The leather grip of Keverel’s mace creaked as he brought it up. “Then it’s no ordinary hyena,” he said over the cackling, which got louder and seemed to come from several directions at once. “It’s a cacklefiend. There will be gnolls with it as well, and perhaps worse than gnolls. Erathis!” he called out, holding up his holy symbol.

Light washed out from the symbol, washing over the hulking shape of a cacklefiend hyena. It was nearly man-high at the shoulder, with a row of serrated spines where an ordinary hyena had bristles down its back. Its fur was mottled green, gray, and black. Behind it loomed the hyenalike humanoid silhouettes of gnolls.

“This is why I hate the desert,” Kithri said.

“Me too.” Lucan unsheathed his sword, which gave off a silvery light similar to the glow of Keverel’s talisman. Iriani too created light, with a complicated pattern of snapping fingers that popped small flares into life over their heads. The cacklefiend ducked its head and chuckled demoniacally, swaying its head back and forth as the gnolls skirted the perimeter of light, timing their rush to the cue the cacklefiend would give.

It was a tricky situation for the members of the party used to having an advantage because of their superior night vision. The gnolls had it too, and the cacklefiend could see the way demons did because it was a demonic perversion of a hyena. So one advantage Lucan, and Iriani were accustomed to had vanished because of circumstance and opponent-yet for Remy and the others, the campfire and the various glares of magical light were a leveler. They could see the cacklefiend and the gnolls perfectly well, or at least as well as the enemy could see them. And the first thing Remy saw after Iriani’s light flashed into being was the gleam of Kithri’s throwing daggers, flickering their way to their target out at the end of the gnoll grouping. She was trying to prevent the gnolls from spreading out and surrounding them. In the uncertain light, Kithri’s attack-unusually for her-wasn’t fatal. The gnoll, a burnished steel dagger hilt sticking out from its shoulder and one of its ears carved to a flap, charged. The rest followed, the giggling cacklefiend skipping around to flank the party and keeping to the edge of the firelight.