“What in the world?” asked the surprised and clearly impressed Kipper, standing by Penelope and readying his own magic.
But Catti-brie wasn’t about to answer. She was deep into her spell then, and the red lines along the black staff began to glow more angrily, as if it was filled with fire that begged for release.
Indeed.
The demons came on in a rush, but Catti-brie struck first. She lifted her staff out to the right, launching a ball of flame out past Bruenor and the twins. Before that fireball had even landed, she swung the staff out the other way and sent a second ball flying off down the tunnel.
The first fireball exploded, and a blast of hot air swept down the tunnel to wash over the companions. The second exploded almost immediately following, and now the hot wind came from the other direction.
When the smoke cleared, far fewer manes were moving, most lying on the ground as smoking husks. The vrocks screeched in protest, the huge nalfeshnee beat its little smoking wings furiously, and the glabrezu drove in harder.
“I see the end of the line!” Penelope said to Kipper, who began tracing an outline in the air. “Keep in the midst of the five dwarves we’re leaving here, Catti-brie,” she instructed.
“And where are you going?” Catti-brie asked.
“Go!” Kipper shouted at Emerus and Ragged Dain, and he pushed them at the magical portal he had just constructed.
“I ain’t leavin’ me friends!” Emerus protested.
“Neither are we!” Penelope shouted. And she had to shout now. The battle had been joined on both ends of the line, Athrogate and Ambergris smashing the leading lesser demons, Bruenor and the Fellhammer sisters battling a pair of vrocks.
Kipper went into the portal and seemed to step into the same tunnel, but far afield, behind the demons to Catti-brie’s left.
“Well, go!” Penelope said emphatically, and Ragged Dain leaped into the gate, Emerus close behind.
“Hold the line and we’ll thin that group in short order,” Penelope said with a wink to Catti-brie. She leaned over and kissed Catti-brie on the cheek then, smiling widely, evidently enjoying it all-and indeed, hadn’t she professed to Wulfgar her adventurous side? With a battle cry that would make a Battlehammer proud, Penelope leaped into the portal and disappeared.
Catti-brie started to call to the five dwarves still around her to tighten up their ranks, but she thought the better of it, realizing that this crew, deep into their fighting now, probably wouldn’t even hear her.
She did yell out anyway, a simple warning of “Light!” and called out “Alfara!” and stamped her staff, which reverted to its silver-gray hue with the blue sapphire. She launched into a quick spell and held the staff aloft, using it as a focus for her magical energies. Once more blue mist wafted out of her sleeves, this time from the right arm, from the spellscar of the unicorn of Mielikki.
And from that magic, Catti-brie brought forth a light, brilliant and warm and full of comfort to her allies, and full of stinging, unwanted pain for the beasts of the lower planes.
Catti-brie stayed halfway between the dwarf lines, looking left and right, ready to cast a spell of healing through the conduit of her magical staff.
The mist from her left sleeve, the symbol of Mystra, began to curl, too, the woman eager to set loose some more destructive arcane magic.
“Trust him,” Penelope told Emerus and Ragged Dain. “Kipper knows this spell better than any alive, I expect!”
The dwarves shook their hairy heads doubtfully. Kipper had asked them to stand five feet back from a wall, a bend in the corridor, and face it, though the demons were back the other way.“They’ve taken notice!” Kipper said. “And here they come!”
Emerus glanced back over his shoulder to see one of the human-height demons, thick as any dwarf, rambling down at them, vulture-like beasts close behind and others pressing in from behind. Emerus’s expression twisted when the hallway seemed to shimmer, and the huge dwarf-like creature disappeared.
And reappeared immediately, stepping through Kipper’s newest gate and exiting right in front of Emerus and Ragged Dain, but not facing them. It was clearly disoriented, stumbling away from them.
“Ho!” Ragged Dain yelped in surprise when the thick-limbed beast appeared right in front of him. He managed to strike out at it and clip it just a bit-and he almost pursued, as did Emerus, but Penelope had told them not to travel farther down the corridor for any reason.
They both came to understand why, as the vulture beast charged through the gate to crash into the turning beast, stopping it short, and now both dwarves got in clean hits. More demons piled through, disoriented, looking the wrong way, crashing into those who had come through before.
The dwarves just kept swinging, their weapons smacking against demon skin and cracking demon bones.
A streak of lightning cut between the dwarves, slicing into the tumbled mob. Behind Penelope, the dwarves heard Kipper laughing.
They just kept swinging.
Hot flames blew back their beards as Penelope’s fireball landed in the midst of the confused and tangled mass of demons, and that only spurred the two Felbarran dwarves on more, their weapons, wet with blood and gore, whacking away with abandon.
Back by the main fight, Athrogate and Ambergris didn’t notice the trailing ranks of the demon mob turning back. Many of the little ones were already dead from Catti-brie’s fireball, but of the ones that remained, many were huge beasts, including one behemoth nalfeshnee that seemed more angry than injured.
“Ah, but I’m saving a fun trick for that one,” Athrogate remarked, and across came a morningstar to intercept, turn aside, and crack open the sharp beak of a vrock. The battered creature tried to fall over him, its leathery wings crowned out wide, but Athrogate’s second weapon was already spinning in and those open wings presented him with a most wonderful target.
The vrock’s screech came out as a breathless gasp as Cracker’s heavy ball crushed its ribs, and as the beast lurched, Ambergris stabbed her huge mace, Skullcracker, straight out, driving back the manes ambling toward her, and whipped it across to smack the vrock in the side of its head just at the same moment that Athrogate’s Whacker came back in on the other side.
The vrock’s thick skull could not resist the press of those two weapons coming together with such force and coordination. The sound of bone snapping echoed off the tunnel walls.
The vrock fell straight down over Athrogate, or would have if the dwarf was not possessed of giant strength. He dropped his weapons and caught the falling creature and sent it flying back into the next demons in line.
The dwarf squatted fast and scooped up his devastating morningstars. He meant to grab them and burst ahead to pummel the demons, but Ambergris tackled him before he ever really started. And a good thing she did. A wall of fire appeared right in front of Athrogate, lining the left-hand wall of the tunnel and running down almost to where Penelope and the others had gone. Flames leaped out from the conflagration, filling the corridor, and terrible shrieks came from within the roiling flames as demon flesh curled.
Athrogate and Ambergris had to fall back a couple of steps, almost to Catti-brie, who stood with her staff upraised, the gem glowing an angry red, reflecting in her eyes. She seemed a part of the weapon and it a part of her, one being bathed in communal magic, controlling the flames, bringing forth the flames, reveling in the cleansing fires.
“Girl,” Athrogate breathed, hardly believing the strength of the wall. Catti-brie didn’t blink, her focus pure. She was drawing straight from the primordial then, her own arcane magical powers enhanced greatly by her kinship with the preternatural godlike creature, and by the powerful weapon it had helped her to fashion.