Undead (7 page)

The knight was undead, its face a rotting skull inside its open helm. Its flying steed, with its night black coat, blazing eyes and breath, and hooves shrouded in flame looked demonic, but nonetheless alive.

If so, Bareris thought, it should be susceptible to enchantments that couldn’t affect its master. Murder, his new griffon, maneuvered to keep away from it while he sought to sing it blind.

When the horse balked, jolting the corpse-knight in the saddle, he knew he’d succeeded. He sent Murder streaking at it.

The undead knight spurred its mount and hauled on the reins, but couldn’t induce the sightless, panicked creature to move in any way useful for defense. Abandoning the effort, it braced its lance in both gauntleted hands and aimed to impale Murder as he closed.

Bareris leaned forward, swung his spear, and knocked his adversary’s weapon out of line. Murder’s talons stabbed deep into the black horse’s body, and for a moment, they all fell down the sky together. Then the griffon pulled his claws free, lashed his wings, and flew clear. The knight and his destrier smashed into the ground.

Bareris cast about to locate the next threat. He couldn’t find one. For the moment, the patch of air in which he and Murder had been fighting was clear of foes.

Good. He and Murder needed a chance to catch their breath. While they did so, perhaps he could figure out how the battle was progressing.

When he surveyed the battlefield, he decided it was going well. Hammered by flights of arrows and quarrels, by the devils and elementals of the conjurors and the firestorms and hailstones of the evokers, by sword and mace and spear, Szass Tam’s battle lines were buckling, and his warriors had nowhere to retreat. Yielding to the pressure only moved them closer to the walls of the Keep of Sorrows, where the defenders maintained their own barrages of missiles and spells.

Ten years we’ve been fighting, Bareris thought, and by dusk it could all be over.

It should have been cause for rejoicing, but he felt empty. He Scowled and looked around for something else to kill.

To So-Kehur’s relief, the keep’s temple, with its altars to Kossuth, Bane, and an assortment of other deities, was empty of priests. No doubt they were all outside tending the wounded and casting maledictions on the undead.

Of course, even had the clerics been in attendance, it was unlikely they would have objected to So-Kehur visiting the shrine. When the defenders of the keep learned that a siege was imminent, they’d surely started watching for spies and scrying. But by entering the castle despite the northern army’s supposed efforts to stop them, and then delivering good news, he and Muthoth had diverted all suspicion from themselves. As the castellan had promised, they were honored guests.

Still, some busybody might have found it odd if one of the newcomers showed an interest in the crypts. So-Kehur appropriated a votive candle and hurried down the stone steps, getting himself out of sight before anyone wandered in.

The wavering yellow candlelight revealed massive sarcophagi, the lids sculpted into the likenesses of those who rested inside. Slabs of marble graven with names, titles, and dates, with mottos, coats-of-arms, and the sentiments of the bereaved were mortared into the surrounding walls. Apparently no aristocrat had died in a while, for dust lay thick and cobwebs choked the walkways. The air smelled of dampness and decay. So-Kehur extracted the scroll Szass Tam had given him, unrolled it, and hesitated.

He wasn’t afraid of the act he was about to perform for its own sake. He sometimes thought that his necromancy and the entities it summoned were the only things that didn’t frighten him. But

once he cast the spells, everyone in the fortress would know him for the enemy he truly was. Everyone would do his or her utmost to slaughter him on sight.

But it didn’t matter that he was afraid. He was mind-bound, and had no choice. The enchantment might not poison a man if he made an honest effort to carry out Szass Tam’s orders and then gave up when the task proved impossible. The magic was subtler than that. But it would smite So-Kehur if he didn’t even try.

He read the first trigger phrase on the vellum, releasing the spell contained therein. Stone grated and crashed as coffin lids slid open and marker stones fell away from the vaults behind them. So-Kehur winced at the racket, but doubted anyone would actually hear it. The battle raging outside the castle was even noisier.

He recited the second trigger. A cold breeze gusted, nearly blowing out his candle. The smell of decay thickened, and the spiders skittered in their webs.

A dead man sat up in his coffin. Another stuck his head out of a newly opened hole in the wall.

Some of the dead, more recently deceased or artfully embalmed, retained a goodly portion of their flesh. Others had deteriorated to mere rickety-looking skeletons, but it didn’t matter. Infused with the power of necromancy, they could all fight, and many already carried swords and axes. As befitted knights and warriors, they’d been laid to rest with their weapons and armor.

Milky eyes fixed on So-Kehur. Empty, mold-encrusted orbits turned in his direction. The dead awaited his command.

“Range through the castle,” he said, “and kill everyone you find, except for me and a man with the fingers missing on his right hand.” The way Muthoth liked to insult and bully him, it would serve him right if the dead went after him as well. But

however obnoxious, the other necromancer had been So-Kehur’s partner in desperate endeavors for a long time, and he was the only ally who could stand with him now.

Or at least the only one who thought and spoke and breathed.

Muthoth sat cross-legged on the floor of the bedchamber. He breathed slowly and deeply, from the belly. He sank deeper and deeper into his trance, deeper and deeper into himself, until he reached the cell or psychic cyst that caged the thing within.

So-Kehur had smuggled death into the Keep of Sorrows on a roll of parchment. Recognizing Muthoth as a more powerful necromancer and a stronger will, Szass Tam had chosen him to bring an even more terrible weapon to bear, and to carry it entombed in his own mind. At times the oppressive weight and the whisper of alien thought had nearly driven him mad, and he was eager to put an end to the torment.

Which didn’t mean he could afford to rush. The entity was inimical to all life, but since it hadn’t enjoyed being imprisoned any more than he’d enjoyed containing it, it now hated him more than anything else in the world. Accordingly, he recited the incantation of release, or rather, of transfer from one form of binding to another, with the utmost care.

The caller in darkness, as such abominations were known, howled up around him in that realm of concept and image they both occupied. The entity was a vortex of dark mist with anguished faces forming and dissolving inside it. Their shrieks pounded at him. They’d blast his mind apart if he let them, then tear the pieces out to add to the collective agony that was their source.

Steeling himself against the onslaught, Muthoth repeated the words of command he’d just recited. The caller recoiled from him, then vanished.

For an instant, Muthoth was confused, then he realized it had transferred itself to the physical plane. It hoped the surface of his mind would prove vulnerable to assault while his awareness was focused deep inside.

He hastily roused himself, suffered a fleeting illusion of extreme heaviness as his psyche fully meshed with his corporeal form. The demented ghost—or amalgam of ghosts—raved around him. It looked just as it had inside its quasi-imaginary dungeon, but its howls were silent now, albeit as palpable and hurtful as before.

He recited the spell a third time, and the caller flinched from him. Its power stopped beating at him, although the psychic howling didn’t abate.

“Go forth,” he panted, “and kill every living person you meet, unless I tell you otherwise.” He intended to trail along behind the caller, where he’d be safe. He hoped that if the entity encountered So-Kehur, he’d spot his fellow necromancer in time to keep the thing from attacking. If not, well, the fat fool wouldn’t be much of a loss.

Still, So-Kehur had a role to play. As the dead men he’d already roused proceeded with the work of slaughtering the garrison, he’d make new zombies of the fallen, just as Muthoth intended to reanimate the caller’s victims. As the defenders’ numbers dwindled, the ranks of their enemies would swell.

Xingax liked to ride on the shoulders of a hill-giant zombie. It made folk assume that a being who resembled an oversized, leprous, and grossly deformed fetus couldn’t get around by

himself, and he liked being underestimated in that way. It gave him an edge when ill wishers sought to kill him.

Or rather, it had worked that way in the past, but he’d discovered that in the midst of a battle like this, his mount was a liability. Even at the center of the northern host, sticking up higher than the heads of the people around him increased the likelihood of being pierced by arrows or fried by flares of arcane energy. So now he simply floated in the air beside Szass Tam.

Xingax disliked the roaring, dangerous chaos that was warfare, and privately felt that he shouldn’t have to endure it. He was an inventor, sage, and artist, not a brute. Thus, it galled him to recognize that he himself was responsible for his presence at the battle. After Bareris Anskuld had mutilated him, he’d repaired the damage with a hand and eye harvested from the body of the fallen nighthaunt Ysval, then learned to wield the abilities the grafts conferred. As a result, Szass Tam had incorporated him into his battle strategy.

The lich had created half a dozen hovering eyes, then sent them soaring up into the sky. Periodically he opened his mind to the sights the disembodied orbs beheld. It allowed him to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole. He signaled the end of such an interlude by pivoting toward Xingax.

“Is it time?” Xingax asked.

The lich smiled. “It is, indeed. Our enemies smell victory. They’re pushing in hard, and that means they won’t be able to disentangle themselves from us later on. So remember what I taught you, and use your power.”

Xingax closed his natural, myopic eye so only Ysval’s round white orb could see. He raised the nighthaunt’s oversized, shadow black hand to the heavens, clenched the clawed fingers into a fist, and strained with all the considerable force of his will.

Responding to his summons, darkness streamed across the

sky. For the Keep of Sorrows, night fell early, and across the length and breadth of Szass Tam’s army, wraiths and other fearsome entities exploded from the wagons, tents, and pools of shadow used to shield them from the light of day.

Tammith looked around. The horses stood ready, but she couldn’t see any clear path along which she and her command might ride to engage the enemy.

Fortunately, the vampires of the Silent Company, made up largely of progeny Tammith had created over the years, had other ways of reaching the foe.

“We fly!” she called, then dissolved into bats. Her warriors each transformed into a single such creature. None of them had inherited her trick of breaking apart into an entire swarm.

She led her spawn over clusters and lines of combatants to a company of mounted knights. By the looks of it, they’d just finished butchering a band of ghouls.

The Silent Company dived at the southerners. Midway through her plummet, Tammith yanked her bats back into a single human body. It was a difficult trick and it hurt, but it was necessary, because her target wore plate armor and had his visor down. The bats wouldn’t be able to hurt him.

She crashed into the knight, swept him from the saddle, and hurled him to the ground beneath her. The impact probably killed or at least crippled him, but she ripped the visor off his helm and drove her stiffened, mail-clad fingers deep into his head to be sure.

She sprang to her feet, found another target, and stared at his face. Addled by her hypnotic power, he faltered, giving her time to draw her sword. As she leaped up at him, his wits returned, and he swung his shield to fend her off. He was too slow, though,

and the point of her sword punched through his breastplate into his vitals.

Meanwhile, the other vampires attacked like lethal shadows, until all the riders were dead. Tammith looked around for new foes and saw the griffon riders wheeling and swooping overhead.

Since the Silent Company could fly, it could engage the zulkirs’ aerial warriors—but no. By all accounts, Bareris was still alive, and had joined the Griffon Legion.

Of course, she didn’t love him anymore. The predator she’d become was incapable of loving anyone. Sometimes she even hated him for failing her as he had.

But still: no. Now that the battlefield was dark, Szass Tam had other warriors capable of fighting in the air, and the Silent Company could find plenty of work to do on the ground.

Malark considered himself as able a combatant as any in Thay. He had, after all, had centuries of life to perfect his disciplines. But he couldn’t use them to best effect standing in a shield wall or charging in a line. The philosopher-assassins of the Monks of the Long Death hadn’t modeled themselves with those sorts of group endeavors in mind.

Thus he preferred to fight on the fringes of the battle, and found plenty of enemies to occupy him—skirmishers, warriors separated from their companies, and undead horrors so savage and erratic that even the necromancers mistrusted their ability to control them. Accordingly, they didn’t even try, just shooed them off in the general direction of the zulkirs’ army to rampage as they would.

He kicked an ore in the chest and burst its heart, then used his batons to shatter the skull of a yellow-eyed dread warrior. He

dispatched foe after foe, all the while exulting in the slaughter. Until the ground began to shake.

The first jolt knocked some warriors to the ground. Malark took a quick step to keep his balance, then glanced around to see what was happening.

On the plain to the north, entities huge as dragons heaved up out of the earth. Dirt showered away to reveal forms akin to those of octopi, but shrouded in moldy cerements. Vast black eyes glaring, tentacles clutching and churning the soil, they dragged themselves toward the rear of the legions of Eltabbar.