The Ghost King (21 page)

It howled and thrashed, arms swinging back furiously, predictably, and Danica easily stepped out of reach, then followed through with a forward step and front kick to the creature’s chest that drove it back against the wall.

Again it reacted with fury, and again she easily leaped out of reach.

This was the way to fight the creatures, she decided then. Strike hard and back out, repeatedly, never staying close enough to engage those awful claws.

Cadderly was more than glad that she had the situation under control when they heard the window in the adjoining room shatter. He spun around the jamb, turning to kick open the next door, and swept into the room with his left arm upraised.

The beast huddled right before him, waiting to spring at him.

With a startled cry, Cadderly fired the hand crossbow, the bolt hitting the charging crawler barely two feet away, close enough that he felt the rush of concussive force as the dart exploded. Then the beast was gone, blown back across the room where it settled against the wall, its long arms out wide and trembling, a hole in its torso so large that Cadderly realized he could slide his fist into it with ease.

His breathing came in surprised gasps, but he heard a commotion just outside. He dropped the hand crossbow from his left hand—it bounced off his mid thigh, for it was securely tethered—and worked fast to reload the other weapon.

He nearly dropped the explosive dart when Danica rushed into the hall behind him, slamming the door of the first room.

“Too many!” she cried. “And they’re coming in all around us. We’ve got to call up help from below.”

“Go! Go!” Cadderly yelled back, fumbling with the dart as a shadowy form filled the window across the room.

Danica, hardly noticing the nearby enemy, ran for the stairwell. The fleshy beast hurled itself at Cadderly.

The crossbow string slipped from his grasp, and he was lucky to stop the dart from falling out of its grooved table. His eyes flashed from bow to beast and back again, and back, to see a filthy clawed hand slashing at his face.

* * * * *

The center stairs at Spirit Soaring ran down a flight, turned around a landing, then ran down another flight in the opposite direction, two flights for every story of the building. Danica didn’t actually run down the steps. She went halfway down the first flight and hopped the railing, landing lightly halfway down the second flight. She didn’t bounce right to the third set of stairs, but leaped down to the landing to reconnoiter the third floor.

As she had feared, she was met by the sound of breaking glass. She yelled down the stairs again and sprang halfway down the next stairway, then leaped to the fourth set of steps. She heard the commotion of many people running up the stairs.

“Break into patrols to secure each floor!” Danica yelled to them, her point accentuated when the lead group reached the landing to the second story and immediately encountered a pair of the beasts rushing down the hallway at them.

Waggling fingers sent bolts of magical force reaching out. Armored clerics crowded into the doorway to shield the unarmored wizards.

Few at Spirit Soaring were untested or unseasoned in battle, and so several broke off from the first group with precision and discipline, most continuing up the stairs.

Danica was already gone from the spot, sprinting back up three steps at a time. She had been away from Cadderly for longer than she had anticipated, and though she trusted in him—how could she not, when she had seen him face down a terrible dragon and a vampire, and when she had watched him, through sheer willpower and divine magic, create the magnificent library cathedral?—she knew that he was alone up there on the fourth floor.

Alone and with more than two dozen windows to defend in that wing alone.

* * * * *

He cried out in alarm and turned away from the blow, but not enough to avoid the long, vicious claws. He felt the skin under his left eye tear away, and the weight of the blow nearly knocked him senseless.

Cadderly wasn’t even aware that he had pulled the trigger of his hand crossbow. The bolt wasn’t set perfectly on the table, but it snapped out anyway, and good fortune alone had the weapon turned in the correct direction. The bolt stabbed into the monster’s flesh, collapsed, and exploded, throwing the beast backward. It flew against the wall, shrieking in a ghastly squeal. Clawed hands grabbed at the blasted-open wound.

Cadderly heard the scream, but couldn’t tell whether it was pain, defeat, or victory. Bent low, he stumbled out of the room, blood streaming down his face and dripping on the floor. The blow hadn’t touched his eye, but it was already swollen so badly he could see only splashes of indistinguishable light.

Staggering and disoriented, he heard more creatures dragging themselves through other rooms. Load! Load! his thoughts silently screamed, and he fumbled to do just that, but quickly realized that he hadn’t the time.

He closed his eyes and called out to Deneir.

All he found were numbers, patterns written on the Weave.

His confusion lasted until a creature burst into the hall before him. The numbers formed a pattern in his mind, and a spell issued from his lips.

A gleaming shield of divine energy enwrapped the priest as the creature rushed in, and though Cadderly instinctively recoiled from its bashing, clawing attacks, they did not, could not, seriously harm him.

They couldn’t penetrate the magical barrier he had somehow enacted.

Another spell flowed into his thoughts, and he wasted no time in uttering the words, dropping his hand crossbows to hang by their tethers and throwing his hands high into the air. He felt the energy running through him, divine and wonderful and powerful, as if he pulled it out of the air. It tingled down his arms and through his torso, down his legs and into the floor, and there it rolled out in every direction, an orange-red glow spider-webbing through the floor planks.

The creature whacking at him immediately began to howl in pain, and Cadderly ambled down the hall, taking the consecrated ground with him. Too stupid to realize its error, the fleshy beast followed and continued to scream out, its lower torso sizzling under the burn of radiant energy.

More creatures came at him and tried to attack, but began howling as they entered the circle of power. The magic still moved with Cadderly as he turned toward the stairs.

There, the mighty priest saw Danica gawking at him.

The first creature died. Another one fell, then a third, consumed by the power of Deneir, the power of the unknown dweomer Cadderly had cast. He waved for Danica to run away, but she didn’t, and went to join him instead.

As soon as she drew near, she too began to glisten under the light of his divine shield.

“What have you done?” she asked him.

“I have no idea,” Cadderly replied. He wasn’t about to stand there and question his good fortune.

“Let’s clear the floor,” Danica said, and together they moved down the hallway.

Danica led with a flurry of kicks and punches that finished off two of the beasts as they writhed in pain when the consecrated ground came under them.

One creature tried to scramble into a side room, and Danica turned toward it. But Cadderly cast forth a pointing finger and cried out another prayer. A shaft of light, a lance of divine energy, shot out and skewered the beast, which howled and crashed into the doorjamb as Danica neared.

The crawler survived the spearlike energy, but it sparkled and glowed, making it easy for the expert Danica to line up her blows and quickly dispatch it.

By the time five bloodied and battered priests arrived on the landing of the stairs to support the couple, one wing of the fourth floor had been swept clear of monsters. Cadderly still emanated the circle of power flowing around him, and discovered too that his wounds were magically mending.

The other priests looked at him with puzzlement and intrigue, but he had no answers for them. He had called to Deneir, and Deneir, or some other being of power, had answered his prayers with unknown dweomers.

There was no time to sit and contemplate, Cadderly knew, for Spirit Soaring was a gigantic structure full of windows, full of side rooms and alcoves, plus narrow back passages and a multilevel substructure.

They fought throughout the night and into the early dawn, until no more monsters came through the windows. Still they fought throughout the morning, weary and battered, and with several of their companions dead, painstakingly clearing the large spaces of Spirit Soaring.

Cadderly and Danica both knew that many rooms remained to be explored and cleared, but they were all exhausted. The task began to reinforce the windows with heavy boards, to tend the wounded, and to organize battle groups for the coming night and the next possible attack.

“Where is Ivan?” Danica asked Cadderly when they finally had a few moments alone.

“He went to Carradoon, I thought.”

“No, just Pikel, with Rorey and …” the names caught in Danica’s throat. All three of her children had gone to Carradoon, had traveled through the mountain forests from which those hideous creatures had come.

“Cadderly?” she whispered, her voice breaking. He, too, had to take a deep breath to stop himself from falling over in fear.

“We have to go to them,” he said.

But Danica was shaking her head. “You have to stay here,” she replied. “You cannot—”

“I can move more quickly on my own.”

“We have no idea what precipitated this,” Cadderly complained. “We don’t even know what power we’re up against!”

“And who better than I to find out?” his wife asked, and she managed a little grin of confidence.

A very little grin of confidence.

S
he wore a little knowing smile, a smile at odds with her eyes, which had rolled again to white. She was floating off the ground. “Ye mean to kill him?” she asked, as if she were talking to someone standing before her. As she spoke, her eyes came back into focus.

“The accent,” Jarlaxle remarked as Catti-brie’s shoulders shifted back—as if she thought she was leaning back in a chair, perhaps.

“If ye be killing Entreri to free Regis and to stop him from hurting anyone else, then me heart says it’s a good thing,” the woman said, and leaned forward intently. “But if ye’re meaning to kill him to prove yerself or to deny what he is, then me heart cries.”

“Calimport,” Drizzt whispered, vividly recalling the scene. “Wha—?” Bruenor started to ask, but Catti-brie continued, cutting him short.

“Suren the world’s not fair, me friend. Suren by the measure of hearts, ye been wronged. But are ye after the assassin for yer own anger? Will killing Entreri cure the wrong?

“Look in the mirror, Drizzt Do’Urden, without the mask. Killin’ Entreri won’t change the color of his skin—or the color of yer own.”

“Elf?” Bruenor asked, but at that shocking moment, Drizzt couldn’t even hear him.

The weight of that long-ago encounter with Catti-brie came cascading
back to him. He was there again, in the moment, in that small room, receiving one of the most profound slaps of cold wisdom anyone had ever cared enough about him to deliver. It was the moment he realized that he loved Catti-brie, though it would be years before he dared act on those feelings.

He glanced at Bruenor and Jarlaxle, a bit embarrassed, too much overwhelmed, and turned again to his beloved, who continued that old conversation—word for word.

“… if only ye’d learn to look,” she said, her lips turned in that disarming, charming smile that she had so often flashed Drizzt’s way, each time melting any resistance he might have to what she was saying.

“And if only ye’d ever learned to love. Suren ye’ve let things slip past, Drizzt Do’Urden.”

She turned her head, as if some commotion had occurred nearby, and Drizzt remembered that Wulfgar had entered the room at that moment. Wulfgar was Catti-brie’s lover at that time, though she’d just hinted that her heart was for Drizzt.

And it was, he knew, even then.

Drizzt began to shake as he remembered what was to come. Jarlaxle moved up behind him then, and reached around Drizzt’s head. For an instant, Drizzt tensed, thinking the mercenary had a garrote. It was no garrote, however, but an eye patch, which Jarlaxle tied on securely before shoving Drizzt forward.

“Go to her!” he demanded.

Only a step away, Drizzt heard again the words that had, in retrospect, changed his life, the words that had freed him.

“Just for thoughts, me friend,” Catti-brie said quietly, and Drizzt had to pause before continuing to her, had to let her finish. “Are ye more trapped by the way the world sees ye, or by the way ye see the world seein’ ye?”

Tears streaming from his lavender eyes, Drizzt fell over her in a great hug, pulling down her outstretched arms. He didn’t cross into that shadowed plane, protected as he was by Jarlaxle’s eye patch. Drizzt pulled Catti-brie down to him and hugged her close, and kept on hugging her until she finally relaxed and slipped back to a sitting position.

At last, Drizzt looked at the others, at Jarlaxle in particular.