Elminster in Hell

nearer….

Cursing, Nergal lifted taloned hands and wove a spell mighty enough to leave him trembling-or rather, several spells spun together. It cost him a lot of his strength and something precious that he'd been saving for a long time-a sphere of fused rock crystal that held a drop of blood from a certain other devil.

Yet Nergal was smiling through the brimstone burst. His magic snatched him away to another comer of Avernus. At the same time it plucked Elminster Auraar elsewhere, into the very lap of the devil whose blood he'd been keeping safe.

Two breaths later, the Simbul came down through the sky like an Avernan fireball, spitting lightning before her onto the bare rocks where her foe had been.

They triggered a blast that should have slain her-and did hurl her back across the sky.

She smiled grimly through that battering. She knew El's captor had hurled her beloved in one direction while taking himself to safety in another. She little cared. The scaly skin of this archdevil or that was of no interest to her. Avenging torment was a task for another day. She was here to bring the Old Mage home.

Her mind seeking was fleeting, this time-he was over there. Powering herself out of her tumble, heedless of the magic she spent in doing so, the Witch-Queen of Aglarond turned in the air and raced off in another direction.

All over Avernus, devils dropped whatever they were doing and scrambled to get a look at this new entertainment.

***

Tasnya arched over her bed of blood. She was a dark and sinuous thing of many spine-studded breasts. The abishai that wrestled her screamed as her long, curving spines transfixed them. The sound rose in a keening music that made drinking their blood all the more pleasant.

'Well, well'Tasnya purred,'what have we here?'

The helpless thing that Nergal had been amusing himself with arrived suddenly. It was but a passing distraction. She spell-swept it aside to smash bloodily against distant rocks. Nergal no doubt had laid spying or explosive magic on the thing.

Moments later, a bolt of otherworldly fire with a furious archmage in it streaked across the sky.

Tasnya of the Torments rolled over. Writhing, screaming abishai covered her like a grotesque, blood-dripping cloak. She lifted a lazy hand to trace a spell that called on the blood around her, sending forth bloodfire in a hungry arm.

It swept up to snatch the onrushing human-and it tightened into a coiling, shrinking spiral.

The Simbul swerved to avoid it-and then swerved again.

Tasnya smiled like a hungry wolf and sent a careful spell right at the intruder's face.

It met and shocked back from a spell coming the other way. Lightning clawed.The ground shook. Bloodfire lances flew in all directions, impaling abishai and Nergal's pet.

Tasnya lifted an eyebrow and sat up smoothly in the gore. She awaited her foe with lengthening, spearlike spines. No spell could get through her own curtain of magic.The bloodfire wrapped her foe in a shrinking cone that would keep her from getting away. As their spells wrestled, it would be Tasnya 's Hell-spawned body against the frail, onrushing human.

'Breast to breast, bite to bite, claw to claw,' she murmured eagerly, anticipating much amusement-and a lot of magic-soon to come.

The very air roared as the Simbul of Aglarond came racing down at the waiting, gloating archdevil. Spell after spell snarled and contended around her, caught up in the archdevil's own awakening magic. Flames of wet, glistening blood roared around her, rising into a tunnel, forcing her down, down toward waiting spines….

Whispering frantically, the fiirious sorceress did the only thing she could. Heedless of torn nails and bleeding fingers, she unbuckled and unsnapped and tore off armor for all she was worth. Metal sang and shrieked off metal as she spell-thrust greaves and plates and all in front of her, into a shifting shield. A grinding chaos of curved metal hurtled toward waiting spines, glowing with the spells the Simbul was still hissing when the crash came.

The sorceress screamed.A spine as thick as she burst up through the crashing steel and laid open her side. Nude and blood-drenched, she crashed into rock after hard rock after harder boulder. She bounced and rolled with clenched teeth. The last of her spells collapsed, and the burning blood sent by her foe ate its sizzling way into the rocks all around her.

Behind her, the archdevil had stopped screaming. There was nothing left of it but flames in a pool of scorched gore. The sticky, blackened hollow of bone and stone was still being hacked at by the pieces of armor she'd animated into a score of slicing, chopping, stabbing blades. Vicious steel rang tirelessly on unfeeling stone.

'Gone elsewhere to rise again, if it knew spellcraft that strong,' the Simbul muttered, ignoring the pain of her burns. Elminster would doubtless need the amulets at her throat and beneath her breasts far more than she did, if he-

— was anywhere to be seen.There was nothing on the rocks where he'd been but a dark splash of blood. Maggots squirmed eagerly to roll in it.

The Simbul sighed. 'See Hell in an afternoon, and make sure lots of folk remember your visit.'

Wearily, the boldest flying devils began to circle in the distance where they could see the battlefield.

The Simbul spun a spell that would bring her armor of tirelessly hacking blades back to her. Perhaps she could hang them around her, in a forest of moving, hostile steel, and fly on awaiting her turn to embrace foes.

On the other hand, she was in no hurry to end up as a blackened pool of blood enlivened by a few flames. The Simbul looked around at the harsh peaks and the bat-winged devils perching in long lines atop them.

'Asmodeus,' she told the empty air, 'perhaps we could bargain. You give me the man I came for-alive, untainted, and unharmed-and I'll slaughter whichever dozen arch-devils you'd like removed from the scene. Have we a deal?'

The sound that raced through the rocks under her bare and bloody feet seemed a thunderous snort of amusement. When it reached the peaks around her, the hundreds of devils took wing in frightened unison, flapping frantically away in all directions.

Alone in Hell, the Simbul gathered her magic and her garments once more about her. 'Well,' she muttered with a shrug, as she knelt to pick up a twisted shard of armor plate,'if you should change your mind…'

***

Ho! Ho! Quite a lady lover you've got there, little worm.

I'u. Give you to another unfriend of mine soon.. Just as soon as i get well down into these juicy memories here….

[scream] hah! Not so much fun taunting me now, eh? Am i finally getting close to something you'd rather i not have? Dear, dear…

[roaring bellows of diabolic laughter]

Chapter Eighteen

HELL RISING

The spinagon toppled off the ridge, its head an empty, burnt husk. Smoke streamed from the sockets that had held its eyes. Nergal wanted no trail left back to him, and the work of his coerced spy was done.

It had watched the pit fiend that was not a pit fiend race past like a dark fireball-wings folded behind it, unused.The Simbul cared about hiding her armor of whirling blades but did not care that there was something odd about the shape she'd assumed. If wandering abishai drew back from attacking the pit fiend that was somehow