Unrelenting, Rogger attempted to haul Tylar, but the regent, lost to the song, swept out his sword and came within a hair of removing his friend’s head. Rogger stumbled back, letting him go.
And still she sang, humming, encouraging, welcoming.
Tylar and Krevan were caught in its melody, like flitterbees in a web.
“We must flee!” Sten cried out.
Brant wanted nothing more than to escape-from here, from the cursed fires that flamed out of the stone. But he had not come this far for nothing. His road had led him to this ruin. He would not turn back.
No…
But no one heard him. Maybe he hadn’t even said it aloud. Did he still have a tongue? He tried again, coughing feebly to clear the flames from his throat.
“No…”
Dral glanced down to him. “Master Brant?”
Thank the Grace-blessed oversized ears of the giant.
He could manage no more than a whisper, all but mute to the others. “Get…me…to her.”
Brant did not have to explain whom he meant. Dral glanced into the room. The way stood open.
The giant searched down at Brant, studying his face. He had no strength for words, but Dral must have read the desperation shining through his pained tears. The giant turned to the door, hitched Brant higher under one arm, and charged forward. He knocked the regent aside and bulled across the threshold and through the smatter of oily flames.
The old woman’s eyes widened at the attack. She lifted her arms but dared not let go of the skull. “Stop!” This was more a screech than a song.
Dral merely lowered his shoulder and lunged. Though Grace-born, the giant was not blessed now. The song held no sway. Brant felt a scintillation of power in the air, but Dral was no mere dagger on the wind. He was born of loam. Water and air were no match.
The giant was upon her in three strides. A massive fist shot out and smashed her square in her surprised face. She flew off her feet, blood spurting. The skull tumbled from her slippery palms and clattered to the floor. A tooth broke from it and skittered away.
Brant wriggled from the giant’s arms. He fell to the floor beside the skull. Fire continued to consume him. He stretched with arms that were surely sculptures of boiled fat and ash.
“Stay back!” the woman cried.
Dral strode toward her.
Brant’s hands closed upon the rogue’s skull, where all his heartache had begun. It would now end. Let them both be consumed together.
As his skin touched bone, the fire inside him snuffed out. There was no relief, no cooling balm, simply gone. It left Brant hollowed out. He had been gutted by the fire, and like the charred husk of a burnt stable, he collapsed inward on himself.
And kept falling.
Tylar’s wits returned like a fall of brass pinches, rattling and heavy in his head. Chaos surrounded him. He could make no sense of it for a breath. Beside him, Krevan rose from hands and knees, face screwed with equal confusion.
Tylar found the Godsword in his hand, but he had no memory of drawing it.
“The boy…” Rogger said at his shoulder, nodding his head to the room while keeping a torch high toward the passageway on the right. To the left, the Oldenbrook captain and Krevan’s woman did the same. Tylar’s torch lay at his toes, guttered and blown.
Beyond the torchlight, darkness stirred against the waning flames, drawing down upon them. They were being herded together, driven toward the room.
“Stop the boy!” Rogger said again, rattling those pinches in Tylar’s head back to some semblance of order.
He lifted his sword.
Brant sat in the center of the floor. Past the boy’s shoulder, the giant had Mirra by the throat, pressed against the far wall, dragging her off her toes. Tylar remembered enough.
Seersong.
He swung back to the boy. Brant stared toward him, but his face was empty. Yet, still something glowed behind the glass of his eye. Tylar knew it wasn’t the boy.
Brant opened his mouth.
Tylar rushed forward, sword high. He would not be snared by the lilt of Dark Grace again.
Too late.
Words flowed out the boy’s stretched mouth, echoing from deep within. “HELP THEM…”
It was no song. The agony behind the two words stayed Tylar’s hand. Also there was something oddly familiar about the sibilant cast to the voice.
Though Brant’s lips did not move and no breath seemed to escape his chest, words still flowed.
“HELP THEM… LET THEM ALL BURN… FREE THEM… LET THEM ALL BURN… FIND THEM… LET THEM ALL BURN… ”
It sounded almost like an argument. Even the cadence shifted back and forth, echoing up from some other world. Tylar paused with uncertainty.
But another had no such hesitation.
“What have you done!” Mirra wailed through the throttling hold of the giant. Her wild eyes found Tylar’s, fired with terror. “Kill the boy…before he wakes them! Tylar, kill the boy! ”
Refusing to be swayed again, Tylar backed a step.
“No!” the former castellan cried out. Her hand rose, bearing a small bone dagger. She drove the yellowed blade into the shoulder of the giant.
He bellowed, stumbling back and letting her free. But one arm swung out as he spun away. He cuffed her on the side of the head, felling her to the ground.
The giant caved to his knees. An arm lifted toward them, the same limb that had been wounded. From the impaled blade, a rotting spread out from his shoulder and down his arm. Flesh melted and putrefied to bone. Fingers fell away. The rot flowed to torso and neck. Half the giant’s face sagged on the one side, sloughing from the skull beneath. He screamed, wafting out an exhalation of pus and virulence-then collapsed face forward.
The stone floor silenced his scream.
Forever.
To the side, the boy continued his litany, like the rote cadences that clerics cast to the aether.
“HELP THEM…HELP THEM… LET THEM ALL BURN… ”
Then Rogger was there. He scooped the skull from the boy with a wrap of cloth. It stank of black bile. He shoved it into an empty sling over his shoulder.
Brant collapsed backward, sprawling out on the stone floor.
Was he dead, too?
Then an arm trembled up. Fingers scribed a pattern of confusion.
“Get the boy!” Tylar ordered Krevan. “We must get free from here.”
A moan escaped the boy as he was lifted up and tossed over the large man’s shoulder.
But Brant was not the only one to stir.
To the side, Mirra shoved to the wall, sitting up. “No escape…” she shuddered out.
Tylar turned to the door.
The Oldenbrook captain and Krevan’s woman backed away from the doorway and farther into the room. Beyond the threshold, darkness ate the light. The black ghawls had closed off their only escape.
Closer at hand, the captain’s torch sputtered out with one last gasp of embers and ash. They were down to two flaming brands, one borne by Rogger, the other by the gray-cloaked woman.
Too few to hold back a horde.
Proving this, shadows stretched into the room and spread across the walls. They were forced back. Knights formed out of the gloom, shifting in an ever-flowing weave of malevolence. Mirra was swallowed up along the edge of them.
