“You hit your servants.”
She blinked furiously and her back went even straighter than before, as though she’d been called to account and it mattered very much how she responded.
“They didn’t like me,” she said.
It was a reportage of fact. The sorrow came after. No tears or sobs or trembles about the mouth; dramatic, yes; histrionic, not at all. She’d discovered within herself a kernel of true pride—This is me, it said, warts and all. This is a wrong thing that I did and I must take responsibility for it—and it gave her a center of being she’d never known before.
“I did it because I could,” she went on. “And because no one told me different. In the tower, in the hearth, I was weaker. The Deceiver didn’t ask what I wanted. He told me—this is what you are, this is your destiny, take it. I order, you obey. It was like he offered glory without price. I speak, the world trembles, it costs me nothing. It’s no wonder his fires burn cold, Drumheller, there’s nothing of warmth, nothing of true life in that abomination.
“Can’t I just run away and hide somewhere?” she asked in sudden desperation. She thought she knew that answer, but he surprised her.
“Of course.” She knew he meant it, knew as well that he’d yield up his life if that was what was necessary, because it was what he once wanted most of all.
“Drumheller,” asked Ryn in a strange voice, picking up the hair clip from where Thorn had set it aside, “where’d you get this?”
“It’s the Princess’s,” he replied absently. “Anakerie’s. She left it in my cell, back in Angwyn. If not for her, I’d have likely died there, or been consumed by the Deceiver’s ChangeSpell. Why, Ryn?”
“I—” the Wyr began, then broke off as Thorn’s expression changed markedly, as though the Nelwyn had heard an alarm bell beyond the comprehension of his companions.
“What?” Ryn demanded, rising to join them, one arm going protectively across Elora’s body while he gathered his muscles for a fight. His other hand took up his sword.
“Something’s afoot.”
“Maizan?”
Thorn shook his head, crouching himself low to the stone, fingertips caressing its scrabbly surface as if it were the most delicate piece of rice parchment, ready to crumble at the slightest puff of breath.
“Firedrakes started it,” he said, so quietly they had to strain to hear. “They’re distant cousins—from the rough-’n-ready side of the neighborhood—of the rock silkies who live within the worldcore. Those resonances I spoke of.” This, to Elora. “The mountain’s beginning to stir.”
In that moment Thorn found himself called to Bastian’s eyes. The eagle was high in the stone rafters of the great hall, very quiet, very still, as he and Rool had been from the start. Nothing had moved below since Anakerie led the Maizan in headlong pursuit of the fugitives. She hadn’t wanted to leave Mohdri, but since Thorn was the only one with even a prayer of saving the Castellan, finding him was of the utmost necessity. A pair of guards were left to guard their fallen commander.
Through Bastian’s eyes, Thorn watched as both warriors were speedily, silently slain. The Deceiver did his work well. A call from within the hearth brought both men close, weapons at the ready; they’d seen their quarry disappear into stone and were quite prepared to see them reappear from same. Tough men, confident men, the kind who survived by never making mistakes. They made none here, by their lights; their loss was that they were playing far out of their league.
They gave the petrified tableau what they thought was a decent berth. It wasn’t enough. Two puffs of frigid flame in both their faces, a reflexive breath of air turned cold as naked space, their lungs instantly freeze-burned, so that even if they managed to overcome the paralysis of their diaphragms and draw another breath, the bronchial membranes would be so badly seared that no oxygen could be transferred to their bloodstream. They suffocated, gasping for air in a room that was rich with it.
Mohdri saw, and to his credit tried his feeble best to avenge them. There was no change to the icon, unlike a decade before when Bavmorda burned herself free of the same trap. Whatever lay imprisoned within simply passed into view, in much the same way that Thorn and the Demon moved through walls. On emergence, it had no form, it looked to be a random coruscation of energy from someplace far beyond human ken; with each step forward, though, it coalesced into a more presentable figure until once more the Deceiver had reclaimed the face of Willow Ufgood.
Anakerie had left a blade by the Castellan’s side; with the last of his strength, Mohdri thrust up and out with it, straight through the center of Willow’s chest. The Deceiver wasn’t bothered in the slightest as he took a couple of steps backward to clear the rapier from his body. Then the slightest of taps shattered the flash-frozen blade to glittering dust.
“Ah, Mohdri,” the Deceiver said in false sorrow, the words possessing a cold so awful it seemed to those watching like they came from somewhere beyond the lights and warmth of creation, some pitiless realm that long ago forswore gentleness and mercy. “Never deceive a Deceiver. I thought so much better of you. Was I not clear in my commands? I wanted—I want—the Nelwyn alive. As whole in mind as body. Did you think without him, I’d be more easily controlled? Or even banished? Wheels within wheels, was I to be your cat’s-paw, as you were mine? The means by which the Maizan could seize Angwyn without a battle? I should have kept you on a tighter rein. Now I suppose”—and the smile was terrible to behold—“I shall.”
Mohdri tried to call for help, but the Deceiver’s hand across his mouth put a stop to that. There was none of the delicacy that was used against Elora Danan—there wasn’t time, for either of them—the filaments burst free of the falseling’s flesh like ravening wolves after fresh meat and plunged immediately the Castellan’s, burrowing deep into body and soul. The big man began to glow, a lambent radiance that lit his skin from within, his eyes going wide as he found himself lifted from where he lay until he and the Deceiver floated face-to-face. And from there into a last embrace.
The watchers thought, from what they’d seen before, they knew what to expect. Between themselves, Bastian and Rool agreed on a course of action: They would wait until both principals were deep into the spell, then the eagle would stoop and Rool hurl a bolt with all the strength left in him. If that didn’t do the trick, Bastian’s claws would either slay the Castellan, thereby depriving the Deceiver of a corporeal host, or at the very least leave him one that was a maimed cripple. They had no illusions of their own fate in this enterprise. For them, it seemed a fair exchange.
Only the past turned out not to be prologue. Whether from desperation or some sense of impending danger, the Deceiver acted with ruthless efficiency. At his touch, Mohdri stiffened into death; within another heartbeat, there was nothing left of the shape that called itself Willow Ufgood.
Hale and healed, Castellan Mohdri filled the chamber with laughter, as resounding in its contempt as in its triumph.
Then he looked straight at Bastian.
Flame shot from his eyes—nowhere near as impressive a blast as what they’d seen before, more than able to finish them nonetheless—but all it did was strike naked stone. The eagle dropped like a rock, throwing sense and caution to the winds as he fought to avoid destruction. How Rool managed to hold on, the brownie never knew, much less how in the bargain he was able to empty his quiver, sending shaft after tiny shaft straight for their foe. Here, the Deceiver’s overconfidence worked in their favor, for the first impact blew him off his feet and the second sent him crashing through the crystallized shell that had been his prison. It shattered as if he’d been a wrecker’s ball, and he dropped in a boneless heap.
Bastian wheeled over wingtip and pumped into the hearth after him, Rool standing to his full height on the eagle’s back, arm at full extension, bow drawn taut to his ear. A good day, a good way, to die.
It didn’t happen.
Bastian’s approach was so extreme h
e needed an equally frantic evasion to keep from smashing himself on the cold stone. That, in turn, nearly precipitated his passenger to disaster, as Rool found himself taking flight; fortunately, another wild twist of the body and quick stabs with both feet managed to save both the brownie and his weapons.
The Castellan was gone. Into the wall, dancing himself through the stone as Thorn had done.
Only his passage wasn’t so courteous as the Nelwyn’s and the mountain didn’t like it.
Not so much a rumble, but a low, tearing groan, felt more than actually heard, that made Thorn scramble bolt upright, face almost as pale as Elora’s ensorcelled skin.
“He’s coming for me,” Elora cried, face stamped with the shock of a girl faced with death and worse. Then her expression hardened with resolution and she said, in a much older voice, “I’ll run, Thorn, but I won’t flee.”
He understood the difference and gave her the best smile he could (not much, sadly, because he thought he knew the odds) as encouragement. This battle would be his.
Ignoring Khory’s outcry, he stepped away from the others and into the stone.
That’s when Geryn and the Maizan found them.
It was a wild fight above, no less so below, as the Pathfinder bulled forward into a collision that bounced Ryn clear of his charge. Geryn lunged after him, determined on a different outcome than their earlier duel, with a pair of wild sword swings that struck sparks and gouged chips out of both stone and steel. Elora Danan was on his back before he could go farther, latching on like a monkey to do what damage she could with voice and fists. He was well armored and well schooled; it wasn’t much. But the distraction allowed Ryn to recover his own blades and he came back for Geryn without hesitation. At the same time the leading element of Maizan and Khory entered the fray themselves and the battle was joined with a vengeance.
There was nothing pretty about the free-for-all; it was a bloody, brutal business, more on the order of a street brawl, with kicks and punches being exchanged far more often than swords were crossed. There was no room to be fanciful with a blade, for fear of hitting one of your own, which in turn proved a further disadvantage to the Maizan. True, they had numbers on their side, but that meant Khory and Ryn could stand back-to-back—with Elora between their legs—and strike pretty much as they pleased.
The eagles broke the battle open. Bastian and Rool were the first on the scene, with the brownie unleashing yet another enhanced shaft, so supercharged it left a burning trail through the air in its wake, to hurl a Maizan bodily into the mass of his fellows. The last sight for one was Bastian’s claws before his eyes, the last sound for another the eagle’s hunting cry before an awful tearing sensation stole away his life. Anele, striking from the opposite direction, took as deadly a toll.
From her sanctuary, Elora had no decent sight of the melee; for her, it was mainly a matter of avoiding stray kicks, until Geryn took himself a nasty header after the confluence of a misstep on some blood and Ryn’s fist to his face. Strung from his belt was Thorn’s knife and, most importantly, his pouches.
The girl was off like a ferret, staying low and moving fast, ignoring the thumps and bumps collected along the way as she scrambled for her prize. A slain Maizan dropped on her; she shoved him over on top of Geryn without a second thought, skipped her plan ahead a couple of steps as she ran eyes across his struggling body as he tried to muscle free. Decided to forgo any attempt at the knot, went for the main belt buckle itself, with the hope in passing that maybe the Pathfinder’s pants would fall down at a critical juncture. The buckle was easy, getting the belt was not; Elora had to use both her own feet as a brace and haul with all her might. Had Geryn’s help in that regard, for the moment he shoved the corpse on top of him aside was when she found clearance to yank the belt, and the pouches, into her arms.
She’d gotten turned around in the struggle—or the body of the fight had moved on without her—and found herself on the fringes of the scrap, with the whole troop of Maizan between her and her companions. Geryn had figured what she’d done, he blocked one way, and a fast flash over the other shoulder brought Anakerie into view, at the head of a whole new band of black-clad warriors.
Which was when a pair of leather-clad arms rose up from the floor to yank her into the body of the mountain.
Mohdri to her left, one hand clutching her by the hair. Drumheller to her right, but she had no notion how to move to him. For her previous jaunts, the rock she’d passed through had been an all-enveloping glob of nothingness. Like swimming underwater, only without even a hint of light to show the way. Strange, how something so fundamentally solid on the outside should have no sense of it from within. There was a resistance to shifts of her body, the only indication that she was in a medium more dense than air or water, but infuriatingly nothing of substance for her to brace herself against or function as an anchoring point.
Now, however, the blackness had grown color, brilliant strands of energy sizzling outward from the two sorcerous combatants as though they were weavers in a race to see who could craft the more eloquent tapestry. Mohdri completed one, a small patterning of knots and sigils, and radiance flared from it to Thorn, who thrust out with his hands in a forward-pointing steeple to form a wedge to break apart the force of the Castellan’s attack.
Without—coming to Elora as rippling waves through the rock, the way a gusting breeze might stir chop on still water—this exchange manifested itself as a line of powerful explosions, bulging and fracturing the wall above the battling warriors, turning the attention of all from one mode of survival to another as shards the size of houses calved from the face.
Within, Thorn wove a reply of his own, a double hand’s worth of strands that seemed to take a winding, leisurely course through the brightening dark toward their target. Mohdri appeared not to notice as he unleashed yet another bolt of force, and Elora couldn’t help an outcry as she saw this one wasn’t to be deflected so easily. Thorn hissed with shock as a portion of it broke past his defenses to turn near half of him to ice. Elora had seen the images from Bastian; she knew what that awful cold could do, and feared she’d see Thorn’s body split asunder. But he proved to be made of sterner stuff and cast off the scourge.
Elora felt her head twisted, her body forced to follow, the Castellan’s hand, as used to breaking horses as warriors in battle, drawing her hair so taut she was sure it would tear loose from her scalp as he made sure she had to look at him.
“Yield,” she was told, with a force that had never been denied. Not an offer, a command.
“No.” She wanted to sound braver, but couldn’t find it in her.
“Elora Danan, you know not what you do. This is for the best, for the world as it stands and for generations yet unborn.”
The horror of it was, in that blinding moment of contact, breaths mingling, eyes so close her own hand couldn’t fit between them, Elora believed him. Every word rang true, the pronouncement as immutable a fact as the dawning of the world. This was no place for her, no role she could play. The Castellan, and the Deceiver who wore his shape, were the personifications of Power; what right had she to stand against them?
So much easier to give up. It was what she wanted, with so much of her heart she was certain she would not survive the breaking of it.
She couldn’t do it. Not out of contrariness, or some sense that she was tired of being pushed around. But because this was wrong. As the Deceiver was wrong. She knew this the way she knew the fact of her being. This was Evil before her, and she could not be a party to it. A part of it.
So, in the barest whisper, her reply was, “No.”
She stood at the gates of her own soul, and gaped with awe when, at his first onslaught, they shook, they splintered, they cracked—but above all, they held. A small measure of her worth, but enough to give her heart, to give her hope.
The Deceiver had no chance to try another. This was the opportunity Thorn had been waiting for and h
is tendrils caught Mohdri by the extremities, to bind him fast, and in that moment came the inspiration Elora needed, that there was indeed a mass within this ephemeral solidity for her body to push against. It stood right before her.
Legs came up, and she was thankful for her ability to fold as she placed her feet flat against his armored chest. He still had a hand on her, the other tearing at Thorn’s strands as though they were composed of acid, burning through to the unseen parts of him without doing a whit of harm to his corporeal flesh. Her first heave brought no joy; she wanted to bite him on the wrist to make him let her go, but the steel facing on his gauntlet would have broken her teeth. So her next kick put both heels in his eyes.
He was human enough to reel at that impact, and that was all she needed.
She flailed wildly, without a proper sense of direction, but Thorn was too occupied to come to her aid. Elora gaped as the texture of his features began to change, losing all sense of flesh as they took on the aspect and then the fundamental nature of the ancient stone that surrounded them. She could still discern his features, but only as striations within the rock. At the same time a great and terrible sound came to her, a basso profundo note that seemed to originate in the core of her own being, as though she was a chime that had just been struck. Accompanying it was a modest radiance, the same kind of glow she saw when for fun she would hold her hand before a candle flame to see how it lit up her skin. She remembered Thorn’s analogy about the match and the sun because that was how she felt now, comparing herself to him as he blazed unbearably bright. The shape of him was a mold that was now being filled with metal heated beyond incandescence. She could bear the sight, Mohdri could not. He snarled and struggled frantically in his bonds. Elora knew they wouldn’t hold him long, and as well that they wouldn’t have to.
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