by David Weber
The ball of witchfire arced through the night and disappeared into what still looked to Houghton for all the world like a solid piece of hillside. Nothing at all seemed to happen, but then Wencit made a satisfied sound.
"That was a very good idea, Gunnery Sergeant," he said. "They didn't like it a bit."
"I thought they wouldn't," Houghton replied grimly, and stepped forward.
He'd never found out where Diego Santander had acquired the MM-1 grenade launcher, nor had he asked. Tough Mama's gunner was an inspired scrounger, and for all Houghton knew, Diego had won the damn thing in a card game with one of the SpecOps guys he hung around with. If that were the case, Houghton probably should have seen about getting it back to the unit it actually belonged to, but the gunnery sergeant had been much too happy to see it to worry about any petty concerns where legal ownership was concerned.
The twelve-shot, revolver-style weapon weighed over twelve and a half pounds even empty, but Wencit had pointed out that all he really needed was to have both hands free in case they required a spell in a hurry. He'd volunteered to help carry other gear, like extra ammunition and the additional grenades. He'd offered to carry the Marine's rifle, as well, but Houghton hadn't been about to let that get that far away from him. Still, the wizard's offer left him free to worry about the launcher without loading himself down like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he smiled unpleasantly at the thought of what it could do.
The MM-1 might be bulky, but it was tough, reliable, easy to maintain, and offered a quick, substantial weight of firepower that was especially welcome to vehicle crews who might find themselves compelled to ditch under it less than ideal circumstances. (Which, in Houghton's opinion, was a perfect description of his current situation.) True, it used the older, low-velocity forty-millimeter grenades, not the newer versions designed for weapons like the Mk 19 rapid-fire grenade launcher. Still, the fragmentation/shaped charge M443 grenades loaded into half its chambers had a casualty radius of over fifteen feet. The other six chambers were loaded with the technically obsolete M576E1 "multi-projectile" grenade, which was effectively an old-fashioned shrapnel round packed with twenty balls, that was even more lethal, in many respects.
Now Houghton stepped across the threshold into the tunnel where Wencit's spell had just extinguished the overhead lights, plunging everything into total darkness. He'd hoped the wizard might be able to do something of the sort, and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl of satisfaction as the infrared illuminator of his NVG flooded the scene before him with light the unaided eye simply couldn't see. Houghton and Mashita each had their own NVG; Santander had left his aboard Tough Mama, and Houghton had given Bahzell a quick, rough and ready briefing before he handed the gunner's gear over to the hradani. He'd been more than a little surprised by how quickly Bahzell had picked up on what he was saying. In fact, he'd suspected for a few moments that Bahzell hadn't understood at all and simply didn't want to admit it, until Bahzell had repeated his instructions perfectly—almost word for word.
Wencit's right—the big guy ain't no slouch, a corner of Houghton's brain reflected as he raised the launcher. Its maximum range was well over three hundred meters, but he wasn't going to need anywhere near that much to reach the confused sprawl of bow and crossbow-equipped armsmen who'd just been plunged into darkness. The green-and-gray imagery was as familiar to Houghton as the normal colors of daylight, and he watched pitilessly as at least half a dozen of those armsmen dropped their weapons and fumbled with torches, trying frantically to get them lit.
Not going to have time for that, boys, he thought grimly, and squeezed the trigger.
The launcher coughed and sent the first grenade downrange. It landed directly in the center of a knot of armsmen and the M550 fuse detonated the forty-five-gram bursting charge. The explosion lit the tunnel like a lightning flash, and the sound of the detonation in such a confined space was like a pair of fists, slamming down across both ears. For one brief moment, that was all anyone could hear; then the shrieks of pain, mingled with terrified confusion, began just as Houghton tracked his aiming point to the right and squeezed again. The self-cocking cylinder rotated, the second grenade went sizzling downrange, and fresh screams answered.
None of those armsmen had anticipated anything like it. Even those who could see the muzzle flash of the launcher had no clue what it was, and Houghton moved after each shot, changing position just in case any of those bows or crossbows returned fire.
Not that there was going to be very much time for them to do that; it took him less than twenty seconds to fire all twelve grenades.
"What in Phrobus' name is that?" the captain of Tremala's armsmen demanded.
He stood at Garsalt's shoulder, staring in shocked disbelief into the depths of the wizard's personal gramerhain. The fist-sized lump of water-clear crystal should have shown a brightly illuminated entry tunnel where forty picked men were waiting, ready to unleash a torrent of arrows and crossbow quarrels as their opponents crossed the threshold and stood blinking stupidly, stunned eyes bat-blind in the unexpected brilliance. But there was no brilliance. Or, rather, not their brilliance.
Garsalt was even more stunned, in many ways, than the captain beside him. Scrying was Garsalt's specialty. Unlike many wizards, he could actually perceive spells and their natures when he captured their caster in his gramerhain. Which meant he knew that those blinding flashes of light ripping through the darkness like trapped lightning were totally non-arcane in nature.
Which, of course, was impossible.
"I don't know what it is," he grated, in answer to the captain's question.
"Well, what happened to the light, then?" The armsman sounded accusing, and Garsalt couldn't really blame him.
"Wencit turned it off," the wizard replied.
"How —?"
"I don't know how!" Garsalt interrupted. "He shouldn't have been able to do it. We didn't create the light-globes; Cherdahn did it with Sharnâ 's aid when he built the temple, and he didn't use wizardry to do it. Even Wencit should have needed at least several minutes to figure out how to turn god-lights off, unless . . . ."
Garsalt's voice trailed off as he thought furiously. The vicious spits of light in his gramerhain continued, mercilessly cutting down the armsmen who had expected to be the ones doing any ambushing, and the wizard swore viciously in sudden understanding.
"He didn't turn them off at all!" he snapped. "He simply used a spell of his own to trap the light above it. The old bastard duplicated the effect of the spell Cherdahn used to keep the light from showing through the archway and projected it between the globes and the rest of the tunnel!"
"But to do that —"
"To do that he had to know the tunnel's exact dimensions before he cast the spell." Sweat beaded Garsalt's forehead, and he shook his head fiercely. "He had to know them, or else there'd've been holes in his barrier, places for light to leak through, at least until he reconfigured it. But he couldn't know! Even if he'd somehow been able to see through Cherdahn's barrier, he'd still have had to be able to see through Rethak's glamour, and not even Wencit could have done that without Rethak knowing it!"
"Well whether it's possible or not, he seems to've managed it!" the captain snarled.
"I know that, idiot!" Garsalt stared down into the gramerhain's crystalline depths as one final explosion flashed within it. Unlike the armsmen trapped in the sudden darkness, Garsalt's scrying spell needed no light to see what had happened.
"They're all down," he said flatly. "Two or three of them managed to run away—all the rest are dead or wounded."
"Phrobus!" the captain muttered in disbelief. No, not disbelief, Garsalt realized. In the desire to disbelieve.
"That's almost a quarter of our total manpower—gone!" the captain continued, and Garsalt suppressed a need to snarl back at him. The wizard was painfully aware of that minor fact.
"I'm thinking I'd sooner have you on my side than the other, Ken Houghton," Bahzell Bahnakson said, surveying
the carnage.
The tangled drifts of bodies were astonishingly clear through Houghton's magical goggles. Many of those bodies lay still and dead, but others were still alive, whimpering or screaming with the pain of their wounds. Their pain sounds were thin and distorted sounding in the fragile silence filling the wake of Houghton's thunderous weapon, and their agonized writhing sent ripples of movement across the heaped bodies.
The hradani surveyed them without sympathy. Honorable foes he could respect, even pity, but men who gave their swords to the service of scum like Carnadosa or Sharnâ were something else. He remembered the village, those shredded bodies piled in the muddy street where they'd died defending their children against the horror these men had chosen to serve, and there was no pity in him.
"Well, yeah," Houghton agreed, standing beside Bahzell and surveying the same scene. "On the other hand, we've only got sixteen more grenades for this thing."
"A man can't be asking for everything," Bahzell said philosophically.
"And why the hell not?" Houghton demanded. The hradani looked down at him, and the Marine shrugged. "All my life, people have been telling me I 'can't have everything.' I'm just wondering why that is."
"Why, now that you've asked, I've no answer at all," Bahzell told him, with a deep chuckle. "I'm thinking I'd best be introducing you to Brandark and letting him explain it to the both of us."
"I'm not sure how practical that's going to be," Wencit put in from behind them. "And, if you'll pardon me for pointing this out, if you're ever going to have another conversation with Brandark, Bahzell, we'd best be moving on, don't you think?"
"Aren't you just the peevish one?" Bahzell replied. "Still and all," he continued before the wizard could fire back, "you've a point."
He stood for a moment, head cocked, as if he were listening for something none of the others could hear, then pointed to the right.
"There's an intersection up ahead there," he said. "The tunnel we're wanting leads to the right."
XV
Trayn Aldarfro's fingernails cut deep, bleeding wounds in the palms of his fisted hands. Sweat covered his face in a thick, solid sheet; breath hissed between his clenched teeth in jagged, explosive spits of air; and every muscle quivered, shuddering with the waves of agony rolling through him.
He could have escaped the torment anytime he chose, which made it even worse in many ways, yet in truth, he couldn't choose to. He was a mage, pledged to fight the Dark at whatever cost. And even if he hadn't been bound by his mage's oath, he'd made another promise. A promise to a girl-woman he'd never even seen.
His spined arched, until only his heels and the back of his head touched the stone floor, and an animal pain sound ripped from his throat. He'd never imagined such agony, yet he knew that despite all he could do, what he was experiencing at this moment was only a fraction of what that girl he'd never seen was suffering.
He was with her as she writhed, twisting and jerking against her chains on the gore-encrusted altar. He was with her as the chanting ghouls who worshiped Sharnâ leaned over her with their knives, their pincers, all the unspeakable instruments of torture consecrated to their Dark God. There was no secret of pain, no possible torture, which they did not know. All the agony which could be inflicted upon the human body was theirs to command, and their victim shrieked as they visited it upon her with a cold, methodical calculation worse than any frenzied explosion of homicidal madness.
Trayn would have given his very soul to save that girl from the atrocity being visited upon her, and he couldn't. He couldn't. His helplessness was a torment deeper than any pain of the flesh, yet he refused to allow it to distract him from the one thing he could do. And so he was with her, sharing her pain, diverting all of it that he could—little though that might have been against such an avalanche of agony. She was scarcely even aware of his presence, now. There was room for so little within the horror which had engulfed her, but still a tiny fragment of her knew he was there. Knew she was not totally alone, even here, even now. And as Trayn bared his teeth in a snarl of agony, still he held the shield he had thrown about her innermost being.
He felt the glowing knot of her life, her soul, like the fluttering of terrified wings against the palm of his hand. Death—and worse than death—was coming for it, and it knew it, yet even as extinction loomed, it blazed ever brighter and more brilliant, focused by the agony inflicted upon her body, consuming itself in her torment. It was that brightness, the final brightness of despair and anguish, that all of this was designed to create. To offer up to the waiting demon until it reached the crucial point and the demon reached out to it. Reached out and took it—consumed its bleeding shreds and sucked the last dim, glowing marrow from its bones as the monstrous evil extinguished not simply the life, but the very soul of its prey.
Trayn twisted, his own sounds those of a tormented animal, but still he held the shield. Still, he muted that brilliant glow. He felt the demon's waiting malevolence, its avid awareness of the feast promised to it, but he refused to yield. He would hold that shield as long as he lived, and until he died, the girl's soul would live, whatever happened to her body.
Cherdahn stepped back from the altar for a moment.
His victim's blood had soaked his vestments in a freshly consecrating flood, and his nostrils quivered with the delicious smell of spilt life and agony. He licked the thin blade of his flaying knife, and the taste was sweet, sweet. But even as its dark power flowed into him, he knew something was wrong.
The sacrifice had been perfect. A virgin, strong-minded enough to have retained her sanity even when her entire family had been butchered, yet old enough—and, perhaps even more importantly, imaginative enough—to appreciate her own fate, and young and strong enough to last even on Sharnâ 's altar. There could not have been a more delectable offering to one of the Scorpion's Greater Servants, and no one in Sharnâ 's service was more skilled than Cherdahn in rendering those offerings.
And yet, he couldn't feel the Servant reaching out to the tender delicacy shrieking upon the altar. He knew the agony had been sufficient, the despair deep enough, but still the Servant stood aloof, without so much as touching the sacrifice's soul. That had never happened to Cherdahn before, and uncertainty tried to chip holes in the dark priest's confidence. Was it possible that somehow, in some unknown fashion, Bahzell and Walsharno were responsible? They were champions of Tomanâk. Could they be managing, even from outside the sacred precincts of the sacrificial chamber, to interfere with the ritual? The very idea was preposterous, yet what else could it be?
He didn't know the answer to those questions, but in the back of his brain a dark worm of fear had begun to grow. In order to bind the Servant, he'd been forced to weaken the bonds Sharnâ 's will had fastened upon it when it was entrusted to Cherdahn's keeping. He'd locked additional restraints into place, tied into the life of the sacrifice, holding it until the instant of her death. That was an essential part of any binding, for a Servant had no loyalty. It hated—and desired—all mortal life, and its most fiery hatred was reserved for those who bound it to their service in the first place. It must be held by the constraints of the Scorpion's ritual until the moment in which it consumed the sacrifice's soul and, in that moment, locked the new binding upon it even as the sacrifice's death dissolved all earlier constraints.
There had been instances in which the ritual had been faulty. In which the sacrifice had died before its soul was consumed. When that happened, the consequences could well prove fatal for the Servant's summoner.
But that had never happened to him, Cherdahn reminded himself, and it would not happen here, either. He refused to let it happen, and his jaw tightened as he stepped back to the altar and bent to his task once more.
* * *
Rethak of Kontovar no longer looked quite so dapper. Sweat and the stink of fear tended to have that effect.
He pressed his back to the smooth stone of a passageway and cursed the architect who'd designed this complex warren of tu
nnels and corridors. The temple was at least twice the size it needed to have been, he thought viciously. Its size was no more than an exercise in egoism on Cherdahn's part, and any priest with half a brain would have kept it as small and inconspicuous as he could have, however good its concealment. But, no, not Cherdahn! He had to flaunt the power of his deity. Had to prove what a magnificent temple he could provide even here, in a land where the worship of Sharnâ was punishable by death for all concerned.
And even when its sheer size offered any invader too many possible avenues of advance. Rethak and Tremala were wizards—they'd been able to absorb the temple's twisting, twining design from a quick glance at its plan. Which meant they'd instantly recognized that there were at least six possible paths by which Bahzell, Wencit, and their allies might approach the sacrificial chamber. There was no way Bahzell and Wencit could know the temple's actual layout, but Bahzell was a champion of Tomanâk. He needed no diagrams. He could feel the concentration of evil he sought, could pick out a path to it with his eyes closed.
Still, even though there were at least half a dozen possibilities, they converged so that each of them passed through one of two narrow bottlenecks before they spread out once more. And because they did, he and Trelma had to defend both bottlenecks if they were to have any hope at all of stopping the invaders..
Which meant that one of them was going to find himself—or herself—face-to-face with Wencit of Rûm with no arcane allies in sight.