"I am Morkney no more," the beast proclaimed. "Gaze upon the might of Praehotec and be afraid!"
"Praehotec?" Luthien whispered, and he was indeed afraid.
"A demon," Oliver explained, gasping for breath--from more than the long run up the stairs, Luthien knew. "The clever wizard-type has lent his material body to a demon."
"It is no worse than the dragon," Luthien whispered, try-ing to calm Oliver and himself.
"We did not beat the dragon," Oliver promptly reminded him.
The demon looked around, its breath steaming in the chill October air.
"Ah," it sighed. "So good to be in the world again! I will feast well upon you, and you, and upon a hun-dred others before Morkney finds the will to release me to the Abyss!"
Luthien didn't doubt the claim, not for a minute. He had seen giants as large as Praehotec, but nothing, not even Bal-thazar, had radiated an aura as powerful and as unspeakably evil. How many people had this demon eaten? Luthien won-dered, and he shuddered, not wanting to know the answer.
He heard movement on the steps behind him and glanced back just in time to see Siobhan come up onto the lower landing, bow in hand.
Luthien took a deep breath and steadied himself. In his love-stricken heart, it seemed as if the stakes had just been raised.
"Come with me, Oliver," he said through gritted teeth, and he clutched his sword tightly, meaning to charge into the face of doom.
Before the halfling could even turn his unbelieving stare on his taller friend, Praehotec reached out a clawed hand and clenched its massive fist.
A tremendous wind came up suddenly from over the bat-tlement to their left, assaulting the companions. At the same moment, Siobhan let fly her arrow, but the gust caught the flimsy bolt and tossed it harmlessly aside.
Luthien squinted and raised an arm defensively against the stinging wind, his cape and clothes whipping out to the right, buffeting Oliver. The halfling's hat pulled free of his head; up it spiraled.
Instinctively, Oliver leaped up and caught it, dropping his rapier in the process, but then he was flying, too, bouncing head over heels in a soaring roll. As he came back upright, he went high into the air, right over the battlement. Stunned Oliver was fully a dozen feet out from the ledge when Prae-hotec's snakelike face turned up into a leering grin and the demon released the wind.
Oliver let out a single shriek and dropped from sight.
Crying out for his lost friend, Luthien charged straight in, sword slashing viciously. Siobhan's arrows came in a seem-ingly continuous line over his head, scoring hit after hit on the beast, though whether or not they even stung the great Praehotec, Luthien could not tell.
He scored a slight nick with his sword, but the blade was powerfully batted away. Luthien dropped to one knee, duck-ing a slashing claw, then came right back to his feet and hopped backward, sucking in his belly to avoid the demon's swiping arm.
An arrow nicked Praehotec's neck and the demon hissed.
In came Luthien with a straightforward thrust that cut the fleshy insides of the demon's huge thigh. The young Bedwyr whipped his head safely to the side as the fanged serpent head rocketed past, but a swiping claw caught him on the shoulder before he could regain his balance, gouging him and heaving him aside.
He kept the presence of mind to slash once more with his blade as he fell away, scoring a hit on Praehotec's knuckle.
Luthien knew that last cut had hurt the demon, but he al-most regretted that fact as Praehotec turned on him, reptilian eyes flaring with simmering fires of rage.
He saw something else, then, a flicker in the demon's fiery eyes and a slight trembling on the side of the beast's serpen-tine maw.
An arrow razored into the demon's neck.
That flicker and trembling came again, and Luthien got the feeling that Praehotec was not so secure in this material body.
The demon straightened, towering above Luthien, as if to mock his suspicions. It shifted its furious gaze, and from its eyes came two lines of crackling red energy, joining together inches in front of the demon's face and sizzling across the tower's top to slam into Siobhan, throwing her back down the stairs.
Luthien's heart seemed to stop.
Hanging from the tower's side, Oliver plopped his hat on his head once more. The thing was on fairly straight, but the wig underneath it had turned fully about, and the long black tresses hung in front of his face, obscuring his vision. His legs and one hip ached from his swinging slam into the stone, and his arms ached, too, as he clung desperately to the rope of his magical grapnel.
The horrified halfling knew that he could not simply hang there forever, so he finally found the courage to look up, shaking the hair out of his face. His grapnel--that beautiful, magical grapnel!--had caught a secure hold on the curving stone, but it was not close enough to the tower's rim for the halfling to climb over it, and Oliver didn't have nearly enough rope to get down the side to the street below.
He spotted the depression of a window a bit above him and to his left.
"You are so very brave," he whispered to himself, and he brought his legs up under him and stood out from the wall. Slowly, he walked himself to the right, then, when he figured that he had the rope stretched far enough, he half ran, half flew back to the left, like a pendulum. Diving at the end of his swing, he just managed to hook the fingers of one hand over the lip of the window, and with some effort, he wrig-gled himself onto the ledge.
Oliver grumbled as he considered the barrier before him. He could break through the stained glass, but the window opening was crossed by curving metal that would certainly bar his entrance to the tower.
The grumbling halfling glanced all about, noticed that a crowd was gathering down below, many pointing up his way and calling out to their compatriots. In the distance, Oliver could see a force of Praetorian Guards making their way along the avenues, coming to quell the rioting in the cathe-dral, no doubt.
The halfling shook his head and straightened his hat, then gave three quick tugs to release the grapnel. He might be able to set the magical thing below him and get down the tower in time to escape, he realized, but to his own amazement, the halfling found himself swinging the item up instead, higher on the wall and near to another window.
Bound by friendship, Oliver was soon climbing, to the continuing shouts of the crowd below.
"Sometimes I do not think that having a friend is a good thing," the halfling muttered, but on he went, determinedly.
Inside the cathedral, the riot had turned into a rout. Many cyclopians were dead and the remaining brutes were scat-tered and under cover, but the crowd could not stand against Morkney's horrifying undead brigade and the wicked gar-goyles. The Cutters worked to herd the frantic people now, to put them together that they might bull their way to an en-trance.
All that mattered to the rioters at this point was escape.
The cyclopians seemed to understand, the gargoyles, too, and whichever way the mob went, barriers were thrown up in their path.
And the horrid undead monsters dogged their every step, pulling down those who were not fast enough to dodge the clawing, bony hands.
A primal scream of outrage accompanied Luthien's bold charge. The young Bedwyr wanted only to strike down this foul beast, caring not at all for his own safety. Two clawed hands reached out to grasp him as he came in, but he worked his sword magnificently, slapping one and then the other, drawing oozing gashes on both.
Luthien ducked his shoulder and bore in, slashing, even kicking, at the huge monster.
The demon apparently understood the danger of this one's fury, for Praehotec's leathery wings began to flap, lifting the creature from the tower.
"No!" Luthien protested. He wasn't even thinking of the dangers of letting Praehotec out of his sword's range; he was simply enraged at the thought that the murderous monster might escape. He jumped up at the beast, sword leading, ac-cepting the inevitable clawing hit on his back as he came in close.
He felt no pain and didn't even know that he was bleed-ing. All that Luthien knew was anger, pure red anger, and all of his strength and concentration followed his sword thrust, plunging the weapon deep into Praehotec's belly. Smoking greenish goo poured from the wound, covering Luthien's arm, and the stubborn young Bedwyr roared and whipped the sword back and forth, trying to disembowel the beast. He looked Praehotec in the eye as he cut and saw again that slight wavering, an indication that the demon was not so se-cure in the wizard's material form.
Praehotec's powerful arm slammed down on his shoulder, and suddenly, Luthien was kneeling on the stone once more, dazed. Up lifted the demon, wings wide over Luthien like an eagle crowning its helpless prey.
From somewhere far away, the young Bedwyr heard a voice--Siobhan's voice.
"You ugly bastard!" the half-elf growled, and she let fly another arrow.
Praehotec saw it coming, all the way up to the instant it drove into the beast's reptilian eye.
Siobhan! Luthien realized, and instinctively the young Bedwyr braced himself and thrust his sword up above his head.
Praehotec came down hard, impaling itself to the sword's crosspiece. The demon began to thrash, but then stopped and looked down curiously at Luthien.
And Luthien looked curiously at his sword, its pommel pulsing with the beating of the beast's great heart.
With a roar that split stone and a violent shudder that snapped the blade at the hilt, Praehotec flung itself back against the parapet.
Siobhan hit it with another arrow, but it didn't matter. The demon thrashed about; red and green blood and guts poured down the creature.
Luthien stood tall before it, fought away his dizziness and pain and looked into the eyes of the monster he thought de-feated.
He recognized the simmering fires a moment too late, tried to dodge as lines of red energy again came from the demon, joining in a single line and blasting out.
Luthien went tumbling across the tower top, and Siobhan once more disappeared from sight, this time to roll all the way to the bottom and land hard on the lower landing, where she lay, groaning and helpless.
Luthien shook his head, trying to remember where he was. By the time he managed to look back across the tower, he saw Praehotec standing tall, laughing wickedly at him.
"You believe that your puny weapons can defeat Prae-hotec?" the beast bellowed. It reached right into the garish wound in its belly and, laughing all the while, extracted Luthien's slime-covered blade. "I am Praehotec, who has lived for centuries untold!"
Luthien had no more energy to battle the monster. He was defeated; he knew that, and knew, too, that if Greensparrow had indeed made such allies as Praehotec, as Brind'Amour had claimed, and as Morkney had apparently proven true, then a shadow might indeed soon cover all of Eriador.
Luthien struggled to his knees. He wanted to die with dig-nity, at least.
He put one foot under him, but paused and stared hard at the monster.
"No!" Praehotec growled. The demon wasn't looking at Luthien; it was looking up into the empty air. "The kill is rightfully mine! His flesh is my food!"
"No," came Duke Morkney's voice in reply. "The sweet kill is mine!" Praehotec's serpentine face trembled, then bulged weirdly, reverting to the face of Duke Morkney. Then it returned to Praehotec, briefly, then back to Duke Morkney.
The struggle continued, and Luthien knew that the oppor-tunity to strike would not last long. He staggered forward a bit, trying to find some weapon, trying to find the strength to attack.
When he glanced back across the tower top, he saw not Praehotec but Duke Morkney's skinny and naked body, the duke bending low to retrieve his fallen robe.
"You should be dead already," Morkney said, noticing that Luthien was struggling to stand. "Stubborn fool! Take pride in the fact that you fended off the likes of Praehotec for several minutes. Take pride and lie down and die."
Luthien almost took the advice. He had never been so weary and wounded, and he did not imagine that death was very far away. Head down, he noticed something then, some-thing that forced him to stand straight once more and forced him to remember the losses he had suffered.
Oliver's rapier.
To Duke Morkney's mocking laughter, the young Bedwyr stepped over and picked up the small and slender blade, then stood very still to find his balance and stubbornly rose up tall. He staggered across the tower top, toward his foe.
Morkney was still naked and still laughing as Luthien staggered near, rapier aimed for the duke's breast.
"Do you believe that I am not capable of defeating you?" the duke asked incredulously. "Do you think that I need Praehotec, or any other demon, to destroy a mere swords-man? I sent the demon away only because I wanted your death to come from my own hands." With a superior growl, Morkney lifted his bony hands, fingers clawed like an ani-mal, and began to chant.
Luthien's back arched suddenly and he froze in place, eyes wide with shock and sudden agony. Tingling energy swept through him, back to front and right out of his chest. It seemed to him, to his ultimate horror, that his own life en-ergy was being sucked out of him, stolen by the evil wizard!
"No," he tried to protest, but he knew then that he was no match for the powers of the wicked duke.
Like a true parasite, Morkney continued to feed, taking perverse pleasure in it all, laughing wickedly, as evil a being as the demon he had summoned.
"How could you ever have believed that you could win against me?" the duke asked. "Do you not know who I am? Do you now understand the powers of Greensparrow's brotherhood?"
Again came the mocking laughter; the dying Luthien couldn't even speak out in protest. His heart beat furiously; he feared it would explode.
Suddenly, a looped rope spun over the duke's head, draw-ing tight about his shoulders. Morkney's eyes widened as he regarded it, and he followed its length to the side to see Oliver deBurrows, crawling over the battlement.
The halfling shrugged and smiled apologetically, even waved to the duke.
Morkney growled, thinking to turn his wrath on this one, thinking that he was through with the impudent young human.
The instant he was free, Luthien jerked straight, and the motion brought the deadly rapier shooting forward, its tip plunging into the startled duke's breast.
They stood face to face for a long moment, Morkney star-ing incredulously at this curious young man, at this young man who had just killed him. The duke chuckled again, for some reason, then slumped dead into Luthien's arms.
Down below, in the nave, the gargoyles turned to stone and crashed to the floor, and the skeletons and rotting corpses lay back down in their eternal sleep.
Oliver looked far below to the now huge crowd and the large force of Praetorian Guards coming into the plaza beside the Ministry.
"Put him over the side!" the quick-thinking halfling called to Luthien.
Luthien turned curiously at Oliver, who was now scrambling all the way over the battlement and back to the tower's top.
"Put him over the side!" the halfling said again. "Let them see him hanging by his skinny neck!"
The notion horrified Luthien.
Oliver ran up to his friend and pushed Luthien away from the dead duke.
"Do you not understand?" Oliver asked. "They need to see him!"
"Who?"
"Your people!" Oliver cried, and with a burst of strength, the halfling shoved Morkney over the battlement. The lasso slipped up from the duke's shoulders and caught tight about his neck as he tumbled, his skinny, naked form coming to a jerking stop along the side of the tower a hundred feet above the ground.
But the poor people of Montfort, under this one's evil thumb for many years, surely recognized him.
They did, indeed.
Out of the north transept came the victorious mob from the cathedral, taking their riot to the streets, sweeping up many onlookers in their wake.
"What have we done?" the stunned young Bedwyr asked, staring down helplessly at the brutal fight.
Oliver shrugged. "Who can say? All I know is that the pickings should be better with that skinny duke out of the way," he answered, always pragmatic and always oppor-tunistic.
Luthien just shook his head, wondering once more what he had stumbled into. Wondering how all of this had come to pass.
"Luthien?" he heard from across the tower top, and he spun about to see Siobhan, leaning heavily on the battlement, her gray robe in tatters.
But smiling.