The Rite (17 page)

Then Will saw it.

“Freeze!” he said—and felt a certain disappointment when Yagoth chose to heed him.

“What’s wrong?” the ogre said.

“I didn’t give your ancestors enough credit,” said Will. “The other white squares with the trident mark are safe, but not the one you were about to tread on. You want the black one up cattycorner, with the sword-and-wings design.”

Yagoth closed his unblemished eye and glared at Will with the scarlet one.

“You want me to step wrong,” the ogre said.

“No,” said Will. “The white tile is offset from where it ought to be. Look, since I can’t see through walls, I can’t tell you everything about this big, intricate trap we’re standing in the middle of, but I have a sense of it because I understand that such contrivances require symmetry. The builders must distribute weight evenly, and support it properly, lest everything drop through the floor. Mechanisms need room to operate, and must stand in the right attitude to threaten a particular area. it’s plain to me where we need to step. I’ll lead again, if you want.”

Yagoth sneered and set his foot on the sword-and-wings. “You’re welcome,” said Will.

The builders had carved still more sigils into the towering stone door, but as far as Will could tell, they were just writing, not anything dangerous. The portal wasn’t even locked in any mechanical way, but even Yagoth, shoving with all his strength, couldn’t budge it.

“Allow me,” Pavel said. He murmured a prayer, brandished his sun amulet, and for an instant, warm, red-gold light illuminated the hallway, as if the company stood beneath the open sky at dawn. “Try it now.”

Yagoth gave the door another push, and it swung easily.

Beyond the threshold was the chamber they sought, a cavernous repository of ancient lore. A single glance sufficed to reveal that those who’d amassed the knowledge hadn’t been much for paper. A few books were in evidence, standing on shelves or lying on worktables, but the greater part of the accumulated wisdom took the form of stone and clay tablets with columns of graven hen-scratchings marching down their faces. Indeed, stacks of the slabs stood everywhere, and Will winced at the thought of how long it would take Pavel to examine them all. Though maybe he wouldn’t have to. Perhaps Sammaster had left the important ones grouped together.

Yagoth growled with impatience and shoved past Will into the library. The halfling and Pavel stepped in after him, and the rest of the ogres followed. The giantkin gawked and muttered to each other.

Then Pavel shouted, “Stand ready! Something’s going to manifest.”

Will pivoted. Saw nothing but tablets, dust, and shadows, and asked, “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Pavel said. “I feel a balance of forces shifting. Sammaster left one of his own traps here.”

Well, thought Will, readying his warsling, at least that meant this was one of the truly important sites.

But when the air split not once but twice, and a pair of shapeless horrors, lumpy and half liquid like stew, came pouring, humping, and splashing out, the thought provided little consolation.

Dorn found Kara in the quarters the monks had assigned her a small sparsely furnished guestroom, desk, and an oil lamp gleamed on her silver-blond tresses, which had taken on a patchy appearance. The healer’s magic had washed away the burns on her scalp, but the hair she’d lost was just starting to grow back. He wondered if they’d both live long enough for him to see it restored to its former loveliness.

Supposedly the guestroom was a place for Kara to rest from her studies in the archives, but in point of fact, she’d brought a stack of ragged, stale-smelling volumes and scrolls back with her, and she sat at the desk bowed over one of them. Dorn raised his hand to rap on the half-open door, but before he could, she turned around in her chair.

She’d detected his presence with a dragon’s razor-keen senses. His muscles clenched, but she smiled at him and the welcoming light in her lavender eyes made the surge of revulsion subside.

“I take it,” she said, “you’re done drilling your troops for the night.”

“I wanted to go on, and the monks were game, but Raryn said all the training in the world won’t help them if they’re too tired to fight when the wyrms come again.”

“Raryn’s wise.”

Dorn grunted. “Anyway, with nothing better to do, I reckoned I’d sample the blueberry wine the brothers make.” He hefted the bottle, drawing attention to it. “It’s supposed to be good, and I thought you might like to try it, too.” He felt awkward then. “But you’re working. I’ll leave you to it.”

“No,” she said, rising, ‘`please stay. The words are dancing in front of my eyes. I need a break, and I’d love some wine.” She picked up the earthenware cups the monks had provided to go with her pitcher of water. “These will do for goblets.”

He extracted the cork, then poured. His hand shook a little, and he nearly slopped wine over her fingers.

The wine was good, sweet, but not overly so. The problem was that Dorn couldn’t guzzle it without pause, and between sips, the silence ached, demanding someone fill it. He was surprised Kara didn’t. As a bard, she had a knack for small talk that he so sorely lacked, but she seemed to be waiting for him to take the lead.

“If think the drakes will attack tomorrow,” he managed eventually.

“Can we hold them?” she asked.

“I have a surprise planned for them at the next bottleneck. But if they don’t break through the first time, they will eventually. They’re going to shove us down into the cellars pretty soon.”

“And I’ve found nothing yet. Or maybe I’ve already read the right book, and didn’t realize what I had. Arcane texts are often subtle. They speak in parable and metaphor, and I feel so stupid with frenzy nibbling at my mind.”

“Your mind is fine, and you’ve got the other scholars in the stronghold to help you. You’ll find it.”

He lifted his human hand to touch her face, then hesitated.

But before he could pull back, she took his fingers in her own and said, “I appreciate your faith.”

“Of course I have faith in you,” he said. “In fact, for a while now…. it’s likely foolish of me to tell you. But according to Raryn, I’m a fool if I don’t, and if one of us had died down in the caves, without me ever having said it…. well, maybe that would have been bad.”

“You’re such a brave man. Why does it frighten you so to declare your feelings, even when you already know mine?” “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter. But I have another question: It no longer bothers you that I’m a dragon?”

“No.” He hoped it was true. He wanted it to be.

“Then let’s not waste any more time,” she said, and opened her arms to him.

Her kisses tasted of the blueberry wine, and he marveled at how they could be so urgent and tender at the same time, and at how many she gave and how she savored them. None

the initial phase of coupling in so sweetly tantalizing a way. It made him realize that, in fact, he knew nothing of actual lovemaking. The gift Kara offered would be nothing like the

brutish rutting he’d known before. It would be the ecstasy celebrated in a thousand songs, which, until that moment, he’d never understood.

“Unlace my gown,” Kara whispered, her voice husky.

Fumbling, trembling, he unveiled her slim white body, and she reached to undress him. For a second, he wanted to stop her. She was as beautiful as Sune Firehair, and he, with his scars and iron parts fused to flesh, was grotesquely ugly. Yet she didn’t seem to find him so.

She knelt on the oval rug in the center of the floor and tugged on his hand to guide him down beside her. Maybe she thought the weight of his half-metal body would break the cot, or perhaps she wanted more room. Either way, it was fine. Lightheaded, he simply wanted to go on touching her, and for her to continue touching him.

Apparently it still wasn’t time for the final joining. She gently pushed him down on his back, kissed his lips, then started working her way down the human half of his chest. He gasped and shivered at the pleasure of it.

Until he felt her teeth.

It surprised him, because she hadn’t done anything the slightest bit painful before. But some of the harlots had given him love bites, and Kara apparently relished the same practice. Unwilling to say or do anything to diminish her pleasure, he tried his best to enjoy the sensation even as she, bit him harder and harder.

When she plunged her teeth deep into the flesh of his belly, the pain of it stabbed through him.

“No,” he said. “You’re hurting me!”

He took hold of her head and tried to lift it away from his body.

Kara snarled like an animal, and resisted. She snapped at him anew, caught more flesh between her teeth, and jerked her head back and forth as if trying to tear it free.

She was a dragon, however human she appeared, and she was trying to eat him alive. In a spasm of fury and loathing, he cocked back his iron fist for a punch that would shatter her skull.

But no. He hit her with the back of his human hand instead, and when she still wouldn’t let go, slapped her harder still.

She jerked her head up. Her pupils were diamond-shaped, and her bloody teeth, long and pointed. A wave of sparkling blue washed away the rosy flush in her cheeks. She scrambled up his body, reaching for his throat with nails extending into talons.

In another moment, she’d revert entirely to drake form, then tear him apart. He slammed an uppercut into her jaw.

The punch stunned her, and she collapsed on top of him. He tumbled her onto the floor, reared above her, reached for a choke hold, then saw the fight was over. The glittering blueness had left her skin. The wide amethyst eyes had round pupils.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He didn’t know how to respond.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” she said. “It was the Rage. Evidently, the . . the excitement gave it an opening. Do you understand?”

“I should go.” He picked up his breeches.

He dressed facing away from her. It was easier that way, though not much.

For one moment, he hadn’t felt like a freak. He’d imagined he could partake of the same joys and comforts as ordinary folk. He supposed it had needed the boundless guile and cruelty of a dragon to rekindle hopes he’d abandoned years before, then crush them once more.

Well, he wouldn’t give Kara the chance to hurt him again. He’d keep on protecting her for the mission’s sake, but let the Black Hand take him if he spent any more time blathering with her, or listening to her songs.

He strode to the door, then, when he reached it, hesitated.

Anger had been his friend for most of his life. He’d come to cherish it as armor against the grief, pain, and loneliness that might otherwise have destroyed him. Yet, the emotion twisting inside him felt contemptible and self-indulgent, an excuse to concentrate on easing his own hurts while ignoring a comrade’s injuries.

He turned around. Kara still sat on the floor where he’d dumped her, silently weeping. The sight of it wrung his heart, and he hated himself for nearly abandoning her to her shame.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I shouldn’t have taken so long, sorting my feelings out. Why don’t you get dressed, and we’ll sit, talk, and drink the rest of the wine.”

They did, and when the bottle and the well of conversation alike ran dry, they simply held hands. Raryn found them thus when he came to tell them Chatulio had disappeared.

Thrashing and writhing, Sammaster’s guardian creatures spilled from rents in the empty air. In that first instant, with only the single enchanted torch providing light, Pavel had difficulty discerning what manner of abomination they were, but then his mind made sense of them despite the gloom and their nauseating, bewildering lack of stability and symmetry.

Each was as tall as an ogre but builder. They looked as if a god had shaped several chromatic dragons out of mud, then, disliking his handiwork, squashed the separate figures into one lump. Their bodies were a patchwork of black, white, azure, green, and scarlet scales, with several misshapen reptilian heads protruding from the squirming central mass. They had no limbs as such, but extending and retracting, hardening and softening, their flesh, where it made contact with the floor, heaved them across the stones.

Such horrors were called squamous spewers. Having identified them, Pavel also had a good idea of what was about to happen, but not enough time to shout a warning.

One spewer roared, a thunderous sound that shook the underground chamber and made a couple of the long-armed, short-legged ogres bolt in terror. The other guardian opened the jaws of its various heads, and an eye-stinging stink suffused the air. The creature spat jets of acid, and giantkin screamed, their warty hides sizzling and smoking.

Chanting and brandishing his sun amulet, Pavel conjured into being a floating mace of crimson light. The weapon flew at a spewer and hammered it.

Will spun his warsling and let fly. The skiprock cracked against one malformed head, then rebounded to strike another.

Yagoth charged and drove the point of his spear deep into the same creature’s rippling, amorphous form.

“Fight, curse you!” the ogre shaman bellowed.

The remaining ogres shouted their war cries, a clamor as fearsome as a spewer’s roar, and surged forward. Pavel conjured a second flying mace to fight alongside the first, ripped a spewer’s hide with a shrill whine of magical sound, then evoked a flash of golden light intended to sear a portion of the creature’s strength away.

But whatever he and his allies attempted, the spewers didn’t falter. Their snapping fangs inflicted ghastly wounds, but the real terror came when, every few seconds, one of them left off biting to spit a breath weapon from its mouths.

Pavel abruptly glimpsed brightness at the corner of his vision. He tried to fling himself aside, but the plume of flame brushed him even so. The hot pain threw him to his knees.

His body wanted to lie still, recover from the shock, but in a battle, such inertia could be fatal. He forced himself to raise his head and peer about, then gasped in dismay.