The Rite

by Richard Lee Byers

  It didn’t look as if any of them were dead, or even maimed. He and Jivex had succeeded in keeping the brass’s attention locked on them. But he almost regretted that because, instead of attacking the crazed wyrm, a number of the wizards were fleeing. A couple blinked out of sight, translating themselves to some safe location. Others scurried along the wall, making for the door.

  Though not everyone was running. The man with the eye patch and the lass dressed in a moon priestess’s silvery vestments were throwing spells at the brass. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to be hurting or hindering it any more than Jivex had.

  Meanwhile, Firefingers battled a different foe. The brass’s blast of fiery breath had set books and documents alight. Indeed, if unchecked, the blaze might well spread to devour Sammaster’s notes themselves and all the scholarly resources the mages were using to try to make sense of them. Weaving his arms in cabalistic passes, the old man in the garish robes crooned to the flames, coaxing and cajoling them. A bit at a time, the blue and yellow tongues floated up away from the paper and drifted to envelop his hands, which burned like torches.

  The brass spun and whipped its tail at Taegan. Caught by surprise, he only just dodged, and in so doing, lost track of the wizards.

  On the final word of his own conjuration, he swiped powdered lime and carbon down his blade, and the steel glittered and burned cold beneath his touch. While the spell lasted, his sword would be sharper than any ordinary blade.

  The room, spacious as it was, was only barely large enough to accommodate a flyer his size. With difficulty, he zigzagged through the air to befuddle his foe, and spotted Jivex clinging to the larger drake’s spine. Tearing with his talons, he swooped to the brass’s flank, and thrust his sword between its ribs.

  The brass jerked and roared. Taegan yanked his weapon free, mindful not to stop moving, and flew on toward its tail. He began another spell, one intended to make him preternaturally fast.

  Wind howled through the room. A brutal downdraft smashed Taegan to the floor and slammed the breath out of him. Heedless of the darts of ice and scarlet light battering it, the brass, which had no doubt conjured the artificial gale, glowered at him. Its long throat swelled.

  It was about to breathe out another cone of flame, and with the screaming wind still pressing down on him, he couldn’t dodge fast or far enough to evade it. He rolled, fetched up under a table, and hacked at the legs on one end. Though his sword was scarcely intended for such a task, its magically honed edge served to chop through the wood. That side of the table crashed down, cutting off his view of the brass.

  The wyrm’s breath engulfed the floor in a mass of flame that blistered him and filled his lungs with excruciating heat. Still, his makeshift shield blocked out the worst of it, and a moment later, the fierce winds halted as suddenly as they’d begun. Evidently one of the mages had countered the dragon’s power with his own.

  Maybe the sudden cessation of the winds had caught the wyrm by surprise. If so, it was possible that Taegan could rush in close and strike a telling blow while it was distracted. He scuttled out from under the table, leaped up, and flew at the reptile through the countless papers, embers, and scraps of ash adrift in the air.

  He’d guessed correctly. The brass had turned away from him to lunge at Firefingers. Taegan’s blade punched deep into its breast. It jerked back around, reaching for him with its claws, and Jivex balked it by whizzing into position to scrabble at its eye. Jaws gaping, it whipped its head around to snap at the faerie dragon, at which point sheets of liquid hammered from the empty air like rain from a tiny, invisible cloud. Where the torrent washed over the brass, its flesh smoked, sizzled, and charred.

  The yellow drake collapsed, rolled, and convulsed, nearly crushing Taegan beneath its bulk before he flew clear. The reptile kept thrashing for half a minute, then finally slumped inert. The stink of its acid-seared flesh combined with the smoke in the air to sting the fencing teacher’s eyes and put a vile taste in his mouth.

  At least the room wasn’t on fire anymore. Firefingers had collected all the leaping, rustling flames. Still murmuring words of power, he rubbed his hands together as if he was washing them, and the blaze went out. His skin wasn’t even pink from the heat.

  The elf wizard hurried over to Taegan. Seen up close, his fair complexion had a slight bluish tinge, as did his shoulder-length dark hair. Something about his pleasant, forthright face reminded the avariel of Amra, the kindly elf ghost, if that was the right word, he’d encountered in the Gray Forest.

  “How badly are you hurt?” the magician asked.

  Taegan tried to respond, but a fit of coughing overwhelmed him.

  “It’s all right,” said the elf. “One of us is a healer, and happily”—he pulled a wry face—“she’s one of the ones who didn’t run. Sinylla, come here, please!”

  The moon priestess hurried in their direction.

  “The body!” Firefingers panted. “Don’t let the leakage dirty any papers!”

  “I’ll get rid of it,” said the one-eyed man. He started the process by murmuring a rhyme and lashing his hand through a complex pattern, whereupon the brass shrank to a fraction of its former size.

  The elf wizard looked sadly at the ravaged, diminished remains. “Poor Samdralyrion,” he sighed. “To all appearances, he was one of the most stable of all Kara’s allies. I didn’t notice any warning signs at all. The Rage took him all at once, in a heartbeat.”

  Taegan frowned at the suspicion that popped into his head.

  Dorn stood in his customary fighting stance, iron half forward, vulnerable human parts behind, long, heavy hand-and-a-half sword cocked back in his fist of flesh and bone. The two bandits edged apart, trying to flank him, and he lunged and snapped his massive metal arm in a backhand blow. His target likely didn’t expect anyone who looked so ponderous to pounce that quickly, and the attack caught him by surprise. The knuckle-spikes smashed his skull, and he dropped.

  The other raider turned tail. Dorn started to pursue, but then Kara stopped singing her battle anthem to snarl instead. Alarmed, the half-golem pivoted in her direction.

  Lithe and lightning-quick, a sparkling crystal-blue in her dragon form, Kara was fighting in front of one of the sod huts that comprised the village. As far as Dorn could tell, nothing had hurt her, nor had any worthy foe appeared to challenge her. Rather, all the surviving brigands in her vicinity were routing. Yet she’d abandoned her music to growl like an angry beast.

  As Dorn had predicted, two dragons and a pair of warriors as able as Raryn and himself had experienced no real difficulty defeating a motley band of marauders. Yet the situation had presented a genuine peril nonetheless, the risk that the excitement of combat would cause one or both of the drakes to succumb to the Rage.

  Dorn had to stop Kara before the fury deepened, before she gobbled down one of the bandits, lashed out at her own allies, or attacked the villagers.

  “Kara!” he called. “Kara!”

  She whipped around to face him, amethyst eyes glaring.

  He set his bloody sword down on the ground. Fresh gore stimulated the Rage, and he wished he could thoroughly clean his iron hand as well, but knew there wasn’t time.

  He eased toward Kara, murmuring to her in as soothing a manner as he could manage: “It’s all right, the fight’s over, you can stop now. Just breathe slowly, and calm down. You can shake the anger off, I’ve seen you do it before.”

  She shuddered and bared her fangs. The air smelled like an approaching storm. He was only a few paces in front of her, and drawing nearer with every step. If she chose to attack him with her breath weapon, a plume of vapor charged with the essence of lightning, it would be all but impossible to dodge.

  He kept on closing the distance anyway, though he wasn’t sure why. It didn’t seem as if his prattle was having any effect. In another moment or so, she was going to snap.

  Dorn wracked his brain for a way to reach her, and after what felt like a long time, an idea came to him. He s
ucked in a breath and started singing one of the first songs he’d ever heard her perform, the one about flying high on the wind and beholding all Faerûn spread out below.

  As he could have predicted, it sounded awful, harsh and off key, the rhythm stumbling. He hadn’t tried to sing since the day the red slaughtered his parents. The impulse was something the wyrm had ripped away along with his arm and leg.

  But bad as it sounded, it gradually stopped Kara’s shaking. When, still singing, he drew near enough, he gingerly stroked the song dragon’s mask.

  Kara sighed, closed her eyes, and shrank, melting into her human guise. When the transformation was complete, she put her arms around him and clasped him tight.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  As always, her touch made him feel soft and strange inside, and that was disturbing. Still, he suffered the embrace for a moment or two before breaking it off.

  “You would have mastered the frenzy anyway,” he said.

  “Perhaps not. It’s growing worse.”

  “I know, which means I was wrong to let you fight an unnecessary battle.”

  Kara smiled and said, “As if you could have stopped me.”

  Dorn felt his lips stretch into an answering grin. “Well, there is that.” Then he was uncomfortable once more, and needed the moment to end. “We should find out what’s happening.”

  She lowered her head as if to conceal a change of expression. “Yes, of course.”

  It only took a few moments to determine that Raryn and Chatulio were unharmed, and that the copper had resisted the frenzy. After that, the seekers turned their attention to the villagers.

  The simple folk cringed from them, despite their efforts on their behalf. It put a bitter taste in Dorn’s mouth, but he figured they were right to fear any wyrm in a time of Rage, and knew only too well that he himself resembled some sort of troll or demon. Even an arctic dwarf like Raryn was an oddity in the hinterlands of Damara, hence an object of mistrust.

  Kara sang a rhyming couplet under her breath, and she grew even fairer than before. Dorn had to struggle not to stare at her. Yet the transformation did more than enhance her beauty. She seemed manifestly virtuous, a saintly creature whose every word carried the weight of wisdom and truth.

  Cloaked in the enchantment, she was able to allay the villagers’ fears and begin the work of setting the hamlet to rights, assigning tasks as necessary. Soon, folk who were still well tended those who were injured. Women cooked, and herders set forth to round up scattered sheep and goats. Employing his illusions, Chatulio created the equivalent of a comical puppet show to help the younger children forget the horrors they’d witnessed. When her other self-assumed responsibilities allowed, Kara devoted herself to those hardest hit by the cruelty and bereavement they’d suffered. She listened to their anguish, held their hands, and murmured words of solace.

  Dorn watched it all at a distance, feeling that he had no aid to give. He had no knack for speaking gently. All he knew was how to kill.

  In time, Raryn strolled up to loiter beside him. The dwarf still had spatters of bandit blood on his cheeks and in his white goatee. The gleaming head of his bone-handled ice-axe, however, was clean. The ranger was scrupulous about caring for his gear. He’d once explained that on the Great Glacier, where he’d spent his youth, weapons and tools were too hard to come by to treat carelessly.

  The two hunters watched Kara discover a maimed dog in the shadow of a hunt, soothe it with her voice and caress, then kill it suddenly and cleanly with a thrust of her knife.

  “She’s a good woman,” Raryn said.

  “She’s not a woman at all,” Dorn replied

  “Near enough.” The dwarf grinned. “By my standards, anyway. Of course, tribal legend has it that some of my forefathers married bears.”

  Dorn grunted.

  “Starting off,” Raryn said, “you hated her just for being a dragon, but I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “So I ask, what are you waiting on? This is risky business, chasing all over the North with mad wyrms and other dangers lurking at every turn, sticking our noses into accursed crypts and haunted tombs. I like to think we’re tough enough to win through, but I wouldn’t bet my mother’s teeth on it.”

  “You’re imagining something that isn’t there. I may not hate Kara, but I don’t desire a creature like her, either.”

  Raryn shrugged his massive shoulders. “Fair enough, if you truly feel she isn’t right for you. I’m just worried the real problem is that, deep down, you think you aren’t good enough for her. If so, you’re mistaken.”

  An hour later, they were traveling again, on a trace the villagers claimed was a shortcut to their destination. Apparently they were nearly there. Raryn and Kara had known where they were headed after all.

  Accordingly, Dorn was eager to reach the place, but his enthusiasm curdled when they crested a hill and he caught his first glimpse of the gray crags, the imposing walls and spires hewn from the same rock, and the white expanse of ice. Specks of color glittered on the landscape far ahead, and if he could even see them at such a distance, Dorn knew they must be huge.

  With his keen eyes, Raryn could make them out more clearly.

  “Bugger,” said the dwarf.

  20 Mirtul, the Year of Rogue Dragons

  Though the upper levels of Firefingers’s tower weren’t as large as the ground floor, they were so spacious Taegan suspected the wizard had cast an enchantment to make them larger inside than out-. The dining hall had room for all of Thentia’s two dozen mages, and the old man had invited each and every one of them to breakfast with him before undertaking the chore of setting their dragon-damaged workroom to rights.

  Taegan and Jivex sat as honored guests at their host’s right hand. The elf mage Rilitar Shadow-water, was on the other side of them, probably because Firefingers assumed Taegan would enjoy the company of a member of his own race, albeit a different branch of it.

  Rilitar seemed to believe the same thing, though in fact, his familiarity made Taegan feel somewhat edgy. Or maybe it was the tense atmosphere afflicting the gathering as a whole. Some of the mages who’d stood their ground to fight the brass dragon plainly disdained the colleagues who’d fled, while the latter resented any implication of cowardice, however justified it seemed.

  Indeed, Phourkyn One-eye was engaged in a particularly vitriolic exchange with Scattercloak, the warlock who went about ever muffled in a gray mantle and hood. Scattercloack sat with his meal untouched lest, in the act of eating, he give someone a glimpse of his face.

  “I did not flee,” insisted Scattercloak in an androgynous, uninflected tenor voice. “I simply veiled myself in invisibility. That’s why you didn’t notice me afterward.”

  “Liar,” Phourkyn sneered, a streak of light glinting on his oily black hair.

  “Retract that.”

  “No.”

  Taegan’s professional experience enabled him to recognize the preliminaries to a violent altercation when he saw them. But before the situation could deteriorate any further, Baelric, Firefingers’s brawny doorman, strode into the hall in a manner that commanded attention.

  Facing his master, he announced, “The Watchlord is here.”

  Firefingers blinked. “Really? Well, show him in.”

  Baelric ushered a middle-aged, solidly built, dour-looking man into the room. The newcomer was fancily dressed by Moonsea standards, though no rake in fashionable Lyrabar would have been impressed. He wore a chain of office dangling on the breast of his black velvet doublet, and at his side he carried a gold-hilted sword in a golden scabbard—likely another symbol of authority. A clerk and a pair of halberdiers trailed along behind him. All the mages rose to greet him, though some performed the courtesy in a perfunctory manner.

  “My dear Gelduth,” Firefingers said, beaming, “this is an unexpected honor. We’ll set a place.”

  “I didn’t come to eat,” the Watchlord said. “I came—” His
head snapped around to stare at Jivex, who sat on his haunches on the linen tablecloth behind the plate he’d just finished licking clean.

  Prompted by Sune-only-knew what witless impulse, Jivex spread his silvery wings. Taegan grabbed him by the neck an instant before he could take flight. Jivex glared at him indignantly.

  “The man’s afraid of you,” Taegan whispered. “Approach him, and he’s liable to take a swipe at you with his sword.” He gave Gelduth a smile. “This is Jivex, Lord. He’s a friend to humans and other civilized folk.”

  The small dragon twisted, brought a hind foot into proximity with Taegan’s hand, and gave him a stinging scratch across the wrist.

  “Indeed.” Gelduth pivoted back toward Firefingers and said, “I came to talk to you—all of you, even though by rights I should be able to summon you to attend me in the Watchlord’s tower, at my convenience. But we all know how that generally works out, don’t we?”

  “Gelduth Blackturret’s pretty much a figurehead,” Rilitar whispered to Taegan, “and some wizards don’t show him much respect. A mistake, in my view, precisely because he is the spokesman for the old families, and they really do run Thentia. Besides, he does a good job of protecting the outlying farms when the orcs come sniffing around.”

  “Well, at least let me get you a chair,” said Firefingers to the Watchlord, and Baelric hurried away to fetch one.

  “We have to talk,” Gelduth persisted, “about all these dragons coming and going. I’ve told you before, it worries me. The noble Houses don’t like it, either. Not when wyrms are running amok and laying waste to all Faerûn. But everyone accepted the situation because you assured us your dragons were safe. Now I understand that the one who arrived yesterday went berserk.”

  “Regrettably,” said Firefingers, “that’s true.”

  “Then I’m going to have to bar all drakes from Thentia.”

  Some of the mages scowled and exclaimed at that, though the show of dismay was less than unanimous. Affronted, Jivex hissed.

  “My dear friend,” Firefingers said, “I’ve told you, we’re seeking a cure for the Rage. That’s important work, and it absolutely requires that we consult with dragons. We’ll lose precious time if you force us to relocate our operation.”