Prophet of the Dead: Forgotten Realms

by Richard Lee Byers

  So perhaps after all he had no satisfactory options. He turned and noticed Uregaunt standing by a chute used to roll enchanted missiles over the side and an open crate of such sigil-inscribed iron and ceramic orbs. The old artilleryman was watching him with a sardonic expression that suggested he’d guessed the direction of his commander’s thoughts.

  Bez snorted. “Perhaps I was a bit rash when I claimed we were the saviors of Rashemen. Now it appears we’re obliged to make good on that.”

  “I figured,” Uregaunt said. He picked up a clay ball, set it behind the gate in the top of the chute, spit on it, and drew a four-pointed star with the spittle and a callused fingertip. For a moment, the trails of moisture sizzled and steamed.

  * * * * *

  By the time Cera and her comrades came in sight of the main force of undead, it was dark as night, and the air stank of decay. A foul taste in her mouth kept coming back no matter how many times she spit it away, and her skin crawled.

  On Vandar’s command, she and her allies had finished their approach at a run. Such recklessness apparently didn’t trouble berserkers or even Old Ones and hathrans, but it had certainly made her nervous.

  She could tell haste had paid off, though. Some of the living corpses and such were still scrambling and lurching around in seeming confusion, while the Rashemi hadn’t entirely forsaken tactics or organization. She and the hathrans had warrior and golem protectors arrayed around them. Unless the fight went badly, she might not even require her borrowed mace and targe.

  She still wished she had her lost gilded weapon, symbolic as it had been of the Keeper’s power. But she could do without it. If she’d learned anything in the past few tendays, it was that her god stood with her always, in the deepest darkness and the most dire circumstances, and it was time to demonstrate that blessed truth to the unnatural horrors before her.

  As berserkers roared their battle cries and charged the foe, she raised the mace over her head and recited a prayer. The gloom and the stench of decay thickened around her, and for a moment, she feared she might grow faint or vomit. But she didn’t. She kept her voice steady and her will focused.

  A shaft of golden radiance stabbed down from overhead to set the mace aglow. She swung the weapon at the enemy, and the captured sunlight leaped forth in a flash. An enormous bat—a vampiric shapeshifter, she assumed—vanished in a puff of flame. Wraiths shredded as though invisible razors were slicing them. Even dark fey, rat-sized flying men with several black bulging eyes and veined transparent wings, flinched from the flare.

  The flash also revealed, if only by failing to penetrate it, the cloud of seething murk at the very center of the stand of weir trees. It felt like an open wound in the skin of the world, or perhaps the fang embedded in such a wound to inject the venom that was Shadow.

  In other words, it was the visible manifestation of the enchantments the durthans had been casting to tilt the balance of primal forces at play in Rashemen. It was a foe that, as much as any jagged-fanged ghoul, misty wraith, or even Lod himself, the land’s defenders needed to destroy.

  And Cera couldn’t tackle that holy task from across the battlefield.

  She turned to her nearest guardian, Aoth’s new sellsword Orgurth. “Can we fight our way forward?” she asked.

  The orc grinned. “Probably not, but let’s try.”

  * * * * *

  The urge to hurl fire at the foe hammered inside Jhesrhi like a frantic heartbeat, all the more insistent because, even before crippling Tchazzar, she’d generally wielded flame against the undead. She was having trouble even thinking of other spells.

  But now that she’d returned to the mortal world, all four elements were her friends, and by the Seven Stars, she’d cast the magic she needed to cast! A direhelm flew down at her, and she spoke to the wind. A spirit of the air seized the animate suit of half-plate and swept it away, crashing it into one tree trunk after another as it gradually came apart.

  Zombies with lambent amber eyes circled to flank berserkers too busy slashing and chopping at ghouls to notice. Jhesrhi pointed her staff and recited as quickly as was possible in one of the ponderous languages of Root Hold. Rumbling, the patch of earth beneath the zombies tilted, one end rising and the other sinking, tumbling them backward and half burying them in the snow that slid along with them.

  The dead men were still clumsily trying to stand back up when Jhesrhi spotted Cera and her bodyguards advancing and led her own squad forward to support her. Her blood felt deliciously hot pumping through her veins, and scowling, she willed it cool again.

  * * * * *

  The unnatural gloom felt nasty enough to set a person’s teeth on edge. Yet Yhelbruna took a certain perverse pleasure in experiencing it for what it was, and particularly in working magic despite its almost conscious efforts to break her concentration with twinges of fear and nausea and block her links to the fountainheads of her power. For now that she understood what plagued her, she could cope.

  So, too, could the entities rushing to answer her call. Driven into hiding or dormancy as the durthans corrupted the natural balance of light and dark in the Urlingwood, they were eager to retaliate now that true hathrans were rallying them.

  An ancient pine that had uprooted itself and taken on a crudely human form to march to war wrestled a dark fey much like itself. Meanwhile, smaller combatants scurried away from the giants’ many-toed feet to keep from being trampled.

  A maiden made of water spoke in a voice like a gurgling brook and compelled a warrior made of ice to melt into liquid too. They embraced, kissed, and merged into a single rippling form that poured down into the snowy ground and vanished an instant later.

  Rearing on its hind legs, a huge black bear beheaded a walking corpse with a swipe of its paw. A pace or two away, a more ethereal telthor, a semitransparent woodpecker, lit on a ghoul’s head and pecked. The undead scavenger howled and flailed at the bird, but its clawed hands slapped right through its small assailant without knocking it away.

  Smiling, Yhelbruna raised her staff and centered herself anew. So far, she’d called only bright fey and spirits native to the world of mortal men. But despite the hindrance of the darkness, her summonings were working well enough to suggest she could draw allies from the Feywild as well.

  But as she spoke the first words of such a calling, cold pain stabbed between her ribs. She looked down just in time to behold the shadowy suggestion of an arrow sticking out of her side before it disappeared.

  She was certain she hadn’t taken a mortal or even debilitating wound, not given her inherent mystical resilience, and not from such a weapon. But as she struggled to cast off the shock of it, seven phantom warriors, their inconstant shapes blurred and tangled into a single cloud of twitching faces and murky blades, swept at her.

  A steel automaton in the shape of a wild boar stopped one murky figure with a slash of its tusks. An Old One cast darts of white light from a brazen gauntlet to obliterate another. Snatching for the wand she’d sheathed to more easily manipulate her staff, Yhelbruna shouted a word of power. A scythe-like curve of congealed moonlight flowed into existence before her, then slashed in a horizontal arc.

  The attack caught an apparition with a short, curved blade in either hand, and it faltered just like a living man whose guts suddenly threatened to slide out the rip in his belly. But either leaping over the strike or ducking under it, the other four aspects of the doomsept avoided harm.

  And now they were all around Yhelbruna, shadowy axes poised to chop and short swords ready to thrust. Could she destroy them all before one of them cut her down? She doubted it, but she could at least make them pay for her death. She thrust her wand at the ghost directly in front of her.

  A crackling bolt of lightning leaped from the tip of the weapon. Pierced through, her target twisted like a cloth wrung by unseen hands and disappeared.

  At the same instant, Vandar rushed in and dispitched another phantom with a slash of the red sword. The last time Yhelbruna had caugh
t sight of him, he’d been berserk fighting at the very forefront of the attack. Judging from the ferocity manifest in his twisted face, rage still possessed him, yet even so, he’d noticed her peril and raced to help her.

  Without pausing, he pivoted toward another phantom just as it was starting to swing its axe at him. Though he surely perceived the threat, he didn’t jump back or even dodge. He simply cut with catlike quickness and trusted his stroke to land first.

  It did. And when the scarlet blade sliced into the ghost, it and its hurtling axe disappeared.

  That fortunate attack still left one aspect of the doomsept unscathed. Yhelbruna spun in a swirl of cloak, seeking it, and found it just as darts of blue light pierced it and made it boil and smoke into nonexistence. Wheeling overhead on Jet’s back, eyes glowing, Aoth saluted her and Vandar with a dip of his spear before turning to find his next foe.

  At the same time, following their new king Jet’s lead, the wild griffons came swooping and diving into battle. The golden telthor plunged down on a lich with a pair of dragon fangs raised above his head in invocation. The impact all but smashed the skeletal wizard flat, and when his hands convulsively gripped the talismans, the edges cut his leathery fingers off.

  Screeching, other griffons tore holes in a shield wall of zombie spearmen, then climbed and wheeled for a second pass. Booming thunderbolts and missiles that burst into corrosive vapor when they hit the ground rained down as even the dastards aboard the Storm of Vengeance began to play their parts in Aoth’s strategy.

  Yhelbruna supposed she’d better keep playing hers as well. As she considered what spell to cast next and where to cast it, Vandar fixed on a white-faced vampire warrior whose sword and chin alike were wet with blood. The berserker screamed like a griffon and charged.

  * * * * *

  A company of bright fey was advancing, or at least Lod assumed the score of warriors and the two sorceresses in their midst were fey. They looked like elves might look if some whimsical power whittled them even skinnier, painted their skins with faint striations, and replaced their hair with tufts of leaves. As if to give the lie to their spindly, fragile appearance, they bore outsized, two-handed cleaverlike weapons that few human beings could have wielded with any semblance of grace or skill.

  They evidently had faith in their prowess, for despite Lod’s daunting appearance, they were coming on without hesitation. He rebuked their arrogance by hissing a word that stabbed pain through their eyes and struck them blind. Only temporarily, but they were still stumbling around in the snow, calling out to one another, and wiping bloody tears when skeletons came running to cut them down.

  It was a satisfying moment. But any pleasure Lod might otherwise have taken in it withered when he twisted away to survey the battle as a whole.

  Rashemen was supposed to be easy prey, backward to begin with, witless and feeble now that the Eminence had rotted it from within. Yet somehow the allegedly befuddled, broken realm had mustered a formidable little army and had known exactly where to send it.

  The Eminence hadn’t lost the resulting battle yet. But it very well might. Lod assumed that he, who had, after all, bested Sarshethrian, was more than a match for any single combatant among the foe. But even he couldn’t be everywhere buttressing every part of the defense at once.

  Nor was the ambient darkness likely to take up the slack. It hindered the living to an extent, but not enough now that they understood its toxicity.

  If only he and the durthans could have continued their rites uninterrupted for a few more days! Then no amount of defensive charms or sheer determination would have saved the attackers from weakening and ultimately strangling on the gloom.

  But what, Lod wondered abruptly, if he and his comrades didn’t actually need a few more days? For safety’s sake, wizards customarily performed their greatest works with protracted, painstaking care. But the present enterprise was already well advanced with mystical safeguards in place. Surely, at this point, competent spellcasters could pick up the pace.

  He cast around, spotted Nyevarra sweeping her antler-topped staff through looping mystic passes, and crawled in her direction. On the way, he observed the sun priestess and fire mage who’d escaped from the Fortress of the Half-Demon fighting their way forward.

  He supposed the two women had overheard too much while in captivity, that the hathrans and such were here because they’d guided them here, and felt a vicious urge to pause and strike the escapees down. He didn’t, though. He kept moving.

  Unfortunately, no matter how single-minded he was, he couldn’t stop the enemy from assailing him and slowing his progress. Sheltered behind golems and spearmen, a hathran chanted and brandished a scythe at him. Growing out of empty air, rose vines wrapped around him, binding him, the thorns jabbing into his scales and even the naked bones of his upper body. Meanwhile, the perfume of the crimson flowers filled his head and made it swim.

  He snarled words of negation and reprisal. The vines vanished, and staggering, the witch yanked up her mask to retch squirming maggots into the snow.

  An iron ball arced out of the sky. He caught it, chanted to it, released it, and it flew back up into the air, reversing its trajectory to burst at its point of origin.

  Finally, he reached Nyevarra. The durthan was reciting what he recognized as a summoning spell even though he couldn’t tell precisely what she was calling. More useless fey, most likely. Nearby, Uramar was conferring with a lich whose shriveled face and limbs were furry with grave mold.

  For a moment, gazing down at the hulking blaspheme and the little witch in her mask of blackened silver made Lod feel as disgusted as he had peering across the battlefield at the sun priestess and fire mage. And why shouldn’t it? Wasn’t Uramar and Nyevarra’s bungling equally responsible for this crisis?

  Well, perhaps not equally, and in any case, the two were his undead kindred, and he needed them. With an effort, he put aside the impulse to blame.

  Nyevarra finished her spell, and half a dozen big, vulturine entities flapped out of nowhere to assail a griffon. She then turned and peered up at Lod.

  “Well done,” he said. “But I need your help with a special task.”

  “Anything,” she replied.

  “We need to pull the breach wider. Let Shadow flood through until our magic is invincible and our enemies sicken and die.”

  Nyevarra hesitated. Then: “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Of course you can! You’re powerful, and so is the staff you carry. And I’m going to help.”

  “You don’t understand. Adjusting the balance with a measure of care is one thing. But we don’t dare just unleash death and decay on the Urlingwood to do absolutely anything they want. There needs to be a living forest when our conquest is over.”

  “There probably will be, and even if there isn’t, Rashemen will still hold power for the Eminence to harness.”

  “We can win this fight without risking the soul of the land!”

  “You led troops during your mortal existence. You should know how to assess the progress of a battle. Take a look at this one and then tell me you’re certain of victory.” He gestured toward the frenzied confusion of griffons screeching, berserkers shouting, blades clashing on shields and the stone and metal flanks of golems, and flares of magic banging and shrilling.

  Nyevarra hesitated again, and then Uramar, who must at some point have finished palavering with the lich, diffidently rested a big, mottled hand, all crooked, ill-matched fingers and old but still prominent suture scars, on her shoulder.

  “I know you didn’t want to,” the blaspheme said, “but you need to choose. What are you first and foremost, a witch of Rashemen or an undead of the Eminence? If the answer is witch, then put the survival of the forest ahead of all else. Just don’t expect any mercy for your forbearance if the hathrans defeat you yet again. They’ll slay you just like they did the first time.

  “But if the answer is an adherent of the Eminence,” Uramar continued, “then do wha
tever it takes to ensure our victory. You’ll crush your old enemies and rule as one of the great powers of Rashemen forever after, beloved by all who matter for what you gave to our cause.”

  Nyevarra stood and pondered for a moment. Then she shifted her grip of the antler-staff and drew herself up straight.

  “It seems,” she said, grim humor in her voice, “that my innermost self is a vampire. And you can’t get blood from trees.”

  * * * * *

  The skeletal wizard in the rotting, tattered robes reminded Aoth unpleasantly of Szass Tam, but fortunately, wasn’t proving to be nearly as strong a combatant. When the lich cast a flare of jagged shadow, Jet veered and dodged it, and when Aoth riposted with a thunderbolt, the twisting shaft of radiance tore the undead apart.

  His legs clamped around Jet—by the Black Flame, he missed his saddle—Aoth cast around for another target and spied wraiths and direhelms rising through the air, likely to attack the Storm of Vengeance. To give Bez credit, he and his crew were inflicting considerable harm on the undead and dark fey on the ground.

  Aoth decided to blast the ghostly boarding party before they could reach their objective, and discerning his intent through their psychic bond, Jet lashed his wings and climbed. Then, however, a jab of pain in the pinion he’d broken made the familiar falter. Aoth started to ask if Jet was all right, but a cramp in his guts and a surge of irrational fear turned the question into a gasp.

  In a paradoxical way, Aoth’s sudden distress was actually reassuring. Jet’s old injuries weren’t troubling him because they’d healed imperfectly. Rather, both he and his master were experiencing a mystical assault.

  But the unfortunate thing was that, as Aoth realized when he slapped a tattoo to release its bracing magic and then looked around, everyone else on the hathrans’ side was suffering it too. A griffon screamed and veered away from the vulturine thing it had been swooping to seize in its talons. Kanilak froze until Shaugar grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a shake. Even berserkers balked.