Aoth wasn’t alarmed, exactly, but he was surprised. The deterioration of Alasklerbanbastos’s physical form had progressed remarkably since he’d seen the undead dragon last. It appeared every bit of hide had fallen or rotted away.
For a moment he wondered about that. But the growing fear among the firestormers pushed the thought out of his head. Genasi were shoving and stumbling back from Alasklerbanbastos and grabbing for their weapons. The riding drakes were screeching and hissing. Aoth had to prove he was in control before outright panic erupted.
He walked toward the dragon with no more concern than a master would show before a well-trained dog, or at least that was how he hoped it looked. “Down on your belly,” he said.
Sparks sizzling and popping on his flayed, mangled, charred, and generally ravaged body, reeking of both corruption and the imminence of lightning, Alasklerbanbastos glared … and stayed as he was.
“The sunlady still has your phylactery,” said Aoth. “She’s proved repeatedly that she knows how to use it. Do we really have to punish you again?”
“I wish you would,” Gaedynn said. “I always enjoy seeing it.”
His raw, slimy countenance and glazed, sunken eyes a mask of hatred, the dracolich lowered himself to the ground.
* * * * *
Khouryn clung to Praxasalandos’s back. Every time the dragon took a stride, it jostled him and hurt him but not as much as if he were trying to hobble on his own two feet, assuming that was even possible. Slamming into the wall had bruised him from head to toe and possibly cracked some bones. He hadn’t felt the damage too badly when he was intent on fighting, but he felt it after.
The quicksilver wyrm stepped down into a depression in the granite floor. That gave Khouryn’s body a somewhat harder bump than usual, and despite himself, he hissed as pain stabbed up his back.
Praxasalandos twisted his head around to look at him. The slash in his neck had finally scabbed over, but it still looked like the nasty wound it was. “I am so sorry,” the dragon said. Although he could have sung bass in any dwarf or human chorus, he had a relatively high voice for one of his kind, and the wretchedness suffusing it left no doubt that he truly did feel guilty.
“It’s all right,” Khouryn said. “If we had a true paladin, instead of this charlatan, he could heal us.” To emphasize his point, he manufactured a hacking cough, which then turned into a real one. His lungs, throat, and nose still ached from inhaling a bit of the dragon’s breath, just as his eyes still stung and watered from the touch of the fumes.
Trudging along at Praxasalandos’s side with his dimly glowing sword held aloft, the ropy scales at the back of his head bouncing a little with every step, Medrash snorted. “Torm’s grace works best to comfort the virtuous. That means black-hearted sellswords are pretty much out of luck.”
Khouryn chuckled, then wished he hadn’t, because that hurt too.
As was often the case, Medrash’s levity proved to be a fleeting thing. “You know I’ll help you as soon as my gifts renew themselves,” he said. “Or if we reach our friends first, the healers there can do it.” He turned his head and gave the dragon a scowl. “Assuming they’re capable of it.”
“I swear to you, they’re fine,” Praxasalandos said. “I couldn’t harass them and stalk you at the same time. If they haven’t wandered off the proper path, you’ll be reunited with them soon.”
Medrash grunted.
The wyrm sighed. “You still don’t like me or trust me, do you, paladin?”
“To be fair,” Khouryn said, “up until recently, you were trying to kill us.”
“I know,” said Praxasalandos. “I deserve your doubt and your scorn. But I was under a spell. Sir Medrash, you know that better than anyone since you’re the one who set me free.”
“How did the magic get hold of you?” Khouryn asked.
“It must be woven into Brimstone’s explication of the Great Game,” the quicksilver dragon said, “because as soon as I heard it, I was lost.”
“And without that trick, no one would care?” Medrash asked. The light inside his blade faded to the merest trace of pale phosphorescence.
Praxasalandos hesitated. “I didn’t say that. In its cold and selfish way, xorvintaal is beautiful.” His voice took on a dreamy, faraway quality. “Fascinating. The multiple levels of play. The subtlety. There are many dragons who’d succumb to the allure without any need for coercion. But not me! I pray to Bahamut to blind my eyes and shear my wings if I’m lying.”
“You can prove what you say,” Medrash said. “But with deeds, not words.”
“Just tell me how,” Praxasalandos said.
“First,” said the dragonborn, “guide us to Gestanius.”
“Of course.”
“Second, help us take her by surprise in the most advantageous circumstances possible. As far as she knows, you’re still her faithful guardian. You can lure her to where we need her to be.”
Praxasalandos hesitated again and Khouryn thought he knew why. Gestanius was likely cunning enough to see through many a deception, and stronger than the quicksilver dragon as well. If she realized her supposed helper was trying to betray her, Prax was unlikely to survive.
But after a heartbeat, he said, “Yes. I’ll do that too because I have to atone.”
They hiked on in silence for a while. Despite his pains, or maybe because of them, Khouryn dozed then jerked awake again just in time to see the light of Medrash’s blade go out entirely. Blind, the paladin faltered.
Prax crouched. “I can carry two as easily as one,” he said. “Climb onto my back.”
“Otherwise,” said Khouryn, “it’ll take us forever to join back up with the others.”
Medrash sheathed his sword. “Very well,” he said.
N
I
N
E
27 ELEASIS, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE
As Jet neared the earthmote, Cera tried not to imagine arrows streaking up out of the dark. She knew her companions were formidable. After all she’d experienced since the day she met the man to whose waist she was currently clinging, she was starting to feel reasonably formidable herself. Still, it took only one lucky shot to kill any human being, windsoul, or even a griffon. Of everyone flying in the vanguard, only Alasklerbanbastos was all but certain to survive any initial attack, and he was a potential threat to the rest of them.
But he wouldn’t be if she stopped fretting and attended to her job. She let go of Aoth with her right hand, slipped it into the pouch on her belt, and gripped the shadow stone.
The contact she so established wasn’t psychic communication like Aoth shared with Jet. It was more raw and primitive than that. But as usual, she felt the dragon’s arrogance, cruelty, and the filthy, unnatural force that sustained his existence, and they grated on her like the rasp of fingernails on a slate. She also felt Alasklerbanbastos’s stab of disgust at her touch and the slavery and indignity it represented.
Jet, Eider, and the dracolich set down on the stony floating island—more or less like a mountaintop with the rest of the mountain scooped out from underneath it—without either of the sentries loosing arrows at them or raising the alarm. Aoth had said he’d chosen a line of approach that neither wyrmkeeper could see well, and darkness and stealth had done the rest.
The six genasi set down too, and the winds that had carried them made Cera’s vestments flap and tousled her curls where they stuck out from under her helmet. She and Aoth swung themselves off Jet’s back, and the familiar immediately lashed his wings and flew away to pick up two more riders. When Gaedynn and Son-liin dismounted, Eider followed.
Gaedynn laid an arrow on his bow then, keeping low, led Son-liin and the windsouls in the direction of the bridge. Their first task was to capture it and keep any wyrmkeepers on the far side from crossing.
Whereas Aoth and Alasklerbanbastos’s job was to slaughter the priests on the near side. They hoped to divest Vairshekellabex of allies before he even realized he was und
er attack.
The warmage and the undead dragon skulked toward the vague forms of the five standing stones the wyrmkeepers had raised and then magically twisted into serpentine shapes. No doubt it was a shrine of sorts, and the priests dwelling on the earthmote had built their huts and pitched their tents around it.
Aoth skulked into one hut, and Alasklerbanbastos slipped his head under a lean-to. Cera could picture the spear thrusts that followed and the piercing and shearing as the dragon’s fangs nipped sleeping men to pieces.
Much as she’d come to detest wyrmkeepers—the wretches had tortured her, after all—Cera was still happy to be excused from such merciless brutality. She was quite happy that it was her chore to hold Alasklerbanbastos’s leash from far enough away that he couldn’t suddenly spin around and strike at her.
A soft, brushing noise came from the left. Her heartbeat accelerating, she pivoted in that direction and poised her buckler in front of her. She remembered Aoth telling her that she tended to hold it too close to her body and shifted it out a little farther.
No matter how she peered, she couldn’t see a threat, no stray wyrmkeeper creeping or wandering around in the night. She wished she could summon Amaunator’s light, but of course that would give away everything.
When no arrow flew at her and no magic flared, she decided her nerves were playing tricks or else she’d heard a night bird or some small nocturnal animal.
She turned back around and located Alasklerbanbastos slinking in the dark, and the sound came again, a bit louder and, therefore, surely, closer.
She jerked around and still couldn’t see anything amiss. But instinct screamed that she was in danger.
She backed up a step, and the clouds that veiled the earthmote parted for a moment. Selûne’s light gleamed and rippled on a flat something flowing over the ground. At first Cera thought it was streaming liquid or a swarm of beetles scuttling as one. Then, perhaps comprehending that she’d spotted it, it heaved itself upward.
It was a hollow dragon. The billowing, sagging, flopping way it moved showed there was nothing inside the leathery hide. It reminded Cera of the costumes that a line of Tchazzar cultists sometimes wore to parade through the streets of Luthcheq. But those constructions were meant to look like red dragons. The sparks that started popping and sizzling and the smell like an approaching storm that mixed with the reek of corruption suggested that the empty wyrm was in some sense a blue.
It was a blue like Alasklerbanbastos, whose flayed appearance she finally understood. Still retreating, she gripped the phylactery and focused her will to force him to call off his creation.
But before she could pour sunlight into the gem, pain stabbed out of it, up her arm and into her head. She staggered and the stone nearly slipped from her fingers.
I didn’t know he could turn it around! she thought, feeling outraged as a child who’d caught a playmate cheating at a game. He never showed me that he could!
White light flickered inside the hollow dragon, at the back of the mouth and behind the empty eye sockets. Realizing what was coming, denying the all-but-paralyzing pain, Cera flung herself to the side. Her attacker’s breath, a dazzling bolt of lightning, blazed past her. Thunder boomed.
Now, Cera thought, now I’ll get the lich. But the empty dragon lunged at her, and she had to focus on avoiding that attack … and the next one … and the next.
* * * * *
Aoth was creeping from a hut to the tent next to it when the thunder boomed. As he spun around, he assumed that some idiot stormsoul had seen a threat and, forgetting that everyone was supposed to keep quiet, exerted his elemental powers in response.
But in fact, it was worse than that. Alasklerbanbastos had turned away from his appointed task and was bounding back the way they’d come, toward the edge of the earthmote and Cera. For some reason, he evidently believed she couldn’t hurt him with the phylactery anymore, and he no doubt had good reason for his confidence. For a heartbeat Aoth thought of Chathi, who’d died because he hadn’t anticipated another clever creature’s secret plan.
He started to run after Alasklerbanbastos then realized he’d never catch him. He pointed his spear and shouted a word of power.
A spark leaped from the point of the weapon, hurtled through the dark, struck the top of the dracolich’s tail, and exploded into a booming burst of flame. Alasklerbanbastos jerked and stumbled but then ran on.
Aoth spun his spear over his head and called floating, spinning blades of amber light into being, right in front of the undead wyrm. Alasklerbanbastos couldn’t stop or turn in time to avoid them, and they sheared chunks of rotting flesh away.
“Turn and fight me!” Aoth shouted. “Otherwise I’ll tear you apart!”
Alasklerbanbastos kept charging toward Cera. He was already close enough to attack her with his breath or a spell but apparently wanted to use fang and claw instead. Another bound or two would close the distance.
* * * * *
The bridge linking the earthmote to the mountaintop was a slender, arching, granite span seemingly extruded from the bedrock. It had low, rudimentary parapets and, as far as Gaedynn could tell, no tangible understructure to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. Magic had made it and sustained it.
One of the earthmote’s two sentries had stood watch on that end of the bridge. His corpse lay facedown with Son-liin’s arrow sticking out of its spine. Gaedynn took another look around, making sure nothing was happening that required his attention, then squatted and started rummaging through the wyrmkeeper’s possessions.
One of the windsouls made a little spitting sound.
“What?” Gaedynn asked, whispering. “We have time and if I find anything, I’ll share.”
“We’re not doing this for loot,” the firestormer said.
“That doesn’t mean you have to shrink from it in horror,” Gaedynn replied.
Son-liin chuckled and a thunderclap split the night. Somewhere behind them, something flashed.
His eyes wide, blue gleams flowing rapidly through the lines that etched his skin, the windsoul who’d taken exception to Gaedynn’s sellsword ways looked as if he’d forgotten all about them. “It’s too soon!” he said. “We aren’t all on the earthmote yet. We can’t be. There hasn’t been time!”
“That’s war for you,” said Gaedynn, rising and reaching for an arrow. “Nothing—” A burst of fire flared in the dark. Specifically, the dark off to the left, near the edge of the floating island. He felt a jolt of alarm.
Vairshekellabex’s cave was in the center of the earthmote. If he’d come out sooner than expected, but Aoth and Alasklerbanbastos had met him with blasts of battle magic and dragon breath, that wouldn’t have been too bad. But the flashes and noise were coming from the wrong spot for that to be the case.
It was just a guess, but Gaedynn suspected Alasklerbanbastos had devised another ploy to steal back his freedom, and Aoth and Cera were trying to subdue him. If so, then there was no one in position to deal with Vairshekellabex when he emerged as, roused by all the commotion, he surely would.
“Hold the bridge,” Gaedynn said. “Make sure no enemy sneaks up behind you. I have to go.”
He stalked toward the heart of the earthmote. Spinning lengths of yellow light appeared on the left. Aoth’s magic, most likely. Gaedynn had seen him use the spell before.
He heard a scuffing footstep and spun around, drawing his bow as he did. Son-liin was trotting to catch up with him.
“I told you to defend the bridge,” he said.
“There!” she said. She showed him where she meant by pivoting and loosing an arrow of her own.
He turned. Flaring into existence when he hadn’t been ready, the various lights had robbed him of some of his night vision. But he could still see a wyrmkeeper folding up around the shaft Son-liin had driven into his guts. Plainly Aoth and Alasklerbanbastos hadn’t disposed of all the wretches before the plan started falling apart.
Two more figures rushed out of the murk, one
human, the other not. When Gaedynn saw its leathery wings and lashing tail, he cursed. Aoth had scouted the earthmote from afar but hadn’t noticed any abishais. Either the devil hadn’t been out in the open then, or one of the dragon priests had just conjured it out of Tiamat’s infernal domain.
Gaedynn shot an arrow into its chest. The attack would have dropped any man, but the creature kept coming. The tail lifted, ready to sting, and the abishai spit a misty spray that was all but invisible in the dark.
Gaedynn sprang to the side. At the same moment, red light flared at the edge of his vision, and white shone and crackled in answer. He surmised that the wyrmkeeper had struck at Son-liin with a spell, and she’d retaliated with her stormsoul abilities. But he couldn’t tell to what effect and didn’t dare look away from his own opponent to find out.
The spray spattered down beside him, sizzling on stone and earth. Though it had missed, the fumes that suffused the air stung his exposed skin and, more seriously, his eyes. Tears welled up and blurred his vision.
Then he realized he didn’t see the abishai anymore. Either he’d simply lost it in the haze and the dark or it was using a supernatural ability to befuddle him. He thought of the stinger reared to stab into his body and pump it full of vitriol.
Nocking another arrow, he backed up and looked for the creature. For a moment, he still couldn’t find the abishai. Then something, a footfall so soft or a scent so faint he wasn’t even conscious of it, or maybe just pure instinct told him his foe was still in front of him and somewhat to the right.
He pivoted, drew, and seemed to be aiming straight at Son-liin. If the abishai wasn’t really between them, or if he simply missed the creature, he stood an excellent chance of killing the genasi girl instead.
He told himself he neither jumped at shadows nor did he miss. He shot, the arrow thumped home, and the abishai became visible in mid-pounce. It convulsed and Gaedynn had little difficulty sidestepping it and avoiding the scrabbling claws and whipping sting. For after all, they were no longer targeting him. The abishai was fighting the one truly invincible foe. Its spasms subsided and it lay motionless.
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