Prophet of the Dead

surprise like we wanted.”

Bez grinned. “Not complete surprise. But still.”

“Right. Our part of the plan hasn’t changed. We’ll give the fight on the ground a little time to get going. Make the undead think what they see before them is all they have to deal with. Then, on my signal, we flyers will hit them from above. You’ll see gaps in the canopy you can shoot through. Just remember that specters and such can fly too. You need to be ready to repel boarders.”

“We are,” said Bez. “May the Foehammer guide your spear, Captain.” He grinned. “Until we finish with Lod.”

Fezim smiled back. “And may Lady Luck smile on you for exactly the same amount of time.”

Jet gave a rasping cry, pivoted, leaped over the gunwale, lashed his wings, and climbed. Meanwhile, watching, Bez thought, I shot you down once, griffon, and from much farther away.

For although Fezim might believe his fellow mercenary commander had no choice but to do as he was told, in fact, a clever man could almost always find options, and the present situation was no exception.

Fezim and an undetermined number of his allies could set the Storm ablaze merely by speaking a certain phrase. But suppose Bez killed the Thayan with a single stroke while his friends were busy fighting on the ground, then simply sailed away. He might get a long head start before Jhesrhi Coldcreek and the others were free to pursue or even realized what had happened.

But another grating screech and a winged shadow sliding across the deck reminded him Jet was far from the only griffon in the air, and the huge black beast was now the chieftain of the others. If Bez struck at Jet, the rest might all attack the skyship.

Well then, what if, instead of killing Fezim and making a run for it, Bez fought the battle through on the undead’s side? Dai Shan had formed an alliance with them. Why shouldn’t another living man do likewise?

Because that strategy brought him right back around to the problem of the runes. Only an idiot would gamble that he could betray his fellow sellsword captain, then linger in the vicinity, and every one of Fezim’s friends would die before a single one of them got around to reciting the trigger words to destroy the Storm.

And even though Bez possessed magic that would enable him to survive the blast, and even though he could recruit new followers, such a calamity simply couldn’t be allowed. Built with arcane secrets lost when the Spellplague devastated the Halruaa of old, the skyship was irreplaceable.

So perhaps after all he had no satisfactory options. He turned and noticed Uregaunt standing by a chute used to roll enchanted missiles over the side and an open crate of such sigil-inscribed iron and ceramic orbs. The old artilleryman was watching him with a sardonic expression that suggested he’d guessed the direction of his commander’s thoughts.

Bez snorted. “Perhaps I was a bit rash when I claimed we were the saviors of Rashemen. Now it appears we’re obliged to make good on that.”

“I figured,” Uregaunt said. He picked up a clay ball, set it behind the gate in the top of the chute, spit on it, and drew a four-pointed star with the spittle and a callused fingertip. For a moment, the trails of moisture sizzled and steamed.

By the time Cera and her comrades came in sight of the main force of undead, it was dark as night, and the air stank of decay. A foul taste in her mouth kept coming back no matter how many times she spit it away, and her skin crawled.

On Vandar’s command, she and her allies had finished their approach at a run. Such recklessness apparently didn’t trouble berserkers or even Old Ones and hathrans, but it had certainly made her nervous.

She could tell haste had paid off, though. Some of the living corpses and such were still scrambling and lurching around in seeming confusion, while the Rashemi hadn’t entirely forsaken tactics or organization. She and the hathrans had warrior and golem protectors arrayed around them. Unless the fight went badly, she might not even require her borrowed mace and targe.

She still wished she had her lost gilded weapon, symbolic as it had been of the Keeper’s power. But she could do without it. If she’d learned anything in the past few tendays, it was that her god stood with her always, in the deepest darkness and the most dire circumstances, and it was time to demonstrate that blessed truth to the unnatural horrors before her.

As berserkers roared their battle cries and charged the foe, she raised the mace over her head and recited a prayer. The gloom and the stench of decay thickened around her, and for a moment, she feared she might grow faint or vomit. But she didn’t. She kept her voice steady and her will focused.

A shaft of golden radiance stabbed down from overhead to set the mace aglow. She swung the weapon at the enemy, and the captured sunlight leaped forth in a flash. An enormous bat-a vampiric shapeshifter, she assumed-vanished in a puff of flame. Wraiths shredded as though invisible razors were slicing them. Even dark fey, rat-sized flying men with several black bulging eyes and veined transparent wings, flinched from the flare.

The flash also revealed, if only by failing to penetrate it, the cloud of seething murk at the very center of the stand of weir trees. It felt like an open wound in the skin of the world, or perhaps the fang embedded in such a wound to inject the venom that was Shadow.

In other words, it was the visible manifestation of the enchantments the durthans had been casting to tilt the balance of primal forces at play in Rashemen. It was a foe that, as much as any jagged-fanged ghoul, misty wraith, or even Lod himself, the land’s defenders needed to destroy.

And Cera couldn’t tackle that holy task from across the battlefield.

She turned to her nearest guardian, Aoth’s new sellsword Orgurth. “Can we fight our way forward?” she asked.

The orc grinned. “Probably not, but let’s try.”

The urge to hurl fire at the foe hammered inside Jhesrhi like a frantic heartbeat, all the more insistent because, even before crippling Tchazzar, she’d generally wielded flame against the undead. She was having trouble even thinking of other spells.

But now that she’d returned to the mortal world, all four elements were her friends, and by the Seven Stars, she’d cast the magic she needed to cast! A direhelm flew down at her, and she spoke to the wind. A spirit of the air seized the animate suit of half-plate and swept it away, crashing it into one tree trunk after another as it gradually came apart.

Zombies with lambent amber eyes circled to flank berserkers too busy slashing and chopping at ghouls to notice. Jhesrhi pointed her staff and recited as quickly as was possible in one of the ponderous languages of Root Hold. Rumbling, the patch of earth beneath the zombies tilted, one end rising and the other sinking, tumbling them backward and half burying them in the snow that slid along with them.

The dead men were still clumsily trying to stand back up when Jhesrhi spotted Cera and her bodyguards advancing and led her own squad forward to support her. Her blood felt deliciously hot pumping through her veins, and scowling, she willed it cool again.

The unnatural gloom felt nasty enough to set a person’s teeth on edge. Yet Yhelbruna took a certain perverse pleasure in experiencing it for what it was, and particularly in working magic despite its almost conscious efforts to break her concentration with twinges of fear and nausea and block her links to the fountainheads of her power. For now that she understood what plagued her, she could cope.

So, too, could the entities rushing to answer her call. Driven into hiding or dormancy as the durthans corrupted the natural balance of light and dark in the Urlingwood, they were eager to retaliate now that true hathrans were rallying them.

An ancient pine that had uprooted itself and taken on a crudely human form to march to war wrestled a dark fey much like itself. Meanwhile, smaller combatants scurried away from the giants’ many-toed feet to keep from being trampled.

A maiden made of water spoke in a voice like a gurgling brook and compelled a warrior made of ice to melt into liquid too. They embraced, kissed, and merged into a single rippling form that poured down into the snowy ground and vanished an instant later.

Rearing on its hind legs, a huge black bear beheaded a walking corpse with a swipe of its paw. A pace or two