Those not in combat flew into the thirty yard wide gap I created. The more that dove in, the less that protected Aranath. We could have tried going through right at that moment and hold open the gap from the other side, except we had no idea whether a giant’s spear waited for us there. Odet and Ghevont cast their wards over the dragon while Clarissa fashioned an expansive dome of water behind our mount. That still left his underbelly, and that’s where three or four columns of Advent soldiers steered their steeds toward.
A good percentage were intercepted as they bowled their way through, but if even one rider was content with forfeiting his own life to tear a hole in the dragon’s wings, then that could be enough to send us plummeting to the ground. I waited until the last possible second to scream for Aranath to dive. With a laborious flap of his wings the dragon “jumped” higher in the sky before tucking in his wings to make for the gap. Concurrently, I lashed out with my prana to give the caustic inferno one last outburst to feed upon. That gave allies and enemies alike a few more seconds to get their asses through the breach.
It was difficult to tell how many of my allies made it through. Two hundred? Eight hundred? Probably somewhere in-between. Down at my right lied a five-tiered castle of white stone and tan wood. Encompassing it from all sides and from bottom to top were swarms of roots as thick as cows. Their origins appeared to be at least seven large bulbs surrounding the once regal building.
Breaking my observation of the grassy hill, the dragon spun to the right to dodge a huge lance of earth. When my sight became less blurry, I traced its former flight path to see that it led to a nismerdon. It stood near its enchanted barrier. Well beyond the other side of the ward, which had faded somewhat after my attack on it, I saw the hazy silhouette of a giant committing itself to the ground battle.
Aranath evaded a grouping of three lances hurled straight from the ground. A high-pitched snarl escaped the dragon when he had to rear up from yet another earthen attack, this one coming from a nismerdon that emerged from under the grassy hill. Aranath was simply too big a target to keep evading forever, and our guardians were too spread out and too individually weak to offer us adequate protection. Almost every thrown skewer plowed through two or three bodies without losing its potency.
“Pick one!” yelled the whole of my lungs. At my next breath, I turned my head halfway and said, “Protect him!”
Aranath pulled in his wings and Odet rose her best shield in front the now purposely plunging dragon. Trusting her power, Aranath didn’t even attempt to avoid the next flung lance. The trust was well founded, for though it cracked the shield, the projectile itself burst into powder. However, the giant’s prowess allowed it to toss another the very next instant, this one spinning at a speed that it seemed to make the air around it visible. Odet, remembering a quick way to mend cracks in her spell, shrank her ward, making it dense enough for lance and shield to neutralize each other in a dusty shockwave.
Now at a close enough range, Aranath expelled an outpouring of flame. The giant rose its ward. I threw in a dragon stone. With one prana aiding the other, a focused rush of blending dragon fire and black counterpart absolutely overwhelmed our target. I could hear its shell crackle and burst. To give us more than a passing blow, Aranath spread his wings to slow his nosedive to a lingering hover. The deep roar of the combustion nearly drowned out the metallic screeching of the giant. No defense it bore could repel the dragon and corrupted realms working as one.
As discussed beforehand, our allies dedicated their attention to a single giant, one not being attacked by Aranath. With only two in sight, that made their choice simple. So as we burned one giant into a pile of enkindled tinder, the other was encircled by the hundreds of griffins not engaging the enemy that slipped through with us.
Aranath and I sensed our connection waver. We had kept up the attack long enough. The dragon lurched his body upward. He was jerked back in place.
“Shit!” said Gerard. “Behind us!”
Long root tendrils originating below ground had caught Aranath by the tail. The top half of a third giant ruptured the surface. A stronger heave by the dragon snapped the tendrils, but by then the giant had thrown two spinning spires of earth at his left wing. Neither one created impressive looking slits, but I imagined two needles going through my palm would still fucking hurt. At least one of them must have done legitimate damage to a muscle or something since the dragon let himself fall. Despite being a controlled fall, it was still a rough landing.
Enraged, and feeling our link faltering, the dragon threw caution to the wind and stampeded toward the giant. The giant, now stepping out fully, beckoned for more roots to entangle Aranath’s legs and head. It also wrought a dozen lances, with each projectile “only” being about twice as long as a man this time. Odet’s ward saved Aranath from suffering hits to the face. At the same time, however, more roots sprang up under the dragon’s head, doing their damnedest to envelop his snout. The entanglement succeeded to an extent. The dragon managed to puff out some flames, but he could not get a good aim.
“Everyone off!” I ordered, unsheathing my sword.
Gerard, anticipating the action, was on his feet first. Declaring the effort he put behind his sword, the knight shouted as he sliced through the roots under the dragon’s head. Tendrils came for him next, but his earth spell hardened the ground to the point they had trouble moving faster than a racing turtle.
A couple more cut roots and Aranath was able to free his head the rest of the way. Now the giant put all its focus on its ward to block the incoming firestorm. I was about to toss in my stone when I noticed the ward pushing away the flames. The nismerdon was charging right at the dragon!
Aranath’s jerking motions and the mild panic produced a poor throw out of me. I held on to the saddle and ignited the stone in a wasteful outreach of prana. Black flames indeed erupted from somewhere in front of the dragon, but a second later had the giant brawling with the rearing, roaring dragon. Fortunately, everyone had jumped off the saddle a moment before, so I only worried about my own balance.
It was impossible to see exactly what was happening from my position. All I sensed were the skin crawling vibrations that came from their noisy clashes. I heard a pained howl from Aranath just before he lowered his head to bite down on the giant’s shoulder, neck area. A blast of firelight that came afterward dwindled our connection further. A grating groan from the giant ascended higher in pitch until my eardrums felt like rupturing. It was something I was obligated to ignore as I lit another stone and fed the subsequent bolide. I jumped the instant before the summon ended.
An entire dragon vanished beneath me in a pulse of air that almost blew away my darkening fireball. I fell toward the giant, who sensed me and cast his ward. However, a bright green light coming from Ghevont’s staff interfered with the ward’s formation. I thus had a clear path to the giant’s torso. I directed my fall so that I landed right on top of the deep bite mark left on the giant’s mangled shell. Sticking my sword in its skin helped me stay on. Then, expending the prana in my crystal, I plunged a searing streak of orange and black fire straight into the inner giant.
The nismerdon did not take kindly to the attack, but thanks to its inability to create a steady ward, large tentacles of water and ice had wrapped around its arms, thwarting its limbs from reaching me for the precious few seconds I needed to use up every trace of prana available in the crystal. Mixing with the blaring cries of the tortured creature was the splintering of its crumbling upper shell, exposing some of the wild heat to myself. My lower arms and hands felt tender and singed by the time I spent what I could and leapt off the creature, leaving my sword behind.
After a stumble, I ran from the possible retaliation from the giant, but Clarissa was still holding tight when I looked back. Taking a cue from the nismerdon, Gerard fashioned a spike of earth. Not usually a good idea against a being who mastered the element, but with it subdued both physically and magically, the knight felt it worth the risk to propel hi
s weapon to the half-melted giant’s back. It pierced all the way through its chest.
The nismerdon’s arms went partly limp. Its shrieking lowered to a dull groaning. Not seeing this as a chance to let up, Clarissa spread her water over the giant’s head and froze it. She squeezed the ice into dozens of icicles, trying to get as many of them to impale the giant’s neck and head as possible. She found its weak spot at the hollow my flame had carved out near its neck. Her ice dug deeper and deeper until a spike of ice burst out its upper back. The giant dropped to its knees, then toppled face down in a silent heap.
Silence did not last any time at all. A third giant remained, though it was hard to see it through the spells of hundreds of winged creatures flying around it in a living tornado. So after taking in a couple of deep breaths, we sprinted to see how much we could contribute in that fight.
Taking our pre-battle suggestions seriously, those at the lower end of the feathery whirlwind were earth specialists who used their partiality to disrupt the giant’s root attacks and attempts at forging weapons assembled from dirt. Everybody else contributed a perpetual barrage of the other elements. Through the smoke, dust, and bodies, I glimpsed that even the giant’s daunting ward flickered in and out of existence from what were otherwise commonplace attacks.
Come what may, the giant was still striking down three or four people at a time in the earthen volleys it did let loose. Those who survived the loss of their steed still endeavored to fight. We joined a group of five such soldiers. After taking a plain, single-edged sword from a soldier, we got them to flank us as we rushed into the flock.
Coming out into the inner side of the incarnate vortex, I asked Ghevont, “Still got some nismerdon prana?!”
Raising his staff, the scholar replied, “Enough!”
A green flash distressed the purple ward fifty yards ahead of us. After the shortest moment possible passed, the arched ward broke. The giant, sensing where the interruption originated, furiously rumbled the earth underneath. Gerard and a pair of soldiers tried steadying the ground, but the soil churned and a dozen roots whipped out at us. Odet and I slashed at the tendrils reaching for Ghevont and our legs.
If it wasn’t for the aid of the flock army, it would have been too much to handle. As it was, witnessing its ward falter so completely prompted many to drop their wards and dive in for an all-out assault. Fire, water, lightning, and ice assailed the nismerdon from every side, obscuring it from view. Then, adding to the obscurity, a huge dust cloud spread outward.
“It’s going underground!” said Ghevont, the brightness of his crystal waning.
“Keep track of it!” I told him.
I had to wait a few moments before the thickest of the dust either settled or was cleared away by air spells. When those above us could see me again, I waved down anyone in view. To a soldier who understood my tongue, I requested that earth specialists follow the scholar and do their utmost to agitate the earth around the giant and pin it down. That soon led to more and more warriors doing as I requested.
In a minute we had enough people opposing the giant’s movements that it actually came to a stop. Right next to Ghevont, I summoned forty or fifty dragon stones, many of them the explosive kind.
“Do you want my stones, too?” asked Clarissa.
“No. I won’t be able to ignite all of these as it is. Just collect them together in water and freeze it.” To Gerard, I said, “When she’s done, push the ice ball toward the giant. Get it as close as you can.”
The green knight nodded and stopped uniting his spell with the others. After the vampire clumped my dragon stones together in an ice ball, Gerard enveloped it in dirt and sunk it under the shifting ground. Meanwhile, I rose my corruption to the surface, keeping it linked with my stones without actually igniting them. I knew I couldn’t ignite them all with the prana I had left, but as long as the stones got close to the giant, anything over ten would probably provide a positive result.
“Something is getting to the stones, Mercer!”
“Good! Just get it closer!”
“The others aren’t making it easy!”
“Really, Gerard?!” said a sarcastic Clarissa. “This is the first hard task you’ve encountered?!”
The noble knight, knowing the vampire was frustrated at her inability to do anything at this juncture, said nothing in return. Or, more likely, he was too preoccupied with his undertaking to pay any heed to her.
“It’s now or never, Mercer!”
A wave of corrupted prana burrowed into the world, setting off every dragon stone I kept a link with. Acting fast, I seized the corrupted dragon fire and compressed it into a tighter and tighter sphere. Sensing it almost fizzle out, I had no choice but to dig deep and incite the flare-up on my own terms. I winced when the release of so much corruption shuddered my blood and muscles.
The dampened burst was temporarily louder and more energetic than the rumbling ground. What that meant for the giant, I could not discern. I know what I wanted, which I declared by yelling, “I want that giant dragged back up here! Nothing else matters!” My eye caught a brief, sneaky smile at the corner of Odet’s lips. “What?”
Getting serious again, she said, “Nothing. Your eyes are a little glazed. Are you okay?”
“Don’t re-” My legs buckled when another internal quake bubbled my blood. Alert to my state, Clarissa came over to help keep me on my feet. After a long, deep inhale, I said, “I’m fine. I just used too much corruption too quickly…” I clenched my fists and pulled away from the support.
“The nismerdon is still alive,” said Ghevont. “It seems to be sinking deeper while it moves west.”
“Stay on top of it for as long as you can. You too, Clarissa. Odet, get some people to follow us. I’d like to see what’s in those bulbs.”
It took a few steps, but I recovered my balance. Using my corruption to any consequential degree would no doubt do more than make me dizzy, so I resolved to stick with my ordinary prana for the next while.
Bringing to bear a voice trained to give orders and using lungs not as stressed as mine, Odet called over four dozen scouts to us, both in the air and on foot. They followed my group to the nearest bulb, which was four times as tall as a man. A hundred roots of varying thickness germinated from its base and slithered over to the castle twenty yards away, most finding a way in by a window or crack in a wall. The other bulbs appeared to have the same arrangement, including a few smaller ones I had not seen from the sky. Without sensing any great power within it, I asked for the warriors to break the bulb open.
In case humans or an imprisoned eidolon occupied the inside of the bulb, Odet requested that no fire spells be applied yet. And in case there was a giant waiting for us, the princess cast her shield over much of the group. Several men hacked at the bulb’s hard exterior with swords and axes. They didn’t do much damage, but they were able to cut enough of it away to give water and ice spells places to shove into.
In a minute the water and ice had forced the cracks to expand to the point a bear standing on its hind legs could walk through. Fire and light spells were used to illuminate the inside. Curled up in a big, motionless ball was a nismerdon. The hundred roots from the outside seemed to sprout from the giant’s lower half. It felt dead more than its inert form suggested, if that made sense. To confirm its state, I requested that fire be applied. Both giant and bulb combusted as easily as a bonfire made of straw. With that taken care of, we moved to the next bulb, one of the smaller ones this time.
The smaller bulbs were barely taller than the tallest man on Orda, whoever that may have been. A line of them were clustered front and center of the castle. The first we opened contained Robin and Kiros on their knees, their green, moss-textured bodies in an embrace. Mirroring the giant’s example, fire did an excellent job of consuming them as kindling.
My corruption reacted to the third bulb we came across. Wards other than Odet’s went up when I verbally identified the active power I sensed.
Aft
er inspecting the contents of this egg, Odet said, “Mercer, he looks like… “Is he…”
“Yes. Lower your ward for me.”
She did so. I ducked into the bulb and slashed the roots hooked into my brother’s skin. Their looked to be twice as many roots on him as even on the giant, presumably due to corruption’s volatile nature. Only his head was clear of any punctures. Cutting the roots disrupted the flow of corruption they absorbed. This crude method of freeing him could have threatened his health, but we had no time to be subtle. He groaned when I dragged his skinny body outside, but he remained unconscious. I handed him over to a guildsman to take care of, telling him to restrain him in case he awoke with a bad case of delusion.
As we made our way to the next bulb, a loud grumble came from within the juddering castle. All of us stared up in silence for a long moment, the hairs on our bodies detecting vacillating changes in the relentless force that pulled us to the ground. Or perhaps a solid, invisible portion of the air was pushing us down. Were it not for our prana bracing our spines, the more extreme pulses would have pinned us to the ground.
Smoke rose from the castle’s roof. Licks of flame came seconds afterward. Sunlight gushed in when the massive ward shattered like glass all at once. The summoned beasts screeched and flapped wildly in an onset of panic. We backed away from the castle, the flames rapidly spreading to every piece of wood it possessed. An unnatural, twirling wind seemed to propagate it.
Now about a hundred feet away from the castle, I saw a black figure staggering out of the orange light. It did not appear to keep a consistent shape. One or multiple parts of its black body would be horrifically thin while other segments resembled the surface of a boiling pot of lumpy soup. Every blink changed which feature of its body experienced these erratic shapes. On occasion, streaks of white sparked into existence, oftentimes flittering around its body, not on it.
The Dragon Knight and the Light Page 45
