Richard Byers - Undead

But Aoth simply whirled the spear in a horizontal arc as if it were a club, and the shaft took Drash in the side. Teeth gritted, exerting every iota of his strength, Aoth kept shoving, threw the autharch off balance, and pushed him staggering through a crenel and off the walk.

A city guard attacked immediately thereafter. Aoth speared him in the guts, and then had a moment to look around.

What he saw was less than encouraging. His comrades were holding their own for the moment, but other guards were running along the battlements toward the gate, with even more scurrying on the ground just inside it, about to climb the stairs on either side.

"Let's kill the ones down below!" Brightwing snarled.

"I suppose somebody has to," Aoth replied, and she leaped down into the mass of soldiers, smashing two or three to the ground beneath her.

She ripped with beak and talon, and he thrust with his spear. For a few heartbeats, it was all right, but then a blade sliced the same foreleg the crossbow bolt had pierced, and afterward Brightwing couldn't use it to claw or even support her weight.

Sword strokes hit Aoth as well, and though his mail kept them from doing more than bruising the flesh beneath, that luck couldn't hold indefinitely. He heard himself gasping, felt the burning in his heaving chest and the exhaustion weighting his limbs, looked at the feral faces and upraised weapons hemming him in all around, and decided that his time had come. After all the perils they'd survived, he and Brightwing were about to die trying to take a stupid gate in a drab little market town that was supposed to be on their side.

Then scraps of darkness fluttered down from above. They attached themselves to several of Aoth's foes, and he realized they were enormous bats biting and clawing at human prey. Startled by the unexpected assault, the warriors of Mophur broke off their furious assault to flail and fumble at the creatures sucking their blood.

The guards so afflicted either collapsed or turned tail. The bats abandoned them to whirl together and become a pale, raven-haired woman in black mail. Mirror floated down from the top of the gate to stand beside her.

The remaining guards decided they no longer liked the odds. They ran, too.

Tammith nodded to indicate the gates. "Let's get these open."

Aoth climbed out of the saddle. Together, they threw their weight against the enormous bar, and it groaned and slid in its brackets. They swung the leaves open while Brightwing and Mirror guarded their backs.

Aoth peered up at the platform atop the gate. It looked as if the fight had ended there as well, and although he couldn't see the bard from this angle, Bareris must have won it. Otherwise, the surviving guards would be taking steps to kill their foes on the ground and close the gate once more.

"Sound your horn!" Aoth shouted, or at least that was what he intended. The cry emerged as more of a wheeze.

But Bareris evidently heard, for he gave the signal. Griffons soared into the air and winged their way toward the city. Hoofbeats drummed as knights spurred their steeds in the same direction.

His sword gory from point to guard, Bareris jumped from Winddancer to the ground, and then his eyes opened wide. It was only at that moment that he realized Tammith had arrived.

He scrambled out of the saddle and embraced her. "I kept waiting for you to appear. If you hadn't found me by morning, 1 was going to turn back to search for you."

As Aoth watched them clinging to one another, he felt wistful. He'd never in his life known anything like the fierce obsessive adoration Bareris felt for Tammith, and she for him. The closest he'd ever come had been with Chathi. But she was long dead, and he supposed that meant that on a certain fundamental level he would always be alone.

On the other hand, he didn't have to worry that any of his casual lovers or whores would ever rip his throat out in the throes of passion, so perhaps things balanced out.

In any case, he had more immediate problems to ponder. "I recommend we clear the gate," he said. "Otherwise, the knights are liable to ride us down."

"Right," said Bareris. Everyone moved aside.

"I did my best to find you," Tammith said, "but what's left of the army has broken into countless tiny pieces fleeing south. It took time to find the right piece, especially since I had to lay up by day."

"Are other griffon riders still alive?" asked Aoth.

"I saw some."

"Thanks be to the Lord of Flames for that. And thank you, too, for coming to help me when you did."

"I needed to help," the vampire said, "if we were going to get the gates open. But… I wanted to. I cared about what might happen." She sounded like a person who'd just discovered something surprising about herself, although Aoth didn't understand what it was.

The rest of his band of refugees arrived before he could ask. Griffon riders glided down the sky to perch on rooftops, and the horsemen trotted through the gate. The leader of the knights inspected the litter of corpses on the ground, shook his head, and said, "What now?"

"We take what we need," said Aoth, "as fast as we can. Food, water, arrows, and fresh horses. Healing and charms of strength and stamina from any priest or wizard we can find. Then we ride on."

"If we could sleep for just a little while-"

"We can't, because if Szass Tam's legions show up outside the walls, we can't hold Mophur by ourselves, and we can't count on the townsfolk to help us. So we have no choice but to keep moving. Get used to it. We're likely to find people changing allegiance all the way south, or at least in every place that has a shrine to Bane."

Bat wings beating, Tsagoth flew over the battlements of Hurkh, and his command-vampires, wraiths, and other undead capable of flight-hurtled after him. No one was stupid enough to shoot at them.

That was as he expected. The town was flying crimson banners adorned with black skulls. The flags glowed with magical phosphorescence to make them stand out against the night sky. The no-doubt hastily sewn cloths didn't precisely duplicate any of Szass Tam's personal emblems, but their message was plain enough.

Tsagoth swooped down into Hurkh's central square and flowed into bipedal form. Some of the vampires did the same, while others melted into wolves. The phantoms hovered, and elsewhere in the city, dogs began to howl.

"Whoever governs this place," Tsagoth shouted at the gates of the town's central keep, "reveal yourself!"

No one inside the fortress responded, although he could sense wretched little humans cowering inside. Rather, the door of a building on the opposite side of the plaza opened.

Constructed of blackened stone, the structure was a temple of Bane, a mass of spires adorned with spikes, jags, and windows narrow as arrow loops. Judging from the black and green gems adorning her dark vestments, the Mulan lady who emerged first looked to be the high priestess. She smiled and strode with a confident air, but the four lesser priests creeping in her wake were pale, wide-eyed, and stank of sweat and fear.

"Good evening," she said. "My name is Unara Anrakh." Up close, she smelled of the myrrh she probably burned during her devotions.

"Are you in charge?" Tsagoth asked.

"For the moment," Unara replied. "Until His Omnipotence Szass Tam appoints a new autharch. The previous one was deaf to the voice of Bane."

Tsagoth grinned. "So you murdered him."

"Should I have allowed him to keep his position and continue giving his fealty to the council? I knew that if I did, you and your comrades would lay siege to Hurkh and put us all to the sword."

Perhaps she believed Hurkh was of greater strategic importance than it actually was. Still, she had a point. "We might have gotten around to it eventually."