Brandon twisted, crying out in pain. His left arm hung uselessly, the joint shattered, and he lay on his back with the Bluestone Axe across his chest. More and more of the magic missiles spewed from Willim’s finger, sparking and sizzling as they struck him right in the heart. By the time Willim had settled to the ground, the spell was exhausted, but the Kayolin general had been smashed with more magical power than any mortal could survive.
Willim smiled as he landed, a hideous grimace creasing his features. Behind him, he heard Gretchan sobbing, her voice raw with grief.
“You think you are suffering now,” he said to her. She looked up at him, hatred glaring from her moisture-shedding eyes.
“Just wait,” he promised as he took a step toward the cage.
Otaxx Shortbeard was gasping for breath. His chest felt as if it were being squeezed in a vice, and he could barely see. Damn his old age! He didn’t have the endurance of a young child anymore.
Still, he pushed himself up the last bit of the hilltop, each breath rasping in his throat. The sound of his blood pulsing was a roar in his ears, and he shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Finally he clawed his way over the lip of the summit and pulled himself to his knees and finally to his feet.
The first thing he saw was Brandon Bluestone, lying on his back, his shoulder and chest shiny with blood. Then he saw the black wizard, advancing toward Gretchan, still trapped in the cage. She rose to her full height and spit at the Theiwar magic-user, and Otaxx wanted to rush to her, to stop her from antagonizing the brutal wizard.
But of course, it was too late. Willim raised his hands, reaching toward the cleric, and Gretchan gasped and fell, rolling on the ground as if she were being physically attacked, though the wizard stood several feet outside of the cage.
The scene was too much for the old general. He drew his short sword and lumbered forward as fast as his tired legs could carry him.
“You leave her alone, you bastard!” he cried. “You leave my daughter alone!”
Then the wizard turned that hideous face toward Otaxx, and he knew he was doomed.
Sadie watched the old Daewar charge, and she knew that he was going to die, that Willim would kill him as certainly as he had killed Facet and Brandon … and would kill Gretchan Pax, and undoubtedly her and Peat after that, probably sooner rather than later.
The old woman felt a strange mix of emotions. Fatigue was high among them: it had been too long that she had known fear every minute, every day, every step she took, every breath she took. She looked to the side, where Peat had come to rest on the ground beside her, and recognized the same fear, the hopelessness, in his eyes.
He had just come back to her, less than an hour past, and it was all going to end. Even more powerful than fatigue was the crushing sadness: she had managed to get Willim to reverse the spell that had condemned him to the glass bell jar, but for what?
Only to die on the rocky hilltop. That place was all too appropriately named, she reflected bitterly.
The Isle of the Dead.
She looked again at Willim, who had driven the old Daewar onto his back with a blow from a force spell, like a powerful punch that required no physical contact on the wizard’s part. The elderly dwarf, his face already reddened to an unhealthy degree, was grunting as the wizard’s intangible blows swatted him back and forth. Willim was taking a long time to kill the old fellow, she realized. Probably he was enjoying it.
Gretchan was sobbing, tugging on the bars of her cage as if that would do any good. She called out to the Daewar, called him “Father” in a tone full of grief and heartache. Sadie actually felt sorry for her.
Only then did she notice the staff on the ground, lying very near her feet, where Brandon had dropped it when Willim’s magic missile barrage had smashed him down. Sadie looked up again. The wizard was fully engaged in his gradual, deliberate murder. He was paying no attention to his elderly apprentice or to her equally elderly husband.
Slowly, not sure why she was doing it, Sadie reached down and picked up the Staff of Reorx. She caressed the smooth wood, which felt very nice and solid in her hands. And she noticed that the priestess had stopped crying.
Instead, Gretchan was looking at Sadie with wide, disbelieving eyes.
Gretchan was almost blinded by grief. She could see Brandon’s bloody, immobile form on the ground and was watching the black wizard pummel her father to death. Those two images were enough to make her want to blind herself, to tear out her eyes.
Then a strange calm possessed her, and her grief slowly dissipated.
She felt the presence of Reorx, a benign and comforting embrace, easing her despair, somehow even infusing her with a measure of hope.
It was then that she looked around, spotting Sadie a mere ten feet away. The old Theiwar woman was holding the sacred staff, looking at it in wonder. Perhaps she, too, felt the presence of Reorx, Master of the Forge, Father God of All Dwarves.
“Please!” Gretchan begged, her voice a hoarse croak. “Give me the staff!”
Sadie stared at her for what seemed like a lifetime but was perhaps only five seconds. Then she inched closer and extended the staff, anvil head first, and the cleric seized it as if it were a lifeline thrown to a drowning woman. She pulled the sacred artifact to her, clutched it to her breast, and spun around to locate the wizard.
Willim stood over her father’s body, gloating. Then the wizard turned his eyeless face toward Gretchan, his expression distorted with fury.
“He died!” cried the wizard in a monstrous rage. “He died before I could kill-”
Abruptly he stopped, growing stiff and still. “Oh, your staff,” he said calmly. “Do you think that will save you? It won’t. But it will make your dying all that much sweeter … for me.”
He took a step toward her, and she planted the butt of the rod on the ground and seized the middle with both hands. “Oh, mighty Reorx,” she intoned. “Father God of All Dwarves! Free me from this unholy cage.”
As the bars burst apart around her, Willim the Black took another step closer and raised his hands for the casting of yet another mighty, lethal spell.
Brandon lay on the rocky ground, his body wracked with pain. This is what dying feels like, he thought. The Bluestone Axe he still held in his right hand, the only hand he could use as his left shoulder had been smashed to a bloody pulp by the wizard’s deadly missiles.
At least they would have been deadly if the Kayolin dwarf hadn’t been able to pull up his axe as he fell and use the wide, Reorx-blessed blade as a makeshift shield. The last dozen of Willim’s bolts had blasted into the metal axe head and been absorbed there without inflicting further damage to their target.
Still, he was brutally wounded. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open, to watch the events swirl around him. He knew that Otaxx was dead; the old Daewar had sacrificed himself to distract the wizard’s attention away from Brandon.
Then he had watched with numb disbelief as Sadie had snatched up the staff and handed it to Gretchan. He had seen the cage burst to pieces as the power of the god was made real. And he witnessed Willim, his back to Brandon, slowly advancing on Gretchan. The priestess did not seem to be afraid, but the Kayolin dwarf knew that neither could she hope to stand, to survive, in the face of the wizard’s murderous rage.
Gasping from the pain, Brandon tried to move. His left arm was on fire, and his shoulder grated sickeningly as the broken bones shifted and twisted against each other. Somehow he managed to block out the agony, to use his right arm to push himself to a sitting position while he rested the axe in his lap. When next he looked up, Willim was only two steps away from Gretchan. She held her staff before her, as if to ward off the villainous wizard, but her power couldn’t match his. With a single, sharp gesture, Willim the Black swept his hand to the side, and the staff was torn from Gretchan’s hands. It went clattering helplessly onto the rocks of the hilltop.