learned a precaution or two from Halonya’s wyrmkeepers. But when she struggled and failed to clamber to her feet, she realized weakness was likely to hold her every bit as well as locks and iron bars.
But she couldn’t let it. Her desperate plan
On the far wall, stout shutters sealed windows scarcely wider than arrow loops. At a couple of points, lines of pale light showed where the ironbound wooden panels fit imperfectly against the stone.
Cera crawled forward. The trailing scraps of her torn mail scraped against the floor.
She couldn’t see precisely where the light shone down. There wasn’t enough of it to make a brighter spot amid the gloom. But she felt it when it touched her.
The sensation, however, was not what she’d anticipated. Ever since she was a little girl, even before she realized her calling, she’d loved the warm caress of sunlight. Now it stung, and she-or rather the pollution inside her-wanted to flinch from it like a parasitic grub squirming away from a healer’s forceps.
But she didn’t flinch. She stayed where she was and fixed her eyes on the luminous cracks, keeping them there even when her head began to throb.
I accept the pain, she thought. It’s like a cauterizing iron searing infection out of me. And while it does, I pray for my god to reveal himself.
The discomfort faded, and the gloom and the massive structure around her faded with it, until she was floating in a sky of flawless blue, gazing into the heart of the Yellow Sun. All around her, though she couldn’t actually see them, she had a sense of wheels meshing and turning one another with utter smoothness and regularity. It was like the world’s most accomplished dwarf artisans had assembled to build the largest, most intricate, and most finely crafted mill in all creation.
Gradually, Amaunator’s radiance warmed and cleansed her, and her perception of the perfect order that was as intrinsic to his nature as the daylight soothed her with the promise that all things, no matter how seemingly discordant, resolved themselves into harmony in the end. Her communion with him was so blissful that a part of her could have basked in it forevermore. But Jhesrhi needed her, and so, after a time, she mustered the will to abandon the rapture of pure contemplation for more practical concerns.
“I have to go back,” she breathed, “to bring more of your grace to the world, and for that, I need my magic. Please, help me.”
She felt a pulse of reassurance that, now that she was out of the dark maze and purged of the taint of incipient vampirism as well, she could channel the god’s power as readily as ever. Then she was back on the floor.
For a moment, she lay relaxed and almost mindlessly serene in the afterglow of her meditation. Then she realized the light leaking through the cracks was dimmer than before.
She didn’t know how long her trance had lasted, but obviously, long enough for the westering sun to travel some distance across the sky. It would be dark soon, and once it was, the undead would be more active and alert.
She tried to rise, and as before, found herself clumsy and feeble. Her communion with the Keeper had revitalized her spiritually but hadn’t restored the physical vigor exsanguination had cost her.
Because, she supposed, she could attend to that herself. She murmured a prayer and felt a warm tingling as light poured into the core of her and made her body glow from within. Inside the blood-spotted rents in her mail and the padding beneath, the fang marks dwindled and disappeared.
She tried again to stand and did so without difficulty. She crept to the door, pressed her ear against the panel, listened, and heard nothing. Unfortunately, that was no guarantee of safety. The undead were notoriously quiet. She took a breath, gripped the handle, and jerked the door open.
As she’d feared, one of the zombies that had tossed her into the room was still standing and staring at nothing just outside. She supposed she was lucky it wasn’t both of them, although she would have felt luckier still if she had a weapon, a shield, and intact armor, or, as long as she was wishing, Aoth and twenty stalwart Brothers of the Griffon surrounding her.
Because she didn’t, she hopped back as the dead man lurched around to face her and slashed with his sword. The cut fell short, and she swept her hand in an arc that evoked the sun’s path from horizon to horizon. “The Keeper grant you peace,” she said.
Golden light shone through the air, and the living corpse crumbled into dust. A bit of it wafted into Cera’s nose and made her want to sneeze. The creature’s blade clanked on the floor, and its brigandine thumped down with it.
Well, Cera thought, that worked out. Especially if no other creature had noticed the holy light flashing out the doorway or the noise the falling sword and leather armor had made.
Deeming it better than nothing even though her clerical training had only encompassed the use of a mace, she picked up the blade. Then she peeked out the door. To her relief, no other undead horror was shambling or floating in her direction. Not yet, anyway.
Now, where was Jhesrhi? Was it possible Lod’s followers had taken the same casual approach to imprisoning the mage that they had to containing Cera?
Perhaps. They’d apparently assumed Cera’s vampire bites rendered her helpless, and from listening to them talk, she knew they’d beaten Jhesrhi senseless after Dai Shan exposed her deception. They’d also placed the wizard in some sort of restraints. They might well believe she was helpless too.
If so, Jhesrhi might be nearby. The undead might not have felt the need to haul her back down to the dungeons and lock her up properly either.
Cera stepped out into the corridor and headed in the opposite direction from the spaces near the primary entrance where many of the undead were taking their ease. To her relief, most of the doors she came to were open, which made checking the various rooms easier, and the traces of light leaking in from outdoors at various points alleviated the gloom just enough for her to grope her way along.
But the feeble illumination didn’t reveal everything, and it was a sunlady’s instincts, not Cera’s eyes, that abruptly gave her a sense of insatiable hunger and boundless hatred rushing out of the dark.
She jumped back and said, “Amaunator!” The Keeper’s power flowed into the core of her, then streamed down her arm to set her stolen sword aglow.
The brightness revealed a ragged shadow with a twisted smudge of a face. The Keeper’s light balked it, but Cera suspected the magic would hold it back for only an instant. Then it would either come back on the attack or raise the alarm.
She hurriedly recited a prayer and tapped the shining sword against the floor. Some of the holy light leaped from the steel to the stone, surging outward from the point of contact to form first a circle and then rays emanating from it.
In an instant, the rays shot out far enough that the wraith was floating just above them. Assailed by the sun symbol’s power, the phantom convulsed and frayed away to nothing.
All right, Cera thought, panting, I had a guard outside my cell. Let’s see if the ghost was lurking here because it was keeping an eye on Jhesrhi.
She cautiously opened a closed door. Gagged with a metal contraption bolted around her head, her hands shackled behind her, the wizard lay on the floor.
Cera smiled with a jubilation that immediately gave way to concern when Jhesrhi failed to react to her appearance. The priestess hurried over to her friend and knelt down beside her.
Thanks be to the Keeper and all the kindly powers, Jhesrhi was still breathing, but that was about all that could be said. She was too profoundly unconscious to stir even when Cera spoke to her, and when the priestess gently lifted the lids of her amber eyes, the pupils were different sizes. Blood matted her hair, and her tawny skin was a patchwork of bruises, scrapes, and scratches. One leg bent between the knee and ankle, and, not content merely to shackle a mage’s wonder-working hands, the undead had broken every one of her fingers.
Cera recited a healing prayer, reached out to Amaunator for all the power she could draw, laid her hand on Jhesrhi’s shoulder, and sent the pure essence of life and health streaming into her stricken comrade’s body. A few of Jhesrhi’s contusions faded, and her leg shifted and clicked as it sought to mend the break. But the wizard didn’t wake.
Cera prayed a second time. Cuts closed and, with a soft but wince-inducing grinding, the fingers of Jhesrhi’s
