Unholy

CHAPTER ONE

Midwinter, The Year of the Dark Circle (1478 DR)

His boots crunching in the snow, Bareris walked the tangled backstreets of Eltabbar and sang a spell under his breath. Over time, the enchantment altered his appearance. Filthy rags mended themselves and turned to shining silk and velvet. His hand-and-a-half sword became a short, slender blade with a jeweled hilt and scabbard, and his brigandine vanished altogether. All the hair on his head disappeared as well, his eyes displayed discernible whites and irises once more, and his canine teeth lengthened into fangs. But it all happened slowly enough that no passerby, glancing casually in his direction, would notice the transformation.

Not that there was anyone to see, no one but Mirror flowing along as an invisible sensation of hollowness and wrongness at his side. Once, no matter how cold the weather, the streets would have teemed with folk celebrating the Midwinter Festival. These days, ordinary people took care to conclude their revelry, or the open-air portion of it, anyway, before the sun went down. They feared to encounter their masters when the latter were in a playful mood.

Bareris and Mirror emerged from a twisting lane too narrow to accommodate a wagon onto a broader, straighter thoroughfare. On the far side of an arching bridge spanning a frozen canal, their destination glowed with silvery phosphorescence. Sleighs, coaches, and litters waited in line to deposit their passengers under the porte cochere of a stone house with turrets at the four corners of the peaked slate roof. A luminous, runic emblem inlaid above the door, its shape and color in constant flux, revealed that at one time, the mansion had belonged to the extinct Order of Transmutation.

"I don't much like this," Mirror murmured. It was the first time he'd spoken in three days. Evidently he was coming out of his latest bout of ghostly disorientation or whatever it was, just in time to fret.

"My disguise will hold up," Bareris said. "You just remain as near to imperceptible as you can get."

"Even if they don't recognize us, there are plenty of other things that can go wrong."

"I don't care. This Muthoth bastard is one of Sylora Salm's chief deputies. There's a fair chance she'll put in an appearance. And even if she doesn't, there'll be other people to kill." He strode toward the bridge and felt Mirror glide along in his wake.

As Bareris spoke to one of the slaves minding the entryway, he infused his voice with magic. The enchantment persuaded the lackey that he saw an invitation in the newcomer's empty hand, and he and a fellow servant swung open the tall, arched double doors.

On the other side was a high-ceilinged marble foyer with several doorways opening off it. Bareris assumed that newly arrived guests were supposed to pass through the one directly opposite the entrance, where an usher waited to thump his staff on the floor and announce them.

But, disguised though he was, Bareris didn't want all eyes drawn to him or to have his false name and fraudulent title shouted aloud to give every listener the opportunity to reflect that he'd never heard of such a person. He led Mirror into one of the other doorways. If this structure was like other Thayan mansions of his experience, a series of interconnecting rooms and passages should provide a less conspicuous means of access to Muthoth's great hall.

Some of the lesser chambers were occupied. In one, a withered husk of a creature robed in red, still the color reserved for the realm's most powerful wizards, sat talking with another malodorous corpse wearing the silver skull-and-crossed-swords badge of an order of undead knights. In another, the hulking, red-eyed undead called boneclaws, Muthoth's household guards of choice, gripped naked prisoners in their enormous, jointed talons. Several guests hovered around the captives, shouting in their ears, pinching them, or jabbing at their eyes with stiffened fingers. Bareris gathered that the object of the game was to make a victim flinch and gash himself against a boneclaws razor-sharp fingers, and that this was a sport on which the players had decided to gamble.

One captive had already severed an artery, and his lifeless body sprawled discarded on the floor. The remaining ones wept and pleaded, with blood trickling down their torsos and legs. A lithe female vampire knelt, licked gore off a taut, quivering stomach, and won a silver coin thereby.

Bareris could feel Mirror's wrath building as if the air at his side were growing colder and colder. "No," he whispered. "We didn't come here to rescue anyone."

"Perhaps we should have."

"But we didn't, and without a plan, we'd surely fail. Look, we've both been spared all these years for a reason; isn't that what you keep telling me? So we can't throw ourselves away. We have to pick our battles and fight intelligently."

"Move on, then. I don't promise to hold back if I watch any more of this."

Another two dozen paces brought them to a doorway opening on the great hall. An orchestra on a dais along the far wall played a pavane, and Bareris felt the old familiar urge, still alive in him when so much else had withered, to immerse himself in the music. He shook it off and surveyed the company instead.

He spotted a reasonable number of living revelers, mostly clad in red, proof that even after a century, Szass Tam hadn't completely transfigured the aristocracy. But the majority of celebrants were undead, shadowy specters, vampires with alabaster skin and chatoyant eyes, crumbling corpses, fleshless skeletons, and things so misshapen and grotesque they bewildered the eye, perhaps experiments created in the laboratories of the necromancers but granted positions of authority even so.

Good host that he evidently was, Muthoth had provided refreshments for all his guests. Some of the trestle tables proffered food and drink fit for mortals, but prisoners lay chained spread-eagled across others for the undead to devour.

A specter slid his fingers into a boy's face. The child screamed loud enough to drown out the orchestra as he grew old and died in a matter of moments. An undead ogre, its rotting body armored or perhaps simply held together by a framework of black iron rings and bands, ripped off a woman's head, then reached up inside her neck to claw out meat and stuff it in his mouth. More thralls waited caged in the corner to replenish the buffet.

Bareris procured a goblet of blood and pretended to sip from it as he sauntered around, eavesdropping, hoping to hear something tonight that would enable him to strike a blow against Szass Tam's government tomorrow. He might as well. It wasn't time to start murdering people yet. That would come later, when the revel grew wilder, and excitement and overindulgence left the attendees vulnerable. When more of them wandered from the great hall to other portions of the mansion to pursue intimate pleasures in private, purge themselves, or pass out.

The usher at the primary doorway knocked the butt of his staff on the floor. "Sylora Salm, tharchion of Eltabbar!" Bareris turned and bowed like all the other gentlemen, then lifted his eyes to inspect this foe he'd never seen before.

His first thought was that she was very like Dmitra Flass, who'd held the same office one hundred years before, a perfect example of a great Thayan lady. She was tall and slender, without a trace of hair on her head, and wore a shimmering scarlet gown that was a triumph of the dressmaker's art. Her ivory complexion was flawless, her smile deceptively warm, and a quick intelligence shined in her bright green eyes.

Perhaps she reflected Szass Tam's ideal of womanhood. Maybe the lich was genuinely fond of her, as supposedly had been the case with Dmitra. Bareris hoped so. He wanted to believe Szass Tam might actually feel at least a little bereft when she died.

And it should be possible to kill her, her sorcery and bodyguards notwithstanding. The gossips said she possessed a lickerish nature and enjoyed the attentions of vampires. He was disguised as such a creature and could exploit his bardic skills to seduce and beguile. When the opportunity presented itself, he'd lure her away to some private spot, then strike her down before she realized anything was amiss.

Or so he thought until Muthoth hurried out of the crowd to greet the new arrival.

His skinny frame robed in crimson. Sylora's lieutenant had clearly become a vampire at some point during the past century, but it didn't matter. Bareris still recognized the sharp, arrogant features, a face made to sneer and spit, and even if he hadn't, there was no mistaking the maimed right hand with its missing fingers.

"Stop staring!" Mirror whispered.

The phantom was right. Bareris mustn't make himself conspicuous. With an effort, he turned away.

"What's wrong?" asked Mirror, barely visible as little more than a man-sized column of blur and ache.

"I told you," Bareris said, "about the necromancers who took Tammith to Xingax. How I caught up with them on the trail, but they wouldn't give her back to me."

"Yes."

"Well, this Muthoth is one of them. I never knew his name or that he was still around. But now that I do, he's going to pay."

"Killing Sylora Salm would better serve the cause."

"To the Abyss with 'the cause.' Muthoth is our target, and he alone."

Tammith Iltazyarra had been Bareris's first and only love. And if Muthoth and his pudgy, timid partner had just taken the princely bribe he'd offered and set her free, everything would have been different. Xingax never would have transformed her into a vampire, and Tsagoth wouldn't have destroyed her. She and Bareris would have shared a long, joyful mortal life together.

Bitter though it was, he'd resigned himself that he almost certainly would never slay Szass Tam, the overlord who controlled all his lesser enemies and was the ultimate source of all his sorrows. Despite decades of scheming, he'd never even managed to kill Tsagoth. But by every melody ever sung, every note ever played, he could take revenge on Muthoth, and he would.

But it wouldn't prove to be easy. As the revelers danced to song after song, and one by one, the prisoners shrieked, thrashed, and died, Muthoth remained at the heart of the festivities. He seemed to be enjoying the celebration too much, or to be too concerned with the obligations of hospitality, for even the persuasions of a bard to draw him away.

Finally the slaves stopped setting out fresh food, living or otherwise, and the weary musicians switched to tunes less suitable for dancing. Taking the hint, or simply sensing the imminence of sunrise, the guests began to depart.

"What now?" Mirror asked.

"We hide," Bareris answered.

They stalked back into the lesser rooms. Shredded corpses, the occasional dismembered limb, and pools and spatters of blood now defaced the gorgeous carpets and handsome furnishings, and in some spaces, slaves had already made a start at trying to clean up the mess.

But the cozy room in which the undead sorcerer and knight had sat and chatted was empty. Mirror faded until he was entirely invisible once more. Bareris sang a spell under his breath to achieve the same effect.

Then they waited for the rest of the revelers to leave and the house to settle down. Occasionally slaves trudged or boneclaws prowled past them, but without so much as a suspicious glance in their direction. Finally Bareris said, "It's time to move."

"Where?" Mirror asked.

"Whatever Muthoth sleeps in, it's a reasonable guess that he keeps it in a bedchamber upstairs."

Still invisible, they made their way to a marble staircase. As they climbed, Bareris felt feverish with eagerness.

At the top of the steps, archways led in three directions. From what he could see, it appeared to Bareris that Muthoth had furnished the rooms directly opposite the stairs with grander, more ostentatious pieces than those visible to the right and left. Which suggested that those chambers comprised his personal suite.

The intruders headed into the more luxurious area and soon entered a large, square room. Bareris just had time to notice that it was strangely empty compared to the two they'd just traversed when the air flared fiery yellow. His head throbbed, reacting to the sudden release of arcane energy.

Looking like a reflection of himself cast in cloudy, rippling water, Mirror popped into view. Bareris looked down at his hands and saw that he was visible, too, and that the charm that had given him the appearance of a vampiric nobleman had dissolved.

Concealed doors flew open. Four boneclaws sprang from the closets in which they'd waited with the mindless patience of lesser undead for someone to come along and trigger this particular trap.

Bareris supposed he'd stepped on a rigged floorboard, an unseen rune, or something similar. He tried to tell Mirror to engage the two boneclaws on the right, but found he had no voice. The blaze of magic he'd unwittingly evoked had both deprived him of his invisibility and shrouded the room in an enchantment of silence.

As a defense, it made sense. Red Wizards had reason to fear rivals in their own hierarchy as much or more than any other foe, and quiet deprived a mage of the greater part of his magic.

As it divested a bard of every last bit of his. Bareris would have to rely on his sword.

Mirror, however, had other options. He raised his blade above his head, and it gave off a golden glow like sunlight. He'd summoned the divine light that was anathema to undead, anathema in theory even to Bareris and himself, but somehow he managed to wield it without annihilating himself or hurting his comrade.

One of the boneclaws on the right cringed, unable to continue its advance. The others kept charging forward. It was about as good a result as Mirror could expect, given that he was trying to evoke the sacred on the home ground of a vampiric necromancer.

Bareris lunged at the two boneclaws on the left. They snatched for him, and their already enormous talons shot out, stretching instantaneously to more than twice their normal length. They likely would have speared a less canny opponent, but he'd seen the trick before. He dived underneath the attack, plunged on between the two crimson-eyed creatures, whirled, and hacked at the back of a knee.

The boneclaw he'd cut pitched forward, but the other, startlingly quick for something so large, was already whirling around. It raked with both hands, talons elongating into blades like scythes, filling the space between itself and its foe.

Bareris leaped backward. It was the only way to avoid being sliced and impaled. He sensed the wall behind him and realized he wouldn't be able to retreat again.

The boneclaw scrambled after him, and he instantly sprang to meet it. The move surprised it, threw off its aim, and when it slashed downward, the attack arrived harmlessly behind him. He cut into its midsection and tore away chunks of wormy, desiccated muscle and gut.

The boneclaw toppled. Glimpsing motion from the corner of his eye, Bareris spun. The creature he'd merely crippled had come crawling after him. Its talons shot out at him, and he wrenched himself out of the way. Then Mirror, who currently resembled an undersized boneclaw himself, rushed in on the creature's flank and sheared into its neck. Its body jerked into rigidity, then collapsed.

Bareris glanced around, making certain the ghost had destroyed the other two boneclaws before coming to his aid. He had, but new foes appeared in the doorway leading deeper into the apartments: another pair of boneclaws and Muthoth himself, clad in a nightshirt but with a jet black staff clasped in his intact hand and several amulets dangling around his neck. Apparently Bareris had also activated an alarm that roused the vampire from his rest.

The fresh boneclaws advanced. Muthoth stayed behind them in the doorway and surveyed the situation. Then he swirled his maimed hand through a serpentine mystic pass, and the unnatural silence ended. Bareris could hear the slap of the boneclaws' feet on the floor, and the minute creak of their leathery sinews.

He realized Muthoth had scrutinized him, observed that he looked like a warrior, not a mage, and drawn the erroneous conclusion that he couldn't work magic. The necromancer thought to dispel the unnatural quiet and so regain the use of his own spells.

If he didn't realize Bareris was a bard, that meant he didn't know him at all, didn't even recognize the man whose life he'd devastated. For some reason, the thought was maddening.

Muthoth chanted, and a carrion stench filled the air. Bareris stepped back, leaving Mirror to engage both boneclaws, and quickly sang his own charm of silence, each descending note softer than the one before. Muthoth's voice cut off abruptly, leaving his incantation unfinished and the spell wasted. The lustrous eyes in his pale face widened in surprise.

Bareris ran forward, trying to maneuver around the boneclaw on his left. Despite Mirror's efforts to hold its attention, it pivoted and slashed at him, and though he dodged, one of its talons sheared through his ribs. The stroke would have killed a living man, but he was undead and enraged and scarcely broke stride.

Muthoth retreated before him, back into the next room. As he did so, he thrust out his staff, no doubt a repository of magic he could employ even in the absence of sound. Shadows leaped and whirled, and suddenly Bareris felt numb and confused, his hatred dulled and meaningless.

Muthoth was trying to control his mind. Bareris forced himself to take another racing stride and another after that, clinging to anger and purpose, and the dazed, bewildered feeling fell away.

The vampire pressed his mutilated hand to an iron amulet, and a gray, vaporous thing with a lunatic's twitching face hurtled out of it. Bareris sidestepped the spirit's frenzied, scrabbling attack and cut through the middle of it. It broke into floating, vile-smelling wisps.

He closed the distance to Muthoth. Cut to the head. The vampire dropped under the stroke as his body reshaped itself, flowing from human form into the guise of a huge, black wolf.

Muthoth sprang. His forepaws hit Bareris in the chest and knocked him onto his back. Eyes blazing, icy foam flying from his muzzle, the vampire lunged to seize his adversary's throat in his fangs.

Bareris just managed to interpose his forearm, and Muthoth's jaws clamped shut on it instead. The lupine teeth cut deep, and Muthoth jerked his head back and forth. Bareris felt the jolting agony as the limb started to tear apart.

His sword was too long to use in such close quarters. He let go of it, drew up his leg, and groped for the secondary weapon he kept tucked in his boot. He drew forth the hawthorn stake and drove it into Muthoth's body.

The vampire flopped down on top of him and lay motionless. Evidently Bareris had pierced the heart.

He rolled Muthoth off him and clambered to his feet. He felt the hot itch as his wounds began to heal. Peering back the way he'd come, he saw that Mirror had already destroyed one boneclaw and, by the looks of it, was about to dispatch the other.

Bareris stooped, gripped Muthoth by the throat, and dragged him farther into the suite, until they passed beyond the magical silence. By that time, the vampire had reverted to human shape, give or take pointed ears positioned too high on his head and a few patches of fur.

Bareris knelt down, positioning his face in front of Muthoth's unblinking eyes. "Do you know me now?" he asked. "I'm Bareris Anskuld, the bard who overtook you on the way to Delhumide. And now I'm going to destroy you as you destroyed me."

He raised his sword and struck Muthoth's head off. Then he watched the two pieces of the necromancer's body rot and realized he didn't feel anything at all.

Mirror found Bareris standing over Muthoth's crumbling, stinking remains. "Well done," he said.

Bareris frowned. "We fought this battle in silence. With luck, no one else knows it happened. Maybe we have time to look around a little."

"And carry away something useful," Mirror said. "Let's do it."

Bareris hung Muthoth's amulets around his own neck and picked up his black, gleaming staff. Then they prowled farther into the vampire's apartments.

They soon came to a portrait of a Red Wizard whose cool, crafty eyes and thin-lipped, resolute mouth seemed a mismatch with a rather weak chin. And when they saw the same face depicted again in a painting above the fireplace in a library, Bareris said, "I know where we are."

"What do you mean?" Mirror asked.

"A hundred years ago, this was more than a chapterhouse of the Order of Transmutation, it was the residence of Druxus Rhym himself, or one of them, anyway. I never knew the man, but when I was a boy, I saw him once or twice, riding in a procession, and that's him."

Mirror, of course, had never known Druxus Rhym. He'd been a broken, essentially mindless thing wandering the Sunrise Mountains when Druxus had been alive. But he'd heard his comrades speak of the zulkir whom Szass Tam had assassinated at the very start of the lich's long campaign to become sole ruler of Thay.

"If these books belonged to an archmage," he said, "there may be some powerful grimoires here."

"Let's hope I have the wit to recognize them," Bareris said. "You stand watch while I flip through them." He pulled a volume from a shelf.

And several books later, he whispered, "By the silver harp!"