Unclean hl-1 Read online

  He was easygoing by nature, and there was a time when he might simply have stepped aside, but he'd learned that, looking as he did, he sometimes had to insist on niggling matters of precedence lest he forfeit respect. He summoned a flare of silvery light from the head of his lance to reveal the badges of a rider of the elite Griffon Legion and the intricate tattooing and manifest power of a wizard.

  Not a Red Wizard. Probably because the purity of his bloodline was suspect, none of the orders had ever sought to recruit him, but in Thay, any true scholar of magic commanded respect, and the other warrior stammered an apology and scurried out of the way. Aoth gave him a nod and tramped onward.

  The masters of Thazar Keep housed visiting griffons in an airy, doorless stone hall that was a vague approximation of the caverns in which the species often laired in the wild. At present, Brightwing-so named because, even as a cub, her feathers had been a lighter shade of gold than average-was the only one in residence. Her tack hung from pegs on the wall, and fragments of broken bone and flecks of bloody flesh and fat-all that remained of the side of beef Aoth had requisitioned for her supper-befouled a shallow trough.

  Brightwing herself was nine feet long, with a lion's body and the pinions, forelegs, and head of an eagle. Her tail switched restlessly, and her round scarlet eyes opened wide when her master came into view.

  "It's about time," she said.

  Her beak and throat weren't made for articulating human speech, and most people wouldn't have understood the clacks and squawks. But thanks to the bond they shared, Aoth had no difficulty.

  "It's scarcely been any time at all," he replied. "What ails you?"

  "I have a feeling," the griffon said. "Something's moving in the night."

  He grinned. "Could you be a little less specific?"

  "It's not a joke."

  "If you say so." He respected her instincts. Heeding them had saved his life on more than one occasion. Still, at the moment, he suspected, she was simply in a mood. Maybe the beef hadn't been as fresh as it looked. "Is 'something' inside the walls or outside?"

  Brightwing cocked her head and took a moment to answer. "Outside, I believe."

  "Then who cares? The Sunrise Mountains are full of unpleasant beasts. That's why Tharchion Focar still keeps troops here, to keep them from wandering down the pass and harming folk at the bottom. But if something dangerous is prowling around outside the fortress, that's not an emergency. Somebody can hunt it down in the morning."

  "Morning may be too late."

  "We aren't even part of the garrison here. We just deliver dispatches, remember? Besides which, there are sentries walking the battlements."

  "We can see more than they can and see it sooner. I mean, if you'll consent to move your lazy arse."

  "What if I find you more meat? Maybe even horseflesh."

  "That would be nice. Later."

  Aoth sighed and moved to lift her saddle off the wall. "I could have chosen an ordinary familiar. A nice tabby, toad, or owl that would never have given me a moment's trouble, but no, not me. I wanted something special."

  Despite his grumbling and near-certainty that Brightwing was dragging him away from his pleasures on a fool's errand, he had to admit, if only to himself, that once the griffon lashed her wings and carried him into the air, he didn't mind so very much. He loved to fly. Indeed, even though the slight still rankled sometimes, in his secret heart, he was glad the Red Wizards had never come for him. He wasn't made for their viciousness and intrigues. He was born for this, which didn't make the high mountain air any less frigid. He focused his attention on one of the tattoos on his chest, activating its magic. Warmth flowed through his limbs, making him more comfortable.

  "Which way?" he asked. "Up the pass?"

  "Yes," Brightwing answered. She climbed higher then wheeled eastward. Below them, quick and swollen with the spring thaw, the Thazarim River hissed and gurgled, reflecting the stars like an obsidian mirror.

  The griffon's avian head shifted back and forth, looking for movement on the ground. Aoth peered as well, though his night vision was inferior to hers. He might have enhanced it with an enchantment, except that having no notion this excursion was in the offing, he hadn't prepared that particular spell.

  Not that it mattered, for there was nothing to see. "I humored you," he said. "Now let's turn back before all the tavern maids choose other companions for the night."

  Brightwing hissed in annoyance. "I know all humans have dull senses, but this is pathetic. Use mine instead."

  Employing their psychic link, he did as she'd suggested, and the night brightened around him. Nonetheless, at first he didn't see anything so very different. He certainly smelled it, though, a putrid reek that churned his belly.

  "Carrion," he said. "Something big died. Or a lot of little things."

  "Maybe." She beat her way onward. He considered pointing out that rotting carcasses didn't constitute a threat to Thazar Keep, then decided that particular sensible observation was no more likely to sway her than any of the others had.

  At which point the undead came shambling out of the dark, appearing so suddenly that it was as if a charm of concealment had shrouded them until the griffon and her rider were almost directly over their heads. Hunched, withered ghouls, sunken eyes shining like foxfire in their sockets, loped in the lead. Skeletons with spears and bows came after, and shuffling, lurching corpses bearing axes. Inconstant, translucent figures drifted among the horde as well, some shining like mist in moonlight, others inky shadows all but indistinguishable in the gloom.

  Aoth stared in astonishment. Like goblins and kobolds, undead creatures sometimes ventured down from the mountains into the pass, but at worst, five or six of them at a time. There were scores, maybe hundreds, of the vile things advancing below, manifestly united by a common purpose. Just like an army on the march.

  "Turn around," the wizard said. "We have to warn the keep."

  "Do you really think so," Brightwing answered, "or are you just humoring me?" She dipped one wing, raised the other, and began to wheel. Then something flickered, a blink of blackness against the lesser murk of the night.

  Aoth intuited more than truly saw the threat streaking up at them. "Dodge!" he said, and Brightwing veered.

  The attack, a jagged streak of shadow erupting from somewhere on the ground, grazed the griffon anyway. Perhaps she'd have fared even worse had it hit her dead on, but as it was, she shrieked and convulsed, plummeting down through the sky for a heart-stopping moment before she spread her wings and arrested her fall.

  "Are you all right?" asked Aoth.

  "What do you think? It hurt, but I can still fly. What happened?"

  "I assume one of those creatures was a sorcerer in life and still remembers some of its magic. Move out before it takes another shot at you."

  "Right."

  Brightwing turned then cursed. Ragged, mottled sheets of some flexible material floated against the sky like kites carried aloft by the wind. Still relying in part on the griffon's senses, Aoth caught their stink of decay and noticed the subtle, serpentine manner in which they writhed. Though he'd never encountered anything like them before, he assumed they must be undead as well, animated pieces of skin that had taken advantage of Brightwing's momentary incapacity to soar up into the air and bar the way back to the castle.

  The skin kites shot forward like a school of predatory fish. Brightwing veered, seeking to keep them from all converging on her at once. Aoth brandished his spear and rattled off an incantation.

  A floating wall of violet flame shimmered and hissed into existence. The onrushing skin kites couldn't stop or maneuver quickly enough to avoid it, and the heat seared them as they hurtled through. They emerged burning like paper and floundered spastically as they charred to ash.

  Aoth hadn't been able to conjure a barrier large enough to catch them all, and the survivors streaked after him. He destroyed more with a fan-shaped flare of amber flame then impaled one with a thrust of his lance. Meanw
hile, twisting, climbing, diving, Brightwing snapped with her beak and slashed with her talons. Another rider might have worried that his mount's natural weapons would prove of little use against an exotic form of undead. Aoth, however, had long ago gifted the griffon with the ability to rend most any foe, even as he'd enhanced her stamina and intelligence.

  The kite on the point of his lance stopped writhing, then Brightwing shrieked and lurched in flight. Aoth cast about and saw one of the membranous creatures adhering to her just below the place where her feathers ended. The kite grew larger. Tufts of hair the same color as the griffon's fur sprouted from its surface.

  Aoth recited another spell. Darts of emerald light leaped from his fingertips to pierce the leech-like creature, tearing it to bits. Precise as a healer's lancet, the magic didn't harm Brightwing any further, though it couldn't do anything about the raw, bloody patch the kite left in its wake.

  Aoth peered and saw other foes rising into the air. By the dark flame, how many of the filthy things could fly? "Go!" he said. "Before they cut us off again!"

  Brightwing shot forward. Aoth plucked a scrap of licorice root from one of his pockets, brandished it, recited words of power, and stroked the griffon's neck. Her wings started beating twice as fast as before, and the pursuing phantoms and bat-winged shadows fell behind. He took a last glance at the force on the ground before the darkness swallowed it anew. The undead foot soldiers started to trot as if something-their officers? — were exhorting them to greater speed.

  During the skirmish, Aoth had been too hard-pressed to feel much of anything. Now that it was over, he yielded to a shudder of fear and disgust. Like any legionnaire, he was somewhat accustomed to tame or civilized undead. The zulkris' armies incorporated skeleton warriors and even a vampire general or two, but encountering those hadn't prepared him for the palpable malevolence, the sickening sense of the unnatural, emanating from the host now streaming down the pass.

  But dread and revulsion were of no practical use, so he shoved them to the back of his mind, the better to monitor Brightwing. As soon as the enchantment of speed wore off, he renewed it. The griffon grunted as power burned through her sinews and nerves once more.

  The ramparts of Thazar Keep emerged from the gloom. Using Brightwing's eyes, Aoth cast about until he spotted a gnoll on the wall-walk. The sentry with its hyena head and bristling mane sat on a merlon picking at its fur, its long legs dangling.

  "Set down there," said Aoth.

  "It isn't big enough," Brightwing answered, but she furled her pinions, swooped, and contrived to land on the wall-walk anyway, albeit with a jolt. More intent on grooming itself than keeping watch, the gnoll hadn't noticed their approach. Startled, it yipped, recoiled, lost its balance, and for a moment looked in danger of falling off the merlon and down the wall. Brightwing caught hold of it with her beak and steadied it.

  "Easy!" said Aoth. "I'm a legionnaire, too, but there is trouble coming. Sound your horn."

  The gnoll blinked. "What?"

  "Sound the alarm! Now! The castle is about to come under attack!"

  The gnoll scrambled to its feet and blew a bleating call on its ram's-horn bugle, then repeated it over and over. One or two at a time, warriors stumbled from the various towers and barracks. To Aoth, their response seemed sluggish, as if they couldn't imagine that their quiet posting might experience a genuine emergency. He spotted one fellow carrying a bucket instead of a weapon. The fool evidently assumed that if something was genuinely amiss, it could only be a fire, not an assault.

  "Find the castellan," said Aoth, and Brightwing leaped into the air. They discovered the captain, an old man whose tattoos had started to fade and blur, in front of the entrance to his quarters, adjusting the targe on his arm and peering around. Brightwing plunged down in front of him, and he jumped just as the gnoll had.

  "Sir!" Aoth saluted with his spear. "There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of undead advancing down the pass. I've seen them. You've got to get your men moving, get them into position on the wall. Priests, too, however many you have in residence."

  Bellowing orders, the castellan strode toward a barracks and the soldiers forming up outside. After that, things moved faster. Still, to Aoth, it seemed to take an eternity for everyone to reach his battle station.

  But maybe the garrison had made more haste than he credited, for when he next looked up the vale, the undead had yet to appear. He realized the flying entities that had pursued him would certainly have arrived already if they'd continued advancing at maximum speed, but evidently, when it became obvious they couldn't catch him, they'd slowed down so the entire force could move as a unit.

  Standing beside him on the wall-walk, squinting against the dark, the castellan growled, "I hope for your sake that this isn't just some drunken…" The words caught in his throat as, creeping, gliding, or shuffling silently, the undead emerged from the dark.

  "The things in the air are the immediate threat," said Aoth, not because he believed the captain incapable of this elementary tactical insight but to nudge him into action.

  "Right you are," the officer rapped. He shouted, "Kill the flyers!"

  Bows creaked, and arrows whistled through the air. A priest of Bane shook his fist in its black-enameled gauntlet, and a flare of greenish phosphorescence seared several luminous phantoms from the air. Aoth conjured darting, disembodied sets of sharklike jaws that snapped at wraiths and shadows with their fangs.

  Archery and magic both took their toll, but some of the flying undead reached the top of the wall anyway. A gnoll staggered backward and fell to a bone-shattering death with a skin kite plastered to its muzzle. A smallish wraith-the ghost of a little boy, its soft, swollen features rippling as if still resting beneath the water that had drowned the child-reached for a cowering warrior. Brightwing pounced and slashed it to flecks of luminescence with her talons. Aoth felt a chill at his side and pivoted frantically. Almost invisible, just dark against dark, a shadow stood poised to swipe at him. He thrust with his spear and shouted a word of command, expending a measure of the magic stored in the lance to make the attack more potent. His point plunged through the shade's intangible body without resistance, and the thing vanished.

  "We're holding them!" someone shouted, his voice shrill with mingled terror and defiance, and so far, he was right.

  But charging unopposed while the defenders were intent on their flying comrades, the undead on the ground had reached the foot of the wall. Ghouls climbed upward, their claws finding purchase in the granite. The gate boomed as something strong as a giant sought to batter it down. Walking corpses dug, starting a tunnel, each scoop of a withered, filth-encrusted hand somehow gouging away a prodigious quantity of earth.

  Aoth hurled spell after spell. The warriors on the battlements fought like madmen, alternately striking at the phantoms flitting through the air and the snarling, hissing rotten things swarming up from below.

  This time it wasn't enough. A dozen ghouls surged up onto the wall-walk all at once. They clawed, bit, and four warriors dropped, either slain or paralyzed by the virulence of their touch. Their courage faltering at last, blundering into one another, nearly knocking one another from the wall in their frantic haste, other soldiers recoiled from the creatures.

  Then green light blazed through the air, shining from the Banite cleric's upraised fist. It was a fiercer radiance than he'd conjured before, and though it didn't feel hot to Aoth, it seared the ghouls and the phantoms hovering above the wall from existence.

  Indeed, peering around, Aoth saw it had balked the entire assault. Creatures endeavoring to scale the wall lost their grips, fell, and thudded to the ground. Beyond them, other undead cowered, averting their faces from the light. Here and there, one of the mindless lesser ones, a zombie or skeleton, collapsed entirely or crumbled into powder.

  Aoth smiled and shook his head. It was astonishing that a cleric in an insignificant outpost like Thazar Keep could exert so much power. Maybe the Banite had been hoarding a talisman o
f extraordinary potency, or perhaps he had in desperation called out to his deity, and the Black Hand had seen fit to answer with a miracle.

  Trembling, his features taut with a mixture of concentration and exultation, the priest stretched his fist even higher. Aoth inferred that he was about to attempt a feat even more difficult than he'd accomplished already. He meant to scour the entire undead horde from existence.

  Then his eyes and most of his features shredded into tattered flesh and gore. One of his foes, perhaps the same spellcasting specter or ghoul that had injured Brightwing, had somehow resisted his god-granted power and struck back. The Banite reeled, screamed, and the light of the gauntlet guttered out. The undead hurled themselves forward once more.

  At least the priest hurt them, thought Aoth. Maybe I can finish what he started. He started to shout an incantation, and darkness swirled around him like smoke from some filthy conflagration. Crimson eyes shone toward the top of the thing amid a protrusion of vapor that might conceivably serve it as a head.

  He tried to threaten it with his spear and complete his recitation simultaneously, but even though he was a battle wizard and had trained himself to articulate his spells with the necessary precision even in adverse circumstances, he stumbled over the next syllables, botching and wasting the magic. Suddenly, he had no air to articulate anything. The spirit had somehow leeched it from the space around him and even his very lungs.

  His chest burning, an unaccustomed panic yammering through his mind, he endeavored to hold his breath, or what little he had left of it, and thrust repeatedly with his spear. If the jabs were hurting his attacker-an undead air elemental, did such entities exist? — he couldn't tell. Darkness seethed at the edges of his vision, and he lost his balance and fell to his knees.

  Pinions spread for balance, rearing on her hind legs, Brightwing raked the spirit with her claws and tore at it with her beak. The entity whirled to face her, a movement mainly perceptible by virtue of the rotation of the gleaming eyes in the all but shapeless cloud that was its body, but before it could try stealing her breath, it broke apart into harmless fumes.