Free Condemnation by Richard Baker Page B

dagger.
    “You will not escape this room with your life, assassin,” Vadalma cried. “Guards! To me!”
    Nimor heard the guards outside fumbling at the chapel door. He ducked and darted, keeping away from the bone demon, but unwilling to engage it. Slaying a guardian demon was pointless, after all. He had only a few moments more, and he wanted to make the most of them. The assassin took one quick step and rolled beneath the demon’s guard, coming up beside Sil’zet as she declaimed the words of her scroll. He rammed his dagger into the small of her back while parrying the bone demon’s scimitar with his own black rapier. Sil’zet shrieked in agony and wrenched away, but Nimor tripped her expertly. She sprawled to the ground and writhed. Nimor followed her and sank the point of his rapier into the notch of her collarbone.
    This time, the demon made him pay for ignoring it. Screeching in rage, it flailed at him with its bone sword, cutting a long, burning gash across his shoulder blade as he tried to spin out of the way. Nimor gritted his teeth against the pain and rolled away before the creature could cut him in two.
    Vadalma barked out the command word for her mother’s wand and blasted blindly with the shadow sphere in Nimor’s direction, flaying the assassin’s flesh with ebon tendrils as cold and as sharp as razors.
    The door guards burst in with blades bared, their faces cold and expressionless. They closed with uncanny swiftness, sword points weaving as they groped closer to Nimor, following him with quick jerks of their heads as if the scuffle of his boots and panting of his breath betrayed him.
    I’ve done what I came for, Nimor decided.
    Ghenni was dead, and Sil’zet clearly dying. Her heels drummed on the marble floor as she drowned in her own blood. He would have liked to have killed Vadalma as well, but the demon and the door guards—whatever they actually were—simply complicated matters beyond practical resolution.
    With a grimace of resignation, Nimor backed off several steps and blinked away with the power of his ring, emerging an instant later near the balcony where he had first entered the castle. The forbidding kept him from escaping in a single dimensional leap, but the assassin simply seized the body of the Tlabbar wizard he’d left by the door and darted outside again. The cut across his shoulders burned abominably, and his legs ached where the icy tendrils of the sphere had lashed him, but Nimor drew in a deep breath and allowed himself a feral grin of triumph.
    “Fortunate fellows,” he said to the dead males at his feet. “When the Tlabbars determine that you guarded the door through which I came, you will be glad that you are dead.”
    The bodies made no response, of course. They never did.
    He glanced out at the faerielight glimmering over the battlements of the castle, listening to the alarms and cries of dismay rising from within. He would have liked to savor the sounds for a long time, but pursuit could not be far behind. With a sigh, he clenched his fist around his black ring and willed himself away.

Chapter
    FOUR
    Halisstra and Ryld played two games, using a small traveling board the weapons master kept in a pouch at his belt. Ryld Argith won both games, though Halisstra pressed him hard in both. She’d always had a knack for sava, though she could tell early on that she was playing a master. Long, silent hours passed in the darkness, with no sign that the lamias had discovered their hiding place.
    I can’t believe they haven’t followed us, Halisstra remarked at the end of the second game.
    We slew many of their favorite thralls, I guess. The lamias were careless of the lives of their slaves, and perhaps do not have enough left to do a proper job of searching the city for us. Ryld smiled coldly. For that matter, we slew a few lamias, too. Perhaps they’re not very anxious to find us.
    As long as they leave us be, Halisstra replied.
    With the sava game no longer holding her