"As we will," Nevron said, "but guided by a prudent strategy."

"If you mean to pass up an opportunity to smash the legions of High Thay-"

"They'll die before the walls of Eltabbar," Nevron said. "Now then. We always benefit from your wisdom, Your Omniscience, but the rulers of Thay have made their decision. That means your role is to determine how your church can best support our strategy."

"Is that my role, also?" asked a sardonic masculine voice. Nevron turned his head to see Dimon stand up.

The tharchion's utterance caught Nevron off guard. Iphegor Nath was at least the head of a church that had proved an invaluable resource in the struggle against the necromancers. It was understandable, if not forgivable, if he sometimes addressed the zulkirs as an equal. Dimon was a lesser priest of a different faith and a governor, beholden to the council for his military rank. It was absurdly reckless for him to take an insolent tone.

"If I were you, Tharchion," Nevron said, "I'd sit back down and hold my tongue."

"No," Dimon said. "I don't believe I will."

"So be it," Nevron said. He released the entity bound in his silver thumb ring like a falconer tossing a goshawk into the air.

The devil was an advespa, a black wasp the size of a bear, with a hideous travesty of a woman's face and scarlet striations on its lower body. Beating so fast they were only a blur, its wings droned, and even the other zulkirs recoiled in their chairs. Its body cast a smear of reflection in the polished surface below it as the thing shot down the length of the long red table.

But Dimon didn't cringe. Rather, the pale priest with the twisting blue veins vivid in his shaven crown laughed and stretched out the hand wearing the black gauntlet.

It seemed a useless gesture, an attack easily evaded by a creature as nimble as an advespa on the wing. But Dimon somehow contrived to seize the devil at the point where its head fused with its thorax, and to hold on to it.

The advespa's raking, gouging claws ripped his face, vestments, and the flesh beneath. Its abdomen rocked back and forth like a pendulum, repeatedly driving its stinger into the cleric's chest.

Dimon kept on laughing and squeezing the juncture of his attacker's head and body, sinking his fingers deeper and deeper. Until the creature convulsed, he jerked his arm back, and the advespa's head with its antennae, mandibles, and harpy face ripped away from the rest of it. The carcass thumped down on the tabletop in a splash of steaming ichor.

Dimon's reedy Mulan frame became bulkier, and flowing darkness stained him. In other circumstances, Nevron might have assumed it was the effect of the poison the wasp devil had injected. But the blackness tinged tattered clothing as well as torn flesh, and even if it hadn't, all the bound spirits Nevron kept ready to hand were clamoring, some terrified, some transported by demented ecstasy.

In another few moments, Dimon was virtually all shadow, although Nevron could make out a glint of eyes, the gleam of the jewels now encrusting the gauntlet, and the static curves of clothing turned to plate. "Do you know me?" the tharchion asked, and though his voice was soft and mellow, something about it lanced pain into a listener's ears.

Nevron took a breath. "You're Bane, Lord of Darkness." He rose, but resisted the craven urge to bow or kneel, prudent as it might have been. He'd decided long ago that a true archmage must never abase himself before anyone or anything, self-proclaimed deities included. Much as he hated Szass Tam, it was the one point on which they'd always agreed.

"Yes, I am," said Bane. "You mages have done a fair job of sealing your citadel against spiritual entities you don't summon yourselves, but you can't lock out a god, and the bond I share with my faithful servant provided a convenient way in." He stroked his temple-Dimon's temple-rather like a man petting a dog.

"To what do we owe the honor of your presence?" Nevron asked.

"I'm tired of your sad little war," the Black Hand said. "It drags on battle after battle, year after year, ruining a realm we gods of shadow raised up to dominate the east."

Lauzoril rose from his seat. When it splashed, the advespa's inky gore had spattered his scarlet robes. "Great Lord, we're doing our best to bring the conflict to a conclusion."

"Then your best is pathetic," said Bane. "Seven archmages against one, seven orders of wizardry against one, the rich and populous south against the poor and empty north, and still, Szass Tam holds you in check for a decade."

"It isn't that simple," Lauzoril said. "At the moment, we don't have a zulkir of Divination, and over time, wizards of every order have defected…" His voice trailed off as he realized that it might not be an ideal moment for his usual practice of fussy, argumentative nitpicking.

Dmitra rose. "Great One, we accept your rebuke. Will you instruct us how we might do better?"

Bane smiled. Nevron couldn't see the expression, but he could feel it, and although it conveyed no threat in any immediate sense, something about it was disquieting even to a man accustomed to trafficking with the most hideous denizens of the higher worlds.

"You already know the answer," said the god, "for you proposed it yourself. Fight Szass Tam when he descends from High Thay, and that will settle the war. All the northern tharchs will lay down their arms if you slay their overlord."

Nevron felt a strange mix of disgust and hope. Ever since Dmitra's ascension to the rank of zulkir, he'd chafed under her pretensions to leadership. The revelation of Malark Springhill's treason had called her judgment into question, and he'd exploited the situation to pull her off her pedestal and claim the chieftain's role for himself.

But only for a tantalizing moment, because this meddling god had lifted her up again. Nevron could see it in the expressions of the other zulkirs. Arrogant though they were, when a deity invaded their council chamber to recommend they reverse a decision, it made an impression.

And there was no point swimming against the tide, especially if it would carry them all to victory. "Lord Bane," Nevron said, "I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we'll do as you direct. We pray you'll give us your blessing and your aid."

"Wherever men shed one another's blood," and Bane, "there will you find me."

The darkness suffusing the Black Hand's form drained away, and then he was merely Dimon once again. The wounds the advespa had given him hadn't bled while he was possessed, but they gushed blood now, and he pitched forward. His head cracked against the edge of the table, then he crumpled to the floor.

Her black and white ornaments clinking, Zola Sethrakt shifted her chair to take a better look at the fallen priest. "He's dead," she said, and Nevron supposed that, worthless as she often proved to be, she was necromancer enough to be right about that, anyway.

After scouting throughout the morning, surveying the way ahead for the troops on the ground, Aoth, Bareris, and Mirror lit on a floating island to rest. The griffon riders dismounted, and Aoth peered over the edge of the floating chunk of soil and rock at a landscape of chasms, ridges, and twisting, leaning spires of stone stretched out far below. The earthbound portion of the council's legions struggled over the difficult terrain like a column of ants. Even with his fire-touched eyes, he couldn't see anything else moving.

He'd imagined that over the course of the past decade, he'd seen his homeland reduced to a wasteland, but he'd been mistaken. This was a wasteland, viewed through a lens of nightmare.

"It looks as if we already fought the war to a bitter end," he murmured, "or the gods waged a final, world-killing war of their own. Like we're an army of ghosts, damned to march through an empty land forever."