“I’m fine!” Neeva yelled. The warrior pressed her hand to the pulsing road, directly over the rope, and called, “Save yourself!”
Neeva faced the inixes and found the huge beasts upon her. The first beast snapped at her head. She ducked, thrusting her sword into the lizard’s maw. The reptile closed its jaws on the steel blade and whipped its head around, ripping the weapon from the warrior’s hand. The second inix opened its sharp beak, pushing the first reptile aside.
The surface of the road suddenly grew cold. It stopped shimmering, and Neeva knew that Sadira had dropped the spell. The warrior felt the bite of the rope across her palm, then she was falling. She closed her fingers around the cord, all that remained of Sadira’s bridge, and caught herself.
The dray dropped onto the rope, causing a sharp jerk, then tipped to one side. As the wagon fell past Neeva, the second inix snapped at her dangling legs. She kicked its beak away, and the beast was gone.
When the warrior looked back to her companions, a sick feeling filled her chest. Sadira was engulfed in a swirling ball of black shadow and gray haze, just transparent enough to reveal that she had risen no farther than her hands and knees. The sorceress’s limbs were all shaking violently, while her weakly glowing eyes stared blankly at the road’s slate surface.
Magnus stood behind her, singing an angry, tempestuous song, while a hot wind tore at the gray wraiths in a vain attempt to rip the apparitions away. Caelum was cautiously approaching the pair, taking care to keep himself between the wraiths and his son.
Neeva hauled herself toward her companions, traveling along the rope hand over hand. The two wraiths that had been animating the inixes streaked up to join the attack. As soon as they rose above the surface of the road, Magnus’s searing windsong sent them tumbling away.
They circled back to approach from below the surface.
Neeva reached the edge of the gap and transferred her hands to the slate roadway. “The last two are coming from underneath!” she warned.
Magnus’s shoulders drooped, and Neeva knew that the windsinger’s spell would not penetrate through stone. Nevertheless, he did what he could to help Sadira, directing his voice down at the surface of the road. The hot gusts simply curled up into his own face. As the last two wraiths passed through the stone directly beneath Sadira and joined the attack, Neeva pulled herself onto the road.
A groan of exhaustion escaped Sadira’s lips, and the sorceress collapsed to her side. The ball of shadow and haze settled over her like a veil, leaving nothing exposed except her flowing locks of amber hair and her emberlike eyes, now blazing a sickly hue of greenish-blue. The murky shroud turned completely black, then flashed to gray, and began to alternate between the two colors at rapid intervals.
“We’ve got to do something!” Neeva said.
“We can’t,” said Caelum. “The wraiths are swarming her spirit. Any attempt to drive them away will harm her more than it does them.”
“Then we have to attack them another way.” Neeva stepped past her husband and took the Scourge from Rkard, who still held the enchanted sword.
“What will you do with that?” asked Magnus.
“I saw Rikus slice a shadow giant’s hand off with this blade,” the warrior explained. “Maybe it will work against wraiths, too.”
Neeva studied Sadira’s flickering shroud for several moments. Finally, the warrior felt confident she could predict the changes. She waited for the pall to turn gray and gently drew the tip of the Scourge along the sorceress’s shoulder, hoping it would slice through a wraith’s insubstantial body without harming Sadira.
A vicious screech echoed off the cliff wall, and a gray ribbon flew off the whirling mass. It shot up the Scourge’s blade in a pearly streak, then expanded to form a gray, cloudlike mass around the weapon.
The warrior thought she had destroyed a wraith. The gray cloud slowly assumed a shape vaguely resembling that of a human female. A pair of orange eyes appeared in the head, and the hazy figure began to shrink. Neeva felt a searing sting as the apparition passed through her flesh, then the sword’s hilt twisted in her hand.
“Get back!” she yelled. “The wraith’s trying to animate the Scourge!”
The sword wrenched violently against her thumb and came free. It did not fall to the ground but floated tip down in front of the warrior. The entire weapon had turned gray, and a pair of angry orange eyes burned out from the pommel. The point slowly began to rise toward Neeva’s heart. Caelum started to reach for the hilt but pulled back when a line of blue frost shot down the length of the blade.
The Scourge stopped rising. The steel began to quiver, filling the air with an eerie, high-pitched wail.
“What’s happening?” Neeva asked.
“The Scourge’s magic is too powerful for the wraith,” Magnus replied, a note of urgency in his voice. “Perhaps we should move-”
Before the windsinger finished, the sword emitted a blue flash of cold. The blade stopped vibrating, and the shrill wail of quivering steel was replaced by a howl of pain. Ribbons of gray shadow flew in all directions, trailing droplets of sleet.
Neeva and the others threw themselves to the ground. The Scourge continued to float, wobbling madly. The blade flexed almost in two. It straightened with a deafening knell, and the sword’s shroud exploded into a cloud of gray haze. For an instant, the road seemed very quiet. Then the weapon clanged to the ground, and the cloud dissolved into a squall of ash-colored snowflakes. The tiny crystals did not even last long enough to fall. In the blistering heat of the day, they evaporated long before they reached the Cloud Road.
Neeva retrieved the Scourge, then gasped in alarm. The sword was as cold as ice, but that was not what troubled her. The blade had lost its silvery sheen. It was now covered with a dull gray stain that made it look more like tin than steel.
“What have I done?” she gasped.
Magnus came and stood at her side. After studying the sword for a moment, he gently took it from her hands. “The wraith’s touch has tainted the blade.”
“Can we fix it?” Neeva asked.
“Perhaps, with time,” answered the windsinger. He kneeled next to Sadira, who remained covered beneath the murky shroud that Neeva had been trying to remove. “But for now, we have more pressing problems. The giants are still trapped at Pauper’s Hope, and the Cloud Road remains impassable. Once the sun sets, we can’t stop them from rampaging-especially with Sadira and Rikus both unconscious.”
“Rikus might be well by then,” said Caelum. “As for Sadira …”
“Even if we can help her prevail against the wraiths, I suspect she will be unconscious until morning,” said Magnus, “Still, we can hope. I see nothing else we can do.”
“I do,” said Neeva. She turned and looked toward Agis’s farm, where the Kledan militia was awaiting their return. “Find me a runner who can show my warriors the way from the Asticles Estate to Pauper’s Hope.”
Magnus folded his ears in doubt. “Your men are brave, but are they a match for giants?”
Neeva shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve learned never to underestimate a dwarf.”
FIVE
THE GRAY
Sadira had gone to the gray.
She stood on a narrow stairway, looking out over an immense abyss filled with a haze that stretched from far below her feet to the zenith of the sky. It was the color of ash and as still as the midday sands. There was nothing else out there.
The steps had been carved from a spire of porous white rock that rose out of the gray murk far below. The stairway spiraled up the pillar to Sadira’s feet, then continued above her head with no apparent end. The column simply grew smaller and smaller, until both the stairs and its tip vanished into the ashen haze far above.
Sadira recognized the pillar as the Pristine Tower but did not think for an instant that she had truly returned to the distant spire of white rock. If she had, the sky would have been yellow-green, with puffy silver clouds drifting past. Lush thickets of bogo trees would have surrounded the base of the column, and in the distance there would have been fields of silver-green broomgrass. Instead, all she saw was a sea of ashen haze.