Seeking cover, he cast around and found nothing that would hide him from hostile eyes or protect him from a fiery blast or a burst of acid. He jerked the red spear out of the demon’s side and resumed running across the snow-covered scrubland.
A thumping sound and a truncated shriek tempted him to glance over his shoulder, but he didn’t need to look to know the skyship was steadily closing the distance. It could fly faster than any man could run, even someone with enchanted weapons lending him strength and endurance.
So maybe Vandar should turn, give himself over to the fury, throw his spear at his enemies, and die like a berserker after all. Maybe perishing alongside the lodge brothers he’d led so disastrously was preferable to the guilt and grief of surviving.
He was still considering it when he glimpsed a different whiteness in the vista before him, a flat, gleaming ribbon winding its way through the snowy, uneven ground and the leafless brush with its burden of icicles. It was a frozen tributary of Lake Ashane, a largish stream or small river he recalled crossing on the march north.
He raced onto the ice and stabbed it repeatedly with the spear. Every thrust penetrated, but each jabbed only a little hole, not the big one he required. Meanwhile, the winged shadow of the
A missile thudded down in the stone beside the little river, then burst into green vapor that streamed out in all directions. Vandar closed his eyes, held his breath, and asked his griffon totem for strength.
None of it helped very much. The toxic fumes still seared him outside and in but only for a heartbeat. Then, finally, a sizable piece of ice shattered beneath him, and he plunged through the opening.
The water washed away the poison clinging to his skin, cooled the burning sting of it, and for an instant, felt wonderful. Then a shock of bitter cold pierced him to the core.
Someone-poor Raumevik, perhaps-had once told Vandar that if a man fell through the ice, he could find an inch or two of air caught between the frozen surface and the water beneath. He floundered upward, and sure enough, there it was. Face tilted up, he gasped some in and got water along with it. He coughed the frigid liquid out and inhaled again.
He struggled to hold his body in the same life-saving attitude as the current carried him along. Meanwhile, the chill numbed him and leeched his strength. It would kill him if he stayed submerged for long, but if he emerged too soon, the sellswords would spot him and drop more lethal magic on his head.
The worst thing about it was that he had no way of telling how far from the skyship he’d traveled. The thick ice above his face was more opaque than otherwise, dusted with drifts of snow.
Soon, though, his ongoing debilitation reached a point where the location of his human foes became irrelevant. Instinct screamed that if he didn’t escape the river immediately, it was going to kill him.
There were tangles of fallen branches on the bottom of the river. They’d bumped and snagged his legs as the current swept him downstream. He waited until he felt the next, then groped and fumbled at it with his feet. They caught in it to anchor him in one place.
Then he attacked the ice as he had before, jabbing it with the spear, but this time, the thrusts were so feeble that most of them didn’t even poke through. He’d waited too long to try getting out. Which meant he was failing his murdered lodge brothers
That thought was insupportable. Despite his numbed debility, it brought the rage howling forth from the place where it lived inside him, and he attacked the ice with one final burst of energy.
Long cracks snaked through the ice, and then chunks of it tumbled down around him. He tossed the spear up out of the hole, caught the edges, and strained to haul himself out of the water.
For a moment, the task was beyond him. Then, grunting and gasping, he dragged himself up onto his belly and lay shuddering, too spent even to raise his head and see if the skyship was close by or not.
Crouching inside the frigid tomb, his neck throbbing, Aoth Fezim gritted his teeth against the pain and reached out with his thoughts.
But the griffon didn’t answer, and it was conceivably just as well. Aoth could feel that his familiar was alive but too deeply unconscious for his master’s psychic call to rouse him. He was also suffering pain so fierce that a trace of it even tainted that profound slumber. Something had hurt him badly, and he likely
Still, if they couldn’t communicate, Aoth had no way of finding out if Cera and Jhesrhi had escaped the otherworldly maze, knowing the current situation at the Fortress of the Half-Demon, or discovering whether anything else was happening in Rashemen. He slammed his fist down on his knee, and sharper pain stabbed through his neck. It made tears spill from his eyes.
The pain also reminded him that he needed to address his own immediate problems. Otherwise, nothing happening hundreds of miles to the north was likely to matter, at least not to him.
He could tell his neck was getting worse. Pain jabbed and scraped at him with every move he made. He wouldn’t be able to do anything else to help himself until he obtained healing, and the only place to seek it was inside the keep a stone’s throw away from the crypt.
He felt singularly unready to go exploring. He’d expended too much of his magic fighting the undead in Rashemen. Even the petty enchantments bound in his tattoos, on which he generally depended to stave off pain, chill, and fatigue, were inert.
Still, waiting and resting seemed the poorer option. What if he did and his condition so deteriorated that he couldn’t move at all? In his years as a legionnaire and sellsword, he’d seen plenty of untreated wounds and injuries that steadily worsened over time.
Stifling a groan, he clambered to his feet and crept back to the wrought-iron gate he’d broken previously. Looking for sentries, or anyone who might cry an alarm, he peered out at the graveyard with its drifts of gray, sooty snow, the courtyard beyond, and the high walls and battlements enclosing it all.
Nyevarra trailed along and watched with a jaundiced eye as Pevkalondra conducted a tour of the cold, echoing, and palely phosphorescent vaults and tunnels under Beacon Cairn. A pearl gleamed in the left orbit of the ghoul’s withered, flaking face, tiny silver scorpions crawled like fleas in the folds of her faded velvet gown, and she stank of rot. It all made her affecting the manner of a house-proud hostess particularly grotesque.
As the reanimated Raumviran clapped her hands, a metal arachnid fell from the hem of her sleeve and scuttled back toward the pointed toe of her shoe. Then a steaming, clinking bronze crayfish the size of a plow horse crawled through a doorway in the right-hand wall. It stank of oil, and its pincers opened and closed repeatedly with a smooth metallic noise like the sliding sound of scissors.
“Impressive,” Uramar said. Hulking, misshapen, and mottled, the patchwork warrior had a hole in his mail shirt that exposed the gray flesh beneath where Aoth Fezim’s spear had pierced him, but the wound didn’t appear to trouble him. Nyevarra felt renewed appreciation for his strength and wondered again how his cold blood tasted. Perhaps, once they’d conquered Rashemen, she could coax him out of his shyness and find out.
“There are dozens more,” Pevkalondra said. “You simply have to reanimate enough of my countrymen to control them to best effect. Then, my lord, I’ll give you the victory the idiot Nars threw away in the Fortress.”
Nyevarra chuckled. “Is that the story we’re telling now, since Falconer isn’t here to speak up for himself and his folk?” The Nar demonbinder was the one true leader of the conspiracy who’d fallen to the enemy.
The Raumviran glared with her single eye. Or perhaps the pearl glared too. It seemed to shine brighter than before.
“The Nar’s inability to defend himself,” she said, “simply proves my point.” She turned back to Uramar. “Raise Raumvirans. Raise all you can find. After the debacle in the Fortress, you need a new army, and I promise you one that will win.”
“When the war is over,” Nyevarra said, shifting her grip on the antler-axe she’d taken from the fallen Stag King, “and the realm is full of Raumvirans with only a sprinkling of durthans, Nars, and travelers from Uramar’s country, I wonder just who will actually rule. What sort of land it will be.”
Uramar frowned. Like every other expression that played across the blaspheme’s lopsided face, it had an uneven quality to it.
“Within the Eminence,” he said, “all undead are equal.”
He appeared to believe that lofty sentiment too. But Nyevarra had a more realistic perspective, and she
