by Tim Waggoner
Fear—overwhelming, crushing, paralyzing—whelmed into him, and he felt his knees go watery and start to buckle. Blackness nibbled at the edges of his vision, and he knew that he was on the verge of losing consciousness. He wanted to give in to the darkness, let it bear him far, far away from the nightmare that stood before him, but if he did that, he would be abandoning his friends—not just Solus, but Diran and the others, all trapped within illusions that were undoubtedly just as horrible as this one. It had been Diran, Ghaji, and Yvka who had rescued him from the Mire, and though they hadn’t encountered Tresslar until after that, the grouchy old artificer had saved Hinto’s life numerous times in the months since then. No matter what happened, no matter the cost to himself, Hinto would not let his friends down. Not this time.
He raised his long knife, shouted a battle-cry, and dashed toward the tentacled monstrosity.
Secluded within the cloak of darkness she’d erected, Nathifa watched as the priest and his companions struggled with the illusions created by the kalashtar. She knew that Skarm, who huddled close to her like a frightened child, saw only mortals stumbling about in an empty chamber while their tormenters watched in mocking amusement, but she had been a powerful sorceress in life and she’d only grown stronger in death. She could see the mindscapes that the kalashtar had devised, and she couldn’t help admiring his diabolical creativity. Perhaps when this was over, she should attempt an alliance with him? No … all that mattered was getting her hands on the Amahau. That’s what Espial had told her, so that’s what she would do.
From the look of things, it wouldn’t be much longer before she at last got her bloodless hands on the dragonhead. In the meantime, she’d remain hidden in darkness and enjoy the show.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Makala moved silent as a shadow through the interior of Mount Luster. To human eyes, she would’ve appeared lithe and graceful, but she felt clumsy and heavy-footed. The moment she had entered the mountain facility, waves of mental energy slammed into her, forcing her to retake human form and walk when it would’ve been so much more efficient to fly. As a vampire, she possessed mesmeric abilities of her own, but it took all her concentration to resist the vast psionic power radiating through Mount Luster. Still, it gave her a destination, for whatever the source of the mental energy, she was certain Diran and the others would be at the center of it—and undoubtedly in quite a bit of trouble.
She made her way through corridors and down stairwells, the waves of psionic energy growing ever stronger and more difficult to resist, until she reached a large cavern. At the heart of the chamber lay a glowing crystalline structure that she sensed was the source of the psionic storm that raged through Mount Luster, but what drew the focus of her attention was what the glowing light revealed: Diran, Ghaji, Yvka, Tresslar Hinto, Solus, and that woman—all of them stumbling about the cavern, pantomiming actions as if in the throes of a waking dream. There were three others—a kalashtar at the center of the crystalline structure, an orc laughing as he watched Ghaji fight imaginary foes, and the only one Makala recognized: an old man wrapped in a bearskin cloak, eyes gleaming with cold malice as he watched Diran move about like a puppet on a string.
Cathmore.
The kalashar might’ve been the one operating the device that held her companions in thrall, but Makala knew that Cathmore was the one ultimately in control. She recalled something he had taught her when she was but a child. Cut off the serpent’s head and the body dies. She intended to put that lesson to good use this night. She would kill Cathmore and sate her hunger at the same time. It would be an appropriately ironic end for the master assassin, for he was far more of a monster than she could ever be.
Makala moved across the cavern floor silent as a passing cloud, approaching Cathmore from behind. Makala thought she could’ve made all the noise she wanted, though, for the man’s attention was completely focused on Diran. This was going to be too easy.
Just when she had closed to within striking distance and was about to leap upon her prey, she felt someone’s eyes upon her. She looked to the kalashtar standing inside the crystalline device, unimaginable energies surging around him. He looked back at her, his eyes blazing with light. He grinned and Makala’s world changed.
As Bruk came at him, Diran side-stepped, spun around, and ran toward the mahogany chest. In the real Proving Room, the chest contained numerous weapons, and Diran hoped this illusion matched the reality. He threw open the doors and was relieved to see that the chest was as full of weapons as he remembered. He heard Bruk coming up fast behind him, and he knew he didn’t have time to be choosey. He reached into the chest and grabbed hold of the first weapon his fingers came in contact with—a warhammer. He whirled about just as Bruk lunged for him. Diran swept the hammer in a vicious arc at the undead sea raider.
The hammer smashed into the left side of Bruk’s face, just below the temple, crushing the eye socket and reducing the eye itself to jelly. Bruk cried out—not in pain, but in frustration—and staggered backward, momentarily knocked off balance. Diran didn’t expect the blow to stop him, but if the illusions adhered to their own cause and effect pattern—and so far they seemed to—then perhaps he could neutralize the undead raider.
Diran dropped the warhammer and turned back to the chest. He snatched up a dagger, spun around, and hurled it at Bruk’s remaining eye. Though he presently wore the form of his younger self, a self who had yet to undergo his assassin’s training, he still possessed his natural ability and his adult memories. The blade flew straight and true and buried itself in Bruk’s right eye. The raider howled in rage. He reached up and yanked the dagger free in a spray of blood, vitreous fluid, and chunks of brain.
Cathmore smiled grimly. “Very good, Diran. You couldn’t repell the zombie with your priestly powers, so you chose to blind him, giving you the advantage. Now you can whittle away at him bit by bit until you’ve rendered him incapable of harming you. As one of your former teachers, I must confess to feeling a certain measure of pride at this moment. But if you’ll recall, I told you that I am in control here, not you.”
Cathmore waved his hand and Bruk’s eyes were restored. The zombie turned to look at Diran and grinned.
“You’re going to die here, Diran,” Cathmore said. “The only question is how long you’ll manage to postpone the inevitable.”
Before Bruk could resume his attack, the air shimmered and a young blond girl wearing a gray tunic and sandals appeared behind Cathmore. Diran’s breath caught in his throat as he recognized Makala—not as she was, but as she’d been when they’d first met, so many years ago at Emon Gorsedd’s academy.
Cathmore turned and smiled at Makala. “It’s about time you arrived, my dear. I was beginning to think you were going to miss all the fun.”
Makala returned Cathmore’s smile, revealing her elongated canine teeth. “The fun’s just beginning, and by the way, you don’t have as much control here as you think.”
Before the master assassin could react, Makala hissed and launched herself at him.
Flames or no flames, Ghaji’s axe was still honed to a fine edge and his arm was as strong as ever. He hacked away at the undead shifters as they came at him, severing limbs and lopping off heads, until the family that he’d once helped slaughter years ago—father, mother, and their two children—lay in a grisly scattering of mutilated body parts.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, love,” Yvka said in a queasy voice, “but I think I’m going to be sick.”
Chagai applauded. “Now that’s more like a full-blooded orc. Why couldn’t you have fought like that when you were under my command?”
Ghaji’s chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath, and with his free hand he wiped a smear of gore from his cheek. “They weren’t real, but you are. I wanted to finish them off so I could finally put you out of my misery.”
Ghaji lifted his axe and rushed forward, but something grabbed hold of his ankle, and he tripped and fell onto the g
rass.
“Ghaji, look out!” Yvka shouted.
Ghaji thought she was warning him that Chagai intended to attack while he was down, and he rolled over so that he would be able to defend himself, but then he looked down and saw what had tripped him: one of the shifter’s arms—the father’s, it appeared—had wrapped its hand around his ankle. Other body parts came crawling, sliding, tumbling, and oozing across the ground toward him, moving with nightmarish speed. Clawed fingers dug into his skin, fanged teeth sank into his flesh, loops of intestine coiled around his throat and limbs like grisly serpents, binding him, choking him …
Yvka rushed to his side and began slicing at the animated remains of the shifters with a jade-bladed knife. The weapon was no doubt magical, provided to Yvka by her masters in the Shadow Network, but whatever its properties, it caused no special damage to the attacking body parts, and they continued their work unfazed.
Ghaji tensed his neck muscles, struggling to keep his airway open, but as strong as he was, the intestine wrapped around his neck was stronger, and he knew he was fighting a losing battle. Chagai’s mocking laughter rang in his ears, accompanied by a roaring sound that he knew heralded the approach of his death.
“No … honor …” he gasped out.
Chagai stopped laughing. “What did you say, half-blood?”
“No … honor,” Ghaji repeated, more loudly this time, using up the last of his air.
Yvka, tears running down her face, desperately slashed at the shifters’ remains with her jade knife. Ghaji wanted to take her hand and tell that it wasn’t her fault, that as a warrior he knew this day would come, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. All he could do was watch his lover cry as his vision began to dim.
Then the pressure on his throat eased, and he was able to draw in a breath. Yvka kept hacking away at the body parts as Ghaji breathed in and out, relishing such a simple, life-affirming act. Now when Yvka’s knife struck, the wounds began to rot, the decay spreading until the affected body part collapsed to dust. Within seconds, the shifter remains were no more.
Ghaji sat up and rubbed his throat as he turned to face Chagai. The orc glared at him with fury in his eyes and perhaps a hint of shame as well.
“Stand up,” Chagai growled, “and let’s finish this like orcs.”
Ghaji rose to his feet, axe gripped tight.
Tresslar might not have his dragonwand in this illusion, but that didn’t mean he was helpless. He grabbed Asenka by the elbow and yanked her out of the way as Paganus’s head lunged at them. Despite the beast’s ravaged condition, he moved swiftly, his wounds no impediment to motion, and his jaws snapped closed on the empty air where the Sea Scorpion commander had been standing only a second before.
“Stay behind me!” Tresslar warned Asenka.
Then, hoping his illusory backpack contained the same objects it had when he was a young man, the artificer reached inside and pulled out a small diamond wrapped in spider-silk. Relieved, he tossed the gem into the air over their heads. The diamond hovered above them, its position fixed, and a shroud of webbing descended from it like a curtain of gauze to envelop them. As the bottom edge of the protective web stretched to the ground, Tresslar reached into his backpack and removed a small stone wrapped in a mesh of thin bronze wire. Tresslar thumbed a tiny switch he’d attached to the wire-mesh, then crouched down and tossed the stone onto the ground just as the web sealed itself around Asenka and him.
Paganus had pulled back his head for a second strike, but he hesitated when he saw what the artificer had done. The dragon cocked his head to one side.
“You can’t possibly believe that such feeble magic can protect you from me,” Paganus rumbled. “I can claw through that webbing as if it were naught but air.”
“It’s not meant to defend against physical attack,” Tresslar said. “It protects against heat. You see, I’ve had a lot of years to think about what I did the first time we met and to consider what I might have done differently. I’m sure you’re aware that the gas you breathe—the gas that fills this cave—while deadly poisonous, does not burn, but the breath of a green dragon will ignite when combined with certain other elements. That small catalyst stone was given to me by an alchemist I did a good turn for once in Cliffscrape. Of course, I modified it to make it a wee bit stronger.”
Tresslar snapped his fingers, the wire-mesh encasing the catalyst stone began to glow, and Paganus roared as his lair exploded.
Solus didn’t know what to do. Though the conglomerate creature Hinto attacked possessed no physical substance, any damage it appeared to do to the halfling would be inflicted on his mind, with results as devastating as any bodily wound. More so, in fact, but if Solus went to his friend’s aid, that would leave the psi-forged open to attack by Galharath. Hadn’t Hinto told him to deal with Galharath while he engaged the conglomeration in battle? By helping Hinto, Solus would be going against his friend’s wishes, and more, he would be dishonoring the halfling’s sacrifice, and he sensed that this was important to Hinto, that the small man was fighting a battle much greater and more personal than simply cutting away at an illusory monster. It was a battle that Hinto needed to fight, and Solus should give his friend that chance.
The others—Diran, Ghaji, Yvka, Tresslar, Asenka, and someone else whom Solus had never met but who was well known to the rest, a woman named Makala—all of them struggled with their own separate battles. They faced the same danger that Hinto did: that their minds would be destroyed by Galharath and the power of the psi-forge.
Solus knew then what he had to do. No matter what else happened, Galharath had to be stopped.
As if sensing Solus’s decision, the kalashtar gazed out from within the cradle of the psi-forge and directed a thought his way.
There’s nothing you can do, Solus. You are merely a construct, imbued with a semblance of life. While I … I have become a god!
Solus had little direct experience in using his psionic abilities in battle, but he had more than his own memories to draw on. He had the memories of his four creators, those who had designed and constructed the psi-forge and who knew the device far better than Galharath ever could. That knowledge would become his weapon.
He looked upon the crystalline structure—the main chamber, the struts rising toward the cavern’s ceiling, the ones that reached down through the cavern floor to draw upon the thermal energies beneath the mountain. He saw the physical components of the device, but he also saw the intricate lattice of psionic power that made up the true heart of the psi-forge. He saw Galharath not as a being of meat and bone, but rather a luminous creature of pure thought … and what’s more, he saw precisely how the kalashtar was integrated into the psi-forge’s energy lattice, and he saw what he needed to do.
Solus focused the power of his mind into a single tight beam of telekinetic energy and sent it hurtling toward the crystalline ring clasped in Galharath’s right hand. The beam sheared off a portion of the outer ring near the top, so small that it would’ve been impossible to detect with the naked eye, but it was enough to do the job.
The ring shuddered in Galharath’s hand, and the kalashtar looked up at it in alarm. A memory came from one of Solus’s creators—which, he couldn’t say. The memory was of the way a glass goblet would vibrate when subjected to certain frequencies of sound … vibrate enough to shatter.
The ring in Galharath’s right hand burst apart in a shower of crystal shards.
The kalashtar screamed.
Diran held out his hand and silver light flared to life in his palm. Makala hissed as the argent illumination poured over her, and she threw herself away from Cathmore, turned her back to Diran, and covered her eyes.
“Are you mad?” she screeched. “You’re protecting a monster!”
Diran hated to see Makala in pain, but he couldn’t let her slay Cathmore. “It’s you I’m protecting—from yourself.”
Cathmore laughed. “How deliciously self-righteous!”
Diran ignored the master assa
ssin and spoke calmly to Makala, though he did not allow the silver fire burning in his hand to go out. “It’s one thing to feed, quite another to kill. Cathmore may deserve to die, but I won’t let you become a soulless murderer.”
“Why not?” Cathmore spoke in a jovial tone, as if he were enjoying himself enormously. “That’s what the Brotherhood trained her to be.”
Makala continued to huddle on the floor, her back to Diran. “Put out that damned light!” she shouted. “Let me do what has to be done!”
Cathmore continued to grin at Diran, but his voice took on a cold edge. “You can’t save her. She’s a killer at heart … just as you are. No matter how much you try to deny your true nature, it will always come to the fore, one way or another. The Diran Bastiaan I trained as a boy was too intelligent not to recognize such a basic fact about himself. Forget your friends and your pathetic excuse for a religion. Become once more who you truly are.”
Cathmore took a step toward him, and his grin fell away. His voice was completely devoid of emotion as he continued, almost as if Cathmore wasn’t speaking, but someone—or something—else was.
“I’m old, Diran. Not many years remain ahead of me. When I die, the spirit inside me will need a new home. You gave up your dark spirit some time ago, Diran, but it’s not too late to return to the way things were.”
Cathmore took another step forward.
“You can become the new host for my spirit, and you don’t have to wait for me to die … we can make the transfer now.”
Confusion, fear, and anger warred in Cathmore’s gaze as he spoke, and Diran understood what was happening.