Pool of Twilight by James M. Ward, Anne K. Brown Page A

streaked from Sirana’s fingertips. It ricocheted wildly around her circular spellcasting chamber, deep in the subterranean warrens of the thieves’ guild, pulverizing priceless sculptures and blasting antique furniture to ashes before finally dissipating against the porphyry walls.
    “How could they lose?” Sirana shrieked, her hands clenched into fists. But no human being could answer her. The last three thieves who had entered her chamber were now scuttling around the floor in the form of cockroaches, doing their best to avoid being crushed by her boot heels. “How could they have lost to a band of doddering holy men? All that blasted abishai had to do was bring back an old book and a foolish boy!”
    Sirana caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror of polished bronze. She liked what she saw—a tall, shapely woman with dark hair and smoldering eyes, clad in a thin white shift belted by a heavy braid of gold. Yes, she thought, even in her rage she looked supremely beautiful. She enjoyed this human form she had taken. Not a hint of her fiendish heritage showed beneath the sultry, feminine exterior.
    She sank into an ornately carved chair—one of the few items in the room that had escaped her magical wrath— and bit delicately on a knuckle. It was time to put rage aside and calculate a new course of action. Revenge was best planned with a cool head. Sirana knew that well. After all, she had made revenge her specialty.
    It was obvious that a direct attack on the clerics of Tyr would not avail her. She had spent months taking over Phlan’s thieves’ guild, perverting it to suit her purposes. Then she had summoned Slayer to be her servant. Slayer was a baatezu abishai, a magical creature of fearsome power, but he had failed miserably. No matter the armored horde of thieves and the pack of feral spinagons she had sent to help him.
    She picked up a small black-lacquered box from a table beside the chair. It was her most precious possession, a gift from her beloved mother on the day Sirana had murdered the old crone. It was a box full of magical memories. Carefully, Sirana opened the lid. Gradually an image began to form in the darkness within.
    An image of a lofty tower, hewn of crimson stone.
    Though Sirana had never gazed upon the tower with her own eyes, it was nonetheless a familiar sight to her. The tower had belonged to her father, Lord Marcus, a powerful Red Wizard from the eastern land of Thay. Once it had been a citadel of awesome power built above a legendary pool of darkness. Marcus had managed to imprison the entire city of Phlan in a cavern underneath the tower, intending to drain the life-forces of the citizens in order to transform himself into a demigod.
    “But it was all for nothing,” Sirana whispered mournfully. “If only I could have been there to help.”
    She watched as history replayed in the images of the black box. She saw the defilers come to the tower: a ranger, a sorceress, a barbarian who could assume the form of a great cat, and finally the one who always sent a shiver of fear through her—a skeletal paladin, his empty eye sockets glowing with horrible, holy blue light. The undead paladin had been the cause of her father’s demise, and for that she despised him most of all. The paladin had turned to dust at the end of the battle, so he was beyond the reach of revenge. But the others were not.
    She watched as the tiny tower inside the black box began to topple and fall. She watched as the invaders fled the scene of destruction. For long moments, the images were still. Nothing moved. Then Sirana could glimpse her mother, the beautiful, fiendish erinyes who had served the human, Lord Marcus, crawl from the ruins, bleeding, wings twisted and broken, yet alive.
    The erinyes had given birth to Sirana not long after the defeat at the red tower. Because of her half-fiendish blood, Sirana had grown quickly. Early on, her mother had sown the seeds of enmity in Sirana’s heart, teaching her