The Ruin, page 13
"Neither," Taegan said. "We need to get out of the thick of it and under cover."
"Make for that keep," Raryn said, pointing a stubby finger. They all skulked forward, skirting lunging, wheeling, stamping combatants who, by virtue of their prodigious strength and size, could have trampled and killed them without even realizing they were there. They also had to dodge blasts of frost and lightning, flame and the distilled essences of death and disease, that dueling spellcasters hurled back and forth.
Grateful that he hadn't exhausted his store of spells in the fight with the tirichiks-his captors had confiscated his grimoire and so prevented him from preparing any new ones-Taegan augmented his natural agility and shielded himself in misty vagueness. His companions likewise enhanced their defenses. Like grouping together and slipping out of the midst of the fray, the tactic made sense, but didn't really answer the question of how to extricate themselves from their current predicament. It seemed wildly optimistic to hope that Iyraclea, Zethrindor, and their sundry followers would all exterminate one another.
Abruptly the air grew hazy. Taegan smelled smoke, and a floating spark stung his cheek. He smiled, and the vapor thickened, massing together and taking on definition. A pair of red eyes glowed from a tapered, coalescing head, and Brimstone crouched before them.
Will laughed. "l was starting to wonder if you'd abandoned us."
"The only way to rescue you," the vampire whispered, "was to fetch something capable of creating a considerable diversion. It took a little time." He turned to Kara. "Change form, singer. Together, we can fly Dorn, Raryn, Will, and Pavel out of here, and with Jivex's assistance, conjure illusions and the like to hinder pursuit."
"Sounds good," said Will. "All but the part about dragging the charlatan's useless arse along."
Kara's body swelled and heaved, and her smooth skin sprouted glittering scales. Brimstone murmured rhyming words. Then Raryn bellowed, "Watch out!"
Taegan looked around, spotted Icy Claws and frost giants glaring back, then felt an abrupt, excruciating chill. He cried out, and his muscles clenched. He struggled to get past the shock of it, while, their magic shifting them instantaneously through space, the gelugons appeared just in front of the would-be escapees. They lifted their lances high to thrust downward, and poised their massive bladed tails to bash and slice. Behind them, the giants scrambled forward. Their footfalls shook the ground.
A white spear leaped at Taegan. He jumped, beat his wings, rose above the stroke, and kept on climbing, veering repeatedly to throw off his opponent's aim. He'd avoided taking to the air before, lest it make him too conspicuous, but that was scarcely a consideration any longer.
He tried to ascend beyond the icy Claw's reach, but despite its lack of wings, the devil too shot up off the ground. Sweet Lady Firehair, was there anything the towering, bug-faced fiends couldn't do?
Taegan dodged two more spear jabs, meanwhile conjuring images of himself, reflections created without the necessity of mirrors, to baffle his assailant. The gelugon rammed its spear into one of the phantoms, popping it. At the same instant, Taegan lashed his pinions, hurling himself at the creature's head, and aimed his makeshift dirk at one of the bulging, faceted eyes.
He hit the target. But instead of driving deep into the devil's skull and brain, the giant's spearhead simply scratched the surface of the eye and glanced off, as if it were made of polished stone. The baatezu lashed its tail at him as he hurtled past. Dismayed by his failure to incapacitate it, the giant nearly missed seeing the stroke in time to evade.
He realized he shouldn't be surprised, might even have anticipated what had happened if the irrational fear the devil inspired hadn't been gnawing at his mind. Some spirits were more or less invulnerable to weapons unless the blades bore magical enhancements. But the spearhead was the only weapon he had. All he could do was try to use it.
He drove home two more thrusts, but each merely chipped his adversary's pale, gleaming shell. Hoping to fly faster than the Icy Claw could pursue, he then rattled off an incantation to heighten his speed, but while that made it somewhat more difficult for the devil to target him, it didn't keep him out of its reach. It used its ability to blink through space to stay with him.
Struggling to stave off outright panic, Taegan insisted to himself that somehow, he could survive this confrontation. Then he glimpsed a flash of motion from the corner of his eye. He tilted his wings, dodging, and chunks of ice shot up from the ground to strike and destroy his last remaining illusory counterpart.
He saw that one of the ice wizards had conjured the attack. He assumed the transformed magician would keep right on throwing spells at him, but didn't know what he could do about it. The gelugon was the more dangerous threat. He started to shift his attention back to the devil, then realized what was hanging at the mage's hip.
It was Rilitar's sword! Taegan had previously observed that one of the ice wizards had taken possession of it, perhaps to study the enchantments used in its manufacture, and that was the sword.
Taegan faked a shift to the right, then furled his pinions and dived at the foe on the ground. He didn't know if he'd actually succeeded in buying himself a precious second, and didn't glance back at the gelugon to find out, lest it slow his plunging descent.
The mage slashed his hands through a mystic pass. More chunks of ice exploded in all directions from a central point in midair. Taegan shielded his face with his arm, and dodged. Some of the missiles battered him even so, but he refused to let the pain balk him.
He slammed into the wizard and knocked the thing backward onto the ground. Crouched on top of it, he stabbed at the milky, rigid, impassive features, breaking the ice that was the spellcaster's altered flesh and bone.
The magician stopped moving. Taegan jerked the sword from its scabbard, felt the surge of confidence and vitality that gripping the hilt always produced, leaped up, pivoted, and the gelugon was there, looming over him, ivory spear leaping at him.
He parried the thrust, beat his wings and rose back into the air, slashed at one of the devil's chitinous forearms. The elven sword bit deep, and the Icy Claw gave a buzzing cry.
Grinning, no longer frightened, Taegan cut it twice more before it could shift the lance to threaten him anew. He hovered before it, inviting an attack, and knocked it aside when it came. That enabled him to close the distance to the gelugon's barrel-shaped torso. The Icy Claw's tail swept at him, but he twisted out the way, thrust his sword into its chest, yanked it out, and followed up with a cut to the juncture of the baatezu's head and shoulders.
The gelugon floundered backward. It glared and shuddered as if it was straining to bring one of its supernatural abilities to bear. Then it collapsed.
Taegan couldn't tell if he'd actually killed it or not. He hoped so, but wasn't willing to invest any time making sure. The sooner he rejoined his friends, the better.
But perhaps he had time for one thing. He lit on the ground, kneeled beside the ice wizard, and rummaged through the creature's pockets and satchel. The transformed spellcasters naturally had no need of warmth, and stripped of their human emotions, cared nothing for modesty. But they needed the odd robe, haversack, and such to carry their talismans and other magical gear.
Taegan heaved a sigh of gratitude when he pulled a familiar blue-bound volume from the wizard's satchel. Of course, it made sense that the same mage who'd taken possession of his sword had likewise appropriated his book of spells.
The avariel also retrieved his scabbard, then lashed his wings and climbed high enough to oversee a significant portion of the frenzied, chaotic battlefield. His heart sank at what he found. The assault on his comrades and himself had thoroughly scattered their little band. On first inspection, he, failed even to spot the majority of his friends.
But he did at least see Brimstone shrouded in a cloud of his smoky breath. The drake pivoted back and forth, ripping with fang and claw at, the frost giants who hacked at him in turn with their pole-axes. Pinions sweeping up and down, Taegan rushed to help the vampire fend them off.
Kara charred a gelugon's white carapace black with a bright, crackling flare of her breath. The baatezu collapsed twitching, its body smoking. At the same instant, however, hailstones hammered down from the empty air to bruise and bloody her scales.
She pivoted and saw another ice devil glaring at her. Resuming her battle anthem, she beat her wings and leaped at the thing. It braced its spear to impale her as she plunged down at it, but she broke the lance with a swat, pierced and felled the Icy Claw with the talons on her other forefoot, and reached to grip its head in her jaws.
Chitin crunched between her fangs. The dense flesh inside was unpleasantly cold, and had a foul, bitter taste. She didn't let that deter her from biting the beetle-like head in two.
She spat out the vileness in her mouth and lifted her foot away from the mangled body beneath. No longer pinned, the Icy Claw's thick, bladed tail whipped up at her. By some dark miracle, the creature still lived.
The blow sliced the side of Kara's face, and a ghastly chill stabbed through her entire body. It couldn't quite keep her from stamping down and grinding the gelugon's midsection to paste, but she shuddered through the process, and went right on shaking. The spasms made her slow and clumsy.
This will pass, she told herself. I just need a few seconds. Then frost blasted down on her, encrusting her dorsal surface with rime and turning her pain to utter anguish.
She hissed at the shock and looked up. One of the larger whites, old and powerful enough that a sprinkle of pale blue and gray scales showed among the ivory ones, was diving at her. She tried to spring out from underneath, but didn't make it. The chromatic's claws rammed deep into her back and slammed her to the ground.
The same giantess who'd guarded Dorn throughout the day chased him, sagging breasts and rolls of fat bouncing, driving him before her with sweeps of a long-handled, stoneheaded warhammer. He backed and jumped away, looking for an opening to lunge inside her prodigious reach and make an attack of his own.
But she wouldn't give him the chance. Despite her bulk, she wielded her weapon adroitly, just as she advanced and when necessary, retreated with considerable agility. She always remained close enough to threaten her smaller foe, yet maintained enough distance to keep him from striking back.
In time she'd likely make an error, but Dorn wasn't willing to wait. He didn't know what had become of his comrades, and didn't dare look away from the giantess to find out. But his instincts yammered that he had to finish with her fast, so he could help the others. Otherwise, something terrible was going to happen.
The giantess feinted a backhand blow. Pretending the move had fooled him, he shifted in the direction she wanted him to go. She whirled her weapon over his head and struck from the other side. He lifted his iron arm to shield himself and twisted.
The hammer clanged against his metal parts. It couldn't break them, but it was likewise true that the iron couldn't stop the human half of his body from suffering a portion of the jolt. He cried out, and the blow flung him down on his side.
He lay still, pretending to be crippled. The giantess leered, down at him, then swung the hammer over her head to administer the death blow. At last the weapon was out of his way, and she was standing still. He scrambled up and at her.
She struck, and the hammer crashed down on the cobbles at his back. She tried to skip backward, but not quickly enough. He lunged behind her and ripped at her hamstrings with his claws.
Blood gushed, her knee gave way, and she fell backward. At once she let go of the hammer, rolled, and reached for him with her bloated, filthy fingers. He swept his iron arm back and forth, slicing her hands, until she snatched them back. He jumped in to rip at the artery in the side of her neck.
More blood sprayed, spattering him from head to knees, the coppery smell mingling with the sour stink of the giantess's flesh. She flopped down on her face. He spat gore from his mouth, wiped it from his eyes, cast about, and faltered in horror.
Though the battle raged everywhere, it was at its most furious in the center of the plaza. Her gown burned away, her snowflake-and-diamond-painted skin raw and blistered, Iyraclea floated in the air at one end, while Zethrindor, his dead flesh ripped and hacked, crouched at the other. The two hurled blasts of blue and silver radiance, bolts of shadow, screaming winds, and pounding barrages of hail back and forth. The discharge of so much magic was nauseating to behold. An observer had a visceral sense the spells were beating at the substance of the world itself, and might conceivably break through.
Between and around the commanders, their minions battled like warring ants grappling under the feet of a pair of duelists. Some of Dorn's companions had gotten caught amid the fracas. Brimstone, Taegan, and Raryn were fighting three giants and an Icy Claw.
What appalled Dorn, however, was Kara's situation. She'd managed the shift to dragon form, but even so, a huge white held her pinned and was ripping gashes in her crystal-blue hide.
Dorn ran toward her, and several of Iyraclea's human warriors scrambled to intercept him.
He had no choice but to kill his way through them. The first to fall bore a kind of primitive sword, a length of bone studded with chips of flint. Once he snatched that up to wield in his hand of flesh, he could slaughter them a little faster, but still not fast enough.
As he clawed and hacked, parried and sidestepped, he caught glimpses of Kara. Flailing with her wings, she broke free of the white's coils and scrambled away. The chromatic, however, simply pounced after her and bore her down once more.
Curse Taegan, Brimstone, and even Raryn! Couldn't they see what was happening? Why didn't one of them break away from their own little skirmish and help her?
Dorn drove his knuckle-spikes into the last barbarian's heart. Ahead of him, the white roared and reared up from Kara's shredded, motionless body.
Dorn sprinted toward the two dragons. Kara couldn't be dead. She couldn't.
Iyraclea shouted, "Auril!"
The cry was deafening, like a shrill thunderclap. She thrust out her arm at Zethrindor and curled her fingers in a clutching motion. White vapor steamed from the dracolich's decaying flesh, and he bellowed. Dorn realized the Ice Queen was leeching forth the cold that was, as she'd warned him, a vital part of his nature.
But Zethrindor wasn't finished yet. He snarled words of power that cracked and crumbled the facades of buildings at the edges of the plaza. Dorn felt a pressure, a seething malignancy accumulating in the air.
All the countless characters graven on the cobbles shined like cats' eyes reflecting light. Brimstone, Taegan, and Raryn faded, their forms becoming vague and ghostly. Before they quite finished disappearing, though, Zethrindor screamed the final syllables of his incantation.
A towering mass of shadow appeared in front of the, dracolich, then swept forward like a wave racing toward the shore. Giants and wyrms scrambled to get out of the way. Those who failed broke part into small fragments, which then crumbled to powder. The darkness likewise obliterated the paving stones in its path, and as soon as the first of them shattered, the symbols on all the others stopped gleaming.
The wave raced on amid swirling dust. It surged over Kara's body, and Raryn, Taegan, and Brimstone's misty forms, and they too disappeared. At the opposite end of the square, it engulfed its actual target and halted with a suddenness no mundane matter could have matched. It clasped Iyraclea's slender form like amber encasing an insect.
Fissures ran through her skin as if she were a clay figure on the verge of breaking. Yet she didn't perish immediately, as lesser beings had. She chanted the Frostmaiden's name, and her body glowed like ice refracting sunlight, the blaze piercing the surrounding murk. She grew taller, as though the Cold Goddess was lending her more strength than a humansized frame could contain.
Then, however, Zethrindor roared another word, and the Ice Queen thrashed in agony. She was woman-sized again, her inner glow guttering out.
"Aur-" she croaked, and a jagged crack split her luscious mouth and perfect face in two. Her left. foot dropped away from its ankle. Then the shadow devoured her completely.
Afterward, the magic dwindled and disappeared like water draining into the ground. Evidently exhausted, Zethrindor slumped down. Dorn looked around and saw nothing but drifts of dust and the broad new scar across the plaza. He hefted the gory bone-and-flint sword and marched toward the dracolich.
Will smiled at the fur-clad spearmen spreading out to flank him. "Wouldn't it make more sense to fight the dragons?" he asked. "They're the ones trying to kill your queen."
The barbarians kept coming.
"Have it your way, then." The halfling faked a lunge at one, then whirled and charged the other.
Startled, the second human nonetheless managed a spear thrust, but his aim was off, and Will didn't even have to dodge. He simply rushed on in, drove his pilfered skewer into his opponent's groin, and dodged around the stricken man as his knees started to give way. He was sure the other tribesman had run after him hoping to take him from behind, and he intended his maneuver to interpose the wounded barbarian between them.
Sure enough, when Will spun back around, his remaining opponent was right where he'd expected him to be, hovering as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to circle right or left. He was still thinking about it when a flying, glowing, redgold mace bashed him in the back of the head. The tribesman pitched forward.
Will turned and felt relief at the sight of Pavel standing unwounded, a pilfered spear clutched in his hands. The halfling tried to think of a fitting insult to greet his friend, then glimpsed what was happening at the center of the plaza. Shocked into silence, he pointed. Pavel pivoted in time to watch the heaving, rushing darkness consuming all in its path. Even Iyraclea failed to resist its power.
As the ravenous power ebbed away, Will spotted Dorn starting toward Zethrindor. Even in the dark, the big man's asymmetrical frame was as unmistakable as his intentions.
"Come on!" Will said. He ran toward Dorn, Pavel sprinted after him, and the flying mace brought up the rear.
