about fellowship and equality, had yet to share all the arcane wisdom of Lod, she
She spied a Raumathari soldier with phosphorescent yellow eyes and the long gash that had no doubt been his death wound splitting his withered chest. He sat honing his halberd with a whetstone until, noticing her as well, he rose and came to attention.
“Ready our troops and as many constructs as we can manage,” she told him. “We have an errand.”
Orgurth positioned himself in front of the double doors, just off center enough that, if Lady Luck smiled, a person pushing one open wouldn’t see him for an instant, and just far enough back that neither panel swinging inward would block his path to the foe. Then, swallowing away a dryness in his throat, he waited.
Meanwhile, Aoth moved into the corner, where no enemy could target or even see him before entering the room, which, of course, he was counting on Orgurth to prevent. There, the mage whispered rhymes and twirled his spear.
With a snort, Orgurth reflected that some things never changed. Orc warriors drew the hard, dangerous jobs, and human wizards pulled the easy ones. But he didn’t mind. However long the odds, he was facing them with a scimitar in his fist and a brigandine on his back, and he owed that to his fellow fugitive.
Footsteps thumped down the hallway, and it belatedly occurred to Orgurth that the searchers might pass right on by the portal room. After all, if no Red Wizard had been inside for the better part of a century, maybe no one remembered the window golem or would understand the significance of the crash of breaking glass.
But that didn’t turn out to be the case. The footsteps halted on the other side of the doors, and people whispered to one another. Somehow, perhaps because a wizard had turned his magic to the purpose, the newcomers were able to tell where the disturbance had originated.
Both doors suddenly swung inward. Orgurth bellowed the booming war cry of a blood orc, the roar that made lesser warriors falter and freeze on the battlefield, and rushed the figures clustered in the opening.
He slashed over the top of a shield and sliced the cheeks and nose of a fellow orc from ear to pointed ear. The warrior fell backward and into a comrade. Orgurth pivoted, feinted high, and cut low into a second target’s knee. The wounded leg buckled, and that guard, a human, dropped.
Unfortunately, Orgurth couldn’t take everybody by surprise. The two remaining guards-more humans, one male and one female-came on guard. The man feinted repeatedly to hold Orgurth’s attention while the woman sidled to flank him.
They were no doubt competent and dangerous in their own right, but more dangerous still was the hairless, scarlet-robed man hastily backing away behind them. Orgurth couldn’t afford to let the mage stay beyond the reach of his scimitar and cast spells with impunity.
He sprang forward and caught the female warrior’s sword stroke on his shield. The other guard’s blade thumped his shoulder. It hurt, but his sudden move had thrown off the male warrior’s aim, and the clumsy cut failed to penetrate the reinforced leather of his armor.
Still charging, Orgurth slammed his shield into the woman, knocked her down, and ran on without paying any attention to whether he was trampling her or not. The only thing that mattered was that he now had a clear path to the mage.
The stoop-shouldered, slightly paunchy Red Wizard, however, was already chanting a spell, and when Orgurth rushed him, he lashed a talismanic orb of mottled brownish crystal back and forth and recited faster. A whip made of crimson light crackled into being in his free hand, and he snapped it at Orgurth’s ankles.
Orgurth leaped over the stroke. The mage released the conjured whip, and floating, it whirled, preparing to make a second attack all by itself.
Ignoring it, Orgurth charged on and cut at its maker. The Red Wizard dodged with surprising nimbleness and grabbed for his attacker’s throat. A fanged mouth opened in the palm of his pale, ink-stained hand.
Orgurth twisted out of the way and lopped the hand off. His blood spurting from the stump, the wizard gasped and froze. Orgurth followed up with a cut to the chest, and his adversary toppled backward.
Orgurth whirled. The red whip had vanished, but the remaining guards were nearly on top of him. He lifted his shield to block a head cut from the woman and slashed at the man’s arm at the same time the guard was hacking at him.
Orgurth’s stop cut landed, and perhaps for that reason, the human’s attack flashed harmlessly past him. He split the man’s skull, pivoted in time to block when the woman tried a thrust, and leered at the fear flowering in her face. He feinted to the outside, cut to the inside, and she too, went down.
By the Unsleeping Eye, it felt good to kill! So good that it was hard to imagine he’d endured the years of slavery without his spirit starving away to nothing inside him.
But there was no time to stand and relish the recovery of his true self. Down by the stairwell, likely drawn by the noise of the fight, another group of enemies emerged from a different corridor. The half dozen guards were gaunt corpses with lambent amber eyes, and the wizard striding stiff-legged behind them was the mummy who’d spoken to Aoth about the flayed skins.
Without the advantage of surprise, Orgurth had no hope whatsoever of charging all the way down the hall and cutting his way through six undead bodyguards to reach their master without giving the mummy abundant opportunity to throw spell after spell at him. Instead, he whirled and dashed for the room with the map. Behind him, the wizard croaked a rhyme.
Orgurth scrambled through the double doors. An instant later, thunder boomed, brightness flashed through the opening behind him, and a crash announced the damage when the conjured lightning bolt blasted the wall at the far end of the corridor.
Aoth was still murmuring and spinning and jabbing his spear around. The only change Orgurth could see was that the point of the weapon was now glowing blue, just like the human’s eyes in their mask of tattooing.
Orgurth wanted to ask if that meant Aoth was making headway but feared to distract him. So he simply faced the doorway, steadied himself, and caught his breath.
The thump of hurrying footsteps announced the dread warriors. As soon as they advanced into view, Orgurth sprang at them. He had to hold the doorway, and if he didn’t let them push him back, maybe their shriveled, stinking bodies would shield him from their master’s magic.
He cut into a zombie’s chest. The resulting injury would have finished any living opponent, but the walking corpse cut back at him, and he blocked the stroke with his shield.
A second dread warrior moved to flank him. Bellowing, Orgurth split its skull, and it dropped.
But at the same time, his first foe came at him hard, trying to push him back. Its fellows maneuvered to do the same.
Even so, slashing furiously, defending frantically, he held his ground for another moment or two. Then, from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a mace hurtling at his head.
It was too late to swing his shield into position to catch the blow. He had to parry with his scimitar, and the resulting jolt loosened his grip on the hilt. He didn’t quite drop the weapon, but as he fumbled to regain a proper hold, the enemy’s onslaught drove him backward, and the dead men pursued him into the chamber.
Then Aoth appeared beside him. The head of his spear burning like a torch, he lashed the weapon from right to left and hurled an arc of flame into the dread warriors’ withered faces, balking them.
“Get on the map!” said Aoth. “Put at least one foot on Rashemen!”
Slashing and jabbing, the two fugitives retreated, and the zombies followed. Orgurth was too busy fending them off to look down and see where Rashemen was, but Aoth somehow found an instant to grab him by the shoulder and jerk him to what was presumably the right spot.
Meanwhile, the mummy stalked into the room behind his guards. He pointed the slender ebony wand in his brown, gnarled hand.
“We go to the Fortress of the Half-Demon!” said Aoth, and at the same instant, a jagged darkness leaped from the tip of the undead wizard’s weapon.
4
