Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Balan, Balan, Balan!” Nesha-tari shouted, and the Devil Lord winked into being at the head of the table.
“Damn,” Balan muttered. “Forgot about that.”
Zeb grabbed his axe from where it leaned against a wall as his crossbow took too long to load to be useful at the moment. Tilda however snatched up her bow and drew a bead on Balan, while Heggenauer raised his shield and mace. Balan smirked at all three of them.
“You don’t really think any of that would work, do you?” Balan asked, but he lost his smile as a snikt! sounded behind him and Uriako Shikashe extended the white blade of the Breath of Winter, holding the tip of the curving sword just off Balan’s neck above his right shoulder.
“Huh,” Balan said, glancing sideways. “Yes, that might do it.”
“Balan, what have you done with John Deskata?” Nesha-tari demanded.
“Not a thing, Madame. He decided to leave completely of his own accord.”
“Where has he gone?” Tilda asked, still with her bow fully drawn back, the string hooked on her archer’s glove and her straight left arm trembling slightly.
“Not far,” Balan said.
“Enough dissembling,” Nesha-tari snapped, marching around the table and coming to stand quite near the devil. Tilda relaxed the pull on her bowstring before her arm gave, and Zeb knelt behind the table to load his crossbow as innocuously as possible.
Nesha-tari’s blue eyes flashed as she glared at the devil, standing near enough now to touch him but only raising one hand to jab a finger at his face. Zeb knew the woman was powerful, but the sight of her confronting the horned, hoofed, red-eyed Devil Lord with her hands empty of weapons, or lightning for that matter, was truly impressive. She growled as she spoke to Balan.
“You will tell the truth to me now, as your kind must. What is it you think to do here?”
Balan stared into Nesha-tari’s eyes, and a wistful smile played about his dark gray lips.
“There is no need for such a coarse tone, Madame. Nor indeed for you to involve yourself here at all.”
Balan looked at Nesha-tari with a solemn expression on his diabolic features, and spoke with complete sincerity.
“There is no reason what I do here need be of any concern to you, nor to your Blue Master, Akroya the Great.”
Nesha-tari’s lips pulled back, exposing her even teeth.
“How do you…”
“Because Danavod told me who you are,” Balan said with a shrug, then looked around at the others. “Even had she not, we would have learned all by now. You people talk entirely too much. Do you not know that the streets of this city have ears? Not to mention eyes. Beady little red ones.”
“Balan…” Nesha-tari snarled. The devil sighed.
“Call off your man, Nesha-tari, that we might speak in a more polite fashion.”
“He is stalling,” Tilda said, but Nesha-tari met Shikashe’s eyes over Balan’s shoulder, and the sword blade hovering just above it.
“Uriako Shikashe, stand down.”
The face mask of the samurai’s helmet was undone. He was seen to frown deeply.
“That is not a good idea, Madame.”
“It is an order. Are you in my service, or are you not?”
Shikashe let a hard breath out through his nose, then gave Balan’s neck a soft tap with the flat of his sword. Balan winced as though the blade was either very hot, or very cold. The samurai lowered his sword and took a step back, though he took a formal stance with both hands on the pommel, clearly ready to strike in an instant.
“That is moderately better,” Balan said, rubbing his neck.
“Speak, Balan,” Nesha-tari growled.
“Fine,” the devil said, and nodded toward Tilda. “She is right. I am stalling.”
The devil disappeared in a wink. Shikashe lunged, his sword flashing, but it passed through where Balan had stood and cut a slice clean through the top of the heavy oak table.
* * *
Deskata jerked Phin off his feet and strode down the ring of stairs, dragging the wizard along by a fistful of robes. The collar twisted tightly around Phin’s neck as he tried to get to his feet, but Deskata loped quickly across the flat circle of floor and started up the dais, banging Phin’s knees and then an elbow against the rising steps. Phin gasped for a breath and at the top was thrown on his side in front of the curving platinum posts. The silvery white metal seemed to glow spectrally against the black stone background.
Deskata set his tower shield aside on its rim, slid the satchel off his shoulder to hold it by the book within, and drew his ugly, fat-bladed short sword. He kept the weapon at his side with the blade pointed at the floor, but his eyes stabbed at the wizard.
“You will cast your spell or speak your words, now!” he roared, his voice suddenly thick with some accent that was not of the Empire. “Open this gate, that I may pass through to Miilark.”
Phin stared back at him. “Miilark?”
“You heard me.”
“I’ve never been to Miilark!”
A vein throbbed along Deskata’s jaw, and his fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword.
“I did not ask if you had been there, I told you to open this damned gate!”
Phin was on his side, but he rolled to his back to look up the long tower at the false sun suspended high above him. He laughed bitterly.
“Nine Gods, you people are all morons!” Phin yelled. “Do the Legions bar entry to anyone with enough brains to pour piss out of a boot?”
The ex-Centurion glared, but he made no move as Phin got shakily to his feet, and shook out his robes which had bunched up awkwardly as he’d been dragged to the center of the room. He pointed a finger at the satchel in Deskata’s hand.
“Who told you idiots that thing could open a gate?”
Deskata glared, and from the utter lack of light in the depths of his muddy brown eyes Phin did not doubt that the man would not hesitate to kill him. Phin just found it hard to care about that at the moment.
“A seer,” Deskata said.
“A seer! That’s really brilliant. Some Orstavian local, I expect? Was he wearing animal skins and rocking back and forth in a tent? Smoking herbs and drinking fermented toadstools? Nice choice. That is exactly who I would consult regarding an ancient work of thaumaturgy, written in Tullish!”
Deskata’s nostrils were wide and he took deep breaths through his nose, as his mouth was shut so tight his lips were going white. He had to pry them apart to speak.
“He said this gate, when opened, could lead anywhere in the world.”
“He wasn’t even close!”
Phin spun toward the posts and threw out his hands.
“When this thing worked, it connected to only one or maybe two specific places. And it hasn’t worked in fourteen centuries! All that is in that book in your hand are musings about why that might be so. Did the cataclysm that tore Vod’Adia out of the world sever the links? Did some safety measure shut it off, so that the rest of this world did not disappear along with the city? It is theory, Centurion. Wonderings and ruminations.”
Deskata shook the satchel with stiff, jerky motions.
“There are spells within this book!”
“Quite right. Three teleport incantations, written as models of how the gate might have worked, once again, fourteen centuries in the past. And before you say then teleport me to Miilark, know two things. One, a wizard teleports by envisioning a destination in his mind, one that has been studied intensely and committed to memory in its every detail. I can’t envision a place I’ve never been, now can I? And two, no spell of any kind can function across a magical barrier. Like, for example, the big gray misty one you may have noticed when you walked into this city! Do you think the Shugak would let magi come into this place if they could teleport away anytime they liked, without paying taxes on the way out?”
Deskata stared at the platinum horns, graceful in their lines and beautiful in their way, and utterly inanimate. Phin spread his hands at his sides, and shrugged. Deskata took a stiff step toward him, then dropped his shoulder and plowed into Phin’s chest.
He hit Phin like a charging war horse, lifting him off his feet and slamming his back into one of the posts. Phin’s breath exploded out of his lungs and as he started to slide to the ground on legs gone to water, Deskata drove a knee into his side so he toppled between the two posts on his way to the floor.
Phin actually had an instant of nervousness, based on nothing, but his body took a predictable path as he sprawled to the dais floor for the second time, albeit on the other side of the gate. He glared up at Deskata, and managed to shout, “Ta-da!”
The Centurion’s face was flushed. He looked at the posts to either side, then took a breath before stepping between them himself. Nothing of course happened, and he stood over Phin.
“Does it feel like home?” Phin asked, sneering. “Smell that Island air?”
“There must be something…”
“There is not.”
“There must be!”
The Centurion shook Kanderamath’s book out of the satchel over Phin’s head, and the Circle Wizard narrowly managed to catch the heavy volume before it hit him in the face. When the bare skin of his hands touched the worn leather covers, the world turned white in Phin’s eyes.
* * *
Zeb heard the Devil Lord’s voice coming out of one of the side rooms, and he raised his crossbow toward the open door. Tilda raised her bow at a different doorway, while the others looked around wildly.
“Madame Nesha-tari,” Balan’s voice addressed the woman as she crouched back against a wall and snarled. “While I had hoped to have a civilized discussion regarding a certain matter, it seems we shall have to do things the easy way.”
Nesha-tari opened her mouth to speak but she only gasped, and staggered on her feet. Amatesu rushed to her side while Shikashe took up a position in front of them both with his sword raised and eyes darting about. Nesha-tari’s blue eyes fluttered like signal lamps and she swooned against the shukenja.
“You have promised not to attack us, devil!” Heggenauer shouted. The Jobian acolyte stood with mace and shield raised, the Duchess Claudja behind him in a corner.
The devil answered Heggenauer, and as Zeb and Tilda both turned to aim at where the voice now seemed to be coming from, they pointed their bows at each other for a moment.
“Actually, I swore that me and mine would do you no harm. This is not harm, nor is it an attack.”
Tilda ducked under Zeb’s crossbow and scooted around him, then put her back against his. Zeb noticed to absolutely no purpose that she smelled very nice right now. Balan’s voice continued to speak.
“There is an aspect to the diabolic presence, I need not deny it, which has a unique effect on simple creatures. Humans among them. With only a little concentration on my part, people can be made to feel very strongly their most fundamental desires. Greed, hatred, envy and lust. And of course, most simply of all, hunger.”
Nesha-tari shoved Amatesu away from her and sagged against the wall, arms held tight against her stomach and mouth locked in a grimace.
“She is in pain,” the Duchess Claudja said from behind Heggenauer.
“True, but pain is not always harm, is it, your Grace? Pain is useful. Pain is honest.”
The voice had moved again, though Zeb stopped whipping his crossbow toward it every time as he was starting to feel like an idiot. Tilda dropped her bow altogether and drew two matching daggers from the sheaths under her forearms.
Nesha-tari’s chest hitched and she stumbled forward, shoving Shikashe hard and sending the surprised samurai staggering sideways. She fell forward but caught herself on the edge of the table, and everyone in the room cringed. Nesha-tari’s spread fingers ended in claws that dug deeply into the oak, and there was tawny fur on the back of her hands and forearms. Her brown hair, still damp from washing, hung lankly in front of her face.
“What the hell?” Tilda asked. Zeb wished she had found a different word.
“You do not know?” Balan’s voice came from still another part of the room. “That hardly seems sporting. The lovely Nesha-tari never told you people of her lineage as a Lamia?”
Zeb dropped his jaw, as the last several weeks he had spent in Nesha-tari’s company suddenly made complete sense to him. He knew just enough about the creatures known as lamias, from spook stories told across campfires if nothing else, to give serious consideration to turning his bow on the woman slumped against the end of the table.
“What is a lamia?” Tilda whispered behind Zeb.
“Monsters of high deserts and lonely plains,” he answered. “They lure men to their deaths, and eat them.”
“Lure them how?” Tilda asked.
“How would you?”
A deep, resonating growl emerged from Nesha-tari. The table she leaned on toppled to its side as though her weight had suddenly increased, and as she hit the floor on all fours she was no longer wholly a woman, though neither was she fully something else. Her clothing strained at the seams as her limbs and torso elongated. Thick, tawny fur sprang from every inch of her exposed skin. She crouched cat-like on four thick paws, and when she raised her head to release a deafening roar it came out of a muzzle framed by long whiskers. Only her eyes, still of the deepest blue, remained unchanged.
Even Shikashe and Amatesu sprang away from her and put their backs to the walls, the samurai’s sword and the shukenja’s club warding away the great half-feline beast. A spark flashed on the floor in front of Nesha-tari and suddenly Balan was there, kneeling right in front of her with his red eyes looking into her blue ones.
“Nesha-tari,” Balan spoke in a soft whisper. “You do not have to fight what you are. Not here, and not with me.”
The big cat’s ears twitched, and Nesha-tari’s fanged maw hung open. The devil reached out slowly and gently scratched the side of her head.
“You can not stay with these monkeys, they will not allow it. Not now that they have seen you for what you are. Stay here, with us, Nesha-tari. We are of a kind.”
Zeb was staring, everyone was staring, with the exception of Kendall Heggenauer. The armored Jobian took several running steps and lunged, dropping his mace to hang from his wrist, bracing both arms and a strong shoulder behind his shield.
Balan looked up to see Jobe’s holy symbol bearing down on him and before he could move or disappear, Heggenauer crashed into him as though fired from a ballista. The devil lord reeled and slammed into a wall, as Heggenauer leaped to his feet and raised his mace, white light blooming from its head.
“She is with us, devil,” Heggenauer said calmly. “Sell your lies to another.”
The great beast that had been Nesha-tari cringed back as Balan’s focus came off her, nails scratching on the floor as the cat reeled back on its hind legs, which were suddenly human legs. She was a woman again, tripping over the overturned table and falling toward the floor. Shikashe and Amatesu came together to catch her by the shoulders. Balan righted himself, and glared at Heggenauer.
“You godlings are the same everywhere, aren’t you?” the devil sneered. “Nesha-tari, explain to this dolt the way of the world, will you?”
Nesha-tari shoved herself away from Shikashe and Amatesu, growling again though it was now with a human voice. The blue lightning bloomed in her hands and she threw her tanned arms forward, split sleeves hanging off them in tatters, and unleashed arcs of crackling blue fire across the room, into Balan.
The devil was lifted off his foot and hoof, and Zeb and Tilda flattened to the ground as the creature was blown across the wall above them, rolling and screeching. Balan slammed into a corner and fell to the ground in a smoking heap. The smell of bad barbeque filled the room so thickly that Zeb nearly gagged.
“Ouch,” Balan muttered, lying on his neck and shoulders with his legs sticking up against the wall. He groaned and rolled to his side, then pushed himself up to a seat. A hole had been blown in the clothing on his chest and the jagged edge of coat, vest, and shirt were all smoldering. The gray skin beneath was blackened like a piece of meat fallen off a spit into the fire. He coughed, and a puff of smoke came out of his mouth.
Nesha-tari stood glaring, her own tattered clothes hanging so she had to hold the trousers up with a hand. Blue fire still danced in her other palm.
“Where is the Wizard?” she hissed.
“And J-John Deskata,” Tilda added, almost getting it out without stammering.
One of Balan’s arms hung limp at his side, but the devil pointed back into the tower entryway with the other.
“First set of double doors on the left. Long hall through the wing, then another set of doors into the central tower. They are both in there.”
The lightning in Nesha-tari’s hand rose in intensity, and Balan shook his head.
“You chose badly, Kitty,” he said, then rolled on the floor and disappeared.
* * *
Balan rolled another turn across the hard ground of a courtyard, shouting as he went over his broken arm. He stopped on his back and let out a ragged breath at the featureless night sky above.
“Poltus,” he said, and the devil appeared instantly above him.
“Anything?” Balan asked, and the spiked devil shook his head once. Balan sighed. “Such a waste. Open the western tower.”
Poltus bowed and disappeared. Balan lay still for a moment, grimacing as the fried skin on his chest moved, burns and blisters sinking back into the flesh and the unhealthy gray pallor returning. Nesha-tari’s lightning bolt had caused the muscles of Balan’s left arm to contract so violently his humerus had snapped. Nothing funny about it. Balan grabbed the arm under the elbow and pulled it straight with a gasp, so that the bones could knit back together.
“Balan?” a disembodied voice asked from all around.
“Danavod,” Balan said, needing to add no affectation of strain to his voice. “The Circle Wizard is in the central tower, at the Node. I have opened the tower doors to your hobgoblins. You must send them right away.”
“The Wizard did this to you?”
“No, Blue Akroya’s servant. She seeks to aid the Wizard.”
There was silence in the courtyard but the air seemed heavy, and angry.
“Does my Blue brother act against me?” Danavod asked, possibly a rhetorical question but Balan answered anyway, and as always with complete honesty.
“I do not know what Akroya wants done here, your Fierceness.”
There was another moment of silence, then dust stirred all around the courtyard as if tremendous wings had beat the ground. The dark presence of the Dragon rose into the sky, and moved off west.
Balan winced and pulled himself to a seat. He moved his left arm at the shoulder with only a twinge of pain, as his chest was fully healed. The clothes, however, were a complete loss.
“Such a waste,” he muttered again, and climbed to his feet.
* * *
When the white light faded before Phin’s eyes, he found himself looking at Kanderamath’s book in his hands, which he had caught just above his nose. He dropped the book to one side and scrambled away from Centurion Deskata, but caught his breath when he looked at the man.
Deskata had tossed the leather satchel aside after shaking out the book over Phin‘s head, and the fact that he now stood absolutely still was nowhere near as disconcerting as the fact that the satchel was hanging motionless in the air a foot from his hand. Phin stared at the man and realized that absolutely still was an understatement. Deskata was frozen in mid motion, one foot raised to step forward, mouth hanging open to draw in breath, probably so that he could yell at Phin some more.
Phin scooted away and scrambled to his feet, panting so hard that it struck him that his breath was presently the only sound in the vast room, and seemingly in the world. There was a cold profundity to the silence all around, and the quality of the light was somehow off as well though Phin could not say just what was wrong with it. He turned where he stood, looking all around, and jerked when he saw the winged woman who had led John Deskata here, across the room and up on the second floor catwalk. She was perched on the balustrade, squatting on her haunches with a broad smile on her face. Motionless.
Some movement did appear in the corner of Phin’s eye and he turned to it almost desperately, but then drew in his breath. At the base of the circular dais of ascending stairs, the dark floor seemed to shimmer as it turned a milky white. A figure began to rise upward through the stone. It was robed all in white and seemed to be wearing some sort of crown, but a nimbus of light that made Phin shield his eyes made it impossible to perceive detail. It did seem to be facing toward him.
Phin did not know if running or playing frozen was a better idea, but in truth he did not know if he was up to a run. The cold feeling he associated with necromancy gripped his innards and he shivered to his core.
The figure stopped rising at the height of a man and the light flared more strongly, causing Phin to close his eyes. When he opened them, the man was staring back at him. He was an older fellow with a salt-and-pepper beard, deep frown lines across his forehead, and a long nose with a distinctive hook. Phin knew the face. The man’s crown was more of a circlet with a zigzag pattern on top, and his long, rumpled robes were an all-too-familiar shade of gray. In one hand he held an onyx wand twisting like the root of a tree, with a great golden gem the size of a goose egg atop it.
“Briandh, bodoan,” the man said, speaking the old language of Tull. Phin answered by rote in the same tongue.
“Greetings to you, brother.”
The man walked up the stairs towards Phin with the stride of an old campaigner, belying stooped shoulders and the network of lines at the corners of pale green eyes. He shook back a wide sleeve from his empty hand and stretched it out toward Phin, who brought his own hand up automatically. They shook, but as their hands touched Phin gasped and swayed on his feet for he felt like his brain had been kicked over on its side and everything was spilling out. He saw Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor, and tall Abverwar for the first time. Voices of his instructors. A young girl, pretty and blonde, laughing in the gray robes. And books. Lots of books. Lessons read, examinations taken. More reading, memorization that faded in days, other things that Phin never forgot. Souterm, Nesha-tari. Zeb and the Westerners, and the Duchess Claudja. Black boots with sharp, cruel heels. Then Deskata, frozen in mid motion.
Phin stumbled and nearly went backward down the stairs, but the man braced him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Your forgiveness, Phinneas Phoarty,” he said. “That is a lot faster than asking questions.”
“You, you, you…”
“Yes, you know me,” the man nodded, then turned his face and his hooked nose to profile. “Not too bad a likeness, I reckon.”
The man was referring to a portrait he had seen in Phin’s head, which Phin had seen every day for the ten years he was at Abverwar. It was one of several hanging above the Chancellor’s table in the mess hall. Second from the left, in fact.
“Kanderamath,” Phin said, and the man frowned.
“Well…almost. More like Kanderamath’s ghost, to be blunt about it.”
Phin only stared, for the second Witch King of Tull had been dead for around five centuries, ever since he had caused the First Opening of Vod‘Adia. Despite being dead, Kanderamath narrowed his eyes and stared off into space for several moments, his gray-flecked eyebrows rising as he did so. He looked at Phin.
“So you did not come here for me at all.” The old Witch King turned and looked at the book on the floor. “You only brought an item of mine here by chance.”
“Kanderamath,” Phin said again, for he had little idea of what else to say. Kanderamath looked at him sideways, and sighed.
“Do not take this the wrong way, Phinneas, but I had rather hoped for a wizard of a somewhat…greater competence. The Circle has done a number on your brain, boy. If they ever catch you, tell them I am sorely disappointed by what they have become.”
Phin stared at the crowned figure, then looked all around the chamber filled with light of a strange quality, as though everything were stuck in a frozen moment.
“Did, did you stop time?”
Kanderamath smiled faintly. “In effect, but not in reality. Time stops for no one. It is however possible to step out of the stream, for a few minutes. And a few minutes is all that we have. Hearken unto me, Phinneas.”
The Witch King took a firmer grip on Phin’s shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes.
“My entrance into Vod’Adia was a disaster, both for the friends who came in with me, and for the world at large. All that I have seen in your mind confirms this for me now. Opening the city unleashed the undead upon Noroth for thirty years of war, and now it has allowed devils and demons to enter this world without being summoned, to butcher the unwary to make claim on their souls. This is intolerable, and it must end.”
“You want me to end it?” Phin blanched, the thought finally jerking his brain loose from the deep wheel rut in which it had been stuck.
“It needn’t be that hard, Phin. May I call you Phin? Good. You see, when I came here I used spells of gyring to move Vod’Adia out of the state in which it had existed since the Ascension.”
“Since the what?” Phin asked, and Kanderamath frowned.
“Let’s just call it the Cataclysm, shall we? The event fourteen centuries ago that tore the city out of our material world, and slew every living thing herein. To enter the place a millennium later, I first had to set it moving. Turning, if you will. For one lunar month the place was to resume its connection to this world, our world, so that I and my companions could venture inside.”
“Why, why in the world would you do that?” Phin asked.
“Because, Phin, in my day that was the sort of thing we forerunners of your Circle of Wizardry did.” Kanderamath sighed. “We were not the customs agents and messengers of an Empire, but a union of the most powerful magi on two continents. Dedicated to the study of magic for its own sake, not just for the practical applications. We believed in magic not just as a tool, but as an art and a science.”
Phin opened his mouth for another question, but Kanderamath raised a hand.
“Let me speak, Phin, for there is space between the things you must know, and those you only want to know. I caused Vod’Adia to Open so that it could be explored, and perhaps reveal clues as to the nature of the…Cataclysm. But what we found here was the immortal remains of all those souls who had perished a thousand years before, reduced to unholy, undead monstrosities.”
“Like those that emerged at the Second Opening. Those that it took the thirty years of the Dead War to destroy.”
“Exactly like them, for that was the same bunch.” Kanderamath sighed and rubbed a finger on the side of his nose. “When we realized that the place was haunted, to put it mildly, my fellows and I still believed that we had the power to fend off the dead while we conducted our exploration. We had too much faith in our own strength, and not enough appreciation for the fact that the undead do not get tired, or afraid, or concerned for their own casualties. The attacks were unceasing and we were picked off, one at a time. In the end, I alone reached this chamber.”
Kanderamath looked at the spot on the floor from which he had arisen, and Phin had no doubt it was the very spot on which the Witch King had fallen. His shade spoke quietly.
“In my hubris, I had bound my gyring spells to cease only upon my exit from Vod’Adia. When I knew my own death was near and that I would never leave this place, I cast certain spells to become as you see me now. I am not Kanderamath, I am only what is left of him.”
“So that when another wizard came looking for you…this would happen,” Phin said. The shade nodded once.
“Even without my leaving, the city Closed to our world after one month. But it continued to move. Ninety-nine years later when it Opened again, the undead poured out into the world where they had once lived, and you know the rest of that story. But what happened after that was in some ways worse, for while Vod’Adia is only Open to our world once in a century, during the long times between it is Open to other places. Infernal places. With the city emptied of the undead, other, even more dangerous things began to make their way in.”
“Like her,” Phin said, jerking a thumb toward the winged woman frozen on the catwalk balustrade. Kanderamath nodded and frowned across the room at her.
“Succubus, from the Abyss. A demon. I think that one is called Uella.”
“You know her?”
“Not really. I retained some dim awareness of things that have happened here over the last several centuries, at least in this chamber. That one has…done some things, here. Unpleasant things.”
Phin looked nervously at the frozen demoness, at her glassy red eyes and leering grin. He shuddered, but for a moment it seemed as though the whole chamber shuddered in his sight.
“Our time grows short, Phinneas. Take this.”
Phin turned and found Kanderamath was extending the twisting wand out to him, holding it around the jeweled top and offering the handle.
“My spells of gyring must be brought to an end Phinneas, so that no one may enter this place again to be tortured and slain by the demons and devils. Nor what would be worse, that the fiends may choose to exit the city into our world.”
Phin raised a hand uncertainly, but Kanderamath slapped the wand into his palm. The touch of it gave Phin a start, for it was warm. The black shaft of it was shaped like a stretched-out coil, something like a pig’s tail pulled out just short of tight. Though it was light, it had the texture of stone. The great golden gem at the end was unlike anything Phin had ever seen.
“What do I do with this?” Phin asked.
“Nothing,” Kanderamath said firmly. “Do not use it, nor try to use it, in conjunction with any spell. This is an object I have fashioned here, over the last many centuries. It contains a portion of my essence and when it is carried out of Vod’Adia, my spells will end with its leaving. All of them.”
Phin looked at the shade, which already seemed to be fading as Kanderamath had let go of his end of the wand.
“What about you?” Phin asked.
“I will get the final death I have long deserved. Conceal the wand, Phin, for it would not do to have anyone here see it. Particularly not the demons nor the devils.”
The light in the room was changing, and Phin thought he was starting to see the shape of one of the Node pillars right through Kanderamath’s shoulder. He jammed the Witch King’s wand up into the billowy right sleeve of his robes and went about knotting the end around his wrist while still speaking with rising desperation.
“Wait! I am still at least half-prisoner of the devils, and I think this guy with the short sword is about to kill me!”
“Don’t let him,” Kanderamath advised, plainly transparent now. “Get that wand out of Vod’Adia, Phin. Then see that it is destroyed.”
“Destroyed? How?” Phin doubted he could just snap the thing over a rock.
“A powerful wizard,” Kanderamath said, only visible now as an outline. “One whom you can trust not to use the wand for their own aggrandizement.”
“I don’t know anybody like that!” Phin shouted. “I don’t know that I am like that!”
“You are,” Kanderamath said, and then he was gone.
John Deskata stumbled forward, then jumped back from the spot on the dais where Phin had been lying only an instant before. The light in the towering chamber was as it had been, and Phin thought he could hear noises far off, like pounding feet.
Deskata looked around wildly until spotting Phin. He pointed his sword at him.
“How did you do that?” he demanded. It took Phin a moment to remember what it was the Centurion wanted from him.
“Deskata, back off,” Phin said, trying for his most commanding tone but not quite getting there. “I can not take you away from this place, but I am still a Wizard. Take another step toward me, and one of us will end up dead. That does not help either of us.”
Deskata glared, his sword level at the end of his arm.
“If you can not help me, then what do I care?”
There were definitely footsteps approaching, heavy boots echoing from beyond one of the numerous sets of double doors around the room.
“Go on, Johnny! Stick him!”
Both Phin and Deskata looked across the room at the grinning succubus on the balustrade, who now had a little spiked devil hovering just off her shoulder. She pantomimed stabbing a blade into her throat, and lolled out a long, forked tongue from the side of her ruby-red mouth.
Deskata frowned at her, then looked back at Phin. He lowered his sword to his side, and called across the room.
“I am not going to fight for your amusement, bitch.”
Uella grinned. “Want to bet?”
“Centurion Deskata,” Phin said softly, and Deskata turned to follow his gaze.
On the west side of the circular chamber two wide double doors were swinging open. Phin could see three or four hobgoblins running through a torch lit hall toward them, lightly armored and carrying spears. Behind them came a crowd of more heavily armored Magdetchoi in heavy splint mail and spiked helmets, bearing axes, morning stars, and bows. Their hobnailed boots rumbled in the hall.
Deskata sighed faintly. He reached up to his neck and jerked a leather cord out from under his Legion breastplate, snapping the string and dropping a ring Phin had seen before into his hand. Deskata slipped the ring onto a finger of his sword hand, and peered at the onrushing monsters through the same striking emerald eyes Phin had only seen on the Sarge’s face, back in Camp Town. He did not look at Phin again. Deskata took up his tower shield and tightened the straps that secured it to his left arm. Then with a savage cry that was from the Miilark Islands as much as the Imperial Legions, the Centurion pounded down from the dais, back up the stairs that faced it, and met the hobgoblins in the doorway.