Текст книги "Prophet of the Dead"

Автор книги: Richard Lee Byers

Соавторы: Richard Lee Byers
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Orgurth sprinted after him. “The slope’s thatway!” the orc cried, pointing with his scimitar.

“I know.”

More undead scrambled to intercept them as they neared the drop at the eastern edge of the saddle. Orgurth hacked the legs out from under another skeleton. Aoth drove his spear into a dread warrior’s chest, sent power surging through the weapon, and blasted its torso to scraps of rot and bone.

He spun around a few paces from the drop-off. “Keep the undead away from me,” he said.

“Fair enough.” The orc brandished his scimitar at the oncoming construct. “As long as you keep that thing away from me.”

“I’m working on it.” Aoth started an incantation, whipped his spear up and down like a drumstick in time to the cadence, and for an instant wondered once again how Jhesrhi was faring. She could cast this particular spell better than he could. But in her absence, he’d have to make do.

Orgurth cut to the chest, and a zombie dropped. Then, three times as tall as a man, the construct caught up to the sellswords.

Still reciting his incantation, Aoth dodged out of its way and was disappointed but unsurprised when it blundered past him but then managed to stop instead of charging right over the edge of the cliff. It was reasonably nimble for something so huge and heavy, and besides, when was anything ever that easy?

The construct turned and swiped at him with one of those long arms, and he leaped back just in time to keep its open hand from smashing him to pulp. As he recited the final words of his spell, he raised his spear over his head, reversed his grip on it, and stabbed it down through the snow into the frozen, rocky earth beneath.

Heaving the ground up and down, waves swept out from the point of penetration as if the saddle were a pool of water and Aoth had just dropped a boulder into it. Even knowing what was coming, he staggered and barely managed to keep his footing. Orgurth snarled a startled obscenity as he did fall down.

Meanwhile, poised at the very brink of the drop-off, towering, ponderous, the construct tottered back and forth, back and forth … but didn’t topple over.

As the jolting in the ground subsided, Aoth could see the automaton settling and recovering its balance. It raised its arm for another blow.

Aoth stepped back into the distance so the steel giant wouldn’t have to move away from the edge. As, still not quitebalanced, it started its swing, he thrust his spear at the ground under its feet and shouted a word of destruction.

The word roared forth as a blast of focused sound that shattered the dirt and rock under the construct and splashed the rubble out into empty space. The steel giant reeled backward and plummeted out of sight.

Aoth resisted an impish desire to stand and listen to it crash and clang its way down the mountainside. Wasting even a moment was inadvisable.

Although, he didn’t think he and Orgurth were in insurmountabletrouble. Everything had happened so quickly that many of the Raumvirans likely still didn’t realize they had foes in their midst, and the unexpected earthquake should have thrown those who did understand into disarray.

Whereas Aoth had more magic already selected for the casting. With luck, he and the orc should be able to retreat unharmed and lose themselves in the darkness.

Then, however, the saddle shook again. Stumbling, Aoth peered around but didn’t see the ghoul sorceress or anyone else casting the same spell he had. Apparently, his original magic had further weakened preexisting faults in the bedrock.

Rumbling, more snow and earth crumbled over the edge. Worse– muchworse-it also poured down into a crack that started opening at the brink and knifed its way inward, cutting across Aoth’s intended line of retreat.

Standing where he was, even he couldn’t see how deep the new crevasse was, but it was plainly deeper than a ditch. Deep enough that he and Orgurth couldn’t just hop in and scramble right out the other side. He turned, taking stock of where the enemy was and what the enemy was doing, and realized he and his comrade had only one recourse.

“This way!” he said. He ran toward the caves, and Orgurth followed. Arrows rained down around them, and blue and scarlet rays stabbed in their direction.

Halting and turning when necessary, Aoth cast spells of his own. A burst of conjured sunlight seared and dazzled powerful undead and burned common zombies and skeletons to ash. A wall of fire leaped up to hold back other foes.

Flames didn’t stop the constructs, though. Either leaping over the luminous yellow barrier or simply plunging straight through, they raced after the fugitives like hounds coursing after a pair of stags.

By the time Aoth and Orgurth ran into the clear space the Raumvirans had left between their front ranks and the mountain fastness, the automatons were closing fast. Aoth wondered if he should stop, turn, and throw another spell. It might cost him his life, but maybe the orc at least would reach the open cave mouth.

Then, however, his fire-kissed eyes saw a sudden glimmer of power run through the peak before him. It looked like water flowing through a network of tiny cracks, and when it finished defining itself, he also discerned the first infinitesimal shifting in the bulging masses of stone it had outlined.

The constructs swept toward Aoth and Orgurth in a converging wave of sculpted blades, fangs, talons, pincers, and stingers, of jointed metal, wood, ceramic, and even stone. Then the face of the Rashemi’s mountain refuge, or a fair portion of it, anyway, dropped away from the granite underneath. Banging and crashing, enormous and unnaturally smooth and round-to make them roll better, no doubt-the dislodged boulders cascaded onto the saddle and tumbled onward.

Aoth and Orgurth stopped running toward the stones and poised themselves to dodge. But Aoth couldn’t see any spaces to dodge into. The boulders were like an onrushing wall.

He drew breath for another magical bellow. Maybe the blast would bump one or two of the boulders off course and makea space.

Then, however, one stone veered sharply to the left, and the one beside it flew off the ground in an arc that would take it safely over the warriors in front of it, in each case, for no apparent reason. Aoth wondered if an earth spirit was steering the boulders.

It was a night for cacophonies, and the crashing as the tumbling stones slammed into the constructs was the most deafening yet. When Aoth yelled for Orgurth to start running again, he could barely hear himself for the din.

As they clambered up the steep slope that led to the open gate, masked men appeared in the opening and brandished wands and staves. Other portals opened, and similar figures appeared in those as well. Thunderbolts and orbs of flame blazed from the ends of the magical weapons. Fortunately, like the leaping boulder, the attacks passed over Aoth and Orgurth’s heads to strike at the Raumvirans.

Hands grabbed the sellswords and hauled them into the cave mouth and to safety. A cave dweller in a leather owl mask trimmed with real feathers regarded the newcomers and said, “The avalanche was our best defense, and we were saving it for just the right moment.” His tenor voice sounded young and pugnacious, but maybe he was just afraid.

“Easy, Kanilak,” said a Rashemi in a wooden mask carved to put a third eye in the center of his forehead. His voice was deeper and older. “We likely weren’t going to geta better moment than when all those constructs charged within range.”

“Still,” Kanilak said, “these two had better be worth it.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Orgurth said, “seeing as how now we’re trapped in this hole with the rest of you.” He gave Aoth a sour look to convey that he knew whose fault thatwas.

5

Darkness blinded Jhesrhi, and the cold made her shiver. Occasionally, she thoughtshe heard one of Sarshethrian’s enormous “vermin” shift position, but the tiny sounds might simply be one of her stag warriors moving slightly or even her own pulse beating in her ears.

Still, it made her skin crawl to imagine that one of the shadow-beasts might actually touchher before she realized it was there, and that in turn made the urge to summon a protective mantle of flame from the core of her that much harder to resist.

Formerly, the irrational impulse to call fire had resided in the staff she’d carried away from Mount Thulbane, but when she’d sacrificed the weapon to steal Tchazzar’s breath and strength, it had truly become a part of her.

It was unhealthy to give herself over to the impulse, though, or at least Cera seemed to think so, and it was certain that showing a light would alert the enemy to their presence. So Jhesrhi endured feeling vulnerable and the general unpleasantness of the deathways as best she could by thinking of Aoth, Khouryn, and Gaedynn, her cherished comrades from the Brotherhood.

She wondered if Gaedynn was still keeping company with the fashionable Chessentan lady he’d met at a ball. The woman was nice enough, but still, even though, in a vague, abstract sort of way, it shamed her, Jhesrhi found herself imagining how fire might flow along the folds and through the layers of one of the noblewoman’s elaborate silk and fur ensembles.

“They’re coming,” Sarshethrian whispered abruptly. The sound startled Jhesrhi and made her jump even though he’d told her he’d magically project his voice to warn her when battle was imminent. “Prepare yourself.”

She closed her eyes, murmured rhyming words, and touched a fingertip to each eyelid on the final syllable. When she opened them, she could see, albeit with colors faded to shades of gray and not as far as she could have with the aid of light. She could, of course, have enjoyed the benefit of the enchantment all along but hadn’t wanted to waste the power required to keep renewing it.

She was sitting on the ground with her back against a black marble mausoleum carved with an elaborate scene of Kelemvor judging the dead. Its antennae twitching, a thing like the shadow of an enormous cockroach crouched to her left. She rose and crept to the right to peek around the side of the tomb.

She was on a hillside in the largest space she’d yet seen in the sometimes claustrophobic vaults and tunnels that made up the deathways. Predictably, the space was a graveyard complete with twisted, leafless trees and wilted wreaths. All the tombs and monuments were black.

Thanks to Gosnorn’s information and the manner in which it jibed with his own knowledge of his dominions, Sarshethrian had been certain Lod would pass through here on his way to Faerun and Rashemen, and now Jhesrhi saw for herself that it was so. Like most any warlord marching through dangerous territory, the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was traveling in a column with his followers arranged protectively around him.

Prompted both by her martial training and natural curiosity, Jhesrhi first picked out Lod himself, and her eyes widened in surprise. The few bone nagas of her experience had been simply and precisely that, the naked, reanimated skeletons of enormous snakes with skulls nearly the same shape as those of human beings. The master wizard who’d woken Lod, though, had crafted something unique.

The commander of the Eminence was a divided being like a centaur. His maker had reshaped the top part of him into something very like the skeletal remains of the top half of a human being, arms, hands, and all. The bottom part remained overtly reptilian, but longer and heavier than one would expect of even a naga, the bones still sheathed in muscle and scales with a ridge of jagged spikes along the top. Jhesrhi wondered if she was actually looking at something that had once been a dragon’stail.

Lod rode coiled on a cart drawn by a dozen scarred, gaunt, and filthy naked living men. According to Sarshethrian, the slaves had once been necromancers who’d made thralls of the undead.

Next, Jhesrhi identified the bone naga’s spellcasters, pallid vampires and withered liches walking with staves in hand and amulets hanging from their necks. She and her allies needed to neutralize them quickly, or at least keep them too busy defending themselves to do the same for their leader.

Finally, she looked over the men-at-arms, particularly the undead of two sorts she’d never encountered before even when fighting Szass Tam’s legions. The floating entities called direhelms were the top halves of suits of plate armor animated by the spirits resident within. Doomsepts were groups of seven luminous phantoms that fought as one and apparently werea single being in some metaphysical sense.

All things considered, the column looked formidable even in comparison to the horde of shadow creatures Sarshethrian had assembled to lie in wait for it. Jhesrhi hoped the maimed fiend was right that her powers and Cera’s would tilt the balance in their favor.

Once again, tinged with hatred and eagerness, Sarshethrian’s voice whispered from the empty air: “Now.”

Jhesrhi clothed herself in flame. It felt so good, so right, that for a moment, pleasure burned every other thought right out of her head.

Then, however, she remembered her purpose. Declaiming words of power, she jabbed with her brazen staff and cast a fiery missile at Lod. Elsewhere, her ordinarily merry voice vibrant with the loathing she felt for the deathways and all they contained, Cera recited a prayer that enveloped a portion of the column in searing sunlight. Sarshethrian’s creatures exploded from their hiding places.

The sellswords of the Storm of Vengeanceand 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, hecould 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 fireat 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.

Lod might have done the same in his place. The shadow beasts were low, mindless things, but formidable in their way, and they outnumbered the warriors and mages of the Eminence. It made tactical sense to simply throw them at the column until they wore it away.

That was why Lod couldn’t allow the battle to continue in that fashion. He reached into his robe, brought out a crystal vial, and, murmuring words of excoriation and compulsion, focused his malice on the eyeball suspended in the cloudy liquid within.

Melemer finished his incantation and flicked the fingers of one hand at Yhelbruna. His various rings glowed brighter, and bitter cold jolted her, for an instant effacing the pain of the luminous tendril that bound her and dangled her above the deck.

The tiefling stopped advancing, tilted his head, and studied her. “Heart not giving out yet?” he said. “Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Not if all the stories about you are true.” He started another spell.

Yhelbruna exerted her will to shut out the pain of her bonds and likewise to believe that, despite its shocking impotence moments ago, her magic was strong. She whispered an incantation.

Melemer finished his spell first. Black worms writhed into existence down the length of her body.

But before they could start burrowing into her flesh, she completed her spell of liberation, and it twisted Melemer’s magic to her own purposes. The soft, squirming creatures gnawed at her glowing bonds instead of her, and the vinelike spiral flickered into nonexistence as it came apart.

The worms likewise falling away and vanishing, Yhelbruna dropped back onto the deck. She tried to stay upright but, unable to catch her balance, banged down on one knee. That too, was going to hurt when pain slipped past the barrier she’d raised against it.

Melemer’s chatoyant eyes goggled at her. Then he snatched the long knife from his belt and rushed her.

She knew she wasn’t ready to withstand him with magic or her rusty quarterstaff skills either. She scrambled to her feet, dashed to the rail, and swung herself over. The dagger made a whizzing sound as it slashed past, just shy of her flesh.

The barge stood tall on its runners. Yhelbruna snapped a word that should have slowed her fall. Again, magic flowed sluggishly, weakly, in answer to her call. She landed with a thump but at least didn’t break or sprain anything or crash right through the ice.

She scurried into the pool of shadow under the barge’s hull. That would keep Melemer from throwing spells at her from up on deck. Then she heard the warlock whistle.

She felt a renewed pang of desperation because the whistle was surely a signal. He’d had one or more confederates waiting to cut her off if she managed to escape the barge or decided at the last moment not to board in the first place. Thus, she was in even greater peril than she’d imagined.

She didn’t know why her magic was feeble-some hostile enchantment centered on the barge, perhaps-and didn’t have time to try to figure it out. But maybe she could transcend the debilitating influence in the moment she did have.

She peered out at Selune trailing her haze of glittering tears across the western sky. One of the Three was looking down on her, and the Three had never failed her.

Then she considered the lake, frozen over now but still teeming with fish, fey, and spirits beneath its covering of ice. Like the favor of the goddesses, the life of the lake was a well of power she could draw from at need, even if the pulse of that vitality suddenly felt faint and faraway. Surely that was only an illusion.

Something thumped down on the ice and roused her from her effort to center herself. Peering, she saw that Olthe, the burly sellsword priestess of Tempus, had jumped down from the dock.

The battleguard spotted Yhelbruna too. Spinning her axe and tossing it from hand to hand, she advanced and said, “Come out from under the boat, hathran. Let’s finish this.” Her melodious alto voice was a surprise issuing from that homely, sneering face and mannish frame.

But what was the point of talking now or of the flashy display with the axe, for that matter? Yhelbruna thought she knew. Reciting under her breath, she edged forward like she did indeed intend to come out into the open and accept Olthe’s challenge. When she reached the last line of the incantation, though, she spun around.

For an instant, she saw nothing but ice and wondered if she’d guessed wrongly. Then a dozen batlike shreds of shadow swooped down, swirled together, and became a small horned figure ideally positioned to attack her from behind ifshe were still facing the other way.

She spit the final words of her spell. In an instant, brambles grew from the side of the ice barge-let’s see how Melemer liked being bound! The thorns ripped his flesh as the briars snaked and crisscrossed around him, and the warlock screamed.

Yhelbruna jerked back around. Olthe had stopped advancing and started praying, chopping the air with her axe in time to the words.

Recognizing the spell, Yhelbruna threw herself sideways. A vertical bolt of flame surged down through the spot she’d just abandoned. It blasted through the bottom of the barge and smashed and melted a steaming hole in the ice.

The heat seared Yhelbruna too, in the instant before she floundered out of range, but not severely enough to balk her. She stabbed her staff at Olthe, and with a boom, a dazzling flare of lightning leaped forth and stabbed into the battleguard’s torso.

Somehow remaining upright despite the slipperiness of the ice, Olthe danced a twitching, lurching dance for the moments the magic lasted. Then, her body smoking, she toppled forward.

Yhelbruna pivoted. Melemer was still tangled in the briars but no longer shrieking and struggling. Before the woody bonds stopped growing, thorns had lodged in the corners of his mouth and stretched it wide. The grimace might almost have looked comical if stickers hadn’t ended up in his eyes as well.

Yhelbruna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Controlling one’s breathing was supposed to promote calmness, but she started trembling with reaction anyway.

She wished she could pause where she was and wait for her nerves to settle, but it wasn’t possible. Now that she knew for a fact that Bez and his sellswords were dastards, she needed to make sure Mangan’s guards took them into custody forthwith.

As she tried to work out how best to accomplish that, she registered the burning foulness in her mouth. She bared her face and did her best to spit the taste of bile away, then strode back to shore, scooped up a handful of snow, and used it to scour the vomit from inside her mask.

Sarshethrian advanced but not witlessly. He did so amid another wave of scuttling shadow creatures and wrapped in supernatural defenses. Even at a distance, Lod could feel the extra power pulsing inside the fiend’s ragged shroud of murky tentacles.

Lod’s followers lunged forward to meet the onrushing vermin. Each of his comrades, he believed, certainly every direhelm, doomsept, specter, or vampire, was more than a match for any one of Sarshethrian’s minions. But superior numbers might still overwhelm the Eminence in the end.

Except that Lod didn’t intend to let it come to that. He crawled down from his cart, slithered toward the ranks of undead fighting savagely to hold back the shadow creatures, and refocused his will on the eye floating in the vial.

Sarshethrian’s voice sounded from the empty air. “The eye has power over me in your world, not in mine. Especially now that I’ve taken measures against it.”

“It pulled you out of your hiding place,” Lod replied. The charm Sarshethrian had cast to facilitate communication would carry his words to the demon as well.

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.