But even as the interloper lifted his hands, the Charnel King saw Havarren rising, bolts of cobalt-blue lightning arcing between his fingers, preparing to strike duMark down. The Dark Lord's rictus grin widened, and he felt the eldritch forces around him surge and dance, as though they, too, celebrated what was to come.
Morthûl's triumph, his euphoria, were short-lived indeed. At the sight of the half-elf's sudden smile, he felt his own expression falter.
Ananias duMark released his spell. No great, earthshaking magic was this, no enigmatic ritual from days of yore. Thin streams of pure arcane force, crossbow bolts shaped of light and willpower, sprang from his palm. It was among the simplest of spells, a beginner's trick, easily mastered by the lowliest apprentice, anger given form. So simple, so weak, it was absolutely useless against the various sorceries and enchantments that protected the Charnel King's undead form.
But then, it wasn't aimed at the Charnel King. The bolts flew true: straight into the air above the combatants. The Dark Lord's scream of impotent fury was lost amid the deafening cacophony of the crumbling ceiling.
Slabs of stone toppled to the floor, pulping anything that dared get in their way. Clouds of dust billowed upward from the shattered cobblestones, a raging storm somehow smuggled into the underground chamber. Thunder rocked the Iron Keep's foundations, echoes blending into echoes until they filled the empty spaces entirely, a physical presence as real as the ponderous rock. The marble altar disintegrated into a fine powder, the magics imbued within it lost as though they had never been. The cauldron, jagged stones already bobbing within its putrid contents, disappeared beneath an enormous chunk of ceiling. The tiny portion of the iron vessel not crushed beyond all recognition was bent so hideously that it would never again hold liquid. The nauseating glow that had permeated the room since the incantation began now faded away, the final moments of a strange and alien sunset.
It seemed as though the torrent of rock might never end. Surely there could be no more stone above their heads! Surely they must have reached the surface by now, and beyond, and still it came. But slowly, ever so gradually, end it did. The stone fell in smaller pieces, in shorter bursts. The impenetrable dust began to disperse, though sight remained a hopeless prospect, as the room's only torches were long extinguished.
And then the last, straggling portions of the ceiling had fallen, the last of the grit settled. Silence reigned, but for the occasional drip of unseen water.
Until, finally, something stirred.
Like a dog shaking off a light summer shower, Ananias duMark rose to his feet, small chunks of rubble cascading off him—or rather, off of the faintly glowing aura that surrounded him and had prevented him from becoming a permanent resident. Casually brushing the dust from his sleeves, he examined the substantial mountain of debris. Even a creature as overwhelmingly powerful as Morthûl couldn't conceivably have survived that collapse—not without the same sort of protective spells that had saved duMark himself. And the half-elven mage was quite certain that the king's godlike powers had been fully invested in the ancient spell. No, odds were good that the terror of a hundred generations was smeared across a hundred square feet of cobblestone.
Then again, this was the Charnel King of Kirol Syrreth and master of the Iron Keep, and “odds” meant precious little. DuMark halted himself halfway through a simple light spell, allowing the inky dark to wash over him. Only then did he once more scour the heaps of stone, searching for the faintest trace of that telltale yellow glow.
“Ananias…Help…”
The half-elf cursed under his breath. He'd completely forgotten…
With a strength born of desperation and fueled by arcane arts, duMark tossed stone after stone across the room, digging toward the source of that plaintive cry. He'd never have gotten so far—never have survived his many clashes with King Morthûl—without his companions, but they could be so bloody inconvenient at times.
There! More stone, its jagged edges stained with blood. The sorcerer quickly cleared enough space to see the dark skin beneath the rubble.
“Kuren?” he whispered, scraping away more of the detritus. “Kuren, are you all right?”
“He can't hear you.” That same whispered voice, and now duMark could just make out a second form lying beneath the insensate warrior.
“Lidia?”
“Yes.” The voice, and the breath behind it, were weak, injured, but alive, thank the Gods! “He—he dragged himself over me as the ceiling began to come down. I—I think he's alive. That is, I can feel his heartbeat. But he's bleeding badly, Ananias. His mouth is full of blood, and…”
But the half-elf was only half listening. His hands now glowing with all the magics he had remaining, he ripped the last layers of stone from atop his companions. For just an instant, something snagged his attention, and his head jerked to the side.
But it was only a hand, protruding from between two gargantuan slabs of rock. A hand possessed of long, slender fingers.
The sorcerer, despite his friends’ condition, couldn't help but grin. Whether or not Morthûl himself was dead, there was at least one foe who wouldn't be causing duMark any more trouble. Momentarily satisfied with that, he turned back to his companions. “There's a great deal of damage, Lidia. Shattered bones, internal bleeding. Even this far from the epicenter, it's a miracle he survived this long. Any other human would be dead.”
Any other, but not Kuren Bekay. Even as a child, he had proven exceptionally strong for his size—a natural attribute duMark's own spells, some years gone by, had magnified tenfold. The man could rip trees up by the roots, and it would take more than a stone hailstorm to put him down.
Probably.
“Let's get him out of here,” duMark ordered, hefting the bulky soldier as though he were an armful of dirty laundry. A quick glance at Lidia, only now dragging herself to her feet, suggested far more eloquently than words could have done that Kuren was not the only one in need of aid.
DuMark met the woman's eyes with his own, refusing to look at the ruined mass that was the rest of her face. “Can you walk?”
“I can bloody well walk away from here,” she told him, a horribly liquid tone to her voice.
“Good.” The sorcerer glided across the broken, uneven footing. “Erris and Father Thomas are still upstairs, holding off the guards. We'll see if Thomas can provide a tincture for you, do something about the pain until he has the time to patch the two of you up properly.”
DuMark threw a single, lingering glance behind him. Nothing but tons of stone. Nothing stirred in the rubble. It was finally over.
“And then…we can go home.”
The door slammed shut behind them with a startling sense of finality, rather like the final page of a long and wearying book. And once again, the room was still.
The air shimmered as if observed through a sheen of rippling water. The very fabric of the room parted, and slowly, an inch at a time, Vigo Havarren returned to the chamber. At his sudden appearance, a faint illumination spread through the room, as though invisible torches shed their flickering light upon the walls.
The gaunt wizard was coated in dust and grime. Blood, or something that was almost blood, seeped from a dozen small wounds, and his jaw still hung crooked on his face. For a brief instant, Havarren simply stood, motionless, lost in concentration. A grating screech, a sudden crack, and his jaw popped roughly back into place. A single grunt was his only concession to the sharp pain that followed.
Gingerly prodding at his chin with the fingertips of his left hand, he knelt beside the right—which he'd deliberately left in the debris—and wished wistfully that it would prove as easy to fix as his jaw. Already, fleshy tendrils had sprouted from the stump where that hand once rested, but it would be weeks before the writhing mass again formed into anything resembling an actual limb.
Standing once more, Havarren scanned the room. A faint gleam of metal shone from the gaps in a small hill of stone, but he ignored it completely. The wizard neither k
new, nor cared, if Falchion had survived. No, his concern was for—
The center of the chamber erupted, showering the already-devastated room with a flurry of jagged rock. A volcanic wave of balefire coursed from the floor, the sorcerous flame melting the rubble into so much slag. Havarren only barely levitated himself above the hell-spawned flood before the all-consuming tide could eat his legs out from under him.
A roar emerged from beneath the carpet of liquefying rock, the mingling wails of a thousand damned souls. Bursts of smoke broke through the eldritch flood, filling the room with the choking stench of sulfur. The walls began to glow with unnatural heat, and the gaunt wizard found himself wondering if even the Iron Keep could survive what was happening to its foundations. Tendrils of balefire climbed those walls, slowly metamorphosing into the questing tentacles of something: something unknown, unseen in all the worst nightmares of mankind. Almost tenderly they brushed the sides of the chamber, the touch of a lover—or perhaps the first inquisitive prods of a prisoner seeking escape.
Arms spread, riding atop the final, cresting wave, he rose. He set his foot down atop the ruined floor, and the balefire parted beneath his tread. Eyes blazing to outshine the arcane flame below, the Charnel King of Kirol Syrreth ascended once more from the clutches of damnation.
But duMark's assault had left its mark. The withered flesh that covered the left side of his body and face was cracked and torn away, leaving gaping windows to bone and muscle beneath. His finery was no longer threadbare, no longer worn: It was nothing but a thin cobweb of dangling threads. Roaches, maggots, and things unidentifiable swarmed across his body, writhing in panic, seeking shelter from the chaos around them. Many fell from him in a great deluge to sink and die in the hellfire below, but an infinite number appeared to take their place.
Quaking under a surge of unaccustomed fear, Havarren could do nothing but watch as Morthûl walked, unhindered, through the wrath of hell, stopping only when the pair of them stood face-to-face.
Slowly, as though it required no small amount of effort, the Charnel King spoke.
“I,” he told his servant, his voice nearly too low to hear at all, “am very disappointed.”
Vigo Havarren didn't believe in many gods, and he tended to despise those that he did believe in. But now, for the first time in his extremely long life, he felt an uncontrollable urge to pray.
Ananias duMark, greatest sorcerer of the Allied Kingdoms, emitted a sigh of sheer bliss as he slowly sank into the down-stuffed mattress. His robe hung on a peg across the small bedchamber; his staff leaned precariously against the wall beside it.
For the past month, ever since his final encounter with his ancient foe, duMark had daily driven himself near the point of collapse. Only within this last week had his arcane abilities returned to what he considered acceptable levels. Only now, finally, could he rest. Exhausted beyond human understanding, the wizard was asleep before his gently pointed ears hit the pillow.
King Dororam, his snow-white beard matted by the pillow upon which it pressed, bolted upright in bed, his heart pounding. Convinced, at first, that he had escaped a truly horrific dream, he had just begun to lie back once more when the hideous, earsplitting scream—identical, his sleep-numbed brain finally realized, to the one that had awakened him—echoed through the halls of Castle Bellatine. And it was only then, as he came fully awake, that Dororam realized his wife, the elegant Queen Lameya, no longer lay beside him. That it was her despairing wail that came to him through the dark. A chill of fear waltzed with improper cheer down his spine, and the aging monarch leapt bodily from his bed, his hand already reaching for the latch set in the thick mahogany door….
Echoing the king of whom he dreamt, duMark jerked upright, face coated in sweat, throat aching from his lingering scream. Before the echoes of that shout had dwindled, the mage was striding across the room, hands reaching of their volition for robe and staff. Rarely, even in his hundreds of years of life, had duMark experienced a dream of such intensity, and even the most wet-behind-the-ears apprentice wizard would have recognized it for the dreadful premonition that it was. Even before the hem of the robe had fully settled around his feet, duMark was mouthing the incantation that would teleport him instantly to Castle Bellatine. But his thoughts were elsewhere, miles away from the spell that he knew by heart.
Gods help me. I should have made sure….
He arrived in the midst of unadulterated chaos. Every servant and resident of the castle dashed hither and yon, spurred on by the call of some urgent duty, none knowing what he or she should actually do. One harried steward, though startled by the sudden appearance of the half-elf in the hallway, recognized the wizard by sight. Without a word of explanation, he quickly led duMark upstairs.
Over a dozen guards milled about on the landing beside the royal chambers, but they all stepped aside quickly as duMark strode past.
Queen Lameya, tears streaking her cheeks, rocked bodily back and forth in a chair in the center of the room, a low wail of anguish sporadically punctuating her sobs. DuMark had always thought of her as an attractive woman, despite her age. Now, however, grief's ungentle fingers had sculpted her face into a grimace of pain and twisted her hair from a distinguished gray to brittle white.
“My daughter, duMark!” King Dororam, who had stood behind his wife, hands upon her shoulders, stormed across the room, his gaze boring into the mage's own. Although a decade older than his wife, Dororam had grown up a warrior and had allowed neither body nor mind to deteriorate. But tonight, his hair was tangled with sleep, his well-trimmed beard matted exactly as duMark had dreamed. And the aura of fury radiating from him was enough to make even the sorcerer retreat a step—almost enough to hide the sorrow behind it. “My own daughter!”
DuMark quickly regained his composure. “Your Majesty,” he intoned, bowing slightly. “Something has happened? I thought I sensed—”
“Happened? Happened?! Oh, gods!” And then he, too, allowed the tears to come, though the rage never once left his eyes.
Reluctantly, the captain of the guard—an older man, one who had served King Dororam for decades—stepped forward, his armor clanking and tabard swaying with each step. “My Lord duMark, Princess Amalia…” The old soldier swallowed once, audibly, and then rigidly suppressed his own grief, his own horror. “Princess Amalia has been murdered.”
DuMark felt his knees go weak beneath him. Had the wall not been near enough to support his slumping form, he would surely have collapsed to the floor. Why didn't I make sure…?
“What…?” His voice was little more than a whisper, barely even a breath. “What happened?”
“We're not certain, my lord. One of the serving maids thought she heard a scuffle, and when she went to investigate—”
“They butchered her, Ananias,” Dororam intoned, his hands seizing the front of the mage's robe. “Butchered my child like an animal! They didn't—they didn't even leave us a whole body to bury….”
Slowly, gently, duMark removed the king's fists from his robe. “Your Majesty—I am so sorry. If there were anything I could do…”
Dororam's head shot up, that haunted look once more replaced by that burning rage. “It was Morthûl, wasn't it?”
DuMark nodded slowly. “I think it must have been.”
The king's mouth twitched, his teeth clenched. “You told me he was dead, duMark.”
“I truly believed he was, Your Majesty. But there's no other answer. Had he died, Falchion or someone else might have taken over, but they'd be far too busy consolidating power to worry about retribution. No, my king. Only the Dark Lord himself could have done this. I’m sorry.”
Dororam stared for the space of several heartbeats. And then, without warning, he was striding across the room, his right hand clenched tightly about the hilt of the sword he had yanked from the captain's scabbard.
“Assemble the soldiers,” he shouted to the guards around. “Assemble them all, and dispatch messengers to the dukes. We ride on Kirol Syrr
eth at dawn!”
DuMark, following on the king's heels, shook his head in protest. “Your Majesty—”
“What?!” Dororam spun, blade held at the half-elf's throat. “You are partially to blame for this, duMark! Would you withhold justice from me as well?”
It took no small amount of effort for the sorcerer to keep his annoyance from showing on his face. Why are they all such fools?
Carefully modulating his voice, duMark said, “Your Majesty, I share your grief. Were it within my power, I would hand you the Iron Keep this very morn.” Carefully, he pushed aside the blade with the head of his staff. “But winter comes in a few weeks. In the peaks of the Brimstone Mountains, the snows are already falling. By the time they reached the borders of Kirol Syrreth, whatever remnants of your army had managed to avoid starving or freezing would find themselves stalled at the Serpent's Pass, unable to cross the Brimstone Mountains and easy targets for the Charnel King's troglodytes. What justice would that bring you, Your Majesty?”
It appeared, at first, as though Dororam were deaf to duMark's entreaty. But slowly, so slowly, the king's wrath dimmed just a little, and the arm that held the sword began to relax.
“What,” he asked, his voice tight, “do you suggest?”
Internally, duMark sighed in relief. The others might have reacted poorly if he'd been forced to enchant the man. “Only that you wait. Delay your vengeance, my king. Shauntille is far from the only nation with reason to hate Morthûl. Use the opportunity that winter brings to send messengers to the others. Assemble the armies of all the Allied Kingdoms. With such a force at your side, even the gathered hordes of Kirol Syrreth cannot stand against you. And I personally shall ride by your side, to ensure that this time, the foul abomination stays dead!”