because she could see at least twice as far along their path in that direction. Still no sign of Marrec.
Elowen bit her lip. She was torn between continuing along after Ash, or going back to see what had become of the other half of their group.
“Gunggari, tell me what you think about this,” began Elowen. “Fallon and Ash are three hours ahead. That means that Ash is at least three hours out of our reach, but Marrec and Ususi are only minutes out of our reach I think we can sacrifice a few more minutes out of three hours just to make sure everything’s OK with our friends.”
Gunggari paused again, wrinkling his brow. Finally he said, “Very well. We can head back, though I have never known Marrec to fail any challenge.”
“Challenges have a way of escalating.”
“True,” responded Gunggari. He turned a full one hundred eighty degrees to face the woody facade of their chaperones. “Perhaps Marrec’s spear is not quite so deadly against these evil wood spirits as your elf blade.”
Elowen raised one eyebrow. “Elf blades have their uses, after all.”
She brought the blade in question up, then swung a wide roundhouse arc, shattering two creatures that had skittered too near into a spray of twigs. The others ceased their forward movement, while those immediately in front of the two travelers tried to backpedal. The monsters further behind failed to stop immediately, pushing yet another twigblight forward to lose its cohesion on Dymondheart’s length.
As dead twigs rained down around her, Elowen yelled, “We’re going this way.” She pointed with the tip of her sword back along their path. “If you don’t want to end today a pile of splinters, get out of our way.”
As she’d hoped, the larger, smarter creatures began to shuffle back, herding their smaller, more numerous brethren with them. That’s when all the creatures went insane.
As if in response to a signal neither she nor Gunggari could see, the enchanted twig constructs went on a rampage en masse. Twigblight turned upon brother twigblight, with the larger ones immediately tossing a few of the smaller creatures headlong through the air, but the smaller monsters swarmed the larger ones like ants on a piece of meat.
For Elowen and Gunggari, that sudden madness included a loss of respect for Dymondheart.
Despite destroying three creatures in as many rapid eye blinks, another was already slashing past her guard, hacking at her face with its sickle-like fingertips. She flinched back, only to trip over a tiny twigblight that had rushed up from the side.
Gunggari steadied her with a lightning-fast hand. He said, “Back to back. These things have lost their fear of death.”
A flailing branch scratched Elowen’s cheek. Her counterattack exploded that one nicely, but two more encroached from the left. One failed to, penetrate her armor; the other sliced her along the neck. The pressure of Gunggari’s back flexed and strained; he was fighting off attacks no less massive than she, though he did not have Dymondheart to even the odds. The sound of his dizheri swishing through the air created a strange melody all its own, almost as if it were being played in truth. She grunted as she deflected a twiggy body hurling through the airone of the big ones had thrown one its small brothers at her, but apparently by accident. She managed to clip the tumbling creature with her blade; the twigblight came apart before impacting her.
She yelled, “What’s happened?”
She could hear Gunggari grunting with exertion as he fought off the unrelenting wave. Finally he said, “Less talk. More sword.”
“They’ve gone mad!”
She realized that if the creatures had earlier decided to rush her and the Oslander without fear of casualties, they’d have been overwhelmed already, but the branch golems were attacking each other as much as the intruders in the lane. Already more than half of the creatures that had surrounded them lay unmoving and dismembered on the ground, choking the lane with so much kindling. A terrible stench also grew. When the monsters perished, they leaked a foul-smelling ooze.
Gunggari cried out behind her. A second later, the pressure of his back against hers was snatched away. Whirling around with her blade extended straight out from her body, she managed to detonate three more creatures as she sought to locate her friend. His feet dangled at eye level. Craning her head, she saw that a large twigblight had caught up the southlander in a punishing grip of tightening wood.
Elowen rushed forward. The creature’s hands were busy clutching the struggling Oslander, so the monster couldn’t prevent her from running it through with Dymondheart. It fared no better against her blade’s touch than the others, and Gunggari awkwardly fell away from the bed of splintered wood that had been his captor. She kept the remaining creatures at bay. The creatures were doing a better job of destroying each other than she could have purposefully managed.
After the tattooed soldier scrambled to his feet, he and Elowen backed up to a nearby arch. They sought to get out of the eye of the madness.
The rampage ended when a swarm of smaller twigblights, having just overcome a larger sibling, turned on each other in an impressive spray of splinters. Finally, only Elowen and Gunggari remained standing in a lane choked with debris reminiscent of the aftermath of a storm. Pregnant silence descended.
Gunggari cocked his head, then said, “Somebody’s coming.” He turned his gaze back in the direction they had just tried.
Materializing out of the fast-dispersing greenish haze was what at first seemed an oddly shaped silhouette. The strange silhouette quickly resolved into two people, one carried by the other.
It was Marrec, running wildly under the arches. He carried the limp, lolling form of Ususi in his arms. Blood streamed from Marrec’s eyes as if he wept life itself, or as if he endured a grief so great that only tears of blood could express his remorse.
Elowen swallowed, knowing that Ususi must be dead. Hollowness invaded her heart.
Gunggari raised a hand to the quickly approaching figure and said quietly, yet loudly enough to be heard, “Pause awhile, warrior. Lay down your burden.”
The sound snapped the man from his running trance. His blood-glazed eyes focused on Gunggari and Elowen. The elf gasped when the gaze swept across her. Even apart from the unsettling red film over his orbs and the scarlet trails leaking from the corner of each eye, Marrec’s gaze seemed to brush her with an almost predatory jolt.
“Oh my…” whispered Elowen. Something had changed, she could see that. Some part of her companion had come alive, and for some reason she couldn’t identify, that thought was somehow distressing.
Marrec stopped. He gently laid Ususi to the ground. Elowen saw that the woman was bandaged, and breath, however slight, still passed her lips. “Ususi!” yelled Elowen and bent to tend her friend.
Marrec made as if to say something else, but unconsciousness claimed him before he could elaborate. Gunggari caught him before Marrec fell face first into the branch-scattered lane.
CHAPTER 17
A bone petal fell from the stem of the flower. It fell only half a foot to the slab of rough cut stone that supported the flower’s vase. In a way completely unlike a flower, the petal cratered the stone slab as if shot from a crossbow. The sound of its impact thundered around the petrified walls of the Close. The new crater overlaid another, slightly older crater. Only a single petal remained.
One of the two figures standing near the slab said simply, “Anammelech is dead.”
Damanda had spoken. She had entered the Close to confer with her lord when the petal fell. She looked at the final remaining petal. The remaining petal signified her connection with her master who stood nearby. In the aftermath of the other petal’s impact, she was the most important agent to the Talontyr’s campaign north of the Great Dale by dint of survival alone. Her brother blightlords were dead. She remained to be tested.
The Rotting Man cursed, using a language once reserved for raising abominations by a race not native to Faerun. No living creature had spoken that language for eight thousand years, but such was the heat of the Talontyr’s fury that he broke an ancient covenant in breathing the words aloud. Each syllable crystallized into a locustlike entity with hatred for blood and a carapace of shimmering purple. With an effort of will, the Rotting Man
