Touched by the Gods

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

“A deserter?”

  “That's not important – that messenger, Captain, what did he tell you?”

  The captain snorted. “We have new orders. We're to let the wizard and his troops go right on past. They've set up some sort of trap for them in Seidabar.”

  Bagar blinked. “What kind of trap?”

  “They haven't told us that. It's a secret, it seems.”

  “Who sent the orders? Lord Kadan?”

  “Lord Kadan's been arrested for treason,” the captain told him. “These orders came from the President of the Imperial Council.”

  Bagar's jaw dropped. Kadan, a traitor?

  But that would explain why the reinforcements had never come, wouldn't it? If Uncle Granzer had given the orders... Bagar had great faith in his uncle, but he couldn't imagine what sort of trap could be waiting in Seidabar if the Imperial Army was out here on the plain.

  “You're sure they're genuine?” Bagar asked.

  “You've got your nerve, don't you?” the captain asked angrily in reply. “You admit you're a deserter, but you're questioning my authority?”

  “Not yours, Captain,” Bagar said quickly. “But the enemy's a wizard – are you sure that the orders came from Seidabar, and not from the Olnamians?”

  The captain stared at him. “Did they try anything like that out east?” he asked.

  Bagar hesitated.

  If he told the truth, then the captain would go on back to camp, maybe have him arrested and chained. If he lied, he might be ruining some scheme his uncle had devised.

  “I heard rumors,” he said.

  The captain stared at him thoughtfully, chewing on his lower lip. Then he turned and stared at the red glow on the highway, already even with the camp's southeastern corner.

  “The orders came through the magicians,” he said at last. “The old magicians. If the wizard can interfere with them, then he can defy the gods themselves, can't he?”

  “Or at least he can fool some priests,” Bagar said. “It's hardly the same thing. I've tricked a priest or two in my day.”

  “Confound it,” the captain said. He looked north, to where his men had reached the camp and formed up in a line, waiting for further orders. Then he shook his head.

  “I have my orders,” he said. Then he turned back to Bagar and said, “but if you want to fight them, I won't stop you, and if any of my men happen to desert and join you... well, desertion's to be expected, when the world's gone mad and the sun's gone dark.”

  Bagar nodded understanding, and ran past the captain, his sword in his hand, into the camp.

  “Listen!” he bellowed. “I'm Prince Bagar, the Empress' grandson! I'm not the champion, but if you want a chance to fight the nightwalkers, I'm ready to lead you into battle! Your captain says he won't stop anyone who wants to fight – who's with me?”

  Men turned, startled, to look at him, but no one answered.

  “The priests say the Council has a trap set, and doesn't want us to fight,” Bagar shouted, “but we came here to fight, didn't we? Are we going to let them take away our only chance? You left your homes and families, spent the winter freezing your asses in Agabdal – now you're going to go home without ever drawing your swords? Come on, and show them what you can do! Tell your women the truth when you say that you fought the nightwalkers!”

  The soldiers looked at one another.

  “Who's with me?” Bagar called.

  Half a dozen hands went up.

  “Come on, then,” Bagar said. “The rest of you, spread the word – if anyone wants to fight the nightwalkers, here's your chance!”

  Then he turned and charged southward, toward the highway, his sword held high and half a dozen soldiers at his back.

  Ten minutes later the handful of warriors crashed shouting into the line of nightwalkers that marched along the highway. The undead were walking swiftly, focused on their goal of reaching Seidabar, and paid no attention as the soldiers began laying about themselves with their swords.

  “Go for the necks!” Bagar shouted. “The only way they stay dead is if you cut off their heads!”

  His men roared wordlessly in reply, and nightwalkers began to fall.

  They didn't resist; Bagar realized, as he lopped the head off his third, that the nightwalkers weren't fighting back.

  They had struck at the line of nightwalkers at the nearest point, an open stretch of road; the wizard was already well past, half a mile to the west. Now, however, the motion of that red glow paused.

  Rebiri Nazakri had heard the shouting, and turned to see what was happening. He was too distant to make out the details in the dark, but he could see violent motion, could see the neat rows of campfires to the north, and could guess what was taking place.

  “Kill them,” he said. “Kill them quickly, then move on. To Seidabar!”

  The order passed along the line wordlessly, almost instantly, by some means known only to the nightwalkers, and abruptly the foes who had been walking quietly to slaughter a moment before raised their weapons and began to fight.

  Bagar and his men were caught off-guard by the sudden change; two of them went down before they knew what hit them. The rest gathered into a tight knot, their backs to one another, and hacked and slashed desperately.

  One tried to run; a nightwalker pursued him and split his skull.

  The rest fought bravely, but they were outnumbered, thousands of nightwalkers against four of them.

  And then three.

  And finally, none.

  And the nightwalkers turned westward and marched on, as if nothing had happened to disturb their relentless progress.

  In the camp, guards were posted to make sure that no other “deserters“ interfered with the Council's plans; soldiers with drawn swords lined the southern perimeter, keeping their comrades away from the marching nightwalkers.

  Ten miles to the west Bishau looked up at Lord Shoule and said, “Your orders have been obeyed, my lord.”

  Shoule smiled and sheathed his dagger. “Good,” he said. Then he stepped out of the magician's room and saluted the waiting Prince Graubris.

  “The worst of news, your Majesty,” he said. “The Imperial Army has been destroyed by the Olnamian's magic; we must flee at once!”

  “Destroyed?” Graubris asked, horrified.

  “So the magicians say; perhaps they misjudge the situation. Still, I think there can be no more question – we must flee to Rishna Gabidéll at once!”

  “As you say, Lord Shoule,” Graubris agreed, as they hurried down the torchlit stone passage. “As you say.”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  The brown disc of the sun crawled up the vault of heaven, vanishing betimes behind gathering clouds, and then sank westward, where it finally dropped beneath the horizon, and the first day of Ba'el's Triad was past.

  Malledd hewed at neck after neck, removed head after head, staggering unheeding over the corpses he left lying in the dust, and still the horde stretched on before him, the reduction in its numbers barely perceptible.

  His arms ached as they had never ached before; though the unnaturally-extended night had turned unseasonably cool and would presumably be much colder before it ended, sweat plastered his hair to his scalp and soaked his beard into strings. His legs were so weary that his feet grew numb, and he knew his toes were being jammed and stubbed constantly; when full sensation returned, if it ever did, he knew he would be in agony, a mass of bruises and sprains from the knees down.

  His boots, so recently new, disintegrated as he trudged onward. When he reached down to peel away the ruined soles his hand came away wet, and he knew he was bleeding – the nails from the heels had been driven up into his feet and he hadn't even felt it.

  Not long after that something snapped under the strain when he needed two two-handed blows to hack through an armored collar and lop off yet another head, and he knew he had broken his left thumb.

  He hoped that Lord Kadan, or someone, was rallying the defenders of Seidabar; he would be in no shap
e to undertake such a task himself.

  He desperately wanted to stop, to collapse, to rest, but still he slogged on.

  The air grew colder and clammier around him. The sun seemed even dimmer when it rose again; Malledd could barely see it through the gathering mists, a shadow against the night sky. By the time it was low in the west Malledd could see the red glow of the wizard's staff far ahead of him, a spark in the distance. He had cut his way through hundreds of nightwalkers now, perhaps thousands, strewing bodies for much more than a hundred miles.

  Somewhere off to his right he saw hundreds of lights – campfires and torches, from the look of them, evenly spaced over a vast area. They seemed to stretch on to the north forever, beginning no more than a mile from the highway. He was too tired to think clearly, but he thought at least those meant that he was not the last living human beneath the Hundred Moons – someone was tending those flames.

  Perhaps they were refugees, camped there.

  Perhaps that was the Imperial Army, come at last – but then why weren't they fighting beside him? Why was the line of nightwalkers ahead of him still so long?

  There were corpses along the roadside, he realized, wearing Imperial uniforms – in the darkness the red and gold appeared black and grey, but the tunics and helmets were still unmistakable. They still had their heads, and their blood had flowed and pooled beneath them – they had been human, not nightwalkers. Some of the army had fought, anyway – but only a handful, while the rest must still be gathered around those fires.

  Why?

  It didn't matter; he was too tired to think about it. He trudged onward, overtaking and beheading the undead, as the sun's ember sank and vanished.

  The western horizon was largely invisible once the dead sun had set, but at one point Malledd, peering ahead, realized that he could make out subtle differences in the blackness that he recognized as shapes he had seen before – the palace tower, and the dome of the Great Temple, still far, far away, but growing steadily nearer.

  He could not see the third sunrise; the sun had darkened too much to be so much as glimpsed through the thickening fog and the heavy overcast. Three days without sunlight to warm the earth or burn off mist had left the air cold and thick with moisture.

  Malledd had lost all sense of time and distance and numbers; his arms were too numb to ache any more. He needed both hands to hold his sword, and cutting through a nightwalker's neck might take four or five blows. Every breath burned his throat and hurt deep in his chest. He moved forward in half-controlled staggers and lunges. For hours he had focused all his attention on the next nightwalker he meant to destroy, and when that one was gone he shifted his gaze to the next, on and on and on, in trancelike repetition. He judged his progress by the slow nearing of the red glow ahead.

  Finally, he tripped over the leg of a sprawled headless corpse, stumbled, and fell.

  The temptation to simply lie there in the dirt was overwhelming, an urge as fierce and strong as any he had ever felt, as powerful as the love he had felt for Anva or for each of their three babies – but no more powerful, and as the comparison came to him he found himself imagining Anva and the children at their home in Grozerodz, and an army of nightwalkers sweeping down upon the village. He pictured his own home as plundered and deserted as the farmhouses around the warring camps, Grozerodz as empty as Drievabor.

  He couldn't allow that. He forced himself up on his hands and tried to drag his knees forward, under him.

  As he did, he saw something, something wrong.

  He blinked, puzzled, and forced himself to turn his head slowly back and try to spot whatever it was that had troubled him.

  He was on a street, he realized – the highway had reached another town. Something high and dark loomed up on his left.

  He forced himself up on his knees and turned to stare upward. It took a long moment before he recognized what he was staring at.

  It was the fortress wall. They were already in the eastern suburbs of Seidabar, and the high black walls of the fortress towered over them, almost invisible against the black of night.

  And the city was dark.

  Oh, a few lights shone dimly here and there, but there were no watchfires on the walls, nor signal-fires on the towers. No light shone from the arrow-slits or other openings in the fortification, and the glow that showed over the parapet was dim and uneven, not the steady blaze of the city's thousands of torches and lanterns.

  “What happened?” he tried to say, but his throat was too dry to force out words, and only a dry rasp emerged.

  He found reserves of strength he couldn't believe he still had, and forced himself up onto his bloody, battered feet.

  He could guess what had happened. The people of Seidabar had panicked and fled. If his message telling them to stand fast had been received, it had been ignored – or perhaps the warning that the Nazakri and his undead army were on the way had triggered the panic.

  But Baranmel had told him that Seidabar must not fall.

  If no one else was here to defend the city gates, then he would have to do it himself. After all, he was the divine champion, touched by the gods before he ever emerged from the womb, Ba'el's clawmark drawn across his face. This was his duty.

  He had to stop Rebiri Nazakri.

  The remaining nightwalkers were unimportant by comparison; the Olnamian wizard was their leader, their guide, their master.

  Malledd had to get between the wizard and the city gates, and stop him.

  Of course, the Outer City had no walls; if the Olnamian decided to destroy that, Malledd could hardly stop him. Somehow, though, he didn't believe that would be a problem. The Nazakri wanted revenge against the Domdur Empire, and that meant the Empress, the Imperial Palace, the Inner City. He wouldn't bother with anything less, Malledd was sure. The Nazakri would almost certainly go on into the Great Plaza and turn onto the ramp there; if Malledd cut through the back streets he might be able to get up onto the ramp from the side before the wizard had gotten very far up the slope.

  Somehow, even after three days of travel and slaughter without food or rest, Malledd broke into a run.

  #

  “They passed the army by,” the priest gasped. “Lord Shoule had sent orders to let them pass; he went to the Great Temple with Prince Graubris and the Archpriest, and the magicians there didn't know any better than to obey. With Lord Kadan gone, no one in the camp dared question those orders until it was too late.”

  “They're in the Outer City now,” a New Magician added. “They'll reach the Great Plaza at any moment now.”

  “But our defenses aren't ready,” Lady Vamia said unhappily. “Prince Graubris took most of the Imperial Guard with him when he left, and we'd already stripped the walls for the vanguard and the camps.”

  “We should have sent word to the temple sooner,” Lord Graush growled. “We should have realized that that was why Shoule wanted Apiris on his side.

  “Yes, we should have,” Prince Granzer agreed. “But we didn't, and it's too late to do anything about it now.”

  Zolous waved the matter away as irrelevant. “Send whoever we have to close the gates,” he ordered. “We may be unable to stop the enemy, but we needn't make it easy for him. Close the gates and man whatever defenses we can – call for volunteers if you see anyone left in the Inner City. We stand here; if the Imperial Palace falls, then we'll fall with it. We can straighten out who gets credit or blame later, if there is any 'later.'”

  The others hurried to give the necessary orders.

  As they trotted down a corridor side by side, Lord Passeil remarked to Prince Granzer, “I do believe you made the right choice for the throne, your Highness.”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Rebiri Nazakri stood in the Great Plaza and waited while his remaining army formed up around him.

  His human companions were long gone, of course; none of them had been equipped for the long march westward from the Grebiguata, and none of them had crossed that crude bridge with him. E
ven his son, Aldassi, had stayed behind; the two of them would meet again somewhere, somehow, once Seidabar had been burned, its great dome and soaring towers and high black walls thrown down.

  But his spirit companions, his nightwalkers, his dark children of the depths of the earth, were still with him. More than half had been butchered on the road, far more, most of their essence collected in his staff for later re-use, and the black crystal throbbed uncomfortably with the overcrowded presence of so much power; three thousand more still wore human form, and were now gathering about him.

  Before them, on the ramp to the southeast, were the fabled gates of Seidabar, lit bloody red in the glow of his staff.

  Three thousand remaining, the rest butchered along the way – and almost all of those by that one determined man. If he was a man; Rebiri was unsure of the nature of the being that had pursued him from the east.

  Nazakri had not dared expend the time and energy necessary to defend the nightwalkers and slay the harrying foe because he knew that both time and energy were limited; the darkness that protected him and left his opponents powerless would not last forever, nor did he have the means at hand to collect more of the magical forces he wielded. He had needed to maintain a healthy reserve for his final goal – Seidabar, which towered above him, black against the night. Turning the nightwalkers against a few ordinary soldiers was one thing; disposing of whatever force it was that pursued them was another, and he had feared that to do so would cost too much.

  The fire-magic remaining in the red crystal would still be enough to blast those gates apart, and the undead horde would storm into the citadel. Rebiri smiled in anticipation.

  Three thousand would be enough.

  He had used much of the red fire simply to sustain himself on the journey westward; he could not use the black for such a purpose without risking losing control of his own body to the earth-spirits. Still, enough remained to blast through the gates, he was sure.

  He took a step toward the ramp, and another, and set his foot on it – and a ragged shape suddenly appeared before him, vaulting up from one side onto the ramp. This mysterious figure wore the tattered remnants of an Imperial uniform and carried a drawn sword.