“What else have we got?” he murmured to himself.
Fortunately, there was something, a long, thin, golden-hilted poniard of an athame. He snatched the ritual dagger from its sheath, and knowledge of its attributes poured into his mind. So-Remas had bound spells in it just as Aoth himself was accustomed to store magic in his spear.
He judged that it would do. In fact, it should do nicely. When more of So-Remas’s soldiers charged into the room, he met them with a nasty smile and a shriek of focused, bone-shattering sound.
The ambush started well. Sarshethrian, his newfound human and stag-man allies, and his shadowy slaves had caught the undead wayfarers by surprise and slaughtered several in the first few moments. Then, however, the creatures of the Eminence of Araunt started fighting back and maneuvering through the darkness, until Jhesrhi suddenly caught a whiff of something putrid.
She spun around. Somehow, two withered ghouls with luminous green eyes had gotten behind her, and now they were rushing in with needle fangs bared and jagged claws poised to rake and tear.
She felt a surge of loathing, less at the foulness of the undead creatures or the danger they represented- although that was there too-than at the prospect of being touched by anything even remotely manlike. She made a slashing motion with her staff and hurled a fan-shaped blaze of flame into the ghouls’ rotten, vaguely canine faces. They fell down, burning and thrashing.
Bells chimed. She looked to her flank and found one of the stag men there. He’d been scrambling to intercept the ghouls, and her flare had nearly hit him too. Maybe he was urging her to be more careful, although because she didn’t understand the language of the bells, and the expression on a stag warrior’s long, narrow face with its brown eyes and dusting of down never changed, it was impossible to tell for certain.
Cera cried, “Keeper! Keeper!” throughout the fight. She’d been invoking her god all along, but now there was a shrill note of desperation in her voice.
Jhesrhi turned. A misty, faintly luminous figure covered in gashes and puncture wounds was floating toward the sunlady. A flying mace made of golden light bashed at the ghost, and brandishing the identically shaped weapon of metal and wood in her hand, Cera sent flares of radiance stabbing through it. But the attacks didn’t stop it.
A shredded face oozing into visibility on the wavering blur that was its head, the ghost grinned and plunged an incorporeal hand into Cera’s shoulder. She cried out and reeled backward.
Jhesrhi hurled more flame from her brazen staff. The flare caught the phantom and burned it from existence.
Which didn’t mean she’d acted soon enough. She glanced around to make sure nothing was about to attack her, then rushed to her friend.
To her surprise, Cera recoiled. “You’re on fire!” the sunlady gasped.
Jhesrhi realized it was so. She must have cloaked herself in flame without realizing it at the same moment she used it to strike at the ghouls.
With a little irrational twinge of reluctance, she pulled the fire back inside herself, and the chilly gloom of the deathways became oppressive once more. But that didn’t matter. Cera did.
“Are you all right?” Jhesrhi asked.
Cera took a breath. “I will be,” she said, pain in her voice. “Once we’re out of here. Is the battle over?”
Jhesrhi looked around and decided that it was. All the undead travelers made of solid flesh were down, and the wraiths and such were gone, incinerated, exorcised, or otherwise expunged from existence. Sarshethrian’s servants, murky forms that resembled rats, leeches, centipedes, and beetles to the extent they resembled anything, were slinking away down various passages, while, lengths of shadow lashing around him, the fiend himself repeatedly kicked a fallen skeletal swordsman.
Jhesrhi recognized the phenomenon from her years on battlefields across northeastern Faerun. The fight had ended too quickly to suit Sarshethrian. He was still full of aggression and was expending the spiteful energy as best he could.
Still, there was something comical if not contemptible about watching a self-styled archdevil comporting himself like a child in the throes of a tantrum. It reminded her of Tchazzar’s excesses, and she made a little spitting sound, softly enough that she didn’t expect him to hear.
He did, though, and, his halo of shadow drawing in its ragged tendrils and groping and coiling in a less agitated fashion, left off abusing the dead thing to turn and give her a sardonic smile. “I take it you think I’ve forgotten my dignity.”
Jhesrhi shrugged. “Do you care?”
“Yes. I told you, I want the three of us to be friends. And when you hear the rest of the story I started earlier, perhaps you’ll be more inclined to forgive my … excitement.”
I doubt it, Jhesrhi thought, but there was no point to saying it aloud and annoying him any further. She and Cera still needed his good will.
“I told you how I freed Lod the bone naga from his endless servitude.” Sarshethrian sat down atop a granite urn in the midst of several mangled, reeking corpses like that was the most natural place in the world to take his ease. Maybe for him it was. “And how his personal liberation inspired him to dream bigger dreams.”
“Yes,” Jhesrhi said. Finally, she thought, they were coming to it. Sarshethrian was about to explain exactly who was attacking Rashemen.
“Lod envisioned a great fraternity of the undead,” Sarshethrian said. “It would find those who were thralls and set them free. It would take those condemned to mindlessness and lift them into sentience. Ultimately, it would set the undead above the living to hunt wherever, however, and whomever they wished, without fear of retaliation.”
“And you agreed to help him accomplish all that as well,” Cera said, an edge of disgust in her voice.
“Yes, of course,” Sarshethrian said. “To that end, we invented more new wizardry, unearthed ancient secrets, and I taught him to traverse the deathways. My home, you see, was a web of secret paths that would enable him to go virtually anywhere to recruit new followers, instruct old ones, and reach any living realm he wished to assail, even one on the far side of an ocean.”
Jhesrhi blinked. “Wait. This Lod was-or is-on the other side of what, the Sea of Swords? Or the Great Sea?”
Sarshethrian smiled. “The former, although it wasn’t always so. Once, the continent on which he dwells occupied another world called Abeir. But then the cosmic upheaval you call the Spellplague uprooted it and dropped it in this world.”
“Like Tymanther,” Jhesrhi said. The same thing had happened to Medrash and Balasar’s home.
Knowing such was the case, she didn’t find Sarshethrian’s tale to be unbelievable so much as exasperating. Didn’t Faerun have enough homegrown horrors and would-be conquerors without new ones slithering onto the scene from faraway places no one ever even heard of?
“Yes,” the pale creature said, “not that it particularly matters. What does is that once again, I kept my word. Lod got the magic he wanted, and when his fellow undead realized the future he promised was actually possible, they rallied to his banner.” His mouth twisted. “All my pledges fulfilled, I awaited the homage he’d promised in return.”
“But you’d misread him,” said Cera. She sat down with her back against the dark hexagonal slab sealing a tomb, pulled off her helmet, and blotted the sweat on her round, flushed face with a kerchief. “He’d learned to hate servitude while wearing the yoke of his first master. He never intended that he or his disciples would accept a new one.”
Sarshethrian gave her a sour look with his single eye. Then: “It’s a pity you weren’t there, sunlady. I could have profited from your insights, for you understand Lod perfectly. When he judged that he had all he needed from me, he and his followers lured me into a trap to kill me.
“In the battle that followed, I lost my eye, the use of my arm, and a portion of my mystical strength. But I survived, and I managed to flee deep into the deathways where the traitors couldn’t find me.”
“And now you waylay Lod’s agents whenever you catch them traveling the maze,” Jhesrhi said.
Sarshethrian nodded. “For the time being, it’s as much as I can do. I didn’t just
“Which is why you sought allies,” Cera said.
