Son of Thunder - Murray J. D. Leeder [63]
"It's a demon," Vell proclaimed. "One I must strive to cast out."
Lanaal breathed heavily, her bronze-tinged face streaked with redness. "It may not be possible to remove it, Vell," she warned.
"I will strive nevertheless," Vell promised. "Thank you for helping me, Lanaal. I hope I can still call you my friend."
"Have no fear," she whispered. Her smile was filled with concern. "I will help however I can. But if you are seeking answers to your puzzle, I don't know if I can help you any further."
"There may be other possibilities," said Vell. "Rask mentioned something about the Fountains of Memory."
CHAPTER 10
Sprites fell like hostile rain. The Antiquarians, Leng, Ardeth, and Gan held their ground against waves and waves of them. The sprites were joined by grigs playing their dreadful fiddles, gossamer-winged pixies, and even some of the seldom-seen nixies. The fey climbed the trees, dived down on the party below, and launched their arrows. The battlefield rang with the grigs' discordant music.
"If we were to surrender," Ardeth shouted through the cacophony, "do you suppose they'd stop playing?"
Amid a duskwood grove carpeted in damp moss, the fey ambushed them and pressed the attack, seemingly unconcerned about their massive casualties. Each swing of Gan's greataxe killed five of them at a time, and the blades of Nithinial and Royce swung unceasingly, slicing the small, fragile creatures with ease. Ardeth crouched with her crossbow and targeted the pixies with her deadly bolts, while Gunton used a net to trap them, then finish them with the point of a short spear. Fey blood pooled on the forest floor. Bessick swung his chains, snagging wings and ripping sprites apart with their cruel spikes. Vonelh blasted the creatures with huge gusts of wind that blew their arrows astray and toppled the smaller sprites, their wings beating hopelessly as the air funneled them hard against the trees.
"If only I could drop a fireball and let them all burn away," Vonelh said, but he knew the danger to the trees was far too great.
Leng was responsible for the most damage. Laughing and cackling with the dark energy of an asylum inmate, he took perverse glee in killing his attackers slowly and painfully. Deep blue bolts of cold erupted from his hands that withered the sprites at a touch, their wings shriveling until their desiccated flesh seemed to slide off their bodies. Leng released dark waves of despair and grief that set some of them weeping. Walls of thorns erupted to rip them apart, and he conjured disembodied black claws that tore into the tiny grigs and pixies as a cruel child might torture a butterfly, plucking off wings and ripping bodies apart.
A flail hung at Leng's waist, and many magical items were concealed in his clothing. But he had no interest in fighting with anything but his spells.
The Antiquarians watched Leng's depredations in awe. He wore an expression of joy as he went about his vile work; his face showed no concern that they were fighting for their lives. This was sport for him; his companions even suspected that Leng could readily kill all the fey with much greater speed, but instead he was drawing out the pleasure, challenging himself to find new and crueler ways of slaughtering them. He almost seemed disappointed as the number of fey around them declined. Whether the large folk were really killing the small ones or if some had decided to flee-fey being notoriously fickle-they could not tell.
"The pixies may be waiting for us to let our guard down," warned Gunton, skewering one on the end of his short spear.
Although equally as small as the grigs, the pixies were far more dangerous foes. Leng and Vonelh tried to wipe out the creatures' invisibility with spells, but the small folk easily crouched unseen in the distance and fired their arrows.
No fewer than ten grigs sprang cricketlike from various places at Vonelh. They all struck his upper body, prodding him with