by Ed Greenwood
"I'm running," he told her tersely, sprinting for the squat square building she'd pointed out.
Jaws and claws raked at his legs and ankles. Small blue bodies crunched underfoot, only to bounce upright again, seemingly unhurt. What were these things?
Then he was pounding up the stone steps, seeing cracks and green mold all over them, and names, or rather writing he hadn't time to read but that was spaced like names, lone names and paired names, and-
The great stone slab of roof was cracked right across, with smaller cracks radiating star-like out from that main wound as if a giant's fist had come down on the building. Yet right here, where he'd just skidded to a halt, the roof felt solid under his feet.
Which would have to do. He spun around, set Tantaerra down, and slashed with his sword across the top of the stair in perfect time to sweep the first yowling rank of dweomercats off the roof.
The second rank sprang, the blurred and rushing third right behind them. Tarram cursed and hacked at the roof around him like an enraged thresher trying to hammer a rat flat-and then the stair was suddenly empty of leaping blue-furred bodies.
They'd all turned to stream toward something else, down in the street. Something glowing and therefore magical, that the swarming press of their bodies now hid from view.
Something that had been thrown there by a man who was all too familiar-and who was now stalking up the stair.
Orivin Voyvik.
He was wearing a cruel little smile.
"I'd planned to spare you," he told Tantaerra, "but no longer."
He sprang, stabbing at her. The halfling frog-leaped aside, to land facing him in a crouch, her own daggers ready.
"I see you've finally learned to quit throwing away your weapons," she taunted.
Not all of the dweomercats had taken the bait. Across the roof, Tarram smarted under the raking claws and jaws of a dozen-some dweomercats, hacking ineffectually just to stay alive.
Voyvik sprang past Tantaerra, landing in a shoulder roll and coming up to his feet between them. The roof groaned-then suddenly, sickeningly, gave way, plunging Tarram and the vicious blue cats down into darkness below.
Tarram clawed desperately to catch hold of something-anything. At the last moment, his fingers finally found purchase, and he swung and swayed in the darkness, cats gnawing at his legs, the eyes of many more gleaming up at him from the room below.
Voyvik had flung himself at the stair to avoid going down with the roof, and landed on all fours on the stairhead. Now he launched himself at the halfling.
As Tarram struggled to climb back onto what was left of the crumbling roof, Tantaerra and the murderous Nirmathi fought.
Their dance was a flurry of frantic leaping, tumbling, and hacking, daggers against daggers. An agile slayer against a halfling a third his size, the roof cracking and sagging underfoot.
A fight that came to a sudden halt as Voyvik overbalanced in a leaning double-dagger slash. Tantaerra sprang over one of his arms to get inside his guard-and triumphantly stabbed Voyvik in the chest.
Only to have her blade scrape across the armor hidden beneath his shirt.
Voyvik shook his head and gave her a cold smile.
His return thrust was into her chest, right to the crossguards.
With a snarl, he lifted her up on his dagger, then flung her off the blood-drenched blade.
Spewing blood, Tantaerra Loroeva Klazra fell helplessly through the broken roof, into the darkness below.
Chapter Fourteen
Into the Tomb
Tantaerra had never hurt this much in all her life.
If she'd been human, she'd be dead already, drowned and choked on her own fountaining blood. Yet Tantaerra was small even for a halfling, so her heart wasn't quite where Voyvik thought it was.
Scant consolation, that, as she crashed helplessly down through a dry-rotten wooden lid and into the coffin beneath it, sobbing in helpless agony.
She landed on cold, hard bones amid spicy-smelling dust. One snapped under her, but the rest started to shift and heave, as she curled up and clutched her knees to her torn-open chest in an effort to keep from rupturing utterly.
The skeletal remains beneath Tantaerra shoved her aside as they rose up, spilling her onto a lot of small, hard, hissingly shifting things.
Ceramic vials, a heap of them, with rotten threads like a net of dark and seaweedy fingers among them. They'd been sewn onto a shroud or burial blanket laid over the skeleton, but whatever it had been was mere sighing black cobwebs now.
The skeleton rose and stretched a bony hand toward her.
Well, she was bleeding out anyway, so …
Fighting hard not to sneeze, Tantaerra grabbed the nearest vial, bit away the crumbling dry wax that sealed it, and spat the stopper aside.
Red agony. Her chest was a sucking storm of pain, a drain she swirled down and out. Above her, the skeleton swayed, stooping now to regard her with empty eye sockets as its bony arms reached for her.
Tantaerra poured the contents of the vial down her throat.
And tasted that lovely clear, minty tingling. It slid into her, healing, the pain fading …
Even as she gasped in satisfaction, skeletal fingers dug into her painfully, low on her uppermost flank and cruelly about the back of her neck, seeking to slide around to her throat.
Tantaerra hunched her head low to hamper any strangling attempt, jerked her body and arched it to try to shake the skeleton's grip on her, and kicked out hard. One of her feet struck a bony ankle, but the other found what she wanted: the thankfully still-solid inside wall of the coffin. Planting both feet against it, she wormed her way behind the ankle and shoved.
Fresh pain flared as her half-healed gutting opened anew. Yet few two-legged creatures on Golarion could have kept their balance against such a back-of-the-ankles shove. The skeleton swayed, arms flailing wildly, then toppled over backward, upflung feet kicking vials high as it crashed down out of sight, off the dais that held its coffin.
Amid the fountain of vials now tumbling in the air above Tantaerra was a still-handsome lacquered plaque. Writhing and moaning as she rolled across the now-vacated coffin, she had a seeming eternity to read its descending inscription.
Valorn the Prankster
Whose healing was matched by his humor.
He who saved so many could not save himself.
Then the plaque and all the vials crashed down on her in a bruising, bouncing rain. Tantaerra screamed and rolled, clutching to try to hold her ravaged innards together, aware of being covered in dark stickiness that was almost certainly her own blood. A lot of it.
She clawed up another vial, fought to bite it open, managed that with almost the last of her strength, drank again-and relaxed in the rapturous flow of cool-to-warm healing.
Something vast, dark, and heavy crashed down, obliterating the end of the coffin and shattering most of the potion vials in an ear-splitting instant. Whatever it was continued on, falling from the dais to slam down against the floor amid squalling, shrieking dweomercats.
A pointed piece of roof had fallen like a titan's dagger to destroy one end of the coffin, pinning Valorn's skeleton to the floor. All that could be seen were its bony arms clawing the air futilely, the great wedge of roof lying between them like a replacement coffin lid.
Tantaerra was hurled into the air, amid vials whole and broken. She crashed back down into what was left of the coffin, now a mess of vial shards and a thick, glowing, pulsing goo. Through this latter she slid helplessly, down one inner side of the coffin and up the other, getting a huge dollop of goo up her nose and down her throat during that slippery journey.
Tingling began within her, and the gloomy chamber around her went misty, dweomercat snarls fading to mere squeaks. The hollow clinks and rattles of the vials moving around her in the coffin were muted, and even the grating squeals of fingerbones on the coffin, as the skeleton scrabbled to climb back in, became brief and faint sounds.
What, by all the go
ds-?
The tingling was now a burning inside her. A warm rising pleasure, roiling through Tantaerra, making her very blood sing. Her body was stirring, arms and legs twitching, wordless song bursting out of her as she rose to stand, swaying like the skeleton had, reaching for she knew not what, but …
Tantaerra fought to concentrate, to govern her exulting, dancing body. She tried to bend and snatch up a handy vial, but her hands went right through it-ghostly, translucent hands that thrust through the solid sides of the coffin as if nothing was there.
The skeleton could still see her, and so could several springing, snarling dweomercats, but their raking bones and fangs went right through her …and Tantaerra's body went right through them. And through the vials, and the solid walls of the coffin, drifting wherever she thought about going.
Which in her initial startlement was through one side of the coffin to the floor of what was obviously a mausoleum.
She could see through herself as she thrashed about, trying to stand on a floor she was sinking through.
Up, she demanded fiercely, trying to shout but managing only gusty silence. Up.
And up she rose, drifting higher-but glowing now, too, as brightly as a good strong fire, flickering and writhing as she got higher.
And larger.
Tantaerra blinked down at herself. She was still a halfling-a ghostly halfling, her body like empty, glowing smoke-but she was now the biggest, tallest halfling she'd ever seen. Twice as tall as The Masked, and getting taller.
Though she could feel nothing at all, and apparently say nothing anyone could hear. Pouncing and leaping dweomercats sprang right through her, frightening and enraging their tail-switching, agitated fellows. They fled, first one or two and then all of them, rushing away as swiftly as they'd first swarmed into view when she and The Masked had arrived in overgrown Hurlandrun.
Tantaerra watched them go as she continued to ascend, growing more slowly now, up …up …and past the roof.
As her head and shoulders rose through the hole where the roof had collapsed, Tantaerra flung up one ghostly hand.
Through her phantom fingers she saw The Masked and Voyvik fighting, rolling around together on what little was left of the rooftop, punching each other, grappling and clawing. Barehanded, their knives gone, their faces twisted with effort and anger, snarling as they rolled over, saw her-and gaped in astonishment.
Tantaerra gave The Masked a wide and embarrassed grin, and a little wave-and was pleased to see that Tarram recovered from his surprise a moment earlier than Voyvik, and managed to land a good, hard punch to the crazed Nirmathi's throat, driving Voyvik into self-clutching agony.
She willed herself to join her partner, and drifted closer to the two entwined men.
Tarram tried to kick himself free and reach for her-but those kicks made small chunks of roof break free of the edge, right under him, to crash down on the spires and catafalques below. He had to catch at the roof edge frantically and cling with all his white-knuckled might to keep from plunging headfirst after them. Voyvik, still lost in pain, launched a feeble kick at The Masked's backside.
"No!" Tantaerra shrieked at Tarram in warning, but nothing at all came out of her mouth. The tingling became almost a buzzing, between her ears, and suddenly she was-
Halfway across the nearest overgrown street of ruined Hurlandrun, just like that. And about the height of four or five tall men above the ground, gaping down at dweomercats who looked just as astonished to see her as she felt, finding herself in midair above them.
Then, just as abruptly, she was somewhere else, somewhere dark and dank and enclosed in moldy stone, a room in a building whose floor was studded with mushrooms and rivulets of lazily running water.
A room that went from dark to an eerie rosy and then a bright, pulsing, lurid pink glow in a flaring instant-a glow Tantaerra realized with some horror was coming from herself.
Her still-translucent, floating, insubstantial self.
Abruptly she was outside again, still aglow, this time hard by a dark curve of stone that she recognized as the sturdier half of what was probably the Shattered Tomb. She tried to will herself around it to where she might be able to look down in and see its interior, and started to drift in that direction, but was snatched away again by the wayward magic roiling inside her-back to the mausoleum, but at the far and gloomy end of it from the riven coffin and the gap in the roof, where dweomercats were perched on catafalques looking toward the light.
Until they saw her: pulsing bright pink in midair not all that far from their noses, a ghostly and irritated halfling who suddenly swooped away from a swiping dweomercat claw, looked astonished as she raced upward again to hover in the air well out of reach of all unenergetic cat attacks …and started to grow fur.
Pink fur, of course.
Fur that even as she gazed at it and tried to wipe it away-with a hand that felt nothing and plunged right through her ghostly arm-burst into flames, flames that started pink but turned a deep, rich royal blue, fire that warmed her not in the slightest but scorched her newfound fur into acrid smoke that set her to sneezing as the world blinked around her again and left her high above Hurlandrun.
Not that she had time to get used to the view.
Even as she started to swoop and fly in loops in the air, just to see if she could, and the pink glow started to fade to feeble sputtering white, one last teleport took Tantaerra to just above the half-roofless mausoleum again, her current loop through the air almost becoming a spectacular collision with the roof.
Tantaerra groaned and shut her eyes, curling her arms around herself tightly, just trying to hold her wounds together, hoping this would end.
The glow was gone entirely now, and the fur was fading, taking its flames with it. Then Tantaerra struck something that sent her tumbling through the air like a child's ball-which meant she must be getting solid again!
She was falling now, not flying, that magical effect fled, and …
Crashing down into vials and slippery goo. She was back in the ruined coffin! There were unbroken vials under her as she kicked and flailed and slid, catching a glimpse of the healer's skeleton still struggling to lift the massive piece of roof it was trapped under.
At last she managed to claw herself up onto her hands and knees. At the far end of the crypt, a row of dweomercats stood gazing at her, all of them looking mightily impressed. Then they exploded into action, racing along coffins, trying to get at her.
Tantaerra clawed up a slimy handful of vials, bit one open, and tossed down its contents.
The taste was a little like spiced fruit, nothing she'd ever known before, and she was suddenly flying again.
She soared up out of the mausoleum, blinking in surprise-and out of the corner of one eye caught a glimpse of Voyvik in his brawl with Tarram.
She turned and swooped at him, in hopes of distracting him long enough for The Masked to take him down. Voyvik, however, had got a knife from somewhere, and was holding The Masked at bay, driving him back with vicious slashes. He turned as she swooped in, shrieking.
The gleaming blade came at her-and The Masked was there, tackling him, the knife gliding over her head.
She strained to turn in the air, kicking, and her left toe caught the mad Nirmathi in the ear and spun him around with a roar of startled pain.
Then she was past, tumbling in the air, curling up to bite at her next vial.
It slammed into her lower lip painfully, splitting it open. Tantaerra tasted blood, spat it out, and bit into the vial's seal.
The healing tingle, when it came, was still one of the most wonderful sensations she'd ever experienced. The pain in her gut faded, and she flew high into the air. She was whole again.
There was no way to know how long this flight would last. With the other potions already fading, it was past time to end this. Tantaerra turned in midair and hurled herself down at the mausoleum again.
On the roof below, Voyvik and Tarram were locked in a struggling clinch
, the Nirmathi's blade held well out to one side with the masked man's hand locked around the wrist that held it. They strained against each other, throwing themselves from side to side to try to overbalance each other. And then they toppled together, with spectacular slowness, into the mausoleum below.
Tantaerra swerved to arrow after them.
They smashed down atop the pinned skeleton of Valorn the Healer, shattering one of its arms. Voyvik ended up on the bottom and took the brunt of the fall, landing on his back amid riven shards of bone, as The Masked tumbled away.
The Nirmathi rolled slowly to his feet and came up staggering, bent over and clutching what were probably broken ribs.
Tantaerra stopped in front of him, floating. "My turn," she spat.
Voyvik ran.
Well now, Tantaerra thought with surprise. Inspiring that sort of fear was a pleasant change.
Then she saw his destination: Valorn's broken coffin, and the healing vials lying in it amid the goo. He scrambled up into it just as Tantaerra's power of flight faded, sending her to the ground in a bruising landing she could feel all over. She rolled, slammed into the dais that held the healer's coffin on high, and ended up with her feet up it and the back of her neck on the mausoleum floor, looking up.
It was the perfect position to watch from as The Masked leap down out of the darkness, from atop another raised coffin he'd scaled, and slammed into Voyvik's back, ramming the Nirmathi face-first against the stone sarcophagus.
It didn't yield, but Voyvik's face did.
The Masked gave him no time to recover, but hauled the Nirmathi up by the shoulders and threw him forward, across the top edge of the coffin. He dragged him back until his neck was on that stone lip-then leaped high and came down on it with both boots.
Voyvik's body bounced and spasmed, arms and legs flailing, then went still. His head lolled loosely, drooling blood, the eyes dark and unseeing.
The Masked turned away from what was left of Voyvik without another glance. "How many vials can you carry?" he asked Tantaerra.