Unclean (21 page)

That didn’t make the remorse that came with the restoration of her original form any easier to bear. The guilt fell on her like a hammer stroke, and she felt a howl of anguish welling up inside.

“Excellent,” Xingax said.

She looked up. The fetus-thing had been watching through the hole high in the wall, just as she’d suspected, and had now dissolved the charm that had hidden him from view.

“I believe that with practice,” he continued, “you’ll find you can remain divided for extended periods of time. I’m confident you’ll discover other uncommon abilities as well, talents that set you above the common sort of vampire.”

“Why didn’t you answer me when I called to you before? Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I wanted to see how far instinct would carry you. It’s quite a promising sign that you managed to manifest a number of your abilities and take down your first prey without any mentoring at all.”

“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, and with the resolve came the abrupt instinctive realization that she didn’t even need to shapeshift to do it. His elevated position afforded no protection. She dashed to the wall and scrambled upward like a fly. It was as easy as negotiating a horizontal surface.

Partway up, dizziness and nausea assailed her. Her feet and hands lost their ability to adhere to the wall, and she plunged back to the floor. She landed awkwardly, with a jolt that might well have broken the old Tammith’s bones, though the new version wasn’t even stunned.

As the sick feeling began to pass, Xingax said, “You didn’t really think we’d give you so much power without insuring that you’d use it as we intend, did you? I’m afraid, my daughter, that you’re still a thrall, or at best, a vassal. If it’s any comfort to you, so am I, and so are the Red Wizards you’ve encountered here, but so long as we behave ourselves, our service is congenial, and we can hope for splendid rewards in the decades to come.”

30Mirtul, the Year of Risen Elfkin

Delhumide gleamed like a broken skeleton in the moonlight. The siege engines and battle sorceries of the ancient rebels had shattered battlements and toppled towers, and time had chipped and scraped at all that had survived the initial onslaught. Yet the Mulhorandi had built their provincial capital to last, and much remained essentially intact. Bareris found it easy to imagine the proud, teeming city of yore, which only served to make the present desolation all the more forbidding.

He wondered if it was simply his imagination, or if he truly could sense a miasma of sickness and menace infusing the place. Either way, the gnolls plainly felt something too. They growled and muttered. One clasped a copper medallion stamped with the image of an axe and prayed for the favor of his god.

Having cajoled them this far, Bareris didn’t want to give them a final chance to lose their nerve. As before, enchantment lent him the ability to speak to them in their own snarling, yipping

language, and he used it to say, “Let’s move. “He skulked forward, and they followed.

He prayed they weren’t already too late, that something horrible hadn’t already befallen Tammith. It was maddening to reflect on just how much time had passed since he’d watched the Red Wizards and their cohorts march her away. It had taken him and the hyenafolk a while to reach Delhumide. Then, for all that the gnolls had scouted the general area before, Wesk Backbreaker insisted on observing the perimeter of the city before venturing inside. He maintained it would increase their chances of success, and much as Bareris chafed at the delay, he had to admit the gnoll chieftain was probably right.

As they’d gleaned all they could, so too had they begun to plan. After some deliberation, they decided to sneak into Delhumide by night. True, it was when the demons and such came out, but even if the horrors were in fact charged with guarding the borders of the ruined city, it didn’t appear they did as diligent a job as the warriors keeping watch by day. Bareris hoped he and the gnolls had a reasonable chance of slipping past them unmolested, especially considering that though creatures like devils and the hyenafolk themselves could see in the dark, they couldn’t see as far as a man could by daylight.

He and his companions picked their way through the collapsed and decaying houses outside the city wall then over the field of rubble that was all that remained of the barrier at that point. The bard wondered what particular mode of attack had shattered it. The chunks of granite had a blackened, pitted look, but that was as much as he could tell.

The gnolls slinking silently as mist for all their size, the intruders reached the end of the litter of smashed stones fairly quickly. Now they’d truly entered Delhumide, venturing deeper than any of their scouts had dared to go before. A cool breeze moaned down the empty street, and one of the hyenafolk jumped

as if a ghost had ruffled his fur and crooned in its ear.

Wesk waved, signaling for everyone to follow him to the left. Their observations had revealed that shadowy figures flitted through the streets on the right in the dark. Occasionally, one of the things shrieked out peals of laughter that inspired a sudden self-loathing and the urge to self-mutilate in all who heard it. Bareris had no idea what the entities were, but he was certain they’d do well to avoid them.

The intruders turned again to avoid a trio of spires that, groaning and shedding scraps of masonry, sometimes flexed like the fingers of a palsied hand. The facades of crumbling houses seemed to watch them go by, the black empty windows following like eyes. For a moment, a sort of faint clamot like the final fading echo of a hundred screams sounded somewhere to the north.

The noise made Bareris shiver, but he told himself it had nothing to do with him or his comrades. Delhumide was replete with perils and eerie phenomena; they’d known that coming in. It wasn’t a problem if you could keep away from them, and so far their reconnaissance had enabled them to do so.

That luck held for another twenty heartbeats. Then one of the gnolls deviated from their course by just a long, loping stride or two, just far enough to stick his head into a courtyard with a rusty wrought-iron gate hanging askew and a cracked, dry fountain in the center. Something had evidently snagged the warrior’s attention, some hint of danger, perhaps, that demanded closer scrutiny.

The gnoll suddenly snarled and staggered, tearing at himself with his thick canine nails. At first Bareris couldn’t make out what was wrong, but when he saw the swelling black dots scurrying through the creature’s spotted fur, he understood.

The gnolls had fleas, a fact he’d discovered when he started scratching as well, and the parasites on the outlaw in the courtyard

were growing to prodigious size. Big as mice, they swarmed over him, burying their proboscises and heads in his flesh to drain his blood. Bulges shifted under the gnoll s brigandine as insects crawled and feasted there as well.

A second gnoll rushed to help his fellow, but as soon as he entered the courtyard, he suffered the same affliction. The two hyenafolk flailed and rolled and shrieked together. Their fellows hovered outside the gate, too frightened or canny to risk the same consequence.

Bareris sang. Magic warmed the air, and he felt a sort of tickling as his own assortment of normal-sized fleas jumped off him. He then chatged into the courtyard, and the enchantment radiating outward from his skin drove the giant parasites off the bodies of their hosts just as easily. With a rustling, seething sound, they scuttled and bounded into the shadows at the rear of the space.

He still had no desire to linger inside the crooked gate. For all he knew, the influence haunting the courtyard had other tricks to play. Fast as he could, he dragged the dazed, bloody gnolls back out onto the street, where the spirit, or whatever it was, couldn’t hurt them any further. At least he hoped it couldn’t, because they needed a healer’s attention immediately if they were to escape infirmity or worse, and in the absence of a priest, he’d have to do.

He chanted charms of mending and vitality. The other gnolls looked on curiously until Wesk started grabbing them and wrenching them around. “Keep watch!” the chieftain snarled. “Something else could have heard the ruckus or hear the singer singing.”

Gradually, one gnoll’s wounds stopped bleeding and scabbed over, a partial healing that was as much as Bareris could manage for the time being. The other, however, appeared beyond help. He shuddered, a rattle issued from his throat, then he slumped

motionless. Meanwhile, the survivor sat up and, hand trembling, groped for the leather water bottle strapped to his belt.

“Howareyou?”Bareris asked him.

The gnoll snorted as if the question were an insult.

“Then when you’re ready, we’ll press on.”

“Areyou crazy?”

Bareris turned and saw that the speaker was Thovarr Keentooth, the long-eared gnoll he’d punched during their first palaver.

“You said you knew how to get us in and out without the spooks bothering us,” the creature snarled, spit flying from his jaws. He apparently meant to continue in the same vein for a while, but Wesk interrupted by backhanding him across the muzzle and tumbling him to the ground.

“We said, “the chieftain growled, “we’d do our best to avoid the threats we knew about, but there might be some we hadn’t spotted. This was one such, and you can’t blame the human or anyone else for missing it, seeing as how it was invisible till someone stepped in the snare.”

“I’m not talking about ‘blame,’” Thovarr replied, picking himself up. “I’m talking about what’s sensible and what isn’t. There’s a reason no one comes here, and—”

“Blood ores do,” Bareris said. “Are they braver than you ? “

Thovarr bared his fangs like an angry hound. “The pig-faces have Red Wizards to guide them. We only have you, and you talk big but don’t keep us out of trouble.”

“Enough!” snapped Wesk. “We’re soldiers again, and soldiers expect to risk their lives earning their pay. If you don’t have the belly for it, turn back now, but know it means the rest of us cast you out for a coward.”

That left Thovarr with three options: obey, leave his little pack forever, or fight Wesk then and there for his chieftaincy. Apparently the first choice was the most palatable, the perils of

Delhumide notwithstanding, because the long-eared gnoll bent his head in submission. Til stick,” he growled.

They dragged the dead warrior’s corpse into a shadowy recessed doorway, where, they hoped, it was less likely anyone or anything would notice it. There they abandoned it without ceremony. Bareris had dealt just as callously with the mortal remains of other fallen comrades when a battle, pursuit, or flight required immediate action, and he had no idea whether gnolls even practiced any sort of funerary observances. It wouldn’t have astonished him to learn that they ate their dead as readily as they devoured any other sort of meat or carrion that came their way. Still, he found it gave him a pang of remorse to leave the creature unburied and unburned, without even a hymn or prayer to speed its soul on its way.

Maybe it bothered him because Thovarr was essentially correct. If Bareris hadn’t used magic to undermine the gnolls’ bettet judgment, they would never have ventured into Delhumide. His friends from more squeamish—or as they might have put it, more ethical—lands might well have deemed it an abuse of his gifts.

But his present comrades were hyenafolk, who boasted themselves that their kind lived only for war and slaughter, and Bareris was paying them a duke’s ransom to put themselves in harm’s way. If he’d sinned, then the Lord of Song could take him to task for it when his spirit knelt before the deity’s silver throne. For now, he’d sacrifice the gnolls and a thousand more like them to rescue Tammith.

Wesk lifted a hand to halt the procession. On the other side of an arched gateway rose a cylindrical tower. Constructed of dark stone, vague in the darkness, it reminded Bareris of some titan’s drum.

He peeked around the edge of the gate and squinted at the flat roof, but he couldn’t spot anything on top of it. He’d considered singing a charm to sharpen his eyes before entering the city

but had opted not to. He could only cast so many spells before exhausting his powers. Better, then, to trust the night vision of his companions and conserve his magic for other purposes.

“Is it up there?” he whispered, referring to the blood-orc sentry that usually kept watch on the roof.

Wesk bobbed his head up above the low wall ringing the tower to check. “Yes.”

“Can you really hit it from down here?” ftziens asked.

He knew Wesk was a skillful archer, maybe even as adept as he claimed. He’d watched the gnoll shoot game on the trek to Delhumide, and only once had the creature missed. Still, Bareris was enough of a bowman in his own right to know just how difficult a shot it was. The ore was four stories up and partly shielded by a ring of merlons.

Wesk grinned. “I can hit it. I’m not some feeble runt of a human.”

He caressed the curves of his yew bow and growled a spell of his own, evidently some charm known to master archers and hunters. The longbow glinted as though catching Selune’s light in a way it hadn’t before, despite the fact that nothing had changed in the sky. Wesk nocked an arrow, stepped into the center of the gate, drew the Retchings to his ear, and let the missile fly.

To Bareris’s eyes, the shaft simply vanished into the dark, but from Wesk’s grunt of satisfaction, and the fact that he didn’t bother reaching for a second arrow, it was evident the first one had found its mark. Bareris imagined the ore collapsing, killed before it even had an inkling it was in peril.

He and the gnolls skulked across the open ground between the wall and the tower. They had no reason to think anyone else was looking—it seemed likely the rest of the folk inside were happy to shut themselves away from the terrors infesting the night—but they couldn’t be sure.

Stone steps rose to a four-paneled door. As Bareris climbed

toward it, he hoped to find only a handful of warriors waiting on the other side. Whoever was garrisoning this particular outpost, though, he and the hyenafolk had no choice but to deal with them.