"Did you see the Beast itself?" Isiem asked.
Ena shook her stubbly haired head. Foreboding shadowed her eyes. "I didn't, and I don't much want to. It stinks around the lair. I'm not sure why the smell doesn't carry farther. It should. It's worse than the smell of sickness, worse than rotten meat ...it's a wrong smell. The Beast is undead, all right. Nothing else reeks like that. But no, I didn't see it. Just the spongy stinking earth and bones around the hole where it's hiding."
"Nightfall, then?" Kyril asked. "You'll lure it out and lead it here?"
"I will," Ena said. "You'd best be ready for it when I do."
The hours until sundown passed in tense silence. Kyril prayed silently, her longsword bare and gleaming across her lap. Pulcher and Copple amused themselves gambling with knucklebones; neither of them seemed the slightest bit concerned about what they might face in the wood. Both of them cheated constantly, and neither noticed. Ganoven paced back and forth, muttering the words to a simple force spell over and over under his breath, like an unprepared actor desperately rehearsing his lines in the last minutes before curtain rise. The incantation was accurate, to Isiem's mild surprise, but if the Aspis agent kept repeating it, he was going to waste it on empty air.
"Calm yourself," Isiem told the man, looking up from his cross-legged perch on a mossy log. "Your spell is correct. Now relax, and wait. If you're too tense, the magic will fail."
Ganoven stopped, visibly startled that he had been addressed. As soon as he recovered from his surprise, though, the half-elf's lip twisted up in a sneer. "Do you think I'm a complete novice?"
Isiem shrugged. He returned to his own meditations, sending his consciousness outward to the fading warmth of sunlight on the trees' upper leaves, the gentle riffle of wind through the hanging vines, the low smells of damp earth and moss. In Nidal he had learned to meditate through times of absolute terror, and while he had discarded many other Kuthite teachings since entering his exile, that one he had kept. It was too useful to forget.
After a time he opened one eye, just a sliver, to see Ganoven seated on a stump ten yards away. The bearded half-elf was imitating Isiem's cross-legged posture and measured breathing, and while his attempt was stiff and awkward, he appeared to be making a real effort.
Inwardly Isiem smiled. He closed his eyes and went back into the haven of his own thoughts.
The last of the daylight dwindled through the screening leaves and vanished. Violet twilight seeped in, cool and moist. An unseen chorus of nocturnal frogs and crickets sprang up, singing to herald the coming night. It was pastoral, tranquil—and painfully evanescent.
"I'm going in," Ena said. The dwarf had pulled her hood up. Cloaked in its drab fabric, she was all but invisible in the gathering gloom. "Be ready."
As she left, Isiem wove a protective ward around himself. The spell formed a nearly invisible shield of force around him; with luck, it might deflect blows aimed his way. A shimmer in the night air told him that Ascaros had done the same. A moment later, Ganoven followed suit, his spell stuttering briefly before solidifying around him. Their other companions took no precautions, as far as the wizard could tell.
"I can't see," Pulcher complained. He pulled off his spectacles and rubbed the greasy lenses against the front of his jerkin, smearing them even more hopelessly. "Can't fight if I can't see."
"Be still." Ascaros stepped out from the shadows, ignoring the tall thug's flinch, and touched the man's forehead with a small agate. He did the same to Copple, who shivered as well as the shadowcaller's spell settled over him and rubbed his eyes in wonderment.
"Well, isn't that a thing," Copple mumbled hoarsely, turning around in a circle and gawking at the trees and bushes. "I can see!"
"Of course you can, you ninny." Pulcher tightened the chinstrap of his open-faced helm and checked his bracers, then picked the hammer up again and gave it a few practice swings. "What did you think the spell was going to do, make you pretty? Hurry up and strap on your shield. Who knows when that dwarf'll be back, or what she'll be trailing when she comes."
"Do you need help with the darkness?" Ascaros asked Teglias. The shadowcaller seemed unnaturally tranquil, his face a white mask in the deepening night. That very stillness was a sign of the man's turmoil, Isiem knew; it meant his concentration was slipping on the illusion of normalcy that masked his true, withered face.
"No," the bearded cleric answered calmly. His hands stayed folded on the hilt of his scimitar, its point driven into the loam between his feet. "No, I think I can handle the night."
Whatever Ascaros meant to say in response was cut off as Kyril raised a hand abruptly. A halo of ghostly blue flame blazed up around her longsword, bathing the paladin's face with holy light.
"It's coming," she said.
Chapter Ten
The Howl
Even as the paladin spoke, Isiem heard the crack of breaking tree limbs. The earth bucked under his feet, suddenly as treacherous as the deck of a storm-tossed ship. By his side, Pulcher fell, losing his grip on his hammer's handle. The big thug scrabbled after it on his hands and knees, grabbing at clumps of skunk cabbage for purchase and throwing dignity to the wind.
Isiem didn't blame him. An onrushing roar filled his ears, growing louder by the second. From the way it reverberated in his head, pushing the insides of his skull outward like wine overfilling a skin, he wondered if it was a real sound or some horrid magic of the Beast's. The backs of his eyes ached from the pressure; purple spots swam across his sight. And still the ground churned and thrashed, adding to his dizziness. Not fifty yards away, mighty trees snapped like toothpicks and crashed down, but the sound of their breaking was nothing against the skull-splitting clamor in his head.
Then it stopped, and a deep, steady rumbling took its place. Ena's traps exploded in the earth, shattering into useless geysers of glass and steam long before their intended target was anywhere in view.
Pulcher got unsteadily back to his feet, wiping mud and blood from a long cut across his hairline. Ganoven, looking past the rest of them into the forest, blanched white. Kyril, beside him, murmured a toneless prayer. The aura of holy fire around her sword flickered like a candle in a draft, then blazed up brighter than before.
The Beast had come.
Isiem smelled the thing before he saw it. At first all he could make out visually was a strangely lumpy shadow looming amid the trees, its head level with their highest branches—but the stench of the Beast was immediate and overpowering. One instant, he was breathing clean forest air. The next, he choked on a foulness so wet and thick that it was like sucking in lungfuls of cold, rotting blood.
He heard Pulcher drop back to the ground, retching; he heard the absurdly quiet plop of the man's spectacles falling into the mess. But he didn't turn or look away, because by then the Beast had smashed enough of the surrounding trees to show itself in the early moonlight.
It was more like a moving hill than anything that should walk. Twenty feet high and nearly as wide, the Beast of the Backar Forest was a monolith of chains and bones and worm-eaten cloth, all packed together by damp, reeking dirt that, Isiem was certain, was what remained of the flesh from its constituent bodies.
It had the rough shape of a scorpion, but it was covered in such a carapace of caked decay that he could barely tell. Skeletal arms and legs bristled from its sides like a porcupine's quills, dwarfed by the enormous bone pincers that clacked in front of the thing. Along its back—if that word could even apply to such a creature—a triple row of decaying human heads gaped and giggled. More skulls were strung along its long, lashing tail; the last of them had a grisly, glistening white spike jutting out of its jaws.
Some of the heads were still fresh enough to have filth-matted hair and skin. Others were bare bone, their craniums packed full of dirt that wept through their eye sockets and trickled from their nostrils. Each was attached by a skeletal hand grasping it through the holes where the spine had once attached to the skull's base, and each was animated into an
unholy mockery of life.
They gibbered and screeched and laughed, sometimes all at the same time. Their jaws, attached only by strings of dried gristle, flapped constantly in meaningless idiot speech. None of them had eyes; several had been dented and crushed in so badly that they no longer had faces. Isiem had no sense that any of the heads were aware of their surroundings, much less able to think or control the creature that wore them.
But something in that mountain of filth had enough rudimentary intelligence to chase Ena. The dwarf came hurtling through the undergrowth ahead of the Beast's pincers, zigzagging around tree trunks and somersaulting down hillsides with desperate skill. Bouncing back to her feet, the bruised and battered dwarf charged straight at the hollow where she'd laid all her traps—and where not one of them was left to help her.
The adventurers scattered, even Kyril, fanning outward in their retreat. Standing their ground in the face of the Beast's trampling fury would have been worse than useless. Their intended ambush was ruined, and the thing would have crushed them without slowing an inch.
Only Ascaros had the presence of mind to do more than scramble out of the way. He blew a wisp of dried spidersilk at the Beast as he darted aside. The fragile strands dissolved on his breath, sparkling in the air—and then reappeared, made a thousand times thicker and stronger by magic. A net of tenebrous webbing, large enough to entangle even the Beast of the Backar Forest, erupted around the undead monstrosity's lower quarters.
The Beast slowed to a grinding stop, dragged to a halt by Ascaros's web. It thrashed at the sticky mess with its pincers, but succeeded only in further ensnaring itself. Several ropy strands strained and snapped, but the bulk of the web held fast. The decapitated heads on the creature's back moaned and babbled in broken chorus, their unseeing eyes and unthinking mouths rolled toward the sky.
Seeing his enemy pinned, Teglias raised his holy symbol in one hand, holding the other flat so that his palm faced the Beast. His voice stern and filled with righteous wrath, the cleric called upon his goddess's power. A beam of blinding sunlight lanced from his open palm, so brilliant it left ghost-streaks seared across Isiem's vision,. The holy light blasted away dirt and bones and squealing fragments of chains, leaving a black-edged hole in the Beast so big that Pulcher could have put his foot through it.
It was impossible to tell if the searing light had hurt it, though. The creature showed no flicker of pain, only the same near-mindless ferocity. It lurched in the webs again, releasing another wave of eye-watering stench, but remained unable to tear free.
Kyril hesitated only a second before swearing, thrusting her longsword back into its sheath, and grabbing her bow instead. In one fluid movement she nocked an arrow and loosed it, burying the long ash shaft in the Beast's earth-filled side. Again, however, the unliving thing made nary a grunt or whimper to show it was aware of any injury.
"This isn't good enough," the paladin growled. She dropped the bow back over her shoulder and drew her sword again. Once more, fire leaped out to sheathe the blade. "I can't hurt it from here. I'm going into the web."
Isiem, preoccupied with his own spellcasting, didn't reply at once. Instead he spread three fingers in a fan and pointed them at the Beast. A stream of fire burst from each of his fingers, scorching through the tangled webs to lash the undead creature with fiery whips of gold and crimson.
And then he couldn't answer, because the Beast struck back at them all. The chains embedded in its body shot out, shedding flakes of rotten flesh and bone, and burst through the shadowcaller's web in a hundred thrashing vines of metal.
A bladed chain stabbed through Teglias's calf, yanking the cleric into the mud and ruining the magic he'd just begun to shape. Another slammed into Copple's face, punching out teeth and a mouthful of blood. Howling, the tattooed thug dropped his sword and fell to his knees. Two more chains swung at Isiem, high and low, but he threw himself to the side and his shield spell managed to deflect their glancing blows.
Ena wasn't as lucky. One of the animated chains wrapped around her waist, whipping around the dwarf again and again until her hands were bound to her sides. At the end it thudded a clot of gristle and steel into her stomach, knocking out her breath. With a final heave, the Beast hoisted the kicking dwarf into the air, dragging her over her companions' heads toward its own web-snared bulk.
It pulled at Teglias, too, hauling him toward its crushing pincers. The cleric seized onto the gnarled root of a nearby tree and clung to it, white-knuckled, until the chain ripped bloodily loose from his leg. Ashen-faced, the Sarenite gulped breaths of agony and relief. The Beast had torn flesh from him, but it did not have him.
It only had Ena, and it hugged her close to its stinking side, pushing the side of her face into the filth next to its rows of moaning heads.
"Oh, no," the dwarf said, staring wide-eyed at a lolling head that returned her stare with a vacant, chittering smile. Her booted feet scuffed uselessly against the dirt and bones beside her. "No, no. Don't let it take my head. Don't let it, you bastards. You can't. You can't!"
"If you had let me use the addict and his idiot, your friend might still be safe," Ascaros muttered to Isiem. The shadowcaller rubbed something between his fingers, whispering another incantation. Isiem caught a whiff of licorice and recognized the magic just before it took hold of him.
Time slowed. The Beast's chains drifted rather than whipping forward, as if they were pushing through clear treacle instead of air. Each drop of blood that fell from Copple's cheek or Teglias's gouged leg or the countless cuts on Ena's face and body seemed to float through the night like a dark bubble, and when each drop struck the ground, Isiem could see every ripple and mote in the splash.
But not everything was slowed.
Kyril plunged past the wizard at full speed, leading with her fiery longsword as if it were a lance. Pulcher had staggered back up and dragged his enormous hammer out of the mud. Vomit stained the front of his shirt and spattered the blocky hammer's hilt, but the big man's grip seemed steady.
Before either of them could bring their weapons to bear, though—before they even reached the fringes of the shadowcaller's web—the lolling heads on the Beast's back turned their faces to the sky and shrieked in unison.
Their cries made no sound, but a rolling wave of force erupted outward from the Beast. Ghostly white, it billowed over the woodland with the delicacy of a jellyfish enveloping its prey, and its touch was just as deadly.
Plants shriveled instantly as the wave of death touched them. Insects dropped from the air, their stiffened wings suddenly pulled down by the hollow anchors of their shells. A puff of something like frost brushed over Isiem's skin, and then he too felt the wrenching, incredible agony of the Beast's magic sucking the life from his body.
It was like a blast of wind on the most brutally cold winter night he'd ever experienced—or, equally, like standing in front of a fiery inferno so ravenous that it pulled the breath from his lungs. Isiem couldn't breathe. He couldn't blink. It was impossible to move, to think, to feel. There was only the Beast's hunger wrenching at everything that made him alive.
And then, somehow, it faded. The magic released its grip.
Air rushed back into Isiem's lungs, raw but exhilarating. He was still alive. His fingers were stiff and wrinkled and white, but—with an effort—they moved. Barely. He was alive.
But he couldn't get up. He couldn't even lift his head out of the dirt. Magic was an impossible dream; the spell stored in his rubied ring might as well have belonged to Mesandroth himself for all the good it would do. All he could do was lie among the dead dry plants and wait to die himself.
As the wizard lay there, helpless tears trickling from the corners of his eyes, he heard Teglias's voice rise in a broken croak. The words were weak and distorted; Isiem couldn't make out the exact nature of the chant, although he recognized it as a prayer.
Wobbly as it was, the incantation held together. A second wave of force roiled through the spell-burned forest, this t
ime a warm gold rather than ghostly pale. Sarenrae's blessing infused them with new life, pushing back the killing numbness of the Beast's hunger. It could not restore the dead—the plants and insects remained inert, beyond the reach of the Dawnflower's revival—but it renewed the strength of the living.
Isiem pushed himself shakily back to his knees.
The first thing he saw was Kyril. The half-elf didn't seem to have been seriously slowed by the undead howl; she had reached the Beast and was hacking at the heads on its back with mighty sweeps of her fiery sword while dodging the clumsy attacks of its one free pincer. Cleaved skulls and shattered chains, set alight by holy flame, showered around the paladin in a messy halo.
Their other companions had been hit harder. Pulcher and Copple stayed on the ground, moaning and only half-sensible, even after Teglias had healed them. Isiem couldn't see Ascaros at all; he didn't know whether the shadowcaller had abandoned them, gone invisible, or simply moved out of view. Teglias slumped against the bloodstained roots of the tree that had saved him, already preparing his next spell.
Ena, still latched to the Beast's back by her robe of chains, had sustained the worst hurt. Isiem couldn't tell if she was unconscious or dead. Blood seeped from her nostrils and darkened her clothing under the chains. Skeletal hands had risen from the depths of the Beast's body and begun digging at the dwarf's neck, working their bony fingertips into her flesh in an apparent effort to pull her head off her shoulders. Several of them had already wormed their way under her skin, and more dug in each second.
Isiem couldn't hurl fire at the Beast without killing Ena. Nor could he strike it with ice or lightning; the destruction wrought by such elemental forces was as imprecise as it was impressive. If it were Copple or Pulcher, or Ganoven, he wouldn't have hesitated, but Ena ...
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