The fiend didn’t bother trying to get to its feet. It used the momentum of its roll to carry itself to where Janik lay. It planted its sword hand on Janik’s shoulder to pin him to the ground, and lifted its shield so its sharpened edge was positioned right over Janik’s neck.
15
Third Reunion
The fiend paused for only a heartbeat. Janik saw its feline mouth curve into a wicked smile and the muscles of its shoulder tense to drive the shield down.
Something hit the rakshasa like a stone from a catapult, knocking it off Janik completely. Janik leaped to his feet and saw Dania on the ground, tangled with the fiend, which looked more like a fierce tiger locked in a death struggle than a warrior in armor. It roared as it tried to roll Dania onto her back, and it ignored its weapons in favor of trying to bite her neck.
Janik took a deep breath as he picked up his sword from the ground, trying to calm his pounding heart. He moved as fast as he could to the zakya and Dania, but he felt like he was running in a dream, as if his feet were mired in swampy ground.
“Get it off her, Janik!” Mathas was yelling. He was poised to cast a spell, but he didn’t want to risk catching Dania in the blast. Dania was struggling, but she seemed unwilling to loose her sword, even though she couldn’t possibly bring it to bear in such close quarters.
Janik reached them. With his left hand, he grabbed a fistful of the zakya’s fur and skin between its helmet and its armor, pulling with all his strength to draw its head back. It snarled and tried to twist its head around to bite his arm, then Janik drove his sword up under its chin.
Again he felt that his sword had grown blunt, that it couldn’t bite through the unnatural flesh. But it didn’t matter. Dania broke free of the zakya’s grasp, found her feet, and stepped backward, swinging her sword with all her strength. Her weapon hit the creature and erupted in a burst of silver flame, then cleaved through its neck as the flame seared its fur and flesh. Janik pulled his hand back from the flames in surprise, leaving his sword embedded in the zakya’s chin. The sword landed, impaled in the fiend’s severed head, at Janik’s feet. Its body slumped to the ground.
“Thanks for getting it off me,” Dania said.
“Thanks for keeping my head on me,” Janik replied. He bent to pull his sword free, and tested the point with his finger. “Auftane?” He looked around for the dwarf, finding him beside Mathas.
“Give me the sword,” Auftane said, anticipating Janik’s request. He took the blade and traced symbols on it as he had done before, then handed it back to Janik. “That ought to help.”
“Thank you.” Janik checked the point again out of habit, then slid the sword back into its sheath. “On second thought,” he said, pulling it out again, “I expect I’m going to need this again soon.”
“I can’t quite believe we’re not still fighting,” Dania said. “Those two certainly made enough noise to draw attention.”
“Well, we don’t know how many of these things are here,” Janik said. “The party that came after us was large, so maybe they didn’t leave many behind.”
“Sounds pretty optimistic,” Auftane observed.
“It’s a pleasant enough fantasy,” Janik said. “But it’s probably a trap.”
“Now that’s the Janik I know,” Dania said with a wry smile. “Where now?” Auftane asked.
“A place to talk about this that’s not out in the open,” Janik said. “It would have been good to come in here with a plan.”
“We were making our way toward a plan,” Dania said, “but they caught us off guard. Sneaking up on our camp in the middle of the night—honestly, they have no respect for the way things are supposed to be done.”
Janik laughed quietly and pointed to a heap of rubble nearby—evidently one of the efforts to rebuild the ruins. They moved quietly into its shadow and huddled together to plan their next steps.
“I see two possible approaches,” Janik said. “One would be to retrace our steps from our last journey. I have the map I made then, though I don’t know how helpful it will be with all the building they’ve been doing.” He pulled the sheaf of parchment out of his coat and rustled through it. “The other option would be to head straight for the ziggurat, assuming that whatever is going on here has its origins in that structure.” He found the map he was looking for, checked the positions of the moons to orient himself, and pulled a small, smooth stone from another pocket. The stone glowed with a dim white light, and he held it near the map so he could read it.
He pointed to a spot at the edge of his map. “I think we’re about here,” he said. “Last time we came from the west and only made it about this far.”
“May I see the map?” Mathas asked, extending a hand.
“Of course.” Janik placed it in the elf’s wizened hand and held the glowstone so it illuminated the map.
Mathas studied it for a moment. “A typical scholar’s scratches,” he sighed. “You can read these notations, can you?”
“You know I can. What are you looking at?”
“Well, I can’t make out a word of it, but if my memory serves—and I have no reason to believe that its efficacy has been dimmed by my advanced age—then we must be almost directly above the place where we located the Ramethene Sword, and not far from the entrance to that underground vault.”
“Let me see that,” Janik demanded. He snatched the map from Mathas and held the light close to it. “Of course,” he said. “You’re right. And we had thought that we might be close to finding an entrance to the ziggurat down there.”
“I’m sorry,” Auftane interrupted, “but could you back up a little bit? I’m having a hard time following you.”
“Forgive me, Auftane. I forget you weren’t with us last time. On our previous expedition, we came in from the west, over here.” He pointed to the map and trailed his finger over it, showing their route through the ruins. “None of this was here—there was no wall, and none of these stacks of blocks. We went straight to the ziggurat and searched for a long time, hoping to find a way inside. We made wider and wider circles around it, and right here—” he pointed to a spot just west of their current position—“we did some digging. We managed to uncover the outline of a large chamber. It was boring work, though, and we gave up on uncovering any more of it—especially once we stumbled onto a passage leading down into the earth, still clear enough for us to pass through. That led us down into a large vault that was pretty much intact, and that’s where we found the Ramethene Sword.”
“When we brought the sword up to the surface, Krael met us,” Mathas said, “and after that defeat we lost interest in exploring the site any further. But we believed that if an entrance to the ziggurat were found, it would likely be connected to that underground vault.”
“And that passage is near here?” Auftane asked.
“I admit that my mapping suffered in the excitement of discovery,” Janik said. “But I believe Mathas is correct. It should be close.”
“Then it could very well be that your two approaches are one,” Mathas said. “By retracing our steps to the vault where we found the sword, we might be able to reach the ziggurat and get to the heart of this.”
“That reminds me,” Janik said. “Mathas, what do you make of the arrangement of these towers, these stacks of rubble?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was up on the wall, it struck me for a moment that there might be some pattern to their placement around the ziggurat. Does that suggest anything to you?”