Dark Vengeance (37 page)

Even before the rumblings and rolling stones had died away, the spellrobe was striding forward into their dust-shrouded midst, and starting to work the same spell again, to throw down the
next
mansion.

In shocked silence Taerune and the Dounlar warblades watched the lone spellrobe overthrow that mansion beyond the first one . . . and then the one behind that, too.

“Holy Olone preserve us,” Garlane Dounlar whispered. Beside him, Taerune nodded grimly. Talonnorn was being destroyed before their eyes, and she could see where the spellrobe
was heading: the Eventowers, the home of House Evendoom.
Her
home—and the source of that now earsplitting, one-note scream that went on and on . . .

Through that deafening shriek, she barely heard the battle cry that rose around her as the House Dounlar warblades and heirs waved their swords in the air, shouted, and then charged.

Orivon started to sprint after them, and Taerune ran like a scouring wind to catch up to him, to where she could put a hand into the crook of his arm. For a few racing breaths they ran together, hip to hip.

Then Taerune abruptly tripped in the rubble and fell, hauling Orivon down into a crashing fall with her. Together they plunged boots-first down a slope of heaped stone rubble.

When they slid to a coughing, dust-shrouded stop, it was in a hollow where an unmoving Nifl arm thrust up through the stones, reaching vainly for something it would never touch.

“Come,” Taerune hissed at the human beside her, rolling over. “We must be away from here!
Now!
”

Orivon blinked—her fall had been no stumble, but a ruse!—and then clambered on hands and knees, following her shapely backside. He clawed his way over a drift of broken stone and down its far side, to where there was bare stone under their boots, and they could run once more—not toward the spellrobe, but in the direction of riven House Oondaunt again.

Taerune started running hard, sunk in a crouch as if trying to avoid being seen from afar, so Orivon did the same. Yet even as he started to hunker, he couldn't resist a look back over his shoulder at the now-distant Dounlar Nifl.

Who were now only a few running strides away from that lone spellrobe's back.

Where something—a warding spell, by Thorar, or he'd spent no time watching Talonar Nifl living around him, all those years—flared at Klarandarr's back. As its glow brightened, Orivon saw the spellrobe whirl around to face the onrushing rampants of House Dounlar.

The Nifl wizard's hands moved in deft, intricate gestures—that
were over and done in less than a breath—and were suddenly cupping a welling, swirling cloud of black and gold, a roiling spell that looked deadly and somehow sickening to look upon—as it shot out from him into those snarling Dounlar faces.

And swept them away, the spellrobe's magic melting flesh from bone, so angry Nifl were no longer running toward him; he was suddenly being charged by many skeletons with swords in their hands.

They were barely a sword-length away, but faltering as their joints failed, when his magic, still at work on them, dashed them all to dust.

Staring, too aghast to swear, Orivon saw a score of swords and daggers, amid plumes of dust, clatter to the stones in front of the spellrobe.

Who calmly flexed his fingers, nodded as if in mild satisfaction, and turned back to blasting his way on through mansions of rising splendor and size, to the Eventowers.

 

The walls of the great cavern that housed Talonnorn bore many high ledges suitable for overlooking much of the great city—and whereas Exalted Daughter of the Ice Semmeira would have had to peer around herself in a long search to spot most of them, Maharla Evendoom, onetime Eldest of her House who would soon be Eldest again, knew them all.

She stood on the very best vantage point right now, gazing down at the tumult of fallen buildings. The destruction formed a line that had begun in the squalid, crowded heart of the Araed—no loss there—and was now proceeding, even as she watched, in a wide swath of ruin that stretched through streets of workhouses and warehouses and respectable shops . . . heading straight for the Eventowers.

Well,
that
would have to be stopped. This was doubtless the work of some cabal of ambitious House spellrobes, seeking to take advantage of Ouvahlor's feeble attack on Talonnorn to find
someone else to blame for their treasonous strike against House Evendoom.

Maharla stood for a moment with half-awakened magic swirling restlessly around her wrists—a moment in which another proud mansion collapsed with a faint, distant roar—and then hit upon the right spell to use.

The casting was intricate, but went flawlessly. As she smiled in satisfaction, a bright net spun away from her, arced high above Talonnorn, and then fell, settling gently over . . . the . . .

The spell was gone, taking her smile with it in an instant.

It had faded and failed in the face of shieldings stronger than any Maharla Evendoom had ever seen before.

Ever.

Including every Holiest of Olone, Eldest of any House, and House spellrobe.

Even the mighty ones of her youth, Aundram Maulstryke and Halovarr Raskshaula.

Frowning now, Maharla Evendoom sent a very different sort of spell to the place where another mansion had just collapsed amid clouds of rising dust. A silent, drifting shadow she could see out of, and so watch just who was down there reducing home after stone home of Talonnorn to rubble in mere moments . . .

“Olone
spew!
” she swore involuntarily, a moment later.
One
spellrobe was down there! Just one! She'd looked everywhere for signs that other, hidden spellcasters were at work, found nothing, then looked hard to see if the destroyer was using some sort of magic to harness the stored might of scepters and rings and other enchanted items.

He was not. She watched the destruction of a tall, sweeping-turreted home she'd always liked from beginning to end, from the stranger—and it
was
a stranger; she sent her shadow as close as she dared to look at his face, and found herself surveying nothing more familiar than calm confidence and hauteur—first looking at the building onward. He cast a spell she did not know, other than that it produced an emerald roiling that ate through stone with
melting ease. It sliced through the walls, and the thunderous collapse promptly followed, Nifl arms waving frantically from windows as their owners vainly sought to invoke Olone or awaken magic or just do
something
ere they died . . .

Then, of course, they died, amid rising dust, and the lone spellrobe strode calmly on over their broken bodies and the rubble burying them, to behold the next building in his way, and do the same things to it, all over again.

Such power!

To do that in the first place—and to have might enough to do it again and again, when he might face foes at any time! He had to be stopped . . . if he
could
be stopped.

She lacked spells enough, unless Holy Olone Herself reached out to crown Maharla Evendoom with a lot more power. Not that such a blessing was likely.

Maharla wriggled her shoulders experimentally, but felt nothing. Olone didn't seem moved to do what she did in legends, just now.

Which left the old, brutish ways. Warblades and their weapons, perhaps a spell cast by her on three of them, to get them to snatch up this spellrobe and rush him under a building he'd just caused to collapse . . .

A roiling was building in the air around the spellrobe now; his own magics, so tormenting the web of old spells that had smoothed and shaped the stones he was shattering, that a chaos of magic was forming a wave around him, and frothing in half-seen silence in his wake.

Yes, it would have to be swords now, not spells. Very few magics would be able to lance through
that.

If she wanted to save the Eventowers, she would have to cause those old, brutish ways to descend on the spellrobe soon.

Maharla shook her head, and then murmured the magic that would take her from the ledge back into the heart of her force of Ouvahlan stoneheads, and—

Was there.

Standing in a puddle of blood on a narrow street near the edge of Talonnorn, with soaring towers on either side and the rumblings of falling buildings faint in the distance. All around her were shouting, rushing Ouvahlans who were busily swording seemingly endless Talonar who came rushing at them out of doorways and alleys.

Dead Talonar were everywhere, and the stone underfoot was slick with blood, lots of blood. Yonder, Ouvahlans were coming out of doorways with wide smiles on their faces and plundered gem-sacks and golden coffers in their hands.

Maharla shook her head sourly; such undisciplined greed.

“Rampants of Ouvahlor,” she snapped, the belt around her hips sending her words hard and clear into their minds, “the Ever-Ice commands you to undertake a most sacred—and pressing—task: you are to head across the city in all haste, and slay the spellrobe gone mad! A lone Nifl who hurls down buildings with his spells! Destroy him!”

She called on the belt to send an image of the spellrobe as she remembered him, his face and then his figure from afar, arms moving in the shaping of spells, with a building falling before him, and the heaped rubble of many buildings in his wake, into the minds of her Ouvahlan warriors, so that—

Her link with their minds was gone, shattered in an instant along with her own mind-shieldings. They were falling away in dark tatters before the sheer power of a sharp, distant mind-voice that said:
Semmeira you are NOT! Who are you? Where is Semmeira, and what have you done to her?

Maharla Evendoom fought to thrust that probing voice away from her, to force it out of her head, to . . .

She found herself stumbling along the street, trembling and sweating, sudden exhaustion overwhelming all else.

She had done it.

She had forced them out, those Anointed of Coldheart, spurned them and turned them away . . .

The nearest Ouvahlan turned to her with cold anger in his
eyes and his sword coming up to menace her, and Maharla had to duck away. He came after her, striding purposefully, boots splashing in the puddled blood . . . and was joined by another Ouvahlan. And another, all of them seeking her with their swords, all of them—

“Olone provide!” Maharla Evendoom snarled, slapping away yet another Ouvahlan, as he turned. Her fingers brushed the bare skin of his neck for the briefest of instants—and she knew, thanks to the imperious mind-voice silently shouting in his mind, what was happening. Priestesses of the Ever-Ice were reaching out from distant Coldheart to magically goad the Ouvahlan to attack the false “Semmeira.”

Fear flared in Maharla Evendoom as another Ouvahlan turned to menace her, and then another.

In the end, she barely managed to teleport away in time.

 

Along a score of passages and linked caverns deep in the Wild Dark, gigantic dung-worms came rushing. Faster and faster, racing along through stone that was starting to shake around them.

Lesser creatures cowered, wondering if the Ghodal was rising at last.

Heedless and nigh-mindless, the dung-worms rushed on, converging on the great cavern of Talonnorn from all directions.

 

The forgefist and the Nilf-she ran on, ignoring the endless scream behind them, and the rumbling crashes that were almost drowning it out—crashes that were befalling almost constantly, now.

There were no gates to keep them out of House Oondaunt any longer, and no massed guard where the gates had been. They saw no living Nifl at all as they rushed toward the riven central keep.

The heart of House Oondaunt had been torn open from battlements to threshold, and lay spilled across the central courtyard
in a great flood of broken stone. Dead crones lay everywhere, some crushed in the fallen rubble, and some sprawled in their blood where they had been felled by Oondaunt servants and warblades spurred by hatred.

Orivon and Taerune rushed into the keep, and through lofty, ornate rooms that were for the most part deserted. A few guards appeared, from time to time as they ran on, and sought to bar passage to the one-armed Lady of Evendoom and the half-naked Hairy One who bore bared swords in both hands. Orivon and Taerune made swift work of them.

Taerune led the way deeper into the keep, and down a level, seeking pantries and kitchens. A step behind her, shaggy head peering this way and that in case someone came rushing out at them from behind, Orivon was almost dancing with worry that the shattering of the great keep had filled the ways down into the yeldeth caverns with stone, entombing the four he'd come to find, but Taerune dismissed that fear briskly.

“Yeldeth is
food
to us, Orivon,” she reminded him. “There will be many ways down, and not all of them from this building. If these are all blocked—and they won't be—we'll seek in yonder wall-tower, or that one, or—”

A guard burst out from behind a curtain then, trying to silence her forever with his sword. With a grunt of effort, before Orivon could reach past her, she parried that sword, and delivered a kick to the guard's chin that flung his head back—and let her drive home the blade that had replaced her left arm, through the gap where the bottom of his helm no longer met the top of his gorget.

His gore drenched her, but she merely laughed and led the way, dripping, on down the stairs.

Where they found death had preceded them, and there were no guards any longer. A dead Nifl who wore a belt of many keys was slumped against a metal-shod door, and Taerune and Orivon did not need to look at each other to announce in unison, “The cellars.”

The stairs beyond the door were darker and damper, all trace of elegance and adornment gone from the walls, and they descended into a heavy warmth that carried a smell they both knew was yeldeth.

“Soon,” Taerune promised—a moment before they reached the bottom of a stairs that opened into a little room, and found the way barred by a gate made of dark heavy metal and greenish Nifl bones.