Richard Byers - The Reaver

“Then clean out your ears!” Cindermoon snapped. “Is the plan truly all that hard to comprehend? By purging Turmish of all who worship the Blue Fire, we’ll magically cleanse the land of the last of the taint itself. That in turn will restore the enclave’s strength. Then we’ll use that might to feed the hungry.”

Stedd shook his head. “You can’t take the power from something so bad and use it for something good.”

Cindermoon’s fingers tightened on the armrests until they ached and she pried them loose again. “Boy, you’re debating first principles with one who was already a druid and Chosen when your great-great-grandfather … never mind. I’ll answer as your station if not your experience deserves. You couldn’t turn death into life. But the Oakfather is the lord of all Nature, hunter and prey, dark and light. Druids can do things-difficult, ambiguous things-that dawnbringers and sunlords never could.”

“Still,” Ashenford said, “Lathander has returned in a time of turmoil. Surely, he has a thousand urgent matters to concern him. Yet he elected to send his first new Chosen here, to us. We’d be wise to consider what the boy has to say.”

Cindermoon glared at him. “You’d be wise to heed what I’m telling you. The scar pilgrims are going to die. The Assembly of Stars has given its blessing-”

“Because you approached them without our knowledge,” Shinthala growled.

“-and I’ve gathered warriors to carry out the campaign. You two can either help, and prove yourselves worthy of the rank you hold, or hold back and-”

Voices cried out. Drummer moaned and scrambled behind the row of thrones. Startled, Cindermoon jerked around on her seat and looked straight ahead.

While she’d been busy squabbling with her peers, a circle of wavering, somehow filthy-looking red light had appeared in the air. It was a window into a place where almost everything was on fire, including the damned souls shrieking and flailing in pits like mass graves and the giant soaring toward the breach between worlds.

Some trick of enhanced motion or warped time brought the balor to the window in an instant. When it did, Cindermoon could make out the pock-like scars on the demon’s hideous face where her conjured hailstones had battered it, and the horn Ashenford had broken with a blow from an enchanted quarterstaff. She’d believed she and her peers had destroyed the demon utterly, but some power even greater than itself must have seen fit to resurrect it.

A beat of its bat-like wings carried it into the gateway, which now took on the aspect of a tunnel, and as it flew onward, some form of distortion made its massive body seem to slither like a snake’s. Appearing suddenly, perhaps simply because the balor had willed them to, dozens of lesser fiends hurtled after it.

Cindermoon abruptly realized she’d lost a precious instant to consternation and had, at best, only one more left. She lifted her hand and drew breath to shout a word of forbiddance.

But before she could, Stedd Whitehorn shrilled, “Lathander!”

Red-gold light pulsed across the heart of the sanctuary, and the balor and the lesser demons tumbled backward like leaves in a gale.

Meanwhile, the mouth of the tunnel drew in upon itself like the contracting pupil of an eye. In a couple heartbeats, it closed completely.

The boy then pivoted to the Turmishan warrior who was supposedly his faithful bodyguard. Looking shocked at the sealing of the passage to the Abyss, the man stood with his cutlass in his hand. The short, curved blade still glimmered with a trace of the same dirty red light that pervaded the balor’s domain. Evidently, it was the talisman that had opened the way. He must have surreptitiously eased it out of its scabbard when everyone else was looking elsewhere.

“Why?” cried Stedd. “Why would you do this?”

“Because a Marivaldi,” the swordsman growled, “finishes what he starts.”

With that, Cindermoon realized exactly which member of that once-respected family he must be, the only conspirator to escape after the near-destruction of Sapra and the Elder Circle. A ranger who likewise understood shouted to identify the dastard to one and all, “That’s Anton Marivaldi!”

For one more instant, the traitor glared across the innermost sanctum at the trio on the thrones as though contemplating a suicidal charge. Then he whirled and ran back into the temple.

“Kill him!” Cindermoon cried, whereupon rangers and druids pounded after the fleeing man like hounds on the track of a deer.

Anton slowed for an instant to thrust his cutlass back into its scabbard. Despite tapers and watch lights, the interior of the House of Silvanus was dark enough that otherwise, the ruddy glow that Umara had conjured into the steel might have served as a beacon for his pursuers.

From the sound of it, he had plenty of them, and that was the idea, to lure all of Cindermoon’s protectors away. He was glad that, in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Sapra, on the day preceding his realization that he was in imminent danger of arrest, curiosity had prompted him to go look at the body of the fallen balor. His description of its wounds had enabled Umara to produce a convincing illusion of the exact same creature. He’d judged that that, combined with the revelation of his own identity, would jolt the elf and her defenders into precipitous action if anything would.

Now he’d see if he could survive the consequences of his success.

Had it been possible to move in a straight line, he could have sprinted from the courtyard in the center of the sanctuary to its outer edge quickly. But it wasn’t. The seemingly random placement of pillars and stone slabs supporting the roof and the lack of anything approximating a genuine corridor obliged him to veer repeatedly, until he wasn’t sure he was even heading in his original direction anymore.

He was all but certain his pursuers were spreading out. It was what he would have done in their place to catch a stranger who was likely blundering back and forth in confusion.

He rounded a corner, and a wolf lunged out of the shadows. He wrenched himself aside and banged his shoulder into granite, but the beast’s jaws snapped shut on empty air.

The wolf started to spin for another try, and he booted it in the ribs. That knocked it stumbling away and gave him time to draw his saber. As the animal gathered itself for another lunge, he decided on a cut to the neck. The curved blade was already in motion when he remembered druids were shapeshifters.

He spun the saber lower and slashed a foreleg instead. The wolf fell. He dodged past it and ran on.

He’d only taken three strides when a voice rasped words of power behind him. Instinct told him when to dodge. Spines like porcupine quills hurtled past him to stab into a wooden screen.

That’s what I get for showing mercy, Anton thought. It would have served him right if the former wolf’s barrage had hit.

Yet he showed mercy again when a ranger rushed out of the dark. Even though it took longer to sweep the other warrior’s broadsword out of line, step in, and drive the curved guard of the saber into his face with stunning force than it would have to simply kill him.

Calling to one another, the voices of Anton’s pursuers echoed. They sounded like they were all around him, and he could only hope it wasn’t really so.

Three more turns, and then he burst in on a skinny adolescent girl in druidic robes who yelped and recoiled. Hostage! he thought, but no. If he took a captive, someone would hurry back to the Elder Circle to report the situation when his entire objective was to keep all their underlings away from them. He simply had to keep running.

When he raced on by without pausing, the young initiate found her courage and started an incantation. Fortunately, she recited the words slowly, like she had yet to fully master the spell, and he left her behind while she was still declaiming it.