The bolt didn't hurt a bit.
I ran and lunged across the table for my uncle, my fingers out like claws.
He flung the crossbow at me, missing, and dodged back. My fingers locked on his clothes, ripping them. I tried to get to his throat.
There was faint popping noise in the air, a flash of light. My uncle was gone.
In his place stood a waist-high dwarf, clad in filthy black clothing. I held his torn shirt in my hands. His mushroom-white face showed only a dirty blond beard, watery blue eyes that bulged out like goose eggs, and a black-toothed mouth that was open like a wound. He was the ugliest dwarf I'd ever seen, and he gave out a shriek that would have sent me to my grave if I hadn't already been there. My uncle… a destroyed man…
The Theiwar had used an illusion spell to disguise himself. I knew then what must have happened to my uncle, and why he had seemed to have changed lately. And who had really killed my cousins. Likely, they'd begun to suspect something.
Garith's gonna live like a huuu-man now, the hobgoblin had said.
"Garith!" shouted Orun from the door. The dwarf shut it behind him, cutting off Roggis's cries in the hall outside.
Panicked, the Theiwar ran under the table to escape me. I shoved myself off the table and snatched at a heavy wooden chair, swinging it up and over and down into the tabletop. The chair shattered; the table split in half and collapsed. Books and papers poured across the floor — and a bag full of rotting gray ears spilled with them. Some of the ears were gnawed.
I stepped back. The Theiwar had vanished.
"Garith!" roared Orun, his axe high. "You a dead boy, too, now! You a dead little white rat, you hear me!"
I caught something from the comer of my eye. The Theiwar had reappeared in a comer of the room, far from Orun and me. His hands leaped out of hidden pockets in his black clothing.
"Orkiska Shakatan Sekis!" he called out in a hoarse, high voice, holding something like a cloth and a glass rod and rubbing them together. He was aiming them at me.
"Reorx damn us!" shouted Orun, as I leaped for the Theiwar. "Evredd, he's — "
There was more light then than I'd ever seen in my life or afterwards. My body was suspended in the air, buoyed up by a writhing white ribbon of power that poured from the Theiwar's hands. For the first time since I'd died, I felt true pain. It was unearthly, burning into every muscle, every nerve, every inch of skin, and I couldn't even scream.
Then it was gone. I crashed to the floor. Smoke billowed from the smoldering rags I wore. My soot-stained limbs jerked madly as if I were the marionette of a bad puppeteer.
I flopped over on my stomach. The Theiwar was climbing a freestanding wall cabinet like a spider. Orun threw his axe. The weapon struck something in the air just before it reached the Theiwar and bounced away with a clanging noise, falling next to my head.
"Damn you, Garith!" Orun cried, snatching his axe up. "Damn you and your magic! You a DEAD boy!"
My limbs began to move the way I wanted them to go, and I staggered to my feet. The Theiwar was on top of the cabinet. He pointed a short white finger down at us. "N'zkool Akrek Grafkun — Miwarsh!" he shrieked, in triumph.
Greenish yellow fog blasted from his finger. A windstorm filled the room. The overhead lights were dimmed by the thick mist.
Orun started to shout, but his voice ended abruptly with a shocked gasp, then a loud, hacking cough. I could barely see him through the green fog. He clutched at his throat with both hands, the axe thumping into the floor. He gave a strangled cry, teeth clenched shut, his lungs filling with poisoned air.
I went for the cabinet. My hands gripped a shelf at the height of my head, and I pulled back hard. The dish-filled cabinet rocked; plates clattered flat. The Theiwar cursed and dropped to his knees, fingers grabbing for purchase on the top. I heaved against the shelf again and saw the cabinet lean toward me, then continue coming. I shoved it aside. It slammed into the floor away from the choking dwarf.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the greenish fog blew away as if caught by a high wind. Orun's hacking cough and hoarse cries echoed in the now silent room.
The Theiwar fell to the floor across the room. Rolling, he came up on his feet. He saw me coming around the fallen cabinet, and he tried to flee for the closed door. He jerked a long crystal vial from his belt. His bulging eyes were as big as moons when I tackled him.
My dead hands locked around his little body. You could hear him for miles, screaming like a spitted rodent with a giant's lung power. He punched and kicked in hysteria. I jabbed one hand through the hail of blows and got my long, cold fingers into the flesh at his throat, sinking in the grip. Gasping, he stabbed at my arm with the vial, shattering it with the first blow and opening up bloodless gashes that went down to the dull white bone.
Abruptly, he stiffened. I grabbed his arm with my free one and held it steady for an instant. I had seen it coming.
A red stream, mixed with strands of oozing black, was running down his arm. His huge, watery eyes focused on his hand with an expression of complete terror such as I had never seen on a living face before. His eyes rolled up then, and his body shuddered and went still.
Garith had just learned what the Nerakans had learned about black wax, with the same results.
I released his body and fell to the floor. I tried to keep myself up on my hands and knees, but my strength poured out of me now like water through a collapsed dam. In the background, I could hear Roggis wailing and Orun coughing. The door to the study burst open, and everyone in the manor surged in to shout and point. But they all kept away from me. They knew.
"The boys warned me that he wasn't the same!" Roggis was saying, in tears. "I didn't believe them. When they were killed, he acted as if he didn't care a whit. I thought he was mad, but I didn't dare speak to him about it. I was afraid he'd become violent. He hardly seemed himself!"
The racket was fading away, far away. I struggled to get up. It was no use. I'd done what I'd come back to do. I was more tired than I'd ever been before in my life.
"Evredd," wheezed a hoarse voice near my ear. "You still there?"
I managed to nod, but that was all.
"Good work for a dead boy," Orun said. "Right on target."
High praise. I wondered if I'd see Garayn and Klart soon, and my uncle, and what they would say about it. Family business.
I fell forward into the darkness. Everything was right again, and there would be no coming back.
War Machines
There was a great blast of steam in the passage through the mountain. Gnomes came sliding down the rock sides, a few dropping from above and caught, heartstoppingly, by nets; two popped out of compressed-air tubes in the ground and tumbled in the air before plummeting toward a landing-pad near the steam source. One landed on the pad, the other in a bush. The assembled gnomes pulled levers, rang bells, turned cranks, and shouted directions at each other without listening to the directions shouted back.
Mara dashed from rock to rock like a child playing hide-and-seek, each sprint taking her closer to her objective. In her whole life in Arnisson she had never heard this much whistling, clanking, and general noise. She resisted putting both hands over her ears and edged quietly and quickly through the assembled gnomes until she arrived at a narrow ledge at the point where the passageway met the inner crater wall of the mountain. She slid onto it, staring down in fascination at the array of gantries and cranes and at the almost continual rain of equipment and gnomes. Far below, she could see a trap door.
A loose cable drifted toward her.
Mara leapt nimbly out of the shadows, catching a hanging cable with her cloth-wrapped hand. She slid down, touching the mountainside lightly with her feet, then sailing back into open air. She vanished into a pit in the ground.