“Yes, the time has come to face the Rotting Man, even here in his place of power,” Marrec told Gunggari, but loudly enough to address everyone. “With Ash at our side, I believe we have a chance.”
“One moment, though,” cautioned Gunggari. He looked over to Ususi. “What of her? She met the vampire’s gaze. She could be under the blightlord’s influence.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” barked Ususi.
“It’s not idiotic to enumerate our weaknesses prior to battle.”
Ususi responded, “No simple glance by a blightlord can suborn my mind; I am stronger willed than that. She merely caught me off guard—had I been any less strong, yes, she might have had me. What you perceived as weakness was in fact my fighting off her insidious instructions. I’m happy to note that I was successful.”
Gunggari studied the mage, no expression crossing his face. Marrec knew the Oslander well enough to interpret the look. Gunggari didn’t trust Ususi’s words.
Marrec shrugged. Before Lurue’s absence, he had access to spells that might have cleansed any taint potentially remaining from the vampire’s gaze. He said aloud, “She seems fine.”
That earned him a quick smile from Ususi. Of course, he mentally vowed to keep an eye on the mage, too.
“It is time to beard the Rotting Man in his lair,” said Marrec. “Everyone ready?”
CHAPTER 29
Great plazas and wrecked temples devoted to demonic powers lay half-buried in the boggy forest that covered all. Stone, cracked and broken into numberless pebbles, littered the expanse, hinting at tumbled statuary, building facades, and other structures. Only ruinous heaps remained of what was once a grand avenue, overgrown with forest plants. There was an arch that still stood, but it looked upon an empty cinder, flooded with foul water. Stagnant pools floated a detritus of wreckage and age-old destruction, but despite the growth, the crumbled grandeur, and encroaching marsh, the outlines of a once-great city were clear, visible despite the lowering twilight.
Elowen took the lead, but Marrec paced at her side. She had once walked these very streets, before the Rotting Man took possession of the Nentyarch’s guardian fortress at the center of Dun-Tharos. Her knowledge allowed them to find a dry path over the half-drowned streets.
As they trudged along, alert to every shadow, Elowen volunteered, “The Nentyarchs ruled from the forest castle at the center for nearly six hundred years, preserving the Rawlinswood from the encroachment of human kingdoms that sometimes sought to loot the Nar conjuries.”
Marrec commented, his voice quiet, “A strange place to choose as a druid capitol.”
“Perhaps, but the Nentyarchs believed that the ruins of the old Nar capital remind us of humanity’s ability to wreak harm on nature. On the other hand, the forest that encompasses the city offers an example of what might be accomplished with patience, strength, and belief in the sanctity of nature.”
“Hmm.” Marrec didn’t know if the elf hunter offered wisdom or an excuse. Before he could formulate his thoughts into something more politic, his eye caught movement high above the trees.
“Say, what’s that?” Marrec pointed to a darkness growing in the sky. Light was fading too quickly to be the natural fall of night. It almost looked like …
“A thunderhead,” said Elowen. “The cloud is forming unnaturally quickly, and unless I’m turned around, it is above the Close.”
Lightning flashed within the boiling thunderhead, as it continued to grow and expand outward in all directions. The smell of rain, mixed with something foul, gusted across them.
Gunggari said, “The Rotting Man knows we are coming.”
Marrec couldn’t gainsay his friend’s conclusion.
They passed down a ruined street, dotted with pines and potholes, between gaping buildings missing doors, windows, and in many cases ceilings and even walls. Then they turned down a wide lane. Before them, not more than five hundred yards by Marrec’s estimate, was the Close.
It was as if the largest trees ever to grow naturally in the world were all gathered together in one place, trunk to trunk, in a great ring. From their perspective, and with the failing light, Marrec couldn’t know the diameter of that ring, but he guessed that the great trees encompassed a circle at least half a mile in diameter.
The great trees were bare of green leaves or needles, seemingly dead. Worse than dead, they were gray and stony, petrified. But they swayed in the rising wind as the thunderhead above began to make its presence known. Or was their movement controlled by some deeper malevolence?
“That bastard,” said Elowen, looking upon the petrified trees, a tear on her cheek.
With a flash of lightning and a crashing clap of thunder, a driving rain emerged from the belly of the black cloud. Marrec and his friends were instantly drenched in the water, which smelled stagnant.
The weakening light revealed that the great fortress of dead trees had a glow all its own—a faint greenish phosphorescence—not the green of living things, no, but instead the essence of gangrene itself—greenish black, pustulant, and pulsing. Thus, even with the arrival of night and through the mist produced by the driving rain, Marrec was able to see the forces that began to stream from the Close.
He had thought the great petrified trees were fused together, but there must have been enough space to navigate between them. Like cheese squeezed from a colander, lines of figures squirmed from between the trunks. The figures, once free of the Close, massed and moved down the lane toward Marrec and the others.
The cleric noticed that the ruined buildings on either side, too, were disgorging ungainly figures. There were hundreds of figures closing upon them at a dead run, with dozens more appearing each second.
Marrec took a pace forward. Gunggari stepped up to Marrec’s left, but a pace behind. Elowen remained to his right, also back a pace. Ususi remained directly behind Marrec, but with space enough between to shelter Ash. In that way, they encircled the girl.
As they rushing forms grew closer, Elowen said, “Volodnis. They’re all rot-touched, like those we fought in Lethyr.”
It was as Elowen said. A tide of blighted volodnis threatened to flow over them, and the rain continued to fall, cold and uncaring.
The blighted volodnis were worked up. They hissed, shouted, and stamped their feet. They broke upon the defenders like a tide, but Marrec held steady. Justlance’s tip became a silver flame in his hand like a thunderbolt, a veritable rod of death to every volodni who opposed him. Marrec slew them as fast as they approached. To his right, he saw Elowen make a similar impact with Dymondheart, save when she slew, the volodnis’ rotting bodies took flame with purifying fire. To his left, Gunggari laid about him, dispatching foes with his sap-spattered dizheri. Behind him, he could hear the continual chant of Ususi, bolts of magical fire laying volodnis low—sometimes one, sometimes several at once.
They advanced. Through the flashing lightning and implacable rain, the silhouette of the Close loomed larger.
They fought, they cursed, and they slew, and the tide continued to part, and a trail of the dead grew behind. Larger shadows begin to stir on the outskirts of the fight, which in a flashing dazzle of lightning were revealed as reinforcements for the enemy—twigblights. Marrec realized that the Rotting Man must know the secret of their animation even without the aid of Anammelech.
The cleric shouted above the thunder, “We can’t fight both volodnis and twigblights and hope to win.”
Ever economical in wielding his dizheri, the Oslander took a moment to shrug, which became the initial move of a dramatic swing that laid two volodnis low.
Each volodni they slew allowed the menacing twigblights to move closer through the crush. They didn’t have to get too close, though—the ones Marrec could make out were fifteen, maybe twenty feet high. Already some were leaning out over the volodnis, seeking to lash Marrec with claws of splintered wood.
Time for the bargainer to make good, Marrec decided. He screamed out, “Queen Abiding, answer to your fin
al agreement. Aid me.”
The sky changed instantly, as if she had been waiting for the call, just out of sight. Where before was driving rain, lightning from the thundercloud, and the sick glow of the petrified forest, there was nothing but black. Tendrils of darkness reached down from that immensity, stabbing into the boggy ground like twisting roots, but more often spearing a blighted volodni or screeching twigblight. Darkness was upon them.
The queen had come.
The void continued to descend. The Rotting Man’s blighted forces cowered and screamed. They sought to escape, but the periphery was already void, so they ran back and forth. Vainly they crawled and clambered, packed into the narrowing space like swarming flies, wailing, calling upon the Talontyr for aid. Their cries were for naught. Some attempted to flee directly into one of the walls of advancing nothingness. In that shadow they found their end.
The lowering void contracted. Sight was taken from Marrec. All sound ceased. Even the sound of the cleric’s own heartbeat was denied him. Marrec wondered if perhaps he should have heeded Ususi’s warning about dealing with demons.
Hearing returned and sight, too. The wide lane was entirely clear of blighted volodnis and twigblights. Neither the blood, the sap, nor the bodies of those already slain, nor the surging mass who a minute earlier had been intent of overwhelming Marrec and his friends remained.
Of the void, only a blot of darkness persisted, almost lost in the rain-streaked night sky, visible only as an absence when lightning streaked.
The queen spoke. “It is finished. If we meet ever again, you shall discover the fate that has befallen your foes.” Then the void, too, was gone.
The crashing thunder echoed hollowly down the lane.
“Forward, then,” urged Marrec. His voice was hoarse, rough from the fear that had sleeted through him before the darkness lifted.
No one replied. Perhaps all were feeling an emotion similar to Marrec’s. The cleric’s relief was tempered with the knowledge that they had yet even to break the perimeter of the Close, and already he had used up the one resource he had thought to unleash on the Rotting Man himself.
It would have to be his petrifying gaze, then, should he get so far, he decided. What an awful surprise it was to him that he would at last come to rely on the evil aspect of himself that he had so long sought to forget and suppress.
Their footsteps clattered on the wet stone of the lane. The tops of the petrified trees towered over their heads as they approached, the branch tips lost in the lightning-rent clouds. Marrec sighted a space between two of the great trunks wide enough to pass two abreast and moved toward the cavity.
They were in. They walked a narrowing path of mud, mold, and mulch of long-dead leaves between two great boles, each as wide and tall as a cliff face. The rain couldn’t reach into the tight space, and the sound of the thunder above was muffled. The light on Marrec’s spear tip proved the only illumination.
“This is the perfect place for an ambush,” noted Gunggari.
Marrec had entertained the same thought, yet they continued ahead unmolested. After about twenty paces, the aperture between the trees reached its narrowest, forcing Marrec to walk sideways. He shuffled forward quickly, certain that an attack was imminent, but no. The passage between the trees began to widen again.
They were through. They stepped into the Court of the Rotting Man.
CHAPTER 30
The Court of the Rotting Man was a great plain encircled by petrified cliffs that towered into the sky. In truth, from within, the ring of colossal petrified trees resembled a steep caldera or crater heralding some ancient catastrophe.
When the court was the Nentyarch’s Seat, the space within the ring of then-living trees had been green and filled with garden paths that wound through groves of flowers and fields of fruit trees, watered by carefully maintained brooks that passed around daisy fields and under quaint stone bridges.
With the coming of the Rotting Man, life had moldered and gone to rot. The paths were washed-out mud tracks, smelly and home to worms and stinging flies, the fruit trees bore only blots of poisonous putrescence, the brooks were dry, and the flowers long since dead. Great holes pockmarked the Court, throwing up great mounds of fresh, muddy earth in places, lending a cemetery feel to the entire space.
Carved back into the inner surfaces of the petrified trees were scores of doors, openings, and dark windows that hinted at chambers, halls, rooms, passages, and alcoves that could lie behind them. Catwalks connected passages from tree to tree. A veritable army could dwell therein: blighted volodnis, twigblights, blightlords, prisoners, slaves, and whatever other dreadful creatures the Rotting Man kept under his sway.
The center of the Court was where all eyes were drawn. In the Nentyarch’s day there had been a simple wooden structure built from specially grown and reverently harvested hardwoods. What had changed since the coming of the Talontyr? A great mist, seeping up from the rot and mound mud hills, obscured the center of the plain.
At least the overhanging and interwoven branches of the ring of petrified trees high above sheltered most of the court from the rain, though flashes of light, rolling booms, and the occasional fall of water continued to gain entry.
Elowen pointed the tip of Dymondheart at the central mass of fog. Only by moving forward, into the mist itself, could the cloaking fog be pierced and the center be revealed. They approached it, careful to keep away from mud that seemed too deep, or cavities in the ground from which the smell of rot issued too strongly. Unfortunately, they could not entirely avoid the stench of decay, but by luck, skill, or some other agency, nothing challenged them as they approached to the very edge of the mist.
Marrec plunged into the clammy whiteness, his companions arrayed about him, and Ash tucked safely among them. The stench of rot grew more intense within the mist, though perhaps the loss of sight merely intensified the other senses. They trudged forward, Marrec hoping that he was ready for anything. Again, nothing challenged their approach through the fog.
As they walked, Gunggari opened the satchel given him by the Nentyarch. He pulled forth four vials and distributed three of them to his friends, one apiece.
Marrec looked at his, “What’s this?” though he guessed what it might be.
“The last four vials within the Nentyarch’s satchel. I perceive that we are about to come face to face with our nemesis.”
“What do these do?” wondered Ususi.
Gunggari shrugged, said, “I do not know—these last four were written with a label containing each of our names only. I inquired of the Nentyarch what these vials represented before our abrupt departure from Yeshelmaar. He indicated that each elixir was different, but each would provide a strength best suited to the needs of its named imbiber. I presume this vial, for instance,” Gunggari indicated the one he had retained for himself, “will grant me strength of arm.” He shrugged again, “But I do not know.”
Marrec palmed the vial in his left hand, retaining his grip upon Justlance in his right. His comrades made similar arrangements.
When at last the fog began to thin, the center was finally revealed.
The Nentyarch’s home, as described to Marrec by Elowen, was gone, with no evidence of it having ever been there. In its place was a lone ash tree—an ash tree of towering size, a hundred or more feet high, though still below the height of the overhanging petrified branches, crowned with an oval mass of sickly green leaves. The leaves hinted that the tree lived, but even so, it was afflicted. The bole was twisted, blackened, and terrible. The tree’s leaves seeped a sick fluid, and at its base was a massive swollen cyst, partially burst, though the poor illumination failed to reveal what lay within the cavity.
Immediately before the cyst was a throne of hardened but putrid mud. A figure sat the throne. The Rotting Man.
From where Marrec and the others exited the mist, they stood not more than forty or fifty feet from the throne and that which sat upon it, but Marrec couldn’t help but shudder when he saw th
e Rotting Man. To his right he heard Elowen cry out, Ususi curse, and even Gunggari take a deep breath. Ash apparently had no reaction, though Marrec didn’t take his eyes from the putrid seat.
The Talontyr was the size of a man, but a man wasted with rot, disease, and madness, from whose pores constantly seeped droplets of blood. The Rotting Man’s body was a battleground for hundreds, maybe thousands, of virulent diseases, all of which strove against each other and the flesh which hosted them.
The Rotting Man could not perish from such ravages. Such was the gift of Talona, the Lady of Poison, the Mother of All Plagues, and other names more gruesome. Rot was the Talontyr’s strength.
Before the Rotting Man’s throne was an altar of rough-cut stone upon which sat a crystal vase. The vase held a slender stem to which a single bone-white petal clung.
To the Talontyr’s right stood Damanda, glowering. She had reacquired her swarm aura.
Surrounding the Talontyr and Damanda were various creatures, all disfigured with lesions, pustules, and other outward signs of sickness, though of course in the Court of the Rotting Man, these creatures obviously drew strength from their condition. Unfortunately, the Rotting Man’s forces created a buffer too wide for Marrec’s special gaze to touch directly upon the author of all their misfortune. Among the creatures arrayed around the throne, Marrec recognized a green-tinged unicorn, a satyr whose eyes were gone but for oozing sores, a score of nixies—or perhaps pixies—each the color of night, a dryad whose ongoing wide-mouthed scream of pain was too raw to be heard any longer, some diseased wolves and bears, plus a few monstrous insects the size of men …
“Ash!”
Marrec glanced back. The child he had so long shepherded was gazing with apparent interest at the large ash tree. Recognizing it. Naming it. Ash and ash …
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