and help keep the animate plate armor where it was.
“Thanks,” Cera gasped. “Lod killed Sarshethrian. The shadow beasts-”
“I know,” Jhesrhi snapped. “We need the brightest, hottest light you can make, right now.”
Raising her mace as if she had a daytime sky and not darkness and stone above her, Cera called out to Amaunator. Spinning her staff, Jhesrhi conjured another cylinder of flame around the both of them. Holy light and fire exploded into being, each overlapping and reinforcing the other.
Jhesrhi spoke to the wind, and it shot both mortals toward the ceiling of the vault. Cera gave one startled yelp but held her peace thereafter.
Prompted by its summoner’s unspoken will, Jhesrhi’s elemental servant set her and the priestess down by an arch that opened on a tunnel, at a spot removed from what remained of the battle. Still capable of seeing without the light that would have otherwise given away their location, she put the end of her staff in Cera’s hand and led her down the passage.
When she was reasonably certain nothing was pursuing them, the wizard said, “There’s a sarcophagus in an alcove on the right. Sit. Rest.”
Panting, her round face sweaty, Cera groped her way to the granite seat. Feeling as spent as the sunlady looked, Jhesrhi flopped down next to her. They’d both fought hard and cast powerful magic, and even her newfound affinity with fire didn’t allow her to throw burst after burst without the exertion eventually taking a toll.
“Well,” Cera said after a while, “I told you allying with a demon lord was a bad idea.”
Flying over Immilmar in bat form, Nyevarra watched in disgust as warriors streamed out of the lodges and the Huhrong’s Citadel to round up the Halruaans. For the most part, the berserkers were a step behind their quarry, and Mario Bez succeeded in collecting the greater part of his crew and leading them south. But who cared? What mattered was that Yhelbruna was still alive.
What kind of sellswords, Nyevarra wondered bitterly, couldn’t trap and murder one old woman, especially one whose magic was starting to falter? Admittedly, she’d known going in that Bez was lying about his part in the siege of the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but still, given his reputation, she’d had every right to assume he and his company were up to the task she’d set them.
She would have liked to chase after the idiot herself, drink him dry, and then tear off his head to ensure he wouldn’t rise. But she had something more important to do.
The scheme she and Uramar had devised after the traitor Dai Shan opened a portal into the Iron Lord’s dungeons was brilliant even if she was vainglorious to think so. Not only would it overthrow the hathrans, it would leave the durthans preeminent in their own country, with Raumvirans, Nars, and strangers from beyond the sea playing only peripheral roles.
But until it was well advanced, the ongoing subversion would be a powerful yet vulnerable strategy, relatively easy to thwart if a foe discovered what was going on. Concerned that Yhelbruna might accomplish precisely that, Nyevarra had sought to remove her from the lanceboard. Unfortunately, the botched attack had almost certainly made the hathran even more curious about what had happened in the north and more wary where her own safety was concerned. A second murder attempt was almost certain to fail.
Yet Nyevarra still needed to ensure the success of her plan, and if she couldn’t do it by arranging the death of an old enemy, she needed to get at someone else at the very heart of power. She winged her way to the Iron Lord’s castle and flowed and swelled back into human form atop the flat, snowy roof of the central keep.
Then, setting her staff aside, she climbed down the granite wall headfirst toward a certain row of narrow, shuttered windows. Mangan Uruk’s apartments lay behind them.
As best she could determine at a glance, nothing protected the openings except the iron shutters themselves. But instinct told her not to trust that first impression. She whispered an invocation to fey with a knack for revelation, pledging tribute in the form of the plucked eyes of five mortals if her allies would only see fit to open her own.
Sigils-Chauntea’s roses, sheaves, and scythes; Mielikki’s unicorn head; Selune’s moon in all its phases; and a number of others-flared into radiant golden life atop the black metal rectangles, and Nyevarra flinched. Had she tried to pass them, they would have reduced her to nonexistence because, although the defensive magic infusing them would have inconvenienced any dark fey, wicked spirit, or fiend, its particular target was the undead.
Nyevarra supposed some cautious witch had placed the wards here when Uramar and Falconer had started feeling out Rashemen’s defenses by the straightforward method of marauding. She recited a counterspell to scour the metal clean, but the signs shined on as brightly as before.
Maybe Yhelbruna herself had emplaced the protections before her power began to attenuate. The wretched things were certainly virulent enough to represent the elder hathran at her best, which was to say, strong enough that Nyevarra doubted her own ability to dissolve them in a reasonable amount of time.
That meant Nyevarra had to outfox their maker. She had to do or be what that witch hadn’t had the foresight to guard against, and in fact, that might be possible.
She and Uramar had encountered a demon called an ekolid in a Nar tomb complex, and when she’d drunk some of the creature’s blood, she’d nearly turned into something resembling an ekolid herself. The blaspheme had saved her from that fate, but the infection, if that was the proper term, still lay dormant inside her. She knew because she was sometimes a demon in her dreams.
If she could rouse that potentiality without permitting it to overwhelm her essential identity, Mangan Uruk’s protections might not recognize her as undead. She might be able to wriggle past them.
She murmured charms to bolster her will and sense of self. Then she reached inside her psyche to the strangeness imprinted there. You want to be me, she thought. I invite you to try. Come steal me if you can.
Her head filled with the droning of wings and a sense of unspeakable vileness. The buzzing told her the only escape from the foulness was to become it.
Her skull ached as, grinding, it changed shape. Her vision altered as new eyes popped into existence. Serrated mandibles protruded above them.
“No,” she gritted. “I am Nyevarra, a witch of Rashemen. You, creature, are a wart. A scar. Just a tiny blemish I picked up along the way.”
By degrees, her body reverted to its normal state. She realized she’d started growing membranous wings when they retracted into her back.
All right, she thought. She’d subdued the ekolid, but its taint was still wakeful; it made her feel feverish and lent a surreal quality to her perceptions. She didn’t know if it was wakeful enough to fool the sigils, but she was going to find out.
She melted into mist. The fluidity of shapeshifting encouraged the ekolid to make another try to impose its guise on her fundamental nature, and she wrestled it into submission once again. Then she flowed into the crack where a shutter met the wall.
Agony ripped through her as though the Great Mother’s scythe, the Forest Queen’s scimitar, and the Moonmaiden’s mace were slashing and pounding her all at once. The torment went on and on, threatening to eclipse awareness of everything else, even the reason for it and the only way to bring it to an end.
But Nyevarra refused to lose cognizance of those truths. Even with torture addling her, she kept writhing forward for what felt like tendays of effort.
Finally, the last trailing curl of mist floated clear of the window. Congealing into solidity again, she thumped down on the floor, lay shuddering, and waited for the residual pain to fade and her strength to return.
Then came the soft, short rasping sound of someone hastily drawing a blade. Startled, Nyevarra looked up.
She’d felt like it was taking an eternity to enter the chamber, and plainly, it really had taken longer than anticipated. For the Iron Lord had had time to abandon the pursuit of Mario Bez and return to his quarters while she was working on it.
Even sitting in the dark, Cera could
“With Sarshethrian dead,” Jhesrhi said, “we’re back where we started: trapped.”
