I dove to the floor and covered my head as the rest of the ceiling burst into flame from above. It occurred to me, irrelevantly under the circumstances, that the din of destruction was very faint in my ears; I wondered if one of the close blasts had blown out my eardrums. A rain of debris was falling into the temple. In the middle of it I spotted the magician from the room upstairs now on the temple floor, in the process of cutting down a group of soldiers with a sword. Again I got my feet under me, favoring my hand and body, and lurched across the heaving floor toward the temple. I took two steps, a third, and then the sword abruptly leapt out to the side and jerked me toward the circular staircase. “What are you -” I yelled, but as I started to yank Monoch back my eyes ran along the line of the pointing blade and fell on the thing smoldering ahead at the bottom of the steps, trailing a dying funnel of green magic. It was the ring.
The floor under my feet was pitching madly, and whole sections were ripping free and disappearing to somewhere below. “Okay,” I said to Monoch, “there’s the ring. What am I supposed to do with it?”
It suddenly occurred to me that if the ring didn’t actually come into contact with my flesh I probably wouldn’t set it off. One of the armchairs had slid across the floor into reach and was caught up against a dangling beam torn loose from the ceiling. I gingerly grabbed a torn piece of satin fabric with my left hand, gritting my teeth at the raw scraping on my torn fingers, parted the remaining threads, leapt a widening chasm, and landed at the base of the stairs, dropped the cloth over the ring, held my breath, and picked the satin-wrapped ring back up.
The ring was warm and mobile in the cloth but showed no inclination to attack. I tied a quick rough knot and eased the bundle into my pocket, then turned back to the temple.
In the brief moment it had taken me to snatch up the ring, almost the entire temple floor and large sections of the walls had disappeared, and the fractures in the floor had spread almost to my feet. The magician in the temple was gone, and the guards he had been fighting, and what seemed like half the remaining structure of the temple was cascading after them into the basement. A swooping ball of flame dominated the airspace, leaving fire behind it in the air and on the walls and dancing along all the remaining wood I could see. Peals of harsh roaring thunder were echoing through the rush of the flames.
In the smoke and heat it was getting difficult to breathe, but every obvious exit was blocked by fire. Every possible exit except one - the basement space I could see through the holes in the floor was still dark. It looked like the fire hadn’t started to really burst downward yet. I hooked my arm around a protruding bearing beam now stripped clean of its floor panels and swung myself down.
Light from the fires trickled through and I had some glow from the sword Monoch as well, certainly enough to move with. I clambered onto a long canted section of boards that had fallen and landed intact, still together in their original assembly, and scurried ahead. A good person-height separated my head from the level of the temple floor but I bent low, trying to balance the need to hurry to escape incineration against the requirement of evading the notice of the flame-thing. The stone floor of the basement had fractured where I could see pieces of it beneath the rubble. The bramble of beams approaching on my left had come alight with spreading fires, so I steered right, dropping further to the floor and easing myself under a groaning heap of wall listing over on the other side. My next footstep landed on an apparently solid piece of stone floor, my weight shifted, and the stone gave way. I slid after it, fell free through my own height, and landed up to my hips in a channel of moving water.
Another giant wail exploded from above. I looked up, and was just in time to see the flame-creature burst upward through the roof and arch away into the sky. Over me on all sides was a solid curtain of fire. It was well and truly time to get the hell out, and the sewer I’d fallen into was the best route I’d spotted so far. I hadn’t seen a sign of the magician who’d confronted Yahlei, but he had to be down here somewhere too; hopefully he was not only down here but still alive as well. Right ahead of me sticking out of the water was a large mound of wreckage with small tufts of fire at its top. I moved toward it.
18. REPERCUSSIONS
At last, thought the Lion of the Oolvaan Plain as he bounded up yet another flight of stairs, leaving behind him yet another trio of guards sinking slowly to the floor, the blood of dripping swords. The business had started as a pain-in-the-neck, but now he was into the good part: he hadn’t had so much fun since the last time he’d knocked heads in a bar fight on a trade mission to Drest Klaaver. The Lion had come around to the admission that his runt son Jurtan had not done badly. Of course, it had taken the satisfaction of killing or maiming a dozen or two of Kaar’s guardsmen to put him in the proper frame of mind, but after all what were guardsmen for anyway? And ahead of him now at the top of the stairs was the door to Kaar’s private apartments.
Jurtan’s father leapt powerfully up the steps, taking them two and three at a time, twirling his nicked and dented sword in absent spirals at his side. He reached the top, landing on both feet with a powerful THUD that shook the short balcony. In front of him was the door. At the other end of the balcony, cowering intelligently against the wall, were four guards. The Lion bared his teeth at them and growled. One of the guards grinned weakly back at him and tossed something across the floor. It was a key - the key to Kaar’s door. The Lion’s snarl widened. He strode across to the door, kicking the key contemptuously out of the way, planted one booted foot on the floor, and raised the other sole-first. His mighty thews, though slightly stiffened these days through lack of sufficient use, nonetheless strained, his whole body contracting forcefully, his foot exploded against the door, and with a giant CRASH-RIIPP!! the lock tore completely loose from the heavy wood panels, part of the stone door frame disappeared in a sudden cloud of gritty dust, and the door smashed open. The Lion sprang after it into the room.
The antechamber was the receiving room of the Venerance. The far wall held a wide expansive window looking west across the river and over the city: the curtains were open. In front of the window was a large desk. At the desk, with his back to the door, gazing out at the city, sat the slight, rather sallow form of Kaar, his head propped on his hands. “It was Oskin Yahlei,” Kaar said quietly. “Oskin Yahlei made me do it.”
“Then he’s dead meat too,” snarled Jurtan’s father. “Who the hell is he?”
“I think you’re going to be a little late for him.”
The Lion looked up, following the direction of Kaar’s gaze. With the curfew and the late hour, Roosing Oolvaya was quiet, the dark broken across most of the city only by the glow of the occasional street-lamps. Near the north wall the situation was different. A low hill and the surrounding neighborhood stood out in powerful reds, bright as the light of day, in the heat of a fountain of flame twisting high into the air. “That’s Yahlei’s place over there,” Kaar said. “I don’t know what he is, not really, but from the way he killed my father and trapped me I know he’s just oozing with power. Anybody who could hit him like that -” Kaar nodded out at the scene “- is bound to be even worse.”