He drew it out and looked at the door. The sizzling sound of whatever caustic substance the strange men had vomited onto it grew louder and louder, then a wisp of brown-gray smoke twisted up from a spot a finger’s length from the crack where the two doors met.
“There is another way out of here, isn’t there, Ransar?” asked Kolviss.
“Where are we going?” Tlaet replied.
“Where are we going?” Osorkon asked. “That depends on what god you prayed to last.”
“I always pray to Waukeen,” Thensumkon said. “Don’t we all pray to Waukeen, for gold and whatnot?”
Osorkon shook his head, hefted his heirloom mace, and stepped around his desk to stand in front of it, facing the door. He refused to look at Marek, so instead he let his gaze linger on his map. Painted onto one wall, the huge representation showed everything from the middle of the Nagaflow south to Piresteap Citadel in excellent detail. Ten months before, on the Ninth day of Nightal in the Year of the Wave, Osorkon had had a thin, straight blue line, running north-to-south, painted in the space between the Nagaflow River and the Lake of Steam.
The door sizzled so loudly his ears began to ring. Palm-sized chunks of wood fell off only to dissolve away to nothing but black blisters on the wood floor. Movement to the side caught Osorkon’s attention and he watched as another figure stepped through the hovering black cloud into the room beyond the disintegrating doors.
“Salatis,” Osorkon whispered.
“Who, Ransar?” one of the bodyguards asked as they both backed into the room with their halberds out in front of them.
“It’s Senator Salatis,” Osorkon said.
“Well,” Thensumkon huffed with sincere disapproval, “he won’t have that title for long.”
“No,” Osorkon said with a wry smile, “he’ll have mine if we don’t fight well.”
“And get damned lucky,” one of the bodyguards grumbled as he watched two more of the six assassins douse the failing doors with caustic secretions.
With a final sizzling, shattering cacophony they were in the room. The two bodyguards dropped back to defend their ransar, stepping past a startled, immobile Thensumkon.
“Well, now,” the advisor started to say, but the words became a gurgle then were lost entirely to the thump of his severed head hitting the floor.
“Goodness!” Tlaet exclaimed.
“Really, now,” Kolviss said, scurrying back in the direction of the ransar and his guards on legs shaking so badly he was obviously on the verge of collapsing, if not shattering, to the floor, “there is a back door out of here, now, isn’t there? A secret door or a trapdoor… a concealed door, maybe? Some of kind of”
Kolviss stopped talking when one of the bodyguards dropped him with the butt end of his halberd and said, “Sorry, Master Kolviss, but don’t crowd us or”
And it was the bodyguard’s turn to stop in midsentence. Kolviss’s hair, then scalp, dissolved away in front of their eyes, in just the blink of an eye revealing a dome of brilliant white skull. The advisor put a hand to his head, felt the bone, and fainted.
Osorkon decided that was a good thingKolviss wouldn’t be able to feel his eyes melt, then his face. No one should have to be awake while his head was liquefied.
Tlaet squealed like a girl and ran so fast and so suddenly he accidentally avoided a swipe from one of the assassins’ longaxes. Two of the assassins stepped right past him to engage the bodyguards. Osorkon stepped back behind his desk, holding his mace in front of him, his feet wide apart and his knees bent. The reach of the assassins’ longaxes almost matched the bodyguards’ halberds, and the four of them parried and struck, parried and struck.
One of the assassins grunted loudly and stepped back. Angry, bleeding from a huge wound in his chest, the strange man opened his mouth, but before he could launch a stream of black acid at the bodyguard who’d sliced him, his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell backward. The black fluid oozed out from the sides of his mouth and began to dissolve the wood floor under his still head.
Another stepped up in his place, and they were back at it again.
The second bodyguard fell to a disemboweling, low slash of a longaxe. He was at least alive enough to cry out for his mother before the assassin stomped on his neck and cut his plea short with an ear-assaulting crack.
“Ransar,” Kolviss squealed, “let us away!”
“For the last time, Kolviss,” Osorkon said stepping back fast to avoid a stream of black fluid that arced through the air at his face, “there is nowhere to go.”
The acid started working at his desk chair, and Osorkon kicked it away and jumped up onto his deskkicking the stacks of parchment to the floor. Kolviss, in a blind panic, leaped at him, grabbing at his legs, his face red and tears streaming from his eyes. One of the assassins stepped up behind Kolviss and brought his longaxe down in a smooth arc to imbed the blade into the top of the man’s head. The blade sank down to the tip of his nose, and there was surprisingly little blood. Kolviss’s eyes still moved, following Osorkon’s, and his lips twitched silently a few times before he managed to say, “Osorkon?” in a voice made both wet and nasal by the bloody ruin his sinuses had become. The assassin twisted the handle of his long axe, choking up on it as he did so, and broke Kolviss’s head open like an egg. Kolviss’s legs collapsed, and he fell in a gory heap.
Two of the assassins crowded the last bodyguard, who bled from half a dozen wounds. The guard growled through gritted teeth and jabbed then swung, jabbed then swung, with his heavy halberd. When he spun the polearm up to parry a downward slash from one longaxe, the other assassin brought his weapon in low and took both of the guard’s legs off at the knees with that one swipe.
“Surrender, Osorkon!” Salatis shouted over the bodyguard’s agonized shriek.
The scream was silenced when one of the assassins took the guard’s head off.
“Surrender!” Salatis called again from the doorway. “It’s over.”
Knowing the new ransar was right, Osorkon let loose an incoherent battle cry and charged the nearest assassin. He managed by pure luck to get inside the longaxe’s reach and he smashed down on the dark man’s shoulder. The carved steel head of the mace crunched the assassin’s shoulder blade and sent a spiderweb of blue-white sparks crisscrossing over his twitching torso. The assassin’s face screwed up in a spasm of agony, and he stood there, quivering under the mace’s enchanted lightning for a heartbeat, then another, Osorkon shouting in defiance the whole timewhich was long enough for another of the intruders to step in and take one of his arms off.
The lightning disappeared, and the assassin dropped to the floor, still twitching, but otherwise dead. Osorkon staggered back, the mace still in the one hand he had left, and watched the blood pump from his open veins.
It doesn’t hurt, he thought. Isn’t that strange?
A dark-skinned assassin charged in, and Osorkon managed to beat his longaxe away with the mace, but he didn’t register the other one standing right next to him.
The fluid was cold on his skin at first, and thick. It felt heavy, and that along with the weight of the mace made him drop his guard. He took a boot to the chest and fell. He tried to take a deep breath from on his back but couldn’t.
Just as well, he thought. Now I can’t give Salatis the satisfaction of a scream.
The acid took his skin and that hurt. Osorkon had never imagined pain like that.
Kill me, he thought, in some way desperate to communicate with the pain itself. Make me pass out, by Loviatar’s bloody scourge.
His eyes slammed shut and his teeth chattered as the acid began to work on the meat of his arm. If he even had a hand anymore, he was no longer holding the mace. He watched it roll across the floor, the haft getting smaller and smaller as acid dissolved even the enchanted weapon.
“What-” he gasped. “What’s that… smell?”
He caught a glance of the bone of his forearm. It was even whiter than Thensumkon’s skull, if that was possible.