advanced cautiously. He sensed the presence of Nevenka Nieroda.
She was in that disgusting man-mountain called Elgar!
In this hour when Anderle's dream waxed strongest, when circumstance had made the Empire the one force capable of reuniting the west, its soul had been vampirized. The last dreamer had been dragged down. Nieroda had cut them out one by one and had brought their fancies to an end.
I'm the last one left, Gathrid thought. And anything I do is futile. She's murdered the dream. In that sense she can no longer lose.
The loss of Anderle angered him as much as the loss of Loida or Anyeck. The Empire was the last of the realities of his boyhood.
A gravelly voice deep within him rumbled, demanding attention. The Empire was not dead, it insisted.
Yedon Hildreth remained a stubborn man.
Gathrid thought the chance too remote, too improbable, too dependent on the unknown quality of the Contessa Cuneo. She was just an Oldani girl, a soldier's brat, thinly lacquered with civilization. What could she do, battling the subtle rigors of imperium?
She is my flesh, Cuneo insisted.
Gathrid had not met her. He admitted he could not know. If she were her father's daughter . . . But what value will and stubbornness against such as Nevenka Nieroda?
Irritably, Gathrid brushed off an attack by the Guards.
Bleibel went berserk. He screamed. Hordes of Sartainians swept in. They hurled themselves on the bewildered Ventimiglians.
Gathrid felt removed from it all. He seemed to be an observer watching killing machines at work. The attackers kept coming. Their corpses piled in drifts. Their blood gathered in lakes on the vast jade floor.
He felt no sense of time. It just seemed that, finally, they stopped coming. He stood alone except for grim, pale Tracka.
He felt stronger than ever. Daubendiek had fed on countless lives. He felt no connection with place or event. He was the Instrument of Suchara . . . .
He began speaking the words she wanted said.
Something inside him monitored and adjusted them. "Now, Nieroda. Now we settle the accounts. Finally. Forever." He thought he used a tight-throated whisper. Why were the walls shaking? "For all that you've done, and been, this time you die the death from which there can be no resurrection."
That great mass of flesh twitched a finger.
From behind the throne came the surviving Toal. They bore Gerdes Mulenex. They dragged Rogala, chained, collared and stumbling.
"You've blinded him!"
A monstrous cackle filled the hall. Gathrid saw that one of the Dead Captains was not a Toal at all, but the demon Gacioch restored to a whole body. He held Rogala's lead chain, and mocked the dwarf with every step.
Outmaneuvered again, Gathrid thought. But not beaten. Far from beaten. As he would teach Nieroda.
Gacioch had been deceiving them. Crafty demon. He had done his spying well.
Gathrid felt no pity for Rogala. Perhaps Suchara's indifference to the welfare of her tools was leaking over.
He sprang at the Toal, destroying one before it could defend itself. The second took but a moment longer.
Tracka handled the demon. He attacked with that savagery unique to masters betrayed by slaves. Gacioch let out one great long wail of surprise and dismay. He cursed Nieroda as he faded.
Gathrid laughed, a peal like a long roll of thunder. The demon had not foreseen his own fate. The Dark Champion had tricked him. "Roast forever," he called after Gacioch. "May it be a solitary Hell."
Gathrid turned to the throne. The thing that had been Gerdes Mulenex began to twitch. The gross corpulence of the Emperor began to snore.
The youth moved toward the two.
"Watch out!" the blind dwarf shrieked. "Trap!"
A storm of poisoned darts hurtled from a thousand hidden recesses. Their numbers darkened the chamber.
The Shield came alive. Missiles pattered off it like hail off a tin roof. Gathrid sighed. Its protection enveloped him completely.
Tracka was less fortunate. Gasping, one hand extended eastward as if he meant to yank himself home, he died. He was the last Ventimiglian.
He left a legacy. With his final breath he mounted a final, violent incantation. His body became a standing bolt of lightning. Jade melted beneath his feet. The blinding fire of him dissipated, becoming a foul, oily cloud. Something burst from its deeps.
It was a tentacular clump of nightmare a dozen feet tall. It had legs like a man. There the resemblance to humanity ended.
It leapt on Elgar. A mouth Gathrid could not see ripped bloody gobbets from the Emperor. The youth muttered, "Wrong one, idiot!" He kicked a passage through the darts mounded