Amber and Iron - Margaret Weis [4]
It wasn’t.
Feverishly Krell placed all the pieces on the khas board. Two were missing, one of which was the khas piece containing the soul of Ariakan; the khas piece that Chemosh had ordered Krell to guard with his undead life.
The death knight broke into a chill sweat, not an easy thing to do when one has no shivering flesh, palpitating heart, or clenching bowels. Krell fell to his knees. He peered under the table and groped about with his hands. The knight piece was not there; neither was the kender.
“The monk!” Krell snarled.
Spurred on by the vivid image of what Chemosh would do to him if he lost the khas piece containing the soul of Lord Ariakan, Krell set off in pursuit.
He didn’t expect this to take long. The monk was broken—both in bones and in spirit. He could barely walk, much less run.
Krell left the tower, where they’d been having such a comfortable, friendly game until the monk ruined it, and entered the keep’s central courtyard. He saw immediately that the monk had an ally—Zeboim, the Goddess of the Sea. At the sight of Krell, storm clouds gathered thick in the sky and a sizzling bolt of lightning struck the tower he’d just left.
Krell was not one of the world’s great intellectual thinkers, but he did have occasional flashes of desperate brilliance.
“Don’t you lay a hand on me, you Sea Bitch, you,” Krell bellowed. “Your monk stole the wrong khas piece! Your son is still in my possession. If you do anything to help the thief escape, Chemosh will melt down your pretty pewter boy and hammer his soul into oblivion!”
Krell’s ruse worked. Lightning flickered uncertainly from cloud to cloud. The wind died. The sky grew sullen. A few hailstones clunked down on Krell’s steel helm. The goddess spat rain at him, and that was all.
She dared do nothing to him. She dared not come to the monk’s aid.
As to the monk, he was gamely hobbling over the rocks, vainly trying to escape Krell. The man’s shoulders sagged. He sobbed for breath. He was about finished. His goddess had abandoned him. Krell expected the monk to give up, surrender, fall to his knees and plead for his miserable life. That was what Krell himself had done when in a similar situation. It hadn’t worked for him, and it wasn’t going to work for this monk.
Again, the monk didn’t play fair. Instead of surrendering, he hobbled with the last of his strength straight for the cliff’s edge.
Mother of the Abyss! Krell realized, shocked. The bastard’s going to jump!
If he jumped, he’d take with him the khas piece, and there was no way Krell could recover it. He had no intention of going for a swim in Zeboim-infested waters.
Krell had to catch the monk and stop him from jumping. Unfortunately, that was not proving an easy task to accomplish. His hulking form encased in the plate and chain mail armor of a death knight, Krell lumbered. He could not run.
Krell’s armor clanked and clattered. His ponderous footfalls sent tremors through the ground. He watched, in mounting terror, the monk outdistance him.
Krell found an unexpected ally in Zeboim. She, too, feared for the khas piece the monk was carrying. She tried to stop him. She pummeled the monk with rain and knocked him off his feet with a wind gust. The wretched monk stood up and kept going.
He reached the edge of the cliff. Krell knew what lay below—a seventy-foot fall onto sharp-edged granite boulders.
“Stop him, Zeboim,” Krell raged. “If you don’t, you’ll be sorry!”
The monk held a small leather bag in his hand. He thrust that bag into the bosom of his bloodstained robes.
Krell clambered and stumbled among the rocks, swearing and waving his sword.
The monk climbed onto a promontory