“I believe this weapon once belonged to Agis’s mother,” he said, lifting the stiletto. He had to raise his voice only a little, for the tumult was beginning to fade.
Sadira scowled and stopped a dozen steps below the wraiths, still holding her small iron hammer. Although puzzled by the warrior’s action, the sorceress was less interested in what he was doing than in selecting her next attack. She estimated that her body contained enough energy for only one more spell. If she wanted to escape, she would need to pick a good one.
“What does it matter who owned it?” Sadira asked.
“You shall see.”
A pearly cloud of haze began to swirl around the dagger, coalescing into the face of a handsome human, a man with even features, a patrician nose, and long black hair streaked down the center by a single band of silver. The rest of his body took form below the dagger, and soon he stood with his sinewy arms hanging limply at his sides and his shoulders slumped for ward.
Forgetting about her spell, Sadira gasped, “Agis!”
The noble said nothing. The pupils of his eyes remained milky and vacant.
“Don’t worry, he’s still alive,” the wraith said in a reassuring voice. “The Gray often disorients the spirits of the living.”
Sadira’s heart felt as though a hand of ice had closed around it. The wraith was lying. Agis’s spirit had coalesced out of the Gray, not been drawn through it. Had the noble come from Athas, he would have arrived fully formed.
The wraith continued his lie: “Your husband valued his mother’s weapon highly. I used that attachment to summon his spirit from Samarah.”
For a moment, Sadira did not move, too shocked to react. Then she cried out and almost collapsed, her whole body convulsing with grief. Samarah. She repeated the name over and over. That one word confirmed her worst fears. The wraiths had found Agis-or Borys had-and they had killed him. All that remained of her husband was the glassy-eyed apparition at the wraith’s side, a spirit that could not remember his own name.
“Go down,” the leader said. “Step into the Gray, or I’ll take your husband’s life.”
“Take him!” Sadira yelled. Her chest suddenly felt constricted and hot. “What good is he to me now?”
The words had barely passed her lips before the sorceress felt sick with guilt. She could not have said such a thing. It had to have been some other woman, a weak woman who had not truly loved her husband.
Sadira knew that she should be sorry for Agis’s death, concerned about the portents it held for the future. She should be worried that Borys had taken the Dark Lens, and that now she and her companions would have no defense against his mastery of the Way. She should be seeing young Rkard, his red eyes blazing with determination, standing before the beast that had killed Agis and a million others. She should be thinking of what came after Borys killed her and Rkard and the others, of how he would raze Tyr and murder its citizens, of how, too soon, an immense pile of rubble would lie where Athas’s only free city had stood.
But Sadira did not feel any of those things. She only felt angry, angry at the husband who gone away and died so far from her.
Magnus suddenly stopped singing, and an eerie silence fell over the tower. The wraiths cast nervous glances back toward the minaret, where a pink band had appeared between the swirling eddies in the sky. The leader motioned to his companions, then started down the stairs, pushing Agis’s spirit before him. The other wraiths followed, taking no chances that Sadira would make a run for the gate.
Magnus’s voice boomed out of the sky. “Sadira, you’re almost out!” he yelled. “Help me. Sing!”
The leader looked up, as if his amethyst eyes could actually see the words booming out of the sky, then he halted two steps above Sadira. “Stay silent!” he ordered. “The time has come for your decision.”
The sorceress opened her mouth and sang, though her thoughts were more on the small hammer of iron in her hand.
The leader stepped back, pulling the hand with the dagger out of Agis. The noble’s spirit looked toward Sadira, his mouth half-open and his eyebrows arched in sadness, then the apparition dissolved into haze.
Sadira stopped singing and threw her hammer past the leader’s head, crying out an incantation. The weapon smashed into the next wraith with a resounding boom. The impact knocked him into the one behind him, and they both fell to the ground.
The hammer hovered over them for an instant, then enlarged to the size of a kank and crashed down. The impact flattened their helmets and demolished the stairs beneath their heads. As the gemstones containing their life forces shattered, a tremendous blast rocked the tower. The explosion hurled the leader into Sadira and blew the other two wraiths off the stairway.
The sorceress and the leader crashed down the steps together, locked in a tight embrace. Each time they rolled, the wraith’s armored body battered Sadira. She fought desperately to throw her attacker off, while he struggled to drive the stiletto into her heart. Finally, they came to rest with Sadira lying on her back, her head lower than her feet. The wraith kneeled astride her, the dagger still clutched in his fist.
Sadira looked past his leg and up the stairway. Her magical hammer had disappeared with the two wraiths it had destroyed. The two who had escaped the blast were nowhere in sight, but the sorceress could see her own feet lying five steps above. They were as pale as ivory, clear down to the toes. She had used the last of her mystic energy.
“No more spells,” hissed the leader, following her gaze.
His purple eyes flashed malevolently from behind his visor, then he tossed the dagger aside. He grabbed Sadira by the shoulders and started to rise.
“Now you go to the Gray.”
“Hardly!”
The sorceress drove the heel of her palm into the bottom edge of the leader’s visor, forcing it up and away from his face. Sadira lashed out with her other hand and grasped the wraith’s withered visage. She began to pull, as though she were drawing mystic energy from a field of Athasian plants. A warm, stinging sensation rushed up her arm. Had the wraith been alive, it would have been impossible for her to draw the life force directly from her foe. But the creature was not alive, and the energies that held him together were not bound into the gemstone nearly so tightly as they would have been fastened into a true body.
The wraith screamed, and his leathery skin began to flake away beneath Sadira’s fingers. He tried to push her away, his arms already trembling from the loss of vital energy. The sorceress wrapped her free arm around his neck and held tight. The leader stepped toward the Gray, gathering himself up to leap off the tower edge.
Sadira thrust her hand deep into the papery mass of his dissolving head and grasped the dark amethyst inside. The leader’s flesh turned to dust. He jumped, but the sorceress felt her feet drop onto the coarse rock of the tower and knew she would not be carried with him. The wraith drifted past her in a dun-colored cloud, which quickly dissolved into hazy wisps as it drifted out into the Gray.
When the sorceress saw no sign of the other two wraiths, she quickly picked up her dagger and used the pommel to smash the leader’s amethyst. This time, there was no storm of escaping energy. She had already drawn all the life force from the stone and could feel it tingling in her flesh, which had assumed a faint purplish cast.
Keeping a watchful eye, Sadira started up the stairs. She began to sing again and pulled a small lump of green clay from her pocket. After she dribbled a few drops of saliva onto the mass, it began to hiss and pop, burning the palm of her hand with tiny droplets of corrosive fluid. The sorceress did not care. She had not yet destroyed the last two wraiths, and when they attacked, she intended to be ready.
By the time Sadira reached the open gates of the bastion, a crevice of crimson light had appeared above the minaret’s crystal cupola. Magnus’s voice sounded clear and pure. There was no sign of the wraiths on the path anywhere between her and the center of the citadel. Nor did she see them in the blue pool that filled so much of the bastion, but she knew that did not mean much. Her enemies could be hiding anywhere beneath the water, and the shimmering waves would make it impossible to see them.