The Nether Scroll

The captain had a similar ability to communicate with his men, equally magical, but derived from the matched rings he and the men wore. The caravan came to a halt. Its muscle-and-magic escort pulled in tight around it. The muscle fastened their chain mail coifs over their faces and tested their swords without drawing them. The magic considered their spells.

"Fire?" Dru suggested softly.

Ansoain shrugged. "It's got no shape or signature. It could be anything, or nothing. Fire needs something to burn."

Galimer opened a foot-long war-fan from distant Kozakura. There, it had been a weapon. Here, it was a spellbook with writs etched in silver along the vanes.

"No time for that, son," Ansoain said grimly. "If your nerves are chancy, hide in the wagon."

"I'm sure of some fire," Longfingers protested, "and a shrieking arrow."

"And you?" she asked Druhallen.

"The usual. I can blur us a little now, if you think that would help."

"No, whatever's out there, it's already taken our measure. Probably slavers. Save your blurring for later. Your gloom, too. The girl's got to be what they're after. The girl and her dowry. Get her out, if push comes to shove. Make a pall of misery and get out beneath it."

Druhallen bit his tongue. They'd tangled with slavers before—a base and brutal lot, and not above using the nastier sorts of spellcraft to protect, or acquire, their merchandise. But slavers were rarely subtle and the disturbance Dru tasted with his inner senses was as subtle as it was potent. He patted his left sleeve, assuring himself that the wax-sealed embers he used to trigger his fire spells were in their proper places. He checked his belt, too—not for the folded box; as Ansoain had told Galimer, it was too late for rehashing spells—but for his dagger. The single-edge knife was mostly a tool for cutting meat and gathering herbs, but he'd made sure it was long enough to pierce a man's heart through his ribs.

The ethereal disruption materialized. Galimer spotted it first.

"Over there," he whispered and cocked a finger at a hilltop north-by-northeast of the caravan.

The hilltop air shimmered with a untimely sunset glow. A moment later at least a dozen figures, each wearing a long, red cloak, circled in the grass. A moment after that there was fire in the sky and a thick, black fog rolling toward the wagons. It could have been worse. They could have stopped at the base of the hill, but they were still in trouble.

Druhallen didn't need to know the name of the spell that wrought the fog to know it was nothing he wanted to breathe. For that matter, he didn't want to be astride when the miasma hit. He leapt to the ground and cast an air-clearing spell just in time to keep his head clear. Dru could have extended the spell to protect his entire body—but it would have faded more quickly and he wouldn't have been able to hurl a fireball at the hilltop.

The spell affected Druhallen's hearing. Sound was fainter than it should have been, and distorted, as if he'd gone diving and surfaced with water in his ears. He heard enough steel and deep-pitched screaming to know that the men-at-arms were fighting for their lives. On hands and knees, Druhallen crept through the fog, away from his mentor—not from cowardice, but to widen the angle of their attack and defense. Never let an enemy kill twice with the same stroke, that was Ansoain's motto.

The red-cloaked wizards abandoned subtlety. A head-blind child could have placed them in the fog—and Dru's fireballs were about as effective as a head-blind child's wish when it came to piercing their defenses. He felt his final spell rebound harmlessly. Some months short of his twentieth birthday, Druhallen of Sunderath confronted the end of a life he'd hoped would be much longer. Drawing his knife, Dru waded through the black fog to join what was left of the muscle near the wagons.

He hadn't taken ten strides when a faintly luminous, undead skirmisher lunged at him. The zombie's face was fully skeletal, and flesh hung in tatters from its long bones. Beyond fear and pain, it fought clumsily with a stone-headed mace until Dru knocked it off its legs. Taking no chances, he kicked its skull aside and stomped its brittle ribs.

Knowing there were undead in the fog, he changed course and headed for the hilltop. If the red-cloaked wizards were so confident of their strength that they relied on zombies for physical protection, then there was a chance—a slim but real chance—that he could stab one or two of them before he died.

But the red-cloaked wizards weren't as reckless as he'd hoped. Halfway up the hill, Dru met another luminous creature. As dead, or undead, as the zombie, its eyes shone with sentience. It knew what to do with the steel halberd it carried.