• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

More of them were coming from the woods. Two of Vokoun’s halflings were down. Keverel’s helmet was knocked off and the upper part of his left ear was hacked away. Biri-Daar bled from every limb, it seemed. Obek, Paelias … they were all wounded, and tiring, and the death knights still came from the trees.

Philomen had sent them. The vizier’s power reached even to the lower Whitefall.

The halflings called from the shore. All three of them fired their crossbows in the direction of the boat. “More of them!” Vokoun called. “In the water!”

“To the boat!” Biri-Daar roared out. They fought a steady retreat, holding back the flood of death knights as Lucan turned and unleashed a barrage of arrows at targets Remy couldn’t see. Two of the death knights reached the trunk of the leaning oak and began to climb.

Remy broke away from the group, seizing a long sword from the ground. He killed the first of the two death knights before it knew he was coming. The second, already clasping the tree’s lowest branch, knocked Remy sprawling with a booted kick to the side of his head. When he got up, he could tell that one of his eyes wasn’t focusing properly, and his ears rang. Still he jumped and grabbed the death knight around the legs. The branch broke off from their combined weight and they fell, the impact sending an agonizing throb through Remy’s head. He shoved the death knight away, clearing space for a sword stroke that opened its throat. It grinned horribly through the blood and Remy barely parried its return thrust … but parry it he did, and the death knight overbalanced ever so slightly.

In the moment when it was extended, its sword too far out and its cut throat fountaining blood onto the forest floor, Remy struck off its head. He turned and headed for the river’s edge, where the rest of the group were standing knee-deep and boarding the boat. Lucan’s arrows helped to hold the death knights back, but some of them waded straight in, and Remy could see another emerging from the water below the tree. “Lucan!” he shouted, pointing—but too late. It severed the boat’s mooring rope before three arrows punched down into it. Looking up, the death knight drew a throwing knife. A fourth arrow appeared to sprout from its armor, a perfect shot just to the left of the breastbone.

Its life force draining away, the death knight raised both hands and clapped them together. As it sank beneath the surface, the tree, and Lucan in it, burst into unholy flames.

Lucan screamed and leaped from the branch into the water, trailing the awful radiance of the unholy flames behind him. The tree burned as if it had been dead and seasoning for two winters, flames roaring up from it to cast flickering shadows on the combat at the shore. “Lucan’s in the water!” Remy shouted. Over the roar of the burning tree, no one could hear him. He dropped his sword, got a running start past the leaning trunk, and dived out over the boat into the black water beyond.

It was cold and his armor was heavy, dragging him down so fast that he could see the bottom, dimly illuminated by the burning tree. Lucan was close enough to touch; the unholy flames were still dying on his body and his eyes were wide with shock. Remy caught him and kicked hard for the surface, pitting his strength against the weight of the armor. It was a struggle he would only win for a few seconds. The hull of the boat above was a leaf-shaped blackness against the infernal orange of the flames. Remy reached, and kicked, and did not know he had thrust one arm out of the water until strong hands grabbed it and pulled him the rest of the way up. “Remy!” Keverel cried. He held Remy’s arm while Obek and Paelias pulled Lucan into the boat.

“Row!” Vokoun ordered. The boat was drifting, far enough out into the water that the death knights could not reach it—or reach up to it from the riverbottom. Remy could see seven of them still, grouped on the shore watching the boat.

Keverel began ministering to Lucan as