They made the trek to the palace, Gharek uneasy despite Rurian’s spell as they passed numerous members of Domoran nobility on the royal avenue, many who’d happily disembowel him on the spot with their bare hands if they recognized him.
They left their mounts in a public stable within walking distanceof the palace, strolling toward the grand building as if they were provincial sightseers on a walking tour. At the palace itself, Gharek directed them to one of the hidden entrances noted on the map he’d drawn. Zaredis kept a knife to his back as they sneaked into the royal residence while Rurian read the map, checking every verbal instruction or hand gesture the cat’s-paw made against the map to verify they matched.
When they reached the palace’s inner most sanctum, the center of a labyrinth of corridors and warren of rooms, the mage swiftly dispatched the two guards standing sentry at a door made of wood darkened with age and engraved with arcane symbols whose power made the air around the frame pulse. The sigil Rurian noted earlier was carved deepest into the lintel above, glowing the crimson shade of fresh blood.
Zaredis poked Gharek in the back. “Take the keys off the guard there,” he ordered. “And unlock the door.”
The dead guard was the size of an ox, and Gharek grunted with the effort to turn him over and retrieve the keys trapped under his corpse. He held them up and waited, noting that the general had traded his knife for a sword, prepared for battle. He knew what the man would tell him and didn’t argue when Zaredis said, “Now open the door.”
The key screeched in a lock not turned for centuries, but the mechanism submitted and a series of clicks and snaps told them the door was unlocked.
Gharek nudged it open with his foot. It swung inward on squealing hinges.So much for any element of surprise, he thought.
No monstrosity perched on the threshold waiting for them to cross so it could pounce and enjoy a quick meal of general,sorcerer, and cat’s-paw. Zaredis gestured for Gharek to go inside first. He and Rurian followed behind him.
He’d scouted the path to this room earlier. It was a spartan chamber except for mysterious glowing runes painted on the walls. They mimicked those etched on the floors. Gharek didn’t need to translate them to know these were protection symbols used to build a sorcerous cage that housed a powerful artifact.
The legendary Windcry sat on a plain table in the center of the room, looking exactly as he remembered it when he’d first seen it while serving as Dalvila’s henchman. Every survival instinct Gharek possessed snapped to attention. There was more in this room than a magical artifact and three would-be thieves. Demon. The guardian trapped in the cage with the Windcry. Gharek’s skin crawled with the sense of otherness that practically breathed in this room.
Different from the ghost-eater of Midrigar but pulsing with the same kind of waiting malice as it bided its time and watched what its prey would do.
He glanced askance at Zaredis, catching the man sketch a protection symbol in the air with his fingers. From some hidden distance something gave a low, mocking, inhuman laugh.
It was Rurian who strode first to the table. The Windcry looked like a piece of decorative glass, one of those expensive and utterly useless things aristo women wasted their wealth on and put on a shelf so they could boast about their acquisition to their equally rich and envious friends.
Gharek hung back as Zaredis joined his sorcerer. “This is truly the Windcry?” Doubt colored his voice, as if he couldn’t quite believe something so fragile-looking had and could level an entire city and win a siege for an army.
“The one and only,” Gharek said. He joined the two men, who stood on the perimeter of another, smaller glowing circle that was carved into the floor and surrounded the table.
“It looks fragile.” Rurian bent to peer more closely at the artifact.
“I’d suggest not throwing it about once you have your hands on it,” Gharek said.
The mage frowned at his mockery. “Obviously.”
Zaredis gazed at his sorcerer, then his prisoner. “Are you ready? I’ve a city to conquer and you, cat’s-paw, have a woman and child to rescue.”
Rurian unhooked a flask from his belt, unstoppering the cork to carefully shake out a green powder that began to smoke as soon as it hit the flagstone floor. The runes glowed even brighter as he used the powder to create a wedge-shaped pattern, with the narrow end touching a part of the smaller circle around the table and the wider end connecting to the larger one at the door’s threshold. A path, a safe avenue leading from one warded space to another. They could safely travel from the table to the door once the original wards were broken as long as they didn’t cross the new lines Rurian’s powder was etching into the floor.
“Clever,” Gharek said, watching as tendrils of smoke wafted off blistered stone.
“Cautious,” Rurian replied. “I’ve no wish to be torn apart by demon kind.” He cursed all of a sudden as he shook out the last of the powder. A thin cascade managed to close the ward but just barely.
Zaredis bent to survey the spot. “Can’t you just spread some of the powder from other spots that have more?”
Rurian shook his head. “It isn’t the powder itself that’s magic. It’s simply the means to disperse it, and that magic has already played into the stone where the powder fell. What you see now is nothing more sorcerous than a baker’s bowl of flour or sand on a beach.” He blew away a portion of the green stuff to reveal the wedge shape carved deep into the stone and glowing as bright as the runes—except for one spot no longer than a small dirk and no wider than the blade itself.
“That,” Rurian said, scowling at the place where the etching was more shallow and the sorcerous glow dimmer, “is the weak point. I think it will still prevent the demon from reaching us but keep your distance just in case.”
“You think?” In that moment Gharek was tempted to revisit his earlier murderous urges and snatch Zaredis’s sword from his hand and skewer the sorcerer with it. “We all might end up bloody stains on the walls because you didn’t measure correctly?”
“Silence,” the general snapped. He didn’t look any happier about Rurian’s announcement than Gharek felt, but he gave the sorcerer a nod. “I need the Windcry. It’s worth the risk. Break the ward.”
Rurian wasted no time. He pulled the grimoire with its ward-breaker spells from the bag at his belt and motioned for his companions to stand with him in the wedge’s safety. His voice took on a sonorous cadence as he recited one of the spells, the invocation echoing with a hollowness one might hear in a vast, vaulted cave instead of a windowless chamber in the palace.
Every hair on Gharek’s nape and arms stood at attention when a snap, more felt than heard, bludgeoned not only his ears but his entire body. The runes decorating the chamber flashed blindinglybright once, then returned to their milder glow. Except for those on the floor. Those had gone dark, including the two circles. Only Rurian’s wedge continued to shimmer, along with portions of the old wards where they made up parts of the wedge.
Rurian didn’t pause in his invocation, and his eyes had turned an otherworldly ice blue from which the pinpoints of his pupils glittered like shards of obsidian. His voice was soon drowned out by the most gods-awful howling shriek Gharek had ever heard. A roiling miasma of pus, blood, fangs, and darkness suddenly burst into existence from thin air.