Prophet of the Dead

1

Aoth didn’t see anyone moving around the courtyard. He supposed he had the cold and the early hour to thank.

From his limited vantage point inside the tomb, he couldn’t see anybody on the walls either, but assumed there was probably a sentry or two up there somewhere, maybe sheltered in the corner turrets. With any luck at all, though, they’d be peering outward, not in.

Next, he looked for religious symbols in the ornate, soot-blackened stonework or any other sign that suggested the location of a chapel. For healing was the province of clerics even when, as was likely in the nightmarish land Szass Tam had made of Thay, the priests in question were dreadmasters of Bane, Lord of Darkness.

But Aoth failed to spot a shrine. A wry smile tugged at his lips when it occurred to him that, for a man whose vision was sharper than a griffon’s, he was doing a poor job of finding anything he looked for.

In fact, it would be unfortunate but not surprising if there were no shrine. Most of the lords with citadels in High Thay were Red Wizards, and in his experience, such folk, devoted as they were to esoteric knowledge, often had little use for faith.

He took a deep breath. The air smelled and tasted of burning sulfur, the taint of the volcanoes whose smoke also darkened the sky. He swung open the creaking iron gate and, trying to stay low, hobbled across the graveyard.

He didn’t like it that he was leaving tracks in the snow, but there was nothing he could do about it. He’d just have to hope nobody would take any notice of them.

By the time he reached the keep, the pain in his neck had spread across his shoulders, all the way down his back, and into his hips, making all the muscles ache and bunch. Struggling to block the clenching torment out, he tested one of the lesser doors.

It was unlocked, and when he cracked it open, there was no one in view on the other side, just a kind of vestibule with five doorways around the walls. Maybe, he told himself-unconvincingly-his luck was finally changing. The Smiling Lady knew it was past time.

It was somewhat warmer indoors, although still chilly and drafty in the part of the castle where its master likely never ventured and the humble folk who saw to his comforts lived and toiled. Those servants and slaves had risen with the dawn to take up their tasks, and Aoth scurried past doorways and crouched behind barrels to keep them from spotting him.

Eventually, he found a small storeroom containing only dusty, cobweb-shrouded crates that, plainly, no one cared about anymore. The space was beyond easy earshot of the chambers where yawning servants were starting the day’s baking, mending, and washing, yet not so distant that there was little hope of anyone wandering by. He limped inside and stood beside the door where no one would see him.

After that, time dragged, slowed by the pain and anxiety that were gnawing away at him. Finally, he heard footsteps padding along. Just a single pair if he could trust his ears. He waited for them to pass by, then stepped out into the passage.

As he hoped, he was looking at only one creature, a stooped, olive-skinned orc dressed in rags. The marks of multiple floggings, some ridged and old, others raw and recent, showed through the rips in the slave’s shabby tunic.

Aoth didn’t know all the ways Thay had changed since Szass Tam became its sole master-and deeply regretted that he wasn’t being allowed to preserve his ignorance-but in the homeland of his youth, pig-faced brutes like the one before him had mostly been soldiers, not common thralls. Maybe the orc had started out that way but then so disgraced himself that his master reduced him to bondage.

“Turn around slowly,” Aoth growled in his best menacing cutthroat voice, “and don’t cry out.” And as the orc pivoted, Aoth tried to look like the war mage and sellsword captain who’d slain dragons and devils in his time and not like the creeping invalid that fearsome fellow had become.

His superficial appearance might help. He still had his squat, muscular frame, his leveled spear and armor, and luminous blue eyes framed in their mask of tattooing. It might take a keen observer to see past all that to the pain and weakness underneath.

The orc had had his tusks pulled, maybe because he’d been in the habit of biting and goring with them. He glowered at Aoth with a certain caution but no overt fear. It all reinforced the sellsword’s suspicion that the creature had once been a man-at-arms.

Aoth jerked his head toward the little storeroom and tried not to react to the resulting stab of agony in his neck. “In there. Fast.”

The slave obeyed, and Aoth closed the door behind them. “Whose castle is this?” he asked.

“Lord So-Remas.”

The name meant nothing to Aoth. “A Red Wizard?”

“Yes.” The orc’s piggy, bloodshot eyes narrowed. “You don’t even know whose fortress you sneaked into?”

Aoth sighed. “It’s a long story. Does So-Remas have a healer who attends him?”

The orc grunted. “He doesn’t need one. He’s undead.”

Curse it! “Then who tends the members of the household when they fall sick?”

“If it’s somebody So-Remas cares about, he gives him a potion to drink. The rest of us just either get well or die.”

Aoth frowned, considering. Healing elixir was valuable, all the more so in a remote fastness where it was apparently the only magical remedy available. “Where does your lord keep his jewels and talismans and such?”

The orc snorted. “You think he’d tell somebody like me?”

Aoth raised the spear a hair to remind the thrall of the threat it represented. “I think you at least have a guess, and I recommend you share it. As soon as you stop helping me, you become a problem with an obvious solution.”

The orc sneered. “But maybe not an easy one. Not for a human standing funny and sweating rivers even in this cold, a human who tells me straight out that he needs a healer.”

Aoth stared his captive in the face. “If you want to try me, go ahead.”

After a long moment, the orc broke eye contact. “What for? Out of loyalty to the master who treats me so well?” He spit.

“Then stop posturing and tell me where he keeps his treasure.”

“In his chambers, I guess. I don’t know where else it would be.”

“Does he sleep during the day?”

“Mostly. I think. I mean, he doesn’t have to. I’ve seen him when the sun is up. But not very often.”

Aoth frowned. “I guess that will have to do. Take me to his quarters. Choose a route where people won’t see us this time of day.”

As they climbed a steep, narrow set of back stairs, and his neck and back fairly screamed with the punishing exertion, Aoth said through gritted teeth, “Exactly what kind of undead is So-Remas?”

The orc shrugged. “I’m not a necromancer. I don’t know all the different kinds.”

“Is he solid or shadowy? Man-shaped or otherwise? What does he eat or drink?”

“He looks like a white-faced, shriveled-up, dead old man. He eats and drinks the same things as living people do. Just, not much.”

Not a vampire or a specter, then. That was good as far as it went, but it left plenty of other nasty creatures that So-Remas could be.

“Quiet, now,” the orc continued. “We’re almost there.”

They stepped from the stairs onto a landing on one of the uppermost floors of the keep. Ornately carved with scenes of a handsome young wizard slaying cloud giants, raising a tempest, and commanding the obedience of groveling pit fiends-a highly embellished depiction of So-Remas’s early career, most likely-the double doors to the master’s apartments were locked.

Drawing on his dwindling store of arcane power, Aoth inserted the tip of his spear into the keyhole and whispered a charm. The point pulsed with green light, and the lock clicked open.

He cracked the door and peeked in at a chamber with drawn curtains and closed shutters behind them. The space would have been entirely dark if not for the red embers glowing in the hearth. But he didn’t need good light-or any light-to discern the high-backed leather chairs, lanceboard table, and collection of ancient Mulhorandi coins, curios, and sculpture. The air smelled of both dry rot and the floral perfume the undead nobleman apparently used in an effort to mask his stink.

There was a bookshelf built into the wall. It didn’t hold enough volumes to fill it, and that was by design. A square of minute cracks outlined the empty section and a hint of silvery phosphorescence crawled on top of it.

Tiptoeing, Aoth led the orc inside, eased the door shut behind them, and then crossed to the hidden panel. He tried to slide and then push it open, but it wouldn’t budge.

The slave was plainly nervous with his owner sleeping in the next chamber, but even so, curiosity or skepticism prompted him to whisper, “How do you know anything’s there?”

Aoth pointed to his lambent eyes. His truesight would have found a mundane lock as easily as the cracks if there had been one. Unfortunately, though, So-Remas had secured the panel with enchantment. That was the source of the argent glimmer.

Maybe Aoth’s charm of unlocking would work as it had before, but maybe not. He’d match his thunderbolts and showers of acid against those of any wizard short of Szass Tam, but the spell of opening wasn’t a part of the potent system of battle magic he’d mastered as a youthful legionnaire. It was just a trick he’d picked up in the years since, and he wasn’t proficient with it.

Still, he’d have to pit it against So-Remas’s ward. He couldn’t simply smash through the panel for fear of waking the mage.

He whispered the words and touched his spear to the surface much as he had before. The panel didn’t move.

Maybe pain was interfering with his concentration. He took several long, slow breaths and tried to exhale it from his body, then focused his will anew and made sure to murmur the words with the exact cadence and pronunciation they required.

The panel still wouldn’t move.

“Come on!” whispered the orc.

Aoth tried again. And thrice more.

Then the double doors to the landing crashed open, and two spearmen in mail and crested helmets rushed into the room. An instant later, So-Remas, withered, bone-white, and milky-eyed, his mostly bald skull sporting white hair like dandelion fluff, stepped to the threshold of his bedchamber. The nightshirt and nightcap lent a grotesque and even comical note to his appearance, but there was nothing funny about the slim ebony wand in his clawlike hand.

Cera felt taut as a bowstring while Sarshethrian stood motionless-well, except for the constant stirring of his ragged corona of shadow-and seemingly entranced. For the moment, eager hope trumped the loathing the demon’s proximity engendered.

“The darkness is responding to him,” murmured Jhesrhi, standing at her side with the top of her brazen staff burning like a torch and the stag men hovering close. “I see the ripples, and I hear the voices.”

“Good,” Cera said, and in her thoughts, she prayed to Amaunator even though she could barely sense him.

For her, that, not the gloom, the cold, or even the knowledge of being lost and trapped, was the greatest horror of this place: It attenuated her link to the god to whom she’d pledged her life and soul. If it frayed away entirely, it was hard to imagine she could withstand the loss.

Sarshethrian turned his gaze on the mortals. “Your friend Aoth is gone.”

Cera felt a jolt of alarm. “What do you mean?”

The creature shrugged. The shoulder of the uninjured arm hitched up and down normally while the other barely twitched. “He may have found a way out of the deathways by himself, although I very much doubt it. Someone else may have removed him. He may have been alive or dead when it happened. All I know is, he isn’t here anymore.”

Jhesrhi scowled. “You’re sure?”

“Well, admittedly, my kingdom is extensive. In theory, if the man traveled a very long way in just a short time … I’ll tell you what. I want us all to be friends, so I’ll keep checking from time to time as we move about. But for now, let’s tentatively agree that one provision of our bargain has been fulfilled.”

“Not by you,” Cera said. “You didn’t help him.”

“And as yet,” the fiend replied, an edge coming into his voice, “you haven’t done anything to help me either. So be happy you got what you wanted and let it go at that.”

“We’ll honor our contract,” Jhesrhi said. “And the more we know about what’s going on, the better we can help you.”

Sarshethrian smirked. “And the more likely it is that you can find your own way home?”

“I thought you claimed we’d never figure it out, no matter what,” Cera said.

The pale creature chuckled. “A fair touch, sun priestess. I did, and I do.” He glanced around, found a black marble sarcophagus with a lid carved in the form of a sleeping lady holding a lily to her chest, and perched on the edge. Then he waved the humans to the stone coffin opposite it. “So make yourselves comfortable and ask your questions.”

Jhesrhi seated herself, and after a moment’s hesitation, Cera did the same, although it felt strange and wrong to flop down casually across from the demon when, in any sane world or set of circumstances, she’d be scourging it with the radiance of the Yellow Sun and a chant of exorcism.

“I want to know three things,” Jhesrhi said. “What is this place, what are you, and who are our mutual enemies?”

Sarshethrian nodded. “Let me tell you a story that will explain all of that by the time it’s through.

“At the beginning-my beginning,” the creature continued, “I came into being in this place. Perhaps it came into existence at the same instant, or perhaps it existed before me. I can’t be certain. All I can say is that so far as I’ve ever been able to determine, no one ever heard of it before I appeared to claim it for my own.

“I also don’t know how long I’ve wandered here. How could I? At first, nothing changed to mark the passage of time, and I didn’t even know what time was. But gradually, language and knowledge formed inside me like a pearl accreting in an oyster.

“Eventually, they prompted me to attempt to define myself. Was I perhaps a devil, or maybe a demon? It didn’t appear so, not in the technical sense, anyway, for although I still didn’t fully comprehend the nature of my home-it’s difficult to take the true measure of a place when you’ve only ever seen it from the inside-it didn’t seem to be a part of the Hells or the Abyss either.”

“Get to the point,” Cera said.

Sarshethrian snorted. “A priestess should be more interested in mysteries. Don’t you realize you’re receiving a bona fide myth no cleric of the light has ever heard before? But never mind. I promise, I am coming ‘to the point.’

“Although I might not have been precisely a baatezu or a tanar’ri, I had quite a bit in common with them, both in terms of my abilities and my awakening desires. And because the latter were cravings I could never satisfy in isolation, I strived ever harder to understand the nature of my home and how it could be made to connect to the greater universe I sensed around it.”

“And eventually, you found out it could connect through tombs and crypts,” Jhesrhi said.

Sarshethrian nodded. “Exactly. Perhaps because it’s a kind of reflection or echo those places strike in Shadow. Or maybe because it’s the perfect, reified idea that every vault and mausoleum in the mortal world expresses in its own limited way … but I’m forgetting that the sunlady is impatient with metaphysics.”

Or you want to make sure you don’t let slip anything that might help us escape, Cera thought.

“Suffice it to say,” the pale fiend continued, “in time, I learned how to step from my world into the funerary places of yours, only to discover I could venture no farther. A realm so full of life was inhospitable to me and would remain so unless I persuaded some of the indigenous creatures to worship me and so provide me with a foothold.”

“And because you could only make your presence felt in tombs,” Cera said, “the only ‘indigenous creatures’ you could talk to were undead.”

Sarshethrian inclined his head. “Exactly so. At first, no one was particularly interested. The lowliest lacked the wit to understand me. Others were content with their existences or skeptical of my ability to improve their circumstances, and perhaps reasonably so. I soon realized it’s fairly common for fiends to try to entice ghouls and wraiths into their service.

“But I persevered and eventually stumbled on a being so desperate for companionship that he was willing to listen to anything and everything I had to say. His name was Lod. Once, he was one of the serpent folk called nagas, and in undeath, he retained all the vast intelligence he’d enjoyed in life. That intellect notwithstanding, the necromancer who reanimated him could think of no better use for him than to seal him up alone in a crypt to guard the grave goods for eternity, and he found the solitude and tedium hellish. He would have done anything to escape them.”

“And so you had your first disciple,” Jhesrhi said. The flames dancing on the head of her staff further gilded her blond hair and tawny skin.

“Yes,” Sarshethrian said, “and I made good on all my promises. Together, we devised magic to break the mystical chains that held him to his endless task, and then to help achieve his grander dreams.”

Cera felt another twist of loathing down in her stomach. “ ‘Grander dreams’ that led to a menace nobody ever heard of attacking Rashemen?”

“Yes,” Sarshethrian said. Then he broke off talking and sat up straight. It reminded her of a hound reacting to a noise its masters couldn’t hear.

“What is it?” Jhesrhi asked.

“I feel them,” the demon said, hopping down from the sarcophagus, “here inside the deathways, and that means the rest of the story can wait. You don’t have to know who they are to kill them.”

Vandar had no doubt that it was only the preternatural vitality he drew from the red weapons that had enabled him to pull himself from the frozen river, and he suspected it was all that was keeping him alive now. But the magic had its limits. Shivering, teeth chattering, he felt colder than ever in his life, and the pale sun in the gray sky seemed to mock him with its lying promise of warmth.

But it did reveal the Fortress of the Half-Demon, visible as a dark nub on the northern horizon, and the sight helped to keep him trudging onward. In the castle, he’d surely find dry clothes, provisions, and a room where he could build a fire and rest out of the snow and the frigid, whistling wind for as long as it took to recover his strength.

Then he’d run to Immilmar as fast as his legs and his rage could carry him, and if the Three truly cared about justice, he’d arrive in time to catch Mario Bez and his sellswords.

Numb feet sliding, he labored to the top of the next rise. Half buried in snow, two more dark objects lay in the hollow before him.

For a moment, in his weariness, he failed to recognize them as anything more noteworthy than the brush, evergreens, and other stunted trees dotting the snow. Then a long, mottled limb, some patches of hide charred black and others glistening raw with a few feathers still clinging to them, rose sluggishly and flopped back down.

Startled, Vandar jumped and leveled the crimson spear. But neither the creature with the burned wing nor what he now recognized to be a man lying beside it moved any farther.

By the rose and scythe, was Vandar looking at Jet and Aoth Fezim? How had they vanished from the Fortress only to reappear out here, and what disaster had befallen them?

Vandar hurried down the slope. When it noticed his approach, the winged creature struggled to its feet, snow spilling from its back and flanks as it did. For an instant, the berserker still wasn’t sure he was looking at Jet. The griffon was too badly burned over too much of his body, and his halting, palsied movements in no way reflected the strength and speed of the beast that had accompanied Vandar and his brothers on the march north. But the smoldering blood-red eyes were still the same.

“What happened?” Vandar asked.

“Bez,” Jet rasped.

“I suspected as much. He attacked the lodge too. I may be the only one left.” Vandar pivoted. “Is Aoth …?” He faltered when he saw that the burned man half hidden in snow wasn’t the Thayan after all but rather Dai Shan. Somehow, despite the lodge’s efforts at secrecy, every contender for the wild griffons had found his way north, not that the Shou had any reason to be glad he’d undertaken the journey.

“Captain Fezim’s alive,” said Jet, “somewhere. I can feel him across our link. But he’s busy, and it could make the danger worse if I distract him. We’ll talk when he’s safe. Or if that imp”-the griffon stabbed his beak in Dai Shan’s direction-“wakes up first, maybe he can tell me where Aoth is.”

“I understand you want to find him,” Vandar said, “but once you do, you need to carry both of us back to Immilmar. It’s our best hope of reaching Bez before he claims his prize and disappears into the south.”

Jet laughed. The sound had always been so bloodcurdlingly harsh that it had taken Vandar a while to realize what it was, but now it held a bitter note that was new.

“I’ve always known that humans are blind and stupid,” the griffon said, “but you take the prize. Open your eyes and look.”

With a grunt, he extended his wing as far as he evidently could, which was about halfway. It bent in places and at angles where it shouldn’t, and in two spots, jagged bone stuck out through the skin.

“I can’t fly anybody anyplace,” the griffon said.

“Curse it!” Vandar said. “But all right. I was going to trek back to Immilmar on foot, and if I still have to, I will. But first, I’m going to double back to the Fortress. You might want to follow and lay up there for the time being. Good luck.”

Vandar turned away and took five crunching steps in the snow. Then Jet said, “Berserker.”

Vandar looked around. “Yes?”

“I don’t know if you think of us of the Brotherhood as your rivals or your comrades. You humans have a way of complicating everything that should be simple. If we’re your rivals, then leave. But if we’re your friends …” The familiar faltered in the manner of a proud creature unaccustomed to needing to ask for anything. “I told you I can’t fly. Truly, I’m so weak, I can barely stand, and without my feathers, I’m nearly frozen through. If you go, I’ll die, and the merchant too, not that he matters.”

Inside, Vandar flinched. “The warriors of the lodge were my brothers. The Halruaans murdered them.”

Jet nodded. “Go get your revenge, then.” He lowered himself back down into the snow.

Vandar tried to turn away once more. Plainly, avenging the lodge was the honorable course. Even Jet realized it and had just acknowledged as much.

And yet …

Jet was a griffon, the lodge’s totem in the flesh.

And believing himself justified, Vandar had turned his back on the outlanders once already, and it was possible that if he’d chosen otherwise, his brothers would still be alive.

Moreover, if he focused his attention inward, he could feel the wordless nudging of the fey spear and sword, strangely warm in his hand and on his hip, urging him on toward the possibility of battle, vengeance, and, perhaps still, even glory. The effect was subtle because it merely reinforced his own innate desires. Yet it was an influence nonetheless, and though he prized the virtues of the weapons as much as ever, he was learning to question the inclinations of the strange sentience that had tangled itself with his own like ivy wrapped around a post.

He heaved a sigh. “I have flint and steel, and there’s wood about. We can make a fire and find something to eat, and then, when you’re up to it, we’ll hike back to the fortress together.”

Aoth leveled his spear, and even that simple action made his neck, shoulders, and back spasm. He rattled off words of command, and the shriveled mage in the nightcap and nightshirt did the same, meanwhile sketching isosceles triangles with his wand. The ebony rod left streaks of amber phosphorescence in the air.

Aoth finished first, only because he’d opted for a simpler spell. Darts of blue light hurtled from the spear and pierced the undead wizard’s scrawny torso. Lord So-Remas cried out and flailed, his casting ruined short of completion.

Running footsteps pounded. All but certain he was moving too slowly to keep the two onrushing guards from driving their weapons into his body, Aoth blundered around to face them.

He was right. If he’d had to protect himself, he would have been too late. But the orc had picked up a small table, and now he heaved it at the soldiers. The improvised missile bashed one guard and made him stumble. Startled, his comrade balked too.

Aoth pulled his short, heavy sword from its scabbard and tossed it to the orc, who caught it deftly by the hilt. It wasn’t much to hold off two armored spearmen, but it was better than nothing, and handing it off was all Aoth had time to do. He had to use his magic-or what was left of it-to fight the most dangerous foe.

He wrenched himself back toward the doorway to the bedchamber and found the Red Wizard had already shaken off the effects of the darts of light. Worse, he was already chanting a new incantation, one that made a sickly green glow flower in the depths of his sunken eyes and branch out through the veins in his temples to his hairless crown.

Aoth started a spell of his own, but this time, So-Remas finished first. He flicked the ebony wand in an arc that ended with it pointing straight at his opponent. Shedding its clattering pieces, the lanceboard table leaped into the air and flew at Aoth.

He tried to dodge and gasped at the resulting stab of agony. The table slammed into him and knocked him onto the floor, and that double jolt was just as excruciating.

He curled up and tucked his head as, prompted by So-Remas’s wand, more objects flew at him. Struggling to keep to the proper cadence despite the punishment, Aoth gritted out another spell and jabbed with his spear on the final syllable.

A red spark shot from the point to strike at the undead mage’s feet. There, it exploded into a fiery blast that knocked the wizard backward and filled the doorway with a hissing sheet of flame.

Gasping, Aoth hoped that was the end of it, and for a heartbeat, it appeared to be. He was about to turn and see how the orc was faring when So-Remas strode back through the fire. Either he was innately impervious to it, or he carried some talisman that made him so.

The undead noble flicked his wand up and down. The animated game table hammered Aoth like a boot stamping repeatedly on an insect.

Aoth struggled to think of a counterstroke he might conceivably accomplish despite the ongoing torment and his depleted powers. The drawn curtains with the shuttered windows behind them caught his eye.

The orc had said that on rare occasions, he’d seen his master when the sun was out. But that wasn’t the same as saying that he’d seen the undead creature in the sunlight, and Aoth was going to gamble that the thrall had meant the former but not the latter, and that there was a reason for it.

He thrust his spear at a window and shouted a word of command. Raw force leaped from the weapon to tear down the drapes, shatter the greenish panes behind them, and smash open the shutters on the other side of those.

A shaft of daylight shined in and caught So-Remas in its center. The undead shrieked and burned, his desiccated skin and the withered flesh inside charring like paper, the purifying power of the sun achieving what Aoth’s burst of arcane fire hadn’t.

Aoth dredged up the concentration for a little more magic. It helped that, now that So-Remas had lost his focus, the lanceboard table had stopped battering him. Aoth cast more glowing darts, and they and the sunlight together were enough. The Red Wizard pitched forward onto his face. By now, he was mostly bare bone, which burned to coals and then to ash like the rest of him.

It occurred to Aoth that if Cera were here, she’d say her god had looked out for him. That in turn made him remember that, as far as he knew, she and Jhesrhi were still trapped in the dark maze. Somehow, he had to get them out!

But he couldn’t think about that now. Aoth twisted around and saw that the spearmen had backed the orc against a wall.

Fortunately, they’d turned their backs on Aoth to do it. With his teeth gritted, he crawled close enough to drive his spear up between one soldier’s legs.

The gelded man whimpered and, knees buckling, collapsed. The other warrior’s head jerked in his wounded comrade’s direction. Risking everything on an all-out attack, the orc lunged and slashed. The remaining guard fell backward with blood pumping from a gaping wound in his neck.

Aoth looked around to make sure there were no other immediate threats. He noticed the orc doing the same.

“Thanks,” Aoth gasped.

The slave shrugged. “I had to fight, or they would have tortured me to death for helping you. It wouldn’t have mattered that you forced me.” He leered a crooked leer. “Although there was more to it. I wanted to kill them.”

“You need to break open the secret panel. Fast, before more guards show up. I’d do it, but I’m not sure I can stand back up.”

The orc attacked So-Remas’s hiding place. The enchanted sword cracked and crunched through the wood in what Aoth knew to be a matter of moments even though it felt like a cruelly long time to him.

The thrall handed him a silver bottle. “This is the stuff.”

Clumsy with pain and eagerness, Aoth fumbled out the stopper and took a long pull of the tasteless, lukewarm elixir inside. He felt the vertebrae in his neck shift, but without discomfort. In fact, all the cramping, throbbing soreness was fading away from his neck all the way down to his rump. He let out a long sigh of relief.

He would have been happy to sit and savor his liberation from torment. But he and the orc weren’t out of danger yet, and although he’d recovered his physical strength, his mystical power would return only with rest. He jammed the stopper back in the bottle, scrambled up, and hurried to So-Remas’s hiding place.

“What else have we got?” he murmured to himself.

Fortunately, there was something, a long, thin, golden-hilted poniard of an athame. He snatched the ritual dagger from its sheath, and knowledge of its attributes poured into his mind. So-Remas had bound spells in it just as Aoth himself was accustomed to store magic in his spear.

He judged that it would do. In fact, it should do nicely. When more of So-Remas’s soldiers charged into the room, he met them with a nasty smile and a shriek of focused, bone-shattering sound.

The ambush started well. Sarshethrian, his newfound human and stag-man allies, and his shadowy slaves had caught the undead wayfarers by surprise and slaughtered several in the first few moments. Then, however, the creatures of the Eminence of Araunt started fighting back and maneuvering through the darkness, until Jhesrhi suddenly caught a whiff of something putrid.

She spun around. Somehow, two withered ghouls with luminous green eyes had gotten behind her, and now they were rushing in with needle fangs bared and jagged claws poised to rake and tear.

She felt a surge of loathing, less at the foulness of the undead creatures or the danger they represented-although that was there too-than at the prospect of being touched by anything even remotely manlike. She made a slashing motion with her staff and hurled a fan-shaped blaze of flame into the ghouls’ rotten, vaguely canine faces. They fell down, burning and thrashing.

Bells chimed. She looked to her flank and found one of the stag men there. He’d been scrambling to intercept the ghouls, and her flare had nearly hit him too. Maybe he was urging her to be more careful, although because she didn’t understand the language of the bells, and the expression on a stag warrior’s long, narrow face with its brown eyes and dusting of down never changed, it was impossible to tell for certain.

Cera cried, “Keeper! Keeper!” throughout the fight. She’d been invoking her god all along, but now there was a shrill note of desperation in her voice.

Jhesrhi turned. A misty, faintly luminous figure covered in gashes and puncture wounds was floating toward the sunlady. A flying mace made of golden light bashed at the ghost, and brandishing the identically shaped weapon of metal and wood in her hand, Cera sent flares of radiance stabbing through it. But the attacks didn’t stop it.

A shredded face oozing into visibility on the wavering blur that was its head, the ghost grinned and plunged an incorporeal hand into Cera’s shoulder. She cried out and reeled backward.

Jhesrhi hurled more flame from her brazen staff. The flare caught the phantom and burned it from existence.

Which didn’t mean she’d acted soon enough. She glanced around to make sure nothing was about to attack her, then rushed to her friend.

To her surprise, Cera recoiled. “You’re on fire!” the sunlady gasped.

Jhesrhi realized it was so. She must have cloaked herself in flame without realizing it at the same moment she used it to strike at the ghouls.

With a little irrational twinge of reluctance, she pulled the fire back inside herself, and the chilly gloom of the deathways became oppressive once more. But that didn’t matter. Cera did.

“Are you all right?” Jhesrhi asked.

Cera took a breath. “I will be,” she said, pain in her voice. “Once we’re out of here. Is the battle over?”

Jhesrhi looked around and decided that it was. All the undead travelers made of solid flesh were down, and the wraiths and such were gone, incinerated, exorcised, or otherwise expunged from existence. Sarshethrian’s servants, murky forms that resembled rats, leeches, centipedes, and beetles to the extent they resembled anything, were slinking away down various passages, while, lengths of shadow lashing around him, the fiend himself repeatedly kicked a fallen skeletal swordsman.

Jhesrhi recognized the phenomenon from her years on battlefields across northeastern Faerun. The fight had ended too quickly to suit Sarshethrian. He was still full of aggression and was expending the spiteful energy as best he could.

Still, there was something comical if not contemptible about watching a self-styled archdevil comporting himself like a child in the throes of a tantrum. It reminded her of Tchazzar’s excesses, and she made a little spitting sound, softly enough that she didn’t expect him to hear.

He did, though, and, his halo of shadow drawing in its ragged tendrils and groping and coiling in a less agitated fashion, left off abusing the dead thing to turn and give her a sardonic smile. “I take it you think I’ve forgotten my dignity.”

Jhesrhi shrugged. “Do you care?”

“Yes. I told you, I want the three of us to be friends. And when you hear the rest of the story I started earlier, perhaps you’ll be more inclined to forgive my … excitement.”

I doubt it, Jhesrhi thought, but there was no point to saying it aloud and annoying him any further. She and Cera still needed his good will.

“I told you how I freed Lod the bone naga from his endless servitude.” Sarshethrian sat down atop a granite urn in the midst of several mangled, reeking corpses like that was the most natural place in the world to take his ease. Maybe for him it was. “And how his personal liberation inspired him to dream bigger dreams.”

“Yes,” Jhesrhi said. Finally, she thought, they were coming to it. Sarshethrian was about to explain exactly who was attacking Rashemen.

“Lod envisioned a great fraternity of the undead,” Sarshethrian said. “It would find those who were thralls and set them free. It would take those condemned to mindlessness and lift them into sentience. Ultimately, it would set the undead above the living to hunt wherever, however, and whomever they wished, without fear of retaliation.”

“And you agreed to help him accomplish all that as well,” Cera said, an edge of disgust in her voice.

“Yes, of course,” Sarshethrian said. “To that end, we invented more new wizardry, unearthed ancient secrets, and I taught him to traverse the deathways. My home, you see, was a web of secret paths that would enable him to go virtually anywhere to recruit new followers, instruct old ones, and reach any living realm he wished to assail, even one on the far side of an ocean.”

Jhesrhi blinked. “Wait. This Lod was-or is-on the other side of what, the Sea of Swords? Or the Great Sea?”

Sarshethrian smiled. “The former, although it wasn’t always so. Once, the continent on which he dwells occupied another world called Abeir. But then the cosmic upheaval you call the Spellplague uprooted it and dropped it in this world.”

“Like Tymanther,” Jhesrhi said. The same thing had happened to Medrash and Balasar’s home.

Knowing such was the case, she didn’t find Sarshethrian’s tale to be unbelievable so much as exasperating. Didn’t Faerun have enough homegrown horrors and would-be conquerors without new ones slithering onto the scene from faraway places no one ever even heard of?

“Yes,” the pale creature said, “not that it particularly matters. What does is that once again, I kept my word. Lod got the magic he wanted, and when his fellow undead realized the future he promised was actually possible, they rallied to his banner.” His mouth twisted. “All my pledges fulfilled, I awaited the homage he’d promised in return.”

“But you’d misread him,” said Cera. She sat down with her back against the dark hexagonal slab sealing a tomb, pulled off her helmet, and blotted the sweat on her round, flushed face with a kerchief. “He’d learned to hate servitude while wearing the yoke of his first master. He never intended that he or his disciples would accept a new one.”

Sarshethrian gave her a sour look with his single eye. Then: “It’s a pity you weren’t there, sunlady. I could have profited from your insights, for you understand Lod perfectly. When he judged that he had all he needed from me, he and his followers lured me into a trap to kill me.

“In the battle that followed, I lost my eye, the use of my arm, and a portion of my mystical strength. But I survived, and I managed to flee deep into the deathways where the traitors couldn’t find me.”

“And now you waylay Lod’s agents whenever you catch them traveling the maze,” Jhesrhi said.

Sarshethrian nodded. “For the time being, it’s as much as I can do. I didn’t just lose my eye. Lod took it and keeps it submerged in venom. The curse weakens me.”

“Which is why you sought allies,” Cera said.

“But why Rashemen?” Jhesrhi asked. “Is Lod already the undisputed master of this Abeir place?”

“No,” the fiend replied. “But I already explained how the deathways render distance and natural barriers meaningless. It’s not much more difficult for the Eminence of Araunt-Lod’s conspiracy-to undertake a campaign in Faerun than it is to pursue their schemes in Dusklan or Marrauk, and Rashemen has two qualities that make it attractive.”

Jhesrhi cocked her head. “It’s poor and backward, certainly, and those qualities ought to make it an easy conquest. But the Thayans have never found it so.”

Sarshethrian smiled. “What I was getting at is that it’s the country where the mortal and fey worlds mingle more than any other. I don’t know why, and at this point, neither does Lod. But he no doubt believes that given time and free rein, he can wring unique and potent magic from the land, and I imagine he’s right.

“It’s also a country that shares a border with those Thayans you mentioned, folk governed by necromancers and undead grandees who have good reason to be content with the world as it is. Lod will never free every zombie and wraith from bondage or persuade every vampire and lich to join him as long as Thay stands as an alternative to his vision. Control of a neighboring land will help him pursue the task of bringing it down.”

Remembering what it was like to fight the legions of Thay with their well-trained troops, formidable mages, and tamed demons, Jhesrhi smiled a crooked smile. “I wish him luck with that.”

“But it doesn’t matter whether he could ultimately defeat Thay,” Cera said. “It’s Rashemen we need to protect.” She shifted her gaze to Sarshethrian. “And you claim it’s still in danger?”

“Yes,” the one-eyed creature replied. “Most of the leaders of the undead fled via the deathways from the Fortress of the Half-Demon to another citadel at a place called Beacon Cairn. I don’t know what their next move will be-clairvoyance has its limits-but in their place, I’d take full advantage of the fact that the Rashemi believe the threat is over.”

Cera lowered her gilded helmet back onto her disheveled golden curls and clambered back to her feet. Her mail clinked.

“All right, then,” she said. “We fought for you, and you told us what we need to know. We appreciate it. Now please send us back to Rashemen, and that will conclude our bargain.”

Sarshethrian smiled. “I’m afraid not, sunlady. I told you I keep my promises, and I do, but it appears you misunderstood the terms of the agreement.”

Jhesrhi scowled, warmth flowed inside her arm, and ripples of flame ran along her staff. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning that by itself, this one little skirmish was insignificant. I need you to fight for me until we do some real damage. Until I’ve exacted revenge and made Lod repent of his ingratitude. It’s only then that I’ll send you home.”