Unclean (29 page)

But the man didn’t move to attack, nor believing himself unobserved, did he continue skulking either. Instead, he dropped to his knees.

“Your Omnipotence,” he said. “Thank you for coming. I realize I’m not as appealing a sight as the whores who delivered my invitation, but you can dally with them later if you’re still so inclined. They understand they’re to await your pleasure.”

“How is it they answer to you? Duma Zan is paying them.”

“You assumed that, and Lady Zan believes you invited the twins to attend the feast as your guests. In reality, I hired them to serve as my go-betweens.”

“Who in the name of the Abyss are you?”

“Malark Springhill. We’ve never met, but perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

“Dmitra Flass’s man.”

“Yes. May I rise?”

Samas hesitated. “I suppose so. What’s this all about?”

“As you’ve surely heard by now, Szass Tam is convening the council of zulkirs. Tharchion Flass requests the honor of a private conversation with you, Yaphyll, and Lallara prior to the conclave.”

Samas blinked. “You mean, with the three of us alone? And Szass Tam none the wiser?” “Yes.”

“Everyone knows Dmitra is the lich’s creature. Is he trying to test our loyalty?”

“If you believe so, Your Omnipotence, then may I suggest that you attend the meeting, then hurry to Szass Tam and tell him what was said.”

Samas realized he’d been standing too long. His back was beginning to ache, and he felt a little short of breath. He cast about, spotted a marble bench, and lowered himself onto it. “What does Dmitra want to talk about?”

“I have no idea.”

Oh, you know, Samas thought, it’s just that the “First Princess of Thay” wants to tell us herself. “At least explain why you found it necessary to contact me in this melodramatic fashion.”

Malark grinned. “If I may say so, Master, you don’t know the half of it. To make it possible for me to reach all three of you zulkirs in time, my mistress conjured me a flying horse, and as 1 understand it, when an illusionist manufactures such a creature,

it isn’t altogether real. Recognizing its ephemeral nature yet still riding it high above the ground makes a man feel rather bold.

“But to answer the question,” the outlander continued, “you are watched. I should know. Some of the watchers report to me, but there may be others who report directly to Szass Tam, and if so, I’d rather they not tell him you and I have spoken.

“Now then: What answer should I deliver to Tharchion Flass?”

Frowning, Samas pondered the question. Like any sane person, he had no desire to run afoul of Szass Tam, yet as Malark himself had pointed out, he could always claim afterward that he attended the secret meeting as the lich’s loyal ally, to make sure no one was plotting against him. Meanwhile, his truest fealty was to himself, and he hadn’t prospered to the extent he had by ignoring any opportunity to find out what the other grandees of the realm were scheming or to accrue every conceivable advantage.

“Where and when does she want to see us?”

Bareris saw that he’d stepped into an overgrown but open stone well. It was like the shaft he’d climbed out of days before, only narrower. Falling, he dropped his sword and grabbed at the curved wall beside him but failed to find a handhold.

Below him, metal rang, and an instant later he slammed down on a hard, uneven surface. Once the shock of the impact passed, and it was clear the short drop had merely bruised him, he discerned that he and his weapon had landed on a portion of a staircase spiraling into the depths. The disquieting vacancy that was his phantom guide hovered farther down.

He wondered if the spirit had just attempted to lure him into a fatal fall. If so, it would be crazy to continue following it.

But if it wanted him dead, it could have just attacked him with its sword, or let the banshee kill him. It seemed more likely that it had simply expected him to spot the shaft before blundering over the edge.

In any case, Bareris might have nowhere to go but down. By now, more of Xingax’s hunters could easily have reached the ridge.

He rose, picked up his sword, and grumbled, “Warn me next time.” The entity drifted onward, and he stalked after it.

Before long they came to the first of the vaults opening onto the well. The chamber was a sort of crypt, with supine, somewhat withered-looking figures of pale stone, their arms crossed, laid out in rows on the floor. They could have been sculptures, but Bareris’ intuition told him they were corpses, coated with rock or ceramic or somehow petrified entirely. That suggested the ancients hadn’t excavated this place to serve as a village or fortress either. It was a warren of tombs.

The dead bodies brought the phantom wavering in and out of visibility as it took on the semblance of first one and then another, but it didn’t cling to any of them for long.

The crypts grew larger as Bareris and his guide descended. Stone sarcophagi, in some cases carved with the images of the dead, hid their occupants from view. Faded, flaking murals on the walls proclaimed their achievements and their adoration of their gods. The phantom borrowed faces from some of the carved and painted images as well, only to relinquish them just as quickly.

The bottom of the well was in view when the phantom led Bareris off the steps and into one of the vaults. A moment later, a gray, plump, segmented creature half as long as the bard was tall crawled from behind a bier. It raised its hairless, eyeless, but nonetheless manlike head and swiveled it in his direction.

Bareris’s body clenched into rigidity, and pain burned

through his limbs. He struggled to fill his lungs then chanted a charm of vitality.

The agony and near-paralysis faded. Intending to dispatch the sluglike creature before it could afflict him a second time, he lifted his sword and took an initial stride, but the spirit stepped to block the way, and a shadow blade extended from its murky hand.

Meanwhile, the crawling thing turned, retreated deeper into the crypt, and called out in a language Bareris had never heard before.

He hesitated. Despite the unpleasantness he’d suffered a moment before, it now seemed as if the worm-creature wanted to talk, not fight, and he certainly didn’t want to battle it and the wraith at the same time if it wasn’t necessary.

He sang to grant himself the gift of tongues then called, “I couldn’t understand you before, but I will now.”

“I said to keep your distance,” the eyeless being replied. “I don’t want to turn you to stone—not unless you mean me harm—but I can’t stop the force emanating from my body any more than you can stop the flow of blood through your veins.”

“I didn’t come to hurt you,” Bareris said. “
asked your … companion here to take me somewhere safe because other undead creatures are hunting me. I should warn you, they might track me into the well. They’ve sniffed out some of my other hiding places.”p>

“I doubt they’ll find this one,” the creature said. “Those who built it had a fear of necromancers tampering with their remains, so they took precautions to prevent such indignities. They laid their dead to rest in a secret place far from their habitations and also arranged for me to dwell here, to petrify the corpses and make them impossible to reanimate. Most importantly from your perspective, they laid down wards to keep a wizard’s undead servants from locating the tombs.”

Bareris felt the tension flow out of him, leaving a profound

weariness in its place. “That’s good to hear.”

“Sit. Mirror and I can offer no other comforts fit for a mortal man, but you can at least rest.”

The bard flopped down with his back against a wall. “Mirror is an apt name for your friend, 1 suppose. Mine is Bareris Anskuld.”

“I’m Quickstrike. A gravecrawler, as you can see.”

Bareris shook his head. “I have to take your word for it. I’ve never met or even heard of a creature like you before.”

“Truly? I wonder if the rest of my kind have vanishedfrom the world.” Quickstrike sounded more intrigued than dismayed by the possibility. “Men also called us ancestor worms.”

“Interesting,” Bareris said, and it was, a little. Despite the despair that had consumed him of late, he couldn’t help feeling somewhat curious about his new companions. Curiosity was a fundamental aspect of the character of any bard. “Are gravecrawlers undead?”

“Of a sort, but not the sort that was ever human or preys on humans, not as long as they behave themselves.”

“I assure you, I intend to. And Mirror is a ghost? “

“Ofa particularly brave and accomplished warrior, I believe. As you will have guessed, Mirror is simply the nickname I gave him, based on his habit of filching an appearance. He doesn’t remember his true name or face any longer, or much of anything really.”

“Why not?”

Quickstrike’s body rippled from head to tail in a manner that suggested a man stretching. “He fell victim to the power that destroyed his entire people. It’s a sad story, but one lean relate if you want to hear.”

Bareris had the feeling that, after centuries with only the mute, nearly mindless Mirror for company, Quickstrike enjoyed having someone to talk to, while for his part, he had nothing better to do than listen.

“Please do. I’ve spent much of my life collecting tales and songs.”

“Well, then. In its time, not so very long after the fall ofNetheril, a splendid kingdom ruled these mountains. It owed much of its greatness to a single man, Fastrin the Delver, a wizard as clever and powerful as any who ever lived.

“For much of his life, Fastrin worked wonders to benefit his people and gave sage counsel to their lords. Eventually, however, he withdrew from the world, and those few who saw him thereafter said he was troubled but couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why, which kept anyone from realizing just how dire the situation was. Fastrin wasn’t just morose, he was going mad.

“One sunny summer morning,” Quickstrike continued, “he emerged from his seclusion and started methodically slaughtering people, laying waste to one community after another, but he wasn’t content with simply ending the lives of his victims. His magic mangled their minds and souls. In many cases, it may have obliterated their spirits entirely. Even when it didn’t, it stripped them of memory and reason.”

“Like Mirror,” Bareris said.

“Yes. He was one of many who tried to stand against Fastrin. Sadly, their valor accomplished nothing. I suppose a few people must have escaped by taking flight, but at the end of the wizard’s rampage, the kingdom he’d done so much to build no longer existed. He then turned that same lethal, psyche-rending power on himself.”

“What was it all about? Even lunatics have reasons, though they may not make sense to the rest of us. Did anyone try to parley with him?”

“Yes,” said the ancestor worm. “Fastrin said he’d been robbed, and since he was unable to identijy the thief, everyone must die. It was the only way to be safe.”

Bareris shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“No one did, and Fastrin refused to elaborate.”

“May I ask how you learned all this?”

“When I was buried in this place? Well, even Fastrin couldn’t kill an entire realm in a day, or a tenday, and as the massacre continued, folk sought my counsel. Ancestor worms were accounted wise, you see. When I ate the flesh of the dead, before I grew beyond the need of such provender, I absorbed their wisdom. Alas, nothing I’d ever learned offered any remedy to the disaster.

“Later, when people stopped coming here, I ventured forth to discover if anyone remained alive. I didn’t find any humans, but by good fortune, I encountered a hunting party of ores, who then attacked me.”

Bareris smiled crookedly. ” ‘Goodfortune, ‘you say.”

“Very much so, because they didn’t all turn to stone. One simply bled out after I pierced it with my fangs, and when I ate some of it, it turned out that it had witnessed Fastrin’s suicide from a safe distance. Either the wizard didn’t notice, or since the ore hadn’t been a subject of the kingdom, it didn’tfigure in his delusions and he saw no reason to attack it. Either way, at least I now knew what had happened, grim though it was, so I returned home.

“Now tell me your tale.”

Bareris winced. For a moment, Quickstrike’s story had distracted him from his sorrows, and he had no desire to return to them. “It’s not worth telling.”

“When it involves you fleeing the undead? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Bareris reflected that the gravecrawler was, in fact, his host, so he owed the creature some accounting of himself. “Asyou wish. I don’t know how much you know about the kingdoms ofmen as they exist today. I hail from a realm called Thay…”

He tried to relate the tale as tersely as possible, without any of the embellishments he would have employed if he’d been enjoying himself or striving to tease applause and coins from an audience. Still, it took a while. Long enough to dry his throat.

He drank the last swig from one of his water bottles. “And

that’s it,” he concluded. “
warned you it wasn’t much of a story. A good one has a shape to it. Even if it makes you feel sadness or pity, it somehow lifts you up as well, hut mine’s just bungling, futility, and horror.”p>

Quickstrike cocked his eyeless head. “You speak as if the story’s over.”

“It is. It doesn’t matter if I make it out of these mountains and live another hundred years. I’ve already lost everything I cherished and the only fight worth fighting.”

“My existence and mind are different from yours. I don’t love, and long solitude that no human could endure suits me. All my knowledge of mortal thoughts and feelings is secondhand, and it’s possible that on the deepest level, I cannot understand, but I think you still have a path to walk, and Mirror will help you on your way.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanders, and despite the damage to his mind, he knows these peaks and valleys, these Sunrise Mountains, as your people name them. He can keep you hidden from your pursuers while he guides you back to your own country.”

“Does he want to? Why?”

“Because he’s empty. He needs something to reflect, to fill and define him, and you, thefirst live man we’ve seen since he manifested in these vaults centuries ago, can do so in a way that lifeless paintings and carvings and I, an undead, inhuman creature, cannot.”