The masked witches

TWELVE

Stop, said Aoth. Ahead, where the tunnel widened out into a spacious pentagonal vault with five other corridors leading away from it, an intricate mosaic covered the floor. Hidden in the pattern, but visible to spellscarred eyes, was a pentacle glimmering with pale green phosphorescence.

I see it, too, Jhesrhi said, more or less. I ve been speaking to the stone around us. It s sick. Poisoned by the things that have been festering inside it for all these centuries. And there s what amounts to a big chancre straight ahead. It s a powerful demon, I think.

Do we know any more about it than that? Cera asked, letting her mace dangle from its martingale so she could tuck a stray blonde curl back up under her helmet.

Apparently, no one did.

I can tell you this, Aoth said, when it pops out at us, it won t be alone. Unless I miss my guess, there are other foes lurking on the far side of those arches where we can t see them. In the side passages behind us, too. The allies had tried to check and clear such potential trouble spots as they explored, but without splitting men off from his little army again and again, there was no way to keep the tunnels cleared. They were too much of a maze. Passages hooked around and linked together in unpredictable ways.

If we know it s an ambush, said a warrior at Aoth s back, what do you say we don t walk into it? Let s find a way around.

No, said Vandar, his red spear gleaming in the glow Cera had conjured to light their way. Let s turn the trap against the trappers.

Aoth nodded. I agree, he said. It s not like we can actually avoid fighting the demon. The Nars will pull it out of its cage eventually. At least up ahead there s room for a bunch of us to fight at the same time, and since we know what to expect well, partly we can give the enemy a surprise instead of the other way around.

Should we find out what the Stag King thinks? Cera asked.

No, said Aoth. If he wanted to voice his opinions, he should have walked in front with the rest of us. Here s what we are going to do

When he had finished laying it out for them, and his orders had been whispered from man to man down the tunnel at his back, he reached out to Jet. Anything? he asked.

No, the griffon answered. If the Nars have tunnels that come up outside the castle, they aren t using them to slip away. Not as far as I can see.

Good, because we re about to release a demon. It wouldn t be a particularly clever thing to do if the real enemy were already long gone.

It likely isn t a clever thing to do, anyway. But that never stopped you before.

The word came back up the tunnel that everyone knew what he was supposed to do. Aoth and his companions prowled onward. The soft, muffled sound of footfalls, clicking hooves, and creaking leather, and of the occasional murmur or growl of a spirit animal, attested to the line of allies moving up behind them.

As the leaders prowled into the crypt, Aoth noticed that not only was it large, but also the vaulted ceiling was high enough to accommodate even a true giant. Wonderful. As he steeled himself to deliberately step on the outermost line of the pentacle, Vandar brushed past him.

Fine, Aoth thought, you do it. And the berserker did, nearly stamping on that part of the mosaic.

The demon exploded into view and roared a word of power at the same time. It was every bit as huge as Aoth had feared it might be, with horns, a lupine head, a shaggy red-black pelt, and disproportionately large crab-like pincers at the end of each long, burly arm. The charge of force the word carried knocked Aoth and his comrades staggering.

He found his footing, shouted his own word of command, and hurled a thunderbolt at the demon s torso. Jhesrhi matched him with a fan-shaped flare of fire; and Cera, with a scorching shaft of Amaunator s light. Seemingly startled by the speed of their response, the glabrezu flailed its claws and stumbled a step.

But it wasn t enough for the three of them to strike back. Their allies needed to start fighting, and once again, Aoth had to admit that the madmen of Rashemen had their uses. Even his sellswords might have hesitated, if only for a heartbeat or two, if such a huge horror had suddenly burst into view directly in front of them. The berserkers didn t. Vandar screeched like a griffon, his brothers responded in kind, and they all charged.

What Aoth found even more impressive was that they acted exactly as he d ordered them to. Some threw themselves at the demon, while others raced to intercept the enemies who, he was certain, were about to pour into the chamber from the other tunnels. The latter was arguably an act of even greater courage, because it required the beserkers to turn their backs on the glabrezu.

Vandar was one of the warriors who rushed the demon. He thrust the red spear completely through the creature s left leg. The glabrezu pivoted toward him, and in so doing, sidestepped and jerked the beserker off his feet. Vandar let go of the spear, and, nimble as a tumbler in a carnival, rolled to his feet with the scarlet broadsword in his hand.

Aoth aimed his spear at the glabrezu s chest and rattled off the first words of an incantation that would blast it with a rainbow of destructive effects. Suddenly, the light in the chamber flickered and dimmed, and behind him, Cera screamed.

The Stag King had some inkling that Aoth Fezim considered him a shirker, and it alternately annoyed and amused him. He could match himself against any foe, as he d proved in the courtyard. But it was asinine for a war leader to march in the vanguard and be exposed to every pit trap and skirmisher sniping from cover. And if the Thayan didn t understand that, then he was a fool no matter how many liches and dragons he d defeated, or how keenly his burning blue eyes saw what others could not.

Besides, someone needed to be rearguard Aoth acknowledged that himself. So why shouldn t it be the Stag King and his servants? Unless he missed his guess, the fighting here at the back of the column was likely to prove every bit as hard and as important as the battle at the front.

An echoing roar, the shouts of men, the cries of other things, and the boom and crackle of magic all mixed together, told him the battle had begun. He peered down the passage behind him, at the arched openings leading to other tunnels, and waited for his own particular foes to appear in the gloom. Beside him, a semitransparent, faintly luminous telthor in the form of a huge wolf sniffed the cold, musty air. It growled, and its fur bristled.

Dark figures surged up the tunnel and out of all the doorways in view. Others simply plunged through the solid stone of the walls, floors, and ceiling. The stench of putrefaction filled the Stag King s nose more indication, if anyone needed it, that he and his fellow warriors were primarily facing the undead.

And is that supposed to daunt me? he asked himself, grinning. With a thought, he commanded the spirit animals to oppose the wraiths and such; since the telthors weren t made of solid flesh, either, they were best suited to the task. Then he bellowed a war cry, stepped to meet the creatures shambling up the passage, and cut a withered ghoul in two with a sweep of his antler-axe. Behind him, weapons thudded home as his offspring degenerate, disappointing brutes, but able warriors all started fighting, too. They woke the bells in their antlers, and the little orbs chimed and chimed and chimed.

The Stag King drove his weapon into another ghoul s chest, smashing ribs, pulping the rotten organs inside, and snapping its spine. Then he struck a zombie s head off. He d already lost count of how many foes he d dispatched, and if he wasn t careful, he was going to give himself over entirely to the frenzy and urgencies of melee, to think of the opponent in front of him and nothing more. Especially since, with the fight raging along a corridor and in the mouths of the intersecting passages, it was virtually impossible to keep track of the overall tactical picture anyway.

But he knew that as the leader of his group, he had to try, partly because so far, the durthans hadn t made their presence felt. When they started weaving magic, it would be his task to counter it.

Perhaps believing its lack of substance would keep it safe, a ghost with a wavering smudge of a face flew at him with wispy hands outstretched. He sliced it to tatters with his axe. A dead goblin with a crushed head swung its scimitar at the Stag King s kidney. He parried and smashed its skull even farther out of shape. It flopped back against the creatures shoving up behind it.

Power suddenly shivered through the air. It wasn t truly sound or light or heat or cold, but anyone with mystical abilities would have sensed it somehow. The Stag King felt it as a twinge in his joints and a vile bitter taste on his tongue.

A phantom bear faltered as the witches sought to retake control of it. A ghostly badger fell down convulsing.

The Stag King sneered, focused his will to slap the durthans power away from their former familiars, and found that it wasn t that easy. Apparently the undead witches had taken advantage of the time between battles to figure out how to contend with him more successfully.

The only way they could possibly accomplish such a thing was if several of them were working in concert. Employing a trick of perception he d mastered millennia before, he deafened himself to all the echoing roars of the battle except for the cold, intricate chanting that, he surmised, the louder noises covered.

The rest of the world fell silent, and he did indeed hear the witches incantation. He d expected them to be working behind the protection afforded by their massed warriors, and so they were. They were also on the far side of a doorway on the left, out of the lethal chaos of the central corridor.

The Stag King allowed his hearing to revert to normal, and the noise of the battle exploded at him. He chopped with the antler-axe and sent a blast of pure force down the passage, smashing some of the ghouls and zombies off their feet and jolting others backward. Then he plunged forward, and some of his offspring, spirit animals that were still strong and obedient to his will, and a couple of screaming berserkers drove forward along with him.

Once he and his servants and the undead jammed together, the Stag King gained ground with every chop, jab, and shuffling half step until the arch was just ahead. He struck again and again till he cut and smashed the final clawing, stabbing, decaying obstacles out of his way. Then he lunged into the side passage.

There were six masked witches gathered in a circle around a little blue fire on the floor. The smoke from the blaze made an eye-stinging haze in the air, and the malignant power of the ritual made grimacing faces take shape and melt away in the sandstone walls. Some were crying tears of blood, which remained even after the sources had dissolved.

The durthans pointed their wands and staves at the Stag King. He raised his power once again, chopped, and cast another burst of force. It staggered the witches and scattered the scraps of bone and desiccated flesh that fueled the fire.

It was a good start. But so far, none of the Stag King s minions had managed to follow him through the arch. He was on his own, and that meant he didn t dare give any of the renegade wise women a chance to recover. He started after them, but saw other robed figures flow into visibility and solidity all around him. He belatedly realized that the haze was made not only of smoke but also of mist, and the one had concealed the presence of the other.

He roared and flailed with all of his strength. But several vampire women were clinging to him, and some of them managed to hold on.

One of them crooned in his ear. Do you know me? she said. And he did. He just had time to recognize the voice of Nyevarra, who d fought so cunningly in the Witch War, before two cold needles slid into his neck.

Aoth s aborted spell discharged its power in a crackling shower of sparks. He pivoted in the direction of Cera s scream, but couldn t quite see her. She was all but lost in the middle of a slashing whirl of shadow demons, and evidently couldn t produce a blaze of light bright enough to destroy or repel them. The demons were somehow making the glow that emanated from her flicker and dim. If it went out altogether, the attackers would have nothing but a few torches and luminous crystals to pierce the ambient murk.

Leaving the glabrezu to Jhesrhi, Vandar, and its other berserker assailants for the time being, Aoth aimed his spear and hurled darts of light at the shadows. It was far from the most powerful attack spell in his arsenal, but he didn t dare cast any of the deadliest ones for fear of hitting Cera as well.

Two dark forms with ragged black wings and long horns curling up from their heads spun out of the whirl in his direction. He charged his spear with the seething essence of chaos and struck at one of the shadows. It dodged, and at the same moment, something jolted him, although the shock was psychic, not physical. His body abruptly felt numb as his spirit began to separate from it.

Aoth snarled a word of defense, invoked the magic bound in a tattoo, and flesh and soul locked together once more. But his instant of clumsiness allowed the demon he d struck at to tear the spear from his grip and toss it away. Both shadows rushed in raking with their claws.

Covering up with his shield, trying to keep either of the demons from getting behind him, Aoth scrambled backward, bumping into someone, and struggling to retain his balance. He snatched out his sword and charged it with a shimmer of destructive power. He feinted a cut at one of the demons, before spinning and extending at the other.

That shadow was lunging at him, and it impaled itself. The magic in the blade frayed it into wisps of darkness.

Aoth pivoted back in the opposite direction. The other shadow demon wasn t there anymore.

Suspecting that it had shifted behind him, he kept turning, just barely in time to block a claw slash with his targe, and then slice the demon across the belly. His foe broke apart into tatters of murk, which then dissolved entirely.

He turned back toward Cera and found he was farther away and could barely see her. The vault was crowded with berserkers and stag warriors rushing to engage one foe or another, or else tottering back from the battle line with streaming wounds. Still, no one could have missed the flash when she finally succeeded in channeling Amaunator s power. All but one of the remaining shadow demons vanished instantly. The last one tried to shield itself by dropping down into the floor, but unraveled away to nothing when it was only waist-deep in the stone.

Aoth weaved and shoved his way to Cera. Are you all right? he asked.

Yes, she panted, the Keeper protected me.

I saw, he said, wanting to embrace her but knowing he didn t have time. He looked around and decided that, although Vandar and his lodge brothers had done a fair job of carving up its lower body, and Jhesrhi, of burning the fur off patches of its upper parts, the glabrezu remained the greatest threat in view. He cast about, found his spear, and picked it up. We need

A blast of dirty red flame hurled back the Rashemi fighting in one of the doorways. Into the breach charged a blaspheme, a hulking monstrosity made of pieces from many different corpses. One green eye and one brown one, the former a finger-width higher than the latter, glared from beneath the rim of the creature s helmet. The ugly face was lumpy, mottled, and crisscrossed with scars.

The patchwork creature wore a suit of plate articulated differently than any that Aoth had ever seen. But he was more concerned about the brute s weapon than its armor. To his eyes, the greatsword fairly sweated destructive power, and when the blaspheme slashed one of Vandar s brothers with it, the berserker s flesh withered even as his knees buckled underneath him.

Beside the blaspheme advanced the skull lord from the roof of the keep, hacking with a falchion. And behind them, a wedge of howling goblin-kin and bellowing ice trolls surged forth. Aoth realized that, once again, the glabrezu would have to wait.

The Stag King felt cold and dazed. Through his muddled thoughts whispered the promise that if he d only flop down on the floor and submit, the chill would turn to ecstasy.

Bellowing, he dropped his antler-axe so that he could grab hold of Nyevarra, rip her fangs out of his throat, and fling her away. It was only after he did so that he realized a second vampire was clinging to him and sucking at a bite in his forearm. He tore her loose and threw her down the corridor as well.

Unharmed, both durthans rolled back onto their feet. Meanwhile, he was still numb and weak. He shouted for help with both his voice and his mind. Some of his offspring would surely hear the former, and every spirit animal he d brought under his sway should register the latter. He just had to hold out until help reached him. He stooped to grab his axe, but it wasn t there.

Nyevarra laughed, and he saw that she d collected the weapon when he wasn t looking. She tossed it clattering down the passage, putting it even farther out of his reach. Her gaze stabbed at him. It made him feel like she was lunging at him, or that the world had tilted on end and sent him falling down at her.

Her stare would paralyze him if he let it. He jerked his eyes away and saw a brown-robed witch rushing in on his flank with her clawed, decay-mottled hands poised to snatch and rend. He lowered his head and whipped it up again. His antlers ripped both her black leather mask and the face beneath it away.

By that time, one of the vampires was rushing him. He caught hold of her as he bellowed, and he jerked her head off her shoulders. Slime pattered out of her robes as her flesh began to liquefy.

He grinned at the other undead witches. Who s next? he croaked.

He didn t really expect his bravado to frighten them into turning tail, and it didn t. But no one else was reckless enough to fight him hand to hand. Instead, standing together, they snarled and hissed curses that made his heart stutter, his guts twist, and fresh blood stream from the cold, throbbing bites in his neck and forearm.

A single phantom hawk swooped through the archway behind him. A witch robed in black and white rattled off a rhyme, and the telthor s body twisted as though invisible hands had seized it and wrung it like a washcloth. It vanished as it fell to the floor.

Zyl hopped through the opening and cried the opening words of an incantation in his shrill voice. A durthan in a brown cloak had pounced on him like a cat before he could finish. She ripped at his body with her jagged claws and flung bloody chunks through the air. The Stag King grieved momentarily for his servant, before grimly refocusing on his own plight.

Through gritted teeth, the Stag King muttered charms of protection that seemed to do no good at all. He struggled to advance on the witches, but it was like walking into a gale. In his addled, pain-ridden condition, he couldn t tell if the enemy had conjured an actual wind or if it was the pressure of Nyevarra s gaze shoving back at him.

Whatever it was, after a straining step or two, it stopped him. He wondered, with more amazement than dread, if, after all these millennia, he d finally fallen into the trap he wouldn t be able to fight or trick his way out of. He gathered his strength for a supreme and perhaps final effort.

Growing in an instant, brambles shot up from the floor. They whipped around him, yanked themselves tight, and plunged their long thorns deep into his flesh.

He strained to break free, but to no avail. The only effect was to tear the punctures wider around the thorns. The durthans pounced on him.

First, the Stag King stopped flailing, then he stopped twitching, and a few heartbeats after that, Nyevarra and her sister witches stepped back from his corpse. She wiped her bloody lips with the back of her hand and slipped on a tarnished silver mask.

Do we give him the chance to rise? asked a durthan in red.

No, the vampire said. Take his head and fetch his weapon.

The witch in red retrieved the axe and used it to decapitate its erstwhile owner. It took four bone-splintering chops for the Stag King s head to tumble away from his neck. She stooped and picked it up by one of the antlers.

Now, said the vampire in the silver mask, let s see if his retainers still want to fight when we show them proof that their lord is dead.

Aoth advanced to meet the patchwork swordsman, and, with a limp that might be the result of having mismatched legs, the creature moved to meet him. So did Aoth s former antagonist, the skull lord.

And Cera knew, so surely that it was possible the Keeper or one of his exarches had whispered the information to her, that her lover couldn t contend with both foes at once. Not in such a press, where he couldn t cast his most potent spells without smiting friend as well as foe. She had to help him.

She swept her mace over her head, drew down the Keeper s power, and hurled a shaft of radiance from the head of the weapon. It struck the skull lord like a battering ram and knocked him backward.

Well, she had his attention. In the moment it took him to recover his balance, she rattled off a second prayer. Floating sigils of golden light shimmered into existence all around her.

She was just in time, for an instant later, red light flickered in the orbs of one of his skulls, and then a flare of crimson fire leaped at her. The scorching heat and sickening vileness of it rocked her backward, and for a moment made it feel like there was nothing around her to breathe but filth and embers. Then the flame went out, and she gasped in cleaner air. Frantically taking stock, she found that the attack had only blistered her. The floating runes had shielded her from the worst.

But the fiery blast had provided the skull lord with cover of a sort, and he d used it to rush forward. Indeed, he d nearly closed the distance between them. Terror jolted Cera and froze her in place.

Or rather, it tried. She gasped, Keeper! and warmth poured into her. It didn t purge her of every trace of her fear it probably would have needed to steal her reason to do that but the unnatural, paralyzing dread dropped away.

The skull lord s falchion leaped at her. She blocked with her buckler, and the heavy blade hit so hard that for an instant she feared the stroke had broken her arm. She tried to hit back with her mace, but she was off balance, and the riposte didn t come anywhere near her foe. The skull lord chopped at her again, and it was only Tymora s favor that enabled her to flounder back out of range.

It was plain that, despite all she d learned during her time with Aoth, she was nowhere near up to the task of defeating her ghastly opponent in a contest of arms. As he advanced, she again reached up for the power of the Yellow Sun and rattled off a prayer. She didn t know if she could finish it in time, but her only real hope was to try.

A pair of ghostly warriors, each a blur of amber light, appeared between her and the skull lord. He tried to lunge between them, but they shifted to hold him back and struck at him with their swords.

Sheltering behind them, Cera hurled bursts of Amaunator s power, shafts of sunlight infused with holiness and the deity s righteous hatred of the undead. The third such attack blasted the skull lord into burning scraps of bone.

For an instant, forgetting what she d learned previously, Cera hoped that was the end of the thing. Then the charred fragments of skeleton slid and jumped back together, commencing the task of reassembling him.

No! she thought. Not again! And though the exertions, physical and otherwise, of the last few moments had left her winded and weak, she scrambled forward to smash the one skull that remained intact. Sliding like pieces on a lanceboard, her conjured protectors moved with her.

She thought she had closed the distance in time, because she reached the skull lord when his power was still putting him back together. But the arm with the gauntlet had already reassembled itself, and, via scapula and vertebrae, reconnected to the remaining fleshless head. The Nar tossed his hand and released the servant he d held in reserve.

A thing like a deformed cherub with bruised-looking purple skin burst into view, a necklace of mummified eyeballs swinging from its blubbery neck. It lashed its leathery wings, shot at Cera, and stretched out stubby hands with long black claws. Her glowing bodyguards cut at it and missed. She tried to deflect it with her buckler but failed to lift the armor quickly enough.

The demon slashed at her face as it hurtled by. Pain ripped through her head, and everything went black. She realized the tanar ri might just have torn out her eyes.

For an instant, horror threatened to drown out every other thought. Then something her deity s grace, perhaps, or the knowledge that she was fighting not only for herself but also for Aoth, or pure loathing of the skull lord impelled her to frantic calculation.

Vicious as the little demon was, its master remained the greater threat. If it wasn t already too late, she had to put an end to him before he finished restoring himself. But she couldn t, because she couldn t target him!

But no, that was panic talking. She hadn t really changed her position; she had just reeled back a step. And if he hadn t yet managed to do so, either, she knew where he was. Reaching out to the Keeper and drawing down his power, she swung her mace and hammered and scoured the floor with a searing radiance she could only feel, not see.

Wheezing, with her legs wobbling, all but giving way under the weight of her armor, Cera waited to see if someone or something would strike back at her. Nothing did.

The throbbing pain in her face eased a little, and blinking, she made out a smear of light. She swiped away the blood running down from gashes on her forehead, and she could see more. Obviously, the demon hadn t actually ripped out her eyes after all. It was venom in its talons, or some magical effect, that had extinguished her vision temporarily.

There was nothing left of the skull lord but ash and cinders, and no sign of the demon whatsoever. Either it was fighting elsewhere in the roaring frenzy of the battle, or it had fled the scene when its master died.

In any case, it wasn t flying around Cera anymore, and for that, she was grateful. She had nothing left to fight it with, either physically or magically. Still flanked by her phantom bodyguards, she retreated toward the relative safety of a section of the crypt her comrades controlled, before noticing a surging confusion in one of the doorways.

The glabrezu aimed a pair of its oversized pincers at Jhesrhi. Pulses of purple light lit the black claws from within.

She threw herself to the side. A blast of toxic force pounded the spot she d just vacated, cracking that piece of the floor and flinging bits of stone into the air.

What does it take to kill the thing? she wondered. She d already burned most of the fur off the top of it and charred the flesh underneath. A dozen of Vandar s berserkers had given their lives to help him cut its legs to ribbons. But it still wouldn t fall down.

She lifted her staff in both hands and called to the stone in the ceiling. For centuries, she told it, the demon tormented you and made you sick. Now you can take your revenge. I ll help you.

The ceiling extruded a pair of enormous hands. They clapped shut around the demon s head and squeezed.

The glabrezu thrashed and beat uselessly at the clenching, grinding trap with its claws. I ve got it! Jhesrhi thought. But suddenly the glabrezu vanished and reappeared just to the left of where it had been, which was to say, free of the hands. The fiend smashed the rocky appendages with a sweep of its arm. Still attuned to the stone, Jhesrhi heard it cry out in pain.

In need of a moment to center herself and refocus her energies, she backpedaled. As she did so, she noticed the warriors stag men, mostly pouring into the vault through the same arch that had previously admitted her and the rest of their comrades.

There was nothing inherently wrong with that. The crypt was where Aoth had wanted to make a stand, and all troops were supposed to make their way into it as expeditiously as was consistent with good order and protecting their rear. But she could tell the stag men weren t hurrying in to fight. They were fleeing, bumping into their allies, knocking them down, and trampling them in their haste, spreading alarm and disarray.

Their little army obviously didn t have much of a rearguard anymore. Something was routing it, and that same something threatened to stab into the very heart of the company just as soon as the fleeing stag men cleared the way.

Jhesrhi decided that the dismantling rearguard was an even bigger problem than the glabrezu. But what could she do about it when she was on the wrong end of the passageway?

She cast about and saw that Vandar s berserkers had successfully defended another of the doorways leading into the chamber, killing or repulsing the enemy who d attacked from that direction. There were just a couple of Rashemi there, keeping watch.

Jhesrhi reached out again to the stone around her. Upset that it had taken harm at her behest, its mind tried to tug away from her own.

I m sorry, she told it, but for something as big as you, that hurt was just a tiny scratch. I need you. Show me how that tunnel connects to the one next to it.

The stone didn t answer for a moment. Then a diagram of sorts flowed into view before her inner eye.

Thank you, she said.

So far, so good. She knew that no one soldier, even a wizard, should venture through any part of the maze alone. She looked for warriors to accompany her, but most of the berserkers were already engaged in one vital struggle or another. The only exceptions were casualties, pale and shaky from pain, blood loss, and the sickness that overtook them when their rage had run its course. Several of the least enfeebled were shouting and waving their arms in a futile attempt to bring the influx of frightened rearguarders under control.

For want of anyone better, Jhesrhi strode in the direction of the stag men. They spotted her, first one and then another, and her approach did what the Rashemi couldn t. The creatures stopped struggling to shove farther away from whatever was behind them and peered at her with brown, shining eyes.

What is it? she wondered, unsettled. What is it they think they see?

But she knew it wasn t the time to ponder the question. Hoping it would further impress them, she cloaked herself in flame.

During her time with the stag men, she d learned that although they couldn t speak, they all understood at least a bit of Elvish. So she switched to what she knew of that tongue, shouted for the stag warriors to follow her, and reinforced the command by sweeping her staff at the archway that was clear. Then she strode in that direction.

For a heartbeat, the stag warriors stayed right where they were, and she thought that, whatever the basis of their interest in her, it wasn t profound enough to overcome their fear. A moment later, their bells chiming and hooves clattering on the floor, they trotted after her, between the surprised berserker sentries, through the litter of bloody corpses, and on down the passageway.

She wanted to tell them to silence their bells but didn t know the right words to give the order. The glow of her fiery mantle would likely alert the enemy that they were coming in any case, and she wasn t willing to douse that for fear that it would undermine the confidence of her troops.

Voicing a dozen screams and snarls at once, a fiend or an undead creature at first glance, Jhesrhi couldn t tell which scrambled out of the mouth of a branching tunnel. The thing was a head taller than she was, and almost as broad as it was high, with dozens of grimacing, mad-looking faces protruding from its slate-gray skin. The visages on its torso might have been flayed from adult men and women, while the ones running down its thick, knotted limbs dwindled in size until they were as small as the faces of newborn babies. It rushed at her with its hands outstretched.

She met the creature with a flare of flame that produced a kind of hollow pang in the core of her. The creature staggered and shrieked from its various mouths. Although covered in burns, it caught its balance and kept shambling forward. She prepared to cast another spell, but four of the stag warriors streamed past her, intercepted the thing, and drove their spears into it until it collapsed.

She supposed that was just as well, because the twinge of almost-pain had been a warning that she d already expended a considerable amount of her power. She was likely to need the remainder for what was to come.

Two more turns brought her and her comrades into the tunnel behind whatever was putting the remnants of the rearguard to flight. She squinted, trying to make sense of the scene before her even though the figures in the foreground nearly blocked out everything behind them.

It looked like a force of undead had come up behind the rearguard as she and her companions had similarly come up behind it. Some of the revenants were witches, and they d apparently panicked the rearguard by killing the Stag King and regaining mastery of the telthors he d previously wrested from their control.

Jhesrhi was able to infer so much in just a heartbeat because, as she d feared, the enemy had heard her and her stag men approaching, and the durthans had left off assailing the rearguard to turn and confront the newcomers. A witch in dark robes and a black mask that might be tarnished silver held the Stag King s antler weapon like a staff. A wise woman in red dangled his severed head. Their eyes gleamed like stars, and phantom wolves and badgers crouched at the witches feet.

The durthans pointed their arcane weapons and recited incantations. The virulence of their curses swept down the passage in a wave of greenish phosphorescence. Patches of the stonework cracked and crumbled as it passed.

Jhesrhi rattled off words of defense. Her own power manifested as a burst of flame that met the oncoming shimmer and burned the poison out of it.

She struck back by calling for fire to leap up from the stones beneath her opponents. But the witch in the silver mask nullified the spell before it had even started to manifest with a contemptuous-looking flick of the antler-axe. The weapon was no doubt a powerful talisman.

The two sides traded attacks for a while, with neither able to penetrate the other s arcane defenses. Jhesrhi decided that she was a more powerful wizard than any of those standing against her, but the weight of their numbers offset that advantage.

While she dueled with her sister mages, spirit animals and undead pounced out of the archways in her vicinity, or simply lunged from solid stone. Stabbing with their spears and slashing with their swords, the stag warriors protected her from them.

Darts of ragged darkness pierced her cloak of fire, and a stab of chill made her clench and gasp. She tried to bring the ceiling down to bury the witches, but nothing happened. Not, she perceived, because the undead had countered the magic, but because the spell had simply fumbled its grip.

This failure was a warning that her current approach couldn t win the fight. Her foes were wearing her down. While still attacking and defending furiously, she tried to think about the situation as her friends might see it.

Aoth and Khouryn would say her current objective wasn t to destroy the creatures who were striving so doggedly to kill her. It was to keep the force they commanded from punching through what little was left of the rearguard and taking the Rashemi by surprise. And Gaedynn, grinning his crooked grin, would tell her that when neither skill nor strength could prevail, it was time to bluff.

Jhesrhi did her best to arrange her mouth into a convincing sneer, like a cruel goddess in mortal disguise who d tired of toying with her puny opponents and was ready to demonstrate the full measure of her power. She made her corona of flame burn brighter, cast fire before her in a continuous, roaring flare, and marched forward.

Advancing into the teeth of the enemies curses made it even harder to blunt and deflect their force. Her limbs throbbed and cramped as more and more of the embodied malice slipped past her guard. But she didn t allow the pain to show in her face, make her break stride, or interrupt the steady outpouring of fire from the head of her staff. Instead, she shaped portions of the blaze into the semblance of furious griffons made of flame.

As she and her flare drew steadily closer, the telthors clustered around the witches. They cringed and peered up anxiously at their mistresses. And after another stride or two, the durthans began to fall prey to the same anxiety. Despite the masks and voluminous robes, Jhesrhi could see their fear in the way they tensed and balked.

The witch in the silver mask snarled, This way! She scrambled into a side passage, and her companions scurried after her. An instant after the last of them had disappeared, an enormous spider web burst into existence in the mouth of the tunnel, no doubt to prevent pursuit.

Panting, profoundly grateful and somewhat surprised the bluff had succeeded, Jhesrhi allowed her flare to gutter out. She leaned on her staff and, with an aching, trembling arm that felt almost too heavy to lift, waved the stag warriors on to attack the lesser undead still trying to cut and claw their way into the glabrezu s crypt.

Vandar had given himself over so utterly to rage that it was like the feeling was the living creature, and he, just a weapon in his grip. And that was fortunate. It kept him cutting, lunging, leaping, and dodging, when by all rights, his limbs should have been feeble and slow with exhaustion. It kept him attacking past the point where a sensible man might have succumbed to futility and despair.

Yet despite his fury, a part of him noticed as his most formidable allies dropped out of the struggle. At the start, while he and his brothers had assailed the glabrezu with swords, axes, and spears, the outlanders had seared it with thunderbolts, flame, and shafts of burning light. But those blasts had stopped coming. Unable to divert his attention from the fiend, Vandar didn t know why. He wondered if the glabrezu s magic had killed Aoth, Jhesrhi, and Cera, too.

Whatever had become of them, it was his fight his and the Griffon Lodge s. And despite the evidence of the pulped and dismembered Rashemi bodies scattered about the floor, Vandar still believed they could win it. Surely the enchantments in the red sword could kill the giant, but not as long as it was only cutting up the creature s extremities. He knew he had to find a way to reach its vitals.

He shouted to attract its attention and rushed at its right foot. It struck at him like he d hoped it would, but not in the way he had wanted. Instead it bellowed a word of power. The magic stabbed pain through the core of him and made blood stream from his nose.

He snarled the pain away and lunged again. Then, as he d hoped, a pair of huge pincers plunged down from on high to catch him and snip him to pieces. He jerked himself out of the way, and when the demon started to pull its extremity back, he sprang and wrapped his arms around the nearer of the claws.

The sharp edges cut him, and if the demon simply snapped its pincers shut, it would shear his arms off. But he d taken it by surprise, and instead it completed the action it had initially intended. It lifted its claws back into the air, and him along with them.

The glabrezu started to close its pincers, but, riding the rage, Vandar was a hair too quick for it. He heaved and swung himself onto the top of the claw, where he was still only an instant away from death. The fiend needed only to flip its arm to toss him up and catch him in its pincers or to hurl him across the vault to smash against the wall. But before it could do either, the beserker stood up and leaped at its chest.

The red sword drove into the glabrezu s burned, blackened flesh almost up to the hilt. For an instant, Vandar hung from the weapon like a mountaineer hanging from a piton. Then his weight pulled it sliding out of the wound.

He snatched frantically with his off hand and caught hold of a tuft of long, coarse hair that his spellcaster allies hadn t burned away. Dangling from that, he managed another thrust, then sensed or maybe it was the red sword perceiving it immense pincers reaching from behind him to pick him off his perch like a nit.

But the claws never closed on him. Instead, with a seeming slowness that reminded him of the start of an avalanche, the demon crumpled to its knees. Screeching, his lodge brothers scrambled to stab and cut at the lower part of its torso.

Trying to control his breathing, Aoth knew he was tiring and his undead opponent wasn t. He needed to end the confrontation. He let his targe drop a little to invite a cut in the high line.

The blaspheme obliged, or at least it seemed to. But as Aoth shifted to avoid the blow, he saw it was only a feint. The true attack had looped low to slice his leg out from underneath him.

Because his shield was on the wrong side of his body, he had to parry the attack with his spear. Shouting a word of defense, he stopped the life-drinking weapon a finger-length short of his flesh, although the clanging impact jolted his arm all the way up to the shoulder.

He set his spear ablaze with chaotic force and thrust at the blaspheme s flank. The point split the creature s mail shirt and pierced the gray, ridged skin inside.

But at the same moment, the blaspheme cut and caught the side of Aoth s head. His helmet clanked, and, stunned, staggering, he reeled off balance.

Frantically, he struggled to prepare for what was coming next. Swaying, he was actually recovering his equilibrium, and shifting his targe and sword into a proper guard, but oh so sluggishly, compared to the speed with which the blaspheme was presenting its blade.

But as the undead warrior made a horizontal cut, one of the ice trolls it had led into the vault lunged between it and Aoth. Intent on closing with some Rashemi or stag man, it apparently didn t notice it was rushing right into the middle of somebody else s fight.

The greatsword bit deep, and the troll collapsed, its flesh shriveling. The blaspheme yanked on the hilt of its weapon to free it from the corpse.

By the Luckmaiden s grace, it took a moment. Time enough for Aoth s thoughts to snap back into focus and for him to rattle off a spell.

Nearly as long as the blaspheme s weapon, a blade made of blue phosphorescence shimmered into being. It flew at the undead and cut at it. It parried, and the greatsword rang.

Fence with that for a while, thought Aoth. Meanwhile, he d take the blaspheme apart with further spells.

But as he took a breath to begin, the patchwork warrior snarled a single word. Aoth had never heard it before, but the charge of power it carried set his teeth on edge and made his battered head throb anew. It also prompted the corpse of the ice troll to make a grab for his ankle.

Aoth barely managed to jump away. The reanimated ice troll heaved itself up off the floor.

All right, he thought, it s a race. I need to get rid of you before the blaspheme finds a way to get rid of my flying sword.

Suddenly, a disembodied female voice sounded across the vault, magic making it audible despite the roar of combat. Uramar! it called. Fall back! Everyone, fall back!

Still defending himself against the sword of light, the blaspheme started to do precisely that, and its troops with it. It occurred to Aoth that a prudent man might be glad to let it go. But he was certain that the blaspheme was a leader maybe the leader of the undead conspiracy threatening Rashemen. He set about stabbing and burning the ice troll out of his way as quickly as he could.

Unfortunately, it took a few heartbeats, and after that, he found himself facing clanking, steaming boarlike constructs of articulated steel and brass products of Raumathari sorcery, probably that the enemy had deployed to recover their retreat. Once he and his allies destroyed those, the vault was theirs, but the blaspheme had long gone.