The Tyranny of Ghosts_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [110]
The hammer’s wielder bared his teeth and turned all of his attention to her. Crouched down low, she moved to the side, searching for an opening.
Beyond the two armed bugbears, Pradoor crept toward the one Ashi had wounded. She moved with eerie confidence for a blind woman, hand going directly to his wound. Ashi didn’t hear the prayer she spoke, but she saw its effects—the bugbear jerked at her touch and sat upright. The wound across its belly was gone.
“Just run, Ashi!” snapped Aruget. He led the way, slipping around his opponent and sprinting through the shattered door into the outer room. Ashi feinted at the hammer-wielding bugbear, then slid to his other side as he reacted.
The bugbear Pradoor had just healed thrust himself to his feet and lunged for her. Ashi skipped aside, and the bugbear’s arms swept wide, but so did her blow. Pradoor cackled with glee. Ashi plunged on through the shattered door after Aruget. The changeling was almost across the outer room, almost at the door to the corridor—
“I call the teeth of the Devourer!” Pradoor shouted.
Whirling white blades burst out of the air between Aruget and the door. He tried to stop, but he slid half in among them. The blades seemed to close on him like a school of fish caught in a feeding frenzy. Aruget screamed and scrambled away. His left arm emerged torn and bloody from the attack. The white blades spread back across the door, cutting off escape.
Ashi caught up to him. “Aruget—”
“I’m fine,” he said in a voice tight with pain.
“No,” she said. “The map.”
Tucked into the changeling’s belt at his left side, it had plunged with him into the spinning blades. Pradoor’s spell had chewed it to tatters.
Aruget looked up at her, and his face hardened. “Keep your paper safe then,” he said—and shoved past her, charging back at the bugbears and Pradoor as they emerged into the outer room. He snatched a heavy vessel of Aundairian glass from a shelf as he raced by and hurled it ahead of him at the old priestess.
For once, Pradoor’s strange senses seemed to fail her. The glass vessel struck her right between the eyes, and she pitched over backward. She hit the floor, and the barrier of blades vanished.
And the bugbear with the hammer hit Aruget. The weapon swung high, slamming into his chest and halting his charge. The changeling’s legs flew out from under him and he crashed down onto his back. The other armed bugbear raised his axe. Ashi saw Aruget’s eyes open wide. He flung himself aside and the axe chopped through the thick carpet deep into the floor. The bugbear jerked at the axe, trying to pull it loose, but the other two bugbears were already on Aruget, the unarmed one kicking at his head with heavy boots, the other raising his hammer for another blow.
There was no need. Between Tariic’s servants, Ashi saw Aruget’s face run like wax. The coarse features, ruddy tones, and long mobile ears of Aruget melted into a pale, delicate visage surrounded by short-cropped, silver hair. The bugbear froze in surprise.
Ashi had never seen Aruget’s true face. Changelings didn’t revert to their natural face in sleep or when they lost consciousness, only when they willed it. Or when they died.
Rage settled over Ashi. In her head, she knew that she should be running—out the door, down the stairs, and out into Rhukaan Draal in search of some way to get her information out of Darguun. Her heart told her she should be doing something very different.
Even though the bugbears couldn’t hear it, she raised her voice in the fluting battle cry of the Bonetree Clan and flung herself at them. The first barely had a chance to look up from his buried axe. Ashi leaped off of a carved table and plunged her sword, with all of her weight behind it, deep into his