Unholy

Another of Szass Tam's armies will come looking for us eventually, and we don't want to fight another battle like the last one. We've lost too many men.' Aoth's mouth twisted. 'The Brotherhood of the Griffon, especially.'

Bareris hesitated, as though he had to search his memory for the response that would come naturally to any living man. But eventually he said, 'I'm sorry about that.'

Aoth shrugged. 'It had to be done. Still, they were good comrades. I'll miss them. More to the point, I'll need to replace them, and it may be difficult. Until you dropped this mess in my lap, I had a reputation for keeping my word and for winning without taking many casualties-that last comes from choosing your causes and fights carefully. Now, it's all tarnished. I turned on the simbarchs and all but beat the Brotherhood to pieces against these black walls. So it remains to be seen whether warriors will flock to my banner as they did before.'

'I'm sorry,' Bareris repeated.

'Truly, I don't blame you.' Aoth grinned. 'At least, not too much. In fact, I want you and Mirror to stay with the company when this is over. We're a motley band of knaves and orphans as it is, and the others have gotten used to you. They'll make you welcome, and they won't care that you're undead.'

'Thank you for that,' Bareris said. 'But it won't be over. Not for me.'

'Don't be stupid! Of course it will! You killed Xingax and Tsagoth. We're about to wreck Szass Tam's great scheme. That's as much revenge as you'll ever get. The lich himself-his person, his existence-is beyond your reach.'

'You heard the speech I made to the rebels. I more or less promised I'd continue to help them.'

'And we keep our pledges,' Mirror whispered, his sepulchral tone as chilling as the wind and rain. 'The rule of our order requires it.'

Aoth scowled. 'For the hundredth time, neither Bareris nor I belong to your extinct fellowship, and we don't care about its code. In fact, he's just using obligation as an excuse to put me off.' He shifted his gaze back to the bard. 'But all right. I can see there's no swaying you. Just tell me one thing. What if, someday, by some miracle, you actually do manage to slay Szass Tam, and his destruction doesn't ease you any more than Tsagoth's did?'

'However I feel, I'll go into the dark as the dead are meant to do and hope Tammith is waiting for me there.'

The Dread Ring was an instrument built by an undead wizard to serve the unholiest of purposes, and to Jhesrhi's way of thinking, it would have made sense to try to break it in the purifying light of day. But Nevron had insisted they work at night, because the spirits he and his aides would invoke would be more powerful then.

He'd insisted on Jhesrhi's presence in the primary circle as well, perhaps because her escape from the trap under the wall had impressed him. Accordingly, she now stood with Aoth, Bareris, and the zulkirs on the same rooftop where Samas had melted the minaret.

She grasped the core idea of the ritual the zulkirs had devised, but not precisely how it worked. Fortunately, she didn't have to. During the initial phase, her job would be to raise power for others to direct. Still, though in most circumstances she was confident of her own abilities, she felt nervous as she waited to begin. What if, somehow, she spoiled the ceremony? Then Szass Tam would murder everyone in the East, everyone in all of Faerun, conceivably, and it would be her fault!

Gaedynn was one of the spectators sitting on the parapet. He wasn't as much of a dandy on campaign as he was when idling in town, but with the siege won, he'd done his best to burnish his appearance. His new, jeweled rings and cloak pin, plunder seized in the wake of the castle's fall, helped considerably.

Perhaps he sensed that Jhesrhi was tense, for he gave her a wink and a grin. His attention evoked the usual awkward tangle of emotions. But on this occasion, gratitude predominated, and she managed a twitch of a smile in return.

In the courtyard below, yellow flame boomed into existence, at this moment of its birth leaping higher than the roof of the keep. The Burning Braziers had lit the bonfire that was key to their own ritual. Mirror, she knew, was down there with them. The ghost was no servant of Kossuth, but, paradoxical as it seemed, he evidently channeled some sort of divine power and believed he could be of more use standing with the priests of fire than among arcane practitioners.

The Braziers would use their magic to support the zulkirs' efforts. Scattered throughout the fortress, secondary circles of wizards would do the same. Every surviving spellcaster who'd marched from the Wizard's Reach was taking part in one fashion or another, and Jhesrhi told herself that all of them, working together, must surely have a reasonable hope of destroying the Ring, even if an infamous lich had built it.

However grudgingly, Lallara's fellow zulkirs had agreed that, as an expert in countermagic, she was best suited to lead the ritual. She thumped the butt of her staff on the rooftop and produced a bang like the slamming of a massive door. 'All right,' she said, 'let's do this.'

She chanted the first incantation, and one at a time, the other members of the circle joined in, either reciting in unison with her or offering contrapuntal responses. Down in the bailey, the Burning Braziers prayed, and the bonfire hissed and crackled, a hint of cadence and pattern, conceivably of language, in the noise. Farther away, the lesser wizards called out words of power until the whole gigantic fortress droned and echoed with the sounds of invocation.

Power gathered in the air, alternately caressing and scraping, searing and chilling, but whatever the sensation, it was never truly painful. To the contrary, a swell of exaltation swept Jhesrhi's lingering anxiety away.

Her consciousness expanded. Her thoughts brushed the cognition of those around her, and it was a touch she could bear without panic or loathing, an intimacy that verged on the seductive. She'd have to take care lest some other mind impress its shape on hers and compromise her identity.

She perceived the demons and devils Nevron had invoked, but only vaguely, as shadows hovering at the borders of physical reality. The vast, ancient entities evidently didn't need to manifest fully to lend their aid to this particular endeavor, and that was just as well. Otherwise, their knowledge and commitment notwithstanding, some of the spellcasters might have fled in terror. Many of the common soldiers surely would.

Last but most clearly of all, she discerned the Dread Ring itself like a festering wound in the earth. Like a well of unnatural and inexhaustible power. Arcing away from it were lines of force linking it to other such talismans, defining an immense dark circle of death on the face of the land.

That was the Dread Ring that Jhesrhi and her allies had to destroy. Not the stone walls and bastions, although some of those might crack and crumble as an incidental effect of their assault, for battlements and towers could be rebuilt. They had to attack the concept, the potential of the Ring. If they could obliterate that, it would spoil the whole pattern, and none of the similar castles scattered across Thay would serve its intended purpose anymore.

Jhesrhi realized that since she now perceived the true, transcendent form of the Ring, it stood to reason that her partners in the circle must see it too. Lallara glanced around as though gauging whether everyone was ready, then raised her staff and rammed it down with all the strength in her deceptively frail-looking arms. Jhesrhi expected a louder bang than before, and perhaps that was exactly what happened, but if so, she didn't hear it.

That was because, as the rod plunged down, she felt the power they'd all raised plunge with it. The magic both stabbed a hole to a different level of reality and thrust her-or perhaps just her spirit- into it, as if she were an ant clinging to the flat of a blade.

She cast about. Previously, she'd seen the essence of the Dread Ring as a well. Now she and the rest of the circle seemed to float deep inside it. The curved walls weren't solid, though, but made up of crisscrossed bands of shadow. Beyond them lay nothing but a sort of twilight, extending as far as the eye could see.

Bareris was the first to attack. He shouted, and his thunderous voice chipped away blackness where one length of shadow overlapped another. Then Aoth hurled fire from his spear and burned away a little more.

Lauzoril spoke in a gentle voice like a father coaxing a child, and a section of well dissolved into dark vapor. Lallara snarled a spell, and a kite shield made of crimson light appeared in one portion of the cylindrical, weblike structure, withering the strands that occupied the same space. Nevron fingered an amulet dangling on his burly chest, and a huge winged devil with long, extravagantly curved horns appeared to stab at the black lattice with an iron trident. Samas brandished his baton, and a section of the construct turned to gold. Jhesrhi could feel that the transmutation compromised it as much as any of the other assaults.

She needed to start her own assault. She couldn't detect any fire, water, or earth ready to hand. If she wanted to use them, she'd have to produce them. But air was here, or at least the notion of it, for everyone could