay one of the remaining gnolls, magically compelled to attack even when it could hardly keep its feet, before he could dismount. Somehow he managed to control his panicky, staggering horse and wield his long sword at the same time, parrying a thrust of the gnoll's spear, then dispatching it with a chest cut. That accomplished, he jumped down onto the pavement.

  Keeping a wary eye out for their foes, the five Uskevren blundered toward one another to confer. The shaking bridge rumbled beneath their feet. Houses on either side of the roadway swayed, their timbers moaning, and falling objects crashing inside them. A roof tore loose from its moorings, pitched backward, and plummeted toward the river far below.

  "Quake!" declared Tamlin, raising his voice to make himself heard above the din.

  "No," Shamur replied, "Our enemy's sorcery is shaking the bridge. Evidently he's willing to destroy the whole thing to kill us. I assume that either he's stepped off the north end already, or he has a magical way of getting off at the moment of collapse." She looked at the road before her, where cobblestones jarred loose from their bed and jutted like rotten teeth, and saw that she and her family had covered a good portion of the distance to the Klaroun Gate. "I think that if we keep moving, we have a fighting chance of getting off ourselves. However-"

  Two more gnolls lumbered forward. Conversation ceased for a moment while the Uskevren cut the creatures down.

  "You were about to observe," Thamalon panted, "that if we simply run away, everyone who lives on the bridge will die."

  "Yes," Shamur said. Frightened and unaware of what was truly happening, most of the residents wouldn't even try to get off the span. Thinking to wait the strange rumbling out, they'd simply cower in their homes.

  "Then we need to kill the masked wizard and hope that ends the shaking," said Thazienne impatiently. "Fine. That's what I wanted to do in the first place, but does anyone listen to me?"

  Strands of sweaty black hair plastered to his face, his square jaw set, and a feral light in his eyes, Talbot nodded. "Let's have done with the wretch. Avenge Jander and Master Selwick here and now."

  "And put an end to all this unpleasantness so we can go back to living like civilized people," said Tamlin, brushing futilely at a gory spatter on his sleeve.

  "Come on, then," Shamur said. She and her family began to advance back the way they'd come, when the shaking stopped. For a moment, she wondered if her analysis of the situation had been at fault. Perhaps the High Bridge wouldn't break, perhaps the spell that threatened it had run out of power. Then spheres of purple glow swelled in the gloom ahead, and as soon as they birthed the creatures intended to block the way, the span resumed jarring back and forth. Evidently Marance was unable to rock it and conjure more of his minions at the same time, and so had elected to briefly suspend the one action in order to accomplish the other.

  When Shamur approached close enough to see them clearly, she judged that the wizard's new servants had been selected specifically to operate on this precarious ground, for they all possessed more than two legs and a low center of gravity. One of them, a pallid creature somewhat resembling a centipede, its segmented body half again as long as a man was tall, scuttled toward her. Tentacles coiled and writhed between its round, black eyes.

  From past experience, Shamur knew that a sticky secretion on a carrion crawler's flexible arms could paralyze at a touch. The tentacles whipped at her, she swept her broadsword in a parry, and the bridge jerked. She fell, her attempt at defense turned into a useless flailing, and one of the feelers brushed her wrist.

  For an instant, a horrible numbness flowed up her arm, but then the sensation passed. Praise Mask for her sturdy gauntlet and sleeve, which had kept most of the crawler's greasy, malodorous poison from reaching her skin.

  Though it might not matter in the long run. She was sprawled on the ground, and the insect-thing was still scuttling forward, chittering. She rolled across the heaving roadway with the carrion crawler in mad pursuit, and then, when she thought she'd widened the distance between them sufficiently to buy herself a moment, tried to scramble onto her feet.

  Just at that instant, another tremor jolted her, but, fighting for balance, she refused to let it tumble her back down. She faked a dodge to the right, then darted left instead. Only deceived for a moment, the carrion crawler lashed its tentacles at her. A couple of them only missed by inches, but miss they did, and then she was behind the creature's head with its leathery natural armor and positioned to strike at its softer, more vulnerable flank.

  She drove her point deep into the crawler's body, between the base of the head and the first pair of legs. The beast jerked spasmodically, then went down.

  As she pulled her blade from the carcass, Shamur surveyed the battlefield. Thamalon was plunging his blade into the chest of what must surely be the last surviving gnoll. Talbot and Thazienne fought side by side against a trio of carrion crawlers. Tamlin, who had lost his sword, slammed the axe into the spine of an enormous, fire-breathing canine. The hell hound fell, and the youth crowed in delight.

  "I told you this thing was lucky," he called to his embattled siblings, brandishing the gory tool as he spoke. Tazi sneered.

  Shamur scowled in frustration. There were plenty of carrion crawlers and hell hounds still remaining, and the bubbles of violet and magenta light swelling on the roadway ahead promised even more adversaries. Meanwhile, the Uskevren had only succeeded in making their way a short distance north.

  They were never go
ing to cut through all of Marance's defenders in time to prevent the destruction of the bridge. They needed another solution, and perhaps, Shamur thought, smiling at the audacity of the notion that suddenly occurred to her, that meant it was time to stop behaving as if she were a mere earthbound warrior and start acting like the thief in the red-striped mask.

  If she meant to try her idea, it had to be now, before she attracted the attention of another opponent. Leaving Thamalon and the children to keep Marance's minions occupied, praying they'd manage all right without her, she dashed to the facade of one of the swaying houses. Then, struggling to cling to hand- and footholds that constantly threatened to judder free of her grip, she climbed.

  For a man as orderly and intelligent as Marance, it was child's play to juggle the various elements of a complex task. He shook the bridge for a while, glanced through the magical eye to see how the Uskevren were faring, summoned some new opponents for them if it seemed necessary, and then repeated the sequence. Now seated on the table beside his magical simulacrum, he didn't even have to worry about the tremors knocking him down.

  Nor need he fret over what would happen when the bridge collapsed beneath him. A single magic word would cause him to drift downward toward the surface of the river as slowly as a bit of silkweed fluff. Then, while his leisurely descent was in progress, he could either invest himself with the power of flight or, if, as he expected to be, he was absolutely certain that all five Uskevren were dead, he could simply click his iron thumb rings together and return to the netherworld. Perhaps the latter option was preferable, given that he'd pretty much worn out his welcome at Old High Hall.

  If Bileworm was in the immediate vicinity, the magic of the rings would whisk him to the Pit as well, but Marance doubted the familiar would make his way back to the fish market in time. He supposed he might actually miss the scamp, his companion and confidant for nearly thirty years. But one must accept casualties in war, and, happily, the Nine Hells possessed an abundance of slaves.