He'd cloaked himself in an enchantment designed to repel vermin, and as he'd learned over the years, it was never certain the magic would work on things the necromancers had made using bugs and the like for raw materials. This time, it did. Buzzing furiously, the mosquitoes flew away from him and Jhesrhi, and he shouted, a thunderous roar that obliterated the insects and blasted bark and dead branches from the oaks behind them.
He kneeled beside Jhesrhi. She seemed dazed though not unconscious, and she had little beads and smears of blood all over her body where the undead swarm had bitten her. He took her hand and sang a song of healing.
Her eyes shifted, focused on his face, and then she jerked her fingers out of his grasp. "Don't touch me!" she snarled.
"I don't need to anymore." He rose and lifted his sword. "You've done your part. Why don't you stay out of the rest of it?"
'"No. I can fight." With the aid of her staff, moving like an arthritic old granny, she clambered to her feet, then peered around. "Oh, no!"
Bareris looked where she was looking, at Khouryn and Gaedynn. Apparently the two had fought in tandem, the dwarf wielding his urgrosh to engage any foe that ventured into range while the archer kept his distance and loosed arrows. Judging from the vaguely man-shaped piles of earth littering the ground around them, it had been an effective strategy. Until now.
Red, liquid tendrils rose from the soft earth beneath their boots like grass growing tall in a heartbeat. The blood amniote had flowed and burrowed through the mud to surround and cage them. The tendrils branched and connected, forming an even more secure prison, and the suggestion of mad, anguished faces formed and dissolved in the surfaces so created. The undead ooze extruded a huge tentacle, raised it high, and lashed it down at Gaedynn.
Confined as he was, the bowman couldn't dodge. The attack swatted him to the ground, and, as the tentacle lifted again, blood burst from his skin and flew upward to add itself to the substance of the amniote. Jhesrhi gasped.
"Hit it with everything you have!" Bareris said. "It doesn't matter if I'm in the way!" If his blistered hands and face were any indication, perhaps he hadn't needed to tell her that, but it still seemed like a good idea. Her slightest hesitation could cost Gaedynn and Khouryn their lives.
He charged the blood amniote, singing even as he sprinted as only a war bard could. It was harsh music, full of hate, designed to bleed the strength from an opponent, and the first sting of it made the gigantic ooze stop flailing at its captives. Bareris closed the distance, slashed at the creature's flowing, foul-smelling body, and then it started hammering at him.
He dodged, cut, and sang his spell of grinding, relentless destruction. More faces appeared in the crimson, latticed mass, and it seemed that a female one mouthed his name. Lightning crackled, thunder boomed, and blasts of fire roared, he felt sudden heat and glimpsed flashes at the periphery of his vision, but Jhesrhi managed to hit the huge undead without striking him. He thought they might actually have the situation under control. Then, instead of lashing at him with an arm, the amniote simply fell at him like an avalanche or a breaking wave.
He couldn't dodge that. The great, formless mass of it slammed him down on his back, then reared above him. Pain, different and worse than the shock of impact he'd suffered an instant before, wracked him.
His heart didn't beat, and he didn't bleed when a blade cut him. He'd assumed he didn't have any blood the amniote could steal. But now skin and muscle split, and the veins beneath them ruptured. Brown powder swirled up from the wounds.
The blood amniote faltered like a man who had taken a bite of food and found it unexpectedly foul. Its liquid bulk shifted toward Gaedynn and Khouryn.
His whole body throbbing with pain, Bareris scrambled to his feet and gritted out the next line of the song. He cut through a section of the amniote's body, and his blade left a trail of scarlet droplets behind it.
The ooze-thing oriented on him again, rearing above him. Then it broke apart, its liquid remains drumming the earth.
Bareris staggered to Gaedynn and Khouryn. Jhesrhi came running too, and flung herself down beside the scout. Neither he nor the dwarf had flesh torn in the same way as Bareris's-perhaps their blood had come out their pores-but they both looked as if someone had dyed them crimson.
"Help them!" Jhesrhi snapped.
Bareris saw they were both still breathing. "I can keep them alive, but they need a real healer. Fetch a priest."
By the time the healer, a young Burning Brazier with keen, earnest features, finished his work, the battle was over, the necromentals and other horrors dispatched. The cleric eyed Bareris uncertainly, and the latter had a good idea what was going through his mind. On one hand, the priests superiors had trained him to despise and destroy the undead. But on the other, Bareris was manifestly an ally and a warrior who'd been fighting Szass Tam, the great maker and master of zombies, vampires, and their ilk, for a hundred years.
"I can try to help you too, if you want," the young man said at length.
"Thank you, but your magic wouldn't work on me." Bareris remembered how another Burning Brazier had labored in vain to save Tammith after one of Xingax's creations bit her head off. Like every memory of his lost love, it brought a stab of pain. "Anyway, my wounds will close on their own in a little while."
After the Brazier took his leave, Jhesrhi approached. Looking down a little, avoiding eye contact, she said, "I snatched my hand away from you."
"I remember."
"I would have yanked it away no matter who was holding it."
And evidently that was as much of an apology or an expression of acceptance and trust as Bareris was going to get. Which was fine. He didn't need Aoth's troops to be his friends. He just needed them to fight.
CHAPTER FIVE
9 Mirtul, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)
Over the years, Aoth had grown used to spotting things from far away that other people failed to notice even at short range, and this was evidently such an occasion. On a ridge a half mile distant, men in mottled green, tan, and brown clothing lay motionless on their bellies, watching the great column that was the zulkirs' army marching north with its mercenary contingent still in the lead. Griffon riders soared almost directly above the necromancers' spies but evidently hadn't seen them.
Aoth blew his horn to snag the riders' attention, then pointed at the watchers with his spear. His aerial scouts took another look at the ridge, then readied their bows and swooped lower.
"You and I could have killed those men ourselves," Jet grumbled.
"I'm a commander now," Aoth replied. "I'm not supposed to slaughter with my own hands every enemy who wanders into view. It would look peculiar."
Still, he wouldn't have minded the exercise. It might have taken his mind off the sad spectacle of the land spread out before him.
It didn't surprise him, exactly. During the ten years of the zulkirs' war, he'd watched the conflict steadily ruin the land. Blue skies gave way to gray. Green fields withered or fell to weeds and tares as relentlessly as estates and towns fell to besiegers and marauders. Contaminated by the residue of malign sorcery, the soil and rivers spawned blight, disease, and monstrosities even when no wizard was trying to call them forth. And Aoth had heard that, after driving his rivals out, Szass Tam hadn't exerted himself unduly to repair the damage, for reasons that were finally apparent. The lich had been too busy building Dread Rings and otherwise preparing for the Unmaking.