The Wizardwar - Elaine Cunningham [7]
She stumbled away from the cage. Her retreat was unheeded, for the wizards' attention was fixed upon the creature bursting free of the shimmering oval and the open cage.
The water demon shielded its glowing red eyes with a dagger-taloned hand as its gaze swept the room. Red orbs focused upon the necromancer.
Hatred burned in them like hellfire.
"Akhlaur," the demon said in a grating, watery voice, pronouncing the word like a foul curse. It sprung, impossibly quick, its massive hands arched into rending talons.
The wizard dropped his useless weapons and seized the creature's wrists.
He frantically chanted spells to summon preternatural strength and killing magic.
Zalathorm's wizards fell back as evil fought evil like two dark fires, each determined to consume the other.
Arcane power crackled like black lightning around the struggling pair.
Akhlaur's luxuriant black hair singed away and drifted off in a cloud of ash. His handsome face blistered and contorted with pain-pain that fed his death-magic spells.
Suddenly the eels upon the demon's head shrieked and flailed in agony.
One by one, they burned and withered, then fell limp to the creature's massive shoulders like lank strands of hair. Fetid steam rose from the demon's body, and green-black scales lifted from its flesh like worn shingles. Too furious to meet death alone, the demon forced Akhlaur inexorably back toward the portal.
The necromancer's hate-filled eyes sought Noor's face. He captured her gaze, then jerked one of the demon's hands, pantomiming a slashing motion.
The girl's head snapped back, and four burning lines opened her throat.
Then Akhlaur was gone. In the mirror, the entwined figures of necromancer and demon rapidly diminished as they fell away from the glowing portal. Kiva felt a surge of triumph, then a sudden, gut-wrenching drop.
To her astonishment, she felt herself sucked into the Plane of Water with the necromancer!
Down she fell, sinking through a sea of magic, falling away from her forest, her clan and kin. Away from her past her heritage. From herself. Falling too far to ever, ever return.
In some part of her mind, Kiva knew she was trapped in a dream. Two centuries had come and gone since Akhlaur's defeat. She awakened abruptly but not with the sudden jolt that usually followed an interrupted dream.
To her horror, she was falling still, tumbling helplessly through thin mountain air. The vision of Akhlaur's tower had been only a dream, but this nightmare was very, very real!
The elf flailed and tumbled, clawing at the empty darkness. Wind whistled past her and carried her shrieks away into the uncaring night. Stars whirled and spun overhead, mocking her with the long-lost memories of starlit dances in elven glades. Kiva felt no sorrow over her forgotten innocence-its loss was too old to mourn. As she fell toward certain death, her only regret was the unfinished revenge that had sustained her for two centuries.
A sudden blur of light and color flashed past her, circled, and dipped out of sight. Kiva struck something soft and yielding and felt herself received and cradled as if in strong, silken arms.
For several moments she lay facedown, too dazed to move, too stunned to make sense of either her fall or her rescue. After a while she raised her head and peered into the elaborate, swirling pattern of a carpet. The wind still whistled past her, but its passage no longer felt cold or mocking.
A flying carpet, then. Kiva felt about for the edges of the magical conveyance and rolled toward the safety of the middle. She cautiously sat up and found herself face to face with Akhlaur himself.
Two centuries of exile in the Plane of Water had taken its toll on Akhlaur.
Lustrous black hair had given way to a pate covered with fine, faintly green scales. His long fingers were webbed, and rows of gills shaped like jagged lightning slashed the sides of his neck, but his expression of faint, derisive amusement was maddeningly