Zuharrin screeched in fury, but Cellester held him firm.
Down below, Fallarond had seen what had occurred on the balcony. In one flowing movement he unslung his bow, fitted an arrow, and sent it into the stone of the wall inches below the balcony where it lodged. Dangling from it was a length of the thin cord that the Deathguard had used to scale the walls of the citadel. Zemella needed no second bidding. Lithe as a cat, she leaped, bent down, and gripped the cord. In one flowing movement she swung outward and began her descent.
Kazzerand, also watching, swore and stepped forward, sword swinging. He would meet the Valenar girl at the foot of the dangling cord.
Vaddi, partly freed of the sorcerer’s powers, called to the fallen sword he had dropped. Like a live thing, it rose up from the floor, green light vibrant about it. In a blur it shot through the air like a hurled javelin. Its point caught Kazzerand under the breastplate, just below his heart, and his armor was powerless to stop the plunge of the blade as it tore into him, splitting his heart in two, tearing completely through him and beyond, finally clattering to the stone in a steaming pool of blood and flesh.
Kazzerand’s mouth opened, as if he would shout out his defiance of this act, but no sound emerged. He collapsed onto his face.
Zemella climbed down the cord and joined Vaddi. Not giving him a moment to protest, she gripped the talisman, her hand closing over it and his hand. She swung them round to face T’saagash Mal together. The demon had risen to stand at the very threshold of the chamber his many arms weaving a grotesque pattern in the air, black powers cracking like whips.
On the balcony, Zuharrin shrieked in fury and smashed aside the hands of the cleric in a blast of scarlet light. Cellester was flung back like a rag into the shadows behind him. Zuharrin turned to him, face ablaze with anger.
“Do your worst,” said Cellester through waves of pain. His robes smouldered, his arms burned and blistered to his elbows, his hands a bloody ruin. He could not rise. He was utterly spent.
“Oh, I will,” said Zuharrin. “You have no idea.” He turned back to the scene below.
Zemella felt her own blood being drawn into Erethindel now, combining with Vaddi’s. It seemed impossible that there was so much of it, but she realized that both she and Vaddi were no more than vessels for something else. This was not their body fluid but dragon blood, drawn through them by the horn from some other source, its flow governed by ancient magics.
The blood that flowed down from them stopped at the lip of the vast opening and ran around the rim, highlighting the bizarre statues there in a blaze of crimson light. The opening shivered tike the hide of a great beast. Behind it, the shape of the demon halted its progress. Then it screamed.
It was tike the fall of a world. Not pain, not the rigors of a mortal wound, but the howl of infinite frustration. The dragon blood that ringed the opening had sealed it anew. T’saagash Mal could not pass.
The demon rammed his fists at the invisible fabric that stood between him and freedom. The air shimmered like glass. Vaddi and Zemella could feel it vibrating, twisting to the intense pressures the demon was bringing to bear. They felt waves of power emanating from behind and above them as Zuharrin threw his own energies into the conflict. Bolts of white light struck the surface of the opening, but they exploded against it, dissipating in steaming gobbets of fire.
Vaddi was bathed in sweat, his whole body weakening with each blow struck. He saw the enemy warriors, changed now into obscene, hopping monsters, rise up from their obeisance and prepare to attack. Fallarond responded at once, drawing the last of the Deathguard in a protective circle around Vaddi and Zemella. Once again, a bloody conflict raged. In wild desperation, the demon warriors pressed forward, heedless of their own destruction, and one by one, Fallarond’s indefatigable Deathguard were hewn or pulled down by the webbed claws of the massed creatures.
“Hold fast!” cried Zemella.
Vaddi felt his fury growing. He focused that madness, forged it into a blazing light, and was about to hurl it along the course of the bloodstream toward the demon, but he checked himself, hearing again, like a faint echo, the voice of Cellester. He focused on the cleric and flung the light bolt up at the place where he had fallen.
He watched as Zuharrin snarled in contempt, the bolt passing him. Vaddi could see the sorcerer redoubling his own efforts to break T’saagash Mal’s seals. It was only a matter of time before he triumphed. Vaddi felt himself weakening, succumbing to the intense pressure.
Vaddi saw his bolt strike Cellester, whose face writhed in agony at the searing pain. To his amazement, the cleric did not collapse, instead using the power of the bolt to reanimate his own flagging strength. Struggling to his feet, calling upon one last surge, he propelled himself forward, slamming into the back of the sorcerer. There was an explosion of brilliant light and Cellester was tossed like a straw doll over the lip of the balcony and down on to the flagstones below. He landed with a sickening thud, but Zuharrin had also been flung aside, and Vaddi could see that his powers had been deflected by the detonation. A wayward bolt struck the column beside the huge opening. It rebounded, tearing into the balcony and blowing it to fragments.
Zuharrin was catapulted out into the chamber. Vaddi watched as he landed across the very dais on which Erethindel had rested, his back smashed to ruin. Something in the dais, a residue of the horn’s energy, perhaps, seeped into him and held him. He lay there, arms twisted and broken. Blood seeped from his mouth, eyes, and ears. A figure stood above him, the green glow of an elf blade in its fist.
Vaddi and the company watched as Fallarond drove his sword down, pinning the sorcerer through the heart, the blade going deep down into the stone beyond. The body of the sorcerer shuddered and convulsed, and its sides ripped apart. Black fluid gushed out, encircling the corpse. It rose up and coalesced into a dozen bizarre shapes, like statues carved from thick oil. These slithered on incomplete limbs to the circle of the pit, coming together and merging into one mutated shape. It flapped brokenly at the stone surface.
T’saagash Mal screamed anew. The demon beat for a last time at the curtain that held him then one of the clutching talons reached through, closing on the malformed thing that had boiled out of Zuharrin’s broken body, squeezing it. Thick black droplets dripped through the claws, then T’saagash Mal fell back, tumbling once more into the deeps that had kept him for so long.
All around the hall, the last of the demon warriors became like headless things, their control lost. Their armor melted from them, and their swords turned to dust. The last of the Deathguard stood back, no longer needing to defend themselves.
Vaddi and Zemella felt something within Erethindel ease back like the slow withdrawal of a wave on a shore. Together they set the horn down upon the column, then they were in each other’s arms, holding themselves up, almost spent by their efforts. Beyond them, the dark circle on the wall closed once more, becoming cold stone.
The multitudes of transformed demon shapes in the hall, deprived of a focal point, swarmed like an infestation of rats out through the openings beyond the huge statues, like sewage floating away on a current, down into the furthest regions of Azzahareb, far from the light. For a long time the frightful sound of their passing came up from below.
Afterward Vaddi felt an arm on his shoulder and looked up through a haze of pain. Fallarond gazed down at him. “It is done,” he said softly.