pommel-first as if he were bashing an opponent with it.
Several cracks sounded in quick succession as bones snapped inside a second Rashemi’s body. The berserker fell and tried to jump back up again immediately, but despite his furious determination, pain turned the effort into floundering failure.
Bez discerned he didn’t have time for a third spell. The remaining berserker was about to close with him. It seemed unfair that the Rashemi could run so fast even in the snow.
But since he could, Bez might as well turn it against him. He retreated two more steps, then lunged, explosively reversing direction with a facility and sense of timing that, he fancied, would have satisfied the most demanding fencing master.
Any opponent who was rushing forward would have had difficulty avoiding such an attack, and the frost- coated rapier stabbed deep into the berserker’s chest. As his knees buckled, the Rashemi tried to strike back with his broadsword, and Bez parried with the main gauche. The impact jolted and stung his arm, but all that mattered was that he stopped the cut, and his opponent wouldn’t be making another. The berserker finished collapsing to his knees, flopped over onto his side, and lay there, shuddering and coughing up blood.
Bez freed the rapier and dispitched the warrior with the several broken bones. Otherwise, the man might eventually have started yelling for help. But he left the unconscious Rashemi with the gashed and battered head alone. He had nothing personal against the fellow, and nobody was paying for his death.
A few moments later, Uregaunt led other crewmen, some still adjusting their garments, blinking, and yawning, out of the inn. The old wizard looked at the bodies lying in the snow and shook his head. “We’re neck deep in the cesspit, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Bez said. “We need to haul the rest of the crew out of the other inns, or at least collect as many as we can. We’re racing the men who are on their way to arrest them.”
“Understood,” Uregaunt said. “Then rendezvous aboard the ship?”
Bez sighed. “No. The barbarians secured the
There to struggle for food and warmth in unfamiliar country in the dead of winter while contending with the trolls, owlbears, and other predatory creatures that reportedly infested the forest. Bez thought of the witch who’d lured him into this predicament and yearned to slide his rapier into
Jhesrhi had observed before the battle started that Sarshethrian had more troops that would perforce fight on the ground than minions capable of flight. So when Lod sent a portion of his forces streaming up the slope at her, she directed her fiery attacks at the enemies in the air. The stag men followed her lead and, the bells in their antlers chiming, loosed arrows at floating direhelms, winging vampire bats, and ghosts with wavering, faintly luminous forms that trailed out behind them like the tails of shooting stars.
It was a joy to burn them. Aoth had trained Jhesrhi always to reduce an enemy to helplessness as quickly and safely as possible, and in the back of her mind, she still remembered the principle. But the idea seemed inconsequential measured against the delight of wielding flame. Rather than desiring a deft, efficient victory, she almost wished the fight would never end.
The swords in its gauntlets poised to slash, a direhelm swooped down on her. She jabbed with her staff, and a bolt of fire roared out and blasted the animated plate into twisted scraps of steel.
Then something prodded her in the ribs. Startled and suffering a surge of the usual revulsion at being touched, she jerked around and nearly hurled flame at the stag man who’d risked his longbow to reach into her fiery halo and poke her. He nodded furiously to ring his antler bells. Perhaps, in his agitation, he’d forgotten she didn’t know how to interpret the sound.
But she did understand to look where he was pointing. She turned back around and registered that her shadowy defenders had begun to abandon her. An antlike thing with five legs on one side of its body and two on the other wheeled and scuttled past her and on up the hill. The murky, flat-looking body of a two-headed grub crumpled in on itself until nothing remained.
Similar desertions were in progress all across the battlefield-presumably because Lod was looming triumphant over Sarshethrian’s black, shriveled remains.
Jhesrhi understood what it all meant but still didn’t want to stop blasting away at the undead now poised to overwhelm her. So strong was the desire that she wasn’t even certain that she could stop.
Then she spotted flashes of light on the other side of the path Lod and his followers had taken into the graveyard. Cera was over there and no doubt rapidly losing her shadowy allies too.
Just as Jhesrhi realized that, a phantom plunged down at her. The oversized mouth in its blur of a face gaped open as if it were giving vent to an endless silent scream.
She swung her staff to attack the specter, but though she moved quickly, her self-appointed follower was faster still. The stag man leaped and batted at the apparition with his bow.
The stave whizzed through the phantom’s insubstantial form without resistance. The undead thrust its clawlike hands into the stag warrior’s torso, and the fey withered.
Jhesrhi burned the specter into nothingness a scant instant later. But her burst of flame arrived too late to save the stag man’s life. He fell to the ground with a final jangle of bells in a rotting heap.
Jhesrhi felt a pang of sorrow that cleared her head, and as it did, she realized she couldn’t simply abandon the stag warrior’s fellows to die. She looked around for them.
But even though they’d never willingly go far from her in the midst of battle, she couldn’t find them. That could only mean they’d already fallen too.
Poor creatures, giving their lives for a loyalty she’d neither sought nor understood. She promised herself she’d avenge them.
But first she had to help Cera, and though it had become her most powerful weapon, fire alone couldn’t do it. If she simply tried to burn her way to the priestess, the enemy would surely surround and overwhelm her.
Hissing words of power in one of the tongues of the Undying Pyre, she spun her staff over her head. A ring of towering flames leaped up around her. Her foes would assume she meant the heat to hold them back, and in fact, she did. But she also wanted the bright cylinder to block their view of what she’d do next.
She spoke to the air in a soft, whistling language, and at once sensed its spiteful reluctance to heed her. In her own world, the spirits of the elements were generally happy to do her bidding, but here in the deathways, everything but fire was apt to balk.
Her voice swelling from the whisper of a breeze to the howl of a gale, she snarled words of chastisement, and the air yielded to her will. It caught her and lifted her hurtling toward the black circle at the top of her roofless tower of flame.
As she shot out into the open, she looked hastily around for flying undead poised to assail her but didn’t spot any. As best she could judge, all the other combatants were well below her, and she supposed she owed Lady Luck an offering of thanks for the height of the ceiling.
She skimmed along just underneath it as she hurtled in Cera’s direction and then over the embattled sunlady. She didn’t want any of the creatures assailing her comrade to observe that she could fly.
She set down behind a mausoleum with a sculpture of Chauntea holding a bouquet of roses in her arms on the roof. The goddess of the earth’s bounty looked strange, a mockery of herself, rendered in obsidian black.
At once, the wind tried to take its leave. Snapping a word of command to let it know she still required its services, Jhesrhi kept it fluttering around her as she ran in Cera’s direction.
A doomsept swept in on her flank, and she lashed her staff at it and set it ablaze. That balked six of the conjoined spirits, but the seventh kept coming and hacked at her with a battle-axe made of sickly greenish light.
She dodged, and the stroke just missed, although even its proximity made her head throb and her sight break up into meaningless spots for an instant. She started to strike back with her own weapon, but then the apparition finished burning away to nothing.
She rushed on to Cera’s side. The priestess was holding back a vampire with a ray of sunlight cast from her gilded mace. The creature’s pasty features became more and more bestial as divine power burned a cavity in its torso. Unfortunately, though, Cera was so intent on that task that she didn’t appear to notice that a direhelm was on the verge of slipping past the flying mace that was bashing dents in its metal body to attack her.
Jhesrhi slashed at the air with her staff. A sword of fire sprang into being to fight alongside the mace of light
