Unholy hl-3

by Richard Lee Byers

  The vasuthant reached for him, and he felt a sick near-certainty that its power had diminished his martial skills as well, that he could no longer wield his sword well enough to fend it off. He was about to perish with Szass Tam unpunished and Tammith unavenged.

  Then the vasuthant's arms whirled past him to reach for Mirror instead, and when Bareris followed the motion, he understood why. Mirror had already turned back into a ghost, which meant that at the moment, he posed a greater threat to their adversary.

  Mirror rattled off an invocation, and his murky blade shined so brightly that Bareris had to squint to look at it. The phantom charged the vasuthant with the weapon extended like a lance.

  Power groaned through the air. With a snapping sound, several jagged cracks opened in the section of cavern floor between Mirror and the vasuthant. Then shadow swirled around the ghost, almost obscuring his running form, dimming the light of his sword, and enclosing him in a sphere of gloom. Mirror froze midstride, immobile as a statue.

  The vasuthant swung its tentacles back toward Bareris. He retreated, and the creature snatched and destroyed one of the remaining duplicates.

  Then Bareris's heart stopped pounding, and for an instant, he felt horribly cold. He was undead once more and suffered an irrational pang of loss, even though he needed all his abilities to have any hope of survival. Without Mirror fighting beside him, that hope was slim enough as it was.

  The last of his doubles vanished.

  Power sizzled around him, and invisible needles jabbed across his body. Then an unseen agency threw him straight up into the air. Aping his every move, voluntary or otherwise, the last of his illusory duplicates hurtled up beside him.

  Bareris just had time to fling up his arms to protect his head before he crashed into the cavern ceiling. The collision hurt but didn't cripple or stun him, and he sang the word that would slow his fall and spare him a second impact.

  But unfortunately, the charm didn't allow him to control where he landed. The vasuthant flowed underneath him, and he dropped into its black, fuming core. At once pain stabbed him, and as the nearly invisible arms snaked at him from every side, wrapping around him, the torment intensified, even as it did him serious harm.

  He spun, dodged, and struck. Each successful evasion or cut bought him another moment of existence but nothing more, because the vasuthant formed new arms as fast as he destroyed them. Meanwhile, the passing instants shuffled and repeated themselves until he thought the confusion of that alone might break his mind.

  Standing in the center of the living darkness, he was also standing at the heart of the wound in time, and the more the creature exerted its powers, the more grievous that injury became. When he realized that, something-instinct, perhaps, certainly not a fully formed idea-prompted him to sing.

  Since he couldn't call anything that could fight as well as he could with sword and magic, he generally had little use for summoning spells. Nor was he currently attempting any of the several such melodies in his arsenal. Rather, this song was an improvisation devised to take advantage of the vasuthant's own chaotic essence.

  Just beyond the periphery of the creature's vaporous form, other Barerises-this time, by no means identical-wavered into being. One was the young man who'd adventured with the Black Badger Company, seeking wealth to buy Tammith and himself a life of ease. Another was the griffon rider who'd fought in the first War of the Zulkirs. The rest were versions of the undead fugitive who'd skulked about Thay in the ninety years after.

  The pallid outlaws attacked. The youthful wanderer and the legionnaire faltered, and Bareris realized they couldn't see in the dark. He conjured light to reveal the cave and the creature it contained, and they too advanced on the entity with slashing blades.

  The vasuthant couldn't form and direct enough arms to hold them all off at the same time, and, perhaps because Bareris and Mirror had already hurt it severely, or because it had already expended so much of its power, it quickly withered under the onslaught. It boiled, thrashed, then shattered into nothingness. Bareris felt a sort of intangible thump as the insult to time repaired itself.

  With the breach closed, his counterparts couldn't remain. Most faded instantly, but for some reason, the youngest lingered another moment. He seemed to gaze at his older self with consternation, pity, or conceivably a mixture of the two.

  It made Bareris want to say something. But he had no idea what, and his younger self dimmed to nothingness before anything came to mind.

  Bareris felt inexplicably ashamed, strangely bereft, and scowled the emotions away. Surely his inner turmoil was just a transient and meaningless aberration, an aftereffect of the psychic punishment he'd endured.

  He needed to focus his attention on Mirror. The vasuthant might be gone, but the bubble of gloom it had created remained, with the ghost still a motionless prisoner inside.

  Bareris walked to the sphere, took a moment to center himself and regulate his breathing, than sang a song of liberation. The dark globe withstood the spell without so much as a quiver.

  "Are they sure?" asked Samas Kul. A stray crumb dropped from his ruddy lower lip.

  Lallara sneered at him. "Do you actually think Captain Fezim's scouts could be mistaken about observing an entire army on the march?"

  Nevron's attendant demons and devils didn't think so. They whispered, hissed, and snarled in voices only he could hear, begging him to take them into another battle.

  The invaders had been working their way down the Lapendrar when a patrol led by Gaedynn returned mid-afternoon. Upon hearing the redheaded archer's report, Aoth immediately summoned the zulkirs to a council of war in the shade of a stand of gnarled, fungus-spotted oaks on the riverbank. Lallara conjured a dome of silence to keep anyone from eavesdropping, and as a result, the world had a strange, hushed quality. Nevron could no longer hear the cheeping birds in the branches overhead or the gurgle of the current.

  "Gaedynn and the other griffon riders are certain of what they saw," said Aoth. Unlike Nevron, Lallara, and Lauzoril, he hadn't bothered to tell an underling to fetch a camp chair. He sat crosslegged on the ground, his back against one of the tree trunks and his spear on the ground beside him.

  His immense floating throne ludicrous in the wan sunlight and open air, Samas made a sour face. "You said that if we avoided Anhaurz, we wouldn't have to fight another battle."

  "I said I hoped we wouldn't," Aoth replied. "But either Szass Tam ordered the autharch of the city to chase us, or else the bastard simply wants a fight. The rebels claim he's some sort of intelligent golem or living metal monstrosity, so Kossuth only knows what's in his mind. Anyway, he's maneuvering to come at us from the west and pin us against the river."

  "Could we march faster and keep away from him?" Samas asked.

  "Conceivably," said Aoth, "but it would destroy any illusion that we're serious about reaching the Dread Ring in Tyraturos."

  Lauzoril laced his fingers together. "What if we actually did cross the Lapendrar? Then this metal man's army and ours would be on opposite sides of it. I understand that we couldn't ford without the aid of magic, but we have magic."

  "That too might work," said Aoth, "but at the cost of putting us exactly where we don't want to be: deeper inside Thay, where the river that shielded us from Anhaurz's army might cut off our escape when an even bigger force descends on us later."

  "So you recommend we stand and fight," Lallara said.

  "Yes," said Aoth.

  "I agree," the old woman said.

  "As do I," said Lauzoril.

  "And I," Nevron said. His familiars roared and cackled to hear it.

  "Can we win?" Samas asked. "Even after the losses we sustained taking the first Ring?"

  "The enemy is fresh, and there are a lot of them," said Aoth. "But the four of you are zulkirs. That should tip the scale in our direction."

  Heedless of the risk that it would draw Szass Tam's sentinels or other dangerous creatures, Bareris sang as loud as possible. He also sustained the
final piercing note longer than anyone but an undead bard could, expelling every trace of breath from his lungs, pouring all the force of his trained will into the tone.

  Mirror's prison weathered the assault just as it had resisted all of Bareris's previous attempts at countermagic.

  In desperation, he drew his sword, grasped the hilt with both hands, and tried to smash the shadowy sphere as if it were an orb of cloudy glass. No matter how hard he struck, the blade glanced away without leaving a mark.

  This was bad. He thought he understood what had befallen Mirror. The vasuthant had snared him in a petrified moment where the ghost could take no action, because nothing could happen without even a slight progression of time for it to happen in.

  But unfortunately, inferring that much didn't enable Bareris to break the enchantment. The songs he ordinarily employed for such tasks hadn't done the job, and he no longer had any hope of improvising a new spell to manipulate time itself. The conditions that made that possible ceased when the vasuthant perished.

  If he called to the zulkirs and they succeeded in translating themselves into the caverns, it was possible that one of them- Lallara, perhaps-could liberate Mirror. But as he'd explained to the ghost, he had his reasons for not wanting to summon the archmages prematurely. These particular caves might not connect to the Citadel's dungeons, and even if they did, the longer the zulkirs wandered around on Szass Tam's home ground, the likelier it was that the lich would detect such a concentration of arcane power and prepare a deadly reception for them. Better, therefore, to wait to call them until it looked as if they might be able to sneak up on their supreme foe relatively quickly.

  Perhaps Bareris could wait until he found a way into the dungeons, and then he could perform the summoning. Then he and his allies could backtrack to this cave-

  But no. Even as he conceived the idea, he knew it wouldn't happen that way. The archmages would never spend precious time and brave additional perils just to rescue Mirror. It wasn't in their natures.

  So that left two alternatives. Bareris could press on alone and trust that whatever danger arose from this point forward, he'd be able to contend with it unaided. Or he could stay here and continue to assail the bubble of frozen time with countermagic, resting when he exhausted his power and hoping that eventually, somehow, one of his spells would breach Mirror's prison. Knowing all the while that Szass Tam could start the Unmaking at any moment.

  Bareris looked at Mirror, a shadow locked in shadow with a blade that glowed like moonlight in his hand. "With so many lives at stake," he said, "I have to go on. And I know you'd want me to."

  That last part was plainly true. If he were able, Mirror would tell him to leave him behind. But Bareris suspected he'd just lied about his own motives-that in truth, it was the possibility of revenge compelling him onward, as it had once prompted him to break faith with Aoth-and it made him feel even more like a traitor.

  Still, he'd made his decision. He turned his back on Mirror, chose one of the exits opening to the northeast, and strode toward it. Once he rounded the first bend in the tunnel on the other side, it was impossible to look back and see the ghost even had he wished to do so. Which he didn't. He needed to focus on whatever lay ahead.

  He told himself that if he survived, he'd come back for Mirror. Told himself too, that it was absurd to imagine that one could truly save a man already dead. Mirror's existence was a cold, hollow mockery of life, misery without end, as a fellow undead knew only too well. The phantom was probably better off suspended as he was.

  Bareris stopped and raked his fingers through his hair. Then he turned and retraced his steps.

  "I know this isn't what you'd want," he said to Mirror. "It's not what I want, either. But apparently it's what I'm going to do."

  He sang until no magic remained to him, and the dark bubble stayed intact. He waited until his power replenished itself, then began again.

  He chanted one incantation, sang another, then started a third. And as the music hammered it, the bubble sheared apart and crumbled like a wasp's nest burning in an unseen flame. It was hard to say why, for he'd cast the identical spell several times before. Perhaps all his attempts at countermagic had exercised a cumulative effect, or maybe it was just that he'd finally gotten lucky.

  Mirror bounded out of the disintegrating sphere, then stopped and cast wildly about when he perceived the vasuthant was no longer in front of him.

  "It caught you in a kind of trap," Bareris said. "I killed it, then set you free."

  "Thank you," Mirror said. Then, perhaps struck by something in his comrade's manner, he peered at him more closely. "How long did it take to free me?"

  Bareris shrugged. "Buried in these tunnels, it's hard to know. But too long. We have to get moving."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  19 Kythorn, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

  Other creatures emerged from the gloom to menace Bareris. But fortunately, none were as formidable as the vasuthant, and one by one, he and Mirror killed them or put them to flight. Until finally, a basket arch appeared at the end of a stretch of tunnel.

  They'd been seeking it so long that, for an instant, an irrational part of Bareris's mind didn't trust it to be real. He had a sense that it would vanish like a mirage as soon as he took another step.

  But it didn't, and on the other side was a passage plainly created by artisans, albeit probably not human ones. The faded murals on the walls depicted lizardfolk carrying on the business of a civilization that looked as complex and advanced as any extant today. For an instant, Bareris wondered what calamity had reduced the reptiles to the primitive brutes with which he was familiar.

  Maybe, he thought, one of their wizards had attempted the Great Work.

  Mirror grinned. "You did it, my brother. You found a way in."

  "We haven't done anything yet," Bareris said. "Stand watch while I try the next part."

  He extracted five small, sealed silver vials from his belt pouch. Each contained a drop of blood drawn from Aoth, Nevron, Lauzoril, Lallara, or Samas Kul. Clasping them in his left hand, he sang under his breath to send a message. To establish a connection over hundreds of miles.

  After a time, he felt the link establish itself, a sensation like a rope pulling taut. He concluded the first song and began another, cobbled together from the same tones, rhythms, and words of power that enabled a bard to shift himself instantly from place to place. Objects appeared to ripple and ooze as he undermined the integrity of the space in which they existed. Violet sparks fell from the air like snowflakes.

  Aoth had found a battlefield to his liking. True, he and his allies would have the Lapendrar at their backs-no practical way of avoiding that-but a bend in the river would protect their right flank, and a patch of woods-and the archers Gaedynn would station there-should keep the enemy off the left. In addition, his side had claimed the high ground. True, it wasn't much higher than the surrounding grassland, but it might make a difference even so.

  Once he was certain that Khouryn and the zulkirs' commanders were setting up the battle formation properly, he, Jet, and half a dozen of his fellow griffon riders flew out to take another look at the foe. As before, he found himself intrigued by the steel behemoth marching in the lead. So-Kehur, autharch of Anhaurz, looked like a scorpion with some additional limbs and a mask of a glaring human face attached, and he-if "he" was the right pronoun-was as huge as the undead octopus-things that had burrowed up out of the ground at the battle of the Keep of Sorrows.

  His army looked nasty too. He had mounted lancers. Spearmen. Crossbowmen. Orcs, dread warriors, Red Wizards, and shuttered black wagons like coffins on wheels to carry entities unable to bear the sun. Their progress shrouded the marching columns in a haze of dust.

  "Can we beat them?" asked Jet.

  "Yes," said Aoth.

  "Even though we're still torn up from the last fight?"

  "Yes. Why the sudden doubts?"

  "Because I get peeks at what's inside your head,
O Mighty Captain."

  Aoth snorted. "I'd be a fool if I liked the situation we're in. But that doesn't mean we can't handle it. I suspect this So-Kehur, who- and whatever he is, has no idea of the kind of power that four zulkirs-"

  "Aoth…"

  It was Bareris's voice crooning his name, and, startled, Aoth reflexively cast about to find the bard. For an instant, he saw him too, standing with Mirror in a corridor decorated with painted lizardfolk. Then the image melted away, exposing the mound of gray cumulus cloud behind it. A sense of connection, however, remained.

  Aoth felt elated and disgusted at the same time, the former because Bareris had succeeded in his mission, the latter because the timing could scarcely have been worse. But there was nothing to be done about the when of it.

  Responding to his master's unspoken desire, Jet wheeled and raced back toward the river. Aoth surveyed the battle lines on the rise, spotted four scarlet-robed figures-and the attendants who generally followed them around-toward the rear of the formation, and sent Jet plunging down to alight beside them.

  "We have to go," said Samas Kul. Aoth observed that the transmuter had abandoned his floating throne. Once again, he wore a harness made of white light to help him carry his bulk around.

  "I know," said Aoth, "but I need another moment." He dismounted, cast about, and found Khouryn already waiting to confer with him. The dwarf wore a leather arming cap but hadn't yet donned the steel helmet that went on top of it. "Bareris just called us."

  "I figured that out," Khouryn said. "You're sure you need to go too?"

  Aoth lowered his voice. "Someone should be there-someone besides Bareris and Mirror, I mean-who thinks that stopping the Unmaking is more important than saving his own skin."

  Khouryn nodded. "I see that. Well, don't worry. The army could use all the magic you five are taking away with you, but we'll manage."

  "I know you will."

  "Now!" Nevron shouted.

  Aoth turned. The zulkirs had moved apart to clear a space among them, and eight soldiers stood inside it. Aoth and Jet hurried to join them.