21
Though her body slipped to the throne-room floor, Sharina's mind watched from a place in limbo as the entrance hall filled with liches. Nonnus backed against the door, seemingly at bay, then launched himself low into the figures of gray flesh before they could react to the change.
The Pewle knife winked in moonlight:
A lich fell, its spine split by the blade slicing in through its belly.
A lich fell, its skull crushed by the pommel hammering against the left temple.
A lich fell, its neck cracked when the hermit's blunt fingers jabbed into its eyesockets for a grip and jerked as if to finish a leg-snared rabbit.
Nonnus backed away. The surviving liches had no fear, no hesitation. Those in the center stepped laboriously over the bodies of their own kind; those to either side moved forward unhindered, their weapons raised and their cold gray faces set.
Nonnus breathed in great gasps. As well as the Pewle knife he now held the end of a boarding pike whose shaft was broken off thirty inches beneath the hooked point. He grinned to his right and jumped left, into the gray mass.
Steel sparkled on steel. From the melee spun a skull dead for centuries and now dead forever, losing bits of gelatinous flesh while still in the air.
Nonnus stepped back, but the door was there and no longer space for maneuver. The liches rolled over him from two sides and then the third. The pile of impassive faces and rusty weapons stabbing continued to move much longer than any human being could have lived to fight—
But when the movement ceased, Sharina's mind returned in a wave of black emptiness to her body on the floor of the throne room.
"Phasousouel eistochama nouchael!" Meder called. He and the procurator stood within the circle he'd scribed on the stone floor with Sharina's dagger. The embedded marble chips steamed and bubbled at the touch of the brown ichor remaining on the blade.
Asera looked cold-faced in the direction of the door, taking no part in the ceremony. She was probably afraid, but she was too much an aristocrat to let her fear show now.
"Apraphes! Einath! Adones!"
The door shook with another series of blows. The point of a rusty boarding axe split the panel near the top and withdrew. A halberd head stabbed halfway through the wood lower down; the liches were using the long shaft as a lever to tear the door apart.
Sharina thought she could move again, though she wasn't sure that she wanted to. When the undead monsters in the hall killed her, they would end her responsibility—and her guilt.
"Dechochtha iathennaouian zaarabem!" Meder called. His voice lilted and his moonlit face held a fierce joy.
Sharina didn't know what the wizard was planning. Based on recent experience it would be something foul, something that a human being would rather die than be associated with.
A mace and the axe together smashed the center of the top panel to splinters. Hands of translucent jelly reached in to pull the broken wood out of the way. Splinters clung to the flesh.
Nonnus wouldn't want her to think of Meder as inhuman. Nonnus wouldn't expect the girl he'd died for to lie on the floor while evil triumphed.
The candlestick that had struck her down lay beside her. Sharina picked it up and stood, backing slightly away from the door and the gray, skeletal creatures who were completing its destruction.
"Namadon! Zamadon! Thestis!"
The door split top to bottom. The latch side sagged and fell into the throne room. Two liches pushed the rest of the door in on its hinges. There was a pile of their kind dismembered just outside the door, as Sharina had known there would be.
She braced herself, raising the heavy candlestick. The liches were already dead, but perhaps her own blood would give Meder the power he needed for his incantation.
"Sharina!" the wizard called. She glanced around by reflex at the sound of her name.
Meder seized Asera by the hair with his left hand. He cut her throat with the dagger.
The procurator's mouth opened wide, but she was too startled even to scream. Blood gouted over her beige robe, then vanished in the jet of red fire filling the protective circle and mushrooming off the ceiling above the black throne.
Even the liches paused. The wizard and his sacrifice both dissolved in the roaring flame. The dagger fell to the floor and bounced away, twisted and glowing. None of the inferno's heat touched Sharina, though she was only arm's length from the protective circle.
The flame vanished, flicked out as if a shutter had fallen. A red-skinned creature with leprous eyes stood in the center of the circle. It was seven feet tall, with shoulders so hunched that the claws on its long fingers brushed the floor.
"I'll save you, Sharina," the demon said in a croaking parody of Meder's voice. He shambled forward, his claws scoring the stone.
Sharina stepped aside, still holding the candlestick. She was too shocked to be frightened.
Half the plastered ceiling dropped with a crash, covering the throne and the burned stone floor. A cloud of white dust spilled outward. Fire twinkled on the bared roofbeams.
Whatever animated the minds of the liches left no room for fear. The pair in the doorway lunged toward the greater monster, swinging their weapons. One's mace clanged from the red skull. The other's swordstroke didn't land because the demon caught the blade in one hand and crumpled the steel like a boy playing with a dandelion stem.
"I'll save you, Sharina," repeated the monster that had been Meder. He squeezed the liches together. When he released them, the bones of their shoulders and upper chests were ground to powder suspended in the jelly of their flesh.
The demon waddled into the main hall on its short legs. There were scores of liches. They attacked with the single-minded fury of bees swarming over a nest-robbing bear, and to as little purpose. The demon pulled his opponents apart or crushed them. Neither the armor some liches wore nor the blows they rained with a variety of weapons on Meder had any effect on his actions.
Sharina dropped to her knees in the pile of liches dismembered outside the door of the throne room. She clawed through putrescent flesh and bones, some of them so ancient that they snapped when she tugged at them.
Nonnus was on the bottom, the Pewle knife in his right hand. His face looked calm; but then, it always had.
"May the Lady cover you with Her cloak, my friend. May the Shepherd guide you to His fold."
Sharina wrapped her fingers around the dead man's. She began to cry.
The demon flung aside fragments of the last remaining lich. He turned with a smile on his flat, lipless face.
"I've saved you, Sharina," Meder said. "Now you're mine."
He started toward her.