“I need it for what I’m about to do, Rollar. Keep the others away from me for the next few minutes; I need to be able to concentrate deeply.”
“Aye, I’ll do that, Lord Vance. You won’t hear a peep out of me, or them.”
Once again, I closed my eyes and spread my arms out to my sides, the palms of my hands facing the sky. I filled my lungs with air, then looked at my army before me. I wasn’t looking at them with my human eyes, though; they were still closed. Rather, I was seeing them with my spirit eyes. Instead of seeing a mass of skeletons and rotting corpses covering the beach, I saw glowing beings, each a three-dimensional construct made of yellow-green light. I looked down at my body and saw that I too was composed of that same light, but my body was glowing far more brightly than that of my minions. Indeed, I shone with such intensity that my light was near blinding.
I blasted out two ropes of black tendrils from my hands, and they snaked through the air at speed, unravelling into tens of thousands of individual fibers. Each fiber had a tiny black harpoon at its tip, and each of these harpoons slammed into the backs of the skulls of my minions. With each impact, a jolt buzzed in me. In the space of seconds, thousands of these jolts were jarring through my body. The fibers tore through the air, each writhing furiously until it slammed into its target. They kept snaking across the beach until every one had plunged into the head of a minion. Finally, every minion in my army was connected to me via the black ropes coming from my palms.
Energy coursed through the fibers. Pulses of it raced out of my body and zapped the undead, causing their bodies to jerk and shudder, as if on the cusp of breaking into a mass seizure. As this was happening, the power drained slowly from my body, and my formerly blinding glow began to ebb, becoming dimmer and dimmer. Finally, when I had spent all the soul energy I’d drawn from the Gray Sentinel, my glow was the same as that of all my troops.
I was now connected to each of them in a way I never before had been. They were me, and I was them. I was no longer a puppeteer controlling puppets. Instead, I was the army.
To test this new sense of synchronized unison out, I pointed straight ahead of me with my right arm. There was no delay, not even for a fraction of a second. The moment I did this, so did every single one of the undead. I held up one finger and curled the others in. My minions did exactly the same thing in unison, the very moment I did it. I hopped on my left leg, and so did each of them.
“Excellent,” I whispered. They all moaned out a soft, wordless groan with me.
I gripped the Dragon Sword in my hand, holding it as if it was a spear. The undead all gripped their spears in the same way. I hadn’t linked myself in this way to my marine creatures, so I sent out a signal to them to begin pulling. With a mighty heave, the Kraken and the whale pulled the thousands of linked sleds, and my army began to move across the bottom of the sea. Now that some forward momentum had been attained, I began to do the motion of driving a bargepole into the sand in a slow, strong even rhythm. My troops followed suit, driving their spears into the seabed and pushing themselves forward, aiding the effort of the kraken and the whale.
That was that; they were moving, and every undead soldier was moving in perfect, synchronized unison. I blasted a command along the network of black fibers to keep doing what they were doing until they reached Prand, and then I opened my eyes, taking myself back into the reality of the present.
“It’s working Lord Vance, it’s working!” Rollar shook his head in disbelief as he watched row after row of undead troops slipping under the turquoise waters.
“I told you it would,” I said. “Next time we see them, we’ll be back on Prandish soil.”
“To tell you the truth, Lord Vance, while I can’t wait to get back home, I’m a little worried about what we might find. We’ve been in Yeng for a while now, and the ocean voyage will take around two weeks, even with Rami-Xayon’s winds pushing us. Elandriel—if he is indeed the Hooded Man—will have ramped things up. He’s not the kind of man who sits back and allows his enemies to build their strength. Now that he’s aware of the full extent of your powers, you can be sure that he’ll be preparing quite a welcome for us back in Prand. Especially since he longer has a navy. He’ll let us cross the ocean in peace, I’ll bet, by pulling all his resources into a land-based campaign and throwing everything he’s got into hitting us with a mighty blow once we land. At least, that’s what I’d do if I were him, and he’s a good deal smarter than I am, I believe.”
“I know, Rollar. Don’t worry, I’m not about to underestimate him. When I fought him here, yeah, I kicked his ass, but I’m well aware that he was away from his main power base and not at the height of his strength. Back in Prand, he’s got the Blood Pyramid, with the full might of the Blood God and the Demogorgon behind him, and you can bet that he’s cutting as many throats as he can to prepare for the coming fight. I intend to approach this final battle with great caution. My undead army is stronger and larger than it’s ever been, but he can amass an army of Crusaders that’s at
