Steeling himself against the onslaught, Muthoth repeated the words of command he'd just recited. The caller recoiled from him, then vanished.
For an instant, Muthoth was confused, then he realized it had transferred itself to the physical plane. It hoped the surface of his mind would prove vulnerable to assault while his awareness was focused deep inside.
He hastily roused himself, suffered a fleeting illusion of extreme heaviness as his psyche fully meshed with his corporeal form. The demented ghost-or amalgam of ghosts-raved around him. It looked just as it had inside its quasi-imaginary dungeon, but its howls were silent now, albeit as palpable and hurtful as before.
He recited the spell a third time, and the caller flinched from him. Its power stopped beating at him, although the psychic howling didn't abate.
'Go forth,' he panted, 'and kill every living person you meet, unless I tell you otherwise.' He intended to trail along behind the caller, where he'd be safe. He hoped that if the entity encountered So-Kehur, he'd spot his fellow necromancer in time to keep the thing from attacking. If not, well, the fat fool wouldn't be much of a loss.
Still, So-Kehur had a role to play. As the dead men he'd already roused proceeded with the work of slaughtering the garrison, he'd make new zombies of the fallen, just as Muthoth intended to reanimate the caller's victims. As the defenders' numbers dwindled, the ranks of their enemies would swell.
Xingax liked to ride on the shoulders of a hill-giant zombie. It made folk assume that a being who resembled an oversized, leprous, and grossly deformed fetus couldn't get around by himself, and he liked being underestimated in that way. It gave him an edge when ill wishers sought to kill him.
Or rather, it had worked that way in the past, but he'd discovered that in the midst of a battle like this, his mount was a liability. Even at the center of the northern host, sticking up higher than the heads of the people around him increased the likelihood of being pierced by arrows or fried by flares of arcane energy. So now he simply floated in the air beside Szass Tam.
Xingax disliked the roaring, dangerous chaos that was warfare, and privately felt that he shouldn't have to endure it. He was an inventor, sage, and artist, not a brute. Thus, it galled him to recognize that he himself was responsible for his presence at the battle. After Bareris Anskuld had mutilated him, he'd repaired the damage with a hand and eye harvested from the body of the fallen nighthaunt Ysval, then learned to wield the abilities the grafts conferred. As a result, Szass Tam had incorporated him into his battle strategy.
The lich had created half a dozen hovering eyes, then sent them soaring up into the sky. Periodically he opened his mind to the sights the disembodied orbs beheld. It allowed him to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole. He signaled the end of such an interlude by pivoting toward Xingax.
'Is it time?' Xingax asked.
The lich smiled. 'It is, indeed. Our enemies smell victory. They're pushing in hard, and that means they won't be able to disentangle themselves from us later on. So remember what I taught you, and use your power.'
Xingax closed his natural, myopic eye so only Ysval's round white orb could see. He raised the nighthaunt's oversized, shadow black hand to the heavens, clenched the clawed fingers into a fist, and strained with all the considerable force of his will.
Responding to his summons, darkness streamed across the sky. For the Keep of Sorrows, night fell early, and across the length and breadth of Szass Tam's army, wraiths and other fearsome entities exploded from the wagons, tents, and pools of shadow used to shield them from the light of day.
Tammith looked around. The horses stood ready, but she couldn't see any clear path along which she and her command might ride to engage the enemy.
Fortunately, the vampires of the Silent Company, made up largely of progeny Tammith had created over the years, had other ways of reaching the foe.
'We fly!' she called, then dissolved into bats. Her warriors each transformed into a single such creature. None of them had inherited her trick of breaking apart into an entire swarm.
She led her spawn over clusters and lines of combatants to a company of mounted knights. By the looks of it, they'd just finished butchering a band of ghouls.
The Silent Company dived at the southerners. Midway through her plummet, Tammith yanked her bats back into a single human body. It was a difficult trick and it hurt, but it was necessary, because her target wore plate armor and had his visor down. The bats wouldn't be able to hurt him.
She crashed into the knight, swept him from the saddle, and hurled him to the ground beneath her. The impact probably killed or at least crippled him, but she ripped the visor off his helm and drove her stiffened, mail- clad fingers deep into his head to be sure.
She sprang to her feet, found another target, and stared at his face. Addled by her hypnotic power, he faltered, giving her time to draw her sword. As she leaped up at him, his wits returned, and he swung his shield to fend her off. He was too slow, though, and the point of her sword punched through his breastplate into his vitals.
Meanwhile, the other vampires attacked like lethal shadows, until all the riders were dead. Tammith looked around for new foes and saw the griffon riders wheeling and swooping overhead.
Since the Silent Company could fly, it could engage the zulkirs' aerial warriors-but no. By all accounts, Bareris was still alive, and had joined the Griffon Legion.
Of course, she didn't love him anymore. The predator she'd become was incapable of loving anyone. Sometimes she even hated him for failing her as he had.
But still: no. Now that the battlefield was dark, Szass Tam had other warriors capable of fighting in the air, and the Silent Company could find plenty of work to do on the ground.
Malark considered himself as able a combatant as any in Thay. He had, after all, had centuries of life to perfect his disciplines. But he couldn't use them to best effect standing in a shield wall or charging in a line. The philosopher-assassins of the Monks of the Long Death hadn't modeled themselves with those sorts of group endeavors in mind.
Thus he preferred to fight on the fringes of the battle, and found plenty of enemies to occupy him- skirmishers, warriors separated from their companies, and undead horrors so savage and erratic that even the necromancers mistrusted their ability to control them. Accordingly, they didn't even try, just shooed them off in the general direction of the zulkirs' army to rampage as they would.
He kicked an orc in the chest and burst its heart, then used his batons to shatter the skull of a yellow-eyed dread warrior. He dispatched foe after foe, all the while exulting in the slaughter. Until the ground began to shake.
The first jolt knocked some warriors to the ground. Malark took a quick step to keep his balance, then glanced around to see what was happening.
On the plain to the north, entities huge as dragons heaved up out of the earth. Dirt showered away to reveal forms akin to those of octopi, but shrouded in moldy cerements. Vast black eyes glaring, tentacles clutching and churning the soil, they dragged themselves toward the rear of the legions of Eltabbar.
As he stared dry-mouthed at the colossi, Malark wondered if Szass Tam and Xingax had created them or unearthed them from some forgotten menagerie of horrors, and wondered too how the enemy had managed to bury them in the field beforehand without anyone in the Keep of Sorrows noticing. Well, caverns riddled the earth hereabouts, and from the first days of the war, the necromancers had employed zombies with a supernatural ability to dig. So perhaps they'd tunneled up from underneath.
Not that it mattered. What did was that the squid-things were about to smash and crush their way into Dmitra's soldiery like boulders rolling over ants, and that meant Malark's place was at her side. He sprinted toward the spot where the standards of Eltabbar and the Order of Illusion, both infused with magical phosphorescence, glowed against the murky sky.
Since the day he'd first sat on griffon-back, Aoth had loved to fly, but now, for an instant, he hated it and the perspective it afforded. He wished he didn't have such a perfect view of victory twisting into ruin.
Gigantic tentacles lashed and pounded, smashing the infantry and horsemen of Eltabbar to pulp. Those few warriors who survived the first touch of the kraken-things' arms collapsed moments later, flesh rotting and sloughing from their bones. Meanwhile, strengthened by the creatures that had emerged with the premature night,
