Darkwell - Douglas Niles [24]
For the second army was a force made up entirely of death. The shambling corpses, animated by the dark power of her faith, dumbly awaited a command.
Her command.
Ysalla was a cleric of Bhaal, in her own way as powerful as Hobarth. However, while the human Hobarth presided over a domain of air and land and light, Ysalla practiced her craft in the dark, chill regions below the surface of the sea.
As Keeper of the Eggs, she ruled her scaly congregation together with Sythissall, the king. Her priestesses – yellow, sleek creatures, as opposed to the sturdy green warriors that made up most of her kind – enforced the will of Bhaal as that will was made known to their mistress.
Now Ysalla and Sythissall had assembled an army more vast than any in the memory of the Deepdwellers. Beside the legions of fierce sahuagin warriors at their command fought the dead of the sea – sailors who had drowned in the oceans of the Moonshae and had been animated by the power of Bhaal to serve as mindless servants of evil. And now, too, they had the remnants of the army of the Black Wizard. These troops, humans mostly, but also the dead remnants of the Ogre Brigade, marched beside the dead of the sea in answer to Ysalla's command.
And over them all swam the sleek legions of sahuagin, ready to burst forth from the surf to lay waste to the lands of northmen and Ffolk alike. They awaited but the command to march.
Summoned by the thrumming cadence of the Deepsong, the army massed in the city of Kressilacc, deep beneath the narrow realm of men. They huddled among the towers and domes of the vast city on the bottom of the sea, gathering force and ferocity from the song.
To the east, they had suffered rebuff and loss against the skill of the new king and the might of the Earthmother. Ysalla sensed that the goddess was not the threat she had been, and the new king was now a hated enemy. The king gave focus to Bhaal's hatred, in a new direction, and so he directed his priestess toward the west.
Toward Corwell.
Ysalla keened sharply from her temple, high on the canyon wall of Kressilacc, summoning her priestesses to the sword. Sythissall called his legions together, and they started on the march to the west. Propelled by the command of Bhaal, they would march to land and lay waste to all the settlements of man they found there. Northmen or Ffolk, it mattered not – the Claws of the Deep would slay regardless.
The god of murder dangled a tempting prize before them. Should they slay the humans along the shore and destroy the ports of Gwynneth, Bhaal would reward them in a way Ysalla could only dream about.
For if they emerged victorious, Bhaal had promised to sink the island. Gwynneth, and the kingdom of Corwell itself, would fall beneath the waves, to become the permanent realm of the sahuagin.
* * * * *
The Earthmother had reigned over the Moonshae Islands far longer than any of the men who had made their homes there. Even the graceful llewyrr, the elves who had once claimed the islands as their own, had come to a land where the goddess already ruled unchallenged.
In those decades and centuries, she had witnessed the birth of creatures misformed by genetic accident. She had beheld the cruel ravages of disease, often deforming and crippling the animals that roamed her lands. All too often, she had been forced to bear the scars of war, the cruelest of such crimes for it was the most avoidable. Her forests had burned; whole villages had fallen to the sword, or the axe, or the fiery magic of evil sorcery.
But never had she witnessed a greater blasphemy than the Children of Bhaal. Their very existence was a challenge to the balance, and their birth, wrought by the magic of the Darkwell, was a challenge to her soul.
She looked upon all the creatures of the isles as her offspring, and this compounded the outrage. Perhaps her heart bled most bitterly for the fate of the great brown bear. Grunt had been a faithful servant and protector of Genna Moonsinger for a very long time, measured in human terms,