The Inquisitives [4] The Darkwood Mask (46 page)

Crossing Fates
Wir, the 11th of Sypheros, 998 YK

T
he air rippled above the yellow liquid as it spilled out onto the floor in a frightening deluge. Soneste’s idea had worked, but in effecting it Tallis might have doomed himself. She lost all sight of him through the rippling air and the chaos of the ghoulish horde. Her stomach lurched as she imagined the Karrn swallowed by the burning tide.

“Aegis, get back up the stairs!” she shouted.

The warforged had kept the undead from gaining the higher ground, but he’d paid a heavy price for it. The polished metal plating was scored all across his body. Half of the slavering creatures had been hewn down by his blade or knocked aside by his thick shield, but to keep them down he’d had to remain at the bottom of the stairs.

“What in Khyber?” she heard Halix shout. She looked up.

The liquid glass flowed across the ground, destroying everything in its path as easily as volcanic lava. The bugbear Rhazan, stuck fast to the ground by Tallis’s trick, had been unable to move in the sleightest. He let out an agonized wail as the glass burned away the lower half of his body. The rest of him caught fire.

Soneste prayed that Tallis was not suffering the same fate. All she could hear was the monstrous scream.

The burning yellow liquid spread out across the factory floor, engulfing the legs of the ghoulish crowd. The creatures shrieked and cavorted in a parody of pain, but Soneste couldn’t tell if it was from real agony or some unnatural semblance of self-preservation. They were already dead—but the molten glass was destroying them.

All of them.

Aegis wasn’t fast enough. Still under assault from the ghouls, he’d stepped back up to the lowest stair, but the hateful creatures pulled back at him. The heated liquid washed over his feet. His head swiveled back and forth in astonishment as he watched the wooden components of his legs burn away. The stone liquefied, the metal became white-hot.

“Mistress!” The warforged panicked, dropping the gore-spattered sword and reaching wildly with his hands to find the railing behind him. “Soneste! Please … help …”

“Aegis, no!” she cried.

Soneste and Halix both stepped down and tried to pull him up, but the metal plating of his arms became unbearably hot in mere seconds. They fell away, skin blistered from the contact. Halix cursed and pulled Soneste up, lifting her bodily away from the dying warforged.

The molten pool rose no higher. It had spread itself out as far as it could, a wide radius forty feet or more around the ruptured vat. The undead creatures had become blackened, human-shaped lumps. They were still burning, their bodies glistening with slowly-cooling glass.

At the base of the stairs, Aegis lay still, the lower half of his body ruined.

Soneste was weary, spent. As much as she wanted to weep for Aegis, she couldn’t. Yet enduring anger coursed through her limbs as she thought about the cost of Lord Charoth’s deeds. The bastard was just behind them in his office. She’d make certain he paid.

The air thinned somewhat as the molten glass began to cool. It had become viscous but was far from being solid again.

There, hanging mere feet above the yellow pool, was Tallis. With two hands he clung to one of his floating metal rods. The Karrn looked exhausted, his skin slicked with sweat and blood and his clothes scorched by the heat.

“Tallis!” she shouted to him.

He coughed, gasping for air, and looked over his shoulder at Soneste. He looked down at the cooling but still deadly mass of heated glass.

“It was … a great plan!” he said hoarsely and offered a weary smile.

Then he deactivated his magic rod and dropped. A shock of fear stabbed through her at the sight, but when he hit the ground he started moving immediately. The glass had become thick, almost gummy, but she could see it was eating away at his boots.

Tallis reached the edge of the pool and jumped to the unmarred floor of the factory room. He looked down with something like regret at his boots—the remaining strips of leather barely clung to his legs. The Karrn shook his head, scooped up his hooked hammer from where it lay safely outside of the glass pool, and worked his way around the glass pool.

Climbing atop portions of machinery, he finally reached the metal stairs and vaulted the railing. Tallis’s face was reddened from the heat, his black hair gray from the fumes.

“Aegis,” she said.

Tallis looked sadly to the the valiant warforged and nodded grimly then touched her briefly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

He looked to Prince Halix. The young man’s eyes brightened with anger. They were all of the same mind. “Let’s finish this.”

Tallis smashed away portions of the glass door that his first strike against it hadn’t cleared, only to discover that Charoth’s invisible barrier was gone entirely. Thank the Host, she cheered. The magic had run out.

Appropriately, the office resembled a wizard’s laboratory. It was spacious and well-furnished with an arcanist’s equipment, but Soneste’s attention was fixed firmly upon Charoth and his allies. The nimblewright, standing still behind the wizard, sprang into motion.

“Borina!” Halix shouted, moving forward as he looked to the glass table and the young woman bound to it.

“Enemies
first,”
Tallis said, grabbing the prince’s shoulder, then pointed to the woman in black robes. “Now spread out!” The Karrn dashed to the right, intent on the wizard himself.

The nimblewright produced its remaining rapier-blade and advanced on Soneste. Her heart hammered in her chest. She feared this elemental construct more than anything. By rights, it had already killed her once.

She raised her rapier fast enough to parry its first attack, but two strikes sent her sword spinning out of her hand and across the room.

Aureon, not again.…

“Kill
Tallis,”
the black-robed priestess commanded.

Without a sound, the nimblewright sprinted away from Soneste. Relief for herself and fear for the Karrn gave way as she and Prince Halix faced the priestess together.

Soneste’s first thought was that Lady Mova looked like a wise woman, a grandmother with eccentric taste in clothing, but her eyes were cold, entirely bereft of humor or compassion.

“Death for you, dear,” the old woman spat, holding up a curving dagger that glowed with a poisonous light.

She rattled a bracelet of bones and swept her arms outward as if she were conjuring a shield. A thick layer of frost appeared on Mova’s skin and clothing, then fell away to form a cloud of tiny ice crystals in the air around her. As Soneste and Halix closed in, the inquisitive could see their breaths puffing in the air.

Soneste drew out her own dagger. Halix himself was distracted—his eyes returning again and again to his vulnerable sister and her prison of glass—but he kept pace with Soneste.

Lady Mova raised a hand in the air and spoke a twisted, undecipherable phrase. Soneste knew very little about true scriptural prayers to any god, but the old woman’s words felt offensive to her very soul. A ray of crackling black energy coursed from her fingertips and struck Halix in the chest.

The prince gasped for breath as if all air had been expelled from his lungs in an instant. He clutched at his chest and fell hard to his knees, his sword clanging to the ground. His body slackened. Mova wasn’t going to kill Halix, Soneste realized. From what the prince had said earlier, he was probably supposed to be Mova’s prize just as Borina was Charoth’s. She needed the prince intact for her own purposes, and young Halix was no match for her magic.

You won’t harm another soul, Soneste promised the woman silently.

Soneste rushed willingly into the aureole of freezing crystals that encircled the priestess, hoping Mova would be no match for her physically. She focused her mind as she closed in, as fast as she could, drawing on the last reserves of her psychic power. Quick as a thought, she recalled the last few seconds in her mind: Mova uttering a prayer of her bloody faith and smiting Halix with its power. Grasping the memory fragment with mental fingers, Soneste flung the vision into Mova’s own mind.

Soneste prayed to Aureon that the priestess could not use the same spell again—a severe risk.

The memory took hold. Lady Mova readied her blade for Soneste then stopped. Her eyes were wild, alarmed, as she raised her hand in the air against her will and spoke the same foul prayer she had only seconds before. This time there was no spell unleashed as she pointed her fingers at Halix.

With her defenses lowered, she was not prepared for Soneste.

The cloud of freezing air hit Soneste like a storm of ice,
chilling her to the core, but she pushed through and plunged the sharp Riedran crysteel into Mova’s body. The old woman’s breastbone resisted then split as the last vestiges of Soneste’s psionic power surged through the blade.

Tallis wanted to bring Charoth down, wanted to hurt the wizard again and again for Lenrik’s death, but the nimblewright had appeared before him to meet his challenge instead.

He steeled his rage and struck first, denting the nimblewright’s armored forearm.

Charoth’s incanting voice rolled across the room as he issued another spell from his defensible position behind the table. At once, the nimblewright’s body appeared to flicker. Tallis reversed his weapon then struck again. The pick’s head slashed harmlessly through the metal body as if it were mere illusion.

“No!” Tallis screamed, exasperated.

His world divided into a series of long, desperate moments, and he was forced fully on the defensive. His efforts were in vain. To have come so far, to find the very man behind all this pain, and to fail. Tallis was once again at the Ebonspire, helpless to stop the killer. Only
he
was the victim.

Well, why not? he despaired. Lenrik, I tried.

The nimblewright’s blade broke through his slowing defenses once, then twice. The rapier would have cut through his stomach, were it not for the bracer’s invisible armor. How long could he last?

Shivering from the hideous cold, Soneste stepped away from the old woman’s body. Lady Mova—priestess, murderess, Seeker of the Blood—writhed on the stone floor, her lips mouthing a meaningless litany.

Soneste turned away, hoping she could do something for Halix.
He slumped on the ground looking as helpless as his sister. Soneste’s teeth chattered uncontrollably as she tried to say his name, to offer him some comfort as her mind inventoried her resources.

Her eyes were drawn to the desperate battle between Tallis and the nimblewright. Crippled by its missing hand, the construct was effectively outmatched, but the Karrn’s every strike passed through its body without effect. This was obviously the same magic that had allowed it to enter the Ebonspire and exit again without a trace.

Her hand trembled as she reached to her haversack and she pulled out the ivory wand. “Take this,” Tallis had said. “Verdax said there are only three charges left, so use it sparingly.”

According to Tallis, this very wand—empowered to strip away magic effects—had been used to dispel the alarm wards at the Ebonspire, allowing him to enter undetected. Soneste herself had used it to extract the truth from the changeling Gan. It was only fitting that she use it here, at the end.