Prophet of the Dead botg-5

by Richard Lee Byers

  Then, however, the saddle shook again. Stumbling, Aoth peered around but didn’t see the ghoul sorceress or anyone else casting the same spell he had. Apparently, his original magic had further weakened preexisting faults in the bedrock.

  Rumbling, more snow and earth crumbled over the edge. Worse-much worse-it also poured down into a crack that started opening at the brink and knifed its way inward, cutting across Aoth’s intended line of retreat.

  Standing where he was, even he couldn’t see how deep the new crevasse was, but it was plainly deeper than a ditch. Deep enough that he and Orgurth couldn’t just hop in and scramble right out the other side. He turned, taking stock of where the enemy was and what the enemy was doing, and realized he and his comrade had only one recourse.

  “This way!” he said. He ran toward the caves, and Orgurth followed. Arrows rained down around them, and blue and scarlet rays stabbed in their direction.

  Halting and turning when necessary, Aoth cast spells of his own. A burst of conjured sunlight seared and dazzled powerful undead and burned common zombies and skeletons to ash. A wall of fire leaped up to hold back other foes.

  Flames didn’t stop the constructs, though. Either leaping over the luminous yellow barrier or simply plunging straight through, they raced after the fugitives like hounds coursing after a pair of stags.

  By the time Aoth and Orgurth ran into the clear space the Raumvirans had left between their front ranks and the mountain fastness, the automatons were closing fast. Aoth wondered if he should stop, turn, and throw another spell. It might cost him his life, but maybe the orc at least would reach the open cave mouth.

  Then, however, his fire-kissed eyes saw a sudden glimmer of power run through the peak before him. It looked like water flowing through a network of tiny cracks, and when it finished defining itself, he also discerned the first infinitesimal shifting in the bulging masses of stone it had outlined.

  The constructs swept toward Aoth and Orgurth in a converging wave of sculpted blades, fangs, talons, pincers, and stingers, of jointed metal, wood, ceramic, and even stone. Then the face of the Rashemi’s mountain refuge, or a fair portion of it, anyway, dropped away from the granite underneath. Banging and crashing, enormous and unnaturally smooth and round-to make them roll better, no doubt-the dislodged boulders cascaded onto the saddle and tumbled onward.

  Aoth and Orgurth stopped running toward the stones and poised themselves to dodge. But Aoth couldn’t see any spaces to dodge into. The boulders were like an onrushing wall.

  He drew breath for another magical bellow. Maybe the blast would bump one or two of the boulders off course and make a space.

  Then, however, one stone veered sharply to the left, and the one beside it flew off the ground in an arc that would take it safely over the warriors in front of it, in each case, for no apparent reason. Aoth wondered if an earth spirit was steering the boulders.

  It was a night for cacophonies, and the crashing as the tumbling stones slammed into the constructs was the most deafening yet. When Aoth yelled for Orgurth to start running again, he could barely hear himself for the din.

  As they clambered up the steep slope that led to the open gate, masked men appeared in the opening and brandished wands and staves. Other portals opened, and similar figures appeared in those as well. Thunderbolts and orbs of flame blazed from the ends of the magical weapons. Fortunately, like the leaping boulder, the attacks passed over Aoth and Orgurth’s heads to strike at the Raumvirans.

  Hands grabbed the sellswords and hauled them into the cave mouth and to safety. A cave dweller in a leather owl mask trimmed with real feathers regarded the newcomers and said, “The avalanche was our best defense, and we were saving it for just the right moment.” His tenor voice sounded young and pugnacious, but maybe he was just afraid.

  “Easy, Kanilak,” said a Rashemi in a wooden mask carved to put a third eye in the center of his forehead. His voice was deeper and older. “We likely weren’t going to get a better moment than when all those constructs charged within range.”

  “Still,” Kanilak said, “these two had better be worth it.”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Orgurth said, “seeing as how now we’re trapped in this hole with the rest of you.” He gave Aoth a sour look to convey that he knew whose fault that was.

  5

  Darkness blinded Jhesrhi, and the cold made her shiver. Occasionally, she thought she heard one of Sarshethrian’s enormous “vermin” shift position, but the tiny sounds might simply be one of her stag warriors moving slightly or even her own pulse beating in her ears.

  Still, it made her skin crawl to imagine that one of the shadow-beasts might actually touch her before she realized it was there, and that in turn made the urge to summon a protective mantle of flame from the core of her that much harder to resist.

  Formerly, the irrational impulse to call fire had resided in the staff she’d carried away from Mount Thulbane, but when she’d sacrificed the weapon to steal Tchazzar’s breath and strength, it had truly become a part of her.

  It was unhealthy to give herself over to the impulse, though, or at least Cera seemed to think so, and it was certain that showing a light would alert the enemy to their presence. So Jhesrhi endured feeling vulnerable and the general unpleasantness of the deathways as best she could by thinking of Aoth, Khouryn, and Gaedynn, her cherished comrades from the Brotherhood.

  She wondered if Gaedynn was still keeping company with the fashionable Chessentan lady he’d met at a ball. The woman was nice enough, but still, even though, in a vague, abstract sort of way, it shamed her, Jhesrhi found herself imagining how fire might flow along the folds and through the layers of one of the noblewoman’s elaborate silk and fur ensembles.

  “They’re coming,” Sarshethrian whispered abruptly. The sound startled Jhesrhi and made her jump even though he’d told her he’d magically project his voice to warn her when battle was imminent. “Prepare yourself.”

  She closed her eyes, murmured rhyming words, and touched a fingertip to each eyelid on the final syllable. When she opened them, she could see, albeit with colors faded to shades of gray and not as far as she could have with the aid of light. She could, of course, have enjoyed the benefit of the enchantment all along but hadn’t wanted to waste the power required to keep renewing it.

  She was sitting on the ground with her back against a black marble mausoleum carved with an elaborate scene of Kelemvor judging the dead. Its antennae twitching, a thing like the shadow of an enormous cockroach crouched to her left. She rose and crept to the right to peek around the side of the tomb.

  She was on a hillside in the largest space she’d yet seen in the sometimes claustrophobic vaults and tunnels that made up the deathways. Predictably, the space was a graveyard complete with twisted, leafless trees and wilted wreaths. All the tombs and monuments were black.

  Thanks to Gosnorn’s information and the manner in which it jibed with his own knowledge of his dominions, Sarshethrian had been certain Lod would pass through here on his way to Faerun and Rashemen, and now Jhesrhi saw for herself that it was so. Like most any warlord marching through dangerous territory, the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was traveling in a column with his followers arranged protectively around him.

  Prompted both by her martial training and natural curiosity, Jhesrhi first picked out Lod himself, and her eyes widened in surprise. The few bone nagas of her experience had been simply and precisely that, the naked, reanimated skeletons of enormous snakes with skulls nearly the same shape as those of human beings. The master wizard who’d woken Lod, though, had crafted something unique.

  The commander of the Eminence was a divided being like a centaur. His maker had reshaped the top part of him into something very like the skeletal remains of the top half of a human being, arms, hands, and all. The bottom part remained overtly reptilian, but longer and heavier than one would expect of even a naga, the bones still sheathed in muscle and scales with a ridge of jagged spikes along the top.
Jhesrhi wondered if she was actually looking at something that had once been a dragon’s tail.

  Lod rode coiled on a cart drawn by a dozen scarred, gaunt, and filthy naked living men. According to Sarshethrian, the slaves had once been necromancers who’d made thralls of the undead.

  Next, Jhesrhi identified the bone naga’s spellcasters, pallid vampires and withered liches walking with staves in hand and amulets hanging from their necks. She and her allies needed to neutralize them quickly, or at least keep them too busy defending themselves to do the same for their leader.

  Finally, she looked over the men-at-arms, particularly the undead of two sorts she’d never encountered before even when fighting Szass Tam’s legions. The floating entities called direhelms were the top halves of suits of plate armor animated by the spirits resident within. Doomsepts were groups of seven luminous phantoms that fought as one and apparently were a single being in some metaphysical sense.

  All things considered, the column looked formidable even in comparison to the horde of shadow creatures Sarshethrian had assembled to lie in wait for it. Jhesrhi hoped the maimed fiend was right that her powers and Cera’s would tilt the balance in their favor.

  Once again, tinged with hatred and eagerness, Sarshethrian’s voice whispered from the empty air: “Now.”

  Jhesrhi clothed herself in flame. It felt so good, so right, that for a moment, pleasure burned every other thought right out of her head.

  Then, however, she remembered her purpose. Declaiming words of power, she jabbed with her brazen staff and cast a fiery missile at Lod. Elsewhere, her ordinarily merry voice vibrant with the loathing she felt for the deathways and all they contained, Cera recited a prayer that enveloped a portion of the column in searing sunlight. Sarshethrian’s creatures exploded from their hiding places.

  The sellswords of the Storm of Vengeance and Aoth Fezim and his companions had all flown to Rashemen to negotiate for the wild griffons. Lacking such a convenient option, the Theskians had trekked across the frozen surface of Lake Ashane, and for the most part, had done so on foot or driving sleighs and dogsleds. Dai Shan, however, had ridden on a sizable magically propelled “ice barge” that sat on its runners at the end of the one of the docks toward the south end of town. A single lamp burned on the bow of the barge, perhaps to assure Yhelbruna that someone really was waiting onboard, while a rope ladder dangled over the side. She walked out onto the pier and, clamping her staff awkwardly under her forearm, began to climb.

  During the day, someone had left a message addressed to her tacked beside the entry to the Witches’ Hall. Reading it, she’d discovered that her anonymous correspondent was one of Dai Shan’s underlings, who claimed his master had left instructions for him to carry out in the event he failed to return from his expedition on Mario Bez’s skyship.

  To that end, the Shou needed to speak with Yhelbruna, and because that entailed an element of danger, he wished to do so secretly. Would the learned sister please meet him aboard the ice barge when Selune had passed her zenith?

  On one level, Yhelbruna hadn’t much appreciated being presented with yet another mystery. Of late, she’d been contending with a surfeit. Yet the parchment, calligraphy, and phrasing were all recognizably Shou, and it would have been just like cagey, slippery Dai Shan to put a contingency plan in place to make sure Bez wouldn’t profit from betraying him. If so, what she learned tonight might finally prove to Mangan Uruk’s satisfaction that the Halruaan had no right to take the griffons.

  Gripping the railing, she stepped up onto the barge’s broad, flat deck. Several low, almost hutlike structures stood along its length, but all were dark except for the captain’s cabin in the stern, where a hint of light leaked through the cracks around the hatch.

  Yhelbruna walked to the cabin and knocked. No one answered.

  “Hello?” she called. Still, nobody replied.

  She tried to twist the brass handle. The hatch was locked.

  Suddenly, belatedly, she sensed she was in danger. She whirled and spotted a small, shadowy figure at the other end of the barge. His several rings glowed as he spun his hands through mystic passes. So did the yellow eyes under his stubby horns.

  He could only be Melemer, Bez’s warlock lieutenant. He’d evidently pilfered Shou parchment and forged a message cunningly conceived to lure Yhelbruna into a trap.

  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, Faerun’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 p
ointed. “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.