The mighty swarm of spiritual undead spiraling up from the city closed in around the invaders, and now Resalintas could see the hideously warped and distorted faces worn by those that still retained some semblance of their original form. They were twisted into expressions of insane hatred and fury at first, but as they came close enough to see the nature of the creatures they were being pitted against it was transformed almost instantly to stark terror. Raks! The invaders are raks! They would have fled if they’d been able to, but the power of the Shadowlord was much too strong and they were compelled to attack.

     The obvious terror of their attackers was a tremendous boost to the white raks, who’d been seriously alarmed by the sheer number of spirits rising up against them. It reminded them of what they were. The most powerful form of undead that humans were capable of becoming. It was amazing how easy it was for them to forget the simple fact that they were no longer alive, that they had undergone a transformation that had vastly increased their power.

     Fangrap and the other priests of Skorvos positively exulted in it, howling the name of their bloody handed God and lashing out with their terrible rak powers, screaming with delight as the spirits fell before them like ears of corn under the farmer’s scythe. Hundreds of miserable, damned spirits fell before them, their tortured souls sent at last to the judgement of the Gods, but even this terrible toll made scarcely any impact on the screaming legion that thronged around them, whipped and driven on by the Shadowlord’s power. And even the power of a rak was not inexhaustible. Soon they would tire, and then they would be borne down by the vast numbers of lesser spirits.

     Resalintas would have been a good deal happier if this meant that they themselves would be sent to the judgement of the Gods. He was ready for judgement, had been for almost his entire life, ever since he’d devoted himself to the service of Samnos after the slaughter of his family, but he was realistic enough to know that if they were captured by the Shadowspirits, their judgement would be indefinitely delayed, probably until the end of the universe. Instead, he and the others would be borne helplessly into the presence of the Shadowlord himself, where they would suffer for uncountable eons for the presumption of having contested his mastery of all the planes of existence.

     This gloomy fact only seemed to excite and arouse the Skorvosians to even greater heights of ecstasy, though. To them, warfare was the only pure form of worship, and this battle, fought in the very heart of the Shadow by the most powerful beings to have walked the world of Tharia since the days of the immortal wizards, would be the greatest prayer ever offered to the bloodstained God of Conquest. They would fall, of course they would, as all soldiers fell sooner or later, but their memories would live on until the end of time and the warriors of the Black Army would scream their names as battlecries as they carried on the eternal fight against the forces of goodness in the afterlife.

     Resalintas wasn’t interested in a glorious defeat, though. He had difficulty even imagining such an insane concept. Defeat was defeat, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the odds. Victory was the only thing that interested him and he wracked his brain, searching for a way to achieve victory from this seemingly hopeless situation. “Fangrap!” he called out, pushing his way to the front of the floating globe of raks and vampires. “We need to get closer to the palace.”

     “We’re completely surrounded,” called back the Skorvosian, his shrunken, mummified body glistening with spilled ectoplasm from a hundred destroyed spirits. “We’re hemmed in on all sides.”

     “Push them back if you can,” cried Resalintas. “We’ve got to get to the palace or we might as well all go home.”

     The Skorvosian laughed. “What’s the matter, Samnian? Aren’t you enjoying yourself? Don’t worry, we’ll get you there, but you’ll need to help. Use one of your Holy Words to drive them back.”

     “We’ll need all our Holy Words when we get to the Shadowbeast,” protested Resalintas, but he knew the Skorvosian was right. All the Holy Words in the world wouldn’t help if they couldn’t get within striking distance of the beast. “All right,” he said therefore, beckoning to Vasta and Renda to come up and join him. “Prepare yourselves.”

     The Skorvosians drew back and cast unholy spells around themselves to protect their evil, unclean souls, which would otherwise have been blasted as badly by the holy power of the God of Righteous Warfare as the spirits assailing them. The spirits lunged forward, thinking that the ranks of the raks were breaking sooner than they’d dared to hope, but then the three Samnians each spoke a single word of such holiness and power that a vast swathe of undead spirits ahead of them were blasted to oblivion, sending a despairing cry of dismay echoing around the city. A cry that reached even to the palace itself where half a dozen Shadowraks had gathered in one of the courtyards in a desperate last stand against the Eeii who had surrounded them there.

     “Now!” cried Resalintas, and the white raks rushed into the gap cleared by the Holy Word, covering as much distance as possible before the spirits closed in around them again. The Samnian rak looked up and saw the swirling colours of the Shadow roiling and boiling angrily. It had also been disturbed by the Holy Word, as he’d hoped it would be but, unlike at the outer fringe of the Shadow, it had remained intact.

     The Shadow was enormously stronger and denser here, close to the centre, and the powers of goodness and holiness were correspondingly weaker. It would take a great many Holy Words, cast by a great many Samnians, to punch a hole in it here. There was a limit to the number of such words that each Samnian could speak, though. The one word Resalintas had spoken had left him feeling noticeably weaker. He doubted he’d be able to speak more than a couple more before collapsing from exhaustion. He prayed desperately that they wouldn’t have to waste too many of them getting to the beast, or they might not have enough left to kill it.

     Kharsh and Dorth then came forward, replacing the first three Samnians, and they spoke a second Holy Word, driving the spirits back again. The white raks surged forward again, covering half the remaining distance to the palace, and a third Holy Word allowed them to reach the airspace directly above the palace’s south western wing. The vampires, still in their bat forms, then swooped down to the palace’s rooftops and returned to their human forms, allowing them to finally take an active part in the battle.

     Although most vampires have no magical or priestly abilities, they are gifted with a wide range of powers over the lesser forms of undead, including the ability to compel them to obedience. Vampire Lords often drafted a number of them into their service, much as a country nobleman would have a staff of cooks, gardeners and manservants, and although they were able to wield only a fraction of the power that the Shadowlord was pouring through the Puncturium, by concentrating it on a few key spirits they were able to break them out of their ranks and turn them against their neighbours, bringing chaos to the vast swarm still surrounding the white raks. The Skorvosians gave a cry of delight as the organised, coherent stranglehold the spirits had on them was broken, and they lashed out with renewed enthusiasm, sending hundreds more of the tormented souls to oblivion. One more effort from the Skorvosians, the fell men and the wizards was all that was required and the white raks were finally able to break out, diving down to the palace’s rooftops before the spirits could re-organise themselves.

     Tragius disintegrated a hole in the roof, and the raks and vampires flew down into the rooms and corridors of the palace. The spirits tried to follow them, but Fangrap and a pair of vampires held them back, using one of their lesser powers to plug the hole in order to conserve their strength. “Go!” cried the Skorvosian, waving the others away. “This place has a thousand entrances. They’ll be inside in no time.”

     Resalintas nodded and led the others away at a run.

     “All these broken windows!” cried Aerethil, pointing into the rooms they were passing, each of which had up to a dozen gaping, open windowframes through which the spirits were staring at them with mingled fury and terror. “Why don’t they come in?”

     “Spirits live in the past,” replied Tragius, amazed by his ability to speak in a calm, level voice even at a dead run. Had he still been alive, he’d have been too busy gasping for breath to say a single word. “They see the palace as it was when they were alive. They see the windows filled with magically hardened glass. They believe it’s an impassable barrier to their entry, and so therefore it is.”

     “Magically hardened glass?” asked the undead enchantress curiously.

     “A holdover from the food riots during the great famines of the fourteen hundreds,” replied Tragius. “On one occasion, mobs stormed the palace itself and almost succeeded in overrunning it. Afterwards, the ordinary glass in the windows was replaced with magically hardened glass, luckily for us. If the spirits were opposed only by the memory of ordinary glass, they would believe themselves capable of smashing it and getting in, and therefore they would be. But there are plenty of doors they can get in through..." Even as he was speaking the corridor ahead of them filled up with spirits and they had to pause while the Skorvosians blasted their way through them.

     More spirits kept appearing from other doorways and corridors as they passed them, and it was slow going for the invaders to fight their way through them. Twice more the Samnians had to use Holy Words to blast their way through, and even Resalintas himself began to despair, fearing that they’d have no strength left by the time they reached the Shadowbeast.

     As they fought their way deeper and deeper into the palace, though, they noticed to their amazement and relief that the spirits assailing them were growing fewer. There were still plenty behind them, hordes of them now pouring unchecked through dozens of doorways on either side, but they now seemed to be increasingly reluctant to follow the invaders. It was Adantus who suddenly understood why.

     “It’s the Shadow!” he exclaimed in delight. “As we get closer to the beast, the Shadow is getting so dense, so strong, that not even the lesser undead can get through it. Only the most powerful forms of undead, it seems, can approach the Shadowbeast itself.”

     “Of course, that must be it!” agreed Fangrap, and he laughed at the irony of it. The Shadow was supposed to protect Arnor from invaders, but now it was having the opposite effect and protecting the invaders from the city’s defenders. “There’s no need for us to go any further, then,” the Skorvosian said. “You go on and get the beast. We’ll stay here and have some fun!”

     The Skorvosian raks stopped and turned back towards the spirits, their shrunken, mummified faces twisted into expressions of inhuman glee at the prospect of a mass slaughter. They’d be able to massacre the lesser spirits to their hearts’ content, an act of worship greater than any that had ever before been offered to the endlessly bloodthirsty God of Conquest, and when they eventually felt their strength beginning to fail they’d be able to retreat closer to the Shadowbeast, where the spirits couldn't follow. To the Skorvosians, it was like a dream come true.

     The gl hugzi and the vampires came with the white raks a little way further until they came to the hub of the palace; the massive central complex where the eight outer wings of the palace came together and whose centre was the dome of the audience chamber itself. Here, the invaders split up and went their different ways. Resalintas and the rest of the Samnians made for the palace’s north wing, the wing whose outermost courtyard contained the Shadowbeast itself, while the wizards entered the eastern wing, the wing that contained the Puncturium. The gl hugzi and the vampires, meanwhile, scattered throughout the rest of the palace, their job to make sure that nothing else was moving through the palace that might threaten the white raks. It’s all down to us now, thought Resalintas grimly as they sped down the corridor. We’ve succeeded in seizing the palace, but if we fail to kill the beast it will all have been for nothing. Samnos grant us strength! We must succeed! We must!