Doom of the Darksword - Margaret Weis [155]
“But did you count? Were there any babies missing?”
“The Duuk-tsarith said there was,” the old woman repeated, frowning. “The Duuk-tsarith said there was.”
“But did you check yourself to see!” Lord Samuels tried again.
“Poor lad,” was all the Theldara said. Looking at Joram, her beady eyes glittered. “Poor lad.”
“Shut up!” Joram rose unsteadily to his feet. His face was dark, blood glistened from a cut on his mouth where he had bitten through his lip. “Shut up,” he snarled again, glaring at the Theldara in such fury that she crumbled back into the couch and Lord Samuels hurriedly stepped between the two.
“Joram, please,” he began, “calm yourself! Think! There is much here that does not make sense …”
But Joram could neither see nor hear the man. His head throbbed, he thought it might burst. Reeling, half-blind, he clutched at his head, tearing at his hair in a frenzy.
Seeing the hair come out dripping blood from the roots, and seeing as well the madness in the young man’s wild gaze, Lord Samuels attempted to lay soothing hands on Joram. With a bitter cry, Joram shoved the man away from him, nearly knocking him down.
“Pity!” Joram gasped. He couldn’t breathe. “Yes, pity me! I am” — he struggled for breath — “nobody!” Again he clutched at his head, pulling his hair. “Lies! All lies! Dead … death …”
Turning, he stumbled from the room, groping blindly for the door.
“It will not open, young man. I have strengthend the spell. You must stay and listen to me! All is not lost! Why did the Duuk-tsarith take an interest in this? Let us look further …” Lord Samuels took a step forward with some thought, perhaps, of casting a spell upon Joram himself.
Joram ignored him. Reaching the door, he sought to open it, but — as Lord Samuels said — the spell stopped him. He couldn’t even get his hands past the invisible, impenetrable barrier, and he beat at it in impotent rage. Without conscious thought, knowing only that he must escape this room in which he was slowly suffocating, Joram drew the Darksword from the scabbard on his back and slashed at the door with the weapon.
The Darksword felt itself wielded; the heat of its masters life pulsed in its metal body and it began to absorb the magic. The spell on the door shattered just as the wood shattered when the blade crashed into it. The Theldara began to scream — a high-pitched, shrill wail — and Lord Samuels stared in wonder and awe until he began to feel weak, Life draining from his body. The Darksword was nonselective, its forger not yet fully acquainted with its potential or how to use it. It sucked the magic from everything and everyone around it, enhancing its own power. The metal began to glow with a strange white-blue light that illuminated the room as the sword caused the fire to die and the magical globes of light on the mantelpiece to glimmer faintly and then vanish altogether.
Lord Samuels could not move. His body felt heavy and foreign to him, as though he had suddenly stepped inside the shell of another man and had no idea how to make anything operate. He stared in a dreamlike terror, unable to comprehend what was happening, unable to react.
The door fell in shards at Joram’s feet. On the other side, reflected in the blue-white radiance of the fiercely blazing sword, stood Gwendolyn.
She had been listening, ear pressed against the door, her heart dancing with sweet, airy fantasies, her mind racing with plans to feign surprise when Joram should burst out and tell her the good news. One by one those airy fantasies had sprouted the wings of demons; their dance turned macabre. Babies of stone; the poor, mad mother nursing the cold, rigid body; the dark specters of the Duuk-tsarith; Anja fleeing into the night with a stolen child …
Gwendolyn had shrunk backward, away from the closed and magically sealed door, her hand pressed over her mouth so that she might not cry out and give herself away. The horror of what she had heard crept up over her soul like the foul waters of a fast-rising