“Hot air rises,” Noetos said, ripping off his tunic. “With the inferno below, the whole tower is like a sweat-cave.”
“A what?” Moralye asked, panting from the climb. “Never mind. Not difficult to work out the meaning.”
“Will… will the tower burn down?” Cylene asked.
“Mmm,” Noetos said. “I don’t know.”
“I haven’t seen any structural timber holding the walls together,” Sautea said. “As long as the stones themselves don’t crack with the heat, I don’t see why it shouldn’t remain standing.”
“Held together by magic,” Duon reminded them.
Even the supremely fit explorer was out of breath. Noetos dropped his hands to his knees and tried to catch his own breath, difficult in this heat.
His daughter put a hand to her head. In the last little while her hand had seldom been anywhere else. “I can feel something,” she signalled.
Noetos could feel it too. Power had begun to build far above them and, in response, pressure had begun to build in his head. Could heads explode? He remembered the Padouki woman’s head exploding as she battled Kannwar in the canopy.
Duon fell to his knees, both hands pressed to his temples. Anomer grabbed the back of his head.
“Umu puts forth her strength,” Noetos said with gritted teeth.
Through his cloud of abject misery, Deorc sees the one thing he’s kept himself alive for, the one thing he does not want to see. Not now, when he is impotent to act!
The Undying Man steps through the door, closes it gently behind him and stands there, hands clasped behind his back. Seemingly relaxed, unconcerned, but harvesting magic furiously from everywhere around him.
Will they exchange witticisms, the immortal and the god? Will they use their voices to gain some advantage in the trial of strength to come?
No. Suddenly Umu expands, filling Deorc’s poor mind with an unbearable weight. There is a conduit open to the void beyond the world and she draws from it flagrantly. In the distance, visible to the broken man’s inner eye, stars begin to go out.
Deorc has sampled the Undying Man’s strength, knows and appreciates the man’s limits. Worked with him for a decade and more leading up to the Falthan War, then suffered under his powerful hand. At the time there was not another man alive to match him. Since then, however, the Undying Man has been broken by the arrow of the Most High, wreaking severe damage on his magical abilities. It has taken him many years to recover. Surely now, at best, he can only be as strong as he was at the commencement of the Falthan War. And if that is the measure of the Undying Man’s strength, it will not be enough. Not nearly enough. Deorc is appalled by the reservoir of pure power Umu has assembled. She may be able to be tricked, as Lenares did once, and subsequently bound, but there is no chance of overwhelming her by using main strength.
The Undying Man has miscalculated. Badly. Fatally. It may not be by his hand, but Deorc will see his long enemy die. And if the Daughter has spent her godhood wisely, accumulating interesting practical knowledge, that death promises to be both protracted and inventive.
This may be satisfying, after all.
She sends her magic forth, not as a bolt of lightning but as a roiling, smothering blanket of world-eating darkness.
The Undying Man snarls, extends his hands and shapes a shield.
Wrong move.
The darkness eats at his shield like acid.
As the shield melts, an unnatural wind begins to blow. Pressure difference in the air. The Undying Man has vanished the air around Umu, around Husk’s poor body sitting on the chair by the window. Clever, that. The darkness flows back towards Umu. Deorc cringes, despite knowing she will bear the pain. He does not want to see his hard-won body corroded.
She puffs out her cheeks—his cheeks—and the miasma is blown through the window, dissolving chunks of rock from the lintel as it expands into the open air outside the tower.
Kannwar is sweating heavily. His face is lined with worry. He begins to apprehend the trouble he is in.
Umu laughs out loud. A weakness, this displaying of emotion. It smacks of anticipating a victory as yet un-earned, however inevitable.
Deorc begins to wonder if his victory might be achieved regardless of who wins this battle.
Should Umu win, she is likely to discard this husk of a body as worthless. She could take the Undying Man’s own body perhaps, with its immortal blood.