"Hunters of magic," Tarram announced, a little wearily. "Dweomercats."
"Lots of dweomercats," Tantaerra agreed. "Jaws and fangs and no doubt a propensity to regard us as dinner. And keen noses that can sniff out anything magical." She sighed, then pointed at a particular large, low rectangular stone building. It had an impressively ornate arched doorway, but no windows at all-and far more importantly, climbing one outside wall … "Stone stair, still a roof at the top!"
"I'm running," he told her tersely, sprinting for the squat square building she'd pointed out.
Jaws and claws raked at his legs and ankles. Small blue bodies crunched underfoot, only to bounce upright again, seemingly unhurt. What were these things?
Then he was pounding up the stone steps, seeing cracks and green mold all over them, and names, or rather writing he hadn't time to read but that was spaced like names, lone names and paired names, and-
The great stone slab of roof was cracked right across, with smaller cracks radiating star-like out from that main wound as if a giant's fist had come down on the building. Yet right here, where he'd just skidded to a halt, the roof felt solid under his feet.
Which would have to do. He spun around, set Tantaerra down, and slashed with his sword across the top of the stair in perfect time to sweep the first yowling rank of dweomercats off the roof.
The second rank sprang, the blurred and rushing third right behind them. Tarram cursed and hacked at the roof around him like an enraged thresher trying to hammer a rat flat-and then the stair was suddenly empty of leaping blue-furred bodies.
They'd all turned to stream toward something else, down in the street. Something glowing and therefore magical, that the swarming press of their bodies now hid from view.
Something that had been thrown there by a man who was all too familiar-and who was now stalking up the stair.
Orivin Voyvik.
He was wearing a cruel little smile.
"I'd planned to spare you," he told Tantaerra, "but no longer."
He sprang, stabbing at her. The halfling frog-leaped aside, to land facing him in a crouch, her own daggers ready.
"I see you've finally learned to quit throwing away your weapons," she taunted.
Not all of the dweomercats had taken the bait. Across the roof, Tarram smarted under the raking claws and jaws of a dozen-some dweomercats, hacking ineffectually just to stay alive.
Voyvik sprang past Tantaerra, landing in a shoulder roll and coming up to his feet between them. The roof groaned-then suddenly, sickeningly, gave way, plunging Tarram and the vicious blue cats down into darkness below.
Tarram clawed desperately to catch hold of something-anything. At the last moment, his fingers finally found purchase, and he swung and swayed in the darkness, cats gnawing at his legs, the eyes of many more gleaming up at him from the room below.
Voyvik had flung himself at the stair to avoid going down with the roof, and landed on all fours on the stairhead. Now he launched himself at the halfling.
As Tarram struggled to climb back onto what was left of the crumbling roof, Tantaerra and the murderous Nirmathi fought.
Their dance was a flurry of frantic leaping, tumbling, and hacking, daggers against daggers. An agile slayer against a halfling a third his size, the roof cracking and sagging underfoot.
A fight that came to a sudden halt as Voyvik overbalanced in a leaning double-dagger slash. Tantaerra sprang over one of his arms to get inside his guard-and triumphantly stabbed Voyvik in the chest.
Only to have her blade scrape across the armor hidden beneath his shirt.
Voyvik shook his head and gave her a cold smile.
His return thrust was into her chest, right to the crossguards.
With a snarl, he lifted her up on his dagger, then flung her off the blood-drenched blade.
Spewing blood, Tantaerra Loroeva Klazra fell helplessly through the broken roof, into the darkness below.
Chapter Fourteen
Tantaerra had never hurt this much in all her life.
If she'd been human, she'd be dead already, drowned and choked on her own fountaining blood. Yet Tantaerra was small even for a halfling, so her heart wasn't quite where Voyvik thought it was.
Scant consolation, that, as she crashed helplessly down through a dry-rotten wooden lid and into the coffin beneath it, sobbing in helpless agony.
She landed on cold, hard bones amid spicy-smelling dust. One snapped under her, but the rest started to shift and heave, as she curled up and clutched her knees to her torn-open chest in an effort to keep from rupturing utterly.
The skeletal remains beneath Tantaerra shoved her aside as they rose up, spilling her onto a lot of small, hard, hissingly shifting things.
Ceramic vials, a heap of them, with rotten threads like a net of dark and seaweedy fingers among them. They'd been sewn onto a shroud or burial blanket laid over the skeleton, but whatever it had been was mere sighing black cobwebs now.
The skeleton rose and stretched a bony hand toward her.
Well, she was bleeding out anyway, so …
Fighting hard not to sneeze, Tantaerra grabbed the nearest vial, bit away the crumbling dry wax that sealed it, and spat the stopper aside.
Red agony. Her chest was a sucking storm of pain, a drain she swirled down and out. Above her, the skeleton swayed, stooping now to regard her with empty eye sockets as its bony arms reached for her.
Tantaerra poured the contents of the vial down her throat.
And tasted that lovely clear, minty tingling. It slid into her, healing, the pain fading …
Even as she gasped in satisfaction, skeletal fingers dug into her painfully, low on her uppermost flank and cruelly about the back of her neck, seeking to slide around to her throat.
Tantaerra hunched her head low to hamper any strangling attempt, jerked her body and arched it to try to shake the skeleton's grip on her, and kicked out hard. One of her feet struck a bony ankle, but the other found what she wanted: the thankfully still-solid inside wall of the coffin. Planting both feet against it, she wormed her way behind the ankle and shoved.
Fresh pain flared as her half-healed gutting opened anew. Yet few two-legged creatures on Golarion could have kept their balance against such a back-of-the-ankles shove. The skeleton swayed, arms flailing wildly, then toppled over backward, upflung feet kicking vials high as it crashed down out of sight, off the dais that held its coffin.
Amid the fountain of vials now tumbling in the air above Tantaerra was a still-handsome lacquered plaque. Writhing and moaning as she rolled across the now-vacated coffin, she had a seeming eternity to read its descending inscription.
Valorn the Prankster
Whose healing was matched by his humor.
He who saved so many could not save himself.
Then the plaque and all the vials crashed down on her in a bruising, bouncing rain. Tantaerra screamed and rolled, clutching to try to hold her ravaged innards together, aware of being covered in dark stickiness that was almost certainly her own blood. A lot of it.
She clawed up another vial, fought to bite it open, managed that with almost the last of her strength, drank again-and relaxed in the rapturous flow of cool-to-warm healing.
Something vast, dark, and heavy crashed down, obliterating the end of the coffin and shattering most of the potion vials in an ear-splitting instant. Whatever it was continued on, falling from the dais to slam down against the floor amid squalling, shrieking dweomercats.