Ghost in the Winds (Ghost Exile #9) - Jonathan Moeller Page 0,3
transformed them into reflexes for Caina, and that alone saved her life. She jerked back, just avoiding the points of Kalgri’s scimitar and dagger, and struck back. The valikon raked across the side of Kalgri’s left arm, drawing blood as the ghostsilver blade pulsed with white fire, and Kalgri threw back her head and screamed, the cords in her neck bulging.
She surged forward, dropping her scimitar and dagger, and seized Caina by the wrists, forcing her arms to the side.
“Take her!” shouted Callatas, his hoarse voice ringing over the hilltop. “Take her and bring me the Seal!”
Caina stumbled, trying to pull her wrists from Kalgri’s grip, but could not wrench her arms loose. Even wounded, Kalgri was still stronger than Caina. The Huntress’s lips pulled back from her white teeth in a snarl, and Caina kicked, driving her boot into Kalgri’s right knee over and over again. On the third kick, she heard something crack, and Kalgri hissed with pain.
She responded by driving her forehead into Caina’s face.
Pain exploded through Caina’s head, and she felt her head snap back. In that instant of dazed pain, Kalgri swept her foot to the side, catching Caina in the ankles, and Caina lost her balance. She stumbled, and Kalgri shoved, knocking her to the bone-strewn ground.
Caina hit the ground hard. She scrambled away, trying to raise the valikon up to strike, and Kalgri grabbed her wrist, trying to wrench the weapon from her grasp.
She and Kalgri wrestled over the ground, rolling over each other, trying to get control of the valikon.
Caina felt herself losing.
###
“Morgant?”
The voice was faint, distant, but familiar. It was so familiar that sometimes Morgant’s own thoughts spoke to him in that voice.
“Morgant!” The woman’s voice filled with alarm.
The eyes of Morgant the Razor, legendary master assassin and the finest painter in all of Istarinmul (or anywhere else, really), twitched open.
He saw a pale pink sky overhead, which was odd. He should have seen the cracked ceiling of his dilapidated house in Istarinmul’s Cyrican Quarter. For that matter, it felt like he was lying on the rocky ground. That was peculiar. Maybe one of his efforts to enter the Inferno and free Annarah had gone awry…
“Morgant!”
He remembered that voice…and with that memory came a jagged series of recollections.
“Oh, hell,” muttered Morgant.
They were in a lot of trouble.
He sat up and looked around.
Annarah knelt next to him, her silver hair in disarray, her face and her clothing smudged with soot and ashes. Her green eyes were bloodshot, and she bled from a cut on the right side of her jaw. Her pyrikon had returned to its bracelet form, the bronze metal aesthetically pleasing against the brown shade of her skin…
Morgant put aside the thought. He could think about painting later, once the Grand Master and a nagataaru-infested madwoman were no longer trying to kill them.
“You’re alive,” said Annarah. “I thought the explosion had killed you.”
“You know me,” said Morgant, getting to his feet. He only wobbled a little. “It takes more than a cataclysmic explosion and a deranged sorcerer to kill me. Lived through a few of those by now.”
He helped Annarah to stand. They were on the edge of the hill, Pyramid Isle spread out beneath them. Another few feet and Morgant would have rolled right over the edge, bouncing down the steep, rocky slope to his death. His broken corpse would have fit right in with the dead jungle. Likely the wave of necromantic power released by the destruction of the Conjurant Bloodcrystal had killed every living thing on the island.
Kharnaces had been destroyed with his creation. Morgant was still alive, and so was Annarah. Had Callatas and Kalgri survived as well?
“Where’s Caina?” said Morgant.
“I don’t know,” said Annarah. “I just woke up myself. It…”
There was a loud cracking sound, followed by a rushing noise, a man’s voice echoing over the hilltop. Morgant had fought enough sorcerers to recognize the sound of a spell of psychokinetic force. That meant Callatas had survived, and if he was casting spells at someone, that meant Caina had survived.
Pity the explosion hadn’t killed Callatas.
After two hundred years, Morgant knew that life was rarely so convenient.
“Time for some fighting,” said Morgant, reaching for his weapons. He had sheathed them to help Caina carry that damned stone box up the stairs, which was just as well since they hadn’t been thrown free by the explosion. His crimson scimitar gleamed in his right hand, the blade sharp and keen and reinforced by spells.