The Haunted Lands: Book II - Undead Read online

He wasn’t afraid of the act he was about to perform for its own sake. He sometimes thought that his necromancy and the entities it summoned were the only things that didn’t frighten him. But once he cast the spells, everyone in the fortress would know him for the enemy he truly was. Everyone would do his or her utmost to slaughter him on sight.

  But it didn’t matter that he was afraid. He was mind-bound, and had no choice. The enchantment might not poison a man if he made an honest effort to carry out Szass Tam’s orders and then gave up when the task proved impossible. The magic was subtler than that. But it would smite So-Kehur if he didn’t even try.

  He read the first trigger phrase on the vellum, releasing the spell contained therein. Stone grated and crashed as coffin lids slid open and marker stones fell away from the vaults behind them. So-Kehur winced at the racket, but doubted anyone would actually hear it. The battle raging outside the castle was even noisier.

  He recited the second trigger. A cold breeze gusted, nearly blowing out his candle. The smell of decay thickened, and the spiders skittered in their webs.

  A dead man sat up in his coffin. Another stuck his head out of a newly opened hole in the wall.

  Some of the dead, more recently deceased or artfully embalmed, retained a goodly portion of their flesh. Others had deteriorated to mere rickety-looking skeletons, but it didn’t matter. Infused with the power of necromancy, they could all fight, and many already carried swords and axes. As befitted knights and warriors, they’d been laid to rest with their weapons and armor.

  Milky eyes fixed on So-Kehur. Empty, mold-encrusted orbits turned in his direction. The dead awaited his command.

  “Range through the castle,” he said, “and kill everyone you find, except for me and a man with the fingers missing on his right hand.” The way Muthoth liked to insult and bully him, it would serve him right if the dead went after him as well. But however obnoxious, the other necromancer had been So-Kehur’s partner in desperate endeavors for a long time, and he was the only ally who could stand with him now.

  Or at least the only one who thought and spoke and breathed.

  Muthoth sat cross-legged on the floor of the bedchamber. He breathed slowly and deeply, from the belly. He sank deeper and deeper into his trance, deeper and deeper into himself, until he reached the cell or psychic cyst that caged the thing within.

  So-Kehur had smuggled death into the Keep of Sorrows on a roll of parchment. Recognizing Muthoth as a more powerful necromancer and a stronger will, Szass Tam had chosen him to bring an even more terrible weapon to bear, and to carry it entombed in his own mind. At times the oppressive weight and the whisper of alien thought had nearly driven him mad, and he was eager to put an end to the torment.

  Which didn’t mean he could afford to rush. The entity was inimical to all life, but since it hadn’t enjoyed being imprisoned any more than he’d enjoyed containing it, it now hated him more than anything else in the world. Accordingly, he recited the incantation of release, or rather, of transfer from one form of binding to another, with the utmost care.

  The caller in darkness, as such abominations were known, howled up around him in that realm of concept and image they both occupied. The entity was a vortex of dark mist with anguished faces forming and dissolving inside it. Their shrieks pounded at him. They’d blast his mind apart if he let them, then tear the pieces out to add to the collective agony that was their source.

  Steeling himself against the onslaught, Muthoth repeated the words of command he’d just recited. The caller recoiled from him, then vanished.

  For an instant, Muthoth was confused, then he realized it had transferred itself to the physical plane. It hoped the surface of his mind would prove vulnerable to assault while his awareness was focused deep inside.

  He hastily roused himself, suffered a fleeting illusion of extreme heaviness as his psyche fully meshed with his corporeal form. The demented ghost—or amalgam of ghosts—raved around him. It looked just as it had inside its quasi-imaginary dungeon, but its howls were silent now, albeit as palpable and hurtful as before.

  He recited the spell a third time, and the caller flinched from him. Its power stopped beating at him, although the psychic howling didn’t abate.

  “Go forth,” he panted, “and kill every living person you meet, unless I tell you otherwise.” He intended to trail along behind the caller, where he’d be safe. He hoped that if the entity encountered So-Kehur, he’d spot his fellow necromancer in time to keep the thing from attacking. If not, well, the fat fool wouldn’t be much of a loss.

  Still, So-Kehur had a role to play. As the dead men he’d already roused proceeded with the work of slaughtering the garrison, he’d make new zombies of the fallen, just as Muthoth intended to reanimate the caller’s victims. As the defenders’ numbers dwindled, the ranks of their enemies would swell.

  Xingax liked to ride on the shoulders of a hill-giant zombie. It made folk assume that a being who resembled an oversized, leprous, and grossly deformed fetus couldn’t get around by himself, and he liked being underestimated in that way. It gave him an edge when ill wishers sought to kill him.

  Or rather, it had worked that way in the past, but he’d discovered that in the midst of a battle like this, his mount was a liability. Even at the center of the northern host, sticking up higher than the heads of the people around him increased the likelihood of being pierced by arrows or fried by flares of arcane energy. So now he simply floated in the air beside Szass Tam.

  Xingax disliked the roaring, dangerous chaos that was warfare, and privately felt that he shouldn’t have to endure it. He was an inventor, sage, and artist, not a brute. Thus, it galled him to recognize that he himself was responsible for his presence at the battle. After Bareris Anskuld had mutilated him, he’d repaired the damage with a hand and eye harvested from the body of the fallen nighthaunt Ysval, then learned to wield the abilities the grafts conferred. As a result, Szass Tam had incorporated him into his battle strategy.

  The lich had created half a dozen hovering eyes, then sent them soaring up into the sky. Periodically he opened his mind to the sights the disembodied orbs beheld. It allowed him to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole. He signaled the end of such an interlude by pivoting toward Xingax.

  “Is it time?” Xingax asked.

  The lich smiled. “It is, indeed. Our enemies smell victory. They’re pushing in hard, and that means they won’t be able to disentangle themselves from us later on. So remember what I taught you, and use your power.”

  Xingax closed his natural, myopic eye so only Ysval’s round white orb could see. He raised the nighthaunt’s oversized, shadow black hand to the heavens, clenched the clawed fingers into a fist, and strained with all the considerable force of his will.

  Responding to his summons, darkness streamed across the sky. For the Keep of Sorrows, night fell early, and across the length and breadth of Szass Tam’s army, wraiths and other fearsome entities exploded from the wagons, tents, and pools of shadow used to shield them from the light of day.

  Tammith looked around. The horses stood ready, but she couldn’t see any clear path along which she and her command might ride to engage the enemy.

  Fortunately, the vampires of the Silent Company, made up largely of progeny Tammith had created over the years, had other ways of reaching the foe.

  “We fly!” she called, then dissolved into bats. Her warriors each transformed into a single such creature. None of them had inherited her trick of breaking apart into an entire swarm.

  She led her spawn over clusters and lines of combatants to a company of mounted knights. By the looks of it, they’d just finished butchering a band of ghouls.

  The Silent Company dived at the southerners. Midway through her plummet, Tammith yanked her bats back into a single human body. It was a difficult trick and it hurt, but it was necessary, because her target wore plate armor and had his visor down. The bats wouldn’t be able to hurt him.

  She crashed into the knight, swe
pt him from the saddle, and hurled him to the ground beneath her. The impact probably killed or at least crippled him, but she ripped the visor off his helm and drove her stiffened, mail-clad fingers deep into his head to be sure.

  She sprang to her feet, found another target, and stared at his face. Addled by her hypnotic power, he faltered, giving her time to draw her sword. As she leaped up at him, his wits returned, and he swung his shield to fend her off. He was too slow, though, and the point of her sword punched through his breastplate into his vitals.

  Meanwhile, the other vampires attacked like lethal shadows, until all the riders were dead. Tammith looked around for new foes and saw the griffon riders wheeling and swooping overhead.

  Since the Silent Company could fly, it could engage the zulkirs’ aerial warriors—but no. By all accounts, Bareris was still alive, and had joined the Griffon Legion.

  Of course, she didn’t love him anymore. The predator she’d become was incapable of loving anyone. Sometimes she even hated him for failing her as he had.

  But still: no. Now that the battlefield was dark, Szass Tam had other warriors capable of fighting in the air, and the Silent Company could find plenty of work to do on the ground.

  Malark considered himself as able a combatant as any in Thay. He had, after all, had centuries of life to perfect his disciplines. But he couldn’t use them to best effect standing in a shield wall or charging in a line. The philosopher-assassins of the Monks of the Long Death hadn’t modeled themselves with those sorts of group endeavors in mind.

  Thus he preferred to fight on the fringes of the battle, and found plenty of enemies to occupy him—skirmishers, warriors separated from their companies, and undead horrors so savage and erratic that even the necromancers mistrusted their ability to control them. Accordingly, they didn’t even try, just shooed them off in the general direction of the zulkirs’ army to rampage as they would.

  He kicked an orc in the chest and burst its heart, then used his batons to shatter the skull of a yellow-eyed dread warrior. He dispatched foe after foe, all the while exulting in the slaughter. Until the ground began to shake.

  The first jolt knocked some warriors to the ground. Malark took a quick step to keep his balance, then glanced around to see what was happening.

  On the plain to the north, entities huge as dragons heaved up out of the earth. Dirt showered away to reveal forms akin to those of octopi, but shrouded in moldy cerements. Vast black eyes glaring, tentacles clutching and churning the soil, they dragged themselves toward the rear of the legions of Eltabbar.

  As he stared dry-mouthed at the colossi, Malark wondered if Szass Tam and Xingax had created them or unearthed them from some forgotten menagerie of horrors, and wondered too how the enemy had managed to bury them in the field beforehand without anyone in the Keep of Sorrows noticing. Well, caverns riddled the earth hereabouts, and from the first days of the war, the necromancers had employed zombies with a supernatural ability to dig. So perhaps they’d tunneled up from underneath.

  Not that it mattered. What did was that the squid-things were about to smash and crush their way into Dmitra’s soldiery like boulders rolling over ants, and that meant Malark’s place was at her side. He sprinted toward the spot where the standards of Eltabbar and the Order of Illusion, both infused with magical phosphorescence, glowed against the murky sky.

  Since the day he’d first sat on griffon-back, Aoth had loved to fly, but now, for an instant, he hated it and the perspective it afforded. He wished he didn’t have such a perfect view of victory twisting into ruin.

  Gigantic tentacles lashed and pounded, smashing the infantry and horsemen of Eltabbar to pulp. Those few warriors who survived the first touch of the kraken-things’ arms collapsed moments later, flesh rotting and sloughing from their bones. Meanwhile, strengthened by the creatures that had emerged with the premature night, the army assembled before the Keep of Sorrows counterattacked ferociously and started to drive the southerners back.

  By rights, the castle’s defenders should have fought to hinder that. They should have kept up a barrage of arrows and magic from the battlements, or attempted a sortie beyond the walls. But they’d stopped doing anything. Plainly, the necromancers had found a way to kill or incapacitate them.

  Aoth felt a sudden surge of hope when the legions of Lapendrar appeared in the northwest. Maybe, driving in on the kraken-things’ flanks, Hezass Nymar’s men would have better luck fighting the behemoths than the soldiers they were pounding flat by the moment.

  But it soon became clear from their maneuvering that they weren’t inclined to try. Rather, in a betrayal that seemed the crowning achievement of his life of opportunism and disloyalty, Nymar meant to attack the southern host.

  The object of the zulkirs’ strategy had been to surround and trap Szass Tam. Now, with the lich’s soldiers on one side, the squid-things on another, and the legions of Lapendrar on a third, their army was the one boxed in.

  “And I could have gorged on horseflesh every day,” Brightwing said.

  Aoth managed a laugh, though it felt like something was grinding in his chest. “It sounds pretty good right now, doesn’t it?”

  “The other riders are looking to you,” the griffon said. “They need orders.”

  Why? Aoth thought. The day is lost whatever we do. Still, they had a duty to fight until Nymia Focar or one of the zulkirs gave them leave to retreat.

  “We attack Nymar,” he said. “If we hit hard before his men can form up properly, maybe it will do some good.” He brandished his spear, waving his men in the proper direction, and they hurtled across the sky.

  Szass Tam knew he’d won the battle, and that meant he’d as good as won Thay, but it was no reason to let up. Any zulkirs who escaped might cause trouble later, delaying the start of his real work, to which all this fighting and conquering was merely the necessary prelude.

  Of course, if they realized their cause was lost, it was possible they’d all whisked themselves to safety already. They certainly wouldn’t tarry out of any misguided devotion to the doomed followers who lacked the same ability to make a magical retreat.

  Still, he had nothing to lose by dropping his line in the water. He sent his magical eyes flying this way and that, swooping over the enemy army to locate his rivals.

  And there was Dmitra, looking sweaty, pale, and exhausted. She’d wearied herself maintaining the shield of illusion that, she imagined, kept him from discerning the southern army’s approach, and had cast many more enchantments during the battle. Nor was she done yet. Reciting hoarsely and whirling a staff, she meant to hurl fire at the undead kraken crawling in her direction.

  Szass Tam summoned the Death Moon Orb into his hand. The jet and magenta sphere was the size of an apple this time, as small as it ever shrank, but fortunately, its potency didn’t vary with its size. He focused his will to wake its magic, then hesitated.

  Because, at the end, the Death Moon Orb hadn’t worked on Yaphyll. And these days, Dmitra, too, was a zulkir.

  He snorted his misgivings away. He still didn’t understand everything that had passed between Yaphyll and himself, but he didn’t regard her resistance to the orb as part of the mystery. No charm of domination succeeded every time. Still, in its way, the artifact was the most powerful weapon in all his arsenal, and he had nothing to lose by trying it. If Dmitra proved impervious to its magic, he’d simply change tactics.

  With a gesture and a spell, he placed an image of himself, complete with the orb, before her. A lesser wizard couldn’t have used the sphere at such a distance, but Szass Tam believed he could, and while doing so, he’d be less vulnerable than if he’d moved his physical body into the center of an enemy army, beleaguered and on the brink of rout though it was.

  When she glimpsed his shadow from the corner of her eye, Dmitra pivoted to face him and continued her incantation. He, or his image, would be the target of the fire spell if he chose to let her complete it. He didn’t. He held out the Death Moon Orb, and she stagg
ered. Her staff slipped from her spastic fingers.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I should punish you for your betrayal, but I always liked you, and you were always useful. I’ll make you a lich and then you can join the new circle of zulkirs I’m assembling to serve me. How does that sound?”

  Her eyes rolled. Shuddering, she fumbled at her scarlet robe, seeking one of the hidden pockets and whatever talisman it contained. But she lacked the coordination to reach it.

  Szass Tam concentrated, bearing down to crush what little capacity for defiance remained. “For now, you can help my leviathans slaughter your soldiers. Don’t worry, the brutes won’t strike at you if I don’t want them to.”

  At that moment, squirming and shoving his way though the mass of panicky legionnaires, Malark Springhill lunged into view. Capitulating to Szass Tam’s orders, Dmitra oriented on the spymaster and started chanting. Realizing she meant him harm, Malark dropped into a fighting stance. He obviously hoped he’d be able to dodge whatever magic she was about to conjure.

  Then, despite her skill and the coercive power of the orb, she faltered, botching the spell. Szass Tam didn’t blame her. He, too, had frozen, as true wizards all across Faerûn undoubtedly had. They sensed what had happened, if not how or why. Mystra, goddess of magic, had just perished, and with her death, the Weave, the universal structure of arcane forces, convulsed.

  Corrupted by sudden chaos, the Death Moon Orb exploded in Szass Tam’s grasp.

  Aoth felt a shock so profound that for an instant it obliterated thought. He assumed, when he was once again capable of assuming anything, that some hostile priest or wizard had cast a spell on him. Yet he seemed unharmed. “Are you all right?” he asked his mount.

  “Yes,” Brightwing said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know.” But the whole world abruptly tasted wrong. He supposed it was because the combatants had unleashed too much magic that day, enough to scrape and chip at the fundamental underpinnings of matter, force, time, and space. Reality was sick with it, and a magic-user like himself could feel its distress.