The Spectral Blaze

Everything had been easy enough so far, but that was what she’d expected. The wyrmkeepers would let her get close to Khouryn before they sprang their trap. That way, there could be no doubt as to her intentions.

She crept past a guard station. Something-either the enchantment of stealth she’d cast or a smile from Lady Luck-kept the two men inside from looking up from their game of cards.

On the other side, a block of cells stretched away into the dark. Her mouth stretched tightly with disgust at the stench. Voices murmured. A child wept and a woman begged her to be quiet so the “bad men” wouldn’t come back.

Jhesrhi shook her head. She’d had some awareness that alleged traitors and scoffers at Tchazzar’s divinity were being rounded up, occasionally on flimsy pretexts. Still, she hadn’t realized just how many were caged there underground.

Surely, she thought, Tchazzar doesn’t realize either. It’s Halonya-

But that was a lie, and she rejected it with a twinge of self-contempt. Tchazzar, whose damaged mind saw threats and treachery everywhere, was to blame. Halonya’s desire to avenge slights past and present, real and imagined, and to enrich her church with confiscated coin and property, simply fed the fire.

But whoever was responsible for the Chessentan prisoners’ plight, Jhesrhi hadn’t come to do anything about it. She cast about and found another set of stairs, leading down to the part of the dungeons the wyrmkeepers had claimed for their own.

From that point forward, there could easily be mantraps that Shala hadn’t been able to warn her about. Jhesrhi murmured an incantation and tapped out a cadence on the onyx in the steel ring on her middle finger. The ring was an arcane focus, taken as plunder when the Brotherhood sacked a town years before. Until then, she’d never actually used it, and it felt like a feeble sort of tool compared to her staff.

It seemed to send a sort of flicker ru

She skulked onward, to the bottom of the steps. No torches or lamps burned in the immediate vicinity. But light glimmered at the end of the passage that ran away before her.

There was a fair chance that Khouryn actually was down there. But it was even more likely that the light was a lure to draw Jhesrhi to where the wyrmkeepers wanted her to be. Fortunately she knew from Shala’s diagrams that the corridor ahead wasn’t the only way to reach the glow. A branching corridor snaked around to arrive at the same spot from behind.

So she headed in that direction and kept sca

A vague, glimmering point appeared floating in the gloom. If she hadn’t been a spellcaster herself, she wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was: a disembodied eye created to watch for intruders.

Whispering, she rattled off words of unmaking and squeezed the hand with the ring shut as though she were squashing something inside it. She actually expected the wyrmkeepers’ magic to sound the alarm before she finished. But apparently her charm of stealth kept the eye from spotting her instantly, and as she spoke the final syllable of the countermagic, it collapsed in on itself and vanished with a tiny squishing sound. For a moment the inside of her fist felt slimy.

She crept onward. Ahead, light spilled from a doorway, surely the same glow she’d spotted from the foot of the stairs. She contemplated which attack spell to hurl into the room and reminded herself that magic manipulating any of the four elements was out of bounds. For a moment it seemed particularly a

Then something hissed.

She cursed under her breath because she was sure she knew what it was. When Aoth had rescued Cera from the cellars of Halonya’s interim temple, he’d found that the wyrmkeepers were using a drake as a guard dog. Apparently this bunch had one too, and the beast had caught her scent.

She doubted she had time to sprint the last few paces to the doorway before the foes inside readied themselves for combat. They were expecting her, after all. It would be better to keep her distance and hurl spells as they came out.

Unfortunately they didn’t really do that. An arm whipped out of the doorway, lobbed stones or marbles, and instantly jerked back out of sight. The missiles clattered on the floor.

Jhesrhi started to speak a word of shielding. The first stone exploded before she finished.

A dazzling, crackling flare of lightning burned her, made her whole body clench, and kept her from articulating the final syllable of the word of protection. An instant later a pulse of chill pierced her to the core. Next came flame and finally two bursts of vapor that stung her exposed skin and eyes, seared her from her nostrils all the way down into her chest, and made her cough and retch.

She fell down and told herself she had to scramble back up again or get ready to fight somehow. But it was impossible when she couldn’t catch her breath and her eyes were blind with tears and floating blobs, as if she’d looked straight at the sun.

Footsteps thumped and scale-armor chasubles made a metallic shivering noise as the wyrmkeepers came out into the corridor. The drake gave another rasping hiss. Then a rough bass voice said, “What in the name of the Five Breaths is that?”

The wyrmkeepers had spotted Jhesrhi, as she’d expected they would. Her charm of concealment wasn’t powerful enough to deflect the attention of someone who already knew she was there. But from the one priest’s reaction, it seemed that her underlying spell of disguise was still working. As a result, they weren’t seeing the woman they’d hoped to trap, but rather bone-pale, black-eyed Bareris Anskuld, the undead bard who’d marched with the Brotherhood on the desperate expedition into Thay.

“It could be a diversion,” said a baritone voice in more cultured, aristocratic tones. “I need eyes looking the other way.”

“What about this thing?”

“Let’s see if we can convince it to be on our side.” The speaker-the wyrmkeepers’ leader, Jhesrhi surmised-switched to the language of dragons with its sibilant, polysyllabic words and convoluted phrasing.

Like many priests, he evidently had the ability to command the undead and thought he could use it on Jhesrhi. That gave her a moment to act.

She turned her back on him as though cringing from the power he was bringing to bear. Then, hoping the darkness in the passage would help to hide what she was doing, she fumbled in the pouch on her belt for the small pewter bottle inside. She’d intended to give all the healing elixir to Khouryn, but if she didn’t use some to restore herself, he was never going to get any.

She pulled out the stopper and took a swig. Her pains subsided and once she blinked the tears away, her vision cleared. She finally managed to draw a proper breath.

The wyrmkeeper with the rough voice said, “Wait. If it’s a vampire or something, why was it coughing?”

Jhesrhi hastily jammed the stopper back in, thrust the bottle into her bag, jerked around, and snarled an incantation. She clenched the fist wearing the ring, then flicked her fingers open on the final word. An enormous spiderweb flickered into existence. Their ends adhering to the walls, floor, and ceiling, the sticky, white strands clung to the foes in the midst of them and only entangled them more as they floundered in surprise.

But either because she’d scarcely had time to aim or because they’d been nimble enough to spring clear before the web fully materialized, she hadn’t netted all her foes. Jaws open wide, the drake, a green-scaled creature the size of a wolfhound, bounded at her on its hind legs.