The Spectral Blaze

by Richard Lee Byers

  “Possibly,” Shala said, “but what makes you think I’d conspire with you?” She smiled crookedly. “After all, you’re a wizard, and as you pointed out, I cruelly mistreated your poor, innocent kind.”

  Jhesrhi shrugged. “You simply enforced laws that existed before you ever came to the throne, laws the temples told you were just and good. And then, when the murders began, you still let Lord Nicos bring the Brotherhood to Luthcheq so the people wouldn’t slaughter all the arcanists.”

  “So I was only half a tyrant?”

  “After that,” Jhesrhi persisted, “you rode to war with Oraxes, Meralaine, and me. Maybe you saw something there, something to persuade you that wizards are just people, not the devil-spawn that the priests have always made us out to be.”

  “Let’s say I did.” Shala sat back down in her chair and waved Jhesrhi to another. “In my life I haven’t found normal people to be all that trustworthy either. If Tchazzar doubts my loyalty, maybe he asked you to trick me into saying something treasonous. And why wouldn’t you be eager to oblige when you’ve risen so high in his favor?”

  “If he decides he wants to get rid of you, do you honestly think he’ll require incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing before ordering your arrest?”

  Shala snorted. “There is that. Still, it doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”

  “You know Halonya arrested Khouryn Skulldark.”

  “And you couldn’t convince Tchazzar to let him go. The madwoman won that round.”

  Jhesrhi scowled and a line of flame oozed up the staff. “The point is that if Tchazzar won’t free him, I have to. And I need help.”

  “You’d risk everything the dragon’s given you—and your own freedom and your own life—to accomplish this?”

  “I only have a handful of friends, High Lady. Khouryn’s one of them.”

  “He’s also a dwarf, and Chessentans don’t like them any better than sorcerers. So why should I risk everything that I have left to help him?”

  “Because you know he’s being punished just for following your orders. Because it will do you good to give Halonya a poke in the eye. And because you know that, even leaving the question of justification aside, it’s rash and stupid for Chessenta to invade Tymanther right after fighting a war in the north.”

  “And freeing your friend will keep that from happening?”

  “It might help,” Jhesrhi said, then explained how.

  Shala grunted. “It sounds like a feeble hope to me.”

  “It may be. But also consider that you won’t be running all that much of a risk. I’ll be the one taking the big chances.”

  “I’m not a coward!” Shala snapped.

  “I know that, High Lady. But you are the one who keeps asking why she should help me. I’m giving all the reasons I can think of.”

  “What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Halonya dangled Khouryn in front of me as bait,” Jhesrhi said. “She wants me to go after him so she can kill or capture me and then convince Tchazzar I’m a traitor.”

  Shala fingered the scar on her square jaw. “That sounds about right.”

  “Still, I have to rescue Khouryn and do it without using my most potent magic because if I invoked the wizardry of the four elements to do the job, it would be like signing my name.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “If I’m going to manage anyway, I need to know about the dungeons under the War College. Where exactly is Halonya keeping Khouryn? Are there mechanical or magical snares along the way, and if so, how do I bypass them? Where are guards generally posted, and where are the wyrmkeepers likely to wait in ambush? I know you can tell me. You’re the type who makes it a point to learn everything about everything over which you hold authority.”

  Like Khouryn himself.

  Shala sat and thought for a moment then stood up abruptly. “If you’re lying to me, then I swear by the Foehammer that I’ll see my blade in your heart before Tchazzar takes me into custody. Now come look at a book. It has diagrams of the tunnel system in it.”

  As he sipped the bitter beer the villagers had given him, Gaedynn reflected that it was odd to feel welcome and at ease among genasi. During his time in Luthcheq, he’d come to regard the Daardendriens and Perra as friends, and the Akanûlans at court, who despised the dragonborn, as hostile to himself and all the Brotherhood as well.

  But there was none of that here. These genasi were effusive in their gratitude. Even Aoth’s appearance didn’t faze them, although, once Gaedynn thought about it, perhaps that made sense. The tattoos that decorated Aoth’s body, face included, somewhat resembled the patterns of lines that crisscrossed the Akanûlans’ skins, and with his shaved scalp, exposed after he’d removed his helmet, he was as bald as the earth- and watersouls.

  Cera slumped beside him with her hand resting on his. She looked as if she could barely keep her eyes open. Gaedynn gathered that turning the waterfall to holy water—a trick he wished he’d witnessed—had taxed her mystical strength considerably. Then she’d expended what magic remained to cast healing charms on Jet and the more sorely wounded genasi warriors.

  “I wish I knew how to repay you,” said Yarel-karn. The leader of the war band was a surprisingly young firesoul with an earnest, studious cast to his ruddy features. Flame rippled along one of the golden lines on the top of his head. It reminded Gaedynn of the way fire would sometimes spring, seemingly of its own volition, from Jhesrhi’s new staff. For a moment, he wished she were there, then, annoyed with himself, pushed her out of his thoughts and refocused on what was happening around him.

  Aoth smiled at Yarel-karn. “Well, now that you mention it, there actually might be a way.”

  “Anything!” the genasi said.

  “We’re on our way to Airspur to seek an audience with the queen,” said Aoth. “If an officer in Her Majesty’s forces passed the word along that we helped him out, it might help us get in.”

  “And lend weight to our words when we do,” Gaedynn added.

  To his surprise, the firesoul looked chagrinned. “It might. Except that, unfortunately, you’ve mistaken me—us—for something we’re not.”

  Aoth frowned. “How so?”

  “We’re not part of the army. We belong to the Firestorm Cabal.”

  After a moment Aoth said, “Which is?”

  Yarel-karn looked surprised and perhaps slightly crestfallen that they didn’t know. “Volunteers. You see, as ordered by the queen and the stewards, the army concentrates on protecting the capital and the lands closest to it. But the settlers on the northern and eastern borders need protection too. In fact, they need it more! This region is full of dangers.”

  “So your cabal patrols it,” said Aoth.

  Gaedynn grinned. “And no doubt the authorities are grateful to you for taking up the slack.”

  Yarel-karn’s eyes narrowed. Then he relaxed as he decided Gaedynn’s sarcasm wasn’t directed at him. “No. They tolerate us. But they also resent our existence for what it is: an implicit judgment that they’re letting the people down.”

  Gaedynn looked at Aoth and said, “In other words, a testimonial from our friends here would be worse than useless.”

  Aoth rubbed a hunk of brown bread around inside his bowl, soaking up the last of the vegetable stew. “Well, at least the food is good.”

  * * * * *

  Jhesrhi disliked the cool, oily feel of illusion on her skin. It wasn’t unpleasant per se, but it was a reminder that she was relying on magic with which she was less than an expert.

  She glanced around, making sure no one was watching, then started down the narrow, stone stairs. Dread welled up in her mind, a feeling that something awful would happen if she continued her descent. She whispered the password Shala had given her, and the enchantment released her from its grip.

  At the bottom of the steps stood a more mundane barrier: a sturdy, ironbound door. She kneeled and whispered coaxing words into the keyhole as if it were a stubborn child’s ear. Th
e pins clicked as they released, just as if a key were lifting them, and she pulled the door ajar.

  Everything had been easy enough so far, but that was what she’d expected. The wyrmkeepers would let her get close to Khouryn before they sprang their trap. That way, there could be no doubt as to her intentions.

  She crept past a guard station. Something—either the enchantment of stealth she’d cast or a smile from Lady Luck—kept the two men inside from looking up from their game of cards.

  On the other side, a block of cells stretched away into the dark. Her mouth stretched tightly with disgust at the stench. Voices murmured. A child wept and a woman begged her to be quiet so the “bad men” wouldn’t come back.

  Jhesrhi shook her head. She’d had some awareness that alleged traitors and scoffers at Tchazzar’s divinity were being rounded up, occasionally on flimsy pretexts. Still, she hadn’t realized just how many were caged there underground.

  Surely, she thought, Tchazzar doesn’t realize either. It’s Halonya—

  But that was a lie, and she rejected it with a twinge of self-contempt. Tchazzar, whose damaged mind saw threats and treachery everywhere, was to blame. Halonya’s desire to avenge slights past and present, real and imagined, and to enrich her church with confiscated coin and property, simply fed the fire.

  But whoever was responsible for the Chessentan prisoners’ plight, Jhesrhi hadn’t come to do anything about it. She cast about and found another set of stairs, leading down to the part of the dungeons the wyrmkeepers had claimed for their own.

  From that point forward, there could easily be mantraps that Shala hadn’t been able to warn her about. Jhesrhi murmured an incantation and tapped out a cadence on the onyx in the steel ring on her middle finger. The ring was an arcane focus, taken as plunder when the Brotherhood sacked a town years before. Until then, she’d never actually used it, and it felt like a feeble sort of tool compared to her staff.

  It seemed to send a sort of flicker running down the stairwell, but what she was actually beholding was an alteration to her own eyesight. While the charm lasted, she could see without benefit of light and glimpse telltale emanations of mystical force. Not as well as Aoth could, but, she hoped, improved enough to get by.

  She skulked onward, to the bottom of the steps. No torches or lamps burned in the immediate vicinity. But light glimmered at the end of the passage that ran away before her.

  There was a fair chance that Khouryn actually was down there. But it was even more likely that the light was a lure to draw Jhesrhi to where the wyrmkeepers wanted her to be. Fortunately she knew from Shala’s diagrams that the corridor ahead wasn’t the only way to reach the glow. A branching corridor snaked around to arrive at the same spot from behind.

  So she headed in that direction and kept scanning the way ahead for dangers. The priests of the Dark Lady might want her to take the one path, but that didn’t mean they’d ignored the other.

  A vague, glimmering point appeared floating in the gloom. If she hadn’t been a spellcaster herself, she wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was: a disembodied eye created to watch for intruders.

  Whispering, she rattled off words of unmaking and squeezed the hand with the ring shut as though she were squashing something inside it. She actually expected the wyrmkeepers’ magic to sound the alarm before she finished. But apparently her charm of stealth kept the eye from spotting her instantly, and as she spoke the final syllable of the countermagic, it collapsed in on itself and vanished with a tiny squishing sound. For a moment the inside of her fist felt slimy.

  She crept onward. Ahead, light spilled from a doorway, surely the same glow she’d spotted from the foot of the stairs. She contemplated which attack spell to hurl into the room and reminded herself that magic manipulating any of the four elements was out of bounds. For a moment it seemed particularly annoying that she couldn’t cast fire, until she realized the risk of burning Khouryn along with his captors.

  Then something hissed.

  She cursed under her breath because she was sure she knew what it was. When Aoth had rescued Cera from the cellars of Halonya’s interim temple, he’d found that the wyrmkeepers were using a drake as a guard dog. Apparently this bunch had one too, and the beast had caught her scent.

  She doubted she had time to sprint the last few paces to the doorway before the foes inside readied themselves for combat. They were expecting her, after all. It would be better to keep her distance and hurl spells as they came out.

  Unfortunately they didn’t really do that. An arm whipped out of the doorway, lobbed stones or marbles, and instantly jerked back out of sight. The missiles clattered on the floor.

  Jhesrhi started to speak a word of shielding. The first stone exploded before she finished.

  A dazzling, crackling flare of lightning burned her, made her whole body clench, and kept her from articulating the final syllable of the word of protection. An instant later a pulse of chill pierced her to the core. Next came flame and finally two bursts of vapor that stung her exposed skin and eyes, seared her from her nostrils all the way down into her chest, and made her cough and retch.

  She fell down and told herself she had to scramble back up again or get ready to fight somehow. But it was impossible when she couldn’t catch her breath and her eyes were blind with tears and floating blobs, as if she’d looked straight at the sun.

  Footsteps thumped and scale-armor chasubles made a metallic shivering noise as the wyrmkeepers came out into the corridor. The drake gave another rasping hiss. Then a rough bass voice said, “What in the name of the Five Breaths is that?”

  The wyrmkeepers had spotted Jhesrhi, as she’d expected they would. Her charm of concealment wasn’t powerful enough to deflect the attention of someone who already knew she was there. But from the one priest’s reaction, it seemed that her underlying spell of disguise was still working. As a result, they weren’t seeing the woman they’d hoped to trap, but rather bone-pale, black-eyed Bareris Anskuld, the undead bard who’d marched with the Brotherhood on the desperate expedition into Thay.

  “It could be a diversion,” said a baritone voice in more cultured, aristocratic tones. “I need eyes looking the other way.”

  “What about this thing?”

  “Let’s see if we can convince it to be on our side.” The speaker—the wyrmkeepers’ leader, Jhesrhi surmised—switched to the language of dragons with its sibilant, polysyllabic words and convoluted phrasing.

  Like many priests, he evidently had the ability to command the undead and thought he could use it on Jhesrhi. That gave her a moment to act.

  She turned her back on him as though cringing from the power he was bringing to bear. Then, hoping the darkness in the passage would help to hide what she was doing, she fumbled in the pouch on her belt for the small pewter bottle inside. She’d intended to give all the healing elixir to Khouryn, but if she didn’t use some to restore herself, he was never going to get any.

  She pulled out the stopper and took a swig. Her pains subsided and once she blinked the tears away, her vision cleared. She finally managed to draw a proper breath.

  The wyrmkeeper with the rough voice said, “Wait. If it’s a vampire or something, why was it coughing?”

  Jhesrhi hastily jammed the stopper back in, thrust the bottle into her bag, jerked around, and snarled an incantation. She clenched the fist wearing the ring, then flicked her fingers open on the final word. An enormous spiderweb flickered into existence. Their ends adhering to the walls, floor, and ceiling, the sticky, white strands clung to the foes in the midst of them and only entangled them more as they floundered in surprise.

  But either because she’d scarcely had time to aim or because they’d been nimble enough to spring clear before the web fully materialized, she hadn’t netted all her foes. Jaws open wide, the drake, a green-scaled creature the size of a wolfhound, bounded at her on its hind legs.

  She had just time to speak a thumb-sized, crystalline wasp into existence. Buzzing, it stung t
he surprised drake on the snout then whirled around its head. The reptile spun too, snapping at it repeatedly.

  When the drake halted, the wyrmkeeper, charging a stride behind, ran right into it. They fell in a heap together, and as the wasp blinked out of existence, the confused reptile bit a final time and plunged its fangs into the priest’s neck. An instant later, Jhesrhi thrust out her hand and splashed the creature with a burst of freezing light. It convulsed, then stopped moving. The chill had evidently stopped its heart.

  Jhesrhi felt a surge of satisfaction, but it lasted only until she pivoted, looking for new threats, and found one. A big man with long, drooping black mustachios had somehow freed himself from the web. Judging from the quality and ornamentation of his gear, he was the leader. He wore a ring on every finger of his left hand and a helm whose contours suggested a dragon’s head. The light spilling through the doorway sent multicolored streaks running through his chasuble, and glints of the same hues oozed inside the curved head of his fighting pick.

  He charged out of the direct illumination spilling through the doorway and into the gloom, and power flared from the rings. Ghostly, crested, wedge-shaped heads at the ends of serpentine necks writhed up from the floor between him and Jhesrhi. The closest one struck at her.

  She dodged it but the defensive action put her in range of a second head. She wrenched herself to one side, and its misty but no doubt murderous fangs snapped silently shut on empty air.

  The heads withered into nothingness an instant later, but by then their creator himself had rushed into striking distance. Bellowing the name of his goddess, he swung the pick, the head glowing red hot and bursting into flame. Jhesrhi jumped back and the weapon missed. Hoping the darkness would hinder her foe, she kept retreating down the passage while she started another spell.