Dread built inside her, but it was not a fear for her own life, not despair at the thought that she might be growing old: for Nicci, the greatest fear was that she might fail on a quest to which she had given her heart and soul, that she might fail Richard’s dreams of a hopeful new order. “I am Death’s Mistress,” she muttered in a grim whisper. “The Lifedrinker is no match for me.”
Mrra hobbled along, and Nicci saw that the cat’s big paws left blood smears on the sharp obsidian rocks as she padded forward. But Mrra remained close at hand, ready to fight alongside her surrogate sister panther.
The static in the air thickened, and the background sound near the amphitheater increased to a crackling hiss. Nicci’s blond hair rose in a charged corona around her head.
The obsidian rocks ground together, and a belching gasp of brimstone steam coughed upward, nearly choking her. Nicci fixed her gaze to where the circle of ominous sharp spires cast dust-blurred shadows on the ground.
Nicci knew the powerful wizard was inside there. She would stand before him, and she would kill him, even if it cost her last spark of energy.
“Lifedrinker!” she shouted, listening to the deep pervasive thunder in the air. Slashes of lightning whipped through the thunderheads. In a lower voice, she said, “Roland. Face me.”
The ground shuddered and cracked, and scuttling forms emerged, black-armored creatures with multiple legs, glittering eyes, and segmented front limbs that ended in clacking pincers. Scorpions, each the size of a dog, emerged from underground nests to stand as guardians on top of the black boulders. Each long tail was capped with a wicked stinger that dripped venom.
Beside her, Bannon gave an audible gulp. Nicci recalled that Thistle’s parents had been killed by similar creatures.
She stepped forward, remembering her main enemy. She shouted a challenge. “Lifedrinker!”
Suddenly, she remembered what the witch woman had written in the life book: Future and Fate depend on both the journey and the destination.
More rocks shifted as the ground convulsed within the circle of towering stelae, and the blackness from the central pit seemed to deepen. Hulking shapes emerged from beneath the ground, withered and desiccated human forms, black with dust. Their sinewy bodies were covered with festering boils, sick open sores that dotted arms and necks, bulges that pushed out the sides of their faces. These horrors were worse than the previous dust people. They stood in a line, blocking Nicci from going closer to the Lifedrinker’s lair.
Mrra growled. Bannon raised his sword. “We can cut through them, Sorceress.”
The blighted human forms lurched forward, and Nicci drew her knife, careful to restrain her magic, but knowing she might have to use it. With clacking pincers, the scorpions scuttled closer, weaving in and around the desiccated dust people.
Mrra bared her long fangs, and her tail thrashed. Bannon stood at her side. “I’ll fight them so you can get close enough, Sorceress.” He gulped.
Finally, with a swirl of black static and a slash of angry lightning all around them, the Lifedrinker himself emerged from the darkness.
CHAPTER 53
The ring of distorted pillars surrounded an empty pit like the gullet of a giant buried serpent, a well that sank into the coldest depths of eternity. From this sunken hole, the Lifedrinker’s unchecked magic continued to absorb the life from the world.
Climbing out of the inky emptiness from below, the thing that had been Roland emerged. The evil wizard hobbled and lurched, swelled and shrank, a tangled construction of incredible power intertwined with desperate weakness. He had been human once, but very little evidence of his humanity remained.
He stepped out into the crackling air illuminated by slashes of blue-white lightning that racked the thunderheads above. Dust swirled and howled, as if the wind itself were gasping in awe at the Lifedrinker’s presence.
He wore what had been the robes of a Cliffwall scholar, but they had frayed and extended into long flapping shrouds that trailed behind him into the deep pit. Dark ripples flowed from his body as his magic stole light itself from the air, drinking, absorbing, draining everything down into the black well. It seemed as if a powerful life lodestone lay at the bottom of the depths—a magical force so great that even the Lifedrinker could not escape its pull.
When the wizard spoke, the words were sucked out of the air along with all other sound, taking Nicci’s breath away, stealing more of her energy. “Few come to see me,” Roland said. He loomed up, his tattered robes whipping about in the storm of his own energy.
She touched the pocket of her black dress, felt the hard kernel of the Eldertree acorn. She took a step closer, remembering many other terrible foes she had faced, and defeated. “I came to destroy you.”
“Yes … I know,” said the wizard. “Others have tried.”
Nicci heard no defiance or arrogance in his voice, just an odd undertone of despair.
His face was long and gaunt, the cheeks sunken, his large eyes red with sickness. Roland’s neck was so thin that the tendons stood out like ropes. As the fabric of his flapping robes exposed his bare chest, Nicci was appalled to see his ribs laced with a tangle of swollen growths, as if his torso were composed entirely of tumors. The chaotic protrusions pulsed and throbbed, reservoirs of misdirected life energy that had grown within him and kept growing, desperate for nourishment. The wasting disease had extinguished everything that had been the weak-willed wizard, and controlled him.
His legs were bent, his spine twisted. The Lifedrinker lived because he was a structure of stolen life, a jumble of patched-together flesh, muscle, organs. “Please…” he said, in a much quieter voice that surged to a roar. “I hunger … I thirst … I need!” He swayed.
The dust people around the circle of obsidian pillars stood motionless.
Bannon held his sword, but could not conceal that his hands were shaking.
Mrra crouched, growling, but did not move.
The Lifedrinker raised his hands. His fingers were mere sticks covered with a film of skin—no matter how much life he drained from the world, it was not enough, never enough. He curled his hands in a beseeching gesture. “I did not intend this. I don’t want this.” He heaved a deep breath, and lightning skirled all around them, striking the tops of the obsidian stelae. “I cannot stop this!” the Lifedrinker moaned.
Even as she felt the years and the life draining away from her in the inexorable tug of the evil wizard, Nicci stepped across the uneven ground. “Then I will stop you.” She would fight him, hurl him back into the endless pit. The Eldertree acorn might be the most powerful weapon she’d ever held.
But the terrible drain wrung vitality from her muscles and made her thoughts fuzzy.
An uncanny flash flickered in the Lifedrinker’s sunken eyes. The tumors that comprised his body writhed like a nest of vipers ready to strike. “No,” he said, “I must survive. I have to.”
An army of unwieldy but deadly marionettes, the dust people began to move. More than a hundred of them lurched into motion, ready to attack.