The chalky menhir of Scathur’s face quaked as if convulsed by a tremor, fragments of it breaking away and sliding down his basaltic skin. Cracks began to appear, criss-crossing its surface in veins of bubo-purple. Those watery little oyster-eyes churned, swelled and seethed, rose out of their sockets in the manner of an overflowing drain, and sulphurous spittle began boiling out from his quivering mouth. Then, without any further warning, the entire surface of his gravestone visage split apart, fell away and, with the jabbering of a thousand fiends, an oily black melee of fibrillating, chitinous appendages burst forth.
As Scathur’s head emptied its contents, so too did Nibulus’s stomach, and the bardische finally clattered to the floor.
Still in spasm, Scathur hurled himself down from the ziggurat and staggered away, his army parting to let him pass. In confusion, for they knew not what this could mean, they watched as he fled the chamber, screaming still, while leaving behind him a trail of steaming puddles upon the marble. And, once he was gone, they milled about like ants that have lost their queen, while the defenders enjoyed a life-saving gasp of air.
Nibulus gratefully accepted Kuthy’s hand, and was hauled to his feet. ‘Nice one, mate.’ He grinned and once again hefted Unferth.
Nice one, indeed, Finwald concurred, then turned back to continue his search for Bolldhe. The uber-rawgr was out of his hair at last, and his minions – whom Finwald had been sensing so horribly close at hand – seemed by some miracle to have been deflected for a time.
But things were still pretty desperate and becoming more so with each minute that passed. So many of his side had already fallen, and the enemy, despite their huge losses, still outnumbered them many times over. Before Finwald’s very eyes Cuthwulf was being dragged down by a pack of crazed predators. His Fossegrim-poisoned voulge had turned black the blood of as many Oghain as it had beheaded the Dead, and in the process built a ramp of their twitching and deflating bodies upon the steps before his feet. But he was set upon from all sides, and had reached the end of his strength. Finwald, momentarily transfixed, could only stare as bone-hard fingers and arms wiry with corded strength sought out Brother Number Two’s trembling flesh, gripped, twisted and pulled it away. The last the mage saw of him was his mouth, barely discernible now in the red pulp of his face, spitting out curses as his eyes stared blindly into space.
It’s all falling apart around my ears. Finwald realized it would not be long before the end.
So do it. Now!
It was a terrible risk, but he had no choice. He loosed his concentration and allowed his aura of protection to fall away from him. Thus freed, he could send his mind forth to seek out Bolldhe and, more importantly, Flametongue.
But before he had the chance to even draw breath, the horde was upon him too. He was jostled with such violence that it was all he could do to concentrate upon merely staying afloat.
This is useless, Finwald fumed. Even surrounded by the Tyvenborgers he could not hope to bring his concentration to bear. What he needed was something instant, something powerful, something to take the heat off him for a while, and get the enemy off his back long enough for him to locate the flamberge.
Then a word popped into his head, or more precisely, a Word of Power. Yes, that was what he needed. Instant, infallible and immensely potent, it was an incantation as yet far above his level of mastery, or even his understanding, but it was the one thing, the only thing, that might yet buy him the time he so desperately needed.
His extremities tingled with forbidden excitement as this thought took hold. A Word of Power, he pronounced to himself experimentally. Yes, why not. It’s either that or death for us all.
Like a dark threatening tower, he appeared to rise up, and power swirled about him. His mind went out again, and waves of wizardry resonated through him, whipping his clothes about, animating his hair and fluttering his eyelids. He could feel such enormity of magical energy around him and within him, so close, almost his! Ah, such mastery!
Then he saw him. After all these years, he actually saw him, floating in the air just yards away.
Cuna, his god, with the Skela all around him.
Finwald could not help but smirk; his god was speaking, trying urgently to talk to him, to plead with him. But no words came out. He was simply opening and closing his mouth like a netted fish.
If ever there had been a time for soul-searching, Finwald realized then, it must surely be now. But then what would be the point of that, as he probably would not even find one?
With still the trace of a smile on his lips, Finwald dismissed his god, mouthing the words, ‘I’ll see you when I’m ready.’
His spine now tingled with an iciness that felt like ghosts dancing on his soul. Then, with one outstretched finger, he touched a Word of Power.
Bad Eye to his Enemies.
Composed of sorcerous light, he saw the sigils appear before him in the smoky air, glowering, knowing, alive. Their magic laid fingers around his soul and stroked sensuously. The mage gasped and felt himself swell. Heart beating, palms slick, eyes aglow with expectation, he finally uttered the Word of Blindness . . .
The sigils faded as swiftly as the smile of a harlot when her job is done and her magic no longer needed. Finwald opened his eyes.
‘No . . .!’ he breathed, and the magic fell right out of his world.
His defenders became a collapsing sea wall, a folding deck of cards, swept down by the onrushing deluge of their enemies. Everyone, man, beast or otherwise, staggered back and flailed about blindly, their strokes wild, their eyes running with foul fluids the same colour as the Word sigils.
Yet their enemies remained completely unaffected, and tore into them with renewed glee. Vetter after Vetter went down, and many a strong Cervulus too. Within seconds all would be lost, and Finwald stared helplessly, almost unable to breathe. His soul was crushed under the weight of his guilt.
Until another Word popped into his view, glowing even more brightly than the one before. Without a second’s thought, he enunciated it, for it was his – their – only chance:
Poisoned Chaos of the Mind. The Word of Insanity.
His lips peeled back and his teeth glistened. This spell was different, a Word of an altogether stronger language. It drained power out of him, and it took something else, too: Finwald felt dimmed, somehow, his skin turning gauze-thin and his blood just that little bit cooler. Into this vacancy something new fingered its way . . .
Then the Word blasted forth from his brain, so much more powerful than the one before, and his breath came rank and black in the foulness of its passage. His legs gave beneath him, and Finwald fell to his knees. He clutched his head and did not dare look up. But the strange cries that now filled his ears soon compelled him to raise his head from his chest and unclench his veiny eyelids.
In the throes of some terrible fit the defenders on the ziggurat now cavorted wildly. Without care or thought for whom they struck or who struck them, they howled and writhed and lashed out in complete lunacy, as if their very souls were on fire.
For some, especially the strongest of them, this proved unexpectedly fortunate, for the insanity that filled their brains also gave them new strength. Maddened like a raging berserker, Nibulus pitched headlong into the enemy and clove a path deep through their ranks, before finally disappearing from sight. Ceawlin, Hwald and Finan scattered the Dead like so many autumn leaves before an overexcited child. Klijjver appeared to have transmogrified from Tusse to Jutul, and grinned dementedly as he hammered both living and dead flesh upon his anvil.
Dolen’s madness manifested itself uniquely: her hair stood out like the spines of a sea urchin as psychosis boiled within her Dhracus brain, then poured out, channelled through her misericord, and exploded straight into her foe. A living swarm of her nightmare horrors wriggled out, clamped onto the heads of the wire-faces, drove mandibles in deep, and winkled the very life from them in cackling hysteria.
For others it did not have such a fortunate effect. Shle
pp, slavering and drooling, let out a howl such as he had never uttered in his life, not even as a puppy, then cowered away helplessly even as a wire-face aimed a tzerbuchjer directly at his skull. Elfswith, meanwhile, was slowly but relentlessly beating his own brains out on the marble step upon which he sprawled. Eorcenwold swung his morningstar around him and laughed uncontrollably as it took the back of his sister’s head off, releasing its contents in a sluggish cascade down her back. And Cynen Englarielle finally disintegrated in a fountain of blood under the frenzied hacking of Kuthy.
Appa simply collapsed, struck upon the head by the back-swing of Wodeman’s tulwar. Finwald stared into the old man’s glazed eyes as he fell upon the steps at his feet and saw reflected there the utter madness that had surely possessed Finwald himself ever since he had first beheld Flametongue. For what else, if not the greatest folly, could have caused him to behave the way he had all these years, or to dream those impossible dreams that had filled his head for so long?
Finwald had lost that which he craved above all else: control. Lost control of his charges, of the magic, of the situation and, yes, even of his own mind. Only then did a memory return to him . . . What was it the shaman had said?
‘You can’t do evil magic without harming yourself.’
Too damn right. Too damn late! For he had let the Evil in, invited it in, and even now the third Word of Power was forming in the air. He did not want it, would have done anything to thrust it away. But he was powerless to resist it. As he stared into the wells of dementia that Appa’s eyes had become, Finwald’s religion came back to him: the plainsong of the ascetics, the simple healing of the mage-priests and, behind it all, the all-pervading face of Cuna, whose red eyes were lidless orbs of radiant energy hot enough to consume souls.
But the Word was complete.
No thoughts flashed through Finwald’s mind. No scheme, stratagem nor revelation. There simply was not the time. He flung himself down next to Appa, clasped him urgently to his breast, and as the Word began erupting from him, focused it straight through the old priest’s head.
He had already figured out his mistakes. Not just the fact that he had got everything so horribly, unforgivably wrong, but the Words themselves. The last sigil was the key: the Enemy. Words of Power not against the enemy of the caster but of the Tomes, of him that had written them in the first place.
And what did Finwald hope to achieve by this last act? He could not foil the Word, could do nothing to impede it, for it was within him and had been for even longer than he knew. He could repress it no more than a woman in labour can hold in her emerging child, or a drunkard grit his teeth to stem the rising of his stomach.
It was at best a desperate prayer for absolution, albeit one without any real hope.
The Word of Death.
A gout of black light exploded between the two mage-priests and hurled them from each other like two repelled lodestones. Between them this anti-light left a gap of nothingness that drew the eyes of all onlookers so forcefully that they almost extruded from their sockets. Immediately there came a great hollow sucking as of the dispelling of an air elemental, then all that remained in the space where the priests had been was the ruined marble of the ziggurat, cracked and desiccated, its lustre and colour drained utterly and rimed with a light frosting.
The battle faltered. For a second, while they all adjusted to this new reality, there was a weighty hush in which no one fought, cried or even breathed.
Then the Word-smitten were whole again, quite whole, both blindness and insanity lifted from them and sucked into the vortex of anti-magic. Finwald’s last act, desperate and unconsidered though it was, had succeeded in dispelling the Words of Power. That Evil could not penetrate the soul of a truly good man, even one as caught up in brainstorm as was Appa, and so had rebounded upon its caster.
While the survivors recovered their senses, their weapons and their positions – and pretty damn quickly too – Appa rolled over and squinted hard through the bilious coruscation in his eyes, trying to locate his brother-in-faith in the darkness beyond the blasted marble.
There! His eyes locked onto a movement, drawn to it by a guttural cry that rose in pitch till it warbled hysterically, and just went on and on. A figure in Finwald’s clothes lurched up from the mound of Dead, a smoking ghoul rising from the pyres of the battle-slain. Fingers no more than the twigs of a lightning-struck tree clawed frantically at its face, now grey and befouled, oozing blood from every orifice and pore. A forked tongue of tumorous pulsation emerged from a man-trap of urine-brown fangs suppurating with a cold, oily venom. As the screaming reached a pitch exceeding that of even the most deranged of the Word’s victims, the figure turned to stare straight at Appa, and its eyes simply melted and ran down its face.
It could stand no more. Amid howls of direst anguish the apparition plunged into the throng. All recoiled before it, for none there possessed the strength or disposition to dare resist it.
So departed Finwald, mage-priest of Cuna, fleeing the chamber, abandoning the quest, renouncing his humanity, vanishing from their lives forever. And behind him he left nothing but the echoes of his torment . . . and a very bad smell.
Released from their madness, the defenders realized just how few they were. Released from their blindness, they could see just how many of their enemies still remained. Their strength was depleted, the lungfuls of breath left to them dwindling rapidly, and hope dissipated to nothing. Englarielle was dead, Wintus lost, and no leader or saviour was there to aid them in their final moments. Step by step they were pushed back up the ziggurat, and with each riser they climbed, more of their number fell.
Of all of them, only Mauglad retained any hope. Though he was still no nearer locating either the flamberge or his original body, he intuitively felt that neither could be far away now. Moreover, he liked this new body he had chosen. It was truly remarkable, so sleek, so well oiled, so potent. True, given the chance he would have opted for the gleaming kettle-copper hair he had sported in real life instead of this awful dull black. But at least the skin was to his liking; death-pale suited the necromancer in him far better than the bilge-brown tone of his erstwhile host, and what better than a ghost-like visage in this life, he had often mused, to prepare a man for an eternity of such a look in the next?
One weapon in each hand, Mauglad went hunting. His Tyvenborg companions neither aided nor hindered him, and he was free to go about his business as he wished. A few moments later he stopped dead amid the chaos and trembled as a graveyard lily in a wintry gust of wind. His black eyes bulged from their sockets, and a skull-like grin spread across his featutes.
There, finally, his old body, scant yards away and getting closer by the second.
My life! What a magnificent specimen!
It was not merely boastful pride, for this was no ordinary foot soldier of the Dead that approached. From toe to pate the contorted cadaver loomed at least three feet above its comrades (reminding Mauglad trenchantly of the manner of his death) and was made taller still by the antler-like sprouting of petrified branches grafted onto the top of its skull. Other features that Mauglad did not recall his original body possessing included a second pair of arms (wielding scythe-like weapons), a narwhal horn as a codpiece down below and – most arresting of all – two faces side-by-side upon its head. The first of these he recognized instantly as his own and winced to see how unkind time had been to it. The second, however, was the greatest insult of all, for this face was that of a lesser rawgr he had habitually bullied during his days in office. In the infernal heat it had partly melted its co-face, and both now ran together in an eternal kiss of death. Neither looked especially happy about it.
Six hundred years, six interminable centuries of banishment – and all about to end beneath the wrecking hands of Mauglad Yrkeshta.
‘Do not, Mauglad, I forbid you!’ Cuna thundered in fury, as if he had any authority in this matter. ‘Stand back from yourself. You have work yet to do. Kill the Rawgr!’
> Several grey-robed figures materialized out of the thurible smoke. Floating upon its haze, they drifted up to Cuna.
‘Plan B still on, then?’ one enquired politely.
Cuna ignored them and continued raging at the thief-clad spirit, yet knowing that it could never, ever, hear him.
But Mauglad did hesitate, Cuna noticed, caught between the horns of a dilemma Cuna knew only too well. He had suffered for so long in Sluagh and could not bear to do so for any longer. Here was a chance – nay, a certainty – of ending it all this instant: just destroy his old body there, and merciful release would be his.
But it was this very purgatory suffered at the design of Drauglir that stayed his hand now, for how could he be truly released when there was such lust for vengeance still within him unfulfilled? Mauglad vacillated. Should he risk failure and a return to another kind of Sluagh that might never end this time, simply to gain a revenge he could only savour for mere moments? Or should he take the easy way out?
Khurghan decided that for him. The Polg came out of nowhere and, as Mauglad and Cuna stared on, punched his spear straight into the melt-faced corpse’s heart.
‘DAMN YOU, YOU LITTLE RUNT!’ roared Mauglad. ‘HE IS NOT THINE TO SLAY!’ And, without a second’s further delay, he jammed his magical dagger squarely into the base of the Polg’s spine and ripped it up clear to his skull.
Khurghan came apart in an explosion of blood, entrails and shattered ribs. He had not even the time to scream before his distended eyeballs glazed over and his body spread out upon the steps.
Mauglad ignored him and regarded his old body. It was tottering, speared through by the assegai, but it would not ultimately fall until brain and heart were separated. Good, thought Mauglad; it would last a while yet, long enough for what he had in mind. But only if it did not get attacked by anyone else. He wasted no time. Mauglad’s former days in the torture pits came back to him in an instant as, expertly, almost joyfully, he set his knife to work. The blade was no purpose-made bone-dislocator, to be sure, but it took only moments to wrench both legs and all four arms from the feebly struggling corpse that had once been himself.
A Fire in the North Page 55
