Ascendency of the Last

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Ascendency of the Last Page 21

by Lisa Smedman


  “Ooze!” Kâras shouted. “Behind you.”

  Valdar laughed. His fingers flicked. A flicker of light danced at the edge of Kâras’s peripheral vision: a forceblade, forged from moonlight and shadow. It streaked toward Kâras—only to slam into his magical shield and explode in a halo of moonlight. Yet in the instant that Kâras’s attention was diverted, Valdar’s other hand whipped forward. Kâras felt a blow like a dull punch, then an ache. He looked down: Valdar’s black blade had buried itself hilt-deep in Kâras’s gut.

  Valdar started to gloat,—only to grunt in pain as the shadow-ooze engulfed his legs, knocking him prone. His face paled to gray, and his eyes widened. He struggled in vain to free himself as the shadow-ooze flowed slowly up his body. “It … You weren’t …”

  “Bluffing?” Kâras edged back, one hand pressed to the blood-slippery shirt where Valdar’s dagger had punched home. He knew better than to draw the blade out. It would only do more damage. “No.”

  He stepped back again, keeping out of range of the bulging shadow-ooze. He sang a prayer to the Masked Lord that should have squeezed the dagger from his gut and stitched the puncture shut.

  Nothing happened.

  “No use,” Valdar gasped. “It’s a life stealer.”

  Worried now, Kâras tried to yank the dagger free. It didn’t budge. A cold centered in his midriff, and he felt his life spiral down into the blade.

  Valdar lay on the floor, the ooze covering all but his shoulders and head. The magic sustaining his disguise bled away, revealing his mask. He tried once more to crawl—painfully, slowly—as the ooze sucked him fully into itself.

  “You were wrong,” Kâras told the vanished Valdar. His voice quavered—and not just from the drain of the magical blade. Yet he kept speaking, if only to convince himself. Blackness crowded the edges of his vision. It wouldn’t be long now before he’d go to the Masked Lord’s embrace. He gestured weakly at the ooze. “This wasn’t … what the Masked Lord … wanted.”

  The last of Kâras’s life-force drained away, conveyed by the magical blade to the great Void. He collapsed. His mask fluttered as his last breath left his lungs. Then it settled against his face. Masked Lord, he prayed as he died. Draw me into your eternal Night.

  His awareness shifted. He stood on a vast gray plain, neither in light nor in shadow. Beside him was another awareness: Valdar. Oddly, Kâras bore the other Nightshadow no ill will.

  A voice called to them: a voice that was neither male nor female, but both. A moment later, it became a pool of utter silence. Then song, then silence. Opposites, twined together, yet somehow harmonious.

  Side by side, the awarenesses that were Kâras and Valdar drifted to the place where the song-silence was coming from. It caught them like leaves and swirled them up toward itself. They drifted in front of an enormous face. Moonlight bathed the face’s upper half in shining radiance; the lower half was shadowed in utter blackness. A glint of blue danced across eyes the color of moonstones.

  Masked Lord, Kâras asked. Is it you?

  A feminine laugh rustled the mask.

  Masked … Lady? he ventured.

  The chuckle deepened, became male.

  Hands moved to the blackness that was the deity’s mask. Fingers gripped its edges. Kâras tensed, and felt the eager anticipation of the awareness that was Valdar.

  The mask lifted.

  Kâras wept.

  So did Valdar—and as he did, Kâras saw into the other Nightshadow’s heart.

  The emotions that had prompted their tears were as different as moonlight from shadow.

  “Seal those corridors!” Erelda shouted.

  She pointed with her sword. Priestesses scrambled to the tunnels leading north, east, and south from the Cavern of Song, raised their holy symbols, and sang. Shimmering barriers, bright as moonlight but steeled with black shadow, sprang into being and sealed the tunnels. These would offer a temporary reprieve. Eilistraee’s faithful could pass through, but the barriers would hold the fanatics and their minions at bay.

  For a time.

  Erelda ran a hand through her sweat-damp hair. The Stronghall had fallen. The Hall of the Priestesses would likely be next The handful of priestesses and lay worshipers staggering back from that cavern were badly wounded, and most had lost both swords and shields. According to the sending she’d just received, a few priestesses held out in the Hall of Healing, but it had been cut off by a flow of oozes from both the north and the south. The healers were on their own now.

  The winding maze of tunnels to the south of the Cavern of Song was rapidly filling with oozes. What had that Nightshadow been thinking, when he ignored the Protector’s warning and hurried into them? With oozes choking the Sargauth, she had to assume that the handful of Protectors who’d been patrolling the opposite side of the river were lost. The lay worshipers, meanwhile, crowded fearfully into the Hall of the Faithful. If oozes came bubbling up out of the breach Cavatina had reported and broke through the seals to reach the Cavern of Song, at least the lay worshipers would be out of harm’s way.

  For the moment, the Cavern of Song was secure. That was a starting point. But they needed to retake the rest of the Promenade, or they’d be trapped here. The Moonspring Portal was on the other side of the shimmering barriers Erelda had just ordered into place. That would be their first objective. They’d fight their way to it, and clear it of the oozes that fouled it. Then reinforcements from the shrines could get through.

  “Lady Qilué,” she called. “Where are you? The Promenade needs your sword and silver fire. Please answer!”

  Nothing. Where was the high priestess? For that matter, where was Rylla? No one had seen either of them since the battle began. If things didn’t turn around soon, they were going to lose the temple; she could feel it. The shrines would survive, but without the Promenade it would be a gutted faith. Anger flared. Eilistraee! You can’t allow this to happen!

  Outwardly, however, Erelda was steel. She directed the last of the wounded to the Hall of the Faithful, and ordered its two northernmost entrances magically sealed with a plug of stone. If the oozes did break through from the north, her Protectors, priestesses, and foot soldiers could fall back through the Cavern of Song without having to defend these entrances. This done, she redeployed her forces, assigning two novices to keep the holy song going at all times, to ensure that Eilistraee’s shimmering moonfire still danced through the cavern. She strode from one defender to the next, offering encouragement to her depleted forces.

  This was a test, she told herself. A test of her faith. She needed to believe they would triumph. Just as Qilué had let belief sustain her, centuries ago. The Promenade’s defenders would rally and drive Ghaunadaur’s minions back.

  A scream came from the corridor leading to the Moonspring Portal. Erelda turned in time to see a novice and a soldier stagger through the magical barrier. Their arms were melting into slime, their fingers dripping away. A priestess rushed forward to aid them. But before she reached them, they collapsed, screaming, into a bubbling mass of ooze.

  The magical barrier wavered as a multicolored sheen that glistened like a soap bubble spread across it. The stone on either side of the tunnel rippled, as if viewed through a heat shimmer. So did the floor and the ceiling. Just behind the barrier, something enormous bubbled forward. A portion of it bulged against the barrier and popped, breaking a hole.

  “Defenders!” Erelda shouted, her sword pealing in her hand as she pointed with it. “A breach. An ooze is—”

  The floor in front of the tunnel rippled. The walls slumped. The defenders closest to that entrance shouted as their feet sank into mud, slowing their charge. The ooze bulged through the songwall, rupturing it, and a swirling, stinking fog roiled into the room. Priestesses collapsed, choking, as it engulfed them.

  A Protector ran forward on a prayer-wrought moonbridge, her singing sword pealing a challenge. She hurled a bolt of twined moonlight and shadow at the monstrous ooze. It bored through the creature, popping
several of its bulging membranes. But then a wave of energy rippled from the ooze and rushed back along the moonbridge in a wave of chaotic color. The Protector tried to leap from the bridge, but the energy reached her before she could spring. She disappeared. For a heartbeat, a rent remained in the place where she had just stood. A cacophony of sounds, colors, and smells poured out of it, flickering between sensations faster than the eye could blink. Then the rent sealed shut.

  “By all that’s holy,” Erelda whispered. “Where did it just send her?”

  The ooze was fully inside the Cavern of Song now. It looked like a collection of multicolored, inflated sacs, glued together with shimmering slime. These popped as the prayers the priestesses hurled ruptured them, then reformed. Triumphant shouts came from behind the creature. The instant it was fully inside the cavern, half a dozen fanatics came howling in after it, their tentacle whips flailing. A Protector cut one of them down even as he leaped into the cavern, her singing sword pealing victoriously, but the fanatic beside him shouted a prayer. Green slime flowed from his fingers and turned into a wave that smashed into the Protector, knocking her down. When it subsided, she was gone.

  The ooze, meanwhile, pushed its shimmering wave of chaotic energy ahead of it. One of the novices maintaining the sacred psalm was engulfed by the energy and vanished, screaming. The other, a pale-skinned moon elf, quavered on. The few lay worshipers remaining in the cavern either fled, screaming, or raised their arms in desperate prayer.

  “Defenders!” Erelda cried. “To me!” She sang a blessing, and a ripple of shadow-dappled moonlight pooled around her, bathing the defenders closest to her in its pure, cleansing light. The blessing would anchor them, and prevent the bubbling ooze from tossing any more of them into whatever hostile realms it had hurled the others.

  One of the defenders couldn’t reach Erelda in time, and went down under a fanatic’s lash. The priestess next to Erelda retaliated with a holy song that crumpled the fanatic where he stood. Erelda herself fended off an attack by a ghaunadan who transformed himself into a walking purple ooze when she tried to cut him in two. She finished him with a prayer that flung him into a wall, splattering him to pieces.

  A ragged cheer went up from the priestesses around her, and she realized her foe had been the last of the fanatics. Yet the bubbling ooze remained. Thankfully, it was smaller, reduced in size by the priestess’s attacks. “Praise Eilistraee,” Erelda gasped. “We will hold the temple.”

  She realized she could hear herself speak. For the first time in decades, the sacred song had faltered. “The Evensong!” she shouted. The priestesses next to her took up the hymn. With her sword raised, Erelda stepped forward to finish off the ooze.

  The world flip-flopped. Up became down. Erelda tumbled, flailing, to the ceiling, together with the handful of defenders who had been standing next to her. She slammed into stone, and saw stars. She scrambled upright—the floor of the cavern reeled dizzily over her head—and realized the ooze had somehow distorted the natural laws of reality. She hurled a bolt of moonlight and shadow “up” at the ooze, but it didn’t stop the thing. The ooze slithered over the statue of Qilué, fouling it. Then it disappeared down the staircase leading to the top of the Pit.

  Erelda and the others fell. Erelda’s wrist snapped as she landed, and pain flared. She rose, cradling the arm against her chest, and sang a hymn of healing. Without looking to see how the others fared, she clambered over the slime-fouled statue and ran to the staircase, shaking feeling back into her hand.

  She ran down the spiral stairs two steps at a time, one hand on the inside wall to steady herself, the other tightly gripping her sword. She slipped, scrambled, sometimes tumbled down the steps, which glistened with the multicolored slime left by the creature as it squeezed its way down the narrow staircase. Always the monster was just around the bend. Just out of sight.

  Gasping, Erelda at last reached the bottom of the staircase. She slipped on the final steps and tumbled into a cavern. Its floor was a bumpy field of broken stone: the fragments of the walls Qilué had collapsed to fill the Pit. The Protector who’d been stationed at the top of the Mound was gone. The ooze was just ahead, bubbling toward the statue of Eilistraee. The statue, made up of tiny chips of magic-suspended stone, was no longer moving. It would have halted its dance when the sacred song faltered. That it hadn’t resumed its slow pirouette was a grim sign. Hadn’t anyone survived above?

  Erelda leaped, her sword flashing. It sliced through the ooze, severing one glistening sac after another. The ooze deflated—but as it did, a rush of multicolored energy rippled outward from it and struck the statue. Half of the stone chips instantly disappeared, and the rest were transmuted to mud that fell like dirty rain onto the spot where it had stood.

  Erelda gasped. Her throat tightened. The seal on the Pit—gone!

  The rubble where the statue had stood glowed with a purple light. Tendrils of violet mist seeped out through cracks between the stones. A feeling like ice slid into Erelda’s gut as she realized what this meant. The breach at the bottom of the Pit had opened!

  The rubble quivered. Something was rising upward through the Pit.

  “Eilistraee!” she cried. She leaped over the deflated ooze and hurled herself, face down, atop the Mound. She couldn’t fuse the rubble—only Lady Qilué could do that with her silver fire—but she could sing into being a blessing that would hold back whatever was rising out of the Pit, for a time. “At this time of darkness, I call down your light. Make holy this—”

  Her song slowed to a dirgelike moan as the purple mist filled her lungs. The cavern was thick with the stuff; she could no longer see the walls. A tentacle erupted out of the rubble next to her, as thick as her arm and glistening with slime. It knocked her tumbling. She turned—slowly, slowly—and saw the eye at the end of the tentacle open gummily, releasing beams of bright orange light that lanced through the purple smoke. One of these struck her sword, which vibrated as if it had just clanged against an opponent’s blade. Its song shrilled to a panic-filled wail, and the steel glowed red with heat.

  Erelda grabbed the sword and struggled—slowly, slowly—to her feet, clinging grimly to her weapon. The leather wrapping the hilt smoked, and the tip of the blade grew white hot. Molten metal trickled down it, like wax from a candle, and dripped onto Erelda’s hand. She screamed and dropped the weapon. It fell silent.

  Determined not to fail her goddess, she resumed her hymn.

  A second tentacle emerged from the portal, beside the first. A second eye opened. Erelda’s mind raced at a speed her body couldn’t keep up with. Eilistraee aid me, she pleaded. It’s Ghaunadaur’s avatar! It’s escaping from the Pit!

  She kept singing. Slowly. The hymn was almost complete. One final word …

  A ray of orange light struck her in the forehead, filling her with a panic that exploded through her body like shards of ice. Her song turned into a scream. Then she crumpled in despair.

  She’d failed. The Promenade was lost.

  Laeral stood in the jungle, clad in a silk nightgown that offered scant protection against the night. She would have dressed, had there been time, but Qilué had demanded her immediate assistance. The urgent message had awoken Laeral from a sound sleep. She’d pulled on her slippers, swept up her magical necklace from her bedside table, fastened her wand belt around her waist, and cast a quick contingency that would blink her out of harm’s way should the Crescent Blade be turned on her. Then she’d teleported here, to the spot Qilué had so precisely described.

  This place was evil. Laeral could feel it. Even though it was night, the air was sticky and hot. A faint sound grated at the edge of her hearing: a distant, wailing cry like the sound of women mourning. The trees here were black and twisted, their heavy branches devoid of leaves. A choking tangle of dead vines snaked between fallen masonry, the smell of their wilted flowers reminiscent of corpses ripening in the sun. The ground was uneven, with blocks of stone barely visible under a thick blanket of rotting, bug-infes
ted loam. Laeral could sense a jungle cat observing her from the darkness, its eyes glinting. Though it was hungry, and she probably appeared easy prey, it didn’t approach. It slunk away into the jungle, its tail lashing.

  What was this place? Laeral reached deep into herself and used a pinch of her own life-force to channel power to her spell. She rested her fingers on a block of masonry, and posed the question again—this time, with a whispered incantation. She tapped the fingers of her free hand to her closed eyelids. Show me, she commanded.

  As she opened her eyes, a vision sprang into place around her. She stood not in a jungle-hemmed ruin, but in an audience chamber with towering walls. Sunlight shone through stained-glass windows, painting everything it illuminated blood red. An elf with dark brown skin and thinning gray hair sat on the throne; wearing thread-of-gold robes and a silver crown. His hands moved in a complicated series of gestures, his twisting fingers teasing wisps of dark smoke out of eight guttering yellow candles. These had been set at the points of a complex eight-sided star that was painted on the floor in what looked like fresh blood. As Laeral watched, breathless, the streams of smoke twined together and thickened, taking on the shape of a monstrous demon with bat wings, horns, and cloven feet. A sword with a flame-shaped blade was strapped to the demon’s back, and crackled to life, its flames matching the red blaze of his eyes. Soot, snorted from his nostrils, drifted onto the floor near his feet.

  Who summons me? the demon growled.

  Geirildin, Coronal of House Sethomiir. The wizard leaned forward on his throne. His hair, now bone white, was shot through with glints of red from the windows above. His eyes glittered. Kneel before your master.

  The demon’s lip curled, yet he did as he was commanded. As he dropped to his knees, one cloven foot kicked over a candle. Its flame guttered and went out. The wizard-coronal tensed, and his hand tightened around a spider-shaped amulet that hung from his neck. The demon drew its foot back inside the eight-sided star, and the wizard relaxed again.

 

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