The Haunted Lands: Book III - Unholy

by Richard Lee Byers

  Perhaps Bareris could wait until he found a way into the dungeons, and then he could perform the summoning. Then he and his allies could backtrack to this cave—

  But no. Even as he conceived the idea, he knew it wouldn’t happen that way. The archmages would never spend precious time and brave additional perils just to rescue Mirror. It wasn’t in their natures.

  So that left two alternatives. Bareris could press on alone and trust that whatever danger arose from this point forward, he’d be able to contend with it unaided. Or he could stay here and continue to assail the bubble of frozen time with countermagic, resting when he exhausted his power and hoping that eventually, somehow, one of his spells would breach Mirror’s prison. Knowing all the while that Szass Tam could start the Unmaking at any moment.

  Bareris looked at Mirror, a shadow locked in shadow with a blade that glowed like moonlight in his hand. “With so many lives at stake,” he said, “I have to go on. And I know you’d want me to.”

  That last part was plainly true. If he were able, Mirror would tell him to leave him behind. But Bareris suspected he’d just lied about his own motives—that in truth, it was the possibility of revenge compelling him onward, as it had once prompted him to break faith with Aoth—and it made him feel even more like a traitor.

  Still, he’d made his decision. He turned his back on Mirror, chose one of the exits opening to the northeast, and strode toward it. Once he rounded the first bend in the tunnel on the other side, it was impossible to look back and see the ghost even had he wished to do so. Which he didn’t. He needed to focus on whatever lay ahead.

  He told himself that if he survived, he’d come back for Mirror. Told himself too, that it was absurd to imagine that one could truly save a man already dead. Mirror’s existence was a cold, hollow mockery of life, misery without end, as a fellow undead knew only too well. The phantom was probably better off suspended as he was.

  Bareris stopped and raked his fingers through his hair. Then he turned and retraced his steps.

  “I know this isn’t what you’d want,” he said to Mirror. “It’s not what I want, either. But apparently it’s what I’m going to do.”

  He sang until no magic remained to him, and the dark bubble stayed intact. He waited until his power replenished itself, then began again.

  He chanted one incantation, sang another, then started a third. And as the music hammered it, the bubble sheared apart and crumbled like a wasp’s nest burning in an unseen flame. It was hard to say why, for he’d cast the identical spell several times before. Perhaps all his attempts at countermagic had exercised a cumulative effect, or maybe it was just that he’d finally gotten lucky.

  Mirror bounded out of the disintegrating sphere, then stopped and cast wildly about when he perceived the vasuthant was no longer in front of him.

  “It caught you in a kind of trap,” Bareris said. “I killed it, then set you free.”

  “Thank you,” Mirror said. Then, perhaps struck by something in his comrade’s manner, he peered at him more closely. “How long did it take to free me?”

  Bareris shrugged. “Buried in these tunnels, it’s hard to know. But too long. We have to get moving.”

  chapter thirteen

  19 Kythorn, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

  Other creatures emerged from the gloom to menace Bareris. But fortunately, none were as formidable as the vasuthant, and one by one, he and Mirror killed them or put them to flight. Until finally, a basket arch appeared at the end of a stretch of tunnel.

  They’d been seeking it so long that, for an instant, an irrational part of Bareris’s mind didn’t trust it to be real. He had a sense that it would vanish like a mirage as soon as he took another step.

  But it didn’t, and on the other side was a passage plainly created by artisans, albeit probably not human ones. The faded murals on the walls depicted lizardfolk carrying on the business of a civilization that looked as complex and advanced as any extant today. For an instant, Bareris wondered what calamity had reduced the reptiles to the primitive brutes with which he was familiar.

  Maybe, he thought, one of their wizards had attempted the Great Work.

  Mirror grinned. “You did it, my brother. You found a way in.”

  “We haven’t done anything yet,” Bareris said. “Stand watch while I try the next part.”

  He extracted five small, sealed silver vials from his belt pouch. Each contained a drop of blood drawn from Aoth, Nevron, Lauzoril, Lallara, or Samas Kul. Clasping them in his left hand, he sang under his breath to send a message. To establish a connection over hundreds of miles.

  After a time, he felt the link establish itself, a sensation like a rope pulling taut. He concluded the first song and began another, cobbled together from the same tones, rhythms, and words of power that enabled a bard to shift himself instantly from place to place. Objects appeared to ripple and ooze as he undermined the integrity of the space in which they existed. Violet sparks fell from the air like snowflakes.

  Aoth had found a battlefield to his liking. True, he and his allies would have the Lapendrar at their backs—no practical way of avoiding that—but a bend in the river would protect their right flank, and a patch of woods—and the archers Gaedynn would station there—should keep the enemy off the left. In addition, his side had claimed the high ground. True, it wasn’t much higher than the surrounding grassland, but it might make a difference even so.

  Once he was certain that Khouryn and the zulkirs’ commanders were setting up the battle formation properly, he, Jet, and half a dozen of his fellow griffon riders flew out to take another look at the foe. As before, he found himself intrigued by the steel behemoth marching in the lead. So-Kehur, autharch of Anhaurz, looked like a scorpion with some additional limbs and a mask of a glaring human face attached, and he—if “he” was the right pronoun—was as huge as the undead octopus-things that had burrowed up out of the ground at the battle of the Keep of Sorrows.

  His army looked nasty too. He had mounted lancers. Spearmen. Crossbowmen. Orcs, dread warriors, Red Wizards, and shuttered black wagons like coffins on wheels to carry entities unable to bear the sun. Their progress shrouded the marching columns in a haze of dust.

  “Can we beat them?” asked Jet.

  “Yes,” said Aoth.

  “Even though we’re still torn up from the last fight?” “Yes. Why the sudden doubts?”

  “Because I get peeks at what’s inside your head, O Mighty Captain.”

  Aoth snorted. “I’d be a fool if I liked the situation we’re in. But that doesn’t mean we can’t handle it. I suspect this So-Kehur, who- and whatever he is, has no idea of the kind of power that four zulkirs—”

  “Aoth …”

  It was Bareris’s voice crooning his name, and, startled, Aoth reflexively cast about to find the bard. For an instant, he saw him too, standing with Mirror in a corridor decorated with painted lizardfolk. Then the image melted away, exposing the mound of gray cumulus cloud behind it. A sense of connection, however, remained.

  Aoth felt elated and disgusted at the same time, the former because Bareris had succeeded in his mission, the latter because the timing could scarcely have been worse. But there was nothing to be done about the when of it.

  Responding to his master’s unspoken desire, Jet wheeled and raced back toward the river. Aoth surveyed the battle lines on the rise, spotted four scarlet-robed figures—and the attendants who generally followed them around—toward the rear of the formation, and sent Jet plunging down to alight beside them.

  “We have to go,” said Samas Kul. Aoth observed that the transmuter had abandoned his floating throne. Once again, he wore a harness made of white light to help him carry his bulk around.

  “I know,” said Aoth, “but I need another moment.” He dismounted, cast about, and found Khouryn already waiting to confer with him. The dwarfwore a leather arming cap but hadn’t yet donned the steel helmet that went on top of it. “Bareris just called us.”
r />   “I figured that out,” Khouryn said. “You’re sure you need to go too?”

  Aoth lowered his voice. “Someone should be there—someone besides Bareris and Mirror, I mean—who thinks that stopping the Unmaking is more important than saving his own skin.”

  Khouryn nodded. “I see that. Well, don’t worry. The army could use all the magic you five are taking away with you, but we’ll manage.”

  “I know you will.”

  “Now!” Nevron shouted.

  Aoth turned. The zulkirs had moved apart to clear a space among them, and eight soldiers stood inside it. Aoth and Jet hurried to join them.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked Aoth the griffon. “Stay here, and you can fight under the open sky.”

  Jet clacked his beak shut on empty air. It was one of several mannerisms the familiar used to expressed annoyance. “I already told you, I’m coming.”

  “Everyone, be silent!” Lallara snapped. She raised her staff, chanted words of power, and, one by one, the other archmages joined in.

  The world shattered into chaotic points of brightness, and Aoth had a sudden vertiginous feeling of hurtling like an arrow shot from a bow. Translating oneself through space wasn’t a part of his own specialized discipline, but other wizards had taken him on such journeys a time or two, so he was prepared for the sensation.

  He wasn’t ready for what happened next.

  The travelers should have appeared before Bareris and Mirror as quickly as a hummingbird flicks its wings. Instead, they abruptly found themselves suspended in a gray void that, Aoth realized, was scarcely even a space in the truest sense but rather a condition of transition and indeterminacy.

  He felt multiple pressures acting on him simultaneously. Something—the spell the zulkirs had cast, presumably—shoved him relentlessly forward. But he couldn’t go forward, because something else—Szass Tam’s wards against this form of intrusion—had him in its grip. Bareris and the archmages had weakened those defenses, but not enough, with the result that Aoth and his companions were like men trying to squeeze through a hole too small to accommodate them. The effect was painful and growing worse.

  One of the soldiers screamed, and then, armor groaning and bones snapping, his body crumpled in on itself and disappeared. Perhaps, ejected back into the real world, the corpse had fallen to the ground somewhere outside the Citadel.

  A second warrior’s body compressed as if it were no weightier than a sponge. Blood gushed from his mouth and nostrils.

  Lallara rattled off a spell of protection. The pressure holding Aoth in place abated, and he had a sensation of lurching forward. Then Szass Tam’s defenses clamped down again, arresting him. Another bodyguard shrieked as magic crushed him like a grape in a press.

  Lallara glared at Aoth. “Back at the Dread Ring,” she said, “I saw you conjure a prismatic wall.”

  He didn’t see how the spell could help them, but he was willing to follow her lead. The Firelord knew, he had no ideas of his own. “Where do you want it?”

  “It doesn’t matter! Just cast as many as you can.”

  The balance of pressures acting on Aoth’s body was becoming more excruciating by the moment, but he managed to grit out the incantation with the necessary precision. Multicolored radiance flared from the point of his spear, but instead of forming the usual barrier, it arced over to Lallara and cloaked her decrepit-looking form in rainbows, which coruscated as she chanted words of command. Aoth inferred that since a prismatic wall was a defensive enchantment, she, with her mastery of that form of magic, could siphon its power to strengthen her own spells.

  He cast another wall, then another, and she wrapped those around herself as well. Szass Tam’s wards mashed three more soldiers to pulp. Then the gray space burst apart.

  The surviving travelers materialized down the length of the corridor in which Bareris and Mirror awaited them. Aoth stumbled a step, then caught his balance. A warrior exclaimed at the sudden darkness, and, with a casual gesture, Lauzoril kindled a globe of floating silvery light.

  Aoth grinned at Bareris. “Nice work.”

  “How do you figure that?” Samas demanded, shrill with displeasure. “We nearly died. Both my guards did die.”

  Nevron sneered. “You’re a sad excuse for a zulkir if you need soldiers to protect you. But if you do, rest assured, we still have plenty.” He made a sweeping gesture to indicate his own person with all its talismans and tattoos, and, by implication, the demons and devils caged inside them.

  “We did experience an awkward moment,” Lauzoril said, “but in my view, the scheme worked as well as we reasonably could have expected. All the important people made it through, and a few of our underlings as well. So I suggest we turn our attention to finding Szass Tam.”

  Bareris had hoped that the zulkirs could cast a divination to pinpoint Szass Tam’s location, and in fact, Samas Kul tried. But for some reason, the magic simply indicated that the lich was somewhere above them. Since that took in the entire fortress, it wasn’t much help.

  Bareris struggled to quell a pang of impatience, to take solace in the thought that surely the lord of the Citadel couldn’t be hard to find. The castle must be crawling with servants who kept track of his whereabouts, the better to meet his needs.

  Lauzoril shrouded the company in an enchantment akin to some of the spells in Bareris’s arsenal. With luck, it would beguile anyone who happened to see them into believing they were familiar faces with legitimate business in the catacombs. Then they started looking for the way up.

  At first the trek was uneventful, with only the occasional scuff of a footstep, creak of leather, or Samas’s wheezing to break the silence. Rumor had it that the dungeons were as haunted and dangerous as the caverns below, but it took a while for one of its denizens to reveal its presence.

  Eventually, though, the intruders climbed a staircase and found themselves at a spot where two passages diverged from a common origin, and a murky painting of a farm without farmers or animals, its fields infested with tares and weeds, adorned a nearby wall. And suddenly Bareris’s hackles rose as he sensed a hostile scrutiny.

  He cast about but couldn’t find the source of the glare boring into him. “Aoth?” he said.

  The warmage peered around with his luminous, azure eyes. “Sorry. Even I can’t see it. Which may mean that somehow, there truly isn’t anything to see.”

  “I think it’s a ghost,” Mirror said, pity in his tone, “but terribly old and faded. It’s forgotten nearly everything.”

  It was what Mirror might have become, Bareris supposed, if the two of them hadn’t encountered one another in the Sunrise Mountains.

  “I can sic a demon on it,” Nevron said.

  “It hates us,” Mirror said, his resemblance to Bareris gradually bleeding out of his shadowy features, “but I don’t think it has the power to hurt us.”

  “Then ignore it, and move on,” Lallara said.

  That sounded good to Bareris. He took a stride and felt the phantom shift position. Which was contrary to common sense, since he hadn’t pinned it down to a specific location before. Yet even so, he somehow perceived a surge of movement, and then, though he still couldn’t see it, his instincts told him the spirit had planted itself squarely in front of the procession.

  “Does it think it can bar our path?” Samas asked.

  “Whatever it believes,” Lauzoril said, “I daresay we can walk right through it, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t.”

  “Wait,” Mirror said, his face oozing into a wavering mockery of Nevron’s brutal features. “I sense it’s trying to do something. Nothing harmful, just … something.”

  Slowly, as if the process required extreme exertion or concentration, a horizontal line scraped itself into existence on the painting of the deserted farm. The spirit then scratched a crude little arrowhead on the left end.

  “It’s pointing for us to turn around and go in the other direction,” Lallara said.

  “Because the ghost hop
es to send us into harm’s way,” Samas said. “You said we should ignore it, and for once I agree with you.”

  “Wait,” Mirror repeated. “I have a feeling it isn’t finished.”

  For several moments, it seemed he was mistaken. Then, even more slowly than it had drawn the arrow, the haunt scratched a pair of letters above it.

  Bareris felt a pang of excitement. “‘S. T.’ Szass Tam?”

  “How can it be?” Lauzoril replied. “The spirit has no way of knowing we’re hunting the lich and no motive to help us even if it does.”

  “Unless it’s trying to lead us into a trap,” Samas said, “just as I warned you.” His wand crawled out of his voluminous sleeve with its trimming of diamonds.

  Bareris peered around and strained to listen as well. As far as he could tell, he and his fellow intruders were alone with the haunt. “I imagine Szass Tam could think of better ways to lure us if he wanted to. Ploys less likely to rouse our suspicions. And remember, we tried to enter the castle in a way that would keep him from noticing.”

  Samas snorted. “‘Tried’ being the operative word.”

  “Maybe,” said Aoth, “the spook has a grudge against Szass Tam. It would hardly be the first undead that a necromancer had ordered around against its will. In any case, I think we should follow its lead, at least for a little way.”

  “Even if this is a trap,” Samas said.

  “We dared to come here,” the warmage replied, “because together, we should be able to overcome the worst our enemies can throw at us. Besides, if we haven’t been as sneaky as we hoped, and Szass Tam does know we’re wandering around in his cellar, we’ll have to fight him on ground of his choosing eventually.”