Rikus started forward to help her. As he stumbled across the slope, he watched helplessly as four lacy wings sprouted from Tithian’s back. Still holding the Dark Lens in his tail, the king rose into the air and flew toward the cliff on the far side of the plain. His size dwindled rapidly, and the mul knew that he would quickly pass out of sight.
Tithian flew away, and Sadira rolled down the slope and pinned the spider beneath her. She pulled her head away from its maw. Her face was covered with red welts that looked like burn marks, but there were no punctures to suggest that the thing had been injecting poison into her body. The sorceress grasped her attacker in both hands and picked it up high over her head. She brought it down on a sharp rock. The thing vanished in a fiery flash.
Sadira screamed in shock and covered her face.
Rikus reached her side. “Let me see,” he said.
“I’m not seriously hurt-which is more than Tithian will be able to say when I catch up to him,” Sadira said. She lowered her arms, revealing a face with singed eyelashes and reddened skin. Rikus was relieved to see that there were no critical burns.
“What about the Dragon?” Sadira asked.
The mul pointed toward the top of the rim. “I snapped the sword,” he said. “What’s left of Borys fell inside.”
“We’d better have a look,” Sadira said.
They climbed the slope and peered cautiously over the top. In the bottom of the crater, a huge skeleton of black-stained bones lay curled into a fetal ball. Its shoulder blades were fused into a single large hump, and its gangling arms were wrapped around its knees. The thing’s face was the remotely human visage that Rikus had seen replace Borys’s, with the Scourge’s shard still lodged in the nose and spewing dark slime into the air.
As they watched, sparks of blue energy began to dance in its empty eye sockets. From its fleshless mouth came a sibilant voice.
“Borys of Ebe, Butcher of Dwarves, Leader of the Revolt,” the voice hissed. “Your master has claimed his punishment.”
Inky fluid began to bubble up between the skeleton’s teeth. The ribs broke open and began to gush ebony syrup from the jagged ends. The arms and legs separated at the joints, then the pelvis split down the center, and finally the spine collapsed into a line of disconnected vertebrae. With each separation, more dark slime poured into the basin, until the skeleton itself disappeared beneath a pool of bubbling, frothing, black sludge.
SIXTEEN
THE BLUE AGE
A stone shifted beneath Rikus’s foot and went tumbling down to the boiling black pond below. The mul’s legs buckled, and he dropped to his seat, landing hard on the crest of the crater’s rim. He managed to keep Neeva cradled tight against his chest, but she groaned anyway.
Rkard was at their side in an instant. “Careful!” The boy scowled at Rikus. “We’re not even supposed to move her.”
“I’m sorry. We have no choice,” said Rikus.
Sadira came over the rim and joined them. “The sorcerer-kings might come through the arch at any moment,” she said, bracing herself on Neeva’s axe to rest. Rkard had sealed the punctures in her stomach and had dressed the burns she had suffered when Tithian had used the Lens against her, but the sorceress still looked pained and fatigued. “You don’t want our enemies to find her, do you?”
“I want you to kill the sorcerer-kings,” said the boy. Neeva took her son’s arm. “Haven’t we talked about this?”
“But they killed Borys,” the boy retorted.
“And maybe they’ll kill the sorcerer-kings later,” Neeva said. She winced with pain, then added, “But they can’t do it now, not with the Scourge broken and Sadira’s powers gone until morning.”
“This is dangerous, Mother,” Rkard protested. “I’m supposed to heal you at least one more time before moving you. Otherwise, you might not walk again.”
“If the sorcerer-kings find me, I won’t live long enough to walk,” Neeva said, her voice growing stern. She looked up at Rikus. “Take me down.”
“Don’t drop her this time,” Rkard ordered. He went down the slope first, kicking loose stones out of the mul’s path.
“He doesn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Rikus,” Neeva said. “After what happened to Caelum, he’s scared to death that he’ll lose me, too.”
“I won’t let that happen,” the mul said.
“Sshhh.” Neeva touched her fingers to his lips. “During the war with Urik, I thought you learned not to make promises you can’t keep.”
The mul shrugged. “Some things never change, I guess.”
Rikus shifted his gaze down the hill. A dozen paces below, the black sludge from his sword had filled the bottom of the crater. Dark wisps of shadow rose from its surface, while yellow eyes blinked in the center of slow-spinning eddies. In places, warped spouts of slime oozed up to form disfigured silhouettes of four-footed birds, two-headed men, and mekillots with long, writhing tails at both ends. Sometimes, the weird beasts even seemed to take on lives of their own, making their way to the shore and crawling a short distance up the slope before they dissolved into sticky messes and drained into the ground.
Rikus thought it a mark of his company’s desperation that they had picked this place to hide Neeva, but he had been unable to think of another plan to protect the injured warrior from the sorcerer-kings. As Neeva had told her son, with the Scourge gone, he and Sadira would not be killing any more sorcerer-kings-at least not until the sorceress’s powers returned in the morning.
Rikus followed Rkard to a jagged tumble of boulders that offered shelter both from searching eyes and splashing ooze. He kneeled down and deposited Neeva in the center of the cluster, bracing her back against a large stone. She glanced through a gap toward the black pond, just a few steps below.
“This should do,” she said, nodding. “The sorcerer-kings won’t be anxious to come down here. You two go on.”
Rkard’s eyes widened. “Go? Where?”
“Now that your mother’s safe, we must find Tithian,” Sadira said.
“No!” The boy grabbed Rikus’s arm. “The Dragon’s dead. You have to stay here.”
Rikus’s heart grew as heavy as stone. “There’s nothing I’d like more,” he said. “But I can’t. If we let Tithian go, he’ll release an evil even more powerful than the Dragon.”
“I know-Rajaat,” the boy answered. “But without the Dragon to keep him locked away, isn’t Rajaat going to escape sooner or later anyway?”
“Not if we capture the Dark Lens,” Sadira explained. “When I touched Rikus’s sword to it, I felt magic as powerful as the sun’s. I think we can use the Lens to keep Rajaat imprisoned.”
“And that means you have to leave my mother in danger?” Rkard asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Rikus answered.
The boy turned away. “My father wouldn’t leave her.”
“Rkard, don’t …”
Neeva let her command trail off and raised her hands to wipe away the tears suddenly brimming in her eyes.
“Look at this,” she said, staring at her wet fingers in amazement. “I haven’t cried since I was a child, when Tithian bought me for his gladiator pits.”
“Water for Caelum,” Sadira said. “Don’t hold it back.”
“I couldn’t if I tried.” Neeva watched her tears tumble to the ground, shaking her head with unspoken regrets. Sadira laid a hand on the warrior’s arm but seemed unable to find the words to comfort her friend. Rikus realized that the sorceress knew the same thing he did: it was too late to apologize now. The spirits of the dead did not hear the voices of their loved ones or even remember their names.
Sadira touched Rikus’s arm. “We’d better go.”
The mul pulled his dagger and held it out toward Rkard’s back. “I don’t know if this blade will do you any good, but it might.”