“It’s all right,” he said, trying to sound convincing. “Lie still and close your eyes. We’re being taken somewhere—maybe to the top of the mountain. It’s bound to stop when we reach it.”
“For their sake, I had better not find whoever created this thing,” Shia muttered wrathfully. Her words made Anvar wonder just who the creators were. This was far beyond the power of his own Magefolk.
“Now, how do we~get out?” As Anvar had predicted, their strange conveyance had eventually come to a juddering, spine-wrenching halt. He looked around, confused by the images that curved into infinity on all sides. Then he saw it—a pale, glimmering blue patch of Magelight that marked the area of his preserving spell. He got to his knees and thrust an experimental hand toward it. To his relief, the spell was still in operation, and his hand passed easily through the wall of the gem.
“Let me go first!” Shia shouldered past him. “If anyone is out there, I want to deal with them!”
They emerged onto flat bare rock that was shadowed in the half darkness of another cavern. Looking behind him, Anvar saw a featureless wall of polished stone, with nothing but the telltale glimmer of his spell to mark the point of their exit. He prayed that the spell would last. This was the first time he had tried anything so complex without Aurian’s help, and he was still uncertain of his raw, untried powers. The roof of the small cavern was low, like an inverted bowl, and the wall through which they had come swept round in a broad semicircle, its ends marked by a massive stone archway, through which the faint light came. From beyond the arch, Bohan was beckoning. Anvar hurried to join him.
Beyond the archway was a broad apron of stone, a ledge over . . . nothing. Anvar reeled back from the dizzy brink, swallowing hard. As far as he could see, the chasm below was endless, its sheer walls stretching away on either side and plunging down into a gut-churning nothingness, in the midst of which glowed the faint and sickly light that illuminated this massive maw in the body of the mountain. Some hundred feet away, on the opposite brink, there was another jutting tongue of rock like the one on which he stood, with a similar archway behind it.
His mouth gone suddenly dry, Anvar prayed that the ledge on which he stood was more solid than its counterpart looked. Apart from the sheer impossibility of scale, Aurian, with her terror of heights, would never have managed to get across. Yet there was no sign of her anywhere. Anvar refused to countenence the obvious—that she might have plunged to her death over the precipice. But if that was unthinkable, only one alternative remained. Something must have taken her across. Furthermore—he thought, recalling her terror on the cliff—she must have been very much against her will. He glanced up at the low roof, where stalactites hung like dripping fangs, hoping to find some means of crossing: a rope, handholds cut into the stone—anything at all. There was nothing.
A shrill, thin screeching, like metal grating against metal, sent Anvar spinning in the direction from which the unnerving sound had come. Framed in the opposite archway was a creature that turned his blood to ice. Its bloated, spherical body was wider than a man is tall, and it moved on a weird conglomeration of jointed, angular legs—too many for Anvar to count in that frozen moment of confrontation. And not all of its limbs were used for walking. Others sprouted like hideous growths from its dully gleaming body, some ending in cruel pincers, others in deadly keen blades like curved knives, still others in clumps of fingerlike manipulators that clenched and unclenched vn ceaseless motion, grasping at the air. There was no head. Clusters of brilliant lights, like eyes, were dotted at intervals around its swollen body, mounted on the ends of writhing limbs. With nightmare slowness, these twisted in the air, turning their blinding beams unerringly in the direction of Anvar and his friends.
“Dear Gods preserve us!” Anvar, in unthinking terror, began to back slowly away toward the sheltering archway.
Beside him, Shia gave a bloodcurdling snarl. “Scatter!” she snapped, as the hideous creature suddenly came scuttling toward them—straight across the thin air of the chasm!
The great cat leapt to one side and Anvar dived for the shelter of the archway. The creature paused on the stony apron, its myriad limbs clicking and rattling, its eyes swiveling, turning their beams this way and that—to fix upon Bohan, who stood, utterly paralyzed with fear, on the very brink of the precipice. Once again, Anvar heard the tortured, metallic shrieking as the angular legs stirred, and began to advance, step by step, toward the eunuch.
“Get him!” Shia’s thought seared into Anvar’s mind as she launched herself at the monstrosity, fastening her jaws around one of the slender legs. The creature’s eyes swiveled toward her and several sets of limbs, their pincers clacking together, their blades whistling through the air, snapped around—to meet on thin air as Shia darted ottt of reach.
In its moment of distraction, Anvar dashed across to Bohan and yanked him back from the edge. “Spread out,” he yelled. “Surround it! Keep it confused!”
Bohan, his paralysis vanished with the hope of a plan, drew his sword and moved to one side, waving the bright blade to distract the creature. As it lumbered toward him, Shia darted in again from behind, fastening her teeth on one of the legs. The limb flipped upward, hurling her against the side of the arch. Anvar had snatched up Aurian’s sword and ran in to chop at one of the swiveling eye stalks. There was a shower of sparks and a jarring backshock ran numbingly up his arm, as metal shrieked against metal. Anvar gasped, more from surprise than pain. This was no natural beast—it was a crafted thing!
The break in his attention almost cost him his life. Anvar looked up in time to see one of the arced blades descending, aimed straight at his head—but Bohan moved quickly in from the other side, fastened his huge hands round one of the legs, and yanked, his face crimson and contorted with exertion. Despite Bohan’s phenomenal strength, the creature did not budge, but the move was enough to deflect its blow at Anvar, who ducked back as the sharp edge whistled harmlessly past his face. Shia bought the eunuch time to escape by diving right beneath the curving belly of the monstrosity, swiping at the metal legs in a whirlwind of claws. It whirred and clicked, spinning violently round on the spot, but its killing limbs could not reach beneath its body. Anvar watched, horrified, as the cat deliberately began to inch toward the edge of the precipice, the creature, reacting with mindless fury, moving with her as it tried in vain to reach its tormentor. It reached the brink—toppled— and suddenly was gone. Shia with it.
“Shia!” Heartsick, Anvar raced for the edge—and saw two sets of claws, digging for dear life into the crumbling stone at the brink.
“Help . . .”
He heard Shia’s wailing cry, at the extreme of anguish— then Bohan was there, grasping frantically at the black paws, heedless of the yawning drop beneath. But even the eunuch’s strength was not equal to the weight of the cat’s massive body. Slowly, he began to slip forward, his feet sliding on the stone. Anvar flung himself down at the edge of the chasm and reached down to Shia. With a bone-cracking effort she dug the claws of her hind feet into the stone, raising herself just enough for him to grasp two handfuls of loose skin at the base of her neck. The struggle seemed to take hours. Anvar pulled until he thought his arms would snap, sick with fear that he might slide forward to his own death. But with the two men supporting her weight, Shia was able to haul herself upward, inch by painful inch— until at last, with a heave and a great sliding rush she was up, safely back on the ledge.