Shadowplay

small rise of stone with half a dozen dead guards sprawled at his feet and something burning brightly in his hand—a flaming skull...?

If you want to live another moment, boy, the fairy’s voice trumpeted through his thoughts, THEN LIE DOWN!

Barrick threw himself toward the ground even as Gyir’s arm swept forward and what seemed a tiny comet hurtled across the cavern. For a moment everything seemed to stop—the faces of guards and prisoners lifted and turned like sunflowers as they followed the path of the blazing thing —then a blast of heat and light crashed across the cavern and rolled Barrick violently before dropping him again. He lay in a vibrating silence, unable to get up, as if lightning had struck only a short distance away.

The rush of ideas into his head was so violent that at first Barrick could make no sense of the demigod’s angry burst of words and thoughts—he felt only a huge hammer of noise pounding at his ears and mind until he felt sure his head would collapse like an eggshell.

“...HOW DID THAT MONGREL CREATURE, THAT FACELESS SLUG, GET HIS HANDS ON MY PRECIOUS FIREPOWDER...?”

Stunned and limp, Barrick thought it might be easiest simply to lie here on his back and let the world end, but a small, nagging voice in the back of his mind kept suggesting that perhaps a prince should meet his death sitting up. He rolled over, trying to get his legs under him.

Another thunderous crack, farther away this time and followed not by ringing silence but by hoarse screams, proved that at least there was still sound and direction and distance. Barrick sat up and brushed something wet off his arm—a rag of bloody skin, but not his own. The rest of the shaggy guard and his two companions, victims of the first of the flaming things Gyir had thrown, were scattered across several yards of cavern floor. Even in such chaos, Barrick was glad the lights were dim: it was madly strange to see things that were so small and yet obviously part of a person who had been alive only moments before.

Gyir, who had been surrounded by guards and prisoners, now stood alone in a widening circle as creatures scrambled away from him in all directions. The fairy held a dirt-smeared death’s head in each hand, and Barrick wondered what strange magic the faceless warrior had summoned.

Get up and run, Barrick Eddon. Gyir’s words echoed in his head and he clambered to his feet almost without realizing.

I will keep them back as long as my fireballs last.

Barrick could not frame the words, but Gyir must have sensed his confusion.

Exploding devices. I had those I could command pack skulls with gun-flour, seal them with mud, and leave them here for me. This way Jikuyin’s victims will get at least a little revenge! Gyir’s thoughts billowed like windblown flame —he was laughing! For the first time Barrick could feel that the fairy had truly been raised in battle, that it was his element in a way it would never be Barrick’s. Now go, while I hold them at bay! Strike for the surface!

But Vansen...!

Is gone, likely dead. All that is certain is that he is lost to us now. You must go. Do you yet have the thing I gave you?

Barrick had forgotten the mirror. His hand crept to his shirt.

Yes.

Think of it no more. Flee! I will do what I can here. But you have to come with me...!

It is more important that at least one of us escapes, Barrick Eddon. Take it to the king in the House of the People. Now go. But...!

“ENOUGH!” The demigod Jikuyin rose up above a screeching herd of prisoners with flames running in their fur or their ragged clothes. The ogre seemed to grow like a ship’s bellying sail until his head threatened to bump the roof of the cavern. “YOU HAVE WASTED ENOUGH OF MY TIME, STORM LANTERN. THE DOOR TO THE EARTHLORD’S HOME IS OPEN. NO LAW, NOT EVEN THE BOOK OF THE FIRE OF THE VOID ITSELF, SAYS I CANNOT SEAL THE CHARM BY SQUEEZING THE BLOOD OUT OF THIS MORTAL CHILD LIKE WATER FROM A BAG OF WHEY!” Jikuyin took a stride toward Barrick, but Gyir bent and lit another muddied skull from the torch by his feet, then straightened and flung the fizzing, sparking ball toward the towering shape. It spat a great gout of fire and hot air as it flared at the giant’s feet and knocked him staggering, but it flung Barrick back onto his knees as well.

Run, said Gyir in a small, insistent voice, and then he lit two more skulls and flung them at Jikuyin. Before they had even struck, the fairy was running toward the roaring demigod with a spear he must have taken from one of the guards. Then the giant and Gyir both disappeared in the doublecrash of light and sound: Barrick could feel the skin on his cheeks blistering in the heat.

Barrick got up again, dizzy, with head throbbing and eyes blurred by stinging tears. He was almost blind, anyway—the cavern was full of billowing dust. He stumbled toward what he hoped was the way out, stepping over bodies that squirmed slowly, like dying insects. One of the hairy guards, its face nearly burned away, clutched weakly at his shin with charred fingers. Barrick crushed the creature’s skull with his booted foot, then pulled an ax out of its clawed grip, a weapon he could wield with his one good hand. He half climbed, half stumbled up the slope toward the doorway leading out of the great cavern. All the other prisoners and guards who could do so seemed to have fled through it already: nothing blocked his way but corpses and whimpering near-corpses.

When he reached the opening, Barrick turned back to see the demigod Jikuyin outlined by the flames in which he stood, grinning and roaring so that his cracked face seemed about to split open, with Gyir clutched in his great hand. The fairy, who should have been crushed by that awesome grip, instead stabbed and stabbed at the giant’s chest with his spear, each thrust followed by a spurt of black blood, each spurt only seeming to make Jikuyin laugh louder.

“YOU CANNOT HURT ME!” the giant shouted. “THE ICHOR OF SVEROS HIMSELF RUNS IN MY VEINS! I COULD DROWN YOUR ENTIRE RACE IN MY BLOOD AND STILL SURVIVE!”

Gyir jabbed silently, not just at Jikuyin’s chest and face, but at his massive hand, too, struggling to keep the giant from throttling out his life.

“I WILL FIND YOUR LITTLE SUNLANDER BOY LIKE A CAT FINDS A LIMPING MOUSE,” Jikuyin chortled. “THEN I WILL RIDE HIS BLOOD TO THE VERY SEAT OF THE GODS!”

Barrick knew he should run—should take advantage of Gyir’s sacrifice, however hopeless—but now something new distracted him. The light of a torch had bloomed in the cavern’s entrance. Several Drows, the twisted creatures that looked like Funderlings, had pushed a huge corpsewagon into the cavern doorway. This one was not loaded with the bodies of dead prisoners but with barrels, and the barrels were surrounded by dry straw.

A bearded Drow sat atop the barrels. He seemed oblivious to the bizarre, apocalyptic events in the cavern below him, his eyes fixed instead on something in the middle of the air. He might have been an old man beside a busy road, content to wait until his passage would be perfectly safe.

“AND WHEN I HAVE THE EARTHLORD’S POWER,”

Jikuyin was gloating, oblivious to the thick, shining blood that oozed down his front, heedless of the dozen new wounds on his face and neck, “I WILL PAINT YOUR PEOPLE’S EPITAPH WITH THE JUICES I WRING FROM YOUR CORPSES! AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT EPITAPH WILL BE?”

I know what yours will be. Gyir’s thought was so quiet that Barrick could barely understand it, although he stood only a few dozen yards away. It will be, “He was not good at thinking ahead.”

The fairy’s arm shot out. His spear jabbed so hard it pushed all the way through the demigod’s neck and out the nape. Jikuyin bellowed in anger, but did not seem any more crippled by this blow than by the others. Gyir leaped onto the giant’s neck and used the shaft of the protruding spear as an anchor so he could wrap his arms and legs tightly around Jikuyin’s head. The ogre’s cries of rage now as loud as the earlier explosions, he staggered out into the middle of the track that ran down from the doorway to the cleared space in front of the earth god’s black gateway.

The driver atop the wagon full of barrels raised the torch and waved it. The little men massed behind him