The Rite

by Richard Lee Byers

  “They just can’t keep this place from catching on fire,” the reptile said.

  “But maybe Firefingers can extinguish the blaze as he did before,” Taegan said, “if we stop Phourkyn from making any more mischief.”

  He cast about, spotted the treacherous mage, and flew at him. In so doing, he met the gaze of Phourkyn’s single eye.

  Bitter sorrow welled up inside Taegan, drowning his anger and determination, making him falter short of his objective. For a moment, the emotion, though intense, was formless, unconnected to rational thought or memory. Then he recalled his mother, father, and the other kindred and friends he’d left behind in the Earthwood. He hadn’t even bade them farewell before forsaking the clan. He’d feared it would be too painful, feared they might even talk him out of his resolve, but how the callous abandonment must have hurt them!

  These feelings aren’t real, he insisted to himself. Phourkyn’s playing with my mind. He struggled against the grief and regret, denying them, and after a second, pushed them back. They still oppressed his spirit like a heavy chain, but at least they weren’t paralyzing him anymore.

  He oriented on Phourkyn once again, just in time to see one of the long worktables squirm like an animal working the stiffness out of its muscles. Flexible as a serpent, spilling the tomes and sheets of parchment heaped on top of it, the table reared up on two legs with the obvious intention of smashing down on the mage. Evidently Jivex had animated it with his supernatural abilities, for he hovered, staring at it, apparently guiding it by sheer force of will.

  Unfortunately, Phourkyn invoked magic of his own, and vanished. The living table crashed down on an empty patch of floor. Jivex hissed in frustration.

  It was conceivable that Phourkyn’s wizardry had carried him a thousand miles away. But Taegan didn’t think so. Now that he’d unmasked Sammaster’s minion, the time for stealthy murder and patient manipulation was over. If Phourkyn wanted to be sure of putting an end to the wizards’ investigations, he had to finish the job. Such being the case, he was probably lurking right outside the tower, conceivably poised to strike at whoever exited through the door.

  Fresh sadness welled up inside Taegan, stinging his eyes with tears, swelling a lump in his throat.

  He snarled to quell the magically induced emotion, then called, “Come here!”

  While Jivex flew to him, he murmured words of power and brandished his scrap of licorice root. His muscles jumped, and the dragon snarled, as the magic seethed through them, quickening their reactions.

  “Take hold of me,” Taegan continued.

  He stretched out his arm, and Jivex gripped it with his foreclaws. Straining a little to support the reptile’s weight, the bladesinger rattled off a second spell.

  The world seemed to wink like an eye—and they were high above Firefingers’s red-and-yellow tower. The open air felt cool and clean after the heat and smoke inside. Taegan beat his wings and studied the streets and rooftops below. Jivex released his arm and flitted back and forth, peering downward also.

  “There!” cried the faerie dragon, his hide rippling with rainbows in the sunlight. “I see him!” He pointed by jabbing his snout in the proper direction.

  “Right,” said Taegan grimly.

  Sword extended before him, conjuring a defensive charm, he dived. Jivex streaked after him. Below them, just outside the gateway to the spire’s courtyard, stood Phourkyn. The traitorous mage began to change, to grow into something colossal. Yellow scales sprouted over his body, his ears lengthened, and his face stretched into fanged jaws. A golden eye burned on each side of his reptilian mask.

  Phourkyn dropped to all fours, then each of his legs divided into two. Batlike wings erupted from his shoulders, and a serpentine tail writhed forth from the base of his spine. At the tip of the appendage throbbed a point of light.

  As the magician swelled and altered, his form grew brighter and brighter, until Taegan had to squint to look at him. The air wavered around him, twisted by the creature’s burgeoning internal heat.

  People screamed and fled. Taegan started to veer off. He’d read of dragons like that in a book from Rilitar’s library. The creature was called a sunwyrm, was hideously powerful, and it probably didn’t matter a mouse’s whisker whether Phourkyn was truly a drake who’d spent years disguised as a human or was a human cloaking himself in the form of a drake. As powerful was his wizardry was, he was almost certainly capable of using all of a sunwyrm’s devastating capabilities either way.

  Taegan could never defeat such a terrible foe. It was hopeless …

  No, curse it, it wasn’t! It was only Phourkyn’s spell making him feel that it was. He and Jivex had killed a dracolich, and they could slay a sunwyrm as well.

  Particularly if they struck before the dastard’s transformation was complete. Until then, he might be vulnerable. Accordingly, intent on thrusting his sword deep into Phourkyn’s heart, Taegan drove at his enemy with every iota of speed he could muster.

  He’d almost reached the target when, wings buzzing, halo of flame crackling, the chasme sprang from Phourkyn’s chest as easily as an earthly creature could pounce from a patch of fog. The fly-thing’s claws were poised to rend, its long, pointed chitinous snout, to stab, and Taegan’s own momentum hurled him onward into the attacks.

  To Dorn, in his impatience, it felt rather like a maddeningly slow and stately dance.

  Soaring above the mountains, valleys, and glacier, the metals and chromatics had maneuvered and countermaneuvered for an hour, each host seeking to attain the high air, to put the chilly wind at its back, or to outflank its foe. Occasionally one dragon or another conjured a bank of fog, a floating mass of darkness, or a veil of invisibility to disguise its movements, and sometimes a spellcaster on the other side exerted himself to wipe such obscurements away. So far, though, no one had thrown a genuine attack spell.

  Nor had Kara commenced one of her ringing battle anthems. Instead, she crooned a gentle ballad. He supposed it kept her relaxed, or helped her think.

  For his part, he found himself incapable of relaxation, and at the moment had nothing useful to think about. He just wished the cursed wyrms would get on with it.

  Then Tamarand roared, hammered his golden wings, and streaked forward. His warriors raced after him. Sammaster’s minions rushed to meet them. Dorn had no idea why it was finally happening. As far as he could tell, none of the maneuvering on either side had accomplished much of anything. But he was grateful the wait was over, and thankful, too, to have plenty of arrows. He and his companions had stopped at a mountain lord’s stronghold just long enough for him to demand a fresh supply from the frightened, astonished inhabitants, along with stout rope to lash the quivers, and Dorn himself, to Kara’s back.

  As he nocked a shaft, Kara switched to a new song, the melody bright and sharp, with a pounding beat. Though Dorn couldn’t understand the words, he sensed the magic in them, felt the enchantments bound in his iron limbs shiver in response. Sparks jumped and sizzled on his artificial hand.

  Across the sky, other dragons conjured defensive wards. A single onrushing green split into five dragons as it created illusory images of itself. Havarlan’s lithe, scarred argent form smudged into a blur. Arranged in a spiral, several points of white glow materialized around Malazan.

  Nexus appeared behind and slightly above the chromatics. The gold’s magic had translated him instantly across the intervening space. He spat a plume of fire, and a black screeched and burned in the blast. But other chromatics swiftly wheeled and spewed their own breath weapons.

  Kara tilted her wings, veered, and swooped downward, sacrificing altitude to distance herself from the red and fang dragons on her flank. It seemed to Dorn as if the reptiles had sprung out of nowhere, as if they’d appeared by magic, and of course it was entirely possible they had.

  Scowling away his surprise, he drew his bowstring to his ear. It was awkward shooting upward, but at least he’d positioned himself in such a way that he didn’t have to wor
ry about hitting Kara’s sweeping, crystal-blue pinion. He loosed the shaft, and it plunged into the underside of the red’s neck.

  The scarlet reptile jerked its head back at the stab of pain. Dorn had delayed it casting an attack spell or spitting flame for at least another moment. Unfortunately, he’d had no way of balking the fang wyrm at the same time. Darts of green light flew from its outstretched claws at Kara’s torso.

  But they blinked out of existence just before they could touch her scales. Dorn realized she must earlier have cast an enchantment that shielded her against that particular attack.

  Recovered from the arrow’s sting, the red furled its wings, dived, spread its jaws wide, and spewed flame. Kara spun away from the stream of fire, turning completely upside down in the process. Dorn felt a jolt of unreasoning fear, instinct’s frantic insistence that, rope or no, he was about to plunge to the earth far below. Then the sky was above him and the ground where it belonged once more, and he saw that Kara had successfully evaded the blast of flame.

  Somehow she’d even looped above the diving red. Dorn tried to drive an arrow into the creature’s spine, but the red wheeled in a way he hadn’t anticipated, and he only succeeded in piercing its wing. Kara was more successful. Without missing a beat in her throbbing, ferocious melody, she discharged a flare of bright, lightning-charged breath to sear the chromatic’s neck and shoulders. The red screeched and floundered in the air.

  Wings pounding, Kara took advantage of the red’s distress to climb higher above her foes. Unharmed as yet, the spurred, gray-brown fang wyrm labored after her. But like most members of its species, it was a clumsy flyer, and failed to narrow the distance.

  Still, magic could leap across the gap. The fang dragon snarled an incantation, and a wave of distortion shot from its foreclaws. It slammed into Kara’s ventral side like a battering ram, bashing her several yards through the air, and making Dorn fumble his grip on his bowstring before he finished drawing it back. The arrow jumped feebly, uselessly away.

  Dorn was sure the impact had hurt Kara, but the pain didn’t mar the perfection of her song as it birthed more of her own magic. Plummeting from empty air, huge hailstones hammered down on the red. The barrage jabbed more holes in its wings, and Dorn drove an arrow into its spine.

  The crimson dragon roared words of power, and a point of light flew at Kara. She tilted her wings, veering, nearly inverting herself and Dorn once more, and when the spark exploded into a blast of fire, they only caught the edge of it.

  Kara completed another spell, and a cloud of foul-looking greenish vapor boiled into existence around the red. It swooped out of the mist and kept on hurtling down and away, gliding above the glacier, its shadow gray on the gleaming ice.

  Dorn peered after it, trying to determine if it was truly running away, then glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye. He jerked around. A green was hurtling toward them.

  “On our right!” he cried.

  Kara dodged left. Glare flashed into being. For Dorn, it was like looking into the sun, except that it was impossible to turn away. The charm the green had cast made the light flare on every side. The only defense was to squinch his eyes shut, and he didn’t manage that quickly enough. When he opened them again, he saw only haze and floating blobs.

  Kara’s body tilted beneath him, snapping him to the side. He surmised she was trying to dodge an attack, and could only pray she’d shifted in the right direction. That she could still see, or, failing that, her other inhumanly keen senses compensated.

  Something seared his skin. Reckoning it to be the green’s breath weapon, he tried not to inhale, but sucked in a bit of the corrosive vapor anyway. It burned his nose, throat, and lungs, and he coughed and retched.

  But the stuff didn’t melt the human half of his face away, or rot his chest from the inside. Kara must indeed have dodged the worst of it.

  He blinked away tears and found that his sight had more or less returned. Kara and her new adversary were circling one another. Left some distance behind, the fang dragon struggled after them until a silver-scaled shield wyrm distracted it by blasting it with a thunderbolt spell.

  Dorn shot an arrow into the green’s shoulder, and it replied by raking at Kara with jagged lengths of conjured darkness. Then darts of azure force pierced the chromatic’s underside. It roared and veered off. Kara wheeled to pursue, spotted the fire drake winging its way at her, and turned to meet that threat instead.

  As Dorn reached for an arrow, he glanced down to determine where the glowing blue missiles had come from. All the way up from the monastery grounds, it appeared. Tiny with distance, folk were scurrying around down there, loosing arrows, crossbow bolts, or spells at any chromatic who ventured into range.

  For a moment, Dorn slumped with relief at knowing for certain that the monks still defended the archives—and that, quite possibly, Raryn still lived. Then he spat the soft feeling away and laid another arrow on his bow.

  He and Kara traded attacks with the fire drake for a few seconds, until the chaos of the aerial battle wrenched the two wyrms apart to seek new opponents. In general, that seemed to be the way it was going to work. With dozens of dragons wheeling in three dimensions, occasionally using magic to pop from one spot to another, the action was too frenzied and confusing simply to pick a single adversary and fight it to the finish. Which made it that much harder to judge which side was winning, though already a copper lay motionless inside the monastery walls, the shattered body of a young red, its tail and one wing dangling over the edge, overfilled a ledge below the stronghold, and a black sprawled in a pool of its own blood on the glacier.

  Malazan roared. Over the course of the next half minute, all three of the fang dragons broke away from the conflict in the air to spiral down toward the monastery. Evidently their commander had decided they’d be more use on the ground, putting an end to the harassment stabbing up from below.

  Raryn had expected that some of Sammaster’s wyrms would fly down and attack their earthbound foes. That didn’t make it any less alarming to watch them coming, plunging out of a sky so streaked and scarred with flares of magic and dragon breath that it scarcely seemed accurate to call it blue anymore. It was more like a jester’s patchwork rainbow of a cloak.

  “Form up your squads!” the dwarf shouted. “Spellcasters, take cover inside the buildings!”

  The monks and their associates scrambled to obey. After tendays of diligent training and hard fighting, they knew what they were doing. Raryn just hoped that would be enough to tilt the balance.

  He scrambled behind a marble fountain, the lip grooved where one of the chromatics had used it to hone its talons. He was in position to fight in concert with the rest of his own squad, though it might not look that way to a casual observer. The group was spread out to make it difficult for a dragon to target more than one of them at a time.

  Raryn murmured a ranger charm and loosed an arrow. The magic enhanced both the accuracy and the velocity of the shot, and the shaft drove so deep into an onrushing fang wyrm’s mottled breast that it disappeared entirely. Quarrels and javelins flew at the creature as well. A wizard jumped up behind a window just long enough to hurl a pearly burst of frost at it, then crouched back down.

  None of the attacks made the gray-brown dragon falter or veer off. It furled its wings and hurtled downward, claws poised to impale the youthful monk underneath it. The boy flung himself out of the way, and for an instant, it looked as if he’d scramble clear. But as soon as the wyrm slammed to earth, it whipped its forked tail in a horizontal arc. With a dull thunk, the long, bony blades at the end of the appendage chopped the youth’s body into several pieces.

  Raryn dropped his bow and grabbed his new harpoon. It wasn’t as fine a weapon as the one he’d lost in the ossuary, but it would do. He cast it at the dragon’s flank, the line he’d tied to the heavy fountain streaming out behind it.

  He grinned for an instant when the barbed lance drove deep between the reptile’s ribs. He grabbed his b
one-handled ice-axe and charged.

  The rest of his team rushed in, also, to assault the dragon from all sides. Each warrior attacked when the creature oriented on someone else—or at least appeared to, for the creature had a nasty habit of feinting at one foe, then pivoting to strike at another—and retreated when it focused on him.

  To Raryn’s mind, it was scant comfort that, so far anyway, for these first few seconds, the melee was a purely physical confrontation. Fang wyrms had no breath weapon, and if it still had any spells left, it was apparently saving them to use against the metallic drakes. But why shouldn’t it? Who could fault it for believing it had no need of magic to annihilate the scurrying mites assailing it? Quick as a viper for all its hugeness, it lashed out furiously with fangs, claws, wings, and tail, the slightest brush of its razor-edged scales sufficient to flay a man or dwarf’s flesh to the bone.

  Raryn hacked at its side, scrambled underneath it, drove his axe into its belly, and sprang clear just before it flung itself down to crush him. A monk drove a pair of long daggers into the base of its neck. Another of Cantoule’s gray-clad followers gave a fierce, resounding shout and thrust a spear straight up into the wyrm’s lower jaw. The bloody head of the lance crunched through multiple layers of hide, muscle, and bone to pop out the top side, in front of the fang dragon’s glaring orange eyes.

  Raryn thought he and his comrades had hurt the reptile badly, but it didn’t slow down. It worked its lower jaw from side to side, and the spear pinning its mouth shut snapped to pieces. It dipped its wedge-shaped head with its thorn-like encrustation of small horns and snatched up the monk who’d pierced its jaws. The spearman screamed, his flailing limbs already withering and blackening as the reptile’s bite poisoned him. Forgetting Dorn and Raryn’s training, another monk charged straight at the dragon’s mask, perhaps in hopes of extricating his fellow from the huge, gnashing teeth. The wyrm ripped most of the organs from the would-be rescuer’s chest with a single flick of its claws.