“Perfect,” he breathed.
Keep quiet, Valas chastised, but Pharaun only laughed.
“It’s going to be loud enough in here in just a moment,” the mage said with a wink. Then he called back to the others, who were higher in the tunnel, up beyond where Valas could see. “Mistress, I’ve found a spot that will do nicely. Get Jeggred ready.”
Valas heard Quenthel ordering the draegloth to kneel and the sound of a drawn dagger. Pharaun, meanwhile, laid a hand on Valas’s shoulder.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I need to get by.”
Valas still wasn’t certain what the mage was doing, but he flattened obediently against the cold stone, allowing Pharaun to squeeze past him into the cavern. Pharaun reached into a pocket of his piwafwi and pulled out a tiny cone of glass. Rolling up his sleeve, he pointed the cone at the water at his feet.
“Chalthinsil!” he cried, his shout filling the cavern.
In that same instant, a cone of bitterly cold air erupted from the glass cone, filling the air with swirling frost. The magical cold struck the pool, instantly turning it to solid ice. Frost continued to roil in the air for a few moments more, coating the walls and ceiling of the cavern with sparkling white ice crystals. Then it vanished, leaving a chill in the air that made Valas shiver.
Pharaun tucked the cone of glass back into his piwafwi.
“Perfect,” he said again, staring down at the expanse of ice. “Nice and smooth. Just the thing to draw on.” Then he shouted back over his shoulder, “Quenthel. I’m ready.”
Behind him, in the tunnel, Valas heard a hiss of anticipation from one of the vipers in Quenthel’s whip. A moment later he smelled the tang of freshly spilled blood. Quenthel appeared at the entrance to the cavern, and passed a cup to Pharaun. The mage clambered down the slope, holding the cup so its contents wouldn’t spill.
Quenthel and Danifae crowded in behind Valas to peer past him at the cavern. Quenthel snapped her fingers, and Jeggred stalked down the tunnel as well, panting clouds of foul-smelling breath into the ice-cold air. One of his massive fighting hands was clamped around a spot on the wrist of his smaller arm. Blood welled out between the clamped fingers and dripped onto the stone at his feet. A moment later, Ryld joined them, having at last given up his cautious watch over the tunnel behind them.
Pharaun was already out on the ice, moving across it in a skating slide. As the others watched, he pulled out a dagger and traced an enormous hexagonal star onto the surface, carving its lines deep, like troughs. When he was done, he stood a minute, looking for imperfections.
Quenthel frowned down at the mage. “Six sides?” she asked. “Why not a standard pentagram?”
Pharaun shrugged and said, “Anyone can summon a demon with a pentagram. I like to do things with a bit more panache.” He moved around the diagram, dribbling the blood from the cup into one of the lines he’d cut in the ice. After a few moments, he raised a hand and beckoned. “Jeggred, come here.”
After a quick glance at Quenthel—who nodded her permission—the draegloth loped down toward the pool, dislodging rocks that tumbled down the slope to skitter across the ice. He crossed the frozen surface to the mage and obediently opened his hand, releasing his bloody arm when Pharaun gestured for him to do so. Taking that arm, Pharaun held the cup under the slashed wrist. When it was once again full, he motioned for Jeggred to re-clamp the wound, then continued limning the diagram in blood.
The mage had to repeat the process twice more before the pattern was complete. Despite the loss of blood, the draegloth remained impassive throughout the procedure. When Pharaun at last dismissed him, Jeggred loped up the slope to join the others.
“Now,” Pharaun said, cracking his fingers as he stretched, “for the difficult part.”
From a pocket, he pulled a candle. He cut it into six pieces, trimming each back to expose the wick. He walked around the star, boring a hole at each of the points and pushing one of the candies into it. Then he stood back and snapped his fingers. Six flames sprang to life as the candles began to burn. Their meager heat magically spread through the blood that had frozen inside the troughs in the ice. The blood melted and began to circulate, pumping through the veins of the hexagram.
Valas squinted as the flickering yellow light disrupted his darkvision. The frosted walls of the cavern picked up the illumination and sparkled like a million tiny diamonds. The candles flickered, their flames guttering slightly to one side. Seeing that, Valas nodded. The cavern wasn’t completely a dead end. There must have been some tiny fissure, hidden from view, through which air was circulating.
Standing with his hands extended over the hexagram, Pharaun began to chant. As his words echoed back and forth across the confined space, the candles burned at a terrific rate, melting down to puddles of wax against the ice. Yet still the wicks burned, and as soon as they touched the ice, the color of the flames turned a brilliant blue. The flame pulsed out along the lines of the symbol and, mixing with Jeggred’s blood, turned a ghastly, glowing purple.
As Pharaun’s chant rose to a crescendo the mage clapped his hands together over his head. The boom of thunder that resulted all but obliterated Valas’s gasp and Jeggred’s harsh grunt. For an instant, the frigid air in the cavern seemed to wrench itself in two. Through the split, Valas could see the roiling red-black clouds and furnace-hot flames of the Abyss. Then came a roar of utter rage and indignation as an enormous, humanoid figure hurtled through the portal between the planes, staggering as though it had been pushed by an invisible hand. Pharaun, facing it, backed up a step or two on the ice, then recovered his composure.
“He’s done it,” Quenthel said.
“So he has,” Danifae agreed, and she sounded impressed.
Valas realized that he was gripping his lucky coin amulet and quickly moved his hand to the hilt of his dagger, instead.
The demon—a glabrezu—was nearly three times as tall as a drow and powerfully muscled. It had four arms—two with hands, and two with enormous, snapping pincers—and a doglike head. Its body emitted a stench that smelled like putrid corpses roasting over a sulfur fire. Its skin was so utterly black it was difficult to see its features clearly, save for a truncated snout filled with gnashing yellow fangs and eyes that glowed with penetrating intensity, as if all the fury of the Abyss swirled within their violet depths.
“You dare summon me?” it roared in a voice that filled the cavern, shaking loose small stones that tumbled down the slope onto the ice. “You dare!”
In what seemed a mockery of the gesture Pharaun had used to summon it, the demon flung its hands above its head. Intensely bright flame erupted between the outspread fingers, filling the cavern with a blinding light. Leering, the demon thrust its hands at Pharaun, sending the flame at him in a horizontal wave.
Instead of washing over Pharaun, the flame was contained by the lines of the hexagram. It licked along the veins of blood, roaring from point to point of the star in a dizzying blur, then gradually began to slow. Rather than melting the ice, the flame seemed to freeze in place. Then it shattered with a tinkling sound, like breaking crystal.
A corner of Pharaun’s mouth twitched up into a half-smile.
“Are you quite finished, Belshazu?” he asked dryly.
The demon’s eyes narrowed.
“You know my name,” it said, its voice dropping to a deep rumble.
“We do,” Quenthel said from behind Valas. “And unless you wish to be trapped inside that hexagram for all eternity, you will tell us where we can find a gate that leads from this realm to the Abyss. Tell us that, and the mage will dismiss you.”