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"As it would this time," Nymia said.
"Maybe yes, maybe no. We'll ride with our best fighters and battle mages. The wizards will enhance our capabilities with enchantment, and we'll hope that when the nighthaunt spies us looking vulnerable, cut off by virtue of our own stupidity from most of our followers, it will come to fight us itself. It's a demon, isn't it, or near enough. It must like killing with its own hands, and it must particularly hanker to slay us. Once it does, it's won.
"Of course," the old man continued, "even if it does reveal itself, it won't be alone, but we'll use every trick we know and every scroll and talisman we've hoarded over the years, and whatever else threatens us, we'll all do our utmost to strike it down."
Nymia shook her head. "Commit suicide if you like, but I won't join you."
"It needs to be both of us," Milsantos said, "to bait the trap as enticingly as possible. Consider that we're not likely to leave this place alive in any case. Would you rather stand before your god as victor or vanquished? Imagine, too, your fate if you did escape but abandoned the zulkirs' legions to perish. The council would punish you in ways that would make you wish a nighthaunt had merely torn you apart."
"All right," Nymia sighed. "We'll do it, with Aoth and a goodly number of the other griffon riders flying overhead to fend off threats from the air."
"I'm coming," said Bareris, and to his relief, neither of the tharchions objected.
He then had to scramble to commandeer a destrier. He knew how to fight on horseback and assumed he'd be of more use doing so than clinging to Brightwing's rump.
Once in the saddle, he crooned to his new mount, a chestnut gelding, establishing a rapport and buttressing its courage. Meanwhile, Aoth delivered orders. Soldiers and spellcasters shifted about, positioning themselves for the action to come.
Milsantos nodded to the aide riding beside him, and the young knight blew a signal on his horn. As one, bowmen shot whistling volleys of arrows into the mass of undead clogging one particular street. Wizards assailed the same creatures with blazes of flame and lightning, while the remaining priests hammered them with the palpable force of their faith.
The trumpeter sounded another call. The barrage ended. The men-at-arms holding the mouth of the street drew apart, clearing a path. Astride a black charger, its barding aglow with some of the same golden sigils adorning his plate, Milsantos dropped his lance into fighting position. Others in the company he'd assembled did the same, then they all charged up the corridor.
The barrage just concluded had thi
Still, foes remained, and undaunted by the a
A ghoul slashed Bareris's horse's shoulder with its long, dirty claws, and the animal lurched off balance. Fearful that the virulence of the undead creature's touch had paralyzed his steed, the bard riposted with a head cut. The ghoul fell, and not crippled after all, the destrier regained its footing and raced onward.
Overhead, griffons screeched, men shouted, and magic boomed and crackled. Plastered with writhing skin kites, a winged steed and its master crashed on a roof, tumbled down the pitch, and dropped in a heap in the street. Bareris looked to see if it was Aoth and Brightwing who'd fallen-it wasn't-but otherwise didn't even glance at the portion of the fight raging in the air. He didn't dare divert his attention from his own assailants.
He hacked a skeleton's skull off the top of its spine, felt more than saw a lunging shadow, and obliterated it with a thrust. Then, suddenly, no foes remained within reach of his blade. He peered about and saw that he and his companions had fought their way clear.
They galloped onward. Skillful enough to sound his instrument even astride a ru
In Bareris's judgment, it wasn't an entirely preposterous notion. Plainly their company could do some damage if left unopposed to maneuver and strike at the rear of the undead host, and even if the nighthaunt wasn't concerned about that, they could still hope their manifest vulnerability would draw it out into the open.
One of the griffon riders yelled, "There!"
Bareris looked up, saw the nighthaunt staring down at him from the battlements atop the gate of the central keep, and immediately comprehended why even a veteran war mage like Aoth feared the dead black, pale-eyed monstrosity. Though its mere presence didn't poison a man like Xingax's could-at least not at this distance-it nonetheless seemed the very embodiment of boundless power wed to unrelenting, all-encompassing hatred. A man could scarcely bear to look at it, and at the same time, transfixed with dread, he found it all but impossible to tear his gaze away. Wings ragged and peeling, body oozing slime, a larger and even more hideous creature stood beside the leader of the undead marauders, while luminous shades hovered in the air behind it, but in that first terrible moment, Bareris scarcely even registered their existence.
"Halt!" shouted Milsantos, and for the most part, the Thayan horsemen obeyed. They had no need to ride farther now that the nighthaunt had appeared, but two men, their nerve breaking, wheeled and fled back the way they'd come.
Tharchions, the nighthaunt said, his silent psychic voice beating at Bareris's mind like a bludgeon. My name is Ysval. You fight well but have no hope of wi
"No," Milsantos said. "The council of zulkirs ordered us to destroy you, and that's what we intend to do."
I hoped you'd answer thusly, Ysval said.
He lashed his wings and hurtled down into the midst of his foes. Trained war-horses screamed and shied. The nighthaunt tore one animal's head off with a swipe of his talons. Blood sprayed from the end of the shredded neck. The wraiths followed their captain toward their mortal foes.
In response, some of the battle mages aimed wands or rattled off incantations. Priests brandished the symbols of their faiths and cried the names of their gods. Flares of power, some visible, some not, flung some specters backward like leaves in a gale and seared others from existence.
Other spellcasters read the trigger phrases from scrolls. Walls of roaring fire and shimmering light sprang up around the horsemen, some at ground level, others floating in midair. Unfortunately, they weren't large and numerous enough to overlap and enclose the riders completely. Wraiths could and no doubt would slip through the gaps between barriers, but at least they'd no longer find it possible to overwhelm their opponents in a single onrushing, irresistible swarm.
In theory, that should leave the majority of the Thayans free to focus on Ysval and the relatively small number of lesser undead that had succeeded in closing before the magical barriers sprang into existence. No doubt recognizing that he'd blundered into a snare, the nighthaunt stopped lashing out with claw and tail and simply stood for a moment. Bareris surmised the creature was trying to shift himself to the safety of another level of existence, but nothing happened. Studying ancient texts, the enchanters had discovered that nighthaunts possessed that particular ability, and one of them had already cast a spell to keep him from exploiting it.