I'm the last one left, Gathrid thought. And anything I do is futile. She's murdered the dream. In that sense she can no longer lose.
The loss of Anderle angered him as much as the loss of Loida or Anyeck. The Empire was the last of the realities of his boyhood.
A gravelly voice deep within him rumbled, demanding attention. The Empire was not dead, it insisted.
Yedon Hildreth remained a stubborn man.
Gathrid thought the chance too remote, too improbable, too dependent on the unknown quality of the Contessa Cuneo. She was just an Oldani girl, a soldier's brat, thinly lacquered with civilization.
What could she do, battling the subtle rigors of imperium?
She is my flesh, Cuneo insisted.
Gathrid had not met her. He admitted he could not know. If she were her father's daughter ...
But what value will and stubbornness against such as Nevenka Nieroda?
Irritably, Gathrid brushed off an attack by the Guards.
Bleibel went berserk. He screamed. Hordes of Sar-tainians swept in. They hurled themselves on the bewildered Ventimiglians.
Gathrid felt removed from it all. He seemed to be an observer watching killing machines at work.
The attackers kept coming. Their corpses piled in drifts. Their blood gathered in lakes on the vast jade floor.
He felt no sense of time. It just seemed that, finally, they stopped coming. He stood alone except for grim, pale Tracka.
He felt stronger than ever. Daubendiek had fed on countless lives. He felt no connection with place or event. He was the Instrument of Suchara... .
He began speaking the words she wanted said.
Something inside him monitored and adjusted them. "Now, Nieroda. Now we settle the accounts.
Finally. Forever." He thought he used a tight-throated whisper. Why were the walls shaking? "For all that you've done, and been, this time you die the death from which there can be no resurrection."
That great mass of flesh twitched a finger.
From behind the throne came the surviving Toal. They bore Gerdes Mulenex. They dragged Rogala, chained, collared and stumbling.
"You've blinded him!"
A monstrous cackle filled the hall. Gathrid saw that one of the Dead Captains was not a Toal at all, but the demon Gacioch restored to a whole body. He held Rogala's lead chain, and mocked the dwarf with every step.
Outmaneuvered again, Gathrid thought. But riot beaten. Far from beaten. As he would teach Nieroda.
Gacioch had been deceiving them. Crafty demon. He had done his spying well.
Gathrid felt no pity for Rogala. Perhaps Suchara's indifference to the welfare of her tools was leaking over.
He sprang at the Toal, destroying one'before it could defend itself. The second took but a moment longer.
Tracka handled the demon. He attacked with that savagery unique to masters betrayed by slaves.
Gacioch let out one great long wail of surprise and dismay. He cursed Nieroda as he faded.
Gathrid laughed, a peal like a long roll of thunder. The demon had not foreseen his own fate. The Dark Champion had tricked him. "Roast forever," he called after Gacioch. "May it be a solitary Hell."
Gathrid turned to the throne. The thing that had been Gerdes Mulenex began to twitch. The gross corpulence of the Emperor began to snore.
The youth moved toward the two.
"Watch out!" the blind dwarf shrieked. "Trap!"
A storm of poisoned darts hurtled from a thousand hidden recesses. Their numbers darkened the chamber.
The Shield came alive. Missiles pattered off it like hail off a tin roof. Gathrid sighed. Its protection enveloped him completely.
Tracka was less fortunate. Gasping, one hand extended eastward as if he meant to yank himself home, he died. He was the last Ventimiglian.
He left a legacy. With his final breath he mounted a final, violent incantation. His body became a standing bolt of lightning. Jade melted beneath his feet. The blinding fire of him dissipated, becoming a foul, oily cloud. Something burst from its deeps.
It was a tentacular clump of nightmare a dozen feet tall. It had legs like a man. There the resemblance to humanity ended.
It leapt on Elgar. A mouth Gathrid could not see ripped bloody gobbets from the Emperor. The youth muttered, "Wrong one, idiot!" He kicked a passage through the darts mounded around him. Nieroda- Mulenex responded uncertainly.
Tracka-monster realized its error. It whipped off Elgar and threw itself at the Red Brother.
Nieroda barely evaded it. She seemed puzzled.
Wailing daggers hurtled out of nowhere. They pounded the Shield and Tracka's demon. The latter squealed and leapt at Nieroda again. Gathrid leaned into the storm of blades. He wanted to reach her before she eliminated the distraction.
Slithering like a snake, Rogala removed himself from danger. Though blind, he seemed to know exactly what was happening.
The jade opened between Gathrid and Nieroda. All Faron shifted, shaking like a dog coming out of water. Screams sounded throughout the palace. The hill groaned as whole wings collapsed.
Gathrid looked inside himself, hunting the spells Ah-lert had used to bring in fill from afar. He could not find them. The Mindak had become as elusive as his sister and Loida. He sprinted along the abyss in search of a place narrow enough to jump.
Smoke ghosts drifted in through high, vaulted windows. Their frames were taking on an orange tinge.
Nieroda lacked confidence. She was trying to avoid a one-on-one. Gathrid grinned wickedly.
She was not retreating. Why?
At the moment she was preoccupied with the gift Tracka had left her. It froze. A struggle took place within it. It swayed, made a surprisingly kittenish sound. And turned on Gathrid.
The youth seized the Staff from where Tracka had dropped it. He used it as an old man uses a cane to discipline a belligerent dog.
The demon darted hither and thither, trying to get past the youth's guard. Gathrid kept poking till, with a howl, it fled the palace.
"Now you've unleashed a Prince of Darkness on an innocent people."
Startled, Gathrid whirled. This was the first Nieroda had spoken. That sarcasm could not have come from Gerdes Mulenex. . '
"Better he than Hell's Queen." He prowled the edge of the abyss. It was pointless trying to anger her into doing something stupid. She did not act on emotion. He wondered if she had any feelings at all.
He had none at the moment.
Suddenly, surprising him, the Mindak was with him. "The Staff," whispered the voice from within.
The feel was little different from what it had been with Aarant. "Speak the words I give you."
"All right." Gathrid locked gazes with Nieroda. Her Mulenex face settled into permanent bewilderment. Gathrid parroted the words Ahlert gave him, hurled the Staff at the abyss.
Thunder and smoke. For a moment there was a bridge. He danced over before Nieroda reacted. He went wondering if it were too easy. Shey always had something up her sleeve before.
Could she be running short, growing resigned in the face of repeated failure?
Facing an apparently unarmed enemy across jade stained by the blood of Karkainen, searching for the trap, he demanded, "Why?" A single thread connected all her actions: destruction. In success or failure, she destroyed. "What do you want from the world? Do you have to flog it like a teamster flogs a dying horse?"
A specter of longing tainted her Mulenex face.
She was ancient. She'd had time to brand her immortality upon the face of the world. Yet less was known of her than of Theis Rogala and Tureck Aarant. The records had been destroyed, probably with her connivance. Only names remained: Sommerlath, Spillenkothen, Wistma Povich. And speculations about a forgotten Swordbearer, and Dreibrant and Grellner. Elusive, Gathrid thought. He wondered if Rogala remembered.