As one, the skeletal figures drew long blades of stone from ragged belts and sashes of rotting uncured pelts. Shrieking her rage, Amina Sharr surged to her feet, thrust with her hands, and actinic power lit the low-roofed chamber like a blast of lightning.

Along the other wall, the Sheers kicked back their chairs, some leaping over the table. The Sheer of Sheers slammed his stick to the table, breaking it. ‘Send them back to their nether-realm, boys and girls!’

The no-man’s-land of shattered furniture and dust erupted into a firestorm of unleashed power where flurries of lancing iron shards peppered stone, the air itself solidified into sheets of rock-hard ice, the flagstones parted revealing black gulfs, and raw unleashed chaos itself roiled through the air in clouds consuming all it touched.

Through this blistering conflagration of energies the figures of bone and rag hides advanced. They threw milky brown flint knives that sliced Sharr and Sheer mages, or rebounded from defensive glyphs. A heaved stone broadsword, a full arm’s length of razor-sharp black chalcedony, arced through the air to take the head from young Manadara Sheer. Her arms fell and the channelled raw chaos she had been summoning gushed on to the table, consuming it and the flagstones beneath. The nearby Sheers scrambled in either direction.

The foremost warrior of bone and dust pushed through curtains of ice shards so impossibly keen and hard that they penetrated even its fossilized bones to stand like daggers. It reached the Sharrs’ table. A single blow from its grey flint longsword parted the timbers in an eruption of dust and slivers.

Amina Sharr confronted it. ‘To annihilation!’ she howled, and, leaping, she locked her legs about the creature’s torso and released all hold upon the arcing energies sizzling her flesh. The two burst into a cloud of ash and soot that dispersed about the coursing, contrary winds of the chamber.

The Sharr of Sharrs, coughing, waving the ash of his cousin/wife from his eyes, slid along a wall. He tried to right himself but found that for some reason he couldn’t. He peered blearily at his arm where it ended at the elbow. He remembered, vaguely, a sword flashing before him, raising an arm … Shaking his head, he continued sliding along the wall. Perhaps if he made it to the entrance to the lower regions …

His path brought him to a shadowed figure awaiting him. He pulled up short, raised his gaze.

The skeletal figure punched its stone longsword through his chest. Coughing anew, the Sharr of Sharrs smiled and dragged himself even closer. He cupped his hand against the discoloured naked bone of the skull as if caressing it and peered into the darkness of the empty sockets. ‘We will take you with us, you know,’ he promised. ‘We neither can outlive the other.’

‘Just so long as you go,’ the creature’s answer came, breathless and faint.

Hand and skull exploded into shards of bone. Both bodies fell.

*