Somewhere behind him, Shaugar echoed his command. Steel wolves and big bronze cats sprang forward.
Meanwhile, Vandar scrutinized the landscape beyond the immediate threat. Nasty as they were, a few briar fey had no hope of defeating a force as sizable as his. Maybe a durthan’s orders or an overwhelming hatred of mankind had prompted them to attack even so, but he feared the purpose was to keep him and his comrades occupied while a different creature carried a warning to the main body of the enemy.
After a moment, he spotted the sentry, a dark, spindly thing springing from tree to tree. Ignoring the scarlet blade’s throb of protest, he dropped the sword in the snow and sought to rip his javelin from the dead fey’s twisted hold. Stickers pricked him as the weapon pulled free, but he didn’t pay any heed to that either.
By the time he cocked the javelin over his shoulder, the sentry was all but out of range and on the very brink of vanishing into tangled branches and dimness. But he used the imminence of its escape to make his berserker wrath blaze even hotter, and as he did, he threw.
The javelin caught the dark fey in mid-spring and stabbed into its torso. It fell to the ground, and for a breath or two, its long limbs twitched, while blood black as ink stained the snow beneath it. Then it rotted away to nothing, and only the instrument of its death and the filthy blotch remained.
Vandar looked around. As he’d hoped, once they engaged, the automatons had made short work of the remaining thorn fey. He let go of anger and shivered as lightheadedness and a pang of nausea took its place.
Then Yhelbruna touched his face, and the sickness disappeared.
“I don’t want you weak,” she said, “not even for a moment. From this point forward, every step will be more dangerous than the one before it.”
As Uramar and his patrol-an assortment of doomsepts, other phantoms, and ghouls-ranged the deeper reaches of the forest, many of his broken souls luxuriated in the gloom. For as every undead learned, darkness could be more than the absence of light. It could be pleasurable and invigorating, a condition in which death waxed strong and life guttered, and that was the sort of murk Lod, Nyevarra, and the other undead durthans were calling into the mundane world.
Those who truly understood the implications assured Uramar the gathering dark meant Rashemen was soon to fall, and naturally, he was glad. Yet the prouder and more bloodthirsty aspects of his complex identity also felt a little wistful. He’d been essential while he was creating and recruiting undead, fighting battles, and Lod was still on the other side of the western sea. But since leading the last little feint of a raid along the River Rasha and then returning to the Urlingwood via the deathways, he hadn’t had much to do.
He knew his idleness was only temporary. Once the Eminence of Araunt controlled its own country, other conquests would follow and require the efforts of every warrior. But in the meantime, he’d assuage his restlessness by patrolling, and never mind that, after his comrades’ efforts at subversion and misdirection, and with dark fey sentries standing watch farther out toward the edges of the wood, such vigilance was almost certainly superfluous.
Up ahead, something gleamed for a moment among a stand of oaks. He squinted and made out a steel centipede as long as four horses standing nose to tail, crawling at right angles to his path, which was to say, toward the weir trees where the rites of shadow were underway. Other figures were stalking along with it.
Uramar smiled. To say the least, he hadn’t liked abandoning the Fortress of the Half-Demon, but he’d found the Raumvirans’ unexpected departure from Beacon Cairn equally troubling. He’d feared they’d come to harm, do something to give away the Eminence’s plans, or even outright betray their undead kindred.
But evidently none of those things had come to pass. Because the centipede was a Raumathari automaton, and that meant Pevkalondra and her people had thought better of their fit of pique and come to rejoin their comrades.
Uramar drew breath to call out a greeting. Then one of his more cautious souls snapped, “Don’t! Be certain first!”
“Yes,” added another inner voice, one of the jocular, japing ones, “you might as well. You’re out here to play watchdog, aren’t you?”
Uramar raised his hand to signal his companions to halt, then stalked forward, taking momentary satisfaction in the silence of his approach. The necromancer who’d created him had assembled his massive, crooked body for strength, not agility and certainly not for stealth. But in the years since his liberation, he’d learned to compensate for his hugeness, deformities, and limp.
He peeked around a mossy tree trunk. His eyes widened, and a dozen inner voices clamored at once to explain the import of what he beheld.
They didn’t need to. He understood. The golems were indeed of Raumathari manufacture. He recalled seeing some of them in the vaults where their creators had kept them. But the folk marching along with the constructs weren’t Pevkalondra and her retainers. They were living berserkers, hathrans, and men in masks, along with the sun priestess who’d destroyed Falconer and the fire mage who’d contended with Nyevarra.
“How did they get past the fey?” asked one of Uramar’s souls.
But he didn’t have time to speculate or curse the durthans’ longtime allies for being less capable than they were supposed to be. He turned and crept back to the rest of the patrol.
“The folk up ahead are an enemy war band,” he whispered, “headed straight for the weir tress. Our troops outnumber them, but if the living take them by surprise, it could still be bad. Zashtyne.”
“Yes,” moaned a gray, wavering, all-but-faceless blur.
“Fly to Lod and warn him. The rest of us will delay the enemy and buy our comrades time to get ready to fight.”
Zashtyne hurtled away. The rest of the patrol awaited Uramar’s further commands. In their various fashions, they all looked resolute despite the long odds, and he felt a pang of pride in them. They embodied the truth of Lod’s teaching that the undead were higher, worthier beings than the mortal husks from which they rose.
Waving his hand, he bade them spread out so no blast of flame or rain of acid could target too many at once. Then he drew his greatsword from the scabbard on his back, charged, and his fellows exploded into a headlong dash along with him. They wouldn’t close the distance before the living noticed them coming, but with luck, they might get close.
His soul fragments shouted war cries or gave advice. One piece of the latter was to shroud himself in what was, for the living, crippling cold, and he willed the force to leap forth from inside him.
The patrol was twenty strides from the foe when the fire wizard spotted them and shouted an alarm, whereupon a bronze sphinx with brass joints and copper highlights pivoted and bounded at Uramar. He wondered if some knowledgeable foe was making sure he battled one of the constructs, for neither his aura of chill nor the life-drinking magic bound in his sword were likely to inconvenience it.
All right, then, he thought, I’ll do this the hard way.
The sphinx’s hinged jaw opened, and without breaking stride, it roared. The sound ripped through Uramar’s head, and a couple of his inner voices wailed. But most of the pieces of his mosaic self held fast against terror.
He faltered, though, just as if he were afraid, and waited for the sphinx to spring. When it obliged, he dodged to the side and cut at its neck.
Metal crashed as steel cracked bronze. The stroke fell well short of decapitating the automaton, though, and it spun around to face Uramar anew. At the same instant, golden light, painful like a bee sting, flashed at the corner of his vision. The sun priestess was channeling the power of her deity.