Realms of the Arcane - Brian M. Thomsen [77]
The look on his face was a mask of fear and disappointment.
A single, clear thought shot through Alashar's brain like a crystal arrow: He's the only one who can get me back.
Rushing to his defense, she felt hands and tentacles and tendrils and other things her language had no name for reaching shadow fingers from the grass to caress her legs with agonizing cold. Her body felt as if it would shake itself apart. Reaching the huge creature that charged Shadow, she attacked as if her life depended on it… because it did.
The shadow things-smaller ones-were still converging on Shadow, but he was keeping them at bay with flashes of light-for now.
Alashar sent her whip-rapier into a spinning spiral. The sound of it whistling through the air pierced her eardrums and drowned out Shadow's constant, unintelligible muttering. When the giant shadow thing touched her, her knees gave out; she fought from the ground. She had to shred the thing, swing the whirling blade back and forth through it.
Whistle. Silence. Resistance. Whistle. Silence. Resistance… Finally she just closed her eyes and let her arms do their work.
Then the resistance was gone, and she wanted to believe the giant thing was dead.
She felt a hand on her arm, warm and real, and forced her eyes open to see that it was Shadow. He was saying something, but he must not have been talking to her because she couldn't understand a word of it. Another of the smaller things, this one the shadow of a sort of monster goat, touched her again, but the cold wasn't quite as bad and didn't last as long.
Her body gave out. Though she was already sitting sprawled on the cold ground, she started falling. She took a sharp breath, surprised.
By the time she hit the floor, the cold was gone, the wind was gone, and she saw the pillars and the warmth and light of the spherical laboratory. She lay on her back. Her neck went limp, and her head rolled to one side. Her eyes met the eyes of her simulacrum, also lying flat on its back. As she slipped into black unconsciousness, she couldn't help noticing how green her double's eyes looked.
She didn't remember their being that green.
* * * * *
The bedcovers were oppressively heavy, but Alashar was still shivering when she awoke. The first thing she saw was a carved wooden post-a corner of the bed- and a molded plaster ceiling scarred black from a fire. Movement made her turn her head, light flashed in her eyes, and there was pain. When her vision cleared, she saw a young woman, barely more than a girl. The woman wore a simple white shift, her dark hair in an almost comically girlish bob, her face an expressionless mask of ambivalence. A servant. The girl glanced at her, peered over her shoulder at someone or something, and then walked away, holding a bucket of water that didn't seem heavy enough.
"Don't try to move just yet," Shadow's voice echoed slightly from across the room.
She moved anyway, and regretted it. The pain in her head was almost overwhelming, almost made her pass out again. She didn't have the energy to fight it. She could and did accept it, sitting up slowly in the opulent bed, shivering, working at breathing.
"Anyone else would be dead," Shadow continued. "You're quite something."
She tried to speak, but her voice came out as a harsh squeak.
"Do you still want to kill me?" he asked her.
She opened her eyes, only then realizing they had been closed, and she could see him sitting in an armchair across the room. The servant girl she'd seen before was kneeling on the scarred wooden floor, still mopping up the rest of the thick, black-red naga blood.
Shadow looked terrible. There were gray-black bags under his