All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [256]
“Fiona!” Eliot shouted, and waved to her to join him.
Eliot and Robert and Mr. Welmann had cleared a patch of solid ground by the far wall.
Louis was there, too. He leaned against the wall, brooding as he watched the slaughter . . . or maybe he was bored; it was hard to tell.
Fiona ran to them. Sealiah and Jezebel trailed behind her.
“This is where we shall make our stand against the Droogan-dors,” Sealiah declared. She looked absolutely majestic, a queen defending the last of her land.
“Dad,” Fiona said. “Grab a sword—some weapon. Do something!”
Louis smiled. “I am using my deadliest weapon, daughter.” He tapped the side if his head. “I am thinking. As you should be if you care at all about your pretty head.”
“Form a circle about me,” Sealiah ordered. “I shall summon my power.”
“I don’t think so,” Fiona told Her Regalness. “We’re not going to be your body shields. Your strategy of brute force verse brute force hasn’t worked so great against Mephistopheles thus far. It’s probably not going to work now.”
The Queen gave Fiona a look that could have melted tungsten.
Fiona shrugged it off. If dirty looks, divine or diabolical, could have killed her, she would have been stone dead years ago from Audrey’s withering gazes.
One canon on the wall had been turned—it blasted down in the courtyard—and destroyed as many knights as shadow creatures.
Fiona cringed. “It’s like the battle of Ultima Thule,” she explained to the Queen. “Lots of inferior forces fighting a handful of superior ones—that’s you.” That last comment seemed to mollify Sealiah. “Only this time, there are too many opponents, and more coming every second.”
The answer of what to do came to Fiona. Not the how of it, but what had to be done.
“We’ve got to seal their tunnels.”
“They must have been digging through solid rock for days,” Jezebel said. “Started beyond our outer defenses at the river.”
“The entire plateau is riddled then,” Sealiah replied. “With our power diminished, they cannot be sealed in time.”
Eliot stepped forward. “I can do it, I think.” He touched Lady Dawn and the ground trembled.
Sealiah looked at her brother and ate him up with her savage eyes. “My Dux Bellorum.”
“An excellent idea.” Louis set a hand on Eliot’s shoulder. The smile on his face, however, dried up as he took a long look at the Lady Dawn guitar. “What have you done to my violin?” he said, horrified.
“Later—” Eliot shrugged off Louis’s touch. “And she’s mine now. You gave her to me, remember?”
Louis narrowed his eyes and continued to stare at the instrument, looking as if he’d been betrayed by it.
“Sure, you can collapse those tunnels,” Fiona whispered to Eliot, “but can you do it without bringing down the entire mesa and killing us, too?” Fiona had seen Eliot’s power unleashed firsthand: He’d leveled downtown Costa Esmeralda.
Eliot pursed his lips, thinking. “I just need to concentrate.”
She gave his arm a squeeze. This was prohibited by their mutually agreed on “never touch each other” rule, but surrounded, about to be overwhelmed by bloodthirsty shadows, in the middle of Hell—it seemed like the right thing.
Eliot gave her an awkward smile.
“Give him some room,” Sealiah commanded. “Let nothing distract him.”
They spread out to defend Eliot.
And he played.
At first, even though Eliot’s fingers strummed and the strings blurred, Fiona didn’t hear a thing over the clash of steel and shouts and roars in the courtyard . . . but she did feel something. It started in her toes, a tingle that traveled through the bones in her legs and into her stomach, and grew into a rumble that made her teeth buzz.
Dust rose into the air.
Three oversized wolves howled at the subsonic noise, whirled, and charged. Fiona braced and swung her chain. Robert picked up a lance. He moved closer, but not too close to her, and held the lance high.
Robert threw the lance; it struck and impaled one wolf.
Fiona cut another down—but the third bit into her arm.