The Warslayer(59)

She wouldn't, would she? Glory bet that all those heroes who'd been "too busy" to come to the Allimir's aid would find time to pitch in against the Warmother once she wandered off her own patch, right enough. And Glory also suspected it would be too late.

So screw the consolations of philosophy.

She adjusted the sweatshirt she'd tied around her shoulders (and around her sword), shivering in spite of it. The day had dawned overcast, and even now was still grey—just as well, all things considered. Glory didn't think she could face the looks of this place in full daylight.

"Well, this is cheery, I must say," Glory muttered under her breath, getting ready for what came next.

It wasn't so much that she had an actual plan, as that she knew what she had to do. Whether that conviction stemmed from heroism or lunacy, she didn't know, and she certainly didn't think that the Oracle had provided the inspiration. All she knew was that she was entirely fed up with this Warmother, and she was going to go and tell her so.

"Which bit's . . . it?" Glory asked Ivradan.

Ivradan pointed at the tallest of the peaks. She had to crane her neck to look at it. The top, fittingly enough, was shrouded in clouds. Great Drathil had been built directly into the base of Elboroth-Haden, the mountain on which the Warmother had once been imprisoned—not where she would have put her largest city, if she'd had a seriously taboo mountain to contend with, but what the hey?

"And the path?"

Ivradan pointed again, lower. Blinking and peering through the ruins of the city, Glory could make out a smooth stone path leading toward the mountain. At one time, it looked as if there'd probably been a set of rather nice iron gates barring the way—at least until they'd been mashed, crumpled, and generally wadded up like a couple of balls of waste paper in a rather petty-minded fashion by something large enough to do the job.

Not good.

"There's something moving down there," Ivradan said in a tight voice. The Allimir horse-master wasn't a happy camper, but Glory gave him points where points were due: he neither grizzled nor whinged, and he'd come along without complaining. He did his job, and if he wasn't happy about it, who was she to blame him? She wasn't happy herself.

"Where?"

Then she saw it. Someone moving around down in the ruins, just stepping out of the shell of one of the buildings. Not a monster. A man.

There was something familiar about him . . .

"Hup-hup-hup!" A better horsewoman than she'd been this time last week, Glory chivvied Fimlas down the road into the city, leaving Ivradan behind.

The little beast was a showoff at heart, happy to leap the fallen timbers that stood in its way. Its unshod hooves clattered over the paving stones of the city proper as it moved into a gallop, and Glory found herself giving tongue to Vixen's trademark battle yell: "Hi-yi-yi-yi! Come, camrado! Evil wakes!"

She didn't even feel silly about it.

By the time she reached the place where she'd seen him, the man had disappeared. The building must have been dead impressive once, whatever it had been: the ground floor was made of large blocks of the local granite, which was why most of it was still here now. The side and back wall were almost intact, though blackened and fire-glazed, and enough of the second floor was still in place to form a roof of sorts, making the structure dark and shadowy inside. A nice place for spiders and snakes, not that she'd seen many of either since she'd got here.

Not that she'd put it past the Warmother to import either by the boxload, just for grins.

She swung down from the horse and pulled her sweatshirt off her shoulders, dropping it to the ground and drawing her sword. The blade flashed, an absurd spot of cheery color in the grey desolation.

"Come on out, you! Better now than later!" she shouted.

There was a scuffling sound from inside the ruins, and a figure emerged.

"Dylan?" Glory stared in slack-jawed disbelief. Dylan MacNee, a cutting-edge vision in black from his Versace loafers to his collarless Prada linen duster, stepped gingerly over the broken rubble and gawped at her in turn. Defrocked priest, hedge-Satanist and black magician (at least he played one on TV), she could have kissed him on the spot.

His resume claimed he was five ten, but Glory towered over him even in flats, and thought five eight was being charitable. Like most actors, he lied about all his vitals. He was slender and pale, with black hair and (thanks to colored contacts) startlingly green eyes, his narrow beard carefully trimmed and waxed into a properly Satanic point for his role as Fra Diavolo, minion of Lilith Kane, the Duchess of Darkness. He had the usual resume: East End, a little Shakespeare, a few episodes of Dr. Who, some commercials. One of that legion of eternal journeymen, their lives unchanged from the Bard's day, whose entire epitaph might well consist of the single line: "He always worked." Like the rest of the TITAoVtS cast, Dylan had been shipped to America on the promo tour, but his part in things had ended earlier than hers had, and Glory hadn't seen much of him after New York.