Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 74

As she stalked through Cliffwall preparing to kill Life’s Mistress, Nicci felt like a black shadow filled with razors. Hollow inside, her heart a bottomless pit like what she had seen at the center of the Scar, she clutched the bloody arrow, its sharp tip not at all blunted by the sticky coating. The necessary poison was based on dangerous love, a love that Nicci had never admitted existed.

Now her heart was just a hot wound.

The spunky orphan girl had surrendered her very life, had forced Nicci to do such a terrible thing in order to achieve the victory they all needed. Thistle had seen something in Nicci’s heart that the sorceress did not even know she had. She squeezed the arrow tighter, but she forced her muscles to relax, so that her anger would not snap the shaft. She dared not waste this weapon she had acquired at a great, impossible price.

Thistle’s blood.

Her normal reaction would have been to deny such feelings, to burn them away or wall them off, but she needed that emotion now because love was the vital component. Love was the poison. In this case, as Victoria would soon discover, love was deadly.

As she prepared to make her way out into the primeval jungle, Nicci saw that she had stained her black dress with the innocent girl’s blood. More poison.

She paid no attention to other tense, frightened scholars who huddled in Cliffwall, looking at her as a savior to stop Life’s Mistress. Poor Thistle had already paid the price.

Victoria would pay a higher one.

Future and Fate depend on both the journey and the destination.

Bannon met her in the wide hallway, dressed in fresh traveling clothes and carrying his unimpressive sword. His face looked drawn and pale. “I am ready to go with you, Sorceress.”

Nathan stood beside him, haggard and distraught, but he had a fire in his azure eyes. “Even if I can’t use my magic, Bannon and I are deadly fighters. You know it. We’re going with you.”

The young man swallowed hard. “Thistle made it possible. We should all do it together.”

She looked at them for a long, silent moment, then shook her head. “No, I go alone. This is my battle. Thistle did her part. Now I will do mine.” Nicci didn’t dare need them. She slung the dragon-bone bow over her shoulder, and carried her one blood-tipped arrow. She did not bring spares. This one would be deadly enough. It had to be. “I have everything I need.”

After a long, solemn moment, Nathan seemed to understand. He reached out to clasp Bannon’s shoulder before the young man could say anything else. “It’s not about us, my boy. You’ve proved yourself over and over. The sorceress needs to do this alone.”

Bannon looked helplessly at his sword, as if it had become useless in his hands. When he glanced up and met her eyes, his expression froze at what he saw on her face. He stepped back, swallowing hard. “Our hearts go with you, Sorceress. I know you will succeed.”

Nathan drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Nicci herself is the deadliest of weapons.”

Traveling through the tunnels, she reached the wall on the far side of the plateau. She had remolded the rock to seal Cliffwall’s defenses against the intrusion of the madly growing jungle, but even stone walls could not stop her. Releasing her magic, she shifted the slickrock and shoved it out of her way like soft clay, opening the wall to the outside.

She looked out upon a primeval disaster, an encroaching wall of twisted, thrashing greenery, tangled vines, fungi that grew as tall as houses before exploding into a blizzard of spores. Thunderheads of gnats and flies buzzed around the fetid forest. In order to solve an extreme problem, Victoria had unleashed an even more extreme solution.

Branches stretched out, vines writhed, ferns uncoiled. A haze of pollen and spores thickened the air into a choking miasma. The rustle, crackle, and hiss of all that growth battering against the mesa cliff sounded like an unstoppable army of life. Too much life.

But Nicci was Death’s Mistress.

“Make way,” she said. She held out both hands and released her magic in a thunderclap of devastation, clearing the path. Wizard’s fire rolled out, unquenchable, unstoppable, and the flames charred the grasping branches and thorny vines into ash. Under the onslaught of heat, massive tree trunks exploded and the storm of splinters shredded adjacent monstrous plants.

Once she had blasted a path, Nicci stepped out into the wreckage and made her way across blackened ground, descending the steep slope. In only moments, the scorched earth already stirred and simmered with new shoots bursting forth. Grass blades and vine tendrils whipped up to grasp at Nicci’s feet, trying to hold her back or take her prisoner. She sent a thought toward them, the merest taste of vengeful anger, and the new growth shriveled and died.

Then she went hunting.

Victoria would not hide from her. The memmer sorceress, swollen with lush fertility, wanted to kill Nicci. She had already sent the shaksis to attack them, and now Nicci would go to the heart of this primeval jungle. She knew what lurked there.

She adjusted the dragon-bone bow on her shoulders and walked forward, her blue eyes focused ahead. Dead things crunched under her boots. The writhing jungle reached out to seize her with clawlike branches and lashing fronds. Nicci summoned the winds, bringing great raging storms of air that blasted the vegetation, snapped trees, stripped leaves off of branches, exploded mushrooms, uprooted ferns. She tore open a path to insure that her progress would be unhindered. Nicci was the eye of a walking storm.

The distance did not matter. She knew her destination, her target.

Expending so much magic should have weakened Nicci, but the anger and hurt inside her were a rejuvenating force. When she had cleared the way far ahead, she stopped the winds and continued deeper into the mad infestation of life. The plants themselves seemed cowed after what she had inflicted upon them.

In that momentary respite, the insects came, a cloud of black, biting gnats, a swarm of stinging wasps, and a thundercloud of dark beetles, tens of thousands of them.

Nicci spared them barely a glance. As the swarms descended upon her, swirling in the air, she released a thought. She did not even need to gesture with her hands as she stopped tens of thousands of minuscule insect hearts. Gnats, wasps, and beetles fell to the ground like a pattering black rain.

Nicci stepped forward, and the jungle fell into a hush. But she knew she wasn’t finished. She had not yet won.

Ahead of her, branches and leaves stirred, and three figures emerged, figures that had once been lovely young women. Audrey, Laurel, and Sage. Now they had been possessed and transformed by the forest. Their skin was the mottled green of mixed leaves, their eyes fractured and glinting with many shades of emerald, their mouths filled with sharp white fangs. Their hair was a stir of moss about their heads.

The women closed in to stand in front of Nicci and block her way. She regarded them with a withering stare. “Victoria sent you to stop me? She fears to face me herself?”

The thing that had been Laurel chuckled. “It is not because she fears you. It’s because she rewards us.”

When the forest women spread their arms, long thorns sprouted from their skin. Glistening sap oozed from the thorn tips as if they had become scorpion tails.

“This is a chance for us to test our powers,” said Sage.

“And we’ll have fun,” Audrey said.

Nicci did not touch her dragon-bone bow, leaving her single poisoned arrow in its quiver as the deadly forest women approached. “I don’t have time to play,” she said.

She unleashed the still-seething magic inside her, manifesting three writhing spheres of wizard’s fire. They rolled forward like miniature suns. Audrey, Laurel, and Sage had time only to reel backward and throw out their hands in desperate defensive spasms before the trio of suns exploded, one for each of them. Unstoppable flames engulfed their green-infested bodies, closing tight, crushing the inhuman women with incinerating fire. The female figures crumbled to ash that smelled more like burning wood than burning flesh.

“Death is stronger than life,” Nicci said.

She stepped over the ashes of their bones and made her way to the heart of the forest.