Mordan grabbed Tarrel’s arm, and the two of them followed Haldin. A zombie tried to claw the gnome down from behind but fell to the young Karrn’s rapier. As the two guards carved a path for their master, his former prisoners guarded his back.
At Haldin’s signal, they stopped in the midst of the battle. Slinging his crossbow on his shoulder, the gnome raised something high over his head—the blue dragon statuette from his desk, Mordan noticed—and howled something in an arcane tongue. The Karrn winced as a bright blue-white light appeared above the carving, hovering there for an instant before shooting outward in all directions. An expanding ring of light shot over the combatants, and wherever it touched the undead, they fell like wheat before a scythe.
The defenders paused and lowered their weapons, half-unable to believe what had happened. Beyond the reach of the light, more zombies were lurching forward; there were scant seconds before the onslaught would be renewed.
“Form a line!” Mordan found himself with his rapier held high, shouting orders as he had done as an officer in the Company of the Skull. In the absence of anyone else taking charge, the defenders obeyed, drawing themselves into a rough order of battle and preparing to receive the next wave of attackers. Facing the barracks from which the zombies were coming, they did not see the fort’s main gate opening.
Standing invisible on the parapet above the gates, Marbulin Dravuliel also winced as he saw the sacred light sweep the zombies to the ground. He couldn’t see the source of it, but he knew that someone in the midst of the battle had powers that he hadn’t counted on. It was time for the next stage of the plan.
As he had anticipated, the defenders were focused on the zombie barracks, and had their backs to him. His sharp eyes watched the invisible zombie’s footprints as they slowly made their way to the gates, and they went out of sight below him he heard the creak of the gates opening. He held a hand up and pronounced an ancient syllable: four globes of light streaked upward and hung dancing in the air more than two hundred feet above the fort. They would be visible for miles.
With the signal given, the necromancer turned his attention back to the fort’s interior. The tide of the battle was turning in the defenders’ favor; broken bodies littered the ground, and they were gradually pushing the remaining zombies back toward the barracks complex. A movement at the edge of the melee caught his eye, and he was pleasantly surprised to see a tall vampire woman crushing the skull of a zombie in her bare hands. Her long red hair, and the patched uniform beneath her cloak, told him that Rolund had failed in his mission.
“Never mind,” he murmured to himself with a smile. “It’s fitting that I should clear up this loose end … personally.” Moving smoothly along the parapet, he pulled a small cloth pouch from a pocket in his robe, opening the neck and scattering a glittering dust into the air as he chanted.
Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, Brey was worried. As a paladin of the Silver Flame she had certainly never shied away from battle; she had even felt satisfaction in the destruction of Thrane’s enemies. But this was different. For the first time, she had given free rein to the beast within her. She had summoned all the dark and violent impulses that she had spent so long resisting, and added her rage against her captivity and the thing she had become. She had hated the undead even before her captivity, but now her hatred was unquenchable.
She lunged, spun, tore, and ripped, scattering zombies before her like a whirlwind. The rhythm of combat became almost a meditation. One part of her being gloried in the destruction, drunk on the rage and violence. Another wondered if she would be able to regain control of herself once this was over. Deeper still, a third voice—one which sounded eerily like old Provost Jeffin, her confessor and personal mentor in the Order—pondered the ethics of using the weapons of evil in the cause of good.
Something washed over her like a cold wind, chilling her even though she had lost the ability to feel cold. The zombies in front of her crumbled into dust, and she felt dizzy. Looking up, she could see no visible cause for what had happened; shaking herself to throw off the strange chill, she loped over to the barracks, where the defenders were forcing the zombies back.
