Unholy (21 page)

The attackers could all still use their magic. But every time they did, the well turned a portion of it against them.

Jhesrhi looked to Aoth, who was hovering a short distance above her. Bat-things flew at him; he pierced them with darts of azure light from the point of his spear, then jerked and grunted as though something had stabbed him as well.

“We’re not going to make it,” she whispered. There was no air left for anything louder. Not in her lungs, anyway.

But Aoth heard, and he glared with his lambent blue eyes. “Yes, we will! All of you, remember, we’re not alone! Our comrades are still feeding us strength! Reach out and take it!”

Hard to focus on that when she was suffocating, with black spots swimming in her vision and raw animal desperation yammering in her mind. But she was a wizard, with a wizard’s disciplined mind, and after a moment, she succeeded in shifting her perception to the Ring of stone and timber.

But she didn’t see it as she would have if she’d reoccupied her corporeal form. Rather, she floated high above the stronghold and somehow perceived an abundance of information all at once. Though still chanting, she and the other members of the primary circle had fallen to their knees or onto their sides. Gaedynn and the other spectators watched them helplessly. Down in the courtyard, Burning Braziers whirled flaming chains and danced in and out of the bonfire. Sometimes they emerged with their clothing ablaze, but even then, they continued to whirl and leap. Glowing

as if his body were made of sunlight, Mirror stood with his sword upraised. Elsewhere, Red Wizards recited rhyming spells and flourished their wands, orbs, and staves. Some bled from the eyes or nostrils, spat out teeth that had suddenly slipped from their gums, or collapsed thrashing and foaming in epileptic seizures. Szass Tarn’s wards were afflicting them as well.

Still, Aoth was right. Power floated above the castle in an opalescent haze. Jhesrhi immersed herself in it, drew it into her, and then she could breathe again. She lingered for another moment, bracing herself, refocusing her mind, then leaped back into the well.

From that point onward, it was a little easier, although the bats never stopped hurtling at her, and the well never stopped trying to steal her breath. Not until glowing red cracks sheared up and down the length of it, zigzagging through every section all at once. An instant later, the entire structure shattered into a million tumbling shards.

And a heartbeat after that, she was back inside her body on the rooftop. She prayed it was because the place her spirit had just visited no longer existed.

She was sore from head to toe but particularly in her chest. She was also soaked with clammy sweat, and when she tried to stand, she found she barely had the strength. Gaedynn started toward her, then stopped when he remembered she wouldn’t want his help.

The other members of the circle floundered up as well. From the looks of it, they all felt as spent and achy as she did, but none displayed any of the bizarre injuries that had so disfigured their discarnate souls.

Nevron glowered at Lallara. “Did we really do it?” he demanded. “Can you tell?”

“Give me a moment,” Lallara snapped. She closed her eyes, took several long, deep breaths, and murmured an incantation.

Then the first smile Jhesrhi had ever seen on that wrinkled, haglike countenance pulled the corners of the pale lips upward.

Jhesrhi felt her own lips stretch into a grin. Sensed the joy bursting forth across the rooftop as her companions observed Lallara’s expression. In another moment, someone would let out a cheer.

Except that then, the crone’s smile twisted into a scowl. “Wait,” she said.

“Wait,” said Szass Tam, and the trio of vampiric knights he’d brought with him halted at the intersection of five tunnels. Narrowed eyes slightly luminous in the gloom, alert for any sign of their quarry, the blood-drinkers peered down the shadowy passages.

Szass Tam dropped to one knee and sketched a triangle on the floor with a withered fingertip. His digit left a trail of red phosphorescence behind. When completed, the glowing arrowhead spun around. And kept on spinning, endlessly, until its maker snorted in mingled annoyance and amusement and wiped it from existence.

“Did you pick up the demon’s trail?” a vampire asked.

“No,” said Szass Tam, rising. “Whatever it is, it knows enough sorcery to cover its tracks.”

“Well, don’t worry, Your Omnipotence, we’ll find it.”

In another rime, the warrior’s expression of loyalty and confidence might have elicited Szass Tarn’s favor. But now that he’d trained himself in scorn, he nearly sneered at the vampire’s sycophancy. But there was no need to show his disdain and several good reasons not to, so he simply chose a corridor at random and headed down it. His bodyguards prowled along behind him.

After a while, they came to an alcove containing a shrine to a minor godling, a psychopomp and guardian of tombs, who’d died thousands of years before. Something had smashed the statue’s avian head and the inscription on the pedestal beneath.

“Has anyone reported this?” Szass Tam asked.

“No, Master,” the same vampire told him.

“It’s recent damage, then.” Which meant the demon might still be in this part of the subterranean complex. Perhaps where divination had failed, luck had succeeded.

Szass Tam touched the topaz set in one of his rings and wrapped himself in an almost invisible haze that would deflect a blow like plate armor. Then something jolted him and sent him staggering.

“Master!” said the talkative vampire. “Are you all right?”

Szass Tam regained his balance. “Yes.” For an instant, he’d wondered if the demon had leaped out of nowhere and struck him, wondered, too, if an earthquake had rocked the Citadel and the mountain and catacombs beneath, but now he could tell that neither was the case. Rather, he’d experienced a purely psychic shock.

Unfortunately, that didn’t make the situation any better. Indeed, it was nearly as bad as it could be.

He brandished his staff. “I have to leave you.”

“Should we—,” began the knights’ spokesman. Then magic whined through the air, enfolded Szass Tam in its grip, and translated him to the apex of the keep.

Attuned as he was to the gigantic instrument he’d created, he’d felt it when one of the Dread Rings broke. Now that he was on the roof, at the very hub and linchpin of the dark circle, he could tell with certainty that, as he’d guessed, it was the fortress in Lapendrar that had surrendered its essential nature. Impossible as it seemed, his enemies must have prevailed against Malark, Tsagoth, and all the castle’s other defenders. Now the symbol

Szass Tam had defined on the face of Thay was warping, collapsing like a spiderweb with a critical anchoring strand severed.

The tetrible irony was that Szass Tam had elaborated on the pattern in Fastrin’s book and had built more Dread Rings than its ancient author suggested. He’d judged that in an endeavor like the Unmaking, one couldn’t have too much power. But now, the loss of one perhaps unnecessary castle threatened to render all the others useless.

At first, no matter how he strained, he couldn’t think of a thing in the world to do about it. Finally he closed his eyes. Centered himself and fought for calm. He was Szass Tam, and he didn’t panic. He wouldn’t panic now.

When he felt ready, he considered the problem anew with all the cold objectivity he could muster. And saw something he hadn’t realized before.

The sigil the Dread Rings defined could never exist again— not in the conventional, three-dimensional world. But there were many more dimensions than that, even if people couldn’t ordinarily perceive them. Were it otherwise, the mortal plane and all the higher and lower worlds wouldn’t be able to coexist.

He dropped his staff to clatter on the roof and summoned a different one, fashioned of clear crystal, into his hand. Once, it had belonged to Yaphyll, the greatest seer he’d ever known; he’d found it sealed in a secret vault in the Tower of Vision after the zulkirs had abandoned Bezantur. It was the best tool he possessed for what he had in mind, which was no guarantee that it was powerful enough.

He brandished the glittering staff and recited words of power, and an image of the realm’s plains, plateaus, and mountains, the rivers, lakes, and seashore appeared floating in the air before him. Black dots designated the Dread Rings and the Citadel.

He spoke again, and the map shifted although no one else would have seen it alter. That was because Szass Tam now viewed

it in four dimensions, in a manner foreign to normal human perception.

And the experience was all but intolerable, like looking directly at the sun. As a necromancer, Szass Tam was used to contemplating the bizarre, the hideous, and the paradoxical, but even so, this view spiked pain through his eyes and deep into his head.

He forced himself to keep peering anyway, until he had the information to make his calculations. Which revealed that four dimensions were not enough.

So he called for five and let out an involuntary groan. Five were much worse than four, exponentially worse, perhaps. And five weren’t sufficient, either.

So it was on to six, and then seven. Whimpering, shuddering, and jerking uncontrollably, he wondered if the mere act of observation could kill a man, even if the fellow was already dead. Given what he was suffering, he suspected it could, but even so, he refused to relent. He’d always known he was risking his existence by undertaking the Great Work, and if he perished now, so be it.

Eight dimensions. Then nine. And nine were enough. When he took the proper two-dimensional cross section of that curved and infinitely complex space, the surviving Dread Rings and his present location fell into the proper positions relative to one another.

He raised all his personal power and likewise tapped the reservoirs of mystic energy that were the Rings themselves. He wielded the magic like a scalpel, first cutting the tainted bonds that linked the healthy Rings to the ruined one. Then he destroyed the remaining ties.

The Dread Rings immediately threatened to fall out of harmony, to lose their fundamental relationship with one another. Szass Tam locked them in temporary correspondence through sheer force of will. Next, using his power as if it were an etcher’s

diamond-tipped stylus, he inscribed new paths between them, connections that ran through nine dimensions and the empty places between the worlds.

When he finished the new pattern, it demonstrated its viability by flaring to life, not with light but with pure power, perceptible as such to a mage’s senses. Szass Tam immediately willed the nine-dimensional map to vanish, then, his strength spent, collapsed. His eyes and head blazed with agony, but he smiled anyway.

21-25 Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

It isn’t possible,” said Samas Kul. Disappointment hadn’t robbed him of his appetites, as the buttered roll in his meaty hand and the crumbs scattered down the front of his gorgeous robes attested. But it seemed to Aoth that though the archmage ate and drank as ceaselessly as ever, there was a sullen quality to it instead of the usual gusto. “Break a pattern and you rob it of its arcane virtues. Every apprentice knows that.”

“What a pity,” Lallara drawled, “that Szass Tam isn’t an apprentice.”

Samas glared at her. “Do you understand how he did it?”

“No,” Lallara said, “but the other Dread Rings are still functional, and so is the device they comprise. We’ve all verified it. So it’s time to stop whining that ‘it isn’t possible’ and figure out what to do next.”

Aoth agreed with her. He just hoped there was something to do and that someone would have the cleverness and the will to

propose it. He wouldn’t have wanted to bet on it.

The Dread Ring of Lapendrar possessed all the amenities of any great castle, including a hall equipped with a round oak table and chairs where lords and officers could palaver. It was here, beneath hanging black-and-scarlet banners adorned with skulls and other necromantic emblems, that the zulkirs, Bareris, and Aoth had assembled for a council of war. And when the sellsword captain looked around ar his companions, it appeared to him that weariness and discouragement had set their stamps on every face.

Or rather, every one but the bard’s. Bareris’s expression was just as it had been for a hundred years, joyless and haggard but keen as a blade. Aoth had the odd and vaguely resentful thought that for his friend, it was a good thing their plan had failed. Now he had a better excuse to go on hating and fighting.

Everyone sat silently for several heartbeats. Then Samas’s throne floated back from the table. “That’s it, then. I have treasure to move out of Escalant. I assume the rest of you have your own arrangements to make.”

Aoth didn’t realize he was going to jump up out of his chair. It just happened, and the seat overturned to bang on the floor behind him. He leveled his spear and said, “You’re not running. Not unless we all decide it’s the only thing to do.”

Samas’s face turned a deeper red, and inside its yatds of jeweled vestments, his gross body seemed to swell like a frog’s. “Are you truly mad enough to try to dictate to me?”

Aoth smiled. “Why not? We’re co-commanders, remember? Besides, our cause is too important, and too many of my men gave their lives to get us this far.”

“This is on your own head, then.” Samas’s quicksilver wand writhed out of his sleeve and into his hand like a snake. “Which would you prefer: to turn to smoke or to live on as mindless worm?”

“Surprise me.” Aoth roused the power in his spear, and the point glimmered.

“Don’t,” Lauzoril said, sounding no more forceful than a priggish tutor reproving unruly children. But his voice carried a charge of coercion that balked Aoth—and Samas, too, evidently—like a dash of ice-cold water in the face.

And a good thing, too, for in the aftermath, Aoth realized he didn’t truly want to fight Samas, and not because he feared him. The past century had taught him more combat magic than the zulkirs likely comprehended even now. But no matter who won, the duel would accomplish nothing. It was just that Aoth was frustrated, and, selfish and arrogant as they were, the archmages made tempting targets at which to vent his feelings.