“I know,” said Aoth. “Bareris and I will talk to him.” He found a sycamore growing near the road, chopped off a leafy branch to signal he wanted a parley, and he and the bard walked their griffons toward the city’s northern gate. Currently resembling an orc with a longbow, Mirror oozed into visible existence to stride along beside them.
As they came near enough to the gate for Aoth to converse without shouting at the top of his lungs, several figures mounted the crenellated wall-walk at the top of it. The flickering light in the grip of a torchbearer was inadequate to reveal them clearly, but Aoth’s fire-infected eyes had no difficulty making them out.
One was Drash Rurith, autharch of the city. Aoth had met him a time or two. Gaunt and wizened, he hobbled with a cane, and looked so frail that one half expected the weight of the sword on his hip to tip him over. But there was nothing feeble or senile in the traplike set of his mouth.
Beside him stood a younger man. Judging from his dark gauntlet and the black pearls and emeralds adorning his vestments, he must be the high priest of Bane’s temple in Mophur. Where Drash looked unhappy but resolute, like a person determined to perform some unpleasant task and be done with it, the cleric smirked and had an air of eagerness around him.
The other eight men were guards, some clad in the livery of the city, the rest sporting the fist-and-green-fire emblem of the Black Hand’s church.
“Milord autharch,” said Aoth, “it’s a relief to see you. Your servants apparently doubt my identity, or that we all owe our fealty to the same masters. I come to you with a number of the council’s soldiers at my back. We need shelter and food.”
“I regret,” said Drash, “that Mophur can’t assist you. The city is already full to overflowing with country folk who fled here when the war, the earthquakes, or blue fire destroyed their homes. I need all my resources to tend to their needs.”
“I understand your situation,” said Aoth. “But you can at least spare us water from your wells, and a length of street on which to unroll our bedding.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“If I must, I demand it in the zulkirs’ names.”
The high priest spat. “There is only one true zulkir, and his name is Szass Tam.”
Aoth stared at Drash. “Does this priest speak for you? Have you switched sides?”
“I only say,” the old man replied, “that, to my sorrow, it isn’t practical for Mophur to accommodate you at this time.”
“You’d better be sure of what you’re doing.”
“We are,” said the priest. “Do you think we don’t know that Szass Tam smashed the army of the south? We do! The Lord of Darkness revealed the truth to his servants, and now we understand that the lich’s triumph is inevitable, and likewise in accordance with the will of Bane. Those who act to hasten that victory will thrive, those who seek to thwart it will perish, and when Szass Tam claims his regency, the earth will stop trembling and the blue fires will burn out.”
“Do you truly find this mad rant convincing?” asked Aoth, still speaking to Drash. “You shouldn’t. I actually saw Bane appear to the council and give them his blessing. Kossuth and the other gods of Thay stand with the south as well. I’ll admit, we lost a battle beneath the cliffs, but we’ve lost them before. It doesn’t mean we’ve lost the war.”
“I regret,” said Drash, “that Mophur cannot help you at this time. I wish you good fortune on the road.”
Speaking softly enough that the men above the gate wouldn’t hear him, Aoth said, “Can you charm the bastard into letting us in?”
“No,” Bareris said. “I pretty much exhausted my magic during the battle. Even if I hadn’t, I doubt I could beguile the autharch with the priest standing right there to counter any enchantment I cast.”
“I was afraid of that. Curse it, we need what’s inside those walls, but I don’t know how to get it. I don’t have any magic left, either. Knights are pretty much useless in situations like this, especially with their horses dropping dead underneath them. The griffons have a little strength left, enough to fly over the walls. But even if they weren’t exhausted, we don’t have enough riders with us to take a city. We don’t even have any arrows.”
“Don’t worry about taking the city. Let’s take the gate, right now, the three of us.”
“Five,” Brightwing said.
“We just rode up out of the dark,” Bareris said. “Most of the town guards have barely gotten themselves out of bed. They’re making their way to the battlements to drive us off if need be, but they aren’t there yet. Let’s strike before they’re ready.”
Mirror frowned around his jutting orc tusks. “We stand before this gate under sign of truce.”
“The autharch has betrayed his oaths to the council. He isn’t an honorable man.”
“But we are.”
No, thought Aoth, we’re Thayan soldiers, not followers of some ancient and asinine code of chivalry. Although in fact, the ghost’s objections gave him an irrational twinge of shame. “Our comrades are going to die if we don’t get inside these walls. That will weigh heavier on my conscience than sinning against the supposed meaning of this stick in my hand. But I won’t ask you to help if you feel otherwise.”
Mirror changed from an orc into a murky, twisted semblance of Aoth. “I’ll stand with my brothers and seek to atone afterward.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Aoth. He dropped the sycamore branch, and the weary griffons beat their wings and heaved themselves into the air. Sword in hand, Mirror followed.
Someone atop the gate cried out in alarm. Quarrels flew, and Brightwing grunted and stiffened, the sweep of her wings faltering. Because of their empathic link, Aoth felt the stab of pain in her foreleg. “I’m all right!” she snarled.
They plunged down on top of the battlements. She bit, and her beak tore into a guard’s torso. Aoth twisted in the saddle and thrust his spear into one of the warriors pledged to Bane. From the sound of it, Bareris, Winddancer, and Mirror had reached the walkway and were doing their own killing, but Aoth was too busy to look around.
Someone roared a battle cry and charged him. It was Drash Rurith, cane discarded and sword in hand. The blade glowed a sickly green, and perhaps the enchantments sealed inside it were feeding the old man strength and agility, for he moved like a hunting cat.
Occupied with another foe, Brightwing couldn’t pivot to face Drash. Aoth was on his own. Drash feinted a head cut, slashed at his opponent’s chest, and Aoth parried with the shaft of his spear. The impact jolted through his fingers. He struck back with a thrust to the belly, but Drash twisted out of the way, then rushed in again. The head of the spear was behind the autharch now, and he was plainly confident that he could drive his sword into Aoth before the griffon rider could pull his long weapon all the way back for another jab.
But Aoth simply whirled the spear in a horizontal arc as if it were a club, and the shaft took Drash in the side. Teeth gritted, exerting every iota of his strength, Aoth kept shoving, threw the autharch off balance, and pushed him staggering through a crenel and off the walk.
A city guard attacked immediately thereafter. Aoth speared him in the guts, and then had a moment to look around.
What he saw was less than encouraging. His comrades were holding their own for the moment, but other guards were running along the battlements toward the gate, with even more scurrying on the ground just inside it, about to climb the stairs on either side.
“Let’s kill the ones down below!” Brightwing snarled.
“I suppose somebody has to,” Aoth replied, and she leaped down into the mass of soldiers, smashing two or three to the ground beneath her.
She ripped with beak and talon, and he thrust with his spear. For a few heartbeats, it was all right, but then a blade sliced the same foreleg the crossbow bolt had pierced, and afterward Brightwing couldn’t use it to claw or even support her weight.
Sword strokes hit Aoth as well, and though his mail kept them from doing more than bruising the
flesh beneath, that luck couldn’t hold indefinitely. He heard himself gasping, felt the burning in his heaving chest and the exhaustion weighting his limbs, looked at the feral faces and upraised weapons hemming him in all around, and decided that his time had come. After all the perils they’d survived, he and Brightwing were about to die trying to take a stupid gate in a drab little market town that was supposed to be on their side.
Then scraps of darkness fluttered down from above. They attached themselves to several of Aoth’s foes, and he realized they were enormous bats biting and clawing at human prey. Startled by the unexpected assault, the warriors of Mophur broke off their furious assault to flail and fumble at the creatures sucking their blood.
The guards so afflicted either collapsed or turned tail. The bats abandoned them to whirl together and become a pale, raven-haired woman in black mail. Mirror floated down from the top of the gate to stand beside her.
The remaining guards decided they no longer liked the odds. They ran, too.
Tammith nodded to indicate the gates. “Let’s get these open.”
Aoth climbed out of the saddle. Together, they threw their weight against the enormous bar, and it groaned and slid in its brackets. They swung the leaves open while Brightwing and Mirror guarded their backs.
Aoth peered up at the platform atop the gate. It looked as if the fight had ended there as well, and although he couldn’t see the bard from this angle, Bareris must have won it. Otherwise, the surviving guards would be taking steps to kill their foes on the ground and close the gate once more.
“Sound your horn!” Aoth shouted, or at least that was what he intended. The cry emerged as more of a wheeze.
But Bareris evidently heard, for he gave the signal. Griffons soared into the air and winged their way toward the city. Hoofbeats drummed as knights spurred their steeds in the same direction.
His sword gory from point to guard, Bareris jumped from Winddancer to the ground, and then his eyes opened wide. It was only at that moment that he realized Tammith had arrived.
He scrambled out of the saddle and embraced her. “I kept waiting for you to appear. If you hadn’t found me by morning, I was going to turn back to search for you.”
As Aoth watched them clinging to one another, he felt wistful. He’d never in his life known anything like the fierce obsessive adoration Bareris felt for Tammith, and she for him. The closest he’d ever come had been with Chathi. But she was long dead, and he supposed that meant that on a certain fundamental level he would always be alone.
On the other hand, he didn’t have to worry that any of his casual lovers or whores would ever rip his throat out in the throes of passion, so perhaps things balanced out.
In any case, he had more immediate problems to ponder. “I recommend we clear the gate,” he said. “Otherwise, the knights are liable to ride us down.”
“Right,” said Bareris. Everyone moved aside.
“I did my best to find you,” Tammith said, “but what’s left of the army has broken into countless tiny pieces fleeing south. It took time to find the right piece, especially since I had to lay up by day.”
“Are other griffon riders still alive?” asked Aoth.
“I saw some.”
“Thanks be to the Lord of Flames for that. And thank you, too, for coming to help me when you did.”
“I needed to help,” the vampire said, “ifwe were going to get the gates open. But … I wanted to. I cared about what might happen.” She sounded like a person who’d just discovered something surprising about herself, although Aoth didn’t understand what it was.
The rest of his band of refugees arrived before he could ask. Griffon riders glided down the sky to perch on rooftops, and the horsemen trotted through the gate. The leader of the knights inspected the litter of corpses on the ground, shook his head, and said, “What now?”
“We take what we need,” said Aoth, “as fast as we can. Food, water, arrows, and fresh horses. Healing and charms of strength and stamina from any priest or wizard we can find. Then we ride on.”
“If we could sleep for just a little while—”
“We can’t, because if Szass Tam’s legions show up outside the walls, we can’t hold Mophur by ourselves, and we can’t count on the townsfolk to help us. So we have no choice but to keep moving. Get used to it. We’re likely to find people changing allegiance all the way south, or at least in every place that has a shrine to Bane.”
Bat wings beating, Tsagoth flew over the battlements of Hurkh, and his command—vampires, wraiths, and other undead capable of flight—hurtled after him. No one was stupid enough to shoot at them.
That was as he expected. The town was flying crimson banners adorned with black skulls. The flags glowed with magical phosphorescence to make them stand out against the night sky. The no-doubt hastily sewn cloths didn’t precisely duplicate any of Szass Tam’s personal emblems, but their message was plain enough.
Tsagoth swooped down into Hurkh’s central square and flowed into bipedal form. Some of the vampires did the same, while others melted into wolves. The phantoms hovered, and elsewhere in the city, dogs began to howl.
“Whoever governs this place,” Tsagoth shouted at the gates of the town’s central keep, “reveal yourself!”
No one inside the fortress responded, although he could sense wretched little humans cowering inside. Rather, the door of a building on the opposite side of the plaza opened.
Constructed of blackened stone, the structure was a temple of Bane, a mass of spires adorned with spikes, jags, and windows narrow as arrow loops. Judging from the black and green gems adorning her dark vestments, the Mulan lady who emerged first looked to be the high priestess. She smiled and strode with a confident air, but the four lesser priests creeping in her wake were pale, wide-eyed, and stank of sweat and fear.
“Good evening,” she said. “My name is Unara Anrakh.” Up close, she smelled of the myrrh she probably burned during her devotions.
“Are you in charge?” Tsagoth asked.
“For the moment,” Unara replied. “Until His Omnipotence Szass Tam appoints a new autharch. The previous one was deaf to the voice of Bane.”
Tsagoth grinned. “So you murdered him.”
“Should I have allowed him to keep his position and continue giving his fealty to the council? I knew that if I did, you and your comrades would lay siege to Hurkh and put us all to the sword.”
Perhaps she believed Hurkh was of greater strategic importance than it actually was. Still, she had a point. “We might have gotten around to it eventually.”
“But now there’s no need. We pledge our loyalty to Szass Tam and have already begun to serve him. Come visit the Black Hand’s altar. See the heads heaped before it. Each belonged to a southern legionnaire. The autharch gave them refuge inside the city walls, and after we killed him, my followers and I disposed of them as well.”
“I’m sure it’s an impressive display,” he said, not caring whether or not she detected his sarcasm. “But I doubt you managed to kill every southern soldier who fled in this direction.”
Unara blinked. “That’s true. We needed to fly the skull banners so you wouldn’t attack us by mistake. But once we started, the southerners stopped coming near the walls.”
“Then my company and I need to press on without delay. With luck, we might overtake more southerners before the end of the night. But first we want to feed. I need forty people, one for each of my followers.”
The priestess hesitated. “I … learned about spectres and similar entities during my training. Do they require nourishment?”
“No. But they have a constant, insatiable drive to hurt and kill, and it’s easier to control them if I allow them to gratify it periodically.”
“Oh. I see. But as I explained, we’ve pledged ourselves to Szass Tam, and I promised everyone that it would make us safe.”
“Most of you will be, unless you keep trying my patience. Have your guards fetch the forty folk you consider
most expendable. Otherwise, I’ll simply turn these hounds of mine loose to feed on whatever rabbits they can catch.”
As he’d expected, Unara brought slaves and emptied out the town jail to fulfill his requirements. Still, as ghosts plunged their shadowy hands into the flesh of the living, withering their victims, and the occasional vampire, lost to blood lust, chewed a throat to shreds, she periodically winced. Perhaps it had occurred to her that Szass Tam’s troops would pass this way again, and eventually all the thralls and captured felons would be gone.
Tsagoth rather enjoyed her discomfiture. Prompted by her god, or so she claimed, she chose to embrace the rule of a lich and the necromancers and undead who carried out his will. Well, here was a first taste of what that would entail.
It wasn’t the first time Aoth had regretted attaining high rank. With the exception of Mirror, every other member of the ragtag band he’d shepherded south was almost certainly sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion. He, on the other hand, was standing at attention and saluting.
“By the Great Flame,” said Nymia Focar, seated behind a silvery soth-wood desk so highly polished that it gleamed even in the wan daylight shining through the window, “was the journey as hard as your appearance suggests?”
“I’m just tired and dirty. We didn’t have to fight south of Mophur. But we had to keep running. I kept hoping we’d reach a place where we could rest for a while and be safe, but we never found it. Some towns and fortresses have gone over to Szass Tam. Some no longer exist, or are in such bad shape that the northerners could overrun them in a heartbeat. Earthquakes knocked the walls down, or they endured some other calamity. Even Tyraturos was no good for us. Dimon naturally favored the church of Bane while he was alive, and the clerics are taking full advantage of the authority he gave them.” He gave his head a shake. “Am I rambling? If I am, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re making sense.” She gestured to a table laden with bottles of wine and a platter of dark brown bread, apples, pears, and white and yellow cheeses. “Take whatever you want, sit down before you fall down, and then give me a full report while you eat.”
The Haunted Lands: Book II - Undead Page 26