the room? If his plan was to dispose of Marabaldia, didn t he realize that this creature would die rather than allow it? He had sat back on his haunches, his face rapt and worshipful, his single eye gleaming as if lit with inner fire.
The pain in Suka s head redoubled. Startled, she looked down at her own hands, and saw that she had raised her crossbow and had aimed it at the middle of the fomorian s back. Her fingers grasped its levers as if their will was different from her own. Then in a moment she understood: She was to kill Marabaldia. And then the cyclops, enraged, was to tear her apart. There was no reason to risk injury to his beautiful dark elves, whom he was likely to consider as superior beings, more nearly on a level with himself. They were there for Poke, the lycanthrope. These other vermin he would leave to exterminate themselves.
Oh, her head hurt. She was astonished that the prince had left her thoughts so clear. His contempt was so profound, he hadn t even bothered to confuse them. Or perhaps he took special pleasure in demonstrating that it was useless to understand. She stood with her feet braced against the crossbow s recoil. Behind her, an empty expanse of brick she knew the gate was there. But she couldn t find it. Her hand tightened on the lever.
Marabaldia, by contrast, was full of feeling. The few thoughts she had were elemental and powerful. She knew Araithe was a twister and a snake, who had betrayed her years ago. If he said her lover was still alive, then maybe her last hope was gone. She stared at the cyclops as if she could bore into his brain through his unprotected eye or reach her hand in through some gratefully surrendered portal and grasp hold of his soul. She saw his lips pull back in terror, revealing his great teeth. She saw his hands fumble for the axe at his belt. She had the iron bar she had taken from her cell, and she d rather die than go back there. For a moment she broke contact with the cyclops. She glanced back at Suka behind her left shoulder. The gnome s pink hair stood up in clumps. Her tongue lolled out and showed her dog tattoo. Her brow creased. She had a puzzled, terrified expression on her face. She swung her crossbow wildly, aiming almost in Marabaldia s face. But she and the gnome had sung their songs together. Marabaldia had nothing to fear from her.
But for security she captured Suka s eyes with her own, just as the gnome jerked up her hand at the last instant and shot her heavy bolt. Marabaldia felt it slide past her ear. She felt the rush of wind. And one of the drow was down, shot in the mouth between his shining teeth. The bolt had done great damage. The drow was screaming, and Suka was screaming too. She bent over and put her hands to her ears, hiding her face. The rest of the drow were moving, and Marabaldia swung her bar. She hoped to catch the leShay prince. He had no weapons that she could see. Nor did he condescend to move aside, but just stood there with that insolent smile on his face while the ragged end of the bar whistled toward him and stopped as if the air around him had turned to jelly, too thick and slippery to penetrate.
Frustrated, Marabaldia searched for the cyclops again, reestablished their link, so that she could wield him like a weapon. He had risen from the ground, his axe in his hand. He caught one of the drow as he ran past him. The axe bit into the back of his head. He had not expected the creature to attack him, and he fell. The others separated into two groups, and two of the dark elves moved toward Suka as the air blackened around them. Prince Araithe was taking the light away. Marabaldia pressed the cyclops to attack him while she struck at one of the drow with her iron bar. Scimitars drawn, wary now, they danced away and then came forward, hacking at her hands.
Suka s fight was over, Poke saw. She knelt with her hands over her ears while the drow stood above her, his sword raised. Confused, maybe, by her helplessness, he didn t bring it down. Now there were three around the giantess, who fought them valiantly with her great bar. And Poke had done nothing yet. She was managing her transformation.
One hand clutched her crossbow. With the other, she unbuttoned her clothes down the front, so she could slip out of them easily. She felt she was climbing down a ladder, down from the furnished living spaces of a house and into a deep cellar. At each rung on the ladder she paused and looked down, before gathering up her courage to proceed. And the cellar was full of smells and noises that were not different from the ones in the house. But they changed in pitch, intensity, and significance as she descended. Foul smells turned intriguing, and then delicious. Speech sounds, which had such preeminence in the World Above, began to blend in with many other noises she had been ignoring, creaks and grunts and raucous breathing, and the subsiding moans of the wounded drow. Underneath these, down another rung, she could hear the shuffle of footsteps and below that, suddenly significant, the movement of rats in the corners of the room.
The light changed at the same time. In her human shape, upstairs, she had watched with the others as the room darkened and the leShay prince worked his magic. But her plan was to sink below the level of his illusions, which were designed, she guessed, for the perceptions of more complicated creatures than mere beasts. And so as she descended the ladder her vision improved, and she could see many things that had been hidden from her up above, including the gate to the courtyard and the outside street, an open postern set into the brick on one side of the wall behind them, with worn stone lintels and a stone threshold, and no door at all. Now she could feel, as if for the first time, the soft breath of outside air. It was a warm evening out there in the cobbled streets of the abandoned town.
And she felt her body change, a sensation that brought with it an intense and aching pain as her joints reformed, her hands stiffened. This pain, bad as it was, was for Poke an outward symptom of a more terrible distortion. Like all the followers of Lady Amaranth, like all the inhabitants of Moray Island who had chosen the way of the climbing rose, she hated this. She hated the feeling of her bestial nature reasserting itself, as she lost by increments the hard-won sense of her own consciousness and sunk instead into a landscape of primal emotions; rage, lust, fear, forsaking all the myriad variations of humankind.
But it was necessary, if she were to help her friends with a surge of mournful pleasure she called them that, understanding also that in a few seconds she would forget the meaning of the word. A sow could fight where a woman could not. Her shoulders rose as her neck disappeared, as her jaw spread apart. Her head broke apart as she turned it to watch the leShay prince with his gloves still in his hand, the little smile still touching his lips. Enormous and furious, the cyclops was attacking him, and yet he did not move. He didn t have to. In a moment the one-eyed creature was down, was crawling toward Prince Araithe on his hands and knees, laboring to lift his axe. But he was already defeated.
Just before her hand ceased to function entirely, before her weapon fell out of it and she herself sank to the ground, she tightened one of her two stiffening fingers on the crossbow s lever, and watched the bolt sing away. The drow had his black hand in Suka s hair, had drawn her head back to cut her throat, when the bolt hit him in the chest. He staggered backward just as Poke sank to the floor. Tusks sprouting from the corners of her mouth, she made her run at the leShay prince. The room seemed bright as day, lit with a radiance that had bleached away all but a few colors from the world.
In her human shape she could see beauty everywhere she looked. But down here there was nothing but chaos. As she moved, she could feel the small tugs of all the mental barriers that Prince Araithe had woven in his own defense. They couldn t hold her down here. She smashed through them like a hand smashing through a curtain of spiderwebs. She scarcely saw or registered or understood the amazed face of her enemy as she seized his right forearm and crushed it between her jaws. She didn t hear his yelp of pain. Instead she turned and dragged him back across the floor, a light, delicate creature with no substance at all in these lower realms. Released from his power, the cyclops staggered to his feet, and with one stroke of his axe he severed the head of one of the three remaining drow that had pressed Marabaldia back against the wall.
The others fled.
Suka had also gotten to her feet. And when Poke dragged the leShay prince out through the postern door, the illusion stretched and snapped and vanished not just for her but for the higher creatures also, and they stumbled out behind her into the dark street.
Chapter Nine — Cross-breeding
Theruined city below Scourtop on Moray Island is by far the oldest sign of sentient habitation in the entire Moonshae archipelago, so old that it has no name in the Common tongue or any other language. The glyphs that decorate the stone table at the mountain s root, the walls of the cavern there, and the carved tablets in the ruined public buildings mean nothing to any living creature. Abraded by the rain and wind, they will disappear before they
