The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [153]
Then, with a groan that shook all the Silent House and flung everyone in the room off their feet, the pillar broke free of its vaulting, trailing huge slabs of ceiling, and toppled like a great stone tree, as wide as all the world and thundering a room-shaking song of doom towards Flaeros.
Somehow he remembered to scream.
Lying in an open coffin, Ingryl Ambelter shuddered as a sudden surge of magic crackled up from Gadaster's bones, their glow becoming briefly blinding. "Three above," the onetime Spellmaster hissed at the ceiling. "Who's using that much magic-and for what?"
For a moment he was almost frantic to get himself a body and get up into the palace to find out… and a moment later, he was very glad that he was lying down in its lowest levels, in the chill, deserted darkness in a room no one still alive knew about, where he would have to remain for some time to come. That just might help him to survive.
The room shuddered and then leaped from end to tile-clattering end as the mighty pillar crashed down, obliterating two running bards in an instant. A third minstrel, sobbing in his fear, raced towards Flaeros screaming, "Out of the way! Out of the way! Out! Out! Out!"
Flaeros struggled to rise or roll away-but the terrified man launched himself over the litter in a dive that took him headlong out into the passage. The two injured bards had to clamber over the splintered ruin of the litter, so they took the time to snatch Flaeros up and stagger a few paces along the passage with him. When they set him down, gasping, he told them to leave him-and, with thankful glances and without another word, they ran off down the passage in the wake of their vanished fellow.
Flaeros Delcamper dragged himself up into a sitting position against the wall, weeping with pain. His leg felt like it was broken again. Biting his lips, he bent his will to ignoring the pain and staring back into the room over his litter. It was so firmly jammed in the doorway that it seemed now to belong there.
It seemed to Embra that she had been crawling for a very long time-that she had always been crawling. Coughing in the thick dust, she dragged herself on over sharp points of rock, one leg useless. She was hurt somewhere inside, too, low on her right side, though only a few small tumbling stones had struck her.
Hawkril, over by his own pillar, had already staggered upright, but Sarasper had made no movement save the slow shrinkings of spidery limbs fading back into the bloody and broken limbs of an old man. "Three preserve us," she gasped, spitting blood with each word.
"No, no, that's my task!" Craer said merrily, from somewhere nearby. A breath or so later lightning cracked through the dust, stabbing blindly at where the procurer's voice had come from. The wizard Ressheven was very much alive, it seemed-and anxious that others in the room not be.
The spell emptied the air of dust in an eye-blink. Embra twisted her head to look back at the Sirl mage, wondering if she could hurl any spell back at him in time-and then, sliding down the far side of a slope of rubble onto a few bare floor tiles, was glad she wouldn't have to.
Craer was scrambling around in the wrack, hurling furniture legs, bloody armaragor limbs, fragments of tabletops, and shattered swords at Ressheven, peppering the snarling wizard with a storm of things that bruised and bounced and clanged. Crashes from behind her made Embra roll over-aahh! Gods, the pain!-to look in the other direction, where she saw a grim and blood-streaked Hawkril, bared to the waist and beyond now, lurching slowly toward the mage, holding the remains of a massive table up in front of him as a shield.
Sarasper's eyes were open, and he was groaning slightly as she reached him. Lightning crackled again behind Embra, but it was followed by Craer's derisive laughter, so she didn't bother to look back.
"Lass," the old healer growled, as she propped herself unsteadily on one arm above him, ''give me some Silvertree gewgaws! Gods, but I hurt!"
"I believe it's a common complaint," the Lady of Jewels