Smiling slightly, Marance decided another option was superior. Unless the Uskevren got off the High Bridge quickly, an improbability with the wizard's minions attacking them, the magic would inevitably kill them, yet, the true beauty of the scheme was that if he knew Thamalon, his old enemy might well stop even trying to depart.
Swinging his staff in intricate passes, the wizard turned widdershins and chanted in a rasping, grinding tongue never devised for a human throat. A knowledgeable observer might have recognized certain similarities to a spell employed by mortal wizards to invest themselves with the capacity to move objects by thought alone. But Marance's version, a secret he'd wrested from an ancient baatezu adept in Maladomini, the Circle of Ruins, was vastly more powerful. It could shift masses unthinkable for any earthly wizard.
The sky flickered red for a moment, and voices wailed and groaned from the empty air. Marance's body burned with purple flame as the power flowered inside him, and he stumbled with the glorious agony of the sensation.
The fire faded, or rather, withdrew inside him. In control of himself once more, he poised his hand above one of the fishmonger's cleaver-scarred tables. A toy-sized simulacrum of the High Bridge, made of violet phosphorescence, wavered into being between his fingers and the butcher-block beneath. After a second, he sensed that his creation had become palpable enough to touch, whereupon he took hold of it and began to shake it back and forth.
The bridge lurched, and Shamur's destrier staggered. Tamlin's mount lost its balance altogether, and the elegant young man, rather less elegant now that his lovely clothes were torn and soiled with the blood of his enemies, frantically kicked his feet out of the stirrups and flung himself clear to keep his leg from being smashed between the horse's flank and the roadway.
A second jolt followed hard upon the first. Shamur's terrified mount stumbled again. Realizing the impossibility of riding under these conditions, she scrambled out of the saddle and released the animal to look after itself. Talbot and Thazienne did the same. Thamalon, however, had to slay one of the remaining gnolls, magically compelled to attack even when it could hardly keep its feet, before he could dismount. Somehow he managed to control his panicky, staggering horse and wield his long sword at the same time, parrying a thrust of the gnoll's spear, then dispatching it with a chest cut. That accomplished, he jumped down onto the pavement.
Keeping a wary eye out for their foes, the five Uskevren blundered toward one another to confer. The shaking bridge rumbled beneath their feet. Houses on either side of the roadway swayed, their timbers moaning, and falling objects crashing inside them. A roof tore loose from its moorings, pitched backward, and plummeted toward the river far below.
"Quake!" declared Tamlin, raising his voice to make himself heard above the din.
"No," Shamur replied, "Our enemy's sorcery is shaking the bridge. Evidently he's willing to destroy the whole thing to kill us. I assume that either he's stepped off the north end already, or he has a magical way of getting off at the moment of collapse." She looked at the road before her, where cobblestones jarred loose from their bed and jutted like rotten teeth, and saw that she and her family had covered a good portion of the distance to the Klaroun Gate. "I think that if we keep moving, we have a fighting chance of getting off ourselves. However-"
Two more gnolls lumbered forward. Conversation ceased for a moment while the Uskevren cut the creatures down.
"You were about to observe," Thamalon panted, "that if we simply run away, everyone who lives on the bridge will die."
"Yes," Shamur said. Frightened and unaware of what was truly happening, most of the residents wouldn't even try to get off the span. Thinking to wait the strange rumbling out, they'd simply cower in their homes.
"Then we need to kill the masked wizard and hope that ends the shaking," said Thazienne impatiently. "Fine. That's what I wanted to do in the first place, but does anyone listen to me?"
Strands of sweaty black hair plastered to his face, his square jaw set, and a feral light in his eyes, Talbot nodded. "Let's have done with the wretch. Avenge Jander and Master Selwick here and now."
"And put an end to all this unpleasantness so we can go back to living like civilized people," said Tamlin, brushing futilely at a gory spatter on his sleeve.
"Come on, then," Shamur said. She and her family began to advance back the way they'd come, when the shaking stopped. For a moment, she wondered if her analysis of the situation had been at fault. Perhaps the High Bridge wouldn't break, perhaps the spell that threatened it had run out of power. Then spheres of purple glow swelled in the gloom ahead, and as soon as they birthed the creatures intended to block the way, the span resumed jarring back and forth. Evidently Marance was unable to rock it and conjure more of his minions at the same time, and so had elected to briefly suspend the one action in order to accomplish the other.
When Shamur approached close enough to see them clearly, she judged that the wizard's new servants had been selected specifically to operate on this precarious ground, for they all possessed more than two legs and a low center of gravity. One of them, a pallid creature somewhat resembling a centipede, its segmented body half again as long as a man was tall, scuttled toward her. Tentacles coiled and writhed between its round, black eyes.
From past experience, Shamur knew that a sticky secretion on a carrion crawler's flexible arms could paralyze at a touch. The tentacles whipped at her, she swept her broadsword in a parry, and the bridge jerked. She fell, her attempt at defense turned into a useless flailing, and one of the feelers brushed her wrist.
For an instant, a horrible numbness flowed up her arm, but then the sensation passed. Praise Mask for her sturdy gauntlet and sleeve, which had kept most of the crawler's greasy, malodorous poison from reaching her skin.
Though it might not matter in the long run. She was sprawled on the ground, and the insect-thing was still scuttling forward, chittering. She rolled across the heaving roadway with the carrion crawler in mad pursuit, and then, when she thought she'd widened the distance between them sufficiently to buy herself a moment, tried to scramble onto her feet.
Just at that instant, another tremor jolted her, but, fighting for balance, she refused to let it tumble her back down. She faked a dodge to the right, then darted left instead. Only deceived for a moment, the carrion crawler lashed its tentacles at her. A couple of them only missed by inches, but miss they did, and then she was behind the creature's head with its leathery natural armor and positioned to strike at its softer, more vulnerable flank.
She drove her point deep into the crawler's body, between the base of the head and the first pair of legs. The beast jerked spasmodically, then went down.
As she pulled her blade from the carcass, Shamur surveyed the battlefield. Thamalon was plunging his blade into the chest of what must surely be the last surviving gnoll. Talbot and Thazienne fought side by side against a trio of carrion crawlers. Tamlin, who had lost his sword, slammed the axe into the spine of an enormous, fire-breathing canine. The hell hound fell, and the youth crowed in delight.
"I told you this thing was lucky," he called to his embattled siblings, brandishing the gory tool as he spoke. Tazi sneered.
Shamur scowled in frustration. There were plenty of carrion crawlers and hell hounds still remaining, and the bubbles of violet and magenta light swelling on the roadway ahead promised even more adversaries. Meanwhile, the Uskevren had only succeeded in making their way a short distance north.
They were never going to cut through all of Marance's defenders in time to prevent the destruction of the bridge. They needed another solution, and perhaps, Shamur thought, smiling at the audacity of the notion that suddenly occurred to her, that meant it was time to stop behaving as if she were a mere earthbound warrior and start acting like the thief in the red-striped mask.