The Conqueror's Shadow (63 page)

NATHANIEL ESPA LAY
on the floor, fetched up in the corner. Huddled and spotted with blood, he struggled to focus past the pain, to blink the tears from his eyes. His right arm was broken in two places, his left leg literally wrenched around at the knee so that it was nothing but dangling deadweight. So covered was he in bruises and lacerations,
he looked as though he'd leapt naked into a briar patch. His sword, his armor, his vaunted skill, all proved less than useless against the sudden, inhuman assault.

In the center of the room, a tornado had struck. Furniture and bits of furniture lay strewn about the room, cadavers made of planks and splinters. The dust fluttered in endless circular clouds, dancing with cruel delight at the unfolding scene of carnage.

Mithraem stood amid the wreckage, a nightmare granted flesh and blood. Mostly blood. He held a relaxed fencer's stance, his thin-bladed sword dancing with simple, idle strokes. Before him, Ellowaine raged, hatchets spinning, but not a single strike could penetrate his casual defenses. Behind them, Seilloah lay crumpled on the floor, trembling and blood-drenched hands clutching tightly around the shaft of wood protruding from her stomach, a stake she'd intended for the creature attacking them. Thick, black blood flowed from the dreadful wound, and the agony goaded her to the very edge of madness. To a witch of Seilloah's skill, the wound need not be fatal, but only if she had access to her powers and her herbs, only if she had the time to treat it properly, only if she could concentrate past the pain …

And by the window, Rheah Vhoune and Corvis Rebaine. The warlord stood, a statue of pale flesh and black iron, staring out the window with sightless, unblinking eyes. The sorceress hovered nearby, torn with indecision.

If something went wrong, and she wasn't there to stabilize Rebaine, they could lose him. On the other hand, Mithraem was tearing through her allies like so much parchment, and if he wasn't stopped, Corvis and the rest were
certainly
lost. Reluctantly, Rheah directed her attention away from the entranced man.

Even as she made her decision, the master of the Endless Legion tired of his sport. A contemptuous flick of his sword sent one of Ellowaine's hatchets across the room. A swift kick followed, and the mercenary collapsed to the floor, accompanied by the sound of snapping bones.

Espa writhed in the corner, helpless rage nearly blotting out the pain as he struggled, and failed, to find his feet. A thick trail of blood stretched across the floor, as though left by some gargantuan crimson
slug. Seilloah, one hand pressed tightly to her gaping abdomen, collapsed from her crawl only feet from where she'd begun and curled tightly into a fetal position, helpless against the agony. And Ellowaine lay stunned, a dramatic angle to her left leg that shouldn't exist in any animal less flexible than an eel.

Not counting the currently vacant body of the Terror of the East, only Mithraem and Rheah remained standing in that beat-up little room. Outside, twin horrors from the depths of legend ran amok, and if they did not truly signify the end of the world, they were certainly the end of Mecepheum. Inside was a foe that should have been far less terrible, yet the idea of facing him alone was almost enough to make the normally unflappable sorceress seize up into a useless, gibbering mass.

It was his eyes, empty, soulless, endless tunnels into an infinity of nothing at all, tugging at her soul. Even in the vilest of men, a spark of unalterable
something
made them, at their core, human.

Mithraem, to his core, was not.

Even as the thing approached, the wizard's hands rose and syllables older than civilization tumbled from her lips. The air around her crackled, the room filled with the smell of smoke and ozone. Desperate to stop the advancing nightmare, Rheah pulled no punches. The most powerful offensive spell she knew coalesced before her, stabbing at her foe, the dagger of the gods.

It was a bolt, but this was no lightning. Energies of all hues, from blinding whites to subtle blues and greens, raced the length of the stream. It slammed into Mithraem's chest, hurling him into the far wall hard enough to crack the surrounding brick and shatter the glass. His sword fell from his fist, landing unnoticed by the window. Smoke rose from the floorboards as the heat radiated outward, yet frost formed on the walls as the energies of the arcane assault vied for dominance. A strike of pure elemental power, it contained all that was—earth and air, fire and water—and nothing of this world could stand against it.

But Mithraem, of course, was not of this world. For long seconds, she leaned into the bolt, covered in a sheen of sweat. On the energies flowed, wave after wave, pinning her target to the wall. And then her reserves simply ran out. With a final crackle, the spell dissipated, and Rheah collapsed to her knees, sucking in great gasps of air.

Stone and wood and plaster shifted, dust cascaded from the wall, and Mithraem pulled himself from the wreckage.

His tunic hung in rags, disintegrated by the spell. Ash coated his torso and face, burns spotted his chest, and half his hair had burned away to reveal a horribly charred scalp. But still he stood, and still he neared, mouth gaping in a taunting smile that showed his white, gleaming, perfect teeth against the blackened canvas of his face.

Too exhausted even to run, Rheah could do nothing as the creature bent down beside her, brushed his lips sensuously across her throat, and began to drink her life away.

Tyannon stood at the room's only window, the shutters open just enough to offer a clear view of the stables, and idly tapped a finger on the sill. It wasn't that she was particularly anxious to
be
anywhere in particular. Rather, she'd found herself generally impatient of late, and had no clear idea why.

The heavy snows of midwinter had kept them in town for weeks, far longer than they'd planned to stay. They also, however, kept travel on the nearby roads to a minimum, so Corvis had told her that he wasn't too concerned about the possibilities of pursuit or attack.

Now that spring was beginning to draw its first shallow breaths, rather like a newborn babe, they'd be moving on shortly. Corvis had gone down to the stables to make some sort of arrangements, while Tyannon gathered their possessions from around the room. Had he left her alone like this months before, she'd have been gone so fast that even the gods would've had trouble keeping up.

Now, though? Tyannon knew she wasn't a prisoner anymore, not really. She told herself that she simply had nowhere else to go, but she knew that wasn't true, either.

No, the truth was that it was growing harder and harder for
Tyannon to reconcile the warlord she'd heard of with the man traveling beside her. She knew his crimes, still occasionally shuddered at remembered horror stories, and of course there were still those memories of that day beneath the Hall. But the man she
knew—
the man who seemed vaguely beaten down by the world around him, the man who had thrown down his weapon to keep her from harm, the man who clearly had no real idea of what to
do
with her—that man seemed someone else entirely. Someone
better
.

And Tyannon found herself unduly curious as to which one was the “real” Corvis Rebaine.

The door flew open as Corvis heaved himself, and his burden, into the room. With a loud clatter and a grunt of strain, Corvis lifted the saddlebag and set it upright against the wall. Tyannon's eyebrow rose as he took just a moment to massage his back.

“Did you need help with that?” she asked archly.

“You couldn't have offered at the
bottom
of the stairs?”

Tyannon's lip twitched. “What fun would
that
have been?”

Corvis grumbled something unintelligible and drew open the bag's ties. There seemed to be nothing within but a collection of cheap and rusty tools; Tyannon knew it to be an illusion, one of the magics that Corvis could manage without the aid of that
thing
that used to hang around his neck. With another grunt, he upended the bag, allowing its true contents—a suit of armor, constructed of black steel and bone spurs, smelling strongly of oils—to spill across the floor.

Tyannon couldn't quite repress a gasp of revulsion.

“I'm not wearing it,” he assured her swiftly. “I just … I wanted you to see this for yourself.”

“See what?”

He didn't answer, not immediately. Instead, Corvis dug into the pile of pieces, retrieving two that clearly didn't match the others. One was a heavy tome, its ancient leather covers warped and bent. The other was the ruby-red pendant on its innocuous silver chain.

Grimacing, as tense as though he were sticking his hand into
a serpent's den, Corvis reached out and clutched the amulet. “Hello, Khanda.” Then, “Cute. Funny as always,” and “I'm not sure. Almost two months, maybe.”

Tyannon could not, of course, hear the other side of the conversation. Part of her wanted to grab the pendant away, hurl it out the window, or simply to scream her fury at its mere presence. She did none of those things, though, simply watched, and listened …

And she could have sworn that, just perhaps, she heard the faintest trace of an enraged scream from deep within the ruby as it, and the ancient codex, suddenly vanished in a pulse of crimson light.

Corvis stood, his shoulders straightening, and damn if he didn't look years younger than he had only moments before. Not yet certain what she'd seen—or perhaps simply unprepared to believe—Tyannon stepped forward. Tentatively, she reached out a foot to prod the spot on the floor where the book had lain, and even poked a finger into the palm of Corvis's hand.

“They're gone,” he told her, his voice softer than she'd ever heard it. “For good.”

“Why, Corvis?”

Did he actually blush as he turned away? “Because I know it's what you wanted.”

Tyannon considered once more the two different men she knew as Corvis Rebaine—and she wondered, for the first time, if just maybe she herself might have a hand in determining, once and for all, which of them was real.

HIS EXPRESSION THOUGHTFUL
, Khanda rose from his throne, the muscles beneath his flesh flowing with unnatural grace and precision. As he stepped aside, Corvis finally saw the surface of the throne on which the demon sat, the source of that labored breathing. Even after his exposure to the horrors of this hellish realm, the warlord sucked in his breath. The crystalline seat and backing of the throne
was padded, for Khanda's comfort, with a cushion stitched together from the missing faces of the souls within the forest. Flattened mouths panted desperate, horrified breaths, moaned silently in torment. Tears ran from the corners of blinded eyes long squashed and dried.

It was definitely time to leave.

“It might work,” Khanda finally admitted, thumb and forefinger slowly stroking his chin in a mockery of human contemplation. “We'll have to be bloody quick about it, though, or Audriss will figure it out. And he holds the pendant, Corvis, which means he's technically in control.”

“Didn't stop you from turning coat on me at the drop of a hat, now, did it?”

“No, I imagine it didn't.” The demon scowled. “I have your word on this. When this is over, I go free. You release me from this damn prison!”

“That's the deal.”

“If you renege on me, Corvis …”

“Have I ever lied to you, Khanda?”

If anything, the scowl grew deeper. “I suggest you get moving. Even as slowly as time's going by outside this place, you don't want to dillydally. Big snakes and spiders eating people, and all that.” Another pause. “Rheah Vhoune
did
tell you how to get back, didn't she?”

“I sort of figured it was just a matter of concentration, actually.”

“Right. So why aren't you concentrating?”

Corvis concentrated.

A SMALL CORNER
of Rheah's mind peered through the haze of exhaustion and the clouds of numbing panic, observing, almost clinically, the process slowly killing her. Her skin stretched as the pores on her face gaped wide, as her blood welled up in those pools of flesh. What little strength remained seeped from her, leached out with her stolen blood.