These blasted things want to take us alive, Borric thought. He shouted orders, and two more guards closed the gap immediately with blades flashing, but their protective ring was thinning by the moment.
Borric shot a glance inward at the huddled citizens. It was mostly children now. The able-bodied men and women had already taken up the weapons of the fallen and thrown themselves into aiding the defense. They were not soldiers, however, and had been even quicker to fall before their tireless foes than the members of the city guard. To Borric’s blurred vision, the children were one big indistinct mass of shape and color, clinging tightly together. He felt a traitorous flash of gratitude that he could no longer see their frightened expressions.
He had a sudden irrational thought for his own son, the boy he had not seen in the years since Borric had taken this job, the boy who would be a tall young man by now. He remembered wiping away the boy’s tears at his departure, his assurances that it would not be as long as it seemed. He remembered his confident promises that he would return one day, laden with his earnings. He had only to accept this important position in a remote outpost for a few years, where the pay was many times what he could earn at home, in a land of untold riches beyond the frayed edges of known civilization…
Someone was shouting at him. Borric blinked, breaking from his reverie and straining to hear the words over the persistent ringing in his ears. He looked around. The ring of guards had thinned to the point of breaking.
“Tighten the ring!” he shouted. “Fall back three steps and tighten the ring!”
The men were quick to obey, their boots stomping and scraping as they backed into a tighter defensive circle. If the ring shrinks much further, Borric thought with a rueful grimace, the men will be tripping over that cluster of children.
A hole opened in the ranks before him as several of the fiends tried to force their way through in a wedge. Dead eyes stared at him above soundless, gaping mouths, and his men struggled to hold them back. With a roar of defiance, the captain of the guard raised his sword and plunged back into the fray.
Someone was shouting at him. A strident voice, somehow both distant and yet uncomfortably near, was gibbering at him to wake up, to fight back and, in a seeming contradiction, to give in and let go. Release me, the voice urged. Join me, so that we may fight together as we were meant to!
Amric’s eyes flared open, and he realized with a chill that he had lost consciousness for a fleeting instant.
The huge visage of the Nar’ath queen loomed before him, and the stench of putrefaction washed over him with her hot breath. Her outer jaws were flared wide, reaching toward him with the hooked prongs that would keep his head frozen in place for the killing kiss. Her ruby lips peeled back to reveal row upon row of tiny glistening fangs that were eager to receive him.
Something slammed into the queen from the side, eliciting a shriek of pain from the monster. Amric gasped as the claws encircling his torso convulsed from the blow and nearly crushed him. She whirled in the direction from which the attack had come, but all Amric could see were the swirling sands obscuring all. Seconds later came another blow from the other side, and she shuddered, spinning in that direction and sweeping her claws in a blind, furious arc.
A phantom laughed echoed back to them, seeming to come from all directions at once. It was a rich, smooth voice, mocking as it slid through the murk and circled them.
Bellimar! Amric realized. The vampire was taking a direct hand in affairs once more, as he had in Stronghold.
A third blow shook the Nar’ath queen with a sound like muted thunder. She lunged in a new direction, roaring in rage and frustration. Shaking Amric like a child’s doll, she slithered into a wide, rapid turn back toward the center of the vast chamber, prowling after this troublesome new prey.
Borric recognized his mistake the instant he made the attack that undid him.
The guard to his right stumbled and went to his knees, and half a dozen black hands seized him in an instant and pulled him headfirst from view. One of the fiends stepped into the gap and lunged at Borric, and the battle-forged reflexes of countless hard-fought campaigns took over. The captain of the guard stepped into a smooth lunge and drove the point of his sword into the throat of the attacker. It was perfectly executed, a lethal blow to any mortal assailant, but Borric knew in an instant that he was undone.
Before he could withdraw, the gaping fiend seized his wrist in a vise-like grip. It drew itself forward, surging along his blade until the hilt rested against its throat and the full length of shining steel projected from the back of its neck. With a wrench, the creature snapped the bones of his forearm, and his sword tumbled from useless fingers. He was jerked forward, the sheer force of it causing his feet to leave the ground. Something slammed into the back of his skull like an iron sledge, and all was darkness.
Black hands caught him before he hit the ground.
Morland cracked an eye and watched the farseer at work. The young man shuddered and flinched from time to time, but his eyes remained wide open and twitched between distant targets that only he could see. Tears ran openly across his face and into his beard.
What a fool, thought Morland with a curl of his lip. It was not as if this show of weakness would have any effect on the outcome down there. The city was lost. His Nar’ath allies were doing just as they had promised by demonstrating the inevitability of their conquest. Morland felt a surge of pride. The Nar’ath had skulked about for centuries, hiding and evading notice, building their strength slowly; the time for such subterfuge was at an end.
Not for the first time, he congratulated himself for turning a minor setback into the promise of success. He had been furious when the Nar’ath attacked his trade caravan so many months ago; even though they had left the goods untouched, it had cost him no small amount of time and trouble to replace the men that had disappeared. It had cost him many more after that to track down the culprits, to gauge their strength, and to make careful advances to establish contact with their leader.
It was all worth it in the end, however. The Nar’ath forces would continue to grow, fueled by this victory, and he would be remembered for his part in accelerating their eventual triumph. He swelled with pride. And of course, once they had taken what they needed, they would establish him as the undisputed ruler over the survivors, just as they had promised. He would at last achieve the power that had long been his goal, but on a scale to which even he had not dared aspire.
He frowned. Something nagged at the fringes of his thoughts, a tattered edge to an otherwise perfect picture. How many survivors would be left when the Nar’ath were sated? What proof had they offered of their assertion that they had no long-term interest in this world? Where were they going? These seemed like questions he would have asked, being a shrewd negotiator and a calculating businessman. In fact, he recalled going to his initial meetings with the Nar’ath queen with every intention of learning the answers to these questions and more. Now, however, when he looked back, his memories of that meeting were a fog, and he could not produce the answers to any of these queries. He tried to call forth the details-any details-from those fateful encounters, but they slid away like raindrops down a slate roof.