Prophet of the Dead: Forgotten Realms

by Richard Lee Byers

  It’s the dark, said Jet. It’s curdling or something.

  Aoth realized that must be so. He looked at the patch of ground at the center of the stand of weir trees and saw the gloom there had grown even deeper, so murky and festering-foul, it reminded him of the deathways, although it still offered no bar to his fire-kissed sight. The female durthan with the Stag King’s antler-axe—Nyevarra—was in the middle of it, as were a couple other undead witches and, rearing above creatures of merely human stature, Lod himself.

  Standing a little closer to the thick of the battle, his gore-streaked two-handed sword canted on his shoulder, the patchwork man—Uramar—was shouting. Aoth had no hope of making out what the blaspheme was saying over the general din. But he was likely ordering any ally who could hear him to fall back and form up to protect the spellcasters behind him. At any rate, that was what various undead were doing.

  Aoth scowled at his failure to secure the cursed area straightaway. But he knew little about the kind of ritual magic that had sullied it, and even Yhelbruna, who claimed to understand it, hadn’t anticipated that if they so desired, the undead witches could accelerate the ongoing contamination.

  But maybe Jhesrhi and Cera had sensed the danger, for they and their squads of protectors were already headed for the weirs. But they’d never punch through the ranks of the enemy without support.

  Responding to his master’s thoughts, Jet abandoned his pursuit of the phantoms rising toward the skyship and hurtled toward the towering sacred trees. He likewise gave a rasping cry that brought wild griffons streaking after him.

  Meanwhile, Aoth cast a charm to amplify his voice. “Push for the weirs!” he bellowed to his soldiers on the ground, and an enormous mink looked up and nodded to show it understood.

  * * * * *

  Cera had long since discovered she’d been too optimistic at the start of the battle. Although Orgurth and her other defenders were fighting savagely to hold back the foe, she’d still needed to wield her mace as a warrior would, often enough that scraps of rotting flesh and strands of greasy hair clung to the stubby spikes.

  Swaying, an animate corpse with its nose and most of its left profile rotted away stumbled between two golems busy with other foes. Reluctant to expend any of the Keeper’s light on a single such brutish creature, Cera waited for the zombie to swing its war hammer, then sidestepped and blocked with her shield.

  The blow banged on the hide-and-wooden targe and jolted her arm but didn’t hurt her. She swung low and smashed the zombie’s knee, and it pitched forward. She then bashed it in the nape of the neck, and it fell on its ruined face in the snow.

  At the same instant, she glimpsed motion at the corner of her vision. She turned. Just a stride away, a ghoul was rushing her with jagged claws outstretched. Fortunately, Orgurth lunged to intercept it, cut, and split its skull. The ghoul dropped.

  The orc grinned at Cera. “Are you close enough yet?” he shouted, making himself heard over the din of battle.

  “A little farther!” Her answer made her feel guilty. People were dying to help her push forward.

  Orgurth’s leer stretched wider. “Why not?” He turned back toward the enemies still separating them from the weir trees and then snarled an obscenity. Because Uramar himself was leading a dozen floating direhelms right at them.

  In a sudden surging confusion, two of the flying suits of half-plate assailed Orgurth, and to dodge the initial slashes of their swords, he sprang to the side. Other direhelms engaged golems and berserkers. Somehow, in an instant, all Cera’s protectors were busy fighting for their own lives, and Uramar had a clear path to her.

  Fine, she thought. A blaspheme was a target worthy of her deity’s wrath. She raised her mace to the sun shining above the filthy darkness and started a prayer to smite him.

  Then, however, her focus shattered into terror and bewilderment, and her half-finished invocation forgotten, she recoiled. Only for a moment, and then a cleric’s trained will allowed her to shed the effects of what had no doubt been an adversary’s spell. But that was time enough for Uramar to lumber into striking distance.

  As he did, bitter cold, fiercer by far than the natural chill of this winter day, stabbed into Cera like a knife. She gasped, and her whole body clenched, rendering her incapable of prayer, raising her targe, or offering any other sort of defense. Uramar swung his greatsword high to split her head.

  Then, missing her by no more than a finger length, Jet swooped over her head, and his talons punched into the blaspheme’s chest. Wings lashing, the black griffon—and Aoth astride his back—climbed and carried Uramar into the air.

  Other griffons dived at more of the foe a heartbeat later. Berserkers, golems, bright fey, and telthors rushed up to reinforce Cera’s original bodyguards. Teeth chattering with the aftereffects of Uramar’s frigid aura, she decided she truly was going to reach where she needed to be. And then, with Amaunator’s help, she’d vindicate the faith of those who fought and fell to get her there!

  * * * * *

  Through their psychic bond, Aoth could feel the deadly chill that emanated from Uramar’s body assailing Jet. And the griffon must have likewise sensed his concern.

  I’m not some dainty human, Jet snarled. I can take a little cold.

  You can’t take even a scratch from a life-stealing blade, Aoth replied. Just drop him. If the fall doesn’t kill him, I’ll blast him.

  I’m gripping him so he can’t use the sword. I want to pull him apart and pop his stitches.

  Aoth opened his mind to Jet’s perceptions so completely that it was like the griffon’s body was his own. And then he realized Jet was right. The familiar was able to withstand the chill, and with both arms grinding together in one set of talons, Uramar truly was helpless.

  All right, Aoth agreed, kill him. But when he shifted back to his own body’s senses, Aoth regretted saying it.

  Because twisting atop the thick, scaly coils of his lower body, Lod was tracking Jet’s course through the air. Lod’s fleshless jaw worked, and his naked phalanges crooked, forming a series of conjuring signs.

  Aoth couldn’t tell what spell the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was casting, but he expected he and Jet needed to dodge it and the griffon would require every iota of his speed and agility to do so. Unfortunately, intent on the struggling foe in his claws, Jet hadn’t even noticed the threat.

  Drop him! Aoth ordered. And see what I’m seeing!

  Jet did both things at once; Aoth’s sense of communion pulsed stronger as, for an instant, his steed looked through his eyes. Then Jet swung himself through a tight evasive maneuver that, in the absence of a saddle and safety straps, nearly tossed his rider off his back.

  Magic banged through the air so loudly, it was as if the world itself were shattering, and Aoth’s ears throbbed. Still, Jet had avoided the actual stream of focused, murderous sound. The attack struck one of the weirs and rattled it, snapping loose a number of the spreading limbs. One just missed Aoth and Jet as it plummeted to the ground.

  Still turning, the griffon sought to get behind the bone naga. Aoth extended his spear, spoke a word of command, and released one of the spells stored in the weapon. A ray of sunlight leaped from the point.

  Unfortunately, the top of his dragonlike tail twisting to rotate the human-skeleton apex of his body, Lod refused to allow his opponents to strike him from behind, and at the same instant the light stabbed forth, he clenched his bony fist. The unnatural gloom thickened around the beam and all but smothered it. The dim remnant that splashed across the naga’s ribs made them shiver and smoke but nothing more.

  All right, Aoth thought, the undead naga had evidently warded himself against daylight, and he’d promised not to hurl fire. But maybe a thunderbolt would do the trick. He rattled off buzzing, crackling words and used his spear point to scratch a glowing zigzag on the air.

  * * * * *

  Striding between two of the several lumpish, faceless men of dirt and stone that the earth had spawned for he
r further protection, Jhesrhi spotted Nyevarra among the mass of undead and dark fey. A fair-minded universe would at least have kept the vampire durthan busy tending the darkness that increasingly eroded the resolve and vitality of mortal men and bright fey alike. But evidently Nyevarra had finished altering the curse she’d laid on the forest and was thus free to rejoin the battle.

  Specifically, raising the Stag King’s stolen weapon high, she appeared to be casting maledictions in Cera’s direction, and the peril to her friend made the urge to hurl fire roar through Jhesrhi’s mind and sent heat surging through her veins.

  But instead of succumbing to the impulse, she spoke once more to the earth, the other element to which she was currently most attuned. Brown hands erupted from the snow under Nyevarra’s feet, gripped her calves, and jerked her downward.

  The surprise attack disrupted the durthan’s casting, and as the earth spirit sought to drag her under, Jhesrhi urged her motley squad of warriors forward. Perhaps they could reach Nyevarra before she struggled free.

  Alas, no. Too many undead and dark fey were in the way, and Nyevarra retained the presence of mind to exploit her vampiric abilities. She dissolved into mist, flowed upward, and took on human form again above the earth elemental’s reach.

  Her whipping hair and robes revealed that a wind was holding her aloft. Other such entities screamed at Jhesrhi and her companions, battering and chilling them and slinging snow in their eyes. Men cried out and stumbled backward.

  For a moment, the only thought Jhesrhi was able to think was that fire countered cold. Then she thrust the notion away and conjured a floating luminous shield to deflect the brunt of the blast.

  Next, she sought to grow the arms and clutching hands she’d already drawn from the soil into a complete manlike figure like the ones she’d summoned previously. But Nyevarra conjured a whirlwind that ripped the new creature apart, half-formed.

  Air wasn’t intrinsically stronger than earth, and Nyevarra wasn’t inherently a more powerful mage than Jhesrhi. In fact, in their previous combat, Jhesrhi had decided she was the stronger. But apparently not when malignant darkness was grinding at her and her adversary bore the Stag King’s scepter. Not when she’d forsworn the use of fire.

  So burn Nyevarra! Burn Lod! Burn everything! Where was the good if the “soul” of the forest survived but as a corrupted precinct of the Shadowfell and Rashemen fell to the undead?

  But if Jhesrhi resorted to that tactic, it would be like surrendering. Like admitting that all of Aoth’s training and all her hard-won sellsword experience had been for naught because there was nothing left of her but the raw strength and mindless greed of fire. And she recoiled from that possibility in disgust.

  Because the soil-and-stone warriors she’d evoked previously were making little headway against the localized gale and were too short of stature to reach Nyevarra anyway, Jhesrhi bade them crack and crumble, and then commanded the resulting debris to throw itself at the vampire. None of the missiles reached its target. Living earth and rock forfeited a portion of their strength as soon as they lost contact with the ground, and the durthan’s allied winds tumbled each attack off course.

  But as the futile barrage ran its course, Jhesrhi whispered a spell.

  A final stone veered in flight and thumped down in the snow. The vampire in her mask of blackened silver swung the Stag King’s staff, and as the weapon swept through its arc, shadowy disembodied racks of antlers burst from it and hurtled at Jhesrhi.

  She dodged and rattled off a counterspell at the same time. The antlers shredded away to nothing. But by the time they did, Nyevarra, still riding the wind, was plunging down at her. No doubt to uncover her mouth, she’d removed her mask, and her snarl revealed extended fangs. The blood thirst was on her.

  But even the frenzied urge to slake it didn’t keep her from faltering in shock when something tore the antler-axe from her hands.

  Nyevarra had summoned several winds to attend her, but that hadn’t prevented Jhesrhi from calling one of her own. It had simply kept the durthan from sensing the newcomer when several other such invisible presences were already moaning and gusting around.

  As instructed, Jhesrhi’s ally had hovered and waited for an opportune moment to snatch the talisman. Now it was sweeping the staff away over the heads of the combatants on the ground, taking it where she hoped it would do the most good.

  Jhesrhi spoke a word of power and lunged to meet the descending Nyevarra in the moment of her consternation. Charged with force, the head of her staff stabbed into the vampire’s chest like a stake. Jhesrhi recited a rhyme to send a bit of her own vitality streaming down her weapon and poison the impaled creature with the essence of natural life.

  But as she spoke the final syllable, she realized she was reciting the wrong spell. It was flame that leaped from the core of her, surged down the length of the staff, and burned Nyevarra from the inside out.

  As Jhesrhi looked down at the blackened, smoking husk crumpled in the snow, panting all the while, she told herself the lapse didn’t matter. She had, after all, fought in the way she’d intended. She’d only used fire to finish off an opponent she’d already beaten, and then in a way that couldn’t possibly start the forest fire the hathrans feared.

  But it did matter. For a moment, at least, and despite her resolve, fire had wielded her and not the other way around. A tear slid from her eye, and when she furiously wiped it away, she saw it was burning like ignited oil.

  * * * * *

  An Old One wielded a shimmering wand and a fey warrior with gnarled bark for skin and moss for hair were fighting ghouls just a few paces to the left. Still, for Cera, the frenzied, roaring mundane part of the battle seemed vague and far away. She was chiefly aware of warmth that seemed to flower in the core of her and shine down on her from above at the same time and of the poisonous darkness with which it contended.

  She couldn’t afford to let her focus stray anywhere else. Because so far, her prayers and words of anathema showed no signs of lifting the unnatural gloom. In fact, the murk was still thickening.

  Perhaps she’d been foolish to imagine she could dissolve it. The durthans had been weaving their enchantments for tendays, and the Urlingwood was a place of power for them even if the hathrans had previously cast them out.

  Scowling, she strained to shove doubt out of her mind. If she only remained steadfast, her god would find a way to help her.

  She took a long, centering breath and recited another spell of exorcism that proved as ineffective as the last. Then, however, Yhelbruna strode out of the murk with the Stag King’s antler-axe in her hand.

  “I discern that this,” said the hathran, hefting the fey weapon, “was used to bring Shadow. If so, it can help banish it as well. Continue your rites, sun priestess, and I’ll support them with my own magic.”

  Cera resumed her prayers, and Yhelbruna chanted and brandished the staff as if she were clubbing and raking an invisible foe. Despite their disparate mystical traditions, they were soon declaiming in counterpoint, reinforcing one another’s incantations in the manner of accomplished spellcasters.

  Gradually, the twinges of anxiety and incipient aches, the malaise trying to worm its way into Cera’s mind and body, faded away. Then the physical gloom began to lighten.

  * * * * *

  At those moments when Vandar was within striking distance of a foe, he didn’t think. Rage singing inside him, guided by instinct, he attacked relentlessly and ducked and dodged as necessary.

  When he was between fights, however, his anger subsided just enough to allow flickers of reflection. Now was such a moment, and it occurred to him that the undead must still include Nar demonbinders among their number, for the thing several paces in front of him looked more alien and unnatural than even the most grotesque dark fey. A headless, asymmetrical tangle of huge bony claws and projecting spikes, it walked on four crooked, mismatched legs and bore a cluster of little round eyes in the middle of its body.

  At present
, the demon was smashing an iron construct in the shape of a small wyvern to pieces. Vandar rushed it, hoping to catch it by surprise, but it pivoted and lifted its giant claws to threaten him. He kept charging.

  A claw jabbed at his head, and he sprang out of the way without breaking stride. That put him on the verge of flinging himself onto one of the immobile but still potentially deadly horns that bristled from the demon’s shell. He twisted past the point, leaped, and cut at the cluster of eyes.

  The demon fell over thrashing, and as it rolled back and forth, the flailing of the various claws and spikes was almost as dangerous as if it were attacking deliberately. Fortunately, Vandar had to avoid them for only a couple of heartbeats before the convulsions came to a sudden end.

  He studied the fiend for a moment, satisfying himself that he truly had killed it, then looked around for his next foe. Some distance away, rearing over the heads of smaller combatants, the undead creature called Lod hurled a jagged blast of darkness from his hand. Wheeling around the bone naga, Jet dodged, and, astride the black griffon’s back, Aoth hurled shafts of blue light from his spear point.

  The red sword urged Vandar in that direction. Because Lod was the leader of the Eminence of Araunt, the ultimate author of Rashemen’s troubles, and the most formidable horror on the battlefield. And if Vandar didn’t play a central role in his destruction, it was Aoth and not he who would be remembered as the hero of the conflict.

  Then, however, Vandar realized the gloom was lifting. Using the spines like a ladder, he scrambled up on the demon’s carcass in hopes of seeing why.

  Cera, Yhelbruna—now in possession of the Stag King’s antler-axe—and a couple other hathrans stood in attitudes of invocation amid a luminous yellow haze. Plainly, their magic was burning away the dark.

  Unfortunately, Vandar wasn’t the only one who’d figured that out. Undead and dark fey were turning in increasing numbers to push toward the sunlady and witches while mortals, bright fey, and golems struggled to hold them back.