Stormlight - Ed Greenwood [105]
Shayna kicked and wriggled furiously in celebration, but the foe didn’t notice her-or didn’t care.
Storm slashed at the hands with a stream of silver fire, but she didn't expect to strike them before they vanished-and she didn't. She sent her silver down to carve the floor in a neat line from the hole where the hands had been toward where she stood, hoping to reveal the foe beneath her.
She'd managed only a few feet of that work when tentacles rose up all around her in a silent, sudden forest.
Fast as those seeking tentacles were, Storm was faster. She turned her hands straight down and used streams of silver fire to blast herself up into the air, seeking the floor above and hoping her little act would work.
The golden sphere lagged behind. She gained her footing in a shattered room, turned, put a look of apprehension on her face as she saw the globe trailing, and swiftly called on Mystra's fire to catch it and draw it up to be with her.
The foe swallowed the bait. A tentacle shot out, its tip glittering. He'd not dropped his fingerblade spell, and was going to use it to slice open the sphere.
Storm yanked the sphere away from him, and then seemed to lose her grip on it. Silver fire swirled, but the sphere drifted free, moving slowly away. Like a carnival knife-thrower, she drew back her hand and hurled silver fire after it, but the darting tentacle got there first.
The sphere exploded in a spray of golden light-and
the very air boiled.
Storm felt the sudden tingling of the blood lightning settling on her, just as she'd planned. Her gaze, however, remained intent on the foe. The shimmering of the wardaway was already coiling down the tentacle, but the shapeshifter had no time to worry about that. Disembodied jaws were appearing all around him. They streaked in to sink fangs into his ever-shifting body. Storm leapt high, as she'd seen the witches of Rashemen do when diving into pools from a height, jackknifed, and dived down into the heart of the foe, trailing silver fire behind her.
She protected her face and throat from the whipping tentacles, but left the rest of herself unshielded. Sure enough, a trio of tentacles that had suddenly acquired sawlike bony edges slashed across her breast and flank.
Blood flowed. The blood lightning burst forth, snarling angrily down into the struggling shapeshifter. Tentacles convulsed and flailed.
As she plummeted, Storm's hands spat silver fire in a dagger of ravening force. It punched right through the screaming foe.
She landed hard in a pile of rubble, rolling over and over and coming up with blood on her chin from a bitten lip, but there was a smile to go with it. At last the foe was tasting what he should have been feeling all the time, these last few days.
The roars of pain twisted very soon into wild, giggling laughter and a cacophony of gabbling voices shouting different things at once. The foe's overloaded mind was afire again.
Storm slipped away through the shadows, quietly rebuilding her barrier around the keep. He'd start blasting thing soon enough, but she did not want to be the one to provoke him into wreaking more devastation. She was aching all over, limping slightly, and restlessly moving one arm to loosen a stiff, battered shoulder. Others in the ruins around her had fared far worse. Her time for healing and taking ease would come when this menace was ended.
The explosion she’d been expecting tore through a pillar not far behind her. A column of three rooms tilted slowly, turned-and with a heavy grandeur fell down into the rubble below. The crash shook the entire fortress.
Shrill laughter arose above the din of clashing and rolling stone. A man with four arms capered amid the dust, Shayna Summerstar swinging high above him.
The mad shapeshifter threw out a blazing bolt of force that smashed through a wall. As stones sprayed and tumbled, shattering the room beyond, the foe bayed like a hound, punching the air with exultant fists. He stiffened, whirled around-and fired another bolt at a shard