"You think I am a staked goat, Lea? Put up here to lure you inside so a half dozen ragged men can fall upon you and kill you?"
Behind and below, the high keening of the rattling undead pierced the silence of the courtyard. Brand's voice lifted in a curse, then in sudden wild laughter. Elansa let go of Char's shoulder and put her hands on the parapet.
"I swear it," Elansa cried. "I stand here freely. And I swear-" Her voice turned to ice. "I swear that I and those with me stand with our backs to the wall." She leaned far over the parapet, and the wind caught her cloak, tearing it wide and showing her naked but for her trousers, the rags of her shirt, and her bruises.
Brand's voice mingled with others now-Dell's high battle cry, the shouts of Nigh-toothless Kerin, and Pragol. In Elvish, two voices cried encouragement, one to the other over the piercing wails colder than wind. Ley and his daughter did battle together.
"You hear them!" Elansa cried. "You hear them, Lea, and I tell you these things cannot be killed with weapons! They cannot, and if you don't let me do what I must, these things will kill those in the fortress, and they will kill me. Then they will come out and find your army, Lindenlea, and they won't care if you have grudges against goblins or if goblins have grudges against you. They simply kill."
Lindenlea did not believe what she heard. She could not see her princess torn and bruised and standing in rags and understand.
"You say there are a half dozen. You are not held. Fine. I'm coming in, Elansa."
Elansa looked across the plain. Dust rose in thick clouds. Almost she could feel the grit of it in her teeth, the dry lifelessness of it on her tongue. All of Lindenlea’s army, restless before the gates of Pax Tharkas, made not even a quarter of what came across the plain, elves and goblins. And in the midst of the thickest cloud, that coming from the west and low to the ground, strange flashes of orange light showed, illuminating the dust like a sputtering sun rolling along the ground.
"I don't think you should come in, Lindenlea."
Elansa pointed west, and she turned away.
Chapter 17
Elansa stood upon the battlements, her phoenix in her hand, on her lips a prayer to her god. The fury of the battle below, the fighting of outlaws and the undead filled her up, lifted her prayer to a god who knew the round of life and death and life. She sent her cry to the Blue Phoenix, the god as he was rising from the ashes of his own death, alive and triumphant.
"Habbakuk, rise! O, Blue Phoenix, lift your wings, and lift me up!"
She raised her arms, and upon her breast the sapphire glowed. In her eyes, the fire of the god kindled, his power rising. The wind, cold around the towers, heard a god's command. Running up from the south and down from the east on the currents of the world, sailing on the paths of Krynn’s sky, the wind changed direction. It turned, like a wide-winged creature summoned.
The howling of the undead echoed between the walls of Pax Tharkas. The light of the new day leaped from the edges of Brand's blade and Dell's. No blood dulled the battle-light, for their enemies’ blood had turned to dust and vanished long ago. They bared their teeth in the Warrior's grin, the two outlaws back to back.
"Heads off!" Dell shouted, laughing. She ducked as Brand swung, then came up and swiped the skeleton of a dwarf off his clattering feet. The thing fell but did not die. She kicked off the creature's head, and it came up again. She felt Brand's laughter vibrating in her own body, so close did their backs press.
Looking down from the wall, out from her magic, Elansa saw that, by the head count, the outlaws had killed their own number in the clattering ancient Royal Guard. They had lost only Bruin.
Brand looked up, as though he felt her eyes on him. Dell swung away from him, trying to swipe the head from a creature upon whose bones rags of silk fluttered, upon whose head a tarnished helm of royal silver sat. The outlaw lord's eyes met hers, and she felt the shock of his lust for battle.
"Char!" Brand roared. "Don’t leave her!"
Char never did. He stood close, his dark beard and shaggy hair blown in the wind of her magic.
The undead poured out from the cellar beneath the eastern tower-humans, elves, and dwarves in rusted and rotting accoutrements of their ancient glory. Clattering, howling, their eye-sockets black as the end of life, they scented living flesh and hot blood and swung at the living with rusted blades. The blades could hurt. They had the edges to maim. One had run right through Bruin's breast. The touch of the undead thing had killed him, though. It was death's touch, turning blood to ice and marrow to dust, stopping the heart.
Nigh-toothless Kerin swung at one, an elf by the look of his ruined armor. He missed the head, shattered a shoulder, and fell screaming to his knees when the thing grasped him by the throat with its remaining hand.
Around Elansa the winds gathered. Char shouted something to her, but she did not hear. She lifted her hands, her arm high, and gathered the airs of Krynn, the breath of the world.
Ley shouted like thunder to his daughter, "Behind! Tianna! Behind!"
The half-elf turned, swift as lightning, to lop the head from a clattering skeleton. Shrieking, something like mist, gray and bodiless, poured out of the hung jaw of the fallen head. For an instant, Elansa thought she saw a figure form, a spirit-mist, a soul long trapped and finally released.
On the battlement, she shouted. "Habbakuk! Take their souls and quench their pain!"
She thought of storm and sent the wind of the world running out from her hand. It caught that spirit-mist in whirling tempest, sweeping it into the heart of itself, a gale directed by Elansa’s own hand. She felt the presence of a god, wings spread wide and sheltering. Into that shelter the lorn spirit fled, the soul of a brave warrior held prisoner by the corruption of a foul magic, a spell anciently cast by a mage whose name no one alive remembered.
Shrieking, another spirit flowed out from a fallen head, a gaping jaw. This, too, her storm gathered. This the god took.
In the courtyard only Brand, Dell, Ley, and Tianna stood among the living.
The moment she counted them, the count of them decreased. Tianna, the half-elven child of a dark elf, died in the white, brittle grasp of a tall skeleton. A moment too late, Ley battered the head and broke the skull of the thing that killed his daughter. His roar of rageful woe bellowed high to the battlements, mingling with the shrieks of the undead thing at last dying.
A voice, Elansa’s, shouted out from the maelstrom of winds, crying, "Brand, give ground! Go inside!"
Never questioning, his face alight with battle-lust, his eyes-she saw them from the height!-shining on her, Brand shouted in a kind of mad-minded laughter, "In! In! Dell! Ley!"
They ran, hacking through the bone-white warriors, Brand himself like a scytheman with his sword. Shrieking rose to the heights, lost souls set loose. Bones rattled, clattering, falling, and Brand, at the doorway to safety, turned and looked up.
"Princess!" he shouted, shining.
Upon her breast the sapphire phoenix lay, blue against her white flesh. He felt it beating, for he knew how her heart felt. He knew the rhythm of it. He had learned it on long, cold nights, as it beat steadily against his own breast. With his sword Brand saluted her, laughing he raised the blade before he plunged into the tower, into darkness.
On his heels ran a wind the like of which the granite fortress had never felt. It ripped bone from bone, tearing ribs from spines, shattering bony necks, flinging skulls in the whirlwind Elansa guided with her own will and shaped with her hands. She scoured the courtyard, broke the bones to powder and sent the poor scraps of once-proud armor and ancient clothing sailing up to the dawn, soaring out over the wall and into the valley where armies of the living gathered.