The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [145]
It opened under his sure touch, into dusty darkness. The king, it seemed, hadn't known about, or cared to use, this secret passage. There were almost three dozen such that Ingryl could recall; perhaps Snowsar had simply never got around to this one.
Like a vengeful wind Ingryl ran to the nearest stair and whirled down it, surefooted in the dank darkness, counting the turns. When the total was high enough he turned on a landing to where there would be a door, outlined it with cautious fingers, and pressed on the right frame-stone to make it open.
Faint light greeted the Spellmaster as he stepped into the passage beyond. Though the lower levels of the sprawling castle were disused, some rooms had windows; here and there sunlight stabbed past dusty curtains.
Hastening to his own most secret place in all the palace, the Spellmaster stopped at a certain closed stone door that looked no different from many others he'd passed. Kissing it in a certain place, Ingryl murmured a word of opening and then, more loudly, a word that was nonsense, and laid his hand upon another spot on the door-and the stone melted away under his hand. In the brief moments before it became solid again, the Spellmaster ducked through the empty doorway into the slime-worm curtains beyond. He hated their cold sucking mouths and the smell of their slime, but only he could pass it and live. Drawing in a deep breath of revulsion, he stepped forward, into his hanging curtain of guardians.
And stiffened in agony, clutching at the hanging net of little slitherers. The blade that was sliding wetly out of his chest had come without warning-as had the hand that now slapped across his nose and mouth and jerked his head around, breaking his neck.
Red agony lashed like lightning through a hungrily spreading mouth of darkness rushing up to claim him. Elsewhere, numbness was racing through him. The Spellmaster tried to speak, but couldn't. He consoled himself with watching, with fading eyes, the glistening ropes of slime-worms adhering to the back of his slayer's hand-and knowing that whoever the man was, he was doomed.
Struggling to move limbs that felt like heavy stones, Ingryl Ambelter drove one elbow viciously back, and then the other. When his killer's grip broke a few moments later, and the Spellmaster felt the wrenching ache of the sword being dragged out of him by the man's fall, he turned his own collapsing body around, shuddering in pain as he drove his own fingers-the ones bearing magic rings-into the bubbling wound the sword had made and held them there, arms trembling.
Gods, but it hurt! He reeled… and fell headlong atop the man who'd killed him.
More agony as he bounced bone-shatteringly, trying-through a strangling froth of blood-to scream. As the last of the vitality left the body he'd crafted, and everything went dark, Ingryl saw one last thing: his slayer had no face.
A long while later, Ingryl Ambelter became aware again. The cold, humming fire of magic was coursing through him, and had been for a long, long time. Its work was almost done now, the rings that had yielded up their age-old enchantments crumbling to dust and ash; their stream of magical power was beginning to pulse as it faded. Soon the flow would die away altogether.
No matter; its work, was done. He was unspun from the body he'd crafted earlier, and yet lived. From the body of the Koglaur who'd dared to strike him down, he'd build a new one. It mattered not if Koglaur weren't entirely human; in this haven he had more than enough magic to twist and reshape and make things match his own carefully stored hair and flesh and shards of fingernails. Oh, no; Darsar would not so easily be rid of Ingryl Ambelter.
The man who'd been a Spellmaster gathered his will and set about the slow, grim work of becoming a man again.
Up, he thought fiercely. Up!
Thrice he whelmed his will, feeling magic swirl and surge in response, and taking pride