Smoke streamed up from the cup of fire into the wyrmkeeper’s face. He started coughing.
Aoth charged the altar, counting on the thick smoke to hide his approach. Unfortunately, it hid the wyrmkeeper too. Though spellscarred eyes ignored darkness and pierced illusion, they couldn’t see through something that was real. But he’d taken careful note of the priest’s position, so maybe it wouldn’t be a problem.
He at least managed to scramble up onto the dais and into the heart of the smoke without hurting himself. At the same time, the coughing stopped. That was bad. If the wyrmkeeper had caught his breath, he could either cry for help or cast a spell.
Aoth glimpsed a shape in the smoke, plowed into it, and carried it down to the dais beneath him. In the process he inhaled smoke, and he too started to cough. Still, groping, he managed to grab the cleric’s neck and squeeze.
After a while, the priest stopped flailing and scratching at him. Despite the burning in his chest, Aoth made himself stop coughing long enough to wheeze a counterspell. The magic cleaned the smoke from the air.
He lifted his head and peered over the altar. No one seemed to be rushing to the wyrmkeeper’s aid.
He looked back down at the priest. The fellow was breathing.
You can fix that, Jet observed.
I could. But in theory, this whoreson is Tchazzar’s holy servant. If I can, I want to find Cera and get out of here without killing anybody, and without anyone recognizing me.
He pulled off the filthy robe, stripped the priest of his outer vestments, and put them on. They were a poor fit, but might do at a distance. Since they too possessed a cowl, they were definitely more likely than his beggar’s robe to pass inspection in the private precincts of the house.
He made sure the unconscious wyrmkeeper was well hidden behind the altar, then arbitrarily chose the door on the right. So far, no one had started modifying the rooms on the other side. They just look like parts of an opulent private home, some in disarray from the celebrations and slovenly habits of the new residents.
But Cera had to be there somewhere.
No, said Jet, she doesn’t. You only went in there on a guess. If there’s nothing, get out before they catch you.
I’ll be all right, Aoth answered. Most of the candles and lamps are out, and nearly everyone’s asleep…. Then, suddenly, peering through yet another doorway, he saw it.
Many aristocrats and wealthy merchants built homes that had secret areas, and the interim temple appeared to be one of them. A section of oak paneling was set a hair deeper than the pieces to either side. The button concealed in the trim was similarly recessed, and the grain in the darker wood didn’t line up precisely.
No one else would have noticed it, certainly not across the length of an unlit room. But just as Aoth could see in the absence of light, so too did he view the world in minute detail.
He stalked across the nondescript, mostly unfurnished chamber and pushed the button. The catch clicked. He cracked the door open. On the other side, a spiral staircase twisted down to some portion of the cellars.
Aoth made sure he could easily reach the hilt of the sword beneath his stolen vestments. Then he started down.
The orcs howled as they charged. It was the fourth time they’d rushed their foes, but Oraxes still flinched. He couldn’t help it.
The enemy crashed against the shields and the warriors who carried them like a great wave battering a rock. And after a time of frenzied stabbing, slashing, and shoving on both sides, like a wave they receded.
Or reeled back, or stumbled away, where they didn’t lie dead or maimed on the ground. One of the things Oraxes had learned early on in this terrifying, fascinating night was that he mostly couldn’t watch a battle and truly grasp the import of what he saw. But still he had a sense the orcs had had enough, and when his companions relaxed, he knew he was right.
A spearman spat. At some point, something had chopped or broken off the point of his weapon, but he’d continued fighting with the shaft in preference to the mace on his hip. Oraxes suspected it had something to do with reach.
“The mighty Red Spears,” the sellsword sneered, and the warriors around him laughed.
A pillar of flame leaped up in the midst of the enemy formation.
For a heartbeat, Oraxes assumed that one of his fellows from Luthcheq had hurled an incendiary attack. Then he glimpsed a horned, skeletal head and clawed hands inside the blaze. Tall as a hill giant, the burning figure stalked forward while its allies scurried out of the way.
Oraxes and his comrades knew the enemy had spellcasters too, mostly conjuring from behind cover, just like their counterparts. The griffon riders in the air had loosed a lot of arrows at them. Seemingly to no avail, because periodically the bastards materialized some new entity to fight on their behalf.
Humor and scorn wiped from his face, the man with the broken spear looked around at Oraxes. “What is that thing?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Oraxes admitted. But his instincts told him it was deadlier than any of the creatures that had preceded it.
He reflected with a pang of fear that he’d largely depleted his magic. Still, maybe he could destroy the thing before it came any closer. He spoke words of power and brandished his hand before him. Frost flowed over it from his fingertips to his wrist. He could feel that it was cold, but the chill wasn’t painful.
Mimicking the attitude of his extremity, a huge, disembodied hand made of ice appeared in front of the oncoming fire creature. Oraxes reached and clenched his fingers shut, and the hand of ice did the same, gripping the entity around the torso and pinning its arms to its sides.
The demon, if that was what it was, snarled and heaved, and the hand of ice shattered. Oraxes gasped at a sudden hot pain. When he inspected his own hand, there were blisters spotting the palm.
He told himself it could have been worse. At least the entity hadn’t broken his fingers.
Its aura of flame illuminating mangled corpses, as well as wounded men and goblinkin who struggled to crawl aside, the spirit advanced on Gaedynn and his archers. The bowmen stood in a somewhat protected position, with Oraxes’s formation of spearmen on their right and a company of native Chessentans to the left.
The archers shot at the advancing fire thing for several moments. Some of them hit it too, but the arrows burned away instantly, and it was impossible to tell if they were doing any real damage.
Then, still steadily drawing and releasing, Gaedynn shouted, “Bows, fall back! Spears, engage!”
Oraxes’s companions scrambled to plant themselves squarely in the fiery giant’s path. He scurried after them.
As they reformed their shield wall and extended their spears, the demon was still a stone’s throw away. But it swept one hand in an arc, and a tongue of flame leaped from its fingers to slash across several sellswords. They staggered and screamed, their garments burning.
The demon charged the point where it had weakened the formation. It snatched, snagged a sellsword on its talons, and heaved him into the air, letting him char in its fiery grasp for a moment before dashing him to the ground. It lashed out again, and a warrior’s head tumbled off his shoulders.
Even several paces back Oraxes felt like he was standing next to a bonfire, and he soon saw that often, the creature didn’t even have to attack a man to take him out of the fight. When their spears and clothing caught fire, or every breath seared their lungs, the mercenaries had no choice but to fall back.
More quickly than Oraxes would have imagined possible, given its steadfast performance against the orcs, the formation started to fall apart. The warriors weren’t routed yet, but he could feel their fear just as he’d felt it when the orcs lost heart.
Griffon riders wheeled overhead, shooting, but their shafts didn’t seem to trouble the demon any more than the ones Gaedynn and the skirmishers had loosed from the ground. The Chessentans kept their distance, unwilling to engage the thing that was ripping and burning its way through the sellsword
s. One spearman yelled, “Jhesrhi! Jhesrhi!” In his terror, he’d forgotten the Brotherhood’s chief wizard wasn’t there.
But Oraxes was, and he had to do something. He rattled off a spell, meanwhile making stabbing and slashing motions with both hands.
A dozen floating daggers materialized in the air around the demon. They too stabbed and sliced.
The demon snarled and sprang forward, smashing spearmen out of the way, extricating itself from the midst of the flying blades. Suddenly there was no one between it and Oraxes.
It slashed down at him. He jumped back and thought he’d avoided the attack. Then he felt fierce heat on his chest. He looked down.
He had two bloody grazes across his torso. But the truly alarming thing was that his tattered shirt and jerkin were on fire.
He dropped and rolled. But he couldn’t put out the fire and defend himself against the demon too. It reached for him-
And kobolds rushed it from the left and slashed at its legs with short, heavy, cleaverlike blades. Some even climbed its legs to strike at higher portions of its body. Its corona of flame didn’t deter them, and as he clambered back to his feet, Oraxes saw the reason why. They were already dead, and so incapable of pain, fear, or concern for their own survival. They didn’t stop trying to carry out their reanimator’s commands until they burned away to nothing.
Meanwhile, Meralaine chanted. The words sounded soft and dull, like shoveled earth dropping on top of a coffin, yet paradoxically they carried despite the din of battle. On the final syllable, she snapped a piece of bone in two.
The giant’s halo of flame shrank in on itself, and for the first time Oraxes got a clear look at the inhuman skeleton at the heart of the blaze. Then the creature collapsed in a heap, with just a few small blue and yellow flames flickering among the bones.
Meralaine gave Oraxes a grin. “It was an immolith,” she said. “An undead demon. So I knew how-”
Behind her, the immolith’s fire leaped up again. Heaving itself to its knees, it reached for her. She pivoted, saw the huge, burning hand right in front of her face, and froze.
Oraxes cried a word of power and squeezed his hands together like he was making a snowball. Then he hurled the imaginary missile. It became real in midflight and struck the immolith’s skeletal head in a burst of frost and steam.
An instant later, a black arrow punched into the side of the demon’s skull.
The immolith collapsed as it had before. Panting, heart thumping and scratches and blisters smarting, Oraxes watched it for a while. It showed no signs of rearing up again.
“That was the last of those,” said Gaedynn, striding nearer. Oraxes inferred that the sellsword meant the arrows he’d brought out of the Shadowfell. “Unfortunately.” He peered at Oraxes’s chest. “That doesn’t look so bad.”
Back home that dismissive comment might have incensed Oraxes. Here … well, he had to admit others had suffered worse. Much worse. “It’s not. Are we winning?”
“Not yet,” the archer said. “Maybe not … Never mind that.” He turned to the spearmen who’d engaged the immolith and who were currently milling around in disorder. “Spears! What in the name of the Black Bow is wrong with you? Form up!”
Once Aoth descended to the secret portion of the cellars, there was no doubt whatsoever that wyrmkeepers had laid claim to it. They hadn’t brought in a veritable treasure trove of icons the way Halonya had upstairs. But there were pentagons, and wheel-like emblems depicting five dragon heads with curving necks radiating from a central point, drawn with care on every wall. A rack in a cramped little armory held military picks, and, clustered together, the baneful enchantments smoldering in the steel made his teeth ache. The five tapers in every candelabra shined red, green, blue, shadowy black, and ghostly white.
Fortunately, he had yet to run into any of the wyrmkeepers themselves. He supposed they needed sleep like everyone else and would rather get it in a warm, properly furnished bedroom than a bare, chilly cellar, no matter how holy the latter was.
There’ll be someone, said Jet. Keep your guard up.
Aoth passed a strong room, its sturdy, ironbound door standing ajar, and wondered how much wealth it had contained before the former householder cleared it out. Next came a torture chamber, sparsely equipped by Thayan standards-with only a rack in the middle of the space and a few whips, pincers, thumbscrews, and pears hanging on hooks on the back wall-but capable of inflicting its share of agony nonetheless. There were dry brown stains here and there, but even fire-kissed eyes couldn’t tell just how old they were. Aoth scowled and quickened his stride a little.
But he need scarcely have bothered, because the one cell was just a few paces farther on, conveniently close to the torments. Her hands and ankles bound with coarse rope woven of multicolored fibers, a woman with golden hair lay on her side on the stone floor behind the iron bars.
“Cera!” said Aoth, keeping his voice low. “Cera!”
She opened her eyes and peered back at him. “Aoth?” she croaked. She seemed more dazed than joyful, like her captors had given her drugs or tortured the sense right out of her.
“Yes. Hang on.” He tried the door. It was locked, and the key was nowhere in sight.
He drew his short sword. Among other things, it had raw force sealed inside it to enable the wielder to thrust or cut with prodigious strength. He slipped the blade between the door and its frame, right above the lock, pried, and released a portion of the power. The grille snapped open.
He hurried into the cage and kneeled down beside her. Up close she stank of blood, sweat, and other filth. “How badly are you hurt?” he asked.
She shook her head. “The rope … I can’t think.…”
He set down the sword, drew a dagger, and sawed at the bonds that held her hands behind her back. They were tough and tried to squirm away from the edge of the blade like snakes. But he kept at it. Eventually one parted, and then the next.
“I …” she said. “I saw … there’s a beast down here! A drake! A priest walks it by every so often. It stares at me like it wants to eat me.” The action of the knife tugged on her arms, and she gasped.
“Did they rack you?” asked Aoth.
“I think … pulling on me. Yes.”
He felt his jaw clench.
The last loop of rope confining her wrists parted. He shifted around to work on her ankles. “Once you’re free, can you heal yourself? Enough to walk, and run if you need to?”
“I think so.”
The final loop parted, and he pulled the writhing pieces of cord away from her feet. She closed her eyes, drew a long breath, and murmured a prayer. A warm golden glow supplanted the chill and shadowy dimness of the cellar.
And, down the hallway, something snarled.
Maybe the drake was close enough to see the magical sunlight, or maybe it had caught Aoth’s scent. It didn’t much matter which. Either way, it and its master were coming.
Hasos walked the battlements, spoke a word of encouragement to an archer or crossbowman from time to time, and surveyed the battle below. Pools of light periodically bloomed or guttered to darkness as wizards tried to illuminate their enemies and keep their allies hidden. Their supply of arrows depleted, griffon riders swooped down at the enemy like owls attacking mice. Masses of infantry shoved and ground together. Horsemen circled wide, maneuvering to attack some group of foemen from the flank or rear. Animated by sorcery, a trebuchet took laborious little steps. The throwing arm whipped like a scorpion’s tail to hammer orcs and kobolds on the ground.
Hasos turned to the aide trailing along behind him. “What do you think?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know, milord. It looks like it could go either way.”
Useless! Hasos thought, even though he knew it wasn’t fair. A subordinate wasn’t supposed to have keener judgment than his commander, and Hasos couldn’t make up his mind either.
But precisely because he was the commander, he had to.
He could thin
k of solid reasons to hold back. The war hero had put Aoth Fezim in charge, not Gaedynn Ulraes. The archer arguably had no authority to order Hasos to do anything.
And if the effort to break the siege failed, as it surely must without his wholehearted support, the Brotherhood of the Griffon would suffer heavy casualties. Afterward Tchazzar would strip Aoth of his authority, because the war-mage had abandoned his command at a crucial moment. Besides, no one would allow the captain of only a defeated, shattered company to lead the defense of an entire realm under any circumstances.
Which ought to benefit Soolabax, for how could it be wise to entrust the town’s defense to a devil-worshiping Thayan arcanist? By the Yellow Sun, with the griffon riders gone, at least the food would last longer. The beasts ate prodigious quantities of meat.
But unfortunately, it wasn’t just wretched outlander mercenaries trading spear thrusts and sword strokes with the kobolds and orcs. Aoth had mustered good Chessentan troops from elsewhere along the border, and they too would die without Hasos’s support.
How could he call himself a true Chessentan noble if he let that happen? How could he ever again sit in the seat of judgment that he still privately thought of as his father’s chair without a withering sense of shame?
He scowled. “Come on. Let’s get to the gate.”
He arrived in the nick of time. Faces twisted with anger, more of the sellswords stood facing ranks of Hasos’s men, who had positioned themselves to protect the windlass that raised the portcullis.
“It’s all right!” Hasos shouted. “We’re going now! Save your anger for the enemy!”
A groom brought his destrier, and he swung himself into the saddle. Men and riders jockeyed about, returning to the positions they’d abandoned when the quarrel broke out.
Hasos nodded to the pair of men charged with turning the windlass. They did their work, and the grille rattled upward on its chains. Other fellows scurried to slide the enormous bar, then swung the gates open.
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