“All right, Nabu,” I said. “Maybe your soul is worth taking after all.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I will destroy all of you fools!” Nabu roared, his voice no longer the husky croak of an old man but instead the thunderous bellow of a mighty warrior. “After I devour your hearts and drink your lifeblood, my master will make me a demigod!”
“The Blood God is very much alive and well, I’d say,” I commented to Elyse, “unless the Lord of Light has had a very radical change in diet. I’m pretty sure your god doesn’t require blood sacrifices and human hearts, and there’s no way this crazy shit Nabu is pulling can come solely from his bishop’s powers.”
“You’re right,” she said, staring at Nabu with a mixture of hatred and horror. “The Lord’s ring he’s wearing does give him mighty powers, but this is something else.”
“It doesn’t matter how he got these powers,” Rami interjected. “What matters right now is not getting killed by them—look out!”
Nabu aimed his warhammer at us, and a torrent of blinding white flame tore through the air. Instinct kicked in, and I dove out of the way. Elyse and Rami also performed some rapid evasive maneuvers, but one of my skeletons wasn’t quite so lucky. The pillar of fire blasted straight through him, the roaring flames swallowing him up. A second or two later, when Nabu dispelled the inferno, there was nothing left of the skeleton but a few scattered, smoldering ashes.
“It’s going to be quite hard to drink our lifeblood if you burn it all up,” I muttered, ducking and rolling as Nabu summoned another stream of white fire from his hammer.
As I came up from the roll, I flung a throwing star at him. He was wearing a helm now, but it wasn’t a great helm like those of the Resplendent Crusaders. While it did protect his cheeks, it was open around his eyes, nose, and most of his mouth. This gave me a much bigger target. I didn’t intend to hurt him with the first throwing star I sent his way, though. I merely wanted to test his reflexes, to see if, beneath this outer shell of a towering warrior, his reaction time was still that of an elderly drunkard.
It wasn’t. Moving with almost superhuman speed, Nabu deflected the throwing star with a contemptuous flick of his gauntlet.
“Is that the best you can do, Lord Chauzec? I could have bested you without assuming this form!”
“Oh, I haven’t even gotten started with you, you wrinkly pile of troll shit. We’re only just—”
I had to dive and take cover behind a concrete pillar when Nabu sent another roaring wall of white fire my way. Even though the pillar was at least four feet thick, the intense heat from the supernatural fire made my skin blister, and I had to jump back.
I’d felt Isu’s presence earlier, when I’d picked up the Crusader’s shield, but she hadn’t shown herself, and now, she seemed to have disappeared. A pity. I could have used a new power about now. Still, I was sure I could take out Nabu with what I already had. It was simply a matter of outwitting him. And then kicking his ass.
Fang snarled and pawed the floor as he prepared to charge Nabu. The giant lizard’s scales may have been impervious to steel, but I doubted that they could resist fire of this intensity. I sent out a hasty mental command to Fang to step back and take cover; I couldn’t afford to lose him now. He scrambled out of the way, scuttling behind a row of pillars just as Nabu sent a flaming torrent in his direction.
“We need to get that asshole’s warhammer out of his hands,” I said to Elyse, joining her behind a pew where we were temporarily shielded from Nabu’s view. “Get your rope ready. I’ll distract him. When he’s busy with me, you send your rope over to him. Use it to yank that fucking hammer out of his hands. Got it?”
Elyse gritted her teeth and nodded, and her hands began to glow with golden light. Nabu was busy blasting jets of flame at my skeletons, who were ducking and jumping behind pillars and pews. While he was distracted, I scrambled on my hands and knees over to the pillar where Rami was hiding.
“You enjartas are good with throwing stars, right?” I asked.
She nodded, so I pulled a couple of mine out and handed them to her.
“I need you to distract Nabu with these while I make a run for a Crusader shield. Wait until I get to that pew over there.” I gestured to the spot almost 10 yards away. “When I give you the signal, launch a couple of stars his way.”
I continued crouching as I went over to the pew closest to the shield. I figured I’d need something more powerful than my new shield trick to deal with Nabu. But it was the only shot I had. And he was dispensing with more of my skeletons with every passing second.
Grave Oath throbbed in my hand, almost bursting from the power of the souls it had consumed. I turned it over in my hand and stared at the demon head on the pommel.
“I sure as hell hope this is gonna work, Isu,” I whispered. “I could use some confirmation before I run out and expose myself to a wall of fire, though.”
A brief, chilly gust of wind ripped in through the smashed stained glass window, and it swirled around me.
Isu was here.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you choose to call upon your goddess,” whispered a faint but familiar voice on the rippling wind. “Picture in your mind the coldest, darkest tomb, where the power of Death rules over everything. Send your mind, heart, and soul into the deepest, most ancient tombs of the Old
