Bannon smashed its head so hard that sparks flew. When the lizard opened wide its fang-filled mouth, he pulled back the sword and thrust forward with all of his strength, stabbing Sturdy’s tip into the soft pink flesh. He shoved harder, twisting the blade and digging it into the creature’s soft palate until it broke through the thin bone and pierced the small brain. As the monster perished, Bannon tore the sword back out, severing the black forked tongue, which fell out and flopped like a dying snake in the blood-soaked dust. The enormous beast twitched and thrashed in a thunderstorm of last nerve impulses.
Bannon spun as the third giant lizard approached from the left, climbing over one of the boulders. Sparing a glance for Nicci, he gasped to see her slumped against the rock as she attempted to recover. “Sorceress!”
Rallying herself, she released a small burst of magic, hoping to stop the creature’s heart, but the moment she made the attempt, Nicci felt the voracious Lifedrinker snatch at her magic and her strength like a hunting dog clamping its jaws around a hare. Before it was too late, she cast her protective webs again and closed off the attempt. Dark static swirled around her vision, and she fell against the boulder, but vowed not to give up. She slid the dagger from her side and clutched it in a shaking hand, determined to fight with whatever weapon she had—even teeth and nails if necessary.
“I’ll take care of the other two, Sorceress.” Bannon charged toward the oncoming lizard, yelling with wordless fury. Again his sword struck sparks from the armored hide. He hammered and hammered with his blade, chipping scales and digging into the lizard’s flesh, and he twisted into one of the crusted, patchy sores. When the lizard hissed and snapped at him, Bannon responded with a primal roar of his own.
Nicci had not seen him release such blind rage since battling the Norukai slavers, but something had unleashed his fighting reactions. He was more calculating than a mindless dervish, though. Even if the edge of his blade caused little harm, he raised the sword above his shoulder and drove the point straight into the lizard’s eye.
With a gurgling hiss, the monster tried to squirm away, but Bannon pushed forward, driving his sword harder, pushing it in farther. He twisted and screwed the tip so that it turned the creature’s eye into a soupy splash of gore. It wasn’t enough.
Throwing his full weight into the thrust, he slammed the sword through the bone of the lizard’s eye socket and into its head. The monster collapsed. Bannon heaved great breaths and struggled to wrench Sturdy free, but the sword was stuck in the lizard’s cranial cavity. He grunted and cursed. “Come on!”
The last of the attacking lizards crawled toward Nicci, cautious. She held out her long dagger, ready for the attack. The monster prepared to spring. She knew its weight and momentum would drive her backward. And she also knew she was too weak to kill it.
Just then she sensed a feral presence, felt the ripple of muscles like an echo inside her, experienced the anticipated joy of the attack and the kill. Before the giant lizard could crash down on her, a tawny feline shape bounded from the boulders above. The great cat hurled herself down in a mass of claws and curved fangs and slammed into the distorted lizard, knocking it off balance.
Nicci felt a surge of excitement and relief as she dragged herself to her feet. “Mrra!”
The sand panther mauled the lizard with her long claws, ripping loose mangy patches of scales, exposing open sores. The monster writhed and bucked, but Mrra would not let go. Saberlike fangs chomped down, working into weak spots in the reptile’s armor.
Inside her mind, thanks to her connection to the spell-bonded panther, Nicci could feel the bloodlust, the energy, the need to kill this threat … this threat to Nicci. Mrra was born as a fighter, trained as a fighter, as a killer.
Because she was joined to Mrra, Nicci wanted to tear this monster apart with her bare hands. A feral blood rage sang through her, as it sang through the sand panther. She bounded forward to join the attack. She didn’t need magic, just her knife.
Mrra pushed over the thrashing lizard to expose the softer scales in its underbelly just as Nicci reached its head. They seemed to be coordinated, synchronized. The monster clamped its fanged jaws shut, and Nicci drove her sharp dagger beneath the reptile’s chin, piercing the thinner skin of its wattled throat. She drove the blade into its head again and again while Mrra tore open the thing’s belly and hauled out its flopping entrails. The lizard’s gushing blood washed away the caked white powder on Nicci’s skin and hands, but she did not feel clean.
Instead, she felt invigorated.
By the time the fourth monster was dead, Nicci shook with exhaustion, but was also afire with the need to go on.
Bannon looked ready to collapse, but he managed an odd grin, giving a respectful look to Mrra. “Good thing I convinced you not to kill the panther, Sorceress.”
“I agree.” Nicci looked down at Mrra, feeling the powerful inexplicable threads binding them. Her sister panther growled deep in her throat.
Bannon added, “And I told you I could be useful. You need me.”
“There are few things I need.” Nicci shaded her eyes as she scanned ahead, looking toward the dark vortex still miles away. “Right now, we need to get to the Lifedrinker.” She touched the pouch at her side that held the Eldertree acorn. “Before it’s too late.”
CHAPTER 52
They trudged forward. The Lifedrinker’s presence dragged at their bodies like tar, making their movements sluggish, their bodies weak, but Nicci pushed ahead toward the center of the Scar, and the wizard she needed to kill. For Thistle, for this once-fertile valley, for Richard, the D’Haran Empire, and the whole world …
“We’re almost there, Sorceress,” Bannon said in a voice as thin as old paper. “My sword isn’t dull yet.”
“He will keep trying to stop us, but we don’t know how he will attack us next,” Nicci said. “Be wary.”
The young man managed a hint of cheer in his tone. “And I’ll be useful.” When she made a noncommittal response, Bannon acted as if she had given him a great compliment.
Mrra stayed with them. The sand panther loped ahead, her tan fur blending into the dusty wasteland. The debris around them turned darker, sharper. The boulders were made of shattered volcanic glass, with every angle as sharp as a knife edge. Sulfurous steam made the air thick and nearly unbreathable, and each step sapped more of their strength.
But as they descended the crumbling, uncertain slope at the heart of the dead valley, Nicci could see their destination ahead. Her target.
The evil wizard’s lair resembled an amphitheater with black stelae, spires of rock reaching upward like desperate claws that encircled a central pit. Waves of the Lifedrinker’s appetite had frozen into ripples preserved in the blasted stone.
Overhead, thunderclouds strangled the sky, and a web of tortured lightning skittered around—electric whips that cracked across the sky, then stung the tops of the high stelae surrounding the amphitheater. The wind rose to a keening whistle, accompanied by a basso undercurrent of perpetual thunder.
On the ground to their left, a slab of black rock split off to reveal a raw flow of lava beneath. Molten rock like the blood of the world spilled out from a cracked, festering scab.
Bannon staggered back from the furnace air. More obsidian rocks shattered and thrust upward, shifting, twisting. Mrra picked her steps with great caution, her muzzle curled back in a snarl as more lightning flashed overhead. She prowled along, close to Nicci.
Bannon gasped, brushing loose ginger hair out of his eyes. “How can we go on?”
Nicci chose her footsteps carefully as the ground grew more unstable. She climbed over the sharp edges as she pressed toward the Lifedrinker’s pit, knowing she would find him there. “How can we not?”
She felt the throbbing, desperate presence ahead, and she wrestled to build shields around her, calling upon her knowledge to protect herself with both Additive and Subtractive Magic. She could not let the Lifedrinker seize her gift, her life. Nicci made use of
new spells that she had learned only recently while poring over volume after volume in the Cliffwall archives. It didn’t make her entirely safe, but it let her keep moving.
Plodding along in a determined trance, Bannon followed her, step by step. When Nicci turned to encourage him, she was astonished to see his face seamed with wrinkles. His long reddish hair was shot through with streaks of gray. He looked at her in turn, and his hazel eyes went wide with alarm. “Sorceress, you look … old!”
Nicci touched her face, and felt wrinkles in her dry skin as if all the years of her long life were catching up with her. The Lifedrinker was stealing the time they had left. “We must hurry,” she said. She needed to use the Eldertree acorn before it was too late, before the evil wizard grew any stronger.
Dread built inside her, but it was not a fear for her own life, not despair at the thought that she might be growing old: for Nicci, the greatest fear was that she might fail on a quest to which she had given her heart and soul, that she might fail Richard’s dreams of a hopeful new order. “I am Death’s Mistress,” she muttered in a grim whisper. “The Lifedrinker is no match for me.”
Mrra hobbled along, and Nicci saw that the cat’s big paws left blood smears on the sharp obsidian rocks as she padded forward. But Mrra remained close at hand, ready to fight alongside her surrogate sister panther.
The static in the air thickened, and the background sound near the amphitheater increased to a crackling hiss. Nicci’s blond hair rose in a charged corona around her head.
The obsidian rocks ground together, and a belching gasp of brimstone steam coughed upward, nearly choking her. Nicci fixed her gaze to where the circle of ominous sharp spires cast dust-blurred shadows on the ground.
Nicci knew the powerful wizard was inside there. She would stand before him, and she would kill him, even if it cost her last spark of energy.
“Lifedrinker!” she shouted, listening to the deep pervasive thunder in the air. Slashes of lightning whipped through the thunderheads. In a lower voice, she said, “Roland. Face me.”
The ground shuddered and cracked, and scuttling forms emerged, black-armored creatures with multiple legs, glittering eyes, and segmented front limbs that ended in clacking pincers. Scorpions, each the size of a dog, emerged from underground nests to stand as guardians on top of the black boulders. Each long tail was capped with a wicked stinger that dripped venom.
Beside her, Bannon gave an audible gulp. Nicci recalled that Thistle’s parents had been killed by similar creatures.
She stepped forward, remembering her main enemy. She shouted a challenge. “Lifedrinker!”
Suddenly, she remembered what the witch woman had written in the life book: Future and Fate depend on both the journey and the destination.
More rocks shifted as the ground convulsed within the circle of towering stelae, and the blackness from the central pit seemed to deepen. Hulking shapes emerged from beneath the ground, withered and desiccated human forms, black with dust. Their sinewy bodies were covered with festering boils, sick open sores that dotted arms and necks, bulges that pushed out the sides of their faces. These horrors were worse than the previous dust people. They stood in a line, blocking Nicci from going closer to the Lifedrinker’s lair.
Mrra growled. Bannon raised his sword. “We can cut through them, Sorceress.”
The blighted human forms lurched forward, and Nicci drew her knife, careful to restrain her magic, but knowing she might have to use it. With clacking pincers, the scorpions scuttled closer, weaving in and around the desiccated dust people.
Mrra bared her long fangs, and her tail thrashed. Bannon stood at her side. “I’ll fight them so you can get close enough, Sorceress.” He gulped.
Finally, with a swirl of black static and a slash of angry lightning all around them, the Lifedrinker himself emerged from the darkness.
CHAPTER 53
The ring of distorted pillars surrounded an empty pit like the gullet of a giant buried serpent, a well that sank into the coldest depths of eternity. From this sunken hole, the Lifedrinker’s unchecked magic continued to absorb the life from the world.
Climbing out of the inky emptiness from below, the thing that had been Roland emerged. The evil wizard hobbled and lurched, swelled and shrank, a tangled construction of incredible power intertwined with desperate weakness. He had been human once, but very little evidence of his humanity remained.
He stepped out into the crackling air illuminated by slashes of blue-white lightning that racked the thunderheads above. Dust swirled and howled, as if the wind itself were gasping in awe at the Lifedrinker’s presence.
He wore what had been the robes of a Cliffwall scholar, but they had frayed and extended into long flapping shrouds that trailed behind him into the deep pit. Dark ripples flowed from his body as his magic stole light itself from the air, drinking, absorbing, draining everything down into the black well. It seemed as if a powerful life lodestone lay at the bottom of the depths—a magical force so great that even the Lifedrinker could not escape its pull.
When the wizard spoke, the words were sucked out of the air along with all other sound, taking Nicci’s breath away, stealing more of her energy. “Few come to see me,” Roland said. He loomed up, his tattered robes whipping about in the storm of his own energy.
She touched the pocket of her black dress, felt the hard kernel of the Eldertree acorn. She took a step closer, remembering many other terrible foes she had faced, and defeated. “I came to destroy you.”
“Yes … I know,” said the wizard. “Others have tried.”
Nicci heard no defiance or arrogance in his voice, just an odd undertone of despair.
His face was long and gaunt, the cheeks sunken, his large eyes red with sickness. Roland’s neck was so thin that the tendons stood out like ropes. As the fabric of his flapping robes exposed his bare chest, Nicci was appalled to see his ribs laced with a tangle of swollen growths, as if his torso were composed entirely of tumors. The chaotic protrusions pulsed and throbbed, reservoirs of misdirected life energy that had grown within him and kept growing, desperate for nourishment. The wasting disease had extinguished everything that had been the weak-willed wizard, and controlled him.
His legs were bent, his spine twisted. The Lifedrinker lived because he was a structure of stolen life, a jumble of patched-together flesh, muscle, organs. “Please…” he said, in a much quieter voice that surged to a roar. “I hunger … I thirst … I need!” He swayed.
The dust people around the circle of obsidian pillars stood motionless.
Bannon held his sword, but could not conceal that his hands were shaking.
Mrra crouched, growling, but did not move.
The Lifedrinker raised his hands. His fingers were mere sticks covered with a film of skin—no matter how much life he drained from the world, it was not enough, never enough. He curled his hands in a beseeching gesture. “I did not intend this. I don’t want this.” He heaved a deep breath, and lightning skirled all around them, striking the tops of the obsidian stelae. “I cannot stop this!” the Lifedrinker moaned.
Even as she felt the years and the life draining away from her in the inexorable tug of the evil wizard, Nicci stepped across the uneven ground. “Then I will stop you.” She would fight him, hurl him back into the endless pit. The Eldertree acorn might be the most powerful weapon she’d ever held.
But the terrible drain wrung vitality from her muscles and made her thoughts fuzzy.
An uncanny flash flickered in the Lifedrinker’s sunken eyes. The tumors that comprised his body writhed like a nest of vipers ready to strike. “No,” he said, “I must survive. I have to.”
An army of unwieldy but deadly marionettes, the dust people began to move. More than a hundred of them lurched into motion, ready to attack.
Nicci forced herself to move three more steps, and the Lifedrinker did not retreat. He seemed to grow larger, swollen with dark energy, like a man-shaped pustule about to burst from its own evil.
r /> The twisted, festering dust people surged closer. Bannon threw himself between Nicci and the mummified attackers. “I’ll clear the way!” He lopped off a desiccated arm at its elbow, then sliced off the head of a second creature. The skin-covered skull rattled onto the blasted ground, its bared teeth still clacking and snapping.
With the oustretched palm of his other hand, the young man shoved another grasping creature, knocking it back into two oncoming foes. Though by now he looked like a greatly aged man himself, Bannon swung and chopped with his sword, splintering ribs, separating shoulders, cleaving body cores. “Complete your mission, Sorceress! Kill the Lifedrinker!”
Nicci could feel herself withering with age and weakness, second by second. She remembered an old crone she had seen long ago in Tanimura hobbling through a market at a snail’s pace, as if each step required careful planning and then a rest afterward. Now, Nicci understood how that felt. Her bones were brittle, her joints swollen and aching, the skin on her arms dry and shriveled.
With a snarl, the sand panther also threw herself upon the dust people, shredding the husks of the Lifedrinker’s victims as if they were no more than straw and kindling. Mrra’s curved fangs ripped the reanimated corpses into scraps of bone and dried flesh.
Behind the dust people, enlarged scorpions moved with angular arachnid speed. In a flash of tawny fur, the big cat dodged the venomous stingers, then bounded onto a rock, leading several scorpions away. When one of the lashing stingers was about to pierce Mrra’s hide, Bannon swung his sword to amputate the segmented tail. Then he skewered the scorpion’s hard shell and flung the dying creature into two oncoming dust people.
Snarling, Mrra lunged back into the fray as more desiccated corpses closed in on Nicci, who was fighting her way closer to the Lifedrinker.