• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A column of light, golden with shimmering motes, stabbed down upon the witch from overhead. An answering flame burst from her stones. Then I saw the reality of what I had only suspected. The thing that was truly Vohanna discarded its human form and swept straight up into the air in a glittering weave of rainbow-spun wings and crystalline jet eyes. It was the same being that I’d seen at Kellet’s Bay.

A door rasped open in the roof and with a tiny thunderclap Vohanna went through it and was gone. The abandoned human body dropped to the sand like a discarded suit of wet clothes. No doubt, the witch herself was even now preparing her defenses against the Nyshphalian fleet.

And as for me, I had no defenses but a sword against the death that came on feet and wings against me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

AT THE POINT OF DEATH

There were three dozen or more of Vohanna’s hybrid guards, unholy mixtures of man and horse and ape, of ghyre and reeth and half a hundred other Taleran monsters. There were the winged ones, shrieking like banshees as they whirled above me. And there was Bryce, with foam flecking his lips in rage at being thwarted by his mistress. He’d wanted to take my life himself; it seemed he would have to share.

I gripped my sword in clenched fingers, wishing suddenly at the point of death that I could at least say goodbye to Rannon. But still my body wanted to live. I began to inch away, seeking instinctively for something to put my back against.

For a moment, Bryce turned and snarled upon the others.

“I told you he was mine!” he shouted.

And for a bare fraction of time the hybrids slowed.

I pivoted and ran.

There was a door, I remembered suddenly, almost certainly leading to a holding area for those who would fight or train in this arena. But was it an exit? Or a dead end? Either way, it was my only hope. To reach it. To get through. To flee.

Behind me I heard the bull-throated roar of the hybrid guards as they saw me run. I heard the shrieks of the winged ones as they saw the same, and heard the pitch of those shrieks alter as leather wings folded and they dived upon me. It was the change in pitch that saved me.

My boots pounded the sand. Dust rose. I heard the winged ones coming, felt them coming. At the last instant I threw myself to the ground. The umbral shadows of wings swept over me; a talon raked a gash across my scalp but didn’t tear my head off.

I rolled and came up running. The door was right there. In front of me. I prayed it wasn’t locked.

It was.

But it was made of wood and not metal.

I spun. Two of the winged devils launched themselves upon me. I slashed off a leg whose talons would have removed my face. The wounded monster screamed, swerved, crashed into its fellow. Together they pinwheeled to the ground. The others circled, looking for their opening. It wouldn’t take them long to find it.

The first of the hybrid guards reached me. Most were huge, slow enough to give me time, but this one was some sleek mixture of tiger, reeth, and man. With nothing but teeth and claws, it hurtled at me on all fours. I swayed aside, hooked one arm over its back and one under its front legs to add my own weight and momentum as I rammed it head first into the locked door. I was practically riding it as it hit and we crashed through the wooden panels in a shout of splintering wood and the cracking sound of the tiger-reeth’s skull.

I tumbled over the creature’s body, staggered up again. A thrown dagger whipped by close enough to fan my hair, and the shock of that galvanized my legs. The holding area was not a dead end. I ran.

Down a long, dimly lit corridor I raced, with the impression of wooden pens crowding close on either side of me. The roof was low enough to prevent the winged hybrids from following, and when I glanced back I could not see Bryce either. But I saw and heard the stalking, slithering, thudding of the others in pursuit.

I ran faster, then stumbled suddenly as from somewhere deep under my feet in the pyramid there came a shuddering rumble.