Free Undead by Richard Lee Byers

creature. None of them had inherited her trick of breaking apart into an entire swarm.
    She led her spawn over clusters and lines of combatants to a company of mounted knights. By the looks of it, they’d just finished butchering a band of ghouls.
    The Silent Company dived at the southerners. Midway through her plummet, Tammith yanked her bats back into a single human body. It was a difficult trick and it hurt, but it was necessary, because her target wore plate armor and had his visor down. The bats wouldn’t be able to hurt him.
    She crashed into the knight, swept him from the saddle, and hurled him to the ground beneath her. The impact probably killed or at least crippled him, but she ripped the visor off his helm and drove her stiffened, mail-clad fingers deep into his head to be sure.
    She sprang to her feet, found another target, and stared at his face. Addled by her hypnotic power, he faltered, giving her time to draw her sword. As she leaped up at him, his wits returned, and he swung his shield to fend her off. He was too slow, though,
    and the point of her sword punched through his breastplate into his vitals.
    Meanwhile, the other vampires attacked like lethal shadows, until all the riders were dead. Tammith looked around for new foes and saw the griffon riders wheeling and swooping overhead.
    Since the Silent Company could fly, it could engage the zulkirs’ aerial warriors—but no. By all accounts, Bareris was still alive, and had joined the Griffon Legion.
    Of course, she didn’t love him anymore. The predator she’d become was incapable of loving anyone. Sometimes she even hated him for failing her as he had.
    But still: no. Now that the battlefield was dark, Szass Tam had other warriors capable of fighting in the air, and the Silent Company could find plenty of work to do on the ground.
    Malark considered himself as able a combatant as any in Thay. He had, after all, had centuries of life to perfect his disciplines. But he couldn’t use them to best effect standing in a shield wall or charging in a line. The philosopher-assassins of the Monks of the Long Death hadn’t modeled themselves with those sorts of group endeavors in mind.
    Thus he preferred to fight on the fringes of the battle, and found plenty of enemies to occupy him—skirmishers, warriors separated from their companies, and undead horrors so savage and erratic that even the necromancers mistrusted their ability to control them. Accordingly, they didn’t even try, just shooed them off in the general direction of the zulkirs’ army to rampage as they would.
    He kicked an ore in the chest and burst its heart, then used his batons to shatter the skull of a yellow-eyed dread warrior. He
    dispatched foe after foe, all the while exulting in the slaughter. Until the ground began to shake.
    The first jolt knocked some warriors to the ground. Malark took a quick step to keep his balance, then glanced around to see what was happening.
    On the plain to the north, entities huge as dragons heaved up out of the earth. Dirt showered away to reveal forms akin to those of octopi, but shrouded in moldy cerements. Vast black eyes glaring, tentacles clutching and churning the soil, they dragged themselves toward the rear of the legions of Eltabbar.
    As he stared dry-mouthed at the colossi, Malark wondered if Szass Tam and Xingax had created them or unearthed them from some forgotten menagerie of horrors, and wondered too how the enemy had managed to bury them in the field beforehand without anyone in the Keep of Sorrows noticing. Well, caverns riddled the earth hereabouts, and from the first days of the war, the necromancers had employed zombies with a supernatural ability to dig. So perhaps they’d tunneled up from underneath.
    Not that it mattered. What did was that the squid-things were about to smash and crush their way into Dmitra’s soldiery like boulders rolling over ants, and that meant Malark’s place was at her side. He sprinted toward the spot