Extinction

The first wight was still moving, crawling furiously after Jeggred with its rotted entrails dragging along behind it. Before it could reach him, Danifae rushed forward, morningstar in hand. There wasn't much room to swing the weapon in the low-ceilinged corridor, but she managed an abbreviated downward smash. The spiked ball of the morningstar co

Pharaun stared at Danifae with a look of open admiration. He held a tiny leather pouch in one hand, which he'd drawn from his pocket as the wights attacked.

"Well done," he said, tucking it back into a pocket of his piwafwi.

Quenthel looked past Danifae.

"Are there more?" she asked Jeggred.

Jeggred stood panting, head turning from side to side as he searched for the scent of additional foes. As his chest rose and fell, Valas noted the wound the wight had inflicted on the draegloth. It was little deeper than a scratch, but it was causing Jeggred to wheeze as if each breath was painful. After a moment, Jeggred shook his head.

"No more," he concluded, "just these two."

Valas cleared his throat.

"Wights are the least of our worries," he reminded the others. "We should get moving. The portal is just ahead, at the center of the vault, about seventy-five paces into the room. Pharaun's marked it with a spell. Quickly now, and one at a time. Take a run and leap out from the end of the tu

That said, he flattened against the wall and motioned the others forward. As he did, he sca

They hadn't.

Quenthel moved forward to glance down into the room, then, after communing silently with her whip vipers, she nodded. She backed down the corridor, then sprinted past Valas and leaped into the air. A heartbeat later Jeggred rushed after her, arms flailing.

As the pair drifted down through the empty room toward the portal, Valas glanced up at the ceiling. Were the gods in the mural scowling a bit more fiercely? He stared back at them a moment, then decided it must have been his imagination. Meanwhile, Quenthel had ignored his instructions and was hovering above the portal. Jeggred, floating in the air beside her, kept glancing back and forth between his mistress and the portal, a confused look on his face.

Valas turned to warn Pharaun that something was delaying the pair, but the mage was just completing the spell he was casting on Danifae, tracing an invisible symbol on each of her knees with something he held pinched in his fingers. Finishing, he gave Danifae a quick smile of encouragement, then he turned and sprinted down the corridor past Valas, leaping into the vault.

He levitated to a halt just above Quenthel and Jeggred and motioned furiously for them to go through the portal. Quenthel, however, shook her head.

"You first," she ordered.

Pharaun, hovering in the air, folded his arms across his chest.

"Come on, Danifae!" he shouted up at the tu

Valas shook his head. The scuffle with the wights had already caused enough noise to wake the undead, and with all the shouting they'd never hear if more approached. Impatiently, he beckoned Danifae forward.

As she crouched on the lip of the tu

Danifae wound up on her hands and knees?but not on the floor. Instead she seemed to have landed on something that held her at arm's length from it. Something invisible?or something cloaked by an illusion. Something that kept shifting.

Pharaun, too, saw her stumble. One of his hands whipped into a pocket of his piwafwi, and a moment later he was smearing something across his eyes as he chanted a spell. As Danifae struggled to her feet on the shifting surface?causing that pebble noise again?Pharaun's eyes widened.

"Danifae!" he shouted. "You're standing on a rotted chest that's spilling gems?but more importantly, there's a wand just to your right. Grab it!"

Quenthel's head snapped up, and she asked, "A wand?"

Danifae began patting the still-invisible pile on which she stood. Valas, meanwhile felt a growing sense of unease. Someone, or something, was watching. Once again, his eyes flicked up to the ceiling.

The scout saw that his intuition had been right. The eyes of the gods in the mural were different. They'd been dull, flat stones a short time before, but had begun too glow red, like angry coals.

Then they blinked.

"Venom's kiss," Valas swore under his breath. Then, as two pairs of glowing red eyes detached themselves from the ceiling and drifted down into the room, he shouted. "Pharaun! Quenthel! Above you?wraiths!"

Jeggred was the first to react. Grasping Quenthel's shoulders, he gave her a shove that forced her down into contact with the floor. Her feet touched the portal and she disappeared. The draegloth then turned and tried to do the same to Pharaun but the mage twisted out of his grasp, kicking Jeggred. The blow forced he draegloth into the portal, and he too disappeared.

Valas grunted, Jeggred's actions had been too deliberate?and too disrespectful?to have been anything but Quenthel's orders. Quenthel had obviously briefed him well in advance about what to do should wraiths attack?and her tactics were sound. She and Pharaun were vital to the quest, but the others could be sacrificed. Pharaun, however, had guessed what was coming?and had decided, wisely or not, to stay and fight.

The mage yanked from his pocket the tiny pouch he'd been reaching into earlier. With a serpent-fast motion, he pulled from it a pinch of diamond dust and flung it into the air. As a pair of wraiths swooped in to attack him?their location revealed only by their glowing eyes?Pharaun shouted his incantation. Unable to stop themselves in time, the two wraiths plunged into the diamond dust. As they struck it they wailed?a hollow, anguished sound that raised the hair on the back of Valas's neck. Their eyes winked out as the powerful spell snuffed out the necromantic magic that had sustained them.

Unfortunately, there were, as the rogue had correctly warned, more than just those two. Dozens of glowing red eyes erupted from the ceiling and descended into the room like tiny, paired embers falling from a burning building.

Seeing that, Pharaun glanced quickly between the wraiths and Danifae. What he was thinking was plainly written on his face. Should he save his own skin by escaping through the portal?or should he stay and protect her?

The wizard began to levitate down coward the portal, then paused abruptly and stared hard?not at Danifae but at something near her feet. Instead of fleeing, he reached into his pouch for another pinch of dust.

The hesitation nearly cost him his life. Unseen, one of the wraiths swooped down behind him and, with a hollow death-rattle of laughter, swept through his body. As its glowing red eyes erupted out of Pharaun's chest the Master of Sorcere shuddered, his face slate gray.

Three more of the wraiths descended with murderous purpose toward Danifae. Raising her morningstar, she braced herself to meet them, even though she must have known the futility of it. The magical weapon might account for one of the ghostly undead, but the other two would almost certainly kill her a heartbeat later.