Prophet of the Dead

8

The wild griffons were the first to spot Aoth and Jet winging in from the south. Still seemingly exhilarated by their liberation from the hathrans’ cage, they screeched, swooped, wheeled, and flew along beside them. Aoth wondered if it perplexed them that their new leader carried a human on his back.

Their commotion alerted the folk down on the ground, where the Storm of Vengeance sat and gleaming golems stood motionless in the snow. Aoth’s lieutenants-for so he chose to consider them, whatever opinions any of them might hold on the matter-assembled to hear what he had to report. Cera’s pretty, round face beamed up at him; Orgurth gave him a grin; and Jhesrhi offered what he’d come to think of as her frown of welcome. Bez wore a crooked, ironic smile; and Vandar, who stood well removed from the Halruaan, a scowl; while Yhelbruna and Shaugar’s masks hid their expressions.

With a final snap of his wings, Jet set down. As Aoth swung himself off the familiar’s back, Vandar asked, “What did you find out?”

“Quite a bit,” Aoth replied. “The Urlingwood may be the crux of everything, but scouting it from the sky was the simplest chore I’ve done since coming to Rashemen. The enemy wasn’t watching for anyone to come spying from on high.”

“They likely don’t see much reason for vigilance,” Cera said. “As far as they know, Aoth Fezim never returned from the North Country, and they’ve either lured all the hathrans and warriors in Immilmar and Urling away to the south, turned them, killed them, or simply fooled them into believing everything’s all right.”

Aoth smiled. “Good appraisal. We’ll make a sellsword of you yet.” He realized his throat was dry and unclipped the water bottle from his belt. “Mind you, some spy in the capital could have noticed the Storm of Vengeance departing and sent word of it, but maybe that message is still on its way. If so, we should move fast.”

“We can if you’ve discovered the information we need,” Yhelbruna said. As usual, her voice was as cold as the wind whistling out of the north, but Aoth had to give her credit. As he understood it, she’d singlehandedly killed the pair of assassins Bez sent after her and didn’t care that, to cope with the present crisis, Old Ones had left their caves without permission and all manner of males were about to invade the sacred forest. Evidently there was more behind her leather mask than condescension.

“I have,” he answered, then took a swig of icy iron water. “We’ll find the bulk of the enemy, including all the ones who really matter, in or near the stand of very old weir trees just west of the center of the wood.”

She nodded. “That comes as no surprise.”

“Well, this last bit of intelligence might, and unfortunately, it’s not good news. In toward the weirs, the forest gets darker, enough so that Jet and I saw vampires and wraiths slinking around in the gloom. We’ll have to contend with them even though we’re going in by day.”

“I brought Amaunator’s light into the deathways,” Cera said. “If need be, I can carry it back into the Urlingwood too.” She smiled at Yhelbruna. “Although I’d welcome help from any hathrans or Old Ones who offer devotions to the Yellow Sun.”

“You’ll have it,” Yhelbruna said. “But Captain Fezim is correct. It is by no means ‘good news’ that the Shadowfell is already overlapping the heart of the forest in such an overt way. It indicates the balance of forces has tilted even farther than I expected.”

Vandar started to raise his hand as though to squeeze Yhelbruna’s shoulder but then appeared to remember that such familiarity, however kindly intended, might be deemed disrespectful. He contented himself with saying, “We’ll go in at first light, and by the end of the day, the durthans, skeleton snakes, patchwork men, and whatever will all be gone. Then you’ll heal the forest, and that will be that.”

“I hope so,” she replied, and Aoth thought he detected a hint of gratitude in her tone. But her voice reverted to ice when she turned her head to speak to the circle at large. “There’s one more thing I need to say. This is a battle for the soul of Rashemen, and we won’t risk annihilating it ourselves in the course of striving to save it. No matter how dire the need may seem, no one will fight using fire magic. Is that understood?”

“I assume that order is directed to me most of all,” Jhesrhi said. “Don’t worry. I know other spells.”

A wisp of steam rose from the puddle of melted snow around her boots.

People sometimes claimed that any man who dared enter the Urlingwood would instantly fall over dead. Vandar had never credited that tale and certainly didn’t now that he and his companions had Yhelbruna’s blessing to purge the forest of evil. Still, he felt a twinge of anxiety as he stalked into the trees and wondered how many of the Old Ones, and of the berserkers he, Yhelbruna, Cera, and Jhesrhi had managed to assemble on the sly, were similarly uneasy.

At any rate, once they were all inside, that tiny worry fell away, leaving him free to fret over more legitimate concerns. At the moment, Aoth was flying above the treetops. So was Bez, not that any Rashemi would take orders from him, regardless. That left Vandar to command the warriors on the ground.

He wondered if he was he up to the task, whether he would lead them all to their deaths as he had his lodge brothers.

Hanging at his side, the red sword whispered to assure him his worries were nonsensical, that he was a great hero headed for a glorious victory, and it would have eased him to give himself over to its encouragement. It was heartening to be reminded that he possessed such powerful magic, and he only wished he still carried the crimson spear as well.

Still, he mustn’t simply succumb to the blade’s influence. If he let the fey weapon’s confidence become his own, so too would its recklessness and battle lust, and he and his comrades wanted to advance as far as possible by stealth.

Suddenly, striding beside him, Yhelbruna raised her hand. “Stop,” she whispered.

Vandar obeyed. So did all the folk and jointed automatons marching beside and behind them. Apparently she’d used magic to make the soft command audible to all.

He scanned the white snowdrifts and black tree trunks and limbs ahead. Had he and his allies arrived at the periphery of the unnatural twilight? He couldn’t tell. Even denuded of their leaves, the weave of branches overhead was thick enough to block a goodly portion of the silvery winter sunlight in a purely natural fashion.

He did know he couldn’t see any particular reason for the halt. “What is it?” he murmured from the corner of his mouth.

“I sense dark fey,” she answered. “The durthans’ allies, most likely, but perhaps I can still persuade them to let us pass without a fight.” She eased a bluewood wand from a sheath on her belt, and, waving it lazily back and forth, crooned words as soft and soothing as a lullaby.

Although he wasn’t the target, mere proximity to the casting made Vandar yawn and even quelled the impatience of the red sword flickering at the back of his mind. He thought that surely the magic must be lulling the fey as well. Then he spotted a subtle disturbance in the snow before him. Something was crawling underneath it.

He bellowed, “Look down!” At the same time, he grabbed Yhelbruna and spun her behind him. As he turned back around, the fey burst up from the blanket of frozen white.

To his surprise, they weren’t any kind of snake but rather whipping tangles of briar with twisted little faces glaring from amid the thorny stalks. They stood as tall as a man when they finished rearing up.

Vandar’s rage took hold of him without needing to call it, and he stabbed with the javelin a fellow berserker had loaned him. The weapon gashed and nearly split a stalk, but more briars whipped around the shaft and kept him from pulling it back. He let go of it and snatched for his sword hilt. In his head, the blade crowed with delight.

As it cleared the scabbard, briars cocked themselves backward. Guessing what was about to happen, he almost dropped into a defensive crouch before remembering his body was shielding Yhelbruna’s. He contented himself with jerking up his arm to protect his face.

The briars whipped forward and threw thorns like miniature darts. Fortunately, his boiled leather vest and thick woolen sleeves kept all but a couple from piercing skin.

He sprang at the pair of briar fey in front of him and started slashing lengths of them in two. They lashed back at him, and he ducked and dodged. Thorns dragged across his armor, snagging then popping free.

He cut into the gnarled face of the fey on his right, and the creature wailed; gave a rattling, clattering shudder; and stopped moving. He pivoted to attack the one on his left in similar fashion but discovered Yhelbruna was already pointing her wand at it. The tip of the arcane weapon pulsed with azure light, and the bramble-thing slumped back down in the snow.

With no more foes in reach of his sword, Vandar pivoted for a look at the rest of the battle. Several briar fey were still attacking the vanguard of the war band, and not everyone was coping as well as he and Yhelbruna had. Men wrapped in ever-tightening loops of bramble struggled futilely as rows of sliding thorns caught and ripped their skin.

At the moment, Vandar was riding his anger and not the other way around, and perhaps for that reason, he saw what needed to be done. “Golems!” he shouted. “Let the golems kill them!” Thorns wouldn’t do much harm to living metal and stone.

Somewhere behind him, Shaugar echoed his command. Steel wolves and big bronze cats sprang forward.

Meanwhile, Vandar scrutinized the landscape beyond the immediate threat. Nasty as they were, a few briar fey had no hope of defeating a force as sizable as his. Maybe a durthan’s orders or an overwhelming hatred of mankind had prompted them to attack even so, but he feared the purpose was to keep him and his comrades occupied while a different creature carried a warning to the main body of the enemy.

After a moment, he spotted the sentry, a dark, spindly thing springing from tree to tree. Ignoring the scarlet blade’s throb of protest, he dropped the sword in the snow and sought to rip his javelin from the dead fey’s twisted hold. Stickers pricked him as the weapon pulled free, but he didn’t pay any heed to that either.

By the time he cocked the javelin over his shoulder, the sentry was all but out of range and on the very brink of vanishing into tangled branches and dimness. But he used the imminence of its escape to make his berserker wrath blaze even hotter, and as he did, he threw.

The javelin caught the dark fey in mid-spring and stabbed into its torso. It fell to the ground, and for a breath or two, its long limbs twitched, while blood black as ink stained the snow beneath it. Then it rotted away to nothing, and only the instrument of its death and the filthy blotch remained.

Vandar looked around. As he’d hoped, once they engaged, the automatons had made short work of the remaining thorn fey. He let go of anger and shivered as lightheadedness and a pang of nausea took its place.

Then Yhelbruna touched his face, and the sickness disappeared.

“I don’t want you weak,” she said, “not even for a moment. From this point forward, every step will be more dangerous than the one before it.”

As Uramar and his patrol-an assortment of doomsepts, other phantoms, and ghouls-ranged the deeper reaches of the forest, many of his broken souls luxuriated in the gloom. For as every undead learned, darkness could be more than the absence of light. It could be pleasurable and invigorating, a condition in which death waxed strong and life guttered, and that was the sort of murk Lod, Nyevarra, and the other undead durthans were calling into the mundane world.

Those who truly understood the implications assured Uramar the gathering dark meant Rashemen was soon to fall, and naturally, he was glad. Yet the prouder and more bloodthirsty aspects of his complex identity also felt a little wistful. He’d been essential while he was creating and recruiting undead, fighting battles, and Lod was still on the other side of the western sea. But since leading the last little feint of a raid along the River Rasha and then returning to the Urlingwood via the deathways, he hadn’t had much to do.

He knew his idleness was only temporary. Once the Eminence of Araunt controlled its own country, other conquests would follow and require the efforts of every warrior. But in the meantime, he’d assuage his restlessness by patrolling, and never mind that, after his comrades’ efforts at subversion and misdirection, and with dark fey sentries standing watch farther out toward the edges of the wood, such vigilance was almost certainly superfluous.

Up ahead, something gleamed for a moment among a stand of oaks. He squinted and made out a steel centipede as long as four horses standing nose to tail, crawling at right angles to his path, which was to say, toward the weir trees where the rites of shadow were underway. Other figures were stalking along with it.

Uramar smiled. To say the least, he hadn’t liked abandoning the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but he’d found the Raumvirans’ unexpected departure from Beacon Cairn equally troubling. He’d feared they’d come to harm, do something to give away the Eminence’s plans, or even outright betray their undead kindred.

But evidently none of those things had come to pass. Because the centipede was a Raumathari automaton, and that meant Pevkalondra and her people had thought better of their fit of pique and come to rejoin their comrades.

Uramar drew breath to call out a greeting. Then one of his more cautious souls snapped, “Don’t! Be certain first!”

“Yes,” added another inner voice, one of the jocular, japing ones, “you might as well. You’re out here to play watchdog, aren’t you?”

Uramar raised his hand to signal his companions to halt, then stalked forward, taking momentary satisfaction in the silence of his approach. The necromancer who’d created him had assembled his massive, crooked body for strength, not agility and certainly not for stealth. But in the years since his liberation, he’d learned to compensate for his hugeness, deformities, and limp.

He peeked around a mossy tree trunk. His eyes widened, and a dozen inner voices clamored at once to explain the import of what he beheld.

They didn’t need to. He understood. The golems were indeed of Raumathari manufacture. He recalled seeing some of them in the vaults where their creators had kept them. But the folk marching along with the constructs weren’t Pevkalondra and her retainers. They were living berserkers, hathrans, and men in masks, along with the sun priestess who’d destroyed Falconer and the fire mage who’d contended with Nyevarra.

“How did they get past the fey?” asked one of Uramar’s souls.

But he didn’t have time to speculate or curse the durthans’ longtime allies for being less capable than they were supposed to be. He turned and crept back to the rest of the patrol.

“The folk up ahead are an enemy war band,” he whispered, “headed straight for the weir tress. Our troops outnumber them, but if the living take them by surprise, it could still be bad. Zashtyne.”

“Yes,” moaned a gray, wavering, all-but-faceless blur.

“Fly to Lod and warn him. The rest of us will delay the enemy and buy our comrades time to get ready to fight.”

Zashtyne hurtled away. The rest of the patrol awaited Uramar’s further commands. In their various fashions, they all looked resolute despite the long odds, and he felt a pang of pride in them. They embodied the truth of Lod’s teaching that the undead were higher, worthier beings than the mortal husks from which they rose.

Waving his hand, he bade them spread out so no blast of flame or rain of acid could target too many at once. Then he drew his greatsword from the scabbard on his back, charged, and his fellows exploded into a headlong dash along with him. They wouldn’t close the distance before the living noticed them coming, but with luck, they might get close.

His soul fragments shouted war cries or gave advice. One piece of the latter was to shroud himself in what was, for the living, crippling cold, and he willed the force to leap forth from inside him.

The patrol was twenty strides from the foe when the fire wizard spotted them and shouted an alarm, whereupon a bronze sphinx with brass joints and copper highlights pivoted and bounded at Uramar. He wondered if some knowledgeable foe was making sure he battled one of the constructs, for neither his aura of chill nor the life-drinking magic bound in his sword were likely to inconvenience it.

All right, then, he thought, I’ll do this the hard way.

The sphinx’s hinged jaw opened, and without breaking stride, it roared. The sound ripped through Uramar’s head, and a couple of his inner voices wailed. But most of the pieces of his mosaic self held fast against terror.

He faltered, though, just as if he were afraid, and waited for the sphinx to spring. When it obliged, he dodged to the side and cut at its neck.

Metal crashed as steel cracked bronze. The stroke fell well short of decapitating the automaton, though, and it spun around to face Uramar anew. At the same instant, golden light, painful like a bee sting, flashed at the corner of his vision. The sun priestess was channeling the power of her deity.

Uramar had hoped some of his warriors would reach her and the wizard before they could start casting spells. But things plainly hadn’t worked out that way, and he needed to deal with the sphinx before he’d have any hope of striking down the southerners himself.

The automaton lunged at him, and he cut at it. With a trickiness he hadn’t expected of a mindless thing-maybe its new master was operating it like a puppet-the sphinx stopped short and swiped at his blade with its paw.

Metal rang once more as the blow connected and nearly tore the weapon from his hands. Intent on reaching him before he could grip the hilt securely again, the sphinx pounced, and he spun aside.

As he did, he glimpsed a specter in flight, its arms and fingers stretching as it rushed the tall, slender wizard. She pointed her staff at it, and the end of the weapon and her long yellow hair both burst into flame. Then, however, all the fire went out as quickly as it had erupted, and she hurled darts of crimson radiance instead.

Uramar barely dodged the sphinx’s spring, and as a result ended up too close to cut at his foe. But as one of his voices needlessly reminded him, that didn’t mean the weapon was useless. He hammered the pommel down on the automaton’s spine with all his strength.

The sphinx lurched off balance, froze for an instant, then pivoted. Uramar hopped back and so avoided a snap of its bronze fangs.

At that moment, undeterred by his mantle of cold, a Rashemi warrior with a battle-axe rushed in his flank. Without taking his eyes off the sphinx, Uramar jabbed his sword to the side and caught the berserker in the neck. It would have been a lethal stroke even with an ordinary weapon, but in this case, the Rashemi withered and died before he could even slip off the point, let alone bleed out.

Meanwhile, the golem lunged, but it was no longer as fast and agile as before. Uramar retreated, shifted the greatsword back in front of him, and swung it down at the top of the sphinx’s half human, half leonine head.

The blade split its target all the way down to the mouth. The automaton collapsed in a rattling heap.

Uramar yanked the sword free and pivoted to locate the sun priestess. There she was, casting spells behind the protection afforded by two warriors made of light. He started toward her, but another golem, the enormous centipede he’d noticed at the start, interposed itself between them.

As he fought to demolish that construct, he caught more glimpses of the rest of the battle. His comrades were perishing one by one, vanquished by superior numbers.

Was it possible they’d delayed the living long enough? Some of the soul fragments thought yes, others no, but perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. Berserkers and golems were maneuvering to cut off any possible retreat.

So be it, then. Maybe the necromantic secrets of the Codex of Araunt would one day reanimate Uramar and his comrades anew. If not, he was willing to die the final death for the cause he held dear.

He sheared the centipede’s front legs out from under it, then smashed its head when it tipped off balance. By that time, though, more foes were converging on him, and he couldn’t see any of his allies anymore.

He wished he hadn’t been so awkward and shy when Nyevarra offered her affection.

And at that instant, as if his thoughts had brought her, she appeared beside him in a puff of displaced air, her tarnished silver mask on her face and the Stag King’s antler staff in her left hand. She took hold of his forearm with her right hand and rattled off rhyming words of power.

The world seemed to shatter into sparks, and he had a sensation of hurtling motion, although without being able to tell if he was falling or streaking along like an arrow. The feeling only lasted for an instant, though, and then his surroundings reassembled themselves into stable, coherent forms as abruptly as they’d burst apart.

Only now they were different surroundings. He and the vampire stood amid the towering weir trees, where everyone was rushing around preparing for battle.

“Zashtyne made it here,” he said, “and then you came for me.”

“We need you,” she said, her fingertips lingering on his biceps. “Are you ready to take on the mortals in a fair fight?”

He smiled at her. “I am.”

When Aoth Fezim and Jet swooped toward the deck, men scattered. And they kept their distance thereafter from the black griffon’s smoldering red eyes, beak, and talons.

It was the natural, prudent reaction, but Bez had no intention of looking intimidated in front of his own crew and aboard his own vessel, even if he was the Halruaan the beast-and his master-genuinely hated. Thus, he strode closer to the newcomers, past masts, rigging, catapults, ballistae, and the cranks that controlled the Storm of Vengeance’s folding wings, and said, “I saw flashes and heard cries filtering up through the tree limbs. So I know our allies on the ground skirmished with more of the enemy. Were you able to make out any of the details?”

“Yes,” said Fezim, “and unfortunately, the durthan who wields the Stag King’s staff appeared and whisked the patchwork swordsman I told you about to safety.”

“So now the rest of the undead and dark fey know we’re coming.”

“At least we got close to the weir trees, and Vandar and the others are moving up fast. They may engage before Lod and his creatures finish putting themselves in order. But we’re not going to take them by complete surprise like we wanted.”

Bez grinned. “Not complete surprise. But still.”

“Right. Our part of the plan hasn’t changed. We’ll give the fight on the ground a little time to get going. Make the undead think what they see before them is all they have to deal with. Then, on my signal, we flyers will hit them from above. You’ll see gaps in the canopy you can shoot through. Just remember that specters and such can fly too. You need to be ready to repel boarders.”

“We are,” said Bez. “May the Foehammer guide your spear, Captain.” He grinned. “Until we finish with Lod.”

Fezim smiled back. “And may Lady Luck smile on you for exactly the same amount of time.”

Jet gave a rasping cry, pivoted, leaped over the gunwale, lashed his wings, and climbed. Meanwhile, watching, Bez thought, I shot you down once, griffon, and from much farther away.

For although Fezim might believe his fellow mercenary commander had no choice but to do as he was told, in fact, a clever man could almost always find options, and the present situation was no exception.

Fezim and an undetermined number of his allies could set the Storm ablaze merely by speaking a certain phrase. But suppose Bez killed the Thayan with a single stroke while his friends were busy fighting on the ground, then simply sailed away. He might get a long head start before Jhesrhi Coldcreek and the others were free to pursue or even realized what had happened.

But another grating screech and a winged shadow sliding across the deck reminded him Jet was far from the only griffon in the air, and the huge black beast was now the chieftain of the others. If Bez struck at Jet, the rest might all attack the skyship.

Well then, what if, instead of killing Fezim and making a run for it, Bez fought the battle through on the undead’s side? Dai Shan had formed an alliance with them. Why shouldn’t another living man do likewise?

Because that strategy brought him right back around to the problem of the runes. Only an idiot would gamble that he could betray his fellow sellsword captain, then linger in the vicinity, and every one of Fezim’s friends would die before a single one of them got around to reciting the trigger words to destroy the Storm.

And even though Bez possessed magic that would enable him to survive the blast, and even though he could recruit new followers, such a calamity simply couldn’t be allowed. Built with arcane secrets lost when the Spellplague devastated the Halruaa of old, the skyship was irreplaceable.

So perhaps after all he had no satisfactory options. He turned and noticed Uregaunt standing by a chute used to roll enchanted missiles over the side and an open crate of such sigil-inscribed iron and ceramic orbs. The old artilleryman was watching him with a sardonic expression that suggested he’d guessed the direction of his commander’s thoughts.

Bez snorted. “Perhaps I was a bit rash when I claimed we were the saviors of Rashemen. Now it appears we’re obliged to make good on that.”

“I figured,” Uregaunt said. He picked up a clay ball, set it behind the gate in the top of the chute, spit on it, and drew a four-pointed star with the spittle and a callused fingertip. For a moment, the trails of moisture sizzled and steamed.

By the time Cera and her comrades came in sight of the main force of undead, it was dark as night, and the air stank of decay. A foul taste in her mouth kept coming back no matter how many times she spit it away, and her skin crawled.

On Vandar’s command, she and her allies had finished their approach at a run. Such recklessness apparently didn’t trouble berserkers or even Old Ones and hathrans, but it had certainly made her nervous.

She could tell haste had paid off, though. Some of the living corpses and such were still scrambling and lurching around in seeming confusion, while the Rashemi hadn’t entirely forsaken tactics or organization. She and the hathrans had warrior and golem protectors arrayed around them. Unless the fight went badly, she might not even require her borrowed mace and targe.

She still wished she had her lost gilded weapon, symbolic as it had been of the Keeper’s power. But she could do without it. If she’d learned anything in the past few tendays, it was that her god stood with her always, in the deepest darkness and the most dire circumstances, and it was time to demonstrate that blessed truth to the unnatural horrors before her.

As berserkers roared their battle cries and charged the foe, she raised the mace over her head and recited a prayer. The gloom and the stench of decay thickened around her, and for a moment, she feared she might grow faint or vomit. But she didn’t. She kept her voice steady and her will focused.

A shaft of golden radiance stabbed down from overhead to set the mace aglow. She swung the weapon at the enemy, and the captured sunlight leaped forth in a flash. An enormous bat-a vampiric shapeshifter, she assumed-vanished in a puff of flame. Wraiths shredded as though invisible razors were slicing them. Even dark fey, rat-sized flying men with several black bulging eyes and veined transparent wings, flinched from the flare.

The flash also revealed, if only by failing to penetrate it, the cloud of seething murk at the very center of the stand of weir trees. It felt like an open wound in the skin of the world, or perhaps the fang embedded in such a wound to inject the venom that was Shadow.

In other words, it was the visible manifestation of the enchantments the durthans had been casting to tilt the balance of primal forces at play in Rashemen. It was a foe that, as much as any jagged-fanged ghoul, misty wraith, or even Lod himself, the land’s defenders needed to destroy.

And Cera couldn’t tackle that holy task from across the battlefield.

She turned to her nearest guardian, Aoth’s new sellsword Orgurth. “Can we fight our way forward?” she asked.

The orc grinned. “Probably not, but let’s try.”

The urge to hurl fire at the foe hammered inside Jhesrhi like a frantic heartbeat, all the more insistent because, even before crippling Tchazzar, she’d generally wielded flame against the undead. She was having trouble even thinking of other spells.

But now that she’d returned to the mortal world, all four elements were her friends, and by the Seven Stars, she’d cast the magic she needed to cast! A direhelm flew down at her, and she spoke to the wind. A spirit of the air seized the animate suit of half-plate and swept it away, crashing it into one tree trunk after another as it gradually came apart.

Zombies with lambent amber eyes circled to flank berserkers too busy slashing and chopping at ghouls to notice. Jhesrhi pointed her staff and recited as quickly as was possible in one of the ponderous languages of Root Hold. Rumbling, the patch of earth beneath the zombies tilted, one end rising and the other sinking, tumbling them backward and half burying them in the snow that slid along with them.

The dead men were still clumsily trying to stand back up when Jhesrhi spotted Cera and her bodyguards advancing and led her own squad forward to support her. Her blood felt deliciously hot pumping through her veins, and scowling, she willed it cool again.

The unnatural gloom felt nasty enough to set a person’s teeth on edge. Yet Yhelbruna took a certain perverse pleasure in experiencing it for what it was, and particularly in working magic despite its almost conscious efforts to break her concentration with twinges of fear and nausea and block her links to the fountainheads of her power. For now that she understood what plagued her, she could cope.

So, too, could the entities rushing to answer her call. Driven into hiding or dormancy as the durthans corrupted the natural balance of light and dark in the Urlingwood, they were eager to retaliate now that true hathrans were rallying them.

An ancient pine that had uprooted itself and taken on a crudely human form to march to war wrestled a dark fey much like itself. Meanwhile, smaller combatants scurried away from the giants’ many-toed feet to keep from being trampled.

A maiden made of water spoke in a voice like a gurgling brook and compelled a warrior made of ice to melt into liquid too. They embraced, kissed, and merged into a single rippling form that poured down into the snowy ground and vanished an instant later.

Rearing on its hind legs, a huge black bear beheaded a walking corpse with a swipe of its paw. A pace or two away, a more ethereal telthor, a semitransparent woodpecker, lit on a ghoul’s head and pecked. The undead scavenger howled and flailed at the bird, but its clawed hands slapped right through its small assailant without knocking it away.

Smiling, Yhelbruna raised her staff and centered herself anew. So far, she’d called only bright fey and spirits native to the world of mortal men. But despite the hindrance of the darkness, her summonings were working well enough to suggest she could draw allies from the Feywild as well.

But as she spoke the first words of such a calling, cold pain stabbed between her ribs. She looked down just in time to behold the shadowy suggestion of an arrow sticking out of her side before it disappeared.

She was certain she hadn’t taken a mortal or even debilitating wound, not given her inherent mystical resilience, and not from such a weapon. But as she struggled to cast off the shock of it, seven phantom warriors, their inconstant shapes blurred and tangled into a single cloud of twitching faces and murky blades, swept at her.

A steel automaton in the shape of a wild boar stopped one murky figure with a slash of its tusks. An Old One cast darts of white light from a brazen gauntlet to obliterate another. Snatching for the wand she’d sheathed to more easily manipulate her staff, Yhelbruna shouted a word of power. A scythe-like curve of congealed moonlight flowed into existence before her, then slashed in a horizontal arc.

The attack caught an apparition with a short, curved blade in either hand, and it faltered just like a living man whose guts suddenly threatened to slide out the rip in his belly. But either leaping over the strike or ducking under it, the other four aspects of the doomsept avoided harm.

And now they were all around Yhelbruna, shadowy axes poised to chop and short swords ready to thrust. Could she destroy them all before one of them cut her down? She doubted it, but she could at least make them pay for her death. She thrust her wand at the ghost directly in front of her.

A crackling bolt of lightning leaped from the tip of the weapon. Pierced through, her target twisted like a cloth wrung by unseen hands and disappeared.

At the same instant, Vandar rushed in and dispitched another phantom with a slash of the red sword. The last time Yhelbruna had caught sight of him, he’d been berserk fighting at the very forefront of the attack. Judging from the ferocity manifest in his twisted face, rage still possessed him, yet even so, he’d noticed her peril and raced to help her.

Without pausing, he pivoted toward another phantom just as it was starting to swing its axe at him. Though he surely perceived the threat, he didn’t jump back or even dodge. He simply cut with catlike quickness and trusted his stroke to land first.

It did. And when the scarlet blade sliced into the ghost, it and its hurtling axe disappeared.

That fortunate attack still left one aspect of the doomsept unscathed. Yhelbruna spun in a swirl of cloak, seeking it, and found it just as darts of blue light pierced it and made it boil and smoke into nonexistence. Wheeling overhead on Jet’s back, eyes glowing, Aoth saluted her and Vandar with a dip of his spear before turning to find his next foe.

At the same time, following their new king Jet’s lead, the wild griffons came swooping and diving into battle. The golden telthor plunged down on a lich with a pair of dragon fangs raised above his head in invocation. The impact all but smashed the skeletal wizard flat, and when his hands convulsively gripped the talismans, the edges cut his leathery fingers off.

Screeching, other griffons tore holes in a shield wall of zombie spearmen, then climbed and wheeled for a second pass. Booming thunderbolts and missiles that burst into corrosive vapor when they hit the ground rained down as even the dastards aboard the Storm of Vengeance began to play their parts in Aoth’s strategy.

Yhelbruna supposed she’d better keep playing hers as well. As she considered what spell to cast next and where to cast it, Vandar fixed on a white-faced vampire warrior whose sword and chin alike were wet with blood. The berserker screamed like a griffon and charged.

A company of bright fey was advancing, or at least Lod assumed the score of warriors and the two sorceresses in their midst were fey. They looked like elves might look if some whimsical power whittled them even skinnier, painted their skins with faint striations, and replaced their hair with tufts of leaves. As if to give the lie to their spindly, fragile appearance, they bore outsized, two-handed cleaverlike weapons that few human beings could have wielded with any semblance of grace or skill.

They evidently had faith in their prowess, for despite Lod’s daunting appearance, they were coming on without hesitation. He rebuked their arrogance by hissing a word that stabbed pain through their eyes and struck them blind. Only temporarily, but they were still stumbling around in the snow, calling out to one another, and wiping bloody tears when skeletons came running to cut them down.

It was a satisfying moment. But any pleasure Lod might otherwise have taken in it withered when he twisted away to survey the battle as a whole.

Rashemen was supposed to be easy prey, backward to begin with, witless and feeble now that the Eminence had rotted it from within. Yet somehow the allegedly befuddled, broken realm had mustered a formidable little army and had known exactly where to send it.

The Eminence hadn’t lost the resulting battle yet. But it very well might. Lod assumed that he, who had, after all, bested Sarshethrian, was more than a match for any single combatant among the foe. But even he couldn’t be everywhere buttressing every part of the defense at once.

Nor was the ambient darkness likely to take up the slack. It hindered the living to an extent, but not enough now that they understood its toxicity.

If only he and the durthans could have continued their rites uninterrupted for a few more days! Then no amount of defensive charms or sheer determination would have saved the attackers from weakening and ultimately strangling on the gloom.

But what, Lod wondered abruptly, if he and his comrades didn’t actually need a few more days? For safety’s sake, wizards customarily performed their greatest works with protracted, painstaking care. But the present enterprise was already well advanced with mystical safeguards in place. Surely, at this point, competent spellcasters could pick up the pace.

He cast around, spotted Nyevarra sweeping her antler-topped staff through looping mystic passes, and crawled in her direction. On the way, he observed the sun priestess and fire mage who’d escaped from the Fortress of the Half-Demon fighting their way forward.

He supposed the two women had overheard too much while in captivity, that the hathrans and such were here because they’d guided them here, and felt a vicious urge to pause and strike the escapees down. He didn’t, though. He kept moving.

Unfortunately, no matter how single-minded he was, he couldn’t stop the enemy from assailing him and slowing his progress. Sheltered behind golems and spearmen, a hathran chanted and brandished a scythe at him. Growing out of empty air, rose vines wrapped around him, binding him, the thorns jabbing into his scales and even the naked bones of his upper body. Meanwhile, the perfume of the crimson flowers filled his head and made it swim.

He snarled words of negation and reprisal. The vines vanished, and staggering, the witch yanked up her mask to retch squirming maggots into the snow.

An iron ball arced out of the sky. He caught it, chanted to it, released it, and it flew back up into the air, reversing its trajectory to burst at its point of origin.

Finally, he reached Nyevarra. The durthan was reciting what he recognized as a summoning spell even though he couldn’t tell precisely what she was calling. More useless fey, most likely. Nearby, Uramar was conferring with a lich whose shriveled face and limbs were furry with grave mold.

For a moment, gazing down at the hulking blaspheme and the little witch in her mask of blackened silver made Lod feel as disgusted as he had peering across the battlefield at the sun priestess and fire mage. And why shouldn’t it? Wasn’t Uramar and Nyevarra’s bungling equally responsible for this crisis?

Well, perhaps not equally, and in any case, the two were his undead kindred, and he needed them. With an effort, he put aside the impulse to blame.

Nyevarra finished her spell, and half a dozen big, vulturine entities flapped out of nowhere to assail a griffon. She then turned and peered up at Lod.

“Well done,” he said. “But I need your help with a special task.”

“Anything,” she replied.

“We need to pull the breach wider. Let Shadow flood through until our magic is invincible and our enemies sicken and die.”

Nyevarra hesitated. Then: “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Of course you can! You’re powerful, and so is the staff you carry. And I’m going to help.”

“You don’t understand. Adjusting the balance with a measure of care is one thing. But we don’t dare just unleash death and decay on the Urlingwood to do absolutely anything they want. There needs to be a living forest when our conquest is over.”

“There probably will be, and even if there isn’t, Rashemen will still hold power for the Eminence to harness.”

“We can win this fight without risking the soul of the land!”

“You led troops during your mortal existence. You should know how to assess the progress of a battle. Take a look at this one and then tell me you’re certain of victory.” He gestured toward the frenzied confusion of griffons screeching, berserkers shouting, blades clashing on shields and the stone and metal flanks of golems, and flares of magic banging and shrilling.

Nyevarra hesitated again, and then Uramar, who must at some point have finished palavering with the lich, diffidently rested a big, mottled hand, all crooked, ill-matched fingers and old but still prominent suture scars, on her shoulder.

“I know you didn’t want to,” the blaspheme said, “but you need to choose. What are you first and foremost, a witch of Rashemen or an undead of the Eminence? If the answer is witch, then put the survival of the forest ahead of all else. Just don’t expect any mercy for your forbearance if the hathrans defeat you yet again. They’ll slay you just like they did the first time.

“But if the answer is an adherent of the Eminence,” Uramar continued, “then do whatever it takes to ensure our victory. You’ll crush your old enemies and rule as one of the great powers of Rashemen forever after, beloved by all who matter for what you gave to our cause.”

Nyevarra stood and pondered for a moment. Then she shifted her grip of the antler-staff and drew herself up straight.

“It seems,” she said, grim humor in her voice, “that my innermost self is a vampire. And you can’t get blood from trees.”

The skeletal wizard in the rotting, tattered robes reminded Aoth unpleasantly of Szass Tam, but fortunately, wasn’t proving to be nearly as strong a combatant. When the lich cast a flare of jagged shadow, Jet veered and dodged it, and when Aoth riposted with a thunderbolt, the twisting shaft of radiance tore the undead apart.

His legs clamped around Jet-by the Black Flame, he missed his saddle-Aoth cast around for another target and spied wraiths and direhelms rising through the air, likely to attack the Storm of Vengeance. To give Bez credit, he and his crew were inflicting considerable harm on the undead and dark fey on the ground.

Aoth decided to blast the ghostly boarding party before they could reach their objective, and discerning his intent through their psychic bond, Jet lashed his wings and climbed. Then, however, a jab of pain in the pinion he’d broken made the familiar falter. Aoth started to ask if Jet was all right, but a cramp in his guts and a surge of irrational fear turned the question into a gasp.

In a paradoxical way, Aoth’s sudden distress was actually reassuring. Jet’s old injuries weren’t troubling him because they’d healed imperfectly. Rather, both he and his master were experiencing a mystical assault.

But the unfortunate thing was that, as Aoth realized when he slapped a tattoo to release its bracing magic and then looked around, everyone else on the hathrans’ side was suffering it too. A griffon screamed and veered away from the vulturine thing it had been swooping to seize in its talons. Kanilak froze until Shaugar grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a shake. Even berserkers balked.

It’s the dark, said Jet. It’s curdling or something.

Aoth realized that must be so. He looked at the patch of ground at the center of the stand of weir trees and saw the gloom there had grown even deeper, so murky and festering-foul, it reminded him of the deathways, although it still offered no bar to his fire-kissed sight. The female durthan with the Stag King’s antler-axe-Nyevarra-was in the middle of it, as were a couple other undead witches and, rearing above creatures of merely human stature, Lod himself.

Standing a little closer to the thick of the battle, his gore-streaked two-handed sword canted on his shoulder, the patchwork man-Uramar-was shouting. Aoth had no hope of making out what the blaspheme was saying over the general din. But he was likely ordering any ally who could hear him to fall back and form up to protect the spellcasters behind him. At any rate, that was what various undead were doing.

Aoth scowled at his failure to secure the cursed area straightaway. But he knew little about the kind of ritual magic that had sullied it, and even Yhelbruna, who claimed to understand it, hadn’t anticipated that if they so desired, the undead witches could accelerate the ongoing contamination.

But maybe Jhesrhi and Cera had sensed the danger, for they and their squads of protectors were already headed for the weirs. But they’d never punch through the ranks of the enemy without support.

Responding to his master’s thoughts, Jet abandoned his pursuit of the phantoms rising toward the skyship and hurtled toward the towering sacred trees. He likewise gave a rasping cry that brought wild griffons streaking after him.

Meanwhile, Aoth cast a charm to amplify his voice. “Push for the weirs!” he bellowed to his soldiers on the ground, and an enormous mink looked up and nodded to show it understood.

Cera had long since discovered she’d been too optimistic at the start of the battle. Although Orgurth and her other defenders were fighting savagely to hold back the foe, she’d still needed to wield her mace as a warrior would, often enough that scraps of rotting flesh and strands of greasy hair clung to the stubby spikes.

Swaying, an animate corpse with its nose and most of its left profile rotted away stumbled between two golems busy with other foes. Reluctant to expend any of the Keeper’s light on a single such brutish creature, Cera waited for the zombie to swing its war hammer, then sidestepped and blocked with her shield.

The blow banged on the hide-and-wooden targe and jolted her arm but didn’t hurt her. She swung low and smashed the zombie’s knee, and it pitched forward. She then bashed it in the nape of the neck, and it fell on its ruined face in the snow.

At the same instant, she glimpsed motion at the corner of her vision. She turned. Just a stride away, a ghoul was rushing her with jagged claws outstretched. Fortunately, Orgurth lunged to intercept it, cut, and split its skull. The ghoul dropped.

The orc grinned at Cera. “Are you close enough yet?” he shouted, making himself heard over the din of battle.

“A little farther!” Her answer made her feel guilty. People were dying to help her push forward.

Orgurth’s leer stretched wider. “Why not?” He turned back toward the enemies still separating them from the weir trees and then snarled an obscenity. Because Uramar himself was leading a dozen floating direhelms right at them.

In a sudden surging confusion, two of the flying suits of half-plate assailed Orgurth, and to dodge the initial slashes of their swords, he sprang to the side. Other direhelms engaged golems and berserkers. Somehow, in an instant, all Cera’s protectors were busy fighting for their own lives, and Uramar had a clear path to her.

Fine, she thought. A blaspheme was a target worthy of her deity’s wrath. She raised her mace to the sun shining above the filthy darkness and started a prayer to smite him.

Then, however, her focus shattered into terror and bewilderment, and her half-finished invocation forgotten, she recoiled. Only for a moment, and then a cleric’s trained will allowed her to shed the effects of what had no doubt been an adversary’s spell. But that was time enough for Uramar to lumber into striking distance.

As he did, bitter cold, fiercer by far than the natural chill of this winter day, stabbed into Cera like a knife. She gasped, and her whole body clenched, rendering her incapable of prayer, raising her targe, or offering any other sort of defense. Uramar swung his greatsword high to split her head.

Then, missing her by no more than a finger length, Jet swooped over her head, and his talons punched into the blaspheme’s chest. Wings lashing, the black griffon-and Aoth astride his back-climbed and carried Uramar into the air.

Other griffons dived at more of the foe a heartbeat later. Berserkers, golems, bright fey, and telthors rushed up to reinforce Cera’s original bodyguards. Teeth chattering with the aftereffects of Uramar’s frigid aura, she decided she truly was going to reach where she needed to be. And then, with Amaunator’s help, she’d vindicate the faith of those who fought and fell to get her there!

Through their psychic bond, Aoth could feel the deadly chill that emanated from Uramar’s body assailing Jet. And the griffon must have likewise sensed his concern.

I’m not some dainty human, Jet snarled. I can take a little cold.

You can’t take even a scratch from a life-stealing blade, Aoth replied. Just drop him. If the fall doesn’t kill him, I’ll blast him.

I’m gripping him so he can’t use the sword. I want to pull him apart and pop his stitches.

Aoth opened his mind to Jet’s perceptions so completely that it was like the griffon’s body was his own. And then he realized Jet was right. The familiar was able to withstand the chill, and with both arms grinding together in one set of talons, Uramar truly was helpless.

All right, Aoth agreed, kill him. But when he shifted back to his own body’s senses, Aoth regretted saying it.

Because twisting atop the thick, scaly coils of his lower body, Lod was tracking Jet’s course through the air. Lod’s fleshless jaw worked, and his naked phalanges crooked, forming a series of conjuring signs.

Aoth couldn’t tell what spell the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was casting, but he expected he and Jet needed to dodge it and the griffon would require every iota of his speed and agility to do so. Unfortunately, intent on the struggling foe in his claws, Jet hadn’t even noticed the threat.

Drop him! Aoth ordered. And see what I’m seeing!

Jet did both things at once; Aoth’s sense of communion pulsed stronger as, for an instant, his steed looked through his eyes. Then Jet swung himself through a tight evasive maneuver that, in the absence of a saddle and safety straps, nearly tossed his rider off his back.

Magic banged through the air so loudly, it was as if the world itself were shattering, and Aoth’s ears throbbed. Still, Jet had avoided the actual stream of focused, murderous sound. The attack struck one of the weirs and rattled it, snapping loose a number of the spreading limbs. One just missed Aoth and Jet as it plummeted to the ground.

Still turning, the griffon sought to get behind the bone naga. Aoth extended his spear, spoke a word of command, and released one of the spells stored in the weapon. A ray of sunlight leaped from the point.

Unfortunately, the top of his dragonlike tail twisting to rotate the human-skeleton apex of his body, Lod refused to allow his opponents to strike him from behind, and at the same instant the light stabbed forth, he clenched his bony fist. The unnatural gloom thickened around the beam and all but smothered it. The dim remnant that splashed across the naga’s ribs made them shiver and smoke but nothing more.

All right, Aoth thought, the undead naga had evidently warded himself against daylight, and he’d promised not to hurl fire. But maybe a thunderbolt would do the trick. He rattled off buzzing, crackling words and used his spear point to scratch a glowing zigzag on the air.

Striding between two of the several lumpish, faceless men of dirt and stone that the earth had spawned for her further protection, Jhesrhi spotted Nyevarra among the mass of undead and dark fey. A fair-minded universe would at least have kept the vampire durthan busy tending the darkness that increasingly eroded the resolve and vitality of mortal men and bright fey alike. But evidently Nyevarra had finished altering the curse she’d laid on the forest and was thus free to rejoin the battle.

Specifically, raising the Stag King’s stolen weapon high, she appeared to be casting maledictions in Cera’s direction, and the peril to her friend made the urge to hurl fire roar through Jhesrhi’s mind and sent heat surging through her veins.

But instead of succumbing to the impulse, she spoke once more to the earth, the other element to which she was currently most attuned. Brown hands erupted from the snow under Nyevarra’s feet, gripped her calves, and jerked her downward.

The surprise attack disrupted the durthan’s casting, and as the earth spirit sought to drag her under, Jhesrhi urged her motley squad of warriors forward. Perhaps they could reach Nyevarra before she struggled free.

Alas, no. Too many undead and dark fey were in the way, and Nyevarra retained the presence of mind to exploit her vampiric abilities. She dissolved into mist, flowed upward, and took on human form again above the earth elemental’s reach.

Her whipping hair and robes revealed that a wind was holding her aloft. Other such entities screamed at Jhesrhi and her companions, battering and chilling them and slinging snow in their eyes. Men cried out and stumbled backward.

For a moment, the only thought Jhesrhi was able to think was that fire countered cold. Then she thrust the notion away and conjured a floating luminous shield to deflect the brunt of the blast.

Next, she sought to grow the arms and clutching hands she’d already drawn from the soil into a complete manlike figure like the ones she’d summoned previously. But Nyevarra conjured a whirlwind that ripped the new creature apart, half-formed.

Air wasn’t intrinsically stronger than earth, and Nyevarra wasn’t inherently a more powerful mage than Jhesrhi. In fact, in their previous combat, Jhesrhi had decided she was the stronger. But apparently not when malignant darkness was grinding at her and her adversary bore the Stag King’s scepter. Not when she’d forsworn the use of fire.

So burn Nyevarra! Burn Lod! Burn everything! Where was the good if the “soul” of the forest survived but as a corrupted precinct of the Shadowfell and Rashemen fell to the undead?

But if Jhesrhi resorted to that tactic, it would be like surrendering. Like admitting that all of Aoth’s training and all her hard-won sellsword experience had been for naught because there was nothing left of her but the raw strength and mindless greed of fire. And she recoiled from that possibility in disgust.

Because the soil-and-stone warriors she’d evoked previously were making little headway against the localized gale and were too short of stature to reach Nyevarra anyway, Jhesrhi bade them crack and crumble, and then commanded the resulting debris to throw itself at the vampire. None of the missiles reached its target. Living earth and rock forfeited a portion of their strength as soon as they lost contact with the ground, and the durthan’s allied winds tumbled each attack off course.

But as the futile barrage ran its course, Jhesrhi whispered a spell.

A final stone veered in flight and thumped down in the snow. The vampire in her mask of blackened silver swung the Stag King’s staff, and as the weapon swept through its arc, shadowy disembodied racks of antlers burst from it and hurtled at Jhesrhi.

She dodged and rattled off a counterspell at the same time. The antlers shredded away to nothing. But by the time they did, Nyevarra, still riding the wind, was plunging down at her. No doubt to uncover her mouth, she’d removed her mask, and her snarl revealed extended fangs. The blood thirst was on her.

But even the frenzied urge to slake it didn’t keep her from faltering in shock when something tore the antler-axe from her hands.

Nyevarra had summoned several winds to attend her, but that hadn’t prevented Jhesrhi from calling one of her own. It had simply kept the durthan from sensing the newcomer when several other such invisible presences were already moaning and gusting around.

As instructed, Jhesrhi’s ally had hovered and waited for an opportune moment to snatch the talisman. Now it was sweeping the staff away over the heads of the combatants on the ground, taking it where she hoped it would do the most good.

Jhesrhi spoke a word of power and lunged to meet the descending Nyevarra in the moment of her consternation. Charged with force, the head of her staff stabbed into the vampire’s chest like a stake. Jhesrhi recited a rhyme to send a bit of her own vitality streaming down her weapon and poison the impaled creature with the essence of natural life.

But as she spoke the final syllable, she realized she was reciting the wrong spell. It was flame that leaped from the core of her, surged down the length of the staff, and burned Nyevarra from the inside out.

As Jhesrhi looked down at the blackened, smoking husk crumpled in the snow, panting all the while, she told herself the lapse didn’t matter. She had, after all, fought in the way she’d intended. She’d only used fire to finish off an opponent she’d already beaten, and then in a way that couldn’t possibly start the forest fire the hathrans feared.

But it did matter. For a moment, at least, and despite her resolve, fire had wielded her and not the other way around. A tear slid from her eye, and when she furiously wiped it away, she saw it was burning like ignited oil.

An Old One wielded a shimmering wand and a fey warrior with gnarled bark for skin and moss for hair were fighting ghouls just a few paces to the left. Still, for Cera, the frenzied, roaring mundane part of the battle seemed vague and far away. She was chiefly aware of warmth that seemed to flower in the core of her and shine down on her from above at the same time and of the poisonous darkness with which it contended.

She couldn’t afford to let her focus stray anywhere else. Because so far, her prayers and words of anathema showed no signs of lifting the unnatural gloom. In fact, the murk was still thickening.

Perhaps she’d been foolish to imagine she could dissolve it. The durthans had been weaving their enchantments for tendays, and the Urlingwood was a place of power for them even if the hathrans had previously cast them out.

Scowling, she strained to shove doubt out of her mind. If she only remained steadfast, her god would find a way to help her.

She took a long, centering breath and recited another spell of exorcism that proved as ineffective as the last. Then, however, Yhelbruna strode out of the murk with the Stag King’s antler-axe in her hand.

“I discern that this,” said the hathran, hefting the fey weapon, “was used to bring Shadow. If so, it can help banish it as well. Continue your rites, sun priestess, and I’ll support them with my own magic.”

Cera resumed her prayers, and Yhelbruna chanted and brandished the staff as if she were clubbing and raking an invisible foe. Despite their disparate mystical traditions, they were soon declaiming in counterpoint, reinforcing one another’s incantations in the manner of accomplished spellcasters.

Gradually, the twinges of anxiety and incipient aches, the malaise trying to worm its way into Cera’s mind and body, faded away. Then the physical gloom began to lighten.

At those moments when Vandar was within striking distance of a foe, he didn’t think. Rage singing inside him, guided by instinct, he attacked relentlessly and ducked and dodged as necessary.

When he was between fights, however, his anger subsided just enough to allow flickers of reflection. Now was such a moment, and it occurred to him that the undead must still include Nar demonbinders among their number, for the thing several paces in front of him looked more alien and unnatural than even the most grotesque dark fey. A headless, asymmetrical tangle of huge bony claws and projecting spikes, it walked on four crooked, mismatched legs and bore a cluster of little round eyes in the middle of its body.

At present, the demon was smashing an iron construct in the shape of a small wyvern to pieces. Vandar rushed it, hoping to catch it by surprise, but it pivoted and lifted its giant claws to threaten him. He kept charging.

A claw jabbed at his head, and he sprang out of the way without breaking stride. That put him on the verge of flinging himself onto one of the immobile but still potentially deadly horns that bristled from the demon’s shell. He twisted past the point, leaped, and cut at the cluster of eyes.

The demon fell over thrashing, and as it rolled back and forth, the flailing of the various claws and spikes was almost as dangerous as if it were attacking deliberately. Fortunately, Vandar had to avoid them for only a couple of heartbeats before the convulsions came to a sudden end.

He studied the fiend for a moment, satisfying himself that he truly had killed it, then looked around for his next foe. Some distance away, rearing over the heads of smaller combatants, the undead creature called Lod hurled a jagged blast of darkness from his hand. Wheeling around the bone naga, Jet dodged, and, astride the black griffon’s back, Aoth hurled shafts of blue light from his spear point.

The red sword urged Vandar in that direction. Because Lod was the leader of the Eminence of Araunt, the ultimate author of Rashemen’s troubles, and the most formidable horror on the battlefield. And if Vandar didn’t play a central role in his destruction, it was Aoth and not he who would be remembered as the hero of the conflict.

Then, however, Vandar realized the gloom was lifting. Using the spines like a ladder, he scrambled up on the demon’s carcass in hopes of seeing why.

Cera, Yhelbruna-now in possession of the Stag King’s antler-axe-and a couple other hathrans stood in attitudes of invocation amid a luminous yellow haze. Plainly, their magic was burning away the dark.

Unfortunately, Vandar wasn’t the only one who’d figured that out. Undead and dark fey were turning in increasing numbers to push toward the sunlady and witches while mortals, bright fey, and golems struggled to hold them back.

Vandar suspected that keeping the exorcism going and so restoring the daylight was even more important than slaying Lod. Still, the sword insisted that any warrior who battled to protect Yhelbruna, Cera, and the other women would simply be one of many. It was champions who bested terrible foes in single combat-or at worst, with the aid of a comrade or two-who won glory.

But Vandar didn’t deserve glory. Not after all his selfishness and disastrous miscalculations. He ordered the sword to be silent and started fighting his way toward the golden glow.

At first, it proved fairly easy to cut down foes who were pushing in the same direction. Then, however, he glimpsed a hulking form from the corner of his eye.

When he turned and took his first close look at Uramar, he felt like a fool for ever mistaking the zombie counterfeit he’d slain under the Fortress of the Half-Demon for the true blaspheme. The genuine patchwork man was even more thick-built, scarred, and misshapen, with eyes of two different colors set at different heights.

Something had ripped away Uramar’s breastplate and shredded the flesh beneath, exposing and breaking ribs in several spots. Yet despite his ill-made body and gaping wounds, his two-handed blade struck constantly and to murderous effect. Essentially, he and Vandar were doing the same thing: cutting down foes who were likewise struggling closer to the sunlady and hathrans. But everyone the greatsword even nicked withered and rotted even as he fell.

Someone needed to stop Uramar before he got anywhere close to Yhelbruna, Cera, and their helpers. Vandar rushed the huge undead.

As he approached, chill bit into him. But his anger and the red sword buttressed him against it.

Meanwhile, Uramar didn’t appear to notice the danger racing in on his left. But when Vandar had nearly closed to striking distance, the blaspheme pivoted and swung the greatsword at his middle.

Vandar parried, and the two blades clanged together. The impact jolted Vandar, but his defense kept Uramar’s sword from cutting him.

Still running, Vandar slashed at the massive open wound that was Uramar’s chest. The undead parried, and the blades rang again.

Vandar plunged on past and now had his back to his opponent. Sliding in the snow, he wrenched himself around barely in time to see Uramar’s next cut leaping at his neck. He ducked underneath the stroke, then hurled himself forward to cut at the spot where a living man carried his heart.

With astonishing quickness for such a limping brute, and one already hideously wounded at that, Uramar retreated on the diagonal, and the footwork gave him time to parry. He took another retreat, and that put him back at the proper distance to take advantage of his longer arms and blade.

Vandar advanced with lowered guard, inviting an attack, then swayed back when it came. The greatsword whizzed past his chest with no more than half a finger’s length to spare. He lunged with the red blade poised for a chest cut.

Uramar shifted the greatsword to parry and once again protect that shredded, unarmored, vulnerable spot. Vandar instantly pivoted and cut at the blaspheme’s left wrist.

The red sword sheared flesh and splintered bone, and, though it didn’t quite sever Uramar’s hand, rendered it useless. The undead stumbled backward with his enormous weapon wobbling in what was now an inadequate grip.

Vandar started after him. Then, with a silent cry, the red sword alerted him to danger at his back.

He spun, and the war club that might otherwise have smashed his skull struck it a glancing blow instead. Still, that was enough to blank out the whole world.

The next he knew, his head was ringing, he lay on his back in the snow, and the zombie that had struck him had the war club raised for another blow. Vandar floundered backward, but the weapon still caught him in the knee. Bone snapped, and he gasped at the flash of pain.

Anger welled up inside him to mask what would otherwise be agony. As the dead man lifted the war club for a third strike, Vandar heaved himself up onto his off hand, cut its leg out from under it, and split its head when it fell down. The creature stopped moving.

Vandar wrenched himself around to face Uramar. The blaspheme had discarded the greatsword for a curved short sword glimmering with its own no-doubt lethal enchantments. Scowling, his half-severed hand dangling and spittering dark blood in the snow, the patchwork man limped forward.

Then the ambient gloom brightened a little more. A shaft of sunlight fell through the leafless canopy overhead, transfixing a pair of phantoms that shredded away to nothing.

Uramar turned and resumed pushing his way toward the women working to banish the darkness.

Vandar struggled to his feet to pursue. Or rather, to his foot, for another stab of pain made it immediately apparent that his injured leg wouldn’t bear his weight.

He hopped through the snow and bent down to retrieve the zombie’s fallen war club to use as a crutch. Before he could straighten up, a dark fey like a hound with a half-human face sprang at him. He killed it with a thrust between the eyes but lost his balance and fell in the process. By the time he managed to stand up, he could no longer even see Uramar past all the other combatants in the way.

It was absurd to think he could catch up, but he had to try. He started hobbling, and jagged fangs bared, a ghoul advanced to intercept him. He poised his sword for a head cut.

Then the golden griffon plunged down atop the ghoul. The impact likely smashed the life-or what passed for it-out of the creature, but the telthor made sure of its destruction by ripping the body to pieces with his claws.

The gold turned his head to regard Vandar with fierce blue eyes. The beast seemed to be waiting for something, and the berserker hoped he understood what.

He hobbled forward, tucked the red sword under his crutch arm, and reached out to scratch in the feathers behind the griffon’s beak. He’d seen Aoth and Cera pet Jet that way, and the gold permitted it as well. But he also gave an impatient-sounding rasp as though to remind the idiot human they were in the midst of battle.

The gold then pivoted, presenting his side, and lowered himself onto his belly. Vandar dropped his makeshift crutch and clambered onto the griffon’s back.

At once, the griffon ran a couple steps, sprang, and, wings beating, soared into the air. Vandar didn’t know how to ride a griffon, didn’t have a saddle, and his throbbing, broken-kneed leg couldn’t clamp against his steed’s side with any strength. Still, bending down and wrapping his arms around the telthor’s neck, he managed to stay on the creature’s back, or maybe the gold contrived to keep him from tumbling off.

The telthor weaved through an aerial melee that, with griffons, winged telthors and fey, and ghosts swooping, wheeling, and tearing at each other, and blasts of magic raining down from the skyship above the trees, was every bit as savage as the struggle on the ground. Still, the gold appeared to be scrutinizing the combatants down in the gory snow.

Vandar was too, but he didn’t spot Uramar until an instant after the griffon dived at him. The blaspheme had almost worked his way to Yhelbruna, Cera, and the other spellcasters. Already, the hathrans’ protectors were faltering as the leading edge of Uramar’s cloud of cold washed over them, and meanwhile, other undead were scrambling to aid the patchwork swordsman as he finished carving his way to his objective.

The golden griffon slammed down in the midst of those would-be helpers, crushing some and striking at the rest with snapping beak and snatching talons. The spiritual power of a telthor made such attacks devastating to even an insubstantial entity such as a specter.

Still, that small part of Vandar that could consider such things despite the fury was surprised at the gold’s choice of target. He’d expected the griffon to plunge down on Uramar. But evidently the creature expected his rider to finish what he’d started while he made sure that this time, no other foes meddled in the duel.

Well, so be it. Vandar gripped argent feathers and the hide beneath to anchor himself and gave every bit of himself over to the rage. Sound faded, and the world slowed.

The gold spun to continue striking at the remaining foes he’d chosen for himself. Uramar circled too, and Vandar realized the blaspheme was maneuvering to attack the telthor, not him. He meant to strike the griffon down from behind.

Vandar pulled his handful of feathers as if they were reins, and somehow the golden griffon understood he meant for it to turn, and in what direction. It jerked around just far enough for Vandar to catch Uramar’s cut with a parry.

Steel clanged. Bellowing, the patchwork man sprang and cut at Vandar’s head.

Vandar leaned sideways and slashed at the same time. Uramar’s sword whistled past him while his blade sheared into the blaspheme’s neck.

Uramar floundered forward, even though that made the fey sword slice deeper. He threw both arms around Vandar in a crushing bear hug.

Finally too bitter for any mortal human being to withstand, chill plunged into Vandar like icicle daggers. He jerked and lost his grip on his sword hilt, and then the cold was even worse. All he could do was shudder as the blade in the blaspheme’s good hand hitched around to aim at his face.

But then Uramar groaned and slumped, and the sword thrust never came. The golden griffon wrenched himself around in a manner that further loosened the undead’s embrace, and with a convulsive effort, Vandar shoved him away. The patchwork man toppled backward to sprawl motionless between the bodies of a fey with spindly limbs and enormous hands and feet and a witch with her bronze mask and the head behind it smashed out of shape. Still shaking, Vandar couldn’t tell if she’d been a hathran or a durthan.

Spinning blades of blue light chopped Lod’s tail. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep the bone naga from throwing a magical attack right back. He whipped his lower body clear of Aoth’s creations and stretched out his skeletal hand simultaneously.

Streaks of darkness painted themselves on the air, defining a cube with Aoth and Jet at the center. Lashing his wings, the griffon hurled himself forward and through the murky stripes in front of him. Cold seared him and his rider too, but they broke out before the magical structure could quite coalesce into a solid cage.

Aoth hurled a glimmering, silvery sphere of force from his spear. Lod flicked his hand to the side, and the attack flew off course to smash bark and wood from a tree trunk.

Your magic isn’t getting the job done, Jet snarled, and unfortunately, that was so.

Aoth had thrown sunlight, thunderbolts, acid, focused noise, and eventually fire-he’d apologize to the hathrans later if anyone complained-and found them all ineffective. Pure force, generally the most difficult energy for a spellcaster to shield against, had done a little more damage, but so far, not enough to slow Lod down. And Aoth had already exhausted his ability to cast his most potent attacks.

As he with his spellscarred eyes had observed early on, the problem was protective runes graven on the inside of Lod’s human rib cage. Coupled with the defensive spells the bone naga could cast at will, they rendered him largely impervious to combat magic.

Still, Aoth had to defeat him. Although since the start of the duel he’d perforce kept his attention on his adversary, he nonetheless inferred from the increasing brightness that his allies were winning the larger battle. But given the chance, Lod, who, as he’d gradually discovered, might even be as powerful as the dracolich Alasklerbanbastos, could still turn things around.

Let’s tear him apart! Jet continued, swooping to dodge a burst of freezing shadow.

Set me down, and I’ll tear him. You fetch Jhesrhi.

Do you think I can’t handle him? I’m as strong as I ever was!

I know that. But look in my head and you’ll see what I have in mind.

Aoth’s sense of connection pulsed stronger as Jet examined his thoughts. Then the griffon spun around Lod and over the heads of the nearest combatants, warriors and creatures that had likely come rushing to aid either Aoth or his foe but ended up fighting one another.

Jet plunged down behind the bone naga. Aoth scrambled off the familiar’s back and roused the magic of tattoos that augmented his strength, agility, and hardiness. At once, aquiline talons and leonine hind paws throwing up snow, Jet ran three strides with the uneven gait of his species, beat his wings, and sprang back into the air.

By then, Lod was twisting atop his serpentine coils to orient on Aoth. His fleshless jaw worked, surely whispering an incantation, and then streamers of snow leaped up from the ground. As they stretched and twisted, they darkened into something so infused with malevolence that their mere proximity made Aoth’s head throb.

He charged his spear with destructive force and whirled. The preternaturally sharp edges of the head slashed three of the shadowy snakelike things to nothingness. The fourth had time to strike at him, but he simultaneously blocked the attack with his shield and annihilated the attacker with a thrust.

He pivoted back toward Lod and, with a short incantation and a jab, hurled glowing blue darts of force from his spear. Apparently they stung, for when they struck just below the point where bare bone gave way to scaly flesh, the undead naga flinched and hissed. In that instant, Aoth dashed a couple of steps closer.

Then Lod swayed from side to side, and something about that sinuous motion wormed its way into Aoth’s head and snarled his thoughts into confusion. No longer sure why he was running, he stumbled to a halt.

His bewilderment lasted only a heartbeat. Then, by trained reflex, he pictured a sigil of psychic defense, and his thoughts snapped back into focus. By that time, though, a wave of smoking liquid was sweeping toward him like a breaker rushing toward the shore.

He threw himself flat in the snow, burrowing in it, and covered his head with his shield. Even so, as it washed over him, Lod’s conjured acid seared him at various points along his back and legs. But evidently not badly, for he was able to leap back onto his feet, and the magic of another tattoo sufficed to mask the lingering pain.

He charged onward. Until Lod vanished, leaving nothing behind but the long, twisting rut where his enormous tail had dragged through the snow.

Lod hadn’t simply turned invisible. Aoth’s fire-touched eyes would still see him if he had. The bone naga must have translated himself through space, and Aoth spun to locate him.

Just as he did, maggots, or something like them, rained down on him from the empty air. He scrambled aside, but some landed on him anyway, clung, and gnawed. One wriggled onto his bare neck, and its bite burned like vitriol.

He slapped the conjured grub away, then, trusting his armor to protect against the rest, charged Lod once again. Come on, he thought, you’re bigger than I am! Just fight me hand to hand!

Lod, however, wouldn’t oblige. Slithering to maintain his distance, he whirled his hands through an intricate pattern as he cast another spell.

The vista before Aoth shattered into senselessness as if he were viewing it through a wall built of warped and cloudy lenses. At the same instant, something pulled at every part of him at once. Though he’d never encountered a spell exactly like it before, he surmised that this time, Lod was attempting to shift him through space, and that different bits of him would end up in different places.

He bellowed a word of dispelling and found the strength to sprint even faster. The painful tugging lost its grip on him when he plunged free of the spot where the unseen framework of existence itself was churning.

Then, finally, instead of retreating and evading, Lod crawled to meet him. Maybe the creature had grown tired of throwing spell after spell to minimal effect. Aoth certainly had.

The bone naga reared over him, raised his fleshless hands, and boiling shadow flowed over them, sheathing them in ghostly clawed gauntlets. Halting, Aoth came on guard, his spear and shield poised to meet the attack when Lod’s upper body whipped down at him.

For the next instant, though, it didn’t, and Aoth abruptly remembered his experiences fighting dragons in Chessenta, and how an attack might come from any direction. He risked a glance backward and discovered the end of Lod’s tail sweeping down at him like a falling tree.

He dodged, and the tail smashed down in the snow. Lod’s skeletal upper body hurtled down at him.

Aoth shifted his targe to block. Raking shadow claws screeched on enchanted steel, snagged in it, and yanked, jerking Aoth off balance before they popped free.

The loss of equilibrium kept him from thrusting with the spear as he’d intended. And before he could recover, the end of Lod’s tail flicked sideways, slammed his legs out from underneath him, and dumped him in the snow.

The undead naga struck down at him, and he just managed to interpose the shield. Lod grabbed it by the edges and tried to rip it away.

Aoth could feel it was useless to resist. Even with tattoo magic enhancing it, his strength was inferior to Lod’s.

So he didn’t resist. He let Lod’s pulling hoist him back onto his feet, then yanked his arm out of the straps on the inner face of the targe.

And finally, a move seemed to catch Lod by surprise. Swaying atop his coils, the bone naga hesitated, holding the shield as if uncertain what to do with it.

Gripping his spear with both hands, Aoth spoke a word that brought all the power still stored in the weapon surging into the point to set it aglow. He fed the blue light with much of his own remaining innate magic, and it blazed brighter still.

Lod cast the targe aside and struck. Aoth met him with a spear thrust that drove cleanly between two ribs. With a dazzling flash, force exploded from the weapon to tear apart the naga’s rib cage from the inside, where the graven symbols didn’t protect it.

Unfortunately, that didn’t finish the bone naga. Lod hissed a word of chastisement, and Aoth cried out with sudden pain, weakness, and dizziness that dropped him to his knees.

Lod tore the spear out of his grasp and opened the fanged jaws of a skull that was abruptly far less human and more reptilian than before. The pieces of rib Aoth had blasted away floated through the air toward their former positions.

But then wind screamed, flung snow across the battlefield, and tossed Aoth onto his side. It caught the rib fragments too and swept them away despite the force animating them.

Lod twisted to look into the wind and no doubt find its source. He raised his hands to start a spell.

But meanwhile, the wind screamed louder still. The naga’s left arm snapped loose and blew away, and the right followed a heartbeat later.

But even that didn’t stop the bone naga’s conjuring. He roared words of malediction that made Aoth’s body feel as heavy as lead-his heart pounded as if it were trying to tear itself apart, and his ears ached as if he were deep underwater. Aoth strained to croak out a spell but couldn’t control his breathing.

Fortunately, Jhesrhi’s voice was chanting as vehemently as Lod’s. At her behest, the wind howled even louder until it drowned out both of them. Then Lod’s entire upper body burst apart into tumbling bones, and the snake part flopped down on the ground.

Although it didn’t die entirely, the wind ebbed. Feeling stronger than he had a moment before, Aoth floundered to his feet, recovered his spear, and found Lod’s fallen skull. The naga’s bones no longer showed any signs of wanting to reassemble themselves, but he smashed them anyway.

As he finished, Jet and Jhesrhi swooped down to light near him, the latter borne aloft by a friendly wind of lesser violence. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I will be,” Aoth panted. “Thanks to the two of you.” He turned to survey the greater battle and was just in time to view the final moments.

The air brightened yet again, burning off the last trace of unnatural murk and letting the sun shine down without hindrance. Phantoms shredded away to nothing. Vampires fell down smoking and thrashing, and zombies balked. And all those foes who were still capable of it turned and bolted, with automatons, berserkers, bright fey, and flares of hathran magic in pursuit.

Aoth grunted in satisfaction. “I believe we’ve fulfilled our contract with Yhelbruna.”

“Yes,” Jhesrhi said, “and done a service for the unknown lands the Eminence of Araunt hailed from, too.”

“Too bad we can’t charge them.”

Jhesrhi stood silent for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Aoth.”

“Yes?”

“The fire. My fire. When it attached itself to me, I thought it made me stronger and would shield me from … from the things I don’t like. But …”

She’d always hated to confess weakness or ask for help, and Aoth saw no reason to make her say the words when he could do it for her. “But now you realize it’s a sickness.”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll cure it.”

How? asked Jet.

I don’t know. But we’ll find a way.

The Storm of Vengeance couldn’t set down inside the Urlingwood. Mario Bez had to rendezvous with his allies, if that was still the proper term for them, on scrubland south of the sacred forest.

By then, the setting sun was casting long gray shadows across the snow, everyone had had some opportunity to rest, and Cera Eurthos, Yhelbruna, or some other hathran had had time to use her healing magic on Aoth Fezim and Vandar Cherlinka.

Still, the folk who’d fought on the ground looked haggard with fatigue, and Fezim and Cherlinka were bandaged where even a priestess’s prayers hadn’t entirely erased a wound. In contrast, Bez still felt relatively fresh. As his Thayan counterpart had predicted, flying foes had intermittently assailed the skyship. But repelling the boarders hadn’t proved too difficult, and Bez himself hadn’t suffered any harm in the process.

He gave the circle of scowling folk who’d assembled to meet him a smile. “I take it,” he said, “that we carried the day.”

“Yes,” said Fezim, the glow of his blue eyes more noticeable with the coming of twilight. “Although a number of undead escaped, and even more of the dark fey and their telthors.”

“The dark fey shouldn’t pose too much of a problem,” the witch said in her usual austere tones. “They’re as much a part of the land as the bright ones, and without the durthans to incite them, they won’t perpetuate a war they no longer have any hope of winning.”

“But you do need to hunt down every last undead,” Cera said. “They’ll prey on the living and spread their contagion until you do.”

“Indeed,” Yhelbruna said. “We must also cleanse the Urlingwood of the stain our enemies introduced. And free those whose minds were twisted, and replace the hathrans and berserkers who perished. It will all take time, and until we accomplish it, Rashemen will be weaker than it should be.”

“Still,” said Bez, “Captain Fezim is right. Victory truly is ours. And given that we all contributed, may I suggest that the appropriate way to honor the occasion is to lay old quarrels to rest?”

For a moment, no one answered. Then an orc who was missing his tusks grinned and said, “But the best thing about beating a war band of walking corpses and angry trees and such is that it frees you to slaughter the people you really hate.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Fezim said, “but Orgurth’s right. You’re not leaving unless you first survive a duel.”

Bez shrugged. “Then let’s get to it. I assume you’re the one who’s going to meet me on the field of honor.”

“No,” said Vandar Cherlinka, “I am.”

Plainly surprised, Fezim turned to regard the berserker. “Bez and I are both war mages. It makes sense-”

“I don’t care,” Cherlinka snapped. “Look, I know you have reason to kill him. He tried to kill Jet. But he did kill my lodge brothers, and I swore to avenge them.”

The Thayan scowled, but he nodded too. “Do it, then.”

Bez waved his hand. “There’s a clear, level patch of ground over there.”

“I see it,” Cherlinka said, and people started moving in that direction. Taking a moment to watch carefully, Bez verified that an earlier impression was correct. His opponent was walking with a bit of a stiff-legged limp.

Bez then turned to Aoth Fezim. “Please, stroll along with me, Captain.”

His fellow commander fell into stride beside him. “What do you want?”

“Aside from the pleasure of your company, to remind you you said one duel.”

“I did,” Fezim replied, “and I swear by the Pure Flame, I won’t insist on fighting you if you kill Vandar. I won’t let dozens of berserkers line up to do it either. You’ll be free to go.”

Bez grinned. “Thank you.”

Fezim smiled back. “I don’t mind renewing that pledge because you aren’t going to kill Vandar. I know you think you are. I saw you taking note of his stiff leg. On top of that, you have wizardry, he doesn’t, and you assume you’ve mastered fencing tricks that will befuddle a barbarian. But I’ve taken your measure and his, and he’s a better fighter than you could ever hope to be.”

For a moment, Bez felt a chill that had nothing to do with the breeze blowing down from the North Country. Then he realized what Aoth was attempting to do and snorted his momentary misgivings away.

“Good try,” he said. “But it’s not that easy to rattle me. Go watch the fight with your friends. Just don’t blink, or you might miss it.”

The motley little army had formed a circle around the dueling ground. Standing together, Uregaunt, Sandrue, and the rest of Bez’s crew made up one portion of the ring, and he gave them a wink as he entered the space. Meanwhile, griffons soared and shrieked overhead.

Yhelbruna walked out into the circle to preside over the combat. Despite her air of aloof severity, she surely wasn’t impartial in her private heart, as she perhaps proved by waving Bez closer to his opponent. She was adjusting the starting distance to facilitate blade work, not spellcasting.

But Bez had no real objection. Indeed, if the adjustment misled Cherlinka into assuming he wouldn’t have to contend with magic, so much the better.

Yhelbruna said, “Draw your weapons,” and they did. With a whispered command, Bez forbade the frost in the core of his rapier and the lightning in his parrying dagger to manifest just yet.

The hathran in her leather mask stepped backward. “Begin!” she said.

At once, Cherlinka snarled like a beast. He sprang forward with the red sword poised for a head cut.

Bez retreated, put his rapier in line, and spoke a word of release to cast one of the spells stored inside it.

Three illusory duplicates of himself sprang into being around him, each with its point extended. Now Cherlinka was hurling himself at four blades, with no way to determine which was the real threat.

The Rashemi coped by diving under all of them. Bez lowered his aim but was a shade too slow. Cherlinka was already past his point.

The berserker swung the red blade in a scything blow that caught two of the illusions and popped them both like soap bubbles. But he hadn’t struck his real foe, and ducking in mid-charge had left him canted precariously forward. Bez sidestepped, raised his sword hand high with the blade aimed downward, and stabbed at his opponent’s back.

A man who looked in imminent danger of falling flat on his face shouldn’t even have perceived that attack, let alone been able to defend against it. But Cherlinka sprang forward, and the thrust missed. Why in the name of the Abyss wasn’t the clod’s bad leg hindering him now?

Berserker fury, Bez supposed, and then assured himself it didn’t matter. Limping or hopping around like a grasshopper, Cherlinka was no match for him.

As the Rashemi arrested his headlong momentum, straightened up, and started to turn, Bez backed away and, with a word of command, roused the cold in his rapier. Fist-sized hailstones hammered down from the empty air.

Again, even with his back turned, Cherlinka somehow sensed the threat. He flung himself sideways, and only a few of the icy missiles battered him.

Still, when he finished spinning around, blood was streaming from a gash in his scalp with more making fresh red spots on his bandages. At the very least, Bez was whittling him down.

Bez retreated, and his remaining illusory twin retreated with him. Cherlinka charged after him.

Bez spoke another word of invocation and drew a pale flare of pure cold from his rapier. Despite his headlong momentum, Cherlinka sprang aside, and the blast only grazed him. That alone would have been enough to drop many a man, but the Rashemi kept coming.

Bez kept his rapier forward and his main gauche well back, as if the shorter weapon were only something to use in the clinches. As Vandar rushed into striking distance, he met him with a lunge, a feint to the face, and a true attack to the stomach.

Cherlinka parried with a downward sweep that might have snapped a rapier that wasn’t enchanted. He riposted with a cut to the flank.

But it was a cut to the flank of the remaining illusory double, and so Bez had no need to parry. Instead, he thrust at the berserker’s eye.

The red sword hit the duplicate, and it burst into nothingness. Meanwhile, Bez’s point streaked at its target.

At the last possible instant, Cherlinka jerked his head to the side. The rapier caught him anyway, but not in the brain-piercing fashion Bez had intended. The edge sliced him across the ear and brought more blood streaming forth.

Still, it was yet another wound. Bez told himself that soon, even a berserker would start showing the effects.

But in the exchanges that followed, Cherlinka attacked with the same relentless aggression as before, and although his sweeping cuts and rudimentary technique repeatedly left him open, Bez didn’t score on him again. The barbarian ducked, dodged, pivoted, and swayed, and the rapier kept missing by a hair.

Until, breathing harder, Bez realized there was at least a slim chance that he was the one who was going to slow down first. Time for more magic, then, specifically, the trick that had never failed him.

He allowed Cherlinka to beat his blade out of line. Clearly not suspecting a trap, perhaps no longer even cognizant of the main gauche his adversary hadn’t used since the duel began, the Rashemi sprang and cut at Bez’s chest.

Bez retreated and spun the dagger in a circular parry. At the same time, a murmured word set it ablaze with lightning. When the blades met, the power would leap from one to the other and on into Cherlinka’s arm.

Steel clanged, and magic flashed and crackled. But the red sword went flying, and Cherlinka kept driving in. Bez just had time to realize the barbarian must have let go of the sword an instant before the two blades came into contact. Then Cherlinka slammed into him, and they fell together.

With the rapier useless at such close quarters, Bez angled the main gauche for a thrust at Cherlinka’s side. But before he could deliver it, the Rashemi punched him in the jaw.

The blow jolted Bez and made him falter. Cherlinka heaved him over so he was facedown, scrambled on top of him, and gripped his throat.

Pinned, his air cut off and his mouth clogged with snow, Bez could neither wield his blades to any effect nor recite an incantation. But there had to be something he could do! Unfortunately, as he flailed blindly and futilely, and his desperation dulled to numb passivity, that cunning tactic never came to him.

The Rashemi cheered when Vandar finished strangling the life out of Bez. Aoth observed that, understandably, the Halruaan commander’s men didn’t share in the general jubilation. But they had better sense than to do anything that would draw attention to their displeasure.

Vandar struggled to rise and then, keeping his weight on his good leg, stood swaying over the corpse. When a man came out of a berserker rage, he always felt weak and sick to one degree or another, but Aoth suspected the Rashemi’s current debility stemmed from more than that. Vandar had suffered a broken knee, a knock to the head, and frostbite during the battle with the undead and dark fey, and Bez had just torn him up all over again.

Aoth glanced down to tell Cera they should go help him, but her expression informed him she’d already decided the same thing. They hurried forward, and so did Yhelbruna.

So did a number of others, likewise wanting to help or simply to congratulate Vandar on his victory. Aoth wondered if he should try to stop them, lest the resulting press make it difficult for Cera and Yhelbruna to do their work.

Then, screeching, Jet and the golden griffon plunged down from the sky to land to either side of Vandar and glare at the crowd. Except for Yhelbruna, the oncoming Rashemi stopped short.

The two priestesses murmured prayers to their deities and touched Vandar’s new wounds with hands glowing gold or green. One at a time, the berserker’s gashes closed, his gaze sharpened, and eventually, he scooped up a handful of snow to wash the blood from his face.

“Now our war is over,” he said.

“Yes,” Aoth replied, “and congratulations on a fight well fought. But the matter that brought Cera, Jet, Jhes, and me to Rashemen remains. Who gets the wild griffons?”

“You do,” Vandar said.

Aoth cocked his head. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“You were able to lead them into battle-”

“You mean, I was,” Jet rasped.

Vandar smiled a tiny fleeting smile. “Sorry, my friend. You were. But either way, it means something.”

Aoth snorted. “Maybe. But I’m not much for signs and destinies, and you did plenty to help our side win. So how about this? I’ll settle for half the griffons. You take the rest, including the telthor.”

“Why, when I no longer have a use for them? My lodge is gone.”

“Rebuild it. Isn’t that what your brothers would want, especially at a time when Rashemen needs every warrior it can muster? Young warriors will come running for the chance to be griffon riders.”

Vandar hesitated. “But … am I the man to lead them?”

Aoth scowled. “It wasn’t you to blame for the destruction of your lodge. It was this treacherous turd lying at our feet. So whatever mistakes you made, learn from them and move on. Any other course is stupid.”

“Captain Fezim is right,” Yhelbruna said. “The spirit griffon came to you when you needed him, and that means something too.” Her tone gentled in a way Aoth hadn’t heard before. “And if even that isn’t enough to persuade you, know that I see goodness and the seeds of wisdom in you.” For just a moment, she touched Vandar’s cheek, and this time, not to heal him.

The berserker looked as surprised as Aoth felt, but then he smiled and drew himself up straighter. “Very well, hathran. If I can count on you to help me, I say yes. And thank you. Thank you, both.”

Cera gave Aoth’s forearm a squeeze and whispered, “Another lecherous hundred-year-old preying on a naive young innocent.”

“Maybe she and I can start a fashion.”

Yhelbruna turned in a rustle of robes, and for an instant, Aoth thought she’d overheard and taken offense at the levity. But, stern and formal once more, she said, “Thank you for your service, Captain, and for your generosity as well.”

Aoth grinned. “I’m not that generous. Watch.” He turned and tramped through the snow to where he could address Bez’s sellswords without shouting. His companions trailed along behind him.

“As even my rival Vandar concedes,” he told the Halruaans, “I earned the wild griffons. Because I’m only taking half of them, I’m collecting the rest of my pay in another form: the Storm of Vengeance.”

The sellswords stared back at him in consternation. Then the wizened, bitter-looking old wizard who was one of Bez’s surviving officers said, “You promised that if we helped fight the undead, we’d go free.”

“I didn’t promise to return the ship.”

“Do you know how to fly her?”

“No,” Aoth replied, “so I’ll make you an offer. You men can swear allegiance to the Brotherhood of the Griffon and crew the Storm for me as you did for Bez. My sergeant Orgurth will come aboard as my eyes and voice, at least until such time as you’ve earned my trust.”

Glowering, a plump man with a scraggy, goatish beard and a bronze sickle hanging at his side asked, “What if we say no?”

“Then I’ll burn the cursed ship and leave you stranded in a country where folk despise you.”

The elderly wizard gave a grim little chuckle. “In that case, Captain, I gladly pledge my fealty.”

Glowering, his comrades mumbled to the same effect.

Yhelbruna said, “In the Wychlaran’s name, Captain, I invite you and yours back to Immilmar to partake of our hospitality. Even these scoundrels, now that they’ve proclaimed you their leader.”

Aoth smiled. “Thank you, learned sister. I’m sure they’ll prefer it to sleeping out in the cold, and I won’t mind a couple days of warm beds and good food either.”

“Only ‘a couple days’? You’re welcome to bide until spring if you like.”

“Thank you, but I have to check on the rest of my men. Cera needs to prepare for a grand conclave of Amaunator’s clergy.” He glanced at Jhesrhi standing alone, her war boots and the butt of her staff planted in a puddle of melted snow. “And we all have a problem to solve.”