The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy Page 28
“But we’re scattered now, and we’ve expended a lot of our power.”
“The former has its advantages. We’ll all take different paths to get to Malark. Even if he realizes we survived, he and his creatures will have difficulty spotting and intercepting all of us. As for your latter point, I assume that since your odd little troupe crept into the Citadel to assassinate me, the zulkirs are carrying as many arcane weapons and talismans as I am. We have plenty of tricks left, and let’s not forget that our arrival goaded Malark into squandering a good deal of his own power. It’s one thing to move the mountains with proper preparation. It’s another to fling them around when you weren’t expecting you’d have to, essentially by sheer force of will.”
Bareris scowled. “You almost sound glad that his creatures attacked us.”
Szass Tam shrugged. “I try to perceive the opportunities implicit in even awkward situations.”
“Have you considered that, now that they’ve seen just how strong and well-protected Malark is, the other zulkirs may ‘perceive the opportunities implicit’ in being apart from one another and free to act as they please? They may try to leave this place and flee beyond the reach of the Unmaking.”
“I understand why the possibility concerns you. They are supremely selfish, and no doubt you and Captain Fezim had to coax and bully them relentlessly to get them this far. But you know, they aren’t cowards. Each had to perform acts of extraordinary daring to ascend to his current eminence. And consider what finally lies within their reach: Revenge on Malark and on me. Rulership of Thay. Given the stakes, this is one time they won’t play it safe.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Szass Tam smiled. “So do I. We’ll see who joins us on Malark’s mountaintop.”
chapter fifteen
19 Kythorn, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)
The sun had set, but the enemy seemed to be waiting for the last traces of its crimson light to fade from the western sky. After that, they’d attack.
Gaedynn used the time to work his way through the patch of woods, making sure everyone was ready, joking with the men to set them at ease. He had to be more off hand when approaching the zulkirs’ soldiers. He didn’t want their officers to feel he was usurping their authority. But he was willing to risk their resentment to shore up the defense.
Red Wizards and Burning Braziers evoked light in the open area beyond the trees. When the battle started, the necromancers on the other side would try to drown the illumination in darkness, so their troops could advance unseen. Patches of glow would bloom and go out unpredictably as the opposing spellcasters vied for dominance.
“They’re coming!” someone shouted. Off to the right, on the clear, slightly higher ground where Khouryn’s armored spearmen stood in their lines, horns blew to convey the same message.
Gaedynn had been talking to a young, nervous-looking legionnaire. He clapped the fellow on the shoulder and dashed back to the spot from which he intended to shoot. It was centrally located enough to offer some hope of keeping track of what everyone else was doing, and the mossy oak rising there was thick enough to provide decent cover.
He’d already stuck a selection of arrows in the ground. Sadly, only two of them held spells stored inside them. He’d used most of his enchanted shafts fighting to take the Dread Ring—as it turned out, what a waste!—and while the army was on the march, Jhesrhi hadn’t had the leisure to make any more.
Ah, well, at least he’d found a nice supply of the more common sort of enchanted arrow cached inside the fortress. They too would slay a vampire or wraith if he shot them straight enough.
A sort of querulous rasp sounded from the hollow in the ground where Eider lay hidden. The griffon sensed the fight beginning and was eager to take part. “Patience,” Gaedynn told her. “You’ll get your chance.”
Then he stepped from behind the oak and started loosing arrows.
Most of the charging creatures were dread warriors, a fact that Gaedynn found annoying. It generally took several ordinary arrows to dispatch one of the yellow-eyed corpses; yet even so, it would be a mistake to use enchanted shafts. He needed to save them for foes more fearsome still.
Fortunately, the priests of Kossuth aided the efforts of the archers and crossbowmen. They chanted and whirled their chains, and the rattling links burst into flame. So did many of the arrows and quarrels arcing over the field, and when they pierced the body of a dread warrior, the zombie too burned as if it were made of paper.
Impervious to fear and constrained to obedience, the living corpses kept coming no matter how many of their fellows perished. But none made it to the tree line.
Even so, a few yards to Gaedynn’s left, a sellsword lay on the ground and screamed. Someone on the other side had hit him with an arrow or a spell; the gloom prevented Gaedynn from determining which. “Help that man!” he shouted, and, keeping low, a Burning Brazier scrambled in the appropriate direction.
Then another charge exploded from the dark mass of the enemy army, this one made of howling blood orcs. Gaedynn grinned because living targets died more easily. He plucked another arrow from the ground.
At one point, pure instinct prompted him to jump back behind the oak. An arrow or crossbow bolt whizzed through the space he’d just vacated. He stepped back into the open and kept loosing arrows until the last orc dropped.
More shrieks sounded from among the trees. No doubt they’d been doing so for a while, but he rarely heard such things when fighting.
He stooped and picked up the leather waterskin he’d laid between two of the oak’s gnarled roots. By the time he finished swigging down his drink, the enemy ranks were opening, clearing a corridor for something to emerge. Gaedynn suspected it would be the first truly serious threat, and in another moment, he saw how right he was.
The shadowy, long-armed giants were as tall as some of the trees, so tall that it was difficult to understand why he hadn’t noticed them before, towering over the soldiers and creatures around them. Their murky forms must have blended in with the dark. “Nightwalkers!” a priest of Kossuth cried.
Seeming to move without haste, but their long strides eating up the distance, the nightwalkers strode forward, and at their approach, the patches of glow illuminating the field went out. The men in the trees stood frozen, appalled, doing nothing to stop them, and that, Gaedynn suddenly realized, included himself.
A surge of self-disgust washed away his inertia. “Kill them!” he bellowed. He nocked a shaft, drew the fletchings back to his ear, and released the string.
His arrow flew, and, to his relief, so did others. But when they pierced the nightwalkers’ bodies, they looked small as slivers stuck in the flesh of a man, and the undead giants kept coming as if they didn’t even feel them.
The wizards and priests of the Firelord fared somewhat better. They hurled gouts of flame and dazzling light, and nightwalkers jerked and staggered. One reeled and fell with its upper body ablaze.
But the rest continued marching forward, and as they did, they struck back. The one directly in front of Gaedynn glared; he couldn’t actually see the eyes in its black smudge of a face, but he could feel the malevolence of their regard. His muscles jumped and clenched, and then relaxed again. He’d been hardy—or lucky—enough to shrug off the paralyzing effect.
Others weren’t so lucky. To either side of him, men grunted or made little strangled sounds as their bodies locked in position.
Another giant shook its fist. Some of the soldiers in front of it recoiled in terror, others peered around as though dazed, and a couple even turned and discharged their crossbows into one another. A third nightwalker stretched out its hand, and men doubled over, whimpering and puking.
Fortunately, a fair number of the clerics and sorcerers weathered those first attacks. Some continued to blast the giants with their magic. Others chanted to less obvious effect. Gaedynn assumed the latter were working counterspells to free the afflicted bowmen from their various curses.
/> For his part, he decided it was time—past time—he used the last of his special arrows. He grabbed one, kissed the point for luck, and shot it into the chest of the nightwalker in front of him.
Strips of the giant’s shadowy substance peeled away, not just where the arrow had penetrated but all over its body. It staggered a step, and then its hand lashed forward as if it were throwing a rock. Gaedynn wrenched himself behind the oak. Even so, the blast of frost chilled him to the marrow; if he hadn’t taken cover, it might well have stopped his heart.
Forbidding himself to falter or his cold hands to shake, he shot Jhesrhi’s last arrow. Midway to the target, it exploded into fog, and when the nightwalker strode into the corrosive vapors, its flesh sizzled and liquefied. It was a tattered, smoking vestige of its former self by the time it reached the tree line.
But it was still capable of doing harm. Agony ripped through Gaedynn’s chest as though something were squeezing his heart. After a moment, the worst of the pain subsided, but by that time, the nightwalker’s fist was hurtling down at him.
Spinning out of the way, he dropped his longbow and grabbed the falchion he’d stowed beneath the oak. He chopped the night-walker across the knuckles before it could lift its fist again, then kept moving.
The giant pivoted with him, and Eider leaped up from her hollow. Gaedynn would have said she couldn’t fly beneath the trees—their limbs hung too low—but she lashed her wings and managed somehow, breaking branches as she came. She slammed into the nightwalker’s head and clung there, biting and clawing.
The nightwalker reached for her. Gaedynn ran in and hacked at its ankle. The giant toppled, snapping more tree limbs as it fell, and Eider sprang clear of it.
It didn’t look as though the nightwalker were going to get back up again, and small wonder. The griffon had torn away a big piece of its already burned and mangled head. She spat foulness out of her beak, and Gaedynn turned to see how the rest of the battle was going.
Not well. Two other nightwalkers had fallen, but the rest—half a dozen in all—were stalking among the trees. He strained to think of a way to fight them at close range with the troops at his command. Meanwhile, sensing victory, the living men and orcs in the enemy host raised a cheer.
Then demons—hopping toad-men, slithering six-armed women whose bodies turned into serpentine tails at the waist, and a variety of others—burst from the trees behind him. They charged the nightwalkers and attacked ferociously. The sellswords and the zulkirs’ troops scrambled back and left them to it.
The nightwalkers ripped a number of demons apart. If not for the damage Gaedynn and his comrades had inflicted, perhaps they would have destroyed them all. But they were wounded, and in time, the demons dragged the last of them down.
The giant was still struggling when Nevron—or a figure that looked exactly like him—strode past Gaedynn. Illuminated by the glimmer of his defensive enchantments, the newcomer advanced beyond the tree line, sneered at So-Kehur’s army, and spat.
Then, still moving without haste, as if nothing on the battlefield posed any threat to him, he turned and tramped back the way he’d come. When he reached Gaedynn again, he stopped as though he wanted to talk, stepping behind the oak in the process.
Nevron’s features dissolved into those of an older-looking man with fewer tattoos and a skinnier frame. He wore Lauzoril’s dagger insignia. “I deemed it best to cut that short,” he said. “I could feel the necromancers studying me, probing for weaknesses. Eventually, they might have seen through my mask.”
“That would have been unfortunate,” Gaedynn said. “Thanks for coming to our aid.”
“It was your comrade Jhesrhi who sensed the need. You should thank her too.” The Red Wizard looked deeper into the trees, where other robed figures awaited him. He’d tried to create the impression that Nevron alone had unleashed the mob of demons, but in reality, it had taken a number of lesser conjurors to command them. “And my colleagues and I should get back. You may think the enemy is pushing hard here, but it’s nothing compared to what the main body of our army is facing.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Gaedynn said. “I was just thinking of lying down and taking a little nap.”
Lallara seemed accustomed to winged steeds, for she rode without clutching Aoth around the waist or any other sign of anxiety. Mirror, who’d found them not long after the cliffs smashed together, flew several yards to the right of Jet. The ghost was currently a glimmering shadow of the knight he’d been in life.
They all had to fly because it turned out that Malark had enchantments in place to keep anyone from shifting through space to his mountaintop. So they used other peaks to shield their approach and kept a wary eye out as they traveled. At one point, Aoth saw a pair of the huge, batlike undead called nightwings gliding in the distance, but the creatures didn’t seem to notice them. He didn’t see Bareris, Szass Tam, or any of the other zulkirs. Not along the way, and not when he and his companions set down on a ledge thirty yards below the site of the ritual.
“Try again to find the others,” he said, swinging himself off Jet’s back.
Lallara extracted a luminous blue crystal cube from one of her pockets, peered into it, and muttered under her breath. “Still nothing. Perhaps they really are dead. Or perhaps they warded themselves lest Springhill locate and attack them again.”
“Well, we’re here,” Mirror said, “and our enemy is just above us. I’m willing to go up and fight him.”
“Szass Tam seemed to think it would take all of us to win,” Aoth replied. “And when I remember how tough Malark was a century ago in the normal world, before the bastard even learned sorcery, I can believe it.”
“I see your point,” said the ghost. “But on the other hand, the Unmaking is happening right now. For all we know, Malark is only moments away from the end. How long do we wait for reinforcements that might never come?”
“I don’t know. Look, I’ll climb up and see what’s happening. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“Not a bad idea, but let me go. I can be invisible and be certain I won’t make any noise.”
“But we can’t count on you seeing everything that I’d see.” Aoth grinned. “Remember, I’ve done a lot of scouting. You can worry about everything else that’s happening in this nightmare—the gods know, I am—but trust in my ability to sneak.”
“And in my ability to shield a man,” Lallara quavered. Murmuring words of power, she swirled her twisted, arthritic-looking hands in circular patterns, and a cold stinging danced over Aoth’s body. “With luck, that will keep even Szass Tam’s prized pupil from spotting you, and if it doesn’t, I’ve also cast other enchantments to armor you and disperse harmful spells before they strike home. They ought to keep you alive for a few heartbeats, anyway.”
“That’s reassuring.” Aoth stowed his spear in the harness a saddler had made for it, strapped it to his back, and started to climb.
At this point, the mountainside was steep but not so sheer that a man needed to be an expert equipped with climbing gear to scale it. That was why Aoth and his comrades had landed where they did. Yet it still seemed to take an eternity to reach the top, as he worried every moment that Malark would sense his coming despite his and Lallara’s best efforts to prevent it, peer over the edge at him, and blast him from his perch with a flare of magic. Or maybe just drop a stone on his head.
But it didn’t happen, and finally, he gripped a last pair of handholds and pulled himself just high enough to peer out across the flat, rocky expanse on the summit.
Malark floated in the center of the space. He wore a jagged diadem formed of murky crystal and held a staff made of the same material over his head.
When Aoth had spotted the spymaster before, he’d been brandishing the staff and chanting, but now he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. That appearance was almost certainly deceptive. He’d simply reached a phase of the Unmaking that required pure concentration as opposed to a more conventional sort of conjuring.
At first, that was all Aoth observed. Then patches of seemingly empty space flickered and oozed in a way that made his head throb and his stomach turn. He assumed he’d located more of Szass Tam’s guardians, concealed so well that even his spellscarred eyes couldn’t make out what they were. But they were big and plentiful.
He decided it was time to return to his comrades. But before he could start his descent, he glimpsed something else.
Also imperceptible to normal sight, a great wheel or sphere or tangled knot of something hung and turned above the mountaintop. Aoth couldn’t see it clearly either, or maybe his mind instinctively cringed from the attempt. He was no surer of its substance than its shape. He thought it might be akin to the blasts of shadow that necromancers hurled to kill the living.
But somehow he knew it was infinitely more poisonous than any such spell effect, as well as profoundly if indefinably hideous. He could imagine the virulence exploding out of it to shred the sky and shatter the earth. He could imagine a man gouging out his own eyes so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore. Yet he found that he couldn’t look away.
He whimpered, realized he’d done so, and a more practical kind of alarm cut through his trance of horror. What if Malark or one of the guardian creatures had heard him? He wrenched his gaze away from the ghastly object above him.
It didn’t look as if they’d heard. He took a deep breath, then invoked the magic of one of his tattoos. The enchantment enabled him to fall slowly and harmlessly down the mountainside.
As he lit on the ledge, Jet said, “I looked through your eyes. I wish I hadn’t. But I already told these two what you saw.”
“So what do we do?” asked Mirror.