This kind of climb was nothing to a Tayledras. As Elspeth dashed into the doors below him, his hand reached the balcony itself, and he pulled himself up and over the railing.
And just as he burst into the ravaged room, he felt the unmistakable shivering in the power-currents of someone building a Gate nearby....
They had all studied the plans of Ancar's palace until they could have walked the place blindfolded. Elspeth remembered a stair going right up into the hallway above, just inside the main doors. The place was deserted; everyone had either gone off to fight the fires or fled in terror when the mage-battle began. She ran up the stairs two at a time, and as she reached the top and the corridor that it led to, she heard the sound of a fight on the other side of the second door along the corridor.
She didn't stop to think; she just gathered power and blasted, disintegrating the door and running through the hole while the dust was still raining down.
And she stumbled to a halt as she hit something that felt like a web, a net that closed around her in a heartbeat and held her immobile.
But her eyes still worked, and the very first thing she saw, by the white light of pure power, was the man that had pulled Hulda inside.
The man, who bore a distinctive device on his tunic - Dear gods - the Emperor's envoy! -
- was building a Gate! He already had the framework up. He wasn't even using a real door as his anchor, he was simply building the thing in midair!
How much of what's happened has been his doing?
Darkwind knelt on the floor, beside the shattered doors to the balcony, cringing beneath his shields as Hulda rained blow after fiery blow down on him. So far, Hulda hadn't even noticed her. The hinged splinters of the balcony doors slammed against the wall, as the rainless mage-storm raged outside, whitening the room in flashes from the lightning. Thunder roared, drowning out any other sounds, and smoke crept in the window from the fires outside.
Elspeth fought the bonds that held her, frantically seeking a weak spot.
Suddenly, the darkness in the Gate brightened - and became a hole in the air, a hole leading to a brightly-lit room somewhere, filled with furnishings in a sinuous style Elspeth had never seen before.
The man turned toward Hulda. "Are you coming?" he snarled. "Or are you enjoying yourself too much to leave?"
Elspeth realized his lips had not moved with his words. He had projected them in open Mindspeech so strong that anyone, Gifted or not, would have Heard him. As his attention wavered for a moment, split between the Gate and Hulda, so did the bonds holding her. She freed one hand, and shook a knife from her sleeve down into it - her old, reliable, predictable, material knives. No pottery to hurl this time....
As Hulda turned to answer him, Elspeth cast the knife, knowing that if the envoy went down, the Gate would go with him.
He was not expecting a physical attack; the knife caught him in the throat. It buried itself to the hilt. Blood spurted from a severed artery, a fountain of ebony-red in the hellish white light. The envoy's face convulsed; both hands clutched at his throat. He staggered backward, across the threshold, and through the Gate itself.
The Gate collapsed as he fell through it.
The bonds holding her faded away. And now Hulda saw her.
There was no recognition in Hulda's eyes, but there was plenty of pure rage.
Elspeth readied a mage-bolt of her own, but Hulda was faster. And Hulda was trapped, with nowhere to escape to; Darkwind was between her and the balcony, Elspeth was between her and the hallway. So she fought with all the desperate strength of any cornered creature, and with the stores of energy she had drained from the land of Hardorn for all these past years....
She was an Adept, easily the equivalent of Falconsbane - and she was not handicapped by having an agent in her own mind, or by a disintegrating personality.
Within moments, Elspeth knew with rising panic that stole her breath that she was in trouble, trying to hold eroded shields against a barrage of mage winds, each of them geared to a specific energy, that began to eat their way down through her protections. They circled her in a whirlwind that caught up papers, bits of wood, shattered glass, and other debris, pelting her with physical as well as magical weapons.
But panic made her mind clearer, and a sudden memory matched the whirlwind. Firesong - the lesson -
She spun her shields until they mated with the whirlwinds; then reached through them, and began to absorb the energies of the attack into her own. But the instant Hulda realized that she had found a counter, the woman set the winds on Darkwind, and attacked Elspeth with -
Demons!
Creatures of shadow and teeth boiled up from the floor, and a hundred taloned hands reached for her. Fear sent arcs of cold down her limbs. Elspeth backpedaled and came up against the wall; for a moment, she was lost in panic. She had no counter to this -
Panicked, until in the next heartbeat, she remembered that these might be illusions. Illusions vanished if challenged! She pulled her sword, forgotten until now, and swung.
The "demons" vanished without a sound. Hulda then flung a wall of fire at her. Her confidence increased. This she could handle! Perhaps Hulda was not so formidable after all!
She countered it by absorbing it - took another step toward the woman -
And then Hulda recognized her. "You! The Brat!"
"The Adept," Elspeth screamed back defiantly. "Your better, bitch!"
Hulda's reply was drowned out by another thunderclap; there was a trace of real fear in her eyes, and her face was like a stone mask. Elspeth laughed hysterically. Hulda was afraid! Afraid of her! They could take the bitch, they could!
But Hulda evidently decided that if she was doomed, she would take her enemies with her.
Hulda reached out with her powers in a thrust that knocked Elspeth back into the wall again, and with great shudders of power that shook her body as they shook the walls, she began to tear the building down around them.
The walls and ceiling screamed with the shrieks of tortured stone and wood. Elspeth dodged a falling chandelier that brought a quarter of the ceiling down with it -
- just in time to see Darkwind falling beneath the outer wall, going down under a cascade of stone and burning wall-maps that buried him completely in an instant.
"No!" she screamed, reaching for him with mind, heart, and powers, forgetting her own peril -
Only to receive, not an answer, but a flood of energy. Energy that felt - final, as if it was all he had.
Her heart convulsed, but her body acted.
She shook her arm and felt her other knife fall into her hand. She screamed again, a wordless howl of rage and anguish; invested every last bit of power in the second knife - and threw it.
The knife cut through the air and ripped through Hulda's shields.
Hulda collapsed in a boneless heap, her howling winds collapsing at the same instant, leaving behind an echoing silence filled only by thunder, and the crunch of an occasional brick falling. A glittering knife-hilt shone from her left eye socket.