doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.
Nothing here, I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for
Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was all shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.
I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. Next time, I guess Ill just knock.
Come on, Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. We have to hurry.
Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.
An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.
The suddenly opened doorway was it.
Mounds of bones around the courtyard exploded into motion. Fetches hurtled at us over the ground. There werent three of them, eitherthere were dozens.
The fetches, here in Faerie, did not look like movie monsters. Their true forms were only vaguely humanoid, wavering uncertainly, as black as midnight shadows but for ghostly white eyes. I could see other shapes around them, translucent and faint. Here, another one of those alien monster things. There some kind of wolflike biped. There an enormous man with the head of a warthog. But the salve I had spread over my eyes revealed those illusions for what they really were, and showed me the thing beneath the mask.
My magic had a risky batting average against these creatures, but there were things I could do besides hosing energy directly at the enemy. Hell-fire came to my call, and my staffs runes exploded into light as brilliant as a magnesium flare. Their flame lit the benighted courtyard while somehow not damaging my clothing or flesh. My will and the Hellfire roared through me in a torrent as I whirled the staff in a circle over my head and screamed, Veritas cyclis !
The howling winds thundered down into the silent courtyard as if I had torn off an unseen roof. They gathered along my spinning staff, fluttering with lightning the same color as the blazing runes on the staff. I cried out and hurled the winds, not at the oncoming fetches, but at the thousands of bones lying between them and me.
The wind picked them up with a wailing shriek; a sudden cyclone of broken bones and shattered armor, spinning them into a whirling curtain. The lead fetches were too late to avoid plunging into the cloud, and the ossified tornado began to rip them apart, battering to pulp whatever was not sheared away by the edges and points of bone and broken shards of ice. Fetches following in their wake skidded to a halt, letting out a startlingly loud chorus of hisses, the sounds filled with rage.
Thomas cried out and I heard heavy footsteps. Another fetch, this one much larger, came around the curve of the spires wall. The ghost image of the Reaper was all around him. A beat later, another charged us from the other direction, just as large, this one with the faint image of Hammer-hand, an almost obscenely muscled figure in black, heavy mallets emerging from the ends of his sleeves.
Into the tower! I bellowed.
The Reaper reached Thomas, and its arm rose up, tipped with gleaming black talons in its true form, the illusion superimposing the image of the Reapers trademark scythe over them. Thomas caught the Reapers sweeping claws on his saber, but instead of the ringing of steel on steel, there was a flash of green-white