Azure Bonds

by Kate Novak

  “So how did you escape?” Akabar asked.

  “Some vestige of the tale survived. A scrap of a letter I’d written to an apprentice fell into Cassana’s hands—something about how my human shell could be made indistinguishable from the real thing. Cassana went to great lengths to track me down. She put a bounty out on an old Harper and tortured him for the information on my whereabouts. I hear he did not submit until she began torturing other creatures as well.

  “I knew none of this when her allies completed a bridge to my place of exile. If I had not been half mad with loneliness and grief for the death of my songs, I might have seen through Cassana’s unholy alliance immediately. But Cassana used her sweetest manner, and Phalse played on my desire for retribution. Zrie cloaked himself in the illusion of a living mage. I was not told of the Fire Knives or Moander or Phalse’s master.

  “I gave up all my secrets, and they helped me build Alias. Later, I learned that the money for the project came from the Fire Knives, and that Moander provided the life energy needed to start Alias breathing. Cassana provided the body, Zrie the power to keep death from her, and Phalse’s master the power to bind a soul in her.”

  “Dragonbait’s soul,” Akabar breathed.

  “The saurial, yes.”

  “And you taught her to sing,” Olive said.

  “Oh, more than that. I spun her entire history, her thoughts, her feelings, her beliefs. A full personality that could interact with others. She was to be my redemption, my justification, of all I had done. I wanted to be sure that no one could see the beauty of my achievement without forgiving the evil means I used to accomplish it.

  “But my allies had their own purposes, something I should have realized when each gave her a different name. I named her Alias because I could not give her my own. All I wanted was for her to live in peace and sing my songs.

  “Then they branded her and the saurial, which Phalse’s master had provided as sacrifice to give her a soul, and I understood they intended her to be a slave.

  “I argued with Cassana, and for the first time she showed me her true nature. She’d left the empty space in the brand to represent me—another of her cruel jokes. I walked out on her and came down here, for this is where Alias and Dragonbait were being kept. I tried to convince myself to destroy Alias rather than bring her into this world bonded to so much evil.”

  The former Harper looked in the cell where Akabar had hung as though he still saw someone there. Tears welled in his eyes. “I am too reasonable a man to believe in miracles, but I suppose they must occur in spite of what I believe. When we’d left her in the cell that evening she was breathing but unconscious. Our calculations said she would not awaken until the saurial was slain. He was very near death already. He had killed many Fire Knives in one attempt to escape, and they beat him every chance they got. They’d left him hanging by the same hook you occupied, mage.

  “When I returned here that night, the lizard was lying on the straw, wrapped in Alias’s cloak. She had taken him down and was tending his wounds, singing him a lullaby, like a child with a doll.

  “I sneaked upstairs to fetch the sword I had bought for Alias and some healing potions for the saurial. I also sought his sword, which Cassana had given to me because I was the only one who could pick it up without pain. I wasn’t certain I could trust Alias with the swords. She was like a very little child. So I gave her the potions and told her what to do with them. When the saurial regained consciousness, I told him I would free him if he would help Alias escape—that he must take her as far from Westgate as possible. He readily agreed.

  “I had to remain behind to cover their escape. An hour before dawn, when we were all preparing to leave for the sacrifice of the saurial, Cassana realized what I had done. She would have destroyed me that moment, but Phalse ordered that I be spared. He thought I might know where they had gone, and he interrogated me in his own fashion. I thought I was safe because I had given the lizard no specific instructions, but I planted in Alias a great nostalgia for Shadowdale. I wanted her to sing there. Phalse learned this, and that is how he knew where to wait for you.”

  “That’s where you met him,” Akabar accused Olive.

  The halfling shrugged. “You knew Alias wasn’t human, but you never told me.” She turned back to the true bard. “Phalse let you live then?”

  “That was Cassana’s decision. She changed her mind about destroying me. She left me in this chamber, where my thoughts would wander and my strength fade so I would grow more pliable. She wanted my help on other projects and … my company.”

  “Piggish, isn’t she?” Olive said. “Just think, Akash, you could have been co-concubine with an ex-Harper.”

  Akabar fixed the halfling with a cold stare.

  “Well,” Olive Ruskettle said with a grin, “she may be a witch, but I can’t knock her taste in men—living ones that is. Shouldn’t we be leaving soon if we’re going to stop this saurial sacrifice?”

  “We wait only until moonset,” the true bard explained. “To avoid the patrols of Fire Knives.”

  “You’ve been babbling away in that cell for a month now. How do you know when moonset is?” Olive asked.

  The crafter picked up a drumstick and took a bite of the meat, chewed, and swallowed before he smiled sweetly at her. “You forget, Mistress Ruskettle, a bard never loses count of the measure.”

  The Sacrifice

  When Dragonbait woke, he was tethered face up on a cold, stone slab with his tail flattened uncomfortably beneath him. He flexed his claws, trying to cut at the bindings that pulled his limbs toward the four corners of the stone, but little metallic twanging noises told him the bindings were not hemp or leather, but thin, steel wires. A dull ache warned him that the wire was slicing through his scales whenever he moved.

  He opened his eyes and, through the great fangs carved of stone that ringed the hillock, saw that the sky was beginning to redden. Just beside the stone slab, in the center of the fanged maw, was a large fire circle filled with day-old ash. He had seen it from the air yesterday—the mound outside Westgate where the worshipers of Moander had waited to receive Alias from their god. The ancient and worn stone they had tied him to was lined with blood-gutters, leaving him no doubt as to the stone’s purpose.

  Concentrating, he summoned his shen. Mist had come as close as she could when she described him to the others as a paladin. From what he had gathered in his short time on this world, he and his brothers had much in common with that breed of fighter, and they had many of the same gods-given powers. But shen was not quite the same as a Realms paladin’s ability to detect evil. With it, Dragonbait could determine all the myriad types of evil that preyed on the soul, the absence of evil, and the grace that nourished the soul. He was also able to judge the strength of a spirit.

  The human mage’s spirit had begun as an orb of dull yellow—weak, but without malice or arrogance; a little greed, but not much. The change in him had been astounding. His battle with Moander had strengthened his spirit a hundredfold. His soul grew cleaner, though grace was something he had yet to reach for.

  The halfling had changed little—a wavering spirit, colored with avarice and ambition, heightened by pinpricks of petty, but deeper, nastiness. Her music helped keep these things at bay, but recently not even that had halted a growing smear of jealousy.

  He would not ordinarily have searched two such as these, but the human swordswoman had decided to travel with them, and he took his oath to protect her very seriously. Her spirit was often so weak it frightened him. He was afraid her spirit would falter, not only because he was duty bound to her, but because her soul was touched with a midsummer sky blue of grace. He wanted to preserve that.

  Now, though, he admitted to himself that he had failed. The hill around him ebbed and pulsed with an evil light. Soon, he would be killed, the swordswoman’s spirit would be quenched, and she would be turned to evil.

  Evil climbed the hill in many bodies. Weak and strong spirits mingled.
A double file of cloaked and hooded men and women entered the circle of stone fangs. They split their ranks upon stepping into the circle and surrounded him. Their dress marked them as followers of Moander and their leader bore the faceless mask common to evil masters, even in the saurial’s world.

  But the worshipers handled their long robes clumsily and their voices faltered as they sang, occasionally missing notes or forgetting the cadence, only to pick it up again several beats later. Could they be imposters? Dragonbait wondered. They all had the feel of the assassins Cassana worked with—The Fire Knives.

  When the pseudo-worshipers of Moander, numbering two dozen, had formed a circle about the perimeter of the hilltop, four figures in gaudy array stepped into their midst.

  First came the small, grinning form of Phalse. He was all in blue—a sickening blue of decaying meat. His blue-on-blue-on-blue eyes shone with anticipation. Dragonbait hissed, and Phalse smirked. Phalse had found the saurial roaming the plane of Tarterus stalking demons. The pseudo-halfling had captured the paladin and brought him to this plane so he could be slain to enslave another.

  Zrie Prakis entered second, decked in red robes the color of blood, trimmed with dirty, bone-white edgings. He bore his staff of power like a ceremonial weapon, ready to strike down any who failed to obey him. His movements were filled with energy, though his atrophied muscles stretched and popped over his bones.

  The lich’s liveliness was due to the proximity of his mistress, Cassana, who strode in behind him. She was dressed in a strapless gown of shimmering green, slit up the side. In her hands she turned the small, slender wand she used to control her pets. She had a wicked, cruel smile.

  Last of all, Alias entered the circle, moving more like the undead that Prakis was than a living being. The puppet’s body was under control of her mistress. She was garbed in leathers split up the sides, the bare flesh cross-tied with thongs which looped about silver button-hooks. Long, shiny black boots with incredibly high heels covered her feet and calves. She wore an ornate girdle at her waist, with the skull of some creature etched in silver at the front. She had been given a chain shirt split open at the middle, baring the flesh between her breasts and offering any sword an easy target. Shoulder plates of lacquered black, a red velvet cape, and a collar of black and silver completed the showy, but impractical, ensemble.

  In her hands she gripped Dragonbait’s diamond-headed sword so tightly her knuckles were white. Her face was drawn into a tight mask, the lines and vessels of her neck standing out. Along her sword arm, the runes glowed with a hellish light, creating a false blue dawn around her.

  Dragonbait pulled at his metallic bonds, trying not to give his captors the pleasure of seeing him thrash. The wires were too well mounted to give way, though, and his wrists grew wet with blood.

  Zrie Prakis stood at one end of the stone, near Dragonbait’s head, and Phalse stood at the lizard’s feet. Cassana took one side, and Alias, fighting the pull of the runes, lurched to a position directly across from her. The saurial understood all that was to happen. They would use Hill Cleaver, his own sword, to slay him. If only he’d been able to reach the blade back at The Rising Raven, he could have negated all of Cassana’s magic and turned the tide of the battle. Now the blade would shatter upon tasting his innocent blood and two good things would be destroyed in a single blow. Three, counting Alias. If all of this was not evil enough, Cassana was forcing Alias to perform the deed. It was completely unnecessary to the ritual. The witch did it only to bring pain and grief to her puppet.

  Dragonbait looked deep into Cassana’s eyes. She would permit no flower to grow without her permission, and before Alias could bloom, the sorceress would encase her in amber. A perverse curiosity prompted him to use his shen sight on her before he died, just to know what such evil looked like. The heat of her soul caused him to flinch. Within was a black wall riddled with flaming red cracks. Hatred burned deep in her and crackled between her, Zrie Prakis, and Phalse. The lich, like a void, sucked up emotions, and beside Cassana he was a vortex of hatred and fear. Phalse glowed like a city put to the torch by invaders. His maliciousness ran the gamut of yellow greed, red hatred, and a sickly green jealousy.

  Cassana grinned, as if she guessed what the saurial was doing. She looked at the sky behind Alias. The sun had almost cleared the horizon. The tops of the sharp, tooth-shaped plinths looked as if they had bitten into something bloody.

  The sorceress motioned to Phalse, who turned his back on Dragonbait. The small servant motioned with his hands in an arcane fashion that seemed to deny the existence of bones in his arms. They swayed back and forth like snakes. Beyond him, a pinprick of light appeared, then grew. It began as a sphere of multicolored magical force, then flattened, turning into a swirling pattern of silver and red.

  Dragonbait had seen this gate before. It was the passage to the Citadel of White Exile, where he and Alias had been branded. Now, that passage had to be opened again to draw power from the domain of Phalse’s master. With it, they would seal control over Alias at the moment of Dragonbait’s death.

  Dragonbait finally looked up at Alias; he did not want to grieve her, but he could not help himself. Their eyes locked like pieces in a magical puzzle. Her eyes were red-rimmed from exhaustion and evaporated tears. He used his shen sight. If he was going to die, he wanted to do so with his eyes fixed on the brilliant blue of her soul.

  Her spirit’s glow was as slender as the flame from a single candle. It flickered like a living sapphire. Yet on all sides rose a tide of darkness, crackling with energy, forcing itself upward to smother the flame. The flame blazed for a moment, but the forces surrounding it rose as well.

  The chanting increased as Phalse worked his spells to control the spinning disk that reached between the planes. The first tendrils of dawn caught Alias’s hair from behind and set it on fire, a glory of bright red against the newborn sky. “Prepare to sacrifice the innocent!” the sorceress bellowed. “Raise the blade!”

  Alias hesitated and Dragonbait saw the candle’s flame burn hotter. Cassana made a pass with her wand, and the sapphire flame dimmed as if a smoked glass chimney had been dropped over it. Alias raised her hands, clasping Hill Cleaver’s hilt, the blade pointed down at the saurial’s chest. His own sigils were now answering the dark siren call of their masters, and Dragonbait thought his hearts would burst from the strain.

  Through eye contact, he tried to plead with the swordswoman to fight, to strengthen her will. He wished desperately to add his own inner strength to hers and fight off the darkness. However, while his skill allowed him to see her spirit, he could not encourage it. Silently he cursed his inability to communicate with her.

  Blue sparks arced between the sigils on his chest, and the runes on Alias’s arm responded in kind. The Abomination had told her that she drew strength from him, but Dragonbait had not discovered how. Maybe, the saurial suddenly realized, he had denied the evil brands for too long. Perhaps they could yet be turned to good.

  Deliberately, he channeled his will through the runes, trying to force the light to arc higher. The sparks showered upward like water in a fountain, their display mirrored on Alias’s arm. Finally, sparks touched and interwove, bridging the gap between sacrificer and sacrifice.

  Cassana’s voice sounded far off as she shouted, “Seal the pact!” The darkness in Alias rose like bile, and the candle flame of her spirit faltered. Then, feeding at last on the saurial’s own, her flame strengthened and grew in intensity.

  Dragonbait shuddered. He felt as if he had just rolled a massive stone up to and over the crest of a hill. Every muscle in his body spasmed. Now that the stone had been given one last push, however, it rolled of its own accord. Alias’s flame grew hotter and brighter with each passing second. The well of darkness began to harden and then crumble like drying mud. New surges of the surrounding mass of evil rose, but they were repelled by the increasing blue fire.

  Alias hovered over Dragonbait, her muscles locked, her face almost serene. Phal
se and the Fire Knives impersonating Moander worshipers held their breath, as would have Prakis, had he any breath to hold.

  Cassana screwed her comely face into a twisted mask of rage—rage mixed with a hint of fear that the made-creature should reveal a newfound strength. Clenching her wand in her fist, she brought her hand up in a sweeping gesture, yanking hard on the strings of her rebellious puppet in an attempt to force her will on Alias.

  Like an old leather thong stretched to breaking, something within Alias snapped. She drove the blade down hard, but she leaped forward as she did so, plunging Hill Cleaver not into Dragonbait, but straight through Cassana. The diamond-headed tip protruded out of the witch’s back, but there was no blood on it.

  The sorceress staggered backward, a look of shock on her face. Both Phalse and Prakis stepped toward her, but she waved them off. Still clutching her wand in one hand, she reached up to draw the blade from her body. Blue sparks danced from Hill Cleaver where she grasped it. Sorcery kept her alive despite her fatal wound, yet nothing could negate the power of the saurial’s sword to defend itself from the touch of evil. Cassana screamed and ripped the blade from her. Very slowly, blood began to well up from the gash in her chest.

  Her face contorted with pain, Cassana whirled the blade at Alias’s throat. The swordswoman fell backward, dodging the weapon, as Prakis and Phalse lunged at her. She rolled from the lich’s chilling touch. Phalse came at her with a dagger as she rose to her feet. The pseudo-halfling caught one of Alias’s boots in the face and the Fire Knives at the edges of the circle began to converge, prepared to bring Alias down by force of numbers.

  There was a shattering explosion to Dragonbait’s right, behind the kneeling form of Cassana. A pillar of fire shot up from the base of one of the sharp-toothed plinths, catching two Fire Knives. The great tower of stone rocked, then toppled sideways.