Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [93]
“I don’t remember what you are or who,” he yelled. “But if I beat you in some past life, I can beat you in this one too.”
“No. This time, you’re alone,” said Murmur. Its awful grin widened.
I am on my own, Demascus thought. Just like the woman Murmur threw into the pit. Just as he’d been from the moment he’d opened his eyes on the shrine. He didn’t have a single memory to hold on to. No one who cared about him.
The demon dream gestured, and a storm of pilfered nightmares rolled off the demon’s hide and washed toward Demascus.
He felt as if his feet were glued in place.
“Demascus!” hissed a voice. “Stop standing there like a half-wit and run!”
It was Riltana. In all her vitriolic glory.
Then he saw Chant. The human was hunched over the manacles restraining a mad-eyed fellow who was screaming, “The Lady was here! The Lady! The Lady!” Spittle frothed the man’s lips.
And where …? There! Carmenere crouched behind a large chest, shrugging into armor. A litter of items lay around her. Including the sword he’d found at the shrine.
He wasn’t alone. The thought illuminated his mind like the sunrise.
Time seemed to decelerate.
He tore the Veil from his neck and snapped it like a whip. The scarf came partly alive in his hand. The far end wrapped around the sword hilt at Carmenere’s feet. He jerked the sword to him through the air. The hilt slapped into his palm. A glitter of pale runes immediately formed, hovering over the blade.
Demascus focused on his sword, and on the runes that spontaneously formed whenever he wielded it. Each of those runes was … what? A memory. A very precise memory. One rune blazed, and it contained a recollection of divine light.
Time resumed its merciless march. Demascus cut the air in a downward slash. The sword tip inscribed an arc of swirling radiant energy. Murmur’s nightmare wave bore down on him, threatening to envelop him in fear unending. But the line of angelic fire he’d summoned sliced clean through the cresting miasma. Its tattered edges rolled past him on either side, and dispersed.
“Perish, demon!” yelled Carmenere.
Demascus saw that the silverstar had donned her armor and found her mace. It glowed like the full moon. A shaft of the conjured light touched Murmur’s seething flesh, tearing rents into the shuddering facade.
Three crossbow bolts and two hurled daggers punched into Murmur’s opposite flank a heartbeat later.
Murmur staggered and made an odd sound. Sort of like the sound an overconfident tough would make who’d taken an unexpected shot to the nether regions, Demascus thought. This demon can be beaten! he thought.
He flung himself at the demon. A radiance, like that which he’d just channeled from his sword, flickered around him like a protective nimbus. When the glow struck Murmur, his aura erupted into a flash a hundred times brighter.
The stolen nightmares the demon had plated itself with evaporated like dew in sunlight.
He hewed at what remained: a violet-skinned, crystal-veined eight-foot-tall monster supported by a nest of red crystal tendrils, naked in all its original horror.
Murmur’s spiraling eyes caught Demascus’s. The demon’s mouth unhinged in an unholy grin. Demascus realized the thing wasn’t the least bit hurt; they’d only managed to disrupt its nightmarish facade.
Crystal strands snaked around his waist and lifted him off his feet. Murmur lifted him over its head.
Demascus couldn’t help but glance down into the roiling crater. Biting insects beyond count thronged there. The half-consumed carcasses of the victims Murmur had already thrown in were strewn down the sides, their shapes suggested only by humps of seething beetles, ants, and cockroaches. Wasps and stinging moths darted just above the aperture like a halo.
“Merciful lords,” said Demascus. If he died in the pit, would he wake up some place and some years hence, his memory wiped clear once more? His flesh and bones didn’t believe it. His mortal frame feared for its life.
One end of the Veil flickered as light woke in individual threads. Words appeared in