actions. Her face was set with determination as she slipped into the role she had agreed to play and handed the baby over with open eyes and an unfeeling heart. Now it was a matter of timing, skill, precision, and luck.
Lightning struck at the edge of the docks, causing shouts of surprise from the gathering. The new acolyte had turned for just an instant to glance in the direction of the lightning strike. Sixx had squeezed his eyes shut as he chanted. The flash of light made him look out to the dock. Myrmeen knew he would see her face, which was illuminated from the apparatus's brilliance, when he looked back. Her opening would last for only a second or two.
Thought and action merged as she pulled back the folds of her cape, lifted the twin loaded crossbows that had been tied to her waist sash, and fired both weapons. The first shaft plunged into the cluster of eyes in Lord Sixx's chest; the second struck the apparatus, knocking it from his hands. The smaller blue-white construct hit the marble at their feet. Its counterpart wavered slightly, the palace of lightning shuddering, then regaining its form and brilliance.
For a moment, Lord Sixx teetered in shock, his words of evocation halted in midsentence. Myrmeen heard a slight whistle of air and prayed that the shaft Reisz had fired from his perch would strike true. She felt a sudden rush of wind at her side and saw a blur of motion as Lord Sixx was thrust out of the way of the shaft and Dymas suddenly appeared with a grunt of agony and surprise, Reisz's arrow buried in his skull. The flayed man went down, his lifeless body falling upon his master's wounded form.
'This one dies for your crime,' said the acolyte.
Myrmeen turned to see the old woman to whom she had handed the infant. The woman's charred black nails suddenly extended into claws that were positioned to descend and tear the infant into bloody ribbons. Before Myrmeen could act, a sword arced through the air and severed the head of the old woman. Myrmeen rushed forward and snatched the baby as the headless body fell.
Krystin stood before her, chest heaving, the sword she had used to kill the acolyte scraping the docks' wooden surface. She was trembling, covered in blood. Although they knew they were dead, that no one would rescue them from the angry mob of creatures that was just now assimilating the shocking events of the last few moments, Myrmeen and Krystin smiled. A strange, insane look passed between them.
'You really should have been my daughter,' Myrmeen said with a laugh as barren as the giggle of a man being led to the executioner's blade. 'You're as arrogant and stupid as I ever was.'
'I love you, too, Mom,' Krystin whispered.
Before them, Lord Sixx was being helped to his knees by the remaining acolytes. The woman with the splash of red upon her black cloak had retrieved the apparatus. Another acolyte was dragging away Magistrate Dymas's body. Myrmeen had no time to react as Lord Sixx produced the edged weapon he had displayed in Pieraccinni's lair, the one Alden had described to her. He pressed the center gem of three rubies on the jagged blade's hilt, and the two knives that had been squeezed together sprang apart, revealing a strand of razor-sharp wire that stretched between them.
Myrmeen knew she could not leap out of the way with the baby in her hands. The fighter clutched the child and turned her back on Lord Sixx as he threw the knife. Krystin screamed her mother's name.
Pain suddenly exploded in Myrmeen's shoulder. Her left arm went limp, forcing her to hold the baby with one arm. She fell to her knees as she pressed the child to her breasts, determined to shield it with her own body. A single thought raced through her:
Reisz, shoot them! Damn you, Reisz, where are you?
Lightning struck, and from the sudden illumination she saw that the rooftop where he had been perched was empty. From his vantage it must have appeared that Sixx had been struck, and Reisz was scrambling down to help her, not realizing that he had left her to die.
Her entire back was soaked with blood and she quickly became light-headed and dizzy. A moment later it occurred to her that she had not been engulfed by the creatures gathered on the dock. She looked up to see that the monsters had come as close as they could with any degree of safety.
The magic of the apparatus is fatal to them upon contact, Myrmeen thought. Only Sixx and the old woman were safe because they had recited spells of protection against the energies. Dymas had gone to Sixx's side even when he knew it would mean his death; Reisz's arrow had been unnecessary.
'Take her,' Myrmeen said, assuming that Krystin was close. The girl appeared before the fighter and took the child from her arms. Myrmeen dragged herself to her feet and turned to confront Lord Sixx.
Behind them, the structures formed by the apparatus suddenly revealed an open center. In that void, a large, rolling cloud of nebulous energy appeared. At the center of the sphere that was forming Myrmeen could see a second round patch of darkness and understood that she was not merely looking at the absence of light, but at entropy, the unraveling of all physical principles known to humanity. The black dot at the ball's core grew until it resembled a pupil.
An eye, Myrmeen thought in shock. She realized that she was staring at the detached eye of something large enough to dwarf the docks, a creature that looked out with eyes of darkness and absorbed reality in its wake, changing the laws of reason to suit its own desires.
'Lord Sixx, it is time!' the first acolyte screamed.
'No,' he hissed. 'This one dies first.'
Myrmeen drew her stolen sword, which she had taken from the shop they had looted, and advanced on the man, her legs nearly giving out with the exertion.
'Not that way,' Lord Sixx said as he yanked her crossbow shaft from the cluster of eyes in his exposed chest. The Eyes of Domination flared. 'Watch closely.'
The five remaining eyes on his chest suddenly locked their gazes with Myrmeen's and changed color. All five suddenly took on the cast of her own eyes-deep blue with golden slivers-and suddenly she was no longer on the docks. The rain had stopped, and her wound had vanished. Darkness surrounded her.
She wondered briefly if she were dead. She knew that it could happen very quickly: an explosion so instant and devastating that she would have no time to become aware of her moment of death. In her mind she ran through a catalogue of other ways in which she could have been dispatched that would explain her presence in this noiseless, formless void.
'What's happening?' she cried. 'Where am I?'
She recalled the eyes of Lord Sixx, the eyes she had seen in a nightmare. Suddenly she understood. He had used those eyes to transport her to another place, a land of the mind. None of this was real.
But how could that be? she wondered. It felt real. It tasted real. The sounds were very real. Music slowly drifted in her direction. Bellophat? No, that was impossible. He had been destroyed, his music stopped forever. She recognized the lullaby, played on a lute, one of her father's compositions.
'Help me,' a distraught voice called from behind her. She turned, fairly certain that what she would see would be a horror that would inflame her nightmares for years, should she survive this encounter and escape this place.
Her father was there. His body had been pulled apart, stretched to impossible elasticity as it had been in her dream. But this time his face and chest were still intact, while the rest of his body had been ripped to steaming bands of muscle, bone, and bleeding tissue.
'I went there because you were hungry,' he sobbed. 'I didn't want to die. I wouldn't have if not for you.'
She was not moving. Her legs were not in motion, but she was getting closer to the web. In a sudden, instinctive burst of understanding, she knew that this gibbering creature before her was not her father. It was nothing more than a nightmare Sixx had dredged up from her past. This isn't real, she thought. Sixx is trying to get at me though my weaknesses, my fears. But I'm tired of being afraid. I'm sick of feeling guilty.
Sixx could shape this place to suit his needs. She understood that if he broke her will here, he would control her forever. And if he murdered her in this place, she would die in the real world. A smile came to her face, because she knew that it also worked both ways.
'I've had enough,' she said, pressing her hands together as if she were clutching a sword. Suddenly a long, burning silver shaft sliced itself from the darkness and she felt the weight of her phoenix armor.
/
