As the creature roared and sidestepped away from him and the dwarf, Janik stole a quick glance over his shoulder at Dania. She was having a little more luck piercing her foe’s hide, but not much. Mathas seemed to have done better—the other creature looked a little scorched from one of the elf’s spells.
“What are we dealing with here?” Auftane called out.
The faces of tigers. Something fell into place in Janik’s mind, and he shouted, “These are fiends of Khyber!”
As he turned his attention back to the fiend nearer to him, Janik heard Dania say, “Then let’s see how you like a taste of holy power, fiend!” Her sword struck like a peal of thunder against her opponent, and the creature roared in pain and rage.
Janik dodged a great sweep of his foe’s sword, but the clawlike spikes on the creature’s shield raked his arm as he tumbled out of the way. “Damn!” he muttered as he thrust his sword toward the fiend’s shield arm. His blow was almost an afterthought and barely grazed the creature’s orange fur.
“Holy power, eh?” Auftane murmured, stepping backward out of the creature’s reach while its attention was focused on Janik.
“Got any of that in your wands there, Auftane?” Janik said. Even as he spoke, though, he saw the dwarf using his fingertip to trace symbols on the wooden shaft of his mace. As Janik feinted and parried the fiend’s much heavier sword, Auftane stepped forward again, swinging another powerful blow at the creature’s tigerlike head.
This blow mattered, Janik was sure—the dwarf’s mace crackled with power as it connected, and Auftane carried his swing through in a stream of crimson. The fiend staggered and snarled. It kept its feet, but Janik had the clear sense that it lacked the strength to roar.
He took the opportunity to drive his sword into its gaping mouth. He placed the strike perfectly, and the blow should have killed the fiend in an instant, but somehow, the blade refused to cut. He might as well have been stabbing the creature with a feather.
Snarling, the fiend bit down on Janik’s blade, holding it tightly between its teeth. In the instant before Janik realized what was happening and he released his grip on the hilt, the fiend swung its shield into Janik’s ribcage with crushing force, sending him sprawling backward to the ground. It spat the sword onto the ground and stepped forward, raising its cruel blade over its head.
A blast of brilliant light engulfed the fiend, accompanied by a deafening clap of thunder. When Janik’s vision cleared, he saw the fiend still standing over him, but its sword had slipped from its hand and its eyes were rolled back in its head. Behind it, he could see Mathas standing near Dania, looking with satisfaction at the result of his lightning spell. The fiend slumped to the ground, joining its companion in oblivion.
“Sea of Fire,” Janik muttered, struggling to his feet. “Let’s not do that again. Suppose there are more of those?”
“Someone blew that horn,” Auftane said, handing Janik his sword.
“You’re right,” Janik said as they walked over to Mathas and Dania. “I think I heard the same horn three weeks ago, if that’s possible.”
“Low sounds like that can travel quite far,” Mathas said.
Dania looked puzzled. “Could Krael have been that far ahead of us?” she asked.
Janik buried his fingers in his hair. “If they were really traveling day and night without ever stopping, I suppose they could.”
Dania used her foot to roll the nearer fiend onto its back, looking at its tigerlike face matted with blood. “So these things attacked Krael and his party here, probably three weeks ago, when you heard that horn, Janik. The skeleton soldiers probably fell quickly, and the necromancer died.”
“But Krael and the warforged escaped,” Janik said, scowling.
“That seems most likely,” Mathas said. “Although perhaps they were captured.”
“What I most dislike about this,” Dania said, “is the horn. Somebody blew it, obviously, which means more of these fiends are probably in that tower. But more to the point—”
“Somebody was meant to hear it,” Auftane said.
“Exactly,” Dania said. “Which suggests we’ve just found an outpost of a little fiend kingdom.”
“Janik,” said Auftane, “how far are we from Mel-Aqat?”
“From Mel-Aqat?” Janik pulled the sheaf of parchments from his pack and produced his map. He held his little finger up to the map, then compared it to the map’s scale. “About a hundred and fifty miles,” he said.
“A hundred and fifty miles of barren desert,” Mathas added. “Probably three weeks of travel.”
“Three weeks …” Auftane mused. “And you heard the horn three weeks ago, right?”
“You think the horn could be signaling someone in Mel-Aqat,” Janik said. “I think you might be right.”
“You recognized these fiends?” Auftane asked. “From your last visit there?”
Janik took a deep breath and let it out slowly, rubbing his hand over the stubble on his chin as he collected his thoughts. “I recognized them from texts,” he said, “not from experience. The earliest descriptions of Mel-Aqat describe giant statues of people with the heads of tigers, so naturally I’ve done some research about what those were supposed to depict. You remember in Stormreach, when we were talking about the Tablet of Shummarak? About the great war that supposedly raged between fiends and dragons in the first age of the world? Well, the legends describe those fiends—or at least some of them—as having the heads of tigers.”
“Rakshasas,” Mathas said. “I have read of them as well.”
“Exactly,” Janik said. “The most powerful of these rakshasas were called rajahs, their rulers, and they were ultimately bound within the earth—”
“By the couatls,” Dania interrupted, “the allies of the dragons. They sacrificed themselves to bind the fiends forever.”
“Right,” said Janik. “But the servitors of the rajahs were not all bound or destroyed. Several ranks or breeds of these fiends served the rajahs. Some wielded powerful magic. A black-furred variety served as scouts and assassins. And there was a warrior caste, called zakyas. I’m guessing that’s what we have here.”
He paused, running his hands through his hair. “It is possible that Mel-Aqat was a place where one of the rakshasa rajahs was imprisoned.”
“What?” Dania turned to face Janik.
“I’m beginning to see some of the pieces of the puzzle here,” Janik said, staring at the tiger-headed demon on the ground. “I don’t know how they fit together yet, but I think I see some pieces.”
He furrowed his brow in concentration.
“Some of the most ancient texts that mention Mel-Aqat—the same ones that describe the statues of these demons—call it the Place of Imprisonment. I’m certain that the ziggurat at the heart of the ruins is the locus of that imprisonment. That ziggurat is the one structure still standing in the city, and we could not find a way inside it on our last visit. So I have considered the possibility that your church is correct, Dania, and we released this rakshasa rajah from the Place of Imprisonment on our last visit. But I don’t think that’s the case, partly because we never got into the ziggurat.”
Dania’s face was flushed. “Unless the Ramethene Sword was a key of some kind,” she said, “and removing it from its place opened the prison.”
“That might be possible—if it weren’t contradicted by every extant text about the Ramethene Sword,” Janik snapped. “If your carefully reasoned theory had any validity, you would expect to see descriptions of the sword as a key, or a linchpin, or a keystone, maybe a cornerstone. Instead, it’s described—as one would expect for a weapon of war—in terms of its capabilities as a weapon. It’s the Sunderer, the Fleshrender, the Axis of Destruction. You are too hasty to assume the worst, Dania. But the most important reason I don’t believe we released the rajah is that the world would have noticed by now. By all accounts, these creatures possess power to rival the Dark Six, and little subtlety. If one had been released into the world three years ago, I’m fairly confident that Stormreach would not still be standing, at the very least.”