The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [126]
Embra thought she saw movement, back in the dark reaches well away from her companions, but when she peered again, she saw nothing but empty shelves and drifting mold spores.
The book she'd glanced at before showed her the same words. That was good. She swept past it and slowed at the next one, murmuring its words under her breath as she scanned them: "The place of fallen majesty, its master and namesake now gone, with all his strivings, to a pearl upon the fast Silverflow, an up-thrust prow of shields for to cleave the winter waves." Well, that was clear enough: the pearl was Silvertree Isle, and the place of fallen majesty Silvertree House. If these were clues to the whereabouts of a Dwaer, they were clearly pointing to the Silent House.
Perhaps the third bThe world around her exploded in a burst of varicolored light, shaking the vast dome above her with a sound like rolling thunder. Amid the roaring, dust rained down, and out of flickering, pulsing afterblasts below her raced long, snakelike necks with needle-toothed, snapping jaws.
Too breathless to scream, Embra was snatched away from them by blasts of tortured air that felt like the blows of large, wildly swung fists. She was cartwheeling through the air, spinning helplessly through shafts of light and phantom books-well, that was one thing learned: touching a shaft, or even a book, robbed a mage of no magic!-with those snaking, impossibly long necks twisting up after her, climbing nearer… and nearer… and she was feeling sick again, weak and empty and…
Whenever the snakelike spell-things touched one of the glowing shafts, they boiled away into it and were gone, Embra saw. Her wild spinning was slowing now as she approached the curving wall of the dome and met roiling air rebounding off it. The dome above her was still ringing like a bell, but through its din she could now hear shouts and the high clang of swords meeting in anger. A shout rose above the rest, soaring up to her ears as she struggled to gain control of her flight: "For Ornentar! For victory!"
By the Three, did warriors bellowing war cries ever realize just how foolish they sounded?
Embra shook her head and plunged down through thinning smokes, past snapping jaws that veered and swooped at her too slowly to find their mark, toward the shelves where heavily armored warriors were hacking at Craer and Hawkril, who stood back to back with old Sarasper dancing between them, tiny lightnings flickering between his fingers as he held some spell she didn't recognize ready… to heal? To harm?
Beyond and behind the warriors stood two men in robes-men with cruel faces and cold eyes. One stood with hands raised, sweat glistening on his forehead, and the ripples of intense concentration playing across his jaws. Jaws, like those that snapped and swooped at her…
The other mage was older, and from his jowls to his wintry brows he reeked of power. His eyes were on her, and his lips were moving. From his fingertips dark wisps of smoke or shadow were curling, welling up as they escaped from his grasp, into dark and flapping things that squeaked and cut the air like shards of black glass. They were… bats.
Embra frowned, even as she hurled herself sideways in the air to escape whatever doom this cold-eyed man was weaving. Hadn't Spellmaster Ambelter-her lips curled in revulsion at the mere remembrance of his face-once disparagingly mentioned a downriver wizard who styled himself the Master of Bats?
Bats were circling the cold-eyed wizard's arms and over his head now, a score of them or more, and Embra applied herself to climbing away from him and getting to where the shafts of light would stand between them. She was going to make it, she was…
Caught like a leaf in a gale, hurled away again too stunned to shriek, as the world exploded in blinding brightness that seared her eyes and rang in her ears and smacked her against curving stone that threw her away again into emptiness…
Was her arm broken? Her hip shattered? Or… were they just numbed past feeling? She tried to turn