Death of the Dragon - Ed Greenwood [88]
Bare and slender, now, they stood on either side of a glowing, pulsing oval of spell light, a blue-white radiance that seemed to throb around their calves as they each raised an open hand. With the small silver daggers they held, they calmly slit open their own palms.
Both sorceresses threw the knives away as violently as a man in fury hurls a goblet, and turned to face each other. From the falling blood, white fire roared into life.
The fire burst forth from their mouths as they moaned, sobbed, then began wailing. A slowly rising ululation became shrieks of pain as the fire leaped across the space between them, becoming blue-white lightning.
"Gods," the swordcaptain gasped roughly, as snarling bolts of lightning played from fingertips to thighs and breasts, and the two curvaceous sorceresses trembled, their flesh seeming suddenly to waver and flap, as if torn out of shape by gales no one else could feel. As warriors of Cormyr watched with narrowing eyes, the spell light between the two struggling sorceresses became almost blinding.
Lightning suddenly stabbed out from the forming star at the center of the chamber, reaching to the ring of naked war wizards sitting on the floor close enough to the walls for the cowering soldiers to reach out and touch-had any of them dared. The wizards whose nakedness, born of the need to preserve enchanted clothing and adornments from the ravening fire of the mighty magic being attempted here, had attracted rather fewer gazes than the two women standing in the center of the hall. Around the ring, fat, hairy men and sunken-chested bearded younglings alike gasped and wavered as the magic plucked at their vitality, calling forth the fire of their lives to build what was needed.
Their cries of pain joined the rising shriek and were echoed by the gasps of the warriors around the chamber walls, as the light suddenly became a ring. The ring raced somewhere else to become the end of a tunnel, and Laspeera Inthre suddenly threw back her head and sobbed, "Durndurve-anchor me! I can't take the pain!"
They saw her image rise up over the glowing ring, a large and ghostly projection of the magic. Rings of lightning raced up and down her shuddering arms. Her once bound and coiled hair was wild and free, licking around her shoulders like dark flames, as she threw her head back and wept. Flames spurted from her very eyeballs as Valantha's ghostly face, also set in pain, snarled through set teeth, "Hold on, Lady! Hold!"
Suddenly Laspeera's body shuddered and seemed to topple-only to rise slowly and smoothly upright again like a falling sapling righted by a forester's hand.
"Lady," a man's voice spoke, seemingly out of her forehead, "I am here. You have reached me in Arabel. You do us all great honor."
A slow and crooked smile spread across Laspeera's face as the pain fell away. She sighed, and the lightning suddenly fell from its wild whirling to coil around her breasts.
"We're through," she gasped. "Now the true test begins."
The warriors grasped their weapons firmly and peered through the still eddying starry splendor of magic at the ring, in case what came through it was a foe.
They saw a grim-faced man-at-arms, the Purple Dragon blazing on his breastplate, looking back at them over his own drawn sword. Behind him was the wide-eyed face of a woman with a babe held against her breast and behind them other helmed heads and staring women. They stood in a room some of the warriors recognized as a chamber in Arabel.
"By the gods," the swordcaptain said, his voice quavering on the edge of tears, "they've done it!"
"For Cormyr!" the first man-at-arms called, raising his sword heedless of the lightning that sprang from the gate to snarl up and down it.
"For Cormyr!" a hundred throats roared from all around the walls. Men surged forward as if a revel had begun.
For in a way, one had…
* * * * *
"Now!" the war wizard commanded, and mages all along the wall clutched their foreheads and shouted in pain. There was suddenly a boulder