and drew its forefinger slowly across its lower line of teeth, parting its jaws slightly as if it licking its finger with a tongue that was no longer there, empty eyesockets fixed on his eyes.
Suddenly Rod felt his fear fall away from him like a wet and heavy cloak dropping from his shoulders. He blinked, astonished at how calm he now felt.
'Wait,' he almost said aloud. 'I'm a fantasy writer. I can handle this. She
She put her head to one side, like many a movie star he'd seen in films, flirting. Rod shrugged, smiled, and offered her his hand to shake.
As smoothly as any real movie star, she shifted her hips and stepped past it without taking it, moving to embrace him.
He stood his ground, skin no longer crawling, as those bony limbs closed around him-chilling him to the bone.
The cold of her embrace was so intense that he gasped, and had to fight for breath-and by then, the empty eyesockets were staring up at Rod Everlar from just below his nose, and both of her bony hands had risen to close around his throat.
She was trying to throttle him!
'Well, that was stupid of me,' Rod panted, trying to break free. Magic flared into glowing visibility up and down her arm-bones as she resisted him, its force making her grasp tremendously powerful.
Not strong enough, however, to keep Rod from hurling himself to the ground and rolling-in a sudden dust- cloud of disintegrating skirts and flailing skeletal legs that made him sneeze violently and repeatedly, sending fingerbones rattling and bouncing in all directions.
She kept firm hold of him, though, that staring skull and those searingly cold, claw-like fingers sinking deeper into his throat, choking him… and bruisingly deeper and tighter…
Lying on his side, now, one knee thrust forward to keep himself that way despite her kicking bones, Rod clenched his teeth, fought for breath, and patiently opened pouch after pouch along his hip-belt of six pouches, and started thrusting the contents of each against the gleaming bones of her wrists.
The glowing and sparkling dust from the little drawstring sacks in the first pouch made her stiffen and sigh, but loosened her grip not at all.
The magical halo around her bones flared into angry brightness at the touch of the first of the seven rings from the second pouch, but that was all it did. Feeling his way along the fine chain he'd looped through all of the seven rings, Rod touched the second ring to the skeleton that was trying to murder him. Nothing happened.
The touch of the third ring, however, made her to stiffen, and a different hue of cold fire appeared out of nowhere to race up and down her limbs.
Suddenly those strangling fingers were gone from his throat. The skeleton arched and surged against him, thrusting and shifting herself up his front just as a small and squirming neighbor's child had once tried to clamber up Rod from his lap, until their noses-his a nondescript point of living flesh, hers a grotesque hole above a line of even, ever-bared teeth-were touching.
'Thank you,' she whispered, her words blowing icy vapor into Rod Everlar and chilling him into shuddering helplessness. 'Telrorna thanks you for her freedom. Free to die at last… I curse Malraun for every cruelty of his binding, for every moment of my enslavement… but you… I thank you, sir, for my death…'
And as Rod fought to master his shivering and make some sort of reply, the skull broke off those bony shoulders and rolled away.
Then the skeleton slumped, crumbled, and fell apart, leaving him lying alone on the floor amid eerie wisps of what had once been a gown, with a magical ring flickering and crumbling to nothing in his fingertips.
Its sighing destruction tickled his fingers, and then was gone.
In a bedchamber in Darswords, the wizard who liked to style himself Malraun the Matchless jolted awake atop a bound and helpless Aumrarr, shouting in pain.
Then, even before his cry could form words, he slumped down again, senseless, his wits overwhelmed by the roaring tumult within them, as a mind linked to his own burst apart at the height of silently shrieking its savage fury at him.
The dying of that mind rocked his own; Malraun was just-and only just-able to recognize the feel of the thoughts so harming his before his own mind collapsed into chaos. He was suffering the destruction of Telrorna, a sorceress he'd slain long ago, then animated in undeath, and magically bound to himself to serve as his thrall.
One among many.
Now one
Through the Doom's binding that linked them, Malraun's pain stabbed into the brain of Taeauna of the Aumrarr, lying bound beneath him. She whimpered, more dazed than awakened, and arched in pain not even her own, straining momentarily against her bonds… ere she fell back into limp, sagging silence.
On the far side of the chamber door, the guards who'd flung open a door at the sound of Malraun's shout and rushed across an outer room to wrench open the bedchamber door, skidded to sudden, reeling halts at the sound of the wingless Aumrarr's whimper.
The younger guard shot the older one a doubtful look, only to see that elder warrior was relaxing and starting to leer.
Barring the younger guard's path onward with the sword he'd already drawn and tapping a finger to his lips in a clear signal for silence, the veteran guard closed the bedchamber door in careful silence, then wordlessly started shooing his younger fellow back across the outer room.
He was grinning broadly and shaking his head as he did so. It took the younger guard only a moment or two to start to blush.
The great front doors of Malragard boomed and shuddered as five charging beasts-with a sixth drifting past low overhead, its many yellow eyes glaring-crashed together in the doorway, each determined to be the first out to maraud, freed to slay and maim and-
Lightnings suddenly erupted from the doorframe, a score of angrily-crackling blue bolts that raced from limb to quivering muscled bulk to roaring-in-pain maw, stabbing upward to transfix the flying monster from a dozen directions at once, holding it shuddering in midair.
As beneath, lightning flashed again and again, and monsters writhed, spasmed, and sank down. Malraun's doorwarding magics, prepared long ago for just such a task, ably and brutally sought to hold his six guardians to their guardianship.
In the heart of that surging tangle of flashing pain, the wolf-heads snarled and snapped at the helmcat and the slitherjaws, who snapped and bit back with fierce enthusiasm. The gliding horror's tentacles flailed everywhere, and the stabspider reared back in quivering frustration, its legs too delicate to risk amid the thunderous collisions in the doorway.
Overhead, the flying maw shuddered, vomiting showers of sparks and defecating floods of more sparks as it burned internally. Pincers clattering in pain, it reeled back into the hall, followed precipitously by five rolling, biting beasts, as the most sorely hurt among them sought to win free of their torment by driving their fellow guardians back from the doorway, so they could flee into the lightning-free hall they'd just come from.
In this, they succeeded; the lightnings fell silent as the guardians fell back into the entry hall.
There came a moment of shared, panting relief-and then a moment of dreadful silence, as all six guardians suddenly spasmed in helpless unison.
Out of the empty air around them burst the wordless shout of a wizard hurled into wakefulness by pain, then stricken senseless by that same agony.
That cry ended as abruptly in Malragard as it had in Darswords-and so was still ringing from end to end of the entry hall as the guardians burst into frantic action again-this time, striking viciously at their fellow beasts, now seeking not to get to freedom or pursue the two humans who'd fled, but just to murder each other.
In Yintaerghast, a blue and scaly Doom of Falconfar rolled over, groaned once, and sat up.
How had he come to be lying on the floor, with a spell-scroll in his hand?
By the Falcon, he must have been tired…
Well, enough slumber for now! He had a new world to conquer-hopefully before Malraun's armies managed to lay waste to much more of this one.
