by K. J. Coble
“We would free you, Exalted One!”
What might have been a hint of fear played about her phantom features. “You have learned much, to have gotten this far. Do you then know what you must do? Do you know Who rules still within the crumbling walls of the Dead City?”
Xass Kham looked up at her. “Thyss-Mallik.”
Candle flames fluttered. One went out, left an inky tendril of smoke to stain the air as the name stained the mind.
“The Chosen of the Gods, till He rejected Them,” she said sneeringly. “The Undying atop his Dead Throne. Our Lord, Our Lover, Our Violator and Doom. He rules, still, from His Crypt, deep below the city, far from my vengeance and that of His peoples, guarded against the slavering hate of Our Children. None can leave. None can escape His madness, not even Him.”
“We will destroy him!” Xam Kham proclaimed.
The dead queen regarded him with disdain. “By what sorcery will you accomplish this?”
“No sorcery!” Urius growled. “By brute force.”
“Ha!” Thyss-Ulea’s scorn bit the air. “His sarcophagus is etched with the most hellish characters. Merely seeing them would melt your feeble minds! His burial chamber lies within an underground complex riddled with traps and false ends. Even I know not its layout and I am interred there! He is guarded by the Sleepless Dead, and worse—demons He consorted with in his insatiable thirst for dark knowledge and His desperation to find everlasting life.”
“We will succeed,” Urius insisted.
“To do so, you will require either the slipperiest of thieves,” she said, “or the most tried of wizards” she chuckled coldly “or the most brutishly ignorant of thugs.”
Urius glanced at Harald, still cowering behind his folded arms, and smiled back at the unliving queen. “I have just the thing.”
She glowered at him, eldritch light scathing behind her eyes. “We shall see.” She turned that gaze back on Xass Kham. “You have come further and with greater knowledge than any who have preceded you. Perhaps we can be of use to one another. If you can somehow slay the Violator, I will help you.”
“You help us first,” Urius said.
The queen flicked her glare back at him. “You take me for a fool?”
“I take nothing for granted. First, you must kill Emperor Bazul II of Scintallos. And you must do it in such a way that the rest of us are not implicated.”
She seemed to consider, lip curling ever so slightly in derision. “He is well-guarded I presume?”
“By warriors and wizards.”
The derision formed fully into a sneer. “Which is why you require me.”
Urius shrugged. “Do it and my men will clear out the Violator’s Crypt. They’ll burn up every trace of the bastard!”
“Such confidence,” she snorted. “But it won’t be enough. I’ve heard the crazed promises of mortals before.” She turned away.
“Highness, wait!” Xass squeaked.
Urius glared at the Xyxian noble. What does the snake play at now? But the ghost-queen was turning back to him with spectral eyebrows raised.
“Certainly, we can offer some token of our dedication?” he asked.
She considered him. “The outer wards. You know of which I speak?”
“They encircled the city, when it still lived as the seat of Thyss-Mallick’s realm. Any army intending to lay siege to it would find provisions spoiled, water poisoned, and disease rampant. Or so the ancient works suggest.”
“They also hold My Children and I in,” she replied. “With those broken I might at least cast my voice further, might draw another supplicant, should you all fail.” She shrugged. “You can at least offer me some future hope” a contemptuous gesture indicated the still-kneeling child-corpse “beyond a few trinkets pilfered from the dust.”
Xass glanced at Urius. “We will do it.”
“You know where to do it? And how?”
He nodded and licked sweat from his lips. “The Dome of Patar. And the Plaque of Law.”
She smiled and Urius’ flesh quivered as he saw her teeth fully, the sharp incisors, the fangs. He’d seen much of magic—too much—and knew some myths had a rotten core of truth to them. The myths of the Nightmare Lands of Old Xyxia spoke of blood-drinkers who took the essence of the young to remain so, themselves.
“Truly,” she purred at Xass, “you are knowledgeable. The wards endure, still, but are not strong. Read the final lines in reverse.” She winked. “And beware the Guardians. They are no longer strong, either, having gone long without much food. But they are still there.”
“And then you will kill Bazul?” Urius demanded.
She looked at him coldly. “You must lure him into the ruins. But, yes, once there, he will be meat for us.” Her eyes flared. “And Thyss-Mallik will burn for you!”
“He will,” Xass agreed.
She looked down her nose at him, as though not truly believing, but willing to see this most recent game through. “We have an agreement.”
The dead queen turned again and strode for the exit. Sand slithered up her calves with each step, and the muscles melted into it, leaving bones and tags of desiccated flesh. This dissolution continued as she reached the still-fluttering tent flaps and the slash of night sky beyond. Curves crumbled away as dust, left the skeletal mummy-thing.
But it paused, turned sharply, and partially-reformed—enough for the echo of Thyss-Ulea’s terrible beauty to flow back across bony crags and empty eye sockets. The dark, dark stare glimmered again and she pointed a finger towards the mummy-child. A purplish flame sputtered to life at her fingertip. She hissed a syllable of command. The dead thing straightened and turned to face her, seemed to sway in confusion.
With a twitch of the finger, the flame leapt the span to splash across the mummy-child’s chest. It stumbled back a step as the blaze spread to an inferno enveloping its whole body, scathing higher to ignite tentpoles and canvas roof. Hellish stink scoured Urius’ nostrils and eyes. The others coughed and gagged.
The child-thing screamed, not as it had in summoning its unholy mother, but in some existential, timeless agony.
“Win or lose,” Thyss-Ulea called over the boom of immolation, “you will not call on me again against my will!”
She puffed away in whorls of dust.
And the flames spread, filling the tent as the mummy-child’s scream warbled out with a final, fiery collapse and the candles burst in sprays of hot wax and purple light.
The conspirators fled with pain and fear into the night beyond.
URIUS LOOKED UPHILL to where his pavilion still smoldered and a handful of grooms still fought to smother the flames. The fire had spread alarm through the whole army camp, but the confusion allowed the Duke to play it off as revelry gone awry. And he had little fear those sifting through the embers would find much.
He’d felt the conflagration’s otherworldly, all-consuming heat.
“We can’t seriously be considering still dealing with this...thing,” a voice said from the tent in which Urius now stood.
He turned, fingering a nearly empty wine goblet and regarded the man, a Scintallan noble such as he. But the resemblance stopped there. The other man—in whose private encampment they now sought refuge—was a corpulent plug, barely fitting in a blue and gold-trimmed tunic tailored to hide that bulk. Double chins shined with grease as he took a bite out of a leg of mutton, shook again as he wiped drooping mustaches clean with the back of a pudgy hand.
“I suppose you have a better idea, Vynn?” Urius asked.
“Win the battle that’s coming!” Baron Vynncenzio Kleve of Perialus huffed. “Win the one after that, and seize the rest of Xyxia by force.”
“And allow Bazul to become even more popular?” groaned another man, the fifth of their group that’d participated in the summoning. Where Kleve was blubber, this one, Baron Artem Ech of Rawenna, was bone, sinew, and little else, a cadaverous, humorless man of liver-spots and sparse, white hair. “He’s already led a successful campai
gn, seizing the coastal settlements. He could retire now and claim victory.”
“He won’t,” Urius said, turning away from the open tent flaps and the view of the starry night over the fitfully-slumbering Scintallan army. “This isn’t just a military consideration; this is obsession.”
“We can’t give up!” Xass Kham insisted from where he sat, leaned against a table littered with plates and half-eaten food, looking drained by the evening’s ordeal. With sudden zeal, he straightened up and pointed a hunk of chewed bread at the others. “I didn’t sacrifice dozens of my followers and a sliver of my very soul in summoning Thyss-Ulea only to not use Her!”
“We can secure for you the Deathless Throne on the field of battle,” Kleve replied.
“Only some of my brothers come with this host that approaches from the interior,” Xass countered. “Destroy them and others will rise quickly. No, I must appear to have the favor of the Old Way, the Dead God-Kings. Then, the common folk will rise in my support.”
Urius smiled in seeming agreement. But he knew from listening to his Imperial cousin’s scheming that the will of Xyxia’s commons would matter less than a damn once the Scintallan legions reached the heartland. Xass might survive as a puppet, but the law and religion of the land would be that of Scintallos the Resplendent One.
“This thing,” Kleve said with a shiver. “This witch-ghost...it will consume us. We can’t trust it. I thought we could ride this particular tiger, but after seeing Her myself...” He shivered again. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t concede to this anymore.”
“Agreed,” Ech proclaimed, lifting his own mug of wine. “We’ve been lucky to not have attracted the attention of Bazul’s spies, as it is, let alone the White Guard.”
Mention of the last group sent an involuntary flinch through Urius.
The White Guard, the Empire’s secret service of wizard-priests, prowled the kingdom and this camp, alert for even the hint of influence from the Outer Dark. They couldn’t have missed the plotters’ supernatural antics on the hill, any more than the camp provosts were drawn to the fire that destroyed his pavilion. But events of the last six months had left them depleted, divided, and distracted as they rarely were. Urius had had a hand in that, a conspiracy with the Guard’s previous, late Master and an ancient artifact of particularly foul properties.
He could only hope they remained distracted.
“We’ve come too far!” Xass said, standing with his fervor. “You can’t be serious!”
“I am sorry, my prince,” Ech was saying, “but we cannot—”
“We will continue with the plan,” Urius cut him off with a voice as mild as it was commanding. He took a sip of wine as the others looked at him in shock. “We will go through with what we’ve started.”
“My Lord—”
“This is decided,” he said with more force. “It was decided when we first agreed to go along with it. There’s no turning back.”
Kleve’s chins wiggled as he fumbled for a response. “But the risk—”
“Is no more than it was when we embarked on this path. You’re merely realizing it now, really realizing it.” He finished the wine with a lusty swig and set the goblet aside. “It’s like the chill before battle, that last-second hope that maybe you can just flee, find some excuse for it.” A little smirk accompanied his words; Ech hadn’t seen a real fight in decades and Kleve could barely mount a horse, let alone get near a shield wall. “And like that, we must push through these hesitations. We are committed.”
“What of the White Guard?” Ech persisted.
“You let me worry about the Guard!” Urius snapped. “I’d remind you both, my lords, that while I appreciate your support in this, I also command it.” He met Ech’s quivering stare. “Baron, you’d be decorating a gibbet with your sparse bones by now if I hadn’t crushed your son’s little conspiracy and occupied your keep with my own troops.” He turned to Kleve. “And you, my friend, by Scintallos, you’d be a mess, by now. Gambling debts and murdered wives.”
“You’d know a thing or two about that, my lord,” Kleve grumbled with a hint of blubbery defiance.
“And I’d know a thing or two about covering it up,” Urius replied without showing annoyance. “Which you didn’t. The High Inquisitor had taken an interest your case and even my cousin still pesters me about my patronage of you.” He glanced back and forth between the pair. “You both owe me. More, I am your Duke.” He clenched his fist before them till the knuckles crackled. “And before long I will be your Emperor.”
Both looked down or away, not exactly bowing, more avoiding his fury.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Xass Kham spoke hesitantly into the ensuing quiet. “My good Duke Urius, we must dispel the wards around Zadam soon.”
“They will have to wait.”
“My Lord—”
“They have to!” Urius shook his head. Truly, he was allied with fools! “The armies of your brothers approach rapidly.”
He turned back to the open tent flaps, looked out across the glittered, red-jewel pattern of the Scintallan army’s thousand campfires. Night kept details of the terrain from him, but he knew from memory the sparsely-grassed hills upon which they now perched, and the long, dusty valley that stretched down into the wastes beyond them.
Bazul intended to debouch into those and array before the Xyxian multitudes, in the very shadow of Zadam. The valley at their back, then, would protect their line of retreat, and the ruins on one side, the hills on the other would protect his flanks against numbers rumored to be five times their own.
“If we don’t win this battle that’s coming, first, Prince Kham, that sliver of your soul you fret over will be joined by the rest in hell!” Urius smiled in gratification at the viperous Xyxian’s flinch. “No, we’ve got to focus on victory for now.”
“But after?” Kleve bleated. “If—when we win, how do we ago about the task? I mean, Bazul’s spies and the White Guard know the stories of Zadam. Certainly, it’ll be watched. How do we start the scheme in motion? Who does it?”
A belch broke the tension in the tent. Four of the conspirators winced and turned their collective gaze on the fifth of their number.
Harald Hegruum guzzled from a full trencher of wine, red rivulets spilling down his whiskers to stain the front of his gold-trimmed red tunic. A stream splashed over the sun-ball of the medallion dangling at his chest, the Sign of the Emperor’s Favor and the signifier of his rank as Commander of the Vothan Guard. Leaning back in his chair, he belched again, into the drink, sent droplets spraying, and gave it a shake as it emptied. With contempt, he cast it aside and wiped the mess away with the back of a beefy forearm. Blinking, the brute realized the others’ attention, and disgust.
Neither seemed to bother him.
“You know what we need,” Urius said to the giant. “Sneak-thieves and spies will be noticed by the very act of attempting to avoid notice. But a pack of drunken Vothans, plundering and carousing in ruins known to contain treasure will arouse only annoyance.”
The Vothan guffawed, but there was an edge of menace to it. “Of course! What else would the Emperor’s Dogs be doing—other than winning His wars for Him?”
Urius narrowed his eyes at the man. “It’s my wars you’ll be winning, soon, Harald.” The chilliness in his voice had the desired effect and the barbarian cringed. “I presume you can find a pack of reprobates to accomplish this?”
Hegruum snorted. “I know just the fool to lead them.”
“The troublemaker from your Fifth Cohort?”
“Exactly,” the Vothan replied.
“I’ll need to accompany them,” Xass spoke up. “I’ll be the one to intone the key phrases and dissolve the wards.” He glanced back and forth between Urius and Harald. “Can you trust this man?”
Harald exploded in a belly laugh that shook not only his monstrous form but the tentpoles and canvas they held up. “Trust him? Oh, certainly! You can trust Strayden of Starad to make an utter mess of anything
he’s involved in!”
Urius chortled quietly and favored the perplexed Xyxian prince with a smile.
“Which is exactly what the task calls for.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE BERBER CAVALRY erupted from the haze of the wastes into the light of morning, sun flashing off bridles and tulwars. A ululating howl rose into the shimmering air, but was lost in the thunder of their mounts’ hooves. They stretched out into a full gallop, kaftans fluttering wildly white, arrowheads glittering as the riders—horse archers renowned throughout the Mid Sea world—knocked missiles to short bows while gripping their reins in foaming teeth.
“Shield wall!” Strayden of Starad roared. “Gruzh bite all your lazy asses! Form the thrice-damned shield wall!”
The rumble of onrushing cavalry throbbed only slightly less than his skull and the jostle of his Vothan comrades into line of battle jarred loose the previous night’s drinking and excesses. He snarled as neighbors’ shields locked together, a rim catching his fingers before he got them withdrawn. He put the stinging hand to the grip of his sword, thought of drawing it, then paused.
The next moments would be decided by nerve, not steel.
“I will gut the first mewling bitch of you who so much as moves a heel backwards!”
The Fifth Cohort of the Vothan Guard tightened around him, sword brothers fused together in a mass of conical helms, sand-dulled chainmail, and iron-bossed circles of elmwood. They cringed, too, anticipating not the charge—no pack of waste wolves could break a Vothan line—but the swarm of stings they knew now to expect.
They’d been enduring them since dawn.
Strayden had known something had gone wrong the moment the Imperial outriders started falling back through their lines, pezenek scout-mercenaries hired to foil the very surprise sprung upon them. Bloody, drooping men on bloodier horses had bolted by and were suddenly replaced by these berber curs, who wheeled just shy of contact, loosing one-two arrows from those infernal short bows, and, kicking away, fired a last shot over their shoulder. Men in full mail had gone down as though their sinews had been cut, dead before they hit the dirt. Dead before anyone knew what in the Nine Hells was happening!