Shaa charged across the guardroom, started up the stairs, and paused. The sound of marching feet was audible from above. It was also growing louder.
“Uh, Shaa?” Jurtan said from behind him.
“What?”
“Did I mention that sometimes the music warns me when something’s about to happen?”
“Oh, great,” Shaa said sarcastically.
“Over here, everybody!” Mont’s sister yelled from across the room. Shaa turned to see her waving people through one of the other doorways. Mont’s father, a disgusted expression on his face and a sword in his hand, plunged past her, snarling “Let me to the front!”, and was gone.
The marching feet-tramp reached the staircase and began to descend in their direction. Shaa would have loved to lock them out; unfortunately the staircase was the one entrance to the room that didn’t have a door. Mont lent a shoulder and they shoved the guardroom table across the floor. Upended, it might block the archway - a soldier clattered around the bend from above and saw them. Shaa leapt to the top of the table and displayed his sword. The guardsman jumped forward two steps, drawing his own sword, and engaged. Shaa swept his other arm around from behind and hit him with the iron bar.
The clang of the bar faded and new footsteps clattered on the stairs as the soldier rolled limply beneath the table. Mont, holding his sword, began to climb up next to Shaa.
“No,” Shaa said. “I will hold them here. You must safeguard the prisoners.”
“But -”
“You will fight later. Action, wherever taken, is nonetheless character,” Shaa said. “Go.”
Mont chewed his lip, leaned in the direction of the exit, bobbed uncertainly on one foot, looked at Shaa, and then took off down the tunnel.
Another voice spoke from Shaa’s shoulder. “You can’t hold this room alone,” Mont’s sister said. “There’s too many doorways.”
Shaa glanced across and down at her, where she stood next to the table. “I appreciate your encouragement,” he said dryly.
“Look out!” she said.
Shaa leaned and thrust at the second soldier without bothering to shift his eyes, a sardonic twist on his mouth, and felt his sword fenestrate a chest. He bowed slightly in the direction of Mont’s sister. “Your name?” he said.
“Ah, Tildamire,” she said. She was quickly discovering the same thing her brother had found out earlier, that Shaa’s attitude had a remarkable capacity for disconcerting its target. “There’s another one coming!”
“If you’re going to stay, you might as well lock the other doors.” Shaa had turned more serious attention back to the staircase. The squads he had seen so far generally ran to ten men apiece. Two were already under the table - no, three, he thought, as the iron bar unchivalrously claimed another victim. The fourth and fifth rushed together, side- by-side, the one on Shaa’s left fractionally closer; Shaa had his sword in his right hand and was presenting his right side to them, almost within reach. He stepped back, moving to their left, the trooper on the far side lunged just a little further, Shaa’s blade nicked out at the soldier lagging behind, and the man lost his balance on the slick step, fell across the length of his partner’s sword, and carried them both forehead-first into the heavy slab edge of the table.
Two sets of legs now stretched upward along the lower stairs. Shaa quickly knelt, rummaged under the table with one hand, temporarily sticking the iron bar in his belt, and came up with another sword. Six, seven, and eight rattled around the corner. Shaa hefted the new sword, drew it back, and launched it hilt-first over the heads of the first two guardsmen. It hit the third man in the shoulder. The impact of the heavy hilt spun him slightly, making him flail about for balance with both arms, and suddenly another multi-person tangle was crashing down the stairs. Shaa performed detail work with his iron bar.
The table creaked behind him. “I could only lock one, and it isn’t going to hold for long,” Tildamire told Shaa.
“Quiet,” Shaa said. The footsteps of new fodder on the steps had stopped. Shaa jumped down from the table, landing silently, and backed across the floor, holding his sword warily in front of him. A reddish glow appeared at the top of the circular staircase.
“What is it?” the woman whispered.
The glow intensified, as something drew around the stairs and came closer to them. “I suggest flight,” Shaa told her.
“But what about you?”
“I will delay it,” Shaa said, “I hope.” The glare from the staircase was painfully bright, and was now casting a sharp-edged fan of pink across the floor and table and ceiling. The fan swept along the room, spreading out. Shaa twisted a small stud on the hilt of his rapier, breaking the integrity of its inhibition spell, and bands of flaming blue wearing hard jagged spikes danced down the blade. He looked at Tildamire. “Thank you for your solicitude. I am, however, not suicidal. Now go.”
She took a last glance, her mouth hanging slightly open, and ran out the remaining open door after the other prisoners. Shaa backed to the doorway and kicked the door shut after her as the thing from the staircase floated into the room. It figured there had to be a sorcerer hanging around somewhere, Shaa thought, his habitual air of smugness somewhat dented by the circumstances.
The light burst full into the room, skimming down the last stairs and over the table. Shaa squinted against the glare. The construct was tall, Shaa’s height, a spinning pillar of intermeshing helices, interference patterns traveling slowly across its face. Waving tentacle-like protrusions flowed from irregular nodes on the surface. The thing leaned into a turn and scudded toward Shaa, its screeching whine mounting. Shaa struck an en garde and cut at the nearest tentacle, felt a brief catch as his churning blue blade bit the air, and saw a severed tentacle end twirl to the floor in a wisp of shooting sparks. He let the momentum of the sword swing it through another tentacle and went for the body.
The bands of fiery blue ground into the construct like a sharp saw. Then the sword caught again and turned in Shaa’s grip. He fought for control, seeing his shadow ahead of him on the floor. In the instant he noticed the shadow and realized one of the glowing tentacles had snuck around behind him, a pain as of flames flayed his back and lanced through to his chest. He hacked frantically at the tentacle behind him, nicked it, and fell to his knees as yet another flailing arm swept over his head. The whirling body drew nearer; his earlier thrust had bashed in one side and the thing was wobbling erratically, but it was not yet near its end. The functional tentacles reached for him. Sweat ran down Shaa’s face into his gritted teeth. His spine contorted. He threw himself back, swinging his rapier in front of him for a stop-thrust, a shower of sparks cascaded over his face, and Shaa felt a lightning shock run down his sword-arm and into his shoulder.
13. MAX DROPS IN
Over the mountains they ran into a storm. Under more rational conditions they would have let it ground them. Thunder crashed on all sides, lightning lit the giant billows of heaving clouds, and downdrafts threatened to rip the bird’s wings off and smash them all into the ground. Haddo’s skill and the buzzard’s native cussedness drove them on; Max wanted to hoard as much of his strength as he could, and influencing even calm weather was a major energy sinkhole. The sky was merely overcast when they reached the river.
The bird turned south, the scattered lights of sailing vessels making cryptic beacons below them in the night. Ten miles north of Roosing Oolvaya they went into a long glide. The city was only a mile or two downstream when the bird leveled out, twenty feet over the long swells. Max adjusted his face-mask, checked the pack straps, and slid into the river. Haddo and the bird banked east and faded out of sight in the darkness. Max turned on his back. The current floated him downstream.