The behemoth obliged, and the punch came fast and straight at Regdar. The lord constable set his jaw, narrowed his eyes, waited half a heartbeat, then slashed at the thing's wrist.
When his heavy, enchanted steel blade met the creature's wrist, the impact sent waves of painful vibrations through Regdar's arms, then the rest of his body. His eyes snapped shut and tears squeezed through the lids. He became conscious of each of his ten fingers peeling off the pommel of the greatsword one at a time. The punch never landed, though, and he knew that even though the impact had twisted the sword out of his grip, he'd felt resistance before it came to a full stop. He'd cut the thing.
Regdar let himself fall and rolled away as soon as his back hit the floor. There was a deafening thud when the thing's foot came down, and the floor shook under him, but Regdar kept rolling.
He opened his eyes just as he rolled out of the mist. He blinked at the corpse of Lem, the watchman's eyes ruined, his armor scorched, but Regdar had the wherewithal to take up the enchanted long sword that had once belonged to Lorec and done Lem no good at all. Regdar smelled smoke. He craned his neck to see a black, sooty cloud billowing up from the ruined platform.
Fire, he thought, like we don't have enough to worry about.
"Regdar!" Naull screamed from above.
The lord constable looked up and saw Naull peering over the splintered edge of the platform at him, a nasty burn reddening one side of her face.
"Can you walk?" he shouted to her.
Naull nodded.
"Can you cast?" he asked next.
She nodded again. Regdar was about to tell her to wait for the thing to come out of the mist when a huge hand of steel reached out of the wall of fog and wrapped itself around Regdar's head.
He heard Naull scream his name again, but that was quickly drowned out by the rush of blood in his head. Regdar heard something squeak and was terrified to realize that it was his own jaw. He pulled in a breath and managed to actually get some air, but the inhalation was quickly forced out of him when the behemoth jerked him toward itself.
Regdar didn't want to imagine what the thing meant to do-squeeze his head off if he was lucky, eat him slowly if he wasn't. Not willing to wait and find out, Regdar whirled the long sword in his right hand and dragged it across the beast's wrist. When the blade slipped into a gap, which Regdar trusted was the wound from his own greatsword, he yanked the blade up and into the wound.
Lorec's enchanted blade was sharp indeed, so that even as the thing increased the crushing pressure on Regdar's head, the warrior managed to saw through its wrist until its hand popped off.
Regdar fell. The weight of the thing's hand nearly broke his neck. He had no choice but to drop the long sword so he could use both hands to pull the severed hand from his head.
After watching Regdar being dragged back into the fog by his head, Naull scrambled to her feet and ran to the stairs. She almost fell on her face trying to stop when she remembered the lightning bolt and the sound of exploding wood. She couldn't see through the fog but she had every reason to believe that the stairs weren't there anymore.
Groaning from a pain in her hip that stabbed at her when she stepped back the way she came, Naull ran three long strides, then dived for the rope that Lem and Samoth had used to climb down from the platform. She tightened her grip on the rope and would have closed her eyes if she could. Instead she had to settle for telling herself over and over again: It's not so high. It's not so high. It's not so high.
She forced fear-stiffened legs over the edge of the collapsed platform. When her full weight fell off the edge, she started sliding down the rope. The rough hemp burned what felt like an inch-deep gouge in her palms, and Naull's first impulse was to let go. She fought that and managed to squeeze the rope tighter, hoping to stop the painful slide. Instead, she just slid a bit more slowly, and her hands started to shake. Though Naull meant to squeeze even tighter, her hands opened on their own and she fell.
Eyes closed, jaw clamped shut, Naull braced for an impact that didn't come as quickly as she'd hoped. In truth she was in the air for less than a full second, but Naull felt as if she had an eternity to imagine what it would feel like hitting the floor-and she hit.
There was a cracking sound she hoped wasn't her leg breaking, a sudden stop, the feeling that her feet were caught in something, then a twisting cramp in her neck when she had to stop her head from snapping back onto the flagstone floor.
Groaning through clenched jaws against the pain in her neck, her side, and her hands, Naull tried to stand. She kicked at whatever was holding her feet and felt the sole of her left boot catch on something. When she pushed as hard as she could with her left leg, something snapped-wood-and pain cascaded up her right leg.
Spinning on her rear, she slid off the pile of broken, slowly burning wood and came to rest looking down at her leg. A huge splinter as big around as two of Naull's fingers protruded from her right leg, just above the ankle. Blood seeped out around it.
Another loud boom echoed from the fog, and Naull heard steel scrape against steel. That was all she needed to hear to remind her of the stakes, and she did her best to push the pain from her mind. She stood and found that her leg would still hold weight but the feeling of the jagged wood in her skin sent cold tendrils up her spine.
There was more smoke than fire from the rotten, damp wood smoldering around her, and Naull coughed. She held a hand over her nose and mouth, squinted in the stinging smoke, and was just able to breathe.
Naull limped past the body of Lem, not looking at the watchman. She started casting a spell even before she crossed the abrupt threshold of the roiling mist. Only two steps in, she saw two humanoid shapes. One was easily eight feet tall, so she aimed her spell at that one.
Three bolts of blue-green light shot from her outstretched hand and whizzed unerringly at the giant shadow. When they hit the creature, they burst in flashes of blue light, and the thing rocked back. It put one foot behind it, steadying itself with a great thud.
I hurt it, she thought, but not badly enough.
The smaller shadow-Regdar, but with a too-small sword-took advantage of Naull's attack to slash three times at the thing's legs. One blow connected with a steel-on-steel sound that set Naull's teeth on edge. Sparks arced through the fog.
The behemoth answered the slash with a kick that knocked Regdar back on his heels. Naull gasped, sure that her lover was about to fall backward and equally sure that he was dead.
A low growl rattled deep in Vargussel's throat as he peered through the spell, focusing and unfocusing his eyes on the conjured image in a vain attempt to see through his own obscuring fog.
"Damn it all," he grumbled aloud.
He tried every trick of the spell he could to make out more detail, to shift his perspective closer, higher, lower, around to the left, back to the right, waiting for any detail to reveal itself. He could see that one of the shield guardian's hands was missing, and that worried Vargussel as much as it infuriated him.
The spell that the young mage cast when she stepped into the fog was a simple one that revealed her relative level of expertise, but it had managed to further damage his construct.
Time to end it, Vargussel thought.
Closing his eyes, wrapping his fingers tightly around the amulet, the mage sent a new set of instructions to the shield guardian, along with a mental image of Regdar.
The rod, he sent. The death ray. Now!
Regdar rolled away the second he hit the floor and managed to just barely avoid the thing's massive foot, which slammed onto the flagstones less than an inch from his left hip. Without bothering to stand, Regdar slashed at the creature's leg and left a good-sized gash in its calf. His sword stopped when it met the solid steel shinbone within. Fearing the worst, Regdar tried yanking the sword from the behemoth's leg only once. The blade didn't budge so Regdar let go. A gouge across the thing's steel thigh struck Regdar's eye. It was the scar he'd given it at the Thrush and the Jay.