Then he spied a deep gorge splitting the earth, and the legionnaires milling around on the far side of it. Their banners bore the eight-pointed crimson star device of the council, as well as the Black Hand of Bane.
Dimon's troops, more than likely. Evidently they'd been heading north and had been unpleasantly surprised to find the chasm barring the way.
Clearly, they wouldn't be marching any farther until morning, and Bareris supposed he and his men might as well share their camp. Using magic to project his voice, he called to them that he and his companions were Nymia Focar's men, then blew a signal on his trumpet to convey the same message.
Meanwhile, his undead steed carried him over the wound in the earth. When he was directly above it, he gasped.
Something huge was climbing out of the depths, a mass of writhing tentacles with bulging eyes and circular orifices, alternately expanding and puckering, down the length of the arms. Blue fire flickered around it and allowed it to sink the tips of its arms into the stony wall, which they penetrated as easily as a knife cutting butter.
It was the most grotesque thing Bareris had ever seen. He couldn't even tell what sort of creature it had been before the blue flame transformed it. Perhaps it hadn't been alive at all. Maybe the wave of chaotic power had made it out of rock, earth, and air, or nothing at all.
Whatever it was, it had nearly reached the top of the crevasse, and by ill fortune, none of the legionnaires were looking over the edge. Bareris bellowed a warning.
It came too late. The creature heaved itself over the edge of the rim and flailed its tentacles. The blows bashed men to the ground or hurled them through the air. But more often than not, what actually killed them was the blue flame playing around the entity's body. When it touched them, they melted.
Bareris hoped that after slaying its first several victims, the creature would stop to slurp up the remains. It didn't. Motivated by fury rather than hunger, it crawled toward more of Dimon's soldiers.
It was fast, too. Panicking, jamming and tangling together, knocking one another down, some legionnaires might escape, but not many.
Bareris sang a song of lethargy. The creature slowed, moving more sluggishly than before.
'Hit it!' he called to the other griffon riders. 'But stay high enough that it can't snatch you out of the air.'
His men loosed arrows. The Burning Braziers hurled sprays of fire, or conjured flying hammers wreathed in yellow flame. He slammed the creature with the force of a thunderous shout.
Was any of it doing the beast harm? The thing was so bizarre that he couldn't tell. But the barrage distracted it. It left off pursuing the men on the ground to grope impotently at the attackers harassing it from on high.
Or perhaps not so impotently after all. Without warning, it shot up into the air.
If it could fly all along, Bareris wondered why it had climbed to the top of the chasm. It made no sense, but then, nothing associated with the blue fire did.
He wheeled his mount to keep beyond the creature's reach, but the skeletal griffon didn't respond quickly enough. A tentacle whipped around its neck, shattering naked vertebrae, and hung there in a loop. Blue fire ran up the arm toward the steed and its rider as though following a trail of oil.
Bareris chanted words of power, undipped the strap holding Tammith to the saddle, and grabbed hold of her shroud. The azure flame leaped at him just as he sang the final note. The world seemed to break apart, and then he was standing on the ground with his legs still spread as though straddling a mount. Tammith fell to the ground at his feet, her weight jerking his hand down with her. The folds of the shroud separated. Smoke billowed forth, and Bareris cried out in horror.
But Tammith wasn't burning up. The sun had already dropped out of sight, and she'd turned to mist to extricate herself from her cloth cocoon. The swirls of fog congealed into human form.
'What's going on?' Tammith asked.
Bareris pointed. 'That.'
The creature had scattered the griffon riders. Perhaps thinking that now they'd leave it alone, it plummeted, and jolted the earth when it slammed down. It then heaved itself toward him, Tammith, and Dimon's men, crawling and lashing its tentacles as fast as it had originally. The curse of slowness had worn off.
Tammith smiled, revealing upper canines extending into fangs. 'I'll stop it.'
'No. Stay back. The blue fire can destroy anything, even a vampire.'
'Then I'll make sure it doesn't touch me.' She exploded into a cloud of bats.
The winged beasts hurled themselves at the oncoming giant. Dodging the sweeps of its tentacles, they caught hold of them in their claws and sank their fangs into them. Bareris couldn't tell if the immense horror had any blood for them to suck, but he was sure Tammith was using the cold malignancy of her touch in an effort to drain its life away.
He, too, did his best to kill it. He wanted to charge and fight near her with his sword, but the better tactic was to stand back and use magic. So he battered the horror with shout after shout and spell after spell.
As Tammith had promised, at first the bats took flight whenever blue flame flowed or leaped close to them, but then she failed to notice a flare until it was too late. The blaze engulfed a bat, and it burst in a sort of fiery splash. Bareris winced.
Then the gigantic creature collapsed, its dozens of arms flopping to the ground and beginning to liquefy. A putrid stench suffused the air.
Bareris hadn't been able to tell which attacks had truly hurt it, and he couldn't tell which had killed it, either. Perhaps none of them. Possibly the beast had borne some fundamental flaw in its anatomy that kept it from living very long.
The surviving bats took flight from the rotting tangle, then whirled together. Tammith wasn't marked or bleeding, but she stumbled.
Bareris ran to her. 'Are you all right?'
She nodded. 'I will be. That was close. When the fire took a portion of me, it felt as if it was going to jump to all my bodies. But somehow I pushed it back.'
'You really didn't have to charge and attack.'
'As far as that's concerned, when you moved us, you didn't have to drop us between the creature and the soldiers of Tyraturos. Neither one of us is responsible for looking after them.'
'I suppose that's true.' They each had acted as instinct prompted, which suggested that, whatever she believed, not all her urges were selfish and cruel.
The captain of Dimon's legionnaires came trotting up to them. He hadn't observed the final phase of the fight in any detail, and he stopped short when he noticed Tammith's alabaster skin, the subtle luminescence in her dark eyes, and the fangs still furrowing her lower lip. Before the war, he might have felt a personal aversion to vampires, but he would have accepted their presence in the army as a matter of course. Now, he feared that any such creature served Szass Tam.
'It's all right,' Bareris said, investing his voice with a dash of magic to calm and convince. 'Captain Iltazyarra is on our side.'
The other commander took a breath. 'Of course. Please, forgive my moment of confusion. To tell you the truth, I'm still rattled from seeing that beast tear into us. I don't know what we would have done if you griffon riders hadn't happened by.'
You would have died, Bareris thought. 'We were glad to help.'
'Can you help some more? I've got soldiers who fled and are still running, not realizing the creature is dead. Can your fellows catch up with them and herd them back?'
'Of course.'
'Thank you.' The officer shook his head. 'By the Hand, what a mess! This route was supposed to be clear. A wave of blue flame must have carved the gorge and created the beast just a short time ago.'
Bareris frowned, then shrugged. 'I suppose.'
Long before his superiors in the Order of Conjuration commanded him to serve with the army, Thamas Napret had become accustomed to the groans and whimpers of injured men. A Red Wizard couldn't climb the ladder of his hierarchy without hearing such noises frequently.
Yet now they seemed like a reproach, and distracted him from his contemplation of the stars. He rose, picked up his staff with its inlaid runes of gold, and walked away from the camp.
He didn't go far. Some of Szass Tam's warriors might still be lurking around, and even if not, wild kobolds and
