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.
