Darkvision - Bruce R. Cordell [94]
"Could be. Or perhaps the puppeteer is just toying with us." Zel peered down the path where the crystal gradually thickened to form the irregular bulb of cracked stone.
Warian looked back and forth between the irregular boulder and the wavering tower. Out of nowhere, a searing flash dazzled his eyes.
"… eretu dmaadar grethalsa od favara!" a loathsome voice broke upon them.
Blinking, Warian looked ahead, behind-and then up.
Sevaera's head, sans body, floated above them, dripping blood. It was nestled in a penumbra of writhing shadow. The puppeteer had killed Sevaera and was using her head as a malefic vehicle.
"No…" pleaded Zel, his jaw dropping open.
The despicable voice repeated its imperative in a language unfamiliar to Warian, then swooped.
Warian lifted his crystal arm to cover his face. He tried desperately to trigger its latent power. And he failed. He was too drained-he couldn't forge the link!
The disembodied head swooped and butted Warian in the chest. A sledgehammer couldn't have struck harder. Warian pitched sideways off the path, his body twisting in midair, his arms flailing for a grip. He caught himself on the edge, the crystal digits on his right hand more hindrance than help. The flesh and blood of his left hand absorbed the cruel sharpness of the ledge. The weight of his body threatened to peel his fingers from their purchase.
He looked up, but the stone path blocked his view of what was happening above him. But he could hear.
Zel cursed, repeating "bastard!" over and over in a crazed voice. He heard the sound of metal on bone-had his uncle connected with his pickaxe?
"Draka ni dornu dmaadar!" screamed the vile voice, just out of sight.
"Bastard!" his uncle yelled again. His pinched, manic tone implied a break with sanity that wouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Warian strained, trying to pull himself up.
A finger slipped. It was all he could do to hold on.
"Zel," he cried. "Kill it!" And "Help, I'm slipping!"
Another flash dazzled Warian. Something else had come through the portal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The eternal, mote-littered dark welcomed Ususi after a long absence. The Celestial Nadir once again accepted her into its twilight vastness.
The wizard fell a few paces through an awkwardly defined portal focus. She nearly tripped on Eined's limp form. Iahn must have dropped her. She saw him streaking toward a small flying creature wreathed in darkness. Another man she didn't recognize stood near the flying creature, swinging wildly at it with a pickaxe.
She was thankful that the misdirected focus was displaced upward, not left or right, off the path. Otherwise, instead of standing at the center of a three-way nexus, she might be flailing her way through a tour of the abyssal spaces of the Celestial Nadir.
Ususi pulled out the keystone and issued a word of command. It lit with a violet radiance. For the first time in a long time, the wizard smiled.
Here in the Celestial Nadir, keystone in hand, she possessed a measure of authority over the crystal denied her outside the artificial space. This was a good time to measure her control against that flying creature, which had turned its back on the man with the pickaxe to deal with the charging vengeance taker. The flying creature looked like… a severed head! Ususi gasped.
It was the missing head from the woman on the other side of the portal! The head was partly sheathed in Celestial Nadir crystal. Ususi raised the thong on which the keystone dangled, and concentrated.
The keystone pulsed once, twice, thrice. A single flash burst in the crystal sheathing of the head. It screeched and shot straight upward at least fifty paces. In the Imaskaran tongue, it screamed, "Use not the keystone against what I have claimed!"
Ususi called up, "Try to stop me!"
It swooped down at her, leaving a meteor green streak across