Llesi realized it in the same instant and Miller felt in his brain the beginnings of some plan take shape—too late. For now there was a strange heaviness in the very air about him—a familiar heaviness. … This was the weapon Brann had used on him once before, turning the air itself to a crushing weight that had all but smashed his ribs in upon the laboring lungs.
He felt his knees buckle under that sudden, overwhelming pressure. The air screamed around him and the vast hanging curtains of the dais billowed with a serpentine motion as displaced air moved with hurricane suddenness through the great room. Miller’s breath was stopped in his chest by that unbearable pressure. His ears sang and the room swam redly before him. Brann’s careless laughter was a distant ripple of sound.
Power from outside himself gathered in Miller’s brain, gathered and spilled over in a wave like molten flame. He felt it gush out toward the platform where Brann sat hidden. But he was blind and deaf with the crushing weight of that suddenly ponderable air.
Even above his own deafness and the shriek of the unnatural wind in the room he heard the scream of riven marble. And the weight upon him lessened a little. He could see again. He could see the great block of stone uprooted with jagged edges from the broken floor at the foot of Brann’s dais.
It seemed to tear itself free, to leap into the air of its own volition—to hurtle toward Brann’s curtains as if Brann’s castle itself had suddenly turned upon him with great jagged stone fangs. In his brain Miller could feel the tremendous, concentrated effort of Llesi’s teleportation, balancing the marble weapon and guiding it on its course.
The weight upon him ceased abruptly. The release was so sudden that the congested blood drained from Miller’s brain and for an instant the great room swam before him. In that moment of faltering the hurtling marble fragment faltered too and Llesi and Miller together struggled with the faintness of Miller’s overtaxed brain.
Brann seized the opening that brief hesitation gave him. He could not stop the flying weapon but he could block it. … A broken segment of the marble steps flew up in the path of the oncoming boulder, grated against it, deflected its course.
The two struck together upon the dais steps and thundered down them with a ponderous sort of deliberation, bounding from step to step, their echoes rolling from the high ceiling. They went crashing across the floor, ploughing into the divans where Brann’s court had lain watching this unexpected sight.
The screams of the watchers as the great marble blocks rolled down upon them added a frenzied accompaniment to the echoes of thunder wakened by the stone itself. The room was a tumult of sound reechoing upon sound.
Miller felt a renewed outpouring of Llesi’s power move in his brain. He saw a gigantic marble pillar across the room stagger suddenly on its base, crack across, lean majestically outward and fall. But it did not strike the floor. Instead it hurtled headlong, jagged end first, toward the dais.
Above it the ceiling buckled. There was a terrible shriek of metal upon stone as the vaulted roof gave way. But the falling debris, in turn, did not strike the floor. Deflected in a rain of shattered marble, it moved to intercept the flying pillar. Column and broken stone together crashed to the ground at the very foot of Brann’s dais.
The great hall was full of the shrieks of the scattering court, the cries of men caught beneath the falling ceiling, the uproar of echo upon echo as Brann’s throne room collapsed in thunderous noise upon its own floor.
When the thunder ceased all who could flee had vanished. Half the ceiling lay in fragments upon the floor and Miller stood dizzily looking up at the dais whose long curtains still billowed in the wind. Brann was silent for a moment as if gathering his resources for another try. And Llesi was whispering,
“My strength is failing, Miller. I can’t keep it up much longer. I’m going to try one last thing. I’ve got to know what it is Brann’s hiding. Help me if you can—and watch!”
For an instant there was silence. Then, from far overhead, a long shudder began and rippled down the length of those vast hanging curtains which shrouded Brann’s dais. Stone groaned deeply upon stone in the ceiling.
From the hidden platform Brann shrieked a soundless, “No!” as the block from which the curtains hung tore itself free of the vault above and came crashing down to rebound from the shattering pavement.
The curtains themselves fell far more slowly. Like smoke they wavered in the air, collapsing softly, deliberately, parting to one side and the other. …
Miller could see Brann trying to stop that fall. Invisibly the forces of his mind seemed to claw at their drifting lengths. But there was something wrong now in Brann’s mind. Even Miller could sense it.
A dissolution was taking place that the mind felt and shrank from. Something worse than hysteria, more frightening than fear itself. Llesi was suddenly intent and Orelle caught her breath.
Like smoke the last fragments of the curtains parted, lying to left and right along the broken floor, far out, in long swaths of shadow.
On the platform stood Brann. …
The figure that had terrorized such a multitude for so long stood swaying, clutching a black cloak about it as if to hide the shape of the body beneath. The face was contorted into a terrible grimace of anger and cold grinning hate. But the face itself was one they had all seen before.
It was the face of Tsi.
Her eyes were closed. She did not look at them nor speak nor move. And, Miller thought to himself, as Brann perhaps she had never opened her eyes. As Brann perhaps that grimace of chill hate always distorted her features. For it was clear to them
