Richard Byers - Prophet of the Dead

The sellswords of the Storm of Vengeance and Aoth Fezim and his companions had all flown to Rashemen to negotiate for the wild griffons. Lacking such a convenient option, the Theskians had trekked across the frozen surface of Lake Ashane, and for the most part, had done so on foot or driving sleighs and dogsleds. Dai Shan, however, had ridden on a sizable magically propelled “ice barge” that sat on its runners at the end of the one of the docks toward the south end of town. A single lamp burned on the bow of the barge, perhaps to assure Yhelbruna that someone really was waiting onboard, while a rope ladder dangled over the side. She walked out onto the pier and, clamping her staff awkwardly under her forearm, began to climb.

During the day, someone had left a message addressed to her tacked beside the entry to the Witches’ Hall. Reading it, she’d discovered that her anonymous correspondent was one of Dai Shan’s underlings, who claimed his master had left instructions for him to carry out in the event he failed to return from his expedition on Mario Bez’s skyship.

To that end, the Shou needed to speak with Yhelbruna, and because that entailed an element of danger, he wished to do so secretly. Would the learned sister please meet him aboard the ice barge when Selune had passed her zenith?

On one level, Yhelbruna hadn’t much appreciated being presented with yet another mystery. Of late, she’d been contending with a surfeit. Yet the parchment, calligraphy, and phrasing were all recognizably Shou, and it would have been just like cagey, slippery Dai Shan to put a contingency plan in place to make sure Bez wouldn’t profit from betraying him. If so, what she learned tonight might finally prove to Mangan Uruk’s satisfaction that the Halruaan had no right to take the griffons.

Gripping the railing, she stepped up onto the barge’s broad, flat deck. Several low, almost hutlike structures stood along its length, but all were dark except for the captain’s cabin in the stern, where a hint of light leaked through the cracks around the hatch.

Yhelbruna walked to the cabin and knocked. No one answered.

“Hello?” she called. Still, nobody replied.

She tried to twist the brass handle. The hatch was locked.

Suddenly, belatedly, she sensed she was in danger. She whirled and spotted a small, shadowy figure at the other end of the barge. His several rings glowed as he spun his hands through mystic passes. So did the yellow eyes under his stubby horns.

He could only be Melemer, Bez’s warlock lieutenant. He’d evidently pilfered Shou parchment and forged a message cunningly conceived to lure Yhelbruna into a trap.

But he was going to regret his cleverness. However adept he was at his arts, she’d had a hundred years to practice her own, and after she rendered him helpless, he could tell her what had really happened in the north.

Gripping her staff with both hands, holding it parallel to the deck, she thrust it forth to symbolize forbiddance and defense. She asked the spirits and fey who were her special allies to lend her their strength. Magic sparkled like powdered emeralds in the air around her.

But something was wrong. She could feel at once that the defense was weak. And when Melemer finished his casting, a tendril of sickly amber phosphorescence shot up from the deck beneath her feet. Twisting around her like a vine strangling a tree, it wrapped itself as tightly as any rope or chain and hoisted her off her feet. Its malignancy burned her wherever it touched, even through her robes, and made her guts cramp with sudden nausea.

As she retched bile into her mask, Melemer advanced and started a second incantation.

In one instant, everything was dark and quiet. Then the world exploded into blinding glare and hot pain. The shock of it made Lod give a screeching hiss and throw his head back, but the glyphs of protection graven inside his ribs and picked out in subtle variations of gray among his scales helped him recover quickly.

Once he did, he discerned that something had thrown fire at him! Vampires and liches who’d been walking near his cart were frantically trying to extinguish their burning garments, while the draft animals harnessed closest to the cart sprawled charred and smoking in the traces.

As soon as he’d taken all that in, he heard a female voice declaiming spells that made patches of radiance bright as summer noon light flare into being up and down the length of the column. No, actually, it was worse than simple sunlight. Lod was a creature of Abeir, and for all his erudition, Faerun’s “gods” and their mortal agents were a mystery to him. But he knew enough to recognize “holiness” when it stung him like a thousand needles.

He’d expected the deathways to present certain hazards, but certainly not flame, the sun, and divine wrath. For one more muddled, dazzled instant, he imagined he was fighting an army of Rashemi, that they’d somehow learned of the Eminence and its plans and moved to oppose him here before he could even reach their country.

Then, though, he saw beyond the flame and the light to what was scuttling in the darkness and almost laughed in relief at the teeming shadow creatures. Because if he was mainly dealing with those, he was fighting Sarshethrian, even if the would-be patron devil of the undead had somehow induced mortal spellcasters to join his cause.

That meant Lod’s grand design was still on track. He just needed to deal with a pest left over from long ago. Fortunately, he’d known it might come to this, and he fancied he was ready.

First, though, he’d better address the complication posed by the mortals. He wouldn’t be able to devote his full attention to Sarshethrian while someone was trying to set him on fire or, worse, purge undeath itself from his body. He peered around.

Although she was using a tomb on the slope to the column’s left for cover, he spotted the wizard as soon as she leaned out from behind it to hurl another incendiary spell at him. Her aura of flame made it easy.

It also made him wonder, even as he hissed a word of warding, swiped at the air, and sent the hurtling spark veering off course, if she was truly human after all. To his arcane perceptions, she looked like mortal flesh and blood but somehow like an elemental as well. Perhaps she was some manner of hybrid.

Not that it mattered at the moment. He leaned down from his cart, gripped a still-befuddled vampire by the spiky pauldron on his shoulder, and pointed. “The mage is there! See the firelight? Kill her!”

The vampire hastily chose others to join him in the endeavor, and they headed up the hillside together. Sarshethrian’s murky, half-formed servants scurried forth by the dozen to oppose the undead on foot, but the ones in the air-be they blood drinkers shapeshifted into bats; levitating direhelms; or translucent, faintly luminous wraiths-had a clearer path to their objective.

Satisfied, Lod next sought the priestess. He’d already noted she was operating on the column’s right flank so she and the wizard could harry it from two directions simultaneously. But at first, he still had difficulty pinpointing her exact location because, unlike her partner, she had the good sense not to kindle light in her own immediate vicinity.

Fortunately, though, it was impossible for anyone to repeatedly channel the purifying, life-giving power of the sun without it standing out in a world where that force was entirely alien. To his mystical sensitivities, the spot where she was invoking her deity throbbed like a rotten tooth.

Lod sent a second squad of his followers driving in the cleric’s direction. Then he cast around for Sarshethrian himself.

But this time, he couldn’t find what he was seeking. The fiend was evidently well hidden and content for the moment to let his minions do the fighting.