hulking automaton of iron.
'Not really,' he answered.
'Well, that's unfortunate,' said the priest. 'Guess I'll have to do it the hard way.'
Grayth leaped into the room and aimed a powerful two-handed cut at the towering golem's knee. Holy steel clanged against animated iron with a terrible sound, and sparks flew from Grayth's blade, but all he achieved was a thin crease in the side of the construct's leg. The hulking machine pivoted and smashed its fists down at the Lathanderite, but Grayth backed away across the uneven floor, choosing to avoid the golem's terrible punches rather than try to parry them.
Now we know why the dragons haven't bothered with this place, Araevin thought grimly.
He followed Grayth into the room more carefully. The tower's ground floor was a large, round room with a sagging ceiling twenty feet overhead. The stairs leading to the upper stories were long gone, but rotten posts still stuck out of the sockets in the stone walls, circling the room as they led up. Once the chamber might have been some sort of workroom or laboratory. Old workbenches stood against the walls, and dusty old glassware was being smashed and broken at a furious rate by the attacking golem.
Maresa levitated in the air near the high ceiling, her white hair streaming around her as she hurled magical darts one after the other into the golem, which ignored them.
Ilsevele crouched atop a table, bow in hand. She took careful aim and fired a pair of arrows into the golem's back. One glanced off the thing's thick iron skin, but the other punctured a hole in the creature. The golem boomed and grated, its joints screeching like a rusted gate as it turned to face the latest attack.
'Maresa!' Araevin called. 'Forget those spells, they can't hurt the creature.'
'What do you want me to do?' the genasi snarled in frustration. 'My rapier wouldn't even dent that thing!'
'Distract it from Ilsevele. She has arrows that can pierce it, but we have to keep it away from her.'
'Distract it? How?' the genasi muttered, but she moved over to the wall and dislodged a large, loose stone from the wall. She grunted with effort, but managed to maintain her levitation spell and drift back over the iron golem before releasing the heavy stone. 'Here, try this, you rust bucket!'
The block dropped ten feet and caught the golem square on the top of its head with a tremendous crash! before tumbling off its shoulder and cracking the flagstone floor. The golem staggered in its tracks, its head marred by a large dent, but the construct simply steadied itself and looked up at the genasi drifting overhead.
Araevin crouched in the doorway, thinking hard. He knew a little about golems. The living statues were common enough as defenses in wizards' towers and magical fortresses. Tower Reilloch possessed a small number of the devices, hidden in various places. Golems were built to be immune to most magic, but some spells could affect them, if in unexpected ways. Magical rust would be the best way to attack a golem of iron, but he had no such spells.
What other elements might serve? he thought furiously. Cold might make it brittle; fire was unlikely to trouble it much. Lightning? A creature made of iron couldn't possibly avoid a lightning bolt…
'Grayth! Back off a bit,' he called.
As the cleric backed away, Araevin leveled his lightning wand at the golem and barked out the command word. With a roar like the tearing of an enormous sheet, the brilliant bolt slammed into the golem's chest. Arcs of electricity danced over its body. The golem lurched awkwardly and toppled backward, crushing a rotten old workbench, but it immediately climbed to its feet again.
Grayth chose that moment to dart in at the creature's back, ramming the point of his sword at a joint in the device's armor. The golem whirled on him and knocked the Lathanderite flying with one backhand blow of its mighty fist, but Grayth bounced back to his feet almost instantly. Araevin's protective spell had absorbed most of the blow for him. He started circling in more carefully. Meanwhile, Ilsevele shifted a few feet back, calmly sighted on the same joint that Grayth had pried open, and sent two more arrows deep into the constructs back. Sparks showered in its innards, and the golem stumbled to one knee. Abruptly it belched out a great cloud of horrible green gas, flooding the room with fumes.
Maresa was safe above the cloud, but Ilsevele threw a hand over her face and turned to scramble up the old sockets of the vanished staircase, leaping lightly from post to post as she climbed up and out of the bilious green vapors.
Araevin retreated back through the archway calling, 'Grayth! Get out of there!'
The cleric stumbled out of the mist, coughing and gagging. He managed to get through the archway before falling to all fours, his sword clattering to the ground beside him. Blood flecked his beard, and his face and hands smoked with the awful vapor. Araevin hurried to his side, but Grayth waved him off.
'Check on the others,' he gasped, 'I will be fine.'
He fumbled for his holy symbol and began to rasp the words of a healing prayer.
Araevin nodded and turned back to the doorway. He could hear the golem's great limbs creaking and scraping as it moved, but the thing was still hidden in the middle of its own poisonous mist.
'Ilsevele,' Araevin said, 'Maresa… are you hurt?'
'No, but we can't see the damned thing!' Maresa called back.
I may not be able to affect it directly with my spells, Araevin thought, but I can certainly do something about that.
He quickly pronounced the words of a wind spell, and blew the green vapors away from the golem. Maresa and Ilsevele huddled together at the place where the old stairs had met the floor above, the genasi holding the spellarcher steady in her precarious perch.
'That's better,' Ilsevele said.
She laid an arrow across her bow and drew it back as far as she could before sending it down into the golem again. The arrow caught it in the back of the neck, sinking down deep into its iron chest. The automaton sparked and smoked, its arms jerked up and down, and it fell face-forward to the ground and didn't move again.
Araevin sighed in relief. He looked behind him, where Grayth stood unsteadily but had stopped coughing blood. The cleric plodded up to stand beside him, gazing at the wrecked golem on the floor of the tower room.
'Just like old times,' he said. 'Lathander grant that there aren't any more of those around.'
'I'm sure it will be something worse,' Araevin replied. He clapped the human on his broad shoulders. 'Thanks, old friend.'
'It was nothing,' Grayth said, and he coughed hard, eyes watering, one mailed hand kneading his armored chest. 'Your lady did all the hard work with her archery,' he rasped. 'I don't know if we could have beat that thing without her. Now let's find your gemstone and get out of here before we learn what else this place has in store for us.'
Nurthel Floshin hurried into Sarya Dlardrageth's con-jury, wings trailing behind him like a great black cloak. His remaining eye glowed green with avarice and purpose, and his infernal golden mail gleamed in the lurid firelight Sarya favored in her chambers. He halted just inside the door and bowed before his queen.
'You sent for me, my lady?' he rumbled.
Restlessly, the demon-sired sorceress circled the chamber. The conjury was a vaulted stone room deep in the catacombs beneath the grand mage's palace. Five thousand years of imprisonment had left Sarya with a distaste for dungeons and deep vaults, and she therefore visited her conjury for only the most important of work.
'Lord Floshin, you would be well advised to answer with more alacrity when next I call for you,' she hissed.
'I apologize, Lady Sarya. I was involved in working spells of sending to dispatch your orders to our spies in Yartar and Everlund.'
Nurthel Floshin had served as Sarya's spymaster for almost five years, and continued to do so even after she had broken open Nar Kerymhoarth. He had been one of the first fey'ri she had gathered to her side on regaining her freedom, and he was far more familiar with the shape of things in the North than the ancient fey'ri warriors who made up her new armies.
'Ah. I might forgive you for that, then.' Sarya's ceaseless prowling slowed a step. She glanced at her fey'ri servant, and moved over to a black silk shroud that covered some unseen furnishing in her conjury. 'How go your
