Authors: Richard Lee Byers
By rights, that should have been the end of the battle. But perhaps the simbarchs’ wizards cast countermagic that kept the trap from being as effective as expected. Or maybe sheer heroic determination was to blame. Either way, muddy figures floundered out of the ooze and ran onward.
Of course, the snare had done some good. It had killed some of the enemy and deprived the charge of whatever order it originally possessed. But there were still a lot of Aglarondans, their features were still contorted with rage, and if they overran the zulkirs’ formation, they could still carry the day.
My turn at last, Khouryn thought. “Wall!” he bellowed. “Wall!”
His foot soldiers scrambled to form three ranks with himself in the center of the first. Everyone gripped a shield in one hand and a leveled spear in the other. The spears of the men in the back
rows were longer than those of the fellows in front, so everyone could stab at once.
Khouryn had time to glance at the human faces to each side of him, and he felt satisfaction at what he saw: fearthat was naturalbut not a hint of panic. They’d stand fast as he’d trained them to, as dwarves themselves would hold the line.
Howling, the first Aglarondans lunged into striking distance.
For a few heartbeats, the defense worked as theory said it should. Overlapping shields protected those who carried them and protected their neighbors, too. The bristling hedge of spears pierced foes reckless enough to come within reach, often before those warriors could even strike a blow.
But then, as so often happened, the work got harder. Aglarondans somehow sprang past the spear points, struck past the shields, and killed defenders, tearing gaps in the formation, even as the relentless pressure of their onslaught buckled the lines. Meanwhile, spears broke or stuck fast in corpses, and sellswords snatched frantically for their secondary weapons.
Khouryn was one of those whose spear stuck fast. He dropped it and his shield, too, and pulled his urgrosh off his back.
A white warhorse, its legs black with muck, cantered at him, turning so the half-elf on its back could cut down at him with his sword. Khouryn parried hard enough to knock the blade out of its owner’s grip, then, with a single stroke, chopped the rider’s leg in two and sheared into the destrier’s flank. Rider and mount shrieked as one, and the steed recoiled.
Khouryn glanced around, making sure he was still more or less even with the soldiers to each side. To anyone but a seasoned warrior, it might have seemed that any semblance of order had dissolved into a chaos of slaughter, into the deafening racket of weapons smashing against shields and armor and the wails of the wounded and dying. But in fact, there was still a formation
of sorts, and it was vital to preserve it.
He killed another Aglarondan, and more after that, until the gory urgrosh grew heavy in his hands, and his breath burned and rasped. The man on his left went down, and Gaedynn, who’d traded his bow for a sword and kite shield, darted forward to take his place.
Sometime after that, the enemy stopped coming. Peering out across the corpses heaped two and three deep in front of him, Khouryn saw the survivors fleeing north toward the safety of Glarondar. The Brotherhood’s horsemen harried them along.
The last Khouryn knew, Aoth had been holding the cavalry in reserve. At some point, he must have ordered them forward, possibly to play a crucial role in foiling the Aglarondans’ attack.
If so, Khouryn supposed he’d hear all about it later. For now, he was simply grateful for the chance to lower his weapon.
Nevron studied the fleeing Aglarondans for a time, making sure they had no fight left in them. Then he drew a deep, steadying breath. He’d need a clear mind and a forceful will to compel his demons and devils back into their various prisons. They were having a jolly time of it hunting enemy stragglers, torturing and killing Aglarondan wounded, and devouring elf and human flesh.
He was just about to start when Samas floated up in the huge, padded throne that spared him the strain of having to waddle around on his own two feet. “Should we chase the Aglarondans and finish them off?” the transmuter asked.
“No,” Nevron said. “A wounded bear can still bite, and we need to conserve our strength if we’re going to Thay. The simbarchs won’t try to take the Reach again for a while. That will have to do.”
“But if we don’t come back to protect it, they’ll take it eventually.”
Nevron spat. “I realize the name of Samas Kul is synonymous with greed. But if you’re dead, I doubt that even you will care what becomes of your dominions.”
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.