The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy Page 22

  “us.”

  “I don’t know, but maybe …”

  “maybe”

  “maybe”

  “… we should keep moving.”

  “Way? Which.”

  Good question. More than one passage appeared to run northeast, and the magic pointing in the direction of the arch couldn’t differentiate between them. Bareris chose at random.

  “Let’s try this one.”

  He took a stride, and the darkness deepened.

  Only a supernatural manifestation could account for such a thing, because here in the heart of the mountain, the dark had already been absolute. The undead enjoyed a measure of vision even so, but now Bareris couldn’t see as far as before, and even nearby objects looked hazy, as though he were viewing them through fog.

  He sang the opening notes of a charm to conjure light. Perhaps it would reveal the location of the creature or creatures he suspected were hiding in the murk.

  Something snatched him off his feet and hurled him ten paces backward into the cavern wall.

  The shock of impact was enough to stun even him. He sensed rather than saw something looming over him, poised to attack again. He raised his sword, hoping the thing would impale itself when it struck. Though he doubted that would be enough to keep the blow from smashing home.

  Light flared in the darkness. It stung Bareris, and he realized it was more than just a flash. It was the power of Mirror’s god, invoked to smite an undead foe.

  The radiance gave Bareris his first look at the thing. It was huge, a formless cloud of darkness with several ragged arms writhing and coiling from the central mass. Without turning—lacking a head, eyes, or an internal structure of bones and joints, it didn’t need to—it shifted its tentacles away from Bareris to threaten the ghost on the other side of it. One arm struck at Mirror, and he caught the blow on his shield. But it still knocked him back, a sign that both he and the creature existed in the same non-corporeal state.

  Mirror cut at the arm as it started to retract. “It’s a vasuthant!” he shouted.

  Unlike Mirror, evidently, Bareris had never encountered a vasuthant, but the undead horrors figured in a couple of the ancient tales he’d collected over the years. They were sentient wounds in the fabric of time itself, a condition that allowed them to play tricks with the march of the moments to destroy their prey.

  If this entity truly was a vasuthant, even Mirror couldn’t contend with it unaided. Bareris floundered to his feet, drew a deep breath, and shouted. The thunderous bellow shook the cave, brought stones showering from the ceiling, and blasted a bit of the vasuthant’s blackness loose from the central body. The wisps instantly withered away to nothing.

  The vasuthant turned its attention back to him, as the new tentacles squirming from its cloudy body attested. Gripping his sword with both hands, Bareris poised himself to dodge and cut.

  With luck, his enchanted blade would hurt the creature, insubstantial though it was.

  The vasuthant snatched for him. He sidestepped, swung at its arm, and slashed completely through it. He felt just a hint of resistance, as though the blade were severing gossamer threads. The end of the creature’s limb boiled into nonexistence.

  Time skipped backward.

  The vasuthant snatched for him. He sidestepped, but it adjusted its aim, and the tentacle coiled around him anyway. It yanked tight as a noose encircling the neck of a man dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows, somehow exerting crushing pressure even though it had no solidity.

  The vasuthant jerked Bareris into the center of its shifting darkness. Pain burned through him. The creature was trying to poison him with the energy of undeath. Since he was undead too, the effect wasn’t as devastating as it would have been to a living man, but it might well prove lethal over time.

  It was difficult even to see the arm gripping him now that the vasuthant had merged it with the central cloud. Bareris cut at the place where he judged it ought to be, but even if he was right this time, the stroke had no apparent effect. Another burst of agony jolted him, and the relentless constriction around his waist threatened to pinch him in two.

  Just barely visible through the murk, Mirror called to his god and slashed his sword through a portion of the vasuthant’s body. Its shadowy core seethed, and the ring of pressure around Bareris’s torso loosened.

  Bareris bellowed a war cry and swung his sword. The tentacle frayed from existence, dropping him to the cavern floor. Still inside the animate darkness, he cut at it repeatedly until it flowed away and uncovered him.

  Without taking his eyes off the thing, Bareris asked, “Are we winning?”

  “I don’t …”

  “don’t”

  “… know,” Mirror replied. “I only ever fought one vasuthant, and this one’s bigger and more powerful.”

  So they really had precious little idea what they were facing. But Bareris surmised he needed some mystical defense in place to counter the creature’s manifest ability to revisit a moment that hadn’t worked out as it would have preferred. He sang, and eight more Barerises sprang into existence around him, each with a stance and facial expression identical to his own.

  Just in time too, for an instant later the vasuthant surged forward like a towering black wave.

  A tentacle flailed, and one of the illusory doubles burst like a soap bubble at its touch. Bareris stepped in and cut the vasuthant.

  A tentacle flailed, and a different illusory double burst like a soap bubble at its touch. Bareris stepped in and cut the vasuthant.

  He grinned a wolfish grin. Perhaps he’d hit on a winning tactic.

  Then one of his duplicates vanished without the vasuthant snagging it with one of its limbs or making any other form of visible attack. It was a pointed reminder that the entity still possessed capabilities he didn’t understand.

  Still, he liked his and Mirror’s chances better than he had before, partly because when the vasuthant obliterated all his illusory doubles, he could always sing up another batch.

  He and his companion battled on, often with sword strokes, sometimes with their mystical abilities. Bareris chanted to leech the strength out of the vasuthant much as it had tried to do to him. Mirror hammered it with flares of celestial power. Meanwhile, time lurched and stuttered.

  The latter effect was disorienting and obliged them to defend themselves from many of the vasuthant’s most cunning attacks not once but twice. Still, they kept the living darkness from doing grievous harm to them, while their attacks withered bits of it.

  Bareris could only hope they were cutting and burning away enough to matter. Since the thing was merely churning blackness floating in blackness, he still couldn’t tell.

  But it seemed a good sign when the creature abruptly flowed back beyond the reach of its opponents’ swords. Bareris wondered if it had finally had enough, if it might ooze into some hole and let him and Mirror pass. Then he felt a frigid prickling on his skin. Power was accumulating in the air, as if an adept like Lallara or Lauzoril were working a particularly potent spell.

  Mirror apparently felt it too, for he charged. Flanked by a pair of duplicates, the remnants of the third group he’d conjured, Bareris drew breath to shout.

  Neither he nor the ghost managed to act in time to balk the vasuthant. Something exploded from it, a force neither visible, audible, nor tangible, but delivering a psychic shock so overwhelming that it froze both its adversaries in place.

  Or perhaps it was simply the realization of what the vasuthant had wrought that paralyzed them. For Bareris once again had a beating heart in his chest and a glow of warmth in his flesh. He was once again the Mulan youth growing up in the slums of Bezantur.

  Which meant Tammith was waiting for him there. He had yet to make the disastrous choice that led to her destruction.

  He told himself it was nonsense. Though he sensed his transformation was more than mere deception, reason said it couldn’t last or change the past even if it did. Still, he was slow to move, his t
wo minds, his two realities, pulling him in opposite directions.

  Beside him, Mirror, now a figure of solid flesh, looked just as stupefied. He had no guilt or anguish over an abused and murdered lover to transfix him, or if he did, he’d never told Bareris about her. But no doubt the sudden restoration of his maimed mind and memory and deliverance from the endless hollow ache of undeath were equally overpowering. That, or the excruciating comprehension that his resurrection was only temporary.

  Churning and coiling, the vasuthant rushed forward. Retreating, Bareris sang to raise a curtain of fire, or at least a semblance of it, between his foe and himself.

  He stumbled over the phrasing, perhaps because it was a powerful, difficult spell, and the boy whose form he now wore and whose intrusive thoughts were addling his own had yet to master it.

  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 cross-legged 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 magi
c.”

  “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.