A shaft of daylight shined in and caught So-Remas in its center. The undead shrieked and burned, his desiccated skin and the withered flesh inside charring like paper, the purifying power of the sun achieving what Aoth’s burst of arcane fire hadn’t.
Aoth dredged up the concentration for a little more magic. It helped that, now that So-Remas had lost his focus, the lanceboard table had stopped battering him. Aoth cast more glowing darts, and they and the sunlight together were enough. The Red Wizard pitched forward onto his face. By now, he was mostly bare bone, which burned to coals and then to ash like the rest of him.
It occurred to Aoth that if Cera were here, she’d say her god had looked out for him. That in turn made him remember that, as far as he knew, she and Jhesrhi were still trapped in the dark maze. Somehow, he had to get them out!
But he couldn’t think about that now. Aoth twisted around and saw that the spearmen had backed the orc against a wall.
Fortunately, they’d turned their backs on Aoth to do it. With his teeth gritted, he crawled close enough to drive his spear up between one soldier’s legs.
The gelded man whimpered and, knees buckling, collapsed. The other warrior’s head jerked in his wounded comrade’s direction. Risking everything on an all-out attack, the orc lunged and slashed. The remaining guard fell backward with blood pumping from a gaping wound in his neck.
Aoth looked around to make sure there were no other immediate threats. He noticed the orc doing the same.
“Thanks,” Aoth gasped.
The slave shrugged. “I had to fight, or they would have tortured me to death for helping you. It wouldn’t have mattered that you forced me.” He leered a crooked leer. “Although there was more to it. I wanted to kill them.”
“You need to break open the secret panel. Fast, before more guards show up. I’d do it, but I’m not sure I can stand back up.”
The orc attacked So-Remas’s hiding place. The enchanted sword cracked and crunched through the wood in what Aoth knew to be a matter of moments even though it felt like a cruelly long time to him.
The thrall handed him a silver bottle. “This is the stuff.”
Clumsy with pain and eagerness, Aoth fumbled out the stopper and took a long pull of the tasteless, lukewarm elixir inside. He felt the vertebrae in his neck shift, but without discomfort. In fact, all the cramping, throbbing soreness was fading away from his neck all the way down to his rump. He let out a long sigh of relief.
He would have been happy to sit and savor his liberation from torment. But he and the orc weren’t out of danger yet, and although he’d recovered his physical strength, his mystical power would return only with rest. He jammed the stopper back in the bottle, scrambled up, and hurried to So-Remas’s hiding place.
“What else have we got?” he murmured to himself.
Fortunately, there was something, a long, thin, golden-hilted poniard of an athame. He snatched the ritual dagger from its sheath, and knowledge of its attributes poured into his mind. So-Remas had bound spells in it just as Aoth himself was accustomed to store magic in his spear.
He judged that it would do. In fact, it should do nicely. When more of So-Remas’s soldiers charged into the room, he met them with a nasty smile and a shriek of focused, bone-shattering sound.
The ambush started well. Sarshethrian, his newfound human and stag-man allies, and his shadowy slaves had caught the undead wayfarers by surprise and slaughtered several in the first few moments. Then, however, the creatures of the Eminence of Araunt started fighting back and maneuvering through the darkness, until Jhesrhi suddenly caught a whiff of something putrid.
She spun around. Somehow, two withered ghouls with luminous green eyes had gotten behind her, and now they were rushing in with needle fangs bared and jagged claws poised to rake and tear.
She felt a surge of loathing, less at the foulness of the undead creatures or the danger they represented-although that was there too-than at the prospect of being touched by anything even remotely manlike. She made a slashing motion with her staff and hurled a fan-shaped blaze of flame into the ghouls’ rotten, vaguely canine faces. They fell down, burning and thrashing.
Bells chimed. She looked to her flank and found one of the stag men there. He’d been scrambling to intercept the ghouls, and her flare had nearly hit him too. Maybe he was urging her to be more careful, although because she didn’t understand the language of the bells, and the expression on a stag warrior’s long, narrow face with its brown eyes and dusting of down never changed, it was impossible to tell for certain.
Cera cried, “Keeper! Keeper!” throughout the fight. She’d been invoking her god all along, but now there was a shrill note of desperation in her voice.
Jhesrhi turned. A misty, faintly luminous figure covered in gashes and puncture wounds was floating toward the sunlady. A flying mace made of golden light bashed at the ghost, and brandishing the identically shaped weapon of metal and wood in her hand, Cera sent flares of radiance stabbing through it. But the attacks didn’t stop it.
A shredded face oozing into visibility on the wavering blur that was its head, the ghost grinned and plunged an incorporeal hand into Cera’s shoulder. She cried out and reeled backward.
Jhesrhi hurled more flame from her brazen staff. The flare caught the phantom and burned it from existence.
Which didn’t mean she’d acted soon enough. She glanced around to make sure nothing was about to attack her, then rushed to her friend.
To her surprise, Cera recoiled. “You’re on fire!” the sunlady gasped.
Jhesrhi realized it was so. She must have cloaked herself in flame without realizing it at the same moment she used it to strike at the ghouls.
With a little irrational twinge of reluctance, she pulled the fire back inside herself, and the chilly gloom of the deathways became oppressive once more. But that didn’t matter. Cera did.
“Are you all right?” Jhesrhi asked.
Cera took a breath. “I will be,” she said, pain in her voice. “Once we’re out of here. Is the battle over?”
Jhesrhi looked around and decided that it was. All the undead travelers made of solid flesh were down, and the wraiths and such were gone, incinerated, exorcised, or otherwise expunged from existence. Sarshethrian’s servants, murky forms that resembled rats, leeches, centipedes, and beetles to the extent they resembled anything, were slinking away down various passages, while, lengths of shadow lashing around him, the fiend himself repeatedly kicked a fallen skeletal swordsman.
Jhesrhi recognized the phenomenon from her years on battlefields across northeastern Faerun. The fight had ended too quickly to suit Sarshethrian. He was still full of aggression and was expending the spiteful energy as best he could.
Still, there was something comical if not contemptible about watching a self-styled archdevil comporting himself like a child in the throes of a tantrum. It reminded her of Tchazzar’s excesses, and she made a little spitting sound, softly enough that she didn’t expect him to hear.
He did, though, and, his halo of shadow drawing in its ragged tendrils and groping and coiling in a less agitated fashion, left off abusing the dead thing to turn and give her a sardonic smile. “I take it you think I’ve forgotten my dignity.”
Jhesrhi shrugged. “Do you care?”
“Yes. I told you, I want the three of us to be friends. And when you hear the rest of the story I started earlier, perhaps you’ll be more inclined to forgive my … excitement.”
I doubt it, Jhesrhi thought, but there was no point to saying it aloud and annoying him any further. She and Cera still needed his good will.
“I told you how I freed Lod the bone naga from his endless servitude.” Sarshethrian sat down atop a granite urn in the midst of several mangled, reeking corpses like that was the most natural place in the world to take his ease. Maybe for him it was. “And how his personal liberation inspired him to dream bigger dreams.”