Hanging at his side, the red sword whispered to assure him his worries were nonsensical, that he was a great hero headed for a glorious victory, and it would have eased him to give himself over to its encouragement. It was heartening to be reminded that he possessed such powerful magic, and he only wished he still carried the crimson spear as well.
Still, he mustn’t simply succumb to the blade’s influence. If he let the fey weapon’s confidence become his own, so too would its recklessness and battle lust, and he and his comrades wanted to advance as far as possible by stealth.
Suddenly, striding beside him, Yhelbruna raised her hand. “Stop,” she whispered.
Vandar obeyed. So did all the folk and jointed automatons marching beside and behind them. Apparently she’d used magic to make the soft command audible to all.
He scanned the white snowdrifts and black tree trunks and limbs ahead. Had he and his allies arrived at the periphery of the unnatural twilight? He couldn’t tell. Even denuded of their leaves, the weave of branches overhead was thick enough to block a goodly portion of the silvery winter sunlight in a purely natural fashion.
He did know he couldn’t see any particular reason for the halt. “What is it?” he murmured from the corner of his mouth.
“I sense dark fey,” she answered. “The durthans’ allies, most likely, but perhaps I can still persuade them to let us pass without a fight.” She eased a bluewood wand from a sheath on her belt, and, waving it lazily back and forth, crooned words as soft and soothing as a lullaby.
Although he wasn’t the target, mere proximity to the casting made Vandar yawn and even quelled the impatience of the red sword flickering at the back of his mind. He thought that surely the magic must be lulling the fey as well. Then he spotted a subtle disturbance in the snow before him. Something was crawling underneath it.
He bellowed, “Look down!” At the same time, he grabbed Yhelbruna and spun her behind him. As he turned back around, the fey burst up from the blanket of frozen white.
To his surprise, they weren’t any kind of snake but rather whipping tangles of briar with twisted little faces glaring from amid the thorny stalks. They stood as tall as a man when they finished rearing up.
Vandar’s rage took hold of him without needing to call it, and he stabbed with the javelin a fellow berserker had loaned him. The weapon gashed and nearly split a stalk, but more briars whipped around the shaft and kept him from pulling it back. He let go of it and snatched for his sword hilt. In his head, the blade crowed with delight.
As it cleared the scabbard, briars cocked themselves backward. Guessing what was about to happen, he almost dropped into a defensive crouch before remembering his body was shielding Yhelbruna’s. He contented himself with jerking up his arm to protect his face.
The briars whipped forward and threw thorns like miniature darts. Fortunately, his boiled leather vest and thick woolen sleeves kept all but a couple from piercing skin.
He sprang at the pair of briar fey in front of him and started slashing lengths of them in two. They lashed back at him, and he ducked and dodged. Thorns dragged across his armor, snagging then popping free.
He cut into the gnarled face of the fey on his right, and the creature wailed; gave a rattling, clattering shudder; and stopped moving. He pivoted to attack the one on his left in similar fashion but discovered Yhelbruna was already pointing her wand at it. The tip of the arcane weapon pulsed with azure light, and the bramble-thing slumped back down in the snow.
With no more foes in reach of his sword, Vandar pivoted for a look at the rest of the battle. Several briar fey were still attacking the vanguard of the war band, and not everyone was coping as well as he and Yhelbruna had. Men wrapped in ever-tightening loops of bramble struggled futilely as rows of sliding thorns caught and ripped their skin.
At the moment, Vandar was riding his anger and not the other way around, and perhaps for that reason, he saw what needed to be done. “Golems!” he shouted. “Let the golems kill them!” Thorns wouldn’t do much harm to living metal and stone.
Somewhere behind him, Shaugar echoed his command. Steel wolves and big bronze cats sprang forward.
Meanwhile, Vandar scrutinized the landscape beyond the immediate threat. Nasty as they were, a few briar fey had no hope of defeating a force as sizable as his. Maybe a durthan’s orders or an overwhelming hatred of mankind had prompted them to attack even so, but he feared the purpose was to keep him and his comrades occupied while a different creature carried a warning to the main body of the enemy.
After a moment, he spotted the sentry, a dark, spindly thing springing from tree to tree. Ignoring the scarlet blade’s throb of protest, he dropped the sword in the snow and sought to rip his javelin from the dead fey’s twisted hold. Stickers pricked him as the weapon pulled free, but he didn’t pay any heed to that either.
By the time he cocked the javelin over his shoulder, the sentry was all but out of range and on the very brink of vanishing into tangled branches and dimness. But he used the imminence of its escape to make his berserker wrath blaze even hotter, and as he did, he threw.
The javelin caught the dark fey in mid-spring and stabbed into its torso. It fell to the ground, and for a breath or two, its long limbs twitched, while blood black as ink stained the snow beneath it. Then it rotted away to nothing, and only the instrument of its death and the filthy blotch remained.
Vandar looked around. As he’d hoped, once they engaged, the automatons had made short work of the remaining thorn fey. He let go of anger and shivered as lightheadedness and a pang of nausea took its place.
Then Yhelbruna touched his face, and the sickness disappeared.
“I don’t want you weak,” she said, “not even for a moment. From this point forward, every step will be more dangerous than the one before it.”
As Uramar and his patrol-an assortment of doomsepts, other phantoms, and ghouls-ranged the deeper reaches of the forest, many of his broken souls luxuriated in the gloom. For as every undead learned, darkness could be more than the absence of light. It could be pleasurable and invigorating, a condition in which death waxed strong and life guttered, and that was the sort of murk Lod, Nyevarra, and the other undead durthans were calling into the mundane world.
Those who truly understood the implications assured Uramar the gathering dark meant Rashemen was soon to fall, and naturally, he was glad. Yet the prouder and more bloodthirsty aspects of his complex identity also felt a little wistful. He’d been essential while he was creating and recruiting undead, fighting battles, and Lod was still on the other side of the western sea. But since leading the last little feint of a raid along the River Rasha and then returning to the Urlingwood via the deathways, he hadn’t had much to do.
He knew his idleness was only temporary. Once the Eminence of Araunt controlled its own country, other conquests would follow and require the efforts of every warrior. But in the meantime, he’d assuage his restlessness by patrolling, and never mind that, after his comrades’ efforts at subversion and misdirection, and with dark fey sentries standing watch farther out toward the edges of the wood, such vigilance was almost certainly superfluous.
Up ahead, something gleamed for a moment among a stand of oaks. He squinted and made out a steel centipede as long as four horses standing nose to tail, crawling at right angles to his path, which was to say, toward the weir trees where the rites of shadow were underway. Other figures were stalking along with it.
Uramar smiled. To say the least, he hadn’t liked abandoning the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but he’d found the Raumvirans’ unexpected departure from Beacon Cairn equally troubling. He’d feared they’d come to harm, do something to give away the Eminence’s plans, or even outright betray their undead kindred.
But evidently none of those things had come to pass. Because the centipede was a Raumathari automaton, and that meant Pevkalondra and her people had thought better of their fit of pique and come to rejoin their comrades.
Uramar drew breath to call out a greeting. Then one of his more cautious souls snapped, “Don’t! Be certain first!”
“Yes,” added another inner voice, one of the jocular, japing ones, “you might as well. You’re out here to play watchdog, aren’t you?”
Uramar raised his hand to signal his companions to halt, then stalked forward, taking momentary satisfaction in the silence of his approach. The necromancer who’d created him had assembled his massive, crooked body for
