The mindbender took a deep, steady breath, calling upon the Way to aid with his escape. He pointed a finger at the top of the cliff and imagined that all the space between himself and that location did not exist. A surge of energy rose from deep within himself, flowing outward to make what he wished temporarily so. When he opened his eyes again, where there had been only flakes of orange sandstone a moment earlier, Maetan saw a silvery tuft of ground holly growing from the crevice of a broken slab of limestone. It was, he knew, the terrain at the top of the gorge.
Maetan started to step onto the clifftop, then decided to give Umbra a last instruction. He stopped halfway there, with one foot on the sandstone in the bottom of the gorge and the other planted squarely on the limestone atop the cliff.
To Umbra, it looked as though the mindbender had divided his body in half. One part stood before him in the gorge, and the other stood far overhead, barely visible at the top of the cliff.
“One more thing,” Maetan said. “Kill the mul.”
Umbra raised the throbbing stump of his missing hand. “Nothing would please me more.”
The mindbender nodded, then stepped all the way onto the clifftop and left the gorge altogether. Umbra took a moment to look up and watch his master climb away from the cliff edge, then turned his attention to the task of rallying Maetan’s cowardly soldiers. Already, the first Tyrians had appeared at the bend and were busily hacking down the slowest Urikites from behind.
“Come with me!” called Umbra, moving toward the citadel. “You will be safe in here!”
The shadow giant’s lie worked easily, for the panicked soldiers were eager to seize any hope of salvation. There was no obvious entrance to the fortress, but Umbra could see a stairway in the deep hollow between the great wagon’s stone wheels. Followed by the fastest of Maetan’s cowards, he led the way to these steps and began climbing.
They passed though an opening on the lowest deck and came out on a balcony on the first level. In the middle of this loge was the lifelike statue of a fully armored woman smashing a spiked club into the floor. Beneath this club lay a shattered, sun-bleached skull, and scattered over the rest of the deck were the splintered bones of another half-dozen skeletons.
Umbra slipped over the bones silently, moving toward the door that stood at the back of the small balcony. He had time to glimpse a bright room at the end of a long hallway before a gray, insubstantial form appeared at the end of the corridor and drifted toward him.
“A wraith!” Umbra hissed.
He retreated from the corridor immediately, though not because he was frightened. No being from the Black had need to fear a wraith, for undead spirits were themselves merely shadows of the living. If it detected Umbra at all, the wraith would regard the shadow giant as a human might an oasis spirit: something dimly sensed and best left alone. Unfortunately, the same would not be true for the Urikites. The wraith would sense the life pulsing in their veins and try to drive them away.
The gray silhoutte slid past Umbra and slipped over the woman’s statue like a pall. The stone sculpture darkened to a dusky shade of brown, and its blank eyes suddenly glowed with a ghastly red light. As the first Urikite tried to slip past, the stony woman cried, “No!”
She swung her club, driving a dozen long spikes deep into the soldier’s neck and chest. He flew off the balcony and crashed onto the heads of his fellows below. They hardly seemed to notice, for the Tyrians were closing in and a battle was already beginning to rage within a dozen yards of the citadel.
Had the choice been Umbra’s, he would have abandoned Maetan’s plan and gone to search out Rikus that instant. Even if he could find another way into the citadel, he doubted the Urikites would survive for very long. Unfortunately, if he did not follow Maetan’s commands to the word, the mindbender would not be compelled to deliver the obsidian he traded for Umbra’s services. The shadow giant could not allow that, for his wives needed the glassy rock. It was almost egging season.
Umbra stepped toward a narrow catwalk that led from this balcony to the next, pausing to address the men who had been following the dead soldier. “Fight past the statue,” he ordered. “I’ll find another entrance.”
When the Urikites hesitated, Umbra pointed back down the gorge. “Fight past the statues or die!” he snapped. “Tyr does not take slaves, so surrender brings only death.”
Rikus stood knee-deep in Urikite bodies, his gaze fixed on the top floor of the strange citadel. There, standing as tall as the winged statue of the bearded man, was Umbra. The shadow giant’s blue eyes were studying the battlefield below, as if he were searching the bodies for a single Urikite survivor.
“What’s he doing up there?” Rikus asked.
“And how did he get past all the statues?” Neeva wondered, pointing at the balconies on the citadel’s lower level. Next to her stood Caelum, who was also looking at the uppermost loge, and K’kriq, who was staring at the dead with as much interest as Umbra.
Rikus studied the lower levels of the building. There was a gap in the stone railing of the first loge, and the statue that had been guarding the door behind it now lay scattered in the rocks below, broken into a dozen pieces. Despite their success in destroying the stony woman, that was as far as the Urikites had gotten.
The statue of an armored man had moved from the second loge and still patrolled the balcony, a four-bladed axe in one hand and a wide-bladed dagger in the other. Sprawled over the railing and lying beneath the balcony were more than a dozen Urikites with slashed throats, missing limbs, and smashed skulls.
As Rikus studied the rest of the citadel’s lower level, he noticed that only the loge from which this statue had come was empty. On each of the other balconies stood another lifelike statue, each cradling some sort of fantastic weapon in its inert hands.
After studying the stone figures for a moment, Rikus took a deep breath, then said, “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” asked Neeva.
The mul pointed at Umbra, whose blue eyes now seemed to be locked onto him. “Up there.”
“Rikus, I’ve seen you do a lot of stupid things in your life, but this would be the worst,” Neeva said. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that if half a Urikite company couldn’t make it past the first balcony, then neither will we?”
“No,” the mul answered. He started toward the stairway concealed beneath the foundation. When he did not hear footsteps behind him, he stopped and turned around. “Aren’t you coming?”
K’kriq was the first to answer. “No. T-too scared.”
Rikus scowled and, not bothering with Caelum, looked to Neeva. “What about you?”
“If you can tell me how we’re going to get past those statues, I’ll follow you,” she said.
Rikus pointed his sword toward Umbra. “The same way he did.”
“How was that?”
The mul shrugged and started toward the stairs again.
Neeva did not join him until he had set a foot on the bottom step. “You’re as one-sighted as a dwarf and about as smart as a baazrag,” she growled.
Behind her came Caelum. Only K’kriq, who had turned his attention to picking through the Urikite bodies, did not join him.
“Even if we make it past the statues, Umbra will kill us all,” said Caelum, half-hiding behind Neeva.
“No one told you to come along,” the mul answered, glaring at the dwarf.
“I asked him,” Neeva said. “If anyone can save us, it will be him.”
Rikus grunted, then climbed the stairs. As he stepped onto the first loge, the statue moved swiftly to meet him. It was a burly man dressed in what appeared to be a full suit of plate armor. From beneath his open-faced helmut dangled long, straight hair, and his pudgy jowls were covered by a bushy beard.
“No!” the statue boomed.
He swung his four-bladed axe. The mul ducked the blow easily, but barely managed to raise the Scourge of Rkard as the statue lashed out with his other hand. There was a loud chime as the dagger met the magic sword, then the stone blade snapped in two. Rikus countered immediately, slashing at the statue’s legs.