Prophet of the Dead: Forgotten Realms

by Richard Lee Byers

  But he was going to regret his cleverness. However adept he was at his arts, she’d had a hundred years to practice her own, and after she rendered him helpless, he could tell her what had really happened in the north.

  Gripping her staff with both hands, holding it parallel to the deck, she thrust it forth to symbolize forbiddance and defense. She asked the spirits and fey who were her special allies to lend her their strength. Magic sparkled like powdered emeralds in the air around her.

  But something was wrong. She could feel at once that the defense was weak. And when Melemer finished his casting, a tendril of sickly amber phosphorescence shot up from the deck beneath her feet. Twisting around her like a vine strangling a tree, it wrapped itself as tightly as any rope or chain and hoisted her off her feet. Its malignancy burned her wherever it touched, even through her robes, and made her guts cramp with sudden nausea.

  As she retched bile into her mask, Melemer advanced and started a second incantation.

  * * * * *

  In one instant, everything was dark and quiet. Then the world exploded into blinding glare and hot pain. The shock of it made Lod give a screeching hiss and throw his head back, but the glyphs of protection graven inside his ribs and picked out in subtle variations of gray among his scales helped him recover quickly.

  Once he did, he discerned that something had thrown fire at him! Vampires and liches who’d been walking near his cart were frantically trying to extinguish their burning garments, while the draft animals harnessed closest to the cart sprawled charred and smoking in the traces.

  As soon as he’d taken all that in, he heard a female voice declaiming spells that made patches of radiance bright as summer noon light flare into being up and down the length of the column. No, actually, it was worse than simple sunlight. Lod was a creature of Abeir, and for all his erudition, Faerûn’s “gods” and their mortal agents were a mystery to him. But he knew enough to recognize “holiness” when it stung him like a thousand needles.

  He’d expected the deathways to present certain hazards, but certainly not flame, the sun, and divine wrath. For one more muddled, dazzled instant, he imagined he was fighting an army of Rashemi, that they’d somehow learned of the Eminence and its plans and moved to oppose him here before he could even reach their country.

  Then, though, he saw beyond the flame and the light to what was scuttling in the darkness and almost laughed in relief at the teeming shadow creatures. Because if he was mainly dealing with those, he was fighting Sarshethrian, even if the would-be patron devil of the undead had somehow induced mortal spellcasters to join his cause.

  That meant Lod’s grand design was still on track. He just needed to deal with a pest left over from long ago. Fortunately, he’d known it might come to this, and he fancied he was ready.

  First, though, he’d better address the complication posed by the mortals. He wouldn’t be able to devote his full attention to Sarshethrian while someone was trying to set him on fire or, worse, purge undeath itself from his body. He peered around.

  Although she was using a tomb on the slope to the column’s left for cover, he spotted the wizard as soon as she leaned out from behind it to hurl another incendiary spell at him. Her aura of flame made it easy.

  It also made him wonder, even as he hissed a word of warding, swiped at the air, and sent the hurtling spark veering off course, if she was truly human after all. To his arcane perceptions, she looked like mortal flesh and blood but somehow like an elemental as well. Perhaps she was some manner of hybrid.

  Not that it mattered at the moment. He leaned down from his cart, gripped a still-befuddled vampire by the spiky pauldron on his shoulder, and pointed. “The mage is there! See the firelight? Kill her!”

  The vampire hastily chose others to join him in the endeavor, and they headed up the hillside together. Sarshethrian’s murky, half-formed servants scurried forth by the dozen to oppose the undead on foot, but the ones in the air—be they blood drinkers shapeshifted into bats; levitating direhelms; or translucent, faintly luminous wraiths—had a clearer path to their objective.

  Satisfied, Lod next sought the priestess. He’d already noted she was operating on the column’s right flank so she and the wizard could harry it from two directions simultaneously. But at first, he still had difficulty pinpointing her exact location because, unlike her partner, she had the good sense not to kindle light in her own immediate vicinity.

  Fortunately, though, it was impossible for anyone to repeatedly channel the purifying, life-giving power of the sun without it standing out in a world where that force was entirely alien. To his mystical sensitivities, the spot where she was invoking her deity throbbed like a rotten tooth.

  Lod sent a second squad of his followers driving in the cleric’s direction. Then he cast around for Sarshethrian himself.

  But this time, he couldn’t find what he was seeking. The fiend was evidently well hidden and content for the moment to let his minions do the fighting.

  Lod might have done the same in his place. The shadow beasts were low, mindless things, but formidable in their way, and they outnumbered the warriors and mages of the Eminence. It made tactical sense to simply throw them at the column until they wore it away.

  That was why Lod couldn’t allow the battle to continue in that fashion. He reached into his robe, brought out a crystal vial, and, murmuring words of excoriation and compulsion, focused his malice on the eyeball suspended in the cloudy liquid within.

  * * * * *

  Melemer finished his incantation and flicked the fingers of one hand at Yhelbruna. His various rings glowed brighter, and bitter cold jolted her, for an instant effacing the pain of the luminous tendril that bound her and dangled her above the deck.

  The tiefling stopped advancing, tilted his head, and studied her. “Heart not giving out yet?” he said. “Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Not if all the stories about you are true.” He started another spell.

  Yhelbruna exerted her will to shut out the pain of her bonds and likewise to believe that, despite its shocking impotence moments ago, her magic was strong. She whispered an incantation.

  Melemer finished his spell first. Black worms writhed into existence down the length of her body.

  But before they could start burrowing into her flesh, she completed her spell of liberation, and it twisted Melemer’s magic to her own purposes. The soft, squirming creatures gnawed at her glowing bonds instead of her, and the vinelike spiral flickered into nonexistence as it came apart.

  The worms likewise falling away and vanishing, Yhelbruna dropped back onto the deck. She tried to stay upright but, unable to catch her balance, banged down on one knee. That too, was going to hurt when pain slipped past the barrier she’d raised against it.

  Melemer’s chatoyant eyes goggled at her. Then he snatched the long knife from his belt and rushed her.

  She knew she wasn’t ready to withstand him with magic or her rusty quarterstaff skills either. She scrambled to her feet, dashed to the rail, and swung herself over. The dagger made a whizzing sound as it slashed past, just shy of her flesh.

  The barge stood tall on its runners. Yhelbruna snapped a word that should have slowed her fall. Again, magic flowed sluggishly, weakly, in answer to her call. She landed with a thump but at least didn’t break or sprain anything or crash right through the ice.

  She scurried into the pool of shadow under the barge’s hull. That would keep Melemer from throwing spells at her from up on deck. Then she heard the warlock whistle.

  She felt a renewed pang of desperation because the whistle was surely a signal. He’d had one or more confederates waiting to cut her off if she managed to escape the barge or decided at the last moment not to board in the first place. Thus, she was in even greater peril than she’d imagined.

  She didn’t know why her magic was feeble—some hostile enchantment centered on the barge, perhaps—and didn’t have time to try to figure it out. But maybe she could transcend the debilitating influence i
n the moment she did have.

  She peered out at Selûne trailing her haze of glittering tears across the western sky. One of the Three was looking down on her, and the Three had never failed her.

  Then she considered the lake, frozen over now but still teeming with fish, fey, and spirits beneath its covering of ice. Like the favor of the goddesses, the life of the lake was a well of power she could draw from at need, even if the pulse of that vitality suddenly felt faint and faraway. Surely that was only an illusion.

  Something thumped down on the ice and roused her from her effort to center herself. Peering, she saw that Olthe, the burly sellsword priestess of Tempus, had jumped down from the dock.

  The battleguard spotted Yhelbruna too. Spinning her axe and tossing it from hand to hand, she advanced and said, “Come out from under the boat, hathran. Let’s finish this.” Her melodious alto voice was a surprise issuing from that homely, sneering face and mannish frame.

  But what was the point of talking now or of the flashy display with the axe, for that matter? Yhelbruna thought she knew. Reciting under her breath, she edged forward like she did indeed intend to come out into the open and accept Olthe’s challenge. When she reached the last line of the incantation, though, she spun around.

  For an instant, she saw nothing but ice and wondered if she’d guessed wrongly. Then a dozen batlike shreds of shadow swooped down, swirled together, and became a small horned figure ideally positioned to attack her from behind if she were still facing the other way.

  She spit the final words of her spell. In an instant, brambles grew from the side of the ice barge—let’s see how Melemer liked being bound! The thorns ripped his flesh as the briars snaked and crisscrossed around him, and the warlock screamed.

  Yhelbruna jerked back around. Olthe had stopped advancing and started praying, chopping the air with her axe in time to the words.

  Recognizing the spell, Yhelbruna threw herself sideways. A vertical bolt of flame surged down through the spot she’d just abandoned. It blasted through the bottom of the barge and smashed and melted a steaming hole in the ice.

  The heat seared Yhelbruna too, in the instant before she floundered out of range, but not severely enough to balk her. She stabbed her staff at Olthe, and with a boom, a dazzling flare of lightning leaped forth and stabbed into the battleguard’s torso.

  Somehow remaining upright despite the slipperiness of the ice, Olthe danced a twitching, lurching dance for the moments the magic lasted. Then, her body smoking, she toppled forward.

  Yhelbruna pivoted. Melemer was still tangled in the briars but no longer shrieking and struggling. Before the woody bonds stopped growing, thorns had lodged in the corners of his mouth and stretched it wide. The grimace might almost have looked comical if stickers hadn’t ended up in his eyes as well.

  Yhelbruna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Controlling one’s breathing was supposed to promote calmness, but she started trembling with reaction anyway.

  She wished she could pause where she was and wait for her nerves to settle, but it wasn’t possible. Now that she knew for a fact that Bez and his sellswords were dastards, she needed to make sure Mangan’s guards took them into custody forthwith.

  As she tried to work out how best to accomplish that, she registered the burning foulness in her mouth. She bared her face and did her best to spit the taste of bile away, then strode back to shore, scooped up a handful of snow, and used it to scour the vomit from inside her mask.

  * * * * *

  Sarshethrian advanced but not witlessly. He did so amid another wave of scuttling shadow creatures and wrapped in supernatural defenses. Even at a distance, Lod could feel the extra power pulsing inside the fiend’s ragged shroud of murky tentacles.

  Lod’s followers lunged forward to meet the onrushing vermin. Each of his comrades, he believed, certainly every direhelm, doomsept, specter, or vampire, was more than a match for any one of Sarshethrian’s minions. But superior numbers might still overwhelm the Eminence in the end.

  Except that Lod didn’t intend to let it come to that. He crawled down from his cart, slithered toward the ranks of undead fighting savagely to hold back the shadow creatures, and refocused his will on the eye floating in the vial.

  Sarshethrian’s voice sounded from the empty air. “The eye has power over me in your world, not in mine. Especially now that I’ve taken measures against it.”

  “It pulled you out of your hiding place,” Lod replied. The charm Sarshethrian had cast to facilitate communication would carry his words to the demon as well.

  Sarshethrian laughed. “I was coming out anyway. I want a good view of your final moments.”

  “I’m afraid your days of viewing anything are over.” Lod hissed an incantation and clenched his fist around the vial, shattering the crystal and crushing its contents.

  Sarshethrian cried and clapped his hand to the eye that was still in his head.

  Lod reared up on his coils so he could cast further spells at the fiend without the combatants on the ground between them getting in the way. The potential drawback was that by rising higher, he also made himself a better target for any hostile entity on the battlefield. But as quick glances confirmed, the wizard and priestess were busy fighting the undead he’d sent against them, and Sarshethrian’s flying servants, murky things like enormous, malformed flies, were less of a threat. When one oriented on him, he spoke a word of power, pointed, and tore it apart with darts of crimson light.

  Then he plucked a black pearl wrapped in a filigree of true-silver wire from one of his pockets, brandished it over his head, and chanted a spell of binding. Argent power flared from the talisman to the blinded, staggering Sarshethrian, whereupon the fiend cried out and vanished. Lod’s bony fingers felt a throb of presence like sudden added weight within in the gem.

  He laughed, and then a blow from behind shattered his scapula and raked on down to snap several ribs as well.

  Lod wrenched himself around. Neither trapped in the pearl nor even eyeless, although black ichor did streak his pallid cheek, Sarshethrian was floating in the air just a couple of yards away, close enough that his shadow arms could easily whip across the intervening distance. Several shot out at once.

  Lod swayed backward atop his reptilian coils. One tentacle still caught the hand containing the evidently useless pearl and jerked it off his wrist. A second lashed around a floating rib and snapped it loose. But the others fell short and failed to envelop him utterly as Sarshethrian plainly intended.

  The fiend flew closer to press the attack. Still twisting, dodging, Lod hissed a word of slaying.

  That worked, at least to some degree. Sarshethrian went rigid as venom, virulent as the bites of a dozen adders, streamed through his veins.

  After an instant, mobility returned, and the fiend sneered and reached anew. By that time, though, the end of Lod’s tail was hurtling down at him.

  The blow smashed Sarshethrian to earth. Lod snarled a word of constraint to keep his foe from shifting through space and so slipping out from under the weight and pressure of his lower portion.

  An instant later, though, Sarshethrian’s shadow arms curled to slash at the member holding him down. Chunks of bloodless, leathery tissue flew through the air, and bone showed through the gashes where it had been. At the same time, the fiend spit three words, and Lod had a dizzying sensation of spinning upward as his psyche began to separate from his body.

  He snarled an incantation of defense and clutched with his remaining hand to symbolize the act of clinging to what was his. He had to grip so tightly that he cracked his own finger bones, but the counterspell worked. His essence locked down into his physical form again.

  As it did, he saw that Sarshethrian had nearly wriggled out from under what was left of his tail. Shrieking, Lod charged his hand with the essence of sharpness, whipped his upper body downward like a common serpent striking at prey, drove his fingers through the fiend’s torso, and nailed him to the ground.

  That g
ave the shadow arms another chance to assail the more human portion of him, but instinct, or perhaps simply an irresistible fury, told him to keep attacking, not pull back. As tentacles hooked in his eye sockets, the corners of his jaw, around vertebrae and ribs, and pulled in opposing directions, he sent more of the pure lethal idea of venom pulsing down his arm and out the fang his hand had become.

  Sarshethrian’s one dark but lustrous eye opened wide. The shadow arms faltered, frayed, and attenuated into something as insubstantial as mist.

  I know what you’re thinking, Lod silently observed, meanwhile infusing his foe with even more poison. This can’t be happening. Because you’re the god of your own little world, and I’m just an artificial thing, a slave, doomed and forgotten until you set me free. But your notions are out of date. I long ago surpassed you.

  Sarshethrian tried again to rend Lod with his shadow arms. For a moment, the bone naga could feel their touch, but it was light and soft as feathers. Then the lashing tentacles vanished entirely, and the fiend blackened, shrank, and twisted like a mortal burning to death.

  Once he was certain Sarshethrian was truly gone, Lod pulled his hand from the devil’s corpse and wished he could linger over it and savor the moment. But his disciples, his brothers and sisters in undeath, deserved better of him. He reared up and looked around to see how they were faring.

  The answer was, about as well as he’d had any right to hope. They’d suffered losses holding back the shadow creatures, but hold them back they had. And with their master slain, Sarshethrian’s minions were abandoning the battle. Big as bears, malformed fleas hopped toward the openings in one of the walls that bounded the vault containing the graveyard. Although vague and murky to begin with, the giant rats became more shapeless still as they simply melted into the dead grass and dark earth under their paws.

  Satisfied, Lod recited a spell of restoration. His severed hand and the rest of his lost bones floated up into the air and converged on him to fuse themselves back into place. New gray flesh smeared itself across the wounds in his tail like butter spread by an invisible knife.