A ghoul slashed Bareris’s horse’s shoulder with its long, dirty claws, and the animal lurched off balance. Fearful that the virulence of the undead creature’s touch had paralyzed his steed, the bard riposted with a head cut. The ghoul fell, and not crippled after all, the destrier regained its footing and raced onward.
Overhead, griffons screeched, men shouted, and magic boomed and crackled. Plastered with writhing skin kites, a winged steed and its master crashed on a roof, tumbled down the pitch, and dropped in a heap in the street. Bareris looked to see if it was Aoth and Brightwing who’d fallen—it wasn’t—but otherwise didn’t even glance at the portion of the fight raging in the air. He didn’t dare divert his attention from his own assailants.
He hacked a skeleton’s skull off the top of its spine, felt more than saw a lunging shadow, and obliterated it with a thrust. Then, suddenly, no foes remained within reach of his blade. He peered about and saw that he and his companions had fought their way clear.
They galloped onward. Skillful enough to sound his instrument even astride a running horse, Milsantos’s trumpeter blew more calls on his horn. His efforts were supposed to create the impression that the riders were signaling the bulk of the army they’d just left behind to enable the two forces to act in concert, to make the nighthaunt worry that the tharchions were well on the way to the culmination of some cunning strategy, even if it wasn’t apparent what it was, and that their adversaries had better act swiftly to balk them.
In Bareris’s judgment, it wasn’t an entirely preposterous notion. Plainly their company could do some damage if left unopposed to maneuver and strike at the rear of the undead host, and even if the nighthaunt wasn’t concerned about that, they could still hope their manifest vulnerability would draw it out into the open.
One of the griffon riders yelled, “There!”
Bareris looked up, saw the nighthaunt staring down at him from the battlements atop the gate of the central keep, and immediately comprehended why even a veteran war mage like Aoth feared the dead black, pale-eyed monstrosity. Though its mere presence didn’t poison a man like Xingax’s could—at least not at this distance—it nonetheless seemed the very embodiment of boundless power wed to unrelenting, all-encompassing hatred. A man could scarcely bear to look at it, and at the same time, transfixed with dread, he found it all but impossible to tear his gaze away. Wings ragged and peeling, body oozing slime, a larger and even more hideous creature stood beside the leader of the undead marauders, while luminous shades hovered in the air behind it, but in that first terrible moment, Bareris scarcely even registered their existence.
“Halt!” shouted Milsantos, and for the most part, the Thayan horsemen obeyed. They had no need to ride farther now that the nighthaunt had appeared, but two men, their nerve breaking, wheeled and fled back the way they’d come.
Tharchions, the nighthaunt said, his silent psychic voice beating at Bareris’s mind like a bludgeon. My name is Ysval. You fight well but have no hope of winning. Yield and I’ll spare you, not to continue precisely as you are, but you and your captains at least will retain your essential identities.
“No,” Milsantos said. “The council of zulkirs ordered us to destroy you, and that’s what we intend to do.”
I hoped you’d answer thusly, Ysval said.
He lashed his wings and hurtled down into the midst of his foes. Trained war-horses screamed and shied. The nighthaunt tore one animal’s head off with a swipe of his talons. Blood sprayed from the end of the shredded neck. The wraiths followed their captain toward their mortal foes.
In response, some of the battle mages aimed wands or rattled off incantations. Priests brandished the symbols of their faiths and cried the names of their gods. Flares of power, some visible, some not, flung some specters backward like leaves in a gale and seared others from existence.
Other spellcasters read the trigger phrases from scrolls. Walls of roaring fire and shimmering light sprang up around the horsemen, some at ground level, others floating in midair. Unfortunately, they weren’t large and numerous enough to overlap and enclose the riders completely. Wraiths could and no doubt would slip through the gaps between barriers, but at least they’d no longer find it possible to overwhelm their opponents in a single onrushing, irresistible swarm.
In theory, that should leave the majority of the Thayans free to focus on Ysval and the relatively small number of lesser undead that had succeeded in closing before the magical barriers sprang into existence. No doubt recognizing that he’d blundered into a snare, the nighthaunt stopped lashing out with claw and tail and simply stood for a moment. Bareris surmised the creature was trying to shift himself to the safety of another level of existence, but nothing happened. Studying ancient texts, the enchanters had discovered that nighthaunts possessed that particular ability, and one of them had already cast a spell to keep him from exploiting it.
Ysval laughed. Well done, but it won’t save you. I could kill the lot of you all by myself if necessary. He shook his fist and enormous hailstones hammered from the air, ringing on the armor of the foes in front of him.
Bareris sang a charm and urged his reluctant mount closer to Ysval. Then the horse thrashed and toppled. Bareris kicked his feet from the stirrups, flung himself out of the saddle, and though he landed hard, just managed to keep the animal’s weight from smashing down on top of his leg.
He scrambled to his feet and found himself facing Tammith across the steed’s still-shuddering carcass.
Tammith felt as if she’d been split into two creatures. One had struggled with all her strength to turn away from Bareris, and if she couldn’t flee the battle altogether at least kill other people instead. But the other, demonic and perverse, lusted to destroy him precisely because she’d loved him her whole life long, and that Tammith proved the stronger. Reveling in her newly acquired strength, she leaped from the rooftop where she’d been lurking, hoping to drop on a horseman as he rode by, rushed Bareris’s mount, and bit a chunk of flesh from the underside of its neck, all before he even realized she was there. The charger fell, and she hoped he’d wind up stuck underneath it. If so, he’d be helpless. Easy prey.
But he threw himself clear, rose, and his eyes widened at the sight of her. She spat out the wad of gory horseflesh in her mouth, and that made his dear, handsome features twist. To her, with her divided psyche, his horror and grief were simultaneously excruciating and the funniest thing she’d ever seen.
“Are you still going to rescue me?” she asked, grinning.
“Yes,” he said. “If it can be done, I’ll do it. Just give me the chance. Don’t make me hurt you.”
“You’re right,” she said, “we mustn’t fight. No matter what happens or what I’ve become, we mustn’t hurt one another.” She turned away from him, then instantly spun back around and leaped over the body of the horse.
Though she’d believed her deception persuasive, he was ready to receive her attack. Even so, her outstretched hands nearly grabbed him, but with a quickness that suggested he was employing his charm of speed, he sidestepped and slashed open her belly in almost the same place where he’d wounded her before.
It hurt. Her guts started to slide through the rent, and doubling over, she clutched at herself to hold them in. She swayed and fell onto her side.
This time, her pretense was evidently more convincing, for with a seasoned warrior’s caution, Bareris then looked about, checking for any foes that might have crept up on him while he was busy with her. He believed her incapacitated, and why shouldn’t he? The same sort of injury had neutralized her before.
But as Xingax had promised, she grew stronger every day, and as a result, she healed more rapidly. As soon as Bareris turned his head, she flowed to her feet and pounced at him.
Darts of golden light streaked down from overhead to stab into her body and make her falter. A deep male voice bellowed, “Behind you!” Bareris pivoted, and as she lunged, he extended his sword. She stopped just short of the point, sprang back,
and started shifting back and forth, trying to confuse him and create an opening. Her predatory instincts instructed her in the proper way to feint and glide.
She wasn’t fooling Bareris. He was too canny. She stood still, stared into his eyes, and tried to catch and crush his will, but that didn’t work either. In fact, as soon as she made herself a stationary target, he ran at her and slashed her leg out from underneath her.
She fell. He stopped, turned, and hesitated. When he cut at her spine, she understood that he’d been trying to calculate how best to incapacitate her without destroying her. The slight pause gave her time to explode into a flock of bats.
With her consciousness divided among her various bodies, her humanity, or what remained of it, diffused along with it, and her need to kill Bareris became as pure as it was profound. She nearly succumbed to the urge to attack.
Nearly, but not quite, because though conscience and mercy were gone, memory remained, and she recalled that he knew a song to repel her in this guise. The bats flew several yards beyond his reach, swirled around one another, and coalesced into her womanly form once more. Her gashed leg throbbed as it took her weight but didn’t give way. It was mostly healed already.
She hobbled toward him, trying to make it appear that her damaged limb was weaker than it was. He swung his sword into a low guard, and she noticed he wasn’t singing. Just as he was too averse to fighting her to attempt a killing blow, so too was he neglecting to exploit his magic to best advantage.
In effect, that meant he’d already surrendered, for half measures couldn’t save him. He was forcing her to murder him, to carry the resulting anguish through all the years of her endless undead existence, and his weakness and selfishness enraged her. She rushed him, his sword whirled up to threaten her, and she sprang at him anyway. The blade sheared into her side, but not enough to balk her. She slammed into him and carried him to the ground beneath her.
He gasped at the grip of her hands, cold and poisonous as any specter’s touch. She could have leeched the life from him through that contact, but it wouldn’t be as satisfying as draining his blood. Grappling, seeking to immobilize him, she opened her mouth to bite.
Bareris bellowed up into her face, and the thunderous sound seared her like a blast of fire. The world went black, and the sudden pain made her fumble her grip on her prey. Bareris shoved her and heaved himself out from underneath her.
Her sight began to restore itself after a moment, but the world remained a blurry, murky place. Still, she could make out Bareris scrambling to his feet, and her ruined face hanging in tatters from her skull, she jumped up to attack him once again.
He started chanting, and she laughed to hear it. Good, she thought, you understand now. I’m not your beloved anymore.
I’m unclean, foul, and a slave to creatures fouler still. Please, please, destroy me if you can.
Meanwhile, she strove to strike, seize, and bite him as relentlessly as ever. Her throat burned with thirst.
His magic shrouded him in a misty vagueness that made it even more difficult for her half-blind eyes to pick him out. Still, she thought she’d judged where he was and sprang to grab hold of him.
He twisted away, avoiding her touch and leaving her floundering off balance for just an instant, time enough for his sword to leap at her neck. He bellowed a war cry as it sheared into her flesh and the bone underneath.
The world seemed to jump, and then she was on the ground, her right profile pressed against the dirt. She tried to rise but couldn’t move. A long shape sprawled in front of her, and after a moment she recognized her own decapitated body.
The realization stunned her. It was so quick, she thought. After she and Bareris had fought so hard, so intimately, it didn’t seem real that a single sudden cut had ended everything.
Looming over her like a giant, weeping, Bareris stepped between her and her body. He raised his sword over his head.
Mirror had a sense that he was supposed to engage Ysval if possible. Had someone so instructed him? He couldn’t recall, but it seemed right. He strode toward the ink-black creature and the legionnaires who were fighting the thing already. A different warrior called out to him, but like so many things, the words simply failed to convey any meaning.
In another moment, however, a second voice, a soft, insinuating baritone, snagged him and pulled him around to face a man wrapped in a hooded gray mantle. The speaker was alive, but even so, Mirror discerned without knowing or wondering how he knew that he was one of the enemy, likely a warlock who’d employed magic to avoid detection hitherto.
The mage swirled his hands through mystic passes. “You’re undead,” he crooned. “You belong on our side.”
Mirror felt something changing inside him. Like any sensation, it was seductive, simply because it filled the emptiness, but even so, it seemed to him that he shouldn’t allow it to continue. He sprang at the wizard, closing the distance with one prodigious leap, and drove his sword into the man’s chest. To his vague disappointment, the weapon didn’t cleave flesh or spill blood like a proper blade, but it did stop the mage’s heart.
Mirror pivoted back toward Ysval and observed another horror battling its way toward the nighthaunt. Tall as an ogre, approximately female in form, the winged, leprous entity ravaged men and horses with her talons, shredding them and rotting their flesh with gangrene all in an instant. Even the liquid filth streaming from her open sores was dangerous, blistering any living creature it touched.
Mirror abruptly recalled that such abominations were known as angels of decay. He thought he might have encountered one on a different battleground but couldn’t actually remember.
In any case, the sight of her sharpened his awareness of the battle as a whole, and he recognized what a mistake it would be to allow her and Ysval to stand together. The nighthaunt was already holding his own against the men-at-arms and battle mages assailing him from all sides. If such a formidable comrade came to his aid, the mortals would have no chance at all.
Fortunately, Mirror thought he could prevent that. Though he dimly recalled someone calling him “undead” at some point in the past, he didn’t know if he truly was or not, but instinct whispered that neither the angel’s infectious touch nor her slather of corrosive muck had any power to harm him.
He flew at her and cut at her flank. Lightning-quick, she twisted out of the way and slashed with her talons. The first blow somehow streaked harmlessly through him, but he sensed that the next one would smash and tear, and he raised his arm to intercept it. As he started the motion, he wore no shield, but by the time he finished, there it was, round and affixed to his forearm by three sturdy straps. He knew it should have a coat-of-arms painted on the front and momentarily longed to view it.
He couldn’t, of course, not while he was fighting. The angel’s talons slammed into the targe and knocked him backward. Seeking to deny him time to recover, the creature lunged after him. Flinging spatters of slime, her flaking wing swatted him and sent him reeling farther.
He thought that would likely prove the end of him, but strangely, a simple exertion of will served to halt his flailing stagger and restore his equilibrium, as if he had no weight at all. He thrust at the angel, caught her by surprise, and his shadowy blade slid deep into her cankerous torso.
She cried out in her rasping voice, stumbled, but she didn’t fall. He pulled his sword back, and they traded blows. Sometimes she evaded his strokes and sometimes they sheared into her, albeit without leaving a mark thereafter. At certain moments, her talons whizzed harmlessly through him, at others, his shield or plate defected them, and occasionally, they slashed him. Then he experienced a shock that was less pain than an upheaval of the elements of his being. The aching hollow at his core yawned wide, threatening to swallow everything else.
It was difficult to tell how many times the angel needed to wound him before that would actually happen, just as it was hard to judge how badly he was hurting her. He truly had no idea who was winning until she sudde
nly pitched forward. Her corpse liquefied completely almost before it splashed facedown in the street.
Victory over such a formidable foe filled him with triumph, and intense emotion sharpened and deepened his thoughts. He sensed that he’d fought many times, and war remained his proper occupation. It might not ever make him remember, but at least while embroiled in the midst of it he comprehended there was something he’d forgotten.
He flew at Ysval.
Bareris’s hand was steady as he hacked open Tammith’s severed head to cut the brain within, then he slid his enchanted blade into her heart. He felt as numb and empty of feeling as any of the zombies he’d faced this day.
As soon as he finished, however, he started to shake, and anguish and self-loathing welled up inside him.
At the end, he’d had no choice but to slay Tammith. Otherwise, she would certainly have killed him, and as it turned out, it simply hadn’t been in him to surrender to that.
He’d likewise deemed it necessary to desecrate Tammith’s remains, lest she rise to fight anew. Yet he now understood that such an act, however essential, could be unbearable and unforgivable as well.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to run his sword into his own heart.
But that would mean abandoning the fight to defeat Xingax, Ysval, and the necromancers, and that was unacceptable. The wretches had to be punished. They had to lose and suffer and die.
Singing a pledge of vengeance, he cast about to see where Ysval was.
Aoth thrust the point of his lance into a shadow. The phantom frayed into tatters of darkness.
The ghosts were coming faster now, more and more of them finding their way through the gaps in the sheets of flame and planes of radiance the wizards had conjured to hold them back. Aoth and his fellow griffon riders fought doggedly to keep the spirits in the air from flying down to aid their commander.
Unclean: The Haunted Lands Page 29
