Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [105]
Its power in Kiril's hands was nothing short of awe inspiring. She didn't attempt to bypass the massed petrified undead. She swept through them, reducing the creatures to so much dust within the vortex of Angul's flashing influence. He knew Nis could not equal what he now witnessed. Could it be, he wondered, that in Kiril's hands, lost love urges the soul fragment to greater heights?
Nis's failure to respond was answer enough.
The lich, too, recognized the greater threat that now approached. It redirected its bedeviling bolts toward Kiril. Telarian was tempted to yell out a warning, but was quelled by Nis: Kill this creature while it is distracted.
Telarian scrambled up onto the throne, and unlike his expectation, wasn't struck with some nameless curse. With a solid foundation underfoot, he was finally able to bring Nis to bear. Even as the lich realized its lapse, Nis's black length fell full upon its head.
The undead's ctown of fire flared then failed beneath the stroke. But the fading crown provided Telarian's foe one last moment of salvation from Nis's penetrating blade. The lich countered with its staff, catching the diviner on the shouldet. Pain, quickly damped down by Nis, couldn't hide the smell of cooked meat.
The rending noise of stone being pulverized announced Kiril's arrival at the base of the pyramid of squirming bodies. She abandoned her sweep-and-smash technique in favor of agility. She ascended the active pile almost as nimbly as Telarian. He noted with interest that Angul's gifts to his wielder didn't include dexterity to the same degree that Nis did.
Kiril reached the summit and her eyes flitted across him, then Nis, but she turned her attention fully on the lich. She bellowed, "Suffer not abominations!" Her accompanying sttike sheared the lich's staff into so many disintegrating tongues of flame. Even as it raised its fiery cape into great wings, as if to beat itself away, Kiril and Telarian simultaneously struck at it.
Angul stabbed low, into its abdomen, Nis swept high, at its head. The flaming wings collapsed and winked out. The unnamed king of fossils who'd sat alone beneath the violet flame for years uncounted tumbled down the mound, unsupported by its subjects. It sttuck the hard cobbles at the pile's base and shattered with a sound high and pure.
A wave of stillness was bom in that instant, an expanding circle whose circumference quickly raced away in all directions, leaving in its wake hundreds of unmoving, eroded, cracked, broken, and blood-stained statues. Above, the violet flame guttered and winked out.
Here and there across the vast city, lantetn light flickered to life as surviving Knights sought to coalesce back into a unified force.
Telarian wondered "how many remained to service his greater scheme, but pushed such distractions from his head for the moment. Kiril demanded all his attention and wit as she stared coolly at him, her features highlighted by Angul's blue fire. He yet held Nis, whose length remained night's own domain.
Sheathe me, instructed Nis. As always, Telarian obeyed.
The diviner blinked, and sudden fear clawed at his guts. She'd cut him down! She-
Kiril sheathed Angul in one easy motion, plunging them into darkness. Into that absence of light, Kiril spoke, her tone strangely even. "What news of the Traitor, Keeper of Stardeep?"
Telarian called up a quick spell of radiance and set it to dance on the throne top. In that glow, he lowered himself from the throne to stand on equal, if uneven, footing with the swordswoman.
He replied, "The Traitor strains at its chains in a fashion never foreseen. It has assumed mental domination over my fellow Stardeep Keeper! Things have nearly fallen completely apart in Stardeep's Inner Bastion."
"The compromised Keeper," said Kiril, "that would be Telarian? I've heard his name from the lips of