Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 5 - The Cerulean Storm (11 page)

The wraith continued his lie: “Your husband valued his mother's weapon highly. I used that
attachment to summon his spirit from Samarah.”

For a moment, Sadira did not move, too shocked to react. Then she cried out and almost
collapsed, her whole body convulsing with grief.
Samarah.
She repeated the name over and over. That one word confirmed her worst fears. The wraiths
had found Agis, or Borys had, and they had killed him. All that remained of her husband
was the glassy-eyed apparition at the wraith's side, a spirit that could not remember his
own name.

“Go down,” the leader said. “Step into the Gray, or I'll take your husband's life.”

“Take him!” Sadira yelled. Her chest suddenly felt constricted and hot. “What good is he
to me now?”

The words had barely passed her lips before the sorceress felt sick with guilt. She could
not have said such a thing. It had to have been some other woman, a weak woman who had not
truly loved her husband.

Sadira knew that she should be sorry for Agis's death, concerned about the portents it
held for the future. She should be worried that Borys had taken the Dark Lens, and that
now she and her companions would have no defense against his mastery of the Way. She
should be seeing young Rkard, his red eyes blazing with determination, standing before the
beast that had killed Agis and a million others. She should be thinking of what came after
Borys killed her and Rkard and the others, of how he would raze Tyr and murder its
citizens, of how, too soon, an immense pile of rubble would lie where Athas's only free
city had stood.

But Sadira did not feel any of those things. She only felt angry, angry at the husband who
gone away and died so far from her.

Magnus suddenly stopped singing, and an eerie silence fell over the tower. The wraiths
cast nervous glances back toward the minaret, where a pink band had appeared between the
swirling eddies in the sky. The leader motioned to his companions, then started down the
stairs, pushing Agis's spirit before him. The other wraiths followed, taking no chances
that Sadira would make a run for the gate.

Magnus's voice boomed out of the sky. “Sadira, you're almost out!” he yelled. “Help me.
Sing!”

The leader looked up, as if his amethyst eyes could actually see the words booming out of
the sky, then halted two steps above Sadira. “Stay silent!” he ordered. “The time has come
for your decision.”;

The sorceress opened her mouth and sang, though her thoughts were more on the small hammer
of iron in her hand.

The leader stepped back, pulling the hand with the dagger out of Agis. The noble's spirit
looked toward Sadira, his mouth half-open and his eyebrows arched in sadness, then
dissolved into haze.

Sadira stopped singing and threw her hammer past the leader's head, crying out an
incantation. The weapon smashed into the next wraith with a resounding boom. The impact
knocked him into the one behind him, and they both fell to the ground.

The hammer hovered over them for an instant, then enlarged to the size of a kank and
crashed down. The impact flattened their helmets and demolished the stairs beneath their
heads. As the gemstones containing their life-forces shattered, a tremendous blast rocked
the tower. The explosion hurled the leader into Sadira and blew the other two wraiths off
the stairway.

The sorceress and the leader crashed down the steps together, locked in a tight embrace.
Each time they rolled, the wraith's armored body battered Sadira. She fought desperately
to throw her attacker off, while he struggled to drive the stiletto into her heart.
Finally, they came to a rest with Sadira lying on her back, her head lower than her feet.
The wraith kneeled astride her, the dagger still clutched in his fist.

Sadira looked past his leg and up the stairway. Her magical hammer had disappeared with
the two wraiths it had destroyed. The two who had escaped the blast were nowhere in sight,
but the sorceress could see her own feet lying five steps above. They were as pale as
ivory, clear down to the toes. She had used the last of her mystic energy.

“No more spells,” hissed the leader, following her gaze.

His purple eyes flashed malevolently from behind his visor, then he tossed the dagger
aside. He grabbed Sadira by the shoulders and started to rise.

“Now you go to the Gray.”

“Hardly!”

The sorceress drove the heel of her palm into the bottom edge of the leader's visor,
forcing it up and away from his face. Sadira lashed out with her other hand and grasped
the wraith's withered visage. She began to pull, as though she were drawing mystic energy
from a field of Athasian plants. A warm, stinging sensation rushed up her arm. Had the
wraith been alive, it would have been impossible for her to draw the life-force directly
from her foe. But the creature was not alive, and the energies that held him together were
not bound into the gemstone nearly so tightly as they would have been fastened into a true
body.

The wraith screamed, and his leathery skin began to flake away beneath Sadira's fingers.
He tried to push her away, his arms already trembling from the loss of vital energy. The
sorceress wrapped her free arm around his neck and held tight. The leader stepped toward
the Gray, gathering himself up to leap off the tower edge.

Sadira thrust her hand deep into the papery mass of his dissolving head and grasped the
dark amethyst inside. The leader's flesh turned to dust. He jumped, but the sorceress felt
her feet drop onto the coarse rock of the tower and knew she would not be carried with
him. The wraith drifted past her in a dun-colored cloud, which quickly dissolved into hazy
wisps as it drifted out into the Gray.

When the sorceress saw no sign of the other two wraiths, she quickly picked up her dagger
and used the pommel to smash the leader's amethyst. This time, there was no storm of
escaping energy. She had already drawn all the life-force from the stone, and could feel
it tingling in her flesh, which had assumed a faint purplish cast.

Keeping a watchful eye, Sadira started up the stairs. She began to sing again, and pulled
a small lump of green clay from her pocket. After she dribbled a few drops of saliva onto
the mass, it began to hiss and pop, burning the palm of her hand with tiny droplets of
corrosive fluid. The sorceress did not care. She had not yet destroyed the last two
wraiths, and when they attacked, she intended to be ready.

By the time Sadira reached the open gates of the bastion, a crevice of crimson light had
appeared above the minaret's crystal cupola. Magnus's voice sounded clear and pure. There
was no sign of the wraiths on the path anywhere between her and the center of the citadel.
Nor did she see them in the blue pool that filled so much of the bastion, but she knew
that did not mean much. Her enemies could be hiding anywhere beneath the water and the
shimmering waves would make it impossible to see them.

The sorceress started to step through the gates, then thought better of it and stopped.
Borys's servants had not become wraiths by easily forsaking the tasks he assigned to them.
If the survivors had not yet assaulted her, it was because they were lying in ambush
inside the bastion itself.

Using the life-force she had drained from the leader's gem, Sadira cast her spell. The
purple sheen faded from her skin, and a caustic-smelling mist began to rise from the lump
of clay in her hand. She waited until the green fumes condensed into a hissing stream of
vapor, then stepped through the gate.

The first thing she noticed was the quiet. She could not hear Magnus's song, the hiss of
the vapor rising from her palm, or even the sound of her feet shuffling over the limestone
cobbles. Then she glimpsed a wraith pulling himself out of the shimmering pool beside the
path. The water dripped from his armor without making a sound, and the sorceress realized
that a magic pall of silence had been cast over the area-no doubt to keep her from voicing
the incantation of her own spells.

Congratulating herself for avoiding the trap, she held her hand out toward her ambusher
and blew a stream of green vapor into his face. The wraith's visor dissolved instantly,
and she saw him open his mouth to curse before his head was swallowed in the green fog.
Without waiting for the magic acid to finish its work, Sadira spun, fully certain that the
last of Borys's knights was behind her.

The sorceress found a pair of mailed fists reaching for her neck. The wraith at the other
end of the arms wore the armor of a broad-shouldered female, with yellow rays of light
pouring through the eye-slits of her visor. Sadira twisted to the side, thrusting the hand
with the magic acid toward her attacker's face. At the same time the sorceress protected
her vulnerable throat behind her shoulder.

The tactic succeeded only partially. Sadira planted her hand squarely in her foe's visor,
which instantly began to dissolve beneath a billowing cloud of green vapor. The wraith
switched her attacks at the last minute, however, smashing one mailed fist down on
Sadira's collarbone and bringing the other around in a vicious uppercut to the ribs. The
blows landed with such force that the sorceress felt bones crack in both places.

Sadira's body erupted into such agony that she barely noticed when her magic acid
dissolved the gem inside her first ambusher's head. She felt the path buck beneath her
feet and saw streaks of ruby-colored light flashing past in the silence, then she dropped
to the cobblestones gasping for breath. The wraith reached down to pick her up, attempting
to carry out Borys's orders even as the sorceress's green fog ate away the repository of
her lifeforce.

One mailed hand clasped onto Sadira's wounded shoulder, and the other reached for her
throat. Then a silent yellow flash flared from inside the acid cloud. The wraith
dissolved. A tremendous shock wave crashed down on the sorceress, spraying her with
droplets of acid vapor and driving her tormented body into the unyielding cobblestones.

The sorceress did not care. Pain would not stop her from escaping the Gray. She forced
herself to her hands and knees and turned toward the minaret. Sadira slowly crawled
forward, the syllables of Magnus's wind-ballad pouring forth from her silent lips.

As the crimson sun slipped behind the purple crags of the Ringing Mountains, long streaks
of shadow stretched across the valley outside Pauper's Hope. The sheen slowly faded from
the glassy plain that Sadira's magic had created earlier. The smooth field of rock slowly
reverted to its true nature, filling the air with a soft murmur as orange stone crumbled
into orange dirt.

To half the titans who had attacked Pauper's Hope that morning, the change no longer
mattered. The one that Rikus had wounded, Tay, lay motionless and blank-eyed at the edge
of the field. Three more, including Tay's comrade Yab, had succumbed to the searing heat
of the Athasian day. They were slumped over at the waist, the tips of their thirst-swollen
tongues protruding from their blue lips.

That left only four living giants to rejoice in the disintegration of their magical
prison. Bellowing in gleeful, thirst-parched voices, they began to dig their hips and legs
free. They hurled each handful of rock-filled dirt to two around just out of arm's reach,
where a company of dwarven warriors had surrounded each of them only moments before.

Despite the steel breastplates and helmets protecting the warriors, the giants' barrage
savaged through their disciplined companies, opening great holes in their neat ranks and
sending armored figures rolling away like tumbleweeds. The dwarves countered with a volley
of crossbow fire. Their iron-tipped bolts were about as effective against the thick hide
of the titans as cactus needles would have been against mul gladiators.

“Call Neeva back,” Rikus said. “Their crossbows are useless.”

Caelum shook his head. “They've just begun,” he said. “She'll never retreat so soon.”

“If she waits much longer, she won't have a chance,” said Magnus, his ears twitching with
tension. “I'm afraid we arrived too late. The wraiths may have failed to kill Sadira, but
the delay they caused might prove fatal to us all.”

The trio stood about a hundred paces from the battle, facing the butte over which Rikus
and the windsinger had climbed when they first heard the giants. Caelum and Magnus were
waiting in reserve, ready to cover the retreat as soon as the battle turned against the
dwarves. Unlike Sadira's sorcery, their clerical magic was primarily defensive in nature,
and not of much use in destroying titans.

Rikus had been forced to stay with the clerics because, up until a few minutes ago, the
ill effects of the scorpion sting had left his vision too blurry to fight. Thanks to his
hardy mul constitution and Caelum's magic, however, Rikus was recovering rapidly-even if
he still had a queasy stomach and sporadic bouts of dizziness. In spite of his condition,
the mul would rather have been with Neeva, standing near the dwarven companies and
directing the attack from close range. Unfortunately, she had ordered him to stay behind,
saying he would only be a liability, and the mul had been in no position to protest. Neeva
had organized the assault, and it was under her full command.

As Magnus had explained to Rikus, Neeva had reacted quickly after the wraith attack on the
Cloud Road. Perceiving that the original plan for dealing with the giants was in jeopardy,
she had sent a half-elven runner to fetch the Kledan militia from Agis's estate. Then,
while the windsinger helped Sadira fight off the wraiths, she and Caelum had discussed
their options. When it became clear the sorceress would survive but might not regain
consciousness before dusk, Neeva had carried Rkard across the rope that spanned the gap.
Caelum and Magnus had followed close behind, with Sadira and Rikus tied to their backs in
the case the pair awakened in time to help confront the giants. The Tyrian legion would
follow as soon as possible, but it seemed unlikely that they could get two thousand
warriors safely across the breach in time to stop what was about to happen.