Bareris resisted, refusing to drop his sword or let his adversary tear apart his elbow. Whereupon Malark let go of his limb, and, straining when there was no longer any opposing force, Bareris lurched off balance. Only for an instant, but that was all the time his foe needed to snap a kick into his knee.

Bareris staggered, and the smaller man kicked his other knee. Neither leg would support Bareris now, and he fell prone in the dirt. He tried to roll over onto his back and raise his sword, but he was too slow. Something-a stamp kick, probably-smashed into the center of his spine, and then another cracked his neck. Pain blasted through him, and afterward, he couldn't move anymore. He tried to croak out the next syllable of his song, but even that had become impossible.

Malark looked down at Bareris, who was squirming feebly and uselessly at his feet, and judged he hadn't done enough. The twice-broken spine would finish any mortal man, but given a little time, the undead bard might well recover even from that.

But he was unlikely to rise up if someone cut off his head, pulled the heart from his chest, and burned him. Malark plucked the sword from his hand to begin the process.

"Sleep in peace," Malark said. "I'm glad I was finally able to free you." He gripped the blade with both hands and raised it high.

A sort of groan sounded from the living members of the audience he'd nearly forgotten, particularly his fellow Red Wizards. They weren't protesting what a zulkir chose to do. None of them would dare. But plainly, they regretted it.

At first Malark couldn't imagine why. Then, abruptly, as if a key had unlocked a portion of his mind, he understood. Like himself, the other mages were necromancers. Their special art was to master the undead, and Bareris was a particularly powerful specimen. Thus, they deplored the waste implicit in destroying him when they could enslave him instead.

Malark realized he agreed with them. He tossed away the sword to clank on the ground, called his wand back into his grasp, swept it through a serpentine mystic pass, and recited the first words of a binding. He made an encouraging gesture with his free hand, and the other necromancers joined in.

When the spell was done, Tsagoth appeared beside him to inspect the pale figure still twitching and shuddering on the ground. "Did you enjoy that?" the blood fiend asked.

"For me," Malark said, "destroying the undead isn't sport. It's a sacrament. But yes, I did enjoy it."

"But you didn't destroy him."

For a heartbeat, Malark felt confused. Perhaps even uneasy. But then he frowned his formless misgivings away. "Well, no. At the last moment, I realized how useful he could be fighting on our side if the council attacks again. Imagine the effect on Aoth and the rebels' morale when their faithful friend rides out to slaughter them."

Szass Tam snapped his shriveled fingers, and a rippling ran down from the top of the oval mirror. It looked like streaming water, and it washed the images of Malark, Tsagoth, and Bareris Anskuld away, so that the lich's own keen, intellectual face looked back at him once more.

It was good luck that he'd chosen to check on the Dread Ring in Lapendrar at this particular time, for he'd enjoyed watching Malark overcome the bard. Anskuld had never been more than a minor problem, but he'd been one for a hundred years, and after all the accumulated irritation, it was satisfying to see him neutralized at last.

Someone tapped on the door softly enough that it took sharp ears to hear it. Szass Tam turned in his chair and called, "Come in."

Ludicrously for such an exemplar of his brutish kind, bred for generations solely to kill whenever and whomever Red Wizards commanded, the blood-orc captain appeared to creep into the divination chamber as hesitantly as a timid child. Perhaps he didn't like the carrion stink and the litter of corpses and broken, filthy grave goods, for, insofar as he could without rendering the room incapable of its intended function, Szass Tam had filled it with such things. He'd done the same with many spaces reserved for his personal use. The ambience helped tune his mind for the Unmaking.

But he suspected the orc seemed uneasy because he had bad news to report, and the warrior confirmed as much as soon as his master told him to get up off his knees. "Your Omnipotence, we lost another hunting party. They found the demon-or it found them-outside the vault with the blue metal door, in the tunnels with all the faces carved on the walls. And it killed them."

I'm served by imbeciles, Szass Tam told himself and conscientiously tried to despise them for their inadequacies. "I'm sorry to hear it. Make sure we provide for the families of the fallen."

The officer swallowed. "There's more, Master. After the demon killed the hunters, it got the door to the vault open. It broke all the staves and wands you kept inside."

Szass Tam scowled. No stray predator from the Abyssal planes should have been capable of opening a door he'd sealed himself. And he'd spent the better part of four hundred years acquiring those rods across the length and breadth of Faerun and even in lands beyond. To lose the entire collection, and not even to a thief-that at least would make sense-but to a creature who'd apparently destroyed it out of sheer random spite-

Szass Tam belatedly realized that if his disgust was appropriate, his sense of attachment and attendant loss was counterproductive, and he did his best to quash it. The staves and wands were flawed, contemptible trash, just like the rest of creation. They would have passed from existence within the next few tendays anyway, when the Great Work erased all the world. Thus, they didn't merit a second thought.

But he supposed he ought to provide a display of pique even though he no longer felt it. The orc would expect no less, and, mind-bound though they were, Szass Tam would rather his minions not question their master's sanity or true intentions. Ultimately, it didn't matter, but it had the potential to make this final phase of his preparations a bit more difficult than it needed to be.

So he scowled and snarled, "Kill the cursed thing! Take a whole legion into the crypts if you have to!"

"Yes, Master. We will. Only…"

"Only what?"

"Considering the cunning wizards and mighty creatures we've already lost, people are saying that maybe this demon's so nasty that only Szass Tam himself can slay it."

Szass Tam realized that if he still cared about the security of his fortress home and the safety of cherished possessions, as he wanted his retainers to believe, that was exactly what he'd do. And perhaps he could use a diversion, a break from the days and nights of near-constant meditation.

"All right," he said. "Forget about sending any more hunters. I'll go as soon as I get a chance."

Throughout the night, some vague impulse prompted Bareris to peer up at the sky. Eventually he observed that dawn wasn't far distant, that it was, in fact, approximately the same time as when he'd invaded the Dread Ring. In the depths of his mind, something shifted.

Once the necromancers were certain they'd enslaved him, Malark had assigned him duties appropriate to a seasoned officer.

As the day dragged by, he'd performed them like a sleepwalker, feeling nothing except a dull, bitter anger he could no longer express or even comprehend.

He was still numb and incapable of contemplating his situation. But he slipped away from the band of ghouls Malark had placed under his command and stalked to a shadowy corner in an empty courtyard. No mouths opened in the stonework to proclaim his whereabouts; he belonged to the garrison now.