the grip of an invisible titan and flung him headlong down the beach. The swordmage tumbled through the air and crashed into the pebble-strewn beach with bone-jarring force. He felt his left wrist snap under him, and a jolt of hot, white pain ran up his arm. He rolled several times before he came to a stop, dizzy and disoriented. Slowly he pushed himself upright with his good hand and reached for his sword, lying on the ground nearby.
Suddenly something hit him across the back, hard. It drove him to the ground, stunning him again, only to drag him into the air a moment later. Wings beat like thunder around him, and talons clenched with iron strength around his shoulders. Only the potent defensive wardings ofhis swordmagic prevented them from sinking deep into his flesh. Through the pain, the thundering wingbeats, the dizzying swings and drops, Geran realized that a gargoyle had caught hold of him and was trying to fly off. Already the beach was a good twenty feet below him, and the monster that had him was beating upward with all its strength.
Geran struggled in the gargoyle’s grasp. “Let go of me!” he snarled. He was a heavy burden for the monster; it sagged and dipped precipitously in midair as he tried to twist free.
The monster croaked in protest. “Mine!” it rasped. “Catch! Slay! Mine!”
He managed to tear free of one talon, which had only been caught in his leather jacket. The gargoyle almost dropped him; Geran glanced down beneath his wildly swinging feet and realized that a fall from his current height would be sure to break bones, if not kill him outright. In fact, if the gargoyle wanted to kill him, the easiest thing to do would be to let go of him. Despite the searing pain of the monster’s grip on his shoulder, Geran reached up with his right hand and seized one ankle in a powerful grip, determined to cling to the creature until the drop below them was something he might survive without crippling injury.
The gargoyle hissed and turned on him in midair, clawing and kicking at him. Talons scored his chest, raked his limbs, and came within an inch of eviscerating him, but his magic wardings held, blunting the attack. But one flailing kick of the gargoyle’s taloned foot snagged the satchel hanging around Geran’s neck and ripped through its strap. The leather pouch-with the starry compass inside-dropped to the ground below, vanishing into thick underbrush in the middle of a roofless house. Geran roared in fear and frustration, hanging on by one hand and waving his damaged left arm ineffectually to fend off the enraged monster.
Then he lost his grip at the same time the gargoyle’s talons tore loose from his jacket.
For one terrible moment he plunged backward toward the earth, flailing in midair. Then he plummeted through the thin branches of a small cedar tree growing alongside the wreckage of an old temple. Limbs pummeled him in a dozen savage blows, spinning him first one way and then another, cracking and thrashing as he fell. He hit the ground below hard enough that his sight went black and his breath
Groaning, gasping for breath, he somehow groped his way to his feet and staggered out from under the cedar. He was standing near the front of what had once been a grand old stone building, its facade now little more than heaps of rubble spilling across a densely overgrown street. His back ached, and his knee throbbed painfully; he couldn’t put much weight on that leg. But he’d been fortunate-the gargoyle’s flight had brought them over the buildings at the top of the bluff, so that instead of falling a hundred feet or more to the beach, he’d only fallen twenty or thirty feet through the branches of a tree. “Fortunate, indeed,” he muttered. “If I’d been a little more fortunate, I wouldn’t have been dragged off in the first place.”
“Catch! Slay!” The gargoyle alighted atop a broken column a short distance from Geran, red rage burning in its eyes. Two more of its fellows circled overhead, apparently drawn by the struggle. The monster flexed its talons and hissed at Geran.
His sword was somewhere on the beach below. The compass was lost somewhere in the maze of ruins around him, if it hadn’t been shattered by the drop. He could barely stand. And he had at least one broken bone, perhaps more. Geran bared his teeth in a fierce snarl. His death was likely moments away, a fact that filled him with fury and frustration. If he fell here, Mirya and her daughter would likely never escape from whatever fate the masters of the Black Moon consigned them to. But he meant to die fighting and die on his feet, if that was all fate offered.
Holding the gargoyle’s gaze, he shaped a single arcane word with his will and whispered,
The gargoyle sprang at him from its perch, claws outstretched. Geran stood his ground as long as he could before dodging aside. He managed to twist out of the way of the deadly claws, but his injured knee gave out under him, and he went down in the loose rubble and wiry grass of the street. The gargoyle gave one gloating hiss and threw itself back at him to finish him off. Then the shrill ring of steel on stone echoed through the air. Geran held out his right hand-and his sword of elven steel flew hilt- first into his open hand, summoned from the beach below by his word of calling. In one fluid motion Geran buried the swordpoint in the gargoyle’s black heart. The thing screeched horribly in his ears, and its body slammed him back to the ground again.
He struggled to free himself from the monster’s dead weight and looked up to see the gargoyles who’d been circling above swooping down on him. He didn’t have the strength to fight off another of the monsters, let alone two at once. Wildly he looked up and down the street, searching for some sort of shelter, some defensible position. All that he saw was the dark doorway of a dilapidated palace across the street. There was no way he could outrun the gargoyles to the doorway, but he had one last card to play. As the two monsters swooped down on him, Geran fixed his eyes on the darkness inside the stone archway and mustered the strength for his spell of teleportation. In the blink of an eye he was no longer on his hands and knees in the rain-soaked street outside, but instead kneeling in the clutter and debris inside the palace, looking back out at the place where he had been. The gargoyles screeched in frustration, fluttering and bounding from side to side in search of their missing prey.
Geran held still, hardly daring to breathe. If the monsters peered too closely at the doorway, they would surely see him … but the creatures moved down the street, passing out of his sight. He heard their wingbeats and their croaking voices moving away.
With a sigh of relief, he climbed to his feet. The interior of the palace was dark and cluttered; he could barely see anything inside. He hobbled a couple of steps away from the open doorway, just in case the gargoyles returned-and then his foot plunged through the floorboards. He hit the floor hard, and the whole thing gave way, sending him into the cellar below in a cascade of rubble and dust. For the second time in the last hundred heartbeats, Geran found himself falling. He hit the bottom, struck his head on something hard, and sank into dizzying darkness.
TWENTY-ONE
The smell of smoke still clung to Hulburg despite several days of intermittent rain. Rhovann believed it was an improvement over the customary odor of the city. He’d never cared for the cities of humankind, with their crowding, their cookfires and forge smoke, their garbage, their unwashed masses. In his more honest moments he might admit that the cool, damp air of Hulburg’s autumn was much more tolerable than, say, Mulmaster or Hillsfar in the middle of the summer-but he was not often inclined to give Hulburg the benefit of the doubt.
A shame the Black Moon hadn’t burned more of the place, he reflected as he gazed from the carriage at the street outside. Rhovann knew it ran counter to his ally Sergen’s purpose to destroy the city outright, but in his eyes it wouldn’t have done that much harm for a few blocks to be burned down. After all, each injury he inflicted on Hulburg was one more bitter draught of justice for Geran Hulmaster to savor. The wrongs Rhovann had endured at Geran’s instigation were many and great, and it might take a human lifetime to repay each one appropriately.
In the seat opposite Rhovann, Maroth Marstel frowned as they passed another burned-out building, one that had survived the Black Moon attack only to be destroyed by a fire set during rioting two days later. “We should muster a few hundred armsmen and clean out the Tailings,” the old lord muttered. “Drive those Cinderfists, those foreign criminals, out of Hulburg forever, before they ruin everything. That’s the first thing I’ll do as harmach, mark my words.”
