Richard Byers - Prophet of the Dead

But she did understand to look where he was pointing. She turned back around and registered that her shadowy defenders had begun to abandon her. An antlike thing with five legs on one side of its body and two on the other wheeled and scuttled past her and on up the hill. The murky, flat-looking body of a two-headed grub crumpled in on itself until nothing remained.

Similar desertions were in progress all across the battlefield-presumably because Lod was looming triumphant over Sarshethrian’s black, shriveled remains.

Jhesrhi understood what it all meant but still didn’t want to stop blasting away at the undead now poised to overwhelm her. So strong was the desire that she wasn’t even certain that she could stop.

Then she spotted flashes of light on the other side of the path Lod and his followers had taken into the graveyard. Cera was over there and no doubt rapidly losing her shadowy allies too.

Just as Jhesrhi realized that, a phantom plunged down at her. The oversized mouth in its blur of a face gaped open as if it were giving vent to an endless silent scream.

She swung her staff to attack the specter, but though she moved quickly, her self-appointed follower was faster still. The stag man leaped and batted at the apparition with his bow.

The stave whizzed through the phantom’s insubstantial form without resistance. The undead thrust its clawlike hands into the stag warrior’s torso, and the fey withered.

Jhesrhi burned the specter into nothingness a scant instant later. But her burst of flame arrived too late to save the stag man’s life. He fell to the ground with a final jangle of bells in a rotting heap.

Jhesrhi felt a pang of sorrow that cleared her head, and as it did, she realized she couldn’t simply abandon the stag warrior’s fellows to die. She looked around for them.

But even though they’d never willingly go far from her in the midst of battle, she couldn’t find them. That could only mean they’d already fallen too.

Poor creatures, giving their lives for a loyalty she’d neither sought nor understood. She promised herself she’d avenge them.

But first she had to help Cera, and though it had become her most powerful weapon, fire alone couldn’t do it. If she simply tried to burn her way to the priestess, the enemy would surely surround and overwhelm her.

Hissing words of power in one of the tongues of the Undying Pyre, she spun her staff over her head. A ring of towering flames leaped up around her. Her foes would assume she meant the heat to hold them back, and in fact, she did. But she also wanted the bright cylinder to block their view of what she’d do next.

She spoke to the air in a soft, whistling language, and at once sensed its spiteful reluctance to heed her. In her own world, the spirits of the elements were generally happy to do her bidding, but here in the deathways, everything but fire was apt to balk.

Her voice swelling from the whisper of a breeze to the howl of a gale, she snarled words of chastisement, and the air yielded to her will. It caught her and lifted her hurtling toward the black circle at the top of her roofless tower of flame.

As she shot out into the open, she looked hastily around for flying undead poised to assail her but didn’t spot any. As best she could judge, all the other combatants were well below her, and she supposed she owed Lady Luck an offering of thanks for the height of the ceiling.

She skimmed along just underneath it as she hurtled in Cera’s direction and then over the embattled sunlady. She didn’t want any of the creatures assailing her comrade to observe that she could fly.

She set down behind a mausoleum with a sculpture of Chauntea holding a bouquet of roses in her arms on the roof. The goddess of the earth’s bounty looked strange, a mockery of herself, rendered in obsidian black.

At once, the wind tried to take its leave. Snapping a word of command to let it know she still required its services, Jhesrhi kept it fluttering around her as she ran in Cera’s direction.

A doomsept swept in on her flank, and she lashed her staff at it and set it ablaze. That balked six of the conjoined spirits, but the seventh kept coming and hacked at her with a battle-axe made of sickly greenish light.

She dodged, and the stroke just missed, although even its proximity made her head throb and her sight break up into meaningless spots for an instant. She started to strike back with her own weapon, but then the apparition finished burning away to nothing.

She rushed on to Cera’s side. The priestess was holding back a vampire with a ray of sunlight cast from her gilded mace. The creature’s pasty features became more and more bestial as divine power burned a cavity in its torso. Unfortunately, though, Cera was so intent on that task that she didn’t appear to notice that a direhelm was on the verge of slipping past the flying mace that was bashing dents in its metal body to attack her.

Jhesrhi slashed at the air with her staff. A sword of fire sprang into being to fight alongside the mace of light and help keep the animate plate armor where it was.

“Thanks,” Cera gasped. “Lod killed Sarshethrian. The shadow beasts-”

“I know,” Jhesrhi snapped. “We need the brightest, hottest light you can make, right now.”

Raising her mace as if she had a daytime sky and not darkness and stone above her, Cera called out to Amaunator. Spinning her staff, Jhesrhi conjured another cylinder of flame around the both of them. Holy light and fire exploded into being, each overlapping and reinforcing the other.

Jhesrhi spoke to the wind, and it shot both mortals toward the ceiling of the vault. Cera gave one startled yelp but held her peace thereafter.

Prompted by its summoner’s unspoken will, Jhesrhi’s elemental servant set her and the priestess down by an arch that opened on a tunnel, at a spot removed from what remained of the battle. Still capable of seeing without the light that would have otherwise given away their location, she put the end of her staff in Cera’s hand and led her down the passage.

When she was reasonably certain nothing was pursuing them, the wizard said, “There’s a sarcophagus in an alcove on the right. Sit. Rest.”

Panting, her round face sweaty, Cera groped her way to the granite seat. Feeling as spent as the sunlady looked, Jhesrhi flopped down next to her. They’d both fought hard and cast powerful magic, and even her newfound affinity with fire didn’t allow her to throw burst after burst without the exertion eventually taking a toll.

“Well,” Cera said after a while, “I told you allying with a demon lord was a bad idea.”

Flying over Immilmar in bat form, Nyevarra watched in disgust as warriors streamed out of the lodges and the Huhrong’s Citadel to round up the Halruaans. For the most part, the berserkers were a step behind their quarry, and Mario Bez succeeded in collecting the greater part of his crew and leading them south. But who cared? What mattered was that Yhelbruna was still alive.

What kind of sellswords, Nyevarra wondered bitterly, couldn’t trap and murder one old woman, especially one whose magic was starting to falter? Admittedly, she’d known going in that Bez was lying about his part in the siege of the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but still, given his reputation, she’d had every right to assume he and his company were up to the task she’d set them.

She would have liked to chase after the idiot herself, drink him dry, and then tear off his head to ensure he wouldn’t rise. But she had something more important to do.

The scheme she and Uramar had devised after the traitor Dai Shan opened a portal into the Iron Lord’s dungeons was brilliant even if she was vainglorious to think so. Not only would it overthrow the hathrans, it would leave the durthans preeminent in their own country, with Raumvirans, Nars, and strangers from beyond the sea playing only peripheral roles.