Unholy (2 page)

But, bloodied though they were, they got up again, and the next moment, the vaporighu and palrethee stalked into the room. It looked as though, tangled together, each had inflicted ugly burns on the other. Still, like the jarliths, they showed no signs of being on the brink of incapacitation.

Despair welled up inside of Aoth, and he struggled to push it down. He raised his hands to cast another spell, quite possibly his last. Then a song, a pounding battle anthem, rang out from somewhere behind the vaporighu and palrethee. The fierce sound of it washed away Aoth’s fear and sent fresh vitality tingling through his limbs even as it made the demons falter and peer around in confusion.

Aoth laughed. Though he hadn’t heard that voice in nearly a century, he recognized it nonetheless. And he was suddenly confident that he was going to survive this nightmare after all.

Whisked through space by the arcane power of bardic music, Bareris Anskuld appeared near Aoth—but just out of reach of the wheel of swords—with the warmage’s spear in his hand. As he tossed the long, heavy spear to his former ally, the semblance of life departed from him like a cloak he’d discarded so it wouldn’t hamper the action of his sword arm. Undeath had bleached his skin and hair white as bone and had turned his eyes to ink black pits.

Aoth caught the spear and felt whole again. “Thank you.”

Bareris didn’t answer. He just kept singing, pivoted toward the enemy, and came on guard. The vaporighu lumbered at him, and one note of his melody banged loud as a thunderclap. The noise ripped chunks of rotten flesh away from the demon’s bones.

The palrethee sprang forward, then lost its balance and pitched forward. When it did, Aoth could make out the vague smoky figure who had just plunged his sword into its back. At first, the spectral swordsman resembled a smeared charcoal sketch of Bareris. Then he flowed into a murky semblance of the demon he’d just attacked.

The phantom could only be Mirror. Somehow he too had survived.

The astonishment of it all might have slowed a less-seasoned combatant, but the roar of one of the jarliths recalled Aoth to the business at hand. Time enough to marvel at this unexpected reunion when he and his friends were out of danger.

He leveled the spear, rattled off a tercet, and power groaned through the air. Seven rays of light, each a different color, blazed from the spear like a whip made of rainbows to lash the jarliths.

One jarlith turned to gray, unmoving stone. The other froze and jerked in spasms as arcs of lightning danced across its body. But when the sizzling, popping effect blinked out of existence, it charged.

Aoth braced the butt of the spear against the floor and impaled the cat as it sprang. The impact jolted him but failed to knock him over. The jarlith’s razor-sharp talons slashed the air in front of his face, falling short by the length of his little finger. Meanwhile the wheel of blades sliced into its guts again and again and again, and he sent destructive power stored in the spear burning up the shaft and point and into the creature’s body.

The jarlith screamed and then went limp. Aoth dumped the carcass on the floor, yanked the spear out of it, and turned to see which of his comrades needed help.

Neither of them.

Mirror and the palrethee were fighting sword against sword. The ghost had changed again, into something approximating the form he’d worn in life, or so his friends believed: the appearance of a thin warrior with a drooping mustache and a melancholy countenance, armored in a hauberk and carrying a targe on his arm. Sometimes he shifted the shield to catch the strokes of the blazing sword. At other moments, the demon’s weapon seemed to whiz harmlessly through his insubstantial body.

Meanwhile, he landed cut after cut on the demon, his shadowy blade plunging deep into its starveling torso. Strangely, whenever he did, the palrethee jerked, but Mirror’s form wavered, too, like a mirage threatening to flicker out of existence. It was as if he couldn’t strike this creature shrouded in hellfire without hurting himself as well. But every time, his shape reasserted itself, reclaiming as much definition as it ever possessed.

Bareris was using his sword, too, but defensively, just to hold the vaporighu back while he attacked with his voice. Aoth could feel the fearful, disorienting power in the keening melody.

It was magic devised to rip a mind to pieces.

The vaporighu dropped to its knees, pawed at its head, and tore away pieces of its own decaying flesh. Bareris gripped his sword with both hands, stepped in, and decapitated the demon.

At virtually the same instant; Mirror plunged his sword into the palrethee’s chest, and its halo of flame blinked out. Its already emaciated body shriveled still further, and then it pitched forward onto its face.

Bareris sang a final descending phrase that brought his battle anthem to a conclusion. Aoth took another look around for onrushing demons or slinking crossbowmen. He didn’t see any, and his instincts told him the fight was over. All the demons were dead, and any surviving human assassins had fled the scene.

He realized how winded he was and drew a deep breath. “It’s good to see the two of you. Better than good. But what are you doing here? Did you know someone was going to try to murder me?

“No,” Mirror said. “We came in search of you because we need your help. It’s the mercy of the gods that we tracked you down just in time to aid you. Who wanted you dead, do you know?”

“Nevron, almost certainly.” The Spellplague had changed everything, including magic itself. The specialized disciplines that formed the basis of the old Thayan Orders of Red Wizardry had largely passed from the scene. But Aoth was certain that the former zulkir of Conjuration still commanded a veritable army of demons and devils.

“We have to talk,” Bareris rapped.

“We will,” said Aoth, “of course. But I have to finish figuring out what happened here. There’s at least a chance Lady Quamara and some of the servants are still alive.”

They weren’t alive. Aoth and his comrades found the bloody corpses in the wine cellar.

Mirror recited a brief prayer for the fallen and swept his semi-transparent hand through a semicircular ritual pass. Millennia ago, he’d been a knight pledged to the service of a beneficent deity, almost a priest, in fact, and he still practiced his devotions despite the seeming paradox of an undead spirit invoking the holy. When he finished, he said, “I’m sorry. Were the two of you in love?”

Aoth sighed. “No. I was her amusement, and she was mine. But she was a sweet lass. She certainly didn’t deserve to end like this. Nor did these others, I suppose.”

“Now can we talk?” Bareris asked.

“No!” Aoth had half forgotten how the bard’s grim single-mindedness used to annoy him. “I have to tell Quamara’s brother and the city authorities what happened, and it’s probably best that I do it without involving you. I know the undead are accepted in Thay, but Aglarond’s a different matter. I’ll meet you at my own house as soon as possible.”

“As soon as possible” turned out to be dawn, but luckily, unlike many undead, both his rescuers could endure sunlight. He ushered them into his house and study and found Khouryn snoring on the floor with his urgrosh lying beside him.

“He’s all right,” said Mirror quickly. “He wouldn’t tell us where you were, so Bareris forced him. At the time, I didn’t approve, but since you were actually in danger, I’ll concede that his instincts were on target.”

“You’re sure Khouryn’s all right?” asked Aoth.

“Yes. I can rouse him if you like, but it might be better to let him wake naturally.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then.” After all, Mirror had a master healer’s knowledge and discernment, even if his chill touch was poisonous except for those moments when he deliberately channeled the power of his unknown god. Aoth bent over, picked up Khouryn with a grunt—dwarf soldiers were damn heavy, considering their stature—and deposited him on a divan.

He then dropped into a chair. “Sit if you like,” he said. And they did, although Mirror’s shadowy, faceless form seemed to float in the general vicinity of the stool he’d chosen, as opposed to actually resting on it. His shape and the seat’s even appeared to interpenetrate a little. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

Bareris smiled bitterly. “Perhaps the easiest way to explain is to tell a story.”

Midwinter, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

His boots crunching in the snow, Bareris walked the tangled backstreets of Eltabbar and sang a spell under his breath. Over time, the enchantment altered his appearance. Filthy rags mended themselves and turned to shining silk and velvet. His hand-and-a-half sword became a short, slender blade with a jeweled hilt and scabbard, and his brigandine vanished altogether. All the hair on his head disappeared as well, his eyes displayed discernible whites and irises once more, and his canine teeth lengthened into fangs. But it all happened slowly enough that no passerby, glancing casually in his direction, would notice the transformation.

Not that there was anyone to see, no one but Mirror flowing along as an invisible sensation of hollowness and wrongness at his side. Once, no matter how cold the weather, the streets would have teemed with folk celebrating the Midwinter Festival. These days, ordinary people took care to conclude their revelry, or the open-air portion of it, anyway, before the sun went down. They

feared to encounter their masters when the latter were in a playful mood.

Bareris and Mirror emerged from a twisting lane too narrow to accommodate a wagon onro a broader, straighter thoroughfare. On the far side of an arching bridge spanning a frozen canal, their destination glowed with silvery phosphorescence. Sleighs, coaches, and litters waited in line to deposit their passengers under the porte cochere of a stone house with turrets at the four corners of the peaked slate roof. A luminous, runic emblem inlaid above the door, its shape and color in constant flux, revealed that at one time, the mansion had belonged to the extinct Order of Transmutation.

“I don’t much like this,” Mirror murmured. It was the first time he’d spoken in three days. Evidently he was coming out of his latest bout of ghostly disorientation or whatever it was, just in time to fret.

“My disguise will hold up,” Bareris said. “You just remain as near to imperceptible as you can get.”

“Even if they don’t recognize us, there are plenty of other things that can go wrong.”

“I don’t care. This Muthoth bastard is one of Sylora Salm’s chief deputies. There’s a fair chance she’ll put in an appearance. And even if she doesn’t, there’ll be other people to kill.” He strode toward the bridge and felt Mirror glide along in his wake.

As Bareris spoke to one of the slaves minding the entryway, he infused his voice with magic. The enchantment persuaded the lackey that he saw an invitation in the newcomer’s empty hand, and he and a fellow servant swung open the tall, arched double doors.

On the other side was a high-ceilinged marble foyer with several doorways opening off it. Bareris assumed that newly arrived guests were supposed to pass through the one directly opposite the entrance, where an usher waited to thump his staff on the floor and announce them.

But, disguised though he was, Bareris didn’t want all eyes drawn to him or to have his false name and fraudulent title shouted aloud to give every listener the opportunity to reflect that he’d never heard of such a person. He led Mirror into one of the other doorways. If this structure was like other Thayan mansions of his experience, a series of interconnecting rooms and passages should provide a less conspicuous means of access to Muthoth’s great hall.

Some of the lesser chambers were occupied. In one, a withered husk of a creature robed in red, still the color reserved for the realm’s most powerful wizards, sat talking with another malodorous corpse wearing the silver skull-and-crossed-swords badge of an order of undead knights. In another, the hulking, red-eyed undead called boneclaws, Muthoth’s household guards of choice, gripped naked prisoners in their enormous, jointed talons. Several guests hovered around the captives, shouting in their ears, pinching them, or jabbing at their eyes with stiffened fingers. Bareris gathered that the object of the game was to make a victim flinch and gash himself against a boneclaw’s razor-sharp fingers, and that this was a sport on which the players had decided to gamble.

One captive had already severed an artery, and his lifeless body sprawled discarded on the floor. The remaining ones wept and pleaded, with blood trickling down their torsos and legs. A lithe female vampire knelt, licked gore off a taut, quivering stomach, and won a silver coin thereby.

Bareris could feel Mirror’s wrath building as if the air at his side were growing colder and colder. “No,” he whispered. “We didn’t come here to rescue anyone.”

“Perhaps we should have.”

“But we didn’t, and without a plan, we’d surely fail. Look, we’ve both been spared all these years for a reason; isn’t that what you keep telling me? So we can’t throw ourselves away. We have to pick our battles and fight intelligently.”

“Move on, then. I don’t promise to hold back if I watch any more of this.”

Another two dozen paces brought them to a doorway opening on the great hall. An orchestra on a dais along the far wall played a pavane, and Bareris felt the old familiar urge, still alive in him when so much else had withered, to immerse himself in the music. He shook it off and surveyed the company instead.

He spotted a reasonable number of living revelers, mostly clad in red, proof that even after a century, Szass Tarn hadn’t completely transfigured the aristocracy. But the majority of celebrants were undead, shadowy specters, vampires with alabaster skin and chatoyant eyes, crumbling corpses, fleshless skeletons, and things so misshapen and grotesque they bewildered the eye, perhaps experiments created in the laboratories of the necromancers but granted positions of authority even so.

Good host that he evidently was, Muthoth had provided refreshments for all his guests. Some of the trestle tables proffered food and drink fit for mortals, but prisoners lay chained spread-eagled across others for the undead to devour.