Undead (37 page)

“I agree,” Thessaloni said, “but you haven’t heard everything yet.”

“The storm damaged a number of ships,” said Aoth, “and the

crews are making repairs. I’m no mariner, but I’ll try to give you the details if you want them.

“The bad weather scattered the fleet as well. It will take some time for it to gather back together. But the really bad news is that the necromancers are chasing us. Somehow, they put their own fleet in the water. They’ve also got undead sea creatures swimming among their vessels, and skin kites and such flying above them.”

“Damn Szass Tam!” Nevron snarled. “Can we make it to the Alaor before he catches up with us?”

“No,” Thessaloni said. “The storm blew us east of the islands. The necromancers would intercept us en route.”

“I thought we brought the priesthood of Umberlee along with us,” Lallara said. “Someone remind me, what use are they, if they can’t bend the wind and the tides to our advantage?”

“You Masters obviously comprehend mystical matters far better than I,” Thessaloni said, “but as I understand it, Szass Tam’s spellcasters are still wrestling with ours for control of the weather, and at the moment, the enemy is having more success than we are.”

Lauzoril cocked his head. “Could Szass Tam catch us if we headed farther east and south?”

Thessaloni felt a stab of annoyance at the obvious tenor of his thought and did her best to mask her feelings. “Possibly not, Your Omnipotence. Not soon, anyway.”

“But then what?” Lallara asked. “Do we beg for sanctuary in Mulhorand? Do you imagine they love us there, and will give us estates to rule? I think I can guarantee you a chillier reception. We have to reach the Alaor and the colony cities and confirm our mastery of them if we’re to have any sort of lives at all.”

Thessaloni had never liked Lallara. Why would anyone feel fondness for a woman who went out of her way to be waspish and obnoxious? But she liked her now.

Samas articulated the logical corollary to Lallara’s observation. “If that’s still our objective, then we need to fight. Can we win?” “Yes,” Thessaloni said.

Lauzoril gave her a skeptical frown. “You seem very sure of yourself.”

“I am.” It was an exaggeration, but she’d long ago learned that few things were more useless than a captain who dithered and hedged. “Masters, with all respect, over the years I’ve built you the best navy in eastern Faerun. Perhaps you’ve forgotten, because, the Bitch Goddess knows, for the past decade the fleet has had little to do. You’ve been fighting a land war, and our only tasks have been to intercept smugglers trying to convey supplies and mercenaries to Szass Tam, and to discourage raiders hoping to take advantage of the weakness of a Thay divided against itself.”

She smiled. “But by the Bitch’s fork, it’s a sea war now, and your sailors are eager to prove their mettle. We don’t care what fearsome powers Szass Tam possesses, or how many ores, zombies, and whatnots are riding on his black ships. They’re landlubbers, and we’re anything but. Give me leave to direct the battle as I see fit, and I promise you victory.”

The zulkirs exchanged glances, and then Samas smiled. “That makes me feel a little better.”

When she sensed that the sun was gone, Tammith arose from the hold to find the griffon riders trying to saddle their mounts. The beasts were skittish, fractious, and liable to screech and even snap. They were creatures of mountain and hill, and according to Brightwing’s grumbling as translated by Aoth, they didn’t like the crowding, the rolling deck, the expanses of water to every side, or any other aspect of the sea voyage.

But Brightwing possessed enhanced intelligence and a psychic link with her master, and Bareris had used his music to forge a comparable bond with Winddancer. No doubt for those reasons, the two officers had succeeded in preparing their steeds for battle in advance of the soldiers under their command. Now they stood in the bow gazing west, where the sky was still red with the last traces of sunset. Looking like the champion he’d been in life, Mirror hovered behind them.

Tammith judged that it would be easier to float over the mass of irritable griffons and their riders than to squirm her way through them, so she dissolved into mist. The transformation dulled her senses, but not so much as to rob her of her orientation, particularly with the forbidding pressure of the sea defining the perimeter of the deck as plainly as a set of walls. She flowed over the heads of beasts and legionnaires and congealed into flesh and bone at Bareris’s side. He smiled and kissed her, and she resisted the impulse to extend her fangs, nibble his lips, and draw blood to suck.

“I thought I might wake to find you fighting,” she said, “or even that the battle was already over.”

Bareris grinned. “That’s because you haven’t fought at sea. It takes at least as long for fleets to maneuver for position as it does with armies on land.”

“But it won’t be long now,” Mirror said. The sword in his scabbard disappeared, then reformed in his hand, the blade lengthening like an icicle. A round shield wavered into existence on his other arm.

Aoth nodded and hefted his spear. “It’s time to get into the air.”

“I wish I could fly with you,” said Tammith to Bareris. “It bothers me that we won’t be together.”

“That would be my preference, too,” he said. “But I’ll be most useful riding Winddancer, and we all need to do our best if we’re

going to smash through Szass Tam’s fleet. So—one last fight, and then it’s on to the Wizard’s Reach and safety.”

She smiled. “Yes, on to Escalant. Just be careful.”

“I will.” He squeezed her hands, and then he and Aoth strode back to their steeds.

The survivors of the Griffon Legion leaped into the sky with a prodigious clatter and snapping of wings. Mirror floated upward to join them on their flight.

Night could blind an army or a fleet, sometimes with fatal consequences. Accordingly, the council’s spellcasters sought to illuminate the black, heaving surface of the sea by casting enchantments of illumination onto floats, then tossing them overboard. But the results were only intermittently useful. As often as not, the glowing domes revealed only empty stretches of water, and when they showed more, the necromancers were apt to cast counterspells to extinguish them. Nevron donned a horned, red-lacquered devil mask invested with every charm of augmented vision known to the Order of Divination, and it gave him a far superior view of what was transpiring.

It wasn’t an especially encouraging view, consisting as it did of dozens of black ships crewed by rotting corpses, gleaming wraiths soaring above the masts, and skeletal leviathans swimming before the bows, all rushing to annihilate the council and its servants. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of fear.

But a true zulkir—as opposed to useless pretenders like Kumed Hahpret and Zola Sethrakt—learned not merely to conceal such weakness but to expunge it as soon as it appeared. Nevron quashed the feeling by reminding himself that it was his destiny to reign as a prince in one of the higher worlds. This little skirmish was merely practice for the infinitely grander

battles he would one day fight to win and keep his throne.

When he was certain he was his true self, all foxy cunning and steely resolve; he pivoted toward the other conjurors on the deck. “Now,” he said. “Bring forth your servants.”

His minions hastened to obey him—some by chanting incantations, some by twisting a ring or gripping an amulet—and demons, devils, and elemental spirits shimmered into view until the deck and the air overhead were thick with them, and the warship reeked of sulfur. An apelike bar-luga slipped free of its summoner’s control long enough to grab a sailor and tear his head off.

Most of Nevron’s followers had called the entities with whom they’d dealt most frequently—the same spirits they would have summoned on land, and that was all right. Most of the creatures could reach the enemy by flying or translating themselves through space. But Nevron knew how to bring forth and control every extradimensional creature the Order of Conjuration had ever catalogued, and he suspected that denizens of the infernal oceans might prove even more useful in this particular confrontation.

He chanted and, infuriatingly, nothing happened. The blight afflicting magic had ruined his spell. Some of the entities caged in the talismans he carried laughed or shouted taunts. He gave them pain enough to turn their mockery to screams, then repeated the incantation.

Forces wailed and shimmered through the air, and then the patch of sea directly beneath him churned as a school of skulvyns materialized. Lizardlike with black bulging eyes and four whipping tails, the demons raised their heads and looked to him for instructions. Other Red Wizards, sailors, and even spirits started drawling their words and moving with languid slowness as the hindering aura emanating from the swimming creatures took them in its grip.

Nevron told the skulvyns who and what to destroy, then recited a second incantation. A gigantic wastrilith appeared in the sea, its mass displacing enough water to rock the ship. The demon resembled an immense eel with a vaguely humanoid upper body, round amber eyes, and a mouth full of fangs. Nevron didn’t have to speak to it out loud, because wastriliths could communicate mind to mind. When it learned what he required of it, it roared with glee and hurtled toward one of the black ships. It reared, spewed, and raked the enemy vessel’s main deck with a stream of seawater heated hot enough to scald. Blood ores screamed.

All right, Nevron thought. It appeared that his wizardry was working properly again, so perhaps it was time to attempt something challenging. His grating words of command cracked the planks under his feet and made the people around him cringe, even though they couldn’t understand them. A sailor’s nose dripped blood. The spirits locked in Nevron’s rings and amulets howled and gibbered in fear.

The myrmixicus’s arrival triggered a sort of purely spiritual shock that staggered nearly everyone, as if the mortal world itself were screaming in protest at having to contain such an abomination. Like the wastrilith, the demon resembled an enormous eel but was even bigger. Its head was reptilian. Beneath that were four arms, each wielding a scythe, and below those, six tentacles. Its tail terminated in a lamprey mouth.

Nevron sent it at the black ships, and a zombie kraken swam to intercept it. The undead creature threw its tentacles around the tanar’ri and dragged it toward its beak. Except for making sure that its arms didn’t become entangled, the myrmixicus didn’t resist. It wanted to close, and when they came together, it hacked savagely, shredding its foe into lumps of carrion.

Then it resumed its swim toward the enemy fleet. A ghostly dragon, a vague shape made of sickly phosphorescence, rose from the depths to challenge it.

Nevron realized the wizards around him had fallen quiet. He looked around and discovered his followers watching the myrmixicus in awe and fascination.

So had he, for a moment, but that wasn’t the point. “What’s the matter with you?” he shouted. “Do you think this is a pageant being staged for your amusement? Keep conjuring, or you’re all going to die!”

The ghost of a woman, slain by torture from the look of her, flew at Aoth and Brightwing. The mouth in the phantom’s eyeless face gaped as if the hapless soul had died screaming, and burns and puncture wounds mottled the gaunt, naked form from neck to toe. Its limbs flopped as though suspension or the rack had separated the joints.

Aoth tried to throw flame from the head of his spear. Nothing happened.

The ghost reached out to plunge its tattered fingers into his body. Brightwing swooped and passed under the insubstantial figure.

Certain the ghost would give chase, Aoth twisted around in the saddle and tried again to summon flame. To his relief, a fan-shaped blaze of yellow fire leaped from his weapon to sear the spirit.

But though its entire form contorted like a sketch on a sheet of crumpling parchment, it wasn’t destroyed by the fire. It kept hurtling forward and thrust its hand into Brightwing’s backside just above the leonine tail. She screamed, convulsed, and fell. Anchored to the griffon’s body, the ghost snatched at Aoth, its skinny arm stretching like dough.

Aoth jerked his upper body away, leaning over Brightwing’s neck, and although it came so near he felt the sickening chill of

it, the ghost’s hand fell short. He drove his spear into its chest, snarled a word of power, and channeled destructive force into the weapon.

The ghost dissolved. Brightwing spread her wings and arrested her plummet.

“Are you all right?” Aoth asked.

“Yes,” Brightwing croaked, her voice more crow than eagle. He studied the black, suppurating sore where the phantom had wounded her. “Are you sure?” “I said yes!”

“All right, but let’s take a moment to catch our breaths.”

The griffon veered, climbed, and carried him to a clear section of sky. Aoth took the opportunity to study the battle raging around and beneath them.

His fire-touched eyes could see nearly everything clearly, even at a distance and in the dark, but at first he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make sense of it all. So much was going on.

Swimming devils and zombie leviathans tore at one another.

Archers and crossbowmen shot their shafts. Ballistae threw enormous bolts, and mangonels, stones. Wizards hurled bright, crackling thunderbolts and called down hailstones.

Galleys and cogs maneuvered, seeking the weather gage or some comparable advantage. One vessel drove its ram into the hull of another. Dread warriors flung grappling irons, seeking to catch hold of a nearby ship and drag it close enough to board. Aquatic ghouls tried to clamber onto what had been a fishing boat, with nets still lying around the deck, while legionnaires jabbed at them with spears.

Fighting from one of the largest warships, Iphegor Nath and some of the Burning Braziers alternately hurled holy fire at enemy vessels and at any particularly dangerous undead that wandered within range. Suddenly, quells appeared among them, shifted through space by the wizards in their midst.

Shadowy figures in swirling robes, glowing mystic sigils floating in the air around them, the apparitions were capable of sundering a priest from the source of his power. Warrior monks, the Braziers’ protectors, charged the quells with burning chains whirling in their hands.