Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [95]
A dozen stony hands, blunt with erosion, pulled his screaming mount from under him. Telarian leaped free, his ebony blade pulling him up and away from the sounds of ripping horseflesh. Then he was on the central mound, dashing up the steep slope of solidified carrion, even as it began to shuddet and separate. Each unit of the cone-shaped structure became a screaming zombie whose flesh was hard as bedrock.
He stepped on a writhing arm, a yowling head, and into a palm and out of it before the hand could clutch and hold him. He batted away a face whose gaping mouth threatened to bite him, turning the pallid stone into so much sand. Then he reached the apex, just as the perpetrator of the uprising surmounted the opposite side. Unlike his own uneven ascent, the energy-wreathed lich was raised securely in the hands of its newly animated followers.
Telarian and the relic lich faced each other from across the crystalline throne. The diviner looked into a countenance so weathered that only a shallow concavity faced him, incapable of displaying the least hint of feature.
The obscene crater that once housed a mouth worked, and it somehow spoke without tongue to shape its words. "The mechanism requires fresh infusion. Blood is too sticky and prone to clotting. Souls serve best." Telarian's spell of translation allowed him to understand the creature's supernatural utterances, but the lich's allusion to a mechanism escaped him. In any event, the context implied nothing pleasant for him and the Empyrean Knights.
Telarian swung Nis down and around from where it lightly rested on his shoulder, in a vicious cross-body swing. His foe easily blocked with its staff of blazing light. The contact jolted through the Keeper's arm, but Nis steadied him despite the flexing, heaving slope on which he stood.
My presence, or perhaps my twin's, Nis projected into his mind, has awakened a thing that lay quiescent in Stardeep's basements since before Stardeep was delved. Splintered desires fuel this ancient shell, desires so potent they bleed out from the host and share animation with petrified remains of a murdered species.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Stardeep, Underdungeon
The demon gauntlet snuffled and coughed, straining forward, following the fading scent of those who'd gone before. Gage was pulled along in the fiend's wake, his gloved hand held forward and down, slinking from tree to silvery tree. His quarry's path had steered wide of chill mist rivers that sliced through the nighted landscape. He was happy to avoid intersecting the impenetrable vapor-even his bound demon shuddered and bucked when he'd ttied to insert it into the first standing bank he'd passed.
At length he came to the forest's edge. A matgin of dead rock lay beyond, decorated with craggy boulders and narrow fissures. Beyond that lay a sea of colorless fog, chill and endless. He drew in a quick breath when he saw several corpses littering the beach, the decaying bodies matching those he'd dispatched earlier. One group of dead monsters lay near the edge of the fog, though several marked the petimetet of a large boulder about thirty paces from the mist's edge. The demon gauntlet bleated and tried to pull forward. Kiril and the other two had come this way. Had they entered the mist?
Gage studied the scene a moment longer, then moved.
The boulder was splashed with green and black ichor-the thief counted at least six of the loathsome creatures, battered, burnt, and…
An opening! A rectangular portal pierced the boulder's overhanging side that faced the fog sea. A massive iron gate lay torn from its hinges, scratched and partially crumpled. The lower portion of the cavity was choked with monsters, all dead, many showing signs of flashburn. Blasting magic had separated many of these from their putrid lives. He didn't see evidence of any blade-work. Kiril had not drawn her Cerulean