Richard Byers - Undead

"Yes, Mistress, very much. But I have griffon riders in the sky."

She looked up, then snorted. "By my estimation, not many, not anymore."

"Still." He swung his leg over Brightwing's back.

Tammith and Tsagoth splashed down into the dark water, and it paralyzed her as completely as the spear, even as it ate at her like acid. As they sank deeper, the blood fiend clawed and bit at her eroding flesh.

Something else plunged into the sea. Her eyes were burning like the rest of her, but she could make out Winddancer's talons ripping at Tsagoth, and Bareris's sword stabbing repeatedly.

The blood fiend vanished.

The weight of Tammith's mail dragged what was left of her deeper amid a cloud of corruption. Now she was beyond Winddancer's reach. Her fingers corroded to nothing, and her sword fell away.

Bareris dived after her, seized her, and struggled to swim upward. She herself wasn't weighing him down. She scarcely had any weight left. Her mail and his brigandine were the hindrances.

She felt relieved when her chain shirt slipped off the wisp of mush she'd become, and he finally started to make headway toward the air above. She couldn't have borne it if he'd drowned.

But it was too late for her, and probably that was for the best. Now she couldn't hurt him anymore. She wished she could tell him so, and then blackness seemed to rise like a great fish from the gulf beneath her and swallowed everything.

Sopping wet, the wind chilling him, Bareris stood at the rail and stared out at the night. Illuminated by the flickering glow of burning ships and flares of mystic force, the battle raged before him on the sea and in the sky, and he knew he could make sense of it if he wanted. But he couldn't muster any interest.

Why did I swim to the surface? he wondered. What was the point? Why can't I find the courage to dive back in?

Wings snapped and fluttered behind him. He assumed it was Winddancer trying to dry her feathers until Aoth's voice said, "I expected to find you aloft directing the men."

Bareris took a breath, then reluctantly turned to face his comrade. "I was. Then I saw Tsagoth fighting Tammith. He was pressing her hard."

Aoth closed his smoldering eyes as if in pain. Perhaps he'd just realized that Tammith was nowhere to be seen, or maybe he surmised her fate from Bareris's manner. "My friend, I'm truly sorry."

"So am I," Mirror said.

For some reason, their sympathy infuriated Bareris, but he realized in a dim way that he ought not to let his anger show. "Thank you," he said, his voice catching in his throat.

"If I were you," Aoth said, "I'd just want to stand here and grieve. But you can't. The battle's going against us. Lallara's fled already, and maybe the other zulkirs, too. I don't know how many griffon riders are still alive, but we need to collect them and try to lead them to safety. On the wing, if we think land is close enough, and aboard this vessel otherwise."

Bareris drew breath to say, Go without me.

But Mirror spoke first. "I thought we were winning."

"We were," said Aoth, "but then Szass Tam unleashed the dream vestige, and for all their theorizing and preparations, the Red Wizards can't stop it. I thought I'd discovered something that would help them, but it was no use, either."

"What was it?" Mirror asked.

Aoth made a sour face. "The souls that make up the cloud are in torment, tangled together as they are, trapped in a kind of perpetual nightmare, and they hate one another even more than they hate the rest of the world. Much as they hunger to eat the living, they're even more eager to lash out at their fellows, but something about their condition-some binding Szass Tam created, perhaps-prevents it. I hoped knowing that would give the Red Wizards an opening, but…" He shrugged.

Bareris wasn't making any effort to attend to Aoth's explanation. The dream vestige no longer interested him, or so he imagined. Yet even so, his friend's words evoked an idea, and an urge to do something more than "stand here and grieve."

"It might be a weakness we can exploit," he said. "I'm going to try."

Aoth scowled. "I told you, Lallara and her circle had the same information, and they couldn't slay the thing. Neither can Iphegor Nath and the other high priests."

"That may be," said Bareris. "But no one weaves magic to spark or twist emotion better than a bard." And he believed at that moment, he understood suffering and hatred as well as any singer ever born.

"Is this just a fancy way of committing suicide?" Aoth demanded. "I ask because it won't end your pain, or send you to rejoin Tammith. You'll be stuck inside that thing, sharing its agony, forever."

"I promise, my goal is to destroy it."

"Let him try," said Mirror to Aoth. "You'd do the same if you believed you had any chance of succeeding."

Aoth snorted. "After watching Lallara abandon the fleet to its fate? Don't count on it." He turned his head toward Bareris. "But all right. I won't stand in your way."

"Thank you." Bareris looked around at some of the surviving sailors and called for them to lower a dinghy. Since the dream vestige wasn't far away, he saw no reason to take Winddancer close enough for the cloud-thing to grab.

"I'll come with you," Mirror said.

"No, you won't. You can't sing spells or row a boat, so you truly would be risking your existence for no reason whatsoever, and that would trouble me."

The ghost lowered his head in acquiescence.

It didn't take the mariners long to put the dinghy in the water, or for Bareris to climb into it. He nodded to his comrades, then rowed toward the dream vestige.

Nothing molested him. Except for mindless things like zombies and their ilk, even Szass Tam's other minions were trying to stay clear of the fog-thing, and so they made no effort to intercept a boat headed toward it.

When he was close enough, he started to sing.

He sang of loving Tammith more than life itself and losing her over and over again. Of hating the world that inflicted such infinite cruelty, and despising himself still more for his failure to shield his beloved from its malice. Of the insupportable need to attain an end. He took rage and grief, guilt and self-loathing, and sought to forge them into a sword to strike a blow against Szass Tam and to aid his friends.

The dream vestige extended a murky arm. He kept singing. The groaning, whispering swirl of shadowy figures engulfed him and hoisted him into the air.

The phantoms slithered around him like pythons trying to crush him. Their jagged fingers scratched and gouged. Shocks of fear and cold jolted him, and he felt some fundamental quality-the boundary that made him a separate entity, perhaps, as opposed to just one more helpless, crazed component of the fog-rotting and dissolving.

Rotting and dissolving as Tammith had, turning to scum and nothingness in his embrace. He focused on that and it gave him the strength to force out another note and another after that, to keep trying to enflame the dream vestige's wrath and self-hatred until they were strong enough to burst any constraint.

Samas Kul decided it was time to go. But he didn't share his conclusion with the transmuters who'd had the honor of journeying with him aboard his own ship, and they kept hurling spells at the enemy.

They were useful followers. He was genuinely fond of some of them. But they weren't made of gems and gold, and it was their bad luck that a spell of translocation could shift only so much weight.

Hoping that no one would notice his absence for at least a little while, he descended a companionway, murmured a word of opening, and entered his luxurious cabin inside the sterncastle.

A stack of chests stood in the center of the space. They couldn't contain the whole of Samas's liquid assets-the entire ship scarcely sufficed for that. But they did represent a significant portion of them, holding as they did, rare mystical artifacts and his finest gems.