Lady of Poison

CHAPTER 22

Fallon had failed to keep the schedule. Damanda tapped midnight black nails on lacquered armor just as dark. Green highlights played along her silhouette. The fluctuating emerald glow emerged from an ominous point further down the ruined hallway where Damanda and her retinue stood.

The pulsing, ravenous glow was the light of the Lurker in the Middle, and by its intensity, it was clear the entity had not snared Fallon. It was still hungry. Damanda, for all her might, had no desire to meet the Lurker face to faceor whatever passed for a Lurker’s face.

Fallon’s absence was troubling. The Rotting Man’s compulsion should have cored the elFs mind and marched him dutifully into the Lurker’s grasp, leaving the idiot child for Damanda to collect at her leisure. No child, no Fallon, no triumphant return to the Close with the Talontyr’s hard-sought prize in tow.

Worry puckered tentative steps across her stomach. It did not do to disappoint the Rotting Man. His plans were coming to fruition. She doubted she could survive being a barrier to his goal, intentional or not.

That’s why she would not fail, despite Fallon’s troubling absence.

The blightlord considered her retinue. Anammelech had preferred oozes, and bumbling Gameliel his corrupted forest creatures. Herself, she had a penchant for the undead, especially those that delighted haunting the nightand the ever dark corridors of these ruined Nar conjuries. From all the cold, animate servants she had to choose from, she had selected her four favorites to accompany her into Under-Tharos to collect Fallon, just in case there was trouble. Indeed, trouble had found her. They would have to discover Fallon’s whereabouts.

Heavily tattooed, poem-spewing Bonehammer rested on the shaft of the weapon from which he derived his name. Bonehammer’s moon-white skin peeked out from between indelibly inked scenes of depraved obscenity. His blank eyes regarded the Lurker’s glow, measuring.

Absalme, elf thin, gowned in thin white leather, hummed a tuneless dirge, awaiting Damanda’s next command. Her fingers played along the length of a flute of fused humanoid vertebrae.

The contorted, constantly twisting frame of Ezekial was draped in dull black cloth, hiding the extent of his deformity. Because of his nature, Ezekial’s posture hid a secret assassin’s strength, redoubled by his deathless spirit.

Finally there was diminutive Lex with her tomes, scrolls, and wands. A shock of purple hair grew like fungus on Lex’s graceful skull.

Lex grinned, showing her cruelly pointed canines, and said, “Some other demon got your elf before he even reached here, eh?”

“Perhaps. It is what we must discover. Ezekial!” “Yes, Mistress?” creaked he of cloaks, daggers, and teeth.

“Find the missing elf, or better yet, the girl-child he has with him.”

Ezekial bent, so precipitously and shockingly that those unused to his contortions might have thought that he had broken and his top half toppled. His nose a mere whisper above the floor, he began to sniff. Sniffing, he shuffled away from the greenish light, back along the way Fallon should have come.

Damanda and the other vampires followed.