The Dragon's Doom - Ed Greenwood [172]
Guards sprinting across the polished floor skidded to astonished halts, and Nuelara screamed again. Hulgor Delcamper and the four armed intruders were gone, vanished as if they'd never been.
The guards stared helplessly… at a gently rocking decanter on a table, and four dark daggers floating in midair.
No one was there to stare back.
"The Three must hold this place sacred to them, for some special purpose," Ezendor Blackgult muttered, as he stood on a crumbling balcony of the sprawling ruins of the Silvertree Palace known to all Aglirta as the Silent House. The burial ground below him was an overgrown maze of trees, shrubs, and leaning tombs.
Then red and black rage rose in him again, choking-strong. Blackgult went to his knees and mindlessly clawed at the stones of a nearby stair for a few frantic breaths, ere he remembered his own name and went boiling up those same steps, to come out on the battlements.
Shuddering, he fought down the madness and stared grimly out across the Vale, to where the long green isle of Flowfoam lay in its quiet splendor out in the Silverflow.
Plague-rage, oh yes, burning strongest where he'd been bitten… poor Indalue must have been infected, and never knew it.
"So here I am at last," he told the uncaring wind bitterly. "Back in the Silent House, the haunted graveyard of half the mages and adventurers Aglirta has ever birthed-wrestling with the Blood Plague."
The rage rose again, and he started striding along the battlements, half-shouting, "If I could hold to my wits long enough, and remember a tenth of what I should be able to, I could heal myself with this!"
The rage passed like a spasm, and Blackgult held up the Dwaer he'd seized not long ago, regarded it regretfully, and whispered, "But I can't."
He walked aimlessly along the battlements, ignoring scattered human and beast bones and the black gorcraw vultures that flapped heavily away at his approach-to land again just out of reach, and watch him balefully… patiently.
Anger rose again, sudden and hot. "A weapon, yes-blast this, savage that, burn the other! Destroying's always easy… But crafting, mending, healing-why, gods, why do you make those so hard, hey? Afraid we struggling beasts will achieve something, and rob you of your entertainment?"
The wind snatched those bitter words away, but brought back no reply. Cold-faced, Ezendor Blackgult found a stair and started down. He'd seized this Stone from his own daughter.
To leave her defenseless while he died here, driven mad by the Blood Plague. Gods, to be laid low by the sneering Serpents at last! No! No!
He was roaring that aloud, he realized dimly, hammering the crumbling stonework with the Stone that could not shatter, screaming and raking the old stone blocks as if his bleeding ringers were talons that could rend…
Gasping, he found himself at the bottom of the stairs, in much pain. Evidently he'd fallen, and now had fresh bruises to add to the sickening plague-surging in his guts. He rolled over, sat up with a growl, and glared at the Dwaer.
Well, if die he must, adorned with this bauble half ambitious Darsar sought, he'd die using it, by the Horns of the Lady!
First, let it be revealed who else was in the Silent House beneath him, just now-what creatures were breathing, which ones were moving, who was making noise… and who was working magic.
Aha! Scuttling things, gliding snakes, lurching skeletons mindlessly guarding this chamber or that… an ancient, sighing awareness that was more of a seeing shadow than anything else… and a large group of frightened men in armor, busily looting an inner chamber under the snapped orders of no less than nine Serpent-priests!
Well, now. The Silent House did have a deadly reputation to maintain…
Ezendor Blackgult smiled like a prowling wolf, clutched the Dwaer to his breast in both hands as if it was a newborn babe, and set off into the darkness at a run, letting the rage build, but using the Dwaer to cling to scene after scene of the House ahead of him, and thereby hold to