Текст книги "Prophet of the Dead"

Автор книги: Richard Lee Byers

Соавторы: Richard Lee Byers
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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.

But what, Lod wondered abruptly, if he and his comrades didn’t actually need a few more days? For safety’s sake, wizards customarily performed their greatest works with protracted, painstaking care. But the present enterprise was already well advanced with mystical safeguards in place. Surely, at this point, competent spellcasters could pick up the pace.

He cast around, spotted Nyevarra sweeping her antler-topped staff through looping mystic passes, and crawled in her direction. On the way, he observed the sun priestess and fire mage who’d escaped from the Fortress of the Half-Demon fighting their way forward.

He supposed the two women had overheard too much while in captivity, that the hathrans and such were here because they’d guided them here, and felt a vicious urge to pause and strike the escapees down. He didn’t, though. He kept moving.

Unfortunately, no matter how single-minded he was, he couldn’t stop the enemy from assailing him and slowing his progress. Sheltered behind golems and spearmen, a hathran chanted and brandished a scythe at him. Growing out of empty air, rose vines wrapped around him, binding him, the thorns jabbing into his scales and even the naked bones of his upper body. Meanwhile, the perfume of the crimson flowers filled his head and made it swim.

He snarled words of negation and reprisal. The vines vanished, and staggering, the witch yanked up her mask to retch squirming maggots into the snow.

An iron ball arced out of the sky. He caught it, chanted to it, released it, and it flew back up into the air, reversing its trajectory to burst at its point of origin.

Finally, he reached Nyevarra. The durthan was reciting what he recognized as a summoning spell even though he couldn’t tell precisely what she was calling. More useless fey, most likely. Nearby, Uramar was conferring with a lich whose shriveled face and limbs were furry with grave mold.

For a moment, gazing down at the hulking blaspheme and the little witch in her mask of blackened silver made Lod feel as disgusted as he had peering across the battlefield at the sun priestess and fire mage. And why shouldn’t it? Wasn’t Uramar and Nyevarra’s bungling equally responsible for this crisis?

Well, perhaps not equally, and in any case, the two were his undead kindred, and he needed them. With an effort, he put aside the impulse to blame.

Nyevarra finished her spell, and half a dozen big, vulturine entities flapped out of nowhere to assail a griffon. She then turned and peered up at Lod.

“Well done,” he said. “But I need your help with a special task.”

“Anything,” she replied.

“We need to pull the breach wider. Let Shadow floodthrough until our magic is invincible and our enemies sicken and die.”

Nyevarra hesitated. Then: “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Of course you can! You’re powerful, and so is the staff you carry. And I’m going to help.”

“You don’t understand. Adjusting the balance with a measure of care is one thing. But we don’t dare just unleash death and decay on the Urlingwood to do absolutely anything they want. There needs to be a living forest when our conquest is over.”

“There probably will be, and even if there isn’t, Rashemen will still hold power for the Eminence to harness.”

“We can win this fight without risking the soul of the land!”

“You led troops during your mortal existence. You should know how to assess the progress of a battle. Take a look at this one and then tell me you’re certain of victory.” He gestured toward the frenzied confusion of griffons screeching, berserkers shouting, blades clashing on shields and the stone and metal flanks of golems, and flares of magic banging and shrilling.

Nyevarra hesitated again, and then Uramar, who must at some point have finished palavering with the lich, diffidently rested a big, mottled hand, all crooked, ill-matched fingers and old but still prominent suture scars, on her shoulder.

“I know you didn’t want to,” the blaspheme said, “but you need to choose. What are you first and foremost, a witch of Rashemen or an undead of the Eminence? If the answer is witch, then put the survival of the forest ahead of all else. Just don’t expect any mercy for your forbearance if the hathrans defeat you yet again. They’ll slay you just like they did the first time.

“But if the answer is an adherent of the Eminence,” Uramar continued, “then do whatever it takes to ensure our victory. You’ll crush your old enemies and rule as one of the great powers of Rashemen forever after, beloved by all who matter for what you gave to our cause.”

Nyevarra stood and pondered for a moment. Then she shifted her grip of the antler-staff and drew herself up straight.

“It seems,” she said, grim humor in her voice, “that my innermost self is a vampire. And you can’t get blood from trees.”

The skeletal wizard in the rotting, tattered robes reminded Aoth unpleasantly of Szass Tam, but fortunately, wasn’t proving to be nearly as strong a combatant. When the lich cast a flare of jagged shadow, Jet veered and dodged it, and when Aoth riposted with a thunderbolt, the twisting shaft of radiance tore the undead apart.

His legs clamped around Jet-by the Black Flame, he missed his saddle-Aoth cast around for another target and spied wraiths and direhelms rising through the air, likely to attack the Storm of Vengeance. To give Bez credit, he and his crew were inflicting considerable harm on the undead and dark fey on the ground.

Aoth decided to blast the ghostly boarding party before they could reach their objective, and discerning his intent through their psychic bond, Jet lashed his wings and climbed. Then, however, a jab of pain in the pinion he’d broken made the familiar falter. Aoth started to ask if Jet was all right, but a cramp in his guts and a surge of irrational fear turned the question into a gasp.

In a paradoxical way, Aoth’s sudden distress was actually reassuring. Jet’s old injuries weren’t troubling him because they’d healed imperfectly. Rather, both he and his master were experiencing a mystical assault.

But the unfortunate thing was that, as Aoth realized when he slapped a tattoo to release its bracing magic and then looked around, everyone else on the hathrans’ side was suffering it too. A griffon screamed and veered away from the vulturine thing it had been swooping to seize in its talons. Kanilak froze until Shaugar grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a shake. Even berserkers balked.

It’s the dark, said Jet. It’s curdling or something.

Aoth realized that must be so. He looked at the patch of ground at the center of the stand of weir trees and saw the gloom there had grown even deeper, so murky and festering-foul, it reminded him of the deathways, although it still offered no bar to his fire-kissed sight. The female durthan with the Stag King’s antler-axe-Nyevarra-was in the middle of it, as were a couple other undead witches and, rearing above creatures of merely human stature, Lod himself.

Standing a little closer to the thick of the battle, his gore-streaked two-handed sword canted on his shoulder, the patchwork man-Uramar-was shouting. Aoth had no hope of making out what the blaspheme was saying over the general din. But he was likely ordering any ally who could hear him to fall back and form up to protect the spellcasters behind him. At any rate, that was what various undead were doing.

Aoth scowled at his failure to secure the cursed area straightaway. But he knew little about the kind of ritual magic that had sullied it, and even Yhelbruna, who claimed to understand it, hadn’t anticipated that if they so desired, the undead witches could accelerate the ongoing contamination.

But maybe Jhesrhi and Cera had sensed the danger, for they and their squads of protectors were already headed for the weirs. But they’d never punch through the ranks of the enemy without support.

Responding to his master’s thoughts, Jet abandoned his pursuit of the phantoms rising toward the skyship and hurtled toward the towering sacred trees. He likewise gave a rasping cry that brought wild griffons streaking after him.

Meanwhile, Aoth cast a charm to amplify his voice. “Push for the weirs!” he bellowed to his soldiers on the ground, and an enormous mink looked up and nodded to show it understood.

Cera had long since discovered she’d been too optimistic at the start of the battle. Although Orgurth and her other defenders were fighting savagely to hold back the foe, she’d still needed to wield her mace as a warrior would, often enough that scraps of rotting flesh and strands of greasy hair clung to the stubby spikes.

Swaying, an animate corpse with its nose and most of its left profile rotted away stumbled between two golems busy with other foes. Reluctant to expend any of the Keeper’s light on a single such brutish creature, Cera waited for the zombie to swing its war hammer, then sidestepped and blocked with her shield.

The blow banged on the hide-and-wooden targe and jolted her arm but didn’t hurt her. She swung low and smashed the zombie’s knee, and it pitched forward. She then bashed it in the nape of the neck, and it fell on its ruined face in the snow.

At the same instant, she glimpsed motion at the corner of her vision. She turned. Just a stride away, a ghoul was rushing her with jagged claws outstretched. Fortunately, Orgurth lunged to intercept it, cut, and split its skull. The ghoul dropped.

The orc grinned at Cera. “Are you close enough yet?” he shouted, making himself heard over the din of battle.

“A little farther!” Her answer made her feel guilty. People were dying to help her push forward.

Orgurth’s leer stretched wider. “Why not?” He turned back toward the enemies still separating them from the weir trees and then snarled an obscenity. Because Uramar himself was leading a dozen floating direhelms right at them.

In a sudden surging confusion, two of the flying suits of half-plate assailed Orgurth, and to dodge the initial slashes of their swords, he sprang to the side. Other direhelms engaged golems and berserkers. Somehow, in an instant, all Cera’s protectors were busy fighting for their own lives, and Uramar had a clear path to her.

Fine, she thought. A blaspheme wasa target worthy of her deity’s wrath. She raised her mace to the sun shining above the filthy darkness and started a prayer to smite him.

Then, however, her focus shattered into terror and bewilderment, and her half-finished invocation forgotten, she recoiled. Only for a moment, and then a cleric’s trained will allowed her to shed the effects of what had no doubt been an adversary’s spell. But that was time enough for Uramar to lumber into striking distance.

As he did, bitter cold, fiercer by far than the natural chill of this winter day, stabbed into Cera like a knife. She gasped, and her whole body clenched, rendering her incapable of prayer, raising her targe, or offering any other sort of defense. Uramar swung his greatsword high to split her head.

Then, missing her by no more than a finger length, Jet swooped over her head, and his talons punched into the blaspheme’s chest. Wings lashing, the black griffon-and Aoth astride his back-climbed and carried Uramar into the air.

Other griffons dived at more of the foe a heartbeat later. Berserkers, golems, bright fey, and telthors rushed up to reinforce Cera’s original bodyguards. Teeth chattering with the aftereffects of Uramar’s frigid aura, she decided she truly was going to reach where she needed to be. And then, with Amaunator’s help, she’d vindicate the faith of those who fought and fell to get her there!

Through their psychic bond, Aoth could feel the deadly chill that emanated from Uramar’s body assailing Jet. And the griffon must have likewise sensed his concern.

I’m not some dainty human, Jet snarled. I can take a little cold.

You can’t take even a scratch from a life-stealing blade, Aoth replied. Just drop him. If the fall doesn’t kill him, I’ll blast him.

I’m gripping him so he can’t use the sword. I want to pull him apart and pop his stitches.

Aoth opened his mind to Jet’s perceptions so completely that it was like the griffon’s body was his own. And then he realized Jet was right. The familiar wasable to withstand the chill, and with both arms grinding together in one set of talons, Uramar truly was helpless.

All right, Aoth agreed, kill him. But when he shifted back to his own body’s senses, Aoth regretted saying it.

Because twisting atop the thick, scaly coils of his lower body, Lod was tracking Jet’s course through the air. Lod’s fleshless jaw worked, and his naked phalanges crooked, forming a series of conjuring signs.

Aoth couldn’t tell what spell the leader of the Eminence of Araunt was casting, but he expected he and Jet needed to dodge it and the griffon would require every iota of his speed and agility to do so. Unfortunately, intent on the struggling foe in his claws, Jet hadn’t even noticed the threat.

Drop him!Aoth ordered. And see what I’m seeing!

Jet did both things at once; Aoth’s sense of communion pulsed stronger as, for an instant, his steed looked through his eyes. Then Jet swung himself through a tight evasive maneuver that, in the absence of a saddle and safety straps, nearly tossed his rider off his back.

Magic banged through the air so loudly, it was as if the world itself were shattering, and Aoth’s ears throbbed. Still, Jet had avoided the actual stream of focused, murderous sound. The attack struck one of the weirs and rattled it, snapping loose a number of the spreading limbs. One just missed Aoth and Jet as it plummeted to the ground.

Still turning, the griffon sought to get behind the bone naga. Aoth extended his spear, spoke a word of command, and released one of the spells stored in the weapon. A ray of sunlight leaped from the point.

Unfortunately, the top of his dragonlike tail twisting to rotate the human-skeleton apex of his body, Lod refused to allow his opponents to strike him from behind, and at the same instant the light stabbed forth, he clenched his bony fist. The unnatural gloom thickened around the beam and all but smothered it. The dim remnant that splashed across the naga’s ribs made them shiver and smoke but nothing more.

All right, Aoth thought, the undead naga had evidently warded himself against daylight, and he’d promised not to hurl fire. But maybe a thunderbolt would do the trick. He rattled off buzzing, crackling words and used his spear point to scratch a glowing zigzag on the air.

Striding between two of the several lumpish, faceless men of dirt and stone that the earth had spawned for her further protection, Jhesrhi spotted Nyevarra among the mass of undead and dark fey. A fair-minded universe would at least have kept the vampire durthan busy tending the darkness that increasingly eroded the resolve and vitality of mortal men and bright fey alike. But evidently Nyevarra had finished altering the curse she’d laid on the forest and was thus free to rejoin the battle.

Specifically, raising the Stag King’s stolen weapon high, she appeared to be casting maledictions in Cera’s direction, and the peril to her friend made the urge to hurl fire roar through Jhesrhi’s mind and sent heat surging through her veins.

But instead of succumbing to the impulse, she spoke once more to the earth, the other element to which she was currently most attuned. Brown hands erupted from the snow under Nyevarra’s feet, gripped her calves, and jerked her downward.

The surprise attack disrupted the durthan’s casting, and as the earth spirit sought to drag her under, Jhesrhi urged her motley squad of warriors forward. Perhaps they could reach Nyevarra before she struggled free.

Alas, no. Too many undead and dark fey were in the way, and Nyevarra retained the presence of mind to exploit her vampiric abilities. She dissolved into mist, flowed upward, and took on human form again above the earth elemental’s reach.

Her whipping hair and robes revealed that a wind was holding her aloft. Other such entities screamed at Jhesrhi and her companions, battering and chilling them and slinging snow in their eyes. Men cried out and stumbled backward.

For a moment, the only thought Jhesrhi was able to think was that fire countered cold. Then she thrust the notion away and conjured a floating luminous shield to deflect the brunt of the blast.

Next, she sought to grow the arms and clutching hands she’d already drawn from the soil into a complete manlike figure like the ones she’d summoned previously. But Nyevarra conjured a whirlwind that ripped the new creature apart, half-formed.

Air wasn’t intrinsically stronger than earth, and Nyevarra wasn’t inherently a more powerful mage than Jhesrhi. In fact, in their previous combat, Jhesrhi had decided she was the stronger. But apparently not when malignant darkness was grinding at her and her adversary bore the Stag King’s scepter. Not when she’d forsworn the use of fire.

So burn Nyevarra! Burn Lod! Burn everything! Where was the good if the “soul” of the forest survived but as a corrupted precinct of the Shadowfell and Rashemen fell to the undead?

But if Jhesrhi resorted to that tactic, it would be like surrendering. Like admitting that all of Aoth’s training and all her hard-won sellsword experience had been for naught because there was nothing left of her but the raw strength and mindless greed of fire. And she recoiled from that possibility in disgust.

Because the soil-and-stone warriors she’d evoked previously were making little headway against the localized gale and were too short of stature to reach Nyevarra anyway, Jhesrhi bade them crack and crumble, and then commanded the resulting debris to throw itself at the vampire. None of the missiles reached its target. Living earth and rock forfeited a portion of their strength as soon as they lost contact with the ground, and the durthan’s allied winds tumbled each attack off course.

But as the futile barrage ran its course, Jhesrhi whispered a spell.

A final stone veered in flight and thumped down in the snow. The vampire in her mask of blackened silver swung the Stag King’s staff, and as the weapon swept through its arc, shadowy disembodied racks of antlers burst from it and hurtled at Jhesrhi.

She dodged and rattled off a counterspell at the same time. The antlers shredded away to nothing. But by the time they did, Nyevarra, still riding the wind, was plunging down at her. No doubt to uncover her mouth, she’d removed her mask, and her snarl revealed extended fangs. The blood thirst was on her.

But even the frenzied urge to slake it didn’t keep her from faltering in shock when something tore the antler-axe from her hands.

Nyevarra had summoned several winds to attend her, but that hadn’t prevented Jhesrhi from calling one of her own. It had simply kept the durthan from sensing the newcomer when several other such invisible presences were already moaning and gusting around.

As instructed, Jhesrhi’s ally had hovered and waited for an opportune moment to snatch the talisman. Now it was sweeping the staff away over the heads of the combatants on the ground, taking it where she hoped it would do the most good.

Jhesrhi spoke a word of power and lunged to meet the descending Nyevarra in the moment of her consternation. Charged with force, the head of her staff stabbed into the vampire’s chest like a stake. Jhesrhi recited a rhyme to send a bit of her own vitality streaming down her weapon and poison the impaled creature with the essence of natural life.

But as she spoke the final syllable, she realized she was reciting the wrong spell. It was flame that leaped from the core of her, surged down the length of the staff, and burned Nyevarra from the inside out.

As Jhesrhi looked down at the blackened, smoking husk crumpled in the snow, panting all the while, she told herself the lapse didn’t matter. She had, after all, fought in the way she’d intended. She’d only used fire to finish off an opponent she’d already beaten, and then in a way that couldn’t possibly start the forest fire the hathrans feared.

But it didmatter. For a moment, at least, and despite her resolve, fire had wielded her and not the other way around. A tear slid from her eye, and when she furiously wiped it away, she saw it was burning like ignited oil.

An Old One wielded a shimmering wand and a fey warrior with gnarled bark for skin and moss for hair were fighting ghouls just a few paces to the left. Still, for Cera, the frenzied, roaring mundane part of the battle seemed vague and far away. She was chiefly aware of warmth that seemed to flower in the core of her and shine down on her from above at the same time and of the poisonous darkness with which it contended.

She couldn’t afford to let her focus stray anywhere else. Because so far, her prayers and words of anathema showed no signs of lifting the unnatural gloom. In fact, the murk was still thickening.

Perhaps she’d been foolish to imagine she could dissolve it. The durthans had been weaving their enchantments for tendays, and the Urlingwood was a place of power for them even if the hathrans had previously cast them out.

Scowling, she strained to shove doubt out of her mind. If she only remained steadfast, her god would find a way to help her.

She took a long, centering breath and recited another spell of exorcism that proved as ineffective as the last. Then, however, Yhelbruna strode out of the murk with the Stag King’s antler-axe in her hand.

“I discern that this,” said the hathran, hefting the fey weapon, “was used to bring Shadow. If so, it can help banish it as well. Continue your rites, sun priestess, and I’ll support them with my own magic.”

Cera resumed her prayers, and Yhelbruna chanted and brandished the staff as if she were clubbing and raking an invisible foe. Despite their disparate mystical traditions, they were soon declaiming in counterpoint, reinforcing one another’s incantations in the manner of accomplished spellcasters.

Gradually, the twinges of anxiety and incipient aches, the malaise trying to worm its way into Cera’s mind and body, faded away. Then the physical gloom began to lighten.

At those moments when Vandar was within striking distance of a foe, he didn’t think. Rage singing inside him, guided by instinct, he attacked relentlessly and ducked and dodged as necessary.

When he was between fights, however, his anger subsided just enough to allow flickers of reflection. Now was such a moment, and it occurred to him that the undead must still include Nar demonbinders among their number, for the thing several paces in front of him looked more alien and unnatural than even the most grotesque dark fey. A headless, asymmetrical tangle of huge bony claws and projecting spikes, it walked on four crooked, mismatched legs and bore a cluster of little round eyes in the middle of its body.

At present, the demon was smashing an iron construct in the shape of a small wyvern to pieces. Vandar rushed it, hoping to catch it by surprise, but it pivoted and lifted its giant claws to threaten him. He kept charging.