are dangerous. Now, Lady Luck has favored us. Grontaix is right there. We don t have to roam through her apartments hunting her. We re going to make the most of our good fortune by hitting hard and fast. He told his comrades what he wanted them to do.
What about me? asked Zyl.
Aoth had no idea what, if anything, the rat could do to help, and he didn t feel like investing the time to find out. Just make yourself useful however you can, he said.
They all took deep breaths and shifted their grips on their weapons. Cera murmured a prayer that made Aoth and everyone else, presumably feel refreshed and clearheaded. With a thought, Jhesrhi cloaked herself in fire, then she spoke to the wall. She wanted the stone to open fast, not quietly, and it split with a deafening crack.
Startled, Grontaix and her consorts jerked around. Aoth scrambled through the breach, leveled his spear, snapped a word of command, and so cast one of the spells stored inside the weapon. A cloud of greenish vapor burst into existence to envelop the gazebo. Aoth could smell its putrid stench even at a distance, and inside the billowing mist, someone started retching.
The poet cyclops reeled out of the cloud with his dulcimer still in hand. His gaze stabbed at Aoth, who felt a twinge of headache, but with Cera s blessing fortifying him, he felt nothing worse. He hurled darts of azure light from the head of his spear, and they plunged into the cyclops s torso.
The brute staggered but didn t go down. He hurled the oversized zither, and it flew at Aoth like a stone from a catapult.
Caught by surprise, Aoth just barely managed to jump aside. The dulcimer slammed into the wall behind him with a crash of wood and a jangle of strings.
The cyclops drew his blade and advanced. Aoth poised his spear to defend, but Vandar screeched like a griffon and raced past him to engage the giant. Aoth wondered if the berserker was actually following the plan or just charging headlong at the first foe to present himself. Either way, it freed Aoth up to look for Lady Grontaix.
As he cast about, he glimpsed Cera chanting and swinging her mace over her head. A shaft of searing light blazed from the head of the weapon and struck the cyclops who d fed his lady the mushroom caps squarely in the face. He cried out and clapped his hand over his eye.
Meanwhile, Jhesrhi chanted at Aoth s back. Other than the breach she d just created, there were two ways into the vault, and her next task was to seal them before other cyclopes came rushing in. Masses of stone banged, crunched, and shifted as her power pulled them shut like curtains. Shaken loose, chunks of rock fell from the ceiling.
Grontaix blundered out of Aoth s conjured fog. She had mushroom-and-red-wine vomit spattered down the front of her silken gown.
You want me! Aoth shouted, advancing a couple paces. I made the mist!
She responded by closing her small eye and glaring with the large one. Though he d never encountered a fomorian before, Aoth had heard that, like their cyclops vassals, they possessed the power of the evil eye. He twisted his head so as to not meet her gaze directly.
It didn t matter. Chathi died again, burning in an instant when the rod in her hand exploded. Mirror plunged his insubstantial sword into Szass Tam s ravaged skeletal form, and they both blazed bright, but when the light faded, the ghost was gone, and the lich lord remained. Szass Tam turned, tore Bareris s head from his shoulders and then advanced on Aoth.
Nor was he the only one. His staff glimmering with magic, Malark glided in on the sellsword s flank. Alasklerbanbastos and Tchazzar loomed above Aoth s other foes, each dragon whipping his head forward and opening his jaws wide as he spewed his breath weapon.
Aoth cried out and staggered, dropping his guard. Grontaix raced forward, her huge hands extended to seize him.
Aoth waited until she was nearly on top of him. Then, pleased that his trick had worked, he dodged, charged his spear with power, and thrust at her knee as she pounded by.
He could do it because, while it was by no means pleasant to watch people he d cared about die all over again, or to see a selection of old enemies attacking him all at once, his truesight made the illusory nature of the phantasms immediately and absolutely apparent. Thus they couldn t disorient or even hurt him as they might have another. But pretending they had was a good way to lure Grontaix in close.
Aoth s spear point tore flesh and scraped bone. The fomorian screamed and staggered, but didn t fall. Instead, she stumbled around to face him again. He rattled off an incantation that put him at the hub of a spinning wheel of blades. Floating at chest level, the defense threatened any foe who ventured into striking distance. But in all likelihood, it would only slash the giant s extremities, not her vital organs.
Too late he saw that Grontaix didn t mean to rush him again. Not yet, anyway. Instead, she invoked magic of her own. She thrust out her fist at him like she was miming a punch, and green and yellow light swirled from the cat s-eye ring on her middle finger to make a kaleidoscopic pattern in the air.
Aoth was no longer looking at illusions that he could recognize for what they were and ignore thereafter. The light was only light, but it was supremely beautiful; its power to fascinate augmented by both the atmosphere of the Feywild and his own preternaturally acute vision. He strained to look away, break free, but there was a treacherous part of him that didn t really want to.
Recognizing that she had him under her spell, Grontaix leered, gripped a little sculpted pear tree, and, with astonishing strength, twisted it and ripped it up from the floor. Aoth saw that the makeshift club would make it easier for her to strike at him without coming in contact with his spinning blades, that the hammering length of black stone would shatter his bones and pulp his flesh, and still, he couldn t quite bring himself to move. With blood running from her wounded knee, his foe limped forward.
Suddenly Zyl darted past Aoth and up the fomorian s bloody leg. He paused for an instant to bite and scratch at the gash the spear had opened, then scurried onward. He vanished under the hem of her gown.
Grontaix roared and pounded with her fist at the moving lump under the fabric. Somehow, she missed, and only managed to thump herself. Zyl scrambled from her front to her back, where she d have trouble reaching, and where, Aoth assumed, he clung gnawing at her flesh.
Still roaring, the fomorian heaved the stone tree over her head and thrust it repeatedly downward like a huge, unwieldy back scratcher. Shaken loose, silver pears fell clanking and rolled clattering across the floor.
Meanwhile, a cyclops at the periphery of Aoth s vision swung his sword at the flying mace of golden light that was assailing him in turn. By keeping the giant occupied, the conjured weapon freed up Cera to try to help Aoth. With her voice shrill but still as controlled as spellcasting required she rattled off a prayer.
It set him free. Suddenly, though the floating, shifting pattern was still beautiful, its hold on him ended. For an instant, he felt a belated horror at having been so helpless, but he shook it off.
By that time, the scraping stone branches had ripped Grontaix s gown from her body. The garment hung from the tree like a tattered flag on a pole. She rammed her weapon downward yet again, and it finally brushed Zyl from his perch and dashed him to the floor. She lurched around, exposing the hump that, crisscrossed with welts, cuts, and bite marks, looked like someone had flogged her, and glared down at the rat. He thrashed like he was in the throes of a seizure. She swung the tree over her head.
Aoth cast a fan-shaped flare of flame from his spear, and it splashed across her crooked, bloody back. She howled and staggered.
I m still here, Ugly! he bellowed.
Finish with me before you start killing rats!
She turned back around like he wanted her to. The force of her glare was like a hammer slamming into his face. He staggered and cried out, and, as fast as her wounded leg would allow, she rushed him.
By the time Aoth had recovered his balance, the stone tree was whirling at him in a horizontal arc. He leaped back, and it missed his body but caught the end of his spear. The force of the blow tore the weapon from his grasp and stabbed pain up his arm. He suspected it was nearly broken or dislocated.
Aoth snatched out the short, heavy sword he carried as a backup. He wasn t as adept with it, nor had he painstakingly infused it with as many enchantments as he had the longer weapon, but it would have to do.
He would have to get close to the fomorian and stay there, so the blade could reach her. She would have a more awkward time of it attacking him from the shorter distance. He scrambled toward her just as she followed up with a backhand swing.
