Lady of Poison_ The Priests - Bruce R. Cordell [92]
The scent milled indecisively throughout the chamber. Living creatures had only recently vacated that chamber, he felt confident, but which way had they gone? His eyes, functioning perfectly in the absolute darkness, focused on the chamber's only other exit. A fall of powder, like snow, spilled from it in shallow drifts.
Footprints tracked through the drifts, leading into the exit and through the tunnel beyond. The smell was so intense that Ezekial was certain his quarry was just minutes ahead, maybe seconds. When he heard the slight rustling from the chamber beyond the exit tunnel, he exulted. The quarry was trying to hide. Though the sounds were slight, the vampire's supernatural senses didn't miss much.
So strong was the smell, and so certain was Ezekial that the rustling was the furtive sounds of those he sought, that he failed to note the strangely regular pattern of the footfalls and the way they did not make an impression deep enough to carry the weight of a full-grown humanoid or perhaps even that of a child.
Ezekial flitted ahead, bursting into the chamber beyond, a vicious grin on his inhuman features. He had to wade through the sea-salt-sized grains that covered the floor at an increasing depth as he moved forward. The raspy, white powder then reached his shins.
If his quarry hid in the chamber into which Ezekial burst, it was burrowed under the massive drifts of white that covered the floor, shrouded the walls, and dripped from the ceiling in strange stalactite-like formations. Only the center of the chamber was clear.
The central clearing, crater-like, held a nearly-black sphere about one foot in diameter. White lines, the same color white as the strange substance all around them, ran like imperfections through the globe. Without visible mechanism, the globe was slowly spinning on its shallow bed of pale salt.
Ezekial paused. Was the sound of the revolving sphere the sound he'd heard?
A moment later he realized not. The sound was that of the "salt" crystals themselves. Like a ripple sweeping away from a stone cast into water, the white motes first closest to the orb, then those further away, and so on, began to stir. They revealed themselves for what they really were, unfurling, Unfolding, and flexing.
Thousands, millions, maybe, of salt-white, tiny demon-lings filled the chamber. They were all drawing sudden animation from the orb, whose eye-like shape peered into Ezekial's mind.
The vampire had a single moment before the white mass of demonlings encompassed him, closing him into a hermetically sealed sarcophagus of sucking evil from which there was no escape, not even for one such as him. He might have used that moment to slide his.physical body into shifty vapor. Instead, he surprised himself by letting rip with a scream of terror-his first and last.
A cry, quickly silenced, echoed down the passage. Fallon nearly jumped at the sound's savage ferocity, its supernatural volume, and its warbling fear. Then he grinned. Fallon had caught something in his trap. He rubbed his left palm where he'd cut himself, just a little, to entice that which hunted him with a smell that he had hoped would make it less attentive to its surroundings.
The Rotting Man had told Fallon, during their unpleasant mental communication, that Damanda would meet him and Ash in Under-Tharos.
While he'd worked for Anammelech, the blightlord had related something of Damanda and her pets.
It didn't take too much of a leap to guess that Damanda, commanded to collect Fallon, would have her vampires in tow. In fact, the elf suspected that Damanda herself was a night stalker, though one of exceptional skill and mastery. Anammelech had never said.
If one her pets had fallen into the grasp of the horror the elf glimpsed back in the white room, that still left Damanda with three of her four favorites, if what he remembered of Anammelech's idle talk could be trusted-her inner cadre numbered