Troy Denning - The Cerulean Storm

A stone shifted beneath Rikus’s foot and went tumbling down to the boiling black pond below. The mul’s legs buckled, and he dropped to his seat, landing hard on the crest of the crater’s rim. He managed to keep Neeva cradled tight against his chest, but she groaned anyway.

Rkard was at their side in an instant. “Careful!” The boy scowled at Rikus. “We’re not even supposed to move her.”

“I’m sorry. We have no choice,” said Rikus.

Sadira came over the rim and joined them. “The sorcerer-kings might come through the arch at any moment,” she said, bracing herself on Neeva’s axe to rest. Rkard had sealed the punctures in her stomach and had dressed the burns she had suffered when Tithian had used the Lens against her, but the sorceress still looked pained and fatigued. “You don’t want our enemies to find her, do you?”

“I want you to kill the sorcerer-kings,” said the boy. Neeva took her son’s arm. “Haven’t we talked about this?”

“But they killed Borys,” the boy retorted.

“And maybe they’ll kill the sorcerer-kings later,” Neeva said. She winced with pain, then added, “But they can’t do it now, not with the Scourge broken and Sadira’s powers gone until morning.”

“This is dangerous, Mother,” Rkard protested. “I’m supposed to heal you at least one more time before moving you. Otherwise, you might not walk again.”

“If the sorcerer-kings find me, I won’t live long enough to walk,” Neeva said, her voice growing stern. She looked up at Rikus. “Take me down.”

“Don’t drop her this time,” Rkard ordered. He went down the slope first, kicking loose stones out of the mul’s path.

“He doesn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Rikus,” Neeva said. “After what happened to Caelum, he’s scared to death that he’ll lose me, too.”

“I won’t let that happen,” the mul said.

“Sshhh.” Neeva touched her fingers to his lips. “During the war with Urik, I thought you learned not to make promises you can’t keep.”

The mul shrugged. “Some things never change, I guess.”

Rikus shifted his gaze down the hill. A dozen paces below, the black sludge from his sword had filled the bottom of the crater. Dark wisps of shadow rose from its surface, while yellow eyes blinked in the center of slow-spinning eddies. In places, warped spouts of slime oozed up to form disfigured silhouettes of four-footed birds, two-headed men, and mekillots with long, writhing tails at both ends. Sometimes, the weird beasts even seemed to take on lives of their own, making their way to the shore and crawling a short distance up the slope before they dissolved into sticky messes and drained into the ground.

Rikus thought it a mark of his company’s desperation that they had picked this place to hide Neeva, but he had been unable to think of another plan to protect the injured warrior from the sorcerer-kings. As Neeva had told her son, with the Scourge gone, he and Sadira would not be killing any more sorcerer-kings-at least not until the sorceress’s powers returned in the morning.

Rikus followed Rkard to a jagged tumble of boulders that offered shelter both from searching eyes and splashing ooze. He kneeled down and deposited Neeva in the center of the cluster, bracing her back against a large stone. She glanced through a gap toward the black pond, just a few steps below.

“This should do,” she said, nodding. “The sorcerer-kings won’t be anxious to come down here. You two go on.”

Rkard’s eyes widened. “Go? Where?”

“Now that your mother’s safe, we must find Tithian,” Sadira said.

“No!” The boy grabbed Rikus’s arm. “The Dragon’s dead. You have to stay here.”

Rikus’s heart grew as heavy as stone. “There’s nothing I’d like more,” he said. “But I can’t. If we let Tithian go, he’ll release an evil even more powerful than the Dragon.”

“I know-Rajaat,” the boy answered. “But without the Dragon to keep him locked away, isn’t Rajaat going to escape sooner or later anyway?”

“Not if we capture the Dark Lens,” Sadira explained. “When I touched Rikus’s sword to it, I felt magic as powerful as the sun’s. I think we can use the Lens to keep Rajaat imprisoned.”

“And that means you have to leave my mother in danger?” Rkard asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Rikus answered.

The boy turned away. “My father wouldn’t leave her.”

“Rkard, don’t …”

Neeva let her command trail off and raised her hands to wipe away the tears suddenly brimming in her eyes.

“Look at this,” she said, staring at her wet fingers in amazement. “I haven’t cried since I was a child, when Tithian bought me for his gladiator pits.”

“Water for Caelum,” Sadira said. “Don’t hold it back.”

“I couldn’t if I tried.” Neeva watched her tears tumble to the ground, shaking her head with unspoken regrets. Sadira laid a hand on the warrior’s arm but seemed unable to find the words to comfort her friend. Rikus realized that the sorceress knew the same thing he did: it was too late to apologize now. The spirits of the dead did not hear the voices of their loved ones or even remember their names.

Sadira touched Rikus’s arm. “We’d better go.”

The mul pulled his dagger and held it out toward Rkard’s back. “I don’t know if this blade will do you any good, but it might.”

When the boy did not turn around, Neeva said, “Rikus is leaving now, Rkard. Do you want this to be the way he remembers you?”

“No,” the boy said. He turned around and, without meeting Rikus’s glance, accepted the dagger. “Good luck.”

The mul patted the boy’s shoulder. “Take care of your mother,” he said. “And if we’re not back by the time she’s walking, leave without us.”

Rkard looked up, his eyes wide with fear. “You’ve got to come back! If you don’t …” He paused, collecting his composure, then said, “I don’t even know the way.”

“If we must, we can find it together.” Neeva took her son’s hand and pulled him to her side, then fixed her green eyes on Sadira. “Don’t make the mistake I did. Say everything.”

The sorceress gazed at Rkard and did not answer for several moments, then finally said, “I will.”

Sadira handed the axe to Rikus, and together they climbed the hill. As they started over the top, the mul paused and ran his eyes over the crest of the rim. “I dropped the top part of the Scourge up here somewhere,” he said. “When the sorcerer-kings come, it might be useful to have the hilt in my scabbard. Maybe we can bluff them into leaving us alone.”

“It can’t hurt to try,” Sadira said. She pointed to a location several dozen paces away, near the top of the small hill. A small circle of ground was covered with an ugly black stain. “Look over there.”

The mul walked to the area. He found the Scourge behind a boulder, with the hilt lying uphill above what was left of the blade. Black slime continued to ooze from the jagged break, creating a bubbling pool of sludge tipped at the angle of the slope. As with the larger pond inside the crater, wisps of shadow rose from its surface, and yellow eyes peered out from the center of slowly swirling eddies.

Rikus considered the amount of sludge still oozing from the blade, then decided it might be better to leave the shard alone. He started to return to Sadira.

The mul stopped a step later, when he glimpsed an orange light flash beneath the great arch. When the glow faded, the four sorcerer-kings and the remaining sorcerer-queen stood between the pillars of the great edifice, their eyes roving over the broken plain. The distance from the crater to the arch was just small enough for the mul to see his enemies clearly. The runt of a limb had sprouted from the stump of Nibenay’s severed arm, and Hamanu showed no sign of discomfort from the dagger that had been plunged into his back.