Screaming in terror and in pain, the young priest twirled up to his knees and pulled the bandolier over his head. Apparently thinking that the battle had turned his way, Abailister paid Cadderly's frantic movements no heed, was deep in the throes of casting another spell.
Cadderly put the flaming bandolier into a few quick spins over his head like a lasso and hurled it across the room, diving for cover as he threw, curling up in a fetal position with his hands tucked behind his head.
Abailister screamed in shock and fear, and the dragon roared as the first of the magical darts exploded.
One after another, the tiny bombs went off, each blast seeming louder than the one before. Metal tips and ends of the darts whipped about the room, pinging off metal bars, ricocheting off stone walls, and smashing glass.
Cadderly could not count the explosions, but he knew that he still had well over thirty darts in his bandolier. He tightened his arms instinctively about his head, continued to scream if for no better reason than to block out the terrible tumult in the room.
And then it was over, and Cadderly dared to look out. Residual sparking fires had been lit all about the huge room. The dragon lay dead, its torso shredded by many flying darts, but the wizard was nowhere to be seen.
Cadderly had started to stand when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a giant snake slipping out of the broken side of a glass container. He put his walking stick in the constrictor's face, held it back until he could quick-step past
A metal pole to the other side disintegrated in a flash of light. Another followed suit, and Cadderly began to understand that he had inadvertently unlocked the bindings of this entire magical pocket.
The young priest rushed across the room, through the far door, and into another, narrower corridor. The wizard stood forty feet away, one arm limp at his side, blood oozing from his shoulder, and his face blackened with soot
"Fool!" Aballister yelled at him. "You have broken my house, but have damned yourself in its collapse!"
It was true, Cadderly realized. The magical bindings were unraveling. He started to reply, but Aballister wasn't listening. The wizard scurried through a nearby door and was gone.
Cadderly ran up and tried to follow, but the heavy wooden door would not budge. There came another explosion, and the floor bucked violently, knocking him to one knee. He glanced frantically up and down the corridor, looking for some escape; he grabbed up his crossbow, only to remember that he had no more explosive darts.
Glaring light flickered through the open door he had left behind - the light of disintegrating material, Cadderly knew. He tried to fall into his magic, to search the song for a way out.
A flash ran along the ceiling above him, leaving a wide crack in its wake, and Cadderly realized that he did not have time.
He took up his adamantite spindle-disks and looped the cord over his finger. He sent them into a few fast movements, running them down to the end of the cord, then snapping them back into his palm, to tighten the cord.
"I hope you made these good," he mumbled, speaking as if Ivan Bouldershoulder were standing next to him. With a determined grunt, the young priest hurled the spindle-disks at the door, and they cracked off the wood, knocking a deep dent in its surface. A flick of Cadderly's wrist sent them spinning back to his hand, and he hurled them again, at the same spot
The third throw popped a hole in the wood and a fierce wind filled with red stinging dust assaulted Cadderly. He kept his balance and his composure and whacked the door again, his spindle-disks widening the hole.
The flickering light to his side became continuous, and Cadderly glanced that way to see the very corridor disSolv-ing, arcing fingers of electricity leading the way toward him, breaking apart the magically created stone so that it might be consumed.
Barely twenty feet away loomed nothingness.
Cadderly's weapon hit the door with all his strength behind it. He couldn't even see through the stinging dust, just flailed away desperately.
Ten feet away, the corridor was gone.
Cadderly sensed it, hurled the disks one final time, and threw all his weight against the weakened door.
Danica and Dorigen worked their way past scores of swarming Trinity soldiers, men and monsters alike. Many stopped to regard the fierce monk curiously, but seeing Dorigen beside Danica, they only shrugged and went on their way.
Danica knew that Dorigen could have had her overwhelmed with a single word at any time, and she spent more time looking at the wizard than at the scrambling soldiers, trying to figure out exactly what was motivating Dorigen.
They heard the firbolg's roar from beyond as they came up on one corner, heard the wind-cutting sweep of Vander's great sword and the frantic cries of dodging enemies. A goblin rushed around the bend, skidding to a stop right before Dorigen.
"Three of 'ems is down!" it shrieked, holding four crooked fingers up before it. Three of 'ems is down!" A sickly feeling washed over Danica. Three of 'ems is down!"
The goblin's smile disappeared under the weight of Dan-ica's fast-flying fist
"We have a truce," Dorigen calmly reminded the volatile monk, but it seemed to Danica that Dorigen was not overly concerned, was even amused, by the wounded goblin squirming about on the floor.
Danica was up to the corner in an instant, peering around at the sight she feared to view. Ivan, Pikel, and Shayleigh lay helpless on the floor, with Vander, showing a dozen grievous wounds, straddling them, the firbolg's huge sword working back and forth furiously to keep the multitude of pressing enemies back.
An ore cried out something Danica did not understand, and the enemy troops broke ranks, rushing away from the firbolg, rushing past Danica and turning, diving, into the corridor behind her. She understood the retreat when the scene cleared, revealing a battery of crossbowmen down the hall beyond the firbolg, weapons leveled and ready.
Vander cried out in protest, apparently realizing his doom. Then a glowing apparition of a hand appeared behind him, touched him, and he swung about, his sword cutting nothing but the empty air.
Danica's first reaction was to spin and clobber the wizard, guessing that Dorigen must have been the one who had brought forth the spectral hand, and fearing what the wizard might have done to Vander. Before the monk moved, though, the crossbow battery opened up, launching a score of heavy bolts Vander's way.
They skipped and deflected harmlessly off the firbolg. Some stopped in midair, quivering before Vander, then fell, their momentum expended, to the ground.
"I am true to my word," Dorigen said dryly, walking past Danica and into the open corridor. She called for Vander to be at ease, called for her own troops to cease the fighting. Some soldiers, ores mostly, near Danica eyed the monk dangerously, clutching their weapons as though they did not understand and did not trust the strange events.
The soldiers who had accompanied the monk and Dorigen from the wizard's area, who had witnessed Dorigen's fury against the ore that had gone against her commands, sent a line of whispers spreading throughout the ranks, and Danica soon relaxed, the threat apparently ended. She rushed around the corner, found Vander, too, slumping against the wall, thoroughly exhausted and gravely wounded.
"It is over?" the firbolg asked breathlessly.
"No more fighting," Danica answered. Vander closed his eyes and slid slowly down to the floor, and it seemed to Danica that he would die.
Danica found the dwarves and Shayleigh alive, at least, and Shayleigh actually managed to sit up and raise one hand in greeting. Ivan was by far the worst off of the three. He had lost a lot of blood and was losing more even as Danica tried futilely to stem the flow. Even worse, his legs had gone perfectly limp and were without feeling.
"Have you any healers?" Danica asked of Dorigen, who was standing over her.
"The clerics are all dead," a nearby soldier answered for the wizard, his words sharp-edged as he, too, tended to a wounded man, a Trinity soldier fast slipping into the realm of death.
Danica winced, remembering Cadderly's brutal work against that group, thinking it terribly ironic that his necessary actions against Trinity's priests might now cost his friends their lives.
Cadderly! The word assaulted Danica as surely as would an enemy spear. Where was he? she wondered. The potentially disastrous consequences of his showdown against Aballister, his father, rang clearer to the monk now, with Ivan cradled helplessly in her arms. Shayleigh seemed stronger with every passing moment; Vander's cuts had already clotted and were somehow mysteriously on the mend; and Pikel groaned and grumbled, finally rolling over with a curious, "Huh?"
But Ivan... Danica knew that only his dwarven toughness was keeping him alive, doubted that even that considerable strength would support him for much longer. Ivan needed a priest who could access powerful spells of healing - Ivan needed Cadderly.
Dorigen ordered several men to assist Danica in her efforts, sent several others to the priests' private quarters to search for bandages and healing potions and salves. None of the men, standing in the blood of their own allies, seemed overly eager to aid the brutal intruders, but none dared to disobey the wizard.
Danica, pressing hard against a pumping wound in Ivan's chest, her armed soaked with blood, could only wait and pray.
The small sun shone red. The air was hazy with swirling dust, and the rocky, barren landscape ranged from orange hues to deep crimson. All was quiet, save for the endless, mournful call of the gusting, stinging wind.
Cadderly saw no Me about him, no plants or animals, no sign even of water, and he couldn't imagine anything surviving in this desolate place. He wondered where he was and knew only that this barren region was nowhere on the surface of Toril.
"No place that has any name," Aballister answered the young priest's unspoken question. The wizard walked out from a nearby tumble of boulders and stood facing Cadderly. "At least none that I have ever heard."