Those questions brought blind panic. Could everything they had done here have been wrong and exactly what the Enemy wanted?
His thoughts raced to what he had seen when he had touched the orb of Spirit.
As with the others he had touched at some time, he had felt a presence inside it. The Enemy—the dragon in that placeless timelessness—was a Fay. So why did it want the orbs, the anchors? Did its greater minions—Sau’ilahk, the specter, and others—seek the orbs for it or against it? Did some of them wish to destroy the Ancient Enemy themselves?
Leave the enslaved alone.
The Enemy had manipulated him to bring the orbs together and had done nothing to stop its own servants from the same purpose and worse. Did the ancient one—the Night Voice—want someone to use those orbs to kill it? Why?
Chap looked around at the carnage Magiere had created. Yet nothing had stopped her or the Enemy’s forces, as if it were all as desired. And Leesil now had the orbs somewhere inside the mountain in seeking out the Enemy.
The implications were beyond any terror.
Chap had seen five Fay who sacrificed to create Existence. Had one of them sought retreat from that? Was the Ancient Enemy one of those five? If so, what would happen if it vanished from existence?
He remembered the presence he had felt when Magiere mistakenly opened the first orb beneath the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks. Leesil had claimed he saw a shadow in the shape of a massive serpent with a head that Wynn later claimed was a weürm, a serpentlike dragon.
Leave the enslaved alone.
Chap began to tremble. Caught between bringing Magiere back to herself, and pulling Sau’ilahk down, and finding a way to halt Leesil, he was too late in ...
Magiere tore loose from one majay-hì. The other was down and not moving. She charged for Sau’ilahk. The earth cracked around Sau’ilahk’s hooked fingers as something began to emerge.
Snarling, Chap charged on a line between them.
The night suddenly lit up from the north.
Caught in a chorus of screams all around, Chap stumbled, blinded for an instant.
Osha halted short of the battle and quickly unstoppered the small bottle Wynn had forced on him.
It should not be this way. What it held should have been for her. And what she had asked of him should have never been asked.
He pulled the last two arrows with white metal tips and sank each head, one at a time, into the bottle. After replacing the stopper, he tucked the bottle away inside his tunic. Then he rose and nocked one arrow with the other pinched between two fingers of his hand around the bow’s handle.
Still, he hesitated.
If what Chane claimed was true about the fluid affecting the undead ...
If he did what Wynn asked to stop Magiere ...
Osha did not want to think of murdering a friend. He looked toward the chaos before him, not hearing the shouts, raging snarls, growls, and screams. All he heard were his own shallow, quick breaths and the hammering of his heart.
Light filled the dark from behind him.
So many out there scrambled to escape, though the staff was too far to burn most of them. As they scattered, he saw so much more.
Magiere rushed at another target, and even from afar, Osha could see her fully black eyes. This time, Wynn’s light did not bring Magiere back. The dhampir was all that was left of her. As tears leaked from his wide eyes, he wiped his sleeve across them.
Then he raised and drew his bow, knowing he could not miss his target.
As Chap’s sight cleared, his every thought stilled at the sight of Magiere.
She screeched and snarled as one of Sau’ilahk’s small stick-creatures leaped into her face. Even as she clawed the thing off, the large male majay-hì rammed her legs from behind. Magiere toppled back and hit the ground.
“No!” Sau’ilahk screamed out. “She is mine!”
One of those glowing-eyed stick things went at the majay-hì as Magiere thrashed over onto all fours.
The ground around Sau’ilahk’s hooked fingers began to break apart.
Chap howled as he charged at Magiere’s back to stop her before whatever came out of the ground. She spun, and he faltered.
Magiere’s eyes fixed on him as if she had forgotten any other target. There was nothing left of the woman he knew, only the dhampir, only a monster out of his worst nightmare.
All he saw was her, just as he had once seen her in that sorcerous phantasm in the forests of Droevinka where everything living around her died.
Was he to die here at the hands of someone he loved?
She charged, and he set himself, ready to lunge.
Magiere’s snarl twisted into a shriek of rage—and she stumbled and lurched.
An arrow stuck out through her hauberk between her chest and right shoulder.
Chap saw his own shock mirrored in Magiere’s white face.
That face twisted quickly into pain as smoke welled out around the arrow’s shaft. Black lines spidered through her face and then her hands, and she dropped the falchion.
Magiere fell screaming and thrashing upon the ground. And there was Sau’ilahk on his feet, staring in shock.
Chapter Nineteen
Leesil crept onward behind Ghassan, who still held his glowing cold-lamp crystal while carrying one chest, as they went deeper into a ragged tunnel they’d found in the chasm’s far side. Leesil supported the forward ends of the poles for two chests with Brot’an behind him at the poles’ back ends. Somewhere farther back were Chane and Ore-Locks doing likewise.
They did not go far before Ghassan halted suddenly, and Leesil lurched to a stop.
The domin turned about, set his chest aside, and straightened with a finger over his lips. Leesil quietly lowered his poles and only released and set them down once he felt the chests settle.
Ghassan turned ahead once more, and upon stepping forward, Leesil saw the crystal’s light expand into an immense cavern of walls that all slanted leftward. The domin halted again, and Leesil stepped up beside him. He was too fixed on what he saw to even notice the others gathering.
There were huge bones spread out in the cavern’s rear, as if the creature to which they’d belonged had simply lain down for the last time and never moved again. Nearest was its skull. If he walked up to it, the top would be taller than he was. The rest was just as large.
All of it was darkened and discolored. Some bones glittered, as if ages of dripping moisture had embedded minerals in the crust over its bones.
Fearful of stepping closer, Leesil noticed something else. It had no limbs. Just the spine of bones curled like a serpent too immense to imagine all the way to that skull with three ridges of what might’ve been horns.
The side rows ran around the back from empty eye sockets big enough to crawl into. The much smaller center spikes started near the bridge’s midpoint and ended at the midtop.
“A serpent,” Brot’an whispered somewhere behind Leesil.
“No, gí’uyllæ,” Ore-Locks corrected.
“All-eater,” Chane explained, “or dragon.”
“I have never heard of one so large in any tale,” Ore-Locks added.
Leesil stepped carefully toward it, listening and watching everywhere for anything. More than once he slowed or paused. The skull grew larger in his sight the closer he came to it. Of what teeth were still whole, the longest had to weigh more than two—or even three—of the men who’d come with him. The more he stared at the huge skull, imagining what such a creature would have once looked like, the more his mind rolled backward to a memory.
Below the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks, Magiere had been caught in a daze when they’d found the first orb, and she had opened it with her thôrhk. In the chaos that followed, as the orb of Water tried to swallow all moisture in that cavern, Leesil had seen an immense shadow coil through the cavern’s upper reaches. Like a serpent bigger than any of the towers, its open maw had come down as if to swallow her.