by Ed Greenwood
The Masked shouted something wordless and furious. Then tortured metal clanged, shrieked, and clattered, a sound that became the dying tinklings of many shards on stone.
Mahalagris laughed.
"Your paltry fangs are no match for the Whispering Blade! But please, keep trying. Come at me with your broken hilts and your stumps!"
Someone—The Masked, she could tell by his panting—came running, scooped Tantaerra up around her waist, and ran with her.
Gods, the pain! She howled, waving her ruined arm. It felt as if it were on fire, and blazing from her elbow on down.
Down to the fingers she'd never have again.
Mahalagris was roaring with laughter now, a booming, gloating bellowing that echoed back from something large and solid just ahead. The Masked skidded to a halt and set Tantaerra down against it, in a half-sitting slump. The wall.
"The winch," he muttered in her ear. "Pull its spike when the moment is right."
And he was gone, sprinting away across the room.
Through a chaos of hair and tears Tantaerra saw her partner reach the catafalque and swarm up it. Still laughing, Mahalagris swooped, not bothering to use his wicked blade. Instead, he raked The Masked's back with his long red talons, baring shoulders and spine in long, bloody slashes that trailed tattered clothing.
The Masked roared in pain, driving his attacker into fresh bellows of laughter.
"Trying to entomb yourself before I slaughter you? How considerate! So thoughtful of you, mask-thief!"
The undead wizard whirled in the air and slammed into The Masked like a charging bull, sweeping him off the catafalque to crash back down to the floor. Mahalagris swirled around him tauntingly.
"Up! Up, fool! Up and lose a finger! Just one at first, I think ...oh, I foresee us dancing together a long while yet!"
Dance together, the Whispering Blade echoed eagerly. Dansssssse.
The Masked got up and ran a few strides away from the catafalque, then skidded to an abrupt halt. Mahalagris was in front of him again, blocking his way, grinning from ear to ear, his eyes two blue flames of malice, his blade drawn back to slash.
"The smallest finger of your left hand," Mahalagris announced calmly, and flew backward, whirling his purring sword above his head in a grand flourish.
The Masked backed a step and planted himself—and the wizard swooped at him, slashing viciously.
Tantaerra's partner dodged, flung away his shattered dagger with enough force to reclaim his balance into a low lunge in the other direction that made the Whispering Blade just miss, and snatched off his glowing mask.
As Mahalagris whirled around in midair and hacked at his quarry, the unmasked man swept the glowing mask through the air in a slash of his own, a parry that met and caught the curved sword.
Tarram snarled in pain as the tip of the Whispering Blade caught in one of the mask's eyeholes—and his own sliced eye, cheek, and brow erupted in a spray of blood!
Yet he'd intended this, Tantaerra saw, for he was already twisting the mask in his hand to bind and capture the sword—as he flung himself over backward.
The startled corpse-wizard didn't let go of his blade, and was vaulted helplessly over The Masked. An instant before he would have slammed headfirst into his own catafalque, Mahalagris let go of the blade and flew upward. His shoulder rammed the edge of the open marble coffin and sent him into a hard, tumbling meeting with the opposite lip of the catafalque.
"Now, Tantaerra!" The Masked roared unnecessarily.
Tantaerra was already leaping into the air, her surviving hand slapping around the dog-spike protruding from the winch. With a snarl of her own, she tugged with all her might.
Then she was falling away, holding it, to the roaring rattle of racing chains.
Halflings bounce well. She turned in the air as she rebounded from the jet-black floor, in time to see the lid of the catafalque smash down on the undead wizard, crushing limbs into flopping ruin.
Mahalagris fought against the massive lid for a frenzied moment, head obviously shattered and broken ends of bone protruding from his shoulder and back, and then sagged, pinned under it.
Only to flinch in helpless spasms an instant later as The Masked landed atop the lid, the Whispering Blade in hand.
Blood streaming down his smooth ruin of a face, Tarram Armistrade hacked at every bit of Mahalagris he could see, dicing the undead wizard as his victim shrieked horribly. The curved sword in his hand flared brighter and brighter, a reddish-purple blaze too bright to look at as the curved steel rose and fell relentlessly.
Soon the screams ended and the glowing blue eyes went dark, but the man with the sword kept right on chopping and slicing for a long and terrible time, until there was nothing left of Mahalagris but an unrecognizable heap.
He stood panting above it, glaring down, until Tantaerra managed a weak cheer.
That died in her throat as he turned to glare at her with one wild eye, peering out of a mask of dripping blood, and sprang down from the wizard's catafalque to stalk toward her.
Your turn, yours, the blade whispered. Death at last, halfling princess.
"I'm not—" Tantaerra mumbled, as she scrambled up, bumping her stump and sending fresh pain racing up her arm.
She staggered back against the wall, feeling sick and beaten, watching the unmasked man coming to kill her.
"Tarram! Tarram Armistrade!"
He wasn't stopping, might not even be hearing her.
Still shrieking his name, Tantaerra rushed desperately to the door and tried to claw it open. She succeeded with almost mocking ease this time, revealing a dimly lit room beyond that seemed to open away to the left.
She didn't have time to see more; the reddish-purple glow rising right behind her told her that much. So instead of plunging through the door into the half-seen unknown, she ducked away along the wall beside it, tugging out one of her vials as she went and swigging it.
The taste that filled her mouth was the minty healing tingle—thank Desna—and she dared to turn and look back.
The Masked was still pursuing her, but was well behind her, staggering like a drunkard. With every stride his body trembled violently, muscles rippling in spasms. Time and again he almost fell, swinging the Whispering Blade clumsily and aimlessly as he lurched and swayed. He seemed to be fighting against his own sword arm.
Come now, the blade chided him aloud. Slaying with me should be simple. Bloodletting is what we do together.
Watching the sword, Tantaerra caught sight of her stump. It was dribbling blood rather wearily, like a half-opened cask spigot, but as the healing she'd drunk stole through her, it stopped. The burning pain ebbed, but the blue healing glow that momentarily flared around her arm darkened as a reddish-purple radiance also blossomed, and wrestled with the blueness. That reddish-purple was the same hue that blazed around the Whispering Blade in a now-sullen aura.
She still couldn't quite believe her hand was gone. Her stump was healed, the dark blood that had been wet mere moments ago now dry and falling off in tattered flakes. Healed, but still a stump, no new hand sprouting, no new fingers reaching for the ceiling as she wriggled them.
Her hand was gone forever.
She stumbled over something on the blood-slick floor that might have been her hand as The Masked came closer. She fled from him, throwing her empty vial in his face and feeling for another.
If he slashed open her throat, could the potion get through the welling blood to heal her?
She'd backed most of the way around the room now, slipping once or twice in blood that was probably her own.
Suddenly—she didn't know how—she was caught in a corner, with The Masked looming up in front of her. No longer glaring, but shaking his head and muttering grimly, looking down, the curved sword wavering in his hand.
And even if he collapsed at her feet, what then? She'd be alone at the heart of this murderous maze, one-handed and weak ...a two-bite meal for most of those dweomercats waiting outside. Doom
ed.
The Masked raised his head and the sword in his hand in one slow, grim movement.
"Tarram!" she screamed. "It's me! Your halfling princess!"
His mouth crooked through the dripping blood, his one eye fixed on her—and then he turned and flung the Whispering Blade across the room.
It hit the wall with an almost musical crash, bounced off, clattered to the black marble floor, and slid lazily across the room.
It came to rest touching—very gently, almost caressingly—something that looked like a dark, oversized arachnid.
Something that rose on legs to scuttle like a spider. Five legs, two of them shorter than the others. Her severed hand. It scuttled away across the room.
"Sorry," The Masked growled, whirling away from her to run raggedly across the room again, scoop up the sword, and hack at the dodging, scampering hand. He chopped at it as savagely and thoroughly as he'd served Mahalagris, not stopping until it was diced to tiny fragments on the bloody marble.
Then he flung down the sword again and came back to her.
"Tantaerra," he gasped, "I'm sorry. I ...that blade was clawing at my mind." He put his arms around her, lifted her to his breast, and leaned against the wall with his forehead, just holding her. "Your poor hand."
Tantaerra burst into tears. And found herself clutching at him and sobbing, all control fallen and fled, while he stammered out incoherent, useless apologies.
It was a long time before her weeping was done, and she could choke out words again. "Drink one of your vials," she hissed at him, when she could. "That eye of yours ..."
He set her down again, got out a vial, drained it—and slowly went pink.
His resigned, lopsided grin made her burst out laughing, broken laughter that soon died. The next vial made him smile in earnest—and his ruined eye glowed faintly blue and was an orb once again, though a deep gash still creased his ruined forehead above and cheek below it. It took another vial before he could see out of it again. The gash stayed just as it was.
When two eyes gazed on Tantaerra out of a mask of drying blood, she asked softly, "You didn't chop up the gauntlet, did you?"
The unmasked man shook his head.
"Then get it, and let's get the hell out of here," she told him fiercely. "Before anything worse happens. Like that wizard rising again."
Armistrade turned, crossed the room, and took up the Fearsome Gauntlet from where it had fallen when he'd chopped the arm that wore it to pieces. Then he bent and plucked up a ring from among the gore. Then another.
"May not be magical," he muttered without looking up, "but they're gold. Oh. Nice gems on this third one."
He turned, took two steps back toward Tantaerra—then stopped in mid-stride, looked over his shoulder, hesitated ...and went back for his mask.
"I don't dare leave it here," he murmured. "Not still linked to Karm, and Mahalagris, and this place ...and me. I just wish I knew more as to how."
Its glow had faded. As he held it up, Tantaerra could see that its entanglement with the Whispering Blade had left it scarred, a large cut crossing brow and cheek and cutting across one eye. In just the same way her partner was now disfigured.
Tarram gazed down at the mask. Then, slowly, he thrust it into the breast of his tattered garments, shook his head, and sighed. He turned to her. "Now, we flee."
Together they ducked through the open door Mahalagris had appeared from, into dimly lit rooms beyond crammed with chairs, tables, and shelves of books.
"If we had more time, and less of a nightmare journey home ..." Armistrade murmured, as they wistfully eyed the tomes they were passing.
"Ifs are horses you can't trust," Tantaerra whispered back at him. She was about to say more, as they headed through an open doorway on into the next room, but heard something behind her—the faintest of boot-scrapes—and whirled around.
In time to see Orivin Voyvik, on his feet again, stalking after them.
The Nirmathi was limping slightly, his head and neck at an odd angle. The Whispering Blade was glowing a cheerful reddish-purple in his hand.
"Tarram!" Tantaerra shrieked. She saw her partner's unmasked face working with effort as the Fearsome Gauntlet on his hand started to glow emerald green. He raised his arm, fingers spread, and aimed it at Voyvik.
The magical gage pulsed once, and something unseen rushed through the air and smote the Nirmathi, hurling him backward.
Voyvik grunted in pain, almost dropping the Whispering Blade as it shrieked its way along one wall and fell, skidding back. Ruby magical radiance awakened on Voyvik's breast and raced briefly up and down his limbs, washing over his face as he rolled up to his feet and started to advance again.
Was he ...taller? Stronger?
His head and neck were no longer askew, and he was indeed taller, Tantaerra decided, backing hastily away but taking care to keep to one side, so The Masked could blast Voyvik unimpeded.
Dung.
The Masked unleashed the blasting of the gauntlet again, a ramming blow that staggered the Nirmathi and made him snarl in pain—yet left him looking even taller as he advanced, moving more decisively now, the Whispering Blade raised and glowing an eager, brighter reddish-purple.
He'd staggered but not fallen. Double dung.
Behind her, The Masked muttered something less than pleased and called on the gauntlet again, a different sort of power this time—louder and more visible, a solid blow that drove Voyvik a few paces back.
And left him trembling and growing. Bulkier, more burly, and striding forward again. Smiling more widely, too.
Frantically, The Masked blasted him again—and again.
Overstretched cloth groaned as Voyvik's body bulged, bulking farther. Then a seam split with a long ripping sound, and the Nirmathi's clothes started to fall away in tatters, revealing not a man beneath, but rippling muscles clad in silvery scales.
Voyvik cried out in pain, howls that swiftly became screams—but the agony was from his transformation, not the relentless blastings of the Fearsome Gauntlet. As Tantaerra and her partner watched, backing away steadily, Voyvik's arms lengthened and split into at least four tentacles, his legs seemed to undulate like eels and then fuse into a long, slithering snakelike body and tail. He flopped forward onto his belly, then rose upright like the bowsprit of a ship, propelled by his now-coiling serpentine body, as his screams gargled and twisted into cold, hissing laughter.
Laughter that sounded very much like the cold mirth of Mahalagris.
Tantaerra shivered. "It's—it's not natural."
"I'm used to that," The Masked snapped, "and you should be getting used to such things by now! It's the wizard's magic working on him, out of the sword! Come on!" He shot out the hand that wasn't wearing the gauntlet, and pulled her around and into a run. They fled together.
The next door led them out of the dim light, books, and luxuries Mahalagris surrounded himself with, and back into the colder gray stone passages of the deadly tomb.
Now something slithering and tentacled but able to rear up like a man, Voyvik came after them, slicing the air gleefully with the Whispering Blade.
The Masked slowed to peer ahead suspiciously. "That," he muttered, looking at the ceiling ahead, "is almost certainly another falling-blocks trap."
"I'm thinking the wizard brought Voyvik back to life and protected him somehow," Tantaerra told him. "Taking all the power of your blastings and using them to make him into that snake-thing. I'll bet Mahalagris is in his head, now—which means he knows where all the traps, their triggers, and the ways around them are."
"I won't take that bet," The Masked growled. "Let's just get out of this place as quickly as we can—before our gliding friend back there can use what he knows of it against us."
"So ...?"
"So let me try something," he said thoughtfully, raising the gauntlet again. What emerged from it this time was a giant, disembodied man's hand that flew ahead of them in ponderous silence.
Blocks on chains hurtle
d down, to sway harmlessly inches above the floor, letting loose swirling dust. The hand shoved them aside as they started to rise again. A little way beyond them, a vertical row of spears thrust out of one wall, followed an instant later by another row out of the facing wall. The giant hand thrust against them, and they squealed as they started to retract.
The hand descended to the floor under The Masked's mental bidding, and bumped along, seeking flagstone triggers it could set off.
There were surprisingly few of them, and Tantaerra and her partner were soon sprinting along farther and faster than either of them had ever run before, both mindful that the gliding tentacled thing pursuing them could use rafters and crossbeams to avoid steps and the like that would slow the two of them.
They ran for a long time but faced far fewer traps ere they emerged through a sliding wall into the first room of the tomb—the one with the relief carving of the dragon all across the ceiling—and burst out into the ruins of Hurlandrun, just as the last rays of the setting sun painted its tallest remnants golden.
Only to find the dweomercats charging them, a vast and furry flood.
The Masked did something with the gauntlet that sent a line of lightning crackling into them—yet rather than scorching fur and boiling blood, it made the blue cats disappear entirely, reappearing instantaneously at his feet. Then they were upon him in an avid tide, pulling him under.
"Tarram! Tarram!" Tantaerra shrieked, struggling through sleek rushing bodies to try to reach where he'd gone down, picturing hundreds of fanged jaws biting and sharp claws raking—
Her partner staggered up into view again, red-faced and breathless.
"They're swarming me," he panted, "or rather—" He tugged, fighting to lift one arm by pulling on it with the other. "—they're swarming the gauntlet!"
Dweomercats had fallen from his elbows, and were now leaping like trained beasts to try to bite the Fearsome Gauntlet, their jaws snapping in midair.
"Swarming?" Tantaerra asked, eyeing it.
"Clutching at it, trying to rub up against it." He waded a step farther and almost fell as he trod on unseen wriggling dweomercats. Others rose in a leaping, snapping wave right in front of him. "Using magic on them just brings them to you faster! The gods know how we're going to get anywhere, with all of these ..."