Fortunately, it hadn’t killed him. The protective charms bound into his tattoos and gear, his own innate hardiness, or Tymora’s favor had preserved him, and he prayed the same was true of his friends. Starting to feel the hot pain of his burns, he floundered around to face his attacker.
Then, at the very periphery of his vision, he glimpsed a robed, hooded figure stepping out of a doorway. Liquid sprayed him and his companions, searing them once again.
Aoth’s eyes burned and filled with tears. Something hit his chest-not, he thought, penetrating his mail but slamming the breath out of him. He was too blind to have any idea what it was.
For a long moment it felt to Medrash like he, Balasar, and the dwarf were simply falling. But at what was surely the last possible moment, the wind gusted upward to slow their descent. They still bumped down hard, but without injury.
Balasar drew his sword. “Appearances to the contrary,” he said, “maybe your wizard friend does have a sense of humor.”
Khouryn spun his axe through a casual practice swing. “No, she just set us down the easiest way, without caring whether it would make us think we were about to meet our ancestors.” He strode to the door of the derelict house and broke it open with a kick. The door banged against the interior wall, and the impact echoed throughout the building.
“Subtle,” Balasar said.
“They already know we’re chasing them,” Medrash said. “I doubt it matters.”
It was even darker once they entered the house. Medrash murmured a prayer and infused the blade of his sword with pearly light.
The glow revealed a ground floor that had, in its time, served the purposes of commerce, with empty shelves and counters near the door and worktables farther back. He couldn’t tell what the long-departed shopkeeper had manufactured and sold.
Nor did he care. All that mattered was bringing the Green Hand-or rather Hands-to justice and completing the task the Loyal Fury had entrusted to him. Ridding Luthcheq of a loathsome evil, further cementing the bonds of friendship between Chessenta and Tymanther, and bringing honor to Clan Daardendrien in the process.
A rat scuttled into a hole at the base of a wall. But except for vermin, the ground floor seemed deserted. “Let’s find the stairs,” he said.
Balasar pointed with his sword. “There.”
They started up, the spongy steps bowing under Medrash’s weight. Ruddy light flickered at the top. He wondered if something was on fire, and then two figures, mere shapeless silhouettes against the glow, abruptly stepped into view. Dark vapor streamed down at him.
Medrash’s nose and mouth burned. He doubled over coughing and could tell from the sounds behind him that his companions were similarly afflicted.
They had to exit the poison cloud and come to grips with their attackers. Despite his inability to catch his breath, and the fiery pain crawling down his throat into his lungs, he started running up the last few risers.
Then he faltered and found that he simply couldn’t continue. His attackers were exerting some sort of psychic compulsion to prevent it.
That meant he and his comrades had to escape out the other side of the fumes. “Back!” he croaked.
They turned and staggered downward. Until Khouryn, who was now in the lead, froze. An instant later, the dragonborn did too. Medrash could just distinguish other figures at the foot of the stairs. He had no idea where they’d been hiding when he’d first entered the shop. But somewhere, obviously, and now here they were, exerting the same influence as their accomplices on the floor above. Caging the intruders inside the toxic vapor.
Still coughing uncontrollably, Balasar collapsed.
The lightning, the fall, and the spray of vitriol, all coming within the span of a heartbeat or two, had stunned Gaedynn into a dazed passivity. But a part of him knew it and screamed for him to move.
He glimpsed motion in the direction from which the lightning had come. The possibility of a second such attack broke the impasse inside him. The part that wanted to act became the whole.
He rolled to one knee. Thanks be to old Keen-Eye, his enchanted bow was still intact despite the abuse it had just sustained. In fact, it seemed to have come through better than he had, considering the ugly chars and blisters on his skin.
But he didn’t yet feel the pain, not really, and praise the Great Archer for that too. He couldn’t afford to feel it.
His teary eyes could just make out a robed figure. He drew back an arrow and let it fly. The shaft buried itself in the robed man’s torso, and he toppled backward.
But at the same instant, Gaedynn heard rushing footsteps. He jerked around. All he could discern were vague flickers of motion, and this time, his smarting, watery eyes weren’t the problem. The oncoming foes were invisible, at least most of the time.
And they were already too close for any more archery. He leaped to his feet, crossed his arms, and snatched out the two short swords he’d brought along for backup weapons.
Unable to see his foes except for a moment now and then, hoping sheer ferocity would daunt them, he slashed madly. Once, he felt his left-hand blade slice something solid. Another time, he parried a stroke by pure instinct. Twice, an attack thumped him but failed to penetrate his brigandine.
He knew his luck couldn’t hold, but he was less afraid than outraged by the sheer unfairness of his situation. He and his companions had ventured forth to catch one murderer. Then they’d learned to Jet’s cost that the one was really two. Now it appeared two had multiplied into a whole houseful, and they could throw lightning and acid around and turn invisible.
The invisibility at least should have posed no problem for Aoth, and the war-mage had in fact regained his feet. But, eyes compressed to streaming slits in his blistered, mottled face, the man who could famously see everything didn’t seem to be doing any more damage with his jabbing spear than Gaedynn was with his swords. Apparently the acid spray had had an even more deleterious effect on his sight.
He and Gaedynn fought side by side, in the hallway where the staircase had come down, to prevent any of their unseen foes from slipping around behind them. Aoth growled a word of power, and frost leaped from the head of his spear. It painted the entire space before them white, and the hooded men as well.
Since he didn’t instantly follow up, it seemed that he still couldn’t see their foes, or at least not clearly. But Gaedynn could. He sprang, beat a short blade like his own out of line, and drove the point of his right-hand sword into an opponent’s guts.
He jerked the weapon free, and the Green Hands disappeared. “Again!” he shouted to Aoth.
But no more frost came. Gaedynn glanced around and saw that Aoth’s helmet was dented and askew, and, though he kept the spear shifting and thrusting in one of the basic defensive patterns, he looked unsteady on his feet.
And because of Gaedynn’s aggression, the two of them weren’t even in line anymore. Cutting and stabbing, he tried to retreat.
Then, behind him, Jhesrhi croaked words of command. Water splashed down over his head and everything else in the hallway like hundreds of buckets had overturned at once.
It washed the stinging acidic residue from his skin. It evidently washed it out of Aoth’s eyes too, and roused him from the daze induced by the knock he’d taken on the head. His eyes snapped open wide enough to reveal their blue fire. He stepped, stabbed, and the power in his spear blasted to pieces the man he’d just impaled.
Aoth then turned and hurled darts of green light in Gaedynn’s direction. They stopped short of him, vanishing as they pierced the two invisible foes between the sellswords. Who became visible as they crumpled to the floor.