Mostly it was her manner that stunned the barbarian: she was as cool as a glacier, confident in her immense power. There was nothing in this room she couldn't grind under with one step, her calm air suggested. And Sunbright, his mind cloudy with grief and hatred, wondered if she were indeed a rescuer, or a worse threat than these monsters.
"Lady Polaris!" sneered the tusked-faced pit fiend. Beside the glorious white-haired woman, the creature looked like some grub turned from under a rotten log. "You bitch! What do you mean invading my kingdom?"
Even the woman's voice was cool. "I shan't keep you long, Prinquis. I've come only to retrieve some of my possessions. I don't care to lose my most promising apprentices. Not even to their own folly."
Turning in midair, she located the filthy and bedraggled Candlemas and Sysquemalyn. A white-painted nail pointed. "There they are. I'll just fetch them along home."
"Not so!" The pit fiend roared in hatred. "You've overstepped yourself this time! Hordes, destroy her!"
That, thought Sunbright, would be difficult, considering she was suspended in the air. But the hounds of hell, commanded to fight and die and rise again and fight and die again, for all eternity, surged forward, pushed by the wave of hate flooding from the pit fiend. Imps bounded like crabbed grasshoppers, bouncing higher each time to grapple for the white-haired woman. Blind giants blundered forward, crushing lemures between their toes. And the few surviving erinyes, naked and dusty, plucked up their stalactite-daggers and flapped clumsily toward the shining woman.
None got closer than a dozen feet. Without even raising her hands, the archmage hurled a pulse of white light like an errant star. Sunbright grunted and wished he'd had a warning, for the brightness seared his eyeballs and left a purple dot centered in his vision that half blinded him.
When he could see again, he realized the blast had been more than light. Feathers and hide and horns littered the ground for scores of feet around Lady Polaris. But there weren't enough scraps to account for the attackers, and Sunbright had to reconstruct what had occurred from the burnt stench in the air. The first circle of erinyes and imps must have been simply obliterated, evaporated to not even dust. The second wave had been crisped as if by lightning, leaving only feathers and toenails and horns. Farther out, fiends were seared and scarred beyond belief. Some had lost faces, the skin burned down to skulls, yet they feebly clung to life and moaned and gibbered. Others had lost arms, skin, eyes, lips, and these poor wretches crawled backward to live and suffer or to die and find relief. And all the others, mostly unharmed, had learned their lesson, and cowered low and whimpered.
Most amazingly, Sunbright and Sysquemalyn and Candlemas had stood at the same distance as the third rank, and so should have been killed. But the destruction had circumvented them, while even the lemures behind them had been reduced to puddles. The barbarian marveled at this woman's power, so mighty yet so contained. If she represented just one of the archmages of the Netherese Empire, it must surely endure a thousand years or more.
The high mage waited, doing nothing but shaking back her frosty hair. Sunbright wondered that she could stay so cool in a such an inferno. It occurred to him then that she might not be here, that what he saw was some projection of her, like a candle-show mimed behind a sheet. Who could know anything of how these archmages worked? Sunbright could no more understand them than a beetle could comprehend a king.
Prinquis, the pit fiend, surveyed the casual destruction of its kingdom, and its fury mounted beyond reckoning. Rearing on its great splayed feet, pounding its chest with horny hands, it threw back its head and roared a battle challenge that made the walls ring and Sunbright cover both ears with his hands. Then the fiend spread its leather wings and launched itself at Lady Polaris, like a red mountain taking off.
It fared no better than its slaves, though this time the archmage did raise her hands, mildly, as if chiding a child. Sunbright saw her power more clearly now, for only a single cometlike pulse flared from her hands. It struck Prinquis square in the face and almost snapped the creature's neck. Slammed as if by a giant sledgehammer, the fiend was bowled head over heels to slam into the far wall. A wing crunched like kindling; then the beast crashed upon the bluff where it had previously stood, a red, charred heap.
A moment of silence hung breathless over the pit. Imps and lemures and skeletal men hunkered and scuttled like cockroaches exposed to the blinding flare of Lady Polaris and her power.
Then, a stir on the bluff. Shaken and battered, Prinquis rose anew.
Its broken wing trailed and dripped gore; its face was red-black and stippled with blood that spattered its tusks. With scabby hands it scrubbed its face, making a coarse rasping noise. Reaching behind it, the fiend straightened the broken wing, snapping it back into place with a shudder. Then, most amazing to Sunbright, the creature grinned around its tusks.
"First round to you, Polaris. But you won't get away from here. You don't have what it takes to best me, not in the long run. Your pulse couldn't kill me, so nothing can."
Strong again, the fiend touched the wall of the cavern behind it. Sunbright knew the barrier was solid rock, yet the creature inserted its hand into the cleft and made the granite crumble like cheese. Looking up at the white-haired mage, Prinquis called, "Shall I ply my strength now? How about I tear down these walls around us? Collapse this cavern so even a snake couldn't wriggle through? Then you and I- near-immortals that we are-can lie crushed in darkness, trapped but alive, feeling yet unable to move, smelling the dead around us rot to nothing. Think of all we could discuss in a thousand years, Polaris. Think what it would be like to miss the sunlight for a millennium. In such time, could you conjure a spell that could truly harm me, here in my own abode?"
Sunbright reeled at the notion of being trapped in blackness for generations. Yet Lady Polaris, on high like a god, never even winked. Her voice continued coolly, "I didn't think I could harm you, Prinquis. That's why I arranged a portal between here and the only place you fear: the Abyss."
A wail rose from the assembled horde, and there began a new scampering to get clear, to escape. The pit fiend roared in rage and horror as Lady Polaris flicked a finger at it, or rather behind it.
On the far wall of the chamber, a glowing line appeared, like the mark of a glowworm. The light was white, the work of the archmage, and thickened and spread. Then, as if it were a blanket being torn, the wall split and peeled back. Rocks were smashed to dust or spit out to bounce on the bluff and off the pit fiend's thick hide. The whole wall was crushed aside, leaving an opening big enough to admit Prinquis, with wings spread.
But what erupted through the rent to the Abyss were fiends larger and even more savage than Prinquis. Towering, bull-headed, bewinged, and horned, the horde of balor rushed into the great chamber in a vast, earth-shaking stampede. In their fearsome claws were morning stars, flails, many-tailed whips, and other instruments of cruelty. Flames wreathed the monsters so they were difficult to see, but clear enough were their cries of savage ecstasy.
Sunbright couldn't begin to guess how long this feud had been raging. He'd heard Sysquemalyn talk of Prinquis's never-ending war with bitter rivals, the tanar'ri of the Abyss. He supposed these creatures could wage feuds just as tribes of men and women did in the tundra and highlands and elsewhere. And he had to admire Lady Polaris, who coolly set one gang of fiends upon another so she could hover above and watch the senseless slaughter she'd engendered.
And as long as he lived, Sunbright would never forget the horror of the display. Balor killed for sheer joy. They grabbed imps by the arms and ripped them apart, even splitting the hollow leather bodies down the legs and torsos. With broad hooves, they stamped and stamped on skeletal fiends until only white dust remained, and they stamped yet on that. With great sweeps of their flails, they spattered lemures to gobbets, then punched down on the squirming mass to ignite it, so the lemures burned even as they reformed. The barbarian was sickened by the sight and wanted to cover his eyes to shut it out. This was ferocity on an unheard-of scale, and he knew it had raged for centuries and would continue for all time. From the glee these balor exhibited, he knew they would kill their rivals, crush them to flinders, burn them to ashes, and then resurrect them to do it all again.