The Spectral Blaze botg-3

by Richard Lee Byers

  When he was ready, he reached out with a mode of perception that was neither squinting, blurry sight nor groping, fumbling touch but vaguely akin to both. He found Faarinnjaallafon’s skeleton and launched himself in its direction.

  He took possession of the skeleton with the brightest flash and the loudest thunderclap yet, both blasting forth from the core of him. Others followed, one after another, fast as the beats of a racing heart.

  Finally the flares and the cacophony subsided. He tried to spread his wings, and rattling a little, they responded exactly as they should. The meld of mind and physical form was perfect.

  Perfect and intoxicating because he could feel that he was finally, truly the Great Bone Wyrm once more, every bit as strong as he had ever been. And how he would make his foes regret it!

  The only problem, he thought with a twinge of humor, was deciding where to begin. For there were so many enemies whose deeds cried out for revenge.

  Perhaps the way to choose was to assess how vengeance could best work in the service of his other goals. And when he considered his situation in those terms, he knew where to go next.

  *****

  Khouryn leaped aside, and the purple worm’s fangs clashed shut in the spot where he’d just been standing. He stepped in, swung his axe, and gashed one of bulges that ran down the length of the creature’s body.

  The riposte should have been safe. By rights, the worm shouldn’t have been able to twist the neckless nub of a head at the end of its thick form far enough to threaten him anew. But somehow it did. The jaws opened wide, revealing the fanglike protrusions that lined the mouth all the way back and on down the throat. The spikes heaved and rippled with a kind of peristalsis, and a hot, rotten stench poured forth.

  The creature’s head jumped at him. Khouryn tried to dodge, and his boot landed on something slippery. He lurched off balance and felt a jolt of terror at the likely consequences. Then a hand clutched his shoulder and jerked. It was just enough to drag him out of harm’s way, and the enormous fangs grated as they once again snapped shut on empty air.

  Medrash had let his sword dangle from its martingale to take hold of him. The paladin tossed his arm and caught the weapon by the hilt as it flipped upward. “Have you fought these before?” he asked.

  “A couple times,” Khouryn said. “It takes a lot of cutting.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Balasar said, advancing on the creature with his buckler extended and his sword high. “Because there are two of them.”

  Khouryn snarled an obscenity. He wanted to glance around and determine where the other worm had popped up-and determine what Gestanius was doing, for that matter-but then the first worm resumed moving, and he realized it could easily mean his death to look away.

  The creature finished writhing out of its hole and struck at Medrash simultaneously. He blocked with his shield and must have channeled some of Torm’s power to do it, or the impact would have knocked him off his feet. Probably hoping to reach some vulnerable or tender part, he stepped in close and slashed at the inside of the worm’s mouth. The beast recoiled, jerking its head back, up, and out of the dragonborn’s reach.

  But the creature immediately twisted and bit at one of the Platinum Cadre warriors. The fellow interposed his targe as Medrash had, and it saved his life. But the worm’s teeth clanged shut on the edges of the shield and wrenched it away. The jerk had surely either broken or dislocated the dragonborn’s arm, and he dropped his mace and reeled backward. The worm swallowed the targe.

  “Squads!” Khouryn bellowed. “Flank it! Like fighting anything big! Like I taught you!”

  Warriors scrambled to form up. Afterward they attacked the purple worm when its attention was elsewhere and fell back when the beast turned toward them. Meanwhile, wizards, including Biri, pierced it with darts of light and dropped nets of steaming, sizzling slime onto its back. The strands seared its flesh and left crosshatches of burns behind.

  The accumulating wounds looked as if they ought to do some good eventually. But the worm wasn’t slowing down yet, and Khouryn wasn’t surprised. In his youth, he’d seen one of the behemoths split open from end to end and knew it scarcely had any vital organs as such. It was just a length of gut sheathed in muscle with a brain that was only a bump at the top of the spinal cord and a dozen hearts to pump its blood around.

  Standing at the center of a wheel of floating, glowing runes, Medrash cut deep into the worm’s flank. Khouryn rushed in and did the same. As the beast twisted in their direction, Balasar darted forward to attack it from the other side.

  The eyeless head jerked back in his direction, and caught by surprise, he couldn’t stop in time. His own momentum flung him into the worm’s mouth. The creature heaved its head high to swallow.

  Medrash cried out and he and Khouryn both struck savagely. If Balasar was even still alive, his only hope was for his allies to slay the worm and cut him out of its body quickly.

  Then Biri ran toward the struggle, which was wrong. She should have stayed on the ledge and cast her spells from a relatively safe distance. Khouryn drew breath to yell for her to go back. Then he noticed the five swords of crimson light hovering around her, the halo of coppery shimmer between the conjured blades and her body, and realized what she intended.

  Medrash glimpsed her coming and opened his mouth. Most likely his first impulse, too, was to order her back.

  “Let her come!” Khouryn snapped. He hoped that by so doing, he hadn’t assured the death of a second friend.

  Medrash’s eyes narrowed. Then he pivoted, raised his bloody sword and his steel-gauntleted fist high, and shouted, “Torm, please, shield her!”

  Points of silvery light started glinting amid the coppery shimmer. They might even have been shaped like hands, but they winked on and off too quickly for Khouryn to be sure.

  Biri planted herself squarely in front of their colossal form. “Here, wormy, wormy, wormy!” she cried.

  The great jaws swung in her direction. Then they hurtled down at her.

  The white-scaled dragonborn gasped. She flinched back an involuntary half step but no farther.

  The worm snapped her up, raised its head, and swallowed. Then it gave a deafening roar as it felt the flying blades slicing it from the inside.

  Khouryn hoped that would distract it from external dangers. “Everyone!” he shouted. “Hit it! Now!”

  The Cadre warriors rushed in from all sides. And the worm didn’t attack them, although the twisting, heaving convulsions of its colossal body threatened to crush them even so.

  Fire blazed out of the beast’s mouth as, apparently still alive and capable of action, Biri unleashed incendiary magic.

  Medrash spun his sword over his head with a flourish quite unlike his usual no-nonsense way of handling a weapon. The spin kindled a brilliant glow inside the blade, and when he attacked, the edge cut as though the worm’s thick hide and dense muscle were soft as melting butter.

  The beast’s head toppled forward and thudded on the cavern floor. It convulsed for another few moments, then sprawled motionless.

  “Get them out!” Medrash shouted.

  Khouryn could guess Biri’s location. She should be just below the part of the worm that gave steaming, blistered evidence of having cooked from the inside. Using his axe alternately like a saw and a butcher knife, he ripped at the creature’s hide. Guided either by his deity’s prompting or simple inference, Medrash attacked a spot a few paces farther down. Cadre warriors scrambled to help them both. Khouryn was peripherally aware of the roaring cacophony and furious motion of the rest of the battle, of the fact that the ongoing violence could engulf the rescuers at any moment. But he still couldn’t afford to worry about it.

  Gripping the head of the axe with one hand and its haft with the other, he sawed the hole he was making a couple of strokes deeper then, grunting, pulled the edges apart. A booted foot appeared amid the muscle, blood, and slime. He yelled, “Here!” Together, he and the dragonborn working beside him c
ut and tore the opening larger still then dragged Biri out into the open.

  She came out, bleeding in a dozen places, but Khouryn judged that none of the cuts was serious. Torm’s blessing and her own power had protected her. Slippery with ooze, retching and coughing, she wheezed, “Nothing… to breathe.”

  “You’re all right now,” Khouryn told her.

  “Balasar,” she said.

  Voices babbled behind them. By the time Khouryn looked around, Medrash and the cultists were pulling Balasar out of the worm’s body.

  He was cut badly, indeed, covered in blood from head to toe. Ordinary armor of steel and leather hadn’t done enough to protect him as the purple worm’s countless internal teeth pierced and ground him and peristalsis crushed him again and again. But he was alive. He must be because, whispering, Medrash was praying the silvery light of healing into his hands.

  Khouryn shifted position to keep Biri from getting a good look. “He’s fine,” he said then turned to one of the Cadre warriors. “Get her back on the ledge.”

  Biri shook her head. “I can-”

  “You can’t do anything more until you at least catch your breath,” Khouryn said. “Now, both of you, move!”

  The warrior helped her to her feet. Khouryn pivoted to find out-finally-what else was going on.

  Though it was pretty much all raw, oozing burns and bloody wounds from end to end, the second purple worm was still alive and striving furiously to reach several Imaskari wizards perched on a ledge. One of them was Nellis Saradexma, who held his orb of dark crystal paled in one long-fingered hand and shifted it up and down and side to side. A ghostly, floating shield made of green phosphorescence shifted with it to block the worm’s attacks. Meanwhile, Nellis’s fellow wizards and the dragonborn and Imaskari warriors surrounding the lower portion of the beast assailed it furiously.

  Unfortunately the diplomat’s defense wasn’t impenetrable. Khouryn gave a wordless little snarl when the green shield failed to jump quickly enough, and the worm snatched a mage off the shelf. Like Balasar and Biri before him, the Imaskari slid down the beast’s gullet in an instant-golden staff, long, black greatcoat, and all.

  But despite that loss, it looked to Khouryn as if the worm’s foes were wearing it down. He couldn’t say the same about Gestanius.

  At the moment the green dragon was primarily concerned with killing Praxasalandos, a duel that, because of the difference in sizes, reminded Khouryn of a dog fighting a cat. And the dog was winning. Prax had at least two serious wounds and several minor ones. The severed tip of his tail and a couple of the short horns from under his jaw lay on the cavern floor.

  The wyrms were lunging, whirling, and striking so quickly that no human or dragonborn dared to venture close and risk a trampling or the bone-shattering flick of a lashing tail. Instead, warriors shot arrows and quarrels, missing as often as not despite Gestanius’s hugeness. When they did hit the mark, the shafts frequently glanced off her scales.

  Attacking with blasts of frost and howls of focused noise, Jemleh Bluerhine and a couple other arcanists-thank the Luckmaiden that the knack for magic ran in the Imaskari blood-were inflicting somewhat greater harm. But it was not enough to make Gestanius falter.

  Gestanius suddenly opened her jaws and, without any of the telltale preparatory movements that Khouryn had learned to watch for, spewed acid. The attack seemingly caught Praxasalandos by surprise as well, for the sizzling acid hit him straight on, and he shuddered, jerked, and burned helplessly.

  Gestanius pounced the instant the acid dissolved, before even another dragon could shake off the punishment she’d just inflicted. She caught Praxasalandos’s neck in her jaws and reared onto her hind legs, so the frills at the back of her head brushed the ceiling. She bit down and clawed at her opponent’s chest at the same time.

  Blood gushed and Prax splashed apart into streams and globs, which rained down from Gestanius’s fangs and talon to make a gleaming pool on the floor. The colossal green immediately dropped into the center of it and kept on clawing. Now she looked like a dog digging, and her efforts flung bits of the quicksilver dragon’s substance far and wide. One spattered right at Khouryn’s feet.

  As it did, Gestanius wheeled to glare at Jemleh and his fellow mages. Without Prax-or someone-to keep her busy with close combat, she was likely to destroy the spellcasters in a couple of heartbeats.

  Khouryn yelled as loudly as he could, raised his axe, and charged. He was keenly aware that if he was the only one who rushed in, he might well be living out the last few moments of his life.

  For a heartbeat, as Gestanius spun in his direction, all the crossbowmen, archers, and slingers stayed right where they were. Then Vishva yelled, “Bahamut!” She dropped her arbalest, snatched her warhammer off the floor, and charged. Other members of the Cadre followed her example, and Imaskari soldiers did it too.

  That didn’t distract Gestanius from striking at the one mad dwarf on the field. Her huge jaws plunged down at him, and his own momentum nearly consigned him to the same ignominious disaster that had overtaken Balasar. But somehow he managed to fling himself aside and even chop at the side of the dragon’s head, although he only nicked it a little. Still charging, he dodged a raking forefoot.

  He plunged into the shadow under the dragon’s belly and started chopping at a foreleg. The ceiling was too low for Gestanius to fly. If he could cut a couple of legs out from under her, it would immobilize her.

  He created a couple of nice, deep gashes, deep enough to recapture her attention, apparently, for then she started stamping. She likely hoped to catch him squarely under her foot and squash him flat, but that might not be necessary. If she simply snagged him with a claw, she stood a fair chance of ripping him apart.

  He dodged frantically and scrambled whenever Gestanius’s lunging and turning threatened to separate them. He swung the axe when he could manage it and, though intent on his own small part of the struggle, occasionally caught glimpses of the rest:

  A swat from a leathery wing smashed an Imaskari spearman.

  An umber-scaled dragonborn axeman ran to join Khouryn underneath Gestanius until the green’s jaws hurtled down and nipped away everything from the waist up. Gestanius spit out what she’d taken as she lifted her head again. The warrior’s eyes blinked once, seemingly at the sight of his severed legs toppling in front of him.

  Cloudy with bits of dissolving flesh, steaming fluid poured down off Gestanius’s flanks. Jemleh or one of his colleagues was attacking her with acid.

  Khouryn bellowed “East Rift!” and swung, burying most of the axe’s head in Gestanius’s flesh. When he wrenched it free, blood spurted, spattering his chest, beard, and flesh and blinding him till he sidestepped and swiped the gore in his eyes away.

  Gestanius howled and snatched her foot off the floor, and Khouryn was ecstatic when it didn’t come stamping down again. She folded up her foreleg against her chest where he couldn’t reach it.

  Khouryn barked a laugh and ran toward the rear of her body. If he could cripple a hind leg too, that would accomplish his purpose.

  But before he could reach the limb, Gestanius roared a word that seemed to stab him through like a rapier. He fell on his face, and the sound hung in the air like the shivering note of a gong. It twisted and tore at him, and just as horribly, he somehow felt it twisting and tearing at the very structure of the world. It was magic so powerful and malign that it tortured reality itself.

  Finally the sound faded. But Khouryn ached in every nerve and couldn’t focus his thoughts. When Gestanius sprang away from him, he almost didn’t realize that was a problem.

  Almost but not quite. Gritting his teeth against a pang of sharper pain, he forced himself to lift his head.

  Nearly as fast as ever despite her laming, Gestanius whirled to face him. He supposed it was an accolade of sorts that out of all the foes who’d been assailing her, he was the one she particularly wanted to dispose of.

  And she very likely would, because when he glan
ced around, there didn’t seem to be anyone capable of distracting her from her purpose. The word of power had stunned everyone, warrior and wizard alike. Some folk lay entirely unconscious. A couple shuddered and rolled their eyes in ungovernable terror if not outright insanity.

  Khouryn heaved himself to his feet and hefted his axe. “Try,” he croaked.

  Gestanius opened her jaws, and a pale cloud gathered at the back of her mouth. The smell of acid suffused the air. Khouryn’s eyes watered as the air filled with noxious fumes.

  Then a silvery waterfall poured down from the ceiling.

  Or rather, it poured halfway. It gathered itself into a coherent shape in mid drop, and by the time it slammed down on top of Gestanius, it was Prax.

  His weight drove the green down on her belly. He seized her neck in his jaws midway down and drove his foreclaws into her. She twisted her head and spit the acid she’d originally intended for Khouryn, but the angle was bad. Prax crouched low and the acid sizzled over his head. The talons on his hind feet raked deep, bloody furrows in Gestanius’s back.

  But then the green whipped her neck and broke Praxasalandos’s grip on it, although his jaws came away full of flesh. She flipped over, crashed down on top of the quicksilver wyrm, and rolled. His claws ripped out of her back, and they tangled together, biting, tearing, each trying to coil around and immobilize the other.

  And they continued to fight the same way when they fetched up against the cavern wall, like wrestlers, not pugilists or axemen. And that, Khouryn realized, meant that other, smaller combatants could get close to them without quite as much danger of getting squashed.

  Still weak and shaky from the effects of the word of smiting, he scarcely felt capable of running across the cavern another time. But he staggered one step, then another, and the debility fell away. Dragonborn and Imaskari followed him, stumbling and lurching at first, then picking up speed.

  When they reached the wyrms, they had to seize their opportunities, rush in, strike, and be ready to retreat in an instant, because while the dragons weren’t whirling and lunging around as they had before, they weren’t motionless either. They rolled and heaved, and any such shift could crush the smaller creatures stabbing and cutting in their shadow.