“So he had to die, didn’t he?”
“You all do!” Gheevy finally screamed, his little body shaking. “Stinking humans… always think you’re so great… and you are the worst of them!” He pointed a trembling hand at Pryce. ‘You’re everything I hate about your kind! Smug, arrogant, stupid… think you’re so smart and funny… but you’re nothing… nothing!”
“You’ve hurt enough people, dark one,” Dearlyn said. “Have you forgotten who you’re dealing with? One who could arrange the Verity melodrama? One who confers with high priestesses of unearthly wisdom? You’re not dealing with a petty outsider any longer. Now you’re dealing with the great Darlington Blade.”
Gheevy grabbed his head, arched his back, and shrieked to the treetops. “Imbecile! I’m the great Darlington Blade!” Then he unleashed his rage at the man who had ruined all his plans.
The clearing between the hilltop and the wood suddenly exploded in streams of lightning, balls of thunder, and sparks of power. Pryce dived to the side, curling into the tall grass as the mongrelman jumped forward, deflecting the nerve dance meant for Covington. The beast twisted and jerked in place as Dearlyn Ambersong hurled her staff.
Gheevy used a rapid reflexive response spell to grab the staff out of the air and hurl it back at Dearlyn. Devolawk twisted in front of her, taking the brunt of the blow as Pryce charged the halfling. But Gheevy’s magic was too fast and too powerful. The halfling created a ring of disintegration and sent a six-inch circlet of annihilating matter directly at Pryce’s head.
Dearlyn immediately effected a spell, raising her arm and crying “Versus petrification!” Another circlet appeared from her palm and shot over to swallow Gheevy’s bead of destruction. Pryce ducked in time to feel the warring spells just barely pass over his neck.
“Blast you!” Gheevy cried. “Blast you both to the bowels of Hades!” He yanked a small, pale item from his pocket and held it up to the autumn sun.
“By Zalathorm, no!” Dearlyn cried.
“Mycontril’s Last Resort,” Gheevy gloated. “Nothing you can do can stop this spell. You will be eradicated in a culmination of all Ambersong magic energy!”
Pryce recognized the spell and the item. To destroy everything in a thirty-foot radius, using the power of all the remaining spells in a caster’s memory, required diamond dust worth five thousand gold pieces, a pure platinum ring… and the finger bone of an archmage.
It was Geerling’s finger.
“Gheevy, no!” Pryce cried. ‘You’ll be hurt, too!” “But I’ll survive,” the enraged halfling shrieked. “Unlike all of you. All that matters is that you will finally be gone… forever!” He started the spell, nature itself reacting to the tear in reality.
The branches and tall grass bent in a powerful wind as dark storm clouds gathered above the halfling.
Pryce looked about wildly. Cunningham and Gurrahh were still down. Dearlyn was too close. There was no way any of them could get clear of the devastation in time. There was no way to escape, to stop him, or to distract him, except
The voice of Geerling Ambersong sounded on the howling wind. “Darlington Blade!”
Dearlyn looked around wildly. “Father?…”
“Darlington Blade!”
The voice was so unearthly and so real that even Gheevy froze in his casting. “M-Master?” he stuttered despite himself.
“Darlington Blade,” Geerling Ambersong called.
A fingered wing touched Dearlyn’s arm and moved her aside. Devolawk, the broken one, trudged forward, his snout-beak all the way open, his corpse teeth and mangled lips making the sounds. “Darlington Blade… you must not do this… ”
“The haunt,” Pryce whispered.
The spirit of Geerling Ambersong was back. It was near because of Cunningham. The Haunt had been traveling with the jackalwere because of Pryce’s horrible previous payment to the jackals in exchange for his first clues.
“M-Master?” Gheevy repeated, startled, but then restarted his spell. “No, not my master! am the master here! You fool, thinking your magic could cure me. There is nothing to cure! You deserved to die! All humans deserve to die!”p›
“No, Darlington, no!” the haunt cried, his winged arms held high.
Pryce looked from the halfling to the woman to the broken one. All three began to move at once. Each was starting a spell, but unless Pryce did something, the halfling would finish first… and then they all would be finished.
Pryce Covington went up on one leg, curled one arm, tightened his fist, and swung his arm under and around. “Gheevy!” he cried. “Crystal Orb!”
The halfling glanced over without slowing his movements. “Idiot! You have no magic!” But then he saw a small glowing ball shoot from Pryce’s sleeve and speed toward his face. Gheevy immediately lost his stance, lost his movements, and stumbled over the necessary spell words.
The illumination ballthe one Pryce palmed when Gheevy had dropped it after the outside wall of the workshop first swung openbounced harmlessly off Wotfirr’s upraised arm.
The halfling stared incredulously down at it, then looked up, openmouthed, at a grinning Pryce. “Well, what do you know?” Covington said pointedly. ‘You’re right.”
That’s when the combined might of the Ambersong father and daughter erupted from the forest and smashed into the infuriated halfling.
Dearlyn’s entire arms were consumed by a fiery white, which sped across the fifteen feet separating her from Wotfirr, but even those beams of destruction couldn’t rival the power displayed by Devolawk. From every finger, every claw, and from under every feather came a bolt, stream, circlet, orb, or blast. They sliced, stabbed, encircled, grabbed, and smashed into Gheevy, making the halfling dance wildly in place, as if the deities themselves had each taken a limb and shook it.
Through this wash of color and power came Dearlyn’s beams, which crashed into the halfling like the waves of a tsunami, engulfing him.
Pryce fell back, shielding his eyes, and quickly crawled over to where the mongrelman and Cunningham lay. In seconds, it was over. Darlington Blade was dead. Long live Darlington Blade.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
All that was left was to bury the dead.
The mongrelman rose slowly. The jackalwere did not.
“Cunningham,” Pryce said sadly, leaning over the torn creature. As he looked down at the burned figure, who was caught between his human and animal state, he found that he had a lump in his throat.
“Ah,” the jackalwere managed to croak. “My dear fellow… please, do not mourn for the likes of me… ”
But Pryce would not leave it at that. “Though you are a monster,” he said softly, “this is not a monstrous thing you have done.”
The jackalwere managed a feeble laugh. “Oh, I know you, my good man. You would have been foolish enough to release me… to let me go with my children… but I ask youyou whom I would call my friendhow many innocent travelers would have been condemned to death by your kind action?”
He raised a paw that was partly a hand and touched Pryce’s face. “Stupid, ignorant, unaware travelers to be sure,” he said, “but innocent nonetheless.”
Pryce chuckled painfully, blinking away moisture. “Travel well, you whom I would call my friend. Run fast in the sleep that knows only peace.”
Cunningham smiled. “I will watch over my children from that place,” he promised. “And every moment I will bless the fact that they have no human consciousness… to make them do anything so foolish as to care.” Then he
