Prophet of the Dead

Vandar looked around. “Yes?”

“I don’t know if you think of us of the Brotherhood as your rivals or your comrades. You humans have a way of complicating everything that should be simple. If we’re your rivals, then leave. But if we’re your friends …” The familiar faltered in the manner of a proud creature unaccustomed to needing to ask for anything. “I told you I can’t fly. Truly, I’m so weak, I can barely stand, and without my feathers, I’m nearly frozen through. If you go, I’ll die, and the merchant too, not that he matters.”

Inside, Vandar flinched. “The warriors of the lodge were my brothers. The Halruaans murdered them.”

Jet nodded. “Go get your revenge, then.” He lowered himself back down into the snow.

Vandar tried to turn away once more. Plainly, avenging the lodge was the honorable course. Even Jet realized it and had just acknowledged as much.

And yet …

Jet was a griffon, the lodge’s totem in the flesh.

And believing himself justified, Vandar had turned his back on the outlanders once already, and it was possible that if he’d chosen otherwise, his brothers would still be alive.

Moreover, if he focused his attention inward, he could feel the wordless nudging of the fey spear and sword, strangely warm in his hand and on his hip, urging him on toward the possibility of battle, vengeance, and, perhaps still, even glory. The effect was subtle because it merely reinforced his own innate desires. Yet it was an influence nonetheless, and though he prized the virtues of the weapons as much as ever, he was learning to question the inclinations of the strange sentience that had tangled itself with his own like ivy wrapped around a post.

He heaved a sigh. “I have flint and steel, and there’s wood about. We can make a fire and find something to eat, and then, when you’re up to it, we’ll hike back to the fortress together.”

Aoth leveled his spear, and even that simple action made his neck, shoulders, and back spasm. He rattled off words of command, and the shriveled mage in the nightcap and nightshirt did the same, meanwhile sketching isosceles triangles with his wand. The ebony rod left streaks of amber phosphorescence in the air.

Aoth finished first, only because he’d opted for a simpler spell. Darts of blue light hurtled from the spear and pierced the undead wizard’s scrawny torso. Lord So-Remas cried out and flailed, his casting ruined short of completion.

Running footsteps pounded. All but certain he was moving too slowly to keep the two onrushing guards from driving their weapons into his body, Aoth blundered around to face them.

He was right. If he’d had to protect himself, he would have been too late. But the orc had picked up a small table, and now he heaved it at the soldiers. The improvised missile bashed one guard and made him stumble. Startled, his comrade balked too.

Aoth pulled his short, heavy sword from its scabbard and tossed it to the orc, who caught it deftly by the hilt. It wasn’t much to hold off two armored spearmen, but it was better than nothing, and handing it off was all Aoth had time to do. He had to use his magic-or what was left of it-to fight the most dangerous foe.

He wrenched himself back toward the doorway to the bedchamber and found the Red Wizard had already shaken off the effects of the darts of light. Worse, he was already chanting a new incantation, one that made a sickly green glow flower in the depths of his sunken eyes and branch out through the veins in his temples to his hairless crown.

Aoth started a spell of his own, but this time, So-Remas finished first. He flicked the ebony wand in an arc that ended with it pointing straight at his opponent. Shedding its clattering pieces, the lanceboard table leaped into the air and flew at Aoth.

He tried to dodge and gasped at the resulting stab of agony. The table slammed into him and knocked him onto the floor, and that double jolt was just as excruciating.

He curled up and tucked his head as, prompted by So-Remas’s wand, more objects flew at him. Struggling to keep to the proper cadence despite the punishment, Aoth gritted out another spell and jabbed with his spear on the final syllable.

A red spark shot from the point to strike at the undead mage’s feet. There, it exploded into a fiery blast that knocked the wizard backward and filled the doorway with a hissing sheet of flame.

Gasping, Aoth hoped that was the end of it, and for a heartbeat, it appeared to be. He was about to turn and see how the orc was faring when So-Remas strode back through the fire. Either he was innately impervious to it, or he carried some talisman that made him so.

The undead noble flicked his wand up and down. The animated game table hammered Aoth like a boot stamping repeatedly on an insect.

Aoth struggled to think of a counterstroke he might conceivably accomplish despite the ongoing torment and his depleted powers. The drawn curtains with the shuttered windows behind them caught his eye.

The orc had said that on rare occasions, he’d seen his master when the sun was out. But that wasn’t the same as saying that he’d seen the undead creature in the sunlight, and Aoth was going to gamble that the thrall had meant the former but not the latter, and that there was a reason for it.

He thrust his spear at a window and shouted a word of command. Raw force leaped from the weapon to tear down the drapes, shatter the greenish panes behind them, and smash open the shutters on the other side of those.

A shaft of daylight shined in and caught So-Remas in its center. The undead shrieked and burned, his desiccated skin and the withered flesh inside charring like paper, the purifying power of the sun achieving what Aoth’s burst of arcane fire hadn’t.

Aoth dredged up the concentration for a little more magic. It helped that, now that So-Remas had lost his focus, the lanceboard table had stopped battering him. Aoth cast more glowing darts, and they and the sunlight together were enough. The Red Wizard pitched forward onto his face. By now, he was mostly bare bone, which burned to coals and then to ash like the rest of him.

It occurred to Aoth that if Cera were here, she’d say her god had looked out for him. That in turn made him remember that, as far as he knew, she and Jhesrhi were still trapped in the dark maze. Somehow, he had to get them out!

But he couldn’t think about that now. Aoth twisted around and saw that the spearmen had backed the orc against a wall.

Fortunately, they’d turned their backs on Aoth to do it. With his teeth gritted, he crawled close enough to drive his spear up between one soldier’s legs.

The gelded man whimpered and, knees buckling, collapsed. The other warrior’s head jerked in his wounded comrade’s direction. Risking everything on an all-out attack, the orc lunged and slashed. The remaining guard fell backward with blood pumping from a gaping wound in his neck.

Aoth looked around to make sure there were no other immediate threats. He noticed the orc doing the same.

“Thanks,” Aoth gasped.

The slave shrugged. “I had to fight, or they would have tortured me to death for helping you. It wouldn’t have mattered that you forced me.” He leered a crooked leer. “Although there was more to it. I wanted to kill them.”

“You need to break open the secret panel. Fast, before more guards show up. I’d do it, but I’m not sure I can stand back up.”

The orc attacked So-Remas’s hiding place. The enchanted sword cracked and crunched through the wood in what Aoth knew to be a matter of moments even though it felt like a cruelly long time to him.

The thrall handed him a silver bottle. “This is the stuff.”

Clumsy with pain and eagerness, Aoth fumbled out the stopper and took a long pull of the tasteless, lukewarm elixir inside. He felt the vertebrae in his neck shift, but without discomfort. In fact, all the cramping, throbbing soreness was fading away from his neck all the way down to his rump. He let out a long sigh of relief.

He would have been happy to sit and savor his liberation from torment. But he and the orc weren’t out of danger yet, and although he’d recovered his physical strength, his mystical power would return only with rest. He jammed the stopper back in the bottle, scrambled up, and hurried to So-Remas’s hiding place.