The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy

by Richard Lee Byers

  This one would conjure a flying eye that he would no doubt send to the ceiling. There, it would survey the entire vault from above, allowing its maker to see it too. Then he wouldn’t need the mummies or any other spotters to pinpoint the whereabouts of his quarry.

  He’d likely cripple or kill Malark the instant after. In light of Malark’s previous failure to hinder Szass Tam’s spellcasting, the spymaster decided he needed to close now, even though the lich hadn’t positioned himself precisely as he’d hoped.

  He charged.

  He had some semblance of cover part of the way, but none for the last few feet. As he burst out into the open, he hoped that astonishment might paralyze his opponent for a critical instant. After all, Malark Springhill had supposedly died in Lapendrar and was supposedly Szass Tam’s faithful disciple as well.

  He should have known better. The lich hadn’t existed as long as he had and hadn’t achieved supremacy in Thay by freezing in the midst of combat. The black blade leaped at Malark.

  He hurled himself underneath the stroke, slid forward on the dusty floor, and sprang upright again. Now the flying sword was behind him, the worst place for it, but he ignored the peril to concentrate on pivoting and driving a thrust kick into Szass Tam’s midsection.

  As intended, the attack knocked the lich stumbling backward, but it also jolted Malark as if he’d kicked a granite column. For an instant, he feared he’d broken his leg.

  When he set it down, it was plain he hadn’t, but there was worse to come. His stomach turned over, and the room tilted and spun. Another effect of Szass Tam’s armoring enchantments, perhaps, or simply the result of touching the undead creature’s poisonous flesh.

  Whatever it was, he couldn’t let it slow him down. He was certain the shadow blade was making another attack. Instinct prompted him to fake left, then shift right, and the stroke missed.

  But at the same time, Szass Tam snarled a rhyme and thrust out a shriveled hand. A splash of liquid appeared in midair, and, nauseated and dizzy as he was, Malark couldn’t dodge it and the sword too. He flung up his arm and shielded his eyes, but the acid spattered the rest of him, burned him, and kept on burning.

  He knew a spell to wash the vitriol away, and another to purge himself of sickness, but had no time for either. Now that he’d knocked Szass Tam backward to the proper spot, he had something else to do, something that neither the lich nor the philosopher-assassins of the Long Death had taught him.

  Rather, he’d learned it as a boy growing up in a long-vanished city beside the Moonsea, before he’d betrayed his best friend for the elixir of perpetual youth, suffered the despair of endless life, or discovered the consolations of devoting himself to death. In that bygone age, he and the other children had played kickball in a field near the purplish waters, with a tree at each end to serve as a goal. He’d gotten pretty good at scoring points once he learned to take an instant to line up his shot.

  And, ignoring his vertigo, churning guts, and the searing pain of the sizzling, smoking acid, twisting out of the path of a sword stroke that slashed close enough to catch his sleeve and make it disappear, that was what he did now. Then he launched himself into a flying kick.

  chapter eleven

  27 Mirtul–9 Kythorn, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

  When the scout arrived, the artisans were giving So-Kehur’s everyday body a second pair of hands, human-looking except for being made of sculpted steel. He’d long since learned to manipulate four crablike claws, tentacles, or what have you at the same time. Now he wanted to see if he could make the precise gestures required for spellcasting with four hands simultaneously, and whether that would enhance the effect of the magic.

  He waved the artisans away with the flick of a tentacle and, using his eight arachnoid legs, turned his cylindrical body in the scout’s direction. He extended several of his eyes at the ends of their flexible antennae to view the newcomer from multiple angles at once.

  Because he’d taken the trouble to do so, he saw the kneeling scout tremble ever so slightly. The creature was an undead soldier with a gray withered face and glazed, sunken eyes, but even so, he feared his lord. So-Kehur found it gratifying.

  But it was detrimental to morale to terrorize underlings who’d done nothing to deserve it—he’d learned that observing Szass Tam—so he’d try to make the scout feel at ease. “Please, get up,” he said. His voice was indistinguishable from that produced by a normal larynx and mouth, for that was necessary for his conjuring. “Would you like some refreshment?”

  “No, thank you, Master,” said the scout. His leather trappings creaked as he straightened up. “One of the grooms offered me a prisoner as I was climbing off my eagle.”

  “Good. Then tell me what you’ve seen.”

  “The invaders abandoned the Dread Ring and marched south again. I thought they’d go back into the Umber Marshes and on home to the Wizard’s Reach, but they didn’t make the turn.”

  So-Kehur felt a surge of excitement. If he’d still possessed a pulse, no doubt it would have quickened. “You mean they’re heading toward Anhaurz.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “The lunatics must actually believe they can reach and destroy another Ring—the one in Tyraturos.” So-Kehur had no idea why the archmages of the council were so fixated on the gigantic strongholds, but it seemed evident they were. “They mean to take the High Road up the First Escarpment. Of the three likely ascents, it’s the only one without a fortress guarding the top. But to get to the High Road, they need to use the bridge here at Anhaurz to cross the Lapendrar.”

  The undead warrior inclined his head. “The autharch is wise.”

  “So this is where we’ll stop them!”

  In his youth, So-Kehur had been a coward, even if it never quite prevented him from doing his duty. But on the plain below Thralgard Keep, in the battle that broke the southern legions, he’d finally found his courage, and afterward, he’d vowed to make sure it never slipped away.

  To that end, he’d started replacing parts of his body with grafts from the undead and, when even those began to seem insufficiently strong to protect him from any conceivable threat, with metal. He supposed that at some point afterward, he must have decided to dispense with an organic form entirely, to become a disembodied brain, charged with the energies of undeath to nourish and preserve it, encased in a steel shell, although oddly enough, he couldn’t recall the exact moment when he’d made such a choice. Rather, when he looked back, it seemed to him as if the process had simply happened by degrees.

  In any case, his transformation had mostly worked out all right. Much as he’d loved to eat, he no longer missed it, or the touch of a woman, either. The cravings faded after he divested himself of the organs with which a person gratified them. Strange abilities emerged to take their place, along with the desire to exert his newly developed strengths.

  That last was the problem because the War of the Zulkirs was over, and afterward, Szass Tam proved unexpectedly reluctant to start any new ones. Instead, he devoted himself to erecting the Dread Rings, unnecessary defenses for a realm already impregnable, or, conceivably, monuments to overweening vanity. Either way, it left So-Kehur with no outlet for his aggression except hunting rebels, scarcely a challenge for the consummate killer he’d become.

  Now, however, an enemy army was heading straight for Anhaurz, a slayer in its own right. Ninety years ago, the Spell-plague had destroyed the town, and when Szass Tam appointed him autharch and gave him the task of rebuilding it, So-Kehur’d done so in a way that expressed his yearning for battle. The new Anhaurz was a true fortress city, constructed and garrisoned to break any force that dared to assault it. Even one led by the likes of Nevron and Lauzoril.

  “Fetch me my maps!” So-Kehur called. One of the artisans scurried to relay the order.

  The road south ran a few miles west of the towering cliffs the Thayans called the First Escarpment. Close, but not nearly close enough for anyone to menace the Brotherhood o
f the Griffon and the zulkirs’ legions with missiles hurled from the top.

  Or so Jhesrhi would have assumed, before the stones started showering down along with the cold drizzle from the overcast sky. They hammered the road with uncanny accuracy too.

  It was plain that only folk who could fly had any hope of stopping the bombardment, so Aoth led griffon riders to the top of the crags, which appeared to be deserted. But the breeze whispered to Jhesrhi that her enemies were almost directly below her, shrouded in an invisibility that couldn’t blind the tactile sight of the wind.

  She drew breath to shout a warning, then saw that she needn’t bother. The concealment hadn’t fooled Aoth’s spellscarred eyes, either. He pointed his spear, power glimmered around it, and a greenish cloud swirled into existence around the hidden men, revealing their forms to those who soared above them.

  Some of the enemy doubled over, puking. Other, hardier crossbowmen shot a volley into the air, but the griffons veered, swooped, and dodged most of the quarrels. Their riders shot back, and Szass Tam’s warriors fell.

  With their bodyguards slain, the Red Wizards died almost as easily. Afterward, the griffon riders set down to loot and learn whatever they could.

  The magical artillery used a scrying pool to provide a view of the highway. Beside the water was a flat piece of slate incised with a groove carved to mirror the slight curve of the road. One aimed and launched a barrage by placing a black pebble at a point along the depression. Then the rocks heaped on a slab of granite vanished to reappear above the designated spot.

  Since Thay had been at peace for some time, it seemed likely the apparatus was relatively old. Jhesrhi wondered if someone had crafted it during the first War of the Zulkirs, and if so, which side the craftsman had been on.

  “What do you think?” Gaedynn asked.

  She turned to face him. As was so often the case, he seemed to be smirking at a joke that was opaque to everyone else, and his long red hair shined even on a gray, cheerless day.

  “It’s cleverly made,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything exactly like it.”

  “It’s good that you can appreciate such things,” he said, “seeing as how we’re likely to have them hurling death at us with some regularity.”

  She frowned. “You know we have no choice but to do what we’re doing.”

  “Because two dead strangers and a funny old book said so, and then our captain suffered a hallucination.”

  “You know his visions come true.” “So far.”

  “Are you just babbling to hear yourself, the way you generally do, or are you actually thinking of running?”

  He grinned. “If I did, honeycomb, would you go with me?”

  “You know I owe Aoth everything.”

  “Whereas I don’t. Honestly, I think he’s lucky to have enjoyed the benefit of my services for as long as he has.” Evidently glimpsing something from the corner of his eye, he turned. She looked where he was looking and saw Aoth straightening up from a red-robed corpse with a folded parchment in his hand. “Shall we go see what the old man’s found?”

  “You should sing,” said Mirror, striding, flickering a little, effortlessly keeping pace with Bareris’s steed. The ghost was merely a shadow in the deepening twilight, his form too indistinct to resemble anyone in particular.

  Bareris’s mouth tightened. He truly wished his friend well. He wished Mirror’s mind could be clear every instant of every day. But it was at those times that the phantom became talkative, and the chatter sometimes grated on Bareris’s nerves.

  “I don’t want anyone to take me for a bard,” he said. That was why he’d left his harp behind when he and Mirror had split off from the army.

  “There’s no one but me to hear you,” Mirror said, and he was indisputably right. The tableland atop the First Escarpment was even more blighted than the plains below. A traveler encountered hamlets and cultivated fields less frequently and saw even more gnarled, pallid flora and deformed wildlife. High Thay was bleaker still, as if Szass Tam’s actual residence was a fountainhead of poison that lost a bit of virulence as it seeped down from the Citadel.

  “Still,” Bareris said, “I don’t see a point.”

  “We’re finally going to try to kill the creature you hate above all others, with the fate of the East—at a minimum—hanging in the balance. You must have feelings about that. Don’t you want to express them?”

  “I always feel the same, and singing doesn’t help it.”

  That answer seemed to irk or discourage Mirror, and they traveled in silence for a time, the cantering gait of Bareris’s steel gray mount eating up the miles. As best he could judge, the burly, misshapen beast was a cross between a horse and some infernal creature and seemed not to require sleep or rest.

  In time, a crescent moon rose to reveal the black, rectangular shape of a tax station. It was no surprise to see it. Such bastions lined the Eastern Way. But Bareris scowled to behold the roadblock, even though they too were common. The soldiers garrisoning tax stations threw them up for any number of reasons, including extortion and simple boredom.

  “It figures,” said Mirror. “We passed through Nethwatch Keep without any trouble only to get stopped out here in the middle of nowhere. Unless you want to go around.”

  “No,” Bareris said. “They’ve already seen us. If we just play our roles, they’ll pass us through.”

  He thought it would work. He was wearing the trappings of a Thayan knight, plundered, like his demon horse, from the Dread Ring, and if that proved insufficiently convincing, he’d bring his bardic powers of persuasion to bear.

  But as he rode closer, he saw that the soldiers manning the barricade were yellow-eyed corpses, all but immune to the sort of songs that addled the minds of the living. And when one of them recognized the outlaws who’d bedeviled Szass Tam’s servants for a century, Bareris and Mirror had no choice but to fight.

  So they did, and when they had finished with the soldiers at the roadblock, they broke into the tax station and slaughtered every creature within. Because no one must survive to report who’d perpetrated the massacre. And for a precious time, the exigencies of combat drove all other thoughts from Bareris’s head.

  When the fight was done, Mirror—who had at some point taken on the appearance of a gaunt, withered ghoul complete with fangs and pointed ears—frowned. “The authorities will likely blame the local rebels for this. They’ll make reprisals.”

  “Good,” Bareris said, then caught himself. “I mean, good if they don’t even suspect that we were the ones who passed by in the night. Not the reprisals part.”

  Keeping low lest the moonlight glint on their armor or the saddles, tack, and packs slung over their shoulders, Toriak and three companions slunk toward the sleeping griffons. Fortunately, the winged creatures occupied a field somewhat removed from the rest of the camp. The zulkirs’ soldiers were leery of the beasts, and well-trained though the griffons were, it would be stupid to keep them close to the horses whose meat they so relished. So, once Toriak and his companions crept clear of the smoky, crackling campfires and rows of tents, they didn’t have to worry quite so much about being spotted.

  Or so he imagined. But as he cast about for Dodger, his own beloved mount, a figure rose from behind the moundlike form of a different griffon. Gaedynn’s long, coppery hair was gray in the dark, but his jeweled ornaments still gleamed a little. He nudged the beast before him with his toe, and it made an annoyed, rasping sound and stood up too.

  “I don’t remember ordering you lads to make a night patrol,” Gaedynn said.

  Toriak wondered if a lie would help, then decided it plainly wouldn’t. He took a deep breath. “We’re leaving.”

  “Remember the compact you signed when you joined the Brotherhood. You can leave between campaigns, not when we’re in the field. Then it’s desertion, and it’s punished the same as in any other army.”

  “We already took plenty of loot from the Dread Ring,” Toriak said. “It’s stupid to
hang around any longer.”

  A dark form reared up, and despite the gloom, he recognized its contours immediately. His voice had woken Dodger, and in all likelihood, the voices of his companions would rouse their particular griffons. He made a surreptitious gesture, hoping they’d understand he was encouraging them to talk.

  “I take it,” Gaedynn said, “that you don’t credit the warning of impending universal doom.”

  Standing to Toriak’s right, Ralivar snorted. “Things like that just don’t happen. Not anymore. Maybe they never did, except in stories.” His griffon raised its head.

  “I’m skeptical myself.” Casually, as though making some petty adjustment to his garments, Gaedynn laid an arrow on his bow. “But it would be embarrassing to bet that it isn’t going to happen and then be proved mistaken.”

  “I’ll risk it,” Duma said. Maybe her griffon hadn’t been asleep, or at least not soundly, for it rose to its feet at once. “It’s better than fighting in the vanguard time after time.”

  “But that’s what sellswords do,” Gaedynn said. “More to the point, it’s what we have to do in this situation. Because we’re better than the council’s troops, and only we can win the toughest fights.”

  “We don’t care! Like Toriak said, we’re leaving! Do you think you can stop us and four griffons too?” Sopsek half-shouted, making sure his mount would hear. Toriak winced at the loudness, but no answering cry of alarm sounded back in camp, and at least Sopsek’s griffon did spring to its feet, cast about, and, like its fellows, come prowling across the field to stand with its rider. Sensing the tension between their masters and Gaedynn, the creatures glared at the latter, and the one steed crouched in front of him.

  “I promise that at the very least, I’ll stop a couple of you,” Gaedynn said. He still hadn’t bothered to draw his arrow back to his ear, much less aim it. “Would anyone like to volunteer to die first in the hope that his gallant sacrifice will aid his comrades-in-arms?”