"The god's power keeps the bogeys away," suggested Wesk. "The bogeys the warlocks didn't whistle up themselves, I mean."
"Maybe, but wouldn't the influence also make it more difficult to practice necromancy? It's inherently-"
"What's the difference?" Thovarr snapped.
Bareris blinked, then smiled. "Good point. We don't care what they're doing, how, or why. We just want to rescue Tammith and disappear into the night. We'll keep our minds on that."
Employing buildings, shadows, and piles of rubble for cover, they crept partway around the temple to look for sentries. It didn't take Wesk long to spot a pair of gaunt figures with gleaming yellow eyes crouched atop the roof.
"Undead," he said. "I can hit them, but zombies and the like are hard to kill. I don't know if I can put them down before they sound the alarm."
"Give me one of the arrows you mean to shoot," Bareris said.
The gnoll handed it over, and Bareris crooned to it, the charm a steady diminuendo from the first note to the last. At its end, the whisper of the wind, the skritch-skritch-skritch of one of the gnolls scratching his mane, and indeed, the entire world fell silent.
Bareris handed the arrow back and waved his arm, signaling for Wesk to shoot when he was ready. The gnoll chieftain laid it on the string, jumped up from behind the remains of a broken wall, and sent it streaking upward. Sound popped back into the world as soon as the shaft carried its invisible bubble of quietude away.
Wesk's followers shot their own arrows, and at least half found their mark, but as the gnoll had warned, the undead proved difficult to slay. Shafts jutting from their bodies like porcupine quills, they picked up bells from the rooftop and flailed them up and down. Fortunately, though, the sphere of silence now enshrouded them. The bells refused to clang, and after another moment, the amber-eyed creatures collapsed, first one and then the other.
Wesk balled up his fist and gave Bareris a stinging punch to the shoulder. "For a human," said the gnoll, "you have your uses."
"I like to think so," Bareris replied. "Let's go."
Keeping low, they ran toward the temple. Their path carried them near a weathered statue of Horus-Re. In its youth, the figure had brandished an ankh to the heavens, but its upraised arm had broken off in the millennia since and now lay in fragments at its feet.
The temple proved to consist primarily of long, open, high-ceilinged galleries, with a relative scarcity of interior walls to separate one section from the next and no doors to seal any of the entrances and exits. To Bareris's war-trained sensibilities, that made it a poor choice for a stronghold, but perhaps in Delhumide, the site's aura of sanctity seemed a more important defense than any barrier of wood or stone.
In any case, he was far more concerned about something else. The temple was occupied. From time to time, they slipped past chambers where folk lay sleeping. But there were fewer than Bareris had expected, nor did he observe any indication that Red Wizards were practicing their arts here on a regular basis.
Eventually Wesk whispered the obvious, "If all those slaves were ever here, they aren't anymore."
"They must be," Bareris said, not because he truly disagreed, but because he couldn't bear to endorse the gnoll's conclusion.
"Do you want to wake somebody and ask him?"
The bard shook his head. "Not unless he's a mage. Any soldier would likely just go into convulsions like our orc. It's not worth the risk of rousing the lot of them, at least not until we've searched the entire place."
They prowled onward, looking for something, anything, to suggest an answer to the riddle of the missing thralls' whereabouts. In time they found their way to a large and shadowy chamber at the center of the temple. Once, judging from the raised altar, the colossal statue of Horus-Re enthroned behind it, and faded paintings depicting his birth and deeds adoring the walls, the chamber had been the hawk god's sanctum sanctorum. More recently, someone had erected a freestanding basket arch in the middle of the floor, its pale smooth curves a contrast to the brown, crumbling stonework on every side. When Bareris spotted it, he caught his breath in surprise.
"What?" whispered Wesk, twisting his head this way and that, looking for danger.
"The arch is a portal," Bareris said, "a magical doorway linking this place to some other far away. I saw one during my travels and recognize the rune carved on the keystone."
"Then we know what became of your female," said Wesk.
"Apparently, but what sense does it make? If the Red Wizards want to do something in private, what haven is more private than Delhumide? No one comes here. Conversely, why bother with this dangerous place at all, if you're only using it as a stepping stone to somewhere else?"
Wesk shrugged. "Maybe we'll find out on the other side."
"Hold on," Thovarr said.
Bareris assumed he meant to point out the recklessness of walking through the gate when they had no idea where it led or what waited beyond, but before the gnoll could get going, a scarlet-robed figure stepped into view through a doorway midway up the left wall. At first, the wizard didn't notice the intruders, and Thovarr had the presence of mind to fall silent. Wesk laid an arrow on his bow.
But as he drew it to his ear, the mage glimpsed the intruders from the corner of his eye, or sensed their presence somehow. He was wise enough not to waste breath and time crying for help that would surely arrive too late to save him, nor did he attempt to scramble back through the doorway as Bareris might have done. Perhaps the space he'd just vacated had only the one exit, and he didn't want to trap himself.
Instead he flourished his hand, and the black ring on his thumb left a streak of shadow on the air. Each gripping a great-sword, four pairs of skeletal arms erupted from the band. They emerged tiny but swelled to full size in a heartbeat.
They were an uncanny sight to behold, and even Wesk faltered for an instant. The Red Wizard snarled words of power, and the bony arms flew at the gnoll and his companions. Ignoring the imminent threat of the greatswords, Wesk shot an arrow at the mage, unfortunately not quickly enough to keep the warlock from finishing his incantation. A floating disk of blue phosphorescence shimmered into being in front of him, and the arrow stuck in that instead, just as if it were a tangible wooden shield.
Then the disembodied arms hurtled into the distance and started cutting with their long, heavy blades. The intruders had the advantage of numbers, but even so, Bareris realized the wizard's protectors would be difficult to defeat. The only way to stop them or even slow them down was to hit hard and square enough to cleave a length of bone entirely in two, and they flitted through the air so nimbly that it was a challenge to land a stroke at all.
But the necromancer was an even greater threat, and Bareris didn't dare leave him to conjure unmolested. He stepped between a set of skeletal arms and Wesk, ducked a cut, and riposted, buying the gnoll chieftain the moment he needed to drop his bow and ready his axe. After that, though, the bard extricated himself from the whirl of blades and charged the mage who, the translucent, arrow-pierced disk still hovering between him and his foes, the skirt of his robe flapping around his legs, was himself sprinting toward the white stone archway. Apparently he believed safety, or at least help, awaited him on the other side.