Chapter four
15-28 Tarsakb, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

With his swarthy skin, the prisoner was evidently Rashemi, although if he'd ever been stocky, as his kind often was, hunger had whittled that quality away. He lay atop the torture rack wirh his arms pulled up behind him. To Malark Springhill, who fancied he might know more about how to destroy the human body than anyone else in Thay, its tradition of sophisticated cruelty notwithstanding, it was clear that the torture had already dislocated the prisoner's shoulders, and that his knee, hip, and elbow joints had also started to come apart.
Still, the Rashemi had yet to provide any answers. It was an impressive display of defiance.
Malark turned the winch another eighth of a rotation. The prisoner gave a strangled cry, and something in his lower body tore audibly. The sweaty, bare-chested torturer, speckled with little scars where embers had burned him, tried not to look as if he resented an amateur usurping his function.
Malark leaned over to look the prisoner in the face. "I want the names of your fellow rebels."
The Rashemi croaked an obscenity.
Malark twisted the windlass a little farther, eliciting a gasp. "I know you've had contact with Bareris Anskuld. Tell me how to find him."
Although it didn't really matter if he did. Over the course of the past ninety years, Bareris and Mirror had done more than any of the other malcontents left in the realm to hamper Szass Tarn's government, but even so, their efforts hadn't amounted to much. Still, Malark had been Bareris's friend, and given the chance, he would gladly rescue the bard from the vileness that was undeath.
That final iota of stretching had evidently rendered the captive incapable of verbal defiance, but, panting, he shook his head and clenched his jaw shut. Closed his eyes too, as though blocking out the sight of his tormentors and the dank, shadowy, torchlit dungeon would make his situation less real.
Malark wondered if one of the spells he'd mastered under Szass Tarn's tutelage would loosen the Rashemi's tongue, then decided he didn't care. It didn't really matter if he unmasked a few more impotent rebels, either. In truth, the success of such efforts had never mattered, only maintaining the appearance that the ruler of Thay was preoccupied with the same sort of trivia as the average tyrant, and with the Dread Rings completed, even that necessity had all but reached an end.
So why not let this hero perish with his spirit unbroken, his secrets preserved? Why not grant him that greatest of all treasures, a perfect death?
Malark turned the wheel. "Talk!" he snarled, meanwhile silently urging, Don't. You only have to hold out a little longer.
"Master—" the torturer began.
Malark turned the wheel. "Talk!" Up and down the length
of the rebel's body, joints cracked and popped as they pulled apart.
"Master!" the torturer persisted. "With all respect, you're giving him too much too fast!"
Doing his best to look as if the Rashemi's recalcitrance had angered him, Malark kept on twisting the winch. "Talk, curse you! Talk, talk, talk!"
The prisoner's spine snapped.
Malark rounded on the torturer. "What just happened?"
Once again, the fellow made a visible effort to cloak his irritation in subservience. "I'm sorry, Your Omnipotence, but his back broke. For what it's worth, he might live a little while longer, maybe even a day, and he won't enjoy it. But he can't talk anymore." He hesitated. "I tried to warn you."
"Damn it!" Still pretending to be furious, Malark ended the prisoner's ordeal by chopping his forehead with the blade of his hand. The blow broke the man's skull and drove scraps of bone into the brain within.
The torturer sighed. "And now he won't even suffer."
An impish urge took hold of Malark, and he glared at the other man. "This rebel possessed vital information, and now we'll never learn it. Szass Tam will hear of your incompetence!"
The torturer paled. Swallowed. "Master," he stammered, "I beg you, forgive my clumsiness. I'll do better next time."
Malark grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. "It's all right, my friend, I'm only joking." He made a gold coin appear between his thumb and forefinger, one of the petty tricks that had come to amuse him since he'd mastered sorcery, and pressed it into the torturer's hand. "Have a drink and a whore on me."
The torturer stared after him in relief and confusion as Malark climbed the stairs connecting the pocket hell of the dungeon with the guard station overhead.
Outside the small keep, under a gray sky fouled with smoke and
ash from one of High Thay's volcanoes, the Citadel went about its business. Much of the kingdom was desolate now, particularly in the highlands, but Szass Tarn's capital city still thrived. Masons slowly carted blocks of marble and granite through the streets, eliciting snouted imprecations from the traffic stuck behind them. Legions of vendors cried their wares, and beggars their afflictions. The naked thralls in the slave markets shivered in the cold mountain air.
People scurried out of Malark's way, then peered curiously after him. He supposed it was only natural. He was, after all, the only one of Szass Tarn's zulkirs not Mulan nor even Thayan-born, the only one not undead, and the only one who customarily walked around without a retinue of lackeys and bodyguards.
He realized his station all but demanded the latter, but he just couldn't persuade himself to endure the inconvenience. Over the course of a long, long life, he'd discovered that clerks and their ilk rarely did anything for him that he couldn't do more efficiently and reliably for himself. And to say the least, a man who'd learned combat from the Monks of the Long Death scarcely needed soldiers to fend off footpads and assassins.
He turned a corner and the dark towers and battlements of the true Citadel, the fortress from which rhe surrounding city took its name, rose before him. Though Szass Tam had claimed it for his residence, he hadn't built it. The structure predated the founding of Thay itself and, according to rumor, was a haunted, uncanny place, with secrets still awaiting discovery in the caverns and catacombs beneath.
Malark had seen indications that rumor likely had it right, but it didn't much concern him. From his perspective, the important thing about the castle was that it was the focal point for the enormous circle of power defined by the Dread Rings, the place where a mage must position himself to perform rhe Great Work of Unmaking.
Pig-faced blood ores, lanky gnolls with the muzzles and rank fur of hyenas, and stinking corpses with gleaming yellow eyes, soldiers all in Thay's Dread Legions, saluted Malark as he passed through the various gates and courtyards, and he acknowledged them all without breaking stride. He was eager to reach his quarters and resume his study of a certain grimoire Szass Tam had given him.
But when he saw the raven perched on his windowsill, a tiny scroll case tied to one of its claws, intuition told him the book would have to wait.
The huge keep at the center of the Citadel had a round, flat roof. The wind flapping his scarlet robes, Szass Tam floated some distance above it. The elevation afforded him a good view of both the city spread out below him and the peaks of the Thaymount beyond. And, his sight sharpened by magic, he looked for the flaws in everything he beheld.
It was easiest to find them in people, ugly in body with their legs too long or too short, their wobbling, sagging flab, their moles, rotting teeth, and general lack of grace. Ugly in spirit, too, squabbling, cheating, every word and deed arising from petty lusts and resentments. And even the few who could lay some claim to comeliness of person and clarity of mind carried the seeds of disease and decrepitude, senescence and death.
The peoples' creations were simply their own failings writ large. Some of the buildings in the city were filthy hovels, and even the finer ones often offended against symmetry and proportion or, in their ostentation, betrayed the vanity and vulgarity of their owners. All would one day crumble just as surely as their makers.
It was perhaps a bit more challenging to perceive rhe imperfections in the mountains, snow capped except for the fuming
cones with fire and lava at their cores. Indeed, another observer might have deemed them majestic. But Szass Tam took note of the gaping wounds that were gold mines, and the castles perched on one crag or another. Men had marred this piece of nature, and even had it been otherwise, what was nature, anyway? An arena of endless misery where animals starved, killed, and ate one another, and, if they overcame every other obstacle to their survival, grew old and died, just like humanity. As they always would, until the mountains too wore away to dust.
Szass Tam turned his regard on himself. Except for his withered hands, he might look like a living man, and, with his lean frame, keen, intellectual features, and neat black goatee, a reasonably handsome one at that. But he acknowledged the underlying reality of his fetid breath, silent heart, and cold, leathery flesh suffused with poison. The idiot priests were right about one thing: Undeath was an abomination. He was an abomination, or at least his physical form was. He could scarcely wait for the moment when he would replace it.
A compactly built man in maroon and scarlet clothing climbed the steps to the rooftop. He had light green eyes and a wine red birthmark on his chin. In his altered state of consciousness, Szass Tam needed a moment to perceive the newcomer as anything more than another bundle of loathsome inadequacies. Then he recognized Malark Springhill and drifted back down to stand before him.
Malark bowed. "Sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing."
"I was meditating," Szass Tam replied. "Preparing for the ritual. When the time comes, I have to be ready to let go of everything. If I feel even a flicker of artachment or regret, it could ruin the casting. So I'm cultivating the habit of viewing all things with scorn."
The outlander grinned. "I hope knowing me doesn't put you
off your game. I mean, since I'm indisputably such a marvelous fellow."
Szass Tam smiled. "You've been a true friend this past century, I'll give you that. And I tell you again, I can recreate you in the universe to come."
"Then I'll tell you again, that's the last thing I want. I just want to watch death devour the world I know, and fall into darkness along with it."
"All right." Even after a long association, Szass Tam didn't fully comprehend Malark's devotion to death, only that it had been the response of a mind ill-prepared to deal with the unique stresses of immortality. But he was willing to honor his wishes. "Did you come to consult me about something in particular?"
Malark's expression grew serious. "Yes. I've heard from my agent in Escalant. The zulkirs—the old ones in exile, I mean—intend to mount an invasion of Thay within the next few rendays."
Szass Tam blinked. "They can't possibly have amassed sufficient strength to have any hope at all of retaking the realm, or you would have learned about it before this. Wouldn't you?"
"I would, and they haven't. My man also reports that Aoth Fezim and his sellswords have hired on with Lauzoril and the others, and that Bareris Anskuld and Mirror slipped out of Thay to join the expedition."
Szass Tam shook his head at the perversity of fate. "If Anskuld and the ghost are there with Lallara and the rest, it can only mean one thing: they discovered what I'm about to do and rallied the test of my old enemies to stop me."
Malark nodded. "That's my guess as well."
"I would very much like to know how they found out. Fastrin's book has been in my possession for a hundred years. Druxus never told anyone but me what was in it, and I never told anyone but you."
"Could the gods have played a part?"
"Except for Bane, they no longer have much reason to pay a great deal of attention to what goes on in Thay, and the Black Hand has given me a thousand years to do whatever I please. Still, who knows? I suppose at this point, the how of the situation is less important than what to do about it."
"Are you sure you need to do anything extraordinary? Thay is well protected, the Dread Legions stronger than any force your foes can field. The Dread Rings aren't just gigantic talismans; they're some of the mightiest fortresses in the East. The final preparations for the Unmaking will be ready in a matter of months or possibly even sooner. It seems to me that at this late date, it's impossible for anyone to stop you."
"I'd like to think so. Still, the zulkirs have powerful magic at their command, and in the old days, Anskuld, Fezim, and Mirror won victories that prolonged the war by years. So I want to crush this threat as expeditiously as possible, which means I want you to take an active part. It's the next best thing to doing it myself, and that isn't practical. I have to finish getting everything ready here."
To Szass Tarn's surprise, Malark seemed to hesitate. It was even possible that a hint of distress showed through what was generally his impeccable poise.
Then the lich inferred the reason. "I swear to you," he said, "that when it's time to start conjuring, if you're still in the field, I'll fetch you. I told you you'll be at my side, and I keep my promises."
Malark inclined his head. "I know you do, Master. Please forgive me for imagining otherwise, even for an instant."
Szass Tam waved a dismissive hand. "It's all right. You've worked tirelessly for this one reward. In your place, if I suspected I might not receive it, I'd be upset too. Now, let's talk about how to make my old colleagues sorry they decided to revisit their homeland. How do you think they'll go about invading?"
A gust of cold wind tugged at Malark's sleeve, exposing a bit of the tattooing on his forearm. "They've held on to the Alaor since the end of the war," said the former monk, "presumably to facilitate an attack by sea, should they ever decide to make one."
"That's true, and just in case they ever did, we've built a formidable fleet. Do they have enough warships to contend with it?"
"Probably not."
"Then I predict they'll deploy their naval resources for what amounts to a feint. Meanwhile, the true invasion will come by land."
"If it does, it can't swing north through Aglarond. The simbarchs won't permit it. The zulkirs just fought a little war with them. That means they'll have to ford the River Lapendrar and come through Priador, almost within spitting distance of Mur-bant. That's good. We can harry them and slow their march to a crawl."
Szass Tam smiled. "There's another possibility. If I were the enemy, I'd come through the Umber Marshes."
Malark cocked his head, and his light green eyes narrowed. "Is it even possible to drag an entire army through there?"
"I've kept track of Captain Fezim's career, and he and his company have a reputation for traversing terrain that his foes, to their cost, believed impassable. Consider also that Samas Kul and the mages who serve him are capable of conjuring bridges out of thin air and turning ooze into dry, solid ground. Not every step of the way, of course—it's a big swamp—but they may be able to help the atmy over the most difficult passages."
"I suppose so," Malark said, "and if I were the enemy, I'd be thinking that Szass Tam might be reluctant to send one of his own armies into that pesthole of a swamp, and that it would have trouble locating my comrades and me even if he did. It would likewise occur to me that the marshes are big enough that it would be hard to predict exactly where we'd emerge. So with luck, we
could at least make it into Thay proper without encountering heavy resistance." "Exactly."
"So what do we do about it?"
"It might well be a waste of resources to send a conventional army into the fens, but I can send other things. If the zulkirs overcome that obstacle, they'll likely make for the Dread Ring in Lapendrar and lay siege to it. You'll be there to aid in the defense."
Malark nodded. "It should be easy enough, considering that we have to hold out for only a relatively short time. But I do have a suggestion. I take it that Tsagoth is still in charge of the Ring in Tyraturos?"
"I'm certain, my lord spymaster, that you would have known within the day if I'd reassigned him."
"Well, I'd like you to reassign him now. Give him to me to fight in Lapendrar."
With reflexive caution, Malark took another glance around, making sure he was still alone. He was, of course. He was locked inside one of his personal conjuration chambers, with gold and silver pentacles inlaid in the red marble floor, racks of staves, cups, daggers, oils, and powders ready to hand, tapestries sewn with runes adorning the walls, and the scent of bitter incense hanging in the air.
He murmured words of power, pricked his fingertip with a lancet, and dripped blood onto the mass of virgin clay on the tabletop before him. Then, chanting, he kneaded those ingredients together with hairs, nail parings, and various bodily fluids. Magic accumulated, straining toward overt manifestation. It sent a prickling across his skin and made the shadows writhe.
As Szass Tam had taught him, he concentrated on what he was doing. Believed in the outcome. Willed it to happen. Yet even so, there was a small, unengaged part of him that reflected that while he shouldht able to perform this particular spell successfully, he'd never actually tried before, and it was supposed to be particularly dangerous.
Still, he didn't see a choice. He'd already had a plan of sorts, but it had been predicated on remaining in the Citadel awaiting an opportune moment to make his move. Now that the lich had ordered him forth, something more aggressive was required. And this scheme was the best he could devise.
He started shaping the clay into a crude doll. Suddenly, a pang of weakness shot through him, and his knees buckled. As he continued sculpting, the feeling of debility grew worse, as though his work was draining a measure of his life.
Was this supposed to happen? The grimoire hadn't warned of it.
Don't think about it! Focus on speaking the words with the proper clarity and cadence. On making the passes precisely and exactly when required.
A crazy titter sounded from thin air, the glee of some petty spirit drawn by the scent of magic. Malark raised his wand above his head and shouted the final words of his spell.
A flare of mystic power painted the room with frost. The doll swelled to life-size, becoming an exact duplicate of Malark right down to the wand, ritual chasuble, and the red and maroon garments beneath. The simulacrum drew up his legs and thrust them out again in a vicious double kick at his creator's ribs.
Malark only barely managed to spring back out of range. Grinning with mad joy, his twin rolled off the worktable, dropped into a fighting stance, and advanced.
"Stop!" Malark snapped. "I'm your maker and your master!"
The simulacrum whipped his ebony wand—a sturdy baton
designed to double as a cudgel—at Malark's head. Malark swayed out of the way, but once again, it was close. He needed the weakness and sluggishness to go away, because his twin certainly didn't seem to be laboring under the same handicap.
But he did seem wild with fury. Perhaps he could be tricked. Malark raised his foot a little as if preparing a kick, then lashed out with his own wand, beat his opponent's weapon, and knocked it out of his grasp. The cudgel clattered on the floor. It was far from the most effective attack he could have attempted, but he was also hindered by the fact that he didn't want to kill or cripple his other self.
The simulacrum laughed as though the loss of his club was inconsequential, and perhaps it was. Throwing one combination after another, he came at Malark like a whirlwind, and his creator had little choice but to retreat.
As Malark did, though, he watched. No one, not even a Monk of the Long Death, could make so many attacks in quick succession without faltering or otherwise leaving himself open eventually.
There! The simulacrum was leaning forward, ever so slightly off balance, and as he correcred, Malark dropped his own wand, pounced, and gripped the other combatant's neck in a stranglehold.
At once Malark felt his adversary moving to break free of the choke, but he didn't attempt any countermeasures. Now that he was staring straight into the simulacrum's eyes at short range, it was time to stop wrestling and try being a wizard once again. Imagining the indomitable force of his will, embodied in his glare, stabbing into his double's head, he snarled, "Stop!"
The simulacrum convulsed, then stopped struggling. The rage went out of his light green eyes, and he composed his features. "You can let go now," he croaked, his throat still constricted by Malark's grip.
Malark warily complied, then stepped backward. His twin remained calm. Rubbing one of the ruddy handprints on his neck, the simulacrum said, "I'm truly sorry. But being born is a painful, disorienting thing. All those babies would lash out too if they had the strength."
Malark smiled. "I'll have to take your word for it."
"And you have to admit, from a certain perspective, this is a setback. For centuries, my dearest wish has been that there be none of me. Instead, the number has doubled."
"Only temporarily, and in the best of causes."
"Oh, I know. I know everything you do, including your plan. I go west to foil the invasion while you stay here, hide, and set a trap."
A patch of azure flame danced on the muddy, sluggishly flowing water, seemingly without having any fuel to burn. Evidenrly the Umber Marshes contained a tiny pocket or two of plagueland— territory where the residue of the Spellplague still fesrered—and Gaedynn had wandered into one of them.
He studied the blue fire with wary interest. Though he'd occasionally visited plagueland, he'd never actually seen the stuff before.
He would have been just as glad to skip the spectacle now. He fancied he'd feel at home in any true forest across the length and breadth of Faerun, but this rust-colored swamp was a different matter. He hated the way the soft ground rried to suck the boots off his feet and especially hated the clouds of biting, blood-sucking insects. Back in the Yuirwood, the elves had taught him a cantrip to keep such vermin away, but it didn't seem to work on these mindlessly persistent pests.
Yes, if there ever was a patch of land that ought to be scouted
on griffonback, this was it—except that the thick, tangled canopy of the trees made it impossible to survey the ground from on high. So somebody had to do it the hard way.
He skulked onward, glancing back at the azure flames periodically, making sure they were staying put. So far, so good, but in Aoth's stories they'd raced across the land in great curtains, destroying everything they engulfed.
Gaedynn faced forward again to see a troll charging him, its long, spindly legs with their knobby knees eating up the distance. The man-eating creature was half again as tall as a human being, with a nose like a spike and eyes that were round, black pits. It had clawed fingers and a mouth full of fangs, and its hide was a mottled red-brown instead of the usual green, possibly to help it blend in with the oddly colored foliage of the marshes.
Perhaps that was why Gaedynn hadn't detected it sooner, expert woodsman though he was. Or perhaps the distractions of the blue fire and stinging insects were to blame. Either way, it was a lapse that could easily cost him his life. He snatched an arrow from his quiver, laid it on his bow, and then the troll was right on top of him.
On top and then past. It ran by without paying him any heed, soon vanishing between two mossy oaks.
Gaedynn exhaled. From one perspective, he'd had a narrow escape, but he didn't feel lucky just yet, because it had certainly appeared that the troll was running away from something. If so, what had put such a fearsome brute to flight?
Whatever it was, it could easily pose a threat to Gaedynn and his fellow scouts as well. He whistled a birdcall. Somewhere off to the left, invisible among the trees and thickets, an archer answered in kind. On his right, however, sounded only the tap-tap-tap of a drilling woodpecker and the plop of something jumping or dropping in water. He whistled a second time and still couldn't raise a response.
As Gaedynn paused to consider how to proceed, the scout on his left yelped. Gaedynn waited a moment, then whistled the signal, but this time, nobody answered.
Keeping low, trying to move fast but stealthily too, Gaedynn headed in the direction of the yelp. Listening intently, eyes constantly moving, he promised himself that nothing else would surprise him.
And nothing did, but it was close. Scuttling beside one of the ubiquitous channels, he glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye, pivoted, and found a red mass rearing over him like a wave about to break. The thing was big as a cottage, but its shapeless, essentially liquid nature had enabled it to ooze along under the surface of the murky water undetected.
Gaedynn retreated and shot the arrow he'd initially intended for the troll. It stuck in the middle of his attacker—which gave off the coppery smell of blood—but didn't even slow it down. The creature heaved and flowed after him.
Some of the special shafts Jhesrhi grudgingly enchanted for him might hurt the thing more, but it seemed a poor idea to stand too close while he tried them. He sprinted away from it.
Something tall as the troll but broader, its inconstant shape vaguely human but composed of filthy water, made a splashing leap from an algae-covered pool on his left and half ran, half flowed to intercept him. It reached with enormous hands—the left one had the fingers fused together, as though it wore a mitten—and he felt the cold, poisonous wrongness festering inside them. It was the same sick sensation he sometimes had when obliged to spend time around Mirror, only more intense.
He could only recoil from the new threat, even though it took him back toward the pursuing blood-thing. Meanwhile, the mud and dark, stagnant water vomited up other horrors, each made of liquid or muck. Glancing around, he realized he was surrounded.
Regretting the necessity, he pulled his one arrow of sending from its place and used the bodkin point to prick the back of his own hand. The world seemed to shatter and reassemble itself in an instant, and he found himself some distance to the west, where a squad of Khouryn's spearmen flailed their hands at mosquitoes while slogging and slipping their way along.
Sitting on a rotten stump, Aoth bit off a mouthful of biscuit. In truth, he was only a little hungry, but since the vanguard had to halt while its officers palavered, it made sense to eat. At least the bread was still relatively fresh. Like any veteran campaigner, he'd all too often been reduced to gnawing bread hard as stone and full of bugs.
"Can you guess," he asked, chewing, "exactly what you ran into?"
Gaedynn swallowed a mouthful of apple and tossed the core away. "Some of the creatures looked like water and earth elemental, but they had the feel of undead about them."
"They're both," Bareris said. Unlike his living comrades, he and Mirror hadn't bothered to sit or squat but rather stood just outside the circle. "In Thay, they call them necromentals. And the red thing was a blood amniote. It will drain your blood fastet than a vampire, if it catches you."
Aoth snorted. "I see that even with Xingax slain and Szass Tam busy with greater matters, the necromancers are still making new toys."
"I'm afraid so," Mirror said. At the moment, he looked like a warped, dingy reflection of Khouryn. Aoth could tell it irritated the dwarf, though he was hiding his displeasure as best he could.
"Do you know how many there are?" asked Aoth.
Gaedynn shook his head. "I was a little too busy to make an accurate count."
"I thought you were supposed to be a scout," Jhesrhi said in one of her rare attempts at humor. She lacked the knack for it, and as usual, nobody laughed.
"I wonder," said Aoth, "if these creatures simply escaped from their keepers and wandered into the swamp. The Thay I remember was already infested with such horrors, and since then, the necromancers have had a century of peace and supremacy to perform any crazy experiment that came to mind." He scowled. "But no. In all honesty, 1 doubt this is pure bad luck. Somehow, Szass Tam knows we're coming and has sent some of his servants to slow our progress."
"I can see them doing a good job of it," Khouryn said. He slapped his neck and squashed the insect that had landed there, just above his hauberk. The blow smacked flesh and made the links of mail clink. "They can dog us while hiding in water or mud. Pop out, kill a man or two, and disappear again."
"Do we have to keep going in this direction?" Jhesrhi asked.
"Yes," Bareris said. "The rebels who smuggle arms into Thay taught me that, unpleasant as it seems, this is one of the few 'good' paths across the marshes. We'd have to backtrack a long way to pick up another."
He didn't have to explain any further. They all knew that even under the best of circumstances, it would be an onerous chore getting an army on the march to suddenly reverse direction. Here in the bogs, with the thick vegetation inhibiting communication and the soldiers all but walking single file along the narrow trails, it would be a nightmare.
"The delay," said Aoth, "might actually give Szass Tam time to place forces all along the edge of the swamp to catch us coming out. And who knows, if we did shift to a different route, we might find these necromentals and whatnot guarding it as well."
Gaedynn scratched at the bump of an old insect bite on his cheek. His nail tore the scab, and a drop of blood oozed out. "So you're saying, we fight."
"Yes," Aoth replied.
Khouryn frowned. "The men will have a difficult time of it on this ground."
"Or contending with elementals," said Aoth, "if they don't command any form of magic, or at the very least, carry enchanted weapons. In addition to which, it's not certain Szass Tarn's creatures would show themselves to an entire company obviously formed up for battle. So I propose that we—those of us in this circle and a few others—go forward, let the brutes accost us, and kill them ourselves."
Gaedynn grinned. "Sounds like a nice, suicidal way to spend an afternoon."
Jhesrhi Coldcreek lifted her staff high, murmured, and magic sent a colorless shimmer through the air. Then she cocked her head and squinted at the rust-colored poplars, mud, and channel of water before her. Bareris inferred that she'd cast a charm to sharpen her sight.
"See anything?" he asked.
"No." Judging from her clipped, cold response, she didn't much like it that, as the company proceeded forward, each member repeatedly swinging right or left to avoid water, mossy tree trunks, thick tangles of brush, and the more obvious patches of soft, treacherous ground, the two of them had ended up in proximity to one another.
"Neither do I," Bareris said. "Perhaps Aoth or one of the Burning Braziers can do better." The former could see all sorts of things with his spellscarred eyes, and the latter, successors to the
warrior priests of Kossuth, god of fire, who'd accompanied the zulkirs into exile, knew spells specifically designed to reveal the presence of lurking undead.
Jhesrhi pushed a low-hanging branch out of her way. "I want you to know something. If this is all a trick, I'll destroy you."
Bareris frowned. "You mean, if Mirror and I are actually working for Szass Tam. If my mad tale about his wanting to end the world is really an elaborate ruse to lure his enemies back within his reach, because he feels the time has come to settle old scores."
The wizard's amber eyes narrowed. "You didn't have any trouble inferring the precise nature of my suspicions."
"Not because they're true; because they're obvious. I'd wonder the same thing in your place, particularly now that the necromentals have turned up on our route, almost as if someone told Szass Tam where to station them. But your captain vouches for Mirror and me. Trust his judgment, or, if you can't manage that, trust the vision that came to him while he was flying over Veltalar."
"I do trust Aoth Fezim. But I also know you're a bard. You can make people feel, think, and perhaps even see and remember whatever you want them to."
"I did do something like that to Aoth, once, a century ago." He remembered the guilt he'd subsequently felt for that betrayal, the pain of broken friendship, and his gratitude when the warmage eventually forgave him. "But it was a mistake, and I wouldn't do it again, even to strike a blow against Szass Tam. It's probably the only thing I wouldn't do."
She brushed gnats away from her face. "You don't have to convince me. I'm here. I'm following orders and doing my part. I just need for you to understand—"
"They're here!" called Aoth.
Bareris peered around and failed to spot whatever had alerted his friend. But a heartbeat later, the first of Szass Tarn's creatures exploded up like geysers from muck and muddy water.
A Burning Brazier hurled a gout of holy fire at an undead earth elemental. It reeled backward, and Jet, who'd insisted on accompanying his master into battle, pounced on it. His aquiline talons and leonine claws tore away chunks of dirt as if he were a dog digging a hole. Aoth leveled his spear and pierced the necro-mental with darts of green light.
A second hulking creature made of mud swung an oversized fist at Mirror, who still resembled a shadowy parody of Khouryn. The ghost sidestepped and struck back with his weapon, which looked like Khouryn's urgrosh at the beginning of the stroke but turned into a sword before the end.
After that, Bareris couldn't watch any more, because what at first glance looked like a wall of dirty water erupted from a sluggish stream on his right and surged at him and Jhesrhi. He could make out the suggestion of heads and limbs amid the churning, surging liquid but couldn't tell just how many necromentals were actually rushing to attack, only that he and the wizard had drawn more than their fair share.
Infusing his voice with magic, he shouted. The sound blasted one necromental into a mist of sparkling droplets and blew away some of the liquid substance of another. Meanwhile, Jhesrhi chanted and pointed her staff. A flare of silvery power leaped from it and froze another pair of water creatures into ice. Off balance, one toppled forward onto its face.
Now that he and his ally had thinned the pack, Bareris saw there were two necromentals remaining, the one he'd wounded and another. And they were about to close the distance. He sprang forward to intercept them and keep them away from Jhesrhi, so she could cast her spells without interference.
He cut into a necromental's leg. It was hard to tell how badly he was hurting a creature made of water, but his blade, plundered from one of Szass Tarn's fallen champions, bore potent enchantments, so it was presumably doing something. A huge open hand
swung down at him. He dodged, and the extremity splashed apart against the ground. The droplets and spatters instantly leaped back together, reforming the hand.
Bareris dodged a blow from the other undead elemental, landed a second cut, and then something big and heavy—an attack he hadn't seen coming—smashed down on him, drenching him and slamming him to his knees. Water forced its way into his nostrils and mouth and down his throat like a worm boring into an apple.
The attack would have killed a living man. But while Bareris hated what his contact with the dream vestige had made of him, it had given him certain advantages. He was more resilient than a mortal warrior. Since he didn't need to breathe, he couldn't drown. And the poison touch of a fellow undead was innocuous to him.
He jumped back up, conceivably surprising the necromentals, and cut the one his shout had injured, distinguishable from the other because the magical assault had left it a head shorter. Retching water to relieve a painful pressure in his chest, and, more importantly, to recover the use of his voice, he whirled and dodged, thrust and cut.
The smaller necromental abruptly lost cohesion, its shattered form pouring to the ground like beer from an overturned tankard. That left him free to focus on the other.
As was jhesrhi. She struck it with a blaze of fire that turned much of it into steam. Bareris snarled and commanded himself not to flinch or falter as the vapor scalded his face and hands. He supposed he should be glad that the mage had at least aimed high enough to avoid hitting him with the flame itself.
He whirled his sword in a horizontal cut through the necro-mental's belly. Jhesrhi chanted rhyming words with a sharp, fierce sound and rapid cadence. The undead water spirit started to boil, bubbles rising inside it. Bareris leaped back before the heat could burn him a second time.
The necromental stumbled around, pawing at itself, then broke apart like its fellow. Jhesrhi cried out.
For an instant, Bareris, still looking at the spot where the steaming remains of the necromental soaked the ground, imagined the wizard had crowed in triumph. Then he recognized the distress in her voice and pivoted.
Jhesrhi was reeling around in the midst of a dark, droning cloud, on first inspection no different from the swarms of mosquitoes that had tormented the living all the way through the swamp. But Bareris assumed the tiny creatures were actually another necromantic creation, capable of inflicting considerable harm.
It was a threat he couldn't dispatch with a sword, nor pulverize with a shout without battering the woman trapped in the midst of the cloud as well. As Jhesrhi fell to one knee, he coughed the last of the water out of his lungs and throat, sang a charm, and ran to her.
He'd cloaked himself in an enchantment designed to repel vermin, and as he'd learned over the years, it was never certain the magic would work on things the necromancers had made using bugs and the like for raw materials. This time, it did. Buzzing furiously, the mosquitoes flew away from him and Jhesrhi, and he shouted, a thunderous roar that obliterated the insects and blasted bark and dead branches from the oaks behind them.
He kneeled beside Jhesrhi. She seemed dazed though not unconscious, and she had little beads and smears of blood all over her body where the undead swarm had bitten her. He took her hand and sang a song of healing.
Her eyes shifted, focused on his face, and then she jerked her fingers out of his grasp. "Don't touch me!" she snarled.
"I don't need to anymore." He rose and lifted his sword. "You've done your part. Why don't you stay out of the rest of it?"
"No. I can fight." With the aid of her staff, moving like an
arthritic old granny, she clambered to her feet, then peered around. "Oh, no!"
Bareris looked where she was looking, at Khouryn and Gaedynn. Apparently the two had fought in tandem, the dwarf wielding his urgrosh to engage any foe that ventured into range while the archer kept his distance and loosed arrows. Judging from the vaguely man-shaped piles of earth littering the ground around them, it had been an effective strategy. Until now.
Red, liquid tendrils rose from the soft earth beneath their boots like grass growing tall in a heartbeat. The blood amniote had flowed and burrowed through the mud to surround and cage them. The tendrils branched and connected, forming an even more secure prison, and the suggestion of mad, anguished faces formed and dissolved in the surfaces so created. The undead ooze extruded a huge tentacle, raised it high, and lashed it down at Gaedynn.
Confined as he was, the bowman couldn't dodge. The attack swatted him to the ground, and, as the tentacle lifted again, blood burst from his skin and flew upward to add itself to the substance of the amniote. Jhesrhi gasped.
"Hit it with everything you have!" Bareris said. "It doesn't matter if I'm in the way!" If his blistered hands and face were any indication, perhaps he hadn't needed to tell her that, but it still seemed like a good idea. Her slightest hesitation could cost Gaedynn and Khouryn their lives.
He charged the blood amniote, singing even as he sprinted as only a war bard could. It was harsh music, full of hate, designed to bleed the strength from an opponent, and the first sting of it made the gigantic ooze stop flailing at its captives. Bareris closed the distance, slashed at the creature's flowing, foul-smelling body, and then it started hammering at him.
He dodged, cut, and sang his spell of grinding, relentless destruction. More faces appeared in the crimson, latticed mass,
and it seemed that a female one mouthed his name. Lightning crackled, thunder boomed, and blasts of fire roared, he felt sudden heat and glimpsed flashes at the periphery of his vision, but Jhesrhi managed to hit the huge undead without striking him. He thought they might actually have the situation under control. Then, instead of lashing at him with an arm, the amniote simply fell at him like an avalanche or a breaking wave.
He couldn't dodge that. The great, formless mass of it slammed him down on his back, then reared above him. Pain, different and worse than the shock of impact he'd suffered an instant before, wracked him.
His heart didn't beat, and he didn't bleed when a blade cut him. He'd assumed he didn't have any blood the amniote could steal. But now skin and muscle split, and the veins beneath them ruptured. Brown powder swirled up from the wounds.
The blood amniote faltered like a man who had taken a bite of food and found it unexpectedly foul. Its liquid bulk shifted toward Gaedynn and Khouryn.
His whole body throbbing with pain, Bareris scrambled to his feet and gritted out the next line of the song. He cut through a section of the amniote's body, and his blade left a trail of scarlet droplets behind it.
The ooze-thing oriented on him again, rearing above him. Then it broke apart, its liquid remains drumming the earth.
Bareris staggered to Gaedynn and Khouryn. Jhesrhi came running too, and flung herself down beside the scout. Neither he nor the dwarf had flesh torn in the same way as Bareris's—perhaps their blood had come out their pores—but they both looked as if someone had dyed them crimson.
"Help rhem!" Jhesrhi snapped.
Bareris saw they were both still breathing. "I can keep them alive, but they need a real healer. Fetch a priest."
By the time the healer, a young Burning Brazier with keen,
earnest features, finished his work, the battle was over, the necromentals and other horrors dispatched. The cleric eyed Bareris uncertainly, and the latter had a good idea what was going through his mind. On one hand, the priest's superiors had trained him to despise and destroy the undead. But on the other, Bareris was manifestly an ally and a warrior who'd been fighting Szass Tam, the great maker and master of zombies, vampires, and their ilk, for a hundred years.
"I can try to help you too, if you want," the young man said at length.
"Thank you, but your magic wouldn't work on me." Bareris remembered how another Burning Brazier had labored in vain to save Tammith after one of Xingax's creations bit her head off. Like every memory of his lost love, it brought a stab of pain. "Anyway, my wounds will close on their own in a little while."
After the Brazier took his leave, Jhesrhi approached. Looking down a little, avoiding eye contact, she said, "I snatched my hand away from you."
"I remember."
"I would have yanked it away no matter who was holding it."
And evidently that was as much of an apology or an expression of acceptance and trust as Bareris was going to get. Which was fine. He didn't need Aoth's troops to be his friends. He just needed them to fight.

Chapter five
9 Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

Over the years, Aoth had grown used to spotting things from far away that other people failed to notice even at short range, and this was evidently such an occasion. On a ridge a half mile distant, men in mottled green, tan, and brown clothing lay motionless on their bellies, watching the great column that was the zulkirs' army marching north with its mercenary contingent still in the lead. Griffon riders soared almost directly above the necromancers' spies but evidently hadn't seen them.
Aoth blew his horn to snag the riders' attention, then pointed at the watchers with his spear. His aerial scours took another look at the ridge, then readied their bows and swooped lower.
"You and I could have killed those men ourselves," Jet grumbled.
"I'm a commander now," Aoth replied. "I'm not supposed to slaughter with my own hands every enemy who wanders into view. It would look peculiar."
Still, he wouldn't have minded the exercise. It might have taken his mind off the sad spectacle of the land spread out before him.
It didn't surprise him, exactly. During the ten years of the zulkirs' war, he'd watched the conflict steadily ruin the land. Blue skies gave way to gray. Green fields withered or fell to weeds and tares as relentlessly as estates and towns fell to besiegers and marauders. Contaminated by the residue of malign sorcery, the soil and rivers spawned blight, disease, and monstrosities even when no wizard was trying to call them forth. And Aoth had heard that, after driving his rivals out, Szass Tam hadn't exerted himself unduly to repair the damage, for reasons that were finally apparent. The lich had been too busy building Dread Rings and otherwise preparing for the Unmaking.
As a result, much of Lapendrar remained a wasteland, either barren or given over to pale, twisted scrub the like of which Aoth had never seen before. No one was maintaining the roads— vegetation encroached everywhere, and at certain points, sinkholes had swallowed the roads, or rain had washed the highways away— evidence that the great merchant caravans no longer traveled the length and breadth of the kingdom. Crumbling ruins dotted the rolling plain, which rose gradually as it ran up to the towering cliffs called the First Escarpment.
Although the province wasn't all desolation. Periodically, Aoth sighted a plantation still growing normal food for those Thayans who still required it. But even there, it was zombies, not living slaves, who toiled mindlessly in the fields when their masters, in all likelihood, had already fled the invaders' approach.
He'd told Bareris the truth. He hadn't missed Thay, not after the first few years in exile, anyway. He'd lived a better life elsewhere than he ever had here. But even so, the realm had been home in a way that no other place would ever be again, and a land of contentment and prosperity for many even if its neighbors
thought it wicked to the core. It was... unpleasant to see it so corrupted and diminished.
"What's wrong?" asked Jet, sensing his sour mood.
"I left my kingdom behind, and it turned into this."
"Did you have a choice?"
"Not really."
"Could you have done anything about it if you'd stayed?" "Almost certainly not."
"Then you're rebuking yourself over nothing. Stop it!"
Aoth smiled. "Your grandmother would have told me exactly the same thing."
"That's because griffons are wise, and humans have a talent for stupidity. Look! Are those more enemy scouts?"
Aoth peered and decided, no, the four men and two women probably weren't, because they were gaunt, haggard, and ragged. Three were poorly armed, and the others carried no weapons at all. Most tellingly of all, they made no effort to conceal themselves as they advanced on the column with its trail of hanging dust.
Outriders trotted to intercept them. Bareris swooped down on his griffon, perhaps to vouch for the newcomers and make sure the horsemen did them no harm.
"Those are rebels," said Aoth.
Over time, more such folk came to join the column. Flying high above the army, Aoth observed them all, but even his spell-scarred eyes failed to recognize their feverish excitement until he and Jet set down on the ground again.
Malark murmured the final words of the incantation, and magic whispered through the air. He considered casting the same spell yet again, then decided against it. It was important that no one stumble across the bare little room in which he'd
stashed his supplies, but surely three layered charms of concealment were sufficient.
And if his refuge was secure, he might as well start hunting.
He drew on the scaly, yellow gauntlets with the barbed, black claws. He scarcely needed such weapons to kill in hand-to-hand combat, but some enchanter had flayed the hide from a demon's hands to make them, and the Abyssal taint still clinging to them should provide a different sort of obscurement.
His leather-and-crystal headband enabling him to see in the darkness, he skulked from the room into the maze of chambers and tunnels beyond, moving warily even though he doubted anyone else was around. Not here. Below him, so rumor said, lurked fearsome creatures, some that had dwelled there since rhe dawn of time and some that Szass Tam had placed, perhaps to contain the others. Above were storerooms, conjuration chambers, dungeons, and vaults, excavated by the long-vanished builders of the Citadel, that the current inhabitants had turned to their own purposes. But this level was a sort of empty borderland, deep enough that no one had bothered to exploit it yet but higher than the lairs of the monstrosities.
Malark found a staircase and climbed.
After a time, a faint, wavering, greenish gleam, the unmistakable light of perpetual torches, warned him he was nearing the deepest of the occupied levels. He left the stairs and stalked onward. Soft chanting led him into an ossuary, where hand bones arranged in intricate floral designs adorned the walls of one room, foot bones another, and vertebrae a third.
A necromancer stood with staff raised and eyes closed in the final chamber, the one decorated with grinning skulls. Perhaps the wizard admired Szass Tam, for like the lich, and in defiance of the usual Mulan preference for heads as hairless as any naked skull, he'd grown a goatish little chin beard.
"Hello," Malark said.
The necromancers eyes popped open, and he faltered in his chanting. Malark felt something, some invisible entity the conjuring had held in its grasp, wriggle free like a fish escaping a net.
"Your Omnipotence," the bearded wizard said. He started to lower himself to his knees.
"Please," Malark said, "don't do that. You don't want to abase yourself before a man who means to kill you."
Straightening up, the necromancer peered at Malark as if he assumed his fellow Red Wizard was joking, but he wasn't quite sure enough to laugh. "Master?"
"I have to start murdering people down here, and I'd much rather begin with you than a menial. It's more sporting and will make a bigger impression."
The necromancer swallowed. "I don't understand."
"All you need to understand is this: I'm not going to use my own sorcery. If you start right now, you might have time to generate one effect before I cross the space between us." Malark sprang forward.
The necromancer snarled a word of command and thrust out his hand. Darkness leaped from his fingertips, swelled, and formed itself into an object shaped somewhat like a greatsword but made of sets of gnashing jaws lined with multiple rows of jagged fangs. Howling and gibbering in some infernal tongue, the fang-blade flew at Malark.
Who dived underneath its raking, slavering stroke, straightened up again, and tore away the necromancer's eyes and throat with two gory sweeps of the clawed gloves. The wizard fell backward, dropping his staff, which clattered on the floor.
Malark spun back around to defend himself from the fang-sword, then saw he wouldn't have to. Without the focused will of its creator to guide it, the weapon simply floated in the air.
Still, Malark thought it wise to silence its caterwauling. Screams of various sorts were by no means uncommon in these
crypts, but even so, the noise might attract attention. He rattled off a charm of dismissal, and the blade disappeared.
Then he dipped a clawed finger in the necromancer's blood and daubed symbols emblematic of Shar, Cyric, and Gruumsh, deities whose worship Szass Tam had forbidden in order to honor his pact with Bane, on the brows of some of the omnipresent skulls. It was yet another form of obfuscation.
Lallara gave Aoth a scowl. "What's the matter?" she snapped.
Actually, she supposed that from a certain perspective, it wasn't entirely bad that he'd insisted on a private palaver in the command tent with her, the other zulkirs, Bareris, and Mirror. Her back and thighs aching from another long day in the saddle, she'd rapidly grown sick of grubby, malodorous serfs and escaped slaves babbling praise and thanks and proffering shabby handicrafts and trinkets. It was a mark of just how far the world had fallen that such wretches even dared approach her.
But she didn't like having a man who'd once vowed to serve the Council of Zulkirs dictating to her, either.
Aoth answered her glower with one of his own. "The rebels obviously think you've come back to overthrow Szass Tam and restore the Thay that was. And you're encouraging them to think it."
"If their misapprehension inspires them to give us whatever help they can," said Samas Kul, "then why not take advantage of it?" He had a walnut pastry in one hand and a cup in the other, and as usual, he sprawled on his floating throne. The ungainly conveyance had snagged the edge of the tent door and nearly pulled down the shelter when he came in.
"Because as our allies," said Aoth, "they deserve to know the
truth: that after we break the Dread Ring, we're going to leave." Nevron sneered. "Allies."
"Yes," said Aoth, "allies. Not subjects. You can't claim to rule them when you fled this land before any of them were even born."
Lauzoril put his hands together, fingertip to opposing fingertip. "Whatever they believe, by aiding us, they'll be fighting for their only hope of survival. Isn't that what's truly important?"
"I suppose so," said Aoth. "And I think they're capable of understanding that if we explain it to them."
His pastry devoured, Samas sucked at the traces of sugar glaze on his fingers. "But where's the profit in risking it?"
Aoth took a deep breath. "Evidently I'm not making myself clear. I'm going to make sure they know the truth. I'm warning you so we can all speak it. That will be better for their morale than if they catch the mighty zulkirs in a lie."
"You'll do no such thing," Lauzoril said. "We forbid it."
Aoth said, "I don't care."
"But you took our coin!" said Samas.
"Yes," said the stocky warmage, his luminous azure eyes burning in the gloom. "You can well afford it, and my men deserve it. But this isn't our usual kind of war. We're fighting for our lives and perhaps the life of the world, not for pay, and you four wouldn't even know about the threat if not for Bareris, Mirror, and me. So I won't take your orders if I don't agree with them. In fact, you might as well consider me your equal for the duration."
Lallara felt a surge of wrath, and then, to her surprise, grudging amusement. The Rashemi bastard knew they needed him, and he was making the most of it. It wouldn't stop her or, certainly, any of the other zulkirs from punishing him in the end, but still, one could almost admire his boldness.
When they had found out the rebels wanted to pay homage , to them, the zulkirs had raised a section of ground to serve as a makeshift dais, then lit it with a sourceless crimson glow.
The archmages were gone now, and so were their chairs, but the mound and light remained, and the ragged, starveling insurgents, apprised that Bareris wished to address them, were assembling before it once again. Standing with Mirror and Aoth, he watched them congregate.
"The zulkirs had a point," he said. "These folk might well have fought better with hearts full of hope."
"Maybe so," said Aoth.
"So why did you insist on giving them the truth?"
Aoth shrugged. "Who knows? I suspected that returning to Thay would be bad for me. Maybe it's clouded my judgment. Or maybe / spent too many years as the council's ignorant pawn."
Mirror, at the moment less a visible presence than a mere sense of vague threat and incipient headache, said, "Telling them the truth is the right thing to do."
Aoth grinned. "Is that what the holy warrior thinks? How unexpected." He fixed his lambent blue eyes on Bareris. "I fully understand we need these people to scout and forage and find clean water. They know the country, and they've kept watch on the Dread Ring since the necromancers started building it. But even so, I don't fear to give them the truth, because I know you can inspire them to stay and fight. You're eloquent, and you fought alongside their grandfathers and fathers after the rest of Szass Tarn's opponents ran away. You're a hero to them."
Bareris had heard such praise before, and as usual, it felt like mockery. "I'm no hero. I've bungled everything that ever truly counted. But I'll do my best to hold them." Judging that most if not all of the rebels had gathered, he climbed onto the mound and started to speak.
As he did, he was tempted to try to hypnotize his audience. But it was possible he wouldn't snare every mind or that some folk would shake off the enchantment in a day or so, and then, feeling ill-used, the rebels would surely depart. Besides, he found he just couldn't bring himself to manipulate them as egregiously as he'd once manipulated Aoth, not with the latter actually looking on.
So he infused his voice with magic to help him appear a wiser and more commanding figure than he might have otherwise. But he stopped short of enslavement.
First, he gave the assembly the truth Aoth insisted they hear and watched it crush the joy out of them. Then he reiterated that it was still vital that they fight. Because, while victory wouldn't bring down their oppressors, it would save their lives.
A man ar the front of the crowd spar on the ground. At some point, a necromancer or necromancer's minion had sliced off his nose, and he wore a grimy kerchief tied around the lower portion of his face to hide his deformity. The cloth fluttered as his breath whistled in and out of the hole.
"My life isn't worth the trouble!" he called.
"I know that feeling," Bareris answered. "I've had it myself for a hundred years, so who am I to tell you you're wrong? But look around at your comrades who risked torture and execution to stand here with you tonight. Aren't their lives worth fighting for?
"And if they aren't reason enough," Bareris continued, "I'll give you another: revenge! When we take the Dread Ring, we'll butcher every necromancer, blood ore, and ghoul inside. I admit, we won't get Szass Tam himself, but we'll deprive him of his hearr's desire, balk him, and gall him as no one ever has before.
"And one day, we rebels willdrag him down off his throne and slay him. As it turns out, it won't be this year or the next, and the Council of Zulkirs may not be there to help us when we do, but it will happen. This siege is the beginning. Imagine what we can do with the arms and magic we'll plunder from the Dread Ring.
Imagine how word of our victory will draw new recruits to our ranks. We'll finally be a true army all by ourselves."
He looked out at the crowd and saw resolve returning in rhe set of their jaws and the way they stood straighter. He drew brearh to continue on in the same vein, then froze when a hulking shape abruptly appeared at the back of the throng.
It was tall as an ogre and had four arms. Red eyes blazed from a head also possessed of a muzzle full of needle fangs. Bareris knew its scaly hide was actually dark purple like the duskiest of grapes, but it looked black in the night.
"I can see you're all brave lirtle lambs," said Tsagoth, a sneer in his tone. "But this is your one warning: the Dread Ring is full of wolves."
He snatched up a young Rashemi woman and beheaded her with a single snap of his jaws. Blood gushed from the stump of her neck. He pivoted and disemboweled a man with a sweep of his claws. Short sword in hand, a third rebel charged the blood fiend from behind, and Tsagoth turned again and locked eyes with him. The swordsman jammed the point of his blade into his own neck.
Aoth ran into the crowd, while Mirror and Jet flew over it. Off to the side of it, Gaedynn, moving with almost preternatural speed, strung his bow and nocked an arrow. Meanwhile, Bareris drew his sword and sang. The world seemed to shatter and mend itself in an instant, and then, magically whisked across the intervening distance, Bareris was standing directly in front of Tsagoth.
The vampiric demon laughed down at him with gory jaws. "Too slow, singer," he said as he disappeared.
Bareris lunged. His blade encountered no resistance, proof that Tsagoth hadn't merely turned invisible. He'd employed his own innate ability to translate himself through space. Gaedynn's arrow streaked through the spot the creature's head had occupied an instant before.
Bareris stalked onward, pivoting, sword at the ready. He crooned a charm to give himself owl eyes.
A hand gripped his forearm. Startled, he wrenched himself around, trying both to break free and to bring his blade to bear before he saw that it was Aoth who'd taken hold of him.
"It's over for now," the sellsword captain said.
"You don't know that. Just because he ran, it doesn't mean he ran far."
"Of course it does. Think. No lone warrior, not even Tsagoth, would linger for long in the midst of an enemy army." "Well, I'll make sure."
"No," said Aoth, his voice soft but steely, "you won't. You climbed up on that pile of dirt to motivate these folk, and it was working, but now Tsagoth's rattled them. You have to go back and talk some more. Otherwise, the blood drinker's undone your good work, and he wins. Is that what you want?"
Shaking, Bareris closed his eyes and struggled to dampen his hatred and rage at least a little. Tried to think of something besides Tammith crumbling in his embrace as the Alamber Sea dissolved her flesh like acid.
"I'll go back," he managed.
Aoth posted more sentries and rousted Lallara and her subordinate wizards to cast additional defensive enchantments, just in case Tsagoth tried to sneak back. Then he returned to the center of the camp, where Bareris was still addressing the rebels and brandishing his naked sword for emphasis. The red light made the blade look bloody.
If Aoth was any judge—and after a century of commanding men, he'd better be—the bard's oration was having the desired effect. The rebels no longer regarded the blood fiend's incursion
as a terrifying guarantee of horrors to come. Now it seemed an infuriating provocation.
Aoth made his way to Mirror's side. "Thank the gods for that golden tongue," he murmured from the corner of his mouth.
"It's bad that Tsagoth's here," replied the ghost. "We'll have to watch over our brother to make sure the old grudge doesn't goad him into folly."
"In case you didn't notice, I just promoted myself to acting zulkir a little while ago. I have this whole army to 'watch over.' Bareris knows what's at stake. I'm sure he'll be fine."
Standing atop the battlements above the Dread Ring's primary gate, Malark—for it was easier to think of himself that way than as the original Malark's magically created surrogate, especially now that they were no longer in proximity—gazed south. The council's army was out there somewhere in the night, probably within a day's march of the fortress. The scouts and diviners had given him a good idea of its size and composition, but even so, he looked forward to seeing such a mighty host of killers for himself and to watching it and the castle's defenders slaughter one another.
A dark, looming form appeared before him. He reflexively shifted his feet just a little—though most observers wouldn't even notice, the change in his stance prepared him for combat—even as he perceived that the new arrival was Tsagoth, come to report as expected.
"How did it go?" Malark asked.
"Anskuld and many others saw me make the kills. One of my victims was a young, dark-haired Rashemi girl, pretty as you humans reckon such things."
"Excellent. Are you thirsty? Would you like me to conjure an imp for you to feast on?" Although, bound as he was into Szass
Tarn's service, Tsagoth generally had to make do with the blood of mortals, he much preferred to prey on other creatures native to the higher worlds.
The blood fiend glared, his crimson eyes blazing. "I'm not a dog for you to reward with treats."
Malark decided not to observe that when Tsagoth, with his lupine muzzle, bared his fangs that way, there was a certain resemblance. "Of course not. You're my valued comrade, and I was trying to show you courtesy."
Tsagoth grunted.
"Why so touchy, if your errand went well?"
"When I arrived, the bard was addressing the rebels. He told them Szass Tam has some demented scheme to kill the entire world."
"Ah."
"Is it true?"
Malark considered denial but decided a lie was unlikely to allay the blood fiend's suspicions. "I wouldn't call it 'demented,' but otherwise, yes. Please tell no one else." Many of the Dread Ring's garrison wouldn't believe or understand Tsagoth even if he did tattle, and, like the undead demon himself, they bore enchantments that would oblige them to perform their functions no matter what they knew. Still, it would be pointlessly cruel to frighten them.
Tsagoth twitched as he felt Malark's mild-sounding request impose irresistible compulsion.
"Have I served well these past hundred years?" the blood fiend asked.
"I assume that's a rhetorical question. You're one of our master's greatest champions."
"I've done all I have in the hope that one day he would return me to my own plane. If you want my very best, one last time, promise me that after we preserve the Dread Ring, you'll send me home."
Malark sighed. "You think you'll be safe if you simply escape Faertin, don't you? In all honesty, I have to tell you, you won't."
Tsagoth snorted. "I know Szass Tam is capable of making a great mess, but I doubt he'll even destroy this one squalid little excuse for a world. His magic surely won't reach into all the worlds there are."
"The Spellplague did."
"So people say, but I still like my chances."
"Have it your way, then. Once we eliminate the threat to the castle, I'll return you to the Abyss. Now, is it clear what I need from you next?"
"Yes. The zulkirs will camp on the lake or near it. When practical, I'm to seize Rashemi maidens and drown them, so they die in water like Tammith Iltazyarra did."
"Precisely."
"What I don't understand is why it's so important to nettle Bareris Anskuld and undermine his judgment. He's just one soldier in an army."
"In his way, he's as accomplished a champion as you are; I'm sure Aoth or the zulkirs will give him men to command, and in any case, this ploy is just one little element of my overall strategy. I'll give you tasks more worthy of your stature as the siege proceeds."
"All right. Whatever you want." Tsagoth hesitated. "Tell me one more thing."
"Surely."
"If you know what's coming, why do you serve Szass Tam so willingly?"
"The promise of perfect beauty and perfect peace." "I don't understand."
Malark smiled. "No one does. It makes me feel lonely sometimes."

Chapter six
10-14 Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

Long before he was old enough to enlist, Aoth had yearned to join the Griffon Legion of Pyarados, because he'd been certain he'd love flying. As he had. And more than a hundred years later, he still relished it just as much as ever.
But this was the sort of morning that took the joy right out of it. The cold rain chilled him despite the magical tattoo and minor charms intended to keep him warm and dry. Maybe he was sensing Jet's discomfort across their psychic link, for his familiar was certainly drenched as well as vexed at winds that consistently blew in exactly the wrong direction to help him go where he intended.
With the sky lumpy with storm clouds promising even heavier rain later on, it was shaping up to be a foul day. As such, it provided the perfect backdrop for Aoth's first look at the Dread Ring of Lapendrar.
The place was black and immense, and something about the
precise curve of its walls and shape of its fanglike towers screamed of arcane power, even though Aoth couldn't decipher the design. Maybe, as a warmage, his knowledge of wizardry was too specialized, or maybe no one could interpret it unless he'd first read Fastrin the Delver's book.
What Aoth couldtell was that the walls were high and thick and laid out so that any attacking force would find itself shot at from at least two directions at once. And there were plenty of defenders to do the shooting. The battlements crawled with bellowing blood ores, withered, yellow-eyed dread warriors, and red-robed necromancers all assembled to watch the besieging force march into view.
"Big castle," said Jet.
"Very," said Aoth.
"But I assume you've captured even bigger, over the course of your long and glorious career."
Aoth snorted. "Not so many as you might expect." "Then we're doomed?"
"No. We have all the surviving members of the Council of Zulkirs on our side, whereas the Dread Ring doesn't have Szass Tam. He's in High Thay, getting ready for the Unmaking. That has to count for something."
Or at least he hoped so.
Bareris looked around the council of war and saw fatigue in every lanternlit mortal face. The work of the last two days, necessary preparation for the struggle to come, had been taxing. The army had needed to pitch tents, build corrals for the animals, and make sure of its water supply. Raise earthworks and dig trenches and latrines. Enlarge and assemble the siege engines carried from the Wizard's Reach in shrunken form. The effort ultimately took
its toll even on officers and Red Wizards, who for the most part left the manual labor to their subordinates.
But it hadn't tired Bareris—since becoming undead, he seldom knew exhaustion in the way that mortals did—and he didn't feel inclined to lounge in the command tent. He wanted to prowl the night and catch Tsagoth the next time the blood drinker came creeping to abduct and drown another girl.
But now that Aoth had appointed Bareris liaison to the rebel contingent of the army, it was his duty to be here, and even if it weren't, the meeting was important, its purpose to devise a strategy to capture the Dread Ring and so foil Szass Tarn's designs. But it was hard to care about even that when the creature who'd killed Tammith with his own four hands was finally within reach.
Slouched in a folding camp chair, his enchanted spear and crestless, plumeless, no-nonsense helmet resting on the ground beside him, Aoth cleared his throat. "All right. We've all had a chance to take a look at the nut we have to crack. What are your thoughts?"
Gaedynn grinned. "Ordinarily, I'd scout a stronghold like this and say, you know, I'm not in any hurry. Let's just starve them out. But from what I understand, zombies and such don't need food, and on top of that, we may only have a few tendays before Szass Tam performs his death ritual. Actually, for all we know, he could be starting it this very moment or could start bright and early tomorrow morning, but we simply have to hope not."
"So why talk about the possibility?" Jhesrhi said. She inspected her grimy hand, then picked at one of her fingernails.
Samas Kul belched. He tossed away a chicken bone, and a candied pomegranate appeared to take its place. "If we could make contact with someone inside the castle—someone alive, I mean—perhaps we could bribe him to open one of the gates."
"I doubt it," Bareris said. "Szass Tam started shackling the minds of his agents at the beginning of the war. Given that the Dread Rings are crucial to his plans, it's unlikely that he'd station anyone there who was still in possession of his free will."
Lauzoril pursed his lips, an expression that made him look even more like a priggish clerk than usual. "Working together, Lallara and I might be able to break some of those shackles. Of course, then you'd still have to identify exactly whom it was. You'd have to find a way to communicate with him and convince him it was in his best interests to switch sides..."
"In other words," said Nevron, sneering, "the idea's too complicated, and we can't pin our hopes on it. We have to take the Ring by force of arms." He shifted his glare to Aoth. "Your avowed area of expertise, our 'equal for the duration.' "
"I've given the problem some thought," the warmage said, "and even with a company of griffon riders at our disposal, I doubt we can get enough men on top of a wall, or inside the walls, to open the place up for the rest of us. We need to break down a gate or a section of wall, and then we'll have a chance."
Lallara frowned. "Those fortifications are massive. Even if the builders hadn't reinforced them with enchantment—which they did—it would take too much time to batter them down with mangonels and such."
"That's true, Your Omnipotence. But every wall, no matter how strongly built, needs something solid to stand on."
"You're talking about mining."
"Yes."
"Wouldn't that take too much time as well?" "If we did it in the usual way. But I hope we have an alternative. Jhesrhi?"
Her golden eyes catching the lamplight, the wizard said, "I'm well-versed in elemental magic, and I've studied the patch of ground on which the Ring stands. I know where the soil is softest
and where an underground stream runs. I believe that if I spoke to the earth and water, I could conceivably topple a section of the east wall. But the job would be a lot more feasible if I had help. Master Nevron, I've heard that you and your disciples are as adept at commanding elementals as you are demons and devils, even if you don't see fit to call on them as often. Would you join me in this effort?"
Nevron's scowl deepened as if it vexed him to have someone who wasn't a zulkir speak to him as an equal. But he simply said, "I'll do it if someone can convince me the plan is practical. It will take more rhan I've heard so far. Let's say the wall falls."
"By all means, let's say that," Gaedynn interrupted. "The collapse breaks the magical pattern, and our work is done. Right?"
"Wrong," Nevron spat. "If we merely inflict physical damage and march away, they can restore the symbol. We need to take the Ring and then perform a ritual to render it harmless for all time. Now, as I was saying: The wall falls. Won't the army still have a great heap of rubble blocking the path into the fortress?"
"A heap of loose stones isn't the same thing as a solid wall," Jhesrhi said. "I'm confident that, with all the wizards in our army, we can clear it out of our way."
"Well, possibly so. But have you considered that when we strike to knock down the wall, the wizards inside the fortress will sense the attack and move to counter us? And no matter how skilled we are at elemental magic, inertia will be on their side."
Aoth scratched his chin. "Yes, that's the tricky part. We need to distract the bastards so thoroughly that they won't notice what you're up to."
"So we make what looks like a committed, furious assault," Bareris said.
"That's my thought," said Aoth.
Lauzoril put his hands together in front of his face, fingertip to fingertip, and peered into the space between his palms as if
wisdom dwelled therein. "The feint will have to look convincing, which means it will give the enemy the opportunity to kill a good many of our troops. Breaching the wall won't help us if we end up too weak to exploit the opportunity."
"Well," said Aoth, "it would stop Szass Tam from using the castle as a giant talisman until his servants mend the hole. You're right, though: if the first battle cripples us, that delay won't save us in the long run. But I don't think the fight has to cripple us. We've been watching this place since we got here and have seen few flying warriors or steeds. Whereas we have griffon riders, so that's one advantage. Most if not all of their mages are necromancers, and they don't appear to have any priests at all. We have a greater diversity of magic at our command, so that's another."
"In fact," Khouryn said, "if I can get some ladders planted against the wall and a squad of my best men to the top of them, this 'feint' might just take the castle all by itself. Stranger things have happened."
Samas Kul shook his head. "I'm just not persuaded this ploy will work."
"Do you have a better idea?" Lallara waited a beat, as if to give the gluttonous transmuter a chance to respond. He didn't take it. "Because I don't, and we have to try something."
"I agree," Lauzoril said.
"As do I," Nevron said. He glowered at Jhesrhi. "But you'd better be as competent as you claim."
That seemed to settle it, for Samas pouted and held his peace thereafter. And, though no one said it outrighr, Bareris sensed that the zulkirs would expect the Brotherhood of the Griffon to do the hardest fighting and face the greatest peril, just as in the battle against the Aglarondans. He had a guilty sense that, as Aoth's friend, he ought to resent the unfairness, but he couldn't. Because if the sellswords were at the forefront and he was with them, it would maximize his chances of getting at Tsagoth.
Jet carried Aoth soaring over the warriors of the Brotherhood of the Griffon who didn't ride the steeds from which the company took its name—ranks of armored foot soldiers, lines of bowmen, lancers on restless, prancing horses, and artillerymen making final, fussy adjustments to their trebuchets and ballistae. Viewing them, he wished, as he often did at such moments, that he could be with every component of his army simultaneously to oversee everything it did.
"Well, you can't," said Jet. "So let's get on with it."
Not the most inspirational words that ever hurled fighting men into the jaws of death, but Aoth supposed they'd do. He looked across the gray sky, caught Bareris's eye, and dipped the head of his spear to signal. The bard nodded, raised a horn to his lips, and blew a call amplified by magic. Scores of griffon riders hurtled at the Dread Ring.
Blood ores on the battlements bellowed to see them coming, while their undead comrades, rotting cadavers and naked skeletons, stood stolidly and waited with weapons in hand. Bareris struck up a song that stabbed terror and confusion into the minds of some of the swine-faced living warriors, and they bolted and plummeted from the wall-walk. Aoth pointed his spear and hurled a dazzling flare of lightning that blasted both live and lifeless defenders to smoking fragments. Gaedynn loosed one of his special arrows, and in a heartbeat, brambles sprouted where it struck, growing and twisting outward from the shaft to catch Szass Tarn's minions like a spiderweb. Those griffon riders who lacked a means of magical attack shot shaft after shaft from their short but powerful compound bows, and hit a target more often than not.
The attackers focused their efforts on those portions of the south wall commanding the approach to the Ring's largest gate.
But since they were wheeling and swooping above the castle, the foes on every stretch of battlement could shoot back. Volleys of arrows and quarrels arced up at them. Necromancers in scarlet-and-black regalia conjured blasts of chilling darkness and barrages of shadow-splinters.
Pierced with half a dozen shafts, a griffon screeched and plummeted, carrying its rider with it. The warrior tossed his bow away, wrapped his arms around his mount's feathery neck, and they crashed to earth in one of the castle baileys. An instant later, another steed fell, both the griffon and the sellsword buckled in the saddle already slain and rotted by some necromantic curse.
It was a nasty situation, but it would have been far worse if not for the griffons' agility and the armoring enchantments Lallara and her subordinates had cast on them immediately prior to taking off. As it was, Aoth judged that he and his companions could continue as they were for a while, providing essential cover for their comrades on the ground.
A mental prompt sent Jet swinging to the right, toward three of the wizards who posed the greatest immediate threat. Aoth hammered them bloody with a downpour of conjured hail, then heard a vast muddled sound at his back that told him the charge had begun.
Khouryn had claimed that if Lady Luck favored them, a ferocious but more or less witless frontal assault might actually take the fortress. He'd judged that his bold assertion might help convince the zulkirs to endorse Aoth's plan. But he understood war far too well to believe what he was saying.
Still, he meant to attack as if he imagined he truly could get over the towering black wall and kill everything on the other side.
The feint had to look real, and if he balked, his men would too.
Besides, he'd told the truth about one thing: in battle, the unlikeliest things sometimes happened.
He kissed his truesilver ring through his steel-and-leather gauntlet. His wife had given it to him on their betrothal day. At the same time, he studied the battlements above the gate. When it seemed to him that there were fewer defenders up there and that a goodly portion of those who remained were busy loosing arrows at griffon riders, he drew a deep breath and bellowed a command. At once other officers and sergeants shouted, relaying his order. Bugles blew, transmitting it still farrher.
Then he started to run, and the horde of men arrayed at his back pounded after him. He had no difficulty staying in the front rank. His legs might be shorter than human ones, but he fancied he carried the weight of armor more lightly than most.
Behind him, he knew, some men were carrying ladders or rolling the huge battering ram called Tempus's Boot along. Not part of the charge itself, acting more or less in concert with the griffon riders, archers and wizards sought to slay any creature that showed itself on the battlements. Squads of horsemen watched and waited to intercept any threat that might emerge from the fortress and try to drive in on the flanks of the running infantrymen.
No doubt it all helped, but none of it helped enough to make the charge anything but a desperate, dangerous endeavor. Arrows whined down from on high, slipped past the shields raised to catch them, and men fell. And even if the men weren't badly hurt when they hit the ground, sometimes their comrades trampled them.
Long, thick veins pulsing and bulging beneath their skins, bloated, hulking creatures heaved themselves over the parapet above the gate. The festering things looked like they might have been hill giants in life, before the necromancers got hold of them.
The drop from the lofty battlements didn't appear to harm them. They picked themselves up and lumbered toward the head of the charge. Khouryn aimed himself and his spear at the nearest.
Jhesrhi, Nevron, and eleven of the latter's subordinates had prepared a patch of ground near the animal pens and baggage carts, close enough to the Dread Ring to monitor the progress of the attack but far enough away, they hoped, to make them inconspicuous.
Smelling of sulfur and sweat, Nevron scowled at the fight as he seemed to scowl at everything. "If the necromancers aren't distracted now, I doubt they ever will be. Let's get started."
Standing in a circle, reciting in unison, the wizards chanted words of power. At first, the only effect was to make Jhesrhi's entire body feel as numb as a foot that had fallen asleep. Then, abruptly, she seemed to float up through the top of her own head, to gaze down on the corporeal self she'd left behind. Her body was still speaking the incantation and would continue to do so until she took possession of it again, but it wasn't capable of doing anything else. That was why a squad of Nevron's guards was standing watch.
She looked around and found a single, silvery, translucent form floating beside her. Only Nevron, the infamous zulkir himself, had exited his body more quickly than she. She felt a twinge of satisfaction.
It took only a few moments for the rest of the assembly to rise like butterflies from cocoons. Then Nevron gestured, turned, and flew north, and everyone else followed.
They didn't go far before the zulkir dived and led them into the ground, where, attuned to the elements of earth and water,
they could see as well as before. They beheld soil and rock but peered through them too, both at the same time.
That made it easy to swim like fish to their destination, the soft ground and subterranean stream they intended to command. Nevron and the other Red Wizards recited new spells, and elementals took on vaguely manlike forms, each in the midst of whatever substance was its essence. Whether rhey were merely revealing themselves or the magic was actually creating them was a question that had been debated since the dawn of time.
Either way, Jhesrhi had no need of such intermediaries. Not for this task. She whispered to the earth and moisture surrounding and interpenetrating her spirit form, and she felt them stir in response.
Malark watched the battle unfold from the apex of one of the castle's fanglike towers. The elevation, coupled with the six arched windows placed at regular intervals around the minaret, provided a reasonably good view.
Which, though useful, had the unfortunate effect of feeding his frustration. The spectacle of so much slaughter made him itch to kill someone himself. But alas, there were times when a commander had to hold himself back from the fray to make sure he gave the proper orders at the proper time.
He tried to tell himself that, in fact, he was killing, that his were the guiding will and intelligence, and the Ring's garrison was simply his weapon. But that perspective only helped a little.
Suddenly, with a puff of displaced air, Tsagoth appeared beside him. The blood fiend's innate ability to translate himself through space made him an ideal choice to carry messages.
Tsagoth said, "Frikhesp reports that Nevron and his assistants are trying to undermine the wall."
"Good." Malark took another look out a window. "And the griffon riders are fully committed. Let's close the trap. Tell Frikhesp... no, wait." He strode to Tsagoth and gripped the scaly wrist of one of the demon's lower arms. "To the Abyss with commanding from the rear. Take me with you."
Aoth glimpsed a flicker of motion below. He looked down. All around the inside of the Ring, doors—big ones, like the doors of a barn—were swinging open.
The first creatures to emerge looked like dozens of twisting, writhing scraps of parchment dancing in the hot air rising from a fire, but Aoth recognized them as skin kites. Behind them hopped gigantic eagles, their eyes milky or rotted away entirely, their flesh withered and decayed, skeletons in armor riding on their backs. The undead birds spread ragged, leprous wings.
Aoth realized that the master of the castle, whoever the whoreson was, had meant for the besieging force to believe he had no aerial cavalry to counter their own. To that end, he'd hidden his flyers in what must be extensive vaults underground. Living avians couldn't have tolerated such confinement, but undead could.
Aoth rained fire on the new additions to the battle, trying to destroy as many as possible while he and his comrades still had the advantage of height. He yelled to everyone within earshot to do likewise, and Gaedynn loosed an arrow that became a lightning-bolt in flight.
It wasn't going to be enough. The griffon riders' situation had abruptly become untenable, and they needed to disengage.
Assuming they could. Aoth needed Bareris to sound a retreat that everyone would hear even amid the howling chaos of combat, then wield his music to help hold the undead flyers back. He cast
about for the bard, then cursed. Tsagoth was riding an especially large eagle, and Bareris was flying straight at him. Judging from the snarl contorting his face, Aoth doubted his friend was aware of anything else.
Tempus's Boot, a massive, iron-capped, soth-wood log, swung back and forth in its cradle of rope, smashing at the crack where the two halves of the Ring's gate interlocked. Khouryn had somehow ended up in proximity to the ram without intending to but couldn't honestly say he was sorry, because the device had a roof of wood covered in wet hide. It shielded the operators from the stones and burning oil showering down from above.
Its relative immunity to those forms of attack made it a prime target for the undead monstrosities the enemy had sent over the wall. Creatures somewhat resembling the big goblin-kin called bugbears, but with gaunt bodies covered in oozing sores and a tentacle lashing beneath each arm, rushed toward the ram, leaped high, and bore some of the engine's defenders down beneath them. They wrapped the sellswords in their tentacles, plunged their jagged fangs into their bodies, and guzzled. The shrieking soldiers' bodies started to flatten as though their vampiric assailants were leeching bone instead of blood.
Khouryn charged, swung his urgrosh—his spear was long gone, stuck deep in the body of his first opponent—and struck off a bonedrinker's head before ir even noticed the danger. But the next one wouldn't be so easy. It jumped up from its kill and sprang at him, tentacles whirling like whips and clawed hands poised to rake.
Khouryn ducked and sidestepped at the same time. He chopped, and the urgrosh's axe blade crunched through the bonedrinker's ribs and into the dry, leathery tissue beneath. The
undead bugbear staggered a pace but didn't go down. Khouryn yanked his weapon free and sidestepped again, trying to get behind the brute—
Something that felt like a noose but could only be a tentacle wrapped tight around his ankle and jerked his leg out from under him. The bonedrinker whirled, pounced, and carried him down. It gripped and enrangled him with all its various limbs, immobilizing his right arm and pulling him close enough to make it impossible to swing the urgrosh. It lowered its head and bit at his throat. The pressure was excruciating and nearly cut off his air, even though his assailant's fangs had yet to penetrate his dwarf-forged mail. He suspected they'd worry their way through in another heartbeat or so.
He took the urgrosh in his left hand, reversed his grip, and stabbed the spike into the side of the bonedrinker's head. Bone cracked, and the creature went limp.
Khouryn's impulse was to stay on the ground at least until he caught his breath, but impulse evidently didn't understand that it would be a bad idea to let another foe catch him supine. He crawled out from under the altered bugbear's corpse, clambered to his feet, cast about, and saw that other warriors had dispatched the rest of the bonedrinkers.
But now a dog the size of a house, its form made of mangled, rotting bodies fused together, was loping toward the Boot. Near it, a pale flash of wizardry froze in ice a ladder and the men struggling to climb it. After a moment, the trapped forms, whether made of wood or flesh and bone, broke apart under their own weight.
When is that damned wall going to fall? Khouryn wondered. We're getting massacred down here. He strove to control his breathing, took a fresh grip on his weapon, and moved to place himself in the path of the charnel hound.
A shock of cold and carrion stink ran through the ground. It jolted Jhesrhi, and for an instant the packed soil around het became black, opaque, as if she still occupied her physical body and had been buried alive.
When vision returned, she kept on trying to make earth and water flow as she desired, but now she met resistance. The stuff crawled back at her, or, if not the matter itself, some hostile power infusing it did so. The chill and fetid reek intensified, nauseating her, making her dizzy. Meanwhile, the elementals turned and advanced on those who'd summoned them.
Jhesrhi realized the necromancers had expected an attack at this site and had set a trap. They'd tainted the soil with graveyard dirt, and the stream with water that had drowned men and in which their bodies had lain. The desecration had turned this whole buried area into a weapon they could use at will.
And unfortunately, mere comprehension was no defense, not when she felt so weak and sick. Frigid, slimy hands congealed and clutched at her, while at the periphery of her vision, an earth elemental—warped into a necromental now—grabbed a Red Wizard's astral form in three-fingered hands and ripped it in two, putting out its silvery light forever.
A thought sufficed to send Jet hurtling after Bareris and his griffon. Maybe Aoth could persuade the bard to break off. Failing that, perhaps the two of them fighting in concert could kill Tsagoth quickly.
Aoth glimpsed motion at the corner of his vision and snapped his head around. Armored in black metal and mounted, like Tsagoth, on a particularly large eagle-thing, a huge, undead warrior was driving in on his flank. It wore no helm, perhaps because its gray, earless, hairless head, the eyelids and lips sewn shut with
blue thread, often terrified its opponents. It held a javelin with a point carved from green crystal raised and ready to throw.
But first it gestured with its offhand. A sudden spasm made Aoth cry out and go rigid, while Jer's wings flailed out of time with one another. Then the deathbringer—as Aoth belatedly remembered the fearsome things were called—threw the javelin.
Still wracked with pain, Aoth could do nothing to protect himself. But Jet screeched, denying his own agony, and brought his convulsing body under control. He veered, and the javelin missed. The deathbringer immediately pulled two flails, one for each hand, from the tubular cases buckled to its saddle.
To the Abyss with that. Given a choice, Aoth knew better than to fight a deathbringer hand-to-hand even if he'd had the time. He drew a deep breath, chanted, and hurled fire from the head of his spear. The blast tore the eagle out from under its rider and ripped it into burning scraps.
Unless Aoth was lucky, neither the explosion nor the fall that came after would slay the deathbringer. But maybe he and the other griffon riders could get away before the undead champion procured another mount.
Aoth cast about, seeking Bareris again. His friend and Tsagoth were wheeling around one another in the usual manner of seasoned aerial combatants, each seeking the high air or some comparable advantage. Meanwhile, one of the bizarre creatures called skirrs, things like gigantic, mummified bats right down to the decayed wrappings, had climbed higher still for a plunge at the pallid target below. Blind with hate, Bareris evidently hadn't noticed it.
So Aoth and Jet had to dispose of the skirr as well. By the time they finished, half a dozen skeletal riders had flown to Tsagoth's aid. Having surrounded Bareris, they too were maneuvering, looking for a good opportunity to strike.
And Aoth hesitated. A warmage's most potent magic tended to produce big, messy flares of destructive power, and at first glance, he couldn't see how to scour Bareris's opponents out of the sky without hitting the bard and his steed, also.
Then Mirror, currently a murky parody of an ore, floated up into the midst of the fight, brandished his scimitar, and released a dazzling burst of his own sacred power. The undead eagles and their skeleton riders fell burning from the air. Tsagoth appeared unharmed, but, his mount destroyed, disappeared, translating himself through space to spare himself a fall.
The divine light, an expression of life and health, hadn't hurt Bareris's griffon, either, but the bard himself slumped on its back, part of his white mane charred away, his alabaster skin blistered and smoking. As Aoth flew closer, he wondered if the ghost couldn't have wielded his magic with more finesse and spared his friend, and then, abruptly, he understood. Mirror had deliberately included Bareris in the effect, willing to risk his existence if that was what it took to slap the crazy fury out of him.
Bareris straightened up and groggily peered about. Judging that he'd approached near enough to make himself heard, Aorh shouted, "Blow the retreat! Help me get our people out of here!"
Bareris shook his head, perhaps in negation, perhaps to clear it. "Tsagoth..."
"Gone! And if you stay to look for him, you'll just get yourself killed, and Tsagoth and Szass Tam will win! That's not any kind of revenge!"
Bareris peered about, jetked his head in a nod, and raised his horn to his lips.
The wizard in scarlet and maroon—a lean man of middling height for a human, with a mark on his chin—brandished an
unusually thick and sturdy-looking black wand. Shadowy tentacles burst from the ground under the feet of four of Khouryn's spearmen, whipped around them, and dragged them down.
Khouryn couldn't imagine what had possessed the fellow to descend from the relative safety of the battlements into the thick of the melee. To say the least, it was uncharacteristic behavior for a Red Wizard. But whatever he was thinking, his spells were doing considerable damage. Fortunately, Khouryn expected he could put a stop to it if he could only close with him. In his experience, it was a rare mage who could throw spells and dodge an urgrosh at the same time. In fact, it was a rare mage who could dodge an urgrosh at all.
A yellow-eyed dread warrior delayed him for a heartbeat. He had to chop its sword hand off and one leg out from under it, before he could get around it and advance. Then he heard a horn sounding the retreat, the high, blaring notes somehow cutting through the crashing, howling din of combat.
An instant later, the griffon riders winged away from the Dread Ring with other flyers in pursuit. The sight gave Khouryn a jolt of surprise. The castle wasn't supposed to have any aerial cavalry worth mentioning, and, caught up in the carnage in front of the gate, he hadn't noticed them until now.
Flying at the back of their company, Aoth, Bareris, and other spellcasters hurled great blasts of magic, seemingly expending every iota of their power to hold the undead back. The warmage painted a wall made of rainbows across the sky. The undead singer bellowed and shattered the bones of three cadaverous birds and the skeletal archers on their backs.
Khouryn wondered if Aoth was running because it was death to stay any longer, or because the east wall was down. But if Jhesrhi and Nevron had succeeded at the latter, surely Khouryn would have noticed some sign of that. He felt a sick near-certainty that this costly gambit had failed.
But now was not the time to think about it. If the griffon riders were fleeing, the infantry had to do the same, and it was up to him to make sure that as many as possible got away safely. He just prayed to the Lord of the Twin Axes that the run away from the fortress wouldn't prove as difficult as the charge up to it.
At first, the grip of the phantom hands chilled and dulled Jhesrhi. Her mind seemed to soften and run, as if it were rotting away.
Then, however, revulsion stabbed through the crippling fog. Under the best of circumstances, she disliked being touched, and the poisonous clutch of the dead, here in solid, claustrophobic darkness, was unbearable.
Loathing threatened to explode into panic, and she strained for self-control. She had to think. Find the way out of this.
She couldn't call on earth or water for succor. The necromancers had corrupted them. Another power would have to liberate her. Air, itself emblematic of freedom. There was none here in this frigid quicksand snare, but she could will it here.
She shouted words of power. Dead men's hands tried to cover her mouth, but they were too slow. Wind screamed from elsewhere, forcing the poisonous earth back, making a bubble of pressure and emptiness in the midst of it. Jhesrhi floated at the center of the hollow.
It was a start, but she still needed a way out that wouldn't require swimming through tainted ground. She spoke to the wind, and, alternately whirling like a drill and pounding like a hammer, it cut a shaft to the surface. The circle of gray sky at the top seemed as beautiful as anything she'd ever seen.
It was only as she flew toward it that she remembered her colleagues and looked to see how they were faring. More of the
luminous soul-forms had vanished, slain by the necromancers' curse. But some remained, and she wondered if she could do anything to help them.
Then new entities, grotesque as the necromentals but far more varied in shape, exploded into view. They roared and hurled themselves at the necromancers' servanrs, and their intervention allowed Nevron and his subordinates to break away. They fled into the vertical tunnel, and Jhesrhi led them up into the sky.
Afterward, they scurried back to their bodies as fast as they could. It only made sense. They'd failed in their mission, the enemy's assault had shaken them, and it was possible the necromancers had other tricks to play.
Jhesrhi plunged into her corporeal form in much the same way she'd exited it. For a moment, her flesh felt heavy as lead. As she halted her droning repetition of the ritual incantation, she caught a foul smell and peered around.
Six of her Red Wizard collaborators sprawled on the ground, their bodies so decayed that it looked as if they'd been dead for days.
The next instant, demons and devils appeared, their various blades and claws poised to strike. It was plain that their controller's will had snatched them out of combat unexpectedly, and, hideous as they were, their surprise might have seemed comical had the situation been less grim.
Or at least Jhesrhi found it droll, but, like most mages, she had some familiarity with such entities. Nevron's human bodyguards cried out and lifted their weapons, and the spirits, evidently happy they still had something to fight, rounded on them.
"Enough!" Nevron barked, and all his servants, mortal and infernal, froze.
The zulkir looked at the dead men on the ground and sneered as though their failure to survive made them contemptible. Then, his crimson robes flapping around his legs, he strode in the direction
of the Dread Ring, no doubt to see how the rest of the battle was going. Jhesrhi followed.
It soon became apparent that the men who'd attacked the south face of the stronghold were retreating. When she saw how many of their number they were leaving behind, torn, tangled, and trampled on the ground, Jhesrhi felt sick all over again.

Chapter seven
14-17 Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

Aoth, Bareris, and Mirror stood at the edge of camp, gazing at the approach to the Ring and the fortress itself. Mirror was invisible, a mere hovering intimation ofwrongness, and hadn't spoken since the griffon riders had fled. Evidently his great evocation of holy power had addled and diminished him for a while.
Perceptible to Aoth's fire-infected eyes, even in the dark and even at such a distance, necromancers chanted on the battlements, the sound a counterpoint to the wailing of the wounded soldiers the retreat had abandoned. Responding to the magic, dead men lurched up from the ground to join the ranks of the castle's defenders.
That was unfortunate, but Aoth doubted it would be the worst thing to happen this cool, rainy spring night. He was sure the Ring had defenders he and his comrades hadn't even seen yet, vile things that couldn't bear daylight. They'd come out now and make quick strikes at the fringes of the camp, forcing men
in dire need of rest to defend themselves instead, doing their best to undermine the besieging force's morale. Or what was left of it.
"By the Flame," Aoth said, "this is why I balked at coming back. I like war—parts of it, anyway—but I hate fighting necromancers."
At first, neither of his companions answered, and he assumed that, as was so often the case, neither would. But at length Bareris said, "I know I should apologize."
Aoth shrugged. "I accept."
"When I saw Tsagoth, it drove me into a frenzy. Made me stupid. Everyone could have come to ruin if you and Mirror hadn't risked yourselves to save me."
"Maybe so, but what's important is that we did get away."
"So I know I should feel sorry and ashamed, but I don't. All I am is angry that Tsagoth got away."
Aoth didn't know what to say.
"It's all I have," Bareris continued. "Undeath has stripped other emotions away from me. Tammith told me it was like this. Told me how broken and empty she was. Told me that even when she seemed otherwise, it was just because she was trying to feel. But I didn't want to understand." He paused. "Sorry. I didn't mean to stray into that. This is my point: I at least remember how people are. I had to act the way they do, over the past ninety years, to make the rebek trust me. And I promise, I'll behave that way now. I won't let you down again."
Aoth sighed. "You still are 'people,' whether you believe it or not. Otherwise, you wouldn't have the urge to unburden yourself this way."
"No, that isn't it. I'm going to propose a plan when we confer with the zulkirs, and I want you to trust me enough to support it."
Malark crouched at the top of the stairs and studied the chamber below, particularly the arched doorway in the north wall. The hunting party would enter that way.
He didn't know exactly who or whar the hunters were. He had yet to get a good look at them. But as he'd murdered the folk he surprised here in the depths, despoiled repositories of treasure, conjuration chambers, and the like, and done anything else he could think of to vex the other inhabitants of the Citadel, each team had been more formidable than the last, and this one would likely continue the trend.
The thought didn't dismay him and wouldn't have even if he'd feared to die. He'd shrouded both the stairs and himself in a spell of concealment. It likely wouldn't fool a Red Wizard for more than an instant, but that ought to be enough.
Intent as he was on the space below, there was still an unengaged part of his mind that wondered how his simulacrum was faring at the Dread Ring. Then, peering this way and that, the hunters stalked into view.
In the lead strode two walking corpses, not the usual zombies or dread warriors, but something deadlier. Even if Malark, favored with Szass Tarn's tutelage in the dark arts, hadn't been capable of sensing the malign power inside them, the superior quality of their weapons and plate armor would have given it away. A greater danger, however, floated behind them, a vaguely manlike form made of red fog, with a pair of luminous eyes glaring from the head. And bringing up the rear were, most likely, the greatest threats of all: a trio of necromancers, their voluminous black-and-crimson robes cut and deliberately soiled to resemble cerecloths, glowing wands of human bone in their hands.
Malark decided to kill his fellow wizards first. Without their masters' spoken commands or force of will to prompr them, the undead might not even choose to fight.
Feet silent on the carved granite steps, he bounded downward.
One of the necromancers glanced in his direction, looked again, goggled, and yelped a warning.
It came too late, though. Malark reached the foot of the stairs, leaped high, and drove a thrust kick into one mage's neck, snapping it. He twisted even as he landed, reached out, and stabbed the claws of one scaly, yellow gauntlet into a second necromancer's heart.
Two wizards down, one to go, but the third was quick enough to interpose the crimson death, as the fog-things were called, between himself and Malark. The creature reached for him with a billowing, misshapen hand.
Malark ducked and raked the crimson death's extended arm. He didn't encounter any resistance but knew that the talons of the enchanted glove might have cut the entity even so. Or nor, for that was the nature of ghostly things.
He felt danger behind him and lashed out with a back kick. Armor clanged when he connected, and rang again when one of the animated corpses fell backward onto the floor.
The other dead man rushed in on Malark's flank and thrust a sword at him. Malark pivoted, caught the blade in his hands— the demon-hide gauntlets made the trick somewhat easier—and twisted it out of the corpse's hand. He reversed the weapon and, bellowing a battle cry, rammed it through its owner's torso. The creature toppled.
Malark whirled, seeking the next imminent threat, but was a hair too slow. The crimson death's hands locked on his forearms and hoisted him into the air. Pain stabbed through him at the points of contact, and a deeper redness flowed from the entity's fingers into its wrists and on down its arms. It was leeching Malark's blood.
He poised himself to break free, and the surviving necromancer lunged and jabbed him in the ribs with the tip of his yellowed wand. Malark jerked at another jolt of pain, this one followed by
a feeling of weakness. The touch had stolen much of his strength. He clawed and squirmed anyway, but it didn't extricate him from his captor's grip.
Merely inconvenienced, not damaged, the corpse he'd kicked to the floor clambered up again. It raised its sword to cleave him while he hung like a felon on a gibbet.
Malark would have preferred to finish the fight without using any more magic, but plainly, that approach wasn't going to work. He rattled off three words of power—a spell Szass Tam himself had invented, taught only to a few—and the crimson death dropped him. The corpse warrior faltered and didn't swing its blade.
The necromancer gaped when he realized hff'd lost control of his servants, and then his eyes opened wider still when he belatedly recognized the man he was fighting. "Master?" he stammered.
"Kill me if you can," Malark answered. "You have a chance. I'm still weak from the touch of your wand." He charged.
The wizard extended his arcane weapon and started to scream a word of command. Malark knocked the length of bone out of line and silenced his foe by clawing out his throat.
Afterward, he dispatched the undead, who remained passive throughout the process. As always, it felt good to destroy the vile, unnatural things.
Aoth looked around the command tent at the zulkirs and Bareris. "Let's get started," he said. "We'll be needed elsewhere soon, when the specters start coming."
Samas Kul frowned, disgruntled either that Aoth had possessed the audacity to call the assembly to order, or that he had, in effect, suggested that the lordly archmages perform sentry duty. "Can't the Burning Braziers keep the spooks away? I was hoping they were good for something."
"And I keep hoping the same about you," Lallara said. She turned her flinty gaze on Aoth. "We expended much of our power during the battle. We need time and rest to recover. But we understand that we must all do what we can."
Nevron glowered at her. A tattooed demon face on his neck appeared to mouth a silent obscenity, but perhaps that was a trick of the lamplight. "Do not," he said, "presume to speak for me." He took a breath. "But yes, Captain, I'll help, and so will my followers. What's left of them."
"I regret the loss of those who died," said Aoth.
"As well you should," Samas said. A cup appeared in fingers so fat the flab bulged around the edges of the several talismanic rings.
"We tried the best plan that any of us could think of," Lallara said.
"Well, I said from the start that it wouldn't work," Samas retorted.
"True. You did. I freely acknowledge that you've finally been right once in the hundred and fifty years we've known you. Now let's talk about something important."
"I think that's a sensible suggestion," Lauzoril said. It was Lallara who looked like a frail if shrewish old granny, but he was the one who'd bundled up to ward off the evening chill. "Captain, what's your assessment? After the beating we took today, is the army in any condition to continue the siege?"
"Well," said Aoth, "the real answer to that is that even if we six were the only ones left alive, we'd still have to continue, given what's at stake. But I know what you mean. Nasty as today was, more men than not made it back alive. I think our legions have at least one more good fight left in them." In fact, even the Brotherhood of the Griffon survived, although, battling at the forefront, its own aerial cavalry and Khouryn's spearmen had suffered a worse mauling than any of the zulkirs' household troops.
"But how do we continue the fight?" Lauzoril asked, fussily tugging his red velvet cloak tighter around him. "We need a new strategy. A better one."
"I think," Bareris said, "that when we conferred previously, His Omnipotence Samas Kul was right about at least two things. The only way to get a significant portion of our army into the Dread Ring is for someone who's already inside to open a gate."
"So we're back to trying to free some of the enemy from Szass Tarn's psychic bonds?" Nevron growled. "I thought we all agreed that scheme was unwieldy."
"We did," Bareris said. "That's why I intend to go inside the Ring and open the gate."
"How?" Lallara asked. "Invisibly? Masked in the appearance of a zombie? I guarantee you the necromancers are prepared for such tricks."
"I'm sure they are. I expect them to spot me almost immediately. However..." In a few terse sentences, Bareris explained his plan.
When he finished, Lallara turned to Lauzoril. "Will it work?" she asked.
The other zulkir fingered his chin. "It might."
"I think so too," said Aoth, "but it's damn risky." Especially considering that the enemy commander had thus far anticipated his adversaries' every move. For all they knew, he might be expecting this as well.
"What concerns me," Nevron said, glaring at Bareris, "is your hatred of Tsagoth. I'm told it overwhelmed you today. What if it does so again once you're inside the fortress? What if you succumb to your obsession and forget all about your mission?"
"It won't," Bareris said. "I don't deny we have a history together, and when I saw him, I lost my head. But truly, it's Szass Tam I hate, and Tsagoth is just his instrument. You can trust me to remember that from now on. But suppose I don't.
Or suppose the scheme fails for some other reason. What have you lost? One warrior."
I'll have lost a friend, Aoth thought, but what he said was, "You can depend on Bareris, Your Omnipotences. When has he ever let you down?"
Lallara gave a brusque nod. "All right. How soon can the legions be ready?"
"A day or two," said Aoth. Somewhere to the north, someone shrieked. Inside the tent, everyone's head snapped around in the direction of the noise. "Assuming we can get them through the night." He picked up his spear, planted the butt of it on the ground, and heaved himself to his feet.
Shrouded in invisibility, Bareris stalked toward the huge, black castle. Lallara had expressed doubt that such a defense would get him very far, but he hoped it would keep him from being noticed until he at least reached the top of the wall.
He made his approach shortly before the first gray insinuations of dawn could stain the black sky to the east. His timing might help him more than the magic. Undead entities and ores could see in the dark, but not as far as a man could see by day. And creatures that couldn't abide the touch of the sun or, like the goblin-kin, were simply nocturnal by nature might alteady be retiring to their vaults and barracks.
He reached the foot of the west wall. If anyone had noticed him, there was no indication of it. He undipped the coil of rope from his belt and sang a charm under his breath. The line warmed in his hands, then squirmed. He loosened his grip on it, permitting it to move freely, and one end writhed up and up until it reached the top of the black barrier before him. It looped around a merlon, tied itself off, and then he climbed it.
At the top, he peeked over the parapet. There were no guards in his immediate vicinity—no visible ones, anyway—so he swung himself onto the wall-walk and prowled onward, looking for a stairway to the courtyard below.
He was expecting to trigger some sort of enchantment, but also was tense enough that he still jumped when it happened. A mouth opened on the inner face of one of the merlons and cried, "Enemy! Enemy! Enemy!" A prickling chill danced over his body, and he didn't even bother to look down to verify that countermagic had ripped his veil of invisibility away.
He jumped off the wall-walk, sang a word of power, and fell slowly enough to avoid injury when he landed in the courtyard. Looking for a doorway, he ran. Other mouths opened one by one in the stonework to cry out his current location.
Blood ores rushed out of the dark, then hesitated when they took in his ink black eyes and bone white skin. They wondered if a warrior so manifestly undead could truly be a foe, and under other circumstances, Bareris might have tried to bluff them. Now, however, he broke their bones and blasted them off their feet with a thunderous shout.
"Tsagoth!" he called in a voice augmented to carry throughout the fortress. "Show yourself!" He sprinted to a door at the base of one of the Ring's lesset towers and yanked it open.
No one was on the other side. Not in this little antechamber, anyway. He sang a spell to seal both the door he'd just entered and the one on the far side of the room, then took a better look around.
Even here, inside the fortress, the windows were mere arrow slits. He just had time tb reflect that nothing solid and man-sized would have room to wriggle though when something else did, a flowing shadow with the murky, rippling suggestion of an anguished, silently wailing old man's face. It reached for Bareris, and he felt the chill poison that comprised its essence. The malignancy was nowhere near as dangerous to him as it would have
been to a mortal, but no doubt the wraith could hurt him.
He sidestepped its scrabbling hands, drew his sword, and cut through the center of it. The phantom flickered, stumbled, then rounded on him. He cut down the middle of its head, and it disappeared.
Bareris pivoted back to the nearest arrow slit. He pressed his eye to it just in time to see a necromancer thrust out a wand made from a mummified human forearm. A spark leaped from the instrument's shriveled fingertips.
Bareris dived away from the opening and threw himself flat. The spark streaked through the arrow slit and, with an echoing boom, exploded into a yellow burst of flame.
Fortunately, only the fringe of the blast washed over Bareris. It stung and scorched him, but that was all. He scrambled back to the arrow slit, chanted a spell, and felt a throbbing in his eyes. He stared at the Red Wizard, and the necromancer cried out and doubled over, dropping the preserved forearm in the process. The blood ores gathered around him gaped in consternation.
"I want Tsagoth!" Bareris howled. "Tsagoth! Bring him to me, or I'll curse you all!"
Malark and Tsagoth stood on the wall-walk, high enough that Bareris couldn't possibly see them, listening to the intruder shout and watching more and more guards gather in front of the minor bastion in which he'd taken refuge.
Malark smiled. "Even after a century of undeath, even when he's raving at the top of his lungs, you can tell he still has that magnificent voice."
His breath smelling of blood, Tsagoth snorted. "'Raving' is the word for it. When you decided to drive him mad with hate for me, I never imagined it would work as well as this."
"Well, since their first assault failed, the zulkirs haven't dared make a move against us. In fact, there are signs they may even pack up and leave. If so, then sneaking into the Ring alone was Bareris's only hope of getting his revenge."
"But it's no hope at all. A sane man would have understood it couldn't possibly work."
Malark twirled his ebony wand in his fingers, a habit the Monks of the Long Death had taught him to promote manual dexterity. "Well, you've got me there. Are you going to go down and give him the duel he so desires?"
"If you tell me to. Otherwise, no. Obviously, I'm not afraid of him. Back aboard that roundship on the Alamber Sea, I held off him, his griffon, the ghost, and Tammith Iltazyarra, all attacking me together. But I don't reciprocate his hatred, either. How could I, when I can barely tell you human vermin apart? So let the dogs"—Tsagoth waved his lower right hand at the ores, ghouls, and necromancers assembled below—"dig the badger out of his hole. It's what dogs are for, isn't it?"
"I suppose. It's just that Bareris is an old friend of mine, and I'd like to give him the gift of a fitting death. If he perished fighting you, that would do the trick. But I consider you a friend as well, and I won't compel you if you aren't so inclined."
Tsagoth laughed, though his mirth sounded more like a lupine snarl. "You're as crazy as he is."
"Perhaps. You're far from the first to tell me so."
"You know, I could promise him I'll meet him in single combat. Then the men could loose a few dozen arrows into him as soon as he comes through the door. That's a way to put him down before he kills any more of us."
Malark shook his head. "I won't do that."
"I figured as much."
"But I will let you lure him out, and then I'll duel him. After aH, I betrayed him and the southern cause. He ought to hate me
too, at least a little. If he meets his end fighting me, it's not as perfect as if it happened battling you, but it's still a death reflective of his fundamental nature."
Peering through an arrow slit, Bareris saw a column of mist spill down from on high. When it reached the ground, it thickened and took on definition until it became a dark, four-armed figure half again as tall as a man, with glowing crimson eyes and a head part human and part wolf.
Bareris shuddered, and hatred like burning vomit welled up inside him. He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the blood fiend. Struggled to remember his true purpose and his pledge to Aoth.
"I'm here, minstrel!" Tsagoth shouted, a hint of a lupine howl in his voice. "What is it you want?"
It seemed to Bareris that he had himself under control. He risked opening his eyes, and it was still all right. "Isn't it obvious? I want to face you in single combat!"
"Done. Come out and let's get started."
The quick acceptance of the challenge brought a fresh surge of fury. Made Bareris want to leap up this instant, rush outside—
He clamped down on the impulse. He needed to do more talking before permitting anything else to happen. "How do I know all your allies won't attack me the instant I appear?"
Tsagoth shrugged a peculiar-looking four-armed shrug. "You'll just have to trust me."
"I have a better idea. You come in here, and that will ensure it's just the two of us."
"The two of us and whatever snares you've prepared with your bardic tricks. I think not. Come out and take your chances, or all these soldiers and I will storm your pitiful little redoubt.
It should take about ten heartbeats."
"All right," Bareris answered, "I'll come out." He dissolved the locking charm he'd cast, opened the door, and, singing, stepped out into the open.
No quarrels or flares of freezing shadow leaped at him. Arranged in a crescent-moon arc some distance from the door, Szass Tarn's servants were content to stand and stare, ores and mages with malice and curiosity in their eyes, zombies with nothing at all in theirs. Tsagoth waited at the other end of the patch of clear ground, in reach at last after ninety years spent hunting him.
Bareris felt his anger deepen until its weight threatened to crush everything else inside him. He told himself that Tsagoth was merely Szass Tarn's pawn and that sticking to his plan was the way to discomfit the lich. Reminded himself of every other consideration he'd counted on to help him maintain control. And at that moment, none of it mattered. How could it? He was a dead man, a ravening beast, capable of nothing but grief, self-loathing, and rage.
He switched to a different song, raised his blade high, and took an eager stride.
He closed half the distance, and then Tsagoth vanished. Bareris faltered, startled, anguished that the demonic vampire evidently intended to break his word. Then Malark, clad partly in crimson, a black wand or cudgel in his hand, floated down from the sky to stand where Tsagoth had been.
Bareris realized a measure of calm had returned to him. Consternation had blunted his frenzy. "My business is with Tsagoth," he said.
"But Tsagoth isn't as interested in you as you are in him," Malark replied.
"Has he turned coward?"
"Most assuredly not. But our mortal conventions of honor mean very little to him. Now, I have a proposition for you. You
can't duel Tsagoth or retreat back into your bolt hole, either." The former spymaster pointed with his wand. Bareris glanced over his shoulder and saw that some of the enemy had shifted to block the way back into the tower. "But you can still have a measure of satisfaction. You can fight me." "Why would you offer that?"
"For old times' sake. Call it an apology if you like. So, do you want to, or would you rather have all these Red Wizards, dread warriors, and whatnot assail you forthwith?"
"All right. I'll fight you. I'll kill you too."
"It's possible. Give me your best."
Malark dropped into a deep stance and started to circle. Grateful to stop talking and resume singing, Bareris poised his broadsword in a low guard and sidled in the opposite direction.
Malark suddenly sprang into the air and thrust-kicked at Bareris's head. Bareris ducked, retreated a half step, and extended his sword. The point should have caught Malark in the groin, but despite his forward momentum, the smaller man somehow contrived to snap his foot sideways into the threatening blade, knocking it out of line.
Malark touched down, pivoted, and slammed a back kick into Bareris's torso. Bareris felt a stab of pain as his ribs snapped. The attack sent him reeling backward, and Malark turned again and rushed him. Still singing, Bareris waited another moment, then planted his feet, regained his balance, and extended his sword a second time. Malark stopped short and once again avoided impaling himself, but not by much. Bareris's point was half a finger-length from his chest.
Bareris lunged, and Malark spun to the side. The sword missed his vitals but sliced a bloody gash in his forearm.
Malark grinned and inclined his head. "Good. Really good." He threatened with his black club, and then, when Bareris tried to parry, tossed the weapon into his other hand and spun it to bind
his opponent's blade. Bareris sprang in closer, altering the relative positions of the blades so that he and not the spymaster was able to exert leverage. He heaved with all his inhuman strength and tore the club from Malark's grip.
At once he continued with a drawing cut to the knee. Malark hopped over it and hit him in the forehead with the heel of his palm. Bareris's skull crunched, and a bolt of agony blinded him. He hacked at the spot where instinct told him Malark must have gone, and evidently he guessed correctly. He didn't hit anything, but neither did any follow-up attack hit him, and when his vision cleared an instant later, the man in red was three paces away, where he must have leaped to dodge the cut. Malark whistled, and the black club flew up off the ground and inro his hand like a dog obeying its master's call.
The duel went on that way for a while, each combatant hurting the other occasionally, but not badly enough to incapacitate. Bareris wondered how much longer he needed to stall. Because that was the problem with the spell he'd been weaving ever since making contact with the enemy, threading the incantation through his seemingly mundane speech and shouts as well as performing it in his song. The effect he hoped to create was subtle, so much so that he himself had no way of knowing whether he'd succeeded. Or at least, none that didn't require betting his existence on it.
He was still wondering when Malark took the decision out of his hands.
Bareris advanced, lunged, and made a head cut. Malark stepped into the attack and should have ended up with a cleft skull as a result. But as he moved, he swiveled his upper body ever so slightly to the side, and somehow, the stroke missed. He dropped his cudgel, grabbed Bareris's forearm, and twisted.
Bareris resisted, refusing to drop his sword or let his adversary tear apart his elbow. Whereupon Malark let go of his limb, and, straining when there was no longer any opposing force, Bareris
lurched off balance. Only for an instant, but that was all the time his foe needed to snap a kick into his knee.
Bareris staggered, and the smaller man kicked his other knee. Neither leg would support Bareris now, and he fell prone in the dirt. He tried to roll over onto his back and raise his sword, but he was too slow. Something—a stamp kick, probably—smashed into the center of his spine, and then another cracked his neck. Pain blasted through him, and afterward, he couldn't move anymore. He tried to croak out the next syllable of his song, but even that had become impossible.
Malark looked down at Bareris, who was squirming feebly and uselessly at his feet, and judged he hadn't done enough. The twice-broken spine would finish any mortal man, but given a little time, the undead bard might well recover even from that.
But he was unlikely to rise up if someone cut off his head, pulled the heart from his chest, and burned him. Malark plucked the sword from his hand to begin the process.
"Sleep in peace," Malark said. "I'm glad I was finally able to free you." He gripped the blade with both hands and raised it high.
A sort of groan sounded from the living members of the audience he'd nearly forgotten, particularly his fellow Red Wizards. They weren't protesting what a zulkir chose to do. None of them would dare. But plainly, they regretted it.
At first Malark couldn't imagine why. Then, abruptly, as if a key had unlocked a portion of his mind, he understood. Like himself, the other mages were necromancers. Their special art was to master rhe undead, and Bareris was a particularly powerful specimen. Thus, they deplored the waste implicit in destroying him when they could enslave him instead.
Malark realized he agreed with them. He tossed away the sword to clank on the ground, called his wand back into his grasp, swept it through a serpentine mystic pass, and recited the first words of a binding. He made an encouraging gesture with his free hand, and the other necromancers joined in.
When the spell was done, Tsagoth appeared beside him to inspect the pale figure still twitching and shuddering on the ground. "Did you enjoy that?" the blood fiend asked.
"For me," Malark said, "destroying the undead isn't sport. It's a sacrament. But yes, I did enjoy it."
"But you didn't destroy him."
For a heartbeat, Malark felt confused. Perhaps even uneasy. But then he frowned his formless misgivings away. "Well, no. At the last moment, I realized how useful he could be fighting on our side if the council attacks again. Imagine the effect on Aoth and the rebels' morale when their faithful friend rides out to slaughter them."
Szass Tam snapped his shriveled fingers, and a rippling ran down from the top of the oval mirror. It looked like streaming water, and it washed the images of Malark, Tsagoth, and Bareris Anskuld away, so that the lich's own keen, intellectual face looked back at him once more.
It was good luck that he'd chosen to check on the Dread Ring in Lapendrar at this particular time, for he'd enjoyed watching Malark overcome the bard. Anskuld had never been more than a minor problem, but he'd been one for a hundred years, and after all the accumulated irritation, it was satisfying to see him neutralized at last.
Someone tapped on the door softly enough that it took sharp ears to hear it. Szass Tam turned in his chair and called, "Come in."
Ludicrously for such an exemplar of his brutish kind, bred for generations solely to kill whenever and whomever Red Wizards commanded, the blood-orc captain appeared to creep into the divination chamber as hesitantly as a timid child. Perhaps he didn't like the carrion stink and the litter of corpses and broken, filthy grave goods, for, insofar as he could without rendering the room incapable of its intended function, Szass Tam had filled it with such things. He'd done the same with many spaces reserved for his personal use. The ambience helped tune his mind for the Unmaking.
But he suspected the ore seemed uneasy because he had bad news to report, and the warrior confirmed as much as soon as his master told him to get up off his knees. "Your Omnipotence, we lost another hunting party. They found the demon—or it found them—outside the vault with the blue metal door, in the tunnels with all the faces carved on the walls. And it killed them."
I'm served by imbeciles, Szass Tam told himself and conscientiously tried to despise them for their inadequacies. "I'm sorry to hear it. Make sure we provide for the families of the fallen."
The officer swallowed. "There's more, Master. After the demon killed the hunters, it got the door to the vault open. It broke all the staves and wands you kept inside."
Szass Tam scowled. No stray predator from the Abyssal planes should have been capable of opening a door he'd sealed himself. And he'd spent the better part of four hundred years acquiring those rods across the length and breadth of Faerun and even in lands beyond. To lose the entire collection, and not even to a thief—that at least would make sense—but to a creature who'd apparently destroyed it out of sheer random spite—
Szass Tam belatedly realized that if his disgust was appropriate, his sense of attachment and attendant loss was counterproductive, and he did his best to quash it. The staves and wands were flawed, contemptible trash, just like the rest of creation. They would have
passed from existence within the next few tendays anyway, when the Great Work erased all the world. Thus, they didn't merit a second thought.
But he supposed he ought to provide a display of pique even though he no longer felt it. The ore would expect no less, and, mind-bound though they were, Szass Tam would rather his minions not question their master's sanity or true intentions. Ultimately, it didn't matter, but it had the potential to make this final phase of his preparations a bit more difficult than it needed to be.
So he scowled and snarled, "Kill the cursed thing! Take a whole legion into the crypts if you have to!"
"Yes, Master. We will. Only..."
"Only what?"
"Considering the cunning wizards and mighty creatures we've already lost, people are saying that maybe this demon's so nasty that only Szass Tam himself can slay it."
Szass Tam realized that if he still cared about the security of his fortress home and the safety of cherished possessions, as he wanted his retainers to believe, that was exactly what he'd do. And perhaps he could use a diversion, a break from the days and nights of near-constant meditation.
"All right," he said. "Forget about sending any more hunters. I'll go as soon as I get a chance."
Throughout the night, some vague impulse prompted Bareris to peer up at the sky. Eventually he observed that dawn wasn't far distant, that it was, in fact, approximately the same time as when he'd invaded the Dread Ring. In the depths of his mind, something shifted.
Once the necromancers were certain they'd enslaved him, Malark had assigned him duties appropriate to a seasoned officer.
As the day dragged by, he'd performed them like a sleepwalker, feeling nothing except a dull, bitter anger he could no longer express or even comprehend.
He was still numb and incapable of contemplating his situation. But he slipped away from the band of ghouls Malark had placed under his command and stalked to a shadowy corner in an empty courtyard. No mouths opened in the stonework to proclaim his whereabouts; he belonged to the garrison now.
Once there, he sang softly. He couldn't have said exactly what he was doing or why, but he exerted his bardic skills anyway, striking precisely the right notes, rhythm, and phrasing to spark magic flickering in the air around him like a cloud of fireflies.
The spell picked at another power that, at this moment, seemed to cover his skin like a smothering coat of lacquer. The process stung, but the pain was a kind of relief, and by the time it ended, his mind was clear, his will, his own once more.
When he'd nudged Malark and the other necromancers to enslave rather than destroy him, he'd fully expected the binding to take. That was why, prior to sneaking into the castle, he, working with Lauzoril and Lallara, had imposed a different geas on himself. At the proper moment, he would find himself compelled to cast countermagic that would, if Tymora smiled, break the enemy's psychic shackles.
Keeping to the shadows but, he hoped, not so blatantly that he'd look like a skulking footpad if someone noticed him anyway, he headed toward a sally-port in the west wall. Still, no enchanted mouths opened to denounce him. The defense wasn't sophisticated enough to distinguish between the thrall he'd been a little while ago and the foe he was now. Some wizard had instructed it that he belonged in the stronghold, and as far as it was concerned, that was that.
The four guards currently standing watch on the battlements above the postern were gaunt dread warriors with smoldering
amber eyes. Bareris couldn't muddle the minds of his fellow undead, and a thunderous shout or some other violent mystical attack was apt to draw unwanted attention.
But that was all right. He didn't mind doing things the hard way.
He climbed a set of stairs to the top of the towering wall and strode on toward the living corpses. They glanced at him once, then resumed their scrutiny of the rolling plain beyond the gate. Dread warriors were more sentient than ordinary zombies, but that didn't mean they were capable of casual curiosity.
The wall-walk was plenty wide enough for him to make his way past the first two. When he was in the middle of the group, their corrupt stink foul in his nostrils, he drew his sword, pivoted right, and struck.
The cut tumbled a dread warrior's head from its shoulders to drop into the bailey below. He swept its toppling body out of his way, rushed the one behind it, and split its skull before it could aim the spear in its gray, flaking hands.
He whirled and saw that slaying the guards on the right had given the ones on the left time to prepare themselves. The dead man in front held a scimitar in one hand and hurled its spear with the other.
Bareris crouched, and the spear flew over his head. He straightened up again and charged.
He cut a sizable chunk of the dread warrior's left profile away, exposing a section of black, slimy brain, but that didn't kill it. The corpse-thing tried to slash his leg out from under him, and steel rang when he parried. He shifted in close and hammered the heavy pommel of his sword into the breach in the dread warrior's skull. Brain splashed his hand, and his foe dropped.
He saw with a jolt of alarm that the last guard was raising a horn to its crumbling, oozing lips. He sprinted at it, slipped a cut from its scimitar, and struck the bugle from its grasp.
That frantic action left him open, and the dread warrior hacked at his flank. He parried, an instant too late, but though he failed to stop the attack from landing, his defensive action at least blunted the force of it and kept it from biting deep. He thrust up under the sentry's chin, and his sword punched all the way through the creature's head and crunched out the top of it. The guard fell.
Scowling at the burning pain in his side, Bareris freed his blade and cast about. As far as he could tell, no one had noticed anything amiss, and he meant to keep it that way.
He sang under his breath, and a shimmer curled like smoke through the air. First it hid the remains of the dread warriors, both the portions of them still on the wall-walk and those that had fallen to the ground. Then it painted semblances of them still standing at their posts.
Bareris was all too keenly aware that both wizards and undead were notoriously difficult to fool with this particular sleight. But he trusted his own abilities and dared to hope the phantasm would at least convince any foe who merely happened to glance in this direction.
Next he crooned a counterspell to obliterate any mouths that might otherwise have appeared and called out from the stone. When that was done, it was finally time to open the postern.
In this colossal stronghold, even the secondary gates were massive, designed to be operated by two or more soldiers at a time. But with his unnatural strength, Bareris managed. It was odd to feel the heavy bars slide and the valves swing apart when, beguiled by the mirage he himself had conjured, his eyes insisted that the sally-port was still sealed up tight.

Chapter eight
17Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

Invisible to hostile eyes—or so they hoped—Aoth, his fellow commanders, and a goodly portion of their army lay behind a shallow rise on the western approach to the Dread Ring. Blessed with the sharpest vision in the company, Aoth peered at the sally-port they'd selected before Bareris sneaked into the enemy stronghold. He willed it to open.
Crouching beside him, Jet grunted. "Yes. Wish for it. That'll make a difference."
"It can't hurt," said Aoth, and then, finally, the two leaves of the gate swung inward, first one and then the other. He could make out a fleck of white that must be Bareris pulling them open.
"By all the flames that burn in all the Hells," said Nevron, for once sounding impressed instead of contemptuous, "the singer did it."
"Or else the necromancers forced hkn to divulge his intentions and are exploiting our own scheme to set a snare for us," Lallara
said, smiling maliciously. "Shall we go find out which it is?"
"Yes," said Aoth. "Let's." He drew himself up, the others followed suit, and for an instant, he thought again how odd it was to have zulkirs lying on their stomachs in the sparse grass at his direction. Even Samas Kul had grudgingly forsaken his floating throne, substituting a conjured armature of glowing white lines that wrapped around his bloated body and evidently enabled him to move without strain.
Only Aoth intended to march in the vanguard, so he had to wait while the archmages retreated to the center of the company and their bodyguards formed protective ranks around them. "Are you sure you want to walk in?" he asked Jet. "You could wait and fly with the rest of the griffons." He hadn't included aerial cavalry in the first wave lest it double the chances of being spotted.
Jet dismissed the suggestion with a toss of his black-feathered head. "I'll go when and how you go. Just don't think you can ride me in the same way you'd ride a damned horse."
"Perish the thought." Aoth glanced around and judged that they were ready. He pointed with his spear, strode forward, and the others followed.
As they advanced, Jhesrhi and other wizards whispered spells of concealment. Aoth could feel the power of them seething in the air, and, even with his fire-kissed eyes, he didn't see. any foes lurking on the battlements waiting to spring a trap. Still, his throat was dry. He couldn't help imagining that when he and his comrades came close enough, flights of arrows and blasts of freezing, poisonous shadow would hammer down from the wall.
Fortunately, it never happened, and when, spear leveled, he warily stepped through the open gate, only Bareris was waiting to meet him. He grinned and gripped the bard by the shoulder. Mirror, on this occasion looking like the ghost of his own living self and not somebody else's, flitted in after him and saluted their friend with an elaborate flourish of his shadowy sword.
Bareris acknowledged them both with a curr nod.
Aoth looked around and found Khouryn already standing expectantly at his side. "Form ranks," he told the dwarf. "Quietly. We don't want the necromancers to know they have callers quite yet."
"I remember the plan," Khouryn said. He turned and waved a group of spearmen forward.
"Now where are the mages?" said Aoth.
"Here," said Jhesrhi, striding forward. The golden runes on her staff glowed. Silvery phosphorescence, the visible manifestation of some armoring enchantment, outlined her body. Her blonde tresses, cloak, and robe stirred as through brushed by a wind that wasn't blowing on anyone else. Several tattooed, shaven-headed Red Wizards trailed along behind her. "I assume it's time?"
"Yes," said Aoth. "Do it."
The wizards formed a circle and raised their instruments—two staves, four wands, and a clear crystal orb wrapped in a silvery web of filigree—above their heads. The mages chanted in unison, power warmed the air, and then a rattle ran from their immediate vicinity down the length of the fortress. It was the sound of doors banging shut in quick succession as they jumped and jerked in their frames.
The magic had sealed them. In some cases, those trapped inside the various towers and bastions would break them open again and rush out into the cool, moist dawn air. In others, the attackers would breach the doors themselves when they were ready, and pass through to kill whoever waited on the other side. Either way, the object was to fight the garrison a piece at a time instead of all at once.
"There's something you should know," Bareris said. "Malark's here, commanding the defense."
"I'm not entitely surprised. We knew we were up against someone clever."
"Be wary of him. He's spent the past ninety years learning sorcery from Szass Tam himself. He's even more dangerous than he was before."
"So are we." Aoth nodded to Khouryn, who relayed the command to the soldiers under his command. As the first hint of sunrise turned the sky above the postern gray, the spearmen stalked forward.
Despite the howling, surging press of battle, the corpse moved in its own little bubble of clear space, as if even its allies were taking care not to come too close. It wore filthy bandages, but if someone had tried to mummify and so preserve it in the usual way, the process had failed. Putrescence leaked from between the loops of linen, and the thing smelled as foul as anything Bareris had encountered in a century of battling undead. As it shambled toward three of Aoth's sellswords, the miasma overwhelmed them. One actually doubled over and puked. The other two reeled.
It made them easy prey. The plague blight, as such horrors were called, grabbed the man who was vomiting and hoisted him off his feet. Streaks of gangrene ran through the man's flesh.
"Leave it to me!" Bareris shouted. Obnoxious though it was, the stink wasn't making him sick, and it was even possible his undead body was immune to the blight's corrupting touch, though he hoped to avoid putting it to the test. He ran up behind the creature and plunged his sword into its back.
It dropped the already lifeless body of its previous opponent and lurched around to face him. He slashed it twice more, then retreated and cut its hand when it pawed for him.
The plague blight kept coming as though its wounds were inconsequential. He shifted out of its path and shouted. The
blast of sound smashed it into wisps of bandage, bone chips, and spatters of rot.
He pivoted, looking for whatever foe was rushing or creeping up on him now. None was, so he took a moment to try to take stock of the battle, difficult as that could be when a warrior was in the thick of it.
Aoth's plan to isolate the various components of the garrison had worked for a while. Long enough, one could hope, to give the attackers a significant edge. But then all the sealed doors opened virtually at once when some master wizard obliterated the locking enchantment. Now all of Szass Tarn's minions could join the fight, and it became a desperate, chaotic affair.
The tide of battle carried Bareris to the main gate. Scores of his allies were fighting like madmen to gain control of it, so they could open it and bring the rest of the zulkirs' army streaming in. But enemy axemen and spearmen were struggling just as furiously to hold them back, while up on the battlements, archers loosed arrows and scarlet-robed necromancers hurled flares of fire and shadow. Confiscated after the besiegers abandoned it and animated by magic, Tempus's Boot rolled itself back and forth to bash at its former masters.
Hoping to see some griffon riders in the immediate vicinity, Bareris looked higher still. Aoth's aerial cavalry had entered the fight some time ago, and some of them ought to be here now, harrying the men on the wall-walk from the air. But they weren't. Evidently the enemy had them tied up elsewhere.
Bareris sang. The world seemed to blink, and then he was standing atop the wall in the middle of the necromancers.
Still singing—now a spell to leech the courage from his foes' hearts and the strength from their limbs—Bareris thrust his sword into one wizard's chest, yanked it free, and stepped past the toppling corpse to confront a second mage. That one brandished a wand capped with a miniature skull and rattled off words of
power. Bareris felt coercion searing its way into his psyche like a branding iron. But this time, he wasn't sprawled crippled and helpless, and he cleaved the necromancer's skull before rhe binding was complete.
He killed the next mage. Dodged a hurtling, crackling ball of lightning. Slew another pair of wizards and saw they were the last spellcasters in that group.
He rounded on a squad of archers. A couple of the blood ores recognized the danger, and they loosed their shafts at him. One arrow stabbed into his chest.
It hurt and rocked him back a step, but that was all. He knocked the bowmen off their feet with another bellow, and then something crashed into the back of his skull, pitching him onto his belly.
It wasn't like when the arrow pierced him; the pain and shock were almost overwhelming. But if he let them paralyze him, he was finished. He floundered over onto his back.
Tsagoth stood several paces away, a second round stone— originally intended as ammunition for one of the Ring's smaller catapults, probably—in his upper right hand. He tossed it into the left and threw it. Bareris rolled, and the missile smashed down beside him.
He scrambled to his feet, and the back of his head throbbed. He wondered just how badly his skull was cracked, and then Tsagoth made another throwing gesture, although now his hand was empty.
An explosion of multicolored light hammered Bareris. Tsagoth vanished.
The blood fiend shifted himself through space with perfect stealth, like the consummate predator he was. It was pure warrior's instinct that warned Bareris rhat his foe had appeared immediately behind him in hopes of rending him while he was still reeling from the blast. He spun and dropped low in the same movement,
and Tsagoth s talons whipped harmlessly over his head. He thrust his sword deep into the vampiric demon's belly.
Tsagoth roared and convulsed but kept fighting. He leaned forward, actually imbedding the sword deeper to do so, and his four hands swept down.
Bareris couldn't free the blade in time to defend. He sang words of power instead, shielded himself with his free arm, and lowered his head in hopes of saving his eyes.
Tsagoth's claws tore his forearm and scalp, but Bareris didn't let the blows spoil the pitch and cadence of his magic. On the final note, force chimed through the air, and now he was the one who translated himself some distance backward.
He and the blood fiend regarded one another across the stretch of wall-walk and the gory corpses lying there. Tsagoth s stomach wound was already closing, faster than even Bareris could heal.
"So you decided to fight me after all," Bareris gritted. '
Tsagoth laughed. "This time I have a reason. I'm ordered to defend the Dread Ring, and if I leave you running loose, those other worms on the ground yonder are likely to get the gate open. So come on. I'll give you what you truly want. I'll send you to join your woman."
Singing, Bareris advanced, but slowly. It gave the burning pain of his wounds time to ease and his enchantment time to tingle through his body.
He stepped into range, and Tsagoth clawed at him. Bareris wished himself a phantom. The attack raked harmlessly through him, and Tsagoth snarled and pivoted. Since he couldn't see Bareris anymore, he assumed the bard had tried the same trick he himself had employed, and shifted behind him.
But Bareris was using a different spell, and since he hadn't really changed position, he was behind Tsagoth now. He willed himself solid and visible again and cut into the blood fiend's back.
Tsagoth staggered and jerked back around, but not fast enough. Bareris had time to land two more cuts and still shift himself beyond the blood fiend's reach when the hulking creature lunged.
Of course, there was no such thing as a perfect defense; even his intermittently ethereal condition didn't qualify. If an attack surprised him, it would score, and Tsagoth was a cunning fighter. Once the undead demon realized what Bareris was doing, he used his ability to whisk himself through space to achieve a comparable effect. So, each trying to predict when and where the other would appear, the two combatants repeatedly materialized, struck, and vanished once again.
The difference was that Bareris guessed better. It was as though Shevarash, god of retribution, guided him. His strokes scored again and again, slicing a Crosshatch of bloody gashes down the length of Tsagoth's body while he himself avoided further harm. And as his dance of vengeance continued, as the demon jerked in pain and Bareris's flying blade cast spatters of the creature's blood, a savage ecstasy swelled inside him.
Perhaps it made him careless.
He willed himself solid, made an overhand cut at Tsagoth's torso, then saw the blood fiend wasn't trying to defend himself. Instead, he hurled himself into the blow, willing to accept whatever harm it mighr do him if, at the same instant, he could drive his claws into Bareris's body.
The sword sheared into flesh, and so did Tsagoth's talons. Bareris stiffened at the shock of his new wounds, and then Tsagoth plowed into him and bore him down beneath him. The injured spot on the back of Bareris's head cracked against the stone, and a flare of pain made him convulse, insofar as that was possible with his huge opponent pinning him down.
Their claws still lodged in Bareris's body, Tsagoth's hands pulled in opposite directions. Agony ripped through the bard as
his frame began to tear apart. The demonic vampire spread his jaws wide, then lowered them to Bareris's face.
Bareris told himself that this was the thing who'd destroyed Tammith, and rage lifted him above the crippling pain. Somehow he found the strength to concentrate and make himself a phantom once more. Tsagoth's fangs clashed shut in the same space his head occupied, but without harming him. The undead demon's body dropped through his and landed with a thump.
Bareris rolled clear, floundered upright, and made himself corporeal. Tsagoth snarled and started to rise. The last sword stroke must have hurt him, for he was floundering too. But he was still coming.
Shaking, his body ablaze with pain, Bareris gripped his sword with both hands, bellowed a war cry, and swung. The blow split Tsagoth's head from crown to neck.
Two more cuts chopped the head free of the body. Bareris reduced it to fragments, then turned his attention to the remainder of his foe's corpse. When he was certain that he'd demolished the blood fiend beyond any possibility of regeneration, all the strength spilled out of him, and he collapsed amid the carrion.
Where he tried to feel triumph. Or at least satisfaction. Something.
But he couldn't. For a few moments, as he had fought and gained the upper hand, he'd felt a teasing promise of joy, but there was nothing now but the torment of his wounds.
As Tammith had once tried to explain to him, this too was what it meant to belong to the living dead. You thirsted for something—blood, revenge, power, whatever—and the need was so hellish you'd do anything to ease it. But you couldn't, no matter what you tried.
As soon as he could, before his wounds had finished closing, he drew himself to his feet to hurl himself back into the roaring chaos of the battle. For after all, what else was there to do?
A griffon rider swooped past the arched window. Malark resisted the impulse to toss a javelin or darts of force at the sell-sword and shrank back instead. If he didn't reveal his location, the enemy couldn't disturb him while he performed his next task.
And it was essential that he succeed. He'd helped the defense by unlocking all the magically sealed doors, but by itself, that wasn't going to be enough. The council's soldiers were pushing into every bailey. They'd taken possession of some of the towers and bastions already. By the looks of it, they were on the verge of seizing the fortress's primary gate to admit the rest of their army.
But Malark judged he could still turn the fight around—if he could blot the wan dawn light out of the sky. Then the specters and other entities lurking in the dungeons, the true night creatures to which the sun was poison, could emerge to join the fray.
Unforrunately, it wouldn't be easy. Ysval had been able to do it, but he'd been a nighthaunt. And then Xingax, but he'd grafted Ysval's severed hand onto his own wrist.
Malark would have to make do with pure sorcery. Encouraging himself with the reflection that at least he'd learned the craft from the greatest mage in the East, he raised his wand and started to chant.
Jet beat his wings, flew above a skin kire, caught the membranous undead in his talons, and shredded it. Meanwhile, Aoth looked around the aerial portion of the battle for another foe and saw the sky was darkening.
With his fire-infected eyes, he'd noticed the process early. That gave him a chance to stop it if he could determine its source.
Unfortunately, no matter how he peered, he couldn't. The wizard responsible was hidden away somewhere.
He cast about for his own wizards and spotted the gleam of Jhesrhi's golden hair atop a captured bastion. She and some colleagues in red were hurling fire from the flat, square roof of the keep, while the soldiers standing with them shot arrows or dropped stones they'd pried loose from the parapet.
Aoth sent Jet diving toward the keep. Their haste nearly earned them a volley of arrows, but then the startled archers realized who was plunging down at their position and eased the tension on their bowstrings.
Jet spread his pinions wide and, despite his speed, touched down with scarcely a bump. "Jhesrhi!" said Aoth. "The sky's getting darker."
Jhesrhi looked up. "It is?"
"Yes, and that's bad. Can you find the person causing it?"
"Maybe. Darkness isn't an element per se, but air is, and the darkness is presumably flowing through the air. I'll speak to it."
She raised her staff over her head, closed her eyes, and murmured words of power. Aoth had a fair knowledge of elemental wizardry himself, for as a warmage, he relied on it extensively, but even so, he didn't recognize this particular spell. A cold wind kicked up, moaning, blowing one direction, then another, fluttering the hems of cloaks and robes.
Jhesrhi lowered her staff and used it to point at one of the taller towers. "It's just one man, and he's in the top of that."
"Thank you." Aoth dismounted, strode to the parapet, pointed his spear, and rattled off his own incantation. A bright, crackling lightning bolt leaped from the point of the spear, only to terminate just short of one of the windows of the minaret.
Aoth cursed and threw a pale blaze of cold. It too failed to reach the target. "The bastard's got wards in place."
One of the zulkirs' soldiers said, "Captain, we could do it the
regular way. Break into the bottom of the tower and fight our way up from there."
Aoth shook his head and pointed to the sky. By now, surely everyone could see it was murkier than before. "We don't have time."
His glistening wand of congealed quicksilver in his hand, the harness of white energy still supporting his ponderous form, Samas Kul waddled forth from the circle of wizards with Lallara hobbling at his side. Aoth hadn't noticed his co-commanders before but wasn't surprised to find them here. The top of the keep was a relatively safe position from which to work their magic, and in his experience, his former masters didn't like facing unnecessary risks. That was the job of lesser creatures like legionnaires.
"I'll break open the tower," Samas said.
Lallara spat. "You couldn't breach the walls before."
"Then," Samas said, "we were outside the Dread Ring, which meant its defenses were at their strongest. Now, we're inside. Watch and learn." He raised his wand with a surprising daintiness that reminded Aoth of a conductor leading a band of musicians, then flicked it through an intricate series of passes.
A piece of minaret sparkled around its pointed window, and then the black stone turned to water. It cascaded down the side of the tower, leaving a ragged hole and revealing the man inside. It was Malark, clad in garments that were partly scarlet, denoting his status as a Red Wizard.
Aoth and Malark both aimed their weapons, but Szass Tarn's aide was a hair quicker. Four poinrs of yellow light shot from the tip of his wand.
"Get down!" Aoth yelled. Praying that the parapet would shield them at least to some degree, he threw himself flat, and his companions followed suit. Most of them, anyway. Lallara was moving too slowly. He grabbed her and jerked her down just as the sparks exploded into blasts of fire.
The heat seared him, and the booms nearly deafened him, but he wouldn't let them pound him into sluggishness. He raised his head and looked around.
Some of the warriors were badly burned, maybe dead. Thanks be to Kossuth, Jhesrhi and Jet looked dazed and a little scorched but essentially unharmed.
On the other side of the gap that separated the one high place from the other, violet phosphorescence seethed on top of the hole Samas had punched, patching it. Somehow, though he'd only had an instant, Malark had conjured a new defense. Now, protected by that shield, he was lifting the trapdoor that granted access to the lower levels of the tower.
He was still chanting and brandishing his ebony club too, and the sky was still blackening. Down in one of the western courtyards, a door flew open, and wolves with glowing crimson eyes—vampires, almost certainly--loped out.
Lallara snapped her fingers and floated back onto her feet as though invisible hands had lifted her. Samas heaved himself up in a way that reminded Aoth of a whale breaching. Jhesrhi rose, and the glowing runes on her staff pulsed brighter, first one and then another, a sign that she was angry.
Lallara glared at the minaret so intently that one could virtually feel her summoning every iota of her mystical might. Then she thrust her staff at it and screamed a word of power.
Samas seized Jhesrhi's blistered hand in his own meaty fingers. "I want your strength," he said, and though she stiffened like he'd jabbed her with a pin, she didn't pull away. He whipped the quicksilver wand through a complex figure.
Assailed by Lallara's spell of dissolution, the shield of violet light shattered like glass, the fragments winking out of existence when they fell free of the whole. As soon as the defense failed, Samas's power enfolded the minaret, and the entire top half of the black tower became a shapeless grayness that collapsed under its own
weight and engulfed the nearly vanished Malark in the process. Portions of the stuff fell away from the central mass in globs and spatters. The rest flowed down what remained of the spire.
For an instant, Aoth couldn't tell what Samas had transmuted the stonework into. Then he heard the fresh screams rising from the base of the tower, looked down at the burned, battered, writhing men and ores, and realized it was molten lead.
He rounded on the obese archmage, who was just letting go of Jhesrhi's hand. "Some of our own men were at the foot of that tower!"
"I killed Malark Springhill too," Samas answered, "and brought back the dawn light." Aoth saw that the sky was indeed lightening, and the vampire wolves were bursting into flame. "It's a fair trade, don't you think?"
Then, as if to save Aoth the trouble of framing an answer, the transmuter swayed and collapsed.
Lallara squinted at him. "Pity," she quavered, "he isn't dead. He simply swooned from his exertions." She turned to a soldier. "Guard him, and find a healer to tend him. And have food and drink ready when he wakes up. I guarantee the hog will want them."
Aoth scratched a patch of itching scorched skin on his cheek. Something was nagging at him, and after a moment, he realized what. He was finding it hard to believe that Malark was truly gone, charred, crushed, smothered in a heartbeat. It would have felt wrong even if the spymaster had simply been the supremely competent warrior of a century ago, and in the time since, he'd mastered a zulkirs skills on top of that.
Still, that was war for you. Even the greatest champion could die in an instant, as Aoth had observed time and again. And to say the least, it was doubtful that any human being could survive the magmalike inundation that Samas had dumped on Malark's head.
Anyway, the problem of the darkening sky was past, Aoth had a battle to oversee, and the best way to do it was on griffonback.
Sensing his intent, Jet bounded to his side. He swung himself back into the saddle, and the enchanted restraining straps buckled themselves to hold him there. The familiar leaped, lashed his black-feathered wings, and carried him aloft.
They climbed until they achieved a good view of the great southern gate. At the moment, he judged, it was the site of the most important struggle of all.
He sighed and sent a silent word of thanks to the Firelord when he saw that his side was winning. A lurching step at a time, paying a toll in blood for every miniscule advance but exacting even greater payment in their turn, the council's soldiers pushed, stabbed, and hacked their way toward the great valves, grinding the mass of defenders in front of them like grain beneath a miller's stone.
Meanwhile, Gaedynn and other griffon riders wheeled above the fight and shot arrows down at Szass Tarn's minions. Singing, Bareris fought on the wall-walk, keeping it clear of enemy warriors when necessary and hammering the legionnaires, dread warriors, and ores below him with his magic the rest of the time. Mirror battled beside him.
The defenders held out for a while longer, but finally the relentless assault proved too much for all but the stolid undead. Panicking, their human and ore counterparrs cringed or turned and sought to run away.
But, hemmed in, they had nowhere to flee, and when they all but stopped fighting, the attacking infantry rolled over them like the tide.
At once, some of Aoth's sellswords scrambled to the mechanisms controlling the gates. The huge leaves cracked open, and a roar arose from the men waiting on the other side.
Aoth smiled. He was sure that he and his comrades would fight for the rest of the day and well into the night. But even so, he judged that in the truest sense, the castle had just fallen.