A strange caw made Tazi turn her head and draw her sword. Not twenty feet away, a stable of riding animals was ablaze. The same intense heat that had cracked the ground beneath her had ignited the wooden slats of their pen. Tazi ran over to them and kicked out at the fence. Wood splintered everywhere, and the frightened mix of animals, eyes rolling wildly in their heads, burst out. Black unicorns and more ordinary horses galloped past her, as well as stranger creatures. One of the last ones to run past Tazi was Naglatha’s own griffon: Karst.
She must have tethered it here, Tazi thought, and forgot about it in her hasty departure.
Tazi caught the beast by the neck, and it reared but couldn’t break her fierce grip. Tazi swung her leg around the creature’s lionlike body and hung onto to its mane with its mixture of feathers and fur. The griffon stood back on its powerful legs and thrashed about with its front claws in an attempt to buck Tazi from its back.
“No!” she screamed defiantly and held on tight. Tazi had only seen a griffon once before in her life, though it was too young to be ridden. But, as a pampered child from a wealthy family, she had ridden her fair share of horses. And, as soon as she was old enough, Tazi had joined her brothers when there were mounts to be broken and displayed an aptitude for the task that surpassed her brothers, much to their chagrin. She hoped that breaking a griffon would be much the same.
Tazi wasn’t disappointed. After a few minutes, the griffon settled down and seemed resigned to its rider. She kicked at its sides and clucked her tongue like she would’ve at a horse. The creature turned its large eagle head back toward her and glared with its golden eyes. And it took off in a grand, loping run.
Before the griffon had gone thirty feet, it sprang into the air with a great flapping of its wings. Tazi felt a moment of exhilaration as they soared into the air, the horror forgotten for one fleeting second. She pulled on its feathers like reins and turned the griffon, so they banked back around toward the barracks. Tazi leaned over to one side and shouted to the orcs.
“To me!” and she didn’t even realize she had switched from Common to Orcish, though the language was previously unknown to her. The orc troops stormed after her as Tazi headed over to Justikar.
With the wind rushing past her face, Tazi hoped her burning cheeks would cool. But the air was dry and hot and did nothing to soothe her. She could see the duergar cursing and shrieking at the sky, assembling his fell forces. Most, as far as she could tell, responded to him to one degree or another. As she glided in closer, Tazi saw that there appeared to be no end in sight to the line of monsters that spewed from the Thaymount, though they seemed to be mostly concentrated around one of the central peaks.
Creatures the likes of which Tazi had never seen, even in nightmares, crawled down the steep slopes. There were darkenbeasts by the thousands streaming from their caves. Unlike the others, these creatures had burning red eyes, and their bones glowed red as well—not the green and purple she had seen before. Otherwise, there was little else that set them apart from the creatures under their own control. Lamias slithered from their dens by the dozens. But these sluglike creatures were fat and bloated like corpses left too long in the sun. Mostly gray, they had long, stringy hair and shiny bodies. By the red radiance of the lava and the eruptions, Tazi realized they left a slime trail behind them, and her gut instinct told her that trail would be poisonous.
She tugged along the griffons left flank, and they banked that way, slowly gliding down to the dwarf. But in the other direction, Tazi observed a different group of Eltab’s forces. Climbing with great expertise against the slopes were monsters as tall as an average human. At first glance, Tazi thought they were the lizardfolk indigenous to the Surmarsh that Naglatha had mentioned. However, like the Thaymount lamias, the lizards were albinos. And Tazi recalled that the other lizardfolk were supposed to be simpletons at best. From her perch, Tazi could see several of the ones in the lead clearly give orders to those bringing up the rear. She watched as they fanned out and moved down the cliffs like they were a part of them, descending on all their limbs or walking upright, changing between modes when necessary.
The griffon lighted down next to Justikar, and he pulled his stolen war axe free, ready to ward the creature off.
“No,” Tazi called to him and jumped off her mount to stand protectively in front of it. The griffon flapped its wings and squawked at the dwarf.
“Remember me, do you?” he asked. “Well, I remember you and what I owe you.”
“No,” Tazi warned him again and shoved him back, striking him in anger for the first time.
Justikar stumbled from her touch and turned back to her in surprise. “Who did you slaughter?” he asked, and looked her up and down.
“No one yet,” she replied bleakly, “but that’s all about to change.” She grabbed him by the shoulder and continued.
“You see there,” she said and pointed to the range of peaks east of them. “As far as I can tell, most of the demons are escaping from those points.” She released her hold on the duergar and squatted down, drawing a map in the fresh soot at their feet. “If we can get our forces to form a semi-circle from here—” she motioned with her finger to the drawing of the gorge between the peaks—“to here—” she then drew a line to the location where she had seen, from her aerial pass, a dormant field of ashfall—“we might be able to cut them off.”
“And what about the lava?” he added.
Tazi looked up to meet his grim stare. “One thing at a time.”
She rose up. “I’ll take the foot soldiers and lead them into position. Can you handle those in the air?”
“Do I have a choice?” he grumbled.
Tazi heard the echoes of Szass Tam’s words when she answered, “You always have a choice.”
Without waiting for a reply, Tazi mounted the griffon and kicked it hard with her heels. The winged animal leaped into the sky almost joyously, and Tazi felt that it was only happy when in flight. Or perhaps it just felt safer there, away from the trembling ground. Considering the black and red clouds of darkenbeasts that were forming along the gloomy horizon like a storm, Tazi was certain the beast would soon revise its notions of safety in the sky.
She pulled on its feathers, and they swooped down low over the battalions of zombies. Though dead, they wore an eager look on their faces as though anticipating the coming bloodshed. Tazi was uncertain how to order them. She reached over and gingerly rested her right hand along the fell mark on her left shoulder. She closed her eyes and imagined the undead lining themselves up as she had envisioned it. She kept the images clear and simple. When she opened her eyes again and circled back around, she could see that they had begun to take up her formation.
Tazi soared down close to the ground where the troop of Blooded Ones had gathered just downhill from the zombies. They were hardly winded from their run, and Tazi could see several of them were gnashing their heavy canines and sniffing the air hungrily. Watching them, she could feel the blood start to throb in her own head. She drew her sword and pointed toward the ashfall in the distance.
“We meet up with the soldiers to the west and form a line to the ashfall along the eastern slope,” she called easily in Orcish. “We form that line and let nothing cross it alive. Do you hear me?” she screamed at them. The troop howled in agreement, beating their swords and cudgels against their shields. Tazi took to the air and assumed a position circling her growing wall of soldiers.
She could see Justikar holding an arm up toward the mass of darkenbeasts that were swirling around in frenzied flight, awaiting her signal. From one side to the other, the legions of undead and the Blooded Ones joined forces, forming a solid barricade, an unholy alliance. Farther north, Tazi could see more and more of Eltab’s demons surge out of the Thaymount. Another eruption shook the region as Tazi turned her head from one side to the other to take one, last inventory.
“Now!” she screamed long and loud. Justikar released his hold on the darkenbeasts, and they swarmed forward
. The Blooded Ones broke out into a full run, while the undead marched relentlessly onward. Tazi kicked at her winged mount and dived straight into the demon hordes, sword flashing.
Szass Tam and Nevron re-entered the council chamber. Lauzoril had taken the unconscious Azhir Kren to a more secure location, with Aznar Thrul trailing close behind.
The gray-haired Nevron had called after them, tauntingly, “Do you really think there is a safe haven in this place as long as the demon-king is free?”
Lauzoril had ignored them and wearily carried Azhir away. Aznar Thrul shouted back over his shoulder to them as he departed, “This is all your doing, with your secret scribblings, so you should be the ones to take care of it.”
Several of the lich’s human servants had come into the chamber not long after the Red Wizards and Tazi had abandoned it. They had tried vainly to salvage what they could from the room and douse the many fires that still blazed. The lich’s zombie servants had pointedly stayed away, as he suspected they would, because of their inherent fear of those very flames. He briefly wondered how Thazienne was going to manage to get his troops to fight with the burning earth all around them, but dismissed those queries as her concerns to deal with. The lich had other matters that occupied his attention.
The room was in shambles. Two women batted at the tapestries that still smoldered with heavy blankets that they had scrounged up from one of the many linen closets. Another was mindlessly collecting up the bits of shattered dinnerware and glasses, simply needing to do something. An elderly man slapped several parchments with a broom. Some of the papers curled up at the edges and wafted around like injured butterflies, and he alternated between swatting them and trying to catch them. He had already collected a small pile and stacked it against the wall nearest him. That was where Szass Tam went first.
“Nevron, go around to the far side of the table where Naglatha had been standing before this disaster took place,” he ordered the other zulkir. “I’ll start in on these.”
As the lich approached the old man, he could see the fear in his faded eyes. Szass Tam ruled with a fierce hand and had little tolerance for failure. Many of his slaves bore subtle and not-so-subtle reminders of their master’s standards. And it was clear that the old man assumed the catastrophe did not bode well for any of those who served the necromancer. Szass Tam appreciated his quivering, obsequious behavior but had no time for it at the moment.
“You did well. Please continue,” he murmured to the slave and floated past him to the remains of his stolen scrolls. He snatched up the fragments and didn’t even notice that the man wept tears of relief as he passed.
With the pieces of his spell scrolls in his skeletal grip, the lich searched for a place to try and piece together the fractured puzzle. He saw that a smaller serving table was relatively unscathed though overturned.
“Right that for me,” he told the two women who had extinguished the last of the flaming furnishings.
They scurried over, coughing heavily, and flipped the table upright.
“You may go,” he dismissed them without an upward glance. He began to lay all the vestiges of parchment on the smooth surface of the table. Scanning the remnants quickly with his sharp eyes and tracing a bony finger across them, Szass Tam tried to cobble together a binding spell.
Barely looking up, he called over to Nevron, “What luck have you had?” The gray-haired zulkir was on his knees, tearing away at a portion of the smashed council table. He tossed bits of the wood madly behind him, and Szass Tam was hard pressed not to laugh in spite of the circumstances. The Zulkir of Conjuration looked for all the world like a dog frantically digging up a bone.
“I think there’s a scroll, or at least a good portion of one, under the table leg—if I can just reach …” his voice faded with the strain.
“Got it,” he croaked triumphantly, and when he popped back out from under the wreckage, his hair was askew and a smudge of soot crossed his forehead. But Szass Tam saw that he had a mostly intact parchment in his fist.
“Bring it here,” the lich ordered. “Let’s see what we have left.”
Nevron walked over quickly, though he too continued to cough from the lingering smoke. Out of the whole room, only Szass Tam was unaffected by it, since he did not need to breathe. The zulkir placed the mostly intact scroll with the other pieces Szass Tam had collected on the table. Together, they read over the documents as best they could. An occasional quake rocked the chamber, but the two men were silent for some time. Finally, Nevron breathed in sharply and turned his head toward the lich with a look of horror and awe.
“I can’t believe you found this,” he said quietly and pointed to one of the burned fragments. “How?” he croaked.
“That is not for you to know,” the necromancer replied.
“My whole life has been in pursuit of these runes,” he said mostly to himself. “And now, to find them here, broken and incomplete …”
“Perhaps you can now understand why one lifetime is not nearly enough,” Szass Tam told him evenly.
“No matter for now,” Nevron dismissed the discussion. “Without the other pieces, I don’t see how we can bind Eltab. We might be able to stop the lesser minions, but the tanar’ri lord may be beyond our reach.”
Szass Tam was silent for what seemed like an eternity. He scanned the puzzle pieces again as though he might have missed the keystone, but it was not there to be found. He balled up his bony hands and pounded the table with a cry of fury. Then he smoothed his robes with those same hands and regarded the other man solemnly.
“I fear you may be right,” he admitted calmly, “but we must try, nonetheless.”
And he and the Zulkir of Conjuration began to chant.
Tazi flew toward another flock of Eltab’s darkenbeasts, carving through them with her sword as she had the others. The griffon swooped into the herd like a hunting raptor and sliced at the flapping bat creatures with its razor-sharp talons. Tazi gripped her mount with her thighs to maintain her seat on its back and hung onto its mane with her left hand. She twisted around to spear a darkenbeast that tried to find purchase on the griffon’s haunches. She dispatched the creature though it left a track of bloody welts along the griffon’s rear left flank. It screeched in pain.
When Tazi turned forward, she ducked low and hugged the griffon’s neck as another darkenbeast swooped toward her face, missing her by mere inches. More started to surround the griffon, smelling the blood, and it reared back, flapping its wings furiously as the smaller darkenbeasts cut off all escape routes. One after another dived at Tazi and her mount, and she swiveled from her right to her left to slash at the monsters. But their numbers kept increasing. As they slashed down one, another two took its place. The griffon cawed in panic as several of the flying creatures began to target its vulnerable wings.
Like a black, rotting infestation, one after another of the darkenbeasts attached themselves to the griffon’s wings. Using their sharp claws, the demon-king’s minions ripped the winged beast’s limbs to shreds. Golden feathers coated in blood swirled about, and Tazi could hear the animal’s suffering, but she was helpless to alleviate it. The sheer numbers of the darkenbeasts weighed the griffon down and Tazi could see they were losing altitude.
A creature slipped past Tazi’s defenses and punctured the griffon’s right eye with its talon. Blood squirted out, and Tazi’s mount plummeted beak first toward the ground, spiraling in tighter and tighter circles. The creatures that were clamped to its wings held fast, and as the ground came screaming up toward them, Tazi leaped from the griffon’s back at the last possible moment.
She fell hard, taking the brunt of the fall on her shoulder as she tucked up into a ball and rolled forward to land in a crouch, weapon still held high. The griffon was not so fortunate, smashing headlong onto the hard soil. As it lay in a heap near a rock pile, Tazi could see it was done for. Its beak was partially broken and blood gushed out of the wound. The ruined eye dangled from its bloody socket to stare blindly ahe
ad. Its wings were practically denuded of feathers, and multiple talon rakes crisscrossed its haunches.
Despite these wounds, the griffon was still alive, and a few darkenbeasts continued to peck and tear at its flesh.
“Off of him, hellspawn,” Tazi shrieked.
She grabbed one of the creatures by the nape of its neck and cleanly ran it through. Some of the other darkenbeasts then shifted their attention from the dying griffon to Tazi. One hovered above her head, clawing at her face and tearing out handfuls of her black locks, while she stabbed another through its heart.
Dropping her sword, Tazi reached up and caught the one that was tangled in her hair, her chainmail gauntlets protecting her hands somewhat from the darkenbeast’s talons. She flung the screeching monster to the ground and crushed its throat under her boot. With most of the beasts gone for the moment or dead, Tazi picked up her weapon and strode over to the griffon.
She reached out a hesitant hand and stroked the beast’s bloody neck. It opened its one good eye and looked at her imploringly.
Tazi raised her sword and said, “I’m sorry for this.” But before she could end the griffon’s misery, a great war axe slashed down and practically beheaded the winged creature in one stroke. Tazi whirled to see Justikar breathing hard and leaning on his bloody axe with both hands like it was a walking stick.
“Now we’re even,” he spat at the dead beast.
“Justikar!” Tazi shouted, though she wasn’t sure if it was anger or relief at seeing him that made her cry out so.
“It had to be done,” he replied.
“But you didn’t have to enjoy it.”
The Crimson Gold Page 22
