A beat of its bat-like wings carried it into the gateway, which now took on the aspect of a tunnel, and as it flew onward, some form of distortion made its massive body seem to slither like a snake’s. Appearing suddenly, perhaps simply because the balor had willed them to, dozens of lesser fiends hurtled after it.
Cindermoon abruptly realized she’d lost a precious instant to consternation and had, at best, only one more left. She lifted her hand and drew breath to shout a word of forbiddance.
But before she could, Stedd Whitehorn shrilled, “Lathander!”
Red-gold light pulsed across the heart of the sanctuary, and the balor and the lesser demons tumbled backward like leaves in a gale.
Meanwhile, the mouth of the tunnel drew in upon itself like the contracting pupil of an eye. In a couple heartbeats, it closed completely.
The boy then pivoted to the Turmishan warrior who was supposedly his faithful bodyguard. Looking shocked at the sealing of the passage to the Abyss, the man stood with his cutlass in his hand. The short, curved blade still glimmered with a trace of the same dirty red light that pervaded the balor’s domain. Evidently, it was the talisman that had opened the way. He must have surreptitiously eased it out of its scabbard when everyone else was looking elsewhere.
“Why?” cried Stedd. “Why would you do this?”
“Because a Marivaldi,” the swordsman growled, “finishes what he starts.”
With that, Cindermoon realized exactly which member of that once-respected family he must be, the only conspirator to escape after the near-destruction of Sapra and the Elder Circle. A ranger who likewise understood shouted to identify the dastard to one and all, “That’s Anton Marivaldi!”
For one more instant, the traitor glared across the innermost sanctum at the trio on the thrones as though contemplating a suicidal charge. Then he whirled and ran back into the temple.
“Kill him!” Cindermoon cried, whereupon rangers and druids pounded after the fleeing man like hounds on the track of a deer.
Anton slowed for an instant to thrust his cutlass back into its scabbard. Despite tapers and watch lights, the interior of the House of Silvanus was dark enough that otherwise, the ruddy glow that Umara had conjured into the steel might have served as a beacon for his pursuers.
From the sound of it, he had plenty of them, and that was the idea, to lure all of Cindermoon’s protectors away. He was glad that, in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Sapra, on the day preceding his realization that he was in imminent danger of arrest, curiosity had prompted him to go look at the body of the fallen balor. His description of its wounds had enabled Umara to produce a convincing illusion of the exact same creature. He’d judged that that, combined with the revelation of his own identity, would jolt the elf and her defenders into precipitous action if anything would.
Now he’d see if he could survive the consequences of his success.
Had it been possible to move in a straight line, he could have sprinted from the courtyard in the center of the sanctuary to its outer edge quickly. But it wasn’t. The seemingly random placement of pillars and stone slabs supporting the roof and the lack of anything approximating a genuine corridor obliged him to veer repeatedly, until he wasn’t sure he was even heading in his original direction anymore.
He was all but certain his pursuers were spreading out. It was what he would have done in their place to catch a stranger who was likely blundering back and forth in confusion.
He rounded a corner, and a wolf lunged out of the shadows. He wrenched himself aside and banged his shoulder into granite, but the beast’s jaws snapped shut on empty air.
The wolf started to spin for another try, and he booted it in the ribs. That knocked it stumbling away and gave him time to draw his saber. As the animal gathered itself for another lunge, he decided on a cut to the neck. The curved blade was already in motion when he remembered druids were shapeshifters.
He spun the saber lower and slashed a foreleg instead. The wolf fell. He dodged past it and ran on.
He’d only taken three strides when a voice rasped words of power behind him. Instinct told him when to dodge. Spines like porcupine quills hurtled past him to stab into a wooden screen.
That’s what I get for showing mercy, Anton thought. It would have served him right if the former wolf’s barrage had hit.
Yet he showed mercy again when a ranger rushed out of the dark. Even though it took longer to sweep the other warrior’s broadsword out of line, step in, and drive the curved guard of the saber into his face with stunning force than it would have to simply kill him.
Calling to one another, the voices of Anton’s pursuers echoed. They sounded like they were all around him, and he could only hope it wasn’t really so.
Three more turns, and then he burst in on a skinny adolescent girl in druidic robes who yelped and recoiled. Hostage! he thought, but no. If he took a captive, someone would hurry back to the Elder Circle to report the situation when his entire objective was to keep all their underlings away from them. He simply had to keep running.
When he raced on by without pausing, the young initiate found her courage and started an incantation. Fortunately, she recited the words slowly, like she had yet to fully master the spell, and he left her behind while she was still declaiming it.
An arrow flew past his head. Seeking only cover, he ducked into the narrow, unpromising-looking gap where two stone “walls” nearly met at an angle. That was the turn that finally revealed the pool, now black as the starless sky it mirrored.
Anton dashed out into the open, looked about, and saw that he’d apparently exited the temple ahead of any of his pursuers. And while people stirred among the lean-tos and campfires on the far shore-some sharp-eared soul must have heard the yelling inside the sanctuary despite the hiss of the waterfalls and the patter of the rain-they weren’t yet doing so in an organized or purposeful way.
Anton judged that if he kept moving smartly, across the pool, past the camp, and on down Hierophant’s Trail, he might actually get away. More likely not, but at least it was a chance.
He found the nearest string of steppingstones and started striding from one to the next. He reached the eighth one, and then an all but shapeless form surged up to tower over him. It seemed less a creature that had been lurking in the pool than a portion of the water that had formed into rippling approximations of arms, a head, and a torso; the liquid bulk at the center of it contained and concealed the next steppingstone in line.
Anton laughed. “You’re confused. You’re supposed to kill evildoers going into the sanctuary. But just sink back down, and I won’t tell.”
The water spirit raised its arm.
Stedd doubted that Lathander’s blessings helped him lie any more convincingly. If anything, the touch of so much goodness ought to tangle his tongue if he tried.
Yet apparently, he’d played his part in Anton’s trick convincingly enough. Because Cindermoon had ordered her guards to chase the pirate, and except for a couple woodsmen in brown and green, they’d all obeyed.
And in the aftermath, it seemed like the reemergence of a deadly threat from the past had distracted the little black-haired elf from current grudges. When her green eyes looked at the other members of the Elder Circle, Umara, or Stedd, it was without the clenched mistrust he’d sensed before.
Maybe we could persuade her now, the boy thought, but really, he knew that hope was too faint for even a Chosen of Lathander to depend on. He and his companions needed to stick to the plan.
Umara plainly agreed. Seemingly peering in the direction where Anton and his pursuers had disappeared, she had her back to the three thrones and their occupants. That enabled her to whisper an incantation and crook and cross her fingers into mystic signs without Cindermoon spotting it. The spell plunged the two rangers into slumber; their legs buckled beneath them and dumped them on the ground.