crossbow thrummed. From the floor she had quietly cocked her weapon and waited for the perfect shot. The towering fiend crumpled to all fours, fumbling to pull out the bolt with one taloned hand, but that brought its head within reach of Donnor’s sword. The cleric surged up and clove the devil’s skull in two with one huge overhand swing. Black blood sizzled and smoked on the dusty ground as the creature folded.
“Well struck, Donnor,” Jorin said.
He stooped and retrieved his bow while Maresa reclaimed her rapier from the devil’s corpse. Nesterin struggled to his feet, having improvised a bandage for his wounded leg by ripping the sleeve off his shirt and binding it tightly over the cut.
“How long will your ice wall hold?” the star elf asked Araevin.
“Only a few minutes. We must move quickly now.” Araevin took a moment to cover the archway leading out to the balcony with a mass of gluey webbing, just in case the canoloths had a way to double back and climb the outside of the tower. Then he hurried to the stairs leading up. “Come on, my friends! The third shard is close.”
Bruised and battered, Araevin and his companions rushed up the curve of the stairs to the next chamber. Two clicking mezzoloths appeared on the stairway above them, iron tridents clutched in their thick talons. “Fight through them!” Araevin called. The mezzoloths raced down the steps to meet them. One hurled its trident at Donnor, who ducked under the weapon and kept going. Jorin and Nesterin shot together, their arrows transfixing that monster long enough for Donnor to bound close and cut it down. Araevin handled the other one, blasting it into flakes of smoking ash with an emerald ray of disintegration. He did not even break stride as he leaped past the wreckage of the two infernal warriors.
They came to the top of the stair, and Araevin halted in amazement. The chamber filled the entire top of the spire. Despite the black ruin that had come to the tower, it was still majestic, soaring half a hundred feet above his head. In the center of the room hovered the third shard of the Gatekeeper’s Crystal, suspended twenty feet above the floor by magic. A great shield of elemental fury enclosed the artifact-dancing bands of ruby fire, crawling arcs of blue-green lightning, spinning boulders covered in foot-long spikes of stone. The sound was indescribable as the flames roared, the lightning snapped and thundered, and the heavy stone spheres howled through their orbits.
“Selune’s starry eyes,” Maresa said. She had to shout to make herself heard over the roaring that filled the room. “There it is, all right, but how do we get it?”
“Is that some sort of shielding spell, Araevin?” asked Jorin.
“Yes. A very powerful one, too,” the mage replied.
Malkizid clearly commanded rare and potent magic indeed. Araevin studied the elemental sphere, picking out the complex weavings of arcane energy it was made of. No ordinary spell would suppress Malkizid’s defenses… but high magic might. The difficulty was that the spell he had in mind could not help but draw a great deal of attention.
Speed, not stealth, he reminded himself. Malkizid’s servants already know we are in the spire. It’s only a matter of time before the master of the house returns.
“Stand back and guard the stairs,” he warned his friends.
Then he raised his hands and began to declaim the opening verses of the kileaarna reithirgir, the spell of unbinding.
Power flooded into him, and he felt the room around him growing gray and unreal, insubstantial. Only he was real and solid, he and the fiery font of magic he coaxed from his heart and hands. The stone blocks of the chamber floor under his feet cracked and dissipated in granite dust, while the air around his body kindled into pure white flame.
Honing his will into pure purpose, Araevin threw his might against Malkizid’s defenses.
Malkizid and his infernal champions tore into the warriors surrounding Seiveril’s banner like a hurricane of black fire. Shrieking, grinning barbed devils hurled themselves against the Evereskan guards and the Knights of the Golden Star and literally ripped seasoned elf warriors limb from limb. Mezzoloths clicked and buzzed in their hideously insectlike speech, dragging down Sembian riders and working awful slaughter with their red-hot iron tridents. In return, elf champions and Silver Ravens hurled themselves into the fray, trying to stem the onslaught. Everywhere gouts of fire and crackling blue rays of disruption hurled back and forth between Malkizid’s fiends and their foes, leaving Seiveril’s ears ringing with thunderclap after thunderclap and the insane roar of hellspawned rage.
The Branded King himself stalked through the elven ranks with avid glee dancing in his black eyes, slaying with spell and blade all who stood against him. Elves and humans who looked him full in the face reeled away, hands covering their eyes and mad shrieks rising from their throats.
“Seiveril Miritar!” the fiend shouted, and his voice shook the vale. “Face me!”
Seiveril’s horse stumbled and foundered, dragged down by a mezzoloth that caught it by its hindquarters and broke its back. The elflord managed to free his feet from the stirrups and leap away as the animal screamed and fell. He banished the insectile daemon back to its hellish home with a spell of dismissal, and found Malkizid striding toward him, only twenty paces distant.
“Your doom is at hand, Lord of Elion!” snarled the archdevil.
“For Tower Reilloch!” Jorildyn appeared beside Seiveril and lashed out with ray of emerald destruction.
The battle-mage’s spell caught Malkizid in his right side and blasted deep into his stony white flesh. Malkizid hissed in pain and twisted away, his ebon armor smoking. Seiveril immediately began to chant a spell of his own, hoping to overwhelm the mighty devil with a barrage of magic.
“Insolent mortal!” Malkizid roared.
He threw out one taloned hand and clenched it into a fist, speaking a word so evil that spikes of hot pain stabbed into Seiveril’s ears. An unseen force crushed Jorildyn’s ribcage like matchsticks. Blood burst from the half- elf’s mouth, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed in a nerveless heap. The archdevil returned his attention to Seiveril-and Seiveril finished chanting his spell. A column of brilliant white fire stabbed down from above, pure and holy, engulfing the Branded King.
Malkizid roared in pain and ducked aside. He retaliated by turning his talons on Seiveril, reaching out to crush him in a fist of malice as he had just destroyed Jorildyn. Seiveril felt the horrible pressure of Malkizid’s grip settling over his chest, tightening, buckling the elven steel of his plate armor. Dark spots danced before his eyes, and the elflord gasped for breath.
“Now, Seiveril Miritar, I send you from this world,” the archdevil gloated.
“Not while I can help it!” Leaping over the body of a dead mezzoloth, Starbrow hurled himself against the Branded King. Keryvian sang with clean holy light as the moon elf launched a furious assault against Malkizid. The baneblade darted past Malkizid’s guard to gash him once across the upper arm and a second time at the knee, but Malkizid parried blow after blow that might have done real harm.
“Is that the extent of your swordsmanship?” the archdevil laughed.
Quickly recovering from the surprise of Starbrow’s attack, he suddenly leaped forward and returned a dizzying fusillade of stroke and counterstroke with his great black sword. Starbrow left his guard just a little low for an instant, and the archdevil very nearly took his head off. The black sword whistled up in a deadly arc that the moon elf somehow ducked under-almost. Instead of decapitating him, Malkizid smashed Starbrow’s helm, sending it spinning through the air, and stretched him out senseless, blood pouring from a bad cut across his forehead.
“Now, to finish this,” the archdevil said.
He turned back to Seiveril, who was wrestling for breath on all fours. But then Malkizid hesitated, and tilted his head to one side as if listening for some faint, far-off sound. His feral grin faded, replaced by a scowl of anger so hot and fierce that Seiveril had to look away.
“What? Impossible!” the archdevil hissed. Then he vanished, teleporting away without another word. In the space of an instant, the concentrated malice and violence at the heart of the fiendish attack vanished as well.
Seiveril pushed himself to his feet, reeling with astonishment. The archdevil simply left? he thought. What in the world is more important to him than what is happening on this battlefield?
He was jarred from his confusion by a scream over his head. He looked up, and leaped aside as a mortally wounded fey’ri warrior plummeted into the ground almost exactly where he had been standing. The red-scaled daemonfey groaned once and fell still. Seiveril turned to search the skies for some clue as to where the fey’ri had fallen from or what might be happening above the battlefield.
The fey’ri were fleeing the fight. Speeding toward the north, they wheeled away from the Vale of Lost Voices and beat their leathery wings with all their might. The shining spirits of the vale guardians ran after them across the
