Richard Byers: Unholy

Muthoth chanted, and a carrion stench filled the air. Bareris stepped back, leaving Mirror to engage both boneclaws, and quickly sang his own charm of silence, each descending note softer than the one before. Muthoth's voice cut off abruptly, leaving his incantation unfinished and the spell wasted. The lustrous eyes in his pale face widened in surprise.

Bareris ran forward, trying to maneuver around the boneclaw on his left. Despite Mirror's efforts to hold its attention, it pivoted and slashed at him, and though he dodged, one of its talons sheared through his ribs. The stroke would have killed a living man, but he was undead and enraged and scarcely broke stride.

Muthoth retreated before him, back into the next room. As he did so, he thrust out his staff, no doubt a repository of magic he could employ even in the absence of sound. Shadows leaped and whirled, and suddenly Bareris felt numb and confused, his hatred dulled and meaningless.

Muthoth was trying to control his mind. Bareris forced himself to take another racing stride and another after that, clinging to anger and purpose, and the dazed, bewildered feeling fell away.

The vampire pressed his mutilated hand to an iron amulet, and a gray, vaporous thing with a lunatic's twitching face hurtled out of it. Bareris sidestepped the spirit's frenzied, scrabbling attack and cut through the middle of it. It broke into floating, vile-smelling wisps.

He closed the distance to Muthoth. Cut to the head. The vampire dropped under the stroke as his body reshaped itself, flowing from human form into the guise of a huge, black wolf.

Muthoth sprang. His forepaws hit Bareris in the chest and knocked him onto his back. Eyes blazing, icy foam flying from his muzzle, the vampire lunged to seize his adversary's throat in his fangs.

Bareris just managed to interpose his forearm, and Muthoth's jaws clamped shut on it instead. The lupine teeth cut deep, and Muthoth jerked his head back and forth. Bareris felt the jolting agony as the limb started to tear apart.

His sword was too long to use in such close quarters. He let go of it, drew up his leg, and groped for the secondary weapon he kept tucked in his boot. He drew forth the hawthorn stake and drove it into Muthoth's body.

The vampire flopped down on top of him and lay motionless. Evidently Bareris had pierced the heart.

He rolled Muthoth off him and clambered to his feet. He felt the hot itch as his wounds began to heal. Peering back the way he'd come, he saw that Mirror had already destroyed one boneclaw and, by the looks of it, was about to dispatch the other.

Bareris stooped, gripped Muthoth by the throat, and dragged him farther into the suite, until they passed beyond the magical silence. By that time, the vampire had reverted to human shape, give or take pointed ears positioned too high on his head and a few patches of fur.

Bareris knelt down, positioning his face in front of Muthoth's unblinking eyes. "Do you know me now?" he asked. "I'm Bareris Anskuld, the bard who overtook you on the way to Delhumide. And now I'm going to destroy you as you destroyed me."

He raised his sword and struck Muthoth's head off. Then he watched the two pieces of the necromancer's body rot and realized he didn't feel anything at all.

Mirror found Bareris standing over Muthoth's crumbling, stinking remains. "Well done," he said.

Bareris frowned. "We fought this battle in silence. With luck, no one else knows it happened. Maybe we have time to look around a little."

"And carry away something useful," Mirror said. "Let's do it."

Bareris hung Muthoth's amulets around his own neck and picked up his black, gleaming staff. Then they prowled farther into the vampire's apartments.

They soon came to a portrait of a Red Wizard whose cool, crafty eyes and thin-lipped, resolute mouth seemed a mismatch with a rather weak chin. And when they saw the same face depicted again in a painting above the fireplace in a library, Bareris said, "I know where we are."

"What do you mean?" Mirror asked.

"A hundred years ago, this was more than a chapterhouse of the Order of Transmutation, it was the residence of Druxus Rhym himself, or one of them, anyway. I never knew the man, but when I was a boy, I saw him once or twice, riding in a procession, and that's him."

Mirror, of course, had never known Druxus Rhym. He'd been a broken, essentially mindless thing wandering the Sunrise Mountains when Druxus had been alive. But he'd heard his comrades speak of the zulkir whom Szass Tam had assassinated at the very start of the lich's long campaign to become sole ruler of Thay.

"If these books belonged to an archmage," he said, "there may be some powerful grimoires here."

"Let's hope I have the wit to recognize them," Bareris said. "You stand watch while I flip through them." He pulled a volume from a shelf.

And several books later, he whispered, "By the silver harp!"

13 Ches, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

"Well?" demanded Aoth. "Don't stop now. What did you find?" Across the study, Khouryn mumbled and rolled over in his sleep.

"This," Bareris replied. He opened the pouch strapped to his belt and brought out a small volume bound in crimson. It didn't look old or in any way special, nor could Aoth feel any arcane power smoldering inside it.

"All right," said Aoth. "Do you expect me to sit and read the cursed thing, or are you going to tell me what's in it?"

"I'll tell you," Bareris said. "It's just… it's strange, crazy even, and I need you to understand and believe."

Aoth frowned in perplexity. Never before had he seen his old friend fumble for words. Even after despair and the lust for vengeance ruined him, Bareris had retained the facile tongue of a bard.

"Just spit it out. After all the weird and terrible things the three of us have survived together, of course I'll believe you."

"Very well. Do you remember the question Malark always used to ask?"

Aoth felt a pang of anger at the thought of the spymaster and false friend who'd betrayed the southern cause. "Why did Szass Tam murder Druxus Rhym, his own ally on the Council?"

"Yes. After reading this book, I finally know."

"That's nice, I suppose, but does it really matter at this late date, more than ninety years after the lich pushed us and the rest of his opponents out of Thay?"

"It matters. Do you also recall the story Quickstrike the gravecrawler told me?"

For a moment, Aoth had no idea what Bareris was talking about, and even when he did remember, the question seemed so bizarre that he wondered if decades of loneliness, anguish, and undeath had finally driven his friend completely mad.

"Dimly. Thousands of years ago, there was a kingdom in the Sunrise Mountains. Its greatest wizard and hero was a fellow named… something about digging…"

"Fastrin the Delver."

"Right. Somebody stole something from this Fastrin, and the loss deranged him. He slaughtered his own people and even mangled the psyches of their ghosts-Mirror here was one such victim-and when he'd destroyed the realm, he committed suicide."

"That's right," Mirror said, "and now I can add to the tale. Recent events have stimulated my memory, even though much is still lost to me.

"My friend Fastrin spent much of his time exploring ancient ruins," the ghost continued, "and his stolen treasure was an article he had unearthed on one such expedition: a book from the dawn of time. He claimed it contained 'the death of the world,' and after it disappeared, he was terrified the thief would unleash the power inside it. In his frenzy, he saw only one solution: kill everyone, just to be sure of getting anybody who'd learned the secret, and strip our spirits of reason and memory."

"It's a sad story," said Aoth, "and I don't mean to sound indifferent to your misfortune, but how can it possibly be relevant to anything that's going on today? You're not going to tell me that this volume you brought me is Fastrin's book? If that thing is thousands of years old, I'll eat it with pickle relish!"