Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [120]
He would fail, decided Telarian. The conjoined blade enjoyed a power fueled by two soul halves, but the consciousness of the conjoined soul had little powet ovet the blades. Nangulis's return was a surprising new element, cettainly, but one with no ability to affect its physical shell, Angul-Nis. He was merely a ghost without form, a will without the ability to achieve an end.
The diviner laughed. While he wielded Angul-Nis, the blades would remain conjoined. Nis was more than a tool; it was also a trap. "Fight all you want," he whispered, "it'll do no good. I'll not let you go." Telarian tightened his grip and once more fixed his gaze into the swirling abyss before him.
The ethereal chains remained visible to him, five in all. The chains secured the Well, and the Traitor's ultimate prison. With Angul-Nis, he began to cut them. He sawed through the first one, and the swaying shadows choking the shaft increased the pace of their obscene undulation. The babble only his ears apprehended doubled in volume.
He sliced through the second phantom chain and paused. Something shrieked far down in the Well, something that had clawed at the boundary layer far past the limits of sanity.
The diviner smashed the third chain to shrapnel. A stroke like lightning leaped up the Well and shook all Stardeep. The light glared off the faces of Delphe, her mouth open in a hopeless shout, and the Sign-wielding monk, whose efforts were overcoming the avatar. Too late.
Something stirred in the Well's bowels, a shadow anticipating its release. A shadow that no longer retained elven shape, but instead pulsed with blasphemous abnormality. He was the High Priest of the Elder Ones, first servant of the vanished Abolethic Sovereignty, who had looked up the Well for a thousand years, who had tasted the blood of his betrayed kin, who sought to lead all star elves to extinction, and who was cast out of Sildeyuir for eternity. He sought to awaken the slumbering lords of Xxiphu from their lair in the nethermost craters of the deep earth. He was the Traitor. And in another few moments, Telarian would end the Traitor's life on the edge of-
"Remember me?" came a half-familiar voice behind Telarian as heart-stopping pain blossomed in the diviner's kidney. "Your spy returns for his payment!"
Angul-Nis slipped free from his spasming hands. "No!" Telarian lurched forward, windmilling for a grip on the sword spinning free above the Well.
The conjoined sword flared, emitting a butst of energy black on one side, blue on the other. Then two blades fell away from each other. "No!" screamed Telarian, leaning forward.
Angul fell just three feet, tip downwatd, and knifed into the lip, and there remained quivering.
Nis tumbled free past the lip and down the Well. The diviner fell to his chest, extending half his body out over the lip as he made one final try to snare the Blade Umbral. But as he strained forward and down, someone kicked him savagely from behind. A terrible sensation of weightlessness sank into his stomach. Overbalanced, he slipped over the edge.
Nis and Telarian fell, Telarian screaming in dismay and mounting fear, Nis tracing a blur of darkness in its wake. Elf and sword flashed past the flickering shadow, past the burning boundary layer, and into the ptesence of the Traitor.
The High Priest of the Abolethic Sovereignty studied its mottal agent. It had expended so much energy molding and shaping the elf's mind. But the elf had failed, and with his fall into the Well, was rendered valueless. The sword Nis, whose creation was the culmination of a plan