Paratha gave no sign that she was aware of anything except Kaeritha, but Kaeritha had almost allowed herself to be fooled once. Now she knew better. And she also knew she had only one opportunity to end this fight before the guards Paratha had spoken of arrived. If the major stayed away, settled for simply holding her in play until the guards burst in on them, she would be doomed. So somehow, she had to entice the other woman into attacking her now . . . or convince the major that she'd tricked Kaeritha into attacking on her terms.
Paratha slowed, letting Kaeritha close gradually with her. Her saber danced and wove before her, its deadly, glowing tip leaving a twisting crawl of ugly yellow-green light in its wake, and Kaeritha's nerves tightened. The priestess with her poisoned dagger was close behind her, now, and Paratha's glittering eyes narrowed ever so slightly. If it was going to happen, Kaeritha thought, then it would happen-
Now!
The priestess sprang forward, teeth bared in a silent, snarling rictus, dagger thrusting viciously at Kaeritha's unguarded back. And in the same sliver of infinity, with the perfect coordination possible only when a single entity controlled both bodies, Paratha executed her own, deadly attack in a full-extension lunge.
It almost worked. It should have worked. But as Tomanâk had told Shigū, his champion was the equal of anything the Spider might bring against her. Kaeritha had known what was coming, and she'd spent half her life honing the skills she called upon that day. Perfectly as Paratha-or Shigū-had orchestrated the attack, Kaeritha's response was equally perfect . . . and began a tiny fraction of a second before Paratha's.
She twisted lithely, turning her torso through ninety degrees, and lunged at Paratha in a consummately executed stop-thrust. Her left-hand blade met the longer saber, twisting it aside in another of those terrible explosions of light and fury, then slid down its glaring length in a deadly extension that punched the blue caprisoned short sword through Paratha's breastplate as if its hardened steel had been so much cobweb. And even as she lunged towards Paratha, her right-hand sword snapped out behind her, and the priestess who'd flung herself at Kaeritha's back shrieked as her own charge impaled her upon that lethal blade.
For one instant, Kaeritha stood between her opponents, both arms at full extension in opposite directions, her sapphire eyes locked with Paratha's hell-lit eyes of brown. The other woman's mouth opened in shocked disbelief, and her saber wavered, then fell to the floor with a crackling explosion. Her left hand groped towards the cross guard of the sword buried in her chest and blood poured from her mouth.
And then the instant passed. Kaeritha twisted both wrists in unison, then straightened, withdrawing both her blades in one, crisp movement, and the bodies of both her opponents crumpled to the floor.
Chapter Forty-Six
The alarm bells continued to sound, and Kaeritha turned from her fallen enemies to face the audience chamber's double doors. Foul smelling smoke drifted and eddied, and small fires burned where the reflected bursts of contending powers had set furniture and wall hangings alight. The walls, ceilings, and polished floors were pitted and scorched, and the windows along the eastern wall had been shattered and blown out of their frames. Bodies-several as seared as the chamber's furnishings-sprawled everywhere amid pools of blood and the sewer stench of ruptured organs.
The blue corona of Tomanâk continued to envelop her, and she knew any priestess who saw it-and who was prepared to think about it-would recognize it for what it was. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that most of the temple's regular guards would do the same. Worse, she knew that although Shigū's avatar had been vanquished, the spider goddess' residual evil remained. Shigū might have been considerate enough to concentrate most of her more powerful servants here in the Voice's chambers for the attack on Kaeritha. But she hadn't concentrated all of them, and even if her remaining servants hadn't hungered for revenge, they must know that their only chance of escaping retribution lay in killing or at least diverting Kaeritha.
Her jaw tightened. She knew what she'd do, if she'd been one of Shigū's tools faced by a champion of Tomanâk. She would feed the uncorrupted members of Quaysar's guard force straight into the champion's blades, and the chaos and confusion and the fact that none of the innocents knew what was really happening would let her do exactly that. Any champion would do all she could to avoid slaying men and women who were only doing their sworn duty, with no trace of corruption upon their souls. And if, despite all she could do, that champion found herself forced to kill those men and women in self-defense, the Dark would count that a far from minor victory in its own right.
But Kaeritha had plans of her own, and her sapphire eyes were grim as she kicked the chamber's doors wide and stalked through them, swords blazing blue in her hands.
The bells were louder in the corridor outside the Voice's quarters, and Kaeritha heard sharp shouts of command and the clatter of booted feet. The first group of guards-a dozen war maids and half that many guardsmen in Lillinara's moon-badged livery-came around the bend at a run, and Kaeritha gathered her will. She reached out, in a way she could never have described to someone who was not also a champion, and seized a portion of the power Tomanâk had poured into her. She shaped it to suit her needs, then threw it out before her in a fan-shaped battering ram.
Shouted orders turned into shouts of confusion as Kaeritha's god-reinforced will swept down the corridor like some immense, unseen broom. It gathered up those who were responding to what they thought was an unprovoked attack upon the temple and its Voice and simply pushed them out of the way. Under other circumstances, Kaeritha might have found the sight amusing as their feet slid across the temple's floor as if its stone were polished ice. Some of them beat at the invisible wall shoving them out of Kaeritha's path with their fists. A few actually hewed at it with their weapons. But however they sought to resist, it was useless. They were shunted aside, roughly enough to leave bruises and contusions in some cases, but remarkably gently under the circumstances.
Yet some of the responding guards were not pushed out of Kaeritha's way. It took them precious seconds to realize that they hadn't been, and even that fleeting a delay proved fatal. Kaeritha was upon them, her blue eyes blazing with another, brighter blue, before they could react, for there was a reason her bow wave hadn't shunted them aside. Unlike the other guards, these were no innocent dupes of the corruption which had poisoned and befouled their temple. They knew who-or what-they truly served, and their faces twisted with panic as they found themselves singled out from their innocent fellows . . . within blade's reach of a champion of Tomanâk.
"Tomanâk!" Kaeritha hurled her war cry into their teeth, and her swords were right behind it. There was no way to avoid her in the corridor's confines, nor was there room or time for finesse. Kaeritha crunched into them, blazing swords moving with the merciless precision of some dwarvish killing machine made of wires and wheels.
Those trapped in front of the others lashed out with the fury of despair as they saw death come for them in the pitiless glitter of her eyes. It did them no good. No more than three of them could face her simultaneously, and all of them together would have been no match for her.