Пол Кемп - Resurrection

He climbed to his feet and stood on wobbly legs.

Fire exploded all around him, soaking the ledge in light and heat. His magical protections shielded him from substantial damage from the flames, but the explosion blew the breath from his lungs, seared his exposed skin, and knocked him flat.

He sat up, blinking, looked to Quenthel, and saw that she too had come through the fireball relatively unharmed, partially because she had been prone. Unfortunately, Danifae and Jeggred too looked blackened but alive.

Another explosion rocked the ledge, then another. The heat was melting the rock. Smoke made Pharaun’s eyes water. Crisped spiders fell from the heights like black snow.

What in the name of the Abyss is happening? he thought.

A lightning bolt ripped across the face of the ledge, shattering rock. Fragments of stone buried themselves in Pharaun’s face, in Quenthel’s hands, in Jeggred’s flesh.

Quenthel’s serpents came hissing to life, followed by their mistress.

From Pharaun’s left, Jeggred too awoke fully, his inner hands brushing away the stone shards stuck in his flesh. Danifae propped herself up on one of arm and looked around, dazed.

For a long moment, the four of them stared at one another.

Another explosion rocked the mountainside.

“What’s happening?” Jeggred growled, as he climbed to his feet.

Danifae stood and said to Quenthel, “It seems we’ve both passed the trial of the Soulreaver, Mistress Quenthel.”

Quenthel’s serpents hissed at the former battle-captive.

“So it appears,” Quenthel acknowledged.

Pharaun started to crawl toward the lip of the ledge, but before he reached it, an impenetrable cloud of white vapor cloaked the edge, and veins of superheated embers suffused it. Pharaun recognized the spell—an incendiary cloud. The embers sank into Pharaun’s skin, burning their way through his protective spells.

Pharaun threw the hood of his enchanted piwafwi over his head. The embers still found his hands, and he gritted his teeth against the pain.

The stink of burning flesh and hair filled his nostrils.

Jeggred roared with pain. The priestesses grunted against the burning.

Pharaun could not see through the fiery mist more than an armspan in front of him.

A second lightning bolt split the fog, rocked the ledge, and sent Pharaun crashing into the mountainside. The embers swirled in the explosion, rooting for exposed flesh.

“Dispel the cloud, Mistress!” Pharaun shouted and did not care which of the priestesses heeded him. “I will give us cover.”

From his left and right he heard both Danifae and Quenthel chanting spells. Their voices sounded as one, eerily disembodied in the burning cloud. Jeggred growled low, the pained, angry rumble of a wounded animal.

Pharaun waited until the priestesses were well into their spell before beginning his own. He took a pinch of diamond dust from his piwafwi and rushed through the gestures and words to a spell that would raise a sphere of magical force around them. He could not tell exactly where Quenthel stood—the explosions had sent both of them careening about the ledge—so he worded the spell to make the sphere as large as possible.

The priestesses finished their spells simultaneously, and one or both of the counterspells dispelled the magical cloud. One moment the cloud was there, the next it was gone.

Both priestesses were brandishing their holy symbols on opposite sides of the ledge. Jeggred crouched in a huddle near Danifae, his arms encircling her protectively, his mane and skin still smoking.

The priestesses stared at each other, Danifae holding her chunk of amber, Quenthel her jet disc.

Pharaun had no way to know whose spell had successfully dispelled the cloud, and the uncertainty troubled him. Everything about the recent past troubled him.

Still, he kept his concentration and finished his own spell. When he pronounced the final word, a transparent sphere of magical force took shape around the ledge, covering all of them.

Another fireball and lightning bolt slammed up against the sphere and exploded in light, but neither breached Pharaun’s spell.

Jeggred stood to his full height, eyeing Quenthel. Dried blood caked his claws and ringed his mouth. Pharaun imagined it to belong to one of the Eilistraeens.

“Mistress,” Pharaun said, “my spell will not hold long.”

“Of course it won’t,” Quenthel answered. “You are a male.”

Pharaun ignored the barb, crept forward the rest of the way, and looked out over the ledge.

The others did the same.

A twisting path, bounded on its sides by sheer drops, led down the steep mountainside to a plateau riddled with chasms, craters, and pools of acidic venom. A green haze filled the air, and Pharaun blinked at the acridity. Through the haze, Pharaun saw...

An army waited below.

“Yugoloths,” the mage observed. “Five hundred, at least.”

“Mercenaries,” Quenthel spat, following his gaze. Her serpents hissed.

Scaled, four-armed, nycaloths swooped through the air above an assembled force of insectoid mezzoloths. The squat, beetle-like mezzoloths bore long polearms in their four arms, while each of the nycaloths held an enchanted battle-axe. They were arranged in a crescent shape at the bottom of the path, a wall of armor and flesh. Pharaun knew the yugoloths to be resistant to most forms of energy. He assumed that most would have used magic to bolster their inherent resistances. Dealing with them would not be as easy as simply burning the lot with a fireball, but he had killed fiends before.

He scanned the army for the ultroloth that he knew must be leading them. Nycaloths and mezzoloths were followers, servants to the archwizard yugoloths.

The haze in the air made it difficult to discern details, but...

There.

Toward the back lurked a gray-skinned, bald ultroloth. Even from that distance, Pharaun felt the weight of its huge, black eyes. Two over-large canoloths, both armed with spiked barding, stood to either side of him. The ultroloth wore dark robes, a sword at his belt, and a quiver at his thigh filled with rods. He held another rod in his hand.

Souls continued to stream out of the pass behind them and soar over their heads. When the spirits reached the plains, the air itself caught them up and exploded in sheets of violet fire. They burned there for a time, writhing in the air above the yugoloth army, before being released. The flames reminded Pharaun of faerie fire, the harmless sheath of flame that most all drow could summon.

“The Purging,” Quenthel said, seemingly more interested in the spirits than the yugoloth army.

“Where weakness is seared away,” Danifae added.

Looking down at the yugoloth army, Pharaun said, “Speaking of searing...”

Even as they watched, several of the mezzoloths held up their palms and balls of fire appeared there. They hurled them up toward the ledge, where they hit the wall of force and exploded.

Instinctively, the drow sheltered behind the ledge, but no fire pierced Pharaun’s spell. They peeked back over.

The army remained in place.

“Why aren’t they coming?” Jeggred asked.

“Why would they?” Pharaun answered. “They would bottleneck themselves on the path.”

Pharaun knew that the four drow could have held for days the narrow path that led to the ledge. The yugoloths hoped to either force them down by bombarding them with spells or simply wait them out. It was no mystery that the four of them had not gone all the way to the very gates of Lolth’s city only to turn back.

“We cannot go back,” Danifae said, giving voice to Pharaun’s next thought. “And we must go forward.”

“Of course we will,” Quenthel said with undisguised contempt. “They are the final test.”