“Well, yes.”
“Your Omnipotence has surely observed that he has now recovered his sight.”
“Of course. I’m not a dunce. But his eyes are still glowing, and I still think it may prove worthwhile to study him.”
“I respectfully suggest that my mistress would disagree.”
“Then it’s too bad she’s in Eltabbar this evening, isn’t it? Otherwise you could run and ask her. Not that I would feel obliged to accede to her notions if they ran counter to my own.”
“No, Your Omnipotence, of course not. It’s only that Captain Fezim is one of Nymia Focar’s ablest officers—”
Lauzoril snorted. “He’s just a soldier. Another such commands the Griffon Legion now, and I imagine he’ll do every bit as well. Better, probably, considering he’s Mulan.”
“You’re correct, Bareris Anskuld is also a fine soldier, but—”
A trace of color tinged Lauzoril’s cheeks. “Goodman Springhill, your prattle wearies me. If you persist, I’m apt to decide you aren’t just tiresome but insolent, and then, you may rest assured, your affiliation with Dmitra Flass won’t shield you from my displeasure.”
Malark noticed his mouth was dry.
He wasn’t afraid to die. But it was entirely possible the archmage had something else in mind. The art of Enchantment lent itself to punishments that crippled and degraded both body and mind but left the victim alive. And despite his prim demeanor, Lauzoril had as sophisticated a sense of cruelty as any other zulkir.
Yet Malark intended to try the wizard’s patience for at least a little longer, even though he himself wasn’t entirely sure of the reason. Maybe he was simply stubborn, or averse to losing an argument.
“I understand, Master,” he said, “but I think I’d be remiss in my responsibilities if I didn’t at least point out that Captain Fezim isn’t the only creature infected with blue fire. We’ve received reports of others, and I assume that if you vivisected them, the bodies would yield the same information.”
“I remember those reports,” Lauzoril said. “The other creatures have become dangerous monstrosities.”
“Still, my agents can trap an assortment of them,” Malark said. “It will just take a bit of doing. It will delay your investigations a little, but that could work to your advantage. It will give you a chance to involve Mistress Lallara.”
“To what end?” Lauzoril asked.
“I shouldn’t even presume to speculate,” Malark said. “After all, you know everything there is to know about the supernatural, while I know virtually nothing. But I wonder—if the blue fire can get inside a person or animal, generally with hideous results, maybe it can jump from one living being to another. Maybe it would even try to invade you when you cut into the creature. If so, you might want the defensive spells of the zulkir of Abjuration to make sure the power didn’t possess you.”
“Ridiculous,” Lauzoril snapped. “I too am a zulkir. I don’t need that shrew or anyone else to protect me. However”—he took a breath—“if a legionnaire is fit for duty, perhaps it would be improvident to sacrifice him when an altered pig or some such would serve just as well. Captain Fezim, you’re dismissed. Go away and take this … jabberer with you.”
“Yes, Your Omnipotence.” Aoth held his head high and maintained a proper military bearing until the goblin closed the crimson door behind him and Malark. Then his squat, broad-shouldered frame slumped so completely that for a moment it looked as if his legs might give way beneath him. “By the Flame,” he sighed. “By the Pure Flame. I didn’t think you were going to convince him.”
“To be honest,” Malark said, “neither did I. I’m still not sure which argument did the trick. Probably the last. For all their might, zulkirs aren’t eager to risk their own skins, particularly when they don’t understand the peril. That’s how they live long enough to become zulkirs, I suppose. Here, take this.” He gave Aoth his spear.
The war mage gripped his shoulder. “I won’t forget this.”
Malark smiled. “I was glad to help.” Aoth had killed a great many men in his time. It felt right to set him free to slaughter more, and to seek an end more befitting such a warrior.
chapter five
29 Mirtul–2 Kythorn, the Year of Blue Fire
Like many orcs, Neske Horthor would have taken offense at the suggestion that she’d ever felt “pity.” But it took only a dash of brains to recognize that the prisoners had it hard, marching on short rations day after day with whips slicing into their backs and fear gnawing at their nerves. It was no wonder that one occasionally dropped dead, succumbing to exhaustion, fever, or pure despair.
Such a child had keeled over that day, whereupon Neske halted the march long enough to dress the corpse. It was wrong of her, she supposed. She should have carried the body on to Xingax. But he’d never know about it unless somebody tattled, and Khazisk wouldn’t. She and the necromancer had worked together long enough to come to an understanding.
She pulled her skewer back from the campfire, inspected the chunks of fragrant, blackened meat impaled on it, and offered it to Khazisk, sitting cross-legged beside her with the sweep of his red robe pooled around him. “Try it. It’s good.”
The wizard’s narrow, supercilious face screwed up as she’d known it would. “Thank you, no.”
She laughed. “You do all sorts of nasty things with rotten bodies. I’ve watched you. But your stomach rolls over at the prospect of fresh meat, just because it happens to come from your own kind. If you had any sense, you’d realize that’s the most nourishing kind of food.”
“You’re saying you eat orc?”
“Every chance I get.” She bit the top piece of juicy meat from the skewer. It was too hot, and seared the roof of her mouth, but she wolfed it down anyway. “You know, it’s a puzzle.”
“What is?”
“Our real enemies, the ones we’re at war with, are in the south. Yet our masters have us sneaking in and out of Thesk, raiding villages and capturing the peasants.”
“You mean paradox, not puzzle.”
She rolled her eyes. He loved to correct her speech. “Whatever it is, it’s stupid.”
“Not really. Xingax will turn our captives into potent weapons of war. The result is a net gain in the strength of our legions.”
“Maybe.” Neske tore another bite of child flesh off the stick. “But when Szass Tam is king, will anyone remember that this chore was important and we did it well? Or will all the rewards go to the warriors who stormed Bezantur and chopped off Nevron and Dmitra Flass’s heads?”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Khazisk said, “our fellow soldiers are welcome to such opportunities. You and I are better off here in the north. If I never see one of the council’s warriors—”
A ram’s-horn bugle bleated. On the western edge of the camp, a sentry was sounding the alarm.
Trained reflex made Neske snatch for the targe that lay beside her and leap to her feet. But though her body knew what to do, her mind lagged a step behind, mired in perplexity. It would have made sense if an attack had come while she and her comrades were across the border in Thesk, or even during the trek through Surthay and Eltabbar. But once the slave takers finished the climb up the Third Escarpment into High Thay, they should have been safe.
“Look up!” someone shouted. Neske did, and made out winged shadows sweeping across the sky.
“Griffon riders,” Khazisk said. He stood up and brandished his staff over his head. The pole was a gleaming white, whittled down from a dragon’s leg bone, or so he claimed. He chanted words that, even though she couldn’t understand them, filled Neske with an instinctual revulsion. A carrion stink filled the air.
But that was all that happened. The magic failed.
Khazisk cursed and began again. Four syllables into the spell, an arrow punched into the center of his forehead. He toppled backward.
Neske decided she needed her bow and quiver, not her scimitar and shield. She pivoted toward the place where she�
�d set the rest of her gear. Then the world seemed to skip somehow, and she was lying on her belly. When she tried to stand, and pain ripped through her back, she understood that an arrow had found her, too.
Griffon riders were trained to hit their targets even when their mounts were swooping through the air, and the first flights of arrows did an admirable job of softening up the enemy on the ground. Then the orcs started shooting back.
Bareris was confident his troops would prevail in a duel of archery. But possibly not before the orcs managed to kill a griffon or two, and their masters with them when the stricken beasts plummeted to earth. Better to prevent that by ending the battle quickly.
“Dive!” he said, projecting his voice so every legionnaire would hear. He nudged the back of Murder’s feathery neck, and the griffon hurtled toward the ground.
An arrow streaked past Bareris’s head. Then Murder slammed down on top of an orc, his momentum snapping its bones, his talons piercing it. The sudden stop jolted Bareris, but his tack was designed to cushion such shocks, and a decade of aerial combat had taught him how to brace himself.
Another orc charged with an axe raised over its head. Murder twisted his neck and snapped at the warrior, biting through boiled-leather armor and tearing its chest apart before it could strike. Bareris looked around but couldn’t find another foe within reach of his sword.
In fact, opponents were in short supply all across the battle-field. Orcs were no match for griffons, and the animals were quickly ripping them apart.
That didn’t mean everything was under control. Some of the prisoners were cowering amid the carnage, but others were scrambling into the darkness.
Bareris kicked Murder’s flanks, and the griffon lashed his wings and sprang into the air. Bareris flew the beast over several fleeing Theskians, then plunged down to block their path. They froze.
“You can’t run away,” he said. He’d never had the opportunity to learn Damaran, the language of Thesk, but bardic magic would make it sound as if he had. “My comrades and I will kill you if you try. Turn around and go back to the campfires.”
The gaunt, haggard folk with their rags and whip scars stared at him. Were they so desperate for freedom that they’d attempt a dash past a griffon and the swordsman astride his back?
A huge wolf padded out of the darkness and stationed itself at Murder’s side. It bared its fangs and growled at the captives.
The two beasts made an uncanny pair. Murder was terrible in his ferocity, but his was the clean savagery of nature’s predators. The wolf, on the other hand, gave off a palpable feel of the uncanny, of corruption and destruction fouler than death, and perhaps it was the sheer horror of its presence that made the Theskians quail, then turn and scurry back the way they’d come.
Bareris kicked Murder into the air to look for other escapees. He and his companions couldn’t be certain they’d collected them all, but they rounded up most of them. Afterward, he set down and dismounted, and the wolf melted back into Tammith.
“So far, so good,” she said.
“Thanks to you,” he said, and it was true. In times past, even a flying company couldn’t foray onto the Plateau of Ruthammar without encountering swift and overwhelming resistance. But Tammith knew how to evade the scrutiny of the watchers overseeing the approaches.
Someone would discover their intrusion soon enough. But if they finished their business quickly and withdrew, they might be all right.
She gave him a smile. “You’re too kind.”
Bareris lifted his hand to stroke her cheek, then caught himself. Something knotted in his chest.
Ever since they’d agreed to treat one another cordially, as comrades, the same thing had happened to him over and over again. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to have her at his side. It warmed him as nothing had in ten years.
Then he would remember that nothing was really the same. He’d lost her and could never have her again. In truth, she’d even lost herself. By her own admission, she was only a husk, a vile parody of the sweet, generous girl he’d loved. And the realization brought a stab of anguish.
Perhaps she noticed the aborted caress, and perhaps it made her uncomfortable. She turned away, toward the huddled captives.
“Looking for your supper?” he asked. Even as he spoke, he felt shame at the spite in his tone. He had no right to be angry with her. Her condition was his fault, not hers.
“No,” she said. “I’m all right for now. I was just thinking. For all these wretches know, they’ve simply passed from the hands of one band of marauders to those of another.”
“Haven’t they?”
“Well, at least we don’t mean to turn them into zombies. It might comfort them to know that.”
He shook his head. “If we tried to make them our willing collaborators, they’d be actors playing a role, and perhaps not convincingly. It’s better if they don’t think anything has changed.”
“I suppose. They’re likely to die anyway, aren’t they, even if they survive in Xingax’s fortress. Because they’ll still be stuck in the center of Szass Tam’s domain. We certainly aren’t going to fly them home.”
“Would you, if you could?”
She sneered, whether at the suggestion or herself, he wasn’t sure. “I doubt it. What are they to me? It’s just … seeing them reminds me of when I was one of the slaves being marched into Xingax’s clutches, and you were the gallant young fool striving to rescue me. Now we’re the drovers flogging the thralls along. It makes you think, is all.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Oh, I suppose that the wrongs that the world inflicts on us all can never be set right. They can only be avenged. Perhaps I will slake my thirst after all.” She strode away.
The stronghold stood among the desolate foothills of the Thaymount. It presented the façade of an imposing keep, with massive gates at ground level and little round windows and arrow loops above. But it had no other walls, or at least none visible from the outside, because its builder had carved it into the face of a cliff.
Supposedly, he’d been a conjuror, and Tammith winced to think how much trouble someone must have had evicting him from this seemingly impregnable redoubt after Szass Tam and the council went to war. But the lich’s servants had managed it, and afterward, Xingax moved in. Now that his existence and endeavors were no longer a secret, he could work more effectively in the center of the realm than in a remote fastness in the Sunrise Mountains.
The conjuror had made efforts to cultivate the approaches to his private retreat, but now the hillsides were going to brush and scrub—pallid, twisted plants altered by the spillover of necromantic energies from within the citadel. Tammith wished the wizard had left the land barren, because she had a nagging sense that something was shadowing her, her comrades, and the captives through the thick and tangled growth. But, her keen senses notwithstanding, she couldn’t tell exactly where or what it was.
Maybe it was just an animal, or one of Xingax’s escaped or discarded experiments, and perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. If it was a sentinel, the impostors had fooled it, or it would have acted already. If it was anything else, it was unlikely to slink too close to the pale stone gates looming dead ahead.
“We have captives,” Bareris called, his face shadowed and his long hair covered by the cowl of his cloak. Tammith tugged the scarf she’d wrapped around the lower portion of her face up another fraction, because it was possible the sentries knew the captain of the Silent Company had deserted.
“What’s the sign?” someone shouted back. Tammith couldn’t see him, but knew he was speaking from a hidden observation port above the gate.
“Mother love,” Bareris answered, and Tammith waited to see if the sign was still valid, or if their luck was so foul that Xingax had changed it. She doubted he had. He claimed to be an aborted demigod, and certainly looked like an aborted something. The password was his sardonic jape at the parent who’d torn him prematurely from her womb, or permitted
someone else to do the deed.
The white stone gates groaned open to reveal what amounted to a barbican, even though it didn’t project out from the body of the citadel. It was a passageway with murder holes in the ceiling, arrow loops in the walls, and a single exit at the far end.
In other words, the passage was a killing box, but only if soldiers had positioned themselves to do the killing. The orc and human warriors inside the torchlit space didn’t look as if they suspected anything amiss. The valves at the end stood open, and the portcullis was up.
The Theskians balked at entering, and Bareris’s men shoved and whipped them onward. An orc, its left profile tattooed with jagged black thunderbolts and its jutting tusks banded with gold, swaggered around inspecting the captives. Tammith wondered if it was looking for someone to rape, like the guard who’d accosted Yuldra and her when they were prisoners.
Whatever was in its mind, it abruptly pivoted and peered at her. “Hey,” it said, “I know you.”
She met its gaze and sought to smother its will with her own. “No, you don’t.”
The orc blinked and stumbled back a step. “No,” it mumbled, “I don’t.” It started to wander off, and she turned away from it. At once it bawled, “This is the vampire that ran off!” She pivoted around to see the creature pointing at her. She hadn’t succeeded in clouding its mind after all. It had only pretended she had.
Well, perhaps the memory of that little victory would warm its spirit in the afterlife. She sprang at it, punched it in the face, and felt its skull shatter. The blow hurled it backward and down. Tammith whirled and cast about, trying to assess the situation.
The orc’s comrades had no doubt heard it yell, but they were slow to react. Bareris’s warriors were not, and cut down Xingax’s guards before the latter could even draw weapons.
The problem was the captives, terrified and confused by the outbreak of hostilities, scurrying to stay clear of leaping blades or bolting back the way they’d come. They clogged the passageway and made it difficult for the invading force to reach the far end.
The Haunted Lands: Book II - Undead Page 14