Richard Byers - The Shattered Mask

As she advanced, she heard him chanting in some bizarre tongue that was all grunts and consonants, but as far as she could tell, the spell had no effect. No destructive power blazed in her direction, nor did her surroundings alter.

Finally she was close enough to rush in and attack him. Somehow divining her location, he pivoted in her direction, settled into a fighting stance, and lifted the sparking, smoldering staff into a strong guard.

She nearly hesitated, for she was sure that last spell had achieved something, had set some sort of snare for her. But she couldn't very well retreat and permit him to strike her down from behind, then resume demolishing the bridge. She had no choice but to fight him, and so she bellowed and charged, trusting to her skills and aggression to see her through whatever surprise he had devised.

When she was nearly close enough to attack, her eyes met the strange, pale ones shining inside the sockets of the sickle-shaped mask, and Marance spoke a word of power. At that instant, Shamur's eyelids dropped, and her knees buckled, even as her mind grew dull and somnolent. She barely noticed Marance sweeping the staff around in a horizontal strike, and nearly failed to comprehend the significance as she did.

Nearly, but not quite. She dropped beneath the blow and bit down savagely on her lower lip. The burst of pain helped clear her mind of the unnatural sleep that had threatened to overwhelm her.

As she sprang up and came back on guard, she realized that Marance's last spell had given him a capacity somewhat like the basilisk that nightly guarded Argent Hall. He could now induce unconsciousness with his gaze, which meant it was perilous even to glance at his pearly eyes. In fact, she thought with a sudden, unexpected swell of her old daredevil's exultation, given all the wizard's advantages, this would almost certainly be the most challenging duel of her career.

Grinning, she feinted a thrust at Marance's foot, then, when the staff whipped down to club her wrist, she lifted the broadsword to cut his forearm. Retreating a half step, he spun his length of polished wood in a parry, and she snatched her blade back a split second before the two weapons could clash together.

He swung the staff at her head, and she jumped back out of range. At that point, he too tried to retreat, and she sprang forward to keep him from withdrawing too far away. She had to press him hard at all times, never allowing him a single moment's respite to cast a spell.

As they battled on, the crackling staff leaped at Shamur time after time, burning brighter and brighter, its corona of magenta fire burning streaks of afterimage across her sight. She ducked when the weapon shot at her head, jumped over it when it swept toward her ankles, sidestepped blows, or evaded them by hopping backward out of range, sometimes avoiding calamity with less than an inch to spare. Whenever Marance gave her a chance, she struck at him in turn, relying on compound attacks to draw the staff out of line and counterattacks to catch him at the moment he started to swing or thrust at her. She made sure above all else that whether her action succeeded or not, he wouldn't be able to bring his weapon into contact with her own.

Considering the handicaps she was laboring under, her mere survival demonstrated that she was fencing as brilliantly as she ever had in her life. But even so, she couldn't penetrate his guard, and soon, she would begin to slow down, for no one could fight as furiously, as she was, never pausing for an instant to catch her breath, without flagging fairly quickly. Meanwhile, if Marance felt any fatigue, he wasn't showing it, and she feared that such mortal limitations were meaningless to the dead.

If she didn't find a way to kill him quickly, he was going to do the same to her, and she could only think of one tactic that might serve.

Marance twirled the burning, crackling staff in a move calculated to draw Shamur's eyes to his face. He'd attempted the trick before, and, recognizing it for what it was, she'd refused to fall prey to it. Now, however, she intentionally did what he wanted her to do, praying that, having resisted the magical slumber once, she could do so a second time.

Marance spoke the magic word, and gray oblivion surged into her mind. Suddenly, everything was dull, distant, meaningless, and, her body numb and leaden. She simply wanted to collapse onto the cobbles and sleep.

Then some defiant part of her remembered Thamalon and the children, dependent on her to save their lives, and, biting her lip bloody, she thrust the lethargy away.

The magic had staggered her, and, pretending she was still in its grip, she continued to reel, meanwhile watching Marance through slit eyes. When he stepped in to bash her head with the staff, she lunged so deeply it carried her beneath the arc of the blow and buried the broadsword in his chest.

Now it was the wizard's turn to stumble, dropping the staff as he blundered backward. The sizzling sparks blinked out as the rod clattered on the cobbles. Shaking, he struggled to lift his fair, delicate hands, seemingly to bring his iron thumb rings together.

Shamur had no idea what that would accomplish, but, suspecting she wouldn't like it very much, she yanked her weapon from his torso, flicked off the thumb of his right hand, then cut at his head. The broadsword shattered the crescent mask and crunched deep into the skull beneath.

Marance collapsed. Believing that one couldn't be too careful with the undead, Shamur, panting, watched him for a time to make sure she really had destroyed him, and while she was so engaged, she noticed that at some point during the duel, the bridge had stopped shaking.

Apparently it wasn't going to fall.

The Drum and Mirror possessed a verandah overlooking the bay, a railed porch warded against cold weather by the same sort of enchantment that protected the Wide Realms. Slumped there now, filthy, sore, weary to the bone, yet actually feeling fine, Talbot savored the warmth of the mulled wine glowing in his belly and the splendor of the red and golden dawn flowering above the Sea of Fallen Stars. His equally grubby and battered parents and siblings sat with him, likewise gazing to the east, and amazingly, whether exhaustion or contentment was responsible, it appeared that no one in his loquacious, quarrelsome family had a word to say.

After, as Talbot now knew, Mother had killed Marance Talendar, the wizard's conjured minions had fought on for a little while longer, then, one species at a time, vanished back to wherever he'd summoned them from. That, however, had scarcely been the end of the family's labors. Father had immediately gotten them started digging through the rubble of the several collapsed houses to rescue whomever might be trapped inside. In time, other residents of the bridge and a troop of Scepters had joined the effort, but the task had taken several hours even so.

It was finished now, and here the Uskevren were, all five of them basking in a rare moment of family amity. Then Tamlin straightened up a little, opened his mouth to speak, and Talbot winced, somehow knowing that his brother was about to spoil the mood.

"I did well tonight, didn't I, Father?" asked Tamlin, fatuously, in Talbot's jaundiced opinion.

Father smiled. "Yes, son. All three of you did."

"Then maybe this is a good time for me to tell you something," Tamlin said. "You know those dreary men from Raven's Bluff and wherever else it was?"

Father frowned. "The emissaries? Of course. What about them?"

"Well," the younger man said, "to tell you the truth, I sent them packing."

"You what?"

"Well, they just babbled on and on, and I didn't understand a word of it. I thought it would make life easier if I simply got rid of them, the better to focus on the effort to find you and Mother and catch the rogue who was trying to assassinate us. So I broke off the talks, trying to be nice about it, though I must confess, the outlanders seemed rather peeved even so. They said they would sail for home forthwith."