The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [159]
"Sargh and bebolt!" the healer cursed, throwing his hands protectively across his crotch as he blinked and then gaped at the room full of surging, hacking men. "What now?"
A factor died from a sword thrust up through his mouth into his brain, and fell back against a wall, squalling, to slide bloodily down it to the floor. He almost crushed a cursing bard who whimpered from time to time in pain, but kept on his painful way, crawling along the wall.
Flaeros Delcamper was a bard of Aglirta, and wasn't going to miss any of this unless the gods themselves dragged him away. The factor's bloody fall gave him an idea. Struggling to a sitting position beside the dead man, Flaeros feigned a lapse into senselessness and called on the Vodal. The battered ring that never left his finger awakened into life, and through half-closed eyes he watched men die and shout and charge and hack-looking for those who were other than they outwardly seemed.
It did not take him long to find one. Baron Maerlin was not a brawny man in gleaming battle-plate, but a Priest of the Serpent with a scaled head, an air-licking forked tongue, and the beginnings of a tail! Moreover, he was murmuring something and pointing a scepter tipped with serpent-fangs at… the Baron Blackgult! A green shimmering was pulsing at one end of the scepter, and beginning to creep slowly along it…
Before he thought about what he was doing, Flaeros Delcamper had drawn the slender sword his uncles had given him and surged upright, his shoulders scraping along the wall. Licking his lips, Flaeros steeled himself against the agony to come. He'd only have one chance to do this… and for all Aglirta's sake, it must be a chance not wasted.
Drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, Flaeros Delcamper took two agonized, staggering steps, his teeth clenched against the pain-and only let a roar of anguish escape his lips as he hacked down the Serpent-priest from behind, chopping the man's neck furiously until the hissing, scaled man fell. In agony, fresh fire flaring in his legs, Flaeros fell atop him, and wrestled the wand out of the priest's hand.
He was pounding it on the floor, trying to break it, when men came rushing at him out of the fray from all sides, blades extended to stab. Serpent-worshippers!
"Uncles," Flaeros snarled, "I died well. I died for Aglirta!"
But before those slim, dark blades could reach him, other men were pouncing on the warriors, driving them aside or running them through, and as Flaeros twisted desperately away from the priest he'd felled, he called on the Vodal to see who his rescuers were-and saw that they had no faces. He swallowed and kept on rolling.
Hands were still reaching for the scepter, though-but half a room away, Ezendor Blackgult saw, and smiled. A Dwaer flashed, and the scepter in the bard's hand caught fire, blazing up blinding white as Flaeros screamed and dropped it.
As the scion of the Delcampers crawled away in trampled agony, the scepter remained behind on the stones, too hot for any man to touch, let alone take up and wield.
The Baron of Blackgult waved a hand that trailed Dwaer-fire, and Flaeros Delcamper was suddenly blinking and trembling on his knees at the baron's feet. The man who stood in a ring of spiraling Dwaer said to Sarasper, "Heal him. Please."
The old man looked back at him for a silent moment and then turned and plucked a gewgaw from one of Embra's pouches, and bent to his work.
Embra stared at Blackgult, and then at the battle surging ever closer to them. Bards were hastening along the walls now, biting their lips, their faces white with fear, and some of them had drawn daggers in their hands. Their eyes were seeking Flaeros.
And then there was something new to see. More warriors were pushing through the door-men whose flesh dripped from their jawbones, frozen in grotesquerie. The Melted were come to war.
Among them