Page 70 of Death's Mistress (Sister of Darkness: The Nicci Chronicles 1)

Bannon smashed its head so hard that sparks flew. When the lizard opened wide its fang-filled mouth, he pulled back the sword and thrust forward with all of his strength, stabbing Sturdy’s tip into the soft pink flesh. He shoved harder, twisting the blade and digging it into the creature’s soft palate until it broke through the thin bone and pierced the small brain. As the monster perished, Bannon tore the sword back out, severing the black forked tongue, which fell out and flopped like a dying snake in the blood-soaked dust. The enormous beast twitched and thrashed in a thunderstorm of last nerve impulses.

Bannon spun as the third giant lizard approached from the left, climbing over one of the boulders. Sparing a glance for Nicci, he gasped to see her slumped against the rock as she attempted to recover. “Sorceress!”

Rallying herself, she released a small burst of magic, hoping to stop the creature’s heart, but the moment she made the attempt, Nicci felt the voracious Lifedrinker snatch at her magic and her strength like a hunting dog clamping its jaws around a hare. Before it was too late, she cast her protective webs again and closed off the attempt. Dark static swirled around her vision, and she fell against the boulder, but vowed not to give up. She slid the dagger from her side and clutched it in a shaking hand, determined to fight with whatever weapon she had—even teeth and nails if necessary.

“I’ll take care of the other two, Sorceress.” Bannon charged toward the oncoming lizard, yelling with wordless fury. Again his sword struck sparks from the armored hide. He hammered and hammered with his blade, chipping scales and digging into the lizard’s flesh, and he twisted into one of the crusted, patchy sores. When the lizard hissed and snapped at him, Bannon responded with a primal roar of his own.

Nicci had not seen him release such blind rage since battling the Norukai slavers, but something had unleashed his fighting reactions. He was more calculating than a mindless dervish, though. Even if the edge of his blade caused little harm, he raised the sword above his shoulder and drove the point straight into the lizard’s eye.

With a gurgling hiss, the monster tried to squirm away, but Bannon pushed forward, driving his sword harder, pushing it in farther. He twisted and screwed the tip so that it turned the creature’s eye into a soupy splash of gore. It wasn’t enough.

Throwing his full weight into the thrust, he slammed the sword through the bone of the lizard’s eye socket and into its head. The monster collapsed. Bannon heaved great breaths and struggled to wrench Sturdy free, but the sword was stuck in the lizard’s cranial cavity. He grunted and cursed. “Come on!”

The last of the attacking lizards crawled toward Nicci, cautious. She held out her long dagger, ready for the attack. The monster prepared to spring. She knew its weight and momentum would drive her backward. And she also knew she was too weak to kill it.

Just then she sensed a feral presence, felt the ripple of muscles like an echo inside her, experienced the anticipated joy of the attack and the kill. Before the giant lizard could crash down on her, a tawny feline shape bounded from the boulders above. The great cat hurled herself down in a mass of claws and curved fangs and slammed into the distorted lizard, knocking it off balance.

Nicci felt a surge of excitement and relief as she dragged herself to her feet. “Mrra!”

The sand panther mauled the lizard with her long claws, ripping loose mangy patches of scales, exposing open sores. The monster writhed and bucked, but Mrra would not let go. Saberlike fangs chomped down, working into weak spots in the reptile’s armor.

Inside her mind, thanks to her connection to the spell-bonded panther, Nicci could feel the bloodlust, the energy, the need to kill this threat … this threat to Nicci. Mrra was born as a fighter, trained as a fighter, as a killer.

Because she was joined to Mrra, Nicci wanted to tear this monster apart with her bare hands. A feral blood rage sang through her, as it sang through the sand panther. She bounded forward to join the attack. She didn’t need magic, just her knife.

Mrra pushed over the thrashing lizard to expose the softer scales in its underbelly just as Nicci reached its head. They seemed to be coordinated, synchronized. The monster clamped its fanged jaws shut, and Nicci drove her sharp dagger beneath the reptile’s chin, piercing the thinner skin of its wattled throat. She drove the blade into its head again and again while Mrra tore open the thing’s belly and hauled out its flopping entrails. The lizard’s gushing blood washed away the caked white powder on Nicci’s skin and hands, but she did not feel clean.

Instead, she felt invigorated.

By the time the fourth monster was dead, Nicci shook with exhaustion, but was also afire with the need to go on.

Bannon looked ready to collapse, but he managed an odd grin, giving a respectful look to Mrra. “Good thing I convinced you not to kill the panther, Sorceress.”

“I agree.” Nicci looked down at Mrra, feeling the powerful inexplicable threads binding them. Her sister panther growled deep in her throat.

Bannon added, “And I told you I could be useful. You need me.”

“There are few things I need.” Nicci shaded her eyes as she scanned ahead, looking toward the dark vortex still miles away. “Right now, we need to get to the Lifedrinker.” She touched the pouch at her side that held the Eldertree acorn. “Before it’s too late.”

CHAPTER 52

They trudged forward. The Lifedrinker’s presence dragged at their bodies like tar, making their movements sluggish, their bodies weak, but Nicci pushed ahead toward the center of the Scar, and the wizard she needed to kill. For Thistle, for this once-fertile valley, for Richard, the D’Haran Empire, and the whole world …

“We’re almost there, Sorceress,” Bannon said in a voice as thin as old paper. “My sword isn’t dull yet.”

“He will keep trying to stop us, but we don’t know how he will attack us next,” Nicci said. “Be wary.”

The young man managed a hint of cheer in his tone. “And I’ll be useful.” When she made a noncommittal response, Bannon acted as if she had given him a great compliment.

Mrra stayed with them. The sand panther loped ahead, her tan fur blending into the dusty wasteland. The debris around them turned darker, sharper. The boulders were made of shattered volcanic glass, with every angle as sharp as a knife edge. Sulfurous steam made the air thick and nearly unbreathable, and each step sapped more of their strength.

But as they descended the crumbling, uncertain slope at the heart of the dead valley, Nicci could see their destination ahead. Her target.

The evil wizard’s lair resembled an amphitheater with black stelae, spires of rock reaching upward like desperate claws that encircled a central pit. Waves of the Lifedrinker’s appetite had frozen into ripples preserved in the blasted stone.

Overhead, thunderclouds strangled the sky, and a web of tortured lightning skittered around—electric whips that cracked across the sky, then stung the tops of the high stelae surrounding the amphitheater. The wind rose to a keening whistle, accompanied by a basso undercurrent of perpetual thunder.

On the ground to their left, a slab of black rock split off to reveal a raw flow of lava beneath. Molten rock like the blood of the world spilled out from a cracked, festering scab.

Bannon staggered back from the furnace air. More obsidian rocks shattered and thrust upward, shifting, twisting. Mrra picked her steps with great caution, her muzzle curled back in a snarl as more lightning flashed overhead. She prowled along, close to Nicci.

Bannon gasped, brushing loose ginger hair out of his eyes. “How can we go on?”

Nicci chose her footsteps carefully as the ground grew more unstable. She climbed over the sharp edges as she pressed toward the Lifedrinker’s pit, knowing she would find him there. “How can we not?”

She felt the throbbing, desperate presence ahead, and she wrestled to build shields around her, calling upon her knowledge to protect herself with both Additive and Subtractive Magic. She could not let the Lifedrinker seize her gift, her life. Nicci made use of

new spells that she had learned only recently while poring over volume after volume in the Cliffwall archives. It didn’t make her entirely safe, but it let her keep moving.

Plodding along in a determined trance, Bannon followed her, step by step. When Nicci turned to encourage him, she was astonished to see his face seamed with wrinkles. His long reddish hair was shot through with streaks of gray. He looked at her in turn, and his hazel eyes went wide with alarm. “Sorceress, you look … old!”

Nicci touched her face, and felt wrinkles in her dry skin as if all the years of her long life were catching up with her. The Lifedrinker was stealing the time they had left. “We must hurry,” she said. She needed to use the Eldertree acorn before it was too late, before the evil wizard grew any stronger.

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.

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