Liar's Island: A Novel (31 page)

“I do not recognize that god,” Lais said, nodding at the statue. “Do you, Dhyana? What would a statue of one of our gods be doing down here in a chamber the Arclords made, anyway? It doesn't make any sense.”

The scepter's eyes rolled again, this time toward the statue.

The statue blinked its eyes, smiled with its tusked mouth, and began to stand up, stone dust sifting down.

“Golem!” Rodrick shouted, and pointed Hrym, throwing up an ice wall between the statue and themselves. “Get the scepter, quick!” Lais darted forward without hesitation and Rodrick thought better of his suggestion. “No, wait, what if it's a trap—”

Lais grabbed the scepter with no apparent ill effects, but she gave Rodrick a considering look before darting up the stairs, Dhyana after her.

The ice surrounding the golem cracked under a massive blow from the other side, and Rodrick yelped and backed up the stairs. “A wall, another wall, a
thicker
wall,” he said, and Hrym complied, sealing off the back half of the room behind a barrier of ice. The golem pounded on the ice with monstrous thuds. “How can it be strong enough to break your ice?” Rodrick said.

“It doesn't feel pain, and it won't stop hitting until it shatters itself into dust.” Hrym said. “Those are very bad qualities in an enemy!”

They hurried upstairs, where Lais and Dhyana stood holding the scepter, looking around the room wide-eyed and scowling, respectively. Grimschaw was gone, the shackles in ruins, the gag on the bench. “You didn't shove the gag in deep enough,” Dhyana said. “She must have spat it out and worked some spell to free herself.”

“I doubt she went far,” Rodrick said. “Not without the scepter.” He nodded toward Lais, who held the scepter, its eyes still rolling wildly. “We'll keep our eyes open, but we should go. If we can get back to Niswan—”

“But you left Niswan in such a hurry.” Nagesh's voice came from the shadows, smooth and amused. “You're so eager to go back?”

“Oh, this is wonderful,” Rodrick said.

“Nice of you to leave a wall of ice standing in the jungle to mark your location,” Nagesh said. A swift arrow flew from the shadows and splashed when it struck Dhyana, the garuda howling as her feathers smoked—he'd conjured or hurled some sort of weapon made of acid.

Nagesh's voice came from another place in the darkness; either he was moving around, or he knew a trick for throwing his voice. “I don't know how you set these slaves of the Arclords upon me, but their attack, combined with your fog, served to spoil the conclave. Those not dead have fled. Vasaghati's cultists are seldom bold fighters, and their skills leave a great deal to be desired when it comes to working together. But
I
am here, still. And I am
enough
.”

“We have the Scepter of the Arclords!” Dhyana shouted, and Rodrick groaned. Always thinking in straight lines, never keeping anything back. Admirable qualities, in a way, but badly misplaced now. “Leave this place, or we'll use it against you!”

“Oh
really
,” Nagesh said. Rodrick still couldn't pin down where his voice came from. “How very interesting. That scepter would be a fine prize.”

“You will never use it to further the goals of Vasaghati!” Dhyana cried.

“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Of course. My goddess. To be perfectly honest, and since none of my fellow cultists are here, I must admit that I'm less interested in the Lady of Knives than I am in
myself
. I'd make a better god than she would, anyway, though it does amuse me to rot out
her
cult from within, and turn it into my own. But listen to me—I've given too many speeches today, and clearly I've gotten into the habit. You were going to use the scepter against me, weren't you? Well, go ahead. I'm curious to see what it does.”

Reading garuda features was difficult, but Rodrick thought Dhyana was annoyed. He was annoyed, too. It was fine to bluff, but it was always better to have some idea what you'd do if your bluff was
called
.

Dhyana tried to brazen it out, stepping forward with the staff held aloft—and then gasped as a blindingly white bolt of lightning cracked out from the darkness and struck her, knocking her into the stone benches and onto the floor, where she shuddered and trembled.

The scepter, dropped when she fell, rolled away along the canted floor—more than the floor's slight slant could account for, especially with that elaborate ornamental head, which should have kept it from rolling at all. Was it moving
itself
? Rodrick supposed he shouldn't be surprised. Its eyes moved, so why not the rest of it?

“Decisions, decisions,” Nagesh said. “Should I kill you with acid and lightning from the shadows, or enjoy the earthier pleasures of biting you to death?”

Enough. Rodrick started swinging Hrym, firing sprays of ice into all the shadowed corners of the room, and was rewarded with a curse from one corner. “Get the staff!” Rodrick cried.

“Already done,” Nagesh said, suddenly visible in the light of a toadlike fire elemental who burst into luminescence beside him. At a glance from the snake-headed rakshasa, the elemental swelled into a ten-foot-high giant, like the volcano from Hrym's mindscape made into a man.

The rakshasa had an ice-encrusted arm where Hrym's magic had struck, but his other hand held up the scepter, its eyes staring directly at Rodrick.

Rodrick ignored Nagesh for the moment and focused on the fire elemental, sending spiraling clouds of snow and spears of ice at it, buffeting the thing back. Dhyana tried to take flight, but stumbled to her knees, then looked around blankly before falling forward on her beak, apparently still disoriented from the lightning strike. Lais rushed to her, murmuring and trying to rouse her. Rodrick couldn't spare them his concern. He pushed forward, driving back the elemental step by step.

The rakshasa didn't seem to pay any of them any mind. “Perhaps I
should
try to catch the goddess's attention,” Nagesh said, holding up the scepter and looking at it admiringly. “I'm sure she knows what this thing does. Maybe I can convince her to let me be the one to do it. Mmm. Or perhaps I could change my appearance, pretend to be Nex himself, returned at last, to take my rightful throne again…”

Then the rakshasa stumbled, dropped the staff, and fell forward. Rodrick was busy trying to drive back the elemental, and could only spare glances, but he saw Grimschaw on the rakshasa's back. She was wearing some kind of fist weapon—spiky brass knuckles, more or less—that glowed with crackling magical energy every time she punched Nagesh in the back of the head. One blow should have filled his brain with holes, but based on Rodrick's own experience with Nagesh, she was probably doing little more than combing his hair. Still, if Nagesh was paying attention to Grimschaw, he
wasn't
paying attention to Rodrick.

The elemental diminished in size, its limbs turning to steam and smoke, as it succumbed to Hrym's onslaught. Good. Once it was extinguished, Rodrick could turn his attention to freezing Grimschaw and Nagesh both—

She ran past him, to where the scepter had rolled—it seemed almost to be trying to return to its hidey-hole. He glanced at Nagesh, who tried to push himself up on his hands and knees but then slumped back down, tongue flickering out weakly. One or two of Grimschaw's punches must have done actual damage. The wizard snatched up the staff and turned on Rodrick, holding the artifact aloft. “I have it! The Scepter of the Arclords is mine! And unlike you fools,
I
was told how to use it!”

Something boomed and cracked from the direction of the huge statue. Rodrick spared a glance in that direction—the elemental was the size of a small dog now, and shrinking fast, but if he left it alone it could flare back to full size—and saw the stone golem emerged from the hole, plodding along implacably. It must have smashed its way through the wall of ice. Things
did
keep finding ways to get worse, didn't they?

The golem didn't pay any attention to Rodrick. It only looked at Grimschaw, wielder of the scepter. “No!” she shouted, turning to face it. “No, the Arclords sent me, I'm
supposed
to take it!”

The golem hurled its stone axe at Grimschaw. She lifted the scepter and opened her mouth, but whatever she was going to do, or say, or cast, she didn't have the chance. The axe struck her head with a sound like … well, like an axe burying itself in someone's head. It was a sound Rodrick had, unfortunately, heard before.

Then the golem just stood there. Rodrick looked at the scepter, which had fallen from Grimschaw's grasp and was rolling across the chamber again, back toward its pit. Definitely moving under its own power. Apparently the guardian didn't much care about anyone else's presence, as long as no one touched the scepter. When the staff rolled past it, the golem turned and began to follow it back toward the vault.

The scepter was Rodrick's only chance at real freedom. He didn't know much about golems, but he knew they were largely immune to magical spells, and clearly it was strong enough that Hrym's ice couldn't contain it for long.

But Hrym was a
sword
. He was many other things, too. But he was definitely also a sword.

Rodrick ran toward the golem, raised Hrym high, and swung at the golem's head.

The magical blade, which he'd seen cut stone pillars in two, just bounced off.

The golem turned toward him, raising its weapons. Rodrick fell back on what basic sword fighting knowledge he had. He'd learned a lot of flashy flourishes, things that looked impressive, but knew very little when it came to actually defeating an enemy, and he barely parried the golem's strike with its short sword. Fortunately, the stone blade sheared right off when Hrym struck it—at least the golem's weapons weren't impossibly durable. Rodrick remembered one move, a sort of spinning curtsy with blade extended, which in theory could hamstring a man …

He made a very pretty pirouette, ducked low, and swung, but the sword just bounced off the golem's legs with a clang. The thing kept coming, hefting its remaining weapons, as implacable as a flow of lava or an avalanche.

Rodrick had to dance away, parrying bows that came slowly, but with enough force to make his arms go numb under the impact. This was a not a sword fight he was going to win, and if Nagesh got his wits about him and decided to bite Rodrick on the back of the head …

Hrym sighed heavily and began to gush forth torrents of ice. The golem was, alas, not blown backward the way a person would have been, but as the ice built up around it, the creature's legs slowed. “Hrym, it's shattered two walls of ice, this won't work!”

“This time, I'm not giving it room to move!”

As the golem lifted its arms, the ice climbed its body, holding its limbs in place, layers of ice piling up thicker and thicker to hold it there. Rodrick backed away, giving Hrym more space to pile on layers, until he stood before an immense boulder of bluish-white ice, with a barely visible gray smudge of golem at the center.

“I don't think that will hold forever,” Rodrick said. “The thing will get out eventually.

“Then let's run away
very promptly
,” Hrym said.

“What if it keeps coming after us, to get the scepter?” Rodrick said.

“Golems are not famed for their investigative skills,” Hrym said. “I doubt it'll be able to track us down.”

“There could be, I don't know, some magical link between the golem and the scepter…”

“Were you planning to keep the thing?” Hrym said.

“Of course not!” The scepter was a means to an end. One animated magical weapon was more than enough for Rodrick.

“Then even if the golem
does
pursue, which it will do at a typically slow golem's pace, it won't be our problem when it arrives, will it?”

Rodrick relaxed. “You make a good point.” He looked toward the secret room, and Lais was there, bending to pick up the scepter before it could roll down the stairs. “We fought for this,” she said, sounding tired. “We may as well keep it.” Rodrick nodded, and looked toward Dhyana, who was sitting up, clearly shaken but alive.

He turned to spray Nagesh with ice, to at least slow
him
down, too—but the rakshasa was gone. Rodrick groaned. Defeating
both
his enemies, Grimschaw and the rakshasa, was clearly too much to hope for. Maybe the wicked advisor would be eaten by an immense lizard in the jungle. There was always hope.

“We should get away,” Rodrick said. “Even if the golem doesn't get loose, there might still be Knife in the Dark nearby. Or even more of Grimschaw's crew.” He didn't look too long at her corpse. She'd hated him, and to be fair, he'd given her reason. The fact that she was an objectively terrible person didn't change the fact that he'd tried to cheat her, and that deception had led her on a winding path to the moment of her death. He didn't usually feel bad about cheating people,
especially
when they were terrible people, but Lais and Dhyana's upright company, and the bad example of the Knife in the Dark, made him more than usually sensitive to his own moral failings.

“Where do we go now?” Lais said, sounding immensely weary. “My master is dead. I have no home anymore.”

“I think,” Rodrick said, “that we should go to Niswan, and as fast as we possibly can.”

“To get the Scepter of the Arclords to safety?” Dhyana said.

“Partly that,” Rodrick said. “And partly so I can face justice.”

“Wait a minute,” Hrym said. “So you can do
what
?”

24

The Audacity of Truth

The escape from the temple was uneventful, with no further attacks from Nagesh. Maybe he'd fled. A lizard-thing much bigger than a horse crouched in the Knife in the Dark's plaza, feasting on corpses with such devotion that it paid the living no mind at all as they crept past in the dark. They tore a cloak from the body of a fallen servant of the Arclords on the far side of the temple and wrapped the scepter inside it, mostly to stop the sense that the rolling eyes were gazing at them.