been contending with a surfeit. Yet the parchment, calligraphy, and phrasing were all recognizably Shou, and it would have been just like cagey, slippery Dai Shan to put a contingency plan in place to make sure Bez wouldn’t profit from betraying him. If so, what she learned tonight might finally prove to Mangan Uruk’s satisfaction that the Halruaan had no right to take the griffons.
Gripping the railing, she stepped up onto the barge’s broad, flat deck. Several low, almost hutlike structures stood along its length, but all were dark except for the captain’s cabin in the stern, where a hint of light leaked through the cracks around the hatch.
Yhelbruna walked to the cabin and knocked. No one answered.
“Hello?” she called. Still, nobody replied.
She tried to twist the brass handle. The hatch was locked.
Suddenly, belatedly, she sensed she was in danger. She whirled and spotted a small, shadowy figure at the other end of the barge. His several rings glowed as he spun his hands through mystic passes. So did the yellow eyes under his stubby horns.
He could only be Melemer, Bez’s warlock lieutenant. He’d evidently pilfered Shou parchment and forged a message cunningly conceived to lure Yhelbruna into a trap.
But he was going to regret his cleverness. However adept he was at his arts, she’d had a hundred years to practice her own, and after she rendered him helpless,
Gripping her staff with both hands, holding it parallel to the deck, she thrust it forth to symbolize forbiddance and defense. She asked the spirits and fey who were her special allies to lend her their strength. Magic sparkled like powdered emeralds in the air around her.
But something was wrong. She could feel at once that the defense was weak. And when Melemer finished his casting, a tendril of sickly amber phosphorescence shot up from the deck beneath her feet. Twisting around her like a vine strangling a tree, it wrapped itself as tightly as any rope or chain and hoisted her off her feet. Its malignancy burned her wherever it touched, even through her robes, and made her guts cramp with sudden nausea.
As she retched bile into her mask, Melemer advanced and started a second incantation.
In one instant, everything was dark and quiet. Then the world exploded into blinding glare and hot pain. The shock of it made Lod give a screeching hiss and throw his head back, but the glyphs of protection graven inside his ribs and picked out in subtle variations of gray among his scales helped him recover quickly.
Once he did, he discerned that something had thrown
As soon as he’d taken all that in, he heard a female voice declaiming spells that made patches of radiance bright as summer noon light flare into being up and down the length of the column. No, actually, it was worse than simple sunlight. Lod was a creature of Abeir, and for all his erudition, Faerun’s “gods” and their mortal agents were a mystery to him. But he knew enough to recognize “holiness” when it stung him like a thousand needles.
He’d expected the deathways to present certain hazards, but certainly not flame, the sun, and divine wrath. For one more muddled, dazzled instant, he imagined he was fighting an army of Rashemi, that they’d somehow learned of the Eminence and its plans and moved to oppose him here before he could even reach their country.
Then, though, he saw beyond the flame and the light to what was scuttling in the darkness and almost laughed in relief at the teeming shadow creatures. Because if he was mainly dealing with those, he was fighting Sarshethrian, even if the would-be patron devil of the undead had somehow induced mortal spellcasters to join his cause.
That meant Lod’s grand design was still on track. He just needed to deal with a pest left over from long ago. Fortunately, he’d known it might come to this, and he fancied he was ready.
First, though, he’d better address the complication posed by the mortals. He wouldn’t be able to devote his full attention to Sarshethrian while someone was trying to set him on fire or, worse, purge undeath itself from his body. He peered around.
Although she was using a tomb on the slope to the column’s left for cover, he spotted the wizard as soon as she leaned out from behind it to hurl another incendiary spell at him. Her aura of flame made it easy.
It also made him wonder, even as he hissed a word of warding, swiped at the air, and sent the hurtling spark veering off course, if she was truly human after all. To his arcane perceptions, she looked like mortal flesh and blood but somehow like an elemental as well. Perhaps she was some manner of hybrid.
Not that it mattered at the moment. He leaned down from his cart, gripped a still-befuddled vampire by the spiky pauldron on his shoulder, and pointed. “The mage is there! See the firelight? Kill her!”
The vampire hastily chose others to join him in the endeavor, and they headed up the hillside together. Sarshethrian’s murky, half-formed servants scurried forth by the dozen to oppose the undead on foot, but the ones in the air-be they blood drinkers shapeshifted into bats; levitating direhelms; or translucent, faintly luminous wraiths-had a clearer path to their objective.
Satisfied, Lod next sought the priestess. He’d already noted she was operating on the column’s right flank so she and the wizard could harry it from two directions simultaneously. But at first, he still had difficulty pinpointing her exact location because, unlike her partner, she had the good sense not to kindle light in her own immediate vicinity.
Fortunately, though, it was impossible for anyone to repeatedly channel the purifying, life-giving power of the sun without it standing out in a world where that force was entirely alien. To his mystical sensitivities, the spot where she was invoking her deity throbbed like a rotten tooth.
Lod sent a second squad of his followers driving in the cleric’s direction. Then he cast around for Sarshethrian himself.
But this time, he couldn’t find what he was seeking. The fiend was evidently well hidden and content for the moment to let his minions do the fighting.
Lod might have done the same in his place. The shadow beasts were low, mindless things, but formidable in their way, and they outnumbered the warriors and mages of the Eminence. It made tactical sense to simply throw them at the column until they wore it away.
That was why Lod couldn’t allow the battle to continue in that fashion. He reached into his robe, brought out a crystal vial, and, murmuring words of excoriation and compulsion, focused his malice on the eyeball suspended in the cloudy liquid within.
Melemer finished his incantation and flicked the fingers of one hand at Yhelbruna. His various rings glowed brighter, and bitter cold jolted her, for an instant effacing the pain of the luminous tendril that bound her and dangled her above the deck.
The tiefling stopped advancing, tilted his head, and studied her. “Heart not giving out yet?” he said. “Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Not if all the stories about you are true.” He started another spell.
Yhelbruna exerted her will to shut out the pain of her bonds and likewise to believe that, despite its shocking impotence moments ago, her magic was strong. She whispered an incantation.
Melemer finished his spell first. Black worms writhed into existence down the length of her body.
But before they could start burrowing into her flesh, she completed her spell of liberation, and it twisted Melemer’s magic to her own purposes. The soft, squirming creatures gnawed at her glowing bonds instead of her, and the vinelike spiral flickered into nonexistence as it came apart.
The worms likewise falling away and vanishing, Yhelbruna dropped back onto the deck. She tried to stay upright but, unable to catch her balance, banged down on one knee. That too, was going to hurt when pain slipped past the barrier she’d raised against it.
Melemer’s chatoyant eyes goggled at her. Then he snatched the long knife from his belt and rushed her.
She knew she wasn’t ready to withstand him with magic or her rusty quarterstaff skills either. She scrambled to her feet, dashed to the rail, and swung herself over. The dagger made a whizzing sound as it slashed past, just shy of her flesh.
The barge stood tall on its runners. Yhelbruna snapped a word that should have slowed her fall. Again, magic flowed sluggishly, weakly, in answer to her call. She landed with a thump but at least didn’t break or sprain anything or crash right through the ice.
