The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy

by Richard Lee Byers

  Aoth snorted. “Nothing new about that. Lords don’t pay good coin to sellswords only to hand the most dangerous jobs to their own vassals. And at least we are getting paid. I told the zulkirs the Brotherhood wouldn’t fight otherwise.”

  Jet screeched. “It’s starting.”

  Arrows rose from ranks of Aglarondan archers like a dark cloud. Gaedynn scrutinized the arc of the shafts as they reached the apogee of their flight. The enemy bowmen were reasonably competent. Of course, one would expect as much, considering how many of them had some measure of elf blood flowing in their veins.

  Strong hands grabbed him by the arm and jerked him onto his knees. “Down!” Khouryn snarled.

  I was getting around to it, Gaedynn thought.

  The sellswords equipped with tower shields or targes raised them to ward themselves and their more lightly armored comrades. The arrows whined as they fell, then clattered against the defensive barrier. Here and there, a man screamed where a missile found a gap.

  Behind the foot soldiers and archers, wings snapped and rustled as the griffon riders took to the air. Gaedynn wouldn’t have minded going with them, but Aoth had decided that in this particular combat, he’d be more useful directing the archers on the ground.

  So he supposed he’d better get to it. “Archers!” he bellowed. “Remember who you’re supposed to kill, and shoot them!”

  His bowmen stood upright. Some of them loosed at their counterparts on the other side of the battlefield. Jhesrhi, who had a particular knack for elemental magic, augmented their efforts with an explosion of flame that tore a dozen Aglarondans apart.

  The remaining Brotherhood archers shot at enemy knights and officers, equestrian figures armored from head to toe, wherever they spotted them. Gaedynn took aim at a chestnut destrier and drove an arrow into its neck. It fell, catching its rider’s leg between its bulk and the ground and, with any luck, crippling him. Not a chivalrous tactic, Gaedynn reflected, but then, he wasn’t a chivalrous fellow.

  Nevron smiled, savoring the sight of thousands of warriors striving to spill one another’s blood, the deafening racket of the bellowed war cries and the shrieks of agony. Unlike his fellow zulkirs, he relished the perilous tumult of the battlefield. Indeed, it was still his dream to abandon the dreary mortal plane and, unlike any living human being before him, conquer an empire in the higher worlds. Regrettably, the chaos of the past century, as magic and the very structure of the cosmos redefined themselves, had persuaded him to bide his time.

  The demons and devils that accompanied him everywhere, caged in rings, amulets, or tattoos, shared his exhilaration. They roared and threatened, begged and wheedled, in voices only he could hear, urging him to unleash them to join the slaughter.

  Although the zulkirs had arranged their formation with the Brotherhood of the Griffon at the center, the natural focus for the Aglarondans’ greatest efforts, there were plenty of the enemy to go around, and they were making a creditable attempt to strike at every target within reach. Thunderclaps boomed in a ragged volley, and five flares of lightning leaped forth at the zulkirs’ right wing, where Nevron stood amid a circle of lesser Red Wizards.

  The thunderbolts winked out of existence short of their targets. Standing some distance away, Lallara gave a brusque, self-satisfied nod that flapped the loose flesh dangling under her chin. The old hag might be abrasive and disagreeable in every conceivable way, but Nevron had to concede that, despite the appearance of decrepitude she’d allowed to overtake her, her command of abjuration, the magic of protection, remained as formidable as ever.

  Something similar might be said of Lauzoril. He looked like a priggish clerk or bloodless functionary someone had dressed in the scarlet robes of an archmage as a joke. But when he murmured a spell and swirled his hands, enchantment, the magic of the mind, plunged a cantering troop of enemy horse archers into terror, and they wheeled and galloped back the way they’d come.

  Golden greatswords clasped in their fists, a dozen crimson-skinned angelic warriors abruptly appeared more or less in the same place from which the thunderbolts had stabbed. Nevron surmised that, invisible behind the spear-and-shield fighters assigned to protect them, the same wizards who’d evoked the lightning were trying a different tactic.

  In so doing, they’d strayed into Nevron’s area of expertise. He decided it was his turn to demonstrate that the wizardry of Aglarond, its vaunted elven secrets notwithstanding, was no match for the darker arts of Thay.

  As the angels charged, he snapped his fingers. Three obese figures shimmered into material existence around him, each twice as tall as a man, with a pair of horns jutting from its head and anguished faces pressing out against the skin from inside its distended belly. Nevron heard the faces wailing even over the ambient din of the battlefield.

  Careless of the humans they trampled or knocked aside, the solamiths lumbered forward to intercept the archons. The demons tore hunks of flesh from their own bodies and threw them. The missiles exploded when they struck the ground, engulfing the angels in blasts of dark, somehow filthy-looking flame.

  Aoth, Bareris, and Mirror waited for the rest of the griffon riders to join them in the air. Then Aoth swept his spear forward, signaling the attack.

  His men shot arrows from the saddle. He rained down fire, lightning, hail, and acid, the spells of destruction that were a warmage’s stock-in-trade. For an instant he remembered how, ashamed of breaking his pledge to the simbarchs, he’d done his best to sneak away from Veltalar without shedding Aglarondan blood. Well, the time for such squeamishness was past.

  A long javelin-cast across the sky, Bareris rode singing, his long white fingers plucking the strings of a black harp. He was high enough above the ground that, were his music not infused with magic, no one below would even have heard him. But as it was, a company of enemy crossbowmen clutched at their ears, reeled, and fell. A couple tried to stab quarrels into their ears, while another drew his dagger and slashed his own throat.

  Then Bareris oriented on a dead elf knight, a wealthy lord or mighty champion judging from the gore-stained magnificence of his trappings. The bard’s song brought the corpse scrambling to its feet to drive its slender gleaming sword into another elf’s back.

  Meanwhile, the Aglarondans shot arrows and flares of magic at the foes harrying them from overhead. Trained to veer and dodge, the griffons avoided many such attacks, and their boiled-leather armor and natural hardiness protected them from others. When none of those defenses sufficed, a steed and its rider plummeted to smash against the ground.

  Jet swerved suddenly. Aoth knew his familiar was evading and, since he himself hadn’t detected an imminent threat, looked into the griffon’s mind to find out where it was.

  Above and to the right. He jerked around to see a trio of wasps as big as Jet himself diving at them, their wings a buzzing blur.

  Jet couldn’t wheel in time to bring his beak and talons to bear. It was up to Aoth. He burned one wasp to ash with a fan-shaped blaze of flame, but by then the other two were right on top of him. He drove his spear into one creature’s midsection, channeled lethal force through the weapon, and the impaled wasp began to smoke and char. It clung to life, however, and jabbed its stinger at him repeatedly. He blocked the strokes with his mithral targe—each one slammed his shield arm back against his torso—but that left him with no hands or gear to ward off the third wasp hurtling at his head.

  The third insect convulsed and, patches of its body withering and rotting, dropped. Still swinging his shadow-sword, Mirror chased the dying wasp toward the ground.

  Though she never would have admitted it to any of her fellow officers—particularly Gaedynn—Jhesrhi lacked the almost preternatural ability to predict the surge and ebb of combat that Aoth and certain others sometimes displayed. Thus, even though she and her allies were expecting a great charge, she had no idea it was about to begin until the enemy bellowed and all plunged forward at once. Their running footsteps and galloping hoofbeats shook the ground benea
th her boots.

  Up until now, although skirmisher had traded blows with skirmisher, and some eager warriors had forayed back and forth, it had mostly been archers, crossbowmen, and spellcasters fighting the battle. Throughout this preliminary phase, the zulkirs’ forces had labored to degrade the Aglarondans’ ability to attack at range, and to harass the knights and lords waiting idly on their mounts. The goal was to goad them into the charge they had just now launched.

  From the enemy perspective, the move no doubt made sense. They outnumbered the zulkirs’ troops by a comfortable margin, and they had considerably more horsemen. They should be able to smash the Thayan formation.

  But they assumed that because they didn’t know that Jhesrhi, fat Samas Kul, and some of his underlings had arrived at the field before them and prepared the ground. They didn’t know what magic their foes intended to unleash.

  Or else they do know, Jhesrhi thought wryly, and they think they have a trick that trumps ours. If she’d learned anything since Aoth delivered her from servitude and gave her a place in the Brotherhood, it was that in war, nothing was certain.

  She peered through the gap between the shields two warriors held to protect her. When she judged that the enemy lancers, pounding along in advance of a horde of foot soldiers, had come far enough, she chanted words of power.

  Elsewhere in the zulkirs’ formation, Samas Kul and the Red Wizards he commanded did the same. She could tell because so much magic, discharged at the same time and to the same end, darkened the air and made it smell like swamps and rot. The golden runes on her staff blazed like little pieces of the sun, and nearby, one of Gaedynn’s archers doubled over and puked.

  Then patches of earth turned to soft, sucking muck beneath the charging Aglarondans’ feet.

  Warhorses tripped and fell, pitching their riders over their heads or crushing them beneath their bodies. Even when a steed managed to keep its footing, it broke stride, which meant that an animal running behind it was likely to slam right into it. Rushing spearmen and axemen sank in ooze to their knees or waists, as though they’d blundered into quicksand. A few dropped completely out of sight. In just a few moments, the fearsome momentum of the charge disintegrated into agony and confusion.

  For an instant, Jhesrhi felt a pang of something that might almost have been pity, but you didn’t pity the enemy. You couldn’t afford to. She flourished her staff and rained acid on three of the nearest Aglarondans. The knights and their mired horses screamed and thrashed.

  Red Wizards hammered the foe with their own attacks. “Down in front!” Gaedynn shouted to anyone who wasn’t an archer, and as soon as they had a clear shot, his men loosed shaft after shaft. Wheeling and swooping above the Aglarondans like vultures keeping watch on a dying animal, the griffon riders also wielded their bows to deadly effect.

  By rights, that should have been the end of the battle. But perhaps the simbarchs’ wizards cast countermagic that kept the trap from being as effective as expected. Or maybe sheer heroic determination was to blame. Either way, muddy figures floundered out of the ooze and ran onward.

  Of course, the snare had done some good. It had killed some of the enemy and deprived the charge of whatever order it originally possessed. But there were still a lot of Aglarondans, their features were still contorted with rage, and if they overran the zulkirs’ formation, they could still carry the day.

  My turn at last, Khouryn thought. “Wall!” he bellowed. “Wall!”

  His foot soldiers scrambled to form three ranks with himself in the center of the first. Everyone gripped a shield in one hand and a leveled spear in the other. The spears of the men in the back rows were longer than those of the fellows in front, so everyone could stab at once.

  Khouryn had time to glance at the human faces to each side of him, and he felt satisfaction at what he saw: fear—that was natural—but not a hint of panic. They’d stand fast as he’d trained them to, as dwarves themselves would hold the line.

  Howling, the first Aglarondans lunged into striking distance.

  For a few heartbeats, the defense worked as theory said it should. Overlapping shields protected those who carried them and protected their neighbors, too. The bristling hedge of spears pierced foes reckless enough to come within reach, often before those warriors could even strike a blow.

  But then, as so often happened, the work got harder. Aglarondans somehow sprang past the spear points, struck past the shields, and killed defenders, tearing gaps in the formation, even as the relentless pressure of their onslaught buckled the lines. Meanwhile, spears broke or stuck fast in corpses, and sellswords snatched frantically for their secondary weapons.

  Khouryn was one of those whose spear stuck fast. He dropped it and his shield, too, and pulled his urgrosh off his back.

  A white warhorse, its legs black with muck, cantered at him, turning so the half-elf on its back could cut down at him with his sword. Khouryn parried hard enough to knock the blade out of its owner’s grip, then, with a single stroke, chopped the rider’s leg in two and sheared into the destrier’s flank. Rider and mount shrieked as one, and the steed recoiled.

  Khouryn glanced around, making sure he was still more or less even with the soldiers to each side. To anyone but a seasoned warrior, it might have seemed that any semblance of order had dissolved into a chaos of slaughter, into the deafening racket of weapons smashing against shields and armor and the wails of the wounded and dying. But in fact, there was still a formation of sorts, and it was vital to preserve it.

  He killed another Aglarondan, and more after that, until the gory urgrosh grew heavy in his hands, and his breath burned and rasped. The man on his left went down, and Gaedynn, who’d traded his bow for a sword and kite shield, darted forward to take his place.

  Sometime after that, the enemy stopped coming. Peering out across the corpses heaped two and three deep in front of him, Khouryn saw the survivors fleeing north toward the safety of Glarondar. The Brotherhood’s horsemen harried them along.

  The last Khouryn knew, Aoth had been holding the cavalry in reserve. At some point, he must have ordered them forward, possibly to play a crucial role in foiling the Aglarondans’ attack.

  If so, Khouryn supposed he’d hear all about it later. For now, he was simply grateful for the chance to lower his weapon.

  Nevron studied the fleeing Aglarondans for a time, making sure they had no fight left in them. Then he drew a deep, steadying breath. He’d need a clear mind and a forceful will to compel his demons and devils back into their various prisons. They were having a jolly time of it hunting enemy stragglers, torturing and killing Aglarondan wounded, and devouring elf and human flesh.

  He was just about to start when Samas floated up in the huge, padded throne that spared him the strain of having to waddle around on his own two feet. “Should we chase the Aglarondans and finish them off?” the transmuter asked.

  “No,” Nevron said. “A wounded bear can still bite, and we need to conserve our strength if we’re going to Thay. The simbarchs won’t try to take the Reach again for a while. That will have to do.”

  “But if we don’t come back to protect it, they’ll take it eventually.”

  Nevron spat. “I realize the name of Samas Kul is synonymous with greed. But if you’re dead, I doubt that even you will care what becomes of your dominions.”

  chapter four

  15–28 Tarsakh, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

  With his swarthy skin, the prisoner was evidently Rashemi, although if he’d ever been stocky, as his kind often was, hunger had whittled that quality away. He lay atop the torture rack with his arms pulled up behind him. To Malark Springhill, who fancied he might know more about how to destroy the human body than anyone else in Thay, its tradition of sophisticated cruelty notwithstanding, it was clear that the torture had already dislocated the prisoner’s shoulders, and that his knee, hip, and elbow joints had also started to come apart.

  Still, the Rashemi had yet to provide any answers. It wa
s an impressive display of defiance.

  Malark turned the winch another eighth of a rotation. The prisoner gave a strangled cry, and something in his lower body tore audibly. The sweaty, bare-chested torturer, speckled with little scars where embers had burned him, tried not to look as if he resented an amateur usurping his function.

  Malark leaned over to look the prisoner in the face. “I want the names of your fellow rebels.”

  The Rashemi croaked an obscenity.

  Malark twisted the windlass a little farther, eliciting a gasp. “I know you’ve had contact with Bareris Anskuld. Tell me how to find him.”

  Although it didn’t really matter if he did. Over the course of the past ninety years, Bareris and Mirror had done more than any of the other malcontents left in the realm to hamper Szass Tam’s government, but even so, their efforts hadn’t amounted to much. Still, Malark had been Bareris’s friend, and given the chance, he would gladly rescue the bard from the vileness that was undeath.

  That final iota of stretching had evidently rendered the captive incapable of verbal defiance, but, panting, he shook his head and clenched his jaw shut. Closed his eyes too, as though blocking out the sight of his tormentors and the dank, shadowy, torchlit dungeon would make his situation less real.

  Malark wondered if one of the spells he’d mastered under Szass Tam’s tutelage would loosen the Rashemi’s tongue, then decided he didn’t care. It didn’t really matter if he unmasked a few more impotent rebels, either. In truth, the success of such efforts had never mattered, only maintaining the appearance that the ruler of Thay was preoccupied with the same sort of trivia as the average tyrant, and with the Dread Rings completed, even that necessity had all but reached an end.

  So why not let this hero perish with his spirit unbroken, his secrets preserved? Why not grant him that greatest of all treasures, a perfect death?