Free Dark Crusade by Karl Edward Wagner

slain.
    Shadowed beneath the rising moon, the rider picked his course amidst the dead, picturing the battle that bad been fought here, and the horrific slaughter that ensued. Before his practiced eye the battle was reenacted. The dead stirred and rose, fought their final battles, and died again. To his ears came the echoes of that battle, the dim ghosts of shouts and death cries.
    Vultures croaked and sidled away with wings upraised. Predators snarled and slunk back from their spoil. He paid them no more heed than he paid to the slain. His thoughts were elsewhere now, and the field of carnage no longer held interest.
    He had looked upon a thousand such battlefields; it might be that he would look upon a thousand such more. The rising breeze moaned a ghost-song through the waving grassland, and its death-scented breath fanned his billowing red cloak. Following the trail of death, Kane dwindled against the far horizon.
VIII: Origin of Storms
    The winds of the tropic storm lashed Ingoldi. Even within the massive fortifications of Ceddi, the monstrous blasts of thunder pounded through the stone walls and rolled along the gloomy hallways. Gusts of water slashed through the balistraria, washing across the stones. Sky-spanning chains of lightning flickered eerily past the narrow apertures, to add their sporadic glare to the flaring cressets along the passages.
    No less than the fury of the storm was the rage of Orted Ak-Ceddi.
    A year had wrought strange transformations upon the former bandit chieftain, even as a hundred thousand pairs of hands had raised Ceddi from a crumbling pile to a towering and unassailable fortress, had moulded Ingoldi from a sprawling city into a military citadel.
    The man who cast no shadow yet showed the pantherlike quickness and the steel-thewed strength of the hunted outlaw. Months of unbridled dissipation had nonetheless begun to leave its mark--clothing his raw-muscled frame with an insidious smoothness of fat, suffusing his ruddy features with shadows and lines of debauchery. His eyes, formerly alight with quick cunning, now blazed with the black flames of fanaticism, and the ponderous dynamism of absolute power.
    For the moment the certainty of that absolute power was shaken, and with uncertainty arose consuming rage. With the assumption of godlike power comes the awareness of godlike passions. Not the impaled agonies of all Orted's captains could slake the Prophet's wrath.
    Alone he brooded in his chambers, staring out across the storm-swept citadel beyond his tower windows. In his demonic rage, not even the priests of Sataki dared approach him. In the courtyard far below, the violent winds flung about the scarecrow limbs of the impaled officers who had failed him--giving false life to their cold flesh.
    "Defeat!" Orted spat, glowering at the puppets that danced for him even in death. "Massacre!"
    It mattered nothing that his generals had attempted to argue that an invasion of the southern kingdoms was suicidal folly: that his unbroken chain of victories within Shapeli were only monstrous extensions of mob violence, and that crude numbers, no matter how overpowering, could not hope to prevail in an actual drawn battle against superior discipline and weaponry. The Prophet had quickly silenced such doubts of victory by pointing out that failure to obey his commands was suicidal folly of a far more sinister degree. Sataki commanded that the southern kingdoms be subdued. Sataki must be obeyed.
    That his protesting generals had had the temerity to escape his wrath by being among the first to die beneath the charge of the Sandotneri cavalry only blackened the Prophet's rage.
    Orted flung open the lattice panes of a window, let the storm beat upon his livid face, the wind lash his perfumed coils of brown hair. Lightning shattered the storm-haunted night, bathing his rigid frame in its hellish glare, splashing a stark highlight to the tossing corpses far below. Stygian darkness, then flickering bursts of