one might expect. He twisted the blade in her heart and grinned, though she still could not see him.
"Greetings, Matron Mother," he hissed aloud. "Perhaps you will find the answers you were seeking when you reach Lolth's black hells."
Ghenni gasped once and coughed blood. She staggered back, clutch-ing at the blade in her heart, and her eyes rolled up in her head and she toppled to the floor. Nimor withdrew his rapier and whirled on the daugh-ter on the left, Sil'zet, while the demon took shape over Ghenni's body. It was a skeletal creature wrapped in green flames, armed with a black-glowing scimitar of pale bone.
The demon evidently could see him perfectly, for it set on Nimor at once. It aimed a ferocious cut at his head, which he simply ducked, but the creature reversed its blade with surprising speed and back-handed a second cut waist high. Nimor scowled and skipped back, mo-mentarily thwarted. Behind the demon, he saw Sil'zet unrolling a scroll to read, while Vadalma held her ground, stooping to retrieve her mother's wand while guarding herself with a 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 mo-ments 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 wrenchedaway, 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 ex-pressionless. They closed with uncanny swiftness, sword points weaving as they groped closerto Nimor, following him with quick jerks of their heads as if the scuffle of his boots and panting of hisbreath 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 prac-tical 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 forsava,