Prophet of the Dead botg-5

  Prophet of the Dead

  ( Brotherhood of the Griffon - 5 )

  Richard Lee Byers

  Richard Lee Byers

  Prophet of the Dead

  Prologue

  Of course you can’t,” said a deep, silky voice; Jhesrhi Coldcreek cast around in vain to find the source. “How can Amaunator shed his light on secrets in a place where the Yellow Sun never shines?”

  Cera Eurthos’s conjured glow faded, and darkness shrouded the chilly crypt with its mad jumble of funerary carvings. The stag men turned this way and that, the bells in their antlers chiming.

  Jhesrhi called for fire. It leaped forth from the core of her, flowed down the inside of her arm, and sprang forth from the head of her brazen staff. She felt satisfaction that the thing that had spoken, whatever it was, couldn’t smother her power.

  But then it came out of the dark, and dread pierced her like a knife. She flinched back a step, and so did her companions. Her gilded mace clutched in her hand and blond curls sticking out from under the rim of her helmet, Cera let out a gasp.

  The newcomer was seven feet tall, with bone-white skin and clothing so dark that Jhesrhi could only half make out the intricate folds and embroidery. Once, he might have been handsome in the way of a corpse embalmed and displayed with consummate art and care, but since then, something had ripped his left eye from its socket and scarred the skin around it. The same calamity, presumably, had shriveled and twisted his left arm into a useless stick he held pressed to his chest.

  The pale being stood and surveyed the two women and the half-dozen stag men with a kind of insouciant poise. His disfigurements notwithstanding, he might even have seemed elegant if not for the corona of shadow that surrounded him like a tattered, billowing cloak. The tendrils of darkness reached and coiled constantly, like starving creatures groping and snatching for morsels of food.

  Jhesrhi’s heartbeat throbbed in her neck, and she gritted her teeth to hold in a whimper. She told herself that, although apparently a powerful fiend or undead, this one-eyed filth was surely no more formidable than Tchazzar or other foes she’d faced. But that rational thought didn’t help.

  Because the dread she felt wasn’t natural. It was the result of some supernatural influence the creature was exerting. She rattled off a charm of warding, but it failed to clear her head.

  “Fall down and wait." it said. “Otherwise, I’ll devour you, body and soul, and the scraps of you I leave on my plate will rise up to serve me in pain and shame forever.”

  He ambled forward, still with the casual self-assurance of a dandy strolling in a garden. But the tatters of shadow stretched and lashed in a frenzy, like twenty blades cutting and stabbing at once.

  The stag men didn’t grovel; most likely, because the pale creature hadn’t spoken in Elvish, they didn’t even understand what he’d demanded. But they couldn’t bear to stand and fight him either. They bolted for one of the several arches connecting the vault to other portions of the maze.

  Meanwhile, Cera stayed put, but not, Jhesrhi suspected, because she was bravely holding her ground. It was because fear had petrified her.

  Jhesrhi was in essentially the same condition, but instinct suddenly told that she didn’t have to be. She could burn the terror out of herself.

  She drew more flame from deep inside and sent it pulsing through her veins and licking along her nerves. The fear melted away.

  His writhing, whipping shadow tentacles almost within snatching distance, the pale man halted and studied her. He nodded with what looked like patronizing approval.

  Jhesrhi felt an urge to burn the superior smile off his face without another moment of delay, but the stag men had nearly reached the exits. She couldn’t let them lose themselves in the labyrinth.

  She thumped her staff on the floor, and fires leaped up to block the arches. Cloven hooves clattering on the limestone floor, the fey warriors floundered to a stop just short of incineration.

  “Get back here!” she shouted in her halting Elvish. “We can kill the wretch if we stand together!”

  Their initial panic startled out of them, the stag men obeyed. Jhesrhi still didn’t understand why she-out of all the humans they’d met of late-was the one who seemed special to the stag men, but here was another reason to be glad of it.

  The one-eyed creature’s smile widened. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “Yes,” Jhesrhi said. She pointed her staff, chanted words of power, and hurled fire from the head. The flare spread out as it traveled to engulf the pale man from head to foot.

  It rocked him back a step, and for a moment, he stood swaying in the midst of the roaring blaze. Then the shadow tentacles shot out from inside the flame. Some had caught fire and burned away to nothing. But others coiled around to pick at the jet of flame like craftsmen removing cracked or faded stones from a mosaic.

  The blast winked out of existence. Worse, the disruption of the magic spiked pain through the center of Jhesrhi’s forehead. She cried out and felt wetness spill from her nostrils onto her upper lip.

  The stag warriors scrambled to interpose themselves between her and the pale man then hesitated, reluctant to brave the cloud of jagged, snatching darkness to strike at the target in the middle. One fey cast his spear, and lengths of shadow caught it and snapped it in two. Plainly hoping the tendrils couldn’t strike where the creature couldn’t see, another stag man circled behind him and charged. Blackness caught the fey, tore his belly open, and dropped him in a pile of his own guts. Then the pale man resumed his advance.

  Jhesrhi forced herself to focus despite the lingering pain. She spoke to the stone in the floor, and it resisted her will like every element but fire resisted her in this dead and hateful place. So she snarled her command and reinforced it with a clanking blow of her staff.

  The stone under the pale man cracked open, swallowing his forward foot, then slammed shut on his ankle. He shouted and lurched off balance, the joint bending in a way it shouldn’t.

  Jhesrhi scrambled toward a spot from which she could throw lightning without hitting any of the stag men. Just before she reached that location, the white-faced creature spoke a word that stabbed inside her head and reverberated there, swelling louder with each instant. Her body turned cold and stiff and then soft and slimy as rot corrupted it. Insects crawled and bored to get at the putrescence.

  She prayed the semblance of death was only an illusion, but even if it was, it was unbearable. She screamed for fire to envelop her and burn the curse away.

  It did, lingering and cloaking her just as her foe’s mantle of writhing shadow covered him. But the purging took too long. By the time she regained control of herself, the pale man had extracted his foot from the crack and advanced on her. She was down on one knee with murky tentacles threatening her from every side.

  She doubted her adversary would allow her time for even the simplest of spells, but she had to try. She sucked in a breath, and then bright, warm light leaped across the chamber.

  Hobbling, the pale man recoiled and, in so doing, pulled the dark tendrils away from Jhesrhi. Chanting a battle hymn, her round, normally merry face as grim as Jhesrhi had ever seen it, Cera stalked after the creature with the glowing head of her mace held high. She hadn’t really been paralyzed with terror after all, or if she had been, it hadn’t lasted. She’d used the past several moments to draw more power from her god despite the impediment of being trapped in this perpetually benighted world of the deathways.

  The pale man stopped retreating. “Enough,” he said.

  But the sunlady plainly didn’t think so because her light shone even brighter, and quivering with rage and loathing, Jhesrhi agreed. She drew flame from the voi
d for the hottest, most explosive blast yet, one that would reduce her enemy to wisps of drifting ash if she were to succeed. The power so filled her that it suddenly became difficult even to think of anything else, her anger, fear, and other concerns melting together into a joyful, ferocious urge to burn.

  Sudden and fast as a pouncing cat despite the broken ankle, the pale creature rushed the nearest stag man. Jagged shadow clutched the fey, immobilized his sword arm, and hoisted him off his feet.

  “Stop fighting,” the enemy said. “Otherwise, your warrior dies. Either I rip him apart or your flame hits the both of us. It’s your choice.”

  Jhesrhi frowned in perplexity. She understood the literal meaning of the words, but she was not clear why the one-eyed man imagined they could possibly deter her. Fortunately, she didn’t need to understand. She rattled off the first words of an incantation in one of the hissing, crackling languages of the Undying Pyre.

  The sunlady’s head snapped around in her direction. “Jhesrhi, no!” the priestess yelled.

  Apparently, the sunlady was deterred. Why? And come to think of it, what was the short, plump woman’s name?

  Jhesrhi knew she ought to remember, and it bothered that she couldn’t. She strained to do so, and then, abruptly, everything came clear, including the fact that a sellsword was supposed to be loyal to her comrades.

  “I’m all right,” she gasped. “I promise not to hurt him if he lets the stag man go.”

  “Fair enough,” the creature said. He dropped the fey, and at the same time, a psychic pressure abated. Jhesrhi hadn’t quite been conscious of it before, but its departure came as a relief nonetheless. She surmised that the foe had dissolved the enchantment intended to strike terror into the hearts of all who beheld him.

  Yet the sight of him still made her skin crawl. There was a fundamental vileness about him beyond anything his physical appearance could explain, like he was the walking embodiment of some hideous disease.

  “Go away,” Cera said, her voice tight. Her mace was still glowing, just not as brightly.

  The pale man smiled. “It would be sad for all of us if I did. We need each other.”

  Dangling from Jet’s talons, Dai Shan saw streaking thunderbolts and orbs of red and yellow light burst into being. They’d been darts and balls of coal when they leaped from the ballistae and catapults of the Storm of Vengeance, but magic had transformed them in mid-flight.

  Many of the attacks fell short or flew wide of the mark, but one looked like it was coming straight at its target. As Dai Shan started to warn Jet, the black griffon lashed his wings and veered. He’d already spotted the threat and was dodging.

  Successfully too. Jet got them safely out of the way, and while Dai Shan had by no means forgotten that Aoth Fezim’s familiar was his captor, not his ally, for a moment, he felt an appreciation that bordered on camaraderie.

  Then the missile made an impossible hairpin turn. Dodging again, Jet dived, but the luminous missile hit him anyway and exploded with a flash and a boom that smashed Dai Shan’s wits into stupefied confusion.

  Perhaps it was the hot pain that roused Dai Shan, for when his thoughts snapped back into focus an instant later, he was on fire, as was Jet, who was no longer flying but rather dropping like a stone.

  If the plummeting griffon carried Dai Shan all the way to the ground, the impact would unquestionably kill him. Fortunately, Dai Shan knew a spell to arrest his descent if only he could separate himself from the winged steed. Blocking out the pain of his charring skin, he tore at the eagle claws gripping his shoulders.

  To no avail. Jet had been holding him tightly even before the fiery missile struck them. When the flame burst over him, he’d apparently gripped even tighter, convulsively, driving his talons into Dai Shan’s flesh.

  Dai Shan jabbered a word of power and infused the griffon’s body with the magic he’d originally intended for himself. Then he willed Jet to rise, not fall.

  That didn’t happen. The beast’s weight and momentum were too much for the enchantment to overcome. But perhaps the fall slowed somewhat, or at least stopped accelerating.

  Yet even if it had, that wasn’t enough to guarantee the drop, or Jet’s weight smashing down on top of Dai Shan, wouldn’t still kill him. “Fly!” he shouted, jabbing at the underside of the griffon’s body with his fingertips. “Wake up and fly!”

  Jet gave a rasping cry and unfurled his fiery wings. That didn’t stop them falling either. It turned a straight drop into a diagonal, but they were still rushing at the ground.

  Dai Shan felt a scream pressing for release and clenched himself to hold it in. If these were his final moments, that made it all the more important to comport himself like a Shou gentleman and his father’s son.

  The ground was hard but not as hard as he’d expected, and it splashed over him afterward, all but burying him. He realized Jet had steered the two of them into a snowdrift, and then darkness swallowed him.

  “What do you mean?” Jhesrhi asked, pulling her aura of flame back inside herself and wiping at her nosebleed. “And who are you?”

  “Sarshethrian,” the pale man said.

  The name meant nothing to her. She glanced at Cera. The priestess shrugged to convey the same lack of recognition.

  “Well, there’s a blow to my pride,” the one-eyed creature said, “but no matter. May I ask your names?”

  Jhesrhi hesitated, pondering if there was a reason to refuse to answer or to lie. But Cera answered at once: “My friend is Jhesrhi Coldcreek, a wizard and officer in the Brotherhood of the Griffon,” she declared. “I’m Cera Eurthos, sunlady of Soolabax in Chessenta.”

  “And unless I’m mistaken,” Sarshethrian said, “you’re both trapped here in the deathways, with scant hope of ever seeing either your sellsword company or your temple again. That is, unless we come to an arrangement.”

  “No,” Cera said.

  Jhesrhi frowned. “Hold on. What kind of an ‘arrangement’?”

  The pale man smiled. “I’m glad one of you is sensible. Together, you wield fire and the sacred light of the Yellow Sun, and those are the ideal weapons to smite some former friends of mine. Help me pay them the wages of ingratitude, and when we’re done, I’ll return you to your own world.”

  “No,” Cera repeated. “Leave us alone or take the consequences.”

  Sarshethrian sighed. “I suppose I evoked this truculence by testing your abilities. But the test is over. Let’s converse like reasonable beings. I’m not asking you to kill anyone you don’t already want to kill anyway. My enemies are yours.”

  “Give or take a couple who may have run away,” Jhesrhi said. “We-and our allies-just finished defeating our enemies in the Fortress of the Half-Demon.”

  The pale creature chuckled. “You were meant to believe that. In truth, all your most important enemies are still alive-well, undead, but you know what I mean. They’ll pursue new designs while Rashemen sleeps, imagining itself secure, and before the thaw, they’ll bring her down.”

  “If that’s true,” Cera said, “then thank you for the warning. Now leave us.”

  “Cera,” Jhesrhi said, “I need to talk to you in private.”

  She told the stag warriors to watch Sarshethrian. Then she and the priestess retreated to the cracked, chipped spot on the wall where they’d worked their unsuccessful divinations.

  “Why are you acting this way?” Jhesrhi asked.

  Cera scowled. “I don’t know exactly what that thing is. But it’s a great evil, and the sort of entity clerics of the Yellow Sun are sworn to oppose with all their strength.”

  Jhesrhi glanced to make sure Sarshethrian wasn’t getting up to mischief. He wasn’t. He was just watching them with a crooked smile that reminded her momentarily of Gaedynn.

  “Is he more evil than the zulkirs of the Wizard’s Reach,” she asked, “or Tchazzar? Because the Brotherhood worked for them.”

  “That’s nothing to boast of,” Cera snapped. Then she took a deep breath in a visible ef
fort to calm down. “Forgive me, Jhesrhi. I don’t look down on the Brotherhood for anything it’s done. You know that. But there’s a difference between serving even the wickedest human being and an undead or a fiend. Demons and devils are nothing but evil in a way mortals never can be. When you look at Sarshethrian, don’t you feel the difference?”

  “Of course,” Jhesrhi said. “It makes my guts cramp. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t know how to get out of here. Do you?”

  Cera hesitated. “You’re a master wizard, and I’m the high priestess of my temple. We’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m a master elementalist,” Jhesrhi said. “I couldn’t open a way out of Shadow when I was stuck in it before, and you’ve never mentioned being an experienced traveler of the planes. There’s no guarantee we can do it, and certainly none that we can do it quickly. What if Rashemen fell to the undead because you were too squeamish to do what’s necessary to get back there and warn everybody? Wouldn’t that be the real sin against Amaunator?”

  Cera sighed. “When did you become so glib?”

  “I’m not. I’m just talking sense. If you won’t bend for the Rashemi, how about Aoth? He’s lost in here too.”

  And Cera loved him. As did Jhesrhi, for that matter, although not in the same way. To her, Aoth was the savior who’d rescued her from a hellish captivity and been her friend and mentor ever since.

  “All right,” the sunlady said. “If Sarshethrian will help us find Aoth, I’ll agree to the bargain.”

  With the folding vanes extended from its hull, the Storm of Vengeance resembled a dragon gliding in the morning sky, and like a dragon, the vessel rained destruction on the berserkers and stag warriors on the snowy ground beneath it. Death came in bursts of foul-smelling smoke and barrages of hailstones hard and sharp as arrows.

  Vandar stared up at the skyship. It wasn’t any fear of death that held him transfixed, but rather, horror at his catastrophic misperception. Mario Bez and his sellswords were the prophesied threat from the air, not Aoth, Jet, Cera, and Jhesrhi.