17
"Garric!" Ilna cried, afraid for him as she would never fear for herself. The liches came on, smiling skeletally through their translucent flesh.
In the crisis Ilna didn't think of the knife she'd brought from Barca's Hamlet, sharp as a sunbeam within its bone case under her sash. The noose was her weapon, the one she'd die with.
She snatched off her cape, twisting the thin fabric into a rope. It was light as spidersilk, but it was that strong also.
Garric, freed from the enchantment, moved as Ilna had never seen a man move before.
He drew the sword, gripping the hilt in one hand and the chape of the simple, sturdy scabbard in the other. The same motion sheared the skull of the lich coming through the right-hand window.
He spun, blocking an axe with the scabbard while the long sword decapitated a lich with a cutlass. The slash became a thrust so quick that it was through the eyesocket of the creature with the axe while sparks the axeblade had struck from the scabbard's iron mountings still glowed in the air.
Ilna crossed her arms, then snapped them back, catching a lich's sword in the temporary loop. The blade was too corroded to sever the silk that held it. The creature struggled briefly to pull the blade out of Ilna's grip before Garric topped its skull like a soft-boiled egg.
Garric stepped chest to chest with a lich, too close for the creature to spear him. He struck with the sword pommel, turned, and cut a pair of liches across at midchest with a single sweeping motion.
The strength and speed of Garric's sword arm splashed jellylike flesh across the walls and ceiling. The bones of some of the creatures powdered like rotten sticks when struck; others sheared cleanly with a fresh, yellow color and traces of marrow at the core.
There had been at least a dozen liches; all were down but two. That pair came on as fearlessly as logs rolling. Garric struck low, under the kite-shaped shield one carried, and split the other lich to midchest with an overhand stroke.
Ilna picked up the axe. She smashed the head of the lich whose legs were severed at the knees, then did the same to one whose rusty sword flailed wildly even though its pelvis lay to one side of the upper body.
Garric turned. His body sagged with exhaustion; his complexion was gray. Bits of stinking gray gelatine darkened and liquesced, dripping from his limbs and torso.
"Garric!" Ilna said, herself suddenly exhausted. Her cape lay wrapped about the blade of a lich's sword, torn and soaked in the filth of the creatures' dissolution.
Garric's eyes focused at the sound of her familiar voice. The smile that started to form on his wide, strong mouth froze in horror and disgust. In a flash of sudden rapport, Ilna saw herself in the mirror of Garric's eyes:
Foulness stained her thin tunic. A point had thrust through it waist-high, front to back, ripping the fabric without touching her flesh; she hadn't even been aware of the danger.
Behind her, wrapping her in branches whose tips thrust into her ears and eyesockets, was a tree with leprous white bark. The leafless limbs caressed her like maggots crawling over flesh. The trunk and branches wove and swayed in a pattern more disgusting than the flesh dripping from the liches' rotting bones.
Ilna screamed. She grasped the branches filling her eyes, but she might as well have tried to tear down the doorposts.
Garric stepped forward, bringing his sword around with both hands on the hilt. His face was cold, his strength and grace that of a youth who had felled many trees without a missed stroke. The sword's heavy blade sheared through the trunk just below the knot of writhing branches.
The cosmos tore apart with a scream of dying fury. A void spread between Ilna and Garric, between her and everything but a chasm of ashen gray. She slid into the abyss.
But she was free. Ilna os-Kenset was free for the first time since she stepped through the portal in Carcosa, and her soul smiled.