he charged at the monster’s back and struck it deeply between its wings.
The infernal creature shrieked in pain, whirling to face Geran. He leaped over its lashing tail, and deflected a strike of its chain that was powerful enough to rip chunks of stone from the wall when it passed over his head. The monster surged toward him in fury, but at that moment Sarth—who was sprawled on the floor a good ten feet back from the creature—raised himself up on his elbow and shouted, “Raizha ektaimu!” From his scepter, a bright green ray shot out, catching the devil in its side. Instantly a great gory bite appeared in its flesh as the disintegrating spell gouged a horrible wound in the creature. The monster shrieked again, so loud that Geran winced in pain, and then sank to all fours under the spell’s power. In a moment nothing was left but a half-eaten corpse, its wound smoking with an eerie green vapor.
“I sincerely hope we see nothing more like that in here,” Hamil said.
“As do I,” Sarth admitted. “That was my only spell of disintegration.”
Geran stood waiting, stretching out with his senses for any hint that more of the devil’s kind were nearby. The aura of supernatural evil had diminished noticeably, but he couldn’t be certain if it was entirely gone. “We’d better keep on,” he finally said. “The sooner this is done, the better.”
He limped toward the archway he’d sensed before with his finding charm, one hand clamped over his badly scored side, his sword in the other. Sarth and Hamil followed after him, weapons at the ready. The passage ran only a few feet before it ended in a large conjury. The summoning circle in the center of the room was defunct, its wardings broken by masonry debris that had fallen from the ceiling at some point in the past. Geran wondered if the devil they’d just battled had been confined within until the debris set it free to roam the vault, or if it had fled into the vault from outside to hide itself from the elves when they retook the city. He decided that it was irrelevant now, and looked around the room for any sign of the tome he sought.
A dusty old bookshelf leaned against the far wall. “Aha,” he breathed. He hurried over to examine it more closely. Most of its contents had long since fallen to pieces, littering the floor with rotted coverings and scraps of yellow parchment, but one book seemed to be in better shape. Carefully he removed it, carrying it over to a worktable nearby.
“Is that it, Geran?” Hamil asked.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. He blew gently over the cover, and found glyphs in Espruar gleaming under the dust: The Book of Denithys. He started to turn away in disappointment, but then it occurred to him that he was looking for a fragment, not a complete tome. He opened the book carefully, and found between its pages a folio of parchment that was a little larger and darker than the rest of the book. He closed the book, turned it over, and opened it by the back cover, and there, right in front of him, were markings to match the ones he’d seen on the rest of the Infiernadex months earlier in the tomb of the priestess Terlannis. “Wait, yes—yes, this is it! We’ve got it!”
His comrades hurried over to his side, peering at the ancient paper. “That’s all there is?” Hamil said. “It can’t be more than five or six pages. What does Aesperus want with them?”
“Allow me an hour to inspect them, and I will have an answer for you,” Sarth replied.
“I suggest that we can inspect the pages later,” Geran said. “I don’t want to linger here a moment longer than we have to.” He took a couple of endplates from the ruined books left on the shelf, brushed them clean, and placed the old Infiernadex pages between them as a makeshift protection for the old tome. Then he put the covered manuscript into his satchel, and led the way as they retraced their steps. They passed through the chamber of the wizards’ tombs again, and back up the long passageway toward the tower foundations.
“Do we set out tomorrow?” Hamil asked. “Or should we wait a day, and make sure we’ve got what we came for?”
“Tomorrow,” Geran decided. “Sarth can inspect the manuscript while you and I retrieve our mounts and reprovision. With luck, we’ll be on our