The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [39]
The pillar was four feet thick, and had held up the lofty ceiling of the hall for centuries. The fine network of cracks clawing their meandering ways across the runes graven into it did not widen as the room shook and the dust fell in clouds, nor did the pillar move an inch. The longfangs roared its pain and lurched away, seeking to go around one side of the pillar and bite down on the rolling, dodging sorceress.
She still had all of her limbs, and still had hold of the figurine, but she wasn't getting even time to breathe, much less call a spell to mind and cast it. Embra roared out rage of her own as she rolled to her feet and sprinted away, the beast's great jaws snapping shut on empty air far too close behind her.
"Lady Embra!" Craer called, from somewhere off to her right. "Can your magics heal? Use the Stone!"
The longfangs crashed into another pillar, and smote the stone floor beside her with one of its useless limbjaws; Embra sprang out of the way and shouted back, "It's inside this beast! Hawk's hurt, isn't he?"
The procurer surprised her. "He's bad," Craer called, after a few soft curses, "but we need Sarasper more. I can follow the way we took down to Adeln-but I don't know how to get to it from here… and this end of the House is all traps!"
"Claws of the happy dancing Dark One!" Embra spat. "Will nothing go our way?"
"And if things did, where then would be our adventure?" the procurer called back cheerfully. "Our heroics? The exploits of the mighty Band of Four that the bards could sing about?"
"Craer," Embra snarled at him, as she panted her way up a short flight of steps to a balcony whose rail had already broken away and shattered, some time ago, "bards will sing about anything. If we did nothing, they'd just make it all up!" Teeth shrieked along stone as a limbjaws tried to sweep her off her feet. "I'd rather see them all here, now," she added, thrusting herself between jagged stones where a hole had been broken open in the balcony wall, to get as far from the longfangs as she could, "to help us fight this thing!"
"Lady," Craer shouted, "remember when you conjured up that nightwyrm, in the ruins-when you were thralled? Could you do that again, now, and fly it down the beast's gullet?"
"Sargh it, Craer," she almost screamed, "it takes forever to…"
The wizard-tamed longfangs was trying to haul itself up onto the balcony, thinking it had her trapped-and the crumbling stones, weakened here by years of water seeping through the stones and freezing each winter to form iron-hard fangs of ice, were breaking free under its weight and tumbling down with it. She might just have time enough.
Bracing her shoulders against broken stone, Embra held up the figurine, set her will, and began to hiss out an incantation that was frighteningly simple…
Forgotten and ignored by the wizard-driven monster, Craer made his way carefully around the chamber to where Sarasper lay. It was no wonder, given all the humans with bows and the delight nightwyrms have of dining on men and their cattle, that the batlike hunting horrors were rare in the Vale these days-but why hadn't wizards made war on each other with swarms of the things?
Sarasper lay on his back, twisted awkwardly amid shards of stone long fallen from the vaulted ceiling above. Craer stroked his hand as gently as any hesitant mother might, to awaken a sick child. "Sarasper?" he whispered. "Do you hear and heed?"
There came a faint groan from the old man sprawled on the stones, and he turned his head a little and mumbled something. Craer bent over him like a lover, moving his ear to keep it always just above those muttering lips.
"Seems like we've always been… running… fighting… Aglirta in our hands, to save or let fall," Sarasper told the darkness. "So tired… let it fall. Just let it fall… to shatter and be done with all striving…"
Craer shivered. He'd heard a man speak so just once before. The man had let go of life and just shrunken and died, in a day and a night, with no wound or mark on him. But was