Xingax was able to muster at least a shadow of his old coercive power, and it combined with the psychic assault she was already fighting to tilt the balance against her. Her body locked into complete rigidity, and Xingax clawed at her hand until flesh and bones came apart and he was able to pull free of her grip.
Something snaked around her. When it lifted her off the balcony, it turned her, and she beheld the creature that had crept up behind her.
Once it sat atop a giant's shoulders. Now the severed head was a swollen, misshapen thing with rows of jagged fangs in its oversized mouth. Some of the guts and blood vessels protruding from the neck hole had wrapped around her. Others had plastered themselves to the wall above the doorways, allowing it to crawl along the vertical surface like a fly.
'You're a bad, ungrateful daughter!' Xingax shrilled. 'I gave you everything!'
The crawling head's trailing tendrils lifted Tammith toward its jaws. Change to mist, she told herself. Then it can't hurt you or hold on to you. But she couldn't transform.
Her captor turned her body. She realized it was positioning her so it could nip her head off.
Then Bareris sprang onto the balcony. He must have finished slaying the giant zombie, clearing away the obstacle that stood between him and the rest of the combat.
He struck at Xingax before the maker of undead realized he was there. His sword crunched into the bulbous skull, and Xingax dropped from the air onto the gallery floor. Bareris instantly pivoted toward the crawling head and Tammith.
But Xingax was still conscious. He grabbed Bareris's leg with his nighthaunt hand, sinking the claws deep into his calf, and pointed with the stunted, withered one. Tammith felt malignant power burn through the air.
Bareris cried out and arched his back, but he didn't fall. After a moment, as the agony abated, he pivoted and cut until Xingax stopped moving, and he could pull free of the long bloody claws.
He hobbled toward Tammith and the thing that clutched her tightly. The giant's head howled, a shriek as full of murderous force as Xingax's final attack, but Bareris sang a fierce, sustained, vibrating note that shielded him from harm.
The crawling head lashed at him with lengths of artery and intestine. Hampered by his torn, bleeding leg, Bareris defended as best he could. At the same time, the creature positioned Tammith's neck between its rows of teeth.
Once more, she struggled against her intangible fetters. Perhaps Xingax's death had weakened them, because her limbs jerked. Bonds of ropy flesh still held her, but nothing else did.
But she was out of time to shapeshift. She strained with all her inhuman strength, heaved her arms free, and braced her sword to prop the head's jaws open.
Heedless of the grievous wound it thus inflicted in the roof of its mouth, the horror snapped its fangs shut. A fiery pain through her neck told Tammith her head had come loose from her body.
She fought to defy terror's grip, to remember that she'd survived this same mutilation before. Then a rippling peristalsis tumbled her head inside the creature, depositing it in some manner of sac. In the darkness, fleshy strands nudged at her scalp, brow, and cheeks, then, biting or stinging, anchored themselves like lampreys.
Her consciousness faded. Despite the layers of bone and flesh around her, she heard Bareris bellow a thunderous battle cry, felt the crawling head jerk in reaction, and then her mind guttered out completely.
CHAPTER SIX
2-21 Kythorn, the Year of Blue Fire
Bareris's shout tore flesh from the giant's head and splintered the bone beneath. At instant later, a Burning Brazier blasted the creature with flame. It lost its grip on the wall and crashed down on the gallery, where it lay blackened, smoking, and still.
Fast as he could, Bareris limped toward it, and a yellow-eyed dread warrior placed itself in his path. He had to slay it, and then the ghoul that took its place. It reminded him that, although all he truly cared about was breaking open the giant's head, he still had a battle to win.
In fact, it didn't take long. When the crawling head perished, the defenders' last hope of victory perished with it, and they began to turn and run.
Bareris cast about, found a fallen battle-axe, and chopped the colossal skull apart. For a time, he was terrified that Tammith's head had completely dissolved inside it, but he finally found it within a sac of leathery flesh.
It didn't move. Not the mouth, not the eyes. Even when he yanked loose the tendrils that had attached themselves to it and lifted it free, it looked as dead as the putrid mass that had imprisoned it. Bareris shuddered and felt a howl building inside him.
Behind him, someone cleared his throat. He turned to see one of the Burning Braziers. Though far advanced in the mysteries of his order, the priest was a relatively young man of Mulan stock.
'Forgive me, Captain,' he said, 'but you still have work to do.'
Bareris took a breath. 'Yes.' He proffered the head. 'You're the best healer we have. Help her.'
The Brazier hesitated. 'Captain…'
'That's an order!'
The priest accepted the head. 'I'll try.'
Limping, using a spear for a cane, Bareris oversaw the securing of the fortress. The chambers echoed with the chanted prayers of the priests. The flashes of fire they conjured gilded the walls. Their power would so purify the place that no one could ever practice necromancy there again.
Meanwhile, the southern wizards plundered the necromancers' libraries and stores of mystical equipment. The warriors of the Griffon Legion hunted down and killed the enemies cowering in dark corners. Finally it was done, and Bareris rushed to find out what had become of Tammith.
The Burning Brazier had taken her to a small room so he could work undisturbed. There she lay atop a table, her form-white skin, black clothing and armor, raven hair, and dark dried gore-ghostly and vague in the glow of a single oil lamp. But even the feeble light revealed the ragged discontinuity that circled her neck like a choker and the mottling of ugly wounds on her face.
Bareris could tell by looking at her that nothing had changed. Still, he turned to the cleric and asked, 'How is she?'
The fire priest hesitated, then said, 'She's dead, sir. She was dead when you last saw her and she's still dead now.'
'She can't be. She survived decapitation before.'
'If so, then I surmise that when the giant thing bit off her head and began the process of combining it with its own substance, the injury was qualitatively different. At any rate, she hasn't moved, and the two… pieces of her don't show any signs of growing together.'
'Did you try to encourage the healing with your magic?'
'Yes, Captain, just as you ordered. Even though healing prayers, which channel the cosmic principles of health and vitality, are unlikely to help a being whose existence embodied malignancy and a perversion of the natural order.'
You're glad she's dead, Bareris thought, and trembled with the urge to knock the Burning Brazier down. Instead, he said, 'Thank you for trying. Go help the other priests with their tasks.'
'I'm sorry I couldn't bring her back. But I can perform the rites to cremate the body with the proper reverence and commend her spirit to Kossuth.'
'Perhaps later.'
'I can also tend you. Your leg needs attention, and unless I'm very much mistaken, you're still feeling sick and weak from Xingax's mystical attack. Let me-'
'Are you deaf? I told you to get out!'
The Brazier studied Bareris's face, then nodded, turned on his heel, and left Bareris alone with Tammith's
