Page 58 of Enthralled

Sudden tension disturbs the air, a tightening in the atmosphere I can’t quite explain. It shivers across my skin, drawing my gaze once more around the courtyard. What is it I’m sensing? I can’t explain it, but . . . are those shadows expanding around the corners of the courtyard? My stomach drops.

“Noswraith!”

In that exact moment the cry bursts from my lips, a massive figure crashes through thegubdagogwall to my right. Screams explode all around me, but I can only stand, frozen in horror as the tall, terrible figure steps through. A nightmare so beautiful, so dreadful, shifting between her eight aspects all within the blink of an eye. One moment she is the mighty queen, the next, the devouring demon. In a strange way, I feel as though I see all eight of her selves at once, like a hydra with multiple long necks and heads twining in and out of each other. An impossible horror, born from the depths of a depraved mind.

She followed me here. And now the Eight-Crowned Queen will feast.

Trolls hurtle bodily against her, flinging themselves between the nightmare and their children. None of them can stand against her. Their strength and their weapons have no effect. She is a figure of spellcraft and pure malice, and there’s only one way to fight her.

I snatch a book from my satchel, open to the first page, and begin to write. The next moment, a spear appears in my hand. In the real world, I wouldn’t have the first idea how to wield such a weapon, but that doesn’t matter here. My pen flies across the page, and my dream-self steps boldly forward. “Idreloth!” I cry.

She turns. Once more, I have the strange impression of all eight heads looking my way, of sixteen awful eyes fixed upon me. I cannot defeat her as I defeated Dulmier Fen. There’s no finding her truth, her center, no reaching her creator and sending this nightmare to ultimate rest. There can be only binding.

I heave the spear straight between her bare breasts, putting all the force of my spellcraft into that missile. It whistles straight and true for its target. But Idreloth is no small fright. She catches the spear easily in one hand and bites off the head. It gleams between her long, black teeth before she spits it out again. Then she lunges at me, and her long fingers close around my throat. I don’t even have time to scream.

Just as she wrenches me from my feet, a net falls around us. It’s like threads of music, snarled and complex and humming with tremendous magic. It wraps over her eight heads, her numerous limbs, a tightly-woven mesh of moth silk and dew drops and mushrooms and memories, all rolled into a great chorus of magic.

Idreloth rears back, losing her grip on me. I drop to the ground and roll away across the paving stones. Yanking back my head, I look up at her massive, multiplied form as she dances and shrieks, struggling to get free of that binding. She cannot escape; it’s too huge, too complex, like the vastness of mountains, the distance of stars. It’s a story and a song, it’s a whole living history caught in the threads of the most complexgubdagogI’ve ever seen. I don’t understand it, and yet visions burst in my brain—visions of cataclysm and fire and destruction, visions of lands torn apart, islands scattered across the Hinter Sea. Visions of Vespre, beautiful Vespre. The last of the great troll cities.

Now Idreloth is part of that story, part of that history. Those threads now contain her, binding her with a strength I’ve never before seen. She’s trapped in this moment of time, this moment of story.

Strong hands grip my shoulders, yanking me back from thegubdagog. “You all right,Mar?”Calx’s voice growls in my ear as he sets me on my feet.

I gape up at him, too dumbstruck to speak. Then I turn my blinking eyes and see what I was not able to see before. Umog Grush stands before the Noswraith, holding the threads of that complexgubdagogwith both hands. Pure power pulses from her hard stone frame, feeding those threads, feeding the spell she has woven. It will tear her apart.

“We’ve got to help her!” I cry, gripping Calx’s arm. In the same moment, a small, pale figure darts forward and clutches at the priestess, nearly pulling her off kilter. Idreloth lurches, ready to break free of her containment, and Umog Grush lifts her gaze to me.

“Take your daughter, librarian,” she growls. “Take her and go!”

Her voice snaps me back into reason. She doesn’t want our help. She’s giving us a chance and she expects us to use it. We cannot waste whatever time she manages to steal.

“Help me, Calx,” I cry, and the two of us take hold of Sis and drag her away from her beloved teacher. The girl screams and kicks, much too strong for me. Calx restrains her, slinging her over his shoulder. She shrieks a stream of troldish curses, her small hands reaching out for Umog Grush as though she could catch hold of her and pull her away from this nightmare. But the low priestess has chosen her fate, and we will honor her for it.

Anj bellows in troldish from somewhere across the yard. The crowd of troll families turns to him like a guiding star. He steps through the torn barrier, and they file after him, the priestesses with theirgubdagogsacting as flank guards. “Come on,Mar,” Calx rumbles. “Time to go.”

I grip my quill and book fast. Then, without a backward glance, I hasten after the refugees into the haunted streets of Vespre.

My pen never stops flying.

No sooner do I bind one Noswraith than another creeps, lurches, or ravages its way up a dark alley, out through a gaping doorway, over the edge of a listing rooftop. Though I never would have attempted such a feat before, I stuff three bindings into a single volume in quick succession, knowing perfectly well they will soon escape. My only hope is to give us time to get to the palace, to get through the gate.

Discarding the squirming, twitching book, I drag another from my satchel. Mixael and Andreas are writing as furiously as I, and the three of us lead the way through the city streets. Thegubdagoglirssurround the vulnerable troll families, weaving their spells with frantic precision, but these are more deflections or deterrents, not powerful defenses. Here and there, one of the priestesses runs ahead to fix a fallengubdagog. I see one such woman make this brave attempt only to be skewered on the end of razor claws suddenly emerging from a darkened window. The woman lets out a single scream before she is dragged into the house and the roiling nightmare within. We hurry on. We cannot stop, cannot try to save her. To do so would be to split our defenses, and those are feeble enough as it is. We must guard the children. They are our only priority now.

I try to keep track of my own children. At one point I glimpse Sis, still weeping over the fate of Umog Grush even as she works frantically on a smallgubdagogof her own. Lir is close by her, and they have a cluster of little trollings between them. Where the parents are, I cannot guess. They may all begrakanak-balja—orphans, belonging to the Deeper Dark. But Sis and Lir both know something about that, and they will not forsake them.

I look ahead up the street. Though we have made good progress from the low temple, the palace still seems so far away, and still more Noswraiths close in on us now, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. “Watch out!” I cry to Mixael, who turns and, spelling a sword into existence, hacks through the reaching limbs of a shadow monster.

Something long and low shoots between my feet. I look down to glimpse a serpentine slither, pale and faintly luminous. It snakes between the legs of several trolls, as though fixated on a single mark.

It’s heading straight for Sis, and she doesn’t see it coming.

“Sis!”I scream, even as my fingers fly, trying to write a knife into existence, something, anything I might use to catch that nightmare, to pin it in place. I cannot seem to make the words answer me. Numb terror floods my veins, slowing my reality, my perception. I can only watch in horror as that hideous thing shoots toward my daughter.

Andreas steps in the way.

The wraith rears up like a cobra, hissing and waggling its coiled body. Andreas’s glasses gleam. Part of me sees him as he is in the waking world, standing there with book and pen in hand, writing with that familiar lazy script of his. Most of my awareness, however, sees him as he is here in the Nightmare Realm. He holds a long knife in his hand and slashes at the wraith, cutting it neatly in half. The two halves flop on the ground only to twist about and lift themselves upright again. Then they dart for his legs, two snake-like entities winding up his limbs, his body, his neck. Before I have time to register what’s happening, they burrow into his ears and vanish inside his head.

Andreas stares. For a heartbeat, his gaze meets mine. Then he screams. Writhing and jerking unnaturally, he falls to his knees. “No!” I shout and rush toward him, my quill at the ready. But what do I write? What spell can I offer? I don’t know this wraith, don’t know its name or any means of binding it. “Andreas!”

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