"Up again," Jak said. "We're close."
"Here they come," Magadon said, looking behind them. He turned, dropped to one knee, and drew an arrow to his ear.
Across the large chamber, the slaadi appeared. Other than some slight charring, their bodies showed no wounds from the fireballs. Both roared.
"Trickster's toes," Jak oathed.
"Keep your concentration on the Tap," Cale ordered him. He did not want Jak trying to cast a spell against the slaadi and losing the thread of his divination.
Magadon spent more of the little mental energy he still had, charged his arrow, and let fly. The missile hit Dolgan in the hip, sank deeply into his body, and sent him spinning to the floor. Azriim leaped over him and continued his charge.
Holding his mask around Weaveshear's hilt, Cale incanted a spell. When he spoke the last word, he called into being a magical wall that spanned the width of the room. Composed of shadows and veined with viridian lines, it audibly sizzled, radiating magical energy from only one side-that facing the slaadi. Cale could barely see through it.
Azriim halted his charge and hissed, skin smoking in the presence of the magic. Behind him, Dolgan climbed to his feet, his skin also smoking. The big slaad jerked Magadon's arrow from his hip. Azriim withdrew a wand from his thigh sheath.
"Up," Cale said. "Go."
Like the wall of stone, he knew the magical wall would slow the slaadi for only a few breaths.
The four comrades raced up the stairs. They found themselves in a wide foyer. A pair of large wooden double doors bound in brass stood on the other side of the foyer.
"In there," Jak said. "That's it."
Below them, the sizzling sound from Cale's wall of energy went silent. Azriim must have countered it somehow.
The slaadi were coming.
"How are you going to kill it?" Riven asked.
"I'm not," Cale answered. "The sun is."
As they charged down the hall, Cale whispered the words to a spell that allowed him to see dweomers. The double doors glowed in his sight, the wards evident to his magic-sensing vision. The Sojourner had warded the doors well. Cale did not hesitate. Blade in hand, he threw his shoulder against them and knocked them open.
Glyphs flared and magical energy blazed out of the jambs. Weaveshear drank it all and Cale suffered no harm. Power rushed into the blade's steel and it emitted a cloud of shadows. The weapon vibrated in Cale's grasp, pregnant with the Sojourner's power. Cale whirled around, pointed the tip at the head of the stairs, and waited.
The moment the slaadi appeared, he discharged the energy.
A beam of viridian light streaked from Weaveshear's tip-the recoil drove Cale back a step-and hit Azriim in the stomach. The slaad bared his fangs and grimaced but the energy seemed to have no effect. Even Azriim looked surprised. He looked up and grinned a mouthful of sharp teeth.
"Go," Jak said to Cale. "We'll hold them off. Get the Weave Tap. Kill it."
Cale hesitated as the slaadi advanced.
"Go," Magadon said over his shoulder.
Cale nodded, turned, and ran into the room. Judging from its size and the defaced murals painted on the walls, the room once was a religious sanctum of some kind. Scorch marks marred much of the floor, as if a magical battle had been fought there.
In the center of the chamber stood the Weave Tap, grown to ten times the size of the sapling Cale had seen the slaadi remove from the Fane of Shadows. Silver limbs formed a canopy for golden leaves sparkling with arcane power. A silver pulse periodically raced up the bole, like the beat of a heart. The energy in the room stood the hairs of Cale's arms on end.
The Tap's roots stood exposed, the ends melded with the floor of the chamber. The entire ceiling of the room glowed silver. Cale visualized the tower shooting a beam of magical energy from its top into the sky. If he killed the Tap, he would kill the beam, kill the eclipse, stop the Sojourner.
He stepped through the space between shadows and covered in one stride the distance between the doorway and the Weave Tap. He materialized amidst its roots, near the bole.
Behind him, he could hear his comrades fighting for their lives with the slaadi. The combat had leaked through the doors into the sanctum. Cale turned to see Azriim unleashing a flurry of claw strikes against Riven. The assassin held off the attack with a whirling counter of his sabers, but barely. The slaad forced Riven backward through the doorway and fired a bolt of energy from his palm at Magadon, who was fighting alongside Jak to finish off Dolgan. The energy struck the guide squarely and drove him into the wall-hard.
Dolgan took the opportunity to tear into Jak. A claw strike sent the little man careening backward, bleeding from his chest. He answered with a stab of his shortsword and a shouted spell. White fire flew from his hand and struck the slaad in the chest. It scorched Dolgan's skin, but the slaad only grinned.
Jak looked over his shoulder and caught Cale watching.
"Kill it, godsdammit!" the little man shouted. He turned and charged Dolgan. Magadon climbed to his feet and joined him. Blades and claws met.
Cale turned, sheathed Weaveshear, and wrapped his arms around the Tap's bole. The wood felt warm, like skin, and the moment he touched it, he knew the Tap possessed sentience.
He gritted his teeth as the Tap's awareness reached for his mind. He did not resist it. The mental touch was not hostile, merely unfocused, flailing. Still, it indicated a living, self-aware creature.
Cale sensed its nature through the mindlink-born of the Weave and the Shadow Weave, of light and darkness, forever existing in the gray area between the poles of its being.
Just like Cale.
And Cale was going to kill it. He had no choice.
I'm sorry, he thought, and hoped it understood.
For a breath, but only a breath, he almost reconsidered. But the sounds of combat from behind brought him back to himself. Jak screamed. Magadon shouted. Another spell sizzled into the stone.
Pulses of silver light throbbed between Cale's arms as regular as a heartbeat. Cale pictured the first place in Selgaunt that came to his mind and called upon the darkness to move both himself and the Weave Tap there.
The darkness answered. Pitch surrounded him and the Tap. He felt the familiar sensation of being stretched parchment-thin, and in the next heartbeat found himself blinking in the half-light of Temple Avenue. He had brought the Weave Tap with him. It stood beside him, towering and unstable on its exposed roots.
Shouts of surprise greeted his appearance. The street was crowded.
"Look! Look there!"
The street traffic stopped. Horses started, snorted at his sudden appearance. Heads poked out of coaches, out of temple windows. A hundred faces, formerly upturned to watch the partial eclipse, turned to regard him. The pilgrims near him backed away quickly, warily. Children regarded him with wide eyes. A walkway philosopher pointed his finger at Cale and berated him as an agent of devilry.
"Is that a tree?" someone shouted. "Look at it!"
Exposed to the partial sunlight, the Weave Tap began to writhe and smoke beside Cale. The silver pulses came faster, faster, the frantic beat of terror.
Cale backed off, eyes wide. People poured out of the temples to watch.
The Tap's branches and roots twisted, curling with agony, blackening in the partial sunlight. Formerly glowing leaves of pure arcane power fell from smoking limbs, showering the street and disintegrating in small explosions of sparks. The Tap's consciousness still had a vague hold on Cale's mind and he distantly sensed its pain and fear.
Bark peeled; the tree's trunk split. Cale imagined the equivalent happening to a man-bones shattering, skin burning, peeling away. It was too much.