Vandar scowled. “What’s that?”
“As Captain Fezim learned and his shrewd familiar now understands, I have the ability to create surrogates for myself. Regrettably, not at the moment. My injuries diminish my mystical capabilities. But when I’m sufficiently recovered, I can conjure such an entity, and it can race to Immilmar more quickly than we three invalids could hope to make the journey. And we need a messenger to go to the Wychlaran and the Iron Lord, do we not, to warn that the most dangerous undead escaped and to denounce Mario Bez.”
What do you think? asked Jet, trying not to let his desperate, selfish hope communicate itself from mind to mind.
Aoth’s answer came with a tinge of bitter frustration, but it also came at once. What choice do we have? Let the little weasel live for now.
Nyevarra led her sisters through the arch with a certain sense of relief. Under Uramar’s tutelage, she’d learned that so long as they knew their route, undead could traverse the deathways without incident more often than not. Yet it was also true that the maze had its perils, and some who entered never emerged.
Glancing around, she found herself in a vault behind a wrought-iron gate. Stone sarcophagi rose from the floor, and cobweb-shrouded jars and urns reposed in niches in the walls. For another moment, the arched doorway opened on the deathways with their crawling, smothering gloom and mad profusion of morbid sculpture. Then the charm of opening ran its course, and space on the other side of the arched doorway wavered into a somewhat more ordinary sort of place, filled with gloom but only the natural kind, and with painted hathran symbols defacing the pentacle mosaic on the floor.
It was the symbols that proved beyond doubt that Nyevarra and her sisters had reached their proper destination. She whispered a cantrip. The lock in the gate made a crunching sound, and, with a squeal, the grille swung open.
Nyevarra and the other durthans swung wide to avoid the pentacle. She had no doubt the sigils would hold their prisoner as they had for centuries, but still, why rouse the demon, especially when stealth was essential? They didn’t want the fiend’s agitation to communicate itself to some sensitive soul in the castle above.
After several turns, a staircase rose to a wall of sandstone blocks. Nyevarra murmured a charm, tapped the barrier with her staff of oak-the antler weapon was too unusual an instrument for someone who wished to be inconspicuous-and, scraping against one another, three loose stones floated free of the matrix. They hovered while the witches clambered through the hole, and then the stones replaced themselves.
Now that Nyevarra and her companions had reached the storerooms, her inhumanly keen hearing could hear drunken male voices roaring out an obscene song somewhere on the ground floor of the citadel. Despite herself, she hesitated, then noticed some of the others doing the same.
“Don’t worry,” she told them-and herself too, she supposed. “This will work. Because the hathrans have no idea that Falconer’s accomplice opened a path for us.”
And it turned out she was right. As she and the others strode through the ground floor of the massive keep, berserkers and lesser folk cleared out of their way and stood respectfully until they passed. Even when they encountered a hathran, the other wise woman simply gave them a casual nod. Aided by enchantment and the natural tendency of folk to see what they expected to see, the masks and voluminous robes of witches concealed the telltale marks of undeath.
The durthans reached the bailey and then the outer gate. It was closed, but the sentries scurried to open it for them, and then Nyevarra beheld Immilmar laid out before her with its ancient, steep-roofed lodge houses rising from the snow and golden firelight shining through the windows. To her surprise, the sight transfixed her and swelled a lump in her throat.
It wasn’t all sacred ground the way the Urlingwood was. But on a more mundane level, it, too, was the heart of Rashemen, the focus of her ambitions, and a place she’d loved ever since she’d first beheld it as a hathran in training. It was also a place that, once it became clear that the durthans’ rebellion was going to fail, she’d believed she’d never see again.
“Are you all right?” one of her sisters asked.
She sighed. “Yes, and we should keep moving. Come on.”
As she led the others through the town, she spied and listened for the signs of ritual. With the wind whistling out of the north, blowing fresh snow from the clouds that mostly obscured the stars, it was a cold night, but still, at one or another of Immilmar’s shrines, there would be witches performing some nocturnal ceremony. There always were.
Before long, she spotted a gleam of yellow fire amid a stand of oaks. The light flickered as figures passed in front of it, walking or dancing around the blaze in a circle. Female voices sang.
Nyevarra raised her hand to halt her comrades. Then they all stood and listened until she’d identified the musical incantation.
When she did, she smiled behind her new leather mask. The hathrans were performing one of the routine rites in honor of the spirits of fertility currently sleeping away the winter like bears. In theory, the ceremony encouraged the entities to wake on time to start the spring.
So Nyevarra and her sisters needn’t worry about disrupting some mighty work of high magic and the potentially explosive consequences that might ensue. That made things simpler.
Still, she spent a while longer crooning her own words of praise and friendship to the spirits of earth, air, flame, and tree the hathrans’ ritual had roused or attracted. She didn’t want them taking the enemy’s side or carrying tales afterward.
For a moment, some of the spirits recoiled from the energies of undeath they felt seething inside her. But they were creatures of magic, and the proper forms placated them. When she was sure they would see what was about to happen as natural and unremarkable, like vines strangling a tree or wolves running down a deer, she motioned the other durthans forward.
The half dozen hathrans had reached a point in the ceremony that required them to take a single solemn step in their circuit around the fire at the end of every line of song. A couple of the mortals glanced at Nyevarra and her sisters as they entered the trees but, seeing nothing amiss, didn’t interrupt the rite with greetings or questions.
Nyevarra suspected she wouldn’t have recognized any of the hathrans even if they hadn’t been masked and hooded. She had, after all, lain dead for decades before Uramar used the magic of the Eminence to call her from her grave. But she was still able to pick out the oldest and thus, in all likelihood, the most powerful. A priestess with a special bond to Selune, the hathran in question had gray hair sticking out over the top of her pale wooden crescent-shaped mask.
Nyevarra waited until the woman’s slow progress around the fire brought her within easy reach. Then she dropped her staff and pounced.
A crescent of pearly phosphorescence glimmered into existence between her prey and her. It looked as insubstantial as mist, but it felt as solid as stone when she slammed into it and rebounded.
Worse, it didn’t disappear after that first impact either. It kept right on floating in the air to protect Selune’s servant. Nyevarra darted to the right in an effort to get around it, but the defense shifted with her.
Meanwhile, the hathran lifted her staff to the night sky and rattled off words of power. Other voices recited other incantations, and one screamed for an instant before something cut the sound off abruptly, but Nyevarra couldn’t look around to see exactly what everyone else was doing. She needed to stay focused on her particular target.