Imperial soldiers swung clubs high to batter the fiend. Sysquemalyn gabbled a conjuration like a curse, stabbed fingers at the ground. Instantly it split, a hundred cracks radiating from her scaly feet. From every crack oozed gallons of black muck that stank like sea mud at low tide. The vile stuff clung to the soldiers' boots, burned through leather like acid. Even steel hobnails melted under the hellish stuff, which climbed like poisonous tentacles. As their boots leaked, the putrid gunk burned men and women's flesh like molten lead. Soldiers howled, jumped, landed in the slop so it splashed legs and hands, eating cloth and flesh. Shouts turned to screams. People saw their own bones daubed with blackness as it seared meat. Panicking, some batted at it, found their fingers rotting. Others tried to run, but tortured feet betrayed them and they splashed facedown. Ooze filled mouths, eye sockets, noses, and corroded flesh like melting candle wax.
Caught in the hellish tide were the dozen orcs who'd guarded the One King, their lord and master. They died writhing, seared by acid, suffering inside, knowing they'd been betrayed.
Courtiers stumbled and ran, pushing the ambassador Polaris toward the flying ships. But the lady stood firm. She was horrified and outraged by this base deception. Now she remembered how Sysquemalyn had coveted her power, beauty, and position, and plotted to gain it any way possible. How Sysquemalyn had insulted her mistress behind her back, then laughed at her own cleverness. That arrogance and presumption had driven Polaris to consign her chamberlain to hell. But now the archwizard saw that she'd made a mistake. Better to have killed Sysquemalyn outright, than let her harness the cabalistic conjurations of hell.
She'd remedy that mistake immediately. A fiend from hell would hate the cold. Polaris shrilled, "By Veridon, feast on this, traitor!"
The air around the monster shimmered, thickened, and frosted, sucking moisture from the air. In seconds the spell formed a block of ice as big as a house around Sysquemalyn. Dead and dying soldiers were crushed as the ice mass solidified and settled, pressing them deeper into the black ooze. A grinding like icebergs colliding resounded as ice cracked and refroze. The flint monster was obscured behind an ice wall until she looked like a shadow.
But the ice block didn't last long. The shadow within flitted like a fish under a frozen river. Then, from the depths, a hole bored through the ice, then flashed hell-fire that scalded ice to steam. The weeping hole was matched by a second, then a third, until the ice block was shot through, fragile as spun glass. With a shriek, the trapped flint monster shattered the block. Chunks of ice tumbled, threw sprays of water, spun crazily. Revealed-dripping wet, dark and dangerous as a storm-lashed mountain-was Sysquemalyn.
The monster-mage unleashed more hellfire as if hurling hatred from her heart. Snapping an arm, Sysquemalyn flung a flaming gobbet at Polaris that sizzled like a meteor. Only the archwizard's personal shield stopped it a foot from her face. Polaris even flinched as hellfire engulfed her, and raised the temperature inside the shield enough to wilt her silver-white hair.
The pool of black ooze, now studded with bones and helmets, caught fire at Sysquemalyn's feet, snapping and gouting around her skinny waist. But a fiend who'd endured real hellfire could ignore this pale imitation. With a curse, the monster raised her hands to spread pain and terror and death.
People had panicked at the first sign of trouble, their first impulse to quit the mountaintop. Soldiers and courtiers stampeded aboard the three landed ships. The six hovering ships, unsure how to help, dropped to pick up anyone they could. Sysquemalyn aimed to destroy them all.
Screeching, she windmilled her arm until it caught fire, convulsed in a giant fireball that burned to her armpit. With an oath, she whipped the arm and let the fireball fly. It struck the middle ship's gangway where people mashed to get in. Screams erupted as the hellfire ignited hair, clothes, leather, and parchment. The boat caught fire, paint and wood blistering and smoking. Sailors recoiling from the heat screamed and toppled from the upper decks, some crashing their heads on stone, others falling scores of feet down the mountainside. As the fire consumed the magical ship, it lifted, a floating coffin of charred dead and dying that sagged in the air. Its stern crunched on rocks. Flaming, smoking, it tilted, then plunged over the mountainside. A rending crash bespoke death on an outcrop far below.
The fiend struck again and again. Airboats battered by flaming gobbets burned immediately. Neither water hurled on the fires nor beaten blankets could extinguish it. Any attempt to put it out only spread it further. Two ships tried to rise but crashed. A third, burning from end to end, with flaming sailors spilling like ants, collided with its neighbor and turned that one into a torch as well.
Blinking sweat in her eyes, Lady Polaris cast about, saw only dead as attendants, and sucked wind. Rarely had she seen such power, and never directed at her. She'd better unleash some awful spell, and soon, or she might actually be harmed. Racking her brain, she mumbled words to a spell read long ago but never uttered, even as her fingers and thumbs, inverted, formed a square to box the monster.
Sysquemalyn spun two fireballs on her arms, the flames flickering eerily on her granite, mineral-shot hide. Now the monster chirped as a square of blackness appeared under her feet. No, nothingness. A portal to a negative energy plane. It gaped under her splayed, horny feet like an open trapdoor that could drop her back into hell.
Yet Sysquemalyn had been to hell, and the portal did nothing but rob her feet of dweomer. With a harsh croak, she shook off the fireballs, and called to Polaris. "I can withstand anything, you pathetic bitch! Can you say the same?"
And stepping off the gaping void, she planted her foot against the hole's edge and kicked.
Lady Polaris balked as the fearsome portal skidded across the ground like a dinner plate, aimed straight at her. She barely jigged aside before the cavity sailed by, revolving slowly. Near the edge of the cliff, soldiers racing for an intact ship failed to see the rocketing threat. The portal clipped off their feet as neatly as a spinning saw blade. Men and women fell shrieking and spilling blood. Those who fell on the portal were sucked within, some disappearing, some cut in half to tumble across rocks in red chunks. Traveling on, the portal reached the cliff and winked out.
Lady Polaris stared in disbelief. Sysquemalyn gargled a laugh. "Fool! Taste this!"
Forking clawed fingers, the fiend hurled a spray like hard water at the archwizard, a whirlwind of steel like a flying buzz saw. Polaris brushed it aside, so it sped on and disappeared over a cliff. But in the meantime, Sysquemalyn invoked a spell by whistling and keening like a shrike's call.
Lady Polaris's first inkling of danger was a crinkling, crackling noise. She turned, found a crystalline structure towering over her, reaching with diamond claws. The giant insect tilted to one side like a malformed scorpion. Its body was indistinct, a moving column of jewels. Blue dots like multi-faceted eyes fixed her with sapphire brilliance: for a second, the greedy archwizard wondered if they really were sapphires. Then triple jagged, glittering claws snapped. Polaris's diamond brooch, the clasp fastening her cloak, was torn off. Her cape slithered off her shoulders and crumpled behind her.
Polaris burbled, retreating in shock. The creature had penetrated her personal shields, something an ogre's arrow couldn't pierce! The gem beast must be an elemental, an earth spirit, but not of this plane. And coming from another plane, it could stab through her shields in this plane! And now the jewel claws weaved, bobbed, and grasped at her robe. It wanted her silver embroidery!