Death's Mistress

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 identifies 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.

The shaksis pulled itself upward.

A wooden foot found a notch in the rocks and anchored there, while the tendrils released from the first hand, and it climbed higher, stretching and cracking. The insects and grubs made a simmering, humming sound that was lost in the silent gulf of the night.

Staring through scarab eyes, the shaksis ascended. It had little room for thoughts in the dried leaves that filled its head. But it held a vivid image of Nicci, of Nathan.

Its targets.

* * *

Shouts awakened Nicci from a deep sleep, and she rolled off her pallet into a fighting crouch, instantly alert and aware. Fortunately, tonight her dreams had not entangled with the sand panther’s mind; otherwise she might not have been able to extricate herself quickly enough.

Thistle sprang from her warm sheepskin on the floor and pulled aside the door hanging as more shouts echoed down the corridor, which was lined with shelves of disorganized books. Even where the scholars slept, wall shelves were crammed with old volumes, stacks of scrolls, folded parchments, and documents the students had taken out to read, but not yet reshelved.

Nathan Rahl, exhausted from his studies and eager to ransack the underground vaults the following morning, emerged in rumpled sleeping robes. He fumbled for his ornate sword and drew it from its scabbard, ready to fight, but he had not found the source of the shouting. Nicci joined him.

Then they saw the thing coming toward them, an inhuman soldier made of brambles, wicker, and tangled thorns. It strode forward with a crackle of limbs and an aura of buzzing noises.

One unfortunate scholar emerged from his quarters just as the creature passed. Reacting to a potential target, the thing lashed out. In an instant, its arm grew long spiky thorns, and the limb curved around and impaled the young scholar, whose mouth opened, gaping, then gasping, and finally spurting a gush of blood as the long wooden spikes found his organs. The stalking creature tossed the dead man aside.

Other horrified scholars in the halls screamed; some remained frozen in place, while others fled.

Thistle clung close to Nicci. “What is that monster?”

“I believe it is a shaksis,” Nathan said. “Made from the detritus of the forest, castaway items from the underbrush.”

“What does it want?” cried one of the scholars, dismayed to see the bloody corpse of his comrade still twitching on the floor.

The shaksis lurched forward. The buzzing around its body grew louder.

Nicci knew. “Victoria sent the thing. It wants us.”

Two bright beetles nestled in the creature’s eye sockets turned toward Nicci’s voice. Seeing her, the shaksis became animated and began to run toward them down the hall.

Turning to face the attacker, Nicci pushed the orphan girl behind her, while Nathan raised his sword. The frightened scholars ducked into their alcoves.

The shaksis surged closer, extending arms like wildly growing vines. Its entire body seemed to swarm with small moving bugs and grubs. The reanimated forest creature drove straight toward Nathan and Nicci.

The wizard hacked at the shaksis with his sword, as if he were a woodcutter felling an unruly sapling. One of the creature’s wooden arms snapped and shattered, then dropped to the stone floor. Insects and worms spilled out like a spray of bizarre, festering blood. The shaksis drew back its stump. Twigs, vines, and grasses curled around, extending outward as the limb regrew.

Nathan hacked off its other arm, again wielding his sword like an axe, but this time the shaksis regrew even faster. The severed vegetation lashed and whipped, then sprang back into place.

“This will require more than a sword, Wizard.” Nicci raised a hand and released a blast of air that rattled into the creature, but it anchored itself, reaching out its branchy arms. It was hollow, woven of wicker, and the breezes whipped and whistled through it. More writhing bugs scuttled across the floor.

“I can’t unleash my black lightning or wizard’s fire in here,” Nicci said. “It would destroy all of the books and the people trapped in the corridor.”

The shaksis lunged forward, extending its sharp hands. Nathan swept his sword again, letting out a loud grunt with the effort. “There’s barely room to swing my blade.”

Nicci hammered at the thing with another fist of air. The creature staggered. Books tumbled off the shelves, their pages flapping. In response, the shaksis stretched out tangled limbs and seized another scholar who tried to slip away to safety. Vines and thorns curled around the young man, snapped his neck, then tossed his discarded body up against the wall, knocking down an entire shelf of books.

Struggling to control the level of destruction, Nicci called a single bolt of lightning that struck and splintered the thing’s thick left leg, rendering it unbalanced. Even though it smoked and smoldered, the tottering creature regrew itself.

Nicci and Nathan stood shoulder-to-shoulder as a barricade, refusing to let the creature past—but it did not want to pass. It wanted to kill them. With a thrashing of uncontrolled branches and dry leaves, along with a buzzing of hungry insects, it pushed back against Nicci’s blasts of air. Nathan hacked again, splintering the encroaching branches.

From behind her, Thistle said, “I’ll get a torch to light that monster on fire.” She darted away, but she didn’t get far.

The shaksis reacted to her movement, and a long whip of its thorny arm extended. Even though Nicci’s magic shoved against the thing’s body core, the deadly elongated arm seized Thistle. Sharp finger-thorns pierced the girl’s skinny leg and drew blood. She kicked and fought, trying to pull away.

Rage rose within Nicci. She didn’t hesitate, did not exercise caution in the confined corridor. This monster had to be stopped. She summoned a ball of flame—normal flame, since wizard’s fire could have been catastrophic—and exploded the blaze into the shaksis.

Flames immediately caught inside its torso, raging through its skeleton of bent branches and dried vegetation. Roasting insects burst or fled. Worms squirmed out, sizzling. Even as the shaksis burned, in a surge of desperation it plodded forward and extended its blazing arms toward Nicci. She shoved back with a blow of solid air and knocked the living inferno against the wall. Some splintered, charred pieces of the forest golem still clattered and twitched, grasping out for any victim.

The forest construct broke into flaming ashes, finally dead. But the embers scattered among the clustered books and stacked scrolls. Because of the speed of her attack and the rush of the air she had unleashed, the volumes quickly caught fire, their pages blackened and curled. Flames raged along the shelves, spreading from one to the next. The fabric door hangings in front of the private quarters also ignited.

Despite her bleeding leg, Thistle ran to their quarters and yanked down the door hanging and tried to put out the spreading fire. Nathan did the same as they yelled for more scholars to help, and they all worked together to stop the inferno.

Nicci released more magic, calling upon the air again, summoning moisture to douse the larger flames. She stole air away to starve the fire until it guttered down to a low smolder.

Cliffwall scholars rushed from other chambers and corridors to aid in quenching the blaze before it could spread to the larger libraries and vaults of books. Seeing their murdered comrades, some of them gasped, halted in their efforts to fight the insidious fire, but others swallowed hard, faced the crisis, and turned their attention to saving the books, the scrolls, the library itself.

One woman, sniffling, struggling to control her weeping, knelt by the first dead and broken scholar. She adjusted his body, his head, and began to pick up the blood-spattered books strewn on the floor from the splintered shelf.

When they had the fire under control, Nicci turned her attention to Thistle and saw that her thigh was bleeding heavily. Without asking, Nicci pressed her palms hard against the deep wound, and released magic to heal the girl and remove the pain.

Thistle laughed with relief. “I knew you’d save me.”

The wizard shook his head. His face was smudged with soot. He plucked a squirming beetle grub out of his white hair and crushed it between his fingertips.

Then, just after the ruckus died down, Bannon returned to Cliffwall, gasping and disheveled, weary from an ordeal of his own. His eyes shone with excitement as he pushed his way through the crowded corridor.

“I just got back. Sweet Sea Mother, you won’t believe the night I’ve had!” He ran his hands through his bedraggled red hair, and he finally noticed the destruction and turmoil around him for the first time. “Oh! What happened here?”