Prophet of the Dead botg-5

by Richard Lee Byers

  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 caught 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 flapp
ed 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 whatever 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.

  It’s the dark, said Jet. It’s curdling or something.

  Aoth realized that must be so. He looked at the patch of ground at the center of the stand of weir trees and saw the gloom there had grown even deeper, so murky and festering-foul, it reminded him of the deathways, although it still offered no bar to his fire-kissed sight. The female durthan with the Stag King’s antler-axe-Nyevarra-was in the middle of it, as were a couple other undead witches and, rearing above creatures of merely human stature, Lod himself.

  Standing a little closer to the thick of the battle, his gore-streaked two-handed sword canted on his shoulder, the patchwork man-Uramar-was shouting. Aoth had no hope of making out what the blaspheme was saying over the general din. But he was likely ordering any ally who could hear him to fall back and form up to protect the spellcasters behind him. At any rate, that was what various undead were doing.

  Aoth scowled at his failure to secure the cursed area straightaway. But he knew little about the kind of ritual magic that had sullied it, and even Yhelbruna, who claimed to understand it, hadn’t anticipated that if they so desired, the undead witches could accelerate the ongoing contamination.

  But maybe Jhesrhi and Cera had sensed the danger, for they and their squads of protectors were already headed for the weirs. But they’d never punch through the ranks of the enemy without support.

  Responding to his master’s thoughts, Jet abandoned his pursuit of the phantoms rising toward the skyship and hurtled toward the towering sacred trees. He likewise gave a rasping cry that brought wild griffons streaking after him.

  Meanwhile, Aoth cast a charm to amplify his voice. “Push for the weirs!” he bellowed to his soldiers on the ground, and an enormous mink looked up and nodded to show it understood.

  Cera had long since discovered she’d been too optimistic at the start of the battle. Although Orgurth and her other defenders were fighting savagely to hold back the foe, she’d still needed to wield her mace as a warrior would, often enough that scraps of rotting flesh and strands of greasy hair clung to the stubby spikes.

  Swaying, an animate corpse with its nose and most of its left profile rotted away stumbled between two golems busy with other foes. Reluctant to expend any of the Keeper’s light on a single such brutish creature, Cera waited for the zombie to swing its war hammer, then sidestepped and blocked with her shield.

  The blow banged on the hide-and-wooden targe and jolted her arm but didn’t hurt her. She swung low and smashed the zombie’s knee, and it pitched forward. She then bashed it in the nape of the neck, and it fell on its ruined face in the snow.

  At the same instant, she glimpsed motion at the corner of her vision. She turned. Just a stride away, a ghoul was rushing her with jagged claws outstretched. Fortunately, Orgurth lunged to intercept it, cut, and split its skull. The ghoul dropped.

  The orc grinned at Cera. “Are you close enough yet?” he shouted, making himself heard over the din of battle.

  “A little farther!” Her answer made her feel guilty. People were dying to help her push forward.

  Orgurth’s leer stretched wider. “Why not?” He turned back toward the enemies still separating them from the weir trees and then snarled an obscenity. Because Uramar himself was leading a dozen floating direhelms right at them.

  In a sudden surging confusion, two of the flying suits of half-plate assailed Orgurth, and to dodge the initial slashes of their swords, he sprang to the side. Other direhelms engaged golems and berserkers. Somehow, in an instant, all Cera’s protectors were busy fighting for their own lives, and Uramar had a clear path to her.

  Fine, she thought. A blaspheme was a target worthy of her deity’s wrath. She raised her mace to the sun shining above the filthy darkness and started a prayer to smite him.

  Then, however, her focus shattered into terror and bewilderment, and her half-finished invocation forgotten, she recoiled. Only for a moment, and then a cleric’s trained will allowed her to shed the effects of what had no doubt been an adversary’s spell. But that was time enough
for Uramar to lumber into striking distance.

  As he did, bitter cold, fiercer by far than the natural chill of this winter day, stabbed into Cera like a knife. She gasped, and her whole body clenched, rendering her incapable of prayer, raising her targe, or offering any other sort of defense. Uramar swung his greatsword high to split her head.

  Then, missing her by no more than a finger length, Jet swooped over her head, and his talons punched into the blaspheme’s chest. Wings lashing, the black griffon-and Aoth astride his back-climbed and carried Uramar into the air.

  Other griffons dived at more of the foe a heartbeat later. Berserkers, golems, bright fey, and telthors rushed up to reinforce Cera’s original bodyguards. Teeth chattering with the aftereffects of Uramar’s frigid aura, she decided she truly was going to reach where she needed to be. And then, with Amaunator’s help, she’d vindicate the faith of those who fought and fell to get her there!

  Through their psychic bond, Aoth could feel the deadly chill that emanated from Uramar’s body assailing Jet. And the griffon must have likewise sensed his concern.

  I’m not some dainty human, Jet snarled. I can take a little cold.

  You can’t take even a scratch from a life-stealing blade, Aoth replied. Just drop him. If the fall doesn’t kill him, I’ll blast him.

  I’m gripping him so he can’t use the sword. I want to pull him apart and pop his stitches.

  Aoth opened his mind to Jet’s perceptions so completely that it was like the griffon’s body was his own. And then he realized Jet was right. The familiar was able to withstand the chill, and with both arms grinding together in one set of talons, Uramar truly was helpless.

  All right, Aoth agreed, kill him. But when he shifted back to his own body’s senses, Aoth regretted saying it.