Prophet of the Dead botg-5

by Richard Lee Byers

  Up ahead, something gleamed for a moment among a stand of oaks. He squinted and made out a steel centipede as long as four horses standing nose to tail, crawling at right angles to his path, which was to say, toward the weir trees where the rites of shadow were underway. Other figures were stalking along with it.

  Uramar smiled. To say the least, he hadn’t liked abandoning the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but he’d found the Raumvirans’ unexpected departure from Beacon Cairn equally troubling. He’d feared they’d come to harm, do something to give away the Eminence’s plans, or even outright betray their undead kindred.

  But evidently none of those things had come to pass. Because the centipede was a Raumathari automaton, and that meant Pevkalondra and her people had thought better of their fit of pique and come to rejoin their comrades.

  Uramar drew breath to call out a greeting. Then one of his more cautious souls snapped, “Don’t! Be certain first!”

  “Yes,” added another inner voice, one of the jocular, japing ones, “you might as well. You’re out here to play watchdog, aren’t you?”

  Uramar raised his hand to signal his companions to halt, then stalked forward, taking momentary satisfaction in the silence of his approach. The necromancer who’d created him had assembled his massive, crooked body for strength, not agility and certainly not for stealth. But in the years since his liberation, he’d learned to compensate for his hugeness, deformities, and limp.

  He peeked around a mossy tree trunk. His eyes widened, and a dozen inner voices clamored at once to explain the import of what he beheld.

  They didn’t need to. He understood. The golems were indeed of Raumathari manufacture. He recalled seeing some of them in the vaults where their creators had kept them. But the folk marching along with the constructs weren’t Pevkalondra and her retainers. They were living berserkers, hathrans, and men in masks, along with the sun priestess who’d destroyed Falconer and the fire mage who’d contended with Nyevarra.

  “How did they get past the fey?” asked one of Uramar’s souls.

  But he didn’t have time to speculate or curse the durthans’ longtime allies for being less capable than they were supposed to be. He turned and crept back to the rest of the patrol.

  “The folk up ahead are an enemy war band,” he whispered, “headed straight for the weir tress. Our troops outnumber them, but if the living take them by surprise, it could still be bad. Zashtyne.”

  “Yes,” moaned a gray, wavering, all-but-faceless blur.

  “Fly to Lod and warn him. The rest of us will delay the enemy and buy our comrades time to get ready to fight.”

  Zashtyne hurtled away. The rest of the patrol awaited Uramar’s further commands. In their various fashions, they all looked resolute despite the long odds, and he felt a pang of pride in them. They embodied the truth of Lod’s teaching that the undead were higher, worthier beings than the mortal husks from which they rose.

  Waving his hand, he bade them spread out so no blast of flame or rain of acid could target too many at once. Then he drew his greatsword from the scabbard on his back, charged, and his fellows exploded into a headlong dash along with him. They wouldn’t close the distance before the living noticed them coming, but with luck, they might get close.

  His soul fragments shouted war cries or gave advice. One piece of the latter was to shroud himself in what was, for the living, crippling cold, and he willed the force to leap forth from inside him.

  The patrol was twenty strides from the foe when the fire wizard spotted them and shouted an alarm, whereupon a bronze sphinx with brass joints and copper highlights pivoted and bounded at Uramar. He wondered if some knowledgeable foe was making sure he battled one of the constructs, for neither his aura of chill nor the life-drinking magic bound in his sword were likely to inconvenience it.

  All right, then, he thought, I’ll do this the hard way.

  The sphinx’s hinged jaw opened, and without breaking stride, it roared. The sound ripped through Uramar’s head, and a couple of his inner voices wailed. But most of the pieces of his mosaic self held fast against terror.

  He faltered, though, just as if he were afraid, and waited for the sphinx to spring. When it obliged, he dodged to the side and cut at its neck.

  Metal crashed as steel cracked bronze. The stroke fell well short of decapitating the automaton, though, and it spun around to face Uramar anew. At the same instant, golden light, painful like a bee sting, flashed at the corner of his vision. The sun priestess was channeling the power of her deity.

  Uramar had hoped some of his warriors would reach her and the wizard before they could start casting spells. But things plainly hadn’t worked out that way, and he needed to deal with the sphinx before he’d have any hope of striking down the southerners himself.

  The automaton lunged at him, and he cut at it. With a trickiness he hadn’t expected of a mindless thing-maybe its new master was operating it like a puppet-the sphinx stopped short and swiped at his blade with its paw.

  Metal rang once more as the blow connected and nearly tore the weapon from his hands. Intent on reaching him before he could grip the hilt securely again, the sphinx pounced, and he spun aside.

  As he did, he glimpsed a specter in flight, its arms and fingers stretching as it rushed the tall, slender wizard. She pointed her staff at it, and the end of the weapon and her long yellow hair both burst into flame. Then, however, all the fire went out as quickly as it had erupted, and she hurled darts of crimson radiance instead.

  Uramar barely dodged the sphinx’s spring, and as a result ended up too close to cut at his foe. But as one of his voices needlessly reminded him, that didn’t mean the weapon was useless. He hammered the pommel down on the automaton’s spine with all his strength.

  The sphinx lurched off balance, froze for an instant, then pivoted. Uramar hopped back and so avoided a snap of its bronze fangs.

  At that moment, undeterred by his mantle of cold, a Rashemi warrior with a battle-axe rushed in his flank. Without taking his eyes off the sphinx, Uramar jabbed his sword to the side and caught the berserker in the neck. It would have been a lethal stroke even with an ordinary weapon, but in this case, the Rashemi withered and died before he could even slip off the point, let alone bleed out.

  Meanwhile, the golem lunged, but it was no longer as fast and agile as before. Uramar retreated, shifted the greatsword back in front of him, and swung it down at the top of the sphinx’s half human, half leonine head.

  The blade split its target all the way down to the mouth. The automaton collapsed in a rattling heap.

  Uramar yanked the sword free and pivoted to locate the sun priestess. There she was, casting spells behind the protection afforded by two warriors made of light. He started toward her, but another golem, the enormous centipede he’d noticed at the start, interposed itself between them.

  As he fought to demolish that construct, he caught more glimpses of the rest of the battle. His comrades were perishing one by one, vanquished by superior numbers.

  Was it possible they’d delayed the living long enough? Some of the soul fragments thought yes, others no, but perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. Berserkers and golems were maneuvering to cut off any possible retreat.

  So be it, then. Maybe the necromantic secrets of the Codex of Araunt would one day reanimate Uramar and his comrades anew. If not, he was willing to die the final death for the cause he held dear.

  He sheared the centipede’s front legs out from under it, then smashed its head when it tipped off balance. By that time, though, more foes were converging on him, and he couldn’t see any of his allies anymore.

  He wished he hadn’t been so awkward and shy when Nyevarra offered her affection.

  And at that instant, as if his thoughts had brought her, she appeared beside him in a puff of displaced air, her tarnished silver mask on her face and the Stag King’s antler staff in her left hand. She took hold of his forearm with her right hand and rattled off rhyming words of power.

>   The world seemed to shatter into sparks, and he had a sensation of hurtling motion, although without being able to tell if he was falling or streaking along like an arrow. The feeling only lasted for an instant, though, and then his surroundings reassembled themselves into stable, coherent forms as abruptly as they’d burst apart.

  Only now they were different surroundings. He and the vampire stood amid the towering weir trees, where everyone was rushing around preparing for battle.

  “Zashtyne made it here,” he said, “and then you came for me.”

  “We need you,” she said, her fingertips lingering on his biceps. “Are you ready to take on the mortals in a fair fight?”

  He smiled at her. “I am.”

  When Aoth Fezim and Jet swooped toward the deck, men scattered. And they kept their distance thereafter from the black griffon’s smoldering red eyes, beak, and talons.

  It was the natural, prudent reaction, but Bez had no intention of looking intimidated in front of his own crew and aboard his own vessel, even if he was the Halruaan the beast-and his master-genuinely hated. Thus, he strode closer to the newcomers, past masts, rigging, catapults, ballistae, and the cranks that controlled the Storm of Vengeance’s folding wings, and said, “I saw flashes and heard cries filtering up through the tree limbs. So I know our allies on the ground skirmished with more of the enemy. Were you able to make out any of the details?”

  “Yes,” said Fezim, “and unfortunately, the durthan who wields the Stag King’s staff appeared and whisked the patchwork swordsman I told you about to safety.”

  “So now the rest of the undead and dark fey know we’re coming.”

  “At least we got close to the weir trees, and Vandar and the others are moving up fast. They may engage before Lod and his creatures finish putting themselves in order. But we’re not going to take them by complete surprise like we wanted.”

  Bez grinned. “Not complete surprise. But still.”

  “Right. Our part of the plan hasn’t changed. We’ll give the fight on the ground a little time to get going. Make the undead think what they see before them is all they have to deal with. Then, on my signal, we flyers will hit them from above. You’ll see gaps in the canopy you can shoot through. Just remember that specters and such can fly too. You need to be ready to repel boarders.”

  “We are,” said Bez. “May the Foehammer guide your spear, Captain.” He grinned. “Until we finish with Lod.”

  Fezim smiled back. “And may Lady Luck smile on you for exactly the same amount of time.”

  Jet gave a rasping cry, pivoted, leaped over the gunwale, lashed his wings, and climbed. Meanwhile, watching, Bez thought, I shot you down once, griffon, and from much farther away.

  For although Fezim might believe his fellow mercenary commander had no choice but to do as he was told, in fact, a clever man could almost always find options, and the present situation was no exception.

  Fezim and an undetermined number of his allies could set the Storm ablaze merely by speaking a certain phrase. But suppose Bez killed the Thayan with a single stroke while his friends were busy fighting on the ground, then simply sailed away. He might get a long head start before Jhesrhi Coldcreek and the others were free to pursue or even realized what had happened.

  But another grating screech and a winged shadow sliding across the deck reminded him Jet was far from the only griffon in the air, and the huge black beast was now the chieftain of the others. If Bez struck at Jet, the rest might all attack the skyship.

  Well then, what if, instead of killing Fezim and making a run for it, Bez fought the battle through on the undead’s side? Dai Shan had formed an alliance with them. Why shouldn’t another living man do likewise?

  Because that strategy brought him right back around to the problem of the runes. Only an idiot would gamble that he could betray his fellow sellsword captain, then linger in the vicinity, and every one of Fezim’s friends would die before a single one of them got around to reciting the trigger words to destroy the Storm.

  And even though Bez possessed magic that would enable him to survive the blast, and even though he could recruit new followers, such a calamity simply couldn’t be allowed. Built with arcane secrets lost when the Spellplague devastated the Halruaa of old, the skyship was irreplaceable.

  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 direh
elm 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.