“Fair enough,” said Balasar, “but I want a closer look.” He headed for the nearest swaying cultist, a ruddy-scaled female with the silver falcons of Clan Clethtinthtiallor pierced into her right ear and the back of her right hand. Khouryn tramped along at his side.
Suddenly the Clethtinthtiallor turned and scuttled to the nearest giant corpse. Her sway becoming more pronounced, and she clawed the foe’s gray, ash-smeared flesh with alternate swipes of her right and left hands.
Balasar and Khouryn faltered in surprise and distaste.
The cultist tore out a handful of flesh, then peered down at it as though entranced. She opened her mouth.
Balasar lunged, grabbed her by the shoulders, and gave her a shake. “No!”
She tried to twist free of his grip and bring the raw flesh to her face at the same time. But by then Khouryn was there too. He seized hold of her wrist with one hand and dug most of the meat out of her fingers with the other.
Then a feminine voice murmured a string of words, each softer than the one before. For a moment, Balasar’s eyelids drooped. The Clethtinthtiallor went limp in his grasp and started snoring.
“Thank you,” Nala said, stepping closer. Her hand trailed a blur of power as she lowered it to her side. “We wouldn’t want her to do something that might embarrass her later.”
Balasar laid the sleeping cultist on the ground. “What’s wrong with her? With all of them?” He waved his hand to indicate the other swaying warriors. Some of them had started tearing at giant bodies too, although it didn’t look like they necessarily meant to eat them.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Nala answered. “It’s just… well, you saw how powerful their breath attacks were, and how fiercely they fought in general.”
“Yes.”
“That’s because the Platinum Dragon exalted them as Torm grants power to Medrash. And it isn’t always easy for ordinary people to channel the might of a god. Afterward, they sometimes experience a brief period of… altered consciousness.”
“I understand why you’re taking the ears. But it’s degrading to oneself to desecrate the body of any enemy, even an ash giant, in some sort of frenzy. And sick to want to eat it!”
“I assure you,” Nala said, “the urge to eat is unusual, and we stop those few who feel it. But even if we didn’t, you can’t condemn what a person does while under the control of the divine. The gods are beyond your judgment.”
Balasar smiled. “With respect, wizard, not even Medrash’s special god matters a flyspeck to me, and I don’t consider anything beyond my judgment.”
“You may yet,” Nala said. “You may yet.”
TEN
12 MIRTUL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
Gaedynn straightened up and loosed two arrows. Jhesrhi looked in the direction they flew and belatedly spotted the black silhouettes of two sentries, each of whom collapsed with a shaft in his chest.
The humans waited until it seemed plain that no one else had noticed the shadar-kai falling. Then they crept onward until they had a clear view of the hillside where Tchazzar lay manacled to the ground.
“Are you ready?” Gaedynn whispered.
“Of course,” she snapped.
Actually, she wasn’t certain. Since arriving in the Shadowfell, she’d gradually discerned that even the elements here had a filthy, alien feel. In her own world, they leaped to do her bidding. In the Shadowfell, they balked and looked for ways to turn her magic against her.
It didn’t matter as long as she was working an ordinary sort of spell. But it might when she tried to exert her powers to the fullest.
Essentially it was a problem of attunement, and she’d spent the better part of a day meditating, striving for a better fit between her consciousness and the shadow world she currently inhabited. It had helped, but the only way to find out just how much was to attempt a truly powerful spell and see what happened.
But first she had two lesser ones to cast. “Hold out your hand,” she said.
He did. She poised a fingertip over his palm and sketched a rune there. For a second it glowed yellow, and the pseudomind inside her staff experienced a pang of pleasure.
“It tickles,” Gaedynn said.
“Shut up. Get ready.”
She spoke to the fire implicit in the air, in all that could burn, and to the fire locked inside her staff. It cloaked her in warmth and wavering yellow light. Across the hillside, shadar-kai and their stunted servants jerked around toward the radiant figure suddenly burning in the dark.
Gaedynn shot the three nearest, dropping them before they had a chance to recover from their surprise. Giving Jhesrhi time to cast the first major spell without interference.
Fortunately, it had been possible to cast part of it in advance. If she tried, she could feel the forces she’d invoked balanced and aligned like the works of a mill, waiting for a final push to set the waterwheel turning and the stones grinding. She chanted words of power.
As she’d feared, when the process was at its most precarious, the earth tried to deny her. She could feel its spite and defiance as an ache in her feet and ankles.
But she knew how to talk to it now. She promised to satisfy the love of pain and destruction festering in everything in the Shadowfell. She wallowed in fantasies of slaughter by crushing and suffocation.
It didn’t make earth and stone despise her any less. It did, however, persuade them that she could help them lash out at other soft, scurrying mites they hated just as much. It beguiled them into using her as she was using them.
She pounded the butt of her staff repeatedly on the ground. Rings of swell flowed outward from the point of impact like ripples in a pond.
She kept hammering, and the ripples rose higher and swept farther. She could feel the disturbance, but had no trouble keeping her balance. The sensation in her feet had changed from gnawing pain to one of pure connection, like she’d set down roots as deep as a mountain’s. Gaedynn, however, staggered, fighting to keep his feet, then fell down anyway. He wasn’t alone. No shadar-kai could stand up either. The ones struggling free of the burrows had to crawl.
The captive dragon stared at Jhesrhi, but she had no idea what it was thinking. Nor, at that moment, did it matter. She had to stay focused on jolting the ground harder and harder and harder.
Cracking and crashing, trees toppled against their neighbors. Sections of hillside, and thinner strips connecting them, fell in on themselves. The earth laughed a rumbling laugh as it squeezed the shadar-kai caught in the tunnels in its murderous grasp.
Jhesrhi realized it was time to stop, but it took three more stamps of the staff before she managed it. Her will was entangled with the earth’s, and her mad collaborator wanted to go on quaking until it knocked down, shattered, or buried everything-even itself.
Gaedynn sprang to his feet. “Keep moving!”
He was right. That was exactly what they had to do, no matter how tired she felt. They turned and ran into the trees.
There, she willed her blazing cloak to go out. Gaedynn waved the hand where she’d drawn the rune. A tongue of flame leaped from his skin to become a tall, slender figure with a feminine shape. From a distance, the elemental ought to pass for a mortal woman wrapped in fire.
Gaedynn dashed onward. The living flame sprang after him.
Jhesrhi stepped behind an oak and whispered charms of silence and concealment. Invisibility was largely a magic of the mind, and she was nowhere near as proficient at it as she was at elemental wizardry. But since she’d given the enemy a nice, bright lure to follow, perhaps they wouldn’t even bother to look elsewhere.
It was only a few heartbeats before, moving in eerie quiet even now, the first shadar-kai came racing after Gaedynn and the fire spirit. Had they been human, some of the dark men might have stayed behind to dig for survivors or simply because they’d succumbed to grief for those presumably lost. But she and Gaedynn had learned that malice and bloodlust were the shadar-kai’s ruling passions even when unprovoked, and they’d done everything in their power to enrage them. They hoped the final outrage would goad every last one of them into giving chase. Leaving Tchazzar unattended.