Marrec convulsed, attempting to throw himself back. The flowing ooze had too strong a grip on him. The blightlord’s entire body opened up like a wet glove and attempted to engulf him.
Realization flashed for Marrec. He had seconds to live, and his mind was giving him the grace of slowed perception to allow him to come to terms with his fate. Nothing he did would matter; all his options pointed to his ending. He could accept that, he decided, but not without a statement.
The flowing grip of Anammelech strengthened as he was pulled more firmly into an all-encompassing grasp of living ooze.
Marrec would die, yes, but he would expire while being true to his long-hidden nature. Maybe he could do some good and redeem both himself and the sin that still stained his heart since he had slain Thanial so long ago…
The blightlord’s voice purred, close and intimate, “I told you I knew all about you.”
The unicorn warrior whispered back, “Did your damned weapon tell you about my eyes?”
“Why would it?”
Marrec’s terrible gaze was drawn out like a sword from its scabbard.
“What’s this? What… That’s not…” Anammelech tried to heave his flowing body away from the searing gaze of the cleric. Marrec’s eyes had become a strobe of light and dark illumination, blasting into the flesh of the blightlord with a transformative grasp that Anammelech was incapable of resisting.
Laughter was gone then. As the stone tide overtook the soft-bodied blightlord, one last whimper escaped the Talontyr’s servant before his voice, too, was locked in a tomb of stone.
|flarrec can handle himself,” grunted Gunggari, not for the first time.
Elowen gritted her teeth as she slashed the length of Dymondheart through the form of yet another twigblight that had sidled too close. The creature explosively shattered with the contact. The living wood of her intelligent blade was anathema to the obscene creatures. Dymondheart’s mere touch not only robbed them of animation but violently dissembled the creatures into so much kindling. The larger ones were smart enough to stay back, but every few seconds a smaller twigblight forgot the fate of all its earlier siblings and rushed forward. Despite the dozens she had shattered, a whole herd of the constructions followed behind them down the arch-defined lane, keeping pace. Maybe that was what they were supposed to do, merely keep her and the Oslander busy.
Elowen guarded as Gunggari paused and got down on his haunches again, studying the dirt, still on the trail of Fallon, Henri, and Ash. Elowen’s training and natural abilities were sufficient to follow the trail without too much trouble, but she had to keep Dymondheart ready. Besides, Gunggari’s ability to track verged on the supernatural. He made observations about their quarry that even Elowen at her best could not deduce from simply looking at the disturbed ground.
Gunggari said, “This track is over three hours old.” He rose, continuing his swift pace. Elowen followed after, her eyes to the rear, guarding their flank.
She asked, “How did Fallon get so far ahead of us?”
The elf saw Gunggari’s shrug out of the corner of her eye. He offered, “Ususi said time was mismatched between the interior and exterior of her pathway dimension. The elf must have exited much earlier than we thought.”
Elowen checked to make sure the rustling, creaking, walking grove of dead sticks keeping pace with them moved no closer. Satisfied, she stole a glance forward along their route. The green haze was thicker, further limiting visibility ahead. The stone arches were getting farther apart, more eroded, and less able to keep out the undergrowth. Trees and other forest growth crowded into the lane from either side. Whatever property kept the lane open at the other end seemed to be failing so far into the forest. Elowen had never walked so far under the Arches of Xenosi. She was idly curious about finding the last arch.
Though the mist was thicker ahead, their passage up the lane seemed to have dispersed the haze behind, because she could see at least twice as far along their path in that direction. Still no sign of Marrec.
Elowen bit her lip. She was torn between continuing along after Ash, or going back to see what had become of the other half of their group.
“Gunggari, tell me what you think about this,” began Elowen. “Fallon and Ash are three hours ahead. That means that Ash is at least three hours out of our reach, but Marrec and Ususi are only minutes out of our reach I think we can sacrifice a few more minutes out of three hours just to make sure everything’s OK with our friends.”
Gunggari paused again, wrinkling his brow. Finally he said, “Very well. We can head back, though I have never known Marrec to fail any challenge.”
“Challenges have a way of escalating.”
“True,” responded Gunggari. He turned a full one hundred eighty degrees to face the woody facade of their chaperones. “Perhaps Marrec’s spear is not quite so deadly against these evil wood spirits as your elf blade.”
Elowen raised one eyebrow. “Elf blades have their uses, after all.”
She brought the blade in question up, then swung a wide roundhouse arc, shattering two creatures that had skittered too near into a spray of twigs. The others ceased their forward movement, while those immediately in front of the two travelers tried to backpedal. The monsters further behind failed to stop immediately, pushing yet another twigblight forward to lose its cohesion on Dymondheart’s length.
As dead twigs rained down around her, Elowen yelled, “We’re going this way.” She pointed with the tip of her sword back along their path. “If you don’t want to end today a pile of splinters, get out of our way.”
As she’d hoped, the larger, smarter creatures began to shuffle back, herding their smaller, more numerous brethren with them. That’s when all the creatures went insane.
As if in response to a signal neither she nor Gunggari could see, the enchanted twig constructs went on a rampage en masse. Twigblight turned upon brother twigblight, with the larger ones immediately tossing a few of the smaller creatures headlong through the air, but the smaller monsters swarmed the larger ones like ants on a piece of meat.
For Elowen and Gunggari, that sudden madness included a loss of respect for Dymondheart.
Despite destroying three creatures in as many rapid eye blinks, another was already slashing past her guard, hacking at her face with its sickle-like fingertips. She flinched back, only to trip over a tiny twigblight that had rushed up from the side.
Gunggari steadied her with a lightning-fast hand. He said, “Back to back. These things have lost their fear of death.”
A flailing branch scratched Elowen’s cheek. Her counterattack exploded that one nicely, but two more encroached from the left. One failed to, penetrate her armor; the other sliced her along the neck. The pressure of Gunggari’s back flexed and strained; he was fighting off attacks no less massive than she, though he did not have Dymondheart to even the odds. The sound of his dizheri swishing through the air created a strange melody all its own, almost as if it were being played in truth. She grunted as she deflected a twiggy body hurling through the airone of the big ones had thrown one its small brothers at her, but apparently by accident. She managed to clip the tumbling creature with her blade; the twigblight came apart before impacting her.
She yelled, “What’s happened?”
She could hear Gunggari grunting with exertion as he fought off the unrelenting wave. Finally he said, “Less talk. More sword.”
“They’ve gone mad!”
She realized that if the creatures had earlier decided to rush her and the Oslander without fear of casualties, they’d have been overwhelmed already, but the branch golems were attacking each other as much as the intruders in the lane. Already more than half of the creatures that had surrounded them lay unmoving and dismembered on the ground, choking the lane with so much kindling. A terrible stench also grew. When the monsters perished, they leaked a foul-smelling ooze.
Gunggari cried out behind her. A second later, the pressure of his back against hers was snatched away. W
hirling around with her blade extended straight out from her body, she managed to detonate three more creatures as she sought to locate her friend. His feet dangled at eye level. Craning her head, she saw that a large twigblight had caught up the southlander in a punishing grip of tightening wood.
Elowen rushed forward. The creature’s hands were busy clutching the struggling Oslander, so the monster couldn’t prevent her from running it through with Dymondheart. It fared no better against her blade’s touch than the others, and Gunggari awkwardly fell away from the bed of splintered wood that had been his captor. She kept the remaining creatures at bay. The creatures were doing a better job of destroying each other than she could have purposefully managed.
After the tattooed soldier scrambled to his feet, he and Elowen backed up to a nearby arch. They sought to get out of the eye of the madness.
The rampage ended when a swarm of smaller twigblights, having just overcome a larger sibling, turned on each other in an impressive spray of splinters. Finally, only Elowen and Gunggari remained standing in a lane choked with debris reminiscent of the aftermath of a storm. Pregnant silence descended.
Gunggari cocked his head, then said, “Somebody’s coming.” He turned his gaze back in the direction they had just tried.
Materializing out of the fast-dispersing greenish haze was what at first seemed an oddly shaped silhouette. The strange silhouette quickly resolved into two people, one carried by the other.
It was Marrec, running wildly under the arches. He carried the limp, lolling form of Ususi in his arms. Blood streamed from Marrec’s eyes as if he wept life itself, or as if he endured a grief so great that only tears of blood could express his remorse.
Elowen swallowed, knowing that Ususi must be dead. Hollowness invaded her heart.
Gunggari raised a hand to the quickly approaching figure and said quietly, yet loudly enough to be heard, “Pause awhile, warrior. Lay down your burden.”
The sound snapped the man from his running trance. His blood-glazed eyes focused on Gunggari and Elowen. The elf gasped when the gaze swept across her. Even apart from the unsettling red film over his orbs and the scarlet trails leaking from the corner of each eye, Marrec’s gaze seemed to brush her with an almost predatory jolt.
“Oh my…” whispered Elowen. Something had changed, she could see that. Some part of her companion had come alive, and for some reason she couldn’t identify, that thought was somehow distressing.
Marrec stopped. He gently laid Ususi to the ground. Elowen saw that the woman was bandaged, and breath, however slight, still passed her lips. “Ususi!” yelled Elowen and bent to tend her friend.
Marrec made as if to say something else, but unconsciousness claimed him before he could elaborate. Gunggari caught him before Marrec fell face first into the branch-scattered lane.
CHAPTER 17
A bone petal fell from the stem of the flower. It fell only half a foot to the slab of rough cut stone that supported the flower’s vase. In a way completely unlike a flower, the petal cratered the stone slab as if shot from a crossbow. The sound of its impact thundered around the petrified walls of the Close. The new crater overlaid another, slightly older crater. Only a single petal remained.
One of the two figures standing near the slab said simply, “Anammelech is dead.”
Damanda had spoken. She had entered the Close to confer with her lord when the petal fell. She looked at the final remaining petal. The remaining petal signified her connection with her master who stood nearby. In the aftermath of the other petal’s impact, she was the most important agent to the Talontyr’s campaign north of the Great Dale by dint of survival alone. Her brother blightlords were dead. She remained to be tested.
The Rotting Man cursed, using a language once reserved for raising abominations by a race not native to Faerun. No living creature had spoken that language for eight thousand years, but such was the heat of the Talontyr’s fury that he broke an ancient covenant in breathing the words aloud. Each syllable crystallized into a locustlike entity with hatred for blood and a carapace of shimmering purple. With an effort of will, the Rotting Man switched to a less potent tongue, one with less likelihood of its merest utterance binding even his soul to an unmentionable darkness.
The shimmering creatures buzzed about the Rotting Man’s head for a moment, surprised by their release from whatever nether dimension they had resided. Damanda stiffened, wondering if she was going to be tested sooner than she expected. The curse-born insects buzzed away like misshapen horseflies but quicker, and with malice aforethought.
“Are those something I’ll have to deal with too?” wondered Damanda, waving after the flitting creatures. She figured that with the way things were shaping up, the Rotting Man couldn’t afford to lose another lieutenant to one of his fits of rage.
The Talontyr, cloaked in his swathe of rot, ceased his curse rampage. He spoke, his voice initially unsteady from its unintended foray, “I rather think yes. Later. We have more pressing tasks to attend.”
“The cleric and his small band?” asked Damanda, though she already knew the answer.
What else had so occupied her lord’s mind these last few tendays? The Rotting Man was quiet with the details, but whoever the “cleric” was, the Talontyr seemed consumed with reports of his progress, which he received from agents unknown to Damanda, or perhaps via simple spells of divination.
The Talontyr answered, “Gameliel’s failure seemed an accident, but Anammelech’s breakdown indicates a trend, don’t you think, pretty Damanda?” He extended fingers not quite bereft of flesh, running them through the air near the blightlord’s face, coming close, but not touching, Damanda’s pale features.
Despite her special nature, she was still relieved to avoid that touch. She said, “The cleric and his group have had their successes, but their path seems clear. They are coming here. No matter their power, they can’t hope to stand against you, Talona’s favored, and your strongest servants, not to mention your… project.”
The cloaked figure laughed then. Damanda was inured to unpleasantness, but she still had to resist stopping up her ears to keep that sound out.
Still chuckling, the Rotting Man said, “Your fellows had but one taskbring the Child of Light to me here in the Close. In their incompetence, they not only lost their lives, but they also impeded the cleric, who had already decided to bring that which I seek directly to me in his own misjudged initiative.”
Damanda said nothing but leaned closer to indicate her interest.
“You wonder how I know all this? There is a spy in the Nentyarch’s Court. Yes, it’s true. He has served our cause before with bits of information channeled through Anammelech, but he took an audacious step. He revealed himself. In a bid to leapfrog his way into Anammelech’s heart and good graces, Fallon has plucked the Child of Light from the cleric and even now seeks to deliver the Child directly to me.”
“Fallon? Who’s he?”
“One of the Nentyarch’s hunters. Anammelech turned him. This Nentyar hunter is in our pocket. Anammelech has kept me appraised of Fallon’s reports and progress.”
Damanda frowned, realizing her brother blightlord had accomplishments in some areas greater than her own, another reason to be glad that Anammelech was not around to receive the Rotting Man’s accolades.
“Anammelech had a delightful ambush arranged.” Some of the joviality left the Talontyr’s demeanor. “That ambush seems to have backfired, but I pray that Fallon is still ahead of the cleric and that the traitor elf has the Child of Light with him.”
“Does he?” wondered Damanda. “We just ‘saw’ Anammelech fall, how can we be sure that Fallon is not also dead, and the Child of Light back in the hands of the cleric?”
Her voice was tight. She wondered what force had overtaken her, making her question her master and thereby precipitate harm to herself. The Rotting Man was not one to gainsay without consequence. Of course, most harm could not long impair her, given her supernatural resilience.
The Rotting Man shook with some unnamed palsy but did not strike down Damanda. He turned and walked a few short strides. He stopped before one of the great petrified trees that formed the periphery of the Close.
He said, “Anammelech plans ahead. He equipped his spy with a means to communicate with his paymaster. I can also access that communication link.”
The Talontyr began to spew syllables toward the tree, giving voice to a rough and somehow obscenely urgent chant. He ran his slender digits across the gnarled bark, caressing it. The dead wood began to shift and mold itself, soon-enough forming the likeness of a face. Damanda thought the features seemed elven and possibly masculine. Sometimes it was hard to be sure with that androgynous race.
The face spoke, saying in a weak voice, as if relayed from a great distance, “Who’s there? Is that you, Anammelech?” Though the face was that of an elf, its texture was that of petrified wood, briefly animate through the workings of the Talontyr’s sorcery.
“It is to Anammelech’s master you speak,” intoned the Talontyr.
The expression on the woody face grew slack with amazement then fear. When it could speak, the face sputtered, “My Lord, I… Where is Anammelech?”
“Anammelech is dead, Fallon. He fell to those who pursue you.”
“Marrec and Elowen? I didn’t think they had the power to contest a blightlord. Where are they?” squeaked the voice, its spike in tone betraying sudden apprehension.
“I don’t know their precise location, Fallon, but you can be assured that as we speak they are growing closer to you. You have only a small chance to escape them, but you will, if you do as I command,” instructed the Rotting Man. “If you fail, they’ll likely kill you. Don’t think that I won’t summon your spirit, from whatever afterlife it attempts to find, so that I can punish you for your failure. I have devised punishments that even the dead fear to feel.”
Damanda knew that last boast to be true.
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