Kagur bellowed, and it broke her free of Holg’s spell. She flung herself forward and felt the breeze as the old man’s staff whizzed through the air at her back.
She whirled, dropped the green crystal lantern to clash against the floor, and snatched for her longsword. She’d cut the treacherous—
No! She wouldn’t! Something was driving both of them mad, but she had to resist it. She left her blade in its scabbard.
Perhaps too addled for any more magic, Holg rushed her. Snarling, he feinted low, then whirled the staff at her head.
She knocked the weapon aside with her shield and shifted in close. She drove her fist into his jaw.
Hitting him was as satisfying as she’d imagined it would be, and more satisfying still when he fell down. Now she’d kick him until—
No! “I’m not your puppet!” she screamed.
That defiant outburst felt right, but just whom was she defying? The blue mold? How could that be? She’d been confused almost since the moment she entered the tombs, before she’d come anywhere near the stuff.
“You’re shrieking at me,” said Eovath, laughter in his rumble of a voice.
Kagur whirled. His axe dripping blood, more gore spattering his body, her brother leered at her from the far corner of the Vault.
“It’s a good trick, isn’t it,” he continued, “driving people crazy? Rovagug taught it to me.”
Trembling, she reached for her sword. Her groping hand couldn’t find the hilt.
“But apparently the magic didn’t quite take with you,” Eovath said. “That’s all right. I’d rather kill you with my hands.” He started forward.
She dodged left, and he compensated instantly. He was still coming right at her, and the way he was shifting his axe from side to side, she couldn’t tell where to position her shield.
But it made no sense that he was lurking here, or that she’d missed spotting someone so enormous the moment she peered into the crypt. It was as crazy as any of the fancies that had been festering inside her head.
And so, as he swung the axe, she croaked out, “You’re not real!”
Eovath vanished.
But what had made her imagine he was here in the first place?
The centipede! Gorum, she’d even glimpsed and chased the filthy thing, but then, with her thoughts warping and blurring as soon as she tried to think them, forgotten all about it.
She had to locate and attack it before it could try any more of its tricks. She cast about but couldn’t see it.
Where could it possibly be hiding? She strained to think, but nothing came to her.
Not until she realized that Eovath—or the illusion of him—had stood straight and walked without difficulty. The tomb had a high ceiling, and in her empty-headed state, she’d neglected to look up.
The creature was floating above her.
It did somewhat resemble a centipede longer than a man was tall. Dozens of legs dangled down the length of its body. But it had a pair of writhing tentacles, too, each wrapped around a scimitar with a blade of smoky crystal. Set in a triangle, one above the other two, its three jagged mandibles gnashed and dripped a viscous liquid. The glows of the blue fungus and Kagur’s lantern glinted on its shell and in its cluster of round little eyes.
The creature was hideous almost beyond bearing, but Kagur sneered at its manifest cowardice. It had fled before her already, and now it imagined it was hovering above her reach.
Resolved to teach it differently, she drew her sword and ran at one of the crystal sarcophagi. She sprang to the top of it, leaped again, and cut.
Her blade lopped off the tip of a segmented leg and swept on to shear into the insect-thing’s belly. Then she dropped back onto the coffin. She floundered on the slick crystal lid and moist fungus but managed to keep her footing. She bent her legs for another jump.
The centipede plummeted straight at her.
She dived out from under it and slammed down hard. Her foe crashed down on top of the sarcophagus. As she rolled to her feet, it hopped to the floor.
The creature scuttled toward her and cut with both scimitars simultaneously. She blocked one with her shield and parried the other with her father’s sword. The steel rang, and before the centipede-thing could pull its tentacles back, she slashed the one on the left. Dark ichor splashed from the wound. The crystal blade slipped from the thing’s grip, and it had to make a fumbling snatch to retrieve it.
Kagur grinned, advanced, and cut again.
As the fight continued, the wormlike insect’s mouthparts periodically dripped a thick, viscous drool. Kagur assumed it was poison, and made a mental note to stay well away from those bony mandibles.
But it was still trying to poison her mind, too. A force she now recognized as intrusive tore at her thoughts, repeatedly reducing them to disorientation and bewilderment. She kept forgetting where she was and how the fight had started.
It didn’t matter, though. Now that she finally had the centipede-thing in front of her, she didn’t need to think to kill it. Fury, loathing, and her training would carry her through.
She pivoted to cut at the centipede’s right tentacle, gashed it, and instantly swung back to meet an attack from the left. The crystal scimitar whirled in low and then whipped high, shedding droplets of venom as it traveled.
Crouching, Kagur dropped below the arc of the attack and cut at the same spot she’d ripped already. Her sword sheared all the way through the tentacle. The severed end and the weapon it was coiled around tumbled to the floor. The centipede gave a rasping cry and faltered.
Trusting to speed to carry her safely past the remaining scimitar, Kagur charged with her point extended. The longsword punched into the cluster of eyes.
Before she could pull it back out, the centipede-thing surged forward. Evidently it was willing to drive the blade even deeper into its own flesh if that was what it took to score on Kagur in return. The three mandibles spread wide.
Then the creature’s legs gave way beneath it, crumpling from front to back so that the thing fell quickly, but still, discernibly, a segment at a time. The other scimitar made a cracking noise as it too dropped to the floor.
Kagur dragged her sword out of the centipede’s head, stepped back, and scrutinized the carcass. It showed no signs of jumping up again, but it was her thoughts coming back into focus as much as the creature’s lack of motion that convinced her it was finished.
Toward the end, she’d realized her mind was failing, but it took the recovery of her faculties to make clear to her just how crippled she’d truly been, how close to falling into utter lunacy or imbecility. The threat was now past, but even so, she shuddered.
She moved back to Holg, poured water on his face, and patted his cheeks. “Wake up, old man.”
Milky eyes fluttered open, and he groaned. “I’m tired of getting hit in the head.”
“Be glad I didn’t cut it off.” She offered the waterskin. “Drink.”
When Holg was ready to stand, he had to go squint at the centipede-thing. Kagur, meanwhile, dribbled herbicide onto the blue mold and watched it wither, the luminescence in certain patches flaring for an instant before flickering out altogether.
The tombs proved to be considerably less extensive and mazelike going out than they’d seemed coming in. Kagur realized it was her burgeoning insanity that had made them so bewildering and wondered with a twinge of disgust just how many times she and Holg had wandered in a circle without realizing it.
She was glad to leave the crypts, but her reaction was premature. She and Holg had to return immediately with Lady Ssa and several guards. The reptile woman wanted to see for herself that her agents truly had accomplished their task.
Kagur considered reminding Ssa of her assertion that the presence of living serpentfolk would offend “the gods and the hallowed dead.” But she was tired, and in the wake of the centipede’s psychic assault had developed a pounding headache. The gibe seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
She suspected Holg felt no better than she did, but as she might have expected, that wasn’t enough to stifle his loquacity. As Ssa surveyed the chamber where the insect-thing had met its end, he asked, “So, what was it really all about?” He pointed with his staff to indicate the centipede’s carcass. “What was that thing?”
“Such knowledge wasn’t part of the bargain,” Ssa replied.
“But will it do any harm to share it?” the shaman said. “I love my tribe in the Uplands, but sometimes, dwelling among them, I missed the conversation of other scholars.” He nodded toward her squat, hunched warriors—creatures unmistakably her kin, yet just as unmistakably formed differently than her or the bodies in the sarcophagi with the crystal lids. “Perhaps, on occasion, you feel similarly.”
Ssa stared at him for several moments. Then: “The thing you killed is a seugathi. Such creatures serve even fouler and more powerful beings that dwell in the Vaults of Orv.”
“How did a seugathi get into the tombs of your ancestors?” Holg asked.
The serpent woman gave a short hiss. “I wish I knew.”
“Well, then, why did it come in? What did it want here?”
“As best I can judge, it wanted to sow the cytillesh—the blue fungus—on the coffins of the sleepers. I assume that if we checked, we’d discover it shifted the lids slightly as well, so the spores could get inside. Then it remained to defend its handiwork.”
Holg frowned. “And why would it want the spores to reach the sleepers?”
“Cytillesh is often called brain mold. Over time, it alters the minds of those who breathe it in.”
Intrigued despite herself, Kagur said, “Then the bodies in the boxes really are ‘sleepers,’ not corpses. They’re hibernating like bears.”
“Yes,” said Ssa, “they’re wizards who suspended themselves to await the moment when we serpentfolk are ready to wrest back all that is rightfully ours from your wretched kind.”
Holg scratched his chin. “And what do the masters of the seugathi have to gain by driving the sleepers mad or afflicting them with whatever it is that brain mold does?”
“I don’t know,” the serpent woman said. “I’ve never met anyone who even had a plausible guess why such creatures pursue the bizarre ends they do. Perhaps they’re all mad themselves.”
Holg mulled that over for a moment or two. Then he said, “I appreciate you indulging my curiosity. Now, if you’ll show us the maps you mentioned, we’ll be even more grateful.”
“As soon as I complete the cleansing you began,” Ssa replied. She faced the sarcophagi and raised her clawed, scaly hands above her head. Emeralds and topazes set in her various ornaments flickered with their own inner radiance. The air grew cold, and her bodyguards scurried to clear the space between her and the coffins.
Averse though she was to any display of sorcery, Kagur recognized that Ssa’s present intentions were no concern of hers. Still, driven by an obscure impulse, she said, “Wait—what are you doing?”
“Destroying them,” the sorceress replied. “They are not going to wake up demented in my time to claim or ruin everything I’ve built.”
“You said that brain mold alters the mind over time. Maybe the sleepers haven’t yet breathed in enough of it.”
“Or perhaps they have.”
“So you’ll just butcher them when they’re lying helpless? Your own kin? The only creatures in this whole great cavern that are truly like you?”
Ssa’s gaze dripped scorn. “No one is like me.”
Then she hissed an incantation, and with a shattering of crystal lids, the bodies in the sarcophagi burst into flame.