Neverwinter (Neverwinter #2)(88)

The archer in the tree moved swiftly into position. Barrabus saw him set an arrow. The other two were nearly at the edge of the clearing, and should charge forth at any moment.

With a determined grimace, Barrabus pulled his attention away and turned back to the Ashmadai leader, noting then the warrior’s curious armor. He wore spiked pauldrons and had circular spiked metal plates strapped at various points on his body: one over his left breast, one centered on his gut, smaller ones on his hips and legs, and a strangely spiked codpiece. That garb was unusual enough, particularly for the uniformly leathered Ashmadai, but what showed beneath the armor as the assassin moved closer for a better look had Barrabus pausing in puzzled curiosity.

Was he about to battle a mummy? The warrior was wrapped head to toe in strips of some grayish material, like dirty old rags.

The assassin didn’t know what to make of it, but as soon as he heard the bowstring’s twang behind him, he didn’t care, and he bolted from the brush.

He came in hard, sword leading in a sudden thrust. He stopped his run with a hop, planting both feet and springing into an airborne somersault. The Ashmadai warrior, surprisingly quick, turned as the assassin flew by, and even managed to prod out with his black and red scepter.

Barrabus parried that easily enough and landed with his sword cleverly underneath the Ashmadai’s weapon. As he turned back in, the Ashmadai charged at him as well, and never quite managed to disengage that weapon. Up went Barrabus’s sword, carrying the scepterlike staff-spear with it and creating a clean opening in the Ashmadai’s defenses. Barrabus waded in happily, dagger set by his hip. He mused that he might be able to get back in time to watch Effron’s demise.

The Ashmadai warrior twisted and tried to pull back, but Barrabus was too fast for that, and the turn only opened up a better target: the hollow of the warrior’s breast, just beside the spiked metal plate.

The fine dagger, magically enchanted, smoothed by the blood of a hundred kills, caught up to the retreating man and plunged hard.

And didn’t penetrate.

Only then did Barrabus understand that the Ashmadai’s backward motion was not a futile retreat, but a ploy—and one that allowed the strange zealot to pull Barrabus off-balance and also put them both in a position where the Ashmadai could disengage his weapon. And since the kill shot had seemed assured, Barrabus had no contingencies in mind.

The assassin moved purely on instinct as he felt the staff-spear pull free of his upraised blade, bringing his sword down hard, though he knew he’d be behind the incoming strike, and throwing himself to the side, swinging his opposite hip out even wider. His amazingly quick reaction prevented a solid strike from the scepter, and he accepted the glancing blow and spun away.

Halfway through that spin, he realized he had a problem.

The muscles on his right hip, where the clubbing scepter had struck, began to twitch and contract, and Barrabus stumbled.

Barrabus the Gray never stumbled.

His hip continued to spasm, the skin tightening around the bruise, and a burning sensation ran down the side of his thigh. He’d never felt anything quite like it. It wasn’t poison, but more of a magical effect.

A necrotic and withering magic.

The twitching did not diminish—quite the opposite. His leg muscles snapped and released and snapped again, painfully, and Barrabus had to fight hard just to hold his footing.

He stumbled more than once, and couldn’t think of executing either a charge or a retreat.

The Ashmadai warrior came on, a grinning mummy.





Effron casually pulled a crooked wooden wand from his belt as he watched the archer in the tree drawing back, the other two crawling in amidst the thick brush.

Those two burst from the underbrush, ten strides away, and the archer let fly.

And Effron tapped the wand to his head, thinned to two dimensions, and thinned again into what seemed like a single line. The insubstantial warlock plunged into a snake hole, sliding into the ground as the arrow flew harmlessly by.

“A caster!” one of the charging zealots yelled as he and his companion skidded to a stop.

That proved to be an expected mistake, from Effron’s point of view, and he came back out of the hole, throwing a curse on the warrior to his left as he widened again to his normal form.

The two cried out and came on with fury, waving their staff-spear scepters and crying out for their devil god.

Effron’s magic reached out at the warrior to the right. He didn’t point his wand at her, but merely offered a sardonic smile. The air between caster and target waved and waggled, like heat rising from a hot stone. A psychic wave rolled out at the female warrior. That wavering air blackened and seemed to roll back up on itself like a coiling serpent, right before it struck her.

She gave a garbled yelp and staggered, her face twisted and torn, her mind scrambled with agony and stinging pulses of magic.

The warlock threw his hand out to block as the other warrior bore down on him, the zealot bending low as if to plow him right over—and why not, the warlock understood, for this one more than doubled his weight.

Except that the warlock had more than one contingency in place for just this kind of attack, and as the warrior struck him, before the fighter could drive him backward, it was the Ashmadai who went flying, straight back the way he’d come, and in that flight, he burst into flames.

Effron, too, went flying, but not from the warrior’s momentum. In his circle of study, the magic was known as Caiphon’s Leap, and he simply dematerialized—noting the archer’s next arrow sailing at him from the tree at just that moment—and walked through a dimensional teleport to reappear right behind the staggering female Ashmadai.