An arrow skipped off the wall above Luthien’s head, angled upward. The cyclopian, shield down low to block the continuing sword blows, caught it full in the chest and staggered backward.
Up came the brute’s shield reflexively; Luthien didn’t miss the opportunity to thrust his sword into the cyclopian’s knee. The brute fell back on the stairs, helpless, and the second cyclopian promptly took flight.
Oliver’s flying dagger got the other monster in the back, two steps up.
Luthien had finished off the first cyclopian and the second turned with a howl—just in time to catch a second rebounding arrow.
Luthien and Oliver figured it out as Siobhan came around the bend behind them.
“Run on!” Oliver bade Luthien, knowing that the lovesick young man would likely stop and make sweet eyes at their rescuer for eternity. To Luthien’s credit, he was already in motion, bounding past the fallen brutes and up the winding stair. “We must get to the wizard-type . . .”
“Before he can prepare another surprise!” Luthien finished for him.
They put two hundred steps behind them, and Luthien’s legs ached and felt as though they would buckle beneath him. He paused for a moment and turned to regard his halfling friend.
“If we wait, the wizard-type will have a big boom waiting for us, I am sure,” Oliver said, brushing the thick wig hair back from his face.
Luthien tilted his bead back and took a deep breath, then ran on.
They put another hundred steps behind them and then saw the unmistakable glow of daylight. They came to a landing, then up five more stairs to the very roof of the tower, a circular space perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter that was enclosed by a low battlement.
Across from them stood Duke Morkney, laughing wildly, his voice changing, growing deeper, more guttural and more ominous. Luthien leaped to the platform, but skidded to a quick stop and looked on in horror as the duke’s body lurched violently, began twisting and bulging.
And growing.
Morkney’s skin became darker and hardened to layered scales along his arms and neck. His head bulged weirdly, growing great fangs and a forked and flicking tongue. Soon Morkney’s face resembled that of a giant snake, and great curving horns grew out from the top of his head. His red robes seemed a short skirt by then, for he was twice his original height, and his chest, so skinny and weak before, was now massive, stretching his previously voluminous robes to their limits. Long and powerful arms reached out of those sleeves, clawed fingers raking the air as the duke continued his obviously agonizing transformation.
Drool dripped off the front of the serpentine face, sizzling like acid as it hit the stone between the monster’s three-clawed feet where Morkney’s boots lay in tatters. With a shrug, the beast brushed free of the red robe, great leathery wings unfolding behind it, its black flesh and scales smoking with the heat of the Abyss.
“Morkney,” Luthien whispered.
“I do not think so,” Oliver replied. “Perhaps we should go back down.”
24
The Demon
“I am Morkney no more,” the beast proclaimed. “Gaze upon the might of Praehotec and be afraid!”
“Praehotec?” Luthien whispered, and he was indeed afraid.
“A demon,” Oliver explained, gasping for breath—from more than the long run up the stairs, Luthien knew. “The clever wizard-type has lent his material body to a demon.”
“It is no worse than the dragon,” Luthien whispered, trying to calm Oliver and himself.
“We did not beat the dragon,” Oliver promptly reminded him.
The demon looked around, its breath steaming in the chill October air. “Ah,” it sighed. “So good to be in the world again! I will feast well upon you, and you, and upon a hundred others before Morkney finds the will to release me to the Abyss!”
Luthien didn’t doubt the claim, not for a minute. He had seen giants as large as Praehotec, but nothing, not even Balthazar, had radiated an aura as powerful and as unspeakably evil. How many people had this demon eaten? Luthien wondered, and he shuddered, not wanting to know the answer.
He heard movement on the steps behind him and glanced back just in time to see Siobhan come up onto the lower landing, bow in hand.
Luthien took a deep breath and steadied himself. In his love-stricken heart, it seemed as if the stakes had just been raised.
“Come with me, Oliver,” he said through gritted teeth, and he clutched his sword tightly, meaning to charge into the face of doom.
Before the halfling could even turn his unbelieving stare on his taller friend, Praehotec reached out a clawed hand and clenched its massive fist.
A tremendous wind came up suddenly from over the battlement to their left, assaulting the companions. At the same moment, Siobhan let fly her arrow, but the gust caught the flimsy bolt and tossed it harmlessly aside.
Luthien squinted and raised an arm defensively against the stinging wind, his cape and clothes whipping out to the right, buffeting Oliver. The halfling’s hat pulled free of his head; up it spiraled.
Instinctively, Oliver leaped up and caught it, dropping his rapier in the process, but then he was flying, too, bouncing head over heels in a soaring roll. As he came back upright, he went high into the air, right over the battlement. Stunned Oliver was fully a dozen feet out from the ledge when Praehotec’s snakelike face turned up into a leering grin and the demon released the wind.
Oliver let out a single shriek and dropped from sight.
Crying out for his lost friend, Luthien charged straight in, sword slashing viciously. Siobhan’s arrows came in a seemingly continuous line over his head, scoring hit after hit on the beast, though whether or not they even stung the great Praehotec, Luthien could not tell.
He scored a slight nick with his sword, but the blade was powerfully batted away. Luthien dropped to one knee, ducking a slashing claw, then came right back to his feet and hopped backward, sucking in his belly to avoid the demon’s swiping arm.
An arrow nicked Praehotec’s neck and the demon hissed.
In came Luthien with a straightforward thrust that cut the fleshy insides of the demon’s huge thigh. The young Bedwyr whipped his head safely to the side as the fanged serpent head rocketed past, but a swiping claw caught him on the shoulder before he could regain his balance, gouging him and heaving him aside.
He kept the presence of mind to slash once more with his blade as he fell away, scoring a hit on Praehotec’s knuckle.
Luthien knew that last cut had hurt the demon, but he almost regretted that fact as Praehotec turned on him, reptilian eyes flaring with simmering fires of rage.
He saw something else, then, a flicker in the demon’s fiery eyes and a slight trembling on the side of the beast’s serpentine maw.
An arrow razored into the demon’s neck.
That flicker and trembling came again, and Luthien got the feeling that Praehotec was not so secure in this material body.
The demon straightened, towering above Luthien, as if to mock his suspicions. It shifted its furious gaze, and from its eyes came two lines of crackling red energy, joining together inches in front of the demon’s face and sizzling across the tower’s top to slam into Siobhan, throwing her back down the stairs.
Luthien’s heart seemed to stop.
Hanging from the tower’s side, Oliver plopped his hat on his head once more. The thing was on fairly straight, but the wig underneath it had turned fully about, and the long black tresses hung in front of his face, obscuring his vision. His legs and one hip ached from his swinging slam into the stone, and his arms ached, too, as he clung desperately to the rope of his magical grapnel.
The horrified halfling knew that he could not simply hang there forever, so he finally found the courage to look up, shaking the hair out of his face. His grapnel—that beautiful, magical grapnel!—had caught a secure hold on the curving stone, but it was not close enough to the tower’s rim for the halfling to climb over it, and Oliver didn’t have nearly enough rope to get down the side to the street below.