Prophet of the Dead

Prologue

Of course you can’t,” said a deep, silky voice; Jhesrhi Coldcreek cast around in vain to find the source. “How can Amaunator shed his light on secrets in a place where the Yellow Sun never shines?”

Cera Eurthos’s conjured glow faded, and darkness shrouded the chilly crypt with its mad jumble of funerary carvings. The stag men turned this way and that, the bells in their antlers chiming.

Jhesrhi called for fire. It leaped forth from the core of her, flowed down the inside of her arm, and sprang forth from the head of her brazen staff. She felt satisfaction that the thing that had spoken, whatever it was, couldn’t smother her power.

But then it came out of the dark, and dread pierced her like a knife. She flinched back a step, and so did her companions. Her gilded mace clutched in her hand and blond curls sticking out from under the rim of her helmet, Cera let out a gasp.

The newcomer was seven feet tall, with bone-white skin and clothing so dark that Jhesrhi could only half make out the intricate folds and embroidery. Once, he might have been handsome in the way of a corpse embalmed and displayed with consummate art and care, but since then, something had ripped his left eye from its socket and scarred the skin around it. The same calamity, presumably, had shriveled and twisted his left arm into a useless stick he held pressed to his chest.

The pale being stood and surveyed the two women and the half-dozen stag men with a kind of insouciant poise. His disfigurements notwithstanding, he might even have seemed elegant if not for the corona of shadow that surrounded him like a tattered, billowing cloak. The tendrils of darkness reached and coiled constantly, like starving creatures groping and snatching for morsels of food.

Jhesrhi’s heartbeat throbbed in her neck, and she gritted her teeth to hold in a whimper. She told herself that, although apparently a powerful fiend or undead, this one-eyed filth was surely no more formidable than Tchazzar or other foes she’d faced. But that rational thought didn’t help.

Because the dread she felt wasn’t natural. It was the result of some supernatural influence the creature was exerting. She rattled off a charm of warding, but it failed to clear her head.

“Fall down and wait." it said. “Otherwise, I’ll devour you, body and soul, and the scraps of you I leave on my plate will rise up to serve me in pain and shame forever.”

He ambled forward, still with the casual self-assurance of a dandy strolling in a garden. But the tatters of shadow stretched and lashed in a frenzy, like twenty blades cutting and stabbing at once.

The stag men didn’t grovel; most likely, because the pale creature hadn’t spoken in Elvish, they didn’t even understand what he’d demanded. But they couldn’t bear to stand and fight him either. They bolted for one of the several arches connecting the vault to other portions of the maze.

Meanwhile, Cera stayed put, but not, Jhesrhi suspected, because she was bravely holding her ground. It was because fear had petrified her.

Jhesrhi was in essentially the same condition, but instinct suddenly told that she didn’t have to be. She could burn the terror out of herself.

She drew more flame from deep inside and sent it pulsing through her veins and licking along her nerves. The fear melted away.

His writhing, whipping shadow tentacles almost within snatching distance, the pale man halted and studied her. He nodded with what looked like patronizing approval.

Jhesrhi felt an urge to burn the superior smile off his face without another moment of delay, but the stag men had nearly reached the exits. She couldn’t let them lose themselves in the labyrinth.

She thumped her staff on the floor, and fires leaped up to block the arches. Cloven hooves clattering on the limestone floor, the fey warriors floundered to a stop just short of incineration.

“Get back here!” she shouted in her halting Elvish. “We can kill the wretch if we stand together!”

Their initial panic startled out of them, the stag men obeyed. Jhesrhi still didn’t understand why she-out of all the humans they’d met of late-was the one who seemed special to the stag men, but here was another reason to be glad of it.

The one-eyed creature’s smile widened. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Yes,” Jhesrhi said. She pointed her staff, chanted words of power, and hurled fire from the head. The flare spread out as it traveled to engulf the pale man from head to foot.

It rocked him back a step, and for a moment, he stood swaying in the midst of the roaring blaze. Then the shadow tentacles shot out from inside the flame. Some had caught fire and burned away to nothing. But others coiled around to pick at the jet of flame like craftsmen removing cracked or faded stones from a mosaic.

The blast winked out of existence. Worse, the disruption of the magic spiked pain through the center of Jhesrhi’s forehead. She cried out and felt wetness spill from her nostrils onto her upper lip.

The stag warriors scrambled to interpose themselves between her and the pale man then hesitated, reluctant to brave the cloud of jagged, snatching darkness to strike at the target in the middle. One fey cast his spear, and lengths of shadow caught it and snapped it in two. Plainly hoping the tendrils couldn’t strike where the creature couldn’t see, another stag man circled behind him and charged. Blackness caught the fey, tore his belly open, and dropped him in a pile of his own guts. Then the pale man resumed his advance.

Jhesrhi forced herself to focus despite the lingering pain. She spoke to the stone in the floor, and it resisted her will like every element but fire resisted her in this dead and hateful place. So she snarled her command and reinforced it with a clanking blow of her staff.

The stone under the pale man cracked open, swallowing his forward foot, then slammed shut on his ankle. He shouted and lurched off balance, the joint bending in a way it shouldn’t.

Jhesrhi scrambled toward a spot from which she could throw lightning without hitting any of the stag men. Just before she reached that location, the white-faced creature spoke a word that stabbed inside her head and reverberated there, swelling louder with each instant. Her body turned cold and stiff and then soft and slimy as rot corrupted it. Insects crawled and bored to get at the putrescence.

She prayed the semblance of death was only an illusion, but even if it was, it was unbearable. She screamed for fire to envelop her and burn the curse away.

It did, lingering and cloaking her just as her foe’s mantle of writhing shadow covered him. But the purging took too long. By the time she regained control of herself, the pale man had extracted his foot from the crack and advanced on her. She was down on one knee with murky tentacles threatening her from every side.

She doubted her adversary would allow her time for even the simplest of spells, but she had to try. She sucked in a breath, and then bright, warm light leaped across the chamber.

Hobbling, the pale man recoiled and, in so doing, pulled the dark tendrils away from Jhesrhi. Chanting a battle hymn, her round, normally merry face as grim as Jhesrhi had ever seen it, Cera stalked after the creature with the glowing head of her mace held high. She hadn’t really been paralyzed with terror after all, or if she had been, it hadn’t lasted. She’d used the past several moments to draw more power from her god despite the impediment of being trapped in this perpetually benighted world of the deathways.

The pale man stopped retreating. “Enough,” he said.

But the sunlady plainly didn’t think so because her light shone even brighter, and quivering with rage and loathing, Jhesrhi agreed. She drew flame from the void for the hottest, most explosive blast yet, one that would reduce her enemy to wisps of drifting ash if she were to succeed. The power so filled her that it suddenly became difficult even to think of anything else, her anger, fear, and other concerns melting together into a joyful, ferocious urge to burn.

Sudden and fast as a pouncing cat despite the broken ankle, the pale creature rushed the nearest stag man. Jagged shadow clutched the fey, immobilized his sword arm, and hoisted him off his feet.

“Stop fighting,” the enemy said. “Otherwise, your warrior dies. Either I rip him apart or your flame hits the both of us. It’s your choice.”

Jhesrhi frowned in perplexity. She understood the literal meaning of the words, but she was not clear why the one-eyed man imagined they could possibly deter her. Fortunately, she didn’t need to understand. She rattled off the first words of an incantation in one of the hissing, crackling languages of the Undying Pyre.

The sunlady’s head snapped around in her direction. “Jhesrhi, no!” the priestess yelled.

Apparently, the sunlady was deterred. Why? And come to think of it, what was the short, plump woman’s name?

Jhesrhi knew she ought to remember, and it bothered that she couldn’t. She strained to do so, and then, abruptly, everything came clear, including the fact that a sellsword was supposed to be loyal to her comrades.

“I’m all right,” she gasped. “I promise not to hurt him if he lets the stag man go.”

“Fair enough,” the creature said. He dropped the fey, and at the same time, a psychic pressure abated. Jhesrhi hadn’t quite been conscious of it before, but its departure came as a relief nonetheless. She surmised that the foe had dissolved the enchantment intended to strike terror into the hearts of all who beheld him.

Yet the sight of him still made her skin crawl. There was a fundamental vileness about him beyond anything his physical appearance could explain, like he was the walking embodiment of some hideous disease.

“Go away,” Cera said, her voice tight. Her mace was still glowing, just not as brightly.

The pale man smiled. “It would be sad for all of us if I did. We need each other.”

Dangling from Jet’s talons, Dai Shan saw streaking thunderbolts and orbs of red and yellow light burst into being. They’d been darts and balls of coal when they leaped from the ballistae and catapults of the Storm of Vengeance, but magic had transformed them in mid-flight.

Many of the attacks fell short or flew wide of the mark, but one looked like it was coming straight at its target. As Dai Shan started to warn Jet, the black griffon lashed his wings and veered. He’d already spotted the threat and was dodging.

Successfully too. Jet got them safely out of the way, and while Dai Shan had by no means forgotten that Aoth Fezim’s familiar was his captor, not his ally, for a moment, he felt an appreciation that bordered on camaraderie.

Then the missile made an impossible hairpin turn. Dodging again, Jet dived, but the luminous missile hit him anyway and exploded with a flash and a boom that smashed Dai Shan’s wits into stupefied confusion.

Perhaps it was the hot pain that roused Dai Shan, for when his thoughts snapped back into focus an instant later, he was on fire, as was Jet, who was no longer flying but rather dropping like a stone.

If the plummeting griffon carried Dai Shan all the way to the ground, the impact would unquestionably kill him. Fortunately, Dai Shan knew a spell to arrest his descent if only he could separate himself from the winged steed. Blocking out the pain of his charring skin, he tore at the eagle claws gripping his shoulders.

To no avail. Jet had been holding him tightly even before the fiery missile struck them. When the flame burst over him, he’d apparently gripped even tighter, convulsively, driving his talons into Dai Shan’s flesh.

Dai Shan jabbered a word of power and infused the griffon’s body with the magic he’d originally intended for himself. Then he willed Jet to rise, not fall.

That didn’t happen. The beast’s weight and momentum were too much for the enchantment to overcome. But perhaps the fall slowed somewhat, or at least stopped accelerating.

Yet even if it had, that wasn’t enough to guarantee the drop, or Jet’s weight smashing down on top of Dai Shan, wouldn’t still kill him. “Fly!” he shouted, jabbing at the underside of the griffon’s body with his fingertips. “Wake up and fly!”

Jet gave a rasping cry and unfurled his fiery wings. That didn’t stop them falling either. It turned a straight drop into a diagonal, but they were still rushing at the ground.

Dai Shan felt a scream pressing for release and clenched himself to hold it in. If these were his final moments, that made it all the more important to comport himself like a Shou gentleman and his father’s son.

The ground was hard but not as hard as he’d expected, and it splashed over him afterward, all but burying him. He realized Jet had steered the two of them into a snowdrift, and then darkness swallowed him.

“What do you mean?” Jhesrhi asked, pulling her aura of flame back inside herself and wiping at her nosebleed. “And who are you?”

“Sarshethrian,” the pale man said.

The name meant nothing to her. She glanced at Cera. The priestess shrugged to convey the same lack of recognition.

“Well, there’s a blow to my pride,” the one-eyed creature said, “but no matter. May I ask your names?”

Jhesrhi hesitated, pondering if there was a reason to refuse to answer or to lie. But Cera answered at once: “My friend is Jhesrhi Coldcreek, a wizard and officer in the Brotherhood of the Griffon,” she declared. “I’m Cera Eurthos, sunlady of Soolabax in Chessenta.”

“And unless I’m mistaken,” Sarshethrian said, “you’re both trapped here in the deathways, with scant hope of ever seeing either your sellsword company or your temple again. That is, unless we come to an arrangement.”

“No,” Cera said.

Jhesrhi frowned. “Hold on. What kind of an ‘arrangement’?”

The pale man smiled. “I’m glad one of you is sensible. Together, you wield fire and the sacred light of the Yellow Sun, and those are the ideal weapons to smite some former friends of mine. Help me pay them the wages of ingratitude, and when we’re done, I’ll return you to your own world.”

“No,” Cera repeated. “Leave us alone or take the consequences.”

Sarshethrian sighed. “I suppose I evoked this truculence by testing your abilities. But the test is over. Let’s converse like reasonable beings. I’m not asking you to kill anyone you don’t already want to kill anyway. My enemies are yours.”

“Give or take a couple who may have run away,” Jhesrhi said. “We-and our allies-just finished defeating our enemies in the Fortress of the Half-Demon.”

The pale creature chuckled. “You were meant to believe that. In truth, all your most important enemies are still alive-well, undead, but you know what I mean. They’ll pursue new designs while Rashemen sleeps, imagining itself secure, and before the thaw, they’ll bring her down.”

“If that’s true,” Cera said, “then thank you for the warning. Now leave us.”

“Cera,” Jhesrhi said, “I need to talk to you in private.”

She told the stag warriors to watch Sarshethrian. Then she and the priestess retreated to the cracked, chipped spot on the wall where they’d worked their unsuccessful divinations.

“Why are you acting this way?” Jhesrhi asked.

Cera scowled. “I don’t know exactly what that thing is. But it’s a great evil, and the sort of entity clerics of the Yellow Sun are sworn to oppose with all their strength.”

Jhesrhi glanced to make sure Sarshethrian wasn’t getting up to mischief. He wasn’t. He was just watching them with a crooked smile that reminded her momentarily of Gaedynn.

“Is he more evil than the zulkirs of the Wizard’s Reach,” she asked, “or Tchazzar? Because the Brotherhood worked for them.”

“That’s nothing to boast of,” Cera snapped. Then she took a deep breath in a visible effort to calm down. “Forgive me, Jhesrhi. I don’t look down on the Brotherhood for anything it’s done. You know that. But there’s a difference between serving even the wickedest human being and an undead or a fiend. Demons and devils are nothing but evil in a way mortals never can be. When you look at Sarshethrian, don’t you feel the difference?”

“Of course,” Jhesrhi said. “It makes my guts cramp. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t know how to get out of here. Do you?”

Cera hesitated. “You’re a master wizard, and I’m the high priestess of my temple. We’ll figure it out.”

“I’m a master elementalist,” Jhesrhi said. “I couldn’t open a way out of Shadow when I was stuck in it before, and you’ve never mentioned being an experienced traveler of the planes. There’s no guarantee we can do it, and certainly none that we can do it quickly. What if Rashemen fell to the undead because you were too squeamish to do what’s necessary to get back there and warn everybody? Wouldn’t that be the real sin against Amaunator?”

Cera sighed. “When did you become so glib?”

“I’m not. I’m just talking sense. If you won’t bend for the Rashemi, how about Aoth? He’s lost in here too.”

And Cera loved him. As did Jhesrhi, for that matter, although not in the same way. To her, Aoth was the savior who’d rescued her from a hellish captivity and been her friend and mentor ever since.

“All right,” the sunlady said. “If Sarshethrian will help us find Aoth, I’ll agree to the bargain.”

With the folding vanes extended from its hull, the Storm of Vengeance resembled a dragon gliding in the morning sky, and like a dragon, the vessel rained destruction on the berserkers and stag warriors on the snowy ground beneath it. Death came in bursts of foul-smelling smoke and barrages of hailstones hard and sharp as arrows.

Vandar stared up at the skyship. It wasn’t any fear of death that held him transfixed, but rather, horror at his catastrophic misperception. Mario Bez and his sellswords were the prophesied threat from the air, not Aoth, Jet, Cera, and Jhesrhi.

Now that it was too late, it was all so clear. Well, most of it. He still couldn’t fathom what had brought the Halruaan mercenaries north to the Fortress of the Half-Demon when they weren’t even supposed to know about the Griffon Lodge’s expedition.

Exhausted and in many cases wounded, the brothers of the lodge and their stag-man allies nonetheless fought back, sometimes struggling up out of litters to stand with their comrades. Javelins and arrows flew up at the winged ship with its horned and bare-breasted she-demon figurehead. The former fell short. A few of the latter arced high enough, but actually hitting any of the tiny figures on deck was an all but impossible shot.

The folk on the ground needed magic to fight magic, and perhaps they would have had it … if Vandar hadn’t turned his back when he heard Cera crying for help in the maze of dungeons beneath the Fortress.

But Vandar had, and so he reached down inside himself for his rage. That preternatural ferocity would do nothing to help him reach the foes aboard the skyship. The cowardly scum might even find it comical. But he was the master of a berserker lodge, and he meant to die like one.

The fury welled up, and then everything exploded in a dazzling flash. The world seemed to jump, and the next thing he knew, he was sprawled in the snow.

Dazed, the rage knocked out of him, he lifted himself on one elbow and beheld the twisted, smoking forms of half a dozen of his brothers. Someone aboard the Storm of Vengeance had hurled a thunderbolt or some similar arcane attack. Vandar had been just far enough away from the point where it struck to escape death.

He looked around and saw that most of his comrades were dead. The aerial warship had passed overhead and was coming about for a second pass at those who were left.

He heaved himself to his feet, brandished the red spear over his head, and willed the rage to return. Then, at his feet, a voice croaked, “No.”

The thunderbolt had burned away most of the speaker’s beard and hair and charred his features black. Still, Vandar recognized Raumevik, who’d once tutored him in the mysteries of the lodge. No one would have blamed the venerable old man if he’d stayed warm by his hearth instead of marching off to one more war. But Raumevik insisted on accompanying his brothers, and it had brought him to his death.

“Don’t call the anger,” Raumevik said. “Don’t stay here and throw away your life. Run!”

Those were the last words Vandar would have expected to hear a celebrated berserker speak, and he had no idea how to answer. He simply gaped in amazement.

“You don’t have to let the cowards win,” the old man said through gritted teeth. “You can avenge the lodge. But only if you live!”

Vandar felt a sort of wordless psychic urging from the red metal spear and sword he’d taken from the fey mound. The enchanted weapons too, wanted him to survive to seek revenge.

He turned to the few berserkers and stag warriors who were still on their feet. “Run!” he bellowed, waving his spear in the hope that the fey, who didn’t understand human speech, might nonetheless take his meaning. “I swear, we’ll kill them another day, when our weapons can reach them!”

The stag men bolted, the bells in their antlers chiming. A couple of humans did too, but the rest were lost to snarling, glaring bloodlust, biting the rims of their shields and gashing their cheeks and arms in impotent rage.

Given time, their lodge master might have calmed them, but there was no time. Despising himself for it, Vandar ran and left them to their fate.

His feet crunched in the snow, and the cold air rasped in and out of his nose. Behind him, magic roared and crackled, and men screamed.

Glancing around, he saw that at least those who’d fled were spreading out, which meant the skyship couldn’t chase everyone at once. Surely at least one person would escape to denounce Bez’s treachery.

Suddenly, Vandar sensed-or maybe it was the red weapons warning him-danger over his head. He threw himself down in the snow, rolled, and glimpsed four hooves galloping in empty air. The churning equine legs extended from a hairless torso mottled with sores.

Then the flying creature hurtled past. As Vandar scrambled to his feet, the creature plunged to earth and wheeled to face him.

Vandar supposed his assailant was the netherworld’s notion of a centaur. The upper body sprouting where a horse had its neck was essentially human except for the long horns curling up from the brow. Spiky plate armor protected the manlike parts and the equine back, and the demon gripped a lance in both hands.

Vandar heard more screaming. Although he didn’t dare look away from the demon in front of him to check, he inferred there were more of the fiends. One of the mages aboard the skyship had summoned them to catch survivors on the ground faster than the vessel could come about and pursue.

The demon centaur charged.

Vandar poised the red spear as though he meant to hold his position. Then, when the point of the lance, engraved with a rune and shimmering with enchantment, was just an arm’s length from his chest, he sprang to the side. As the fiend thundered by, he thrust the spear at its flank.

He was trying for the exposed leprous flesh of its belly, but he aimed too high. Fortunately, the crimson weapon punched right through the creature’s armor.

The demon’s forward progress ripped the spear from Vandar’s hands as it plunged by. The creature staggered a step, and he hoped to see it fall, but it recovered instead and whirled around. Snarling words in some grating Abyssal language, it dropped the lance and yanked a flail loose from the place where it hung on its armor.

Meanwhile, Vandar snatched out the red sword, and he and the centaur fiend began to circle.

Vandar told himself to be patient and wait for an opportunity, even though he needed to finish this fight before the skyship drew near. He likewise instructed himself to resist his natural impulse and not go berserk, lest he find himself incapable of flight when the combat was through.

The flail whirling through the air, its chain links clattering, the demon rushed him. Vandar ducked and felt the breeze as the knobbed iron ball whipped over his head. He leaped up and thrust at the fiend’s upper body. His point punched through its breastplate to pierce the spot where human beings carried their hearts.

Vandar assumed that was the end of it, especially when the manlike part of the creature convulsed. But the horse half reared to batter with its front hooves.

Caught by surprise, he nonetheless tried to wrench himself aside. One hoof grazed his temple anyway, and stunned, he reeled backward. Mincing on its hind legs, the hellish centaur pursued to pummel him some more.

Vandar roared his dazed slowness away, got his feet under him, and cut. The red sword sheared into the spot where an earthly horse kept its heart. The demon toppled forward, and Vandar jumped out of the way to keep it from slamming down on top of him.

He studied it for a moment to be sure it was finished. It was. He grinned with a satisfaction that lasted only for as long as it took him to look around.

Just as he’d feared, the fight had taken too long. The Storm of Vengeance had finished coming about, and it was flying straight at him.

Seeking cover, he cast around and found nothing that would hide him from hostile eyes or protect him from a fiery blast or a burst of acid. He jerked the red spear out of the demon’s side and resumed running across the snow-covered scrubland.

A thumping sound and a truncated shriek tempted him to glance over his shoulder, but he didn’t need to look to know the skyship was steadily closing the distance. It could fly faster than any man could run, even someone with enchanted weapons lending him strength and endurance.

So maybe Vandar should turn, give himself over to the fury, throw his spear at his enemies, and die like a berserker after all. Maybe perishing alongside the lodge brothers he’d led so disastrously was preferable to the guilt and grief of surviving.

He was still considering it when he glimpsed a different whiteness in the vista before him, a flat, gleaming ribbon winding its way through the snowy, uneven ground and the leafless brush with its burden of icicles. It was a frozen tributary of Lake Ashane, a largish stream or small river he recalled crossing on the march north.

He raced onto the ice and stabbed it repeatedly with the spear. Every thrust penetrated, but each jabbed only a little hole, not the big one he required. Meanwhile, the winged shadow of the Storm of Vengeance came gliding over the snow, and he caught the voices of the officers and crew calling to one another. It sounded like they were enjoying the massacre.

A missile thudded down in the stone beside the little river, then burst into green vapor that streamed out in all directions. Vandar closed his eyes, held his breath, and asked his griffon totem for strength.

None of it helped very much. The toxic fumes still seared him outside and in but only for a heartbeat. Then, finally, a sizable piece of ice shattered beneath him, and he plunged through the opening.

The water washed away the poison clinging to his skin, cooled the burning sting of it, and for an instant, felt wonderful. Then a shock of bitter cold pierced him to the core.

Someone-poor Raumevik, perhaps-had once told Vandar that if a man fell through the ice, he could find an inch or two of air caught between the frozen surface and the water beneath. He floundered upward, and sure enough, there it was. Face tilted up, he gasped some in and got water along with it. He coughed the frigid liquid out and inhaled again.

He struggled to hold his body in the same life-saving attitude as the current carried him along. Meanwhile, the chill numbed him and leeched his strength. It would kill him if he stayed submerged for long, but if he emerged too soon, the sellswords would spot him and drop more lethal magic on his head.

The worst thing about it was that he had no way of telling how far from the skyship he’d traveled. The thick ice above his face was more opaque than otherwise, dusted with drifts of snow.

Soon, though, his ongoing debilitation reached a point where the location of his human foes became irrelevant. Instinct screamed that if he didn’t escape the river immediately, it was going to kill him.

There were tangles of fallen branches on the bottom of the river. They’d bumped and snagged his legs as the current swept him downstream. He waited until he felt the next, then groped and fumbled at it with his feet. They caught in it to anchor him in one place.

Then he attacked the ice as he had before, jabbing it with the spear, but this time, the thrusts were so feeble that most of them didn’t even poke through. He’d waited too long to try getting out. Which meant he was failing his murdered lodge brothers again by letting Bez’s perfidy go unpunished.

That thought was insupportable. Despite his numbed debility, it brought the rage howling forth from the place where it lived inside him, and he attacked the ice with one final burst of energy.

Long cracks snaked through the ice, and then chunks of it tumbled down around him. He tossed the spear up out of the hole, caught the edges, and strained to haul himself out of the water.

For a moment, the task was beyond him. Then, grunting and gasping, he dragged himself up onto his belly and lay shuddering, too spent even to raise his head and see if the skyship was close by or not.

Crouching inside the frigid tomb, his neck throbbing, Aoth Fezim gritted his teeth against the pain and reached out with his thoughts. Jet! Talk to me! I need you.

But the griffon didn’t answer, and it was conceivably just as well. Aoth could feel that his familiar was alive but too deeply unconscious for his master’s psychic call to rouse him. He was also suffering pain so fierce that a trace of it even tainted that profound slumber. Something had hurt him badly, and he likely needed to rest.

Still, if they couldn’t communicate, Aoth had no way of finding out if Cera and Jhesrhi had escaped the otherworldly maze, knowing the current situation at the Fortress of the Half-Demon, or discovering whether anything else was happening in Rashemen. He slammed his fist down on his knee, and sharper pain stabbed through his neck. It made tears spill from his eyes.

The pain also reminded him that he needed to address his own immediate problems. Otherwise, nothing happening hundreds of miles to the north was likely to matter, at least not to him.

He could tell his neck was getting worse. Pain jabbed and scraped at him with every move he made. He wouldn’t be able to do anything else to help himself until he obtained healing, and the only place to seek it was inside the keep a stone’s throw away from the crypt.

He felt singularly unready to go exploring. He’d expended too much of his magic fighting the undead in Rashemen. Even the petty enchantments bound in his tattoos, on which he generally depended to stave off pain, chill, and fatigue, were inert.

Still, waiting and resting seemed the poorer option. What if he did and his condition so deteriorated that he couldn’t move at all? In his years as a legionnaire and sellsword, he’d seen plenty of untreated wounds and injuries that steadily worsened over time.

Stifling a groan, he clambered to his feet and crept back to the wrought-iron gate he’d broken previously. Looking for sentries, or anyone who might cry an alarm, he peered out at the graveyard with its drifts of gray, sooty snow, the courtyard beyond, and the high walls and battlements enclosing it all.

Nyevarra trailed along and watched with a jaundiced eye as Pevkalondra conducted a tour of the cold, echoing, and palely phosphorescent vaults and tunnels under Beacon Cairn. A pearl gleamed in the left orbit of the ghoul’s withered, flaking face, tiny silver scorpions crawled like fleas in the folds of her faded velvet gown, and she stank of rot. It all made her affecting the manner of a house-proud hostess particularly grotesque.

As the reanimated Raumviran clapped her hands, a metal arachnid fell from the hem of her sleeve and scuttled back toward the pointed toe of her shoe. Then a steaming, clinking bronze crayfish the size of a plow horse crawled through a doorway in the right-hand wall. It stank of oil, and its pincers opened and closed repeatedly with a smooth metallic noise like the sliding sound of scissors.

“Impressive,” Uramar said. Hulking, misshapen, and mottled, the patchwork warrior had a hole in his mail shirt that exposed the gray flesh beneath where Aoth Fezim’s spear had pierced him, but the wound didn’t appear to trouble him. Nyevarra felt renewed appreciation for his strength and wondered again how his cold blood tasted. Perhaps, once they’d conquered Rashemen, she could coax him out of his shyness and find out.

“There are dozens more,” Pevkalondra said. “You simply have to reanimate enough of my countrymen to control them to best effect. Then, my lord, I’ll give you the victory the idiot Nars threw away in the Fortress.”

Nyevarra chuckled. “Is that the story we’re telling now, since Falconer isn’t here to speak up for himself and his folk?” The Nar demonbinder was the one true leader of the conspiracy who’d fallen to the enemy.

The Raumviran glared with her single eye. Or perhaps the pearl glared too. It seemed to shine brighter than before.

“The Nar’s inability to defend himself,” she said, “simply proves my point.” She turned back to Uramar. “Raise Raumvirans. Raise all you can find. After the debacle in the Fortress, you need a new army, and I promise you one that will win.”

“When the war is over,” Nyevarra said, shifting her grip on the antler-axe she’d taken from the fallen Stag King, “and the realm is full of Raumvirans with only a sprinkling of durthans, Nars, and travelers from Uramar’s country, I wonder just who will actually rule. What sort of land it will be.”

Uramar frowned. Like every other expression that played across the blaspheme’s lopsided face, it had an uneven quality to it.

“Within the Eminence,” he said, “all undead are equal.”

He appeared to believe that lofty sentiment too. But Nyevarra had a more realistic perspective, and she intended to make sure that, although perhaps swearing abstract fealty to some distant authority, it was she and her sisters who would truly control Rashemen. It had always been a unique land of witches and fey, and so it must remain, even if the witches were ghosts and vampires, and the spirits were greedy and cruel. The thought of mechanical insects and other such unnatural contraptions infesting the lonely hills and sacred forests was loathsome to her.

“Of course,” she said. “You’ve explained as much, my friend. It’s just that old habits of thought die hard. Still, the truth is, we don’t need an army of the sort Lady Pevkalondra describes. What we need is all the durthans we can muster.”

The ghoul made a spitting sound. “You really think this feckless scheme will work?”

“It isn’t ‘feckless.’ It’s cunning. Although it doesn’t surprise me that a relic of a vanquished, vanished realm can’t tell the difference.”

“Enough!” Uramar said. It truly seemed to upset him when his allies bickered. Perhaps, in his distant homeland, the Eminence stood united in perfect amity, although given what Nyevarra knew of human-and undead-nature, she doubted it.

“We’ll proceed with the strategy we all agreed on,” the patchwork swordsman continued. “Despite any second thoughts you may be having, Lady Pevkalondra, I still think it’s a good one. But you’re right that we need to rebuild our force of arms in case the plan goes awry. We’ll be vulnerable until we do. So of course we’ll reanimate more of your folk, more durthans too, and everybody else who can be of use. And we’ll ask for fresh help from Nornglast.” He paused to survey them both. “Does that satisfy you?”

“Of course, my lord.” Pevkalondra gestured her companions onward. “Come this way, and I’ll show you one of the largest Raumathari war devices ever made. It slaughtered hundreds of Nars in its day.”

“That sounds fascinating,” Nyevarra drawled. “But I must go and prepare to begin the real work of conquest.” She gave Uramar a smile, squeezed his forearm, and turned away.

As she walked along, the butt of the antler weapon clicking of the floor, she hoped she remembered her way out of the maze of tunnels. It would mar the insolent effect of her departure if she had to come back and ask for directions.