Unclean hl-1

by Richard Lee Byers

  Wesk lifted a hand to halt the procession. On the other side of an arched gateway rose a cylindrical tower. Constructed of dark stone, vague in the darkness, it reminded Bareris of some titan's drum.

  He peeked around the edge of the gate and squinted at the flat roof, but he couldn't spot anything on top of it. He'd considered singing a charm to sharpen his eyes before entering the city but had opted not to. He could only cast so many spells before exhausting his powers. Better, then, to trust the night vision of his companions and conserve his magic for other purposes.

  "Is it up there?" he whispered, referring to the blood-orc sentry that usually kept watch on the roof.

  Wesk bobbed his head up above the low wall ringing the tower to check. "Yes."

  "Can you really hit it from down here?" Bareris asked.

  He knew Wesk was a skillful archer, maybe even as adept as he claimed. He'd watched the gnoll shoot game on the trek to Delhumide, and only once had the creature missed. Still, Bareris was enough of a bowman in his own right to know just how difficult a shot it was. The orc was four stories up and partly shielded by a ring of merlons.

  Wesk grinned. "I can hit it. I'm not some feeble runt of a human."

  He caressed the curves of his yew bow and growled a spell of his own, evidently some charm known to master archers and hunters. The longbow glinted as though catching Selыne's light in a way it hadn't before, despite the fact that nothing had changed in the sky. Wesk nocked an arrow, stepped into the center of the gate, drew the fletchings to his ear, and let the missile fly.

  To Bareris's eyes, the shaft simply vanished into the dark, but from Wesk's grunt of satisfaction, and the fact that he didn't bother reaching for a second arrow, it was evident the first one had found its mark. Bareris imagined the orc collapsing, killed before it even had an inkling it was in peril.

  He and the gnolls skulked across the open ground between the wall and the tower. They had no reason to think anyone else was looking-it seemed likely the rest of the folk inside were happy to shut themselves away from the terrors infesting the night-but they couldn't be sure.

  Stone steps rose to a four-paneled door. As Bareris climbed toward it, he hoped to find only a handful of warriors waiting on the other side. Whoever was garrisoning this particular outpost, though, he and the hyenafolk had no choice but to deal with them.

  That was because one could only see so far into a ruined city while scouting it from the outside, and thus the intruders had little idea what lay beyond this point. If they were to avoid lurking demons and locate Tammith, someone would have to enlighten them.

  Bareris tried the door and found that, as expected, it was locked or barred. He motioned for the gnolls to stay behind him then bellowed.

  The magic infusing his voice cracked the door and jolted it on its hinges but failed to break it open. He threw himself against it and bounced back with a bruised shoulder, but then Wesk and Thovarr charged past him and hit the barrier together. They smashed it out of its frame to slam down on the floor of the hall beyond. Orcs, three kneeling in a circle around their dice and piles of coppers, and two more wrapped in their blankets, goggled at them in amazement.

  As it turned out, there were no mages on hand, and with the orcs caught unprepared, the fight that followed was less a battle than a massacre. In fact, that was the problem. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment, the gnolls appeared to have forgotten that the point of their incursion was to take at least one of the enemy alive.

  Bareris cast about. For a moment, he could see only gory, motionless, gray-skinned bodies and the hyenafolk still hacking at them. Then he spotted an orc that was down on its back but still moving, albeit in a dazed manner, groping for the dirk in its boot. Thovarr swung his axe over his head to finish the creature off.

  "No!" Bareris shouted. He lunged and shoved Thovarr away from the orc, swiped the latter's hand with the flat of his sword to stop its reaching for the knife, and aimed his point at its throat. "We have to talk to one of them, and this appears to be the only one left."

  He proceeded with the interrogation as soon as the gnolls verified that the rest of the tower was empty. "You can answer my questions and live," he told the orc in its own language, "or I can give you to my friends to kill in whatever fashion amuses them. It's up to you."

  "I can't tell you anything!" the orc pleaded. "I'll die!"

  "Nonsense. Perhaps your masters will punish you for talking if they get their hands on you, but you can run away."

  "That's not it," said the orc. "The Red Wizards put a spell on me, on all of us. If we talk about their business, we die."

  From the manner in which he attended to the conversation, it was apparent Wesk understood the orcish tongue, and now he and Bareris exchanged puzzled glances. The bard wondered again what endeavor merited such extraordinary attempts at secrecy.

  "Listen to me," Bareris said, infusing his voice with the magic of persuasion, "you don't know that your masters truly laid a spell on you. It would have been a lot less work simply to lie and claim they did. Even if the enchantment is real, you can't be sure it took you in its grip. It's the nature of such charms that they can always fail to affect a particular target. On the other hand, you know my sword is real. You see it with your own eyes, and you can be absolutely certain of dying if I cut your throat with it. Bearing all that in mind, whom do you choose to obey, the wizards or me?"

  The orc took a deep breath. "I'll answer."

  "Good. Where in the city do the slaves end up?"

  The prisoner sucked in another breath. Bareris realized the orc was panting with fear. "They-"

  A single word was all it took. The orc's back arched, and surprised, Bareris failed to yank his sword back in time to avoid piercing the orc's neck. But the point didn't go in deep, and he doubted the orc even noticed the wound. The orc was suffering far more grievous hurts.

  The orc's back continued to bend like a bow, and his extremities flailed up and down, pounding the floor. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and bloody froth foamed from his mouth. Hoping the creature might survive if he could only keep him from swallowing his tongue, Bareris cast about for an implement he could wedge in his mouth, but before he could find one, the orc thrashed a final time and lay still. A foul smell suffused the air. The warrior had soiled himself in his death throes.

  "Well," said Wesk, "it wasn't lying about the geas."

  "No," Bareris answered.

  He felt a twinge of shame for compelling the orc to such a death, and scowling, he tried to quash the feeling. He'd had no choice but to force the creature to speak.

  "So what do all of us 'soldiers' do now?" Thovarr asked. "Just wander around and look for the slave? Delhumide's big, and it's got a spook hiding in every shadow."

  Bareris prayed it hadn't come to that. "We search this place," he said. "Maybe we'll find something useful."

  They began by searching the orcs' bodies then moved on to ransacking their possessions. Wesk dumped out the contents of a haversack, picked up a parchment, unfolded it, and then brought it to Bareris.

  "Is this anything?" asked the gnoll.

  Bareris studied the scrawled diagram. It didn't have any words written on it, just lines, circles, rectangles, and dots, and for a moment, he couldn't decipher it. Then he noticed certain correspondences, or at least he hoped he did. He rotated the paper a quarter turn, and the proper orientation made the similitude unmistakable.

  "It's a map of this part of the city."

  Wesk eyed it dubiously. "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. It's difficult to tell because it's crudely drawn and the orc left so much off, but this is the breach in the wall we came through, here are the laughing shadows, and here the towers that squirm of their own accord. The mapmaker used the black dots to indicate areas best avoided. This is the building we're in now, and this box near the top must be the place where the Red Wizards themselves have taken up residence. Why else would anyone take the trouble to indicate the best path from here to th
ere?"

  The gnoll chieftain leered like a wolf spying a lost lamb. "Nice of the pig-faces to go to so much trouble just to help us out."

  With the map to guide them, they skulked nearly to the center of Delhumide without running afoul of any more malevolent spirits or mortal foes, but as Bareris peered expectantly, waiting for the structure indicated on the sketch to come into view, he felt a sudden difference and froze. The gnolls sensed something as well, and growling, they peered around.

  It took Bareris a breath or two to puzzle out precisely what they'd all registered. Probably because it was the last thing he would have expected. "It's… more pleasant here. The feeling of evil has lifted."

  "Why?" asked Wesk.

  Bareris shook his head. "I don't know. Just enjoy the relief while you can. I doubt it will last."

  It did, though, and when they finally beheld their goal, he knew why. It was a square-built, flat-roofed hall notable for high columns covered in carvings and towering statues of a manlike figure with the crowned head of a hawk. Thayans no longer worshiped Horus-Re, but bards picked up a miscellany of lore in the course of acquiring new songs and stories, and Bareris had no difficulty identifying the Mulhorandi god. The structure was a temple, built on hallowed ground and still exerting a benign influence on the immediate area centuries after.

  Bareris shook his head. "I don't understand. I'm sure it's the right place, but why would the Red Wizards set up shop in a shrine like that?"

  "The god's power keeps the bogeys away," suggested Wesk. "The bogeys the warlocks didn't whistle up themselves, I mean."

  "Maybe, but wouldn't the influence also make it more difficult to practice necromancy? It's inherently-"

  "What's the difference?" Thovarr snapped.

  Bareris blinked, then smiled. "Good point. We don't care what they're doing, how, or why. We just want to rescue Tammith and disappear into the night. We'll keep our minds on that."

  Employing buildings, shadows, and piles of rubble for cover, they crept partway around the temple to look for sentries. It didn't take Wesk long to spot a pair of gaunt figures with gleaming yellow eyes crouched atop the roof.

  "Undead," he said. "I can hit them, but zombies and the like are hard to kill. I don't know if I can put them down before they sound the alarm."

  "Give me one of the arrows you mean to shoot," Bareris said.

  The gnoll handed it over, and Bareris crooned to it, the charm a steady diminuendo from the first note to the last. At its end, the whisper of the wind, the skritch-skritch-skritch of one of the gnolls scratching his mane, and indeed, the entire world fell silent.

  Bareris handed the arrow back and waved his arm, signaling for Wesk to shoot when he was ready. The gnoll chieftain laid it on the string, jumped up from behind the remains of a broken wall, and sent it streaking upward. Sound popped back into the world as soon as the shaft carried its invisible bubble of quietude away.

  Wesk's followers shot their own arrows, and at least half found their mark, but as the gnoll had warned, the undead proved difficult to slay. Shafts jutting from their bodies like porcupine quills, they picked up bells from the rooftop and flailed them up and down. Fortunately, though, the sphere of silence now enshrouded them. The bells refused to clang, and after another moment, the amber-eyed creatures collapsed, first one and then the other.

  Wesk balled up his fist and gave Bareris a stinging punch to the shoulder. "For a human," said the gnoll, "you have your uses."

  "I like to think so," Bareris replied. "Let's go."

  Keeping low, they ran toward the temple. Their path carried them near a weathered statue of Horus-Re. In its youth, the figure had brandished an ankh to the heavens, but its upraised arm had broken off in the millennia since and now lay in fragments at its feet.

  The temple proved to consist primarily of long, open, high-ceilinged galleries, with a relative scarcity of interior walls to separate one section from the next and no doors to seal any of the entrances and exits. To Bareris's war-trained sensibilities, that made it a poor choice for a stronghold, but perhaps in Delhumide, the site's aura of sanctity seemed a more important defense than any barrier of wood or stone.

  In any case, he was far more concerned about something else. The temple was occupied. From time to time, they slipped past chambers where folk lay sleeping. But there were fewer than Bareris had expected, nor did he observe any indication that Red Wizards were practicing their arts here on a regular basis.

  Eventually Wesk whispered the obvious, "If all those slaves were ever here, they aren't anymore."

  "They must be," Bareris said, not because he truly disagreed, but because he couldn't bear to endorse the gnoll's conclusion.

  "Do you want to wake somebody and ask him?"

  The bard shook his head. "Not unless he's a mage. Any soldier would likely just go into convulsions like our orc. It's not worth the risk of rousing the lot of them, at least not until we've searched the entire place."

  They prowled onward, looking for something, anything, to suggest an answer to the riddle of the missing thralls' whereabouts. In time they found their way to a large and shadowy chamber at the center of the temple. Once, judging from the raised altar, the colossal statue of Horus-Re enthroned behind it, and faded paintings depicting his birth and deeds adoring the walls, the chamber had been the hawk god's sanctum sanctorum. More recently, someone had erected a freestanding basket arch in the middle of the floor, its pale smooth curves a contrast to the brown, crumbling stonework on every side. When Bareris spotted it, he caught his breath in surprise.

  "What?" whispered Wesk, twisting his head this way and that, looking for danger.

  "The arch is a portal," Bareris said, "a magical doorway linking this place to some other far away. I saw one during my travels and recognize the rune carved on the keystone."

  "Then we know what became of your female," said Wesk.

  "Apparently, but what sense does it make? If the Red Wizards want to do something in private, what haven is more private than Delhumide? No one comes here. Conversely, why bother with this dangerous place at all, if you're only using it as a stepping stone to somewhere else?"

  Wesk shrugged. "Maybe we'll find out on the other side."

  "Hold on," Thovarr said.

  Bareris assumed he meant to point out the recklessness of walking through the gate when they had no idea where it led or what waited beyond, but before the gnoll could get going, a scarlet-robed figure stepped into view through a doorway midway up the left wall. At first, the wizard didn't notice the intruders, and Thovarr had the presence of mind to fall silent. Wesk laid an arrow on his bow.

  But as he drew it to his ear, the mage glimpsed the intruders from the corner of his eye, or sensed their presence somehow. He was wise enough not to waste breath and time crying for help that would surely arrive too late to save him, nor did he attempt to scramble back through the doorway as Bareris might have done. Perhaps the space he'd just vacated had only the one exit, and he didn't want to trap himself.

  Instead he flourished his hand, and the black ring on his thumb left a streak of shadow on the air. Each gripping a great-sword, four pairs of skeletal arms erupted from the band. They emerged tiny but swelled to full size in a heartbeat.

  They were an uncanny sight to behold, and even Wesk faltered for an instant. The Red Wizard snarled words of power, and the bony arms flew at the gnoll and his companions. Ignoring the imminent threat of the greatswords, Wesk shot an arrow at the mage, unfortunately not quickly enough to keep the warlock from finishing his incantation. A floating disk of blue phosphorescence shimmered into being in front of him, and the arrow stuck in that instead, just as if it were a tangible wooden shield.

  Then the disembodied arms hurtled into the distance and started cutting with their long, heavy blades. The intruders had the advantage of numbers, but even so, Bareris realized the wizard's protectors would be difficult to defeat. The only way to stop them or even slow them down was to hit hard and square eno
ugh to cleave a length of bone entirely in two, and they flitted through the air so nimbly that it was a challenge to land a stroke at all.

  But the necromancer was an even greater threat, and Bareris didn't dare leave him to conjure unmolested. He stepped between a set of skeletal arms and Wesk, ducked a cut, and riposted, buying the gnoll chieftain the moment he needed to drop his bow and ready his axe. After that, though, the bard extricated himself from the whirl of blades and charged the mage who, the translucent, arrow-pierced disk still hovering between him and his foes, the skirt of his robe flapping around his legs, was himself sprinting toward the white stone archway. Apparently he believed safety, or at least help, awaited him on the other side.

  Bareris was too far away to cut him off. He sang a charm so rapidly that he feared botching the precise rhythm and pitch required, but he didn't have the option of taking his time.

  Magic groaned through the air, and the section of floor under the Red Wizard's feet bucked as though an earthquake had begun. The vibration knocked the mage staggering then dumped him on his rump. Bareris dashed on, closing in on the warlock while likewise interposing himself between his foe and the portal.

  The Red Wizard thrust out his arm. A glyph tattooed on the back of his hand leaped free of his skin and became a hand itself, levitating and seemingly formed of shadow. It bobbed over the top of the floating shield, then streaked at Bareris.

  The bard tried to dodge, but the hand grabbed him by the shoulder anyway. Agony stabbed outward from the point of contact to afflict his entire body.

  It was the fiercest pain he'd ever experienced, severe enough to blind and paralyze, which was no doubt the object. Evidently still intent on reaching the gate, but looking to finish off his adversary as well, the necromancer simultaneously circled in the appropriate direction and hissed sibilant rhyming phrases.

  The pain is in my mind, Bareris insisted to himself, and I can push it out. He struggled to straighten up, turn in the mage's direction, and lift his sword once more. For a heartbeat, it was impossible, and then the bonds of torment constraining him ripped like a sheet of parchment tearing in two.