Richard Lee Byers - Unholy

Thanks to Susan Morris and Phil Athans
for all their help and support.

THE HAUNTED LANDS

Book I
Unclean

Book II
Undead

Book III
Unholy

Anthology
Realms of the Dead
January 2010

Also by Richard Lee Byers

R.A. Salvatores War of the Spider Queen
Book I
Dissolution

The Year of Rogue Dragons

Book I
The Rage

Book II
The Rite

Book III
The Ruin

Sembia: Gateway to the Realms

The Halls of Stormweather
Shattered Mask

The Priests

Queen of the Depths

The Rogues

The Black Bouquet

H is 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 dont much like this, Mirror murmured. It was the first time hed 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 dont recognize us, there are plenty of other things that can go wrong.

I dont care. This Muthoth bastard is one of Sylora Salms chief deputies. Theres a fair chance shell put in an appearance. And even if she doesnt, therell 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 newcomers 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 didnt 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 hed 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 Muthoths 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 realms 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, Muthoths 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 Mirrors wrath building as if the air at his side were growing colder and colder. No, he whispered. We didnt come here to rescue anyone.

Perhaps we should have.

But we didnt, and without a plan, wed surely fail. Look, weve both been spared all these years for a reason; isnt that what you keep telling me? So we cant throw ourselves away. We have to pick our battles and fight intelligently.