Stars glowered overhead, the fiery eyes of heaven, and a cool and salty breeze breathed over the land.
With the coming of night, the spirits of the land rose from their hiding places.
A second human army was gathering for the night, soldiers from far places riding horses to the towers. Crull-maldor did not want to leave her wyrmlings defenseless, yet she needed to gain information.
So while the armies began to surround her fortress, Crull-maldor dropped from the citadel and went floating beneath the starlight, weaving her way between boulders, drifting above the gorse and bracken.
Field mice felt the cold touch of her presence, and went hopping for their burrows.
Hares thumped their feet to warn their kind. Then they would either hold still, hoping that she passed, or race for the shelter of the gorse.
Nothing substantial had lived here—until today. Nothing substantial could have lived here. Crull-maldor had been cheating death for centuries, living as a shade, a creature that was nearly pure spirit. But to hold on to the spark of life, to stay in communion with the world of fleshy creatures, required tremendous power, power that could only be gained by drawing off the life force of others.
Thus, on a normal night, as she wound her way through the bracken, Crull-maldor would have touched a rabbit here, drained a bush there, or cut short the song a cricket as she passed.
She would have left a trail of death and silence in her wake. But to night she felt sated, for she had fed upon the spirits of men.
Her mind was not upon the hunt for food that evening, but upon the hunt for information. Her eyes could see beyond the physical realm. Indeed, she was so far gone toward death that she could not easily perceive the physical world anymore, unless she happened to be riding in the mind of a crow or a wolf.
Now she passed through the wilds in a daze, as if moving through a dream.
More immediate, more real to her, were the perceptions of her spirit. She could see into the dead world easily, a world that had always been a mystery to mortals.
They lived here in the Northern Wastes, the dead did—in these so called “barrens.” Most of the time, the dead prefer to isolate themselves from the living, for living men often hold powerful auras that confuse and trouble the dead.
So the dead had built cities that seemed to be sculpted from light and shadow. Great towers rose up all around her in shades that the mortal eye cannot see—the rose colors of dawn, the deepest purples of twilight, and shades of fire that no mortal can imagine.
Soaring arches spanned the streets, with flowering vines cascading from them, while great fountains spurted up in broad plazas that seemed to be paved with a pale mist.
What a living wyrmling imagined was only a barren waste was in fact the home to millions.
But to night in the spirit world, much had changed. There had been one city here yestereve. Now Crull-maldor saw towers everywhere, rising above the plains. Hosts of human dead had come.
Their women shrieked for joy and children laughed, while minstrels played in far pavilions.
The spirits of the dead celebrated here, the shades of humans and wyrmlings mingling together, oblivious of the living world—just as the living world was oblivious of them.
So the lich lord wafted above streets of mellow haze, into the House of Light, and there came upon a great convocation of elders, mixed with scholars from the human world.
Crull-maldor did not see them with her physical eyes; instead she perceived their spirits, like spiny sea urchins created from light. Each spirit was a small round ball with thousands of white needle-like appendages that issued out in every direction.
Each spirit had the memory of its fleshly form draped over it like a cloak, showing dimly remembered exteriors. Thus, the balls of light hovered about inside the shells of wyrmling lords and men.
Crull-maldor went to the most glorious among them—a human woman who shone with tremendous brilliance, a symbol of her wisdom and power.
Then the lich lord seized the woman. Crull-maldor sent a tendril of light coiling out from her own spirit, and penetrated the woman’s field. The lich took the woman by the umbilicus and twisted, causing the woman untold pain.
Once again, Crull-maldor found the act to be surprisingly easy. A spiritual attack upon such a powerful being should normally have required great concentration. But now it felt like child’s play.
“Tell me what you know!” Crull-maldor demanded.
The woman shrieked, and the color of her spindles of light suddenly changed from bright white to a delicious deep red. She recoiled, and all of the tendrils around her nucleus shrank in on themselves, the way that the arms of sea anemone will do when something brushes against it.
“What would you have of me, great lord of the dead!” the woman cried. Her name was Endemeer, and she had once been a vaunted scholar.
“What has happened to my world?”
“A great sorcerer has come,” Endemeer said. “He has bound two worlds into one, two worlds that were but shadows of the one true world that existed at the beginning of time.
“He has bound flesh to flesh in those who live; and he has bound spirit to spirit among the dead. . . .”
Immediately Crull-maldor knew that the scholar spoke correctly. This world that she had said once existed, Crull-maldor had heard of it from some of the greater spirits she had tortured.
But until now, Crull-maldor had not believed in it. She had suspected that it was a place found only in one’s imagination.
It explained everything so simply, yet it had tremendous ramifications.
Crull-maldor had not yet revealed to the emperor her news about the humans in her land. She knew now that she could not hide the news. This great change impacted entire continents.
Humans are abroad in the land once again, Crull-maldor thought, and where there is conflict, there is also opportunity.
Crull-maldor immediately sent an alarm, a flash of thought to the emperor Zul-torac. Our wyrmling scouts have found humans in the Northern Wastes. They came with a great change that has twisted the earth.
The emperor sent back a terse reply, and she felt his thoughts crawling through her mind, seeking to infiltrate it. She set a barrier against them, so that he could not read her mind, and he replied. I know, fool! Deal with them.
His thoughts fled, dismissing her.
Crull-maldor grinned. As she had hoped, he had not had the foresight to tell her how to deal with them.
The scholar Endemeer whimpered and tried to escape Crull-maldor’s grasp. The lich lord merely held her, eager to wring more information from her.
“Tell me about the humans’ new magic, the glyph magic.”
Crull-maldor sent her own tendrils of light plunging deep into those of her captive. Each tendril of light was like a strand of human brain. It stored wisdom and memories. As Crull-maldor brushed against Endemeer, she glimpsed the memories stored upon Endemeer’s tendrils.
Grasping the ones that she wanted, Crull-maldor ripped the tendrils free. It was like tearing apart a human brain. The tendrils’ light immediately began to dim, so Crull-maldor shoved them into her own central bundle, transplanting the memories. By doing so she stole the spirit’s knowledge. It was a violation as reprehensible as rape, a type of murder.
So Crull-maldor hunched over her prey, ripping light from Endemeer and in the City of the Dead the lich lord discovered the deepest secrets of the runelords.
6
A Call to Arms
It is only when a man gives up his life in service to a greater cause that he can attain true greatness.
—The Wizard Binnesman
War horns rent the air; Myrrima startled awake, heart pounding.
She cocked an ear, alert for sounds of danger, and heard the screams of horses dying in battle, along with some warlord shouting, “Man the breach! Man the breach, damn you!”