make that would buy them the time they needed to reach the top.
“You would test your strength against the Adepts?” he asked again, putting a measure of disdain in his tone when a fierce part of him wanted only to hurl himself against her. “Tread with care, dark one.”
“Perhaps you are a youngling,” she mused as if she had not heard him, “still uncertain of your powers. Whatever the reason, you seem unable or unwilling to use them. Long have the Nar’ath wished for the day we would test our newfound strength against the Adepts, and long have I wished for the day I would taste the peerless life force of your kind.”
The shoulders of the Nar’ath queen bulged as her body bowed and tensed, and a spider’s web of cracks shot through the stone surrounding her. Her eyes were narrowed to a painfully bright razor’s edge of eldritch green as her head slowly lowered and extended toward him.
“I think, Adept,” she said, “that this will be that day.”
With a scream of primal fury, she surged upward and burst from her containment. A sound like a peal of thunder tore through the cavern as huge shards of rock exploded outward. Amric threw up an arm to shelter his vision against flying debris. He had a split second in which to see the retreating group on the stairs high overhead, staring downward and frozen in shock. Through the rain of rock and the billowing cloud of dust, he had a fleeting moment to glimpse a mammoth serpentine form fringed with countless angular, grasping arms, writhing free of the gaping hole in the ground. Then the Nar’ath queen was hurtling toward him, and he had time for nothing else.
CHAPTER 20
“I’m telling you, there has to be something guiding them.”
Horek paused with his fork midway to his mouth. “What’s that you say, lad?”
The younger guard shot a glance at him over one shoulder before returning his attention to the narrow window. “They were all wild, fierce creatures. What else would possess such a horde to attack in unison? Something is organizing their efforts, it has to be.”
Horek groaned and shoveled the meat into his mouth, chewing noisily as he drew the back of his other hand across his bearded chin. “Not this again, lad,” he said. “Can we not share a single watch without flogging the same old discussion?”
At the window, Sivrin’s square, clean-shaven jaw tightened. “It can’t be that old a topic,” he muttered. “The attack came only a few days ago, and there has not been another since. Do you not find it strange?”
“A swarm of maddened, magical creatures throwing themselves at the city walls? Of course it is strange. Hell’s breath, the whole business is strange. But you’ll not find me complaining that they have not returned.”
“They will return,” Sivrin insisted. “And mark my words, I will wet my blade in their foul flesh, if I am not stuck on watch again here at the southern gate instead of the eastern one on that night as well.”
“The southern gate is every bit as important an assignment, lad. The next attack could come from any direction, not necessarily the east.”
“Bah, you don’t believe that any more than I do,” Sivrin said. “The eastern gate is where the action will be. The Captain knows it as well. He has over thirty men at the eastern gate, and just a few of us here.”
“Six of us,” Horek corrected him. “Two at the gate, two in the room below, and the two of us up here to man the portcullis. That is more than a few. You saw what those fiends did to the great wooden doors of the gate itself. Quick action on the inner portcullis may be all that keeps them out of the city streets next time.” He gestured at the huge, squat winding gear affixed to the stone floor on the other end of the room, its thick system of chains trailing upward into slots in the wall. “It is an important duty, lad, whether you enjoy it or not.”
Sivrin heaved a sigh and shook his head. “Do not remind me, Horek. Even on the off chance an attack does come to the southern gate, we must man the device and cannot even respond directly. I am doubly cursed. Is the Captain determined to keep me from proving myself?”
The older guard tapped the fork against his lips as he regarded the other fellow. He was supposed to be training the