“But now I am here,” Amric said.
“Yes,” the queen said softly, hunching low in her cone of rock. “Now you are here. But we did not know this when I sent my forces against the city. How did you learn of our presence?”
He ignored her question because he had no answer to give, hoping that she would interpret the omission as a mortal foe refusing to divulge such information. “So you will hurl your minions against the city to the north? You said yourself it was no threat to you, and yet you are willing to lose many, battering against their high walls.” He decided to venture a guess. “You may lose more numbers than you gain, and then where will you be?”
“Arrogant Adept!” she snapped with indignant rage. “Think you we know nothing of tactics? Our numbers will swell tonight, for the city will be yielded up, ripe for the harvest, by one of its own.”
Amric paused. “One of its own?”
Her laugh was lilting and harsh. “Indeed, Adept. We have not faced your kind in centuries, but we remember well your tactics with the lesser races. One of the primitives encountered our strength, and sought to curry favor for himself by making an alliance with us, claiming to be a man of some power among his people. He believed our assurances that we have no wish to rule this world, as well as our promises that he would be made supreme among his kind once we have what we need. As if there will be anyone or anything left to rule.” She gave a dark, ugly chuckle. “He knows so much of what is happening, and yet understands so little.”
Amric felt a chill at the casual certainty of her words, but he did not allow any interruption in his casual stride as he continued to make a wide circle around her. “This ally of yours sounds too gullible to be a man of influence here,” he scoffed. “By what name is this pretender known?”
“I think not,” The Nar’ath queen snarled, her distended jaw twitching and flaring slightly open to reveal a glimpse of the human face beneath, contorted in anger. “I have use for him yet, and I will not have you interfering in our deception. The Adepts, above all, know well how credulous these creatures are, but do not think to treat us the same way.”
“Naturally not,” he said in a dry tone.
“Do not mock us, Adept!” she hissed. There was a sharp report as the edge of the stone rim encasing her cracked beneath her clenched claws. He stopped walking and turned to face her. At the corners of his vision, he saw her hulking minions appear at the mouths of several tunnels, shouldering their way partially from the shadows. Their dull, hateful eyes fixed upon him, their ponderous heads swaying back and forth in response to their queen’s agitation. Without taking his own eyes from the queen, Amric mentally marked the positions of his warriors and waited for her to give the command to attack. His hands tingled, aching to reach for his swords, but he held himself utterly motionless. For a long, tense moment they stood thus, gazes locked together at the core of a brittle silence, and then the queen relaxed and settled back with a speculative look. Her minions shuffled back with a sulking reluctance and were swallowed once more by the dark maws of the tunnels.
Releasing a pent breath, he resumed his slow stroll around the chamber. He noted that the Sil’ath warriors had stolen around the cavern perimeter and reached the captives. Valkarr knelt among them in hushed discussion while Innikar and Sariel stood over them. It would be several minutes before his unhurried pace brought him near enough to them to exchange quiet words. It took Amric long seconds to locate Bellimar, as he did not want to crane his neck back and forth searching for him and thus risk drawing undue attention to his position. He finally discerned the vampire standing at the edge of a pool further around the room. He stood tall and straight with his cloak folded tightly about him, little more than a sliver of night in the cavern’s gloom. His attention appeared to be absorbed by something in the glowing waters.
“The city will fall this night,” the Nar’ath queen assured him. Though she had to be aware of the presence of the others within the chamber, she still seemed to pay them no heed whatsoever.
“You sound very certain of that.”
“Even now my forces gather there,” she said. “When night falls, the city will bare itself to us, and by morning’s light my minions will have harvested them all.”
He glanced upward through the opening far above and onto the tortured sky. The oppressive blanket of clouds had walled off the sun at last, and the light that poured down now into the chamber was a dim grey shroud. He wondered how long remained until nightfall. Under normal circumstances there would be several hours of daylight remaining, but if this cloud cover rolled over Keldrin’s Landing as well, a serviceable darkness-and the accompanying assault-might come all the sooner.
“Why bother with the city at all?” he asked. “If, as you say, conquering this world is truly not your goal.”
She gave a long and sibilant hiss, but he could not decipher whether the sound indicated pleasure or annoyance. “We are after bigger game, as you must realize by now. But we must build our forces, and maneuver them into proper position.”
“Again you speak of ‘we’, and yet all I see here is you.”
She uttered a keening, triumphant shriek that he realized was a laugh. “Then you have only begun to look, arrogant one. My sisters and I have grown in strength slowly over the centuries, recovering in secret from the blow you dealt us so long ago. And had you not activated the Gate and begun to draw upon this world, it might have taken many more centuries before we were ready to strike at yours. Now our hives fill the wasteland, draining the land dry of life, and we build our forces to hurl against you. The time for hiding and preparing is almost done.”
He paused, reeling with the implications of her words. He quailed at the thought of many more monstrosities like this one, each building its own army of black creatures, their sinister hives pockmarking the land like a spreading disease. They were stealing the beings of this world and converting them into their own blasphemous parody of life, and growing stronger all the time. Very soon, if it had not come to pass already, they would need fear nothing on this world. The Nar’ath queen leaned forward, her long black claws rasping against the stone, as she mistook his partial comprehension for something more.
“Did you truly think that you had eradicated our kind? You, whose avarice granted our existence in the first place? We are a growing cancer on the ley lines that feed your world. We know your addiction. You cannot survive without it, and yet the more you draw upon it, the stronger we continue to grow.”
Her tone grew more heated with every word, and he could see her huge form tensing and swelling.
“We have adapted, Adept, evolved over these many centuries that we might more perfectly hunt your race. In your arrogance and greed, you have given us the means to strike at you in more ways than you even realize.”
“Calm yourself, foul one,” he said quickly, striving for a dismissive tone. “You are not ready to pit yourself against the might of the Adepts.”
She gave a deep, grating chuckle, still poised on the verge of action. “I hear ‘we’, and yet see only you,” she said, twisting his own words and casting them back at him.
He threw back his head and boomed a laugh that echoed eerily around the vast chamber, warping the sound until he did not recognize it as his own. “And did you truly think that I came alone?”
It had the desired effect. The Nar’ath queen hesitated, eyes widening to dart suspiciously around the cavern. Her malevolent gaze slid over the Sil’ath warriors, whose position he was nearing now, and dismissed them as inconsequential. She tilted her head upward and froze. Thalya stood upon the rim of the opening high above, silhouetted against the silver sky, her bow drawn and leveled at the creature. Amric hoped she had nocked one of her ensorcelled arrows, as he had a strong suspicion that nothing less would suffice. Another head peered over the edge; Syth’s, by the shape of it, though the height was too great to pick out his features.