Dorigen must have been the one who had brought forth the spectral hand, and fearing what the wizard might have done to Vander. Before the monk moved, though, the crossbow battery opened up, launching a score of heavy bolts Vander's way.
They skipped and deflected harmlessly off the firbolg. Some stopped in midair, quivering before Vander, then fell, their momentum expended, to the ground.
"I am true to my word," Dorigen said dryly, walking past Danica and into the open corridor. She called for Vander to be at ease, called for her own troops to cease the fighting. Some soldiers, ores mostly, near Danica eyed the monk dangerously, clutching their weapons as though they did not understand and did not trust the strange events.
The soldiers who had accompanied the monk and Dorigen from the wizard's area, who had witnessed Dorigen's fury against the ore that had gone against her commands, sent a line of whispers spreading throughout the ranks, and Danica soon relaxed, the threat apparently ended. She rushed around the corner, found Vander, too, slumping against the wall, thoroughly exhausted and gravely wounded.
"It is over?" the firbolg asked breathlessly.
"No more fighting," Danica answered. Vander closed his eyes and slid slowly down to the floor, and it seemed to Danica that he would die.
Danica found the dwarves and Shayleigh alive, at least, and Shayleigh actually managed to sit up and raise one hand in greeting. Ivan was by far the worst off of the three. He had lost a lot of blood and was losing more even as Danica tried futilely to stem the flow. Even worse, his legs had gone perfectly limp and were without feeling.
"Have you any healers?" Danica asked of Dorigen, who was standing over her.
"The clerics are all dead," a nearby soldier answered for the wizard, his words sharp-edged as he, too, tended to a wounded man, a Trinity soldier fast slipping into the realm of death.
Danica winced, remembering Cadderly's brutal work against that group, thinking it terribly ironic that his necessary actions against Trinity's priests might now cost his friends their lives.
Cadderly! The word assaulted Danica as surely as would an enemy spear. Where was he? she wondered. The potentially disastrous consequences of his showdown against Aballister, his father, rang clearer to the monk now, with Ivan cradled helplessly in her arms. Shayleigh seemed stronger with every passing moment; Vander's cuts had already clotted and were somehow mysteriously on the mend; and Pikel groaned and grumbled, finally rolling over with a curious, "Huh?"
But Ivan... Danica knew that only his dwarven toughness was keeping him alive, doubted that even that considerable strength would support him for much longer. Ivan needed a priest who could access powerful spells of healing - Ivan needed Cadderly.
Dorigen ordered several men to assist Danica in her efforts, sent several others to the priests' private quarters to search for bandages and healing potions and salves. None of the men, standing in the blood of their own allies, seemed overly eager to aid the brutal intruders, but none dared to disobey the wizard.
Danica, pressing hard against a pumping wound in Ivan's chest, her armed soaked with blood, could only wait and pray.
The small sun shone red. The air was hazy with swirling dust, and the rocky, barren landscape ranged from orange hues to deep crimson. All was quiet, save for the endless, mournful call of the gusting, stinging wind.
Cadderly saw no Me about him, no plants or animals, no sign even of water, and he couldn't imagine anything surviving in this desolate place. He wondered where he was and knew only that this barren region was nowhere on the surface of Toril.
"No place that has any name," Aballister answered the young priest's unspoken question. The wizard walked out from a nearby tumble of boulders and stood facing Cadderly. "At least none that I have ever heard."
Cadderly took some comfort in the feet that he could still hear Deneir's song playing in his mind. He began to sing along, quietly, his hand with the magical ring clenched at his side.
"I would be very careful before attempting any spells," Aballister warned, guessing his intent. "The properties of magic are not the same here as they are on our own world. A simple line of fire" - the wizard looked to the ring as he spoke - "might well engulf this entire planet in a ball of flame.
"It is the dust, you see," the wizard continued, holding his hand up into the wind, then folding his long, skinny