The merchant continued forward, his hat shielding his eyes. Neeva drew her swords and stood ready to defend herself.
“Speak,” she ordered.
The man was now so close that she could see that his clothes were not covered with road dust, as she had thought earlier. They seemed immersed in a pale shadow, as if he were lurking in some back alley in the Elven Market. The same was true of the inixes, for Neeva could now see dim blotches of much-faded color on their hides.
“Stop and show yourself!” she demanded.
The merchant raised his arms to about chest height. Though he carried no weapon, Neeva took the gesture as a hostile one. She waited for the man to close within two steps, then raised both her short swords. The merchant threw his arms up to ward off the expected blows. She slipped one blade over his guard and slapped the hat away, baring his head.
The warrior gasped at what she saw. The man was a corpse, with a swollen tongue protruding from between his cracked lips and the hollow expression of death in his eyes. A gray pall covered his flesh, not in the fashion of his inherent color, but like a silken shroud clinging to his lifeless features.
“It’s a wraith!” Neeva yelled.
Having fought similar creatures during the war with Urik, the warrior knew instantly that she was in trouble. Wraiths had no bodies of their own. Instead, they took control of other beings, such as the corpse before her or the gold scorpion that had stung Rikus. She had even seen them animate marble statues.
The wraith launched itself at her, the corpse’s arms outstretched, and its filthy fingers slashing at her eyes. Neeva swung her second sword, twisting her whole body to increase the force of the blow. Her blade sank deep into the neck. There was a pop as the head came free, but the corpse’s momentum carried it forward. She caught the brunt of its charge on her shoulder, then dived away and rolled.
Neeva came up facing her companions. Sadira continued to kneel at the edge of the road, holding onto the rope to keep her spell activated. Caelum was just charging past the sorceress with a raised mace, while Rkard followed a few steps behind with Rikus’s sword clutched in both hands.
“Rkard, no!” she yelled.
Caelum’s crimson eyes went wide, and he spun around instantly, almost impaling himself on the Scourge as his son crashed into him. He swept Rkard off the ground and started back up the road.
A shiver rolled down Neeva’s spine as a pair of cold hands touched her neck. She raised a hand above her head and spun. As she came around, she brought her arm down and trapped her assailant’s wrists between her elbow and body.
Neeva found herself staring into a pair of sapphire eyes set into a face of ghostly gray shadow that sat upon the stump of the corpse’s severed neck. The wavering visage was that of a sneering man with a sharp chin, an arrowlike nose, and hollow cheeks.
The boy! it commanded. Although the wraith’s lips moved when it spoke, no sound came from them, and Neeva heard the words inside her head. Borys commands it!
Neeva’s mouth went dry as she realized that not only did her attacker resemble the creatures she had encountered during the war with Urik, it was one of them. Before their deaths a thousand years ago, the wraiths had served as knights in Borys’s campaign to eradicate the dwarven race. They had even fought at his side when he had used the Scourge to mortally wound the last king of the dwarves, Rkard. Now, having returned to their master’s service, they had come to destroy Rkard’s namesake and heir, her young son.
“This time, Rkard shall not fall!” Neeva yelled.
Still holding the corpse’s forearms trapped beneath her elbow, the warrior plunged the sword in her free hand into its stomach. The weapon sank deep and true, the tip driving up into the heart. Blood, cold and dark with death, oozed from the wound.
The dead thing simply raised its arms and clasped its hands around Neeva’s throat. The cold fingers sank deep into her flesh. Her temples began to pound, and she felt dizzy. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, a hissing roar filled her ears, and her knees grew weak.
Leaving her second sword buried in her attacker, Neeva snaked her hand over one of his arms and under the other. She clasped her hands together around the pommel of her other weapon and pivoted. The motion sent the dead merchant swinging toward the side of the road, and the warrior used all her strength to pry the thing’s arms from her throat.
The corpse’s grip broke, and it soared away, tumbling over the edge of the road toward the red sands below. After the body hit, a gray shadow drifted away and began a slow rise back toward the road. The warrior watched the wraith long enough to be sure the thing would take many moments to reach her again, then turned her attention to a more immediate danger: the inixes.
The gray-mantled beasts were only a dozen steps away, scrambling forward as fast as they could pull the heavy wagon. Their eyes sparkled with gemlike light, one’s red and the other’s yellow, leaving little doubt in the warrior’s mind that the beasts were also controlled by wraiths.
Neeva turned and ran. Had the things been normal inixes, it would have been a simple matter for her to find a vulnerable spot and kill them both, even with her small sword. But, animated as they were by wraiths, the only way to stop them was by cutting their huge bodies to shreds or pushing them off the bridge, and she would need help to do either.
“Borys sent them for Rkard!” she called, pointing at her son. “Take him and go!”
Caelum passed their son to Magnus. The windsinger started up the road with Rikus tucked under one arm and Rkard under the other, and the dwarf raised a hand toward the sun.
Neeva glanced over her shoulder and saw that the inixes remained a dozen paces behind. Normally, the lizards would have caught her in a matter of steps, but with a heavy cargo dray harnessed to their shoulders, they were not as swift as usual.
“Sadira will help me, Caelum. You go with Rkard!” Neeva commanded. She pointed at the many fissures lacing the hard granite next to the road. “The scorpion that stung Rikus was possessed by a wraith. There may be more.”
Caelum stopped short of casting his spell and ran after Magnus, positioning himself between the windsinger and the wall.
“Hurry, Neeva!” Sadira called, her hand still on the rope. “I can’t cast another spell until I drop this one.”
As Sadira spoke, a flurry of gray forms streamed out of nearby crevices and streaked over to her. Before Neeva could cry a warning, the wraiths attacked, their immaterial hands sinking into the sorceress’s flesh as though it were air.
A cloud of black shadow billowed from Sadira’s mouth. Her glowing eyes flared white, and her ebony body trembled with the pain of the onslaught. She did not release the rope to save herself.
One more gray streak flashed up from the valley below, slipping over the side of the Cloud Road to join the attack on Sadira. Neeva looked down and saw that the wraith that had animated the merchant’s corpse was gone. It had been waiting to join its fellows in the assault against the sorceress.
The wraiths had played her for a fool, Neeva realized. They had never intended to take Rkard but had only demanded him so that the company would concentrate on protecting the child. Then they had struck at their true target: Sadira.
Behind the sorceress, Magnus was rushing back to help, leaving Caelum to guard Rikus and Rkard, whom he had dropped upon the Cloud Road. Neeva did not think he would arrive in time. She kneeled and felt the roadway shuddering with the heavy footsteps of the inixes.
“Drop the spell!” Neeva yelled.
Sadira shook her head and did not release the rope. Her emberlike eyes burned with pain. She flung her free arm about madly, trying to shake off a pair of wraiths clinging to it. Her ebony body had turned gray in many places.