Authors: Richard Lee Byers
Certainly the one in front of Taegan showed no signs of clambering back to its feet. He congratulated himself that, even drunk, he’d proved a match for it, then glimpsed a pale flicker at the corner of his eye. He pivoted, already knowing he was too slow. Another abishai, one of the whites, would have its teeth and claws in him before he could present his blade.
But Pavel was behind the abishai, and he swung his mace. Bone crunched. Its skull smashed, the demon toppled.
The priest turned, peering, making sure no other foes were advancing on them. Then he made Taegan the beneficiary of his healing prayers and luminous touch. First the Morninglord’s golden light mended the maestro’s wounds, then purged him of his intoxication with a spell devised to cleanse the blood of any poison.
“Thank you,” Taegan panted.
“You’re welcome,” Pavel answered. “I’m sorry those creatures slipped past the rest of us. It turned out we hadn’t spotted quite all of them.”
“Remind me, whose job was that?”
“Will’s. I’d be happy to hold your cloak while you give him a thrashing.”
“What a couple of whiners,” the halfling said, grinning down from atop the eaves of a nearby house. “You ingrates should be praising me for concocting a perfect plan. We’re all fine, the watch is nowhere to be seen, none of the cultists escaped, and we took a few of them alive. Now all we have to do is drag them somewhere private for questioning.”
The zombie shambled out of the foul-smelling darkness in the abandoned tannery, and Pavel lifted his sun amulet. The medallion blazed. The walking corpse flinched and shielded its eyes, and as it stumbled about in seeming confusion, Dorn sprang at it. One swing of his iron fist nearly sufficed to tear its head from its shoulders. Another buried the knuckle spikes in its chest. The creature fell and lay inert.
When a bladesinger knew he was headed into battle, he could magically enhance his own strength and quickness before the fact, and Taegan had availed himself of the opportunity. Still, his comrades had eliminated the threat with such brisk efficiency that he’d barely had a chance to lift his rapier.
“Nicely done,” he said.
“Not really,” Pavel said. “Lathander’s light should burn a zombie to smoke, but this whole place has been imbued with
unholiness, to strengthen the cult’s magic and weaken that of their foes.”
“Rubbish,” said Will. “You’re just making excuses for being inept”
“Find the secret door,” Dorn growled, stingy with words as usual.
Taegan had noticed Raryn often had even less to say, but that seemed to be simply because he was quiet by nature. The white-haired dwarf ambled through the world with an air of calm affability and often enough, amusement, while the half-golem stamped along seething with sullen anger.
Obeying his leader’s order, Will scrutinized a particular section of wall, looking for traps. Their informant, a prisoner whod proved more interested in earning his release than protecting the secrets of the cult, had sworn there weren’t any and Pavel, who’d cast a spell that supposedly enabled him to tell when someone dissembled, believed he was telling the truth. Still, it seemed best to be certain.
At length the halfling unlatched the hidden panel and swung it outward. On the other side was a flight of steps leading downward. The greenish light of ever-burning torches leaked up from below. So did the echoing drone of a sonorous chant. That, too, was as the intruders had expected. Their captive had told them the cult was performing magic tonight, and they hoped to surprise the conspirators in the act, before the dastards had any inkling their latest attempt to murder Taegan had gone awry.
The winged elf and his comrades skulked down the stairs and on toward the chorus. Will, with his knowledge of snares, and Raryn, with his ability to see even if the torchlight failed, took the lead. Dorn followed, his massive form shielding Kara. When she assumed dragon form, she was unlikely to require such protection, but her reptilian body would jam in the narrow tunnels. Taegan played rearguard. Someone had to. The way the dank, gloomy corridors forked and snaked around, it would be easy for an enemy to come up behind them.
The stink of the derelict tannery faded, which merely made the rotting-flesh stench of a den of zombies and necromancers that much plainer. Taegan was almost surprised it didn’t make him sick to his stomach, just as it bemused him that he scarcely felt a flutter of trepidation, invading the cult’s stronghold with such a small force. But he was too eager to go on the attack, to confront the Wearer of Purple once more and avenge the outrages her followers had perpetrated at her behest.
A man wrapped in a dark mantle with an amice-trimmed collar stepped through an arch up ahead, glanced casually at the party slinking down the passage, then peered more intently, trying to determine whether he knew them or not. His eyes widened in dismay, and Raryn’s arrows took him in the heart. He crumpled with scarcely a thump, let alone an outcry to herald his demise. The dwarf dragged the cultist back into the crypt from which he’d just emerged and stashed him where no casual passerby would see the body. The intruders stalked deeper into the catacombs.
Finally they spied a particularly high and ornately embellished horseshoe arch. The chanting, which had become a kind of catechism, with a single female voice and the rest of the assembly speaking contrapuntally, seemed to issue from just beyond it. A noisome feeling of unholy force accumulating, a nasty prickling on the skin, leaked out as well. Will tiptoed up to the doorway, peeked inside, then turned and gave his comrades a nod, indicating that, yes, they’d found the place they sought. As the rest of them crept forward, Taegan whispered a charm to shroud his body in blur.
On the other side of the arch, three semicircular steps led down to the floor of an expansive crypt with a lofty rib-vaulted ceiling. A score of common cultists stood in a ring around an arrangement of bones laid out to form sigils or runes. The air above the symbols squirmed and curdled, continually on the verge of congealing into translucent shapes which then dissolved before the eye could quite make them out. Zombies and abishai stood along the walls, perhaps
comprising a grotesque ceremonial guard. Five more living humans, evidently true spellcasters and the officers of the cabal, presided over the ceremony from a dais at the far end of the chamber. The one in the middle was an attractive, middle-aged woman with an impish face and brown curls frosted with golden highlights. At the moment she wore ornate purple robes, but Taegan had often seen her in more conventional attire.
She was Cylla Morieth, a respected instructor at Lyrabar’s school of wizardry and a welcome guest at the banquets, dances, and other social functions hosted by the city’s elite.
It was a mystery that such a person would betray the kingdom that had given her such a congenial life, but Taegan would have to puzzle over it later. At the moment, he and his comrades had cultists to kill. If the plan worked, many of the enemy would die without the chance either to surrender or raise a hand in their own defense, but the maestro felt no pity. These were the same despicable folk who’d murdered Gorstag and set fire to the academy while dozens of his associates slumbered helplessly inside.
Dorn glanced at his companions, making sure they were ready, then snapped them a nod. It was time to begin.
They spread out across the archway. The enemy noticed them almost at once, the chanting dissolving into a babble of alarm, but by that time, arrows and skiprocks were flying. Raryn, Dorn, and Will targeted the figures on the dais first, reckoning them the most dangerous among the opposition, and by a pleasant chance, the combination of the sunken floor and elevated pedestal afforded the marksmen clear shots. Two of the spellcasters fell. A third merely staggered when a shaft struck him in the chest but glanced off the armor evidently hidden beneath his robes.
Meanwhile, Pavel recited words of power, and Kara sang them. The effect of the cleric’s spell wasn’t immediately perceptible from Taegan’s vantage point, but when the bard finished conjuring, a point of light streaked from her outstretched hand into the midst of the cultists, where it
exploded into a spherical blast of dazzling, crackling lightning. People, zombies, and abishai jerked, burned, and fell. But not all of them, and the survivors howled and rushed the steps.
Dorn cast away his longbow, whipped out his bastard sword, and stepped forward to meet them. Raryn and Will followed suit. Pavel lifted his sun amulet, and singing once more, Kara started to grow, her fair skin taking on a sheen like blue crystal.
Taegan recited a spell, and in an instant it shifted him across the crypt onto the dais, where everything fell so utterly silent it was as if a god had struck him deaf. He knew Pavel’s spell was actually responsible. The cleric had sealed that end of the chamber in silence to hamper the enemy spellcasters.
Unfortunately, not all magic required the spoken word, and his square, black-bearded face a mask of fury, the man who’d survived the arrow was even then sweeping his hands through mystic passes. As Pavel sent Lathander’s sunlight blazing through the chamber, balking the animate corpses lurching toward the steps, Taegan lunged. The bearded man tried to deflect the rapier with a dirk, but the avariel deceived the parry. His sword, its strength and sharpness augmented by enchantment, pierced the cultist’s breastplate where the arrow had failed. The human fell.
Taegan whirled, seeking the Wearer of Purple. Though the bearded man had been too provocative a target to ignore, she was his particular task. She knew the answers Kara needed if anyone did, and for that reason, he was supposed to take her alive.
Cylla Morieth was a few feet away, casting a handful of powder into the air. The motes of dust flashed and disappeared, and sound surged back into the world. The stuff had counteracted Pavel’s charm.
That was bad. It would allow her and the other surviving cult spellcaster to use every charm they carried ready for the casting. With a snap of his wings, Taegan sprang, intent on
incapacitating her before she could start conjuring.
She pointed at him, and some invisible force slammed him backward. As she hadn’t had time to weave a spell, she must have had the effect stored in a ring, talisman, or some other piece of her regalia. He crashed down hard on the stone platform, shook off the shock of the impact, and scrambled to his feet.
It took him too long, and Cylla had time to conjure. She swept two daggers through mystic passes then tossed them into the air. They lengthened into weapons the size of broadswords then sprang at Taegan, assailing him and blocking the path to the wizard who’d animated them.
He could parry their attacks, but when he riposted to the seemingly empty spaces behind them he found nothing to hit, no invisible but tangible wielders into whom he could drive his point, which meant he could see no way to eliminate the threat. He tried to fly over the weapons, but they simply ascended with him. Safe behind her magical protectors, the Wearer of Purple rattled off another incantation and snapped a handful of black ribbons like a whip.
Jagged lengths of darkness exploded outward from a central point in the air, so sudden and thick that Taegan couldn’t dodge. Their icy touch froze him with sudden nausea and terror. As if sensing his incapacity, the living swords sprang in hacking.
Somehow he broke free of the crippling effect an instant before the blade in the lead would have split his skull. He parried that one and dodged a chest cut from the other, which only preserved his life for a few more seconds.
Soon enough, his luck would run out, and Cylla would kill or cripple him with her wizardry. He had to reach her. He spun the rapier, captured one broadsword in a bind, and flung it away. By that time, the other was slashing, but he twisted aside, then beat it out of his way. Wings hammering, he streaked at the Wearer of Purple. He had no doubt the animated blades were hurtling right behind him, and he prayed he could stay ahead of them.
Taegan lashed the flat of his weapon against Cylla’s temple. He wouldn’t have been surprised if some defensive enchantment had deflected the blow, but it slammed home, and she reeled. Touching down on the dais once more, he whirled.
He’d hoped that if he broke the mage’s concentration, it would stop the living blades, but it hadn’t. They were still chasing him and already leaping in for the kill. If not for the charm that had quickened his reflexes, even Taegan, with all his skill, could never have parried both attacks in the split second he had left.
The fencing master glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye. Her forehead bloody, Cylla had fallen and looked as if she’d stay down for a while, but the other surviving spellcaster, a scrawny little man armed with a skull-topped staff like the wyvern rider, had oriented on the avariel and was using the rod to sketch a glowing pattern on the air. Taegan wanted to turn and attack the cultist, but it was impossible. Cylla’s blades were still pressing him too hard.
As he wondered if he could withstand another curse, the strains of a savage yet beautiful battle anthem swelled above the muddled roar of the battle at large. Kara, fully transformed into draconic form, snapped up the man with the staff, bit him in two, then wheeled to face the trio of abishai flying in to assault her from behind. She puffed out a plume of vaporous lightning, or something akin to it, suffusing the air with the smell of ozone and burning the demons from the air. Then she lunged after other foes, leaving Taegan to manage the floating swords that still doggedly labored to spill his blood.
Fortunately, without Cylla to worry about, it wasn’t too difficult. Like most duelists of flesh and blood, the blades had a few attacks they repeated over and over, and once he identified them, it was even possible to defend and watch the rest of the battle at the same time. It was a relief to see that his comrades were faring at least as well as he had. By the time Cylla’s spell ran out of power, and the broadswords
shrank back into daggers and dropped clanking to the floor, the fight was essentially over.