The wizard expelled her breath into a searing conical cloud. Anton’s skin burned wherever the corrosive vapor brushed it, and on the steps below him, other captives cried out in pain.
He couldn’t let the shock of injury balk him, nor allow the witch to cast another attack spell. The greatsword agreed and steadied him with a surge of strength and anger. He jerked it from the first spearman’s body and cut down the second one then another cultist who rushed in with a short sword. That cleared a path to the magician.
He sprang out onto what he now perceived was one of the natural balconies overlooking the big cave at the top of the volcano. Smoke and steam swirled through the air, and fire flickered somewhere down below, but he couldn’t tell what was burning. Too many people were in the way.
The witch goggled as if astonished he’d survived her initial attack. She started jabbering a second incantation, and the words slurred into a gargling sound as the greatsword crunched into her skull.
Anton stepped deeper into the mass of cultists and cut at another foe. His enemies were all around him now, and even an enchanted sword wouldn’t save him from a stab in the back. Only his comrades could do that—assuming any were still alive and fit to fight.
Cries of fury and scrambling footsteps established that they were. They swarmed out onto the platform and ripped into the cultists. Jamark swung a mace. A cultist managed to catch the blow on his shield, but the force sent him stumbling backward to topple off the ledge. Stedd drove a sword into an opponent’s chest and laughed crazily. Then the eyes rolled up in his head as the other man, mortally wounded but not dead yet, thrust a blade into his torso. They took a lurching sidestep together, like spastic dancers.
As he fought, Anton looked for Diero but at first couldn’t spot him amid the frenzied press. Finally, though, the master of the enclave, with his trim frame, purple vestments, and silvery hair, came into view. To the spy’s surprise, Diero was facing outward, away from the battle. His hands slashed through mystic passes, and it looked as if he might be trying to complete a conjuration begun before the escaped slaves intruded on the proceedings.
Anton struggled toward the wizard. If Lady Luck smiled, he might reach him in time to cut him down from behind and spoil the magic, whatever it was. But he had to kill another cultist first, and it was too late.
A prodigious roar sounded from the floor of the chamber below. Flickering firelight cast a gigantic serpentine shadow on the wall. By the Lanceboard, had there been a wyrm down there all along? Why had the cursed thing kept so quiet until this moment?
There was no time to ponder that, either. Diero was the immediate threat. The wearer of purple called something—Anton couldn’t make out the words—to the dragon then turned toward his embattled followers and their assailants. His gaze fell on Anton. He murmured a word and extended his hand, and a bastinado appeared in it. He swept the cane through an occult figure.
Anton rushed in and made a chest cut. Diero hopped back, and the attack fell short. He flicked the bastinado through a final backhanded stroke, as if chastising a thrall.
Agony tore through Anton’s body. It was worst in his guts, and he doubled over. Tears blurred his vision.
Diero tossed away the stick to vanish in midair. He took something from a pocket and brandished that instead. Ripples of distortion seethed around his hand.
Anton had little doubt that the follow-up spell, if completed, would mean the end of him. He had to straighten up and strike. Had to. Had to. He sucked in a breath, bellowed it out, and heaved himself upright. The curse inflicted a final spasm, and the torment faded.
But perhaps it had delayed him long enough. Diero lifted the fist clutching the spell focus as if grasping a dagger in an overhand grip. It looked as if it must be the penultimate move in the conjuration. When he stabbed downward, the magic would blaze into existence.
Anton cut as the hand plunged down. The greatsword clipped the extremity off just above the wrist. Blood spurted from the stump. Diero’s face paled all at once, and his mouth fell open. Anton pulled the dark blade back for the death stroke.
“The torturer wanted to break you,” whimpered Diero, gripping his truncated forearm in a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to stanch the bleeding. “I saved you.”
“That was a mistake,” Anton replied. He decided to behead Diero, shifted the sword into the proper attitude, then hesitated.
Because somehow, in spite of all his hatred and anger, all the terror and excitement of combat, he’d abruptly remembered he was a spy. A gatherer of secrets, and it was certain no one on Tan knew more secrets about the Cult of the Dragon than its resident wearer of purple.
Still he yearned to kill Diero, and the greatsword urged him on. His arms trembled with the need to cut. He gave a wordless cry, denying the impulse, and kicked the wizard’s feet out from under him instead. Once his foe was down, he booted him in the chin then stamped on the fingers of his remaining hand. Even if Diero escaped death by exsanguination, the fractures should keep him from casting any more spells.
As Anton finished, he heard the wyrm on the cavern floor snarling what sounded like an incantation of its own. He rushed to the drop-off to see what was happening.
To his dismay, the dragon was Eshcaz, the most formidable of them all. The red bore a number of wounds, but if they’d weakened him, it wasn’t apparent from his carriage. Eshcaz declaimed the final syllable of his spell, and a soft, oozing, semitransparent wall appeared midway across the chamber. It looked like water piled up on top of itself, like a tall wave that refused to curl and break.
Rather, the mass simply lost cohesion, shattered, and all the liquid plunged toward the floor. It vanished into nothingness, though, before it could raise a splash. Eshcaz strode toward the opposite end of the cavern and the defenseless creatures gathered there.
Most were ixitxachitls and gill-men, crawling, stumbling, or gliding erratically about in manifest confusion and distress. One, however, was a shalarin shrouded in bright, crackling flame, as if someone had dipped it in oil and set it alight. That one rolled back and forth on the ground.
After her first clash with Kassur, Anton had explained to Tu’ala’keth that if she ever caught fire, dropping and rolling was the way to put it out. Was that her?
Maybe it was, though he couldn’t imagine how she could have returned at the head of an ixitxachitl army. As he understood it, the demon rays were hostile to the Nantarn Alliance. Still, what other shalarin could it be?
He reflected grimly that in another moment, it wouldn’t much matter who it had been. The shalarin and its allies were helpless, and Eshcaz was about to kill them. Even if Anton had cared to intervene on behalf of a creature who’d given him to the cultists to torture and enslave, he could only delay the inevitable for a moment or two at most, and that at the cost of his own life.
He knew it, jumped off the ledge anyway, and couldn’t even say why. He wondered if the sword’s irrational, implacable bloodlust had prompted him then decided it didn’t matter. Though he was committing suicide, it felt right: pure, in a black and ferocious way.
The final spell in his meager store allowed him to land softly as a drifting wisp of gossamer, without injury or even a jolt. He charged instantly.
Eshcaz must have been intent on the creatures who’d evidently managed to wound him previously, or else the ambient noise and stinks masked Anton’s approach, for despite the dragon’s keen senses, he didn’t notice the newcomer. Anton cut deep into his flank.
Eshcaz roared and spun around toward his foe, which meant the world shattered into a chaos of sweeping tail and trampling feet. Anton had to duck, dodge, and scramble just to avoid being crushed before the red even oriented on him and made an actual attack.
Eshcaz glared with eyes like hellfire. He opened his fangs, and his wedge-shaped head surged forward and down at the end of the serpentine neck. Anton waited until the final instant—dodge too soon and a foe would simply compensate—then wrenched himself aside. The gigantic jaws
clashed shut beside him, and he cut at the dragon’s mask.
His sword glanced off the wyrm’s scales. Eshcaz flicked his head sideways, and the great bony mass of it smashed into Anton like a battering ram, flinging him through the air and down on the floor. Claws loomed above him and slashed, and he rolled out from underneath. The dragon immediately leaped, trying to smash down on top of him. He scrambled back and just got clear. When Eshcaz slammed down, the cavern shook.
Anton got his feet planted, poised the greatsword to cut, then glimpsed motion at the periphery of his vision. He had to forgo his own attack to jump away from another sweep of Eshcaz’s talons.
Well, he thought, at least I managed to cut the bastard once. He feinted left then scuttled right, trying to get back on the red’s flank. Eshcaz sneered, and with a quickness incredible in a thing so huge, matched him shift for shift. Wisps of smoke seeped from his nostrils and between his fangs.
Tu’ala’keth rolled and rolled, and still fire clung to her like a horde of leeches. She wondered if Anton—who had, after all, betrayed her in the end—had lied about the way to put out such a conflagration. Perhaps rolling intensified the flames.
But they finally guttered out, either because she’d smothered them or because the curse that had kindled them had run out its time. She tried to lift her head, and even with the fire gone, her entire body cried out in agony.
She slumped back down and might even have stayed that way, too daunted to try again, except that Eshcaz was roaring and snarling, and once she noticed, she remembered how wrong that was. She shouldn’t be able to hear the red. Silence was an essential component of the defenses against him.
Despite the torture of charred skin cracking and splitting, she managed to take a look around. The surviving ’chitls and locathahs appeared as helpless as she was. Though she hadn’t truly been able to see through her shroud of flame, she’d had a vague impression of a succession of mystical attacks hammering them, and it was evidently so.
Eshcaz was on their side of the cave, and no wave or waterspout was forming to shove him back. Plainly, all the wards were gone. The red would no doubt have finished off his original adversaries already, except that a lone human had appeared from somewhere to challenge him. He had an octopus tattooed on one arm and wielded a huge sword with shadow drifting and twisting inside the steel—impossible as it seemed, it was Anton!
Naturally, he couldn’t prevail against Eshcaz. It was miraculous he’d lasted any time at all. But magic had hurt the dragon. If Anton could keep the creature busy a little longer, it was at least remotely possible it might finish the job of killing the red.
Of course, she didn’t mean her own personal magic. Even if she were still capable of articulating a complete incantation with the necessary precision, it simply wasn’t strong enough. But the remaining spells bound in Yzil’s book might serve.
She expected to find the pages lying right beside her. When she didn’t, though, she dimly recalled dropping them at the moment she burst into flame then reeling blindly about before she fell. She looked around and spotted them scattered a few feet away. As weak and anguished as she felt, it was like peering through a scrying mirror and observing them on the far side of the world.
She started crawling on her belly. Her silverweave rattled and clinked. Bits of ruined skin broke off and flaked away.
The pain was like a tide trying to sweep her into darkness, and she had to fight the desire to let it take her. Umberlee, she thought, Umberlee, Umberlee, Umberlee. It was as much of a prayer as she could manage.
Finally she reached the sheets of horn. Certain she was on the very brink of losing consciousness, she pawed through them to find the first spell she needed. That was almost as difficult as crawling. Her cooked fingers couldn’t bend or grasp.
Here! Here it was, but could she actually use it? Though mercifully short compared to an entire spell, the trigger phrase required accurate enunciation, too, and she wasn’t sure she even still had a voice. Maybe the fire had burned that away also.
She sought to steady herself, to hold back the pain that might otherwise have made stammer and stumble, then tried to whisper. The words came out faintly but clearly.
Magic washed over her like the caress of the sea. Pain faded. Scorched and blistered skin blurred, flowed, and became smooth and soft. Her dorsal fin, which had nearly burned away, extended into the high, scalloped crest it had been before.
She looked at the battle just a few yards away. Somehow, Anton was still on his feet. Perhaps Eshcaz was playing with him. The dragon’s chest pumped, and his neck swelled in time. If she’d seen a lesser air-breather doing that, she would have inferred it was winded. But the red’s strength seemed inexhaustible, and judging from the smoke streaming from his mouth and nostrils, she suspected he was actually recharging his depleted breath weapon.
Once he accomplished that, his foes would have no hope at all. She hastily returned to the pages of Yzil’s book. They were depleted, also, the majority of spells cast already, and most of the remaining ones, duplicates of invocations that had already failed to put the dragon down.
But one potentially crippling spell remained. She would have attempted it already, except that it required the caster to touch the target, and she and her allies had hoped to stay away from him. But now that their defenses had fallen, that was no longer a consideration.
She murmured the trigger phrase, and an aching throbbed deep in her right hand. It was bearable enough—compared to the agony of burning, it was almost laughable—but even so, she could sense the profound malignancy it represented. Fortunately, it was incapable of inflicting its devastation on her.
She cast about, found her trident, snatched it up in her off hand, and ran forward. Though seemingly intent on Anton, Eshcaz must have heard her coming or else felt the bane she harbored in her flesh, for he whirled to face her.
His neck bulged, and his head cocked back. His flame had renewed itself, and he was about to spit it at her, while she was still nowhere near enough to touch him. Nor did she have any realistic hope of dodging the great expanding blaze that was his breath.
But Anton rushed the foe who’d pivoted away from him. Its seething darkness smeared with gore, the greatsword swung high and swept down to bury itself in Eshcaz’s side.
It must have found a vulnerable spot, for the dragon convulsed, and the spasm made him spew his flame too high. Tu’ala’keth threw herself to the floor, and the crackling flare passed harmlessly above her. The fierce heat was unpleasant, but did her no harm.
Eshcaz rounded furiously on Anton, which required twisting away from her. She scrambled up and charged. The red lifted a foreleg to rake at the swordsman, and she planted her hand midway along the limb.
She winced at the blistering heat of the reptile’s body. Then the power she’d invoked leaped from her flesh into his, and he screeched. His scaly hide split again and again, into a crosshatch of gashes. Between the cuts, sores opened to seep and fester, and knotted tumors bulged. A milky cataract sealed one blazing golden eye.
The dragon shuddered and took a stumbling step. Tu’ala’keth stabbed him repeatedly with her trident. She suspected that, on the other side of the gigantic creature, Anton was attacking just as relentlessly, doing his utmost to take advantage of Eshcaz’s vulnerability.
Then, unbelievably, the red regained control of his ravaged body. A wing snapped down out of nowhere to swat Tu’ala’keth to the ground. Eshcaz poised his head to seize her in his fangs. She tried to spring back to her feet, but dazed, could only clamber clumsily. It wasn’t going to be quick enough.
But the wyrm’s head slammed down beside her. His body listed ponderously to the side then toppled. His limbs flailed, feet clawing, tail lashing, but not at any target. After a few moments, the thrashing subsided. He shivered and lay dead.
Tu’ala’keth surmised that as Eshcaz had prepared to strike at her, Anton must have scored a final, fatal blow. She started around the enormous corpse to find the
human.
Anton slumped over, panting, the end of the greatsword resting on the floor. For the moment, he was too exhausted to hold it up.
Cheering sounded from overhead. He looked up at the ledge. His fellow captives had won the fight against the cultists. Good for them. He didn’t blame the survivors for declining to climb down to the cavern floor and fight Eshcaz. The Red Knight knew, it was the craziest, stupidest thing he’d ever done, and the fact that he’d somehow prevailed didn’t make it any less idiotic.
Tu’ala’keth stalked around the great mound of Eshcaz’s carcass to remind him he hadn’t prevailed unaided. As was often the case, he couldn’t read her expression. Behind her, some of the afflicted ixitxachitls had finally recovered from whatever magical effect had ailed them. Bodies rippling, they glided forward.
He had no idea what to expect of the comrade he’d attempted to murder, or of her allies either. Until now, he and his band had avoided contact with the ixitxachitls. Partly it was because they were afraid the ’chitls wouldn’t be able to distinguish between human captives and human cultists. But it was also because of the ’chitls’ reputation as raiders and vampires. Under normal circumstances, they were hostile to mankind.
Still the current situation was far from normal, and he felt an obligation to try to look after his comrades. “My friends,” he said, pointing, “fought alongside you, even if you didn’t notice. They helped me kill the wearer of purple. I ask that they be allowed to take the cog on the beach and depart in peace.”
“The ’chitls,” said Tu’ala’keth, “have no use for slaves who cannot live underwater. I expect I can persuade them.”
“Thank you.” He hesitated. “What about me? Where do I stand?”
“It appears,” she said, “that you have resumed your role as Umberlee’s champion.” A ixitxachitl with blistered hide and a cut above its eyes came flying up beside her. “How, then, can I do anything but accept you as my ally?”
He smiled. “I can think of one or two other things I might do in your place. So thank you again.”
Queen of the Depths Page 24
