Tangled Webs

fight.
    «Have you ever seen Lucivar on a killing field?» Rainier asked.
    «I’ve seen him when he’s riding the killing edge. Hell’s fire, your caste of male rises to that edge as easy as you breathe. Maybe more so.»
    «Not the same thing. I saw him, once, when he walked off a killing field.» Rainier swallowed hard. «May the Darkness have mercy on us if he sees us as an enemy.»
    Not something she wanted to hear—especially when it was being said by one Warlord Prince about another.
    A door suddenly appeared in the wall and swung open—and the demon-dead walked out. A dozen of them. None of them wore Jewels, but that didn’t matter. Not in this fight.
    «Now I know why we couldn’t find any weapons,» Surreal said. «The demon-dead were hoarding them.»
    Knives. Pokers. Clubs.
    She spared one thought for the four children pressed into a corner behind her and Rainier. She hadn’t liked most of them, wouldn’t have spent an hour with any of them by choice except for…
    She glanced at the children. Sage gave her a wobbly smile that seemed all the more brave because of the wobble.
    Her chest ached.
    She looked away.
    Odds were good that the children would have been lured into the spooky house as fodder for the game, but she and Rainier had invited them in last night, and she felt the weight of their presence on her shoulders—and she would carry the weight of their deaths.
    And his. Rainier, too, was here because of her.
    I’m sorry.
    Even more sorry because she knew the weapon that would kill her in the end. The cildru dyathe. She would do everything she could to destroy the adults, but not the demon-dead children. Memories of ghosts swam through her mind—and the night when she’d seen the truth about a place called Briarwood.
    She couldn’t raise a weapon against a child.
    Then all the demon-dead attacked, and there was no more time to think—or regret.
    Damn hard to win a fight when you could die and the enemy couldn’t. No room to maneuver, no place to retreat.
    The room swam and time became fluid as the poison inside her worked its deadly magic. Either blows came too fast or she made a defensive move for a blow that took too long to fall, giving another enemy an opening.
    Her shields would fail soon, and the blows would start breaking bone, start breaking her down, start killing her for real.
    A female grabbed her left wrist and jerked her arm up, throwing her off-balance and pulling the wound in her side.
    A club came toward her head that she barely deflected with the poker.
    Then something dark and fast and so damn big came toward her, shining in places where the sunlight caught metal and—
    A hand shoved the female’s head against the wall.
    Surreal ducked as brains splush ed out of the shattered skull.
    A movement in front of her. A scream of fear.
    She looked up just as he spun to meet another of the demon-dead, and she saw him—the glazed gold eyes, the face carved from implacable stone. Here in this place, his life was about slaughter; his world was made of death. He was power and grace, savagery and skill—and no mercy.
    Now she understood what Rainier meant about seeing Lucivar on a killing field.
    He was so damn fast. He didn’t bother to duck the blows from the demon-dead. He didn’t even try to parry them. Their blows hit his shields and never touched the man. And any of the demon-dead who were close enough to strike at him…
    It wasn’t that large a room, and he seemed to fill it.
    He severed heads, sliced through limbs. Or simply ripped off an arm and drove it into the next body.
    And he was just as ruthlessly efficient when it came to eliminating the cildru dyathe from the fight.
    Then there was only the sound of harsh breathing—hers and Rainier’s—and the children whimpering in the corner.
    Lucivar stood in front of them, those cold glazed eyes just staring at them. He pointed the war blade at her, then shifted the tip to a spot on her right.
    “Move,” he said.
    She sidestepped to the right.
    Lucivar pointed at the wall. The Ebon-gray ring flashed as a burst of power was unleashed.
    The wall exploded, leaving a gaping hole.
    An odd feeling, like netting tightening over bare skin.
    Before she could cry out a warning, the spells around the house hit Lucivar with a vicious amount of power. Enough power that she felt his Ebon-gray shield break.
    But he withstood the strike, never moving, and when that lash of power was done…
    She could feel all the spells trying