staff, crossing the handful of paces between the elf and the demon in less than the time it took for Valmaxian to close his eyes against the sudden light.
It was too bright. Valmaxian knew that right away. The missiles wouldn't generate that much light.
He opened his eyes, blinking rapidly. The purple splotches cleared soon enough, and the demon was gone. The missiles might have hurt it, certainly hadn't killed it, couldn't possibly have disintegrated it, but it was gone.
'Chasianna,' Valmaxian breathed, then turned and ran for the stairs, muttering the words to the spell that would take him in a flash to the home of the only elf on Toril he'd ever truly loved.
Valmaxian stepped into Chasianna's home through the last of a series of dimension doors, holding the staff out in front of him. He expected to see the demon En'Sel'Dinen there, expected that Chasianna and her house retainers would be fighting the creature off. He expected to join the fight. The last thing he expected was nothing, but that was exactly what greeted him.
The tastefully appointed sitting room into which he stepped was dark and quiet. A gold filigreed end table had been tipped over, a crystal vase shattered on the floor next to it, and a single long-stemmed lily lay already wilting on the damp rug.
'Chasianna!' Valmaxian shouted, letting his voice echo in the sitting room's domed ceiling.
He held his breath waiting for a reply, but none came. He scanned the room and saw nothing else out of place. The room was sprinkled with valuable antiques, some enchanted by Kelaerede himself. Valmaxian had come to know every one of them, and none were missing.
He crossed quickly to the wide doorway that emptied into the foyer. He stepped out onto the checkerboard marble tiles, his boots clicking and sending a rattle of sharp echoes up the soaring stairway.
'Chasianna!' he shouted again, waiting as his voice followed the footstep echoes up the stairs. Again, there was no answer.
Something madehim keep walking, stopping at the foot of the stairs. He'd opened his mouth to shout for her again when he heard it. At first it sounded like a scream, and that sent a cold chill racing down Valmaxian's spine. It wasn't a scream, though. It was a less natural, less elven sound. It sounded like wind whistling through-through what? Rocks? A narrow canyon?
Valmaxian didn't stop to think why he might have drawn that specific conclusion. Instead he raced up the stairs trailing his robe and the staff-held firmly in one hand, the other sliding up along the banister-behind him.
'Chasianna!' he shouted at least once more as he ascended the stairway.
His legs began to ache as he rounded the top of the stairs, but he ignored the pain. He came to the wide double doors-closed-to Chasianna's bedchamber and realized two things at the same time: the upstairs maid was not there to open the doors for him, and there was a bright red light-wholly unlike the warm orange glow of Chasianna's hearth fire-burning from under the door.
Valmaxian put a hand to the wrought-iron door handles and recoiled from the heat. He cursed and gathered up a corner of his robe, using it like a potholder to open the door. He stepped into a blast furnace.
Chasianna's personal suite was large, befitting a woman of her class. Where Valmaxian expected to see a wall some hundred feet in front of him, where the bed would be, there was nothing. It seemed as if the whole side of the house, with the servant's wing behind it, had been broken off. The room had been opened to the outside, but it was not Siluvanede Valmaxian saw there. The 'outside' was a blasted landscape of sand and rock-dead, barren, and bathed in a blood-red light. The wind poured out of it in unnaturally sustained waves of near-blistering heat. The air held a foul odor-no, a thousand foul odors-and searing grains of white-hot sand.
Valmaxian stood at the doorway of his lover's bedchamber and stared straight into the depths of the Abyss itself.
'Chasianna!'
A figure stepped out from behind a twisted spur of wind-carved rock.
Valmaxian stepped forward, the staff tapping the floor next to him, and said, 'Chasianna… is it you?'
A second figure eased from around another rock, then a third, and a fourth. Valmaxian stepped forward again, his heart beating rapidly, sweat beginning to pour from him in sheets.
More of them appeared from the sand-blown air of the Abyss. They were bent, bloated forms not unlike elves in that each had two arms, two legs, and a head. The comparison stopped there. None of them stood more than four feet tall. Their pale, gray skin shone almost purple in that hellish light. Their mouths hung open, revealing irregular rows of serrated fangs. From the tips of their chubby, almost childlike fingers grew long, heavy claws. There were more than a dozen of them, and when Valmaxian stopped moving they rushed forward.
Valmaxian thrust the staff out in front of him and spoke the now-familiar command. Bolts of arcane energy spat from the tip of the staff-five of them-and split into separate paths on their way to the bloated humanoids. Five of them fell, but the others came forward, so Valmaxian sent five more missiles into their midst and dropped five more.
He could kill many of them that way, but for every five that fell, seven or eight more appeared from the rocks and concealing wind behind them. Valmaxian spoke a different command. The first little demon that touched what Valmaxian had conjured in front of him recoiled in unhurt surprise from the solid wall that was there but could not be seen. The other little demons-dretches, Valmaxian recalled-railed against the wall, pounding at what looked like thin air, scratching at it, even biting it.
Valmaxian stepped through the gate and felt as if he was falling. The effect passed a heartbeat later and he was aware of the heat radiating from the coarse sand. It started to burn his skin, as hot as a summer sun, and he could feel it on the soles of his feet even through his sturdy boots.
Valmaxian looked up and caught the eye of a particularly bulbous dretch on the other side of the invisible wall. The thing bared its spiny teeth at him. Its eyes bulged and its nostrils flared. Valmaxian felt a shiver course through his sweating arms. He drew in a breath and held it, then realized the thing was using magic. Valmaxian shrugged it off. He would not be scared away that easily. He would not be scared at all.
Valmaxian smiled and started to utter the complex words of a spell. The dretch wanted to scare him, but Valmaxian knew how to scare people too, and he knew how to do it better. The spell rolled off his tongue, and his hands traced the intricate patterns in the air in front of him. Valmaxian could feel the energy burst out of him. He couldn't see anything, but he knew the dretch and several of its rotund companions could. They saw their worst nightmares, their most vile imaginings, the terror that consumed their hearts, smash into their fragile psyches and explode. They ran, losing their water on the burning sands, screaming, gibbering in some freakish Abyssal dialect that Valmaxian was glad he couldn't understand.
Not all of them ran, though. There was a way around the wall of force and a few of the dretches found it. That was enough to lead the others in that direction. Dozens more kept drifting out from behind stones, and a few even dug their way from under the sand like zombies rising from the grave. Valmaxian peppered them with glowing missiles of concentrated Weave. He dropped five at a time: five, ten, fifteen, twenty…
One dretch got within a few paces of Valmaxian and spat out a cloud of gas. The vapor seemed to stick in the wind, moving with it but not as quickly as the sand that passed through it. It coalesced into a cloud of greenish gray smoke that looked like a miniature thunderhead. Valmaxian could smell the cloud from several paces away, and it almost made him gag. The smell was indescribable. Valmaxian rattled through another spell and held his arms out on each side of him. He roared an incoherent challenge, and a rush of wind spread out, knocking a few of the little demons off their feet and sending the roiling cloud of reek scattering into the blowing sand.
He'd had to concentrate at least a little to cast the spell, and in the time his attention was occupied a dretch drew sharp, jagged claws across his midsection. Valmaxian hissed in pain and struck out at the dretch with the staff. The fine weapon pulped the creature's head, spraying green and gray fluids across the sand in front of Valmaxian. Another of the little demons came up to take the headless dretch's place, and Valmaxian swung the staff around, smacking it into the thing's chest hard enough to shatter ribs, break skin, and spill out the fiend's stomach. It died squealing, then everything went dark.
It wasn't a natural darkness. It wasn't night, and Valmaxian wasn't blind. It was a darkness that only the Weave could create. Valmaxian reacted quickly. He could hear more of the things near him and getting closer. He hissed through a spell and felt his skin tighten, felt something touch him in an angry, violent manner, but it didn't hurt. There came a clang like something hard banging on steel. Valmaxian smiled, though it wasn't easy since his spell had turned his skin to iron.
