Annihilation (44 page)

Jeggred drew in a breath, and Pharaun could tell he was ready to pounce, though the glabrezu was hovering well out of his reach.

“Jeggred …” Quenthel started but stopped when the draegloth whirled on her.

“It’s meat to me,” Jeggred growled. “Just another tanar’ri scum. That thing is no parent of mine.” He turned to the glabrezu. “Call me ‘son’ again, demon, and it’ll still be on your lips when I rip off your head.”

“Fear not, draegloth,” the demon replied with a feral grin. “Even if you were full-blood I wouldn’t give you a second thought. For a half-breed I won’t even bother killing you.” Belshazu turned his attention back to Pharaun but spoke to the rest of them. “All I want is the summoner. Give me the wizard, and you can go on to meet your Spider Queen.”

“Only him?” Quenthel asked.

Pharaun looked at her, and she tried to avoid his gaze, keeping her attention on the hovering glabrezu.

The demon glanced down at his severed legs and said, “The trick with the ice … I had to snip my own legs off.” He held up one of his four arms, one of two that ended in a hideous, sharp pincer claw. “They won’t grow back. At the very least, the whoreson owes me two legs. Give him to me now, and be on your way.”

“Everyone,” Quenthel said, her voice faraway and bored, “step aside.”

The draegloth growled, and Valas appeared from behind a pile
of broken bricks, shifting his feet in an uncharacteristically audible way. Pharaun looked at Quenthel, and she met his gaze evenly.

“Are you serious?” the wizard asked.

“Yes,” Quenthel replied. “You summoned him, you bound him, you froze him in ice. The rest of this expedition is too important to waste fighting every monster we stumble across—not anymore anyway, and not to settle vendettas you bring upon yourself with your own simpleminded carelessness.”

“Pharaun summoned that demon on your command, Mistress,” Valas reminded her, but she didn’t acknowledge the scout at all.

Pharaun looked at Belshazu, who was quietly laughing, obviously surprised that Pharaun’s companions had so quickly and easily sold him out. The wizard scanned the glabrezu quickly and found that he was flying thanks to a thin platinum ring on the little finger of his left hand.

“It’s all right,” Pharaun said. “All we’re talking about here is one legless glabrezu. Go on ahead, and I’ll catch up in a minute or so.”

The glabrezu roared and moved closer. Pharaun’s first impulse was to run, his second to stand and swallow. He forced himself to do neither. Instead he prepared his first spell.

Something drifted past Pharaun’s face. He leaned back a bit to avoid it, but something else tapped him under the chin. Dust rose up from the ground all around him—and pebbles, shards of petrified bone, and little bits of twisted, rusted iron. He looked at the glabrezu, who was holding up one of his two proper hands, a knowing grin on his canine face.

Pharaun’s stomach lurched, and he felt himself being pulled upward. His boots came off the ground, and he was falling—but falling upward along with the debris around him. The others backed out of the area where gravity had been reversed. Quenthel watched with a look of irritation, as if she were disappointed that
the demon was taking so long to kill him. Valas drew his kukris but seemed unsure if he should intercede. Jeggred looked at Danifae, who waved him off but watched expectantly.

With a sigh, Pharaun went to work.

He touched the Sorcere insignia and used its levitation power to counter the gravity reversal. It was disorienting, but he managed to hover at the same level as the glabrezu. He then touched his steel ring and brought forth the rapier held within it.

The weapon flew at the demon. As the blade flashed through the air, the glabrezu slashed at it with his claws and snipped at it with his pincers. The demon had the advantage of being able to fly with the enchanted blade, and they quickly matched speeds so that Belshazu and the rapier were evenly paired.

Pharaun took advantage of the stalemate to cast a spell. His stomach lurched again, and his levitation started to pull him up instead of down. The demon’s upside-down gravity was gone.

Belshazu could parry the animated sword’s attacks but couldn’t hurt it. At the same time the rapier nicked the demon here, slashed him there, and blood started to drip onto the dead ground from half a dozen cuts.

“Unfortunate,” Belshazu hissed, almost to himself, “but I would have liked to keep this one after I kill you.”

The demon made a gesture difficult to define—a blink, a shrug, a shudder—and the blade shattered into a thousand glittering fragments of steel that rained down onto the ancient battlefield.

Pharaun felt his blood boil, his face flush, and his breath stop in his throat.

I should have remembered, he scolded himself. I should have known he could do that.

The Master of Sorcere wanted to hurl a string of invectives into the air, at Belshazu and the cold, uncaring multiverse, but he swallowed it. Still, he’d always liked that rapier.

“I’ll take the value of that blade out of your guts, demon,” Pharaun threatened.

The glabrezu’s animal face twisted into a feral grin again as he rushed through the air toward Pharaun.

From behind him, the mage heard Valas say, “You’ll leave a fellow drow to a filthy demon? You’ll leave us without a mage?”

“Yes,” Quenthel replied with an utter lack of regret that Pharaun actually found refreshing.

The tanar’ri approached quickly, and Pharaun pulled an old glove from a pocket of his
piwafwi
. He started the incantation even before the glove came out of the pocket, and by the time the glabrezu was in striking range, the spell was done.

A hand the size of a rothé appeared in the air between the wizard and the demon. Though Belshazu tried to avoid it, he couldn’t. The hand opened and pushed him through the air, forcing him away from the wizard no matter how hard he resisted the conjured hand.

Pharaun turned to Quenthel, who looked at him blankly when he said, “What I’m about to do, I should do right here and let you all taste it, but I won’t. I’ll push him away first and keep you at a safe distance. Nonetheless, I want you to remember, Mistress, that I can do this again, and by all rights I
should
do it again.”

He didn’t bother to wait for a response—none came anyway—instead he turned back to the glabrezu who had been pushed by the spell several paces away in the air over the ruined temple grounds. Pharaun started to run over the uneven, debris-scattered ground, counting his paces as he went. Belshazu ripped and slashed at the conjured hand in a mad flurry of uncontrolled, frustrated attacks but to no effect. The magic held.

When Pharaun had gone twenty paces away from the rest of the expedition, he stopped. He held the hand in the air, no longer pushing the glabrezu, but keeping him at bay. As he ran
he’d gone over in his mind again everything he’d learned about tanar’ri in general and glabrezu in particular. When he stopped he cast a spell—not a terribly complicated one—that would prevent another inconvenient manifestation of the tanar’ri’s natural magic. A ray of green light leaped from Pharaun’s outstretched hands and found its way unerringly to the floating demon. The spell would hold him to the sixty-sixth layer of the Abyss, preventing the glabrezu from teleporting even within the confines of the plane.

“Tell me the—” the wizard called out to the demon, stopping when Belsahzu’s huge pincer burst through the conjured hand.

Solidified magic burned away from the surface of the black fist like blood clouding in water. The glabrezu grinned, grunted, and slashed at the hand. The great fingers twitched, their grip loosening.

The wizard had never seen anything tear through that spell in the same way. The glabrezu was more powerful, more uniquely talented than Pharaun had given him credit for. Even as those thoughts passed through his mind, the drow mage pulled another spell out of the Weave.

The demon’s hideous pincer broke through one of the fingers. When it came away from the hand, the black magic burst like a bubble and the finger was gone. Belshazu pushed at the quivering, dissipating hand with one severed leg and his all-too-intact arms. As Pharaun’s next spell began to form in the air above the demon, Belshazu fell out of the conjured hand and onto the wreckage-strewn ground.

The demon roared at him, and it was all Pharaun could do to force himself to appear unaffected by the deafening, terrifying sound. Belshazu stood but didn’t look up—didn’t see the slab of stone assembling itself bit by bit in the thin air above him.

“Tell me the truth.” Pharaun slid a loose strand of hair away
from his eyes and asked, “Can you tell I haven’t washed my hair in over a tenday?”

The glabrezu growled, roared again, and leaped into the air—

—just as the wall of stone fell.

The demon disappeared under it, and the ground shook. The wall cracked as it came to rest on the uneven surface. Belshazu lifted the several-ton slab off him just enough to turn his head and reveal burning eyes sunk in a bleeding, animal’s head.

The look of the battered creature made Pharaun smile. The spell he’d had to move so far away from the others to cast safely came to his lips as the tanar’ri continued to slowly dig itself out from under the stone slab. When he completed the incantation, Pharaun opened his mouth wide and screamed.

The sound came not from his lungs, throat, or mouth but from the Weave all around him and inside him. The sound rolled up, louder and louder, then shot out of him: a mad, keening shriek that smashed into the demon so hard it even blew the massive slab of stone into smoky vapor, then blew that smoke away into nothing. The sound crashed into the glabrezu, shaking him and spinning him into the air. Bruises exploded on Belshazu’s tough red hide, and his bones cracked loudly one by one. The demon couldn’t muster the breath necessary to scream, though Pharaun reveled in the obvious fact that he wanted to.

Especially when pieces of him started coming off.

Pharaun kept screaming, continued pushing air out of himself. The sound shredded the glabrezu, taking off skin, plates of exoskeleton, divots of fur, claws, fangs, eyes, then blood and entrails. The whole mess whirled in the air as if it were being stirred in a great invisible cooking pot, then all at once the spell—and the hideous shrieking scream—was gone, and the shredded remains of Belshazu fell in a heap on the battle-scarred ground. Blood
continued to rain down in tapping spatters for a minute after the last big piece hit the ground.

Pharaun sighed, pushed away his errant hair again, and stepped gingerly into the mess. He kicked pieces this way and that with the toe of one boot until his eyes settled on the thin platinum band. He bent and retrieved the ring, making some effort not to touch the tanar’ri’s blood.

“You owed me a ring,” he said to the demon’s mute remains then slipped the ring on a finger and turned back to rejoin the drow who had been more than happy to let him face the glabrezu alone.

“It looked big from a distance,” Pharaun said as he ran a hand along a cold, rusted metal rib. “It’s even bigger from the inside.”

The Master of Sorcere looked up along the line of the gently curving steel beam and tried to guess how far above his head it ended—a hundred feet, maybe a hundred and fifty?

“Why was this just left here for a thousand years?” asked Jeggred. The draegloth was sniffing the outer surface of the great spider fortress and seemed dissatisfied. “It should have been cleaned up. Wouldn’t the goddess want it cleared away?”

“It hasn’t been here a thousand years,” Quenthel said. She was standing inside a huge tear in the side of the broken sphere, her arms crossed in front of her. “I told you all, I was here.”

“How long ago?” asked Danifae.

The high priestess looked at her with open contempt but answered, “Ten years.”

“Ten years ago,” Pharaun asked, “was this thing intact and moving?”

The Mistress of Arach-Tinilith nodded. “How were you here?” Danifae asked.

Quenthel turned to Pharaun and said, “If there is anyone alive in here, could you sense them?”

The wizard glanced at Danifae, who offered him a bored shrug.

“There are spells,” he answered Quenthel, “that will do that, yes. Do you think we’ll find someone alive in here? Lolth herself, perhaps?”

“If the Spider Queen is anywhere,” said the Baenre priestess, “she’ll be here. This is her palace. Still, I don’t sense her presence. I still can’t feel her here at all.”

Pharaun nodded and looked around at the ruin again.

“Far be it from me to argue, Mistress,” he said to Quenthel, “but I find it impossible to believe that this construct was in operation a mere ten years ago. I’ll admit I’ve never seen materials like this—steel beams big enough to hold up a building, a magical construct as big as House Baenre—but I’ve seen steel both old and new, and this steel has been laying out here for somewhat longer than ten years. I will accept that you’re reluctant to tell us how you came to be here a decade ago, but …”

“But what?” Quenthel snarled.

Pharaun stopped to think. The Mistress of Arach-Tinilith watched him the whole time, and finally he shrugged and shook his head. Quenthel turned and strode deeper into the wrecked spider fortress.