Before I’d even decided to, my arm shot out and plunged the dagger into the thing’s head.
Would a normal blade have worked? Probably not. That one did. It still held a residue of powerful magic. Awful magic. It pierced the thing’s skull as if it were an eggshell, and the creature fell from the wall to land behind me, dead. That was the good news. The bad news was that one of its tentacles brushed my hand. It was the briefest of contacts, but my whole arm went numb for a moment, and I lost the dagger. At least I was alive.
We reached the bottom of the stairs and high-tailed it toward the double doors, which stood some twenty yards away. The blood doll’s light had gone out by then. It didn’t matter. We were almost free. Besides the one I’d slain, there were no shadow creatures on our side of the hall that I could see.
I had forgotten the mother of all bad dreams above us.
A tentacle as wide around as a Borian pony slammed down in front of us, cutting off our route to the double doors. It could just as easily have crushed us. I guess it liked to play with its food. Holgren, just ahead of me, skidded to a halt and backed up, muttering and gesturing. I doubted whatever he was preparing would be any more effective against this thing than his previous attempts to kill the raiders.
I looked up at it. It looked down at us. With a voice like wind whistling among tombstones, it giggled.
“What’s so damn funny?” I shouted. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it.”
“Amra—” Holgren muttered. I ignored him. Holgren wasn’t much for bravado, but sometimes, it had its uses.
The tentacle coiled around the two of us, drawing tighter, threatening but not yet touching. That awful giggling continued all the while.
“Be prepared to make light,” I murmured to Holgren. “Some bright light.”
You ask me what I find amusing, little one? I was Sent to snare a goddess and instead find an alley rat and a hedge mage. Is that not amusing?
“Not particularly, no.”
I am amused, though the master will not be. Your skulls will make fine wombs for my beautiful children.
“Out of curiosity, how does that work, that skull-womb process?”
It’s quite simple, actually. I bite your heads off and eat them. You won’t die though. Not immediately. My babies need a host still able to experience torment, you see.
“I do see. Thank you for clearing that up. I’ve got one more question if you don’t mind. What blind excuse of a cross between a giant squid and a spider would have the poor taste to impregnate you? Judging by the stupidity and sheer ugliness of your children—”
With a snap, its tongue retreated into its mouth, and it lunged.
“Now, Holgren!” I screamed. I closed my eyes and waited for those silvery teeth to descend and rip my head off. I had gambled our lives on the fact that these were creatures of shadow. The spell that Holgren cast wasn’t deadly. It was in fact one of the simplest spells I’d ever seen him perform. The power he invested it with, however, was awesome.
Light blossomed from his fingertips and engulfed the fiend’s head, but to call it simply light is to say a sea contains a little water. It was as if a heatless sun had sprung from his outstretched hand. Closing my eyes just wasn’t enough. I threw my arm over my face, and still, my eyes pained me.
The mother of monsters wasn’t giggling any more. She was shrieking. The light began to fade, and I risked a squinting glance up. She was pulling herself back out of the hall, her long, vicious head no longer visible, hidden behind the brilliance of Holgren’s spell. I couldn’t look at her directly.
I looked down at the floor around us and saw with satisfaction several black, shriveled husks, tentacles now only wavering piles of ash. The little ones had been more susceptible to the light.
“How long will the spell last?” I asked, surveying the damage.
“Not much longer. Hurry.” His voice was strained.
We bolted toward the doors. His spell was already fading. The hall had begun to groan and tremble. The mother of shadows was going to tear the place apart.
I spared a glance back. I immediately wished I hadn’t. She was thrashing through the opening above, ripping stonework away in her haste and fury. She made no sound now except for the violence of her passage. Ichor dripped from the great, black orbs that were her eyes.
We reached the doors and pushed for all we were worth. Each door was massive and made of black basalt. We groaned, sweated, cursed. Nothing, nothing—and finally, mercifully, movement. The door had moved enough for us to slip out. I grabbed Holgren’s arm and yanked him through. Beyond was a cavernous darkness.
“Let’s go.” I started off.
“Wait,” he said. “Help me close the door.”
“No time. Let’s move.”
“I’m going to set a Binding. It’s worth the delay.”
“I hope you’re right.”
We shoved the door closed, and he worked a quiet magic. Time stretched. Impatience is hardly the word for what I felt, but railing at him would only break his concentration.
“It’s done,” he finally whispered. “It will buy us more time.”
I didn't waste time on words. I started running. My eyes were not adjusted to the dark after Holgren’s light show, but it was a huge hallway. Our footsteps and our panting echoed back from the matte black walls. It was mercifully free of obstacles, but still, one or the other of us would stumble. Holgren created another light, but it was a puny thing. I suppose it was all he could muster.
If the Sending caught us this time, we were worse than dead. And she was coming. She pounded out her fury on those doors, booming, shuddering blows that made the very air tremble. I found an extra bit of speed.
Time is impossible to measure when you’re running in abject terror. The booming grew fainter after a time, until it was barely audible over our gasps. For a fractured moment, I began to think it possible the doors might hold indefinitely. Then, Holgren abused me of the notion.
“The binding weakens,” he panted. “Faster, Amra.” I went faster.
We didn’t get much further before the doors gave. When they collapsed, her shriek echoed down the passageway before her, a chilling howl that voiced her triumph and our doom. I felt it as much as heard it, and my imagination tormented me with images of the monster and her progeny coming for us, swarming over the rubble of those giant slabs to hunt us down.
The most maddening thing was the silence. She said nothing more after that one shriek, and shadows make no sound when they move. I spared a glance back and saw a boiling darkness rushing down the tunnel toward us. It overtook Holgren and me before we’d gone three more paces, and when it did, it became near pitch black. Holgren’s magelight cast no more illumination than a glowing ember.
“Just keep running,” he gasped. Holgren had pulled ahead of me with those lanky legs of his, so it was him that smacked into the wall at the end of the passage. I heard the meaty thud of his body connecting with solid stone in time to pull up before I repeated his performance.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He grunted. And I took that as a yes. I began to run my hands along the wall, praying there was a door. If not, we were finished, and the Flame had a very odd and distinctly unfunny sense of humor.
At first, I felt only stone, and panic washed over me anew. Had we missed a door or a passageway in our headlong flight? Then, my fingers brushed past stone into an opening. I explored it with blind hands and found it big enough for two abreast.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
I helped Holgren to his feet and pulled him after me through the opening. The Sending at least would not be able to fit through though her children would. She would have to tear open a hole big enough for her monstrous bulk. That would take time.
I was barely a pace in when my foot encountered a step. Up, thankfully. If the stairs had led down, we would have taken a tumble and broken our necks in the dark.
&nb
sp; I hauled Holgren up the steps, holding him by the waist and guiding him. He seemed dazed by the run-in with the wall. His light had disappeared completely.
“Faster,” I urged him. “We have to go faster.”
I smelled it first—that algae-ridden, vaguely fishy smell that large bodies of water tint the nearby air with. We were close to an exit and fresh water.
We were near an exit. Hope flared briefly, then died down. If it was still night, we were probably still doomed whether we made it outside or not. Daylight was our only hope.
The stairs went up and up. I could hear them, now, behind us, the faint skittering of claws on stone. I spared a glance back but of course could see nothing. I looked up—merciful gods. High above us, made small by distance, stood the faint outline of a doorway.
Fear is a powerful motivation. Fear mixed with hope becomes a grand sort of magic. I thought I had given my all before. Now, even hindered by a groggy Holgren, I fairly flew up the stairs. There was light beyond that door.
Two hundred yards or more separated us from escape. I couldn't be sure how much distance separated us from the Shadow King’s creatures, but that gap was shrinking by the second. I kept my eyes on the approaching exit and did not look back again. Gray dawn filtered through the doorway, and as we approached, it illuminated our steps. I was already going as fast as I could, but the simple fact that I could see where I placed my feet was a relief. We narrowed the distance, second by second, step by step.
I could hear them swarming up the stairs now, and it was only with an act of will that I kept from looking back the way we’d come. Either we’d make it or we wouldn’t. I refused to waste any time looking back.
“Come on, partner. Not far now. Hurry. Please hurry, Holgren.” He did his staggering best. I could hear the wind on the water above now. I could also hear our pursuers scrambling up the steps, near enough to hit with a cast dagger if I still had one.
My head was just level with the top of the stairs when the first tentacle wrapped itself around my boot heel and sent me sprawling. Instinctively, I kicked out and connected with nothing. Another wrapped itself around my leg and a third. I tried to pull myself up the stairs but was yanked back.
“Go!” I screamed at Holgren. He stood there a few steps above me, dazed confusion showing on his face. He didn’t move. I felt a burning indignation for him at that—that he was going to die because he’d addled his brains running blindly into a wall. What an idiotic way to go.
And then the sun rose over the horizon, and the first glorious shafts of golden light found their way into the stairwell. The tentacles that trapped me fell away. A putrid, burning stench flooded the stairwell. I was free.
I gained my feet, grabbed Holgren’s hand, and stumbled out to gaze on the most beautiful sunrise I’d ever laid eyes on.
Chapter Seven
The first thing I saw on exiting was the sun rising over a distant line of low, brown mountains. Even without the added spice of a sudden reprieve from death, it would have been a beautiful sight. As it was, tears welled up at the sheer grandeur of it. I wiped them away with the back of a hand.
We stood on a stone ledge about five feet wide and twenty long. Both the landing and the stair’s exit were hewn from the face of a cliff whose rough, gray bulk rose thirty feet or more above us and twenty down. The landing ended in sets of stairs down on either end.
In front of and below us, the rays of the rising sun gilded the rippling waters of a vast lake. It stretched on for several miles to the east and was perhaps a mile wide from north to south at its narrowest point.
I helped Holgren to a sitting position against the cliff face. The blow he’d taken to the head worried me. They could be dangerous. I should know, having practically made a career of them.
“Holgren. Stay awake now. You need to stay awake.”
“All right,” he said, eyes squinted shut. I pried open one lid and then the other and checked the size of his pupils. Sometimes, with a bad head injury, differently sized pupils meant serious damage. Or so I had been told. Holgren’s seemed to be fine. He pushed my hand away from his face and put his own hands over his eyes.
“Don’t go to sleep, partner.”
“I won’t. I can’t. I’m in too much pain.”
“Good. I’m going to take a look around. Don’t wander off.”
“Ha,” he said in a pained voice. If he was feeling up to even weak sarcasm, I assumed he would be all right. I gave his shoulder a brief squeeze and got up to see what I could.
I found an ancient stone quay at the base of the stairs, crumbling and algae-slick. There were no boats of course. I looked to the right and left, hoping for some sort of path to shore. All I found was cliff wall for a hundred yards in either direction, slime-coated near the waterline. To the left, where the cliff curled away and diminished, jumbled rocks met the shoreline. To the right, the cliff fell away even more. A marshy area filled with waxy reeds stretched off for an uncertain distance beyond it. No telling where the marsh ended and solid ground began.
I supposed it would be possible to swim to either side, but there was a fundamental problem with the idea. I’d never learned how to swim. Even if I’d wanted to, there had been no one to teach me.
I had spent much of my childhood in Hardside, a seaside slum just outside Bellarius proper. Most working men there were fishermen. To my knowledge, there isn’t a fisherman or sailor alive on the Dragonsea who knows how to swim. Better a quick death by drowning, it is reasoned, than a slow one which will almost certainly end in having your legs ripped off by one or more of the gray urdus or the pheckla that infest those waters. They don’t call it the Dragonsea for nothing. So. Swimming. Not one of my many skills.
I sighed, scratched my head, and climbed the stairs again to consult with my partner. I tried not to think about what fate held in store for us after night fell, but it was impossible not to. Be it the shadow raiders or the mother of nightmares and her children, we would be overtaken in short order and then—I remembered that hideous talking chest cavity of the shadow raider and the agonized faces on the torso of the spidery shadow fiend. I felt despair begin to creep over me.
“One thing at a time,” I whispered and took long, deep breaths. The first order of business would be getting off this cliff and onto solid ground. After that, whatever happened, happened. Maybe Holgren would be able to think of something.
I climbed back up the stairs and sat down next to him. He had moved back to lean against the cliff face. One hand shaded his eyes; the other picked at a ragged edge of his cloak. Cloak—I had lost mine somewhere, some when. Which meant I’d lost the gems that had been sewn into the hem as well. An inane thought bubbled up to the surface of my mind, and I laughed out loud.
“I could use a little humor too,” Holgren grated.
“It’s nothing. Just a stupid thought, not really funny at all.”
“Share it with me anyway.”
“I’ve lost the Duke’s gems. We’ll have to call the whole adventure off. You know I don’t work without pay.”
He smiled. “You call what you do working?”
I grabbed his hand and squeezed. Strained and stilted as it was, it was good to banter with him. When I tried to pull my hand away, he held on to it more tightly.
“Amra,” he began, but I cut him off.
“I know, Holgren. But I make it a practice never to become involved with business associates.”
“Don’t joke, woman. This is difficult for me. And I may not get the chance to say it again.”
“Holgren—”
“No. Let me say what I have to say.” He shifted, sighed, and proceeded not to say anything. I knew him well enough to know he was organizing his words just so. There was no point trying to rush him.
I studied his face and realized for the first time—allowed myself to realize for the first time—how truly beautiful he was. Not handsome. Handsome is a matter of looks and dress. Lanky, scarecro
w Holgren might be considered good-looking by some, but handsome was a stretch. But he was beautiful in ways I could hardly find words for. I was vaguely aware that it had something to do with the way he moved his hands, the way he smelled, the emphasis he would invariably put on certain words, and a thousand other things. It scared me to death, that realization. I waited for him to speak with a strange mixture of terror and anticipation.
“I don’t know if you remember,” he said, voice low and serious, “but last year, I lent you twenty marks—”
I punched him dead in the ribs.
“Ow! All right, all right! Mercy, Amra,” he cried, managing both to smile and grimace as he hugged his ribs.
“You bastard,” I growled.
“Do I have to say it?” he asked.
I just glared at him.
“Very well. I’ll say it. I love you.”
A dozen things to say occurred to me ranging from sarcastic to syrupy. I settled on kissing him.
I wouldn’t say I was comfortable with my body. I have an endless list of complaints. No one had ever mistaken me for a raving beauty, nor would they ever. A boy, yes—and I’ve exploited that fact on numerous occasions when it served me.
I suppose that would have been the perfect time, there on that ledge with the sun rising and the water lapping and a gentle breeze and all. The odds of our ever getting a second chance to make love were worse than slim. But I wasn’t ready. I just wasn’t, and the truth was I didn’t know if I’d ever be.
When I pulled away from him, more abruptly than I meant to, he seemed to sense something of that. He reached out gentle fingers, and I guided them to my lips, kissed them.
“It’s all right, Amra. Whatever comes, it’s all right.”
Thief Who Spat in Luck's Good Eye Page 10