She scurried into the pool of shadow under the barge’s hull. That would keep Melemer from throwing spells at her from up on deck. Then she heard the warlock whistle.
She felt a renewed pang of desperation because the whistle was surely a signal. He’d had one or more confederates waiting to cut her off if she managed to escape the barge or decided at the last moment not to board in the first place. Thus, she was in even greater peril than she’d imagined.
She didn’t know why her magic was feeble-some hostile enchantment centered on the barge, perhaps-and didn’t have time to try to figure it out. But maybe she could transcend the debilitating influence in the moment she did have.
She peered out at Selune trailing her haze of glittering tears across the western sky. One of the Three was looking down on her, and the Three had never failed her.
Then she considered the lake, frozen over now but still teeming with fish, fey, and spirits beneath its covering of ice. Like the favor of the goddesses, the life of the lake was a well of power she could draw from at need, even if the pulse of that vitality suddenly felt faint and faraway. Surely that was only an illusion.
Something thumped down on the ice and roused her from her effort to center herself. Peering, she saw that Olthe, the burly sellsword priestess of Tempus, had jumped down from the dock.
The battleguard spotted Yhelbruna too. Spinning her axe and tossing it from hand to hand, she advanced and said, “Come out from under the boat, hathran. Let’s finish this.” Her melodious alto voice was a surprise issuing from that homely, sneering face and mannish frame.
But what was the point of talking now or of the flashy display with the axe, for that matter? Yhelbruna thought she knew. Reciting under her breath, she edged forward like she did indeed intend to come out into the open and accept Olthe’s challenge. When she reached the last line of the incantation, though, she spun around.
For an instant, she saw nothing but ice and wondered if she’d guessed wrongly. Then a dozen batlike shreds of shadow swooped down, swirled together, and became a small horned figure ideally positioned to attack her from behind
She spit the final words of her spell. In an instant, brambles grew from the side of the ice barge-let’s see how Melemer liked being bound! The thorns ripped his flesh as the briars snaked and crisscrossed around him, and the warlock screamed.
Yhelbruna jerked back around. Olthe had stopped advancing and started praying, chopping the air with her axe in time to the words.
Recognizing the spell, Yhelbruna threw herself sideways. A vertical bolt of flame surged down through the spot she’d just abandoned. It blasted through the bottom of the barge and smashed and melted a steaming hole in the ice.
The heat seared Yhelbruna too, in the instant before she floundered out of range, but not severely enough to balk her. She stabbed her staff at Olthe, and with a boom, a dazzling flare of lightning leaped forth and stabbed into the battleguard’s torso.
Somehow remaining upright despite the slipperiness of the ice, Olthe danced a twitching, lurching dance for the moments the magic lasted. Then, her body smoking, she toppled forward.
Yhelbruna pivoted. Melemer was still tangled in the briars but no longer shrieking and struggling. Before the woody bonds stopped growing, thorns had lodged in the corners of his mouth and stretched it wide. The grimace might almost have looked comical if stickers hadn’t ended up in his eyes as well.
Yhelbruna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Controlling one’s breathing was supposed to promote calmness, but she started trembling with reaction anyway.
She wished she could pause where she was and wait for her nerves to settle, but it wasn’t possible. Now that she knew for a fact that Bez and his sellswords were dastards, she needed to make sure Mangan’s guards took them into custody forthwith.
As she tried to work out how best to accomplish that, she registered the burning foulness in her mouth. She bared her face and did her best to spit the taste of bile away, then strode back to shore, scooped up a handful of snow, and used it to scour the vomit from inside her mask.
Sarshethrian advanced but not witlessly. He did so amid another wave of scuttling shadow creatures and wrapped in supernatural defenses. Even at a distance, Lod could feel the extra power pulsing inside the fiend’s ragged shroud of murky tentacles.
Lod’s followers lunged forward to meet the onrushing vermin. Each of his comrades, he believed, certainly every direhelm, doomsept, specter, or vampire, was more than a match for any one of Sarshethrian’s minions. But superior numbers might still overwhelm the Eminence in the end.
Except that Lod didn’t intend to let it come to that. He crawled down from his cart, slithered toward the ranks of undead fighting savagely to hold back the shadow creatures, and refocused his will on the eye floating in the vial.
Sarshethrian’s voice sounded from the empty air. “The eye has power over me in your world, not in mine. Especially now that I’ve taken measures against it.”
“It pulled you out of your hiding place,” Lod replied. The charm Sarshethrian had cast to facilitate communication would carry his words to the demon as well.
Sarshethrian laughed. “I was coming out anyway. I want a good view of your final moments.”
“I’m afraid your days of viewing anything are over.” Lod hissed an incantation and clenched his fist around the vial, shattering the crystal and crushing its contents.
Sarshethrian cried and clapped his hand to the eye that was still in his head.
Lod reared up on his coils so he could cast further spells at the fiend without the combatants on the ground between them getting in the way. The potential drawback was that by rising higher, he also made himself a better target for any hostile entity on the battlefield. But as quick glances confirmed, the wizard and priestess were busy fighting the undead he’d sent against them, and Sarshethrian’s flying servants, murky things like enormous, malformed flies, were less of a threat. When one oriented on him, he spoke a word of power, pointed, and tore it apart with darts of crimson light.
Then he plucked a black pearl wrapped in a filigree of true-silver wire from one of his pockets, brandished it over his head, and chanted a spell of binding. Argent power flared from the talisman to the blinded, staggering Sarshethrian, whereupon the fiend cried out and vanished. Lod’s bony fingers felt a throb of presence like sudden added weight within in the gem.
He laughed, and then a blow from behind shattered his scapula and raked on down to snap several ribs as well.
Lod wrenched himself around. Neither trapped in the pearl nor even eyeless, although black ichor did streak his pallid cheek, Sarshethrian was floating in the air just a couple of yards away, close enough that his shadow arms could easily whip across the intervening distance. Several shot out at once.
Lod swayed backward atop his reptilian coils. One tentacle still caught the hand containing the evidently useless pearl and jerked it off his wrist. A second lashed around a floating rib and snapped it loose. But the others fell short and failed to envelop him utterly as Sarshethrian plainly intended.
The fiend flew closer to press the attack. Still twisting, dodging, Lod hissed a word of slaying.
After an instant, mobility returned, and the fiend sneered and reached anew. By that time, though, the end of Lod’s tail was hurtling down at him.
The blow smashed Sarshethrian to earth. Lod snarled a word of constraint to keep his foe from shifting through space and so slipping out from under the weight and pressure of his lower portion.
An instant later, though, Sarshethrian’s shadow arms curled to slash at the member holding him down. Chunks of bloodless, leathery tissue flew through the air, and bone showed through the gashes where it had been. At the same time, the fiend spit three words, and Lod had a dizzying sensation of spinning upward as his psyche began to separate from his body.
He snarled an incantation of defense and clutched with his remaining hand to symbolize the act of clinging to what was his. He had to grip so tightly that he cracked his own finger bones, but the counterspell worked. His essence locked down into his physical form again.