At the same time, strands of jagged darkness writhed about the sunwyrm’s wings, the shadow dimming their radiance. The limbs withered at its touch.
Taegan risked a glance around to find out which of the other wizards had emerged from the tower to join the battle. As it turned out, three of them had: Scattercloak, Jannatha Goldenshield, and Baerimel Dunnath. The petite, impishly pretty sisters looked ferocious. Avid to avenge their murdered cousin.
Phourkyn snapped his head around in their direction and snarled words of power. Trying to disrupt the conjuration, Taegan drove his sword into the sunwyrm’s neck. Jivex streaked through the air and ripped at the larger reptile’s eye. Phourkyn stumbled over his recitation. Taegan thrust home, pulled back his sword, and arterial blood spurted from the puncture.
Phourkyn vanished. Taegan swung his blade again anyway, just in case the traitor had simply become invisible, but the weapon touched nothing. The avariel cried out in fury that, at the end, his foe had eluded him.
But then Scattercloak said, “No. I forbid it.”
Whereupon Phourkyn reappeared beneath Taegan as abruptly as he’d blinked away.
It was startling, but Taegan had the reflexes of a master fencer even when his wits were addled. He attacked, slicing open a prodigious gash.
Phourkyn’s head splashed down into the quicksand. Half expecting the sunwyrm to rear back up, Taegan hovered warily above him. But all the traitor did was sink deeper into the muck. The yellow glare of his scaly hide dimmed.
“I don’t much like it,” said Scattercloak in his emotionless tenor voice, “when people commit unsavory acts and try to shift the blame onto me.”
Wings pounding, Taegan rushed back toward the alley and Rilitar. Jivex hurtled in his wake.
Dorn loosed arrow after arrow. Singing her defiance, Kara wheeled toward Malazan.
It seemed suicidal. The ancient red was twice Kara’s size. But in Dorn’s judgment, the bard was making the right move. Over the past months, he’d learned her limits well enough to know she was nearly out of magic. Malazan almost certainly wasn’t. Therefore, if Kara tried to keep away from her adversary, the chromatic would simply smite her with spell after spell, while she had no way of striking back. Whereas, if she closed the distance, it was possible she could employ her breath weapon to good effect.
The drawback to the strategy, though, was that Kara would be in range of Malazan’s fiery breath as well. It was even possible that the red with her sheen of wet blood would catch the song dragon in her talons and bring her superior physical strength to bear. Dorn could only hope that Kara, being the smaller, would prove more agile in flight, or that his own presence would somehow give Kara a decisive advantage, unlikely as that seemed. He sent another shaft streaking across the sky. It flew to the target but glanced off Malazan’s scales.
The red roared an incantation. The words of power made Dorn’s stomach churn. For a second, the cold mountain wind blew hot.
Kara screamed and pulled her wings into her body, as if they were clenching in an uncontrollable spasm. She and Dorn plummeted. Malazan hurtled forward and down, swooping to intercept them in mid-descent, claws poised to seize and rend.
“Fight it!” Dorn shouted, simultaneously loosing another arrow.
The shaft lodged in Malazan’s chest, but intent on making her kill, she didn’t even seem to notice.
Painted in gore, the red’s outstretched wings seemed to cover the entire sky. Dorn sunk an arrow into her flesh and snatched for another, even though the onrushing dragon was so close that he doubted he’d have time for a final shot.
Then, at the last possible instant, Kara resumed her song and unfurled and beat her wings. The action jerked her to the side, and Malazan plummeted past her. Kara blasted the red with a sparkling jet of her breath. Malazan jerked and screeched at the crackling touch of the lightning suffusing the vapor.
Panting, his heart pounding, Dorn realized Kara had tricked her foe. Recognizing the spell Malazan had cast to cripple her wings, she’d pretended the power had overwhelmed her, to lure the red into opening herself up to an attack.
A successful ploy, but scarcely a decisive one. Malazan swept her wings up and down, climbed after them, and spewed fire.
Kara tilted her pinions and spun herself out of the path of the plume of flame. Woven into the savage melody of her song, another spell from her dwindling store shrouded Malazan in a cloud of nasty-looking olive vapor, but to no apparent effect.
Kara and Malazan wheeled and swooped about the sky, and though intent on the red, Dorn nonetheless caught glimpses of the aerial battle as a whole. After repeated uses, the dragons’ breath weapons took more time to renew themselves. For that reason, or because it seemed a relatively safe tactic to use against a wounded, weary, or smaller foe, a good many wyrms were finally assailing their enemies with fang and claw. A red swooped over a gold, raking gouges in the metal’s scales as it hurtled past. A brass attempted a similar maneuver against a skull wyrm, but the black seized its attacker’s hind leg in its teeth and yanked it close. Ripping and biting at one another, unable to fly while twined together, the dragons plummeted halfway down the sky before breaking their grapple, springing apart, and spreading their wings once more.
Dorn still couldn’t tell which side was winning.
He drove an arrow into Malazan’s mask, just missing the gigantic reptile’s blank yellow eye. The red snarled words of power, and the longbow jerked from his grip, as if invisible hands had seized it. The ploy caught him by surprise, and though he snatched for the weapon, he failed to catch it. It tumbled end over end toward the mountains below.
Without it, he was useless, nothing but hindering weight on Kara’s back.
He recognized the final spells Kara cast, one after the other. The first should have stolen Malazan’s voice, but didn’t take. The other made her breath blaze so brightly that it might have blinded the red, except that the chromatic dodged the blast. After that, though the bard kept chanting her song of righteous wrath, there were no more incantations threaded through the lyrics.
She veered, climbed, and swooped, accelerated and decelerated, with uncanny foresight and agility, evading the flares of flame and sorcery that Malazan hurled in her direction. Until the red howled words that jabbed pain into Dorn’s ears and made them bleed. Malazan then spewed more fire, not bothering to aim it at Kara but simply blasting it into the air.
The mass of flame lingered, floating, and writhed into the shape of a dragon nearly as huge as Malazan herself. It lashed its burning pinions and streaked toward Kara.
With a pang of fear, Dorn grasped the point of the tactic. The song dragon had enjoyed some success evading one foe, but two could maneuver to trap her between them.
Malazan and her creation winged their way toward Kara, converging on her from two directions. The crystal-blue dragon faked a turn, then spun back around, swooped lower, and caught an updraft to fling her high once more.
It didn’t matter. She succeeded in distancing herself from the creature of living fire, but Malazan matched her move for move. Indeed, the red anticipated her, attained a slight advantage in altitude, and close enough once more, spat flame.
Kara tried to swoop under the attack, but the flare still seared the ends of her upraised wings. The shock silenced her song and made her flounder in the air, whereupon Malazan dived at her. Dorn bellowed a warning that, he already knew, Kara was for the moment incapable of heeding.
But some invisible agency intercepted Malazan short of her target and bounced her higher into the air. The fringe of the same force caught Kara and spun her like a wheel until she managed to right herself.
Meanwhile, Dorn recognized the surge of vertigo that resulted when up and down reversed themselves, for Azhaq had once used the same power against him. He looked down and saw the silver climbing toward Malazan with Raryn astride his back. The dwarf shot an arrow into the red’s belly.
Wings pounding, Malazan wheeled to escape the enchantment Azha
q had created, the treacherous, disorienting zone where things fell upward. She screeched, and her fiery conjured creature hurtled at the silver.
Azhaq didn’t try to evade the apparition. He simply rattled off an incantation, and the bright mass of living flame vanished as if it had never been. Raryn loosed more arrows, driving them into the red’s neck, breast, and guts.
Azhaq was an old wyrm, unscathed, with a highly competent archer mounted on his back. Kara was relatively young, wounded, and bore a rider who had no way of attacking at range. Understandably, Malazan oriented on the Talon of Justice and the tracker, and that, Dorn realized, afforded him an opportunity.
“Climb!” he said to Kara. “Swing behind and above Malazan, and get close.”
“I don’t need to be too close to use my breath.”
“Do it!”
“I’ll try,” she promised, and beat her charred and blistered wings.
Azhaq roared an incantation, and a blaze of frost streaked up from his outstretched talons, only to melt away just before it reached Malazan. The red laughed and growled her own cabalistic rhyme. Gashes split Azhaq’s argent hide, as if invisible blades were hacking him. As he reeled in the air, wracked by the ongoing punishment, Malazan rattled off a second spell. A creature that seemed part man and part gray-feathered vulture materialized midway between its summoner and the shield dragon. It gave an ear-splitting screech and dived at Azhaq and Raryn. The dwarf drove an arrow all the way through its spindly, crooked neck, but it didn’t falter.
That was all Dorn had time to see before Malazan reclaimed his full attention. The red plainly hadn’t forgotten her other foes, for her head twisted, seeking them. Her eyes blazed when she saw how close they’d sneaked.
But Dorn saw with a sick, helpless feeling, that it wasn’t close enough.
He expected Kara to veer off. Malazan having spotted her, it was the only sane thing to do. But still striving to do as Dorn had bade her, resuming her battle anthem, she swooped nearer.
Malazan met her with a burst of fiery breath. The song dragon’s body shielded Dorn from the worst of it, but even so, the brush of the flame was excruciating. Quite possibly, it had burned Kara’s life away.
But he couldn’t think about that. He had to act. He jerked loose the knot securing him to Kara’s back, scrambled to his feet on her scorched, blistered body, and leaped.
He was no acrobat like Will, and when Malazan spotted him and started to spin away, he was sure he was going to miss, to fall and smash himself to pulp on the ground far below. But he banged down on the red’s back instead.
Malazan’s scales were slick with their coating of blood, and he started to slide away into space. He snagged his iron claws in her hide and drew his bastard sword.
Malazan spat fire at him. He hunkered down, shielding his human parts behind the metal ones, and though he gasped in agony, when the jet of flame guttered out, he was still alive. He plunged his sword into the red’s flesh.
The blade bit deep, but not deep enough. Malazan poised her head to strike at him. It was an awkward angle for her, straight back along her own spine, but neither could he do much in the way of dodging when he had to cling to her like a tick to keep her slippery, heaving mass from flinging him off. All he had was the forlorn hope that she’d hurt her fangs on his iron half, and flinch back.
Or so he thought, until Kara hurtled onto Malazan’s neck. Though her blue hide was horribly blackened and burned from head to tail, she clawed and bit at the red with a ferocity no doubt born of desperation, and Malazan struck back at her. Locked together, the dragons fell.
Dorn kept thrusting and cutting, and ducked a random sweep of Kara’s tail that would otherwise have snapped his neck.
Malazan left off biting long enough to roar three grating syllables, and afterward, any blood her attackers spilled burst into flame on contact with the air, searing them.
Dorn refused to let the pain balk him. He attacked until one particularly deep wound made Malazan convulse. The sudden jerk broke the hunter’s grip on the hilt of his sword, tore his talons from Malazan’s hide, and hurled him into empty air.
Here is death, then, he thought. Naturally, it had arrived only when he’d decided he actually wanted to live.
To his surprise, however, he slowed to a stop, then rose toward the blue dome of the sky. Below him, Azhaq, still on the wing despite the ghastly wounds he bore, his vulture-demon assailant evidently slain, grunted in satisfaction at making the catch. Raryn nodded at Dorn, laid another arrow on his bow, and cast about for a target. Weak and clumsy with pain but still alive, Kara laboriously climbed toward her erstwhile rider, to collect him before the magic holding him aloft ran out of strength.
But nobody moved to assist Malazan. Either dead or crippled, in any case incapable of flight, the colossal red fell like a shooting star, shrouded in the flames of her burning blood and leaving a trail of smoke in her wake. She smashed down on a mountainside. The impact flattened and deformed her body and stabbed lengths of broken bone through her hide.
Faced with the likes of Tamarand, Nexus, and Havarlan, perhaps the chromatics had been losing the battle even before their commander perished, but even if not, her destruction panicked them. Crying to one another, most sought to break away and scatter in all directions.
Dorn wondered how many would get away. None, he hoped. Let the wrathful metallics slaughter them all. Then a wave of faintness picked him up and carried him into darkness.
Shrouded in invisibility, Brimstone circled over the benighted battlefield, taking stock of the situation. It looked as if Dragonsbane’s strategy had worked about as well as the king had had any right to expect. His troops had inflicted grievous casualties on the Vaasan horde.
But the majority of the goblins and giants had stood their ground and likewise butchered many a Damaran warrior through the hours of daylight, and since darkness had fallen, it was possible the balance was tilting in their favor. They could see well at night, and humans couldn’t. Dragonsbane’s wizards conjured fields of pearly glow to compensate, but often enough, a spellcaster on the other side extinguished them, and in any case, they couldn’t light up the whole landscape.
As he listened to the clash of metal on metal and the anguished cries of the wounded and dying, rather savoring them, Brimstone mused on just how easy it would be to betray his allies and hand the victory to Vaasa. Easy and natural, for though the goblin kin and their ilk were base, dull vermin compared to him, they were nonetheless born of the same darkness. Why not aid them, then, to slaughter the miserable paladins and priests of light, and rule as their monarch thereafter?
Only because such a betrayal would do nothing to further his vengeance against Sammaster. Someday, perhaps, he would claim a throne, command legions, and make his name a byword for terror across Faerûn, but for the moment, he craved retribution more than glory.
Brimstone flew to a place where the two armies ground together and soon spotted Dragonsbane at the forefront of the Damaran host. The paladin king was surely exhausted, but no one could have told it from the vigor with which he swung his broadsword and exhorted the warriors around him to fight on.
That was good. The little drama Brimstone had devised wouldn’t seem very convincing if Dragonsbane looked half dead in the saddle.
The vampire whispered words of power, shedding his mantle of invisibility and replacing it with a corona of harsh white light. The glare illuminated the puppet astride his back as well. It was simply an animated skeleton, a mindless tool, but crowned with gold and jewels and robed in ermine and purple, it looked the part of Zhengyi the Witch-King, and with Brimstone’s will prompting it, would behave appropriately as well.
Brimstone swooped down over the battlefield, roaring to attract the combatants’ notice. The puppet brandished its staff, and the goblins clamored to see their master finally appear. Then a dozen of them scrambled for their lives when they perceived that Brimstone intended to land on the patch of bloody, trampled earth they occu
pied.
His impressive advent made both sides pause in their struggles to gawk at him, and that was how he wanted it. As soon as he touched down opposite Dragonsbane, he bellowed maledictions and a challenge to single combat in a magically augmented voice that every member of the Vaasan host could hear and understand. The words, of course, seemed to rave from the skeletal figure perched on his back.
It might have been nice if the king had replied with a speech of his own, but he simply slashed his sword through the air to indicate he accepted the challenge. Conceivably his idiotic paladin code forbade him to say anything that amounted to a lie, but he was willing to act his part in a misleading pantomime and let the Vaasans draw their own erroneous conclusions.
Dragonsbane extended his blade in front of him and charged. Brimstone cast the first of the spells with which his puppet was supposedly attacking the king, invocations that filled the air with dazzling flashes, seething mists, and thunderous bangs and roars, magic that even shook the ground, but could do no actual harm to anyone.
The king cut at Brimstone. He was a talented enough swordsman to make it look convincing even though the strokes were too soft to penetrate a smoke drake’s scales. Brimstone bit and clawed at the human and his horse, warning what the next attack would be with slight shifts of his head and legs. He and Dragonsbane had rehearsed their dance, but he wasn’t willing to risk the human making a mistake. His fangs and talons were simply too deadly.
The hardest part was resisting the impulse to strike out in earnest, for he could feel the virtue, the sacred power, burning inside the paladin, and it filled him with loathing. He wondered if Dragonsbane was struggling against an equivalent urge.
As the drama progressed, Dragonsbane appeared to try repeatedly to strike at the figure on Brimstone’s back, and the vampire always moved to shield it, or lift it out of harm’s way. Until finally it was time to conjure the semblance of a burst of fire, an illusion so convincing that those nearby would even feel a flare of heat, though it wouldn’t burn the man and destrier caught in the center of the blast.
The Rite Page 32
