Unholy

Szass Tam walked to the center of the rooftop, turned, and gave them all a smile that jabbed a fresh spasm of loathing into Bareris's guts. He stifled the feeling as best he could.

"Well, here we are," said the lich. "Nothing remains but to unlock the door. So if you want to enhance your defenses or anything like that, now's the time."

"So it really is going to be just us," said Samas Kul, his tone petulant. "Even though you have an entire army garrisoned here."

"He already explained," Lallara said. "Springhill is in control of the realm beyond the gate. Since he created the place, Szass Tam can take us through even so, but we're about the limit. Any more and we'd simply lose people, much as we lost them translating ourselves into the dungeons. Now, if we could be certain of losing you-"

"I understand!" the obese transmuter snapped. "I'm just amazed that a would-be god can't do a little better."

"Perhaps the years have sapped my powers," Szass Tam said. "I suspect that the next little while will give you ample opportunity to judge."

"Before we go in," said Aoth, his fingers scratching amid the feathers on Jet's neck, "I need to be clear on one thing. Is it enough to interrupt Malark? If we knock the breath out of him in the middle of an incantation, will that stop the Unmaking?"

"Unfortunately, no," Szass Tam replied. "The ceremony involves a number of conditions and limitations, but that isn't one of them. He can pause, deal with an interruption, and then pick up where he left off."

"So we have to kill him," Nevron growled. "Fine. We all want to kill him. Let's get on with it."

"As you wish," Szass Tam said. He turned his back on them; Bareris shivered and clamped down on the urge to strike while the lich looked vulnerable.

Szass Tam flourished his shadowy staff and whispered words that somehow made Bareris angrier still, that seemed to feed the hate and bitterness inside him like dry wood feeding a fire. Then a square of utter blackness, big as the entry to a rich man's house, painted itself on the air.

Bareris assumed that they'd walk into it. Instead, it rushed forward, expanding as it came, first swallowing Szass Tam and then himself. And all the others too, presumably, although at that instant, he lost sight of them. He seemed to tumble through freezing darkness, then jolt down on his feet. A new world oozed into view.

It was a place of towering crags and twisting canyons, without even a sprig of brush or speck of fungus growing anywhere on the dry earth and stone. Only a handful of faint stars gleamed in the black, moonless sky.

He and his companions had arrived in one of the gorges. The others pivoted, peering around. "I assumed," Lauzoril said, "that you'd shift us into position to attack Springhill immediately."

"It wasn't possible," Szass Tam said. "He has layers of protection. I couldn't pierce them all with a single spell."

"But now that we're here?" Samas asked.

"I hope so." Turning, the lich studied the peaks and cliffs, then chuckled.

"What?" Nevron spat.

"Malark's altered the geography," Szass Tam said. "Either to disorient me if I escaped Thakorsil's Seat and came after him or simply because he finds the new skyline more conducive to focusing his thoughts."

Either way, Bareris didn't like hearing that their foe had shifted mountains like a child playing with blocks. Szass Tam had warned that Malark was a god in this realm, and that didn't seem like hyperbole anymore.

"So I take it we have to find him," Lallara said. "I can cast a divination."

"We might as well try the obvious way first," said Aoth. Jet shook out his wings, and the warmage swung himself into the saddle.

"Be careful," Szass Tam said. "I put guardians in the sky as well as on the ground."

"I under-" Aoth began, and then Jet leaped, lashed his wings, and carried the warmage aloft. Apparently, after all the time he'd spent underground, the griffon was eager to take to the sky, even the sky of a dismal place like this. Seemingly surprised by the abrupt departure, Mirror rose into the air a moment later.

Bareris watched as they soared high overhead. If something attacked them up there, he'd have a difficult time helping them.

But nothing did, and after a time, they swooped back down to earth. "Got him," Aoth said. "He's conjuring on a flat mountain-top about a mile in that direction." He pointed with his spear.

"Did he notice you?" Lallara asked.

"I didn't see any indication of it."

"Does he have a pack of guardians clustered around him?" Samas asked.

"I didn't see those, either."

"Still," said Szass Tam, "they're there. I guarantee it."

"So we hit fast and hard and kill their master before they can react," Nevron said, "just as I've been advising all along." He glowered at Szass Tam. "Captain Fezim has given you your bearings. Now can you translate us to our quarry?"

"Let's find out." The lich slipped his withered fingers into one of his many pockets, no doubt to remove a talisman or spell trigger. Then skeletal figures stalked out of the darkness ahead.

Each was half again as tall as a man, with strips of ragged, desiccated flesh dangling from its frame. Their heads were hairless, and their ears, pointed. Tiny figures writhed inside their ribs like anguished prisoners jammed behind the bars of a cage.

One of the zulkirs' surviving soldiers happened to be closest to the oncoming horrors. He wailed and raised his sword and shield to fend them off. The creature in the lead pounced. The legio

"They're devourers!" Szass Tam called. Perhaps the term meant something to the zulkirs, but Bareris had never heard it before.

But if he had to fight in ignorance, so be it. He shouted, and the thunderous bellow ripped flesh from the lead devourer's frame and broke a number of its bones, even as the cry echoed down the gorge and brought pebbles showering from overhead.

Its legs shattered, the devourer fell but crawled onward. Mirror stepped up beside Bareris, brandished his sword, and light flared from the blade. The crawling devourer and the one behind it burned away to nothing in an instant.

It was encouraging to see that the things could perish, and it was good, too, that they had to come down the relatively narrow passage to reach their intended victims. It meant they couldn't spread out and surround them, and that spells like thunderbolts, blasts of fire, and Bareris's own battle cries generally hammered more than one at a time.

Offsetting that advantage, however, was the devourers' resilience and their numbers. New ones kept streaming down the defile like a rushing river, the husks of their predecessors crunching and cracking beneath their feet.

Samas pointed his quicksilver wand and turned a devourer to gold. It toppled forward. Someone else felled one of the creatures with darts of scarlet light. His tone cold and demanding, Szass Tam rattled off an incantation. It must have returned two of the devourers to his control, because they halted abruptly, turned, and lashed out at their fellows.

Bareris saw that it wasn't enough. In another moment, unless the warriors in their band prevented it, the devourers would overrun everyone, zulkirs included. And even archmages would have trouble conjuring with such creatures ripping at them.

"Wall!" Bareris yelled, and then heard Aoth and Mirror yelling the same thing. Though white-faced with fear, the last surviving bodyguard heeded the call, and Nevron sent a miscellany of demons and devils to answer it too. The one that came to stand on Bareris's right was a barbed devil, a somewhat manlike figure with a lashing tail, its body covered with spines and quills.