Gyir, who had been surrounded by guards and prisoners, now stood alone in a widening circle as creatures scrambled away from him in all di¬rections. The fairy held a dirt-smeared death's head in each hand, and Bar¬rick wondered what strange magic the faceless warrior had summoned.
Get up and run, Barrick Eddon. Gyir's words echoed in his head and he clambered to his feet almost without realizing. I will keep them back as long as my fireballs last.
Barrick could not frame the words, but Gyir must have sensed his con¬fusion.
Exploding devices. I had those I could command pack skulls with gun-flour, seal them with mud, and leave them here for me. This way Jikuyin's victims will get at least a little revenge! Gyir's thoughts billowed like windblown flame-he was laughing! For the first time Barrick could feel that the fairy had truly been raised in battle, that it was his element in a way it would never be Barrick's. Now go, while I hold them at bay! Strike for the surface!
But Vansen…!
Is gone, likely dead. All that is certain is that he is lost to us now. You must go. Do you yet have the thing I gave you?
Barrick had forgotten the mirror. His hand crept to his shirt. Yes.
Think of it no more. Flee! I will do what I can here.
But you have to come with me… /
It is more important that at least one of us escapes, Barrick Eddon. Take it to the king in the House of the People. Now go.
But…!
"ENOUGH!" The demigod Jikuyin rose up above a screeching herd of prisoners with flames running in their fur or their ragged clothes. The ogre seemed to grow like a ship's bellying sail until his head threatened to bump the roof of the cavern. "YOU HAVE WASTED ENOUGH OF MY TIME, STORM LANTERN. THE DOOR TO THE EARTHLORD'S HOME IS
OPEN NO LAW, NOT EVEN THE BOOK of THE FIRE OF THE VOID ITSELF, SAYS I CANNOT SEAL THE CHARM BY SQUEEZ-ING THE BLOOD OUT OF THIS MORTAL CHILD LIKE WATER FROM A BAG OF WHEY! "Jikuyin took a stride toward Barrick, but Gyir bent and lit another muddied skull from the torch by his feet, then straight ened and flung the fizzing, sparking ball toward the towering shape. It spat a great gout of fire and hot air as it flared at the giant's feet and knocked him staggering, but it flung Barrick back onto his knees as well.
Run, said Gyir in a small, insistent voice, and then he lit two more skulls and flung them at Jikuyin. Before they had even struck, the fairy was run¬ning toward the roaring demigod with a spear he must have taken from one of the guards. Then the giant and Gyir both disappeared in the double-crash of light and sound: Barrick could feel the skin on his cheeks blister¬ing in the heat.
Barrick got up again, dizzy, with head throbbing and eyes blurred by stinging tears. He was almost blind, anyway-the cavern was full of billow¬ing dust. He stumbled toward what he hoped was the way out, stepping over bodies that squirmed slowly, like dying insects. One of the hairy guards, its face nearly burned away, clutched weakly at his shin with charred fingers. Barrick crushed the creature's skull with his booted foot, then pulled an ax out of its clawed grip, a weapon he could wield with his one good hand. He half climbed, half stumbled up the slope toward the door¬way leading out of the great cavern. All the other prisoners and guards who could do so seemed to have fled through it already: nothing blocked his way but corpses and whimpering near-corpses.
When he reached the opening, Barrick turned back to see the demigod Jikuyin outlined by the flames in which he stood, grinning and roaring so that his cracked face seemed about to split open, with Gyir clutched in his great hand. The fairy, who should have been crushed by that awesome grip, instead stabbed and stabbed at the giant's chest with his spear, each thrust followed by a spurt of black blood, each spurt only seeming to make Jikuyin laugh louder.
"YOU CANNOT HURT ME!" the giant shouted. "THE ICHOR OF SVEROS HIMSELF RUNS IN MY VEINS! I COULD DROWNYOUR ENTIRE RACE IN MY BLOOD AND STILL SURVIVE!"
Gyir jabbed silently, not just at Jikuyin s chest and face, but at his mas¬sive hand, too, struggling to keep the giant from throttling out his life.
"I WILL FIND YOUR LITTLE SUNLANDER BOY LIKE A CAT
FiNDS A LIMPING MOUSe," Jikuyin chortled. "THEN 1 WILL RIDE HIS BLOOD TO THE VERY SEAT OF THE GODS!"
Barrick knew he should run-should take advantage of Gyir's sacrifice, however hopeless-but now something new distracted him. The light of a torch had bloomed in the cavern's entrance. Several Drows, the twisted creatures that looked like Funderlings, had pushed a huge corpse-wagon into the cavern doorway. This one was not loaded with the bodies of dead prisoners but with barrels, and the barrels were surrounded by dry straw.
A bearded Drow sat atop the barrels. He seemed oblivious to the bizarre, apocalyptic events in the cavern below him, his eyes fixed instead on some¬thing in the middle of the air. He might have been an old man beside a busy road, content to wait until his passage would be perfectly safe.
AND WHEN I HAVE THE EARTHLORD'S POWER," Jikuyin was gloating, oblivious to the thick, shining blood that oozed down his front, heedless of the dozen new wounds on his face and neck, "I WILL PAINT YOUR PEOPLE'S EPITAPH WITH THE JUICES I WRING FROM YOUR CORPSES! AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT EPITAPH WILL BE?"
I know what yours will be. Gyir's thought was so quiet that Barrick could barely understand it, although he stood only a few dozen yards away. It will be, "He was not good at thinking ahead."
The fairy's arm shot out. His spear jabbed so hard it pushed all the way through the demigod's neck and out the nape. Jikuyin bellowed in anger, but did not seem any more crippled by this blow than by the others. Gyir leaped onto the giant's neck and used the shaft of the protruding spear as an anchor so he could wrap his arms and legs tightly around Jikuyin's head. The ogre's cries of rage now as loud as the earlier explosions, he staggered out into the middle of the track that ran down from the doorway to the cleared space in front of the earth god's black gateway.
The driver atop the wagon full of barrels raised the torch and waved it. The little men massed behind him shoved the cart out onto the downslope.
As the cart picked up speed, bouncing down the track faster than a horse could run, the driver made no attempt to dismount. Instead he dropped the torch into the straw piled around his feet. The flames flared high around the barrels, so that within a few more moments a great billowing blaze sur¬rounded the little man and filled the back of the wagon. At the base of the track the unheeding giant still tore blindly at the small shape on his back, the faceless gnat who so annoyingly refused to die.
Jikuyin finally yanked Gyir free, pulling the fairy's arm loose in its socket so that it dangled helplessly and the spear dropped from his nerveless lin gers. As Jikuyin bellowed in triumph, ignoring the wagon, Barrick realized what was in the barrels.
"I WILL EAT YOU, INSECT!" the demigod roared.
You will choke on me. The skin of Gyir's outer face had been torn away, and his strange small mouth twisted in what might have been a bloody smile. Look.
For the merest instant Barrick saw Jikuyin s face and the way it changed, then the blazing cart crashed into the demigod and the entire cavern van¬ished in a howling, crackling storm of fire. Barrick felt the Storm Lantern's last thought, a joyous curse on his defeated enemy, then the prince was flung away up the slope, skidding and rolling, and he felt the fairy's pres¬ence in his thoughts wink out like a snuffed candle.
Barrick came to a stop in the doorway amid the shrieking Drows who had brought the wagon, awakened by Gyir's death into this incomprehen¬sible chaos. The stupefying concussion of the gun-flour, still echoing, was followed a moment later by the cracking, scraping sound of the cavern's stone roof collapsing. Solid rock jumped and boomed like Heaven's own drums. Several of the creatures who had unwittingly engineered this mon¬strous event scrambled over Barrick like rats in their haste to flee the doomed cavern. The prince could only cover his head and hold his breath as the impacts lifted and dropped him.