Unbidden, he took a step forward. The three young women extended their emerald arms, exuding a mist of attracting chemicals. The lovely, but deadly, flowers bloomed around them.
Tears filled Bannon’s eyes, because he wanted them so much. He remembered how wonderful they were, how sweet and caring, how innocent, and yet how skilled when they had made love to him.
“We can be together,” he said, “if only you’ll just—”
Laurel interrupted him. “Yes, we can be together. Always.”
“We want you now more than ever,” said Audrey. “We are more fertile, more filled with desire.”
“We can be everything you want,” Sage added. “And you will give us everything we need.”
They spread their arms, and their breasts beckoned him. Their dark green nipples looked like flower buds. Bannon yearned for them. He had meant to come and argue, to fight to take them back. The sword felt slick in his hand. Even with its leather grip, his palms were so sweaty, he could barely hold on.
“Come to us, Bannon,” said Laurel.
The other two echoed the invitation.
He could not resist. He succumbed, gliding toward the edge of the jungle.
With a great blow, a growling, furred form crashed into him. The full weight of a sand panther knocked him off his feet and tumbled him out of the reach of the vicious forest girls.
The beautiful apparitions snarled, their mouths opening to reveal long woody fangs. Their arms stretched out, coiled with vines, corded muscles, and tendons. Their fingers reached out for him, tipped with hooked thorns. The smooth, perfect green skin on their arms became studded with deadly barbs that dripped with milky venom.
Gasping, Bannon rolled over and tried to catch his breath. The spell was broken. Mrra bounded away, then circled back, snarling. The forest women reached out with a thorn-studded embrace, trying to catch Bannon before he got out of reach.
He instinctively slashed with Sturdy, lopping off one of Audrey’s arms. It dropped to the ground, and its severed stump twitched, extended, and grew roots, digging deep into the ground while the arm continued to grope upward for him.
Howling, Audrey raised the stump of her arm, and a new limb grew from the severed end, a tangle of vines, muscles, and blood vessels reemerging to restore her.
Bannon hacked at them, swinging his sword sideways, then up, then back down, splintering the female forms. They did not bleed red, but spilled oozing green sap.
“I wanted to save you,” he cried.
The three just laughed as they regrew into contorted new forms with additional branchlike arms that sprang from their shoulders and torsos. Their hair became a wild, marshy tangle of strands.
The sand panther retreated, growling to Bannon. He backed away onto the rocky, desolate ground where the forest avatars could not yet go. From their verdant refuge, they simply glared at him, and Bannon stared back, sobbing. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I thought I loved you.”
“We will have you again,” the women said in a single rasping voice like dry leaves crackling in a fire. “We will have you forever.”
CHAPTER 65
The broad grin on Nathan’s face made Nicci immediately suspicious. “I may just know where to find the answer, Sorceress!” The old wizard stopped her in the hallway as she made her way to her chambers, where Thistle was already asleep.
She allowed herself a moment of hope. “You are certain of this spell?”
Nathan’s smile faltered. “‘Certainty’ is an overused term, to be sure. I am confident, let us leave it at that. See here.” He set the thick volume on a bench in one of the corridors.
He opened the pages, drew his fingers down a line of archaic text. “It is just a clue, but the best clue we’ve had. You already gave me the incantation and the spell-form that the memmers think Victoria used, and that provided some excellent parameters for a counterspell or a weapon. We knew the essence of what we were fighting, but not how to do so.”
He tapped a stained page where tight handwriting had run together as the ink dissolved. “This gives us somewhere to look, a listing of other books that also shed more light about the Lifedrinker.”
“He is no longer a concern,” Nicci said. “I killed him.”
“Yes, yes, but think of how they are connected. Roland’s spell stole too much from the world, and now Victoria’s will restore too much. It is all a matter of control, finding a way to modulate the flow of hungry magic, the power of giving and taking.”
“Like a valve,” Nicci said, unconsciously biting her lower lip. “The Lifedrinker said he had opened up the magic with his spell, but the flow was too strong. He could not stop himself.”
“And neither can Victoria,” Nathan said. “Both Roland and Victoria were conduits for the magic. When you destroyed the Lifedrinker, you shut off his flow of death. Now we must destroy Victoria and stop the flow in the opposite direction.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Nicci said. She looked up as three scholars hurried past them, eager for their dinner. Another middle-aged man strolled by, holding an open book in his hands, reading as he walked. She continued, “I simply need to know how to do it.”
Nathan pointed at the stained pages again. “This listing identif
ies a volume we need to find, and I have reason to believe it is buried in the vault beneath the damaged tower, where those other scattered books were hidden. It is very late now, but we can try to excavate tomorrow.”
“And you know where to look?” Nicci asked, thinking of the unexplored maze of damaged rooms and passages underground. “Exactly?”
Nathan smiled. “Mia does.”
* * *
Though it had left the riotous fecundity of the primeval jungle behind, the shaksis could still feel the power of Life’s Mistress driving its mission. As the creature walked across the desolate ground on limbs made of twisted vines and leaves, motivated by swarms of worms, spiders, and insects, the shaksis kept drawing energy from a distance.
It continued across the desolate Scar through the night. Though parts broke off in the dry rocks and jagged uplifts, the shaksis replenished itself with plant matter once it reached the foothills and walked through scrub brush and tangled grasses. The dead vegetation came alive again, whipping around its body, strengthening its limbs, winding like armor around its body core.
Finally, in the darkest hour before dawn, the creature faced the sheer cliff of the plateau uplift. The shaksis knew that its two victims were inside the hidden enclave high above.
Because Victoria knew all about Cliffwall, the shaksis remembered how to ascend that sheer rock, using the hidden handholds and the faint trail that had isolated the great archive for millennia. The golem of reanimated twigs and vines turned its hollow head upward and stared at the cliff with living-beetle eyes.
An agile person could climb the path to reach the hooded overhang above, but the shaksis did not need agility; it had a different kind of power. It reached out with the splayed branches of its hands and touched the stone. With a surge of vibrant life, the fingers grew. Vine tendrils extended and worked their way into the rock, like the roots of a clinging windswept tree. The shaksis reached with a branchy arm, slapped its hand higher up, and fastened with root tendrils. Its bulging wooden muscles groaned. The vermin infesting its hollow body skittered around, adding energy, squirming.