Jhesrhi did her best to arrange her mouth into a convincing sneer, like a cruel goddess in mortal disguise who d tired of toying with her puny opponents and was ready to demonstrate the full measure of her power. She made her corona of flame burn brighter, cast fire before her in a continuous, roaring flare, and marched forward.
Advancing into the teeth of the enemies curses made it even harder to blunt and deflect their force. Her limbs throbbed and cramped as more and more of the embodied malice slipped past her guard. But she didn t allow the pain to show in her face, make her break stride, or interrupt the steady outpouring of fire from the head of her staff. Instead, she shaped portions of the blaze into the semblance of furious griffons made of flame.
As she and her flare drew steadily closer, the telthors clustered around the witches. They cringed and peered up anxiously at their mistresses. And after another stride or two, the durthans began to fall prey to the same anxiety. Despite the masks and voluminous robes, Jhesrhi could see their fear in the way they tensed and balked.
The witch in the silver mask snarled, This way! She scrambled into a side passage, and her companions scurried after her. An instant after the last of them had disappeared, an enormous spider web burst into existence in the mouth of the tunnel, no doubt to prevent pursuit.
Panting, profoundly grateful and somewhat surprised the bluff had succeeded, Jhesrhi allowed her flare to gutter out. She leaned on her staff and, with an aching, trembling arm that felt almost too heavy to lift, waved the stag warriors on to attack the lesser undead still trying to cut and claw their way into the glabrezu s crypt.
Vandar had given himself over so utterly to rage that it was like the feeling was the living creature, and he, just a weapon in his grip. And that was fortunate. It kept him cutting, lunging, leaping, and dodging, when by all rights, his limbs should have been feeble and slow with exhaustion. It kept him attacking past the point where a sensible man might have succumbed to futility and despair.
Yet despite his fury, a part of him noticed as his most formidable allies dropped out of the struggle. At the start, while he and his brothers had assailed the glabrezu with swords, axes, and spears, the outlanders had seared it with thunderbolts, flame, and shafts of burning light. But those blasts had stopped coming. Unable to divert his attention from the fiend, Vandar didn t know why. He wondered if the glabrezu s magic had killed Aoth, Jhesrhi, and Cera, too.
Whatever had become of them, it was his fight his and the Griffon Lodge s. And despite the evidence of the pulped and dismembered Rashemi bodies scattered about the floor, Vandar still believed they could win it. Surely the enchantments in the red sword could kill the giant, but not as long as it was only cutting up the creature s extremities. He knew he had to find a way to reach its vitals.
He shouted to attract its attention and rushed at its right foot. It struck at him like he d hoped it would, but not in the way he had wanted. Instead it bellowed a word of power. The magic stabbed pain through the core of him and made blood stream from his nose.
He snarled the pain away and lunged again. Then, as he d hoped, a pair of huge pincers plunged down from on high to catch him and snip him to pieces. He jerked himself out of the way, and when the demon started to pull its extremity back, he sprang and wrapped his arms around the nearer of the claws.
The sharp edges cut him, and if the demon simply snapped its pincers shut, it would shear his arms off. But he d taken it by surprise, and instead it completed the action it had initially intended. It lifted its claws back into the air, and him along with them.
The glabrezu started to close its pincers, but, riding the rage, Vandar was a hair too quick for it. He heaved and swung himself onto the top of the claw, where he was still only an instant away from death. The fiend needed only to flip its arm to toss him up and catch him in its pincers or to hurl him across the vault to smash against the wall. But before it could do either, the beserker stood up and leaped at its chest.
The red sword drove into the glabrezu s burned, blackened flesh almost up to the hilt. For an instant, Vandar hung from the weapon like a mountaineer hanging from a piton. Then his weight pulled it sliding out of the wound.
He snatched frantically with his off hand and caught hold of a tuft of long, coarse hair that his spellcaster allies hadn t burned away. Dangling from that, he managed another thrust, then sensed or maybe it was the red sword perceiving it immense pincers reaching from behind him to pick him off his perch like a nit.
But the claws never closed on him. Instead, with a seeming slowness that reminded him of the start of an avalanche, the demon crumpled to its knees. Screeching, his lodge brothers scrambled to stab and cut at the lower part of its torso.
Trying to control his breathing, Aoth knew he was tiring and his undead opponent wasn t. He needed to end the confrontation. He let his targe drop a little to invite a cut in the high line.
The blaspheme obliged, or at least it seemed to. But as Aoth shifted to avoid the blow, he saw it was only a feint. The true attack had looped low to slice his leg out from underneath him.
Because his shield was on the wrong side of his body, he had to parry the attack with his spear. Shouting a word of defense, he stopped the life-drinking weapon a finger-length short of his flesh, although the clanging impact jolted his arm all the way up to the shoulder.
He set his spear ablaze with chaotic force and thrust at the blaspheme s flank. The point split the creature s mail shirt and pierced the gray, ridged skin inside.
But at the same moment, the blaspheme cut and caught the side of Aoth s head. His helmet clanked, and, stunned, staggering, he reeled off balance.
Frantically, he struggled to prepare for what was coming next. Swaying, he was actually recovering his equilibrium, and shifting his targe and sword into a proper guard, but oh so sluggishly, compared to the speed with which the blaspheme was presenting its blade.
But as the undead warrior made a horizontal cut, one of the ice trolls it had led into the vault lunged between it and Aoth. Intent on closing with some Rashemi or stag man, it apparently didn t notice it was rushing right into the middle of somebody else s fight.
The greatsword bit deep, and the troll collapsed, its flesh shriveling. The blaspheme yanked on the hilt of its weapon to free it from the corpse.
By the Luckmaiden s grace, it took a moment. Time enough for Aoth s thoughts to snap back into focus and for him to rattle off a spell.
Nearly as long as the blaspheme s weapon, a blade made of blue phosphorescence shimmered into being. It flew at the undead and cut at it. It parried, and the greatsword rang.
Fence with that for a while, thought Aoth. Meanwhile, he d take the blaspheme apart with further spells.
But as he took a breath to begin, the patchwork warrior snarled a single word. Aoth had never heard it before, but the charge of power it carried set his teeth on edge and made his battered head throb anew. It also prompted the corpse of the ice troll to make a grab for his ankle.
Aoth barely managed to jump away. The reanimated ice troll heaved itself up off the floor.
All right, he thought, it s a race. I need to get rid of you before the blaspheme finds a way to get rid of my flying sword.
Suddenly, a disembodied female voice sounded across the vault, magic making it audible despite the roar of combat. Uramar! it called. Fall back! Everyone, fall back!
Still defending himself against the sword of light, the blaspheme started to do precisely that, and its troops with it. It occurred to Aoth that a prudent man might be glad to let it go. But he was certain that the blaspheme was a leader maybe the leader of the undead conspiracy threatening Rashemen. He set about stabbing and burning the ice troll out of his way as quickly as he could.