Troy Denning - The Cerulean Storm

“Borys sent them for Rkard!” she called, pointing at her son. “Take him and go!”

Caelum passed their son to Magnus. The windsinger started up the road with Rikus tucked under one arm and Rkard under the other, and the dwarf raised a hand toward the sun.

Neeva glanced over her shoulder and saw that the inixes remained a dozen paces behind. Normally, the lizards would have caught her in a matter of steps, but with a heavy cargo dray harnessed to their shoulders, they were not as swift as usual.

“Sadira will help me, Caelum. You go with Rkard!” Neeva commanded. She pointed at the many fissures lacing the hard granite next to the road. “The scorpion that stung Rikus was possessed by a wraith. There may be more.”

Caelum stopped short of casting his spell and ran after Magnus, positioning himself between the windsinger and the wall.

“Hurry, Neeva!” Sadira called, her hand still on the rope. “I can’t cast another spell until I drop this one.”

As Sadira spoke, a flurry of gray forms streamed out of nearby crevices and streaked over to her. Before Neeva could cry a warning, the wraiths attacked, their immaterial hands sinking into the sorceress’s flesh as though it were air.

A cloud of black shadow billowed from Sadira’s mouth. Her glowing eyes flared white, and her ebony body trembled with the pain of the onslaught. She did not release the rope to save herself.

One more gray streak flashed up from the valley below, slipping over the side of the Cloud Road to join the attack on Sadira. Neeva looked down and saw that the wraith that had animated the merchant’s corpse was gone. It had been waiting to join its fellows in the assault against the sorceress.

The wraiths had played her for a fool, Neeva realized. They had never intended to take Rkard but had only demanded him so that the company would concentrate on protecting the child. Then they had struck at their true target: Sadira.

Behind the sorceress, Magnus was rushing back to help, leaving Caelum to guard Rikus and Rkard, whom he had dropped upon the Cloud Road. Neeva did not think he would arrive in time. She kneeled and felt the roadway shuddering with the heavy footsteps of the inixes.

“Drop the spell!” Neeva yelled.

Sadira shook her head and did not release the rope. Her emberlike eyes burned with pain. She flung her free arm about madly, trying to shake off a pair of wraiths clinging to it. Her ebony body had turned gray in many places.

“I’m fine!” Neeva yelled. The warrior pressed her hand to the pulsing road, directly over the rope, and called, “Save yourself!”

Neeva faced the inixes and found the huge beasts upon her. The first beast snapped at her head. She ducked, thrusting her sword into the lizard’s maw. The reptile closed its jaws on the steel blade and whipped its head around, ripping the weapon from the warrior’s hand. The second inix opened its sharp beak, pushing the first reptile aside.

The surface of the road suddenly grew cold. It stopped shimmering, and Neeva knew that Sadira had dropped the spell. The warrior felt the bite of the rope across her palm, then she was falling. She closed her fingers around the cord, all that remained of Sadira’s bridge, and caught herself.

The dray dropped onto the rope, causing a sharp jerk, then tipped to one side. As the wagon fell past Neeva, the second inix snapped at her dangling legs. She kicked its beak away, and the beast was gone.

When the warrior looked back to her companions, a sick feeling filled her chest. Sadira was engulfed in a swirling ball of black shadow and gray haze, just transparent enough to reveal that she had risen no farther than her hands and knees. The sorceress’s limbs were all shaking violently, while her weakly glowing eyes stared blankly at the road’s slate surface.

Magnus stood behind her, singing an angry, tempestuous song, while a hot wind tore at the gray wraiths in a vain attempt to rip the apparitions away. Caelum was cautiously approaching the pair, taking care to keep himself between the wraiths and his son.

Neeva hauled herself toward her companions, traveling along the rope hand over hand. The two wraiths that had been animating the inixes streaked up to join the attack. As soon as they rose above the surface of the road, Magnus’s searing windsong sent them tumbling away.

They circled back to approach from below the surface.

Neeva reached the edge of the gap and transferred her hands to the slate roadway. “The last two are coming from underneath!” she warned.

Magnus’s shoulders drooped, and Neeva knew that the windsinger’s spell would not penetrate through stone. Nevertheless, he did what he could to help Sadira, directing his voice down at the surface of the road. The hot gusts simply curled up into his own face. As the last two wraiths passed through the stone directly beneath Sadira and joined the attack, Neeva pulled herself onto the road.

A groan of exhaustion escaped Sadira’s lips, and the sorceress collapsed to her side. The ball of shadow and haze settled over her like a veil, leaving nothing exposed except her flowing locks of amber hair and her emberlike eyes, now blazing a sickly hue of greenish-blue. The murky shroud turned completely black, then flashed to gray, and began to alternate between the two colors at rapid intervals.

“We’ve got to do something!” Neeva said.

“We can’t,” said Caelum. “The wraiths are swarming her spirit. Any attempt to drive them away will harm her more than it does them.”

“Then we have to attack them another way.” Neeva stepped past her husband and took the Scourge from Rkard, who still held the enchanted sword.

“What will you do with that?” asked Magnus.

“I saw Rikus slice a shadow giant’s hand off with this blade,” the warrior explained. “Maybe it will work against wraiths, too.”

Neeva studied Sadira’s flickering shroud for several moments. Finally, the warrior felt confident she could predict the changes. She waited for the pall to turn gray and gently drew the tip of the Scourge along the sorceress’s shoulder, hoping it would slice through a wraith’s insubstantial body without harming Sadira.

A vicious screech echoed off the cliff wall, and a gray ribbon flew off the whirling mass. It shot up the Scourge’s blade in a pearly streak, then expanded to form a gray, cloudlike mass around the weapon.

The warrior thought she had destroyed a wraith. The gray cloud slowly assumed a shape vaguely resembling that of a human female. A pair of orange eyes appeared in the head, and the hazy figure began to shrink. Neeva felt a searing sting as the apparition passed through her flesh, then the sword’s hilt twisted in her hand.

“Get back!” she yelled. “The wraith’s trying to animate the Scourge!”

The sword wrenched violently against her thumb and came free. It did not fall to the ground but floated tip down in front of the warrior. The entire weapon had turned gray, and a pair of angry orange eyes burned out from the pommel. The point slowly began to rise toward Neeva’s heart. Caelum started to reach for the hilt but pulled back when a line of blue frost shot down the length of the blade.

The Scourge stopped rising. The steel began to quiver, filling the air with an eerie, high-pitched wail.

“What’s happening?” Neeva asked.

“The Scourge’s magic is too powerful for the wraith,” Magnus replied, a note of urgency in his voice. “Perhaps we should move-”

Before the windsinger finished, the sword emitted a blue flash of cold. The blade stopped vibrating, and the shrill wail of quivering steel was replaced by a howl of pain. Ribbons of gray shadow flew in all directions, trailing droplets of sleet.

Neeva and the others threw themselves to the ground. The Scourge continued to float, wobbling madly. The blade flexed almost in two. It straightened with a deafening knell, and the sword’s shroud exploded into a cloud of gray haze. For an instant, the road seemed very quiet. Then the weapon clanged to the ground, and the cloud dissolved into a squall of ash-colored snowflakes. The tiny crystals did not even last long enough to fall. In the blistering heat of the day, they evaporated long before they reached the Cloud Road.