The thunder of running feet sounded above them, and the demon screeched behind the warded door.
“Go now before you’re trapped in this hallway,” Rurian said. “Leave the Windcry with us.”
Gharek gladly handed the artifact to the sorcerer. “Even with the map, you’ll never outrun palace soldiers, especially now.” He nodded toward Zaredis.
The sorcerer’s eyes, no longer the eerie ice blue from earlier, gleamed in the corridor’s dim torchlight. “Your doubt in my abilities is humbling, cat’s-paw. Have no fear that you’ll see the general at the head of his army as the walls of Domora fall.” He gestured with a lift of his chin. “Now go. My magic is stronger spent on two instead of three.”
Dozens of footsteps thundered toward them. Gharek didn’t need to be told twice. He sprinted for one of the corridors that leddeeper into the bowels of the palace, to a tunnel that ascended once more. At its end an exit into the royal gardens lay behind a vicious barricade of thorny roses.
He ran, euphoria and fear giving his feet wings. He raced toward another battle, another monster, to save the two people who reminded him what it was to love and to hope.
CHAPTER TEN
Siora held her hands up to the sullen sky in supplication, allowing her cupped palms to fill with rainwater until it threatened to spill over her knuckles. She bent then and tipped her makeshift cup to Estred’s lips. The child drank greedily until Siora’s palms were empty.
“More?” At Estred’s enthusiastic nod, Siora stretched her hands out a second time, just enough beyond their meager shelter and the ward she’d drawn in the dirt around them. Except for the gray sheets of a spring shower falling from a jaundiced sky, the dead city of Midrigar was silent. She let Estred drink her fill before soothing her own parched lips and throat with rain.
The sky above had transformed since her last foray here, now an eerie tapestry of oddly changing light in which the sun moved at unnatural speed across the horizon, slinging shadows against decrepit structures like paint splashes. A sliver of twilight already graced the far edges of the heavens. It was as if time outside the walls rushed by in increments of moments instead of hours, leaving dead Midrigar an island to stagnate in an abyss.
Thirst, hunger, and the demands of a bladder were the only ways she could guess how much time had passed since the eater of ghosts had abducted her and Estred, dropping them among theruins along with a crowd of the dead. Were she alone, Siora might have succumbed to terror and screamed herself senseless. Instead she’d raced for shelter, useless though it was in such circumstances, and sketched a shallow protection ward in the dirt. The rain couldn’t reach it to wash parts of the circle away, but a strong wind would, and she prayed neither she, Estred, nor nature itself sneezed. If she guessed right, they’d hidden under the shadow of a partially toppled building for more than a day, two at most, surrounded by a tattered fog of ghosts bound to her by the vile Holdfast spell.
The irony of a necromantic spell of enslavement managing to protect many from the ghost-eater’s predation wasn’t lost on her. Revulsion still gripped her at the possibility of possessing such magic but for now it had its uses. Even the protection ward in which she and Estred stood sprang from this poisoned well. It kept away the dozen pale, faceless wolves lurking nearby, creatures like the pair that had stalked her and Gharek in the Maesor. They raised their heads to sniff the air, scarlet tongues in equally scarlet mouths flickering out like a serpent’s before sliding back behind needle-like teeth.
Siora held Estred even tighter. The little girl clung like an ivy vine, her tears wet on Siora’s neck. “Where’s my papa?”
Siora patted her back. “Shh. Safe, love. Don’t talk.” She didn’t want any more attention drawn to them than what was already there, and Estred’s young, living voice was surely a confection the ghost-eater and his minions couldn’t resist.
Their voices, at normal volume, seemed strangely loud in the destroyed city, and the ever-changing light made it difficult for Siora to focus her gaze. She blinked several times, watching as the faceless hunters crept ever closer. A pair slunk like great cats, movingon all fours with a sinuous gait. Others scuttled like insects, and more crawled down the walls of broken buildings, their forms shifting back and forth between amorphous shapes that rippled like water and solid bodies the shade of a corpse with their white skin and bloody mouths.
An icy touch on her arm made Siora jump with a gasp. She turned to discover her father next to her and Kalun adjacent to him. “Papa!” she exclaimed. “Kalun! Thank the gods!” The ghost-eater hadn’t taken them. Her hastily invoked Holdfast spell had worked. Not only on them but on the many other phantoms huddling close to her.
Skavol’s apparition gazed at her with both pride and apprehension.Your mother and I always suspected your magic to be far greater than hers, far greater than that of a lowly fortune-teller.
She said aloud what he didn’t, her voice mournful. “Necromancer.” She held the shaking Estred closer for warmth, shivering herself with terror.I have to get out of here, Papa. Get Estred to safety.He turned to stare at all the ghostly shapes, bound by magic that kept them from becoming a ghost-eater’s dinner but enslaved them just the same to a desperate, newly minted spellcaster.I’m afraid,she told Skavol.
Kalun joined the conversation.But you’re not alone, Siora.Skavol nodded.We’re yours to command. In the world outside Midrigar, we are as nothing, but here, where the city straddles two existences, we can help.
Siora pointed to one of the creeping hunters.Can you help with that?
Kalun nodded.But you have to command us. You are our mistress now. We serve you.
His words brought only despair and a generous helping of guilt. All around her were the remnants of a city punished, annihilated; its populace slaughtered, then cursed. And at its shriveled heart, a thing had taken up residence in a nearby temple and fed first on those trapped for a millennium, then on the denizens of the Maesor. It had come for more. It had also come for her. She’d known in her gut the ghost-eater hadn’t scooped her up by chance. It had sensed a rival’s power even before she herself became aware of it.
As if the ghost-eater knew her thoughts, its command rang throughout the city in an abyssal voice.“Give to me what is mine, witch of the dead.”
The ghosts around her wailed, and even her father and Kalun cowered before the entity who demanded she surrender the spirits she held in thrall.
That arrogant, entitled command snapped her out of the fear threatening to choke her, replacing it with righteous anger. “No,” she yelled back. “These people are not yours, nor are they meat as you call them.”
A wrathful snarl filled what remained of the plaza in which she stood with her phantom audience.“To me, meat!”the ghost-eater thundered, and the ghosts rippled as one misty shade, pulled toward the grand temple whose dark interior faced the plaza and housed a thing that watched from behind a facade of crumbling pillars.
“Stay,” Siora cried out, only half believing that her command would counteract the ghost-eater’s power. She stared at her father, at Kalun, a slow grin turning up her mouth when neither of them moved from their place beside her.
You’re doing it, daughter,Skavol said, his misty face beaming like sunlight through glass.
“KILL!”
This time the entity’s screech almost cracked her skull in half. Estred screamed in her arms and called out for her father. Siora wanted to call out for him too.