Down the aisle, the templars and guards turned at the sound of Magnus’s voice. Seeing what was about to happen, they abandoned their pursuit of the sorcerer and charged toward Faenaeyon.
Sadira quickly summoned energy for a spell. “Magnus hurry!”
The windsinger glanced down the aisle, then twisted his lumpy lips into a scowl and stopped singing. Still holding the slave line with one hand, he formed the other into a massive fist and smashed it into the wall.
The bricks disintegrated into a spray of jagged shards, and the ring popped free. Magnus threw Faenaeyon over his shoulder, then groaned in pain and shook the fist he had used to smash the wall. Sadira waved him toward the next aisle and followed after him, moving backwards so she could keep watch on the approaching Nibenese.
The guards were swinging their curved blades to and fro, frantically trying to clear a path through the men and women cowering before them. They succeeded only in filling the aisle with mutilated pedestrians too stunned and frightened to crawl out of the way.
One of the templars stopped and called upon her king’s magic. A glowing red stone streaked from her hand, striking Magnus square in the back. The rock glanced off his hide, taking with it a swath of skin and filling the air with the stench of scorched leather. The windsinger crashed to the floor in a bellowing heap, sending Faenaeyon rolling toward the emporium’s back wall.
“Magnus!” Sadira screamed, “Get up!”
He did not answer, but the sorceress did not take her eyes off her enemies long enough to look in his direction. Instead, as a second templar pointed a long-nailed finger at her, Sadira flung a tiny shard if crystal high into the air and whispered her incantation.
After reaching the top of its arc, the shard did not fall. Instead, it hovered in the air for an instant, then exploded into a glittering disk of solid crystal. Though Sadira knew the wafer to be no thicker than a finger, it was impossible to tell by looking at it. The circle seemed infinitely deep, and filled with sheets of gemlike color: emerald, amethyst, even flashes of diamond.
When the templar’s spell struck the other side, it flared white, then divided into dazzling waves of yellow, red, and blue. Each blast of color shot off in a different direction, then quickly slowed to a stop and hung trapped within the radiant depths of the disk.
The sorceress traced a circle in the air. Spinning in a crazy maelstrom of color, the crystal flew down the corridor, absorbing everything it touched. Within moments, it was filled with the distorted, inert figures of those who had been standing in the aisle: slave buyers, house agents, guards, and the three Nibenese templars.
Sadira turned toward Magnus and saw the windsinger struggling to his knees. But, as she moved to help him, something came scraping over the wall to which Faenaeyon had been attached. She spun around and saw Dhojakt’s figure appearing at the top, his eyes burning with a hateful gleam.
Sadira began summoning energy for another spell. At the same time, Dhojakt motioned at the floor upon which she stood, closing his fist and raising it upward as of drawing something from the earth. With a series of sharp bangs, the flagstones beneath her feet cracked apart, and a gaping hole opened. The sorceress cried out in alarm and stepped away, still holding her palm downward.
A cilops crawled from the fissure, swinging its oval head from side to side and flailing its antennae about wildly. Its compound eye quickly fell on Sadira, and the beast opened its three sets of pincers. Blasting her with its musty breath, it shot forward.
The sorceress leaped into an empty slave pen, but was no match for the beast’s speed. Catching her around the thigh, the thing lifted her into the air. A stream of hot blood spilled down her leg, and she felt the numbing sting of venom entering her veins.
“Magnus!” she yelled, panicked by the thought of being poisoned. “Help me!”
“Don’t look to your big companion,” scoffed Dhojakt. “He was what he came for, and now he’s gone.”
The sorceress glanced at the rear wall of the emporium. As the prince claimed, neither Magnus nor Faenaeyon were anywhere to be seen. Cursing the windsinger for being so fast to leave, Sadira plunged a hand into her satchel and withdrew the first thing he touched, a wad of soot-covered hemp. She almost put it back, for it was an ingredient to a spell that she could cast only on herself. Then an idea occurred to her, and the sorceress thrust her fingers down to the cilop’s pincers. She slapped the hemp onto the thing’s head, then grabbed an antenna and spoke her incantation.
The cilops turned as black as Dhojakt’s eyes and faded to an insubstantial silhouette. Sadira slipped from between its pincers and dropped to the floor. The shadowy beast tried to attack again, but its mandibles passed through the sorceress without effect. Ignoring the impotent attacker, Sadira ripped a strip or cloth from her sarami and made a tourniquet around her savaged thigh. The bandage would prevent the poison from traveling to the rest of her body, at least for a few minutes.
“Your king didn’t say you’d be so difficult to kill,” Dhojakt observed, his segmented body slinking over the wall.
“You’re doing this for Tithian?” Sadira gasped. She tied off her bandage and placed her hands on the flagstones as if to push herself to her feet. Instead of trying to rise, however, she drew the energy for another spell. With her palm touching the floor directly, there would be not be even the faintest shimmer of energy to betray what she was doing.
“I do not serve that fool,” Dhojakt hissed. “I have cause of my own to end your life.”
“Which is?” Sadira asked.
Instead of answering, Dhojakt began to descend, his cilops body slinking slowly over the wall.
Sadira had begun to tingle with magical energy, but not nearly enough to stop the prince. If she hoped overcome whatever had protected him from her spells yesterday, she would need much more power. The sorceress kept her hand open and turned toward the floor. Vines began to drop from their pillars, withered and brown. She did not stop, even after they had crumbled to ash, leaving the soil beneath the emporium as lifeless as its flagstone floor.
The stream died away. Sadira feared no more energy would come, then she felt another source yielding its life. It came from outside the emporium, flowing into her body more slowly, as if the plants were reluctant to yield it. The sorceress realized that the force had to be coming from Sage’s Square, where the magnificent agafari trees grew.
“No!” Dhojakt yelled, starting across the aisle. “You must not defile my father’s grove!”
Sadira clenched her teeth and pulled as hard as she could. At the same time, she reached for her spell ingredients with her free hand. For an instant, it seemed the agafari grove would not yield its life to her summons-then she felt as if a thundercloud had opened. Magical energy flooded into her in such a rush that the sorceress’s muscles began to burn and quiver from head to foot. She closed her hand, but the flow continued against her will, streaming into her body and making it impossible to control her own limbs.
As Dhojakt came nearer, the prince’s nostrils flared angrily, and Sadira heard the hiss of his breath rushing in and out of the cavernous openings. The skin around his nose was cracked and inflamed, probably from the trap Raka had laid for him yesterday.
The prince extended the bony mandibles from beneath his lips, then grabbed Sadira by the shoulders and drew her close. The sorceress felt energy streaming from her body into his, and control of her muscles returned to her.
“I had intended to kill you mercifully,” the prince spat. “But now it is necessary to punish you.”
Sadira pinched a nugget of crystallized acid between her fingers. The oils of her skin triggered an instantaneous reaction, causing her to grimace as the vitriolic stuff ate at her flesh.