“We might as well try the obvious way first,” said Aoth. Jet shook out his wings, and the warmage swung himself into the saddle.
“Be careful,” Szass Tam said. “I put guardians in the sky as well as on the ground.”
“I under—” Aoth began, and then Jet leaped, lashed his wings, and carried the warmage aloft. Apparently, after all the time he’d spent underground, the griffon was eager to take to the sky, even the sky of a dismal place like this. Seemingly surprised by the abrupt departure, Mirror rose into the air a moment later.
Bareris watched as they soared high overhead. If something attacked them up there, he’d have a difficult time helping them.
But nothing did, and after a time, they swooped back down to earth. “Got him,” Aoth said. “He’s conjuring on a flat mountaintop about a mile in that direction.” He pointed with his spear.
“Did he notice you?” Lallara asked.
“I didn’t see any indication of it.”
“Does he have a pack of guardians clustered around him?” Samas asked.
“I didn’t see those, either.”
“Still,” said Szass Tam, “they’re there. I guarantee it.”
“So we hit fast and hard and kill their master before they can react,” Nevron said, “just as I’ve been advising all along.” He glowered at Szass Tam. “Captain Fezim has given you your bearings. Now can you translate us to our quarry?”
“Let’s find out.” The lich slipped his withered fingers into one of his many pockets, no doubt to remove a talisman or spell trigger. Then skeletal figures stalked out of the darkness ahead.
Each was half again as tall as a man, with strips of ragged, desiccated flesh dangling from its frame. Their heads were hairless, and their ears, pointed. Tiny figures writhed inside their ribs like anguished prisoners jammed behind the bars of a cage.
One of the zulkirs’ surviving soldiers happened to be closest to the oncoming horrors. He wailed and raised his sword and shield to fend them off. The creature in the lead pounced. The legionnaire’s blade bit into its torso, but it didn’t seem to notice. It grabbed him in its jagged talons, and the man screamed, convulsed, then dangled limp as string. A new prisoner—the soldier’s soul, evidently—squirmed into existence behind the skeletal entity’s ribs. The creature dropped the corpse and kept coming.
“They’re devourers!” Szass Tam called. Perhaps the term meant something to the zulkirs, but Bareris had never heard it before. But if he had to fight in ignorance, so be it. He shouted, and the thunderous bellow ripped flesh from the lead devourer’s frame and broke a number of its bones, even as the cry echoed down the gorge and brought pebbles showering from overhead.
Its legs shattered, the devourer fell but crawled onward. Mirror stepped up beside Bareris, brandished his sword, and light flared from the blade. The crawling devourer and the one behind it burned away to nothing in an instant.
It was encouraging to see that the things could perish, and it was good, too, that they had to come down the relatively narrow passage to reach their intended victims. It meant they couldn’t spread out and surround them, and that spells like thunderbolts, blasts of fire, and Bareris’s own battle cries generally hammered more than one at a time.
Offsetting that advantage, however, was the devourers’ resilience and their numbers. New ones kept streaming down the defile like a rushing river, the husks of their predecessors crunching and cracking beneath their feet.
Samas pointed his quicksilver wand and turned a devourer to gold. It toppled forward. Someone else felled one of the creatures with darts of scarlet light. His tone cold and demanding, Szass Tam rattled off an incantation. It must have returned two of the devourers to his control, because they halted abruptly, turned, and lashed out at their fellows.
Bareris saw that it wasn’t enough. In another moment, unless the warriors in their band prevented it, the devourers would overrun everyone, zulkirs included. And even archmages would have trouble conjuring with such creatures ripping at them.
“Wall!” Bareris yelled, and then heard Aoth and Mirror yelling the same thing. Though white-faced with fear, the last surviving bodyguard heeded the call, and Nevron sent a miscellany of demons and devils to answer it too. The one that came to stand on Bareris’s right was a barbed devil, a somewhat manlike figure with a lashing tail, its body covered with spines and quills.
They just had time to form their line, and then the devourers crashed into it. Bareris cut, parried, and sang a spell to make himself a blur. The point of his spear ablaze with blue light like the fire in his eyes, Aoth thrust and thrust and thrust again. Fighting alongside him, Jet reared, slashed with his talons, and screeched when he tore off a devourer’s head.
Meanwhile, flares of multicolored light and ragged blasts of shadow crackled over the defenders’ heads to sear and wither the massed devourers. Bareris assumed that one or more of the wizards must have floated into the air—or simply clambered onto a rock—to evoke such magic without fear of hitting his allies. He couldn’t actually look around to verify his guess, because he didn’t dare take his eyes off the creatures in front of him.
A devourer’s black, sunken eyes glared down at him, and for a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, what the creature was, or how he was supposed to react to it. But training made him sing the next note of his battle anthem, and his magic shattered his confusion. He cut into the devourer’s torso, and its legs buckled.
“I see the end of them!” Samas called. Bareris felt a surge of renewed determination, then noticed a shiver in the ground beneath his feet.
A moment after that, someone behind him cried out, something inhuman roared, and stone rumbled and crashed. The earth heaved, and he almost lost his balance.
Now he truly wanted to turn and see what was happening at his back. His nerves sang with the fear that if he didn’t, something looming there would strike him down. But it would still be suicidal to look away from the last devourers.
He hacked the leg out from under one such brute, then gutted it when it dropped. A second scrambled over the corpse of its fellow and grabbed him by the shoulder. He felt a pull through the point of contact; the devourer was leeching his spirit from his body.
He cut the devourer with all his waning strength. His sword ruined an eye and buried itself in the creature’s skull, but the incorporeal pull didn’t abate. He tried to yank his sword free, and it wouldn’t come out of the wound.
He sang a charge of malice and loathing into his eyes, then discharged it by glaring at the devourer. The creature stiffened in pain and fumbled its grip on his shoulder. The pull abated, and he felt stronger. He jerked his blade free and drove the point into the devourer’s heart, or at least the spot where a human carried such an organ. The vile thing fell.
At last, nothing else was running to attack him. Not from the front, anyway. He spun around, then faltered.
His first impression was of a corpse swarming with maggots. But in this case, the body was the ground itself and the cliffs rising on each side of the gorge, while the maggots were creatures that, except for the unrelieved blackness of their bodies, resembled the snakelike behemoths called purple worms.
It had been more than ninety years since Bareris had seen one of these monstrosities, but that occasion had been a slaughter he’d never forget. The worms were nightcrawlers. Undead fearsome enough to give even an archmage pause.
Two of the worms bursting from the ground spread their jaws wide and spewed blasts of frost. Lallara raised her staff and cried a word of forbiddance, and the pale jets split like a river streaming around a rock, spattering the sides of the cliffs instead of the people on the ground.
At the same instant, a nightcrawler that had burrowed out of a rocky wall struck straight down at her. It was huge enough to swallow her whole, and she didn’t even seem to notice the threat. But Samas screamed—no incantation to it, just a noise of pure desperation and resolve—and pointed his wand at the creature’s plunging head. The
lead section of the nightcrawler dissolved in a puff of smoke. The rest of it convulsed, the length that still protruded from the burrow slamming repeatedly against the cliff.
Lauzoril produced illusory duplicates of himself to confuse his foes, then snapped his fingers to strike a spark that expanded into a giant made of flame. Nevron brandished his staff, and spiders fell from the ends of his voluminous sleeves. When they touched the ground, they too grew to enormous size, then scuttled to attack the nightcrawlers, spitting webs to bind them, then crawling on their ink black bodies and biting.
Szass Tam chanted in the same imperious fashion as before, and one of the nightcrawlers swiveled its head, struck, and seized a fellow worm in its jaws. Snapping and gnawing, twisting around one another, the creatures thrashed in a struggle that threatened to crush anyone within reach and sent new shocks jolting through the ground.
Bareris sang a song that made the frenzy before him appear to slow, although in reality, his own perceptions and reactions had accelerated. Then he ran at a nightcrawler that had tunneled up out of the canyon floor. The thing was twisting in Aoth’s direction. The warmage was still on the ground, but at some point during the last few moments, he’d climbed onto Jet’s back.
Bareris drew breath to batter the nightcrawler with a war cry, then glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye. He pivoted; a leftover devourer was lunging at him. He sidestepped its raking claws, let it blunder past, then cut at its spine. The creature toppled.
Bareris spun back around. He was too late to distract the nightcrawler from attacking Aoth, but fortunately, the sellsword commander had noticed the threat. When the worm spat frost, Jet beat his wings and bounded like a grasshopper to carry his master out of the way. Aoth hurled lightning from the point of his spear, and the nightcrawler jerked at its searing touch.
Bareris charged the snakelike undead and cut at its flank. He knew it was dangerous to fight such a colossal creature close up. Without even intending it, the nightcrawler could shift its bulk on top of him and crush him. But he trusted his heightened reflexes to protect him.
For a while, they did, and he slashed a portion of the night-crawler’s body into a crosshatch of oozing gashes. Then the creature swiveled its head in his direction and hissed.
Sensing danger at his back, he whirled just in time to see a dozen shadowy figures, all but invisible in the gloom that prevailed at the bottom of the gorge, flicker into existence. Their presence chilled the air, and they charged Bareris like a pack of famished wolves.
In an instant, they were all around him, scrabbling and clutching with their freezing though insubstantial hands, and he feared they might overwhelm him with sheer numbers. Then a blaze of light withered them. It spiked pain through his body as well but didn’t actually seem to injure him. He nodded to Mirror—who currently resembled Samas Kul, of all people, except that he had a sword instead of a wand—to indicate as much.
Bareris pivoted back toward the nightcrawler and thrust his sword into its body. Mirror flew into the air and cut at its head. Aoth slashed chunks of it away with a conjured wheel of spinning blades. The worm screamed, and then the top half of it plummeted to the ground like a felled tree.
Bareris watched for a moment to make sure it wouldn’t start moving again, then pivoted to survey the battlefield. To his surprise, it appeared to him that he and his allies were holding their own. The last remaining bodyguard was gone, and so were a number of Nevron’s demons. Severed pieces of their grotesque anatomies littered the canyon floor. But, hanging like vines from the cliffs or, in their immensity, all but blocking the defile, several nightcrawlers were dead as well, while the archmages, Aoth, Jet, and Mirror all survived.
Yet Bareris had a feeling that something was wrong, and after another moment, he realized why. The earth was quaking.
No one else appeared to notice, probably because, with the gigantic nightcrawlers tunneling and heaving themselves around, it had been shaking for a while. But this was different: more constant and growing steadily more intense.
He looked skyward just in time to see the cliffs start falling.
Aoth’s fire-infected eyes abruptly saw a new murkiness in the air. Mystical power was at work, and it was something apart from all the combat magic he and his companions were evoking to destroy the nightcrawlers.
He cast about. Chunks of stone were tumbling from the canyon walls, but that was far from the worst of it. The cliffs were lurching toward one another.
He remembered Szass Tam’s claim that Malark had shifted the mountains. It stood to reason that if the traitorous whoreson could do that, he could also smash them together.
Aoth looked around for Bareris and found him too. Unfortunately, the bard stood where the stones were raining down the thickest and at the epicenter of the impending collision. If Aoth tried to retrieve him, they’d both be crushed.
Even so, left to his own devices, he might have tried or at least hesitated in dismay. But, unfurling his wings, Jet raced to carry him out of the deathtrap by the shortest possible path.
Aoth looked for someone he actually might be able to save. He spotted Lallara, tottering in an effort to keep her feet. Moving with her, a disk of crimson light floated above her head. Falling stones bounced off it.
He willed Jet to change course and felt the griffon’s resulting pang of annoyance as if it were his own. Neither of them truly wanted to spend an extra instant in the danger zone. But he needed Lallara. Needed all of them, truly, but she was the one within reach.
He leaned sideways and snatched the old woman to him. At once, Jet spread his wings, lashed them, leaped, and flew.
More boulders fell. A big one shattered against the hovering disk, which then winked out of existence, subjecting Aoth, Lallara, and Jet to a shower of gravel. The converging sections of wall accelerated, springing toward one another like clapping hands. Lallara gasped as she finally perceived the true magnitude of the peril.
Aoth doubted they were going to make it, then felt Jet’s savage determination. The griffon put on a final burst of speed and kept it up until the passage became so narrow that he could no longer spread his wings.
But by that time, they were close enough to safety that sheer momentum threw them clear into a wider section of canyon. Aoth automatically cast about for new threats. Everything was still.
Jet glided down to the ground. Scowling, Lallara shoved at Aoth to extricate herself from their awkward embrace.
He turned to study the cloud of dust behind him and the mass of stone sealing the passage he’d just escaped. Nothing was moving in that direction, either.
Bareris sang a song intended to shift him to safety, and a nightcrawler turned its head in his direction. Pain and dizziness stabbed through him, and he fell to his knees. The worm had attacked him with some sort of supernatural ability. After a moment, the fierce pangs diminished, but not before he fumbled the next phrase of his spell. The power he’d raised dissipated in a useless sizzle.
He floundered to his knees, took a breath raw with rock dust, and tried to focus his thoughts for another effort even though he sensed that, his charm of acceleration notwithstanding, he wouldn’t have time.
Fingers squeezed his shoulder. “Allow me,” Szass Tam said. Seemingly standing without effort despite the upheavals, he touched the butt of his shadow staff to the quaking ground.
He and Bareris shot down into the earth, which parted for them as if their bodies were made of dense, sharp metal. Startled, sightless, Bareris had the mad, random thought that here at last was burial, ninety years late. Then he and Szass Tam abruptly came to rest in a bending tubular tunnel. The lich had to crouch too, or he wouldn’t have fit.
“This is a nightcrawler burrow,” Szass Tam said. “The way the brutes were popping up around us, I knew the ground had to be riddled with them.” He crooked his fingers into a mystical sign, and sheets of dark fire crawled on the walls around them, burning away soil and rock and creating more open space. He then straightened up an
d stepped away from Bareris.
A nightcrawler’s head burst through the ceiling, showering them with dirt. It was gouged and dented, probably battered by falling boulders. Like its foes, it must have dived into the earth to remove itself from between the converging walls.
The thing plunged into view directly above Szass Tam, and for once, even he appeared startled. The enormous jaws gaped, then snapped shut around him. Because the lich had enlarged this part of the burrow, it was high enough to admit not just the nightcrawler’s head but a bit of its body. As a result, Bareris saw its throat swell as it swallowed.
For a moment, he simply stared, too addled with contradictory emotions and impulses to act on any of them. Then he rose, lifted his sword, and took a stride in the creature’s direction.
Its head blew apart in a flash of scarlet light. The detonation rocked him back, even as it spattered him and the walls of the burrow with filth. Smeared with slime, Szass Tam squirmed feet-first out of what little remained of the nightcrawler’s mouth.
The necromancer inclined his head to Bareris. “Obviously, I didn’t actually need your help. But it’s good to see you have your priorities straight.”
Bareris wondered how Szass Tam knew he’d been coming to his aid. “You and I will settle our score after we deal with Malark.”
Szass Tam waved a shriveled hand, and the jellied filth vanished from his person. “If you insist. If you believe your devotion to a rather ordinary girl who died a century ago requires it. But it seems to me that what you truly love is your own misery. The Maiden of Pain possessed you in the moment of your despair, and you never managed to escape.”
Bareris took a steadying breath. “If you want our alliance to last until we stop Malark, then don’t mention Tammith or speculate about my feelings anymore.”
“As you wish. Let’s turn our attention to the task at hand.”
“Do we still have any hope of succeeding, even after what just happened?”
“Oh, certainly. You weren’t thinking you and I are the only survivors, were you? Getting caught between two masses of rock wouldn’t hurt your friend Mirror. Captain Fezim scooped up Lallara and tried to carry her out of the affected area, and I suspect he succeeded. Unless they panicked—and that’s unlikely—the other zulkirs were capable of saving themselves as well.”
The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy Page 27
