Nightblade by Liane Merciel

Author:Liane Merciel [Merciel, Liane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60125-663-8
Publisher: Paizo Inc.
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Fiendslair

Red light swallowed them.

The world shifted under their feet, but Isiem saw none of it. Hot air blew across his face, and cold, and a breath of damp wind that smelled of musty spices and sour wine. It left a clammy coating on his skin, which lingered as the crimson glow finally softened and gave way to an ordinary lack of light.

He raised a finger. Light blossomed around it, a brilliant hibiscus pink that changed to an equally vibrant emerald green after the first few seconds. The wizard nodded slightly, satisfied that the colors of his magic worked as he willed. Wherever Fiendslair was, it wasn't the Umbral Basin.

They stood in a five-sided chamber walled in smooth brass. A circle of runes crawled across the floor under their feet. The living horses were still with them, crowding the room uncomfortably, but the spellsteeds had been dispelled. Reflections of Isiem's floating light danced across the polished metal, refracted into a thousand tiny, verdant suns. It was beautiful, but it was the only thing in the room that was.

Five doors stood in the chamber, one in each of the mirrorlike walls. The doors were as dull as the brass was bright, for each of them was made of flesh.

Scaly, spiny, or oozing with ichor, each door seemed to have been made of the flattened and contorted carcass of a demon. Isiem recognized the curling stripes and smoke-scented fur of a brimorak, the mangy hides and goatlike horns of a half-dozen spite demons pressed together, and a slaggy, melted face, coated in a thick layer of masking slime, that he thought might be an omox.

As Isiem studied the amorphous visage, trying to determine if it was indeed such a formidable fiend trapped inside, its sagging eyes suddenly blinked. Ena's shaggy pony threw its head back in alarm. The pony retreated to the center of the room, where it huddled with the other animals and whickered nervously at the fiendish doors on all sides.

"They're alive," Ascaros hissed.

"Why yes, so they are," Teglias said. He approached the omox door, stopping two feet away with his hands clasped professorially behind his back. The cleric leaned down, marveling at the trapped demon, and Isiem waved his light toward the door to better illumine it for them both. "Yes, of course."

The omox's slimy eyes squinted painfully as the light drew near. It tried to turn its squashed face away, pulling back under the layers of viscous greenish-pink ooze that constituted its body, but it was as trapped in its position as a butterfly pinned under glass.

"What do you mean, ‘of course'?" Kyril asked. She frowned at the demonflesh door, flexing a mailed fist as if she wanted to smite it then and there. "How long did you say this place had been abandoned? How many centuries? And these things still live?"

"They're demons. They do not age, they do not die. Unless you kill them ...and there's no reason to kill these. They'd lose their efficacy if they were dead.

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