Sword Brother

burst of light like the heart of a sun.

There was no sensation of heat, no stunning concussion such as the flash-bangs Houghton had worked with before would have produced. But from the way the blackness behind his closed eyelids turned abruptly bright red, he rather suspected that the flash itself was even brighter, and the stunning effect of pure light had to be experienced to be believed.

'Now!' a deeper, more powerful voice rumbled, and the two Marines opened their eyes and charged forward at Bahzell Bahnakson's heels.

* * *

Rethak staggered backward, his hands rising to his eyes. The armsmen between him and that abrupt explosion of brilliance had protected him from the worst of it, yet even the relatively small amount which had gotten past them was enough to savage his eyes and fill them not simply with blindness, but with pain, as well.

He was still moving backward when he heard a ghastly, wet, crunching sound and the first screams began.

* * *

Bahzell charged through the intersection, and as he crossed over its threshold, he burst through Rethak's glamour and found himself confronting a passage abruptly packed with armsmen. He couldn't tell exactly how many of them there were, but there were enough to block his way. Unfortunately for them, they were pawing frantically at their stunned, anguished eyes when he suddenly appeared amongst them. The tunnel was too cramped for him to use his sword the way he might have in the open, but there was room enough, and his lunging blade punched through the breastplate of the nearest armsman like an awl through rotten wood. Then he recovered, and his still-blind victim slid backward off the tempered steel, screaming as he clutched at the blood-spouting hole in his cuirass.

'Tomanak!' Bahzell bellowed, and heard the sudden, deafening thunder of his allies' weapons behind him as they spun to the left and right.

Mashita wasn't really concerned about 'accuracy' at a moment like this. The range to his farthest target was no more than sixty feet, and his opponents were packed into a tunnel no more than ten feet across. The armor-piercing ammunition punched through the front ranks, exploding out their backs in spray patterns of blood, then slammed into the men behind them.

Houghton had fewer rounds, and his weapon was incapable of sustained automatic fire, which meant he had to be more selective. He had the selector lever set on three-shot burst, and unlike the men in front of him, he could still see just fine. The glowing dot projected by his day-and-night sight settled on the head of a man less than fifteen feet from him, and his finger stroked. The target went down, and he tracked instantly to his left. Another squeeze, and another helmeted head exploded and another body fell.

* * *

Rethak backed away, still rubbing his stunned, watering eyes, as his ears told him what was happening to his carefully hidden ambush. The ear-shattering roar of the strangers' impossible weapons made it impossible for him to pick any details out of the general cacophony, but that was scarcely necessary.

Panic roared through him, urging him to turn and run, but he retained just enough control to know how stupid that would have been. There was a steep, winding flight of stairs back there. He couldn't possibly get down them without killing himself when he couldn't even see. Not that standing here, waiting while Bahzell Bahnakson carved his way towards him seemed like a much better option. Some of the armsmen felt the same way, and he staggered as two or three of them shouldered past him. They ran frantically, bouncing off the wall for guidance, forgetful (or uncaring) of the stairs in their panic, and an instant later he heard fresh screams from behind him-screams which were cut off with bone-snapping suddenness-as they went headlong down the steep stair.

He blinked again, and his heart spasmed with sudden hope. The barrier of armsmen in front of him had shielded his eyes from the direct impact of that intolerable flash, and his vision was recovering much more rapidly than theirs had. He could actually make out blurry ghosts of images, and he rubbed more furiously, willing his sight to clear.

It did . . . just as an enormous shape, glittering with a nimbus of blue light, loomed up before him.

Rethak squealed and turned to dash after the fleeing armsmen, but it was too late. He was still turning when an avalanche of gory steel sheared effortlessly through his neck.

XVI

'Rethak is dead, Tremala!'

The sorceress' head twitched as Garsalt's voice spoke in her ear.

'What happened?' she demanded. 'Was it Wencit?'

'No,' Garsalt sounded as if he were about to wet himself, she thought. 'It was Bahzell. He and those other two. They mowed down Rethak's armsmen, and then Bahzell took his head off before he could run.'

Despite the fear quivering under the surface of their own thoughts, Tremala's eyebrows arched.

'Why in the Lady's name did the idiot let Bahzell Bahnakson into sword's reach of him?'

'I think he was blind until it was too late.' She could hear Garsalt's heavy breathing, almost taste his panic. 'Wencit cast some kind of light spell. It was so bright none of them could even see while Bahzell and the others cut them down. Phrobus! It was bright enough it almost blinded me through the gramerhain! I think Rethak's vision was just starting to clear when-'

Garsalt stopped. Not, Tremala reflected, that there was any real need for him to finish the sentence. A light spell! Who would have expected that? And yet, it was as brilliantly effective as it was simple. Wencit's precious Strictures prohibited him from using his sorcery to harm any non-wizard except in direct self-defense, but there was no prohibition against temporarily blinding them.

Even if it did leave them totally helpless against someone else.

'What are they doing now?' she half-snarled.

'They're still headed straight towards the chamber.'

'Garsalt, there's no way anyone could go 'straight' anywhere in this miserable place, and he has at least four options now that he's finished off Rethak! I need better than that, idiot!'

Garsalt didn't reply immediately-not in words, at any rate. An instant later, however, a diagram of the temple's tunnels, looking for all the world like an intertwined ball of snakes, appeared before her. It floated at eye level, and she saw one of the twisting strands glowing red. It connected Rethak's last position to the sacrificial chamber, but it wasn't the shortest of the possible pathways, and she wondered for a moment why Bahzell had chosen it. Then she realized. No, it wasn't the shortest path, once its sinuous twists and turns were allowed for, but it had started out leading in the direction of the shortest straight-line distance between Rethak's position and the hradani's objective.

'All right,' she said, 'I see it. And I think I can cut them off here-' a flick of her finger turned an intersection in the highlighted tunnel a pulsating green, instead of red '- and at least slow them down. But I'm not sure there's any point, if Cherdahn doesn't get his damned demon under control quickly.'