by David Weber
A deep, resonant bell rang somewhere deep in the depths of Bahzell Bahnakson’s soul. A single musical note enveloped him, wrapped itself about him and Walsharno, and as it sang like the voice of the universe itself, Walsharno’s presence blazed beside him like the very Sun of Battle for which he was named. The power and essence of Tomanak himself was infused into that glorious heart of flame, and Bahzell felt all of the myriad connections between the three of them. It was unlike anything he had ever felt before, even in that moment when he and Kaeritha had felt and experienced with Vaijon the moment that Tomanak accepted his sword oath.
Chapter Forty-One
“The Mistress was right—they are fools!”
Treharm Haltharu, who looked as human as Jerghar Sholdan—and was—exposed razor-sharp teeth in a vicious smile. Stars twinkled overhead, their jewellike beauty uncaring, and the crescent new-moon hung low on the eastern horizon. He stood beside Jerghar atop the low hill over the cave in which they had spent the daylight hours, and his eyes glittered with the deadly green light of his true nature.
“Of course the Mistress was right,” Jerghar replied harshly, “but She never called them fools.”
“Of course She did!” Treharm snarled. “Are you as big a fool as they? Are your mind and memory failing like a shardohn’s? Or do you call me a liar?”
He glared at Jerghar, fingers flexing, and raw fury hovered between them. Then Jerghar’s right hand came up and across in a terrible, crashing blow. The sound of the impact was like a tree shattering in an icy forest, and Treharm’s head snapped to the side as its savage force flung him bodily from his feet. He flew backward for almost ten feet before he hit the grassy hilltop and skidded, and his high-pitched shriek of rage tore the night like the very dagger of the damned.
He bounded back up with the impossible speed and agility of what he had become, but even that unnatural quickness was too little and too late. Jerghar had already moved, and the fingers of his right hand tangled in Treharm’s hair. He fell to one knee and heaved brutally, yanking the other Servant’s spine into a straining bow across the bridge of his other thigh, and Treharm’s scream of rage turned into something more frantic, dark with fear, as Jerghar’s left arm pinned his own flailing arms. And then even that whimpered into silence as Jerghar’s fangs flashed scant inches from his arched and straining throat.
“You said something, pig?” The words were malformed, chopped into lisping pieces by the teeth which had suddenly elongated into deadly white scimitars, and the green glare flowed out of Treharm’s eyes like water. The unnatural strength of a Servant of Krahana went with the emerald light, and Jerghar held his grip for another ten seconds, grinding that surrender deep into Treharm’s mind and soul. Then, slowly, he released the other Servant, and allowed him to crouch on the grass at his feet. Had Treharm been a dog, he would have rolled to expose his belly in submission, and Jerghar’s mouth curled in a snarl of dominance.
“Defy me, or anger me, once more, and I will take you.” The words hissed and eddied past his fangs, and his eyes glared with a brighter, stronger green than Treharm’s ever had.
“Yes, Master,” Treharm whimpered, and Jerghar spat into grass that hissed and smoked as his emerald spittle struck it.
“Better,” he said, then straightened. Had he still been a living man, he would have drawn a deep breath. But he wasn’t, and so he simply forced his spine to unbend and his hands to unclench, then jerked his head impatiently at his trembling second in command.
“Get up,” he said coldly, and Treharm pushed himself shrinkingly to his feet once more. Jerghar watched him, tasting his own anger, his own contempt, then closed his glittering eyes and forced the last of his rage to yield to self-control.
It took several seconds, but when he finally opened his eyes once again, his expression was calm. Or as close to it as any Servant ever came when he put off his cloak of seeming mortality. The simmering rage spawned by the insatiable hunger and need to feed which was always near the surface of any Servant in the hours of darkness could be useful when he hunted by himself. But, he reminded himself once again, it could be something very different when more than two or more Servants were forced to work together.
“Now,” he said to Treharm, his ice-cold voice more nearly normal as his fangs dwindled once again, his dominance reasserted, “it may be that they’re fools, and it may be that they aren’t. What the Lady said was that their patron was arrogant, and that they partook of his arrogance. But that isn’t the same as being fools, Treharm. It may lead them into acts which appear foolish, but to assume that they’ll act in that fashion is to give them a dangerous advantage. And this is a champion of the accursed sword. Only an axe of Isvaria could be more dangerous to such as us. Do not forget it.”
“No, Master,” Treharm promised abjectly, still in full submission mode. Jerghar gave him a menacing glare to see to it that his subordinate stayed that way, although he cherished no illusions that it would last longer than this very night. But that was as long as it truly had to.
“However,” he continued after a moment, allowing some of the ice to flow out of his tone, “there are times when arrogance and stupidity become indistinguishable, and it’s possible—possible, I say—that this may be one of those times.”
Treharm’s submissively bowed head rose slightly, a tiny rim of green glittering once again around the edges of his eyes, and Jerghar nodded.
“It is, at the very least … audacious for him to challenge us in the hours of Her darkness. I’d looked for wiser tactics from the champion who so easily defeated Sharna not once, but twice. To confront us now, when our strength is greatest, is to give us an advantage I never dared to plan upon. And since he’s been so obliging as to come to us at the place and time of our choosing, we will meet him and crush him.”
The green fire in Treharm’s eyes flickered and grew brighter, and he dared to smile at his superior. Treharm had never really liked Jerghar’s original plan to harry their enemies’ flanks, picking off the weakest first and weakening the strong steadily with the despair of their comrades’ destruction, until the time came to take them all. He’d argued that such an attack would take too long, spend too many precious hours of night. In the end, it might allow Bahzell and Brandark, the two enemies who, among all others, must perish, to escape.
Jerghar had been prepared to risk that, despite the penalty he knew his mistress would inflict upon him if he failed, because he had never anticipated that Bahzell would be so rash as to come directly to him in his own prepared place of power. It was no carefully concealed temple, hidden away, depending for its security upon secrecy, as Sharna ’s Navahkan temple had. The life force the shardohns had ripped from the slaughtered coursers had provided Jerghar with all the power he needed to raise a fortress around this hill against any champion of the Light. It was a heady, exhilarating power, a tide of stolen strength such as no Servant of Krahana had tasted in centuries, if ever. Jerghar had never suspected the true nature of the coursers, never guessed that draining them would produce such a prodigious well of strength. It had been necessary to reclaim them from the shardohns—temporarily, at least—so that he might use them as burning glasses, reaching through them into their unsuspected link with the energy of the entire world about them.
The shardohns had hated it. Two of them had actually tried to resist Jerghar, and been destroyed and devoured themselves for their impudence. That had been enough, and the others had disgorged their prey, yielding up the taken souls of the courser herd to Jerghar as they would ultimately have yielded them to the Lady Herself.
Oh, but that had been a moment of ecstasy and deadly temptation. As all those souls, all that power, had flowed through him to lie in his hand, ready for his use, he had touched the ver
y edge of godhood himself. As Treharm had been foolish enough to challenge his own authority, he had felt his own momentary power seducing him into thoughts of how he might have used it for himself, kept it for himself, and not as his mistress had commanded.
It in the end, it had been only temptation, for he’d known too well what vengeance Krahana would have taken upon him. All of that life force, all of that additional power, was his only to borrow for use against Her enemies. In the end, it was Her prize, not his. She would have it, harvest it from her shardohns, and woe betide any who dared to stand between Her and it.
And so, instead of claiming it for himself, he’d used it, and the result hovered in the darkness about him. He felt the coursers’ souls, reclaimed—however briefly—from the creatures who had slain them, screaming silently. They had tasted what awaited them, and the horror of that taste swirled through them like a cyclone of terror. And that was good, for their fear, their effort to escape the hideous dissolution awaiting them, only made it easier for him to manipulate their essences. They were his focuses, the anchors of the glittering web he’d woven, and his smile was ugly in the darkness. It would make their despair complete, and the taste of their broken life energy so much sweeter, when they realized that it had been they—their souls, and the power stolen from them—which had trapped and destroyed one of Tomanak’s hated champions.
“Go to Haliku and Layantha,” he told Treharm now. “Tell them both that our enemies will be here within the hour. And tell Layantha to join me here … and that when the time is right, she will have what she requires.
* * *
“We’re after being close now.”
Bahzell’s voice was low as his companions—hradani, human, and courser alike—gathered about him and Walsharno. He sensed their tension, their dread of what awaited them. But he also tasted their grim determination and their hatred for the evil they’d come to find.
“How can you tell?” It was Battlehorn. Even now he sounded sullen, resentful, yet the question was genuine, not a challenge or statement of skepticism.
“It’s a sense Himself is after giving his champions,” Bahzell replied levelly, answering the question with the honesty it deserved. “It’s not something as I can be putting neatly into words, but I’m after sensing the presence of the Dark much as you’d see a cloud against the sun. And what it is that’s waiting up ahead there is after being the very stormfront of Krahana herself.”
Muscles tightened, and jaws clenched, but no one looked away.
“What is it you want us to do?” Kelthys asked simply.
“It’s little I know of exactly what we’ll be facing,” Bahzell said grimly, “but this much I do know. There’s after being two battles waiting for us—one as will attack physically, with claw and fang or blade, and one as won’t be using weapons most of you will be so much as seeing. I’ve a nasty enough sense of what’s ahead to know as there won’t be anything of the mortal, natural world about it, physical or not. But anything as is solid enough to be after hurting you is solid enough that you can be hurting it. I’ll not say as how you can be killing it, but at the least, you can be after holding it in check.”
He paused for a moment, surveying his allies, then flicked his ears.
“I’ll not be lying to you. It’s in my heart and soul to wish as how you’d none of you come, beyond us of the Order, but you’d have none of it, and I knew it. And, truth to tell, I can’t but be admiring the guts as brings each and every one of you to this. You’ve made us sword brothers all, by your courage. Yet men—and coursers—are after dying in battle, brothers, and it’s in my mind as how some of us will be doing that this night.”
Dozens of eyes look back at him, levelly, despite the tension ratcheting higher and tighter behind them.
“There’s a part of this battle as will be mine to fight,” he continued. “It’s not one as any of the rest of you can be after joining. But what you can be doing is to keep the rest of whatever it is we’re facing off of me while I’ve the fighting of it. Will you be watching my back for me, brothers?”
“Aye.” It was Luthyr Battlehorn, his voice cold and hard with promise despite the dislike still showing in his eyes. “Aye, Milord Champion, we will.”
* * *
“Now, Layantha.”
Jerghar’s command was a sibilant hiss as he crouched atop his hill, and the once-woman beside him smiled a terrible smile. Layantha Peliath was something vanishingly rare among the Servants of Krahana—a mage who’d actually sought the service of the Queen of the Damned. And not just any mage, for she’d been an empath. Not a receptive empath. Most of those went into healing, either of the mind or the body, and the very nature of their talent was enough to make any fate like Layantha’s unthinkable. Had she been a receptive empath, her talent would have carried the predatory cruelty of Krahana and her Servants too clearly to her for her to have voluntarily yielded. She might have been taken by a Servant, or a shardohn, or even Krahana herself, but she would not have yielded, and so could not have become what she now was.
But Layantha had been a projective empath, able to project her own emotions, but unable to sense those of others. It was one of the mage talents of extremely limited utility, and perhaps that had been a factor in the choice she’d made. Layantha had never had the sort of personality which was prepared to accept that she was not the center of everyone’s universe as she was of her own.
She hadn’t realized in time that to accept Krahana was to become no more than one more satellite of the voracious void which she had made her mistress. The fact that she remained anything but the center of the universe was bitter poison on her tongue, but that only fanned her hatred of all still-living beings even higher. And the mage talent which had survived her surrender to Krahana was no longer a thing of limited utility.
Now, as her enemies crested the last undulating swell of the Wind Plain before their hill, she reached out to that portion of the reservoir of focused power Jerghar was prepared to make available to her, and her smile was a hideous thing to see.
* * *
A wave of sheer terror curled across the night-struck grassland like a tsunami.
Terror was no stranger to Bahzell Bahnakson. He’d faced wizards, cursed swords, and demons, and no man, however great his courage, was immune to fear. But he had never tasted a deeper terror, one with a darker core of horror … or one which had no apparent source at all.
Layantha’s tidal bore of darkness crashed over him, and he heard stricken cries and high-pitched, equine squeals as it fountained over his companions, as well. It smashed down on them, vast and noisome and more crippling than any physical wound. He sensed them behind him, and knew that the only reason they hadn’t fled was that the terror which had invaded them was so totally overwhelming that they were paralyzed. Frozen helplessly, like mesmerized rabbits waiting to be taken by a gamekeeper.
Bahzell was trapped with them, but the black river of ice which had sucked them under could not—quite—reach his core. That indomitable core of elemental hradani stubbornness, buttressed by his link to Tomanak … and to Walsharno.
He and the courser stood motionless, as frozen as any of their companions, as the night took on a hideous unlife of its own. He could see the darkness coming alive with the pustulant green sores of hundreds of glittering eyes. They came towards him, and he recognized them. Not because he’d ever seen them with his own eyes, but because Gayrfressa had seen them. Had felt the fangs and poison, and the terrible, lustful hatred which lived behind them. He had experienced Gayrfressa’s experiences as his own, and beyond that, he was a champion. The true nature of the shardohns could not hide itself from him, and so, even more than Gayrfressa, he understood what he faced and the true horror of what awaited any who fell to them.
The creatures closed in slowly, made cautious by their dread of Tomanak and his power despite the quicksand of projected terror which had frozen their enemies. And that caution was a mistake.
They should have flu
ng themselves upon Bahzell. They should have ripped the life and soul out of him and Walsharno instantly, brutally, while Layantha held them paralyzed. But instead, they hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, Bahzell reached deep.
He didn’t think—he simply acted. Despite the vicious wave of emotion sweeping over him he reached both deep within himself and without. It was as if he stretched out both of his hands, one to Tomanak and one to Walsharno, and answering hands closed upon his in clasps of living steel. He was an acrobat, arcing through empty air in the unwavering knowledge that hands he could trust even more deeply than he trusted his own would be waiting to catch him, and the electric shock when they did rocked through his soul like cleansing sunlight.
And even as his god and his courser brother caught him in that three-part fusion, Bahzell summoned the Rage. Summoned the wild whirlwind of berserker bloodlust which had been the curse of his people for twelve centuries, until time and healing had transformed it into something else—into elemental determination and deadly, ice-cold concentration.
The mighty cables of hopeless horror Layantha had cast about him snapped like cobweb, shredded by the rushing wind of Walsharno’s fierce strength and shriveled by the blazing presence of Tomanak. And at the heart of that focus of Dark-rejecting Light stood Bahzell Bahnakson in the dreadful exaltation of the Rage, like the rock on which the tide of terror broke and recoiled in baffled foam and rushing confusion.
“Tomanak!”
The deep, bull-throated bellow of his war cry split the darkness, and Walsharno’s wild, fierce scream of rage came with it. Bahzell’s sword leapt into his right hand, summoned by a thought, glaring so bright a blue that even mortal eyes were dazzled by its brilliance, and the shardohns froze, squealing with a terror even deeper than the one Layantha had conjured to paralyze their foes.
* * *
Layantha screamed. Her hands rose to her head, balled into fists, pounding her temples, and she staggered back. She writhed, shrieking as the terror she’d projected recoiled upon her. In all her mortal life she had never received the emotions of another. She’d been as blind to them, despite her empathy, as any non-mage. But now, at last, her mind was opened, its barriers and defenses ripped wide by a talon of azure power, and all the hatred and black despair she had leveled against her intended prey lashed through her.
