The Spectral Blaze botg-3

by Richard Lee Byers

  Then dead men lurched up from the ground and stabbed and struck at the Chessentans, and that was finally too much. The attackers turned and fled, some flinging away their weapons and shields to scurry faster.

  The sellswords didn’t run, but they, too, shrank back from the swaying, shuffling corpses. “It’s all right!” called a high, breathless voice. “They’re on our side!”

  Khouryn pushed between two spearmen and saw a petite, snub-nosed girl astride a drakkensteed, of all things. He dimly recalled her from Aoth’s assembly of Luthcheq’s mages.

  She remembered him too. “Khouryn Skulldark! You came back!”

  “Of course I did,” he said, “and here on the ground, I’m in charge. In five breaths or less, tell me exactly what in the name of the Twin Axes is going on.”

  *****

  There was no hope of avoiding Tchazzar’s fiery breath. Though it was a pitifully inadequate defense, Medrash raised his shield to protect Biri and himself.

  Meanwhile, Praxasalandos had essentially the same idea. He couldn’t dodge the flame but managed to flip himself upward so it burned into his ventral surface and not the riders on his back.

  Unfortunately, since his body was aligned vertically, Medrash started slipping from his back. Bellowing, trying to shout the weakness out of his muscles, he clutched at the dragon’s hide with fingers and knees. He prayed Biri was holding on too. He certainly couldn’t do anything to help her.

  Prax continued his backward somersault until he was belly up. Then, his flesh still burning like dry wood, he plummeted.

  Medrash looked down at the peaked roof rushing up from below.

  He reached out to Torm, and a smaller surge of the deity’s power-all that he could gather and hold in his depleted state-shivered into him. He concentrated it in his clutching fingers, then passed it on to Prax.

  Wings suddenly flailing, the dragon heaved underneath him. Prax couldn’t arrest his fall, but perhaps he slowed it, just as he twisted to drop feet first.

  He also liquefied as he smashed down onto the rooftop, and maybe, to some degree, that cushioned the shock for his riders. Still, the jolt shattered Medrash’s thoughts into jangling confusion. By the time he snapped out of his daze, he’d nearly slid down the slope to the eaves, with rivulets of quicksilver streaming along beside him. He clutched at the shingles and anchored himself.

  He looked around. Biri was higher up on the roof. She didn’t seem to be in any danger of rolling or sliding off, but he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

  Horribly, not all of Prax had turned to liquid metal. Some still on fire, body parts lay amid the globs and spatter.

  Alarming as all that was, Medrash could barely spare it a glance because, yellow eyes burning, flames leaping from between his fangs, Tchazzar was swooping toward the rooftop.

  Still shaky from the fall, keenly aware of the treacherous slope beneath his boots and the drop-off at his back, Medrash heaved himself to his feet. Realizing that at some point he’d dropped his lance, he snatched for his sword. He hoped he could at least land a cut before the red wyrm overwhelmed him.

  Then Balasar and his bat hurtled at Tchazzar’s head, and the Daardendrien threw his lance at the dragon’s eye. He didn’t hit it, but the missile did stick in the creases of hide underneath.

  Tchazzar struck back but the bat dodged, and the blazing jaws clashed shut on nothing. Balasar kept on flitting around the wyrm’s head. His arm cocked and snapped as he threw knives.

  Leveling off, Tchazzar twisted his neck for another strike. Then the wind howled. Though Medrash felt only the fringe of the blast, that was enough to send him tottering backward before he caught himself.

  Tchazzar took the full force of the gale. It slammed him sideways into a tower to smash the facade. He and chunks of broken sandstone fell down into the street together. Meanwhile, Balasar and his bat tumbled through the air but fortunately didn’t suffer a collision of their own.

  Roaring, Tchazzar rose with a lash of his wings that threw banging, clattering rubble in all directions. Then Jhesrhi Coldcreek swooped over him. To Medrash’s surprise, the sellsword wizard was riding a huge eagle, not a griffon.

  He had little doubt that she’d conjured the wind, and Tchazzar apparently thought so too. He spit flame but missed the eagle as it raced on by. And since the street in which he’d landed was too narrow for him to spread his wings, he couldn’t immediately return to the air to chase it there. He snarled and bounded after it on foot.

  Medrash had no way of following even had he wanted to, and he realized he still hadn’t checked Biri. Just as he scrambled up to her, she groaned and shifted her arm.

  Then Balasar set his bat down on the roof and swung himself out of the saddle. “Are you all right?” he said.

  “I think I’m just bruised,” said the mage. She tried to sit up, and Balasar crouched to help her. “Thanks to Prax.” She looked around the rooftop, and sorrow entered her voice. “He’s not going to put himself back together this time, is he?”

  “I don’t think so,” Medrash said.

  “So,” Balasar said, “I gather the exorcism didn’t work.”

  “No,” Medrash said, and a bewildered anger welled up inside him. “And I don’t understand! Why would the Loyal Fury urge me to rush here if I can’t affect the outcome of the battle?”

  “I’ll be a son of a toad if I know,” Balasar said. “It’s your superstition and your magic. But maybe there’s a reason. Think it through.”

  Medrash gripped his gauntlet-shaped pendant as though he could squeeze inspiration out of it. “All right. I freed Prax but he was a metallic. Tchazzar’s a chromatic and it’s the chromatics who are really Tiamat’s people. Maybe I can’t channel enough power to break her grip on them.”

  “But not all the dragons fighting on Tchazzar’s side are chromatics,” Biri said. “I spotted gem wyrms.”

  “And if I can get them to turn on Tchazzar,” Medrash said, “or just go away, it will change the odds considerably. It might give Aoth and Shala Karanok a real chance to win.”

  “Take the bat,” Balasar said. “You’ll need it to get close to your targets.”

  “Thanks.” Medrash clambered toward the crest of the roof and the animal perched atop it. “Will you two be all right?”

  “Fine,” Biri said. “I just need a moment to catch my breath, and then we’ll find a way down to the ground. I imagine Khouryn and his infantry can use an extra swordsman and wizard.”

  Medrash touched his heels to the bat’s flanks, and the animal lashed its wings and soared upward. Resenting the dark, the eye-stinging smoke, and the taller structures, all of which seemed engaged in a conspiracy to deny him a clear view of the air around him, he looked for dragons.

  The first one he spotted was Alasklerbanbastos, unmistakable even to someone who’d never seen him by virtue of his hugeness and the lightning flickering around his bare bones. According to Jhesrhi by way of Khouryn, Aoth had found a way to control the lich. But if so, the creature had slipped the leash, because he and his erstwhile master were fighting.

  The Great Bone Wyrm spit a thunderbolt. Jet raised one wing and swept his rider safely to one side. Aoth hurled a rainbow of presumably destructive power from his spear. But Alasklerbanbastos didn’t even bother dodging, and the magic played over his skeletal form without doing any discernible damage.

  Medrash wanted to go to the Thayan’s aid. Everything about Alasklerbanbastos outraged his sensibilities as both a paladin and a dragonborn. He could barely look at the lich without clenching and shivering with hate.

  And besides, Aoth seemed to need help because at the moment there weren’t many other griffon riders fighting Alasklerbanbastos. Evidently the dragons were thinning them out, either by hurting them and their mounts or simply exhausting their supplies of arrows. It wouldn’t be long before there weren’t enough foes left in the air to keep the wyrms from turning their attention to the relatively helpless warriors on the ground.

  And
that, Medrash decided, was why he had to stick to his original plan. It offered the only real hope of winning. Though his instincts cried out against it, he passed the dracolich and the beleaguered warmage by.

  The smoke seemed to thicken. Then he realized it wasn’t smoke anymore, not over that bit of the city, but rather something damper and cleaner: fog.

  But though the mist was easier to breathe, it was an even greater hindrance to sight, and he soon realized that others had discovered the same thing to their cost. Below him, just visible in the cloud, battered sellswords tended their wounded mounts.

  Then he heard crashing, and a squat, drum-shaped tower swam out of the vapor and the gloom. Even if it hadn’t originally been intended as a bastion, it resembled one, and troops on Aoth and Shala’s side had taken refuge inside. They could probably have held off the warriors who’d surrounded the structure for a long time too, except for the thing that was smashing and tearing its way down to them from above.

  Medrash couldn’t see it even when he was nearly on top of it, although its existence was apparent from the long, deep tears appearing as it clawed the wood beneath it. Not content merely to blind its adversaries with fog, it had wrapped itself in true invisibility as well.

  And that, Medrash realized, meant he had no way of knowing when it was about to use its breath weapon. But fortunately the bat had its own ways of sensing and had probably fought dragons on Black Ash Plain. The animal flung itself sideways, and although the shriek that sounded an instant later was painfully loud, it didn’t do Medrash any actual harm.

  He resolved to let his mount fly as it saw fit. At the moment it understood how it ought to maneuver far better than he did. He reached out to Torm and Bahamut and, grateful that his mystical strength had returned, drew cold fire down.

  Then pain ripped through his skull. He almost lost focus and let the gift the gods had given him spill from his grasp, but not quite. Snarling, he pushed the clawing alien presence out of mind.

  But by the time he accomplished that, new rips had stopped scarring the rooftop, and the rapidly disintegrating surface no longer bowed under an unseen weight. The dragon was on the wing.

  The bat flung itself to the right then the left, swooping and whirling, dodging more attacks that Medrash couldn’t see. But its agility wouldn’t save it for long, not against a foe who could strike with fang and claw, a burst of sound, the hammering force of its will, and Torm only knew what other tricks.

  Medrash had to end the fight quickly, and-he hoped-he still held the means shivering and burning like ice inside him. But how could he cast the power at an invisible mark?

  He needed to sense Tiamat’s taint as he’d sensed it before. He reached out with his intuition or some faculty akin to it and thought he felt a sickening locus of vileness arcing through the air.

  He stretched out his hand and shouted, “Torm!” A white blaze leaped from his fingers. The fog diffused some of its light, but the rest played across and half-revealed the serpentine form of a dragon.

  The creature roared. Flailing its wings, it made a final furious effort to close with the bat and Medrash. Then, as he scoured it with the last of the holy light, it gave up that effort and its invisibility too. The glow of a burning building gleamed on scales like plates of polished emerald.

  You’ve… restored me to myself, the dragon said, speaking mind to mind. The words were like a kettledrum throbbing and rumbling inside Medrash’s head.

  “Then here’s how to thank me,” he replied. “My comrades and I need your help against Tchazzar and Alasklerbanbastos.”

  I acknowledge a debt to you, dragonborn, and I’ll repay you if I can. But I’m no match for the Red Dragon of Chessenta and the Great Bone Wyrm. I’d only be throwing my life away.

  “Like the rest of us,” Medrash said, “you’re no match for them by yourself. But I’m going to purge the other dragons too. As many as I can, until I run out of strength.”

  The emerald dragon pondered that for a breath or two as it and the bat glided over the rooftops. Then it said, Don’t bother with the black. I doubt you can break the Great Game’s hold on him.

  “I already guessed that. Does this mean you’ll help?”

  Until I judge my debt is paid. The wyrm lashed its wings and climbed.

  *****

  Alasklerbanbastos hissed words of power, and a shape like a huge, black sword appeared in the air. Someone else might have called it a shadow, but Aoth’s fire-kissed eyes recognized it for what it truly was: a movable wound slashed in the fabric of the world, a hole through which a man could fall into nonexistence.

  The sword cut at him and Jet. The griffon swooped under the attack. It was bad tactics to give up the high air to the dracolich. But Aoth could feel how tired Jet was and that the familiar had been unsure of his ability to dodge the cut in any other way.

  The shadow sword leaped at them again. Aoth rattled off a counterspell and jabbed his spear at the blade. Nothing happened.

  Jet kept dodging, though the cuts were forcing him lower and lower. Aoth hurled fire at the black sword, and the flare winked out of existence as the two magics collided. The sword kept coming.

  Aoth rasped words of power, spun his spear over his head, and thrust it at the magical threat. A shadow sword of his own, smaller but identical in every other way, leaped from the point and shot at Alasklerbanbastos’s creation.

  The air, or a spherical portion of space itself, squirmed as the two manifestations of nothingness struggled to swallow one another. Bile burning in the back of his throat, Aoth averted his eyes. His instincts told him that if he didn’t, his truesight might discern something that would damage his mind.

  Twisted and knotted together like fighting serpents, the blades vanished. But Jet’s claws were nearly brushing the cobblestones, and looming overhead, lightning dancing over his naked bones, Alasklerbanbastos had nearly completed another incantation, one that would rain thunderbolts down on the narrow, crooked street. The air smelled of the coming storm.

  Aoth hurled darts of azure light from his spear. It was something he could do virtually instantaneously, but it was also a relatively weak spell. He knew it likely wouldn’t be enough to make the dracolich fumble his casting, and sure enough, it didn’t.

  But something else did. A howl stabbed through the air and smashed Alasklerbanbastos’s crested skull to the side. The lich whipped his head back around, seeking the new foe who’d dared to strike him.

  Aoth judged that gave him and Jet one chance to get out of Tchazzar’s view and catch their breaths. Perceiving what he wanted, the griffon touched down and charged at a door. Aoth pointed his spear and blasted the panel and much of the frame away with a pulse of pure force.

  Jet leaped through and they found themselves in a chandler’s shop. Aoth smashed away a section of wall, and they raced on into a hatter’s establishment.

  *****

  Alasklerbanbastos couldn’t see the impudent wretch who had struck him. But he heard leathery wings flapping as the coward beat a hasty retreat into the… smoke? It actually looked like it might be fog.

  He spit a booming, blazing thunderbolt into the cloud. But nothing screamed or thudded to the ground afterward.

  He hesitated, momentarily uncertain whether to go after the traitor or finish off Aoth Fezim, and the dithering cost him. When he looked back down into the street, the sellsword and griffon were gone.

  Alasklerbanbastos snarled, then strained to put frustration aside and think. And when he had, he lashed his clattering wings, climbed, and looked around the sky for flashes of fire.

  They led him to Tchazzar, who was chasing Jhesrhi Coldcreek. Plainly the wizard’s battle sense and the agility of her steed had thus far kept her alive in a confrontation with a vastly more powerful foe in much the same way that Fezim had survived his clash with Alasklerbanbastos.

  But now Jhesrhi would have two ancient wyrms to contend with, and she was so busy fencing with Tchazzar that she might not even have noticed Alask
lerbanbastos’s approach. He studied the eagle, discerned its true nature, and whispered words of unmaking.

  The eagle vanished from underneath its rider. Jhesrhi plummeted between the tops of two buildings and vanished from view. Spewing flame, Tchazzar let out a roar of shock and anguish. He was afraid Alasklerbanbastos had cheated him out of his revenge by killing the wizard himself.

  Alasklerbanbastos doubted that, and when they each settled atop one of the houses-the structures creaked as they took their weight-and looked down into the twisting alley dividing them, he saw he was right. There was no corpse lying at the bottom.

  “These humans are tricky,” he said. “You have to give them that.”

  Tchazzar glared at him. “You piece of dung! I nearly had her! And then you… startled me!”

  The red’s petulance reminded Alasklerbanbastos of just how much he despised him, how much he wanted to lash out… but no. Not yet. Maybe not for many years to come. “I understand how you feel,” he began.

  “You don’t!” Tchazzar snapped.

  “I do. You hate the wizard for deceiving you. I hate Fezim for making a slave of me. And so we’ve both spent much of the battle chasing them around. Meanwhile, the complexion of the fight is changing around us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Llemgradac balked me just when I was about to finish off Fezim. Or at least I’m virtually certain it was him.”

  “Why would he do that? He must understand that he’ll score more points helping us preserve the sanctity of the game than he could pursuing any other course.”

  Alasklerbanbastos snorted. “So I assumed. But perhaps I overlooked the fact that we’re playing a game devised to last for decades or even centuries, and every worthy player employs a long-term strategy. Llemgradac may be willing to sacrifice points now in the expectation that it will pay off later on.”