Unholy (7 page)

“I suppose we would be stupid to cast away such a weapon,” Nevron said, “but it galls to me to think of that insolent Rashemi going unpunished.”

Lauzoril fingered his chin..”Well, how about this? Someone will have to bear the brunt of it when Aglarond attacks. Let it be the Brotherhood of the Griffon. If Fezim and his company perish, that’s his punishment. If they survive, they can serve as our vanguard in Thay. And if they make it through that, then we can always butcher the traitor when we come home again.”

As Aoth had anticipated, a substantial force of Aglarondans had chased the Brotherhood some distance into the Yuirwood before Gaedynn’s maneuvering shook them off the trail. But even with elves and druids to aid their passage, the simbarchs had balked at the arduous task of bringing the whole of their armed might south through the dense forest with its dangerous patches of plagueland. Instead, they’d marched their forces east, to emerge from the fortified city of Glarondar onto the plains north of Escalant.

Aoth flew high above the field to inspect the Aglarondans in their battle array and the zulkirs’ troops in their own formation. Bareris and Mirror accompanied him, but none of the other flyers. There was no reason to tire the griffons prematurely or to show

the enemy just how many aerial cavalry there were, even though they’d had ample opportunity to learn before the Brotherhood switched sides.

Switched sides. Aoth tried to spit the unpalatable thought away.

He glanced over at Bareris, an uncanny ivory apparition astride his own griffon, its tawny wings gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The bard’s scowl suggested that his thoughts were bitterer than Aoth’s.

“Cheer up,” called Aoth. “The situation doesn’t look all that bad.”

“This is a waste of time,” the bard replied. “We should already be in Thay.” He nudged his mount with his knee and sent it winging to the left.

“It would be futile to go by ourselves,” Aoth said, even though his fellow griffon rider was already out of earshot. “I’m doing the best I can, damn you.”

Mirror floated closer. For Aoth, it was one of those moments when regarding the ghost actually was like peering into a warped and murky looking glass. “He knows that. But you have to admit, you would feel silly if, while we were busy fighting the simbarchs, Szass Tam performed his ‘Great Work’ and killed us all.”

Aoth snorted. “Is that supposed to be funny? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you try to joke before. You’ve come a long way.”

“Some days are good, some, I’m as mad and empty as the day Bareris met me. But yes, I’ve emerged partway into the light, even as he’s slipped farther and farther into darkness. At times I feel like some sort of vampire. As if I’m leeching his soul from him without even realizing it.”

“I never knew you to fall prey to poetic fancies before, either.” Aoth senr Jet swooping for a better look at some of the enemy’s archers. “I’m sure your company has been as good for him as his has been for you. I suspect it’s the thing that’s kept him at least a little sane.”

“I suppose it could be so.” Mirror hesitated. “You were always a shrewd soldier. You do realize that, the way our side is formed up, a good many of the Aglarondans are going to end up hammering away at your Brotherhood. More than your fair share, I’d have to say.”

Aoth snorted. “Nothing new about that. Lords don’t pay good coin to sellswords only to hand the most dangerous jobs to their own vassals. And at least we are getting paid. I told the zulkirs the Brotherhood wouldn’t fight otherwise.”

Jet screeched. “It’s starting.”

Arrows rose from ranks of Aglarondan archers like a dark cloud. Gaedynn scrutinized the arc of the shafts as they reached the apogee of their flight. The enemy bowmen were reasonably competent. Of course, one would expect as much, considering how many of them had some measure of elf blood flowing in their veins.

Strong hands grabbed him by the arm and jerked him onto his knees. “Down!” Khouryn snarled.

I was getting around to it, Gaedynn thought.

The sellswords equipped with tower shields or targes raised them to ward themselves and their more lightly armored comrades. The arrows whined as they fell, then clattered against the defensive barrier. Here and there, a man screamed where a missile found a gap.

Behind the foot soldiers and archers, wings snapped and rustled as the griffon riders took to the air. Gaedynn wouldn’t have minded going with them, but Aoth had decided that in this particular combat, he’d be more useful directing the archers on the ground.

So he supposed he’d better get to it. “Archers!” he bellowed.

“Remember who you’re supposed to kill, and shoot them!”

His bowmen stood upright. Some of them loosed at their counterparts on the other side of the battlefield. Jhesrhi, who had a particular knack for elemental magic, augmented their efforts with an explosion of flame that tore a dozen Aglarondans apart.

The remaining Brotherhood archers shot at enemy knights and officers, equestrian figures armored from head to toe, wherever they spotted them. Gaedynn took aim at a chestnut destrier and drove an arrow into its neck. It fell, catching its rider’s leg between its bulk and the ground and, with any luck, crippling him. Not a chivalrous tactic, Gaedynn reflected, but then, he wasn’t a chivalrous fellow.

Nevron smiled, savoring the sight of thousands of warriors striving to spill one another’s blood, the deafening racket of the bellowed war cries and the shrieks of agony. Unlike his fellow zulkirs, he relished the perilous tumult of the battlefield. Indeed, it was still his dream to abandon the dreary mortal plane and, unlike any living human being before him, conquer an empire in the higher worlds. Regrettably, the chaos of the past century, as magic and the very structure of the cosmos redefined themselves, had persuaded him to bide his time.

The demons and devils that accompanied him everywhere, caged in rings, amulets, or tattoos, shared his exhilaration. They roared and threatened, begged and wheedled, in voices only he could hear, urging him to unleash them to join the slaughter.

Although the zulkirs had arranged their formation with the Brotherhood of the Griffon at the center, the natural focus for the Aglarondans’ greatest efforts, there were plenty of the enemy to go around, and they were making a creditable attempt to strike at every target within reach. Thunderclaps boomed in a ragged

volley, and five flares of lightning leaped forth at the zulkirs’ right wing, where Nevron stood amid a circle of lesser Red Wizards.

The thunderbolts winked out of existence short of their targets. Standing some distance away, Lallara gave a brusque, self-satisfied nod that flapped the loose flesh dangling under her chin. The old hag might be abrasive and disagreeable in every conceivable way, but Nevron had to concede that, despite the appearance of decrepitude she’d allowed to overtake her, her command of abjuration, the magic of protection, remained as formidable as ever.

Something similar might be said of Lauzoril. He looked like a priggish clerk or bloodless functionary someone had dressed in the scarlet robes of an archmage as a joke. But when he murmured a spell and swirled his hands, enchantment, the magic of the mind, plunged a cantering troop of enemy horse archers into terror, and they wheeled and galloped back the way they’d come.

Golden greatswords clasped in their fists, a dozen crimson-skinned angelic warriors abruptly appeared more or less in the same place from which the thunderbolts had stabbed. Nevron surmised that, invisible behind the spear-and-shield fighters assigned to protect them, the same wizards who’d evoked the lightning were trying a different tactic.

In so doing, they’d strayed into Nevron’s area of expertise. He decided it was his turn to demonstrate that the wizardry of Aglarond, its vaunted elven secrets notwithstanding, was no match for the darker arts of Thay.

As the angels charged, he snapped his fingers. Three obese figures shimmered into material existence around him, each twice as tall as a man, with a pair of horns jutting from its head and anguished faces pressing out against the skin from inside its distended belly. Nevron heard the faces wailing even over the ambient din of the battlefield.

Careless of the humans they trampled or knocked aside, the solamiths lumbered forward to intercept the archons. The demons

tore hunks of flesh from their own bodies and threw them. The missiles exploded when they struck the ground, engulfing the angels in blasts of dark, somehow filthy-looking flame.

Aoth, Bareris, and Mirror waited for rhe rest of the griffon riders to join them in the air. Then Aoth swept his spear forward, signaling the attack.

His men shot arrows from the saddle. He rained down fire, lightning, hail, and acid, the spells of destruction that were a warmage’s stockin-trade. For an instant he remembered how, ashamed of breaking his pledge to the simbarchs, he’d done his best to sneak away from Veltalar without shedding Aglarondan blood. Well, the time for such squeamishness was past.

A long javelin-cast across the sky, Bareris rode singing, his long white fingers plucking the strings of a black harp. He was high enough above the ground that, were his music not infused with magic, no one below would even have heard him. But as it was, a company of enemy crossbowmen clutched at their ears, reeled, and fell. A couple tried to stab quarrels into their ears, while another drew his dagger and slashed his own throat.

Then Bareris oriented on a dead elf knight, a wealthy lord or mighty champion judging from the gore-stained magnificence of his trappings. The bard’s song brought the corpse scrambling to its feet to drive its slender gleaming sword into another elf s back.

Meanwhile, the Aglarondans shot arrows and flares of magic at the foes harrying them from overhead. Trained to veer and dodge, the griffons avoided many such attacks, and their boiled-leather armor and natural hardiness protected them from others. When none of those defenses sufficed, a steed and its rider plummeted to smash against the ground.

Jet swerved suddenly. Aoth knew his familiar was evading and, since he himself hadn’t detected an imminent threat, looked into the griffon’s mind to find out where it was.

Above and to the right. He jerked around to see a trio of wasps as big as Jet himself diving at them, their wings a buzzing blur.

Jet couldn’t wheel in time to bring his beak and talons to bear. It was up to Aoth. He burned one wasp to ash with a fan-shaped blaze of flame, but by then the other two were right on top of him. He drove his spear into one creature’s midsection, channeled lethal force through the weapon, and the impaled wasp began to smoke and char. It clung to life, however, and jabbed its stinger at him repeatedly. He blocked the strokes with his mithral targe—each one slammed his shield arm back against his torso—but that left him with no hands or gear to ward off the third wasp hurtling at his head.

The third insect convulsed and, patches of its body withering and rotting, dropped. Still swinging his shadow-sword, Mirror chased the dying wasp toward the ground.

Though she never would have admitted it to any of her fellow officers—particularly Gaedynn—Jhesrhi lacked the almost preternatural ability to predict the surge and ebb of combat that Aoth and certain others sometimes displayed. Thus, even though she and her allies were expecting a great charge, she had no idea it was about to begin until the enemy bellowed and all plunged forward at once. Their running footsteps and galloping hoofbeats shook the ground beneath her boots.

Up until now, although skirmisher had traded blows with skirmisher, and some eager warriors had forayed back and forth, it had mostly been archers, crossbowmen, and spellcasters fighting the battle. Throughout this preliminary phase, the zulkirs’

forces had labored to degrade the Aglarondans’ ability to attack at range, and to harass the knights and lords waiting idly on their mounts. The goal was to goad them into the charge they had just now launched.

From the enemy perspective, the move no doubt made sense. They outnumbered the zulkirs’ troops by a comfortable margin, and they had considerably more horsemen. They should be able to smash the Thayan formation.

But they assumed that because they didn’t know that Jhesrhi, fat Samas Kul, and some of his underlings had arrived at the field before them and prepared the ground. They didn’t know what magic their foes intended to unleash.

Or else they do know, Jhesrhi thought wryly, and they think they have a trick that trumps ours. If she’d learned anything since Aoth delivered her from servitude and gave her a place in the Brotherhood, it was that in war, nothing was certain.

She peered through the gap between the shields two warriors held to protect her. When she judged that the enemy lancers, pounding along in advance of a horde of foot soldiers, had come far enough, she chanted words of power.

Elsewhere in the zulkirs’ formation, Samas Kul and the Red Wizards he commanded did the same. She could tell because so much magic, discharged at the same time and to the same end, darkened the air and made it smell like swamps and rot. The golden runes on her staff blazed like little pieces of the sun, and nearby, one of Gaedynn’s archers doubled over and puked.

Then patches of earth turned to soft, sucking muck beneath the charging Aglarondans’ feet.

Warhorses tripped and fell, pitching their riders over their heads or crushing them beneath their bodies. Even when a steed managed to keep its footing, it broke stride, which meant that an animal running behind it was likely to slam right into it. Rushing spearmen and axemen sank in ooze to their knees

or waists, as though they’d blundered into quicksand. A few dropped completely out of sight. In just a few moments, the fearsome momentum of the charge disintegrated into agony and confusion.

For an instant, Jhesrhi felt a pang of something that might almost have been pity, but you didn’t pity the enemy. You couldn’t afford to. She flourished her staff and rained acid on three of the nearest Aglarondans. The knights and their mired horses screamed and thrashed.

Red Wizards hammered the foe with their own attacks. “Down in front!” Gaedynn shouted to anyone who wasn’t an archer, and as soon as they had a clear shot, his men loosed shaft after shaft. Wheeling and swooping above the Aglarondans like vultures keeping watch on a dying animal, the griffon riders also wielded their bows to deadly effect.