to preserve her existence and restore her vision, but accomplishing the latter had left her even weaker and more parched than before. She stared at the myriad puncture wounds on her hands and forearms, willing them to close, and nothing happened.
At that point, misery overwhelmed her. She curled up into a ball and wept, though her new eyes seemed incapable of shedding actual tears, until a key grated in the lock of the door. It creaked open, and an orc shoved Yuldra through and slammed it after her. The lock clacked once again.
Tammith extended a trembling hand. She knew the other captive couldn't do anything substantive to ease her distress, but Yuldra could at least talk to her, clasp her fingers, or cradle her, perhaps. Any crumb of comfort, of simple human contact with someone who wasn't a pitiless torturer, would be better than nothing.
Yuldra flinched from the sight of her ravaged body, let out a sob of her own, wheeled, and scrambled into a corner. There she crouched down and held her face averted, attempting to shut out the world as she had before.
'How many times did I take care of you?' Tammith cried. 'And now you turn your back on me?'
Nor was Yuldra the only person who'd so betrayed her. She'd spent her life looking after other people. Her father the drunkard and gambler. Her brother the imbecile. And what had anyone ever done for her in return? Even Bareris, who claimed to love her with all his heart, had abandoned her to chase his dreams of gold and excitement in foreign lands.
She realized she was on her feet. She was still thirsty, it was a fire burning in her throat, but she'd shaken off weakness for the moment, anyway. Anger lent her strength.
'Look at me,' she snapped.
Her voice was sharp as the crack of a whip, and like a whip, it tangled something inside of Yuldra and tugged at her. The slave started to turn around but then shook off the coercion.
'Fine,' Tammith said, stalking forward, 'we'll do it the hard way.'
She didn't know precisely what
The realization brought a horror that somewhat dampened her rage if not her thirst. I can't do this, she thought. I can't be this. Yuldra is my friend.
She stood and fought against her need. It seemed to her that she was winning. Then her body burst apart into a cloud of bats much like the conjured entities that had attacked her, and that made the world a different place. The sense of sight she'd so missed became secondary to her ability to hear and comprehend the import of her own echoing cries, but the fragmentation of her consciousness was an even more fundamental change. She retained her ultimate sense of self and managed her dozens of bodies as easily as she had one, yet something was lost in the diffusion: conscience, perhaps, or the capacities for empathy and self-denial. She was purely a predator now, and her bats hurtled at Yuldra like a flight of arrows.
Rather to Tammith's surprise, given Yuldra's usual habit of cringing helplessness, the other slave fought back. She flailed at the bats, sought to grab them, and when successful, squeezed them hard enough to crush an ordinary animal, wrung them like washcloths, or pounded them against the wall. The punishment stung, but only for an instant, and without doing any real harm.
Meanwhile, Tammith clung to the other thrall and jabbed her various sets of fangs into her veins and arteries. When the hot blood gushed into her mouths, she felt a pleasure intense as the fulfillment of passion, and as it assuaged her thirst, the relief was a keener ecstasy still.
Before long, Yuldra weakened and then stopped struggling altogether. Once Tammith drank the last of her, the bats took flight. They swirled around one another, dissolved, and instantly reformed into a single body, now cleansed of all the wounds that had disfigured it before.
That didn't make the remorse that came with the restoration of her original form any easier to bear. The guilt fell on her like a hammer stroke, and she felt a howl of anguish welling up inside.
'Excellent,' Xingax said.
She looked up. The fetus-thing had been watching through the hole high in the wall, just as she'd suspected, and had now dissolved the charm that had hidden him from view.
'I believe that with practice,' he continued, 'you'll find you can remain divided for extended periods of time. I'm confident you'll discover other uncommon abilities as well, talents that set you above the common sort of vampire.'
'Why didn't you answer me when I called to you before? Why didn't you warn me?'
'I wanted to see how far instinct would carry you. It's quite a promising sign that you managed to manifest a number of your abilities and take down your first prey without any mentoring at all.'
'I'm going to kill you,' she told him, and with the resolve came the abrupt instinctive realization that she didn't even need to shapeshift to do it. His elevated position afforded no protection. She dashed to the wall and scrambled upward like a fly. It was as easy as negotiating a horizontal surface.
Partway up, dizziness and nausea assailed her. Her feet and hands lost their ability to adhere to the wall, and she plunged back to the floor. She landed awkwardly, with a jolt that might well have broken the old Tammith's bones, though the new version wasn't even stunned.
As the sick feeling began to pass, Xingax said, 'You didn't really think we'd give you so much power without insuring that you'd use it as we intend, did you? I'm afraid, my daughter, that you're still a thrall, or at best, a vassal. If it's any comfort to you, so am I, and so are the Red Wizards you've encountered here, but so long as we behave ourselves, our service is congenial, and we can hope for splendid rewards in the decades to come.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
30 Mirtul, the Year of Risen Elfkin
Delhumide gleamed like a broken skeleton in the moonlight. The siege engines and battle sorceries of the ancient rebels had shattered battlements and toppled towers, and time had chipped and scraped at all that had survived the initial onslaught. Yet the Mulhorandi had built their provincial capital to last, and much remained essentially intact. Bareris found it easy to imagine the proud, teeming city of yore, which only served to make the present desolation all the more forbidding.
He wondered if it was simply his imagination, or if he truly could sense a miasma of sickness and menace infusing the place. Either way, the gnolls plainly felt something too. They growled and muttered. One clasped a copper medallion stamped with the image of an axe and prayed for the favor of his god.
Having cajoled them this far, Bareris didn't want to give them a final chance to lose their nerve. As before, enchantment lent him the ability to speak to them in their own snarling, yipping language, and he used it to say,
He prayed they weren't already too late, that something horrible hadn't already befallen Tammith. It was maddening to reflect on just how much time had passed since he'd watched the Red Wizards and their cohorts march her away. It had taken him and the hyenafolk a while to reach Delhumide. Then, for all that the gnolls had scouted the general area before, Wesk Backbreaker insisted on observing the perimeter of the city before venturing inside. He maintained it would increase their chances of success, and much as Bareris chafed at the delay, he had to admit the gnoll chieftain was probably right.
As they'd gleaned all they could, so too had they begun to plan. After some deliberation, they decided to sneak into Delhumide by night. True, it was when the demons and such came out, but even if the horrors were in fact charged with guarding the borders of the ruined city, it didn't appear they did as diligent a job as the warriors keeping watch by day. Bareris hoped he and the gnolls had a reasonable chance of slipping past them unmolested, especially considering that though creatures like devils and the hyenafolk themselves could see in the dark, they couldn't see as far as a man could by daylight.
He and his companions picked their way through the collapsed and decaying houses outside the city wall then over the field of rubble that was all that remained of the barrier at that point. The bard wondered what particular
