No, thought Aoth, you don't get to break away and work your magic without interference. You have to stay on the ground where everyone can pound on you.

"Get him," he said, and Brightwing dived.

Ysval heard or sensed them coming and turned to face them. When he met the gaze of the nighthaunt's moon white eyes, Aoth felt a jolt of dread, and angry at his reaction, he promised himself it was the last time. One way or another, this filthy thing was never going to scare him again.

Then Brightwing froze. Thanks to their psychic bond, Aoth could tell his familiar was still alive and conscious. Indeed, she wasn't even wounded, but Ysval had somehow paralyzed her, and now she wasn't swooping but falling. The nighthaunt laughed.

Why shouldn't he? Now that the griffon couldn't shift her wings, her plummeting trajectory wouldn't take her and Aoth within reach of him.

Aoth charged his lance with all the power it could hold then hurled it like a javelin. The long, heavy weapon wasn't designed for use as a missile, but perhaps some god sharpened his eye and strengthened his arm, maybe Kossuth, avenging the treacherous murder of his Burning Braziers, because the spear plunged into Ysval's shoulder.

To how much effect, it was impossible to say, because Aoth and Brightwing fell past him an instant later. The mage started rattling off a counterspell that might, if poor Chathi's patron deity saw fit to grant a second boon, cleanse the griffon's clenched muscles of their affliction.

Unfortunately, Aoth didn't have time to finish. He and Brightwing slammed down hard on a rooftop, which crunched and buckled beneath them but didn't give way entirely.

The impact spiked pain up the length of his body, but rather to his surprise, he survived it, and Brightwing did too. He could only assume that, despite her paralysis, her wings had caught enough air to keep them from falling at maximum speed.

Some yards away, Ysval crashed onto the street with the lance still sticking out of his body. He immediately sought to scramble to his feet, so obviously neither the spear nor the fall had killed him, but as Aoth had hoped, the injury to his shoulder had at least deprived him of the use of his wings.

Evidently recovered from the stunning effect of the burst of shadow, Bareris and Mirror rushed Ysval and cut at him relentlessly. The nighthaunt managed one more snatch with his talons and a final strike with his tail then toppled onto his side and lay motionless.

Some part of Bareris realized Ysval was dead. Nonetheless, he couldn't stop hacking at the corpse, not until a phantom streaked across his field of vision and tore a knight from the saddle.

Bareris looked up. Having existed for their allotted span, the floating barriers had begun to wink out of existence, and the ghosts were rushing through the openings, swarming on the griffon riders like soft, gleaming leeches attacking a party of swimmers.

The plan indicated that as soon as Ysval died, someone who possessed the necessary magic was supposed to dispel the unnatural gloom enveloping the fortress. It didn't seem to be happening. Was any of that select group of spellcasters still alive? If so, immersed in the chaos of battle, struggling to fend off the foes assailing him, had he even perceived that the moment for action had arrived?

Bareris drew a deep breath and bellowed loudly as only a bard could. "Break the darkness! Now! Now! Now!" On the other side of the battlefield, Milsantos's trumpeter blew the call intended to communicate the same message.

For several heartbeats, it appeared no one heard, at least no one with the power to respond in the appropriate manner. Then, however, the sky brightened from black to blue in an instant. Bareris flinched and squinted at the sudden blaze of sunlight that scoured the wraiths from the air.

He wasn't certain they'd all perished. Perhaps some endured as mere disembodied awareness or potential, like Mirror at his most ethereal, but even if so, they lacked the power to manifest until night returned.

Of course, the Keep of Thazar still harbored ghouls and animate corpses, creatures able to tolerate daylight even if it pained them, so the battle was far from over. Still, Bareris was now certain he and his allies were going to win. Considered as revenge, it wasn't enough. It could never be enough, but it was a start, and weary to the bone though he was, he strode back toward the breached wall and the muddled din of the fight still raging there in search of something else to kill. For some reason impervious to the purifying sun, Mirror fell into step beside him.

chapter fourteen

17 Kythorn, the Year of Risen Elfkin

Aoth took a swallow of beer, belched, and said, "One nice thing about the undead: When they occupy a fortress, they don't drink up all the ale."

In truth, he had good reason to be glad of it. So many priests had died when Szass Tam's torches exploded that after the battle, healing magic had been in short supply. As a captain and war mage, he hadn't had any difficulty or qualms about commandeering the services of a cleric to knit his broken bones and Brightwing's too, but bruises, however painful, were a different matter. Nymia and many other officers he'd known wouldn't have hesitated to order up a second dose of healing to ease them, but he couldn't, not when there were legionnaires likely to die for want of a priest's attention. He simply bore the discomfort as best he could, and alcohol helped, as it helped so many things in life.

Seated on the other side of the shabby little parlor that comprised the greater portion of their billet, methodically honing a dagger, Bareris raised his head and asked, "How soon, do you think, will we head up into the mountains?"

Aoth sighed. His new friend's response had nothing to do with what he himself had said, but at least he'd answered. Half the time, when someone spoke to him, he didn't.

"It's hard to say. You know as well as I do, an army needs time to put itself back in order after a big, hard fight, and when the tharchions are ready to attack this underground fortress you tell of, it might be easier to reach it through the portal in Delhumide."

"No." The dagger whispered against the whetstone. "The necromancers know an intruder found and used it already. I doubt it's there anymore."

"Well, you could be right." In actuality, Aoth wasn't certain Nymia and Milsantos would decide to go hunting "Xingax" and his cohorts by any route. The zulkirs hadn't ordered them to, a march over the Sunrise Mountains would be difficult, and who knew if Bareris could even find the wizards' lair again? But he had a hunch the bard wasn't ready to hear that.

Bareris glowered. "You sound as if you don't even want to go."

"I won't want to go anywhere for the next couple of days. You wouldn't either, if you'd come out of the battle banged up like me. Anyway, I'm a legionnaire. I go where my tharchion sends me."

"What about Chathi?"

"I liked her. I miss her, but it won't keep me from living the rest of my life. She wouldn't want that. I doubt your Tammith would have wanted it for you, either."

"You don't understand. You can't. You were only with Chathi a short time. My whole life centered on Tammith."

"It's grand to love and be loved, but a man needs to stand at the center of his own life."

"I only wanted to make her happy, yet I failed her in everything." Bareris laughed. "By the Harp, that's a mild way of putting it, isn't it? Failed her. I destroyed her."

"A priest would say you set her soul free. Certainly, you did everything you could for her. It's a miracle you were even able to track her."