As soon as he turned the corner, the malformed body of what had once been Rol Mandred came crashing through the stone wall, pulverizing it as if it were made of sand.
Komir looked at his sister. “There’s just no way that that’s a good thing.”
An eldritch glow that Komir recognized as the residue of powerful magic covered Rol, followed by Drahar floating through, surrounded by a similar glow.
Then he saw that the chamberlain’s nose was gushing blood onto his upper lip. That was less impressive-he knew from Feena that such only happened to practitioners of the Way who were overstepping their abilities.
Rol gestured and seemed to throw the glow off him, slamming it instead into Drahar, who deflected it aside, causing it to shatter another wall, sending rock flying. Komir raised his arm to protect his bald head from the debris.
Beyond that wall were the cubicles that held the fighters. Peeking out from his arms, Komir saw that at least one of them was dead, one was buried under rubble and might have been dead too, and several others were injured.
“What the frip is that?”
“Volmar’s dead.”
“Hell with this-I’ll get three silver somewhere else.”
As the fighters scattered like mice, Komir saw one of the dwarves-a bald fellow with a thick mustache-trying to help the one who was buried.
“What are you doing?” some idiot asked. To Komir’s shock, he realized that he was the idiot-confirmed by his feet moving, somewhat against his better judgment, toward the dwarf to aid him.
The dwarf-whose name, Komir recalled, was Barglin-said, “Gan’s under here.”
Komir felt his stomach drop. “What was he doing in here?”
Barglin was grabbing rocks and throwing them to one side, trying to clear Gan’s body. “He got knocked in here by that thing with the three mouths that used to be Mandred. Now you wanna help me, or not? He might live if we get him out.”
“If we don’t get out of here, we might not live.” Even as Komir said the words, he kneeled down and, like the dwarf, started tossing stones aside. He wasn’t about to leave Gan behind on top of everything else.
Drahar was losing.
In truth, he had lost before he started. Whatever the Voidharrow creature was, he was considerably more powerful than Drahar. The chamberlain feared he might be more powerful than Hamanu.
Drahar had to put everything he had and more into his fight. To spare anything, even to summon the king to aid him, would be suicidal.
Too late, he realized his own arrogance, his own blindness. All he’d thought about was how he and Tharson could use the creature to curry favor with the king by providing him with a way to raise an army that would enable him to truly become the King of the World.
Instead, he’d let himself be fooled by charalatans-he wasn’t sure how or why, but he knew now that Wrena and Dalon were frauds-and now he was about to die at the hands of an otherworldly creature he couldn’t hope to understand.
But he for damn sure wouldn’t go down without a fight.
On the Astral Plane, the Voidharrow punched him repeatedly in the stomach. A sad irony that their magical battle would translate in the ether to the very fisticuffs that Drahar so abhorred.
This ends now, minion, the dreadnaught boasted as he slammed Drahar with a misshapen fist.
“No, it doesn’t,” said another voice.
A blonde with curly hair was standing behind him. Drahar hadn’t the first clue who she was, but his trained mind instantly detected that she had a powerful talent-albeit raw and unfocused.
“I will aid you, Lord Chamberlain,” she said, touching his shoulder. He could feel her power flowing into him. “Together, we will make this thing pay for what it did to Rol.”
The chamberlain grabbed onto the woman’s power, and for a moment it nearly overwhelmed him. She was obviously untrained-which, if nothing else, proved she was not born and raised in Urik. Hamanu’s templars tested every child born under his rule and placed them appropriately. A child of her ability would have been fast-tracked to the King’s Academy just as Drahar had been-but where his placement was due to his station, hers would’ve been entirely due to ability.
But Drahar was in no position to dwell on the waste of letting her potential lay fallow. Right now what he needed was the strength of this woman-whose name, he now knew, was Feena Storvis, the sister to the one with the eye patch-to stop the Voidharrow.
Perhaps now he might not lose. At the very worst, he’d put up a better fight.
Karalith was making sure that everyone who was still upright got out safely.
One half-giant grabbed her and asked, “When do we get our money?”
“Go to the Three Brothers Stable by the City of the Dead and wait for us there, you’ll get paid. Tell the thri-kreen that I sent you, and say the word ‘geresche.’ ” It was a codeword that was meant to sound like elven, but it truly meant nothing. But it signaled to Tricht’tha that the fighters had truly been sent by someone from the emporium.
Once they all got out, she found Zabaj, holding a large metal box filled with their profits from the increasingly dangerous job. “What’s going on?”
Karalith blew out a breath. “Everything’s going to hell is what’s going on. Whatever Rol’s turned into, it’s powerful enough to take on the chamberlain. Feena’s gone to help him.”
“What?”
As soon as she’d said it, Karalith realized she should have kept her mouth shut.
Zabaj immediately dropped the box onto the stone floor. It hit with a rattling thunk and Zabaj ran back the way Karalith had come.
With a sigh, she hauled the box of ceramic coins and made her way to the exit. She wasn’t sure where Komir was, but she trusted her brother to take care of himself. She needed to get the hell out of there before the chamberlain and the monster conspired to destroy the entire arena.
Zabaj ran through the catacombs of the arena and what he saw chilled him to his very bones.
Intellectually, the mul knew that Feena was a mind-mage. Not a trained one, and she mostly only used her skills to help fool victims in the game, and to occasionally block the emporium members’ thoughts from other mind-mages.
So it was easy for him to forget how powerful she was.
There she stood, side-by-side with Drahar, magic coursing through them both, lattices of energy that were intertwined and being thrown at the monster that Rol had been changed into.
For all his life-both in the arena and with the emporium-Zabaj had solved most problems with his might. Either he’d punch things or lift heavy things or do something else that required his prodigious strength.
This, however, was a fight where he wasn’t sure what good his physical abilities would do.
But Feena was fighting for her life, and she was the woman Zabaj loved. He was still angry at her for making him go back on his word and become a part of this foul place, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t lay down his life for her if necessary.
So he charged the creature, slamming it into the wall.
Feena felt a surge of joy as Zabaj’s bulk sent the Voidharrow smashing into a wall. So focused was the otherworldly monster on the magical end that it had lost track of the physical.
Drahar, with Feena’s help, took advantage of the distraction to strike as hard as possible.
In truth, the actual spellcasting was all Drahar. Feena’s lack of training in the Way prevented her from being an active participant, instead being relegated to being a power source. She was simply the water that flowed through the pumps-Drahar was the well that did the work to bring it out.
Zabaj’s arrival, however, weakened the creature enough that Feena was able to split her focus briefly. Drahar could handle things for a bit.
Instead, Feena turned her attention to the corner of the Astral Plane where she saw Rol curled up into a ball.