Lady of Poison

CHAPTER 16

They penetrated further into the Rawlinswood. The light dimmed slightly, but otherwise the trees, undergrowth, and other foliage to either side of the corridor remained fairly uniform. By that time their forward progress had slowed to a fast walk. The sounds of fighting ahead died away, perhaps because of intervening distance.

To keep his mind off their slow pace, he asked, “Why’d you call those creatures twigblights?”

Ususi shrugged. She said, “It seemed appropriate.”

The unicorn warrior smiled and gave her hand a squeeze. “Indeed.”

Recognition of the true nature of the ‘dead tree’ standing just outside the arch-defined corridor came a heartbeat too late, as it stumble-rushed forward on its tree trunk legs, blocking their path.

Ususi cursed, again in a language unknown to Marrec. No, she wasn’t cursing; she was uttering syllables of a spell. Marrec released her hand and reached for his spear. Just in time; her hands began to spark with the imminent release of power.

The twigblight rushed them. It was so big that it had to duck to fit beneath the stone arch under which they’d stopped. He rolled left, Ususi rolled right; the creature charged past. One of its twig-claw hands scraped along Marrec’s armor but failed to find an opening.

Marrec drove his spear into the creature’s back, trying to find the ‘sweet spot’ he’d discovered on the other creature outside the forest. It deflected his thrust with a weighty claw of gnarled wood.

Ususi’s spell generated an arc of electric blue light that crackled along the creature’s body, sending it into flailing convulsions. The smell of burning wood and ozone mixed, and a trail of smoke rose to mingle with the greenish mist.

Partially stunned, the twigblight shuddered and stepped back. Marrec was ready. That time the creature wasn’t able to bring up its wooden limbs quickly enough to defend its heart. The tip of his spear punched through the woody shell and found something soft, yielding, and odiferous. It shuddered again, then ceased all movement. Robbed of animation, the creature resembled nothing so much as an old, rotting tree with vividly posed branches.

“Impressive,” whispered a voice from behind.

Marrec groaned with sick anticipation as he whirled to face the speaker. A dark silhouette, hazy and indistinct in the green distance, gained clarity and sharpness of outline as it glided smoothly forward along the ground. Anammelech had caught them.

The blightlord’s armor was either covered with or formed of hardened ooze. The plates were mobile, softening, shifting, and flowing over and across each other in a mesmerizing crawl. Anammelech’s head was bare, and the crawling plates of his armor never rose above his neckline. His face was filthy and his eye sockets twin voids but for a wet sparkle far back in each empty orbit. In one hand he gripped a halberd-shaped hole in the air, just like Gameliel’s.

The blightlord continued to slide forward without flexing his legs to stride like a mortal. Marrec saw a glistening slime trail in Anammelech’s wake. He was reminded of a snail’s trail.

The blightlord slid to within just a few feet of Marrec and Ususi. They both stood ready, Marrec with Justlance, Ususi poised to fling a spell.

“I guess I should thank you,” continued Anammelech in a conversational tone, “You fit the description of those who slew my compatriot. I’ve always fancied Gloomgate, but the weapon was given him by the Talontyr. With Gameliel’s death, Gloomgate passed to me.” He gestured with the halberd-shaped profanity.

Despite the part of his mind warning him against striking up a conversation with the blightlord, Marrec blurted, “Our description?”

“When it appeared to me, it told me of Gameliel’s slaying, and about his slayers. It told me of all your plans, so you see, I knew you were going to Yeshelmaar. I even guessed you might come here, chasing after that poor little girl.”

Marrec glared at the dark weapon. Intelligent weapons were rare, and those aligned with evil even more so. Truly Gloomgate was an abomination.

“Imagine my surprise when our spy Fallon gifted me with this…” said the blightlord as he drew forth the dully glinting Keystone.

Marrec’s eyes widened. Ususi gasped.

“Where’s Ash?” rasped the unicorn warrior. If Anammelech had the Keystone, he must also have the girl.

“I sent Ash’ along ahead with Fallon. The Talontyr wants to see her.” Anammelech chuckled, though the sound bubbled up as if from lungs choked with fluid.

Marrec brought his own spear up, tip dancing a few feet away from unconcerned features of Anammelech. “We destroyed Gameliel and doubt not that you’ll fall just as easily. So leave us, and retreat whence you’ve come. If we find that you’re following us, we’ll be forced to destroy you. You’ve been warned.”

Anammelech’s chuckle grew into a full-throated laugh of incredulity.

“First,” added Ususi, “Hand over the Keystone. It is mine.” She held out her left hand palm up.

“You want this?” asked the blightlord, a playful note in his voice. He dangled the Keystone higher, causing it to swing back in forth before Ususi. “I’m afraid I’ve grown quite fond of it in just the short time it’s been with me. Quite an interesting little area this trinket unlocks. Once I’ve dealt with you, I intend to explore it at my leisure.”

Marrec came to the end of his patience. “You’ve had your warning.”

Anammelech sighed. He said, “Don’t you think Gloomgate has informed me of your abilities? Even now, it whispers to me of your failing spells, your needy spear with its inability to be parted from you, and your sad devotion to a diminished goddess. And you,” he turned his empty sockets on Ususi, “are completely reliant upon spells, especially fire. Good thing fire has no power over me.”

Like the head of a striking adder, the axe head of Gloomgate lashed out, slashing Ususi down the side. Black mist smoked off the halberd, tracing its deadly path through the air. The blade left a horribly long, deep gash. Blood flowed. Ususi screamed as she collapsed backward then fell prone, unmoving.

“Now, you’re dead,” concluded Anammelech.

Marrec berated himself for speaking to the blightlord. Anammelech had lulled them with his calm approach and insipid conversation. Without speaking, he drove Justlance hard into the blightlord’s body, attempting to thrust through the migrating plate armor, but the enchanted armor resisted.

The moving plates caught his thrust and held his spear fast between two segments. He grunted, attempting to push the spear through.

Anammelech was back to chuckling.

Marrec mentally grasped the remaining charge of strength left in the gauntlets given to him by the Nentyarch. In one gulp, all the remaining magic stored in the gloves was drained and instead danced in his sinews. With a truly superhuman effort granted by that strength, he broke through the resistance of the sliding armor as if it were tissue. His spear penetrated all the way through Anammelech’s body. His gauntleted hands still held to the shaft but were pressed up against Anammelech, so far had the blightlord been run through,

“I should have told you,” confided Anammelech, his face inches from Marrec, his breath as rotten as spoiled flesh, “Armor is just a shape I like to take on occasion. Really, I’m much more amorphous.” The blightlord’s ‘armor’ began to writhe where it touched Marrec’s spear. A horribly sentient surge of liquid ooze ran up the spear shaft, up Marrec’s arms, and across his face.

Marrec convulsed, attempting to throw himself back. The flowing ooze had too strong a grip on him. The blightlord’s entire body opened up like a wet glove and attempted to engulf him.

Realization flashed for Marrec. He had seconds to live, and his mind was giving him the grace of slowed perception to allow him to come to terms with his fate. Nothing he did would matter; all his options pointed to his ending. He could accept that, he decided, but not without a statement.

The flowing grip of Anammelech strengthened as he was pulled more firmly into an all-encompassing grasp of living ooze.

Marrec would die, yes, but he would expire while being true to his long-hidden nature. Maybe he could do some good and redeem both himself and the sin that still stained his heart since he had slain Thanial so long ago…

The blightlord’s voice purred, close and intimate, “I told you I knew all about you.”

The unicorn warrior whispered back, “Did your damned weapon tell you about my eyes?”

“Why would it?”

Marrec’s terrible gaze was drawn out like a sword from its scabbard.

“What’s this? What… That’s not…” Anammelech tried to heave his flowing body away from the searing gaze of the cleric. Marrec’s eyes had become a strobe of light and dark illumination, blasting into the flesh of the blightlord with a transformative grasp that Anammelech was incapable of resisting.

Laughter was gone then. As the stone tide overtook the soft-bodied blightlord, one last whimper escaped the Talontyr’s servant before his voice, too, was locked in a tomb of stone.

|\flarrec can handle himself,” grunted Gunggari, not for the first time.

Elowen gritted her teeth as she slashed the length of Dymondheart through the form of yet another twigblight that had sidled too close. The creature explosively shattered with the contact. The living wood of her intelligent blade was anathema to the obscene creatures. Dymondheart’s mere touch not only robbed them of animation but violently dissembled the creatures into so much kindling. The larger ones were smart enough to stay back, but every few seconds a smaller twigblight forgot the fate of all its earlier siblings and rushed forward. Despite the dozens she had shattered, a whole herd of the constructions followed behind them down the arch-defined lane, keeping pace. Maybe that was what they were supposed to do, merely keep her and the Oslander busy.

Elowen guarded as Gunggari paused and got down on his haunches again, studying the dirt, still on the trail of Fallon, Henri, and Ash. Elowen’s training and natural abilities were sufficient to follow the trail without too much trouble, but she had to keep Dymondheart ready. Besides, Gunggari’s ability to track verged on the supernatural. He made observations about their quarry that even Elowen at her best could not deduce from simply looking at the disturbed ground.

Gunggari said, “This track is over three hours old.” He rose, continuing his swift pace. Elowen followed after, her eyes to the rear, guarding their flank.

She asked, “How did Fallon get so far ahead of us?”

The elf saw Gunggari’s shrug out of the corner of her eye. He offered, “Ususi said time was mismatched between the interior and exterior of her pathway dimension. The elf must have exited much earlier than we thought.”

Elowen checked to make sure the rustling, creaking, walking grove of dead sticks keeping pace with them moved no closer. Satisfied, she stole a glance forward along their route. The green haze was thicker, further limiting visibility ahead. The stone arches were getting farther apart, more eroded, and less able to keep out the undergrowth. Trees and other forest growth crowded into the lane from either side. Whatever property kept the lane open at the other end seemed to be failing so far into the forest. Elowen had never walked so far under the Arches of Xenosi. She was idly curious about finding the last arch.

Though the mist was thicker ahead, their passage up the lane seemed to have dispersed the haze behind, because she could see at least twice as far along their path in that direction. Still no sign of Marrec.

Elowen bit her lip. She was torn between continuing along after Ash, or going back to see what had become of the other half of their group.

“Gunggari, tell me what you think about this,” began Elowen. “Fallon and Ash are three hours ahead. That means that Ash is at least three hours out of our reach, but Marrec and Ususi are only minutes out of our reach I think we can sacrifice a few more minutes out of three hours just to make sure everything’s OK with our friends.”

Gunggari paused again, wrinkling his brow. Finally he said, “Very well. We can head back, though I have never known Marrec to fail any challenge.”

“Challenges have a way of escalating.”

“True,” responded Gunggari. He turned a full one hundred eighty degrees to face the woody facade of their chaperones. “Perhaps Marrec’s spear is not quite so deadly against these evil wood spirits as your elf blade.”

Elowen raised one eyebrow. “Elf blades have their uses, after all.”

She brought the blade in question up, then swung a wide roundhouse arc, shattering two creatures that had skittered too near into a spray of twigs. The others ceased their forward movement, while those immediately in front of the two travelers tried to backpedal. The monsters further behind failed to stop immediately, pushing yet another twigblight forward to lose its cohesion on Dymondheart’s length.

As dead twigs rained down around her, Elowen yelled, “We’re going this way.” She pointed with the tip of her sword back along their path. “If you don’t want to end today a pile of splinters, get out of our way.”

As she’d hoped, the larger, smarter creatures began to shuffle back, herding their smaller, more numerous brethren with them. That’s when all the creatures went insane.

As if in response to a signal neither she nor Gunggari could see, the enchanted twig constructs went on a rampage en masse. Twigblight turned upon brother twigblight, with the larger ones immediately tossing a few of the smaller creatures headlong through the air, but the smaller monsters swarmed the larger ones like ants on a piece of meat.

For Elowen and Gunggari, that sudden madness included a loss of respect for Dymondheart.

Despite destroying three creatures in as many rapid eye blinks, another was already slashing past her guard, hacking at her face with its sickle-like fingertips. She flinched back, only to trip over a tiny twigblight that had rushed up from the side.

Gunggari steadied her with a lightning-fast hand. He said, “Back to back. These things have lost their fear of death.”

A flailing branch scratched Elowen’s cheek. Her counterattack exploded that one nicely, but two more encroached from the left. One failed to, penetrate her armor; the other sliced her along the neck. The pressure of Gunggari’s back flexed and strained; he was fighting off attacks no less massive than she, though he did not have Dymondheart to even the odds. The sound of his dizheri swishing through the air created a strange melody all its own, almost as if it were being played in truth. She grunted as she deflected a twiggy body hurling through the airone of the big ones had thrown one its small brothers at her, but apparently by accident. She managed to clip the tumbling creature with her blade; the twigblight came apart before impacting her.

She yelled, “What’s happened?”

She could hear Gunggari grunting with exertion as he fought off the unrelenting wave. Finally he said, “Less talk. More sword.”

“They’ve gone mad!”

She realized that if the creatures had earlier decided to rush her and the Oslander without fear of casualties, they’d have been overwhelmed already, but the branch golems were attacking each other as much as the intruders in the lane. Already more than half of the creatures that had surrounded them lay unmoving and dismembered on the ground, choking the lane with so much kindling. A terrible stench also grew. When the monsters perished, they leaked a foul-smelling ooze.

Gunggari cried out behind her. A second later, the pressure of his back against hers was snatched away. Whirling around with her blade extended straight out from her body, she managed to detonate three more creatures as she sought to locate her friend. His feet dangled at eye level. Craning her head, she saw that a large twigblight had caught up the southlander in a punishing grip of tightening wood.

Elowen rushed forward. The creature’s hands were busy clutching the struggling Oslander, so the monster couldn’t prevent her from running it through with Dymondheart. It fared no better against her blade’s touch than the others, and Gunggari awkwardly fell away from the bed of splintered wood that had been his captor. She kept the remaining creatures at bay. The creatures were doing a better job of destroying each other than she could have purposefully managed.

After the tattooed soldier scrambled to his feet, he and Elowen backed up to a nearby arch. They sought to get out of the eye of the madness.

The rampage ended when a swarm of smaller twigblights, having just overcome a larger sibling, turned on each other in an impressive spray of splinters. Finally, only Elowen and Gunggari remained standing in a lane choked with debris reminiscent of the aftermath of a storm. Pregnant silence descended.

Gunggari cocked his head, then said, “Somebody’s coming.” He turned his gaze back in the direction they had just tried.

Materializing out of the fast-dispersing greenish haze was what at first seemed an oddly shaped silhouette. The strange silhouette quickly resolved into two people, one carried by the other.

It was Marrec, running wildly under the arches. He carried the limp, lolling form of Ususi in his arms. Blood streamed from Marrec’s eyes as if he wept life itself, or as if he endured a grief so great that only tears of blood could express his remorse.

Elowen swallowed, knowing that Ususi must be dead. Hollowness invaded her heart.

Gunggari raised a hand to the quickly approaching figure and said quietly, yet loudly enough to be heard, “Pause awhile, warrior. Lay down your burden.”

The sound snapped the man from his running trance. His blood-glazed eyes focused on Gunggari and Elowen. The elf gasped when the gaze swept across her. Even apart from the unsettling red film over his orbs and the scarlet trails leaking from the corner of each eye, Marrec’s gaze seemed to brush her with an almost predatory jolt.

“Oh my…” whispered Elowen. Something had changed, she could see that. Some part of her companion had come alive, and for some reason she couldn’t identify, that thought was somehow distressing.

Marrec stopped. He gently laid Ususi to the ground. Elowen saw that the woman was bandaged, and breath, however slight, still passed her lips. “Ususi!” yelled Elowen and bent to tend her friend.

Marrec made as if to say something else, but unconsciousness claimed him before he could elaborate. Gunggari caught him before Marrec fell face first into the branch-scattered lane.