They had to exit the poison cloud and come to grips with their attackers. Despite his inability to catch his breath, and the fiery pain crawling down his throat into his lungs, he started running up the last few risers.
Then he faltered and found that he simply couldn’t continue. His attackers were exerting some sort of psychic compulsion to prevent it.
That meant he and his comrades had to escape out the other side of the fumes. “Back!” he croaked.
They turned and staggered downward. Until Khouryn, who was now in the lead, froze. An instant later, the dragonborn did too. Medrash could just distinguish other figures at the foot of the stairs. He had no idea where they’d been hiding when he’d first entered the shop. But somewhere, obviously, and now here they were, exerting the same influence as their accomplices on the floor above. Caging the intruders inside the toxic vapor.
Still coughing uncontrollably, Balasar collapsed.
The lightning, the fall, and the spray of vitriol, all coming within the span of a heartbeat or two, had stunned Gaedynn into a dazed passivity. But a part of him knew it and screamed for him to move.
He glimpsed motion in the direction from which the lightning had come. The possibility of a second such attack broke the impasse inside him. The part that wanted to act became the whole.
He rolled to one knee. Thanks be to old Keen-Eye, his enchanted bow was still intact despite the abuse it had just sustained. In fact, it seemed to have come through better than he had, considering the ugly chars and blisters on his skin.
But he didn’t yet feel the pain, not really, and praise the Great Archer for that too. He couldn’t afford to feel it.
His teary eyes could just make out a robed figure. He drew back an arrow and let it fly. The shaft buried itself in the robed man’s torso, and he toppled backward.
But at the same instant, Gaedynn heard rushing footsteps. He jerked around. All he could discern were vague flickers of motion, and this time, his smarting, watery eyes weren’t the problem. The oncoming foes were invisible, at least most of the time.
And they were already too close for any more archery. He leaped to his feet, crossed his arms, and snatched out the two short swords he’d brought along for backup weapons.
Unable to see his foes except for a moment now and then, hoping sheer ferocity would daunt them, he slashed madly. Once, he felt his left-hand blade slice something solid. Another time, he parried a stroke by pure instinct. Twice, an attack thumped him but failed to penetrate his brigandine.
He knew his luck couldn’t hold, but he was less afraid than outraged by the sheer unfairness of his situation. He and his companions had ventured forth to catch one murderer. Then they’d learned to Jet’s cost that the one was really two. Now it appeared two had multiplied into a whole houseful, and they could throw lightning and acid around and turn invisible.
The invisibility at least should have posed no problem for Aoth, and the war-mage had in fact regained his feet. But, eyes compressed to streaming slits in his blistered, mottled face, the man who could famously see everything didn’t seem to be doing any more damage with his jabbing spear than Gaedynn was with his swords. Apparently the acid spray had had an even more deleterious effect on his sight.
He and Gaedynn fought side by side, in the hallway where the staircase had come down, to prevent any of their unseen foes from slipping around behind them. Aoth growled a word of power, and frost leaped from the head of his spear. It painted the entire space before them white, and the hooded men as well.
Since he didn’t instantly follow up, it seemed that he still couldn’t see their foes, or at least not clearly. But Gaedynn could. He sprang, beat a short blade like his own out of line, and drove the point of his right-hand sword into an opponent’s guts.
He jerked the weapon free, and the Green Hands disappeared. “Again!” he shouted to Aoth.
But no more frost came. Gaedynn glanced around and saw that Aoth’s helmet was dented and askew, and, though he kept the spear shifting and thrusting in one of the basic defensive patterns, he looked unsteady on his feet.
And because of Gaedynn’s aggression, the two of them weren’t even in line anymore. Cutting and stabbing, he tried to retreat.
Then, behind him, Jhesrhi croaked words of command. Water splashed down over his head and everything else in the hallway like hundreds of buckets had overturned at once.
It washed the stinging acidic residue from his skin. It evidently washed it out of Aoth’s eyes too, and roused him from the daze induced by the knock he’d taken on the head. His eyes snapped open wide enough to reveal their blue fire. He stepped, stabbed, and the power in his spear blasted to pieces the man he’d just impaled.
Aoth then turned and hurled darts of green light in Gaedynn’s direction. They stopped short of him, vanishing as they pierced the two invisible foes between the sellswords. Who became visible as they crumpled to the floor.
Aoth pivoted again and hurled three lightningbolts down the hall in quick succession. The flashes dazzled Gaedynn, and the booms hurt his ears.
Afterward, Aoth lowered his spear and turned away from the steaming, twisted corpses he’d just created and the several small fires he’d started. Evidently this particular fight was over.
Gaedynn wiped the blades of his swords, returned them to their scabbards, and retrieved his bow. “That was quite… enthusiastic, there at the end.”
Aoth grunted. “After the Spellplague touched me, I was blind for a while. I suppose it’s the kind of experience that leaves a mark. Is everyone all right?”
“Not too bad,” Jhesrhi said. “I have an elixir to numb the pain and keep us on our feet.” She took a little pewter vial from her belt pouch, unscrewed the stopper, and took the first swallow herself. Gaedynn knew why. She would have found it difficult to drink from the container after someone else put his mouth on it.
As she handed the vial to Gaedynn, Aoth stooped over one of the Green Hands, then cursed. Gaedynn peered at the corpse and felt like doing the same.
Aoth possessed inhumanly keen sight, but even so, this was the first clear, close, unhurried look that he or his comrades had had at one of the killers. And now the unexpected shape of the hood was apparent. Or rather, the shape of the head inside it.
Aoth ripped the cowl away.
“We have to get to Khouryn,” Jhesrhi said.
Medrash’s helpless coughing made it impossible to recite any of his prayers. The pain burning throughout his respiratory system, and the knowledge that he could easily die breathing the poisonous vapor, further impaired his ability to focus his will.
But he would focus it. He had to help his comrades-and besides, the body and its distress were not the ultimate reality. Torm and his glory were.
He reached out to the god, and power like frigid spring water poured into him. He infused it with righteous fury, shaping it into a weapon, then brandished his sword. Flares of white light leaped from the blade to stab at the figures at the bottom of the stairs.
The attack rocked the Green Hands backward. Nearly tripping, Medrash staggered over the fallen Balasar, tried to slip past Khouryn, and again discovered he couldn’t advance any farther. He’d hurt the Green Hands, but not enough to make them lose control of the psychic wall they’d created.
He channeled more power, though it was even harder this time. He fixed his gaze on one of the killers and willed him to climb the stairs and come within reach of his sword.
The Green Hand took one lurching step. Another. Then, however, he gave a harsh, wordless cry, stopped, and retreated to his original position.
Blackness swam at the edges of Medrash’s vision. His legs started to give way, and he had to drop his sword and clutch the banister to keep from falling.
Torm’s glory was limitless, but a mortal’s capacity to draw from it was not. Medrash judged that at best, he
