Besides, someone needed to be rearguard—Aoth acknowledged that himself. So why shouldn’t it be the Stag King and his servants? Unless he missed his guess, the fighting here at the back of the column was likely to prove every bit as hard and as important as the battle at the front.
An echoing roar, the shouts of men, the cries of other things, and the boom and crackle of magic all mixed together, told him the battle had begun. He peered down the passage behind him, at the arched openings leading to other tunnels, and waited for his own particular foes to appear in the gloom. Beside him, a semitransparent, faintly luminous telthor in the form of a huge wolf sniffed the cold, musty air. It growled, and its fur bristled.
Dark figures surged up the tunnel and out of all the doorways in view. Others simply plunged through the solid stone of the walls, floors, and ceiling. The stench of putrefaction filled the Stag King’s nose—more indication, if anyone needed it, that he and his fellow warriors were primarily facing the undead.
And is that supposed to daunt me? he asked himself, grinning. With a thought, he commanded the spirit animals to oppose the wraiths and such; since the telthors weren’t made of solid flesh, either, they were best suited to the task. Then he bellowed a war cry, stepped to meet the creatures shambling up the passage, and cut a withered ghoul in two with a sweep of his antler-axe. Behind him, weapons thudded home as his offspring—degenerate, disappointing brutes, but able warriors all—started fighting, too. They woke the bells in their antlers, and the little orbs chimed and chimed and chimed.
The Stag King drove his weapon into another ghoul’s chest, smashing ribs, pulping the rotten organs inside, and snapping its spine. Then he struck a zombie’s head off. He’d already lost count of how many foes he’d dispatched, and if he wasn’t careful, he was going to give himself over entirely to the frenzy and urgencies of melee, to think of the opponent in front of him and nothing more. Especially since, with the fight raging along a corridor and in the mouths of the intersecting passages, it was virtually impossible to keep track of the overall tactical picture anyway.
But he knew that as the leader of his group, he had to try, partly because so far, the durthans hadn’t made their presence felt. When they started weaving magic, it would be his task to counter it.
Perhaps believing its lack of substance would keep it safe, a ghost with a wavering smudge of a face flew at him with wispy hands outstretched. He sliced it to tatters with his axe. A dead goblin with a crushed head swung its scimitar at the Stag King’s kidney. He parried and smashed its skull even farther out of shape. It flopped back against the creatures shoving up behind it.
Power suddenly shivered through the air. It wasn’t truly sound or light or heat or cold, but anyone with mystical abilities would have sensed it somehow. The Stag King felt it as a twinge in his joints and a vile bitter taste on his tongue.
A phantom bear faltered as the witches sought to retake control of it. A ghostly badger fell down convulsing.
The Stag King sneered, focused his will to slap the durthans’ power away from their former familiars, and found that it wasn’t that easy. Apparently the undead witches had taken advantage of the time between battles to figure out how to contend with him more successfully.
The only way they could possibly accomplish such a thing was if several of them were working in concert. Employing a trick of perception he’d mastered millennia before, he deafened himself to all the echoing roars of the battle except for the cold, intricate chanting that, he surmised, the louder noises covered.
The rest of the world fell silent, and he did indeed hear the witches’ incantation. He’d expected them to be working behind the protection afforded by their massed warriors, and so they were. They were also on the far side of a doorway on the left, out of the lethal chaos of the central corridor.
The Stag King allowed his hearing to revert to normal, and the noise of the battle exploded at him. He chopped with the antler-axe and sent a blast of pure force down the passage, smashing some of the ghouls and zombies off their feet and jolting others backward. Then he plunged forward, and some of his offspring, spirit animals that were still strong and obedient to his will, and a couple of screaming berserkers drove forward along with him.
Once he and his servants and the undead jammed together, the Stag King gained ground with every chop, jab, and shuffling half step until the arch was just ahead. He struck again and again till he cut and smashed the final clawing, stabbing, decaying obstacles out of his way. Then he lunged into the side passage.
There were six masked witches gathered in a circle around a little blue fire on the floor. The smoke from the blaze made an eye-stinging haze in the air, and the malignant power of the ritual made grimacing faces take shape and melt away in the sandstone walls. Some were crying tears of blood, which remained even after the sources had dissolved.
The durthans pointed their wands and staves at the Stag King. He raised his power once again, chopped, and cast another burst of force. It staggered the witches and scattered the scraps of bone and desiccated flesh that fueled the fire.
It was a good start. But so far, none of the Stag King’s minions had managed to follow him through the arch. He was on his own, and that meant he didn’t dare give any of the renegade wise women a chance to recover. He started after them, but saw other robed figures flow into visibility and solidity all around him. He belatedly realized that the haze was made not only of smoke but also of mist, and the one had concealed the presence of the other.
He roared and flailed with all of his strength. But several vampire women were clinging to him, and some of them managed to hold on.
One of them crooned in his ear. “Do you know me?” she said. And he did. He just had time to recognize the voice of Nyevarra, who’d fought so cunningly in the Witch War, before two cold needles slid into his neck.
* * * * *
Aoth’s aborted spell discharged its power in a crackling shower of sparks. He pivoted in the direction of Cera’s scream, but couldn’t quite see her. She was all but lost in the middle of a slashing whirl of shadow demons, and evidently couldn’t produce a blaze of light bright enough to destroy or repel them. The demons were somehow making the glow that emanated from her flicker and dim. If it went out altogether, the attackers would have nothing but a few torches and luminous crystals to pierce the ambient murk.
Leaving the glabrezu to Jhesrhi, Vandar, and its other berserker assailants for the time being, Aoth aimed his spear and hurled darts of light at the shadows. It was far from the most powerful attack spell in his arsenal, but he didn’t dare cast any of the deadliest ones for fear of hitting Cera as well.
Two dark forms with ragged black wings and long horns curling up from their heads spun out of the whirl in his direction. He charged his spear with the seething essence of chaos and struck at one of the shadows. It dodged, and at the same moment, something jolted him, although the shock was psychic, not physical. His body abruptly felt numb as his spirit began to separate from it.
Aoth snarled a word of defense, invoked the magic bound in a tattoo, and flesh and soul locked together once more. But his instant of clumsiness allowed the demon he’d struck at to tear the spear from his grip and toss it away. Both shadows rushed in raking with their claws.
Covering up with his shield, trying to keep either of the demons from getting behind him, Aoth scrambled backward, bumping into someone, and struggling to retain his balance. He snatched out his sword and charged it with a shimmer of destructive power. He feinted a cut at one of the demons, before spinning and extending at the other.
That shadow was lunging at him, and it impaled itself. The magic in the blade frayed it into wisps of darkness.
Aoth pivoted back in the opposite direction. The other shadow demon wasn’t there anymore.
Suspecting that it had shifted behind him, he kept turning, just barely in time to block a claw slash with his targe, and then slice the demon across the belly. His foe broke apart into tatters of m
urk, which then dissolved entirely.
He turned back toward Cera and found he was farther away and could barely see her. The vault was crowded with berserkers and stag warriors rushing to engage one foe or another, or else tottering back from the battle line with streaming wounds. Still, no one could have missed the flash when she finally succeeded in channeling Amaunator’s power. All but one of the remaining shadow demons vanished instantly. The last one tried to shield itself by dropping down into the floor, but unraveled away to nothing when it was only waist-deep in the stone.
Aoth weaved and shoved his way to Cera. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she panted, “the Keeper protected me.”
“I saw,” he said, wanting to embrace her but knowing he didn’t have time. He looked around and decided that, although Vandar and his lodge brothers had done a fair job of carving up its lower body, and Jhesrhi, of burning the fur off patches of its upper parts, the glabrezu remained the greatest threat in view. He cast about, found his spear, and picked it up. “We need—”
A blast of dirty red flame hurled back the Rashemi fighting in one of the doorways. Into the breach charged a blaspheme, a hulking monstrosity made of pieces from many different corpses. One green eye and one brown one, the former a finger-width higher than the latter, glared from beneath the rim of the creature’s helmet. The ugly face was lumpy, mottled, and crisscrossed with scars.
The patchwork creature wore a suit of plate articulated differently than any that Aoth had ever seen. But he was more concerned about the brute’s weapon than its armor. To his eyes, the greatsword fairly sweated destructive power, and when the blaspheme slashed one of Vandar’s brothers with it, the berserker’s flesh withered even as his knees buckled underneath him.
Beside the blaspheme advanced the skull lord from the roof of the keep, hacking with a falchion. And behind them, a wedge of howling goblin-kin and bellowing ice trolls surged forth. Aoth realized that, once again, the glabrezu would have to wait.
* * * * *
The Stag King felt cold and dazed. Through his muddled thoughts whispered the promise that if he’d only flop down on the floor and submit, the chill would turn to ecstasy.
Bellowing, he dropped his antler-axe so that he could grab hold of Nyevarra, rip her fangs out of his throat, and fling her away. It was only after he did so that he realized a second vampire was clinging to him and sucking at a bite in his forearm. He tore her loose and threw her down the corridor as well.
Unharmed, both durthans rolled back onto their feet. Meanwhile, he was still numb and weak. He shouted for help with both his voice and his mind. Some of his offspring would surely hear the former, and every spirit animal he’d brought under his sway should register the latter. He just had to hold out until help reached him. He stooped to grab his axe, but it wasn’t there.
Nyevarra laughed, and he saw that she’d collected the weapon when he wasn’t looking. She tossed it clattering down the passage, putting it even farther out of his reach. Her gaze stabbed at him. It made him feel like she was lunging at him, or that the world had tilted on end and sent him falling down at her.
Her stare would paralyze him if he let it. He jerked his eyes away and saw a brown-robed witch rushing in on his flank with her clawed, decay-mottled hands poised to snatch and rend. He lowered his head and whipped it up again. His antlers ripped both her black leather mask and the face beneath it away.
By that time, one of the vampires was rushing him. He caught hold of her as he bellowed, and he jerked her head off her shoulders. Slime pattered out of her robes as her flesh began to liquefy.
He grinned at the other undead witches. “Who’s next?” he croaked.
He didn’t really expect his bravado to frighten them into turning tail, and it didn’t. But no one else was reckless enough to fight him hand to hand. Instead, standing together, they snarled and hissed curses that made his heart stutter, his guts twist, and fresh blood stream from the cold, throbbing bites in his neck and forearm.
A single phantom hawk swooped through the archway behind him. A witch robed in black and white rattled off a rhyme, and the telthor’s body twisted as though invisible hands had seized it and wrung it like a washcloth. It vanished as it fell to the floor.
Zyl hopped through the opening and cried the opening words of an incantation in his shrill voice. A durthan in a brown cloak had pounced on him like a cat before he could finish. She ripped at his body with her jagged claws and flung bloody chunks through the air. The Stag King grieved momentarily for his servant, before grimly refocusing on his own plight.
Through gritted teeth, the Stag King muttered charms of protection that seemed to do no good at all. He struggled to advance on the witches, but it was like walking into a gale. In his addled, pain-ridden condition, he couldn’t tell if the enemy had conjured an actual wind or if it was the pressure of Nyevarra’s gaze shoving back at him.
Whatever it was, after a straining step or two, it stopped him. He wondered, with more amazement than dread, if, after all these millennia, he’d finally fallen into the trap he wouldn’t be able to fight or trick his way out of. He gathered his strength for a supreme and perhaps final effort.
Growing in an instant, brambles shot up from the floor. They whipped around him, yanked themselves tight, and plunged their long thorns deep into his flesh.
He strained to break free, but to no avail. The only effect was to tear the punctures wider around the thorns. The durthans pounced on him.
* * * * *
First, the Stag King stopped flailing, then he stopped twitching, and a few heartbeats after that, Nyevarra and her sister witches stepped back from his corpse. She wiped her bloody lips with the back of her hand and slipped on a tarnished silver mask.
“Do we give him the chance to rise?” asked a durthan in red.
“No,” the vampire said. “Take his head and fetch his weapon.”
The witch in red retrieved the axe and used it to decapitate its erstwhile owner. It took four bone-splintering chops for the Stag King’s head to tumble away from his neck. She stooped and picked it up by one of the antlers.
“Now,” said the vampire in the silver mask, “let’s see if his retainers still want to fight when we show them proof that their lord is dead.”
* * * * *
Aoth advanced to meet the patchwork swordsman, and, with a limp that might be the result of having mismatched legs, the creature moved to meet him. So did Aoth’s former antagonist, the skull lord.
And Cera knew, so surely that it was possible the Keeper or one of his exarches had whispered the information to her, that her lover couldn’t contend with both foes at once. Not in such a press, where he couldn’t cast his most potent spells without smiting friend as well as foe. She had to help him.
She swept her mace over her head, drew down the Keeper’s power, and hurled a shaft of radiance from the head of the weapon. It struck the skull lord like a battering ram and knocked him backward.
Well, she had his attention. In the moment it took him to recover his balance, she rattled off a second prayer. Floating sigils of golden light shimmered into existence all around her.
She was just in time, for an instant later, red light flickered in the orbs of one of his skulls, and then a flare of crimson fire leaped at her. The scorching heat and sickening vileness of it rocked her backward, and for a moment made it feel like there was nothing around her to breathe but filth and embers. Then the flame went out, and she gasped in cleaner air. Frantically taking stock, she found that the attack had only blistered her. The floating runes had shielded her from the worst.
But the fiery blast had provided the skull lord with cover of a sort, and he’d used it to rush forward. Indeed, he’d nearly closed the distance between them. Terror jolted Cera and froze her in place.
Or rather, it tried. She gasped, “Keeper!” and warmth poured into her. It didn’t purge her of every trace of her fear—it probably would have needed to steal her reason
to do that—but the unnatural, paralyzing dread dropped away.
The skull lord’s falchion leaped at her. She blocked with her buckler, and the heavy blade hit so hard that for an instant she feared the stroke had broken her arm. She tried to hit back with her mace, but she was off balance, and the riposte didn’t come anywhere near her foe. The skull lord chopped at her again, and it was only Tymora’s favor that enabled her to flounder back out of range.
It was plain that, despite all she’d learned during her time with Aoth, she was nowhere near up to the task of defeating her ghastly opponent in a contest of arms. As he advanced, she again reached up for the power of the Yellow Sun and rattled off a prayer. She didn’t know if she could finish it in time, but her only real hope was to try.
A pair of ghostly warriors, each a blur of amber light, appeared between her and the skull lord. He tried to lunge between them, but they shifted to hold him back and struck at him with their swords.
Sheltering behind them, Cera hurled bursts of Amaunator’s power, shafts of sunlight infused with holiness and the deity’s righteous hatred of the undead. The third such attack blasted the skull lord into burning scraps of bone.
For an instant, forgetting what she’d learned previously, Cera hoped that was the end of the thing. Then the charred fragments of skeleton slid and jumped back together, commencing the task of reassembling him.
No! she thought. Not again! And though the exertions, physical and otherwise, of the last few moments had left her winded and weak, she scrambled forward to smash the one skull that remained intact. Sliding like pieces on a lanceboard, her conjured protectors moved with her.
The Masked Witches Page 24