He remained calm, although he could barely breathe under the weight. The little air that did reach him reeked with a mixture of burnt flesh, dried blood, and excrement from those cadavers with gut wounds. Gagging, grunting, he marshaled all his strength and forced his body upward through the suffocating pile.
As he raised himself to his hands and knees, he felt the stone blocks of the floor beneath him begin to vibrate. He did not know what it meant or what was causing it—Glaeken knew only that he had to get away from here. With a final convulsive heave, he threw off the remaining bodies and leaped to the steps.
Behind him there came a loud grinding and scraping of stone upon stone. From the safety of the steps he turned and saw the section of the floor where he had been pinned disappear. It shattered and fell away, taking many of the cadavers with it. There was a muffled crash as the tumbling stone and flesh struck the first-floor landing directly below.
Shaken, Glaeken leaned against the wall to catch his breath and clear the stench of the cadavers from his nostrils. There was a reason behind these attempts to hinder his progress—Rasalom never acted without a purpose—but what? As Glaeken turned to make his way up to the third level, movement on the floor caught his eye. At the edge of the hole a severed arm from one of the corpses had begun dragging itself toward him, clawing its way along the floor with its fingers. Shaking his head in bafflement, Glaeken continued up the steps, his thoughts racing through what he knew of Rasalom, trying to guess what was going on in that twisted mind. Halfway up, he felt a trickle of falling dust brush against his face. Without looking up, he slammed himself flat against the wall just in time to avoid a stone block falling from above. It landed with a shattering crash on the spot he had occupied an instant before.
An upward glance showed that the stone had dislodged itself from the inner edge of the stairwell. Rasalom's doing again. Did Rasalom still harbor hopes of maiming or disabling him? Rasalom must know that he was only forestalling the inevitable confrontation.
But the outcome of that confrontation ... that was anything but inevitable. In the powers each of them had been allotted, Rasalom had always had the upper hand. Chief among his powers were command over light and darkness, and the power to make animals and inanimate objects obey his will. Above all, Rasalom was invulnerable to trauma of any kind, from any weapon—save Glaeken's rune sword.
Glaeken was not so well armed. Although he never aged or sickened and had been imbued with a fierce vitality and supernal strength, he could succumb to catastrophic injury. He had come close to succumbing in the gorge. Never in all his millennia had he felt death's chill breath so close on the nape of his neck. He had managed to outrun it, but only with Magda's help.
The scales were nearly balanced now. The hilt and blade were reunited—the sword was intact in Glaeken's hands. Rasalom had his superior powers but was hemmed in by the walls of the keep; he could not retreat and plan to meet Glaeken another day. It had to be now. Now!
Glaeken approached the third level cautiously. It was deserted—nothing moving, nothing hiding in the dark. As he walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs, he felt the tower tremble. The landing shook, then cracked, then fell away, almost beneath his feet, leaving him pressed against a wall with his heels resting precariously on a tiny ledge. Peering over the toes of his boots, he saw the crumbling stone block of the floor crash down to the landing below in a choking cloud of dust.
Too close, he thought, allowing himself to breathe again. And yet, not close enough.
He surveyed the wreckage. Only the landing had fallen away. The third-level rooms were still intact behind the wall against his back. He turned around and inched his way along the ledge toward the next set of steps. As he passed the door to the rooms, it was suddenly jerked open and Glaeken found himself facing the lunging forms of two more German cadavers. They flung themselves against him as one, going slack as soon as they made contact with him, but striking with enough force to knock him backwards. Only the fingertips of his free hand saved him from falling by catching and clinging to the doorjamb as he swung out in a wide arc over the yawning opening below.
The pair of corpses, unable to cling to anything, fell limp and silent through the darkness to the rubble below.
Glaeken pulled himself inside the doorway and rested. Much too close.
But he could now venture a guess as to what his ancient enemy had in mind: Had Rasalom hoped to push him into the opening and then collapse all or part of the tower's inner structure down on him? If the falling tons of rock did not kill Glaeken once and for all, they would at least trap him.
It could work, Glaeken thought, his eyes searching the shadows for more cadavers lying in wait. And if successful, Rasalom would be able to use the German corpses to remove just enough rubble to expose the sword. After that he would have to wait for some villager or traveler to happen by—someone he could induce to take the sword and carry it across the threshold. It might work, but Glaeken sensed that Rasalom had something else in mind.
Magda watched with dread and dismay as Glaeken disappeared into the tower. She yearned to run after him and pull him back, but Papa needed her—more now than at anytime before. She tore her heart and mind away from Glaeken and bent to the task of tending her father's wounds.
They were terrible wounds. Despite her best efforts to stanch its flow, Papa's blood was soon pooled around him, seeping between the timbers of the causeway and making the long fall to the stream that trickled below.
With a sudden flutter his eyes opened and looked at her from a mask that was ghastly in its whiteness.
"Magda," he said. She could barely hear him.
"Don't talk, Papa. Save your strength."
"There's none left to save ... I'm sorry..."
"Shush!" She bit her lower lip. He's not going to die—I won't let him!
"I have to say it now. I won't have another chance."
"That's not—"
"Only wanted to make things right again. That was all. I meant you no harm. I want you to know—"
His voice was drowned out by a deep crashing rumble from within the keep. The causeway vibrated with the force of it. Magda saw clouds of dust billowing out of the second- and third-level windows of the tower. Glaeken...?
"I've been a fool," Papa was saying, his voice even weaker than before. "I forsook our faith and everything else I believe in—even my own daughter—because of his lies. I even caused the man you loved to be killed."
"It's all right," she told him. "The man I love still lives! He's in the keep right now. He's going to put an end to this horror once and for all."
Papa tried to smile. "I can see in your eyes how you feel about him ... if you have any sons..."
There was another rumble, much louder than the first. Magda saw dust gush out from all the levels of the tower this time. Someone was standing alone on the edge of the tower roof. When she turned back to Papa his eyes were glazed and his chest was still.
"Papa?" She shook him. She pounded his chest and shoulders, refusing to believe what all her senses and instincts told her. "Papa, wake up! Wake up!"
She remembered how she had hated him last night, how she had wished him dead. And now ... now she wanted to take it all back, to have him listen to her for just a single minute, to have him hear her say she had forgiven him, that she loved and revered him and that nothing had really changed. Papa couldn't leave without letting her tell him that!