The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(86)
The tiger was upon her then, tearing at her arm with its powerful jaws. She switched the knife to her other hand, swung it towards the tiger’s neck, but before she could cut its throat a tremendous force threw her back towards the wall. She struck it hard and all the air went out of her, but she managed not to drop the knife. For a moment her senses burst open, but the instant she smelled fire she clamped them shut again. She felt Nia approaching with the spear, wrestling with its Magic. She wanted to use Swarn’s own weapons against her, just to show off, but it would take her time to pervert such strong enchantments and this was to Swarn’s advantage. Her right arm had been torn badly by the tiger and was of little use to her now. With her left hand she hurled the knife again towards Nia. The arrows had come back to her quiver. Blocking the pain from her savaged arm as best she could, she fired off a second volley, these ones toward the tiger, but they were all sent off course and the knife too clattered to the ground. Swarn felt her concentration clouding and quickly repelled the Confusion. Slow, she was slow not to have known it was coming before it began. She lunged forward, laying hands on the spear Nia held. For a moment they wrestled for it and, because the spear was hers and all its power yearned towards her, Swarn won. She tried to drive it into her enemy but her hands began to fumble it suddenly. Again she had to pour all her power into fending off the Confusion.
“You look silly running around with your eyes closed and your face all pinched that way,” said Nia. “I don’t have to use Illusion, you know.”
Swarn felt something hurtling towards her. She opened her eyes and saw only a fog, thick and white, and then the thing struck her and she crashed to the ground, stunned. It was one of the carvings come loose from the wall. The stone head of a dragon.
“The Ancients would call it sacrilege,” rasped Swarn. “You murder their Oracle, desecrate their temples, destroy the Hall they built!”
“The Ancients don’t care,” Nia replied, and another great statue, this of a Mage, broke free of the wall and flew across the Hall, slamming into Swarn. The Confusion pressed hard against her mind. She forced it out, and as she did so she was struck yet again. This time she felt her ribs cave in beneath the blow. She gasped for air and pain shot through her. She accepted the pain this time. She could not hold off the pain as well as the Confusion. Somehow Nia had her spear again and she wasn’t sure how it had happened. With all her will she tugged it towards her, and it pulled Nia to her. She wrenched the spear away.
“I will kill you with your own spear eventually,” said Nia in her ear. “The only question is how close to dead you’ll be when I get to it.”
Swarn cleared her mind with an agonizing breath. It was nearly hailing slabs of stone and statues now. She locked her mind on one and caught hold of its flow, swung it round towards Nia. It shattered in the air before it struck the sorceress and Swarn felt a crushing blow to the back of her neck. She was flat on the stone floor, and opened her eyes without meaning to. Flames sprang up around her. She leaped above them, hanging onto her spear, which hovered in the air at a gasped command. Balancing on her spear, she reached into her pocket and hurled a sleeping powder at Nia. Nia brushed the potion from her, but it slowed her for a moment, and Swarn’s spear shot from under her, straight for Nia’s heart. She tried to dodge it but wasn’t quick enough and the spear went through the same shoulder that had taken the arrow wound. Nia cried out in rage and pain as the spear’s enchantment coursed through her bloodstream. Without her spear to stand on, Swarn had plunged into the flames below, but crawled free of them, rolling over to put them out. She could smell her own flesh sizzling.
Nia wrenched the spear from her shoulder, shuddering violently. She tried to hurl the spear at Swarn but it would not go, so she battered the witch with stones, half-burying her in them. Dazed, Swarn lay beneath the heap of rock and for a moment she could not move. It was all the time Nia needed. Clutching the spear with her two hands, she fought it to the finish. It broke with a thunderous clap and she gave a yell of triumph. Swarn was slowly, painfully, pulling herself out from under the rubble. The Confusion came upon her so quickly and powerfully that it took her whole. She fell back, bewildered, lost. Nia smiled, then heard her tiger growl warningly. Something large and white was flying towards her, and she heard the words of a Curse. Her vision began to cloud and a thread of icy fear wove its way into her blood. A Faery. She shook off the Curse with an angry shout, then hurled the bottom half of the broken spear into the myrkestra, which plunged straight to the ground, dead. The Faery rolled upright immediately, drawing his sword and beginning the Curse again. A dragon was coming at her from the other direction, pouring fire from its mouth. Nia pointed a finger in either direction and spoke two spells at once. She sent the dragon and its two passengers flying back into the wall and baffled the Faery’s tongue so he could not finish the Curse. The next instant, Jalo found himself bound with the same silver chains that Alvar had put on Malferio, and Charlie was no longer a dragon but trapped in the form of a cockroach.
“There,” Nia said a little breathlessly, smiling at Jalo and shrugging off the last clinging shadows of the unfinished Curse. “Isn’t it convenient I hung onto those chains, you naughty pactbreaker. Won’t your new king be cross when he hears what you’re up to?”
Nell was sprawled on the floor, banged up and winded from the dragon suddenly flying into the wall – this had not been in any way part of their attack plan. The cockroach scuttled to Nell’s side. She had not for a moment really believed they would fail – she didn’t have much experience with failure – and so she was slow to realize what was happening. Ander had spent a long time in the army, however. He had not really believed they would succeed and was quick to assess the new situation. He saw that Nia had neutralized the two new attackers who posed any kind of practical threat – the Faery and the Shade – and would now turn her attention to the witch. He knew what she would do even as she did it and he acted without thinking. The mission, after all, was to help the witch, to get her out of here. He was already up on his feet and running when the other half of the broken spear left Nia’s hand. He knocked it to the ground, picked it up and turned on the Sorceress. And then it was hard to say what happened, but the spear shaft was in her hand again rather than his and a moment later it caught him full in the chest. Nell could see the point of it come out his back, but it didn’t register, even as he staggered and then fell back amid the broken statues cluttering the ground.