Free The Paladins by James M. Ward, David Wise Page B

together, then pressed them against her full lips. She bowed her head and whispered into her closed hands. They began to glow red from the inside, as though each held a brilliantly illuminated pearl.
    Without opening her eyes, Aleena looked down the corridor, toward the gate chamber. She briefly glanced down at her companions, who gazed at her face intently, unaware that she now looked upon them from above, with an invisible magical eye. Her sight turned back toward the rough, slightly curving corridor ahead and moved that way.
    Aleena’s eye paused at the entrance of the room, as she mentally gasped. The area would be dark but for the kaleidoscopic glow of the gate itself, at the far end of the chamber, which threw eerie light upon a room filled to the corners with fiends. She looked over a stormy sea of mindless, murderous manes. They crowded within the confines of the chamber, pushing, shoving and biting. Curiously, the manes refused to spill into the corridor, though no door or gate stood between them and her party. Obviously, some greater fiend kept them from stampeding into every available space.
    Aleena turned her attention toward the gate and spied dark figures atop the pyramid, beside glowing tusks. A pair of tall silhouettes stood over a third creature, who lay at their feet. Slowly, she drifted closer, over the heads of the turbulent manes, penetrating the gloom, focusing upon the creatures by the gate. Her magical eye drifted higher and closer to them. At last she could make out the oily feathers, the scaly heads, the cruel beaks.
    “Vrocks!” her lips pronounced, back in the corridor. “True tanar’ri! Some of the most powerful of fiends!”
    “You flatter us, human scum-wizard,” boomed Rejik’s voice in her head, and both of the vulturelike fiends looked directly at her magical eye! “Except you should’ve said, The most powerful of fiends!’”
    “Tell the worms of Tyr to come out of hiding and face us, if they dare!” cried Shaakat. Across the room, the manes began to chatter and churn with escalating blood lust.
    As Aleena looked past the vrocks, at the third figure on the floor of the pyramid’s flat top, one of the vrocks extended its pair of shriveled humanoid arms and gestured toward her invisible eye. Her enchantment shattered and dissolved with a shimmering rain of sparks. Back in the corridor, she unclasped her fists and slapped her hands over eyes, throwing back her head in pain. Miltiades caught her as she reeled. She drew her hands from her eyes and blinked until she could see normally again.
    “They know we’re here,” she said. “There’s a mass of manes just a few feet away, and two vrocks atop the pyramid, next to the gate.”
    “Then it’s time for justice!” cried Jacob.
    “Battle positions!” ordered Kern.
    “Hold,” countered Miltiades. He squinted down the hallway, toward the enemy, so close yet not coming any closer. “They’re waiting for us, aren’t they?”
    “Yes,” said Aleena. “And there’s more.”
    The men turned and looked at her expectantly.
    “Kastonoph’s in there! They’ve got him tied up at the top of the pyramid, by the gate.”
    The men gasped. “I thought you said Noph was dead,” said Miltiades, looking at Trandon.
    “They’re probably creating an illusion of him to fool us,” suggested Jacob.
    “Maybe I was wrong,” sputtered Trandon. “Maybe they teleported him here to use against us.” Miltiades stared hard at him. “Fiends teleport, don’t they?”
    “If Noph’s in there, then there’s no time to waste!” said Kern.
    “Kern, if we launch a frontal assault, Noph won’t live long,” cautioned Aleena.
    “If we don’t destroy them immediately, Noph will die much too slowly,” replied Miltiades evenly, turning to her. “But there’s a trap awaiting us in there. I know fiends, and I know how they think. If they’re just waiting for us when their hordes are only thirty feet away, with nothing physical to keep them