Wind Rider's Oath

Chapter Forty-Five

The flame-wrapped spider towered up, compound eyes ablaze with hatred and madness. Its mandibles clashed, dripping with venom that flamed and hissed, bubbling on the polished stone floor as it burned its way into it. Claws scraped and grated, and the vilest stench Kaeritha had ever imagined filled the audience chamber. The hideous apparition loomed over her, reaching for her with more than mere claws and pincers, and a black tide of terror lapped out before it.

Even as Kaeritha recognized the spider, Paratha seemed to grow taller. The false Voice hadn't been Shigū's true tool, Kaeritha realized; Paratha had. The Voice might even have believed that she was Shigū's chosen, but in truth, it had always been Paratha, and now the major no longer hid behind the camouflage of the Voice. She was drinking in the life energy-probably even the very souls-of her fallen followers, and something more was coming with it. Potent as all that energy might be, it was only a focus, a burning glass which reached out for something even stronger and more vile and focused it all upon the major.

Paratha's face was transfigured, and her entire body seemed to quiver and vibrate as Shigū poured energy into her chosen. Kaeritha remembered Bahzell's description of the night he'd faced an avatar of Sharnā , and she knew this was worse. Harnak of Navahk had carried a cursed blade which had served as Sharnā 's key to the universe of mortals. Paratha carried no key; she was the key, and Kaeritha's mind cringed away from the insane risk Shigū had chosen to run.

No wonder she'd been able to penetrate Lillinara's church, tamper with scores of people in Kalatha, and kill Lillinara's priestesses and Voices and replace them with her own tools! For all the endless ages since Phrobus' fall into evil, no god of Dark or Light had dared to contend openly with one of his or her divine enemies on the mortal plane. They were simply too powerful. If they clashed directly, they might all too easily destroy the very universe for whose dominion they contended. And so there were limits, checks set upon their power and how they might intervene in the world of mortals. It was why there were champions of Light and their Dark equivalents.

Yet Shigū had intervened directly. She'd moved beyond the agreed upon limits and stepped fully into the world of mortals. Paratha was no champion. She was Shigū's focus, her anchor in this universe. She wasn't touched by the power of Shigū-in that moment, she was the power of Shigū, and Kaeritha felt a terrifying surge of answering power pouring into her from Tomanâk.

"So, little champion," Paratha hissed. "You would contend with Me, would you?"

She laughed, and the web of her power reached out to her living minions, as well as the dead. Kaeritha heard their shrieks of agony-agony mingled with a horrible, defiled ecstasy-as Shigū's avatar seized them. They didn't die, not right away, but that was no mercy. Instead, they became secondary nodes of the web centered upon Paratha. They blazed like human torches to Kaeritha's Sight as the same power crashed through them, and the will which animated Paratha-a will Kaeritha realized was no longer mortal, if it ever had been-fastened upon them like pincers. All nine of the remaining priestesses moved as one, closing in to form a deadly circle about Kaeritha with Paratha.

"So tasty your soul will be," Paratha crooned. "I'll treasure it like fine brandy."

"I think not," Kaeritha told her, and Paratha's eyes flickered as she heard another timbre in Kaeritha's soprano. A deeper timbre, like the basso rumble of cavalry gathering speed for a charge. The blue corona flickering around Kaeritha blazed higher and hotter, towering over her as the luminously translucent form of Tomanâk Orfro, God of War and Justice, Captain General of the Gods of Light, took form to confront the spider of Shigū. The priestesses caught up in Shigū's web froze, as if stilled by some wizard's spell, but although Paratha drew back ever so slightly, her hesitation was only brief and her mouth twisted like the snarl of some rabid beast.

"Not this time, Scale Balancer," she-or someone else, using her voice-hissed venomously. "This one is mine!"

Her body tensed, and, on the last word, a deadly blast of power ripped from her. It screamed across the audience chamber like a battering ram of yellow-green hunger, and the entire temple seemed to quiver on its foundations as it slammed into Kaeritha. Or, rather, into the blue nimbus blazing about her. The nimbus which deflected its deadly strength in a score of shattered streamers of vicious lightning that cracked and flared like whips of flame. Small explosions laced the chamber's walls, shattered fountains, and incinerated two of the living priestesses where they stood, and Kaeritha felt the staggering violence of the impact in her very bones. But that was all she felt, and she smiled thinly at her foe.

"Yours, am I?" she asked, and a strange sense of duality swept through her on the tide of Tomanâk's presence. "I think not," she repeated, and Paratha's face twisted in mingled fury and disbelief as Tomanâk's power shed the fury of her attack.

Kaeritha's smile was hard and cold, and she felt the call to battle throbbing in her veins. She was herself, as she had always been, and the will and courage which kept her on her feet in the face of Shigū's hideous manifestation were her own. But behind her will, supporting it and bolstering her courage like a tried and trusted battlefield commander, was Tomanâk Himself. His presence filled her as Shigū's filled Paratha, but without submerging her. Without requiring her subservience, or making her no more than his tool. She was who she had always been-Kaeritha Seldansdaughter, champion of Tomanâk-and she laughed through the choking stench of Shigū's perversion.

Paratha's entire face knotted with livid rage at the sound of that bright, almost joyous laugh, and the spider snarled behind her. But Kaeritha only laughed again.

"Your reach exceeds your grasp, Paratha. Or should I say Shigū?" She shook her head. "If you think you want me, come and take me!"

"You may threaten and murder my tools," that voice hissed again, "but you'll find Me a different matter, little champion. No mortal can stand against My power!"

"But she does not stand alone," a voice deeper than a mountain rumbled from the air all about Kaeritha, and Paratha's face lost all expression as she and the power using her flesh heard it.

"If we two contend openly, power-to-power, this world will be destroyed, and you with it!" Paratha's mouth snarled the words, but the entire audience chamber shook with the grim, rumbling laugh which answered.

"This world might perish," Tomanâk agreed after a moment, "but you know as well as I which of us would be destroyed with it, Shigū." Paratha's lips drew back, baring her teeth like a wolf's, but Tomanâk spoke again before she could. "Yet it will not come to that. I will not permit it to."

"And how will you stop it, fool?!" Paratha's voice demanded with a sneer. "This is My place now, and My power fills it!"

"But you will bring no more power to it," Tomanâk said flatly. "What you have already poured into your tools you may use; all else is blocked against you. If you doubt me, see for yourself."

Paratha's eyes glared madly, but Kaeritha's heart leapt as she realized it was true. She had never faced such a terrifying concentration of evil, yet that concentration was no longer growing.

"If I am blocked, then so also are you," Paratha grated. "You can lend no more power to your tool, either!"

"My Swords are not my tools," Tomanâk replied softly. "They are my champions-my battle companions. And my champion is equal to anything such as you might bring against her."

"Is she indeed?" Paratha laughed wildly. "I think not."

Her saber seemed to writhe and twist. The blade grew longer, broader, and burned with the same sick, green radiance as the giant spider and its web.

"Come to me, champion," she crooned. "Come and die!"

She leapt forward with the words, and even as she did, the remaining priestesses charged with her. They came at Kaeritha from all sides, a wave of deadly blades, all animated and wielded by the same malign presence.

Unlike the priestesses, Kaeritha was armored. But there was only one of her, and she dared not let them swarm over her with those envenomed daggers. Nor did she care to face whatever unnatural power had been poured into Paratha's blade while the priestesses came at her back. And so she spun to her left, away from Paratha, and her twin blades struck like serpents, trailing tails of blue fire as she ripped open the belly and throat of the nearest priestess. She vaulted the body, lashing out with her right-hand sword, and another priestess staggered away as the backhand stroke slashed the tendons behind her knee.

Paratha-or Shigū, if there was any difference-shrieked in wordless, enraged fury. Her remaining tools pursued Kaeritha, charging after her madly, and Kaeritha laughed coldly, deliberately goading Paratha with the sound.

She supposed some idiots who'd paid too much attention to bad bard's tales might have thought it cowardly, or unchivalrous, to concentrate on her unarmored, dagger-armed foes rather than go directly for the opponent who was also armored and armed. But although Kaeritha might be a knight, she'd been born a peasant, with all a peasant's pragmatism, and Tomanâk's Order believed in honor and justice, not stupidity. She turned again, once she was clear of the closing perimeter, and two more of Paratha's priestesses caught up with her . . . and died.

Paratha's shriek was even wilder than before, but the two surviving priestesses fell back. The sole unwounded one bent over and seized the crippled one's arm and dragged her to one side, and Kaeritha turned once again-slowly, calmly, with a direcat's predatory grace-to face Paratha and the flaming spider form of Shigū.

The glaring light web still connected Paratha's body to those of the false Voice and all of the others except Kaeritha herself, living or dead, in the audience chamber. But there was a difference now. The strands connected to the dead women glared with a brighter, fiercer radiance that flared high, then faded and died. And as they died, the nimbus about Paratha blazed more brilliantly still. The bodies themselves changed, as well. They went in an instant from freshly slain corpses to dried and withered husks. Like flies in a true spider's web, Kaeritha thought, sucked dry of all life and vitality.

Tomanâk had blocked Shigū from pouring still more strength into her avatar, and so she had ripped everything from her dead servants, devouring even their immortal souls and concentrating that power in Paratha.

"Come on, 'Major Kharlan,' " Kaeritha invited softly. "Let's dance."

Paratha screamed wordlessly and charged.

Whatever else Paratha might have been, she was an experienced warrior. She had the advantage of reach, and her armor was every bit as good as Kaeritha's. But she also realized she had only one weapon to Kaeritha's two, and for all her shrieking fury, she was anything but berserk.

Kaeritha discovered that almost too late, when Paratha's headlong charge suddenly transmuted into a spinning whirl to her left. The demented shriek had very nearly deceived Kaeritha into thinking her foe truly was maddened by rage, attacking in a mindless fury. But Paratha was far from mindless, and she pivoted just beyond Kaeritha's own reach, while her longer, glowing saber came twisting in in a corkscrew thrust at Kaeritha's face.

Kaeritha's right hand parried the thrust wide, and their blades met in a fountaining eruption of fire. Blue and green lightning crackled and hissed, exploding against the chamber's walls and ceiling, blasting divots out of the marble floors like handfuls of thrown gravel. She gasped, staggered by the sheer ferocity of what should have been an oblique, sliding kiss of steel on steel. No doubt Paratha had felt the same terrible shock, but if she had, it didn't interrupt her movement. She was gone again, fading back before Kaeritha could even begin a riposte.

Kaeritha's entire right arm ached and throbbed, and sweat streaked her face as she turned, facing Paratha, swords at the ready, while alarm bells continued to clangor throughout the temple complex.

"And what will you do when the other guards come, little champion?" Paratha's voice mocked. "All they will see is you and me, surrounded by the butchered bodies of their precious priestesses. Will you slay them, as well, when I order them to take you for the murderer you are?"

Kaeritha didn't reply. She only moved forward, lightly, poised on the balls of her feet. Paratha backed away from her, eyes lit with the glitter of hell light watching cautiously, alertly, seeking any opening as intently as Kaeritha's own.

Kaeritha's gaze never wavered from Paratha, yet a corner of her attention stood guard. She'd always had what her first arms instructor had called good "situational awareness," and she'd honed that awareness for years. And so, although she never looked away from her opponent, she was aware of the remaining unwounded priestess creeping ever so cautiously around behind her.

Paratha gave no sign that she was aware of anything except Kaeritha, but Kaeritha had almost allowed herself to be fooled once. Now she knew better. And she also knew she had only one opportunity to end this fight before the guards Paratha had spoken of arrived. If the major stayed away, settled for simply holding her in play until the guards burst in on them, she would be doomed. So somehow, she had to entice the other woman into attacking her now . . . or convince the major that she'd tricked Kaeritha into attacking on her terms.

Paratha slowed, letting Kaeritha close gradually with her. Her saber danced and wove before her, its deadly, glowing tip leaving a twisting crawl of ugly yellow-green light in its wake, and Kaeritha's nerves tightened. The priestess with her poisoned dagger was close behind her, now, and Paratha's glittering eyes narrowed ever so slightly. If it was going to happen, Kaeritha thought, then it would happen-

Now!

The priestess sprang forward, teeth bared in a silent, snarling rictus, dagger thrusting viciously at Kaeritha's unguarded back. And in the same sliver of infinity, with the perfect coordination possible only when a single entity controlled both bodies, Paratha executed her own, deadly attack in a full-extension lunge.

It almost worked. It should have worked. But as Tomanâk had told Shigū, his champion was the equal of anything the Spider might bring against her. Kaeritha had known what was coming, and she'd spent half her life honing the skills she called upon that day. Perfectly as Paratha-or Shigū-had orchestrated the attack, Kaeritha's response was equally perfect . . . and began a tiny fraction of a second before Paratha's.

She twisted lithely, turning her torso through ninety degrees, and lunged at Paratha in a consummately executed stop-thrust. Her left-hand blade met the longer saber, twisting it aside in another of those terrible explosions of light and fury, then slid down its glaring length in a deadly extension that punched the blue caprisoned short sword through Paratha's breastplate as if its hardened steel had been so much cobweb. And even as she lunged towards Paratha, her right-hand sword snapped out behind her, and the priestess who'd flung herself at Kaeritha's back shrieked as her own charge impaled her upon that lethal blade.

For one instant, Kaeritha stood between her opponents, both arms at full extension in opposite directions, her sapphire eyes locked with Paratha's hell-lit eyes of brown. The other woman's mouth opened in shocked disbelief, and her saber wavered, then fell to the floor with a crackling explosion. Her left hand groped towards the cross guard of the sword buried in her chest and blood poured from her mouth.

And then the instant passed. Kaeritha twisted both wrists in unison, then straightened, withdrawing both her blades in one, crisp movement, and the bodies of both her opponents crumpled to the floor.