Black Wizards (59 page)

One of the elementals tumbled to the ground, but the second continued to smash at the ogres. Their leader down, their numbers shrinking rapidly, the ogres suddenly had had enough. As one mass, the company facing the companions turned and lumbered toward the imagined security of their own army. Tristan’s fighting fury diminished, and he leaned on his sword as he gasped for breath.

But then he noticed the commotion to his right. Finellen’s dwarves fought bravely—dozens of ogre dead littered the ground. But the dwarves were paying a heavy price, falling slowly back before the monstrous crush.

And then, to his left, he heard cries of pain and shrieks of horror—human shrieks. He saw that the sahuagin approached the crest and had met the thin line of defenders. He stabbed expertly, knocking a sahuagin spear aside and driving the tip into the monster’s chest. But as it fell backward, two more swarmed into its place.

More and more of the fish-men crept up the hill. And suddenly the line of Ffolk collapsed as the sahuagin broke through in a dozen places at once.

And the narrow path to the promontory—their only route of retreat—suddenly lay open before the rushing sahuagin.

White, fishy eyes stared emotionlessly from the hilltop. A hundred sahuagin had pushed through the thin file of defenders to gain the highest ground. They stood in a circle, facing outward, holding sharp tridents or captured spears in a bristling ring of weaponry. Pink, straight tongues flicked between their tooth-studded jaws—the only
sign of fear or excitement.

Others of the sahuagin pressed upward to gain the breach their first line had created. Men of Doncastle came from parts of the knoll to fill that line, however, and they stopped the second push. But still the ring of fish-men held the hilltop and could control the outcome of the battle by striking anywhere they chose.

“Fall back to the promontory!” called the prince, and the word flew down the line.

The men of Doncastle retreated before the dark dwarves, before the bloated, rotted undead. They held firm against the sahuagin, lest more fish-men break through and cut off their retreat onto the high peninsula.

“Finellen—let’s, break that ring!” urged the prince. The sahuagin stood astride their retreat path. The monsters would have to be pushed out of the way before the rebel force could cross the narrow neck of land leading to the promontory.

“Charge!” cried the dwarf, and her company—now less than a hundred—shouted a hoarse challenge. Their stumpy legs pounded the ground as, axes flailing, they rushed toward the fish-men.

But another challenge came from the prince’s left, and he saw Hugh O’Roarke leading a band of his men into the bristling defense. The bandit lord fought like a demon, roaring and crashing about with his broadsword. The sahuagin stabbed and hissed, thrusting at the human attackers, but then the dwarves crashed into the other side of the ring. The creatures fought to the last, but soon the hilltop was greasy with their red, fishy blood.

Tristan caught a glimpse of Pontswain in the middle of a mob of duergar. The lord’s blade was bloody, and though his eyes were wide with panic, he struck about him like a wildman, somehow keeping the dark dwarves at bay.

Now the men of Doncastle fell back across the neck of land. Here, where the promontory was barely fifty feet wide, sheer cliffs more than a hundred feet tall dropped to either side of the peninsula. Farther out, the promontory widened, but it was surrounded by high cliffs on all sides.

The rebels filed across the land bridge as the dwarves and small groups of men held the attackers at bay. Tristan stood with Finellen,
and Canthus snarled and fought between them. They fought back-to-back against the sahuagin that threatened at any moment to overwhelm them—but somehow, they held them at bay.

The prince’s arms had long grown numb, and blood poured across his skin from a number of wounds. He was soaked to the elbows in the gore of his enemies, and his movements had become automatic. Numbly, he lifted his still-gleaming blade and swung, lifted and swung.

O’Roarke and Daryth stood with their men on the other side of the knoll, holding back the dark dwarves and the sea’s dead. They, too, fought with automatic precision, adding body after body to the pile.

Finally the bulk of their force had crossed, and the men of the rearguard backed onto the neck of land. Tristan, Daryth, Finellen, and Hugh O’Roarke stood side by side in the center of the line. They fought a mixture of duergar, sahuagin, corpses, humans of the guard, and ogres.

A vicious, drooling ogre lunged at the prince, and fatigue numbed Tristan’s reactions. The monster’s huge, spiked club whistled toward his head, but then a wide broadsword cracked into the weapon, knocking it off its mark.

The ogre bellowed at Hugh O’Roarke, who had stepped forward to deflect the blow. Before he could recover, the lord staggered from the thrust of a sahuagin trident.

Tristan leaped forward and cleaved the ogre’s chest into a wide death-wound, seizing O’Roarke’s arm as the lord stumbled. But another fish-man stretched forward his horrible claws and pulled on Hugh’s arm. Tristan whirled to avoid a duergar battleaxe, and suddenly O’Roarke was gone.

He heard the lord’s bellow of challenge as a dozen sahuagin dragged him into their midst, and saw at least two of the fish-men fall dead from the outlaw’s dying blows.

And then he felt the earth reel beneath his feet, and the world began to come apart around him.

Cyndre sat upon the roof of the royal coach, watching the progress of the ogres and the sahuagin. He could not see the other brigade of the Scarlet Guard, nor the duergar, nor undead, but he felt confident the battle progressed according to plan.

His time would come soon, when all were occupied. He waited specifically for a sign of Alexei. Often in a battle such as this, the mage who revealed himself first was the mage who died first.

But Alexei was careful. Cyndre was not overly concerned by this—he knew his own power far exceeded that of his former lieutenant. Soon it would be time to move.

Below him, seated in the coach, the king drooled and gibbered senselessly. His mind was finally broken, and only with great difficulty had Cyndre concealed this fact from the men of the Scarlet Guard. After their victory, however, it would not matter.

Now, he decided. He would find Alexei and kill him. Then he would see that the battle was won in a suitable fashion.

Cyndre gestured quickly, and in the space of a blink he disappeared.

Alexei idly watched the struggles raging around him. He stood upon the highest rise on the promontory, separated from the main battle by the thin peninsula. From here, he sought signs of visible magic or any other clue as to Cyndre’s whereabouts. Safe from the din of the battle and tense with the thrill of his impending vengeance, Alexei dwelled upon images of his former master writhing under the torturous impact of his spells. When would Cyndre appear? For the hundredth time, his eyes searched the battlefield, looking for an explosion of flame or rolling cloud of gas that would give his former master away. Nervousness seized him. Now that the hour of his vengeance was almost at hand, he feared he lacked the power to challenge the mighty sorcerer. He thought briefly about teleporting to someplace far away—but then he remembered his days of torment, his hands crushed and his spirit broken, in the cell. And he vowed to claim his vengeance no matter what.

Suddenly he felt that same menacing presence that had awakened him—and this time it was very close. He knew that his former master was about to act. But where?

Alexei whirled, in time to see Cyndre materialize a scant twenty feet away. The master of the council drew back his hood enough for Alexei to see those pale blue eyes, icy as death. Alexei unconsciously stumbled backward. Face to face with Cyndre, he suddenly felt grave doubts as to his own powers. Desperately, he groped for a spell, an act, with which he might stave off his doom.

“Stupakh!” sneered Cyndre, and in that one word Alexei saw disaster.

A stunning shockwave of magic slammed into him, knocking the wind from his lungs and smashing him to the ground. He lay, flat on his back, unable to move a muscle—but his eyes and ears functioned perfectly, and he could do nothing but stare at Cyndre’s slow approach.

Alexei understood what had happened. His mentor had used one of the words of power—a word that stunned do listener into paralysis. Completely helpless, he wondered why Cyndre had not used the power word that would have killed him on the spot. But the black wizard answered his unspoken question as he stopped above Alexei’s motionless body, looking down to gloat.

“Well, my pupil, I see you have studied your lessons well.” Cyndre absently prodded Alexei’s side with a soft-toed boot. “You have caused me much trouble in the past days—and you have slain people who were close to me, who counted upon my protection.

“For this you will inevitably die. But your death, in itself, will not atone for these crimes. It is fitting that you should first witness the elimination of the rebel army—these pathetic fools whom you sought to aid against
me!
Then, you will be taken, alive, to Callidyrr. Only when the altar of Bhaal is ready to receive you will the lifeblood be drawn ever so slowly from your heart.

“Until that time, you will be secured—this time, with no hope of escape.” Cyndre smiled coolly. Alexei could look into his eyes from his position on the ground, but he could do little else.

The black wizard began to cast a spell of doom. Each word struck Alexei like a physical attack. It was made more horrible by the fact that he recognized the spell—he knew what would happen.

When Cyndre uttered the last word to the spell, his soul would be torn brutally from his body, condemned to an imprisonment of infinite suffering, until the sorcerer decided to release him by granting
him his death.

Robyn held tightly to the runestick. She had used three of its elements—wind, fire, and earth—the three she understood. The fourth, water, remained, but the young druid did not know what would happen when she called upon it, and so she held the stick as a talisman and little else.

Unafraid but practical, she stayed back from the melee with the ogres—her club would be little threat to the brutes, while one solid hit from an ogre could kill her.

She held Fiona’s arm to prevent the lass from charging into the melee. “That sword will only make an ogre mad,” she pointed out. She was surprised when Fiona listened to her and paused in her headlong charge.

“If you want to fight,” suggested Robyn, “take that blade and stand with those who will meet the sahuagin—we are thin there, and could use you.”

“I will!” declared the red-haired girl, eager to accept the assignment. She climbed up the broken hillside to join the men who were now lighting brands and torches in anticipation of the fish-men’s onslaught.

Robyn stepped carefully backward across the churned ground, moving up the slope. A panorama slowly appeared. Right before her eyes, the Prince of Corwell wielded his sword in a glittering pattern of swirling steel. He danced this way and ducked back, all the while turning to keep the enemy from his back. And one after another, mighty ogres fell, slain by a single lightning thrust.