He paused for a moment, surveying his allies, then flicked his ears.
"I'll not be lying to you. It's in my heart and soul to wish as how you'd none of you come, beyond us of the Order, but you'd have none of it, and I knew it. And, truth to tell, I can't but be admiring the guts as brings each and every one of you to this. You've made us sword brothers all, by your courage. Yet men-and coursers-are after dying in battle, brothers, and it's in my mind as how some of us will be doing that this night."
Dozens of eyes look back at him, levelly, despite the tension ratcheting higher and tighter behind them.
"There's a part of this battle as will be mine to fight," he continued. "It's not one as any of the rest of you can be after joining. But what you can be doing is to keep the rest of whatever it is we're facing off of me while I've the fighting of it. Will you be watching my back for me, brothers?"
"Aye." It was Luthyr Battlehorn, his voice cold and hard with promise despite the dislike still showing in his eyes. "Aye, Milord Champion, we will."
"Now, Layantha."
Jerghar's command was a sibilant hiss as he crouched atop his hill, and the once-woman beside him smiled a terrible smile. Layantha Peliath was something vanishingly rare among the Servants of Krahana-a mage who'd actually sought the service of the Queen of the Damned. And not just any mage, for she'd been an empath. Not a receptive empath. Most of those went into healing, either of the mind or the body, and the very nature of their talent was enough to make any fate like Layantha's unthinkable. Had she been a receptive empath, her talent would have carried the predatory cruelty of Krahana and her Servants too clearly to her for her to have voluntarily yielded. She might have been taken by a Servant, or a shardohn, or even Krahana herself, but she would not have yielded, and so could not have become what she now was.
But Layantha had been a projective empath, able to project her own emotions, but unable to sense those of others. It was one of the mage talents of extremely limited utility, and perhaps that had been a factor in the choice she'd made. Layantha had never had the sort of personality which was prepared to accept that she was not the center of everyone's universe as she was of her own.
She hadn't realized in time that to accept Krahana was to become no more than one more satellite of the voracious void which she had made her mistress. The fact that she remained anything but the center of the universe was bitter poison on her tongue, but that only fanned her hatred of all still-living beings even higher. And the mage talent which had survived her surrender to Krahana was no longer a thing of limited utility.
Now, as her enemies crested the last undulating swell of the Wind Plain before their hill, she reached out to that portion of the reservoir of focused power Jerghar was prepared to make available to her, and her smile was a hideous thing to see.
A wave of sheer terror curled across the night-struck grassland like a tsunami.
Terror was no stranger to Bahzell Bahnakson. He'd faced wizards, cursed swords, and demons, and no man, however great his courage, was immune to fear. But he had never tasted a deeper terror, one with a darker core of horror . . . or one which had no apparent source at all.
Layantha's tidal bore of darkness crashed over him, and he heard stricken cries and high-pitched, equine squeals as it fountained over his companions, as well. It smashed down on them, vast and noisome and more crippling than any physical wound. He sensed them behind him, and knew that the only reason they hadn't fled was that the terror which had invaded them was so totally overwhelming that they were paralyzed. Frozen helplessly, like mesmerized rabbits waiting to be taken by a gamekeeper.
Bahzell was trapped with them, but the black river of ice which had sucked them under could not-quite-reach his core. That indomitable core of elemental hradani stubbornness, buttressed by his link to Tomanâk . . . and to Walsharno.
He and the courser stood motionless, as frozen as any of their companions, as the night took on a hideous unlife of its own. He could see the darkness coming alive with the pustulant green sores of hundreds of glittering eyes. They came towards him, and he recognized them. Not because he'd ever seen them with his own eyes, but because Gayrfressa had seen them. Had felt the fangs and poison, and the terrible, lustful hatred which lived behind them. He had experienced Gayrfressa's experiences as his own, and beyond that, he was a champion. The true nature of the shardohns could not hide itself from him, and so, even more than Gayrfressa, he understood what he faced and the true horror of what awaited any who fell to them.
The creatures closed in slowly, made cautious by their dread of Tomanâk and his power despite the quicksand of projected terror which had frozen their enemies. And that caution was a mistake.
They should have flung themselves upon Bahzell. They should have ripped the life and soul out of him and Walsharno instantly, brutally, while Layantha held them paralyzed. But instead, they hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, Bahzell reached deep.
He didn't think-he simply acted. Despite the vicious wave of emotion sweeping over him he reached both deep within himself and without. It was as if he stretched out both of his hands, one to Tomanâk and one to Walsharno, and answering hands closed upon his in clasps of living steel. He was an acrobat, arcing through empty air in the unwavering knowledge that hands he could trust even more deeply than he trusted his own would be waiting to catch him, and the electric shock when they did rocked through his soul like cleansing sunlight.
And even as his god and his courser brother caught him in that three-part fusion, Bahzell summoned the Rage. Summoned the wild whirlwind of berserker bloodlust which had been the curse of his people for twelve centuries, until time and healing had transformed it into something else-into elemental determination and deadly, ice-cold concentration.
The mighty cables of hopeless horror Layantha had cast about him snapped like cobweb, shredded by the rushing wind of Walsharno's fierce strength and shriveled by the blazing presence of Tomanâk. And at the heart of that focus of Dark-rejecting Light stood Bahzell Bahnakson in the dreadful exaltation of the Rage, like the rock on which the tide of terror broke and recoiled in baffled foam and rushing confusion.
"Tomanâk!"
The deep, bull-throated bellow of his war cry split the darkness, and Walsharno's wild, fierce scream of rage came with it. Bahzell's sword leapt into his right hand, summoned by a thought, glaring so bright a blue that even mortal eyes were dazzled by its brilliance, and the shardohns froze, squealing with a terror even deeper than the one Layantha had conjured to paralyze their foes.
Layantha screamed. Her hands rose to her head, balled into fists, pounding her temples, and she staggered back. She writhed, shrieking as the terror she'd projected recoiled upon her. In all her mortal life she had never received the emotions of another. She'd been as blind to them, despite her empathy, as any non-mage. But now, at last, her mind was opened, its barriers and defenses ripped wide by a talon of azure power, and all the hatred and black despair she had leveled against her intended prey lashed through her.
She shrieked again, fighting frantically to stop the pain. But she wasn't permitted to. She couldn't stop projecting, with all of the stolen energy Jerghar had funneled to her. And not just because Tomanâk and his champions would not allow it. The slaughtered victims of the Warm Springs courser herd had been dragged back to face the desecration of being made to serve their destroyers. But those tormented souls were the souls of coursers, and as Lord Edinghas had told Bahzell, coursers would not yield to demon, devil, or god. They refused to take back their power. They writhed, shrieking in torment as terrible as Layantha's own as Jerghar flailed them with the power of his own will, beating at them with whips of fire as he commanded them to stop pouring their stolen life energy through her mage talent. They writhed . . . but they did not relent.