Melemer finished his incantation and flicked the fingers of one hand at Yhelbruna. His various rings glowed brighter, and bitter cold jolted her, for an instant effacing the pain of the luminous tendril that bound her and dangled her above the deck.
The tiefling stopped advancing, tilted his head, and studied her. “Heart not giving out yet?” he said. “Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Not if all the stories about you are true.” He started another spell.
Yhelbruna exerted her will to shut out the pain of her bonds and likewise to believe that, despite its shocking impotence moments ago, her magic was strong. She whispered an incantation.
Melemer finished his spell first. Black worms writhed into existence down the length of her body.
But before they could start burrowing into her flesh, she completed her spell of liberation, and it twisted Melemer’s magic to her own purposes. The soft, squirming creatures gnawed at her glowing bonds instead of her, and the vinelike spiral flickered into nonexistence as it came apart.
The worms likewise falling away and vanishing, Yhelbruna dropped back onto the deck. She tried to stay upright but, unable to catch her balance, banged down on one knee. That too, was going to hurt when pain slipped past the barrier she’d raised against it.
Melemer’s chatoyant eyes goggled at her. Then he snatched the long knife from his belt and rushed her.
She knew she wasn’t ready to withstand him with magic or her rusty quarterstaff skills either. She scrambled to her feet, dashed to the rail, and swung herself over. The dagger made a whizzing sound as it slashed past, just shy of her flesh.
The barge stood tall on its runners. Yhelbruna snapped a word that should have slowed her fall. Again, magic flowed sluggishly, weakly, in answer to her call. She landed with a thump but at least didn’t break or sprain anything or crash right through the ice.
She scurried into the pool of shadow under the barge’s hull. That would keep Melemer from throwing spells at her from up on deck. Then she heard the warlock whistle.
She felt a renewed pang of desperation because the whistle was surely a signal. He’d had one or more confederates waiting to cut her off if she managed to escape the barge or decided at the last moment not to board in the first place. Thus, she was in even greater peril than she’d imagined.
She didn’t know why her magic was feeble-some hostile enchantment centered on the barge, perhaps-and didn’t have time to try to figure it out. But maybe she could transcend the debilitating influence in the moment she did have.
She peered out at Selune trailing her haze of glittering tears across the western sky. One of the Three was looking down on her, and the Three had never failed her.
Then she considered the lake, frozen over now but still teeming with fish, fey, and spirits beneath its covering of ice. Like the favor of the goddesses, the life of the lake was a well of power she could draw from at need, even if the pulse of that vitality suddenly felt faint and faraway. Surely that was only an illusion.
Something thumped down on the ice and roused her from her effort to center herself. Peering, she saw that Olthe, the burly sellsword priestess of Tempus, had jumped down from the dock.
The battleguard spotted Yhelbruna too. Spinning her axe and tossing it from hand to hand, she advanced and said, “Come out from under the boat, hathran. Let’s finish this.” Her melodious alto voice was a surprise issuing from that homely, sneering face and mannish frame.
But what was the point of talking now or of the flashy display with the axe, for that matter? Yhelbruna thought she knew. Reciting under her breath, she edged forward like she did indeed intend to come out into the open and accept Olthe’s challenge. When she reached the last line of the incantation, though, she spun around.
For an instant, she saw nothing but ice and wondered if she’d guessed wrongly. Then a dozen batlike shreds of shadow swooped down, swirled together, and became a small horned figure ideally positioned to attack her from behind if she were still facing the other way.
She spit the final words of her spell. In an instant, brambles grew from the side of the ice barge-let’s see how Melemer liked being bound! The thorns ripped his flesh as the briars snaked and crisscrossed around him, and the warlock screamed.
Yhelbruna jerked back around. Olthe had stopped advancing and started praying, chopping the air with her axe in time to the words.
Recognizing the spell, Yhelbruna threw herself sideways. A vertical bolt of flame surged down through the spot she’d just abandoned. It blasted through the bottom of the barge and smashed and melted a steaming hole in the ice.
The heat seared Yhelbruna too, in the instant before she floundered out of range, but not severely enough to balk her. She stabbed her staff at Olthe, and with a boom, a dazzling flare of lightning leaped forth and stabbed into the battleguard’s torso.
Somehow remaining upright despite the slipperiness of the ice, Olthe danced a twitching, lurching dance for the moments the magic lasted. Then, her body smoking, she toppled forward.
Yhelbruna pivoted. Melemer was still tangled in the briars but no longer shrieking and struggling. Before the woody bonds stopped growing, thorns had lodged in the corners of his mouth and stretched it wide. The grimace might almost have looked comical if stickers hadn’t ended up in his eyes as well.
Yhelbruna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Controlling one’s breathing was supposed to promote calmness, but she started trembling with reaction anyway.
She wished she could pause where she was and wait for her nerves to settle, but it wasn’t possible. Now that she knew for a fact that Bez and his sellswords were dastards, she needed to make sure Mangan’s guards took them into custody forthwith.
As she tried to work out how best to accomplish that, she registered the burning foulness in her mouth. She bared her face and did her best to spit the taste of bile away, then strode back to shore, scooped up a handful of snow, and used it to scour the vomit from inside her mask.
Sarshethrian advanced but not witlessly. He did so amid another wave of scuttling shadow creatures and wrapped in supernatural defenses. Even at a distance, Lod could feel the extra power pulsing inside the fiend’s ragged shroud of murky tentacles.
Lod’s followers lunged forward to meet the onrushing vermin. Each of his comrades, he believed, certainly every direhelm, doomsept, specter, or vampire, was more than a match for any one of Sarshethrian’s minions. But superior numbers might still overwhelm the Eminence in the end.
Except that Lod didn’t intend to let it come to that. He crawled down from his cart, slithered toward the ranks of undead fighting savagely to hold back the shadow creatures, and refocused his will on the eye floating in the vial.
Sarshethrian’s voice sounded from the empty air. “The eye has power over me in your world, not in mine. Especially now that I’ve taken measures against it.”
“It pulled you out of your hiding place,” Lod replied. The charm Sarshethrian had cast to facilitate communication would carry his words to the demon as well.
Sarshethrian laughed. “I was coming out anyway. I want a good view of your final moments.”
“I’m afraid your days of viewing anything are over.” Lod hissed an incantation and clenched his fist around the vial, shattering the crystal and crushing its contents.
Sarshethrian cried and clapped his hand to the eye that was still in his head.
Lod reared up on his coils so he could cast further spells at the fiend without the combatants on the ground between them getting in the way. The potential drawback was that by rising higher, he also made himself a better target for any hostile entity on the battlefield. But as quick glances confirmed, the wizard and priestess were busy fighting the undead he’d sent against them, and Sarshethrian’s flying servants, murky things like enormous, malformed flies, were less of a threat. When one oriented on him, he spoke a word of power, pointed, and tore it apart with darts of crimson light.
Then he plucked a black pearl wrapped in a filigree of true-silver wir
e from one of his pockets, brandished it over his head, and chanted a spell of binding. Argent power flared from the talisman to the blinded, staggering Sarshethrian, whereupon the fiend cried out and vanished. Lod’s bony fingers felt a throb of presence like sudden added weight within in the gem.
He laughed, and then a blow from behind shattered his scapula and raked on down to snap several ribs as well.
Lod wrenched himself around. Neither trapped in the pearl nor even eyeless, although black ichor did streak his pallid cheek, Sarshethrian was floating in the air just a couple of yards away, close enough that his shadow arms could easily whip across the intervening distance. Several shot out at once.
Lod swayed backward atop his reptilian coils. One tentacle still caught the hand containing the evidently useless pearl and jerked it off his wrist. A second lashed around a floating rib and snapped it loose. But the others fell short and failed to envelop him utterly as Sarshethrian plainly intended.
The fiend flew closer to press the attack. Still twisting, dodging, Lod hissed a word of slaying.
That worked, at least to some degree. Sarshethrian went rigid as venom, virulent as the bites of a dozen adders, streamed through his veins.
After an instant, mobility returned, and the fiend sneered and reached anew. By that time, though, the end of Lod’s tail was hurtling down at him.
The blow smashed Sarshethrian to earth. Lod snarled a word of constraint to keep his foe from shifting through space and so slipping out from under the weight and pressure of his lower portion.
An instant later, though, Sarshethrian’s shadow arms curled to slash at the member holding him down. Chunks of bloodless, leathery tissue flew through the air, and bone showed through the gashes where it had been. At the same time, the fiend spit three words, and Lod had a dizzying sensation of spinning upward as his psyche began to separate from his body.
He snarled an incantation of defense and clutched with his remaining hand to symbolize the act of clinging to what was his. He had to grip so tightly that he cracked his own finger bones, but the counterspell worked. His essence locked down into his physical form again.
As it did, he saw that Sarshethrian had nearly wriggled out from under what was left of his tail. Shrieking, Lod charged his hand with the essence of sharpness, whipped his upper body downward like a common serpent striking at prey, drove his fingers through the fiend’s torso, and nailed him to the ground.
That gave the shadow arms another chance to assail the more human portion of him, but instinct, or perhaps simply an irresistible fury, told him to keep attacking, not pull back. As tentacles hooked in his eye sockets, the corners of his jaw, around vertebrae and ribs, and pulled in opposing directions, he sent more of the pure lethal idea of venom pulsing down his arm and out the fang his hand had become.
Sarshethrian’s one dark but lustrous eye opened wide. The shadow arms faltered, frayed, and attenuated into something as insubstantial as mist.
I know what you’re thinking, Lod silently observed, meanwhile infusing his foe with even more poison. This can’t be happening. Because you’re the god of your own little world, and I’m just an artificial thing, a slave, doomed and forgotten until you set me free. But your notions are out of date. I long ago surpassed you.
Sarshethrian tried again to rend Lod with his shadow arms. For a moment, the bone naga could feel their touch, but it was light and soft as feathers. Then the lashing tentacles vanished entirely, and the fiend blackened, shrank, and twisted like a mortal burning to death.
Once he was certain Sarshethrian was truly gone, Lod pulled his hand from the devil’s corpse and wished he could linger over it and savor the moment. But his disciples, his brothers and sisters in undeath, deserved better of him. He reared up and looked around to see how they were faring.
The answer was, about as well as he’d had any right to hope. They’d suffered losses holding back the shadow creatures, but hold them back they had. And with their master slain, Sarshethrian’s minions were abandoning the battle. Big as bears, malformed fleas hopped toward the openings in one of the walls that bounded the vault containing the graveyard. Although vague and murky to begin with, the giant rats became more shapeless still as they simply melted into the dead grass and dark earth under their paws.
Satisfied, Lod recited a spell of restoration. His severed hand and the rest of his lost bones floated up into the air and converged on him to fuse themselves back into place. New gray flesh smeared itself across the wounds in his tail like butter spread by an invisible knife.
His cloak fastened, his collar upturned, and his plumed, broad-brimmed hat tugged down, Mario Bez stepped out of the turret with its cramped spiral staircase onto the wall-walk of the Iron Lord’s castle. Despite his bundling up, the bite of the cold night air made him stiffen and want to go right back inside.
That might be a good idea anyway. The point of spending the evening in the citadel was to be seen by as many Rashemi of consequence as possible. That way, even if they later tumbled to the fact that someone had killed Yhelbruna, they’d be that much more likely to assume that heroic Captain Bez, who mere days ago had delivered their land from the menace of the undead, couldn’t possibly be involved.
But curse it, Melemer or Olthe should have reported by now. Bez peered west across the peaked rooftops of Immilmar in an effort to make out some hint of what had happened, or was currently happening, aboard Dai Shan’s ice barge.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t, and he certainly wasn’t going to stroll right up to the killing field. But to have a hope in the Hells of seeing anything, he was going to have to get closer.
Fortunately, the Storm of Vengeance currently reposed on the lakeshore not too far north of the barge. And no one should think it strange if a conscientious captain paid a nocturnal visit to his vessel to make sure the lookout was awake and all was in order.
Bez stepped into a crenel and jumped far enough out that he needn’t worry about scraping any part of himself against the castle wall. Then he spoke the word of gentle falling that every skyship wizard learned, or at least every one with any sense.
He touched down so lightly that he might have been another snowflake adding to the white blanket on the ground. Then, shivering, he strode toward the shore and the docks until an unexpected sight stopped him in his tracks.
Torches burned aboard the Storm, and the wavering light just sufficed to reveal that the men holding them were berserkers of the Owlbear Lodge. His hosts and drinking companions of three nights past had evidently forced their way aboard, likely killing or taking the crewman on watch prisoner while they were about it.
It could only mean Yhelbruna had survived the attempt on her life. Now she was rousing any Rashemi warriors within reach to seize the Halruaan sellswords and the vessel that might otherwise have afforded them a means of escape.
Bez pulled off his hat and tossed it away. He hadn’t seen any Rashemi wearing one like it, and its shape might make him conspicuous even in the dark. Unfastening his cloak to facilitate access to his blades, he turned and strode south, parallel to the lakeshore. He was even colder now but, intent on the business at hand, only noticed in an abstracted and occasional sort of way.
For the capital of such a poor and backward land, Immilmar was well supplied with inns, and all the crew of the Storm had sought lodgings in one or another of them. Such accommodations provided a welcome change from the cramped quarters aboard the skyship, and Bez had hoped spreading some coin around would endear him to the locals and make them more inclined to offer him the griffons.
He, his officers, and his spellcasters had all taken rooms in Blackstone House, purportedly the finest inn in town, and the one scrap of luck Tymora had allowed him on this disastrous night was that it was close by. Catering to outlanders who arrived by boat, it too, sat near the lakeshore midway between the Storm and Dai Shan’s barge.
Bez studied the structure. No one appeared to be lying in wait outside, and despite the shuttered windows, he c
ould just make out the mournful voice of a minstrel serving up a tragic ballad within.
By the looks of it, Bez had reached the inn ahead of the enemy. Still, his heart beat faster, and his hands fairly tingled with the urge to draw his weapons, until he stepped through the door into the light, warmth, and cheer of the common room and knew for certain he hadn’t just walked into a snare.
The ballad sobbed to an end, and the audience clapped and tossed a few coppers into the wooden bowl at the scruffy singer’s feet. Meanwhile, Bez headed for the Storm’s third mate, a white-headed, sour-faced old wizard and artilleryman named Uregaunt.
Thanks be to the Foehammer, despite the pewter cup and firewine bottle in front of him, the old man didn’t appear drunk. Evidently marking something grim in Bez’s manner, he asked, “What is it, Captain?”
“The crew needs to assemble outside, and right now. Get everyone up and moving. But don’t attract any more attention than you have to.”
“Got it.” Uregaunt rose and headed for the table where two sellswords were throwing dice with a pair of Dai Shan’s retainers.
With a twinge of regret for the possessions he was abandoning in his room, Bez stalked back outside to stand watch. Almost immediately, three Rashemi loped out of the dark. Embroidered, embossed in leather, or picked out in beadwork, images of stag heads and stylized designs representing racks of antlers identified each as a member of the Great Stag Lodge.
Bez was sure Yhelbruna meant to turn out the Great Stag Lodge-along with every other lodge and the garrison of the Iron Lord’s citadel-in force. She must have encountered these three berserkers abroad in the night as she was making her rounds and sent them on ahead to keep an eye on Blackstone House.
But they weren’t content to settle for spying now that they beheld the commander of their enemies standing right in front of them. They bellowed and shuddered, invoking their empowering rage in a heartbeat as only veteran berserkers could, and charged.
Bez retreated and snatched out his rapier and main gauche. Ice flowed down the long blade, and the promise of lightning glowed and buzzed in the shorter one. Snarling a rhyme, he thrust with the sword.
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