Zombies with lambent amber eyes circled to flank berserkers too busy slashing and chopping at ghouls to notice. Jhesrhi pointed her staff and recited as quickly as was possible in one of the ponderous languages of Root Hold. Rumbling, the patch of earth beneath the zombies tilted, one end rising and the other sinking, tumbling them backward and half burying them in the snow that slid along with them.
The dead men were still clumsily trying to stand back up when Jhesrhi spotted Cera and her bodyguards advancing and led her own squad forward to support her. Her blood felt deliciously hot pumping through her veins, and scowling, she willed it cool again.
The unnatural gloom felt nasty enough to set a person’s teeth on edge. Yet Yhelbruna took a certain perverse pleasure in experiencing it for what it was, and particularly in working magic despite its almost conscious efforts to break her concentration with twinges of fear and nausea and block her links to the fountainheads of her power. For now that she understood what plagued her, she could cope.
So, too, could the entities rushing to answer her call. Driven into hiding or dormancy as the durthans corrupted the natural balance of light and dark in the Urlingwood, they were eager to retaliate now that true hathrans were rallying them.
An ancient pine that had uprooted itself and taken on a crudely human form to march to war wrestled a dark fey much like itself. Meanwhile, smaller combatants scurried away from the giants’ many-toed feet to keep from being trampled.
A maiden made of water spoke in a voice like a gurgling brook and compelled a warrior made of ice to melt into liquid too. They embraced, kissed, and merged into a single rippling form that poured down into the snowy ground and vanished an instant later.
Rearing on its hind legs, a huge black bear beheaded a walking corpse with a swipe of its paw. A pace or two away, a more ethereal telthor, a semitransparent woodpecker, lit on a ghoul’s head and pecked. The undead scavenger howled and flailed at the bird, but its clawed hands slapped right through its small assailant without knocking it away.
Smiling, Yhelbruna raised her staff and centered herself anew. So far, she’d called only bright fey and spirits native to the world of mortal men. But despite the hindrance of the darkness, her summonings were working well enough to suggest she could draw allies from the Feywild as well.
But as she spoke the first words of such a calling, cold pain stabbed between her ribs. She looked down just in time to behold the shadowy suggestion of an arrow sticking out of her side before it disappeared.
She was certain she hadn’t taken a mortal or even debilitating wound, not given her inherent mystical resilience, and not from such a weapon. But as she struggled to cast off the shock of it, seven phantom warriors, their inconstant shapes blurred and tangled into a single cloud of twitching faces and murky blades, swept at her.
A steel automaton in the shape of a wild boar stopped one murky figure with a slash of its tusks. An Old One cast darts of white light from a brazen gauntlet to obliterate another. Snatching for the wand she’d sheathed to more easily manipulate her staff, Yhelbruna shouted a word of power. A scythe-like curve of congealed moonlight flowed into existence before her, then slashed in a horizontal arc.
The attack caught an apparition with a short, curved blade in either hand, and it faltered just like a living man whose guts suddenly threatened to slide out the rip in his belly. But either leaping over the strike or ducking under it, the other four aspects of the doomsept avoided harm.
And now they were all around Yhelbruna, shadowy axes poised to chop and short swords ready to thrust. Could she destroy them all before one of them cut her down? She doubted it, but she could at least make them pay for her death. She thrust her wand at the ghost directly in front of her.
A crackling bolt of lightning leaped from the tip of the weapon. Pierced through, her target twisted like a cloth wrung by unseen hands and disappeared.
At the same instant, Vandar rushed in and dispitched another phantom with a slash of the red sword. The last time Yhelbruna had caught sight of him, he’d been berserk fighting at the very forefront of the attack. Judging from the ferocity manifest in his twisted face, rage still possessed him, yet even so, he’d noticed her peril and raced to help her.
Without pausing, he pivoted toward another phantom just as it was starting to swing its axe at him. Though he surely perceived the threat, he didn’t jump back or even dodge. He simply cut with catlike quickness and trusted his stroke to land first.
It did. And when the scarlet blade sliced into the ghost, it and its hurtling axe disappeared.
That fortunate attack still left one aspect of the doomsept unscathed. Yhelbruna spun in a swirl of cloak, seeking it, and found it just as darts of blue light pierced it and made it boil and smoke into nonexistence. Wheeling overhead on Jet’s back, eyes glowing, Aoth saluted her and Vandar with a dip of his spear before turning to find his next foe.
At the same time, following their new king Jet’s lead, the wild griffons came swooping and diving into battle. The golden telthor plunged down on a lich with a pair of dragon fangs raised above his head in invocation. The impact all but smashed the skeletal wizard flat, and when his hands convulsively gripped the talismans, the edges cut his leathery fingers off.
Screeching, other griffons tore holes in a shield wall of zombie spearmen, then climbed and wheeled for a second pass. Booming thunderbolts and missiles that burst into corrosive vapor when they hit the ground rained down as even the dastards aboard the Storm of Vengeancebegan to play their parts in Aoth’s strategy.
Yhelbruna supposed she’d better keep playing hers as well. As she considered what spell to cast next and where to cast it, Vandar fixed on a white-faced vampire warrior whose sword and chin alike were wet with blood. The berserker screamed like a griffon and charged.
A company of bright fey was advancing, or at least Lod assumed the score of warriors and the two sorceresses in their midst were fey. They looked like elves might look if some whimsical power whittled them even skinnier, painted their skins with faint striations, and replaced their hair with tufts of leaves. As if to give the lie to their spindly, fragile appearance, they bore outsized, two-handed cleaverlike weapons that few human beings could have wielded with any semblance of grace or skill.
They evidently had faith in their prowess, for despite Lod’s daunting appearance, they were coming on without hesitation. He rebuked their arrogance by hissing a word that stabbed pain through their eyes and struck them blind. Only temporarily, but they were still stumbling around in the snow, calling out to one another, and wiping bloody tears when skeletons came running to cut them down.
It was a satisfying moment. But any pleasure Lod might otherwise have taken in it withered when he twisted away to survey the battle as a whole.
Rashemen was supposed to be easy prey, backward to begin with, witless and feeble now that the Eminence had rotted it from within. Yet somehow the allegedly befuddled, broken realm had mustered a formidable little army and had known exactly where to send it.
The Eminence hadn’t lost the resulting battle yet. But it very well might. Lod assumed that he, who had, after all, bested Sarshethrian, was more than a match for any single combatant among the foe. But even he couldn’t be everywhere buttressing every part of the defense at once.
Nor was the ambient darkness likely to take up the slack. It hindered the living to an extent, but not enough now that they understood its toxicity.
If only he and the durthans could have continued their rites uninterrupted for a few more days! Then no amount of defensive charms or sheer determination would have saved the attackers from weakening and ultimately strangling on the gloom.