and sent a line of spittle at Sylora’s feet. “I go!” it announced.
“You do not!” Sylora demanded sharply. “First you must battle and defeat this child of the Dread Ring you have so callously insulted.” She glanced over at Valindra, letting the lich see her grin, but that brought more puzzlement to Valindra’s expression than anything else.
Sylora recognized that and wasn’t surprised by the lich’s reaction, given that Valindra hardly understood what was happening either. But something surely was happening, within the wand and deep in her subconscious, and the sensation she received from the Dread Ring was of power and pleasure, like a building climax.
The imp spat on the floor again and cursed Sylora.
She invited the release.
The ashen zombie beside Valindra exploded into a puff of black smoke and ashes, and before any could spread wide or descend to the floor, the wand drew them in, hungrily eating the zombie’s remains.
Sylora’s eyes closed in a fit of power and pleasure, and she let the decomposed zombie flow through the wand, bursting back out in a black spray that struck the imp and sent it flying backward into the wall. It howled in pain as wafts of smoke began rising from all around it.
“What have you done?” Valindra asked happily, but Sylora ignored her, couldn’t be bothered with her at that moment as she, too, tried to sort out the magic she’d just enacted.
The imp came forward, but slowly, its movements sluggish as if it was in thick mud or tar. It was the ash, Sylora realized, hardening around its joints and skin. The imp tried to spit, attempted to stick out its tongue, but Sylora saw the black goo covering the creature’s mouth press forward.
The magic fully encased the creature except for one eye the imp had managed to close before being struck, and that the imp had opened quickly enough to avoid the hardening black coating. That eye revealed the creature’s hatred for Sylora, a red gaze of sizzling and seething flame.
The diminutive beast kept approaching, and Sylora was too mesmerized to even realize she should retreat, or strike again.
But it didn’t matter. The imp turned aside and dived into the fireplace. It rolled around on the logs and slid its limbs under the hot coals, burning the black goo from its body. The fire didn’t bother a creature of the lower planes, after all. In moments, it was free, and it shot one last hateful look at Sylora, full of indignity and dire threats, then rushed up the chimney and out of Ashenglade entirely.
“That show was worth the cost of a zombie,” Valindra said coyly.
Sylora turned to her and held forth the crooked, blackened wand Szass Tam had given her. “There’s more,” she said with both conviction and confusion, for she knew there were indeed more and varied catastrophes she could conjure with the magical energy of the ashen zombies, though she wasn’t quite sure what those disasters might be.
Sylora’s eyes sparkled at the possibilities.
“You can channel the power of the Dread Ring,” Valindra reasoned, and Sylora nodded.
“It’s intoxicating,” the sorceress admitted.
“More powerful than your own practiced magic?”
Sylora considered that for a few moments, then nodded once more. “I had thought my time here near its end,” she admitted. “One last strike at the Netherese and the settlers of Neverwinter, one added massacre to complete the Dread Ring, and I would move along to another place, another mission.”
“But now?”
Sylora was too lost in the sensations of the wand to catch the undertone of concern in Valindra’s voice, or to even consider that she hadn’t made her impending departure a secret, or that her departure would place Valindra Shadowmantle as her heir apparent in Neverwinter Wood.
Valindra’s question remained unanswered as Sylora fell deeper into the connection to the Dread Ring, trying to sort out the powers it might now afford her. She wasn’t quite sure.
But she intended to find out.
IT’S NEW TO ME,” DAHLIA WHISPERED. SHE LAY ON A GRASSY KNOLL, Drizzt to her right and the man she’d known as Barrabus the Gray farther to her right, beyond the drow.
“It’s a very recent addition,” Entreri replied, though Dahlia had aimed her remark at Drizzt. She hadn’t spoken a word to Entreri since the fight of the previous day. “I’ve been scouting Sylora Salm for some time—all through your journey to Gauntlgrym. I’ve been near to her, looking over her shoulder, and I’ve seen nothing like this fortress before. Not a hint that any such thing existed.”
“It reminds