Prophet of the Dead

5

Darkness blinded Jhesrhi, and the cold made her shiver. Occasionally, she thought she heard one of Sarshethrian’s enormous “vermin” shift position, but the tiny sounds might simply be one of her stag warriors moving slightly or even her own pulse beating in her ears.

Still, it made her skin crawl to imagine that one of the shadow-beasts might actually touch her before she realized it was there, and that in turn made the urge to summon a protective mantle of flame from the core of her that much harder to resist.

Formerly, the irrational impulse to call fire had resided in the staff she’d carried away from Mount Thulbane, but when she’d sacrificed the weapon to steal Tchazzar’s breath and strength, it had truly become a part of her.

It was unhealthy to give herself over to the impulse, though, or at least Cera seemed to think so, and it was certain that showing a light would alert the enemy to their presence. So Jhesrhi endured feeling vulnerable and the general unpleasantness of the deathways as best she could by thinking of Aoth, Khouryn, and Gaedynn, her cherished comrades from the Brotherhood.

She wondered if Gaedynn was still keeping company with the fashionable Chessentan lady he’d met at a ball. The woman was nice enough, but still, even though, in a vague, abstract sort of way, it shamed her, Jhesrhi found herself imagining how fire might flow along the folds and through the layers of one of the noblewoman’s elaborate silk and fur ensembles.

“They’re coming,” Sarshethrian whispered abruptly. The sound startled Jhesrhi and made her jump even though he’d told her he’d magically project his voice to warn her when battle was imminent. “Prepare yourself.”

She closed her eyes, murmured rhyming words, and touched a fingertip to each eyelid on the final syllable. When she opened them, she could see, albeit with colors faded to shades of gray and not as far as she could have with the aid of light. She could, of course, have enjoyed the benefit of the enchantment all along but hadn’t wanted to waste the power required to keep renewing it.

She was sitting on the ground with her back against a black marble mausoleum carved with an elaborate scene of Kelemvor judging the dead. Its antennae twitching, a thing like the shadow of an enormous cockroach crouched to her left. She rose and crept to the right to peek around the side of the tomb.

She was on a hillside in the largest space she’d yet seen in the sometimes claustrophobic vaults and tunnels that made up the deathways. Predictably, the space was a graveyard complete with twisted, leafless trees and wilted wreaths. All the tombs and monuments were black.

Thanks to Gosnorn’s information and the manner in which it jibed with his own knowledge of his dominions, Sarshethrian had been certain Lod would pass through here on his way to Faerun and Rashemen, and now Jhesrhi saw for herself that it was so. Like most any warlord marching through dangerous territory, the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was traveling in a column with his followers arranged protectively around him.

Prompted both by her martial training and natural curiosity, Jhesrhi first picked out Lod himself, and her eyes widened in surprise. The few bone nagas of her experience had been simply and precisely that, the naked, reanimated skeletons of enormous snakes with skulls nearly the same shape as those of human beings. The master wizard who’d woken Lod, though, had crafted something unique.

The commander of the Eminence was a divided being like a centaur. His maker had reshaped the top part of him into something very like the skeletal remains of the top half of a human being, arms, hands, and all. The bottom part remained overtly reptilian, but longer and heavier than one would expect of even a naga, the bones still sheathed in muscle and scales with a ridge of jagged spikes along the top. Jhesrhi wondered if she was actually looking at something that had once been a dragon’s tail.

Lod rode coiled on a cart drawn by a dozen scarred, gaunt, and filthy naked living men. According to Sarshethrian, the slaves had once been necromancers who’d made thralls of the undead.

Next, Jhesrhi identified the bone naga’s spellcasters, pallid vampires and withered liches walking with staves in hand and amulets hanging from their necks. She and her allies needed to neutralize them quickly, or at least keep them too busy defending themselves to do the same for their leader.

Finally, she looked over the men-at-arms, particularly the undead of two sorts she’d never encountered before even when fighting Szass Tam’s legions. The floating entities called direhelms were the top halves of suits of plate armor animated by the spirits resident within. Doomsepts were groups of seven luminous phantoms that fought as one and apparently were a single being in some metaphysical sense.

All things considered, the column looked formidable even in comparison to the horde of shadow creatures Sarshethrian had assembled to lie in wait for it. Jhesrhi hoped the maimed fiend was right that her powers and Cera’s would tilt the balance in their favor.

Once again, tinged with hatred and eagerness, Sarshethrian’s voice whispered from the empty air: “Now.”

Jhesrhi clothed herself in flame. It felt so good, so right, that for a moment, pleasure burned every other thought right out of her head.

Then, however, she remembered her purpose. Declaiming words of power, she jabbed with her brazen staff and cast a fiery missile at Lod. Elsewhere, her ordinarily merry voice vibrant with the loathing she felt for the deathways and all they contained, Cera recited a prayer that enveloped a portion of the column in searing sunlight. Sarshethrian’s creatures exploded from their hiding places.

The sellswords of the Storm of Vengeance and Aoth Fezim and his companions had all flown to Rashemen to negotiate for the wild griffons. Lacking such a convenient option, the Theskians had trekked across the frozen surface of Lake Ashane, and for the most part, had done so on foot or driving sleighs and dogsleds. Dai Shan, however, had ridden on a sizable magically propelled “ice barge” that sat on its runners at the end of the one of the docks toward the south end of town. A single lamp burned on the bow of the barge, perhaps to assure Yhelbruna that someone really was waiting onboard, while a rope ladder dangled over the side. She walked out onto the pier and, clamping her staff awkwardly under her forearm, began to climb.

During the day, someone had left a message addressed to her tacked beside the entry to the Witches’ Hall. Reading it, she’d discovered that her anonymous correspondent was one of Dai Shan’s underlings, who claimed his master had left instructions for him to carry out in the event he failed to return from his expedition on Mario Bez’s skyship.

To that end, the Shou needed to speak with Yhelbruna, and because that entailed an element of danger, he wished to do so secretly. Would the learned sister please meet him aboard the ice barge when Selune had passed her zenith?

On one level, Yhelbruna hadn’t much appreciated being presented with yet another mystery. Of late, she’d been contending with a surfeit. Yet the parchment, calligraphy, and phrasing were all recognizably Shou, and it would have been just like cagey, slippery Dai Shan to put a contingency plan in place to make sure Bez wouldn’t profit from betraying him. If so, what she learned tonight might finally prove to Mangan Uruk’s satisfaction that the Halruaan had no right to take the griffons.

Gripping the railing, she stepped up onto the barge’s broad, flat deck. Several low, almost hutlike structures stood along its length, but all were dark except for the captain’s cabin in the stern, where a hint of light leaked through the cracks around the hatch.

Yhelbruna walked to the cabin and knocked. No one answered.

“Hello?” she called. Still, nobody replied.

She tried to twist the brass handle. The hatch was locked.

Suddenly, belatedly, she sensed she was in danger. She whirled and spotted a small, shadowy figure at the other end of the barge. His several rings glowed as he spun his hands through mystic passes. So did the yellow eyes under his stubby horns.

He could only be Melemer, Bez’s warlock lieutenant. He’d evidently pilfered Shou parchment and forged a message cunningly conceived to lure Yhelbruna into a trap.

But he was going to regret his cleverness. However adept he was at his arts, she’d had a hundred years to practice her own, and after she rendered him helpless, he could tell her what had really happened in the north.

Gripping her staff with both hands, holding it parallel to the deck, she thrust it forth to symbolize forbiddance and defense. She asked the spirits and fey who were her special allies to lend her their strength. Magic sparkled like powdered emeralds in the air around her.

But something was wrong. She could feel at once that the defense was weak. And when Melemer finished his casting, a tendril of sickly amber phosphorescence shot up from the deck beneath her feet. Twisting around her like a vine strangling a tree, it wrapped itself as tightly as any rope or chain and hoisted her off her feet. Its malignancy burned her wherever it touched, even through her robes, and made her guts cramp with sudden nausea.

As she retched bile into her mask, Melemer advanced and started a second incantation.

In one instant, everything was dark and quiet. Then the world exploded into blinding glare and hot pain. The shock of it made Lod give a screeching hiss and throw his head back, but the glyphs of protection graven inside his ribs and picked out in subtle variations of gray among his scales helped him recover quickly.

Once he did, he discerned that something had thrown fire at him! Vampires and liches who’d been walking near his cart were frantically trying to extinguish their burning garments, while the draft animals harnessed closest to the cart sprawled charred and smoking in the traces.

As soon as he’d taken all that in, he heard a female voice declaiming spells that made patches of radiance bright as summer noon light flare into being up and down the length of the column. No, actually, it was worse than simple sunlight. Lod was a creature of Abeir, and for all his erudition, Faerun’s “gods” and their mortal agents were a mystery to him. But he knew enough to recognize “holiness” when it stung him like a thousand needles.

He’d expected the deathways to present certain hazards, but certainly not flame, the sun, and divine wrath. For one more muddled, dazzled instant, he imagined he was fighting an army of Rashemi, that they’d somehow learned of the Eminence and its plans and moved to oppose him here before he could even reach their country.

Then, though, he saw beyond the flame and the light to what was scuttling in the darkness and almost laughed in relief at the teeming shadow creatures. Because if he was mainly dealing with those, he was fighting Sarshethrian, even if the would-be patron devil of the undead had somehow induced mortal spellcasters to join his cause.

That meant Lod’s grand design was still on track. He just needed to deal with a pest left over from long ago. Fortunately, he’d known it might come to this, and he fancied he was ready.

First, though, he’d better address the complication posed by the mortals. He wouldn’t be able to devote his full attention to Sarshethrian while someone was trying to set him on fire or, worse, purge undeath itself from his body. He peered around.

Although she was using a tomb on the slope to the column’s left for cover, he spotted the wizard as soon as she leaned out from behind it to hurl another incendiary spell at him. Her aura of flame made it easy.

It also made him wonder, even as he hissed a word of warding, swiped at the air, and sent the hurtling spark veering off course, if she was truly human after all. To his arcane perceptions, she looked like mortal flesh and blood but somehow like an elemental as well. Perhaps she was some manner of hybrid.

Not that it mattered at the moment. He leaned down from his cart, gripped a still-befuddled vampire by the spiky pauldron on his shoulder, and pointed. “The mage is there! See the firelight? Kill her!”

The vampire hastily chose others to join him in the endeavor, and they headed up the hillside together. Sarshethrian’s murky, half-formed servants scurried forth by the dozen to oppose the undead on foot, but the ones in the air-be they blood drinkers shapeshifted into bats; levitating direhelms; or translucent, faintly luminous wraiths-had a clearer path to their objective.

Satisfied, Lod next sought the priestess. He’d already noted she was operating on the column’s right flank so she and the wizard could harry it from two directions simultaneously. But at first, he still had difficulty pinpointing her exact location because, unlike her partner, she had the good sense not to kindle light in her own immediate vicinity.

Fortunately, though, it was impossible for anyone to repeatedly channel the purifying, life-giving power of the sun without it standing out in a world where that force was entirely alien. To his mystical sensitivities, the spot where she was invoking her deity throbbed like a rotten tooth.

Lod sent a second squad of his followers driving in the cleric’s direction. Then he cast around for Sarshethrian himself.

But this time, he couldn’t find what he was seeking. The fiend was evidently well hidden and content for the moment to let his minions do the fighting.

Lod might have done the same in his place. The shadow beasts were low, mindless things, but formidable in their way, and they outnumbered the warriors and mages of the Eminence. It made tactical sense to simply throw them at the column until they wore it away.

That was why Lod couldn’t allow the battle to continue in that fashion. He reached into his robe, brought out a crystal vial, and, murmuring words of excoriation and compulsion, focused his malice on the eyeball suspended in the cloudy liquid within.

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 wire 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 could 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.

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. Then 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.”

“Tell me.”

“Let’s say I’m a sunlady who allied herself with Sarshethrian because even that was better than letting the undead overrun Rashemen.”

“You are, give or take.”

Cera smiled for an instant. “Yes, but bear with me. I’m a sunlady. You, however, are a fire spirit Sarshethrian bound into his service, and when he died, you regained your freedom. Now you want to escape the deathways, and Lod’s the one who can let you out. In exchange, you’ll help him conquer Rashemen. Ordinary mortals, after all, are nothing to you. To prove your good faith, you’ll give him the prisoner you captured: me.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, I’m plainly a human being, not an elemental.”

Cera took a moment to choose her next words carefully. “Of course you’re human, but since you stole Tchazzar’s might, you’re also … special. Why do you think the stag men gave you their allegiance? Because they were fey, and you looked like a mighty fey or spirit to them.”

“I … it doesn’t matter. Because the scheme would also require me to deceive Lod, and I’m a bad liar.”

“How long did you keep Tchazzar beguiled?”

“He was mad and blind with, well, lust.” Jhesrhi’s emphasis bespoke her revulsion. “The bone naga won’t be.”

“But you have moments when you think a fire’s thoughts, and human concerns recede. I’ve seen it. And like any wizard, you know how to manipulate the state of your own consciousness. Be living fire when you approach Lod. Then he won’t see the emotions that would give you away.”

“Like being upset at the prospect of what’s going to happen to you? Because it will be bad. Even if I can convince the undead to make common cause with a creature of fire, they won’t be kind to a cleric of the Yellow Sun.”

“I’ll count on your glibness to convince them I’ll be more useful alive than dead.”

“I already told you, I don’t have any glibness.”

“Well, even if they kill me, it’s better for one of us to escape than neither. Someone has to find Aoth, stop the undead, and pay back that little turd Dai Shan. Don’t you think?”

Jhesrhi sat in silence for a few breaths. Then: “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” It was the best chance, for Jhesrhi if not for her. “Just promise me one thing. If they don’t only kill me, if they turn me into one of them, burn me up if you possibly can.”

“I’ll try to keep it from coming to that.”

“I know you will.” Cera put her helmet back on. “We should hurry back and find them while we can. Amaunator grant they haven’t moved on already.”

“They haven’t,” Jhesrhi answered, her garments rustling as, presumably, she too stood. “Unless it needs to run away, every war band, even an undead one, bides to rest and put itself back in order after a battle.”

Threatened with a hand-and-a-half sword in the grip of one of Rashemen’s greatest warriors, Nyevarra reflexively sought to spring to her feet. But weakness made her flounder and nearly fall back down again.

That was bad. But her vampiric strength would return, and in the meantime, maybe she could stall. Her sudden appearance in the Iron Lord’s personal chambers was understandably alarming, but even so, in her mask and vestments, she looked like an ordinary hathran.

“Majesty,” she began.

Mangan Uruk called up his rage without any of the shuddering, stamping, howling, gnawing on a shield rim, petty self-mutilation, or other tricks required by less accomplished berserkers. Only a sudden wild light in his eyes afforded even an instant’s warning as he sprang and slashed at Nyevarra’s neck.

Somehow, she twisted out of the way of the cut, and as she did, she discerned the reason for the failure of her deception. Her right hand was as it ought to be, but the left had warped and darkened into a cloven stump like the terminus of a wasp’s leg. It was as if the ekolid had concluded it could never possess her and so had spitefully betrayed her to her foe.

Reckless but preternaturally strong and fast, Mangan immediately pivoted and cut a second time. Nyevarra dodged, but less successfully. The blade sliced her shoulder, pulled free, and whirled down for a stroke to the guts.

Instinct told her she wouldn’t be able to dodge that one either. Blocking out the belated flare of pain in her shoulder, she snarled a word of warding and made a pushing motion with her good hand. With a clang, the bastard sword rebounded from the invisible shield she’d conjured to deflect it.

This, she realized, was the way to survive. A physical assault stirred her predatory instincts and made her want to answer in kind, but she wouldn’t be a match for Mangan until her strength returned, and conceivably, not even then. She had to oppose him with witchcraft, one difficulty being that, while he was intent on slaughtering her, she couldn’t achieve her purpose if she killed him, visibly wounded him, or even made sufficient noise to alarm people elsewhere in the fortress.

Mangan sidestepped and cut at her head. She jumped back out of range without an inch or an instant to spare, kept on retreating, rattled off words of power, thrust her good hand at him, and simultaneously puffed out her breath at his face.

He faltered as the stream of noxious fumes engulfed him, but only for a heartbeat. Then, shaking off the nausea, he rushed her again.

Curse it! Another hastily conjured shield kept his blade from driving home, but she couldn’t count on that trick working every time, nor did she want anyone to take note of the recurring clash of steel. She chanted and swirled her hands in the air.

To her dismay, the ekolid hand, if it even could be described as such, turned out to be awkward. It was attached to a wrist of sorts, but the joint didn’t bend in precisely the way a human wrist did, and for a second, Nyevarra felt the pattern of force she was weaving threatening to dissolve. But she spoke her words of power even more insistently and made reinforcing flourishes with her human hand, and that compensated for the fumbling of the demon limb.

Like the curtains of soft, subtle lights that sometimes danced in the northern sky, color rippled into existence between her and the berserker. The flowing phosphorescence was beautiful, and despite his fury, Mangan hesitated to gawk at it.

But as before, it was plain the spell would hold him only for a moment. His jaw clenched, and his grip on his sword hilt tightened as he started to break free.

Risking an attack, one she almost certainly couldn’t avoid since she’d be moving right into it, Nyevarra stepped into the center of the luminous haze. To her relief, Mangan didn’t slash or stab at her. But he would in another instant unless she forestalled it.

She grabbed his head between her two hands and stared into his eyes. Her conjured light had muddled him. Perhaps, in so doing, it had opened a breach in his psychic defenses through which a vampire’s power of command could stab to more permanent effect.

For a moment, he shuddered. Then he let out his breath in a long sigh, and his sword arm relaxed and hung at his side.

Nyevarra had him, and the instant she knew it, she felt the urge to feed. It would pay him back for hurting her and help her heal more quickly too.

But it was one thing to drink the blood of common hathrans who went around muffled in robes and masks and were unlikely to attract undue attention even if their habits and demeanors changed a little. It would be a different matter to prey on the Iron Lord himself. If Mangan Uruk looked pale and started squinting and flinching at the sunlight, someone-such as Yhelbruna-might well notice.

And besides, Nyevarra didn’t need to turn the warlord into a genuine thrall, gratifying though that would have been. She only needed him to commit a single error in judgment when the occasion arose for him to do so.

She told him what she wanted and made sure he understood. Then she ordered him to forget ever meeting her.

Now all that remained was to head back to Beacon Cairn via the deathways and tell Uramar what he needed to do to make her scheme work out as planned. Smiling, she melted into mist and then put on solidity once more. Her smile widened when she saw that the last transformation had restored her altered hand to normal.

Jhesrhi cloaked herself in flame for the hike back to the cemetery. That way, Lod and his creatures wouldn’t think she was trying to sneak up on them, and Cera, looking cowed and fearful, her mace, shield, and helmet left behind, had light to see by.

Even after Jhesrhi’s previous exertions, calling the fire in her core to come out and dance had been relatively easy. What was difficult was maintaining the dual consciousness her masquerade required.

She needed to be as ruthless and uncaring as flame. Otherwise, her lies wouldn’t fool a creature as cunning as Lod must surely be. But underneath the mask of fire, the human Jhesrhi needed to remember she was lying and maintain ultimate control.

And while she was keeping the balance, neither allowing human worry and loathing for the undead to dampen the flame nor permitting the inner blaze to spread to her affection for Cera and her other friends and burn that loyalty away, she also had to scan the gloom ahead. It wouldn’t do for an undead to spring out of hiding and drive filthy, jagged talons or a blade forged of shadow and disease into her heart before she even had a chance to start talking.

She fancied that she managed to stay vigilant. Still, several paces into the graveyard, it was Cera, a sworn foe of the undead possessed of a certain intuitive sensitivity to their presence, who suddenly stopped short. She didn’t cry a warning, though. That would have undercut the pretense that she and Jhesrhi were no longer on the same side.

Their flowing, inconstant forms lending a deceptive appearance of slowness to their movements, seven luminous bluish phantoms sprang from the tombs nearest the two women to surround them. Jhesrhi spoke words of power, and a circle of flame leaped up around her and Cera.

She sensed that if she chose, she could make the ring expand and sweep over the sentries. In fact, it took willpower to resist the impulse. Both sides of her nature wanted to succumb-the fire because it lived to burn whatever it could, and the human because the apparitions were menacing and vile.

Still, resist she did. “I don’t want to fight. I want to talk to your leader. As a show of good faith, I brought you a present.”

On the final word, she gave Cera a prod with her burning staff. With luck, it looked like she didn’t even care if she set the priestess on fire, although in reality, her control over the flames kept Cera’s garments from catching.

The seven transparent, wavering sentries moaned and whispered an answer in unison. They must actually be a single entity, a doomsept. “Give her to us, then.”

“I’ll hand her over when I talk to Lod. Is that all right? If not, I can burn you up like I already burned up many of your comrades, then vanish away to safety like before.”

The doomsept thought it over for a moment. Then the seven phantoms said, “Come.”

Jhesrhi dispelled the circle of flame with a sweep of her staff and gave Cera another jab in the back with it, and they followed the apparitions deeper into the graveyard.

As they proceeded toward the central path, loping ghouls and skeletons with glowing eye sockets joined the procession. Maybe the stinking things were curious, or perhaps they wanted to be in striking distance in case it turned out that Jhesrhi had actually returned to renew hostilities. Either way, there were soon enough of them to make retreat problematic if not impossible.

Still, peering around to assess the state of their expedition as best she could, Jhesrhi noted with satisfaction that there weren’t as many as there used to be. With her aid and Cera’s, Sarshethrian had done considerable harm to the Eminence’s forces even though he’d lost the battle in the end.

Still, like mortal soldiers in the wake of a battle, some of the undead that had suffered harm were merely wounded, not destroyed. To facilitate their recovery, creatures with necromantic skills brought pools of black liquid malignancy bubbling up from the graveyard earth; their fellow horrors either drank from them or splashed the foulness on their injuries. Meanwhile, Lod had sacrificed the surviving cart slaves to restore burned and mangled vampires, and the gaunt, naked mortals shivered and twitched as two or three blood drinkers battened on each.

Except for the damage to his charred and tattered robe, Lod himself was intact again already, every broken human-looking bone back in place and the burns and gashes in the long scaly tail erased. He sat coiled in the bed of his wagon, the better, perhaps, to oversee his company as it dealt with the aftermath of combat.

He cocked his fleshless skull of a head as he peered down at Jhesrhi and Cera. “The two of you fought well today. Too well to expect anything but vengeance if you fell into our hands.”

Jhesrhi gave Cera a poke with the staff. “This one deserves it. She fought of her own free will. I didn’t.” She proceeded to tell the tale the sunlady had concocted.

When she finished, Lod simply stared down at her for a while. A wizard’s instincts warned her he was using some occult means of perception in an attempt to examine her essence. I’m fire, she told herself, fire, ready to incinerate any dead, filthy thing that displeases me, and she gazed back at him unflinchingly.

At last he said, “You don’t look exactly like an elemental.” And all around her, anticipating that he was about to give the order to attack, direhelms, zombies, and wraiths gathered themselves to lunge and pounce.

“I admit,” Jhesrhi said. “My mother was human. But she burned to death giving birth to me, and afterward, my efreet father took me to raise. He taught me to hate the cold, wet, mortal part of me, and with his help, I reforged it into something stronger.”

“Congratulations,” Lod replied, a note of irony in his slightly sibilant voice. “Undead too, occasionally have to work to slough off clinging vestiges of the lesser beings we started out as. But that doesn’t change the fact that fire and our kind are natural enemies.”

“Sharp steel harms living warriors,” Jhesrhi answered. “That doesn’t stop them from wielding axes and swords, and in my time, I’ve known liches and the ghosts of mages to wield flame. I’d wager you yourself have a fire spell or two in reserve for when fire is exactly the right weapon for the occasion. If not, you’re a fool.”

The bone naga chuckled. “Perhaps I do at that. Yet even if so, should I trust living, thinking fire not to betray me?”

“I don’t deny I view your kind with distaste. But my current predicament obliges me to overlook that. Does my gift do nothing to prove my sincerity? The clerics of Amaunator stand in opposition to your kind more than any fire spirit ever could.”

Lod’s lower body shifted position, the coils sliding. “It is a nice gesture. Under other circumstances, I’d punish the woman properly to avenge those who burned when she called the daylight. But important matters await my attention in Rashemen, so I suppose we only have time for a little torture before the kill.” Swaying, he leaned out over the edge of the cart to scrutinize Jhesrhi even more closely. “That is what you expected, isn’t it?”

Be fire, Jhesrhi reminded herself, and when she replied, her voice was steady. “Do what you please. It doesn’t matter to me. But I don’t know how detailed your knowledge of affairs in Faerun is. Your prisoner is Cera Eurthos. She’s the lover of Aoth Fezim, a sellsword captain hired to fight your forces. She’s also one of the principal candidates for the head of the church of the Yellow Sun in the land of Chessenta. You might find she’s more useful to you alive.”

“Hm. That does seem possible. And I confess, I know little about gods and divine magic and such, and I need to remedy that. Perhaps a priestess can instruct me.”

“No,” Cera said. “I won’t help you in any way.”

“Oh, I trust you will,” Lod said, “starting right now.” He turned to the vampires, who, Jhesrhi now observed, had at some point risen from the drained, lifeless bodies of the slaves. “Who’s still thirsty?”

Leering, mouths smeared with red, three of the pallid undead started forward. Cera stepped back, drew breath, and raised her hand to what, in a sane, living world, would have been a sky. She had, Jhesrhi knew, intended to play the helpless prisoner whatever transpired, but the threat of the vampires’ attentions was so repellent that instinct had taken over.

Lod spoke a word of chastisement, and even though Jhesrhi wasn’t the target, it made her body feel as if it were vibrating. Cera cried out and fell to her knees.

The vampires closed with her an instant later and threw her down on her back. Their white fingers ripped away mail and the leather underneath to expose flesh. Then the creatures bent down and bit.

“Try not to kill her,” said Lod. Swaying, he alternated between watching his followers feed and watching Jhesrhi.

Be fire, she thought, and anger and horror dwindled from her awareness as though they’d burned away.

Apparently that was good enough for Lod. For after a while, he said, “I have had reports from Rashemen, of course. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be going there. But please, my new friend, tell me everything you know.”