Death's Mistress

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.

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.

The evil wizard jerked his hands, guiding his minions. More dust people crawled up from hiding places beneath the seared ground. For all the attackers that Bannon and Mrra had already savaged, twice as many now joined the fight.

Nicci didn’t have much time.

The Lifedrinker’s sunken gaze met her cold blue eyes. “Please…” he said. “I know I have caused so much harm. I see what I have done, but I cannot make it stop! I just wanted to live, wanted to stop the wasting disease from stealing the life inside me. I never wanted this curse.”

He raised both of his hands, clenched his clawlike fingers into hard, bony fists. His body swelled with dark ripples of energy, and Nicci felt a sudden flood of debilitating weakness that nearly drove her to her knees.

“I don’t know how to shut it off!”

Nicci said in a hoarse voice, “If you found the power within yourself to cause this, then you can find a way to stanch the flow, tie off the wound that is bleeding the world to death. Find it within your own soul.”

His voice was hollow with despair. “I drank my own soul long ago. All that remains of me is the need!” When he surged again, Nicci knew that the magic had entirely possessed him. The spell had become a living thing in its own right.

An overwhelming army of dust people closed in. More venomous scorpions clattered over the boulders, rushing toward Nicci.

Bannon fought with wild abandon. By now he was an old man with sparse gray hair, yet he still defended her with all his strength, giving the sorceress a chance to make her move. The sand panther also looked old, her fur showing spots of mange, but the branded spell-forms seemed to protect Mrra from the Lifedrinker’s deadly appetite.

Nicci herself exhibited many signs of age. The backs of her hands were a tangled map of veins marked with liver spots on skin that had been so creamy and perfect not long ago. Each step she took felt as if she were fighting against a wind of time, age, and weakness.

Behind her, dust people closed around Bannon, but he kept fighting, hacking, chopping them to pieces, even though there were too many. Mrra dove into the fray, trying to protect the swordsman, but a new army of scorpions flowed in, stingers poised and dripping.

Nicci took the final step and reached into her pocket. The Lifedrinker kept draining her magic, and she could not unleash wizard’s fire, could not so much as attempt any of her spells. He would only absorb them and then engulf her.

Nicci pulled out the throbbing Eldertree acorn and spoke through gritted teeth. “You. Will. Stop!”

The Lifedrinker swelled even more, looking at his creatures around him. Oddly, he cried as well, “It must stop!” With a surge of his magic, he stole more life from the world, squeezing last drops out of the air, out of the dust—out of the dust people. As he drained his own servants, ten of the mummified corpses twitched and then crumbled into blackened bone powder. The scorpions cracked, shattered, and fell into dust.

The Lifedrinker howled, squirming in the air, raising his hands, as if by triggering this last great call, he had accelerated a magical wildfire, and now a cyclone began to draw down into the endless pit that formed his lair. “Save me,” he begged.

Nicci took advantage of that one second of respite. “No. No one can save you, Lifedrinker.”

He whispered, “I … am … Roland.”

Nicci held out her palm, cupping the last acorn of the Eldertree, and released a simple burst of magic, gathering the air around her in what would otherwise have been a trivial effort. Instead of manipulating the wind to create fists of solid air against an opponent, she used the air to accelerate the acorn forward. The life-infused projectile sped through the air like a quarrel fired from a tightly wound crossbow.

The Lifedrinker screamed, and the acorn plunged into his cavernous mouth, down his throat.

Contained within its hard shell, the last seed of the Eldertree held the concentrated life of the once vast primeval forest. Deep inside the evil wizard, the hard nut cracked and released a flood of life, like a dam bursting in an enormous reservoir. Resurgent energy flared out in an unstoppable explosion of vitality, of renewal, of rejuvenation.

Roland let loose a shriek that seemed to tear open the Scar itself. The evil wizard was an empty pit, an endless appetite that demanded all life, all energy—and the seed from the Eldertree contained all life, all energy. The thrashing tumor-strangled wizard was like a man dying of thirst who now found himself drowning in a flash flood.

His evil spell tried to absorb the limitless power geysering from the acorn. The dust storms howled around the curved black pillars; tornadoes of unleashed fury whipped the dry ground, flinging sharp obsidian projectiles in all directions.

Spent, Nicci collapsed mere feet from the edge of the Lifedrinker’s pit, unable to move. The battle within the evil wizard continued to build, and he howled with agony. The acorn that had embedded itself inside him blazed and brightened into an inferno of life.

While the Lifedrinker attempted to smother it with ripples of hungry shadows, the remaining dust people collapsed in a rattle of bones and dried skin. The last of the scorpions fell dead, their segmented limbs curling up tight against their armored bodies; their stingers went limp.

Bannon threw the bodies off of him and climbed forward to try to rescue Nicci. He tottered like an ancient man, barely able to survive another hour. Mrra, too, pushed forward, close to the sorceress. Although Nicci was wrung dry and utterly exhausted, she felt the touch of her sister panther in her mind.

The ground shook and rumbled. Stones cracked. Huge boulders fell into the Lifedrinker’s pit. The towering stelae creaked, then toppled like felled trees into the hole. The avalanche continued, and the sinkhole slumped, filling with debris. Lightning struck all around.

The raging battle of life continued. The remnant of the Eldertree struggled to produce new life faster than the Lifedrinker could drain it. The bright flare that surged out from the acorn dimmed and flickered away as dark magic continued to fight, but the shadows faded as well, grew patchier, like a mist burning off under a morning sun.

Finally, the evil wizard, the Lifedrinker—Roland—disintegrated, his body gone. All of his death and emptiness turned to dust, and a last bright echo coughed out of the Eldertree acorn, washing over them.

Nicci staggered backward, feeling the warmth like a summer breeze reviving her. Life. Energy. Restoration.

Her joints eased and loosened. Her throat grew less constricted, and when she gasped in a long breath, she smelled a sweetness in the air that she had not experienced since she had first seen the Scar. Nicci raised a hand to her face as the dazzle cleared from her vision, and her skin felt smooth and supple again.

Bannon picked himself up, coughing and shaking. When he turned toward her, Nicci saw that his hair was again thick and red. The wrinkles that had covered his face were gone, leaving only his usual spatter of freckles.

She brushed herself off, and her eyes searched for the place where the Lifedrinker had collapsed, where Roland had lost his battle with the last seed of the original forest.

There, in the middle of the vast dead Scar, stood a sprig of green, the only thing left from all the exuberant power of the Eldertree acorn. A single spindly sapling.