Richard Byers - Prophet of the Dead

Sarshethrian laughed. “I was coming out anyway. I want a good view of your final moments.”

“I’m afraid your days of viewing anything are over.” Lod hissed an incantation and clenched his fist around the vial, shattering the crystal and crushing its contents.

Sarshethrian cried and clapped his hand to the eye that was still in his head.

Lod reared up on his coils so he could cast further spells at the fiend without the combatants on the ground between them getting in the way. The potential drawback was that by rising higher, he also made himself a better target for any hostile entity on the battlefield. But as quick glances confirmed, the wizard and priestess were busy fighting the undead he’d sent against them, and Sarshethrian’s flying servants, murky things like enormous, malformed flies, were less of a threat. When one oriented on him, he spoke a word of power, pointed, and tore it apart with darts of crimson light.

Then he plucked a black pearl wrapped in a filigree of true-silver wire from one of his pockets, brandished it over his head, and chanted a spell of binding. Argent power flared from the talisman to the blinded, staggering Sarshethrian, whereupon the fiend cried out and vanished. Lod’s bony fingers felt a throb of presence like sudden added weight within in the gem.

He laughed, and then a blow from behind shattered his scapula and raked on down to snap several ribs as well.

Lod wrenched himself around. Neither trapped in the pearl nor even eyeless, although black ichor did streak his pallid cheek, Sarshethrian was floating in the air just a couple of yards away, close enough that his shadow arms could easily whip across the intervening distance. Several shot out at once.

Lod swayed backward atop his reptilian coils. One tentacle still caught the hand containing the evidently useless pearl and jerked it off his wrist. A second lashed around a floating rib and snapped it loose. But the others fell short and failed to envelop him utterly as Sarshethrian plainly intended.

The fiend flew closer to press the attack. Still twisting, dodging, Lod hissed a word of slaying.

That worked, at least to some degree. Sarshethrian went rigid as venom, virulent as the bites of a dozen adders, streamed through his veins.

After an instant, mobility returned, and the fiend sneered and reached anew. By that time, though, the end of Lod’s tail was hurtling down at him.

The blow smashed Sarshethrian to earth. Lod snarled a word of constraint to keep his foe from shifting through space and so slipping out from under the weight and pressure of his lower portion.

An instant later, though, Sarshethrian’s shadow arms curled to slash at the member holding him down. Chunks of bloodless, leathery tissue flew through the air, and bone showed through the gashes where it had been. At the same time, the fiend spit three words, and Lod had a dizzying sensation of spinning upward as his psyche began to separate from his body.

He snarled an incantation of defense and clutched with his remaining hand to symbolize the act of clinging to what was his. He had to grip so tightly that he cracked his own finger bones, but the counterspell worked. His essence locked down into his physical form again.

As it did, he saw that Sarshethrian had nearly wriggled out from under what was left of his tail. Shrieking, Lod charged his hand with the essence of sharpness, whipped his upper body downward like a common serpent striking at prey, drove his fingers through the fiend’s torso, and nailed him to the ground.

That gave the shadow arms another chance to assail the more human portion of him, but instinct, or perhaps simply an irresistible fury, told him to keep attacking, not pull back. As tentacles hooked in his eye sockets, the corners of his jaw, around vertebrae and ribs, and pulled in opposing directions, he sent more of the pure lethal idea of venom pulsing down his arm and out the fang his hand had become.

Sarshethrian’s one dark but lustrous eye opened wide. The shadow arms faltered, frayed, and attenuated into something as insubstantial as mist.

I know what you’re thinking, Lod silently observed, meanwhile infusing his foe with even more poison. This can’t be happening. Because you’re the god of your own little world, and I’m just an artificial thing , a slave, doomed and forgotten until you set me free. But your notions are out of date. I long ago surpassed you.

Sarshethrian tried again to rend Lod with his shadow arms. For a moment, the bone naga could feel their touch, but it was light and soft as feathers. Then the lashing tentacles vanished entirely, and the fiend blackened, shrank, and twisted like a mortal burning to death.

Once he was certain Sarshethrian was truly gone, Lod pulled his hand from the devil’s corpse and wished he could linger over it and savor the moment. But his disciples, his brothers and sisters in undeath, deserved better of him. He reared up and looked around to see how they were faring.

The answer was, about as well as he’d had any right to hope. They’d suffered losses holding back the shadow creatures, but hold them back they had. And with their master slain, Sarshethrian’s minions were abandoning the battle. Big as bears, malformed fleas hopped toward the openings in one of the walls that bounded the vault containing the graveyard. Although vague and murky to begin with, the giant rats became more shapeless still as they simply melted into the dead grass and dark earth under their paws.

Satisfied, Lod recited a spell of restoration. His severed hand and the rest of his lost bones floated up into the air and converged on him to fuse themselves back into place. New gray flesh smeared itself across the wounds in his tail like butter spread by an invisible knife.

His cloak fastened, his collar upturned, and his plumed, broad-brimmed hat tugged down, Mario Bez stepped out of the turret with its cramped spiral staircase onto the wall-walk of the Iron Lord’s castle. Despite his bundling up, the bite of the cold night air made him stiffen and want to go right back inside.

That might be a good idea anyway. The point of spending the evening in the citadel was to be seen by as many Rashemi of consequence as possible. That way, even if they later tumbled to the fact that someone had killed Yhelbruna, they’d be that much more likely to assume that heroic Captain Bez, who mere days ago had delivered their land from the menace of the undead, couldn’t possibly be involved.

But curse it, Melemer or Olthe should have reported by now. Bez peered west across the peaked rooftops of Immilmar in an effort to make out some hint of what had happened, or was currently happening, aboard Dai Shan’s ice barge.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t, and he certainly wasn’t going to stroll right up to the killing field. But to have a hope in the Hells of seeing anything , he was going to have to get closer.

Fortunately, the Storm of Vengeance currently reposed on the lakeshore not too far north of the barge. And no one should think it strange if a conscientious captain paid a nocturnal visit to his vessel to make sure the lookout was awake and all was in order.

Bez stepped into a crenel and jumped far enough out that he needn’t worry about scraping any part of himself against the castle wall. Then he spoke the word of gentle falling that every skyship wizard learned, or at least every one with any sense.

He touched down so lightly that he might have been another snowflake adding to the white blanket on the ground. Then, shivering, he strode toward the shore and the docks until an unexpected sight stopped him in his tracks.

Torches burned aboard the Storm , and the wavering light just sufficed to reveal that the men holding them were berserkers of the Owlbear Lodge. His hosts and drinking companions of three nights past had evidently forced their way aboard, likely killing or taking the crewman on watch prisoner while they were about it.