Page 48 of Shroud of Eternity (Sister of Darkness: The Nicci Chronicles 2)

The panthers moved forward in a coordinated unit, tails thrashing, lips curled back to expose saberlike fangs. Ulrich planted his booted feet apart and held his curved sword, ready to face the feline attackers. The crowd cheered, energized and titillated.

Nicci watched the troka split apart. One sand panther approached the target directly, while the other two cats spread out to each side, assessing their enemy, studying his reactions.

Ulrich turned slowly, trying to watch all of them. The flanking panthers circled, then switched sides while the ancient warrior rotated to protect his back, then swung back to face the closest panther.

“Dear spirits, I know Mrra, but I’ve never seen a troka work together,” Nathan said. “Is that what attacked you and poor Thistle in the canyons?”

“Yes,” Bannon said. “We fought them. We had to.”

“We killed Mrra’s sister panthers, but I healed her,” Nicci said. “Her troka must have escaped from the animal pits here.”

“Just like the combat bear,” Bannon said.

“Perhaps the animals were intentionally let loose.” Nicci thought about Mirrormask and his rebels, how they meant to instill chaos, how they had also freed other slaves and sent them fleeing into the countryside.

Down in the arena, the foremost panther sprang ahead in a frontal attack on the ancient warrior. Ulrich brought up his sword and slashed, but the cat dodged and received only a scratch. A red stripe of blood stood out on her ribs, not a deep wound. The attack had just been a feint.

The impact of a second panther struck Ulrich from the side and sent him reeling. The cat lunged in, raking claws down the warrior’s biceps. In a normal human, such an attack might have ripped his arm off, but the claws left only white gouges in the grayish skin, which quickly hardened over. The crowd muttered and gasped.

Nathan leaned forward, fascinated. “He’s still part stone!”

Bannon said, “I think he’s only half recovered from the spell.”

Even Ulrich seemed surprised at his invulnerability, looking at the wound. With greater anger, he raised his curved sword and brought the pommel down hard on the sand panther’s flat skull. The crack of the blow resounded throughout the arena.

The people cheered, as if they didn’t really know which outcome they preferred. The third panther pounced from behind, slamming into Ulrich and driving him facedown in the sand. The cat tried to claw his back, raking white gouges down the armor, which should have been shredded.

The second panther bit down on Ulrich’s wrist, dragging his sword arm, but the ancient warrior pummeled the cat with a stone-hard fist. The injured cat limped away, obviously wounded. Ulrich heaved himself to his feet again as the other two panthers closed in, but now they were wary.

One of the cats lunged, and the warrior slashed viciously with the short sword, leaving a gash in the tawny fur. Ulrich was damaged, too, his armor broken in places, white gouges marking his neck, his arms. But he fought as if he considered himself invincible. The battered sand panthers circled out of his reach.

“Such a warrior seems hard to kill,” Nathan observed. “Imagine hundreds of thousands of them.”

The crowd grumbled when the cautious panthers refused to press the attack. The troka circled, made tentative advances, then backed off. Nicci felt sorry for the cats, knowing they had been manipulated by the chief handler to become killing animals. The sister panthers were united but confused by this unusual opponent.

Finally, another figure strode through the barred gate from which the panthers had emerged, a burly man who wore no armor. Chief Handler Ivan.

He walked forward as if he had a hurricane in his veins. For a weapon he carried an enormous war hammer with a thick shaft and a head a foot wide, weighted with stones and capped with iron on each end. Ivan moved without hurry, letting the huge mallet swing like a pendulum at his side.

Ulrich turned to his new opponent. The wounded panthers kept circling, but the ancient warrior ignored them, knowing they had been injured physically, defeated psychologically.

Ivan let out an animal growl of his own. Without speaking a word, he began to sprint, taking heavy strides, using the giant mallet for momentum.

Ulrich raised his curved sword, cocked back his claw-marked arm, but the blade was laughably small. When Ivan swung the giant mallet, the impact struck the hilt of the sword and broke off the ancient warrior’s entire forearm at the wrist. Ulrich staggered backward and looked down at his stump, which looked like broken rock that oozed thick strands of red.

He roared a hollow, incomprehensible challenge to the chief handler, but Ivan was impatient, not wanting to continue the sport. As the big man ran forward, he drew back the mallet, and when it reached the extent of its swing behind him, he put all of his strength into the weighted war hammer. He lifted it up in a smooth arcing motion, timed perfectly so that his last footfalls brought him right up to Ulrich.

The massive mallet crashed full into the ancient warrior’s chest—and it was as if a mountain had struck him. The mallet shattered Ulrich, broke his torso, splintered his ribs like kindling, plowed through what would have been his heart.

He collapsed, a mixture of gore and stone, the rubble of what had been a living being.

The audience cheered, but Nicci detected an uneasy undertone in their cries. Ivan did not revel in the adulation of the crowd. He stood with the mallet over the destroyed warrior; then he raised the huge weapon over his head and brought it down again, obliterating the gray hardened face of Ulrich into the sand of the arena.

The spell-bonded panthers were pacing, obviously in pain from their wounds. The chief handler turned from his victim, stretched a hand toward the troka, and released his gift. He manipulated the big cats, nudged them, forced them. All three snarled and resisted, fighting back. One even made a tentative lunge toward Ivan, but the chief handler grimaced with additional effort, twisted his fingers, and released a burst of magic. The rebellious sand panther seemed hobbled, forced away. Ivan drove the three animals back through the barred gate and into the pits beneath the arena.

“Quite an exciting combat, hmmm?” Andre sounded delighted. He looked to Elsa, Damon, Quentin.

“Too bad Renn couldn’t be here to see it,” Elsa said.

“He’d better hurry and get back in time,” Maxim said. “Otherwise we may need to find a new duma member.” He didn’t seem dismayed by the prospect.

Bannon hunched in his seat, wrestling with grief and anger. “Ulrich just wanted help. We don’t know why he woke up, why the spell wore off.”

Nicci looked around the arena, watched the citizens shift and jostle as they departed from the stands. She said in an ominous voice, “And that warrior was only one of many thousands.”

CHAPTER 35

Nicci stood at the ruling tower’s wide observation windows, peering out at the precipitous drop, which plunged down to the clustered buildings and tangled alleys of the city. The breezes that wandered into the open chamber were cool and crisp.

She stood with her back to the gathered duma members, uninterested in their droning irrelevant nonsense. The muscles in her back twitched and rippled as if some ghostly hand had brushed her. Nicci’s blond hair hung to her shoulders, and her intense blue eyes stared out at Ildakar, focused on what she knew, rather than what she saw. The city had not settled down since the previous day’s combat exhibition.

Sovrena Thora sat on her high throne like an ice queen. Behind her, a pair of silent slaves erected a set of empty songbird cages, while others carried silken nets that held small struggling captives. The hunters delicately extricated the birds one by one, placing the larks inside the golden cages. They twittered and cheeped in terror, but Thora sat back in her chair with a cool smile. “It is good to be surrounded by music again, although the others were delicious.”

“Crunchy bones,” said the Norukai captain, who wandered about the duma chamber, looking for something to amuse himself. Kor and his comrades had marched into the ruling tower

, uninvited. Taking any available seats, the Norukai looked bored. Dar announced he had secured a shipment of wine casks and dried Ildakaran fruits, but he still intended to get some freshly butchered yaxen. “Easier cargo than walking meat,” he said.

The captain grumbled, scratching the implanted shark’s tooth on the side of his shaved skull, “But just as expensive.”

“And yet you keep coming back to Ildakar whenever our shroud is down,” Maxim said. “You seem very curious about our city.”

“King Grieve is curious, and so we come back,” Kor said. “But I would rather be home on our islands.”

Nicci turned from the wide windows. Every time she thought about the Norukai, she wanted to unleash her gift and incinerate these abhorrent beings. She also wanted to take down the preoccupied and heartless council members and free the people, as Mirrormask intended.

But she had to find a way that would not be a futile gesture. Nicci was confident she would come up with an approach that would free Ildakar.

Bannon was off again with his friends, but Nathan joined the group in the ruling chamber for the opportunity to talk with Andre. “Fleshmancer, as there are no crucial items on the agenda, couldn’t we perhaps go back to your studio? Keep working to restore my gift?”

Andre brushed him aside as if he were a persistent fly. “Right now it’s imperative that I study the fragments of the dead stone warrior. What if the wizard commander’s entire spell is fading? We must be concerned.”

“My spell is not fading,” Maxim said. “Something has changed in the underpinnings of the world.”

Nicci stepped away from the window. “We told you that already. Lord Rahl caused the star shift and sealed the underworld for all time. You can see the difference in the night sky.”

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