Materializing in midair, fist-sized hailstones hammered down on the onrushing berserkers. One Rashemi pitched forward onto his face in the snow with blood welling from his scalp. The other two staggered but kept coming, spreading out to flank Bez in the process. Apparently their rage didn’t preclude the use of basic tactics.
Still giving ground, Bez rattled off another incantation. On the final syllable, he whipped his rapier down pommel-first as if he were bashing an opponent with it.
Several cracks sounded in quick succession as bones snapped inside a second Rashemi’s body. The berserker fell and tried to jump back up again immediately, but despite his furious determination, pain turned the effort into floundering failure.
Bez discerned he didn’t have time for a third spell. The remaining berserker was about to close with him. It seemed unfair that the Rashemi could run so fast even in the snow.
But since he could, Bez might as well turn it against him. He retreated two more steps, then lunged, explosively reversing direction with a facility and sense of timing that, he fancied, would have satisfied the most demanding fencing master.
Any opponent who was rushing forward would have had difficulty avoiding such an attack, and the frost-coated rapier stabbed deep into the berserker’s chest. As his knees buckled, the Rashemi tried to strike back with his broadsword, and Bez parried with the main gauche. The impact jolted and stung his arm, but all that mattered was that he stopped the cut, and his opponent wouldn’t be making another. The berserker finished collapsing to his knees, flopped over onto his side, and lay there, shuddering and coughing up blood.
Bez freed the rapier and dispitched the warrior with the several broken bones. Otherwise, the man might eventually have started yelling for help. But he left the unconscious Rashemi with the gashed and battered head alone. He had nothing personal against the fellow, and nobody was paying for his death.
A few moments later, Uregaunt led other crewmen, some still adjusting their garments, blinking, and yawning, out of the inn. The old wizard looked at the bodies lying in the snow and shook his head. “We’re neck deep in the cesspit, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Bez said. “We need to haul the rest of the crew out of the other inns, or at least collect as many as we can. We’re racing the men who are on their way to arrest them.”
“Understood,” Uregaunt said. “Then rendezvous aboard the ship?”
Bez sighed. “No. The barbarians secured the Storm first thing. We’ll go to ground in the Ashenwood.”
There to struggle for food and warmth in unfamiliar country in the dead of winter while contending with the trolls, owlbears, and other predatory creatures that reportedly infested the forest. Bez thought of the witch who’d lured him into this predicament and yearned to slide his rapier into her heart.
Jhesrhi had observed before the battle started that Sarshethrian had more troops that would perforce fight on the ground than minions capable of flight. So when Lod sent a portion of his forces streaming up the slope at her, she directed her fiery attacks at the enemies in the air. The stag men followed her lead and, the bells in their antlers chiming, loosed arrows at floating direhelms, winging vampire bats, and ghosts with wavering, faintly luminous forms that trailed out behind them like the tails of shooting stars.
It was a joy to burn them. Aoth had trained Jhesrhi always to reduce an enemy to helplessness as quickly and safely as possible, and in the back of her mind, she still remembered the principle. But the idea seemed inconsequential measured against the delight of wielding flame. Rather than desiring a deft, efficient victory, she almost wished the fight would never end.
The swords in its gauntlets poised to slash, a direhelm swooped down on her. She jabbed with her staff, and a bolt of fire roared out and blasted the animated plate into twisted scraps of steel.
Then something prodded her in the ribs. Startled and suffering a surge of the usual revulsion at being touched, she jerked around and nearly hurled flame at the stag man who’d risked his longbow to reach into her fiery halo and poke her. He nodded furiously to ring his antler bells. Perhaps, in his agitation, he’d forgotten she didn’t know how to interpret the sound.
But she did understand to look where he was pointing. She turned back around and registered that her shadowy defenders had begun to abandon her. An antlike thing with five legs on one side of its body and two on the other wheeled and scuttled past her and on up the hill. The murky, flat-looking body of a two-headed grub crumpled in on itself until nothing remained.
Similar desertions were in progress all across the battlefield-presumably because Lod was looming triumphant over Sarshethrian’s black, shriveled remains.
Jhesrhi understood what it all meant but still didn’t want to stop blasting away at the undead now poised to overwhelm her. So strong was the desire that she wasn’t even certain that she could stop.
Then she spotted flashes of light on the other side of the path Lod and his followers had taken into the graveyard. Cera was over there and no doubt rapidly losing her shadowy allies too.
Just as Jhesrhi realized that, a phantom plunged down at her. The oversized mouth in its blur of a face gaped open as if it were giving vent to an endless silent scream.
She swung her staff to attack the specter, but though she moved quickly, her self-appointed follower was faster still. The stag man leaped and batted at the apparition with his bow.
The stave whizzed through the phantom’s insubstantial form without resistance. The undead thrust its clawlike hands into the stag warrior’s torso, and the fey withered.
Jhesrhi burned the specter into nothingness a scant instant later. But her burst of flame arrived too late to save the stag man’s life. He fell to the ground with a final jangle of bells in a rotting heap.
Jhesrhi felt a pang of sorrow that cleared her head, and as it did, she realized she couldn’t simply abandon the stag warrior’s fellows to die. She looked around for them.
But even though they’d never willingly go far from her in the midst of battle, she couldn’t find them. That could only mean they’d already fallen too.
Poor creatures, giving their lives for a loyalty she’d neither sought nor understood. She promised herself she’d avenge them.
But first she had to help Cera, and though it had become her most powerful weapon, fire alone couldn’t do it. If she simply tried to burn her way to the priestess, the enemy would surely surround and overwhelm her.
Hissing words of power in one of the tongues of the Undying Pyre, she spun her staff over her head. A ring of towering flames leaped up around her. Her foes would assume she meant the heat to hold them back, and in fact, she did. But she also wanted the bright cylinder to block their view of what she’d do next.
She spoke to the air in a soft, whistling language, and at once sensed its spiteful reluctance to heed her. In her own world, the spirits of the elements were generally happy to do her bidding, but here in the deathways, everything but fire was apt to balk.
Her voice swelling from the whisper of a breeze to the howl of a gale, she snarled words of chastisement, and the air yielded to her will. It caught her and lifted her hurtling toward the black circle at the top of her roofless tower of flame.
As she shot out into the open, she looked hastily around for flying undead poised to assail her but didn’t spot any. As best she could judge, all the other combatants were well below her, and she supposed she owed Lady Luck an offering of thanks for the height of the ceiling.
She skimmed along just underneath it as she hurtled in Cera’s direction and then over the embattled sunlady. She didn’t want any of the creatures assailing her comrade to observe that she could fly.
She set down behind a mausoleum with a sculpture of Chauntea holding a bouquet of roses in her arms on the roof. The goddess of the earth’s bounty looked strange, a mockery of herself, rendered in obsidian black.
At once, the wind tried to take its leave. Snapping a word of command to let it know she still required
its services, Jhesrhi kept it fluttering around her as she ran in Cera’s direction.
A doomsept swept in on her flank, and she lashed her staff at it and set it ablaze. That balked six of the conjoined spirits, but the seventh kept coming and hacked at her with a battle-axe made of sickly greenish light.
She dodged, and the stroke just missed, although even its proximity made her head throb and her sight break up into meaningless spots for an instant. She started to strike back with her own weapon, but then the apparition finished burning away to nothing.
She rushed on to Cera’s side. The priestess was holding back a vampire with a ray of sunlight cast from her gilded mace. The creature’s pasty features became more and more bestial as divine power burned a cavity in its torso. Unfortunately, though, Cera was so intent on that task that she didn’t appear to notice that a direhelm was on the verge of slipping past the flying mace that was bashing dents in its metal body to attack her.
Jhesrhi slashed at the air with her staff. A sword of fire sprang into being to fight alongside the mace of light and help keep the animate plate armor where it was.
“Thanks,” Cera gasped. “Lod killed Sarshethrian. The shadow beasts-”
“I know,” Jhesrhi snapped. “We need the brightest, hottest light you can make, right now.”
Raising her mace as if she had a daytime sky and not darkness and stone above her, Cera called out to Amaunator. Spinning her staff, Jhesrhi conjured another cylinder of flame around the both of them. Holy light and fire exploded into being, each overlapping and reinforcing the other.
Jhesrhi spoke to the wind, and it shot both mortals toward the ceiling of the vault. Cera gave one startled yelp but held her peace thereafter.
Prompted by its summoner’s unspoken will, Jhesrhi’s elemental servant set her and the priestess down by an arch that opened on a tunnel, at a spot removed from what remained of the battle. Still capable of seeing without the light that would have otherwise given away their location, she put the end of her staff in Cera’s hand and led her down the passage.
When she was reasonably certain nothing was pursuing them, the wizard said, “There’s a sarcophagus in an alcove on the right. Sit. Rest.”
Panting, her round face sweaty, Cera groped her way to the granite seat. Feeling as spent as the sunlady looked, Jhesrhi flopped down next to her. They’d both fought hard and cast powerful magic, and even her newfound affinity with fire didn’t allow her to throw burst after burst without the exertion eventually taking a toll.
“Well,” Cera said after a while, “I told you allying with a demon lord was a bad idea.”
Flying over Immilmar in bat form, Nyevarra watched in disgust as warriors streamed out of the lodges and the Huhrong’s Citadel to round up the Halruaans. For the most part, the berserkers were a step behind their quarry, and Mario Bez succeeded in collecting the greater part of his crew and leading them south. But who cared? What mattered was that Yhelbruna was still alive.
What kind of sellswords, Nyevarra wondered bitterly, couldn’t trap and murder one old woman, especially one whose magic was starting to falter? Admittedly, she’d known going in that Bez was lying about his part in the siege of the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but still, given his reputation, she’d had every right to assume he and his company were up to the task she’d set them.
She would have liked to chase after the idiot herself, drink him dry, and then tear off his head to ensure he wouldn’t rise. But she had something more important to do.
The scheme she and Uramar had devised after the traitor Dai Shan opened a portal into the Iron Lord’s dungeons was brilliant even if she was vainglorious to think so. Not only would it overthrow the hathrans, it would leave the durthans preeminent in their own country, with Raumvirans, Nars, and strangers from beyond the sea playing only peripheral roles.
But until it was well advanced, the ongoing subversion would be a powerful yet vulnerable strategy, relatively easy to thwart if a foe discovered what was going on. Concerned that Yhelbruna might accomplish precisely that, Nyevarra had sought to remove her from the lanceboard. Unfortunately, the botched attack had almost certainly made the hathran even more curious about what had happened in the north and more wary where her own safety was concerned. A second murder attempt was almost certain to fail.
Yet Nyevarra still needed to ensure the success of her plan, and if she couldn’t do it by arranging the death of an old enemy, she needed to get at someone else at the very heart of power. She winged her way to the Iron Lord’s castle and flowed and swelled back into human form atop the flat, snowy roof of the central keep.
Then, setting her staff aside, she climbed down the granite wall headfirst toward a certain row of narrow, shuttered windows. Mangan Uruk’s apartments lay behind them.
As best she could determine at a glance, nothing protected the openings except the iron shutters themselves. But instinct told her not to trust that first impression. She whispered an invocation to fey with a knack for revelation, pledging tribute in the form of the plucked eyes of five mortals if her allies would only see fit to open her own.
Sigils-Chauntea’s roses, sheaves, and scythes; Mielikki’s unicorn head; Selune’s moon in all its phases; and a number of others-flared into radiant golden life atop the black metal rectangles, and Nyevarra flinched. Had she tried to pass them, they would have reduced her to nonexistence because, although the defensive magic infusing them would have inconvenienced any dark fey, wicked spirit, or fiend, its particular target was the undead.
Nyevarra supposed some cautious witch had placed the wards here when Uramar and Falconer had started feeling out Rashemen’s defenses by the straightforward method of marauding. She recited a counterspell to scour the metal clean, but the signs shined on as brightly as before.
Maybe Yhelbruna herself had emplaced the protections before her power began to attenuate. The wretched things were certainly virulent enough to represent the elder hathran at her best, which was to say, strong enough that Nyevarra doubted her own ability to dissolve them in a reasonable amount of time.
That meant Nyevarra had to outfox their maker. She had to do or be what that witch hadn’t had the foresight to guard against, and in fact, that might be possible.
She and Uramar had encountered a demon called an ekolid in a Nar tomb complex, and when she’d drunk some of the creature’s blood, she’d nearly turned into something resembling an ekolid herself. The blaspheme had saved her from that fate, but the infection, if that was the proper term, still lay dormant inside her. She knew because she was sometimes a demon in her dreams.
If she could rouse that potentiality without permitting it to overwhelm her essential identity, Mangan Uruk’s protections might not recognize her as undead. She might be able to wriggle past them.
She murmured charms to bolster her will and sense of self. Then she reached inside her psyche to the strangeness imprinted there. You want to be me, she thought. I invite you to try. Come steal me if you can.
Her head filled with the droning of wings and a sense of unspeakable vileness. The buzzing told her the only escape from the foulness was to become it.
Her skull ached as, grinding, it changed shape. Her vision altered as new eyes popped into existence. Serrated mandibles protruded above them.
“No,” she gritted. “I am Nyevarra, a witch of Rashemen. You, creature, are a wart. A scar. Just a tiny blemish I picked up along the way.”
By degrees, her body reverted to its normal state. She realized she’d started growing membranous wings when they retracted into her back.
All right, she thought. She’d subdued the ekolid, but its taint was still wakeful; it made her feel feverish and lent a surreal quality to her perceptions. She didn’t know if it was wakeful enough to fool the sigils, but she was going to find out.
She melted into mist. The fluidity of shapeshifting encouraged the ekolid to make another try to impose its guise on her fundamental nature, and she wrestled it into submission once again. T
hen she flowed into the crack where a shutter met the wall.
Agony ripped through her as though the Great Mother’s scythe, the Forest Queen’s scimitar, and the Moonmaiden’s mace were slashing and pounding her all at once. The torment went on and on, threatening to eclipse awareness of everything else, even the reason for it and the only way to bring it to an end.
But Nyevarra refused to lose cognizance of those truths. Even with torture addling her, she kept writhing forward for what felt like tendays of effort.
Finally, the last trailing curl of mist floated clear of the window. Congealing into solidity again, she thumped down on the floor, lay shuddering, and waited for the residual pain to fade and her strength to return.
Then came the soft, short rasping sound of someone hastily drawing a blade. Startled, Nyevarra looked up.
She’d felt like it was taking an eternity to enter the chamber, and plainly, it really had taken longer than anticipated. For the Iron Lord had had time to abandon the pursuit of Mario Bez and return to his quarters while she was working on it.
Even sitting in the dark, Cera could feel Jhesrhi give her a sour look. Perhaps before attempting to lighten the mood, she should have remembered that the sellsword, for all her good qualities, mostly lacked a sense of humor. A flaw no doubt exacerbated by the fact that at the moment, there truly wasn’t much of anything to laugh about.
“With Sarshethrian dead,” Jhesrhi said, “we’re back where we started: trapped.”
“Could we spy on Lod and his creatures?” Cera asked. “Just watch and see how they open a door into Rashemen?”
“We’ll have to try if we can’t think of a better plan,” the wizard replied. “But it won’t be easy. The undead know we survived. They’ll be on the lookout for us. And what if we need to be up close to really see how to control the arches?”
Cera shifted uncomfortably on the hard stone surface beneath her, removed her helmet, and ran her fingers through her sweaty, tangled curls. “Maybe,” she said reluctantly, “I do know another way.”
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