It was encouraging to see that the things could perish, and it was good, too, that they had to come down the relatively narrow passage to reach their intended victims. It meant they couldn't spread out and surround them, and that spells like thunderbolts, blasts of fire, and Bareris's own battle cries generally hammered more than one at a time.
Offsetting that advantage, however, was the devourers' resilience and their numbers. New ones kept streaming down the defile like a rushing river, the husks of their predecessors crunching and cracking beneath their feet.
Samas pointed his quicksilver wand and turned a devourer to gold. It toppled forward. Someone else felled one of the creatures with darts of scarlet light. His tone cold and demanding, Szass Tam rattled off an incantation. It must have returned two of the devourers to his control, because they halted abruptly, turned, and lashed out at their fellows.
Bareris saw that it wasn't enough. In another moment, unless the warriors in their band prevented it, the devourers would overrun everyone, zulkirs included. And even archmages would have trouble conjuring with such creatures ripping at them.
"Wall!" Bareris yelled, and then heard Aoth and Mirror yelling the same thing. Though white-faced with fear, the last surviving bodyguard heeded the call, and Nevron sent a miscellany of demons and devils to answer it too. The one that came to stand on Bareris's right was a barbed devil, a somewhat manlike figure with a lashing tail, its body covered with spines and quills.
They just had time to form their line, and then the devourers crashed into it. Bareris cut, parried, and sang a spell to make himself a blur. The point of his spear ablaze with blue light like the fire in his eyes, Aoth thrust and thrust and thrust again. Fighting alongside him, Jet reared, slashed with his talons, and screeched when he tore off a devourer's head.
Meanwhile, flares of multicolored light and ragged blasts of shadow crackled over the defenders' heads to sear and wither the massed devourers. Bareris assumed that one or more of the wizards must have floated into the air-or simply clambered onto a rock-to evoke such magic without fear of hitting his allies. He couldn't actually look around to verify his guess, because he didn't dare take his eyes off the creatures in front of him.
A devourer's black, sunken eyes glared down at him, and for a moment, he couldn't remember where he was, what the creature was, or how he was supposed to react to it. But training made him sing the next note of his battle anthem, and his magic shattered his confusion. He cut into the devourer's torso, and its legs buckled.
"I see the end of them!" Samas called. Bareris felt a surge of renewed determination, then noticed a shiver in the ground beneath his feet.
A moment after that, someone behind him cried out, something inhuman roared, and stone rumbled and crashed. The earth heaved, and he almost lost his balance.
Now he truly wanted to turn and see what was happening at his back. His nerves sang with the fear that if he didn't, something looming there would strike him down. But it would still be suicidal to look away from the last devourers.
He hacked the leg out from under one such brute, then gutted it when it dropped. A second scrambled over the corpse of its fellow and grabbed him by the shoulder. He felt a pull through the point of contact; the devourer was leeching his spirit from his body.
He cut the devourer with all his waning strength. His sword ruined an eye and buried itself in the creature's skull, but the incorporeal pull didn't abate. He tried to yank his sword free, and it wouldn't come out of the wound.
He sang a charge of malice and loathing into his eyes, then discharged it by glaring at the devourer. The creature stiffened in pain and fumbled its grip on his shoulder. The pull abated, and he felt stronger. He jerked his blade free and drove the point into the devourer's heart, or at least the spot where a human carried such an organ. The vile thing fell.
At last, nothing else was running to attack him. Not from the front, anyway. He spun around, then faltered.
His first impression was of a corpse swarming with maggots. But in this case, the body was the ground itself and the cliffs rising on each side of the gorge, while the maggots were creatures that, except for the unrelieved blackness of their bodies, resembled the snakelike behemoths called purple worms.
It had been more than ninety years since Bareris had seen one of these monstrosities, but that occasion had been a slaughter he'd never forget. The worms were nightcrawlers. Undead fearsome enough to give even an archmage pause.
Two of the worms bursting from the ground spread their jaws wide and spewed blasts of frost. Lallara raised her staff and cried a word of forbiddance, and the pale jets split like a river streaming around a rock, spattering the sides of the cliffs instead of the people on the ground.
At the same instant, a nightcrawler that had burrowed out of a rocky wall struck straight down at her. It was huge enough to swallow her whole, and she didn't even seem to notice the threat. But Samas screamed-no incantation to it, just a noise of pure desperation and resolve-and pointed his wand at the creature's plunging head. The lead section of the nightcrawler dissolved in a puff of smoke. The rest of it convulsed, the length that still protruded from the burrow slamming repeatedly against the cliff.
Lauzoril produced illusory duplicates of himself to confuse his foes, then snapped his fingers to strike a spark that expanded into a giant made of flame. Nevron brandished his staff, and spiders fell from the ends of his voluminous sleeves. When they touched the ground, they too grew to enormous size, then scuttled to attack the nightcrawlers, spitting webs to bind them, then crawling on their ink black bodies and biting.
Szass Tam chanted in the same imperious fashion as before, and one of the nightcrawlers swiveled its head, struck, and seized a fellow worm in its jaws. Snapping and gnawing, twisting around one another, the creatures thrashed in a struggle that threatened to crush anyone within reach and sent new shocks jolting through the ground.
Bareris sang a song that made the frenzy before him appear to slow, although in reality, his own perceptions and reactions had accelerated. Then he ran at a nightcrawler that had tunneled up out of the canyon floor. The thing was twisting in Aoth's direction. The warmage was still on the ground, but at some point during the last few moments, he'd climbed onto Jet's back.
Bareris drew breath to batter the nightcrawler with a war cry, then glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye. He pivoted; a leftover devourer was lunging at him. He sidestepped its raking claws, let it blunder past, then cut at its spine. The creature toppled.
Bareris spun back around. He was too late to distract the nightcrawler from attacking Aoth, but fortunately, the sellsword commander had noticed the threat. When the worm spat frost, Jet beat his wings and bounded like a grasshopper to carry his master out of the way. Aoth hurled lightning from the point of his spear, and the nightcrawler jerked at its searing touch.
Bareris charged the snakelike undead and cut at its flank. He knew it was dangerous to fight such a colossal creature close up. Without even intending it, the nightcrawler could shift its bulk on top of him and crush him. But he trusted his heightened reflexes to protect him.
For a while, they did, and he slashed a portion of the nightcrawler's body into a Crosshatch of oozing gashes. Then the creature swiveled its head in his direction and hissed.
Sensing danger at his back, he whirled just in time to see a dozen shadowy figures, all but invisible in the gloom that prevailed at the bottom of the gorge, flicker into existence. Their presence chilled the air, and they charged Bareris like a pack of famished wolves.
In an instant, they were all around him, scrabbling and clutching with their freezing though insubstantial hands, and he feared they might overwhelm him with sheer numbers. Then a blaze of light withered them. It spiked pain through his body as well but didn't actually seem to injure him. He nodded to Mirror-who currently resembled Samas Kul, of all people, except that he had a sword instead of a wand-to indicate as much.