In the Claws of the Tiger (30 page)

“I’m pretty sure I can climb this,” he said, turning to his companions. “If I get up there and drop a rope down, will the rest of you be able to make it up?”

“Of course,” said Dania. Mathas nodded, though he looked almost too tired to speak.

Auftane looked uncertainly at the stone block, but then he nodded as well.

“Up I go,” Janik said.

He slid one hand up the wall until he found a good handhold in the worn rock, then did the same with one foot. A moment later he was sliding up the side of the wall like a spider. He only slipped once and caught himself quickly. He reached the top of the block and squeezed into the gap
between the two upper ones. He checked above him, still not seeing any guards, and peered down the length of the gap. It narrowed considerably at the other end.

“Wait there,” he hissed down to the others. “I want to make sure we can get through the other side before you all climb up here.”

Turning sideways, he crept along between the two stone blocks until he was sure he could fit in the gap all the way through. He peered out the narrow space at the far end and gasped as he got his first look at Mel-Aqat in over three years.

It had changed considerably, as Mathas had said. On their last visit, only the merest suggestion of ancient buildings marked what had once been a great city, with the exception of the towering ziggurat in its center. Janik and his companions had dug away some of the parched earth to reveal more of the crumbling walls in places, and they had found one ancient vault underground that was almost completely intact—and there they had found the Ramethene Sword. But above ground, nothing had stood—barely two stones stacked on top of each other.

This time, in addition to the reconstruction of the wall, there were strange, crumbling towers erected in various places around the central ziggurat. They were nothing more than huge stone blocks in haphazard stacks, like the constructions of a young child’s toy blocks, but on a much larger scale. Some leaned far to one side, while others buckled in the middle and then righted themselves. For a moment, Janik almost thought he saw some pattern to their arrangement around the ziggurat, but it escaped him and he made a mental note to consider the question later. He needed to help his friends over the wall—and quickly, before any guards appeared.

He pulled a coil of fine silk rope from his backpack and
looked for a good place to tie it as he moved back to the outside edge of the wall. The worn stone surface offered no large protrusions—barely more than the narrow fingerholds he had used to climb the lower blocks. He reached the outer edge and threw one end of the rope down.

“Wait another second,” he whispered. “I need to secure this end.”

He tied a large knot in the other end of the rope as he made his way back along the narrow gap. On the inside edge, he crouched down and worked the rope in between the upper and lower blocks so that the knot would catch in place. He pulled hard on the rope to make sure it was secure, checked one more time for guards, and, seeing none, went back to the other end of the gap.

“Come on up,” he said.

Dania tested the rope with her weight and then handed it to Mathas. The old elf glanced at the rope, then handed it back to Dania.

“I’ll do it my way,” he said, and cast a quick spell. Looking up at Janik, he started to float upward. At the top, Janik reached out and pulled him over to stand on the wall, laughing quietly.

“I don’t think there’s room for you to get past me,” he said to Mathas.

Janik backed into the gap, making enough room for Mathas and Auftane, who was walking up the wall, pulling himself along with the rope. Dania held the rope at the bottom to keep him from swinging. Mathas tried to help Auftane clamber up over the edge, almost causing them both to tumble back down onto Dania.

Dania came up last, pulling herself quickly hand over hand and easily finding her feet on the top of the wall. She
pulled the rope up behind her and handed it to Auftane, who passed it to Janik. Janik led the way through the gap and pulled the knot free from the crack where he had wedged it.

“Uh-oh,” he said, ducking his head to the side just as an arrow whizzed past his ear. Mathas cursed in pain behind him. Janik pulled his head farther into the gap while searching the ground below for the source of the arrow.

Mathas spotted the rakshasa first, ignoring the arrow’s cut and sending a blast of magical fire to engulf a figure crouching in the shadows below them. The zakya roared and loosed another arrow, which clattered harmlessly off the stone block behind Mathas.

“Well, I’m no use up here,” Janik muttered. He dropped the rope behind him and jumped to the ground, landing on his feet and running over to the zakya. It dropped its bow and pulled out a heavy, toothed sword. Too late, Janik remembered how the other fiends had resisted the bite of his blade, and he wished he had been less impulsive.

The zakya’s fur was partly burned away by Mathas’s fiery blast, and Janik saw pink, blistered flesh beneath it. He could see the pain in its eyes, but its mouth was twisted into something like a snarling grin as it anticipated cutting into Janik with its sword.

Good, Janik thought, it expects me to be easy.

The fiend led with a sweeping blow that would have knocked Janik flat on his back while it opened a gash in his belly—if Janik had been in its path. He tumbled down and to his right, staying ahead of the blade and enticing his foe to extend the swing, reaching too far out. Planting his feet at the end of his roll, Janik hurled his whole body at the zakya, leading with the point of his sword. The blade entered the fiend’s body below its arm and bit deeply despite
the creature’s preternatural toughness. Janik ended his roll facing the wall, where Mathas was floating to the ground, and he saw Auftane fumbling with the rope to get himself safely down.

The fiend wheeled to face Janik and adopted a more cautious stance, holding a blood-drenched hand to the wound beneath its sword arm and snarling in anger.

“Janik, watch out!”

Janik was barely conscious of Mathas’s shouted warning, but instinctively dodged to the side just as another rakshasa’s blade swung down where his head had been. In the same instant that Janik dodged, a massive bolt of crackling lightning stretched from the elf’s fingertips to engulf both fiends. The one in front of him fell, tiny arcs of lightning flaring in its fur. The second fiend roared and charged past Janik toward Mathas, beginning to raise its sword for a deadly blow.

“Ignore me, will you?” Janik muttered. As the zakya passed him, his sword darted out and sliced into the fiend’s leg, sending it sprawling on its face on the dusty earth. Janik sprang forward to kill it before it could rise, but it rolled over and slammed its shield into Janik, knocking him aside. He tried to roll with the blow and come up on his feet, but the blow had upset his balance and he joined the rakshasa sprawled in the dust, staring up at the sky.

The fiend didn’t bother trying to get to its feet. It used the momentum of its roll to carry itself to where Janik lay. It planted its sword hand on Janik’s shoulder to pin him to the ground, and lifted its shield so its sharpened edge was positioned right over Janik’s neck.

T
he fiend paused for only a heartbeat. Janik saw its feline mouth curve into a wicked smile and the muscles of its shoulder tense to drive the shield down.

Something hit the rakshasa like a stone from a catapult, knocking it off Janik completely. Janik leaped to his feet and saw Dania on the ground, tangled with the fiend, which looked more like a fierce tiger locked in a death struggle than a warrior in armor. It roared as it tried to roll Dania onto her back, and it ignored its weapons in favor of trying to bite her neck.

Janik took a deep breath as he picked up his sword from the ground, trying to calm his pounding heart. He moved as fast as he could to the zakya and Dania, but he felt like he was running in a dream, as if his feet were mired in swampy ground.

“Get it off her, Janik!” Mathas was yelling. He was poised to cast a spell, but he didn’t want to risk catching Dania in the blast. Dania was struggling, but she seemed unwilling to loose her sword, even though she couldn’t possibly bring it to bear in such close quarters.

Janik reached them. With his left hand, he grabbed a
fistful of the zakya’s fur and skin between its helmet and its armor, pulling with all his strength to draw its head back. It snarled and tried to twist its head around to bite his arm, then Janik drove his sword up under its chin.

Again he felt that his sword had grown blunt, that it couldn’t bite through the unnatural flesh. But it didn’t matter. Dania broke free of the zakya’s grasp, found her feet, and stepped backward, swinging her sword with all her strength. Her weapon hit the creature and erupted in a burst of silver flame, then cleaved through its neck as the flame seared its fur and flesh. Janik pulled his hand back from the flames in surprise, leaving his sword embedded in the zakya’s chin. The sword landed, impaled in the fiend’s severed head, at Janik’s feet. Its body slumped to the ground.

“Thanks for getting it off me,” Dania said.

“Thanks for keeping my head on me,” Janik replied. He bent to pull his sword free, and tested the point with his finger. “Auftane?” He looked around for the dwarf, finding him beside Mathas.

“Give me the sword,” Auftane said, anticipating Janik’s request. He took the blade and traced symbols on it as he had done before, then handed it back to Janik. “That ought to help.”

“Thank you.” Janik checked the point again out of habit, then slid the sword back into its sheath. “On second thought,” he said, pulling it out again, “I expect I’m going to need this again soon.”

“I can’t quite believe we’re not still fighting,” Dania said. “Those two certainly made enough noise to draw attention.”

“Well, we don’t know how many of these things are here,” Janik said. “The party that came after us was large, so maybe they didn’t leave many behind.”

“Sounds pretty optimistic,” Auftane observed.

“It’s a pleasant enough fantasy,” Janik said. “But it’s probably a trap.”

“Now that’s the Janik I know,” Dania said with a wry smile. “Where now?” Auftane asked.

“A place to talk about this that’s not out in the open,” Janik said. “It would have been good to come in here with a plan.”

“We were making our way toward a plan,” Dania said, “but they caught us off guard. Sneaking up on our camp in the middle of the night—honestly, they have no respect for the way things are supposed to be done.”

Janik laughed quietly and pointed to a heap of rubble nearby—evidently one of the efforts to rebuild the ruins. They moved quietly into its shadow and huddled together to plan their next steps.

“I see two possible approaches,” Janik said. “One would be to retrace our steps from our last journey. I have the map I made then, though I don’t know how helpful it will be with all the building they’ve been doing.” He pulled the sheaf of parchment out of his coat and rustled through it. “The other option would be to head straight for the ziggurat, assuming that whatever is going on here has its origins in that structure.” He found the map he was looking for, checked the positions of the moons to orient himself, and pulled a small, smooth stone from another pocket. The stone glowed with a dim white light, and he held it near the map so he could read it.

He pointed to a spot at the edge of his map. “I think we’re about here,” he said. “Last time we came from the west and only made it about this far.”

“May I see the map?” Mathas asked, extending a hand.

“Of course.” Janik placed it in the elf’s wizened hand and held the glowstone so it illuminated the map.

Mathas studied it for a moment. “A typical scholar’s scratches,” he sighed. “You can read these notations, can you?”

“You know I can. What are you looking at?”

“Well, I can’t make out a word of it, but if my memory serves—and I have no reason to believe that its efficacy has been dimmed by my advanced age—then we must be almost directly above the place where we located the Ramethene Sword, and not far from the entrance to that underground vault.”

“Let me see that,” Janik demanded. He snatched the map from Mathas and held the light close to it. “Of course,” he said. “You’re right. And we had thought that we might be close to finding an entrance to the ziggurat down there.”

“I’m sorry,” Auftane interrupted, “but could you back up a little bit? I’m having a hard time following you.”

“Forgive me, Auftane. I forget you weren’t with us last time. On our previous expedition, we came in from the west, over here.” He pointed to the map and trailed his finger over it, showing their route through the ruins. “None of this was here—there was no wall, and none of these stacks of blocks. We went straight to the ziggurat and searched for a long time, hoping to find a way inside. We made wider and wider circles around it, and right here—” he pointed to a spot just west of their current position—“we did some digging. We managed to uncover the outline of a large chamber. It was boring work, though, and we gave up on uncovering any more of it—especially once we stumbled onto a passage leading down into the earth, still clear enough for us to pass through. That led us down into a large vault that was pretty much intact, and
that’s where we found the Ramethene Sword.”