Unclean hl-1

by Richard Lee Byers

  I'm unclean, foul, and a slave to creatures fouler still. Please, please, destroy me if you can.

  Meanwhile, she strove to strike, seize, and bite him as relentlessly as ever. Her throat burned with thirst.

  His magic shrouded him in a misty vagueness that made it even more difficult for her half-blind eyes to pick him out. Still, she thought she'd judged where he was and sprang to grab hold of him.

  He twisted away, avoiding her touch and leaving her floundering off balance for just an instant, time enough for his sword to leap at her neck. He bellowed a war cry as it sheared into her flesh and the bone underneath.

  The world seemed to jump, and then she was on the ground, her right profile pressed against the dirt. She tried to rise but couldn't move. A long shape sprawled in front of her, and after a moment she recognized her own decapitated body.

  The realization stunned her. It was so quick, she thought. After she and Bareris had fought so hard, so intimately, it didn't seem real that a single sudden cut had ended everything.

  Looming over her like a giant, weeping, Bareris stepped between her and her body. He raised his sword over his head.

  Mirror had a sense that he was supposed to engage Ysval if possible. Had someone so instructed him? He couldn't recall, but it seemed right. He strode toward the ink-black creature and the legionnaires who were fighting the thing already. A different warrior called out to him, but like so many things, the words simply failed to convey any meaning.

  In another moment, however, a second voice, a soft, insinuating baritone, snagged him and pulled him around to face a man wrapped in a hooded gray mantle. The speaker was alive, but even so, Mirror discerned without knowing or wondering how he knew that he was one of the enemy, likely a warlock who'd employed magic to avoid detection hitherto.

  The mage swirled his hands through mystic passes. "You're undead," he crooned. "You belong on our side."

  Mirror felt something changing inside him. Like any sensation, it was seductive, simply because it filled the emptiness, but even so, it seemed to him that he shouldn't allow it to continue. He sprang at the wizard, closing the distance with one prodigious leap, and drove his sword into the man's chest. To his vague disappointment, the weapon didn't cleave flesh or spill blood like a proper blade, but it did stop the mage's heart.

  Mirror pivoted back toward Ysval and observed another horror battling its way toward the nighthaunt. Tall as an ogre, approximately female in form, the winged, leprous entity ravaged men and horses with her talons, shredding them and rotting their flesh with gangrene all in an instant. Even the liquid filth streaming from her open sores was dangerous, blistering any living creature it touched.

  Mirror abruptly recalled that such abominations were known as angels of decay. He thought he might have encountered one on a different battleground but couldn't actually remember.

  In any case, the sight of her sharpened his awareness of the battle as a whole, and he recognized what a mistake it would be to allow her and Ysval to stand together. The nighthaunt was already holding his own against the men-at-arms and battle mages assailing him from all sides. If such a formidable comrade came to his aid, the mortals would have no chance at all.

  Fortunately, Mirror thought he could prevent that. Though he dimly recalled someone calling him "undead" at some point in the past, he didn't know if he truly was or not, but instinct whispered that neither the angel's infectious touch nor her slather of corrosive muck had any power to harm him.

  He flew at her and cut at her flank. Lightning-quick, she twisted out of the way and slashed with her talons. The first blow somehow streaked harmlessly through him, but he sensed that the next one would smash and tear, and he raised his arm to intercept it. As he started the motion, he wore no shield, but by the time he finished, there it was, round and affixed to his forearm by three sturdy straps. He knew it should have a coat-of-arms painted on the front and momentarily longed to view it.

  He couldn't, of course, not while he was fighting. The angel's talons slammed into the targe and knocked him backward. Seeking to deny him time to recover, the creature lunged after him. Flinging spatters of slime, her flaking wing swatted him and sent him reeling farther.

  He thought that would likely prove the end of him, but strangely, a simple exertion of will served to halt his flailing stagger and restore his equilibrium, as if he had no weight at all. He thrust at the angel, caught her by surprise, and his shadowy blade slid deep into her cankerous torso.

  She cried out in her rasping voice, stumbled, but she didn't fall. He pulled his sword back, and they traded blows. Sometimes she evaded his strokes and sometimes they sheared into her, albeit without leaving a mark thereafter. At certain moments, her talons whizzed harmlessly through him, at others, his shield or plate defected them, and occasionally, they slashed him. Then he experienced a shock that was less pain than an upheaval of the elements of his being. The aching hollow at his core yawned wide, threatening to swallow everything else.

  It was difficult to tell how many times the angel needed to wound him before that would actually happen, just as it was hard to judge how badly he was hurting her. He truly had no idea who was winning until she suddenly pitched forward. Her corpse liquefied completely almost before it splashed facedown in the street.

  Victory over such a formidable foe filled him with triumph, and intense emotion sharpened and deepened his thoughts. He sensed that he'd fought many times, and war remained his proper occupation. It might not ever make him remember, but at least while embroiled in the midst of it he comprehended there was something he'd forgotten.

  He flew at Ysval.

  Bareris's hand was steady as he hacked open Tammith's severed head to cut the brain within, then he slid his enchanted blade into her heart. He felt as numb and empty of feeling as any of the zombies he'd faced this day.

  As soon as he finished, however, he started to shake, and anguish and self-loathing welled up inside him.

  At the end, he'd had no choice but to slay Tammith. Otherwise, she would certainly have killed him, and as it turned out, it simply hadn't been in him to surrender to that.

  He'd likewise deemed it necessary to desecrate Tammith's remains, lest she rise to fight anew. Yet he now understood that such an act, however essential, could be unbearable and unforgivable as well.

  It would be the easiest thing in the world to run his sword into his own heart.

  But that would mean abandoning the fight to defeat Xingax, Ysval, and the necromancers, and that was unacceptable. The wretches had to be punished. They had to lose and suffer and die.

  Singing a pledge of vengeance, he cast about to see where Ysval was.

  Aoth thrust the point of his lance into a shadow. The phantom frayed into tatters of darkness.

  The ghosts were coming faster now, more and more of them finding their way through the gaps in the sheets of flame and planes of radiance the wizards had conjured to hold them back. Aoth and his fellow griffon riders fought doggedly to keep the spirits in the air from flying down to aid their commander.

  He looked around and realized that at last the battle had granted him and Brightwing a moment to catch their breaths. No new foes had yet appeared in their immediate vicinity. It gave him a chance to peer down and assess what was happening on the ground.

  Ysval clawed. Milsantos caught the blow on his shield, but the impact knocked him out of the saddle. The nighthaunt virtually tore the old man's war-horse out of his way as if it were a curtain and lunged after him, but in so doing, the undead captain exposed his flank to Bareris, who, chanting, slashed the creature's night black body with his sword. As did Mirror, flitting around to attack from behind. Ysval faltered, and Milsantos clambered to his feet.

  Ysval pivoted and drove his talons into Mirror's chest. The ghost's misty form writhed and boiled. Ysval raised his other hand for a follow-up blow. Bareris cut at him but failed to divert the nighthaunt from his fellow undead.

  Then, however, a colossal spider,
gnashing mandibles dripping venom, ring of eyes gleaming, materialized beside Ysval. One of Aoth's fellow battle wizards had evidently summoned it. The spider pounced on the shadowy entity. The serrated jaws ripped him.

  Ysval tore the creature off him and smashed it down on its back. As it started to heave itself upright, he thrust out his hand at it, malign power shivered through the air, and the arachnid stopped moving.

  But Mirror's form once more appeared as steady and stable as it ever did, and as Ysval finished with the spider, Nymia rode by him and bashed him with her mace.

  We're like a swarm of wasps attacking a man, Aoth thought. Individually, we're puny in comparison, but it's hard for him to defend himself against all of us at once.

  Perhaps, his arrogance and manifest fury notwithstanding, Ysval also believed his foes might ultimately overwhelm him, for he brandished his fist, and ragged tendrils of shadow blazed outward from his body. His opponents stumbled and reeled. He lashed out with claw and tail, flinging them backward, giving himself room to spread his wings and spring into the air.

  No, thought Aoth, you don't get to break away and work your magic without interference. You have to stay on the ground where everyone can pound on you.

  "Get him," he said, and Brightwing dived.

  Ysval heard or sensed them coming and turned to face them. When he met the gaze of the nighthaunt's moon white eyes, Aoth felt a jolt of dread, and angry at his reaction, he promised himself it was the last time. One way or another, this filthy thing was never going to scare him again.

  Then Brightwing froze. Thanks to their psychic bond, Aoth could tell his familiar was still alive and conscious. Indeed, she wasn't even wounded, but Ysval had somehow paralyzed her, and now she wasn't swooping but falling. The nighthaunt laughed.

  Why shouldn't he? Now that the griffon couldn't shift her wings, her plummeting trajectory wouldn't take her and Aoth within reach of him.

  Aoth charged his lance with all the power it could hold then hurled it like a javelin. The long, heavy weapon wasn't designed for use as a missile, but perhaps some god sharpened his eye and strengthened his arm, maybe Kossuth, avenging the treacherous murder of his Burning Braziers, because the spear plunged into Ysval's shoulder.

  To how much effect, it was impossible to say, because Aoth and Brightwing fell past him an instant later. The mage started rattling off a counterspell that might, if poor Chathi's patron deity saw fit to grant a second boon, cleanse the griffon's clenched muscles of their affliction.

  Unfortunately, Aoth didn't have time to finish. He and Brightwing slammed down hard on a rooftop, which crunched and buckled beneath them but didn't give way entirely.

  The impact spiked pain up the length of his body, but rather to his surprise, he survived it, and Brightwing did too. He could only assume that, despite her paralysis, her wings had caught enough air to keep them from falling at maximum speed.

  Some yards away, Ysval crashed onto the street with the lance still sticking out of his body. He immediately sought to scramble to his feet, so obviously neither the spear nor the fall had killed him, but as Aoth had hoped, the injury to his shoulder had at least deprived him of the use of his wings.

  Evidently recovered from the stunning effect of the burst of shadow, Bareris and Mirror rushed Ysval and cut at him relentlessly. The nighthaunt managed one more snatch with his talons and a final strike with his tail then toppled onto his side and lay motionless.

  Some part of Bareris realized Ysval was dead. Nonetheless, he couldn't stop hacking at the corpse, not until a phantom streaked across his field of vision and tore a knight from the saddle.

  Bareris looked up. Having existed for their allotted span, the floating barriers had begun to wink out of existence, and the ghosts were rushing through the openings, swarming on the griffon riders like soft, gleaming leeches attacking a party of swimmers.

  The plan indicated that as soon as Ysval died, someone who possessed the necessary magic was supposed to dispel the unnatural gloom enveloping the fortress. It didn't seem to be happening. Was any of that select group of spellcasters still alive? If so, immersed in the chaos of battle, struggling to fend off the foes assailing him, had he even perceived that the moment for action had arrived?

  Bareris drew a deep breath and bellowed loudly as only a bard could. "Break the darkness! Now! Now! Now!" On the other side of the battlefield, Milsantos's trumpeter blew the call intended to communicate the same message.

  For several heartbeats, it appeared no one heard, at least no one with the power to respond in the appropriate manner. Then, however, the sky brightened from black to blue in an instant. Bareris flinched and squinted at the sudden blaze of sunlight that scoured the wraiths from the air.

  He wasn't certain they'd all perished. Perhaps some endured as mere disembodied awareness or potential, like Mirror at his most ethereal, but even if so, they lacked the power to manifest until night returned.

  Of course, the Keep of Thazar still harbored ghouls and animate corpses, creatures able to tolerate daylight even if it pained them, so the battle was far from over. Still, Bareris was now certain he and his allies were going to win. Considered as revenge, it wasn't enough. It could never be enough, but it was a start, and weary to the bone though he was, he strode back toward the breached wall and the muddled din of the fight still raging there in search of something else to kill. For some reason impervious to the purifying sun, Mirror fell into step beside him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  17 Kythorn, the Year of Risen Elfkin

  Aoth took a swallow of beer, belched, and said, "One nice thing about the undead: When they occupy a fortress, they don't drink up all the ale."

  In truth, he had good reason to be glad of it. So many priests had died when Szass Tam's torches exploded that after the battle, healing magic had been in short supply. As a captain and war mage, he hadn't had any difficulty or qualms about commandeering the services of a cleric to knit his broken bones and Brightwing's too, but bruises, however painful, were a different matter. Nymia and many other officers he'd known wouldn't have hesitated to order up a second dose of healing to ease them, but he couldn't, not when there were legionnaires likely to die for want of a priest's attention. He simply bore the discomfort as best he could, and alcohol helped, as it helped so many things in life.

  Seated on the other side of the shabby little parlor that comprised the greater portion of their billet, methodically honing a dagger, Bareris raised his head and asked, "How soon, do you think, will we head up into the mountains?"

  Aoth sighed. His new friend's response had nothing to do with what he himself had said, but at least he'd answered. Half the time, when someone spoke to him, he didn't.

  "It's hard to say. You know as well as I do, an army needs time to put itself back in order after a big, hard fight, and when the tharchions are ready to attack this underground fortress you tell of, it might be easier to reach it through the portal in Delhumide."

  "No." The dagger whispered against the whetstone. "The necromancers know an intruder found and used it already. I doubt it's there anymore."

  "Well, you could be right." In actuality, Aoth wasn't certain Nymia and Milsantos would decide to go hunting "Xingax" and his cohorts by any route. The zulkirs hadn't ordered them to, a march over the Sunrise Mountains would be difficult, and who knew if Bareris could even find the wizards' lair again? But he had a hunch the bard wasn't ready to hear that.

  Bareris glowered. "You sound as if you don't even want to go."

  "I won't want to go anywhere for the next couple of days. You wouldn't either, if you'd come out of the battle banged up like me. Anyway, I'm a legionnaire. I go where my tharchion sends me."

  "What about Chathi?"

  "I liked her. I miss her, but it won't keep me from living the rest of my life. She wouldn't want that. I doubt your Tammith would have wanted it for you, either."

  "You don't understand. You can't. You were only with Chathi a short time. My whole life cente
red on Tammith."

  "It's grand to love and be loved, but a man needs to stand at the center of his own life."

  "I only wanted to make her happy, yet I failed her in everything." Bareris laughed. "By the Harp, that's a mild way of putting it, isn't it? Failed her. I destroyed her."

  "A priest would say you set her soul free. Certainly, you did everything you could for her. It's a miracle you were even able to track her."

  "If I'd never left Bezantur-"

  "And if I'd figured out the torches were dangerous a few breaths sooner, Chathi might still be alive. Whenever things go wrong, you can always find an if, but what's the point of brooding over it? You're only torturing yourself."

  Bareris stood up and reached for his sword belt, which hung on a peg on the wall with Aoth's lance leaning beside it. "I'm going for a walk."

  "My friend, if I've said anything to offend you, I'm sorry."

  Bareris shook his head. "It isn't that. It's just…" He slid the newly sharpened knife into its sheath then buckled on his weapons. "I just need to be alone."

  Malark was as tired as he could recall ever being, even during the first months of his monastic training, and accordingly eager to reach his destination. Even so, he brought his flying horse down to the trail for the final leg of the journey up the valley. If the undead were still in possession of the Keep of Thazar, he'd be at least slightly less conspicuous approaching at ground level, and if the legionnaires had succeeded in retaking the place, he didn't want them mistaking him for a wraith. By now, they were likely wary of most anything that flew.

  His steed snorted, expressing its displeasure at descending. When first created, it hadn't displayed emotion, nor had its black coat felt so much like actual horsehair. Malark wondered if, over time, simply by virtue of being perceived and employed, an illusory creature could become more real.

  The question intrigued him, but now was not the time to ponder it. He'd do better to focus his attention on his surroundings, lest some skeleton or dread warrior notice him before he spotted it.