The Last Protector (51 page)

"I think it's a moving stairway,” Jape said.

Nalia frowned as she reached the base of the unmoving stairs. “Shame it doesn't work."

Jape shrugged. “It's a hundred years old—"

"Shhh!” Scrornuck cupped his hands around his oddly shaped ears and strained to discern the source of a rustling sound. “Somebody's coming."

"Let's move,” Jape said, starting up the steps.

They had climbed some thirty feet when Scrornuck saw the first of many soldiers emerge from the lower level. “Duck!” he whispered, shoving Jape and Nalia down. “Maybe they won't see us.” A moment later a volley of arrows struck, clattering off the column and railings.

"So much for not being seen,” Jape said, holding his hands together and forming a small, intense ball of white light between them. Slowly, carefully, he set the light-ball on the step below his feet.
"Run!"
he commanded, and the three scrambled up the stairs. Exactly eight seconds later the fireball exploded, making the column sway drunkenly and destroying a good ten feet of the stairway. “That should slow them up a bit."

"And how are we supposed to get down?” Nalia demanded.

"Mister Saughblade will think of something."

After circling the support column several more times, the stair climbed into a round, airy room some sixty feet across, lit by sunlight streaming in through arched windows. To their left, along the windows, another stairway continued upward, apparently to the tower's roof. A steel track emerged from an opening beneath that stairway, running halfway around the outside of the room before plunging into another opening in the floor—and on that track sat a jet-black, nine-car roller coaster, waiting for its first run. Scrornuck grinned. “I know how we're getting down."

Jape shook his head. “No, thanks—I'd be puking the whole way.” He pointed to the stairs leading upward. “Come on, we're almost there."

The final stair led to a rooftop deck offering a spectacular view of the Castle's towers and the desert beyond. Though bright sun shone over its surroundings, the rooftop itself was in twilight, illuminated only by a flickering purple light. Jape raised his hands and inspected his rings. One glowed an intense blue, while the other pulsated slowly between deep violet and brilliant, electric white.

Reluctantly, Scrornuck looked up at the Orb. The sickly purple bladder, easily twenty feet across, sat atop a crude wooden scaffold some fifteen feet high. Its surface squirmed, its center flashed with energy, and the fluid within swirled, carrying tiny black flakes that made it look like an insane snow-globe. He again saw what looked like a fish, several feet long, watching him with glowing orange eyes. As it flipped its tail and disappeared, he felt a slight prickling of his fingertips and heard a faint sizzling. Thing still hates me, he thought.

As Jape and Nalia climbed the steep, flimsy steps at the far corner of the scaffold to perform their controlled experiments, Scrornuck turned his attention to their surroundings. Eight gargoyles, each a ten-foot-high head of Spafu, faced outward, and a stout railing filled the space between the leering dragons. He stepped atop the railing to make sure nobody was hiding. From there, he inspected the slender flying buttresses running down from the gargoyles to eight smaller towers. Straining his enhanced vision to its limits, he saw that each buttress sprang from its tower just above a narrow walkway, right next to a small metal service door.

A bell rang, shrill and insistent. Drawing his sword, Scrornuck sprinted down the stairs just in time to see a dozen or more heavily armed soldiers burst through a door labeled
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND.
One irritated pike-carrier stabbed his weapon upward, ripping the bell from the wall as the leader of the troops doffed her black helmet and smiled at Scrornuck. “Hello, Dizzer."

His jaw dropped. “You should be dead..."

"I could say the same about you, demon,” the Captain replied, most certainly alive despite many bruises and burns. “It seems we're both rather hard to kill."

How did she—? In perfect clarity, the scene came back to him:

The soldiers squirmed and doubled over as the subsonic undertones of Scrornuck's “incantation” churned their guts. He finished the second chorus and crashed to the floor. As he pulled Nalia closer, he got a glimpse of the Captain staggering behind the support pillar, upchucking violently. Then Jape said the final word and brilliant white light surrounded them.

"I'd like to thank you for saving my life,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

"You're welcome, bitch."

She stepped forward, inspecting him with a mixture of awe and disgust. “I see you've stopped pretending to be human. May I ask just what kind of abomination you are?"

"The kind that eats lizards for breakfast.” Very slowly, keeping his eyes locked with the Captain's, he started backing up the stairs. This is bad, he thought—there were at least twenty soldiers in the room, with more stepping from the emergency exit every second.

"Blasphemer! You shall pay for this..."

"Yeah, yeah, going to try skinning me again?"

"In fact, I've been practicing.” The Captain followed slowly, careful to stay just beyond Ol’ Red's reach. “So have my helpers.” With a flourish, two of the soldiers removed their helmets, and Scrornuck saw they were Servants of Spafu that he'd beaten up in Taupeaquaah. “I believe you've met?"

"Where's your pal Ferinianne?” Scrornuck spat. “Still trying to blow his nose?” He backpedaled further, reaching the rooftop deck. Where's Jape, he wondered, risking a glance over his shoulder. As he expected, the Ranger and Nalia were on top of the rickety scaffold, engrossed in their examination of the Orb. As he took another step back, he looked closely and realized that the scaffold was little more than a pile of shipping pallets. Maybe, if he could signal Jape and Nalia to come down, he could collapse the whole bloody thing, including that damned Orb, onto his enemies...

A sour-sounding horn suddenly blew, the crowd of soldiers parted, and a black-robed, black-masked man marched up between them. The Captain bowed and escorted the imposing figure to the top of the steps.

"So this is Lord Draggott?” Scrornuck said disdainfully.

Ignoring Scrornuck, the black-clad warlord looked up to Jape and called, “Good morning, James. We are pleased to meet you again."

"Pleased to meet you, too,” Jape said, hurriedly heading for the scaffold's stairs.

Draggott's voice was whiny, wheezy, somehow familiar. “When you set off on that wild goose chase to the south, we feared we would not have the opportunity to—"

He stopped in mid-sentence and stood unmoving. An instant later, Jape, frozen in mid-step, toppled over the edge of the scaffold. “Shit,” Scrornuck whispered, sprinting a few steps to catch the falling Ranger. As he carried Jape away from the scaffold and set him down in a safe place, Scrornuck saw that the Captain and her soldiers were also silent and still. He strained his ears and heard nothing—the sounds of battle in the courtyard had ceased.

"Shit, shit,
shit, shit, SHIT!"
he shouted, knowing what he would see when he looked up at Nalia. She stood by the Orb, oblivious to the world, her arms buried in its electric-purple glow, as tendrils of energy caressed her shoulders, back and head. Crap, I'm just a dumb sword-swinger! he thought, I'm supposed to kill dragons and fight off armies, not figure out what to do with a mind reader and a—a—whatever that bloody thing is!

Forcing himself to breathe slowly and calmly, he recalled Jape's plans to conduct “controlled experiments” with the Orb. The top of this tower, surrounded by a hostile army, hardly seemed “controlled.” Jape hadn't told Scrornuck what he intended to do once Nalia was in contact with the Orb, and now he was in no position to say anything.

Think this through, Scrornuck told himself, overriding the instincts that screamed at him to pull her out. At least thirty soldiers blocked the only way down, but if he could capture Draggott and the Captain while they were still in a trance, he'd gain the upper hand. Well, he thought, the last two times Nalia touched that thing, it didn't seem to hurt her. She could wait a few minutes. Pulling the last red bandanna from his boot, he bound the Captain's hands tightly behind her back and looked around for something he could use to tie up Draggott.

A loud, electric crackling suddenly filled the air, followed by creaks and pops as the unsteady scaffold shifted. Scrornuck looked at Nalia and froze—a storm of purple lightning surrounded her as the Orb ponderously inched closer, and he realized that in a few seconds the thing would ingest her completely.

"Shee-ee-
yit!!
” he cried, “Don't I ever get a break?” Propping himself against the stair railing at what he hoped would be the right angle, recalling how he'd learned never, never,
never
to attempt an angled jump, he triggered the boots. He soared over the scaffold, cracking his knee painfully on its corner, as tendrils of purple-white lightning shot from the Orb's surface to meet him. Gasping for breath, muscles jerking and cramping from the jolts of energy, he collided with Nalia and struggled to hold on. In a cloud of smoke and violet sparks, they rolled and slid over the edge of the scaffold.

He struggled to get the boots beneath him before he hit the floor, and Nalia landed hard on top of him, knocking the wind from his lungs. Well, it's a landing, he thought. Slowly, he rolled out from under Nalia's unconscious form, and got to his feet. He reeked of smoke, and when he leaned against the scaffold to catch his breath, the scorched shoulder-guard of his jacket crumbled into ash. Sighing, he slit the jacket's laces with one of his claws and tossed the charred garment aside.

As he carried Nalia over to the spot where he'd left Jape, he heard some soft, confused grunts. Great, he thought, just great. The Captain's soldiers were waking up. He slapped Jape a couple times, but the Ranger remained unconscious.
Gotta get out of here.
He glanced over the rooftop's edge, at the small service door atop the tower at the far end of the flying buttress. As much as he disliked the idea, this appeared to be the only escape route.

The Captain shook her head groggily, got a look at Scrornuck, Jape and Nalia, and shouted, “Seize them!” As the first few bleary-eyed soldiers advanced, she irritably added, “And somebody untie me!"

Scrornuck put a shoulder against the heap of pallets that made up the scaffold's stair, and pushed with all his strength. With a satisfying crash, the stair toppled, sending the soldiers scrambling. A moment later, the whole scaffold creaked and popped as its far corner sagged and the Orb shifted. The Captain barked orders, and the groggy soldiers struggled to shore up the scaffold before the whole unsteady structure collapsed.

Throwing Jape and Nalia over his shoulders, Scrornuck muttered a prayer for good balance and stepped onto the flying buttress. The thing swayed and wobbled under his weight, and he realized it was purely decorative, just a cable covered in foam and stucco. He staggered as his foot broke through the thin crust and sank several inches into the soft plastic. Shit, he thought, Dad didn't raise me to be a tightrope walker.

"Yurgh
...” Hands dug into Scrornuck's back as Jape awoke. “What? How?"

"Same as always—Nalia touched that balloon and you all played living statues. Only this time the bloody thing tried to swallow her."

"It can move?"

"Yeah” Scrornuck concentrated on keeping his balance and stepping gently so as not to break through the
faux
stonework's flimsy crust. “Thing had her about halfway in when I grabbed her.” He felt a vibration in the cable. “Are they following us?"

"Afraid so,” Jape said.

"How many?"

"At least a dozen."

"Shit. Are they gaining on us?"

"Yes—they're crawling on all fours."

"Bloody hell.” Scrornuck attempted to pick up the pace, and the buttress responded by quivering more violently. “We're going to have to fight them. I need my arm free—can you hang on?"

"I think so."

"Okay, one, two, three...” Scrornuck bent his knees, dropped slightly and pulled Jape's backside forward. Jape slid up over his shoulder and ended up face-to-face with Scrornuck, arms around his neck and legs wrapped firmly around his waist. It was still an awkward position, with one passenger clinging to his chest and another out cold and thrown over his shoulder, but at least he had his sword arm free. Fake stone crumbled beneath his feet as he drew Ol’ Red and delicately turned to face the soldiers. “All right,” he muttered, “let's dance!"

And then the fake-stone beneath his feet gave way completely. His leg dropped, the cable bounced to his left, and he fell to his right in a shower of plaster chunks and powdered plastic foam. Desperately, he squeezed Ol’ Red's grip. The fibersword's blade sprang out in two pieces, the inner a fat rope that slashed through the remaining fake stone and wrapped itself firmly around the cable, the outer doubling back and forming a fine network of fibers around his forearm, reaching back to his elbow, wrapping around the root of the bony spike.

"Hang on!” he yelled, and with a jolt that felt like it would tear his shoulder from its socket, the sword caught. Scrornuck swung wildly below the crumbling buttress, his right arm clutching Nalia against his shoulder as Jape clung to his neck and waist. His closest pursuers screamed as they lost their purchase and fell to the stone floor far below. The buttress bounced again as waves shot down the cable, sending two more soldiers falling. Chunks of disintegrating fake-stone pummeled Scrornuck as he struggled to hold on. Thin trickles of blood dribbled from the places where the sword's fibers cut into his skin. Nalia regained consciousness and screamed.

"I see you're awake!” Scrornuck shouted. “Jape, can you hang on to her?"

"I think so...” Wrapping his right arm more tightly around Scrornuck's neck, Jape grabbed hold of Nalia's waist with his left. “Got her!"

"What's going on?” Nalia wailed.

"Tell you later! For now just hang on!” Scrornuck realized he was talking as much to himself as to Nalia.