Prompted both by her martial training and natural curiosity, Jhesrhi first picked out Lod himself, and her eyes widened in surprise. The few bone nagas of her experience had been simply and precisely that, the naked, reanimated skeletons of enormous snakes with skulls nearly the same shape as those of human beings. The master wizard who’d woken Lod, though, had crafted something unique.
The commander of the Eminence was a divided being like a centaur. His maker had reshaped the top part of him into something very like the skeletal remains of the top half of a human being, arms, hands, and all. The bottom part remained overtly reptilian, but longer and heavier than one would expect of even a naga, the bones still sheathed in muscle and scales with a ridge of jagged spikes along the top. Jhesrhi wondered if she was actually looking at something that had once been a dragon’s tail.
Lod rode coiled on a cart drawn by a dozen scarred, gaunt, and filthy naked living men. According to Sarshethrian, the slaves had once been necromancers who’d made thralls of the undead.
Next, Jhesrhi identified the bone naga’s spellcasters, pallid vampires and withered liches walking with staves in hand and amulets hanging from their necks. She and her allies needed to neutralize them quickly, or at least keep them too busy defending themselves to do the same for their leader.
Finally, she looked over the men-at-arms, particularly the undead of two sorts she’d never encountered before even when fighting Szass Tam’s legions. The floating entities called direhelms were the top halves of suits of plate armor animated by the spirits resident within. Doomsepts were groups of seven luminous phantoms that fought as one and apparently were a single being in some metaphysical sense.
All things considered, the column looked formidable even in comparison to the horde of shadow creatures Sarshethrian had assembled to lie in wait for it. Jhesrhi hoped the maimed fiend was right that her powers and Cera’s would tilt the balance in their favor.
Once again, tinged with hatred and eagerness, Sarshethrian’s voice whispered from the empty air: “Now.”
Jhesrhi clothed herself in flame. It felt so good, so right, that for a moment, pleasure burned every other thought right out of her head.
Then, however, she remembered her purpose. Declaiming words of power, she jabbed with her brazen staff and cast a fiery missile at Lod. Elsewhere, her ordinarily merry voice vibrant with the loathing she felt for the deathways and all they contained, Cera recited a prayer that enveloped a portion of the column in searing sunlight. Sarshethrian’s creatures exploded from their hiding places.
The sellswords of the Storm of Vengeance and Aoth Fezim and his companions had all flown to Rashemen to negotiate for the wild griffons. Lacking such a convenient option, the Theskians had trekked across the frozen surface of Lake Ashane, and for the most part, had done so on foot or driving sleighs and dogsleds. Dai Shan, however, had ridden on a sizable magically propelled “ice barge” that sat on its runners at the end of the one of the docks toward the south end of town. A single lamp burned on the bow of the barge, perhaps to assure Yhelbruna that someone really was waiting onboard, while a rope ladder dangled over the side. She walked out onto the pier and, clamping her staff awkwardly under her forearm, began to climb.
During the day, someone had left a message addressed to her tacked beside the entry to the Witches’ Hall. Reading it, she’d discovered that her anonymous correspondent was one of Dai Shan’s underlings, who claimed his master had left instructions for him to carry out in the event he failed to return from his expedition on Mario Bez’s skyship.
To that end, the Shou needed to speak with Yhelbruna, and because that entailed an element of danger, he wished to do so secretly. Would the learned sister please meet him aboard the ice barge when Selune had passed her zenith?
On one level, Yhelbruna hadn’t much appreciated being presented with yet another mystery. Of late, she’d been contending with a surfeit. Yet the parchment, calligraphy, and phrasing were all recognizably Shou, and it would have been just like cagey, slippery Dai Shan to put a contingency plan in place to make sure Bez wouldn’t profit from betraying him. If so, what she learned tonight might finally prove to Mangan Uruk’s satisfaction that the Halruaan had no right to take the griffons.
Gripping the railing, she stepped up onto the barge’s broad, flat deck. Several low, almost hutlike structures stood along its length, but all were dark except for the captain’s cabin in the stern, where a hint of light leaked through the cracks around the hatch.
Yhelbruna walked to the cabin and knocked. No one answered.
“Hello?” she called. Still, nobody replied.
She tried to twist the brass handle. The hatch was locked.
Suddenly, belatedly, she sensed she was in danger. She whirled and spotted a small, shadowy figure at the other end of the barge. His several rings glowed as he spun his hands through mystic passes. So did the yellow eyes under his stubby horns.
He could only be Melemer, Bez’s warlock lieutenant. He’d evidently pilfered Shou parchment and forged a message cunningly conceived to lure Yhelbruna into a trap.
But he was going to regret his cleverness. However adept he was at his arts, she’d had a hundred years to practice her own, and after she rendered him helpless, he could tell her what had really happened in the north.
Gripping her staff with both hands, holding it parallel to the deck, she thrust it forth to symbolize forbiddance and defense. She asked the spirits and fey who were her special allies to lend her their strength. Magic sparkled like powdered emeralds in the air around her.
But something was wrong. She could feel at once that the defense was weak. And when Melemer finished his casting, a tendril of sickly amber phosphorescence shot up from the deck beneath her feet. Twisting around her like a vine strangling a tree, it wrapped itself as tightly as any rope or chain and hoisted her off her feet. Its malignancy burned her wherever it touched, even through her robes, and made her guts cramp with sudden nausea.
As she retched bile into her mask, Melemer advanced and started a second incantation.
In one instant, everything was dark and quiet. Then the world exploded into blinding glare and hot pain. The shock of it made Lod give a screeching hiss and throw his head back, but the glyphs of protection graven inside his ribs and picked out in subtle variations of gray among his scales helped him recover quickly.
Once he did, he discerned that something had thrown fire at him! Vampires and liches who’d been walking near his cart were frantically trying to extinguish their burning garments, while the draft animals harnessed closest to the cart sprawled charred and smoking in the traces.
As soon as he’d taken all that in, he heard a female voice declaiming spells that made patches of radiance bright as summer noon light flare into being up and down the length of the column. No, actually, it was worse than simple sunlight. Lod was a creature of Abeir, and for all his erudition, Faerun’s “gods” and their mortal agents were a mystery to him. But he knew enough to recognize “holiness” when it stung him like a thousand needles.
He’d expected the deathways to present certain hazards, but certainly not flame, the sun, and divine wrath. For one more muddled, dazzled instant, he imagined he was fighting an army of Rashemi, that they’d somehow learned of the Eminence and its plans and moved to oppose him here before he could even reach their country.
Then, though, he saw beyond the flame and the light to what was scuttling in the darkness and almost laughed in relief at the teeming shadow creatures. Because if he was mainly dealing with those, he was fighting Sarshethrian, even if the would-be patron devil of the undead had somehow induced mortal spellcasters to join his cause.