The companions needed a measure of luck then, and they found it, for a pair of servants, human women and not cyclopian, came bustling up the stairs, grumbling about the duke. They wore plain white garb—Oliver recognized them as cooks, or as maids.
“E’s got ’imself a pretty one this night,” said an old woman, a single tooth remaining in her mouth, and that bent and yellow, sticking out over her bottom lip at a weird angle. “All that red hair! What a firebrand, she be!”
“The old wretch!” the other, not much younger and not much more attractive, declared. “She’s just a girl, she is, and not ’alf ’is age!”
“Shhh!” the one-tooth hissed. “Yer shouldn’t be spaking so o’ the duke!”
“Bah!” snorted the other. “Yer knows what he’s doin’. He sends us away fer a reason, don’t yer doubt!”
“Glad I am then, that we is done fer the night!” said one-tooth. “Up to bed wit me!”
“And down to bed with the duke an’ the girl!” the other shrieked, and the two burst out in a fit of cackling laughter. They walked right beside the companions, never noticing them.
It took all the control Luthien could muster for him to wait until the pair had passed before running down the stairs. Even then, Oliver tried to hold him back, but Luthien was gone, taking three steps at a time.
Oliver sighed and moved to follow, but paused long enough to see that the cape had left another of its “crimson shadows” on the wall beside the stairwell.
Their options were fewer when they came down to the next level. Three doors faced the stairwell, each about a dozen feet away. The two to the sides were unremarkable—Luthien could guess that they opened into corridors. He went to the third, curbed his urge to charge right through, and tried to gently turn the handle instead.
It was locked.
Luthien backed up and snarled, meaning to burst right through, but Oliver was beside him, calming him. From yet another pouch of his remarkable housebreaker, the halfling produced a slender, silver pick. A moment later, he looked back from the door at Luthien and smiled mischievously, the lock defeated. Luthien pushed right past him and went through the door, coming into yet another corridor, this one shorter, incredibly decorated in tiled mosaics, and with three doors lining each side.
One of those, the middle door to Luthien’s left, had a pair of burly Praetorian Guards in front of it.
“Hey, you cannot come in here!” one of the brutes growled, approaching as it spoke and moving its hand to the heavy cudgel strapped to its belt.
“My friend here, he needs a place to throw up,” Oliver improvised, jabbing Luthien as he spoke.
Luthien lurched forward, as though staggering and about to vomit, and the horrified cyclopian dodged aside, letting him stumble past. The brute turned back to complain to Oliver, but found a rapier blade suddenly piercing its throat.
The other Praetorian, not seeing the events behind Luthien, moved to slap the apparently drunken man aside. Luthien caught the hand and moved in close, then the guard went up on its toes, its expression incredulous as Blind-Striker sunk into its belly, angled upward, reaching for its lungs and heart.
Oliver shut the door to the stairwell. “We must hope that we are in the right place,” he whispered, but Luthien wasn’t even listening and wasn’t waiting for any lockpicking this time. The young Bedwyr roared down the corridor, cutting to the right, then back sharply to the left, slamming through the door into Duke Paragor’s private bedchamber.
Paragor was inside, sitting with his back to his desk in the right corner of the room, facing the bed, where Katerin sat, ankles and wrists tightly bound, a Praetorian flanking her on either side.
Something else, something bigger and darker, with leathery wings and red fires blazing in its dark eyes, was in the room as well.
26
The Demon and the Paladin
Luthien’s first instincts were to go to Katerin, but he kept his wits about him enough to realize that the only chance he and Katerin had was to be rid of the wizard quickly, and hopefully the wizard’s demon along with the man. The young Bedwyr took one running step toward the bed, then cut sharply to the right, cocking back Blind-Striker with both hands.
The wizard jumped up and shrieked, throwing his skinny arms in front of him in a feeble attempt at defense. Luthien cried out for victory and brought the sword in a vicious arc, just under the flailing arms, and the young man snarled grimly as the sword struck against the wizard’s side, boring right across. He saw the wizard’s robes, brownish-yellow in hue, fitting for the sickly looking man, fold under the weight of the blow, saw them follow the blade’s path.
Blind-Striker had moved all the way around, left to right, and the robes with it, before Luthien realized that Paragor was not there, that the wizard somehow was no longer in these robes. The young Bedwyr stumbled forward a step, overbalancing as his sword found nothing substantial to hit. He caught himself and wheeled about, the brownish-yellow robes folded over his blade.
He saw a shimmer across the room against the wall beyond the foot of the bed, as Paragor came back to corporeal form, wearing robes identical to the ones wrapped over Luthien’s sword. He saw Praehotec, eyes blazing, rage focused squarely on Luthien, coming over the bed, rushing right past Katerin and barreling over one of the cyclopians as he went, the fiend’s great wings buffeting both Katerin and the other one-eyed guard.
Luthien knew that he was dead.
Like his companion, Oliver thought the key to this fight would be in slaying the wizard. And like his companion, Oliver came to understand that getting to Paragor would not be easy. At first, the halfling started right, following Luthien. Then, seeing that Luthien would get the attack in, Oliver had cut back toward the middle of the room, toward Katerin. The halfling’s eyes bulged when he realized Paragor’s magical escape, and how they bulged more when Oliver saw Praehotec, gigantic and horrid Praehotec, coming over the bed!
With a squeak, Oliver dove down, crossing under the tumbling cyclopian and slipping under the bed as the demon charged out. The agile halfling recovered quickly, in a roll that turned his prone body about, and he scrambled right back out the way he had come in so that he could stab at the downed one-eye with his rapier. He scored a hit, then a second and a third, but the stubborn brute was up to its knees, bellowing like an animal, turning around to face the halfling.
Oliver stuck it once again as it turned, and then the halfling let out a second squeak and faded back under the bed, the enraged cyclopian in close pursuit.
From the very beginning, Katerin had not been a model prisoner, and she kept up her reputation now. She accepted the hit as Praehotec passed, the demon’s wing knocking her flat to the bed and blasting her breath away. Her instincts yelled for her to go to Luthien, to die beside him, for she knew that he could not defeat this monstrous beast. But her wits told her to inflict as much pain on wretched Paragor as she could, and so as she went flying downward, she tensed her muscles and threw herself into the fall, hitting the cushioned bed with enough force to bounce right back to a sitting position. The second cyclopian, half on the bed and half off, dazed by the weight of Praehotec’s wing, was more concerned with its companion, who was scrambling under the bed, than with Katerin.
The brute felt her arms come across its broad shoulders, the chain binding her wrists scraping its face as her wrists came down in front of its burly neck. In a split second, the cyclopian felt Katerin’s feet against its upper back, and she was pushing and tugging with all of her strength, her chained wrists tight across the one-eye’s throat.