Prophet of the Dead botg-5

by Richard Lee Byers

  “Yes, because a traitor opened a magical gateway into the Iron Lord’s castle itself.”

  “Dai Shan,” said Aoth, his fingers tightening on his spear. He thanked Kossuth, Amaunator, Tymora, and any other deity who might conceivably have had a hand in Cera and Jhesrhi successfully killing the little snake, but a part of him would always regret he hadn’t done the job himself.

  “Yes,” Pevkalondra said, still grinning, “and that and the new powers undeath conferred on the durthans enabled them to subvert and weaken first our foes in Immilmar and then in the Urlingwood itself. They killed hathrans, donned their masks, and impersonated them. Vampires turned or enslaved other defenders of the old order, while ghosts possessed still more. A plague of treachery, torpor, and muddled wits swept through the covens, the Huhrong’s Citadel, and the lodge houses, and as a result, the forest is already under our control.”

  “You’re lying!” Kanilak spit. “Nothing’s weakening our magic. It’s as strong as ever.”

  Pevkalondra inclined her head. “True enough, boy, as my soldiers and I discovered to our cost. But in your crude way, you Old Ones are like Raumvirans. You’re makers, and your magic derives more from the mind and less from the soul. In retrospect, it makes sense that your power might stand strong for a while longer than that of your mistresses.”

  The ghoul turned her stained, jagged grin back on Aoth. “So you see,” she said, “I’ve lost a battle, but you’ve lost the war. The Eminence of Araunt has occupied the ground it needs to ensure its triumph and neutralized all who might have broken its hold in time.”

  Aoth considered the situation and decided it justified Pevkalondra’s confidence. Indeed, because she didn’t know Lod himself had come to Rashemen to speed the dark rituals along to their fruition, the Eminence’s position was even stronger than she realized.

  “The Black Flame burn me,” he said, “if I ever travel without my own army again. If I walk down to the corner for a mug of beer, the entire Brotherhood of the Griffon is going with me.”

  “Then you admit defeat,” Pevkalondra said.

  Aoth smiled back at her, and something in his expression made her give a tiny start, predatory monstrosity though she was. “Well, no,” he answered, “I wouldn’t say that.”

  He pivoted back toward the Old Ones. “You heard,” he said. “Your country’s enemies have deprived it of its usual cadre of protectors. We have to assemble a new one quickly to drive the vermin out of your sacred wood. Obviously, that effort starts with you. How soon can you be ready to march?”

  For a heartbeat, no one answered. Then a man in a wolf mask said, “We can’t just do that because we want to. We can only leave the Running Rocks if the hathrans command it.”

  “Stinky just told you,” Orgurth said, “the witches can’t command it. They’re dead, addled, or too stupid to see what’s falling apart right in front of them.”

  “Still,” Shaugar said, “our vows are vows, and even if we did break them, no man is allowed in the Urlingwood.”

  Orgurth shrugged. “Once you start breaking rules, what’s the difference if it’s one or two?”

  An Old One in an iron T-shaped mask that left his cheeks and the corners of his mouth uncovered said, “To break our oaths would disgrace us. To defile the Urlingwood-”

  “It’s being defiled now!” Aoth shouted. “How can you let that happen and still tell yourselves your vows and your religion count for anything? I’m an outlander-Abyss, I’m one of the Thayans you Rashemi all despise-and I don’t claim to understand your ways. But if it were my sacred forest, I’d save it and worry about getting punished for disobeying orders afterward. That’s what loyalty and duty mean to me!”

  For a moment, the Old Ones were quiet again. Then Shaugar said, “But the ghoul was right. We are crafters first and foremost, and you saw how many of our staves and amulets we’ve already emptied of magic.”

  “I’ve also seen plenty of intact Raumviran golems still standing around in the foundry,” Aoth replied. “Old Ones put them to sleep, and you can wake them too.”

  “Some acts of creation,” quavered a stooped figure on the uppermost tier, an Old One in every sense of the term, “work in accordance with Nature, while others mock it. Our tradition-”

  “So you break three rules!” Orgurth said, “to save your holy trees!”

  “Yes,” said Shaugar, a hint of grim humor in his voice, “to save the ‘holy trees.’ ” He rose and turned so that, for a moment at least, he looked each of his fellow enchanters in the eye. “Our friends are right. We can’t sit idly by while the undead take over Rashemen even if the Wychlaran burn us all in wicker cages afterward. So: who’s coming with me?”

  “I will!” Kanilak said.

  “And I,” said a big man in a long-eared rabbit mask that presumably didn’t look as comical to his fellow Rashemi as it did to Aoth.

  One by one, all the others agreed to march, although in some cases with manifest reluctance or windy-and likely specious-discourses on how precedent or the exact wording of their laws and vows might after all permit them to do as they intended. The lawyering made Aoth seethe with impatience, but he tried not to show it.

  When all the talk was finally through, and most of the enchanters were headed out to prepare for the journey, Shaugar came down to the floor of the amphitheater. “Thanks for your support,” Aoth told him. “Can I hope the part about wicker cages was an exaggeration?”

  Shaugar snorted. “You were right before. You really don’t understand Rashemen. But you were also correct that we mustn’t worry about that now. As we head north, we’ll pass near a couple other Old One villages. We can ask them to join us.”

  Pevkalondra laughed. “You still won’t have enough men to stop what’s happening in the forest.”

  “We’ll see,” said Aoth. “It may be that I can scare up a few more.”

  “Either way,” Orgurth said, “I’m tired of listening to Stinky, here, jeer at us. I’ve also gone too long in my new life as a sellsword without picking up any plunder.”

  He turned, grabbed Pevkalondra’s ocular between thumb and forefinger, and yanked. The pearl jerked free, trailing the thin prongs of metal that had zigzagged back into her head. They came out with bits of rotten matter clinging to them, and the ghoul screamed.

  “See?” asked Orgurth, making a casual attempt to wipe the decay off on his sleeve. “I told you I could have made her talk.”

  The durthans were performing their rites in a stand of towering, many-branched weirwood trees. It was one of the most sacred places of power in the Urlingwood, yet even so, permanently tilting the balance of dark and light in all Rashemen was proving to be a long and arduous process requiring night after night of chanted prayers and incantations around the greenish fire.

  Although things were moving a little faster now that, with matters elsewhere under control, Nyevarra was leading the rituals. The Stag King’s antler staff had turned out to be a potent talisman for strengthening the conjurations.

  She was spinning it through a complicated figure that made the bonfire blaze higher when, her mystical perceptions heightened by the ceremony, she sensed entities possessed of considerable supernatural power approaching in the night. She used a hand signal to warn her sister witches a pause was necessary, and they all stopped chanting on the same word, at a point that kept the forces they’d raised from bursting free of the metaphysical structures meant to channel and contain them.

  Nyevarra and the other durthans then turned to await the newcomers. Some witches gasped or exclaimed when their fellow ghouls and specters marched out of the dark.

  There were many creatures in the column formidable enough to merit such expressions of admiration and respect. But Nyevarra had no doubt that it was the singular entity crawling in the lead who’d riveted everyone’s attention.

  The upper part of him was the top portion of a human skeleton. At the waist, those bare bones fused with an enormous, scaly serpentine body like a dragon’s tail
. She knew from the description Uramar had given her that this was Lod, but even if she hadn’t, she would have assumed as much from the exceptional wizardly strength she sensed inside him.

  She left the circle to greet him and his companions. Swaying slightly from side to side, he loomed over her, and she felt small and vulnerable. Making sure that didn’t reveal itself in her stance or voice, she said, “Welcome.”

  “Thank you,” Lod replied. “You must be Nyevarra. Uramar’s messenger told me you’re the one who worked out how best to conquer this realm.”

  Nyevarra smiled behind her mask. “It was my notion. But every durthan is aiding in the effort.”

  Lod nodded. “I like it that you’re willing to share the credit. It reflects the spirit of fellowship our cause requires.” He peered over her head in the direction of the green fire. “But plainly, our arrival interrupted your labors. Will you take them up again? It would be a privilege to observe.”

  Nyevarra blinked. “Right now? You’ve traveled a long way.”

  “Yes. But as you’ve surely discovered, one of the many benefits of undeath is being impervious to fatigue.”

  “In that case, please, come to the fire.”

  After another series of complex invocations, the durthans came to a planned halt; undead might be tireless in the general course of things, but any witch performing a lengthy ritual was well advised to pause from time to time to refocus her will. At that point, curious to hear his opinion, Nyevarra looked up at Lod.

  “Remarkable,” the bone naga said. “Until Uramar relayed your plans, I would never have dreamed such a thing was possible. Still, I have lore of my own, and with your permission, I believe I can speed things along.”

  “I’m eager to see what you have in mind.”

  “Then when everyone is ready, I’ll take the lead while you and your sisters make the ritual responses. I’m only going to change your incantations a little, so you won’t have any difficulty following along.”

  In a sense, that proved to be true. But in the aggregate, the small changes-an arcane gesture performed with extra slashing vehemence, an alteration in the cadence of a phrase, the substitution of one name of power for another-made a considerable difference. Attuned to the magic, Nyevarra could perceive it transforming the Urlingwood in ways it hadn’t hitherto.

  The fire turned from green to a gray so deep it was nearly black, and in some indefinable but ghastly fashion, the crackling alternately suggested sobbing and laughter. A darkness deeper than natural night thickened in the air.

  Tendrils of rot snaked through one of the weir trees, riddling the heartwood in an instant. Farther away, oaks and pines perished of the same cankerous affliction.

  Earth shifted and clenched like a miser’s fist, and the spring water that had bubbled up to feed a frozen brook could no longer find its way to the surface.

  A bear sleeping in its burrow whimpered and thrashed as a new deformed head-three-eyed, with crooked jaws and jagged, oversized fangs-sprouted from its shoulder. But the natural head didn’t truly wake until the freakish one started eating it.

  There was still a part of Nyevarra, the part that recalled life as a dutiful young hathran, that winced at the accelerated corruption and desecration. But the rebel and vampire that naive girl had become rejoiced. Before, she’d estimated that her rituals would make her and her allies invincible near the time of the spring thaw. But with Lod’s aid, it should require only another tenday or two.

  Vandar felt a surge of happiness as, riding the giant hawk Jhesrhi had conjured to carry him, he gazed down on Immilmar from the air. After all the dangers and horrors he’d encountered in the north, home had never looked more inviting.

  Or at least that was the case until his eyes fell on the peaked roof of the Griffon Lodge. Even on this frigid winter day, no smoke rose from the chimney, and why would it? The building stood empty as it would until someone new took possession of it.

  Vandar averted his eyes, and in so doing, turned them toward the lake. The Storm of Vengeance was sitting on the shore.

  Grief and guilt gave way to rage, and had he known how, he would have turned his steed toward the skyship. Because he didn’t know how to steer the giant hawk, he could only wait as his bird, Jhesrhi’s, and Jet, who was carrying Cera, swooped down to light in the snow in front of Witches’ Hall.

  As soon as their riders dismounted, the two huge raptors dissolved into wind, moaning and flinging up snow for a moment, and then they were gone. Vandar started westward.

  “Stop!” Cera said. “I saw the ship too, but you can’t just run off by yourself.”

  “She’s right,” rasped Jet. Frequent applications of Cera’s healing sunlight had strengthened him and improved his appearance, although black feathers and fur had yet to cover over every patch of ugly scarring. “I’ve got a score of my own to settle, and if things were different, I’d come along and help you. But we have a plan in motion. A plan to rescue your miserable excuse for a homeland.”

  Vandar hesitated and felt the red sword at this side urging him on to battle and revenge. And as he’d learned to his cost, when he felt the fey weapon goading him toward one course of action, that in itself was reason enough to at least consider doing the opposite.

  “All right,” he growled. “I’ll wait.” He marched up to the hathrans’ house and pounded on the door.

  A coltish novice in a simple cloth half mask answered, goggled at Vandar and those clustered behind him, and, when Vandar made his wishes known, scurried off to fetch Yhelbruna.

  “You realize,” said Jet, “by now, the great hathran could be possessed or a vampire’s thrall herself.”

  “If she is,” Cera said, “I’ll know.”

  “So will I,” said Vandar. Yhelbruna had allowed him to meet the real woman hidden behind the leather mask and cold, mysterious demeanor only once, after they’d encountered the undead hag and goblins in the High Country, but it had left him with a vivid sense of who she truly was.

  Vivid enough that he sensed the happiness the sight of him inspired when his companions almost certainly did not. “You’re alive,” she said.

  “So is Captain Fezim,” said Jhesrhi, a new and hastily carved ash staff in her hand. She’d enchanted it as she did her clothing to keep it from charring in her grip. “Whatever Mario Bez may have told you.”

  “We found out Bez is a liar,” Yhelbruna said. “Still, when you failed to return from this alleged battle at the Fortress of the Half-Demon, we had no choice but to assume the worst.”

  “Aoth is looking through my eyes and listening through my ears right now,” said Jet. “He’ll speak through me too when he needs to. Take a walk with us, hathran. We need to talk where spies can’t overhear, and we’re short on time.”

  “As you wish,” the witch replied. She turned and stepped out of the doorway for a moment, and when she reappeared, she wore a green hooded cloak and carried a staff of her own in her hand.

  As they all wandered toward a little stand of trees to the west of the hall, Jhesrhi began to relate all that she and her comrades had discovered. Apparently, life as a sellsword had taught her to report clearly and succinctly, for it took her only a little time to lay out the facts as best they understood them.

  “So you see,” she concluded, “at this point, we don’t know who among the hathrans and the Iron Lord’s warriors has been compromised and who hasn’t. But if Yhelbruna and Cera work together, the two of you should be able to identify at least some folk who are still trustworthy and free others from the undead’s influence. The troops you muster will rendezvous with the Old Ones south of the Urlingwood, and then we’ll all assault the wood together.”

  Yhelbruna shook her head. “No. That won’t work.”

  Vandar took a breath. “As you heard, the Old Ones understand they’re breaking their vows, and we all know men are barred from the forest. But-”

  “Rose and scythe!” Yhelbruna snapped. “Do hathrans truly seem like such mad tyrants that you
imagine I care about any of that when the soul of the land itself is in jeopardy? The wizard’s proposal won’t work because this Eminence of Araunt is a move ahead of us. Again. A few of their creatures revealed themselves on the southern shore of the River Rasha, and Mangan Uruk rushed forth to chase them with every witch and berserker he could find. I imagine we can still collect a smattering of reinforcements between here and Urling, but not in the numbers you were hoping for.”

  Everyone was glumly silent for a moment. Then Cera said, “All right, but let’s think this through. The undead’s plan is based on stealth and trickery for good reason. We destroyed much of their strength at the Fortress of the Half-Demon, and Pevkalondra threw away more when she detached the Raumvirans from the rest of the creatures’ army and led them to defeat. Lod sought to bring reinforcements, but Sarshethrian’s ambush killed at least half of those. Maybe we aren’t at as much of a disadvantage as we think.”

  Yhelbruna stopped and pondered, meanwhile idly poking holes in the snow at her feet with the lead tip on the butt of her staff.

  “That all makes sense on its own terms,” she said eventually, “and now that I understand what’s been weakening my witchcraft, true hathrans can take countermeasures. But the enemy’s witchcraft is gaining strength, and with the Urlingwood falling into shadow, I guarantee you dark fey are assembling to support their old allies and ensure their ascendancy in the new Rashemen.”

  Cera scowled. “I didn’t endure Sarshethrian’s foulness and vampires sucking my blood just to hear our cause is hopeless.”

  “Aoth says it isn’t,” said Jet. “He wants to know, how did Yhelbruna come to realize Mario Bez is a liar, and why is the Storm of Vengeance still in Immilmar?”

  Vandar’s jaw muscles clenched.

  Even without the aid of a saddle and tack-Jet’s accouterments had burned away when the orb of fire blasted him-Aoth felt good hurtling along on griffon-back once more, with a cold wind in his face, a blue sky and wispy cirrus clouds above, and the tangled branches of a forest below. His pleasure would have been even keener if he hadn’t felt the ache in the griffon’s wings. Jet had pushed himself hard to fly to the Running Rocks, collect his master, and carry him to the Ashenwood, leaving Orgurth to shepherd the Old Ones the rest of the way north.