Clearwater Dawn (44 page)

Morghan managed to fall back toward tall shelves at the closest corridor, protecting him from the first volley of arrows. Scúrhand took to the air to twist away from the knot of blades that erupted around him. As he sailed toward Morghan, he heard Ectauth’s voice.

“Kill them both!”

“Call it,” Scúrhand shouted.

Morghan appraised the mass of figures circling, another volley of arrows hissing past as he pressed back.

“Run,” he said.

Long minutes and longer strides took them out and down the narrow course of a winding stair, then into the shadow of uncounted corridors beyond. By an instinct Scúrhand couldn’t name but was grateful for, Morghan lost their pursuit faster than he had any right to hope for. From shadow to darkness to shadow again, they ran blind through a maze of stairs and corridors where Ectauth’s forces were already exploring ahead of them.

More than once, they tripped across patrols with no warning, the soldiers of the black boar left incapacitated by Scúrhand’s spellcraft. The guards came by pairs, mostly. A squad of six once, but where the mage came up short against them, Morghan’s sword was a blur of red and grey that made up the difference. No quarter given, the warrior slipping into the well-honed reactions of a lifetime at the blade.

Scúrhand was slower than the warrior, but Morghan kept himself and his armor between the mage and pursuit. He had lost track of the turns they’d taken, empty and crumbling chambers flashing past to both sides, when he had to signal Morghan to stop. In a five-way staggered intersection, he fought to slow his breathing. Morghan stepped far enough away to listen for any sign of pursuit, but there was only silence above and behind them.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” the mage whispered. Morghan shook his head. “Just checking.”

“Traffic through here, though,” the warrior said. He bent low to the floor, traced the dust with one hand, Scúrhand trying in vain to read the faint tracks there. All around them, pale light glowed from the frames of arched doorways, intact here. Marking off the deadly traps of Razeen’s workrooms and archives that Scúrhand would have struck any bargain to peer into under other circumstances.

“Where do you think…” the mage began, but then Morghan was on him, one hand pushing him to the wall while the longsword came up in the other. Scúrhand registered the footsteps racing toward them only an instant before he saw motion in the dark intersection, five figures on top of them. Morghan’s blade slashed out even as Scúrhand stumbled back.

He felt the moment stretch, blind in the near-darkness that crippled his ability to target his magic with any accuracy. However, he knew better than to raise a light. Morghan was at his best in the shadows, able to pick out his targets with an uncanny ease. Scúrhand heard strangled cries, caught the movement of blood-dark steel in the half-light as five bodies fell.

“Light,” the warrior hissed. Scúrhand set his dagger’s lightning to life as he pressed back, the storm glow illuminating the landing and the stairs around them. Four Norgyr guards were beyond any aid he could give them, Morghan taking no chances in close quarters. The fifth figure was still moving, however, trying to crawl back into the retreating shadows. Morghan was there first, lifting the body as if it weighed nothing, slamming it back to the wall with a force that stunned it, head lolling forward as the figure went limp in his grasp.

“Blood and moons…”

It was the girl. Thiri. Scúrhand saw the gash where Morghan’s blade had cut her leg almost to the bone. He noted the pool of blood spreading, the pallor of her face where the red hair framed it. Then he glanced to Morghan, followed his gaze to the girl’s shoulder, and realized that it wasn’t the recognition of the young mage that had inspired the warrior’s look of absolute shock.

Even before they had stumbled out through Eltolitinus’s ruined gates and given thanks to sky above and ground below for their lives, Scúrhand recognized a darkness lurking in Morghan that hadn’t been there when they’d parted a year before on the Norgyr frontier. He had gone east then, Morghan catching up to him as promised by the time winter turned. But in that lost year, something had happened to the warrior.

When they met up in Yewnyr, the great Free City, Morghan had carried only the clothes he wore and an ivory-hafted shortsword Scúrhand didn’t recognize. The wealth and the weapons the warrior had spent the previous year amassing were gone, and there was a darkness in him, threading through spirit and body alike, that the mage had never seen before. On the road to Myrnan, he had loaned Morghan what he could for broadsword and mail without complaint. When the warrior had paid him back tenfold after the dungeons of Eltolitinus, he no longer needed the money but he knew better than to argue.

Only once, in the month of recovery from what Eltolitinus had done to them, had he asked what had happened to Morghan in that year. The warrior’s stony silence had convinced him of the wisdom of not asking again.

There had been a moment within the ruins. Morghan was dressing a neck wound after a particularly brutal skirmish with Eltolitinus’s undead hordes. Scúrhand had seen the mark. A narrow sequence of three interlocking loops, barbed like links of spiked chain. It was set in black ink at the warrior’s shoulder, tattooed with a precision that suggested whoever had done it meant it to last. Now, where Thiri’s shoulder had been bared by her tunic bunched in Morghan’s fist, Scúrhand saw the same tight knot of jagged line on her pale skin.

In the ruins of Myrnan, close to the breaking point already, Morghan had drawn steel against the mage when he caught Scúrhand’s gaze on the black mark, seemingly ready to kill. He spoke of it much later, only to apologize. Never an explanation.

From behind and far off came faint footfalls. Scúrhand willed the dagger’s illumination away, startled suddenly to find Morghan’s bloody hand at his wrist, squeezing with a strength that the mage had seen break bones.

“Light…”

In the warrior’s voice, Scúrhand heard a need he didn’t recognize. In the pulsing gleam that the dagger’s lightning conjured again, Morghan was on his knees. His sword was cast to the side as he pulled out his own dagger, laid the girl gently to the floor. He checked her breathing as he cut the legging away to fully expose the wound beneath. A deep gash, dangerously close to the fast blood.

Morghan motioned to Scúrhand for his waterskin, flushed the wound and hacked an edge from Thiri’s cloak to bind it. He motioned again, Scúrhand digging within his cloak, pulling free a carefully packed glass vial. A healing draught within it, gleaming pale blue with its own light. The mage thought to remind Morghan that the two of them might have better need for it later, but he said nothing as the warrior slipped the vial to the girl’s lips, checked her suddenly even breathing, her eyes still closed, face ashen.

Scúrhand wasn’t watching, focused only on the footsteps getting closer.

“She’ll have aid soon enough,” he whispered. “Or we could take her. They might ransom…”

“No.” Morghan’s voice had a dangerously dark edge as he grabbed up his sword and stood, appraising the girl’s unconscious form. He pointed down the passageway in the direction that Thiri been running. “Move,” he said.

As they pounded along endless corridors of black stone and dark stairs, Scúrhand lost track of time, lost track of where the noise of pursuit was coming from. He was already gasping air, Morghan barely breathing hard. They hit more patrols twice, Scúrhand taking them out with routine spellcraft, leaving the Norgyr warriors to slumber or to wander befuddled, stripping their armor and weapons off as they went.

Against a foe set for the fight, the more subtle spellcraft was often the best offense, Scúrhand had discovered long ago. As he always did when the stakes were high, he felt the call of the eldritch power in him. The darker energy of his blood, the birthright of the names he bore. Waiting always for its chance to be unleashed, but he was content to hold it back for now. It was more than a hunch that told him he’d be needing it later.

Ahead, there was sudden darkness. They skidded to a stop where the corridor seemed to disappear into empty space.

“Light,” Morghan whispered. Scúrhand obliged.

At the end of the finished passageways they had passed through, a space of raw stone opened up. A blister of shadow, a rough-edged rock dome rising where the floor suddenly fell away. It was cold there, Scúrhand feeling it in the air, in the stone at his feet. Across a space of perhaps a dozen strides, a narrow stone bridge arced into shadow, open space to both sides.

Far below them, a pool of black water faintly caught the light of Scúrhand’s blade and the gleam of lamps where Ectauth’s force was spreading on the opposite side, shifting into defensive positions along a wide terrace.

There were footsteps behind them, growing louder. Scúrhand glanced ahead and back as Morghan stepped up.

“Call it,” the mage said.

“We fight here, we’re closed in. We break for the bridge fast enough, we have a chance.”

“Of course.”

With a snarling cry that he could only hope sounded like battle-ready rage, Scúrhand soared out across the stone arch, Morghan one stride behind him. The first hail of arrows hit like black rain, Scúrhand summoning up the dweomer that sent each dark-barbed shaft splintering off into empty space. Morghan ran the rough stone of the arch at a speed that made the mage’s stomach turn, the warrior already shouting tactical directives for when they hit the other side. Scúrhand only dimly registered them, all his focus directed to protecting them and hoping that Morghan could avoid looking down to the dark water below.

Ectauth hit them just past the halfway point, as Scúrhand knew he would. He had sought out the silver-armored battlecaster in the ranks, but there was no sign of him where he must have been holding back behind the protective cordon of archers and shield fighters. The flare of spellforce exploded in the darkness of the chasm nonetheless, smashing into him and Morghan both like a hammer blow.

He heard the rending of steel, saw the warrior’s longsword sundered. It was a dweomered blade with the strength of ancient magic, Ectauth’s spellcraft as strong as Scúrhand had feared. The warrior’s armor and shield, the mage’s black cloak all flared as they were scoured with eldritch energy, but were spared. Morghan cursed as he hurled the broken hilt-end of his blade toward a well-armored axe-fighter leaping to the attack, its jagged edge punching through the figure’s neck to unleash a fountain of blood.

Scúrhand touched down along the rough stone ledge that fronted the terrace, breaking hard right behind Morghan exactly as the warrior had called it, heading straight for the thickest bulwark of defenders where they massed behind pillars some dozen strides away. Ectauth missed them completely with his second attack, sending the full fury of his arcane blood slamming down into the ledge behind them. Scúrhand felt a moment’s elation that they were clear, the battlecaster caught off guard by their suicidal charge. No chance to hit them again as they closed with the dark-cloaked Norgyr forces.

Then he heard the grinding of stone twist through the echo of the eldritch blast, and the rough ledge beneath his feet gave way. Ectauth had hit behind them on purpose, had judged the relative weakness of the ledge where it had been carved from the rough face of the chamber. The bridge cracked and split behind it, cutting off escape. Nowhere to run.

Scúrhand found himself admiring the battlecaster’s tactic as the floor ahead of them cracked cleanly and detached. He hoped he’d stay alive to use it himself some day.

Morghan stumbled as the floor disappeared, his feet churning empty air as he fell. Then he felt hands on his shoulders, Scúrhand swooping in beneath him, cape spread like black wings in the shadow. There was a lurch as the mage fought to hold him against the pull of gravity, then they were rising clumsily, the collapsing bridge shunted off into endless shadow below them.

Ectauth hit them dead center with a pulse of spellfire as they climbed. The shattered landing was almost within reach, Morghan feeling a blast of heat and light swallow them both, Scúrhand taking the brunt of it as he screamed. A razor-point of pain erupted where the mage’s hands gripped beneath Morghan’s shoulders, the copper ring burning as it swallowed eldritch flame.

Then those hands slipped. The warrior twisted in midair, grabbed at Scúrhand’s smoldering form as they both fell. All around was motion and shadow, the black pool circling far below at the edge of vision, no time to react, no time to think.

Morghan felt for a second’s desperate instinct, obeyed it without question even as the thought flitted through his mind that Scúrhand would have no doubt pointed out the futility of his actions if he’d been conscious. Through an endless moment of falling, he pulled the cloak from the mage’s shoulder, managed to force most of one arm into the sleeve as he willed the dweomer there to fly with all his will.

It didn’t work. Not enough to send them skyward again at any rate, though Morghan somehow managed to slow their frenzied flight. He felt a lurch as they twisted and shot sideways, felt them slowing even as the water rushed up at them.

There was a moment of crushing impact, then a second of numbing cold. There was a darkness that Morghan fought hard, but it took him anyway in the end.

When he awoke, he was sprawled on cold stone, no light to betray any detail of place or position. The fact that he was soaked to the skin was the only reason he didn’t wonder idly if he was dead, the ice water of the black pool still clinging to him. He felt the pain in his side that told him he’d broken ribs, senses reeling as he fought to stay awake. He gave vague thanks to fate that his limbs were whole as he rolled to sitting, then began the slow shifting through the blackness to find Scúrhand’s motionless body where it lay three strides away.