Ducking under Malachite’s sword arm in the swirling gloom, Galthia hits his friend in the chin, the chest, the neck. He dances backwards into deeper shadow as Malachite shakes off the stunning pain. “I’m sorry, Malachite, but this is too important for you to sabotage. You’ll be all right once we destroy this.”
“I’ll be all right?” Malachite steps forward and squints into the liquid darkness around him. “Galthia, snap out of it. You’re clearly mind controlled.”
The monk snorts. “Sure I am.” He dodges as Malachite flicks Karthos in a sweeping arc overhead.
“You’re also slow.” Reversing the swing, Malachite brings the sun blade down into Galthia’s shoulder and dark blood splatters the walls and floor. The sword twists and spills more blood before finally ripping free. The monk winces briefly from the pain but he’s nowhere near as hurt as Malachite; the radiant knight can feel a broken rib grating every time he moves.
“Karthos, can you heal me?”
The sword’s voice is a metallic burr. “If you can stop swinging me long enough to me to concentrate.”
“Then I can’t take much more of this,” Malachite thinks over the mindlink. He feels something insistent prodding at his mind and trying to twist what he knows is true. The amulet given him by Claris thrums.
“It’s for the best, everyone,” says Galthia. “If I fail, Mara and Velendo will have to stop him.” He prods a pressure point on his own body to stop the bleeding before trying to kick out Malachite’s knee. Beside him, the opening in the wall dilates and slender fibrous tendrils begin to squirm outwards towards the combatants.
Stone Bear and Burr-Lipp strain to pull Galthia up and out of the pit, back into the throne room. They tumble backwards as the monk slips free of his rope harness in order to stay in the pit. Everyone else clusters on hands and knees as they try to stare down into the reeking darkness.
Eve is shaking with fright. “What’s happening down there? What’s going on?” She repeats the question over her mindlink to Velendo, but he doesn’t immediately answer her.
Priggle’s frown deepens as he explains. “Galthia is mind controlled and is attacking Malachite. Or vice versa. Probably just warming up for the rest of us.”
“Malachite? We have to get him out! Should I? I can do it!” She stares down, trying to see the flicker of light that would be Malachite’s sword. Power surges in her mind, but doubt holds her back. “Ask him if that’s what he wants!”
“No!” thinks Velendo directly to Eve. “We’re almost there. We can heal him.” He and Mara now hang just overhead.
“Shall I?” asks Mara.
“No, Mara, I’ve got him,” says the old cleric as he dangles from the rope harness and prays fervently for all of Malachite’s wounds to be healed. As soon as he begins the prayer Velendo feels the intense negative energy pushing in from all sides and knows he’s in trouble. Velendo’s permanent arcane sight actually lets him see his spell getting subsumed and eaten by the darkness in the pit, the guttering lines of light being swallowed one by one by void.
“I take that back,” he says with a grimace. “There’s no way I can heal him down here.”
“Then I need to back off for a moment,” growls Malachite as he blocks another series of attacks from Galthia. He activates his boots of levitation and is buoyed upwards, even as Mara slides down to take his place. Mara’s blue eyes widen as she sees what the other two have missed.
“Aeos preserve us.” Mara stares blankly into a gaping womb of fleshy tendrils and squealing fish-white blobs. She realizes instinctively that this is the cyst of Imbindarla, and that the twitching albino larvae are her unborn children. Proto-gods, each hungry for untasted blood, each capable of becoming another abomination like the Ivory King. Their horrible need sings to her in the darkness. She recoils, and in doing so snaps off a filament of pale flesh that has quietly wrapped itself around her leg.
“I see them,” says Velendo in a small voice.
“What do we do?”
“Are they undead?” He sounds doubtful. For a second Mara wonders if he too has been possessed by the malign intelligence before them, then decides that he hasn’t. Hopes that he hasn’t.
“Let’s try the obvious.” She smiles grimly and concentrates. Her implacable faith surges as she tries to pierce the shadows, and for an endless moment Mara is worried that the darkness will win. Then she remembers the smell of the sun baked streets of Corsai and the feel of the noon heat, and light bursts from her in a cascade of radiance. The fell consciousness of the cyst screams wordlessly.
“You’ll ruin everything for us!” says Galthia worriedly. He hits Mara four times in the face, trying to knock her senseless without hurting her too badly. He then loops a final punch at Velendo. The cleric catches it on the edge of his stone shield.
“I shouldn’t have left Cruciel to watch for wraiths. Mara, we’ve got to deal with him.” But he’s right, Mara is possessed, thinks the cleric for an instant before pushing the thought away. Something is trying to burrow its way into his mind. “Did your faith actually do anything?” He peers into the shifting darkness, trying to see if anything was hurt. Acting on faith and with no better idea, Velendo turns undead as well. The rumble of falling bricks fills the cavity.
“We have to go into the cyst to destroy it!” says Galthia.
“No, Galthia,” explains Mara as if talking to a child. “That’s a tremendously bad idea.” She raises her mace and calls on every bit of power she possesses. Then with a flick of the wrist so as not to impale the githzerai on any of her mace’s spikes, she brings Lightbinder around on a short powerful arc to his head. There is a sound like a melon being dropped. “I’m really sorry about this,” she says earnestly, and hits him two more times on the back of the head. The monk drops senseless.
“Look,” says Velendo. “Those tendrils are burned back. . .”
“And they’re coming forward again.” She bites her lip.
“But the floor feels different. Less spongy. Why?” He squints down into the darkness and sees that part of the floor and wall has grown hard and brittle. The pattern of the change is odd, and it takes him a second to figure out why. “Blood! Mara, the positive energy transformed everywhere Malachite and Galthia’s blood splashed. It's like scar tissue. We need to coat this whole area in a wall of blood and then cement it in place with faith.” He grimaces at the squealing shapes within the cyst. “Before that thing opens any more.”
Mara looks at him in confusion. “But where are we going to get. . .” Comprehension dawns in her eyes, and she looks sick.
“Malachite, we need you as soon as you’re healed. And Agar, we have to get Galthia out of here; maybe Proty can teleport him. We won’t need Stone Bear, he doesn’t draw blood, but get what’s-his-name ready to descend just in case.”
“Burr-Lipp?”
“No, with the picks. Priggle.”
“I’m quivering with anticipation.”
“Better start,” says Velendo to Mara. “I can’t heal down here. Don’t kill me.”
Flipping her mace around to make sure she uses the ripping spikes, Mara hits Velendo in the neck.
--- o ---
“Something’s out here,” warns Eve from where she waits on watch in the anteroom. “Something’s coming.” Her own mindlink to Velendo doesn’t connect to the rest of the group, and only he hears her worry.
“Deal with it, Eve. We’re a little busy.” She doesn’t hear his cry as his lifeblood spills out over the trembling cyst, or his gasp as Mara lays on hands.
“Yes sir.” She glares at the open door, and relaxes when it's only monkeys that begin scampering in. The ape Soder dressed as Nolin leaps onto to a torch sconce and hisses at her. “This is something I know how to handle.”
Eve flicks out her mind like a sharpened blade. “Come here, monkeys.” All the monkeys scamper closer in lockstep. “Sit down.” They sit simultaneously, hooting. “Sit quietly, and be still.” The monkeys fold their simian hands in their hairy little laps and crouch motionless, staring. And waiting. Eve can feel their intellects like hot pellets within her mind, totally subject to her whim. She smiles.
“All set,” she says.
In the pit, Velendo takes huge rasping breaths of polluted air as he examines the cyst opening. It’s still trying to open, but the hardened blood has covered it with an inflexible membrane. Only an arm-sized hole remains, through which pale tendrils of something try to force their way. “I’m too old for this,” he mumbles. Next to him, Malachite pauses to lay his hands across a near-mortal wound on Mara’s belly.
“The cyst is almost closed,” Mara says. A strange look passes across her face. “And I can’t let it possess you!” She jumps forward and swings her mace into Velendo’s head, ripping off a bloody chunk of scalp. Velendo drops as blood droplets spray from the end of Lightbinder.
“Oh, by dawn and dusk,” says Malachite. “Mara’s taken, too.” He swings Karthos at the back of Mara’s neck, making sure that he doesn’t swing hard enough to accidentally take her head off. She screams with the unanticipated pain and staggers around. Before she can act, Malachite smears a handful of their mixed blood across the breach in the cyst’s scar tissue and turns undead one final time. There is a searing noise as the blood hardens to a crust, and as if a lever is switched the amount of negative energy in the pit noticeably lessens.
Mara takes a few tottering steps backwards and falls down, almost sitting on Velendo’s unconscious body. She pushes her last few dregs of healing into his form and is glad to see his eyes flutter.
“Sorry about that.”
“Yes,” says Malachite as he painfully reaches down to drag Velendo to his feet. “But it’s done. The cyst is closed, really closed, and my mission is complete.” Haggard with blood loss and smeared with gore, he nevertheless smiles with dazzling joy.
“We did it.”
To be continued. . .
