The Haunted Lands: Book II - Undead

by Richard Lee Byers

  Aoth sighed and felt a little of his anger seep out of him. “You’re right, it was. And fortunately, you didn’t take the whole of the legion with you to High Thay. Maybe, when the rest return from Delhumide, it will turn out there are enough left to lead. But considering the tidings of late, I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Bareris frowned. “It is much worse than I thought it would be. I understood the hazards, but still, I never imagined the campaign would go so badly.”

  “Has it occurred to you that there might be a reason? A reason beyond the obvious, I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Aoth took a breath. “When I was blind, I told you I occasionally glimpsed things invisible to normal sight. Now that I can see properly again, that’s even more true. I can see in the dark, or through a blindfold. When an illusionist casts a glamer, I see it, but I also see through it.”

  “That … sounds useful.”

  “Once in a while, I also see signs. After you tampered with my mind, I saw you dangling a puppet made in my image, and when the guards came to march me to my death—”

  “Someone ordered your death?”

  Aoth waved the interruption away. “I saw knives in their hands. Not long ago, I saw Malark’s face turn into a naked skull.”

  Bareris hesitated. “And you thought, a skull to signify allegiance to Szass Tam, or that Malark’s a deadly menace to our cause? Mightn’t it simply mean that he’s a skilled fighter and assassin? You and I have seen the proof of that, time after time.”

  “Yes. So this new sight of mine didn’t need to conjure a phantasm to tell me.”

  “You’re assuming you understand how it works, and that it works efficiently. You could be mistaken.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why would Malark, of all people, turn traitor ten years in? He stood with us when we defied Szass Tam himself. He kept the lich from taking Bezantur in the first tendays of the war.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always trusted him, and I’d like to go on doing it. I mentioned I was nearly killed. The zulkirs hit on the idea of vivisecting me to learn more about the blue fire. I wouldn’t be here if Malark hadn’t interceded. I feel like a filthy traitor myself just for suspecting him of treachery.”

  “But you saw his face turn into a skull.”

  “That’s only part of it. Short of a zulkir, who’s the one person who, if he turned traitor, could do the most to ruin our campaign? Our spymaster, the grand collector of information and disseminator of orders and intelligence. He could reveal all our plans and the disposition of our forces to Szass Tam. Steer our troops into ambuscades, or into the path of the blue fire. Sow rivalry and mistrust among our officers. Kossuth knows, they’re all jealous of their positions as it is.”

  Bareris fingered his chin. “I’m still not convinced, but we did run into an interesting situation on the flight home.”

  “What?”

  “Some of Dimon’s troops expected to march over clear terrain, but instead found their way blocked by a new chasm and an abomination that climbed out of it. They assumed that the blue fire had passed by recently. But the griffon riders had spent the day flying high enough to see a long way, and we hadn’t spotted any blue flame.”

  “So it’s possible Malark deliberately guided Dimon’s soldiers into difficulty.”

  “I suppose. But why are you telling me this? Take your suspicions to the zulkirs.”

  Aoth scowled. “I can’t. I mean, I won’t accuse a friend unless I’m certain. I especially don’t want to do it when it’s my sight that put my thoughts running in this direction.”

  “I understand. You barely escaped being vivisected. If they learned that you’ve acquired extraordinary abilities, they might insist on slicing you up after all.”

  “Yes. And if that weren’t bad enough, I also have to recognize that Dmitra Flass values Malark, trusts him as much as any zulkir ever trusts anyone. She has reason. He saved her life at the Keep of Sorrows.”

  “So you can’t denounce Malark, at least not yet, but you can’t forget what you’ve seen, either. You’ll need proof, and you must be telling me because you want my help. Why? I mean, why me?”

  It was a good question. Aoth supposed it was because even though Bareris had betrayed him once, in the decade leading up to that moment of treachery, he’d been as faithful a comrade as anyone could want. No matter how grim and morose he became, how utterly indifferent to his own well-being, he’d always given his utmost when Aoth needed him.

  But Aoth didn’t want to acknowledge that out loud. “I’m asking you because you owe me,” he said. And that was true as well.

  “I do,” Bareris said, “and of course I’ll help you, even to spy on another friend. But I hope you turn out to be wrong.”

  “So do I.” Aoth hesitated and tried to rein in his curiosity, but didn’t quite manage it. “You’re … different. This Tammith. Even changed, she’s what you need?”

  Bareris smiled a smile that conveyed happiness and rue in equal measure. “In life, she was a river. Undeath has dried her to a trickle. But after ten years in the desert, a man will weep with gratitude at any taste of water.”

  Pyras Autorian, tharchion of the Thaymount, had a meadow outside his castle walls. Working under Szass Tam’s supervision, twenty necromancers drew a broad and intricate pattern in yellow powder on the flat, grassy field, then set the stuff on fire to burn the design into the ground.

  Long-necked and weak-chinned, Pyras watched the process from a chair his slaves had fetched. An awning protected his pasty skin from the feeble sunlight leaking through the cloud cover. He plainly wanted to ask what was going on, but couldn’t quite muster the nerve.

  His restlessness amused Szass Tam, but that wasn’t the reason he opted not to explain. Though timid and dull-witted, Pyras had served him to the best of his ability for a long while. It would be shabby to repay him with an explanation that would only make him more uncomfortable.

  The necromancers positioned and consecrated the altar stones inside the pattern with meticulous care. By the time they finished, the sun had set.

  Szass Tam turned to Pyras. “Now,” he said, “we need the slaves.”

  He focused his will, and after a moment, dread warriors marched a score of naked slaves out of the castle gate and over the drawbridge. The zombies’ amber eyes shone in the gloom.

  When the thralls beheld the pentacle and altar stones, and realized what lay in store, some tried to run. Dread warriors clubbed them senseless and dragged them onward.

  Pyras cleared his throat. “You know, Master, slaves are valuable.”

  Szass Tam wished he could offer a reassuring smile, but he was still lacking a face capable of such nuances. “I promise that in days to come, you won’t regret the loss. Now I must ask you to excuse me. It’s time for me to take a more active role.”

  He rose and walked to the center of the mystic figure, while dread warriors shackled weeping slaves on top of stones, and the necromancers took up their ritual daggers. When the zombies finished their task, they cleared out. The wizards looked to Szass Tam like a choir awaiting a downbeat from its conductor.

  He called a staff of frigid petrified shadow into his bony hands, raised it high, and spoke the initial words of the lengthy incantation. Chanting in unison, the lesser Red Wizards supplied the counterpoint and made the first cuts.

  The slaves screamed louder. Szass Tam amplified his voice to keep it audible above the din. His followers needed to synchronize their declarations with him. If the timing was off, the ritual could escape his control, with fatal consequences.

  In fact, that could happen anyway. His powers were diminished, wizardry itself had become slippery and undependable, and he was undertaking something he’d never attempted before.

  If even a zulkir felt a hint of apprehension, he could only imagine how nervous the lesser wizards must be. Since the ritual had nothing to do with necromancy, they must truly feel they were treading on alien, treach
erous ground. Yet no one could have read it in their demeanors, and he was proud of their discipline.

  Gradually, shadow flowed, and a sickly green shimmer danced in the air. Disembodied voices whispered and sniggered, and a vile metallic taste filled Szass Tam’s mouth. Invisible but perceptible to the wise, a metaphysical structure took form, a little at a time, like a stone hall constructed without mortar. Szass Tam could feel that the slightest misstep would bring it crashing down. But it didn’t fall—the elements were in perfect balance.

  Perceiving what he perceived, his assistants smiled. Then triumph turned to puzzlement when the slaves expired, their killers recited the last lines they’d been schooled to say, and nothing happened. The power they’d raised was like a bow, bent but not released.

  “Don’t worry,” Szass Tam said. “We simply haven’t finished. Unlock the fetters and push the corpses off the altars.”

  The Red Wizards did as instructed, and when they were done, he concentrated fiercely, focusing every iota of his willpower. “Now, shackle yourselves to the stones and lie quietly. I’ll come around to lock down the hand you can’t secure for yourselves.”

  He’d long ago laid enchantments of obedience on these particular followers. Yet the disorder arising from Mystra’s death could conceivably break those bonds, and if even one of the necromancers tried to fight or flee, his exertions would spoil the ritual.

  Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Some of the mages made choking sounds or flailed, others shuddered as if in the throes of a seizure as they tried to resist. But in the end, they all shackled themselves to the gory stones. Szass Tam completed the task of restraining them, then drew an athame into his hand and commenced butchering them.

  By the time he finished, he had blood all over the front of his robe. He turned to Pyras, who looked on with goggling eyes.

  “Come into the circle,” Szass Tam said.

  Pyras stood and advanced, trembling and stumbling. He too was mind-bound, and had no choice.

  Szass Tam met him halfway, took his arm, and conducted him to the center of the circle. “We won’t bother with fetters,”

  he said, because Pyras was no Red Wizard, just a weak-willed wretch who had no hope of squirming free of his master’s psychic grip.

  “Please,” Pyras whispered, tears sliding from his eyes, “I’m loyal. I always have been.”

  “I know,” Szass Tam said. “I’m grateful for your fidelity, and I apologize. If it’s any consolation, your sacrifice will serve the best of causes, and I’ll make it go as quickly as I can.” He slit open Pyras’s gold-buttoned velvet doublet and silk shirt.

  Szass Tam sensed it when the tharchion’s heart stopped beating, and felt the man’s anguished spirit fleeing his ruined body. The magic he’d worked so assiduously to create finally discharged an instant later.

  A sudden sense of overwhelming wrongness and malice impressed itself on his mystical awareness and bashed his mind into momentary confusion.

  Then the moon and stars disappeared, and Pyras’s castle, too. Darkness sealed the pentacle away from the rest of the world like a black fist closing around it.

  And then Bane appeared. His form was murky, but Szass Tam could make out dark armor, the infamous jeweled gauntlet, and the glint of eyes.

  On first inspection, the Lord of Darkness appeared no more terrible than some of the spectres Szass Tam had commanded in his time. Yet an aura of vast power and cruel intelligence emanated from him, and the lich felt a sudden urge to abase himself.

  Annoyed, he quashed the impulse. Bane is simply a spirit, he told himself. I’ve trafficked with hundreds and this is just one more.

  “How dare you summon me?” said the god. His bass voice was soft and mellifluous, but some hidden undertone pained the ears.

  “I invited you,” Szass Tam replied, “by sacrificing twenty men and women in the prime of their lives, twenty accomplished necromancers I can ill spare, and one of Thay’s wealthiest and most powerful nobles.”

  Bane sneered, although how Szass Tam knew that, he couldn’t say, for he couldn’t make out a twist of lip in the smudge of shadow that was the deity’s face. “Say, rather, twenty slaves, twenty charlatans whose magic had largely forsaken them, and a half-witted, cowardly toady.”

  “That is another way of looking at it, but my perspective is as valid as yours. I tendered the gift at a moment when I had every reason to fear the magic would wriggle out of my grip and destroy me. I hoped that even a god would appreciate such a compliment.”

  “I might,” said Bane, “if it came from one of my worshipers, but that you have never been.”

  “Yet I’ve always supported the church of the Black Hand.”

  “But no more than you’ve supported the churches of Kossuth, Mask, Umberlee, and even Cyric. You played each against the other, making sure that none ever achieved preeminence in Thay, and thus, that none will ever undermine the rule of the Red Wizards.”

  “I concede the point. That is how it used to be. But now Thay is a different place, and I have more urgent concerns.”

  “As do I. Far more urgent than chatting with an impudent magus with no claim on my consideration. With Mystra slain, the higher worlds are in turmoil. My place is there. Open the door to the Barrens.”

  “As soon as we finish our talk.”

  Bane didn’t lift his fist in its shell of gems and dark metal, nor did he grow any bigger than Szass Tam himself. Yet suddenly the Black Hand gave off a sense of profound and immediate menace, even as, in some indefinable but unmistakable fashion, he loomed taller than a giant. “Do you imagine,” he asked, “that your puny summoning can hold me here?”

  “For a while.”

  “Then die a true death,” said Bane. “Die and be nothing.”

  Darkness seethed around Szass Tam and took the form of shadowy hands with long claws. Some gripped him, seeking to immobilize him, some pummeled him, and the rest hooked their talons in his body and ripped strips of flesh away.

  The pain was excruciating. He forced himself to focus past it and speak the words of command to activate the talismans of protection concealed around his person.

  The grip of the dark hands grew feeble. He wrenched himself away from them, and they faded into nothingness.

  His now-tattered robe flapping around him, Szass Tam brandished his staff. Tendrils of gleaming ice coiled around Bane like vines climbing a tree. Spikes sprouted from them to push against the shadowstuff that was his body.

  For a moment, the god seemed surprised, perhaps even slightly disconcerted, as a grown man might be if a child slapped him. Then he jerked the hand with the gauntlet over his head, shattering his bonds.

  “You see how it is,” Szass Tam said. “Yes, you can break free, and quite possibly destroy me in the process. But you’ll have to work at it, and I might even bloody your nose before you finish. It will be less trouble and take less of your time to grant me the parley I seek.”

  The Black Lord snorted. “What is it you want, dead man?”

  “Help winning my war. My rivals currently hold the upper hand. I have a new aide who’s doing a brilliant job of keeping them from making the most of their opportunities, but he can’t turn the conflict around by himself.”

  “I won’t lend you an army of devils. I wouldn’t even give them to the Zhentarim, or any of the other folk who have already rendered me their service. With the old order shattered, I’ll have my own wars to win.”

  “I understand. That’s not what I’m asking for.”

  “What, then?”

  “First, teach me everything you can about the nature of magic as it exists today.”

  “I’m not the god of wizardry, and the nature of the arcane has yet to stabilize. It continues to alter even as we speak.”

  “But you are a god, and I’m sure you understand things I don’t. I’ll take whatever you can give me.”

  “What else do you want?”

  “I’ve emptied the tombs and graveyards of the north. I�
��ve slaughtered many of its slaves and peasants and even some of my own living soldiers. Which is to say, I’m running short of raw material on which my necromancers can practice their art.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Isn’t it? Yet it needn’t be a disaster. This ancient land is still full of dead bodies. It’s just that they’ve decayed so utterly as to be indistinguishable from the soil in which they lie. But a highly skilled necromancer could still call something forth—if he were capable of recognizing the exact patch of ground containing the remains.”

  “And so you want me to give you that ability as well.”

  “Yes, and I fear there’s more.”

  Bane laughed. Though musical, the sound was even more hurtful than his speech, and Szass Tam stiffened. “You don’t lack for gall, necromancer.”

  “So people often told me. When I was climbing up the hierarchy of my order, I mean. Once you become a zulkir, people stop critiquing your character to your face. Anyway, you’re probably aware that I share a psychic bond with many of the sorcerers under my command, and that I have a limited ability to be in multiple places simultaneously.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need my powers augmented, so I can direct my wizards more efficiently. Otherwise, I won’t be able to turn a fresh supply of corpse dust into warriors fast enough to do me any good.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just one thing, the obvious. Currently the Church of Bane supports my fellow zulkirs. It would help if you instructed your priests to back me instead.”

  “Dead man, just for amusement’s sake, let’s imagine I might be willing to grant you all these extravagant favors. What could you possibly offer of comparable worth?”

  “Thay. When I’m its sole sovereign, you’ll be the only god worshiped within its borders.”

  “I’ve explained. With the higher worlds entering an era of strife and chaos, Faerûn, let alone this little piece of it, is of little concern to me.”

  Szass Tam stared at the sheen of eyes in Bane’s murky face. “I don’t believe you. We inhabitants of the physical plane may seem like grubs and ants to the gods, but you need us. Our worship gives you strength.”