The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy Read online

  Red, liquid tendrils rose from the soft earth beneath their boots like grass growing tall in a heartbeat. The blood amniote had flowed and burrowed through the mud to surround and cage them. The tendrils branched and connected, forming an even more secure prison, and the suggestion of mad, anguished faces formed and dissolved in the surfaces so created. The undead ooze extruded a huge tentacle, raised it high, and lashed it down at Gaedynn.

  Confined as he was, the bowman couldn’t dodge. The attack swatted him to the ground, and, as the tentacle lifted again, blood burst from his skin and flew upward to add itself to the substance of the amniote. Jhesrhi gasped.

  “Hit it with everything you have!” Bareris said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m in the way!” If his blistered hands and face were any indication, perhaps he hadn’t needed to tell her that, but it still seemed like a good idea. Her slightest hesitation could cost Gaedynn and Khouryn their lives.

  He charged the blood amniote, singing even as he sprinted as only a war bard could. It was harsh music, full of hate, designed to bleed the strength from an opponent, and the first sting of it made the gigantic ooze stop flailing at its captives. Bareris closed the distance, slashed at the creature’s flowing, foul-smelling body, and then it started hammering at him.

  He dodged, cut, and sang his spell of grinding, relentless destruction. More faces appeared in the crimson, latticed mass, and it seemed that a female one mouthed his name. Lightning crackled, thunder boomed, and blasts of fire roared, he felt sudden heat and glimpsed flashes at the periphery of his vision, but Jhesrhi managed to hit the huge undead without striking him. He thought they might actually have the situation under control. Then, instead of lashing at him with an arm, the amniote simply fell at him like an avalanche or a breaking wave.

  He couldn’t dodge that. The great, formless mass of it slammed him down on his back, then reared above him. Pain, different and worse than the shock of impact he’d suffered an instant before, wracked him.

  His heart didn’t beat, and he didn’t bleed when a blade cut him. He’d assumed he didn’t have any blood the amniote could steal. But now skin and muscle split, and the veins beneath them ruptured. Brown powder swirled up from the wounds.

  The blood amniote faltered like a man who had taken a bite of food and found it unexpectedly foul. Its liquid bulk shifted toward Gaedynn and Khouryn.

  His whole body throbbing with pain, Bareris scrambled to his feet and gritted out the next line of the song. He cut through a section of the amniote’s body, and his blade left a trail of scarlet droplets behind it.

  The ooze-thing oriented on him again, rearing above him. Then it broke apart, its liquid remains drumming the earth.

  Bareris staggered to Gaedynn and Khouryn. Jhesrhi came running too, and flung herself down beside the scout. Neither he nor the dwarf had flesh torn in the same way as Bareris’s—perhaps their blood had come out their pores—but they both looked as if someone had dyed them crimson.

  “Help them!” Jhesrhi snapped.

  Bareris saw they were both still breathing. “I can keep them alive, but they need a real healer. Fetch a priest.”

  By the time the healer, a young Burning Brazier with keen, earnest features, finished his work, the battle was over, the necromentals and other horrors dispatched. The cleric eyed Bareris uncertainly, and the latter had a good idea what was going through his mind. On one hand, the priest’s superiors had trained him to despise and destroy the undead. But on the other, Bareris was manifestly an ally and a warrior who’d been fighting Szass Tam, the great maker and master of zombies, vampires, and their ilk, for a hundred years.

  “I can try to help you too, if you want,” the young man said at length.

  “Thank you, but your magic wouldn’t work on me.” Bareris remembered how another Burning Brazier had labored in vain to save Tammith after one of Xingax’s creations bit her head off. Like every memory of his lost love, it brought a stab of pain. “Anyway, my wounds will close on their own in a little while.”

  After the Brazier took his leave, Jhesrhi approached. Looking down a little, avoiding eye contact, she said, “I snatched my hand away from you.”

  “I remember.”

  “I would have yanked it away no matter who was holding it.”

  And evidently that was as much of an apology or an expression of acceptance and trust as Bareris was going to get. Which was fine. He didn’t need Aoth’s troops to be his friends. He just needed them to fight.

  chapter five

  9 Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

  Over the years, Aoth had grown used to spotting things from far away that other people failed to notice even at short range, and this was evidently such an occasion. On a ridge a half mile distant, men in mottled green, tan, and brown clothing lay motionless on their bellies, watching the great column that was the zulkirs’ army marching north with its mercenary contingent still in the lead. Griffon riders soared almost directly above the necromancers’ spies but evidently hadn’t seen them.

  Aoth blew his horn to snag the riders’ attention, then pointed at the watchers with his spear. His aerial scouts took another look at the ridge, then readied their bows and swooped lower.

  “You and I could have killed those men ourselves,” Jet grumbled.

  “I’m a commander now,” Aoth replied. “I’m not supposed to slaughter with my own hands every enemy who wanders into view. It would look peculiar.”

  Still, he wouldn’t have minded the exercise. It might have taken his mind off the sad spectacle of the land spread out before him.

  It didn’t surprise him, exactly. During the ten years of the zulkirs’ war, he’d watched the conflict steadily ruin the land. Blue skies gave way to gray. Green fields withered or fell to weeds and tares as relentlessly as estates and towns fell to besiegers and marauders. Contaminated by the residue of malign sorcery, the soil and rivers spawned blight, disease, and monstrosities even when no wizard was trying to call them forth. And Aoth had heard that, after driving his rivals out, Szass Tam hadn’t exerted himself unduly to repair the damage, for reasons that were finally apparent. The lich had been too busy building Dread Rings and otherwise preparing for the Unmaking.

  As a result, much of Lapendrar remained a wasteland, either barren or given over to pale, twisted scrub the like of which Aoth had never seen before. No one was maintaining the roads—vegetation encroached everywhere, and at certain points, sinkholes had swallowed the roads, or rain had washed the highways away—evidence that the great merchant caravans no longer traveled the length and breadth of the kingdom. Crumbling ruins dotted the rolling plain, which rose gradually as it ran up to the towering cliffs called the First Escarpment.

  Although the province wasn’t all desolation. Periodically, Aoth sighted a plantation still growing normal food for those Thayans who still required it. But even there, it was zombies, not living slaves, who toiled mindlessly in the fields when their masters, in all likelihood, had already fled the invaders’ approach.

  He’d told Bareris the truth. He hadn’t missed Thay, not after the first few years in exile, anyway. He’d lived a better life elsewhere than he ever had here. But even so, the realm had been home in a way that no other place would ever be again, and a land of contentment and prosperity for many even if its neighbors thought it wicked to the core. It was … unpleasant to see it so corrupted and diminished.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Jet, sensing his sour mood.

  “I left my kingdom behind, and it turned into this.”

  “Did you have a choice?”

  “Not really.”

  “Could you have done anything about it if you’d stayed?”

  “Almost certainly not.”

  “Then you’re rebuking yourself over nothing. Stop it!”

  Aoth smiled. “Your grandmother would have told me exactly the same thing.”

  “That’s because griffons are wise, and humans have a talent for stupidity. Look! Are those more enemy scouts
?”

  Aoth peered and decided, no, the four men and two women probably weren’t, because they were gaunt, haggard, and ragged. Three were poorly armed, and the others carried no weapons at all. Most tellingly of all, they made no effort to conceal themselves as they advanced on the column with its trail of hanging dust.

  Outriders trotted to intercept them. Bareris swooped down on his griffon, perhaps to vouch for the newcomers and make sure the horsemen did them no harm.

  “Those are rebels,” said Aoth.

  Over time, more such folk came to join the column. Flying high above the army, Aoth observed them all, but even his spell-scarred eyes failed to recognize their feverish excitement until he and Jet set down on the ground again.

  Malark murmured the final words of the incantation, and magic whispered through the air. He considered casting the same spell yet again, then decided against it. It was important that no one stumble across the bare little room in which he’d stashed his supplies, but surely three layered charms of concealment were sufficient.

  And if his refuge was secure, he might as well start hunting.

  He drew on the scaly, yellow gauntlets with the barbed, black claws. He scarcely needed such weapons to kill in hand-to-hand combat, but some enchanter had flayed the hide from a demon’s hands to make them, and the Abyssal taint still clinging to them should provide a different sort of obscurement.

  His leather-and-crystal headband enabling him to see in the darkness, he skulked from the room into the maze of chambers and tunnels beyond, moving warily even though he doubted anyone else was around. Not here. Below him, so rumor said, lurked fearsome creatures, some that had dwelled there since the dawn of time and some that Szass Tam had placed, perhaps to contain the others. Above were storerooms, conjuration chambers, dungeons, and vaults, excavated by the long-vanished builders of the Citadel, that the current inhabitants had turned to their own purposes. But this level was a sort of empty borderland, deep enough that no one had bothered to exploit it yet but higher than the lairs of the monstrosities.

  Malark found a staircase and climbed.

  After a time, a faint, wavering, greenish gleam, the unmistakable light of perpetual torches, warned him he was nearing the deepest of the occupied levels. He left the stairs and stalked onward. Soft chanting led him into an ossuary, where hand bones arranged in intricate floral designs adorned the walls of one room, foot bones another, and vertebrae a third.

  A necromancer stood with staff raised and eyes closed in the final chamber, the one decorated with grinning skulls. Perhaps the wizard admired Szass Tam, for like the lich, and in defiance of the usual Mulan preference for heads as hairless as any naked skull, he’d grown a goatish little chin beard.

  “Hello,” Malark said.

  The necromancer’s eyes popped open, and he faltered in his chanting. Malark felt something, some invisible entity the conjuring had held in its grasp, wriggle free like a fish escaping a net.

  “Your Omnipotence,” the bearded wizard said. He started to lower himself to his knees.

  “Please,” Malark said, “don’t do that. You don’t want to abase yourself before a man who means to kill you.”

  Straightening up, the necromancer peered at Malark as if he assumed his fellow Red Wizard was joking, but he wasn’t quite sure enough to laugh. “Master?”

  “I have to start murdering people down here, and I’d much rather begin with you than a menial. It’s more sporting and will make a bigger impression.”

  The necromancer swallowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “All you need to understand is this: I’m not going to use my own sorcery. If you start right now, you might have time to generate one effect before I cross the space between us.” Malark sprang forward.

  The necromancer snarled a word of command and thrust out his hand. Darkness leaped from his fingertips, swelled, and formed itself into an object shaped somewhat like a greatsword but made of sets of gnashing jaws lined with multiple rows of jagged fangs. Howling and gibbering in some infernal tongue, the fang-blade flew at Malark.

  Who dived underneath its raking, slavering stroke, straightened up again, and tore away the necromancer’s eyes and throat with two gory sweeps of the clawed gloves. The wizard fell backward, dropping his staff, which clattered on the floor.

  Malark spun back around to defend himself from the fangsword, then saw he wouldn’t have to. Without the focused will of its creator to guide it, the weapon simply floated in the air.

  Still, Malark thought it wise to silence its caterwauling. Screams of various sorts were by no means uncommon in these crypts, but even so, the noise might attract attention. He rattled off a charm of dismissal, and the blade disappeared.

  Then he dipped a clawed finger in the necromancer’s blood and daubed symbols emblematic of Shar, Cyric, and Gruumsh, deities whose worship Szass Tam had forbidden in order to honor his pact with Bane, on the brows of some of the omnipresent skulls. It was yet another form of obfuscation.

  Lallara gave Aoth a scowl. “What’s the matter?” she snapped.

  Actually, she supposed that from a certain perspective, it wasn’t entirely bad that he’d insisted on a private palaver in the command tent with her, the other zulkirs, Bareris, and Mirror. Her back and thighs aching from another long day in the saddle, she’d rapidly grown sick of grubby, malodorous serfs and escaped slaves babbling praise and thanks and proffering shabby handicrafts and trinkets. It was a mark of just how far the world had fallen that such wretches even dared approach her.

  But she didn’t like having a man who’d once vowed to serve the Council of Zulkirs dictating to her, either.

  Aoth answered her glower with one of his own. “The rebels obviously think you’ve come back to overthrow Szass Tam and restore the Thay that was. And you’re encouraging them to think it.”

  “If their misapprehension inspires them to give us whatever help they can,” said Samas Kul, “then why not take advantage of it?” He had a walnut pastry in one hand and a cup in the other, and as usual, he sprawled on his floating throne. The ungainly conveyance had snagged the edge of the tent door and nearly pulled down the shelter when he came in.

  “Because as our allies,” said Aoth, “they deserve to know the truth: that after we break the Dread Ring, we’re going to leave.”

  Nevron sneered. “Allies.”

  “Yes,” said Aoth, “allies. Not subjects. You can’t claim to rule them when you fled this land before any of them were even born.”

  Lauzoril put his hands together, fingertip to opposing fingertip. “Whatever they believe, by aiding us, they’ll be fighting for their only hope of survival. Isn’t that what’s truly important?”

  “I suppose so,” said Aoth. “And I think they’re capable of understanding that if we explain it to them.”

  His pastry devoured, Samas sucked at the traces of sugar glaze on his fingers. “But where’s the profit in risking it?”

  Aoth took a deep breath. “Evidently I’m not making myself clear. I’m going to make sure they know the truth. I’m warning you so we can all speak it. That will be better for their morale than if they catch the mighty zulkirs in a lie.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Lauzoril said. “We forbid it.”

  Aoth said, “I don’t care.”

  “But you took our coin!” said Samas.

  “Yes,” said the stocky warmage, his luminous azure eyes burning in the gloom. “You can well afford it, and my men deserve it. But this isn’t our usual kind of war. We’re fighting for our lives and perhaps the life of the world, not for pay, and you four wouldn’t even know about the threat if not for Bareris, Mirror, and me. So I won’t take your orders if I don’t agree with them. In fact, you might as well consider me your equal for the duration.”

  Lallara felt a surge of wrath, and then, to her surprise, grudging amusement. The Rashemi bastard knew they needed him, and he was making the most of it. It wouldn’t stop her or, certainly, any of the other zulkirs fro
m punishing him in the end, but still, one could almost admire his boldness.

  When they had found out the rebels wanted to pay homage to them, the zulkirs had raised a section of ground to serve as a makeshift dais, then lit it with a sourceless crimson glow.

  The archmages were gone now, and so were their chairs, but the mound and light remained, and the ragged, starveling insurgents, apprised that Bareris wished to address them, were assembling before it once again. Standing with Mirror and Aoth, he watched them congregate.

  “The zulkirs had a point,” he said. “These folk might well have fought better with hearts full of hope.”

  “Maybe so,” said Aoth.

  “So why did you insist on giving them the truth?”

  Aoth shrugged. “Who knows? I suspected that returning to Thay would be bad for me. Maybe it’s clouded my judgment. Or maybe I spent too many years as the council’s ignorant pawn.”

  Mirror, at the moment less a visible presence than a mere sense of vague threat and incipient headache, said, “Telling them the truth is the right thing to do.”

  Aoth grinned. “Is that what the holy warrior thinks? How unexpected.” He fixed his lambent blue eyes on Bareris. “I fully understand we need these people to scout and forage and find clean water. They know the country, and they’ve kept watch on the Dread Ring since the necromancers started building it. But even so, I don’t fear to give them the truth, because I know you can inspire them to stay and fight. You’re eloquent, and you fought alongside their grandfathers and fathers after the rest of Szass Tam’s opponents ran away. You’re a hero to them.”

  Bareris had heard such praise before, and as usual, it felt like mockery. “I’m no hero. I’ve bungled everything that ever truly counted. But I’ll do my best to hold them.” Judging that most if not all of the rebels had gathered, he climbed onto the mound and started to speak.

  As he did, he was tempted to try to hypnotize his audience. But it was possible he wouldn’t snare every mind or that some folk would shake off the enchantment in a day or so, and then, feeling ill-used, the rebels would surely depart. Besides, he found he just couldn’t bring himself to manipulate them as egregiously as he’d once manipulated Aoth, not with the latter actually looking on.