Azure bonds - Kate Novak [170]
Dragonbait plunged in, taking Olive with him. Alias and Akabar blocked the portal. The Turmish mage brought the end of the staff up hard, cracking the jaw of an assassin.
Then two withered hands, strong as steel, closed around the staff. The aged face of Cassana, drooling and twisted beyond the limits of humanity, confronted the mage. "You use it as a club," she lisped. "Now feel its full force."
Alias slew another assassin with Hill Cleaver, but there were more than a dozen left, and the effects of her wounds were taking their toll on her reaction time. "Into the portal'" she ordered the mage.
"But the witch," Akabar protested, as Cassana began to intone words of power.
"In!" the swordswoman cried.
Alias put her foot on Akabar's stomach and shoved the mage through the disk. Akabar would not loosen his hold on the staff, and Cassana was dragged toward the bull's eye. Akabar was lost to sight beyond the silvery glow of the portal, but the haggish sorceress managed to plant her feet firmly on the ground and hold her position. With the tendons of her arms popping from the strain, Cassana began to pull the staff back from the portal.
Alias stepped halfway into the portal, straddling it with one foot on each side of the planar gate. She brought Hill Cleaver down on the half of the staff of power that jutted out from the disc hovering over the Hill of Fangs.
The blade cut through the ancient wood like an axe, and a multicolored fireball blossomed out from the broken staff. Alias felt heat wash over her body as the force of the explosion pushed her through the gateway, into the lands that lay beyond. The shock wave caught the last pieces of Cassana's body and the fire-ravaged forms of the remaining assassins, carrying them from the top of the Hill of Fangs. The last curved and pointed stones toppled from their moorings, and, for the second day in a row, a new star burned over Westgate.
30
The Citadel of White Exile
"Alias, are you all right?'" Olive asked, bending over the swordswoman.
"I feel like I've been taken apart and put back together, with lots of pieces missing," Alias moaned.
"That's a pretty sick joke," Olive chided. "Apt, but sick."
"What do you expect?" A throbbing pain had filled her head, ner flesh stung from half a dozen cuts, and she felt badly sunburned. She opened her eyes, then shut them instantly, growling, "Well, that was a mistake."
A bright white light seared her eyeballs, leaving blue dots dancing before her mind even after she'd squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. This was not the icy white of sun on snow or the ivory white of silk, but the hot burning white of coals in the center of a forge.
Shielding her eyes, she ventured another look. The sky above was convoluted whirls of white-whites and off-whites-hot matter and even hotter matter swirling and twisting in a vain attempt to combine.
"This is where the gods roll across the sky like storm fronts," she muttered.
"What?" Olive asked.
"Nothing. Just a line from an old tale."
"Right," the haifling said, realizing just who must have told her the tale. "You going to lay there all day?" she asked.
Alias sighed and sat up. Beneath her were gray flagstones shimmering in the light of the white-on-white sky overhead.
Olive knelt beside her. The halfling's glittering white dress, a copy of the one Cassana had worn to last evening' midnight dinner, was covered in mud and blood.
To Alias's right, Akabar and Dragonbait were kneeling over a fifth figure-the stranger who'd helped them fight the battle on the Hill of Fangs. Alias felt a momentary twinge of jealousy that they were looking after the stranger before they did so for her.
Don't be a fool, she told herself. For someone who's just fought two dozen assassins, a witch, and a lich, and who's broken a staff of power, you're in pretty good shape. You got off easier than Sylune did in Shadowdale. A pang of grief went through her, though, as she remembered how the river witch had met her end.
Is there a difference, she wondered, between the sadness that real