It moved.
Tarma had succeeded in this much, anyway; the gates were now unbarred.
She pushed a little harder, slowly, carefully. The gate swung open just enough for her to squeeze herself through, scraping herself on the wooden bulwarks both fore and aft as she did so.
Before her lay the courtyard, mostly open ground.
Remembering all Tarma had taught her, she crouched as low as she could, waited until the moon passed behind a cloud, and sprinted for the shelter of the dried-up fountain.
Under the rim, in shadows, she looked around; watching not for objects, but for movement, any movement. But there was no movement, anomalous or otherwise. She crawled under the rim until she lay hidden on the side facing the temple doors.
She watched, but saw nothing; she listened, but heard only crickets and toads. She waited, aching from the strain of holding herself still in such an awkward position, until the moon again went behind a cloud.
She sprinted for the temple doors, flinging herself against the wall of the temple behind a pillar as soon as she reached them. It was then that she realized that there had been something very anomalous at the gate.
The aged gates, allegedly locked for fifteen years, had opened smoothly and without a sound -- as if they had been oiled and put into working order within the past several days.
Something was very wrong.
A shadow bulked in front of her, and she started with alarm; she pulled the sword in a defensive move before she realized that her "enemy" was Warrl.
He reached for her arm and his teeth closed gently on her tunic; he tugged at her sleeve. That meant Tarma wanted her.
"You didn't meet with anything?" Kethry whispered.
Warrl snorted. I think that they are all asleep or blind. A cub could have penetrated this place.
This was too easy; all her instincts were in an uproar. Too easy by far. She suddenly realized what their easy access to this place meant. This was a trap!
And now Kethry felt a shrill alarm course through her every nerve -- a double alarm. Need was alerting her to a woman in the deadliest danger, and very nearby --
-- and the bond of she'enedran was resonating with soul-deep threat to her blood-sister. Tarma was in trouble.
As if to confirm her fears, Warrl threw up his head and voiced his battle-cry, and charged within, leaving Kethry behind.
And given the urgency of Need's pull, that could only mean one thing.
Thalhkarsh was here -- and he had the Sworn One at his nonexistent mercy.
The time for subterfuge was over.
Kethry pulled her ensorcelled blade with her left hand, and caused a blue-green witchlight to dance before her with a gesture from her right; then kicked open the doors of the temple and flung herself frantically through them. She landed hard against the dingy white-plastered wall of a tiny, cobwebbed anteroom, bruising her shoulder; and found herself staring foolishly at an empty chamber.
Another door stood in the opposite wall, slightly ajar. She inched along the wall and eased it open with the tip of her blade. The witchlight showed nothing beyond it but a brick-walled tunnel that led deeper into the temple proper. Warrl must already have run down this way.
She moved stealthily through the door, and into the corridor, praying to find Tarma, and soon. The internal alerts of both her blade and her blood-bond were nigh-unbearable, and she hardly dared contemplate what that meant to Tarma's well-being.
But the corridor twisted and turned like a kadessarun, seemingly without end. With every new corner she expected to find something -- but every time she rounded a corner she saw only another long, dust-choked extension of the corridor behind her. The dust showed no tracks at all, not even Warrl's. Could she have somehow come the wrong way? But there were only two directions to choose -- forward, or back the way she had come. Back she would never go; that left only forward. And forward was yard after yard of blank-walled corridor, with never a door or a break of any kind. She slunk on and on in a kind of nightmarish entrancement in which she lost all track of time; there was only the endlessly turning corridor before her and the cry for help within her. Nothing else seemed of any import at all. As the urgings of her geas-blade Need and the bond that tied her to Tarma grew more and more frantic, she was close to being driven nearly mad with fear and frustration. She was being distracted; so successfully in fact, that it wasn't until she'd wasted far too much precious time trying to thread the maze that she realized what it must be --
-- a magical construct, meant to delay her, augmented by spells of befuddlement.
"You bastard!" she screamed at the invisible Thalhkarsh, enraged by his duplicity. He had made a serious mistake in doing something that caused her to become angry; that rage was useful, it fueled her power. She gathered it to her, made a force of it instead of allowing it to fade uselessly; sought and found the weak point of the spell. She sheathed Need, and spreading her arms wide over her head, palms facing each other, blasted with the whiteheat of her anger.
Mage-energies formed a glowing blue-white arc between her upraised hands; a sorcerer's wind began to stir around her, forming a miniature whirlwind with herself as the eye. With a flick of her wrists she reversed her hands to hold them palmoutward and brought her arms down fully extended to shoulder height; the mage-light poured from them to form a wall around her, then the wall expanded outward. The brick corridor walls about her flared with scarlet as the glowing wall of energy touched them; they shivered beneath the wrath-fired mageblast, wavered and warped like the mirages they were. There was a moment of resistance; then, soundlessly, they vanished.
She saw she was standing in what had been the outer, common sanctuary; an enormous room, supported by two rows of pillars whose tops were lost in the shadows of the ceiling. Tracks in the dust showed she had been tracing the same circling path all the time she had thought she was traversing the corridor. Her anger brightened the witchlight; the green-blue glow revealed the far end of the sanctuary -the forgotten god stood there, behind his altar. The statue of the gentle god of rains had a forlorn look; he and his altar were covered with a blanket of dust and cobwebs. Dust lay undisturbed nearly everywhere.
Nearly everywhere -- she was not the expert tracker Tarma was, but it did not take an expert to read the trail that passed from the front doors to somewhere behind the god's statue. And in those dust tracks were paw prints.
Desperate to waste no more time, she pulled her blade again and broke into a run, her blue-green witchlight bobbing before her, intent on following that trail to wherever it led. She passed by the neglected altar with never a second glance, and found the priests' door at the end of the trace in the dust; it lay just behind and beneath the statue. It had never been intended to be concealed, and besides stood wide open. She sent the witchlight shooting ahead of her and sprinted inside, panting a little.
But the echoes of running feet ahead of her as she passed into another brick-walled corridor told her that her spell-breaking had not gone unnoticed.
Common sense and logic said she should find a corner to put her back against and make a stand.
Therefore she did nothing of the kind.
As the first of four armed mercenaries came pounding into view around a corner ahead, she took Need in both hands and charged him, shrieking at the top of her lungs. Her berserk attack took the demon-hireling by surprise; he stopped dead in his tracks, staring, and belatedly raised his own weapon. His hesitation sealed his doom. Kethry let the eldritch power of Need control her body, and the bespelled blade responded to the freedom by moving her in a lightning blow at his unprotected side. Screaming in pain, the fighter fell, arm sheared off at the shoulder.
The second hired thug was a little quicker to defend himself, but he, too, was no match for Need's spell-imparted skill. Kethry cracked his wooden shield in half with a strength far exceeding what she alone possessed, and swatted his blade out of his hands after only two exchanges, sending it clattering against the wall. She ran him th
rough before he could flee her.
The third and fourth sought to take her while -- they presumed -- Kethry's blade was still held fast in the collapsing body. They presumed too much; Need freed itself and spun Kethry around to meet and counter both their strokes in a display of swordsmanship a master would envy. They saw death staring at them from the witchlight reflected on the blood-dripping blade, from the hate-filled green eyes.
It was more than they had the stomach to face -- and their lives were worth far more to them than their pay. They turned and fled back down the way they had come, with Kethry in hot pursuit, too filled with berserk anger now to think that a charge into unknown danger might not be a wise notion.
There was light ahead, Kethry noticed absently, allowing her rage to speed her feet. That might mean there were others there -- and perhaps the demon.
The hirelings ran to the light as to sanctuary; Kethry followed --
She stumbled to a halt, at first half-blinded by the light; then when her eyes adjusted, tripped on nothing and nearly fell to her knees, her mind and heart going numb at what she saw.
This had once been the inner temple; Thalhkarsh had transformed it into his own perverted place of unholiness. It had the red-lit look of a seraglio in hell. It had been decorated with the same sort of carvings that had ornamented the demon's temple back in Delton. The subject was sexual; every perversion possible was depicted, provided that it included pain and suffering.
The far end of the room had been made into a kind of platform, covered in silk and velvet cushions, plushly upholstered. It was a cliched setting; an overdone backdrop for an orgy. The demon certainly enjoyed invoking pain, but it appeared that he himself preferred not to suffer the slightest discomfort while he was amusing himself. The platform was occupied by a clutch of writhing nude and partially clothed bodies. Only now were some of those on the platform beginning to disengage and take notice of the hirelings fleeing for the door on the opposite side. Evidently not even the demon foresaw that Kethry would be able to get this far on her own.
The demon and his followers had been interrupted by her entrance at the height of their pleasures. And it was the sight of the demon's partner that had stricken Kethry to the heart -- for the one being used by the demon himself was Tarma.
But it was Tarma transformed; she wore the face and body the demon had given her when he had first tried to seduce her to his cause. Though smaller and far frailer, she was still recognizably herself -- but with all her angularities softened, her harshness made silken, her flaws turned to beauty. Her clothing was in rags, and she had the bruises and the look of a woman who has been passed from one brutal rape to another. That was bad enough, but that was not what had struck Kethry like a dagger to the heart; it was the absence of any mind or sense in Tarma's blank blue eyes.
Tarma had survived rape before; were she still aware and in charge of herself, she would still be fighting. Mere brutal use would not have forced her mind from her, not when the slaughter of her entire Clan as well as her own abuse had failed to do that when she was a young woman and far more innocent than she was now. No -- this had to be the work of the demon. Knowing he would be unable to break her spirit, Thalhkarsh had stolen Tarma's mind; stolen her mind or somehow forced her soul out of her body.
The demon, wearing his form of a tall, beautiful human male, was the first to recover from surprise at the interruption.
"Amusing," he said, not appearing at all amused. "I had thought the skill of those I had paid would more than equal yours, even with that puny blade to augment it. It appears that I was mistaken."
Before Kethry could make a move, he had seized Tarma, and pulled her before him -- not as a shield, but with evident threat.
"Put up your blade, sorceress," he purred brazenly, "or I tear her limb from limb."
Kethry knew he was not bluffing, and Need clattered to the floor from her nerveless hand.
He laughed, a hideous howl of triumph. "You disappoint me, my enemy! You have made my conquest too easy!" He stood up and tossed Tarma aside; she fell to the pile of cushions with the limpness of a lifeless doll, not even attempting to break her own fall. "Come forth, my little toy -- " he continued, turning his back on his fallen victim and beckoning to someone lurking behind the platform.
From out of the shadows among the hangings came a woman, and when she stepped far enough into the light that Kethry was able to get a good look at her, the sorceress reeled as if she had been struck. It couldn't be --
The woman was the twin of an image she herself had once worn -- and that she had placed on the unconscious form of the marauding bandit Lastel Longknife by way of appropriate punishment for the women and girls he had used and murdered. It was an image she had never expected to see again; she had assumed the bandit would have been treated with brutality equaling his own by what was left of his fellows. By all rights, he should have been dead -- long dead.
"I think the bitch recognizes me, my lord," the dulcet voice said, heavy irony in the title of subservience. Platinum hair was pushed back from amethyst eyes with a graceful but impatient hand.
"You never expected to see me again, did you?" Her eyes blazed with helpless anger. "May every god damn you for what you did to me, woman. Death would have been better than the misery this shape put me through! If it hadn't been for a forgotten sword and an untied horse -- "
She came closer, hands crooked into claws. "I've dreamed of having you in my hands every night since, gods -- but not like this." Her eyes betrayed that she was walking a very thin thread of sanity. "What you did to me was bad enough -- but being trapped in this prison of a whore's carcass is more than I can bear -- it's worse than Hell, it's -- "
She turned away, clenching her hands so tightly that the knuckles popped. After a moment of internal struggle she regained control over herself, and turned to the demon. "Well, since it was my tales to the priests that lured them here, the time has come for you to keep your side of the bargain."
"You wish to lose your current form? A pity -- I had thought you had come to enjoy my attentions."
The woman colored; Kethry was baffled. She had only placed the illusion of being female on the bandit, but this -- this was a real woman! Mage-sight showed only exactly what stood before her in normalsight, not the bandit of the desert hills!
"Damn you," she snarled. "Oh, gods, for a demonslaying blade! Yes, you bastard, I enjoy it! As you very well know, squirming like a vile snake inside my head! You've made me your slave as well as your puppet; you've addicted me to you, and you revel in my misery -- you cursed me far worse than ever she did. And now, damn you, I want free of it and you and all else besides! I've paid my part of the bargain. Now you live up to your side!"
Thalhkarsh smiled cruelly. "Very well, my pretty little toy -- go and take her lovely throat in both your hands, and I shall free you of that body with her death."
One of the acolytes scuttled around behind Kethry and seized her arms, pinioning them behind her back. He needn't have bothered; she was so in shock she couldn't have moved if the ceiling had begun to fall in on them. The slender beauty approached, stark, bitter hatred in her eyes, and seized Kethry's throat.
A howl echoed from behind her; a hurtling black shape leaped over her straight at the demon. It was Warrl -- who evidently had met the same kind of delaying tactics as Kethry had. Now he had broken free of them, and he was in a killing rage. This time Thalhkarsh took no chances with Warrl; from his upraised hands came double bolts of crimson lightning. Warrl was hit squarely in midair by both of them. He shrieked horribly, transfixed six feet above the floor, caught and held in midleap. He writhed once, shrieked again -- then went limp. The aura of the demon's magic faded; the body of the kyree dropped to the ground like a shot bird, and did not move again.
Lastel was not in the least distracted by this; she tightened her hands around Kethry's neck. Kethry struggled belatedly to free herself, managing to bring her heel down on the foot of the acolyte behind her, catching him squa
rely in the instep so that he yowled and dropped to the floor, clutching his ruined foot.
But even when her arms were free, she was powerless against the bandit; she scratched at Lastel's hands and reached for her eyes with crooked fingers -- uselessly. Her own hands would not respond; her lungs screamed for air, and she began to black out.
The demon laughed, and again raised his hands; Kethry felt as if she'd been plunged into the heart of a fire. Crackling energies surrounded both of them; her legs gave beneath her and it was only when a new acolyte caught her arms and held her up that she remained erect. With narrowing vision she stared into Lastel's pale eyes, unable to look away --
And suddenly she found herself staring down into her own face, with her own neck between her hands! Kethry released her grip with a cry of disbelief; stared down at at her hands, at herself, horror written plain on her own face. Lastel stared up at her out of her own eyes, hatred and black despair making a twisted mask of her face.
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