Fireballs and gouts of hellish flame began to burst down in the city itself, and screams rose in the night as people awoke to a nightmare of fire and claws. Despite her orders, more than a few of her summoned demons had chosen to simply attack the sleeping city. Sarya scowled, but she didn’t try to recall the fiends. Random slaughter and chaos in the streets would serve to confuse Hillsfar’s defenders as to the true nature of the attack.
She and her winged warband reached the First Lord’s Tower, and Sarya alighted on the high terrace that Maalthiir had formerly set aside for use in teleporting to his keep. An ironclad door sealed the tower interior from the open battlements. Sarya gestured to a nycaloth hovering nearby.
“Through there!” she commanded.
“Yes, my queen!” the monster hissed.
It dropped down in front of the iron door and clenched its great talons in the iron plate. With a mighty effort, the hulking creature wrenched the door from its pintle and hurled it across the battlements, sending it crashing to the street. Sarya watched the heavy door shatter the stone steps at the tower’s gate.
Down below the battlements a large band of fey’ri stormed Maalthiir’s front gate, leaving a dozen Red Plumes dead on the steps, hacked down by daemonfey swords or charred by daemonfey spells. More bands of fey’ri and demons assaulted other entrances to the tower, or simply teleported inside.
The nycaloth ducked down and pushed its way into the tower, but a terrible flash of blue light suddenly flared in front of the creature, and a potent symbol shone brightly before it. The nycaloth screeched once and staggered back, its talons raised in front of its eyes-and it froze, motionless, its green scaly hide suddenly growing clear and translucent. In the space of an instant the monster was turned into glass.
Sarya motioned to her fey’ri. “Get rid of that,” she snarled.
A pair of vrocks wrestled the glass nycaloth out of the way, and hurled the petrified creature from the battlements in the same spot where the iron door had been dropped. The nycaloth exploded into countless shards of flying glass below, but Sarya paid the creature no mind. She turned her attention to the symbol guarding Maalthiir’s tower, and she chanted the words of a powerful cancellation spell. The symbol glowed once under the force of her magic before it vanished.
“A potent defense, Maalthiir, but not sufficient to repel my attack,” Sarya gloated.
She stepped aside, and her demons and hellspawned warriors poured into the fortress. Great gouts of hellfire exploded in the doorway, and she heard the ring of steel on steel and screams of terror. Maalthiir doubtless had many arcane defenses within his tower, but he likely had never planned on fighting off the attack of hundreds of demons and hellspawned warriors at one stroke. Towering constructs of stone and iron animated in defense of the first lord’s sanctum. Yugoloths and demons shattered the living statues with their fearsome hellfire. Red Plume guards fought desperately to drive off the attack, only to fall by the score under fey’ri swords and demon claws.
“Find Maalthiir! Slay him!” Sarya cried. “Leave no one alive!”
Powerful spells and wards appeared to slay or block Sarya’s minions, but she and her most skillful sorcerers struck down Maalthiir’s defenses or simply overwhelmed them by hurling yugoloths and demons into the shrieking arcs of destruction until the spells were exhausted. Daemonfey magic shattered walls, broke open vaults, and set the tower burning with hellish red flames that leaped and spread, dancing through the First Lord’s Tower.
For half an hour Sarya and her warriors tore Maalthiir’s burning tower apart, searching for any sign of the first lord or his elite guards. But finally Sarya grudgingly gave up on destroying Maalthiir in person. Even if he had been present at the beginning of the attack, she had no doubt that he would have fled rather than stay to defend his citadel against her attack. She watched over the destruction, delighting in the screams of terror. Maalthiir would not soon forget her visit. And better yet, Xhalph was at that very moment leading an even larger attack against the Red Plumes encamped near the Standing Stone, fifty miles to the south. She had no intention of giving her foes any more set-piece battles, not when she commanded thousands of hellspawned warriors and demons who could appear out of thin air or strike like dragons out of the night sky. Xhalph was under orders to slaughter, not fight-to rake the standards and pavilions in the heart of the Red Plume camp with hellfire and deadly spells, then withdraw with chaos in his wake.
Next, she’d visit the same terror on the Sembians. Then she’d turn her infernal hordes against those wretched humans in Mistledale or Shadowdale, and Evermeet’s accursed army. There would be no disaster at the Lonely Moor to save Evermeet’s traitors from destruction at her hands. With each sunset her armies grew stronger. More and more demons and yugoloths answered her summons and poured through the gates she’d opened in Myth Drannor. The next time Sarya met Evermeet in battle, she did not intend to be defeated.
Maalthiir will not elude me forever, she decided. She had other things to do that night, and she had harried Hillsfar enough for the time being. Sarya called for her captains and demons, and strode out of Maalthiir’s burning tower into a night that had turned red with fire.
“Well done, my children! Well done!” Sarya cried. She looked back on the inferno that had been Maalthiir’s tower, and the firelight danced in her malevolent green eyes. “Now come away. We have more slaying to do tonight.”
The first three steps into the swirling gray mist seemed harmless enough, though Araevin’s ankles crawled at the sensation of the thick vapor tugging at him as he moved deeper. It felt as if he were wading into a sea, warm and thick as blood. He could see the white tree trunks and silver-green boughs behind him, the fair green hills of silver-tasseled grass rising not far behind him, the pale mossy stones of the road leading back into the luminous depths of the twilit forest. Then Araevin took another step, and he plummeted into darkness.
He cried out and flailed, his senses reeling, transfixed in a moment of endless falling-but then his foot fell on the next step of the road. He stumbled to his knees and found himself on all fours on a path made of dull paving stones covered over with thick, oily black moss. The stink of wet rot assailed his nostrils, and he looked up into a pallid, festering jungle. Sildeyuir’s silver starlight was gone, leaving only a humid, cloying blackness, broken only by the sickly green phosphorescence of huge, rotting toadstools.
The trees are dead, he realized. The great silver-white boles of Sildeyuir’s forest still surrounded him, but they were leprous and gray, choked by more of the black moss and sagging under the weight of parasitic fungi. He had not left Sildeyuir, not really. The gray vapors marked the border of a creeping blight, a monstrous disease consuming an entire world.
His gorge rising at the smell of the place, Araevin pushed himself to his feet and wiped his hands on his cloak. The foul moss left long black smears on the elven graycloth. He turned to look for his companions, and for a horrible moment he saw that he was alone-until Ilsevele suddenly appeared in midair, only an arm’s-reach from where he stood. She gasped aloud and reeled, but Araevin caught her arm and steadied her.
“I have you,” he said. “The disorientation will pass.”
“It’s horrible,” Ilsevele gasped.
Araevin didn’t know if she referred to the smell or appearance of the place, or her own nausea, but he held her while she found her feet. In the space of a few moments the rest of the company joined them, each appearing one by one. Donnor Kerth set his face in a fierce scowl and said nothing. Maresa winced and found a handkerchief, binding it over her nose and mouth.