Of course, it was possible they didn’t need to care. Their power might well prevail against every ruse and tactic Myth Nantar had prepared.
But Tu’ala’keth refused to believe it. Not after she and Anton had come so far and achieved so much. The Bitch Queen had no mercy, nor concern for fairness as mortals understood it, but still the pattern would not complete itself in such a bitter fashion.
She and the human swam onward, past dozens of their exhausted, frightened comrades rushing to get indoors, to the keep that was supposed to be their particular refuge. They hurried through an entry on the third story, an opening blessedly too small for even the least of the wyrms to negotiate, and the shalarin warriors waiting on the other side gaped at them.
“What’s happening?” an officer asked.
Somewhere outside a dragon roared.
“That noise pretty much says it,” Anton gasped, slumping with exhaustion. “We drew the dragons into town. Now you go kill them.”
Anton watched as the shalarins made their last-second preparations for combat. Most were soldiers of the Protectors Caste, with bony spines stiffening their dorsal fins rigid as the crest on a human knight’s steel helm. But they had spellcasters to support them.
Across the city other squads drawn from all six allied races were no doubt doing exactly the same thing, and Anton silently wished them luck. It was their fight now. He and his comrades had done their job by luring the dragons down the proper streets in the proper heedless state of mind.
But maybe he didn’t want to hold back while others finished the battle. It was strange, really. As a spy, he’d rarely been present when the Turmian fleet or army, acting on intelligence he’d provided, eliminated a threat to the republic, and he’d rarely cared. But this time, for whatever reason, he wanted in at the kill.
The greatsword rejoiced at his witless impulse, at a new opportunity for bloodshed. Calm down, he told it sourly, meanwhile casting about for Tu’ala’keth.
Clasping her skeletal pendant, the waveservant was murmuring a prayer. At the conclusion, she shivered, rolled her narrow shoulders as if working stiffness out, then took a firmer grip on her trident.
He swam to her. “What did you just do?” he asked.
“I suppressed my fatigue,” she said, “making myself fit to fight once more.”
“Cast the same charm on me, will you? If you’ve got another.”
She flashed him one of her rare smiles. “I do. I expected you would want it.”
The spell stung like a hundred hornets, and he grunted at the blaze of pain. It lasted only an instant, though, and afterward, he felt as though he’d rested for a day.
Tu’ala’keth made her way to one of the warriors bearing a satchel. “I will take that,” she said, indicating the bag.
The Protector eyed her uncertainly. “I volunteered,” he said.
“Your bravery does you credit,” she said, “but unless you have experience fighting dragons, I am better suited to the task.”
“All right. If you put it that way.” He handed her the bag just as a roar from the street outside agitated the water and shook the walls of the keep itself.
Anton hurried to a window. Beyond was a dragon turtle, its spiky shell nearly broad enough to fill the canyonlike avenue. Its beaked head twisted from side to side, and its eyes glared as it sought the elusive prey who’d fled inside the buildings to either side.
Quarrels flew from windows and doorways. Anton shouldered his own crossbow and started shooting. Many of the missiles glanced harmlessly off the reptile’s shell or scales, but some lodged in its hide. Meanwhile, the magicians threw darts of light and raked the beast with blasts of shadow. Blood tinged the water around its body.
The reptile pivoted toward one of the larger entryways across the street, a circular opening midway up a marble wall. Anton prayed that everyone inside recognized the danger, that they were already bolting deeper into the structure. But even if so, many wouldn’t get clear in time.
With a screech like the wail of a god’s teakettle, the dragon turtle vomited its breath weapon, boiling the water in front of it. Framed in the windows to either side of the entryway, shalarins convulsed then floated lifeless.
But other defenders endured elsewhere, to shoot darts and fling attack spells, and it would take the reptile’s breath time to replenish itself. Maybe, despite its derangement, it now began to understand it was at a disadvantage. With a stroke of its flippers, it shot a few yards farther down the street then halted as it evidently perceived it couldn’t escape in that direction. Myth Nantar was a city half buried in reef, and like many of its byways, this particular street terminated in an upsweep of coral.
The dragon turtle wheeled just as, rippling with rainbows, a curtain of conjured force abruptly blocked the other end of the avenue. The leviathan angled its body upward, preparing to ascend, but a gigantic net, the magically toughened cables thick as a strong man’s thigh, now covered the street like a lid on a pot to complete the killing box. A team of warriors had stretched it across while the reptile was looking elsewhere.
Even so, it swam upward. Maybe it had wit enough to realize the net was the least substantial component of its cage. Its prodigious beak could likely nip through, or failing that, its raw strength and immensity could probably tear the mesh loose from its moorings.
Though not entirely unexpected, the dragon turtle’s sound judgment was the allies’ misfortune. They’d hoped to harry it from the relative safety of the buildings for a while longer, hurt it a little more, anyway, before anyone ventured out into the open. But they couldn’t permit it to breach the netting and maneuver freely. So officers shouted the command to go forth, and Anton, Tu’ala’keth, and dozens of others obeyed.
Some of the warriors bellowed war cries to attract the reptile’s attention. Anton yelled, “Turmish!” The dragon turtle peered downward then, trailing billows of blood, dived at the foes who had at last dared to come within its reach.
Midway through its plunge, it spat more of its breath. Some of the shalarins recognized the threat, but nobody managed to dodge. Everyone caught in the path of the blast boiled and died amid the burst of bubbles. By pure luck, Anton was safely to the side, but even he had to grit his teeth at a brush of scalding heat.
The dragon turtle hurtled down into the midst of its foes. The crested head at the end of the long neck swiveled left then right, biting a shalarin to fragments at the end of each arc. The elongated flippers bore talons like the feet of a land-born wyrm, and they clawed with equally devastating effect, tearing warriors to tatters and clouds of gore.
How could anything so gigantic maneuver so quickly? The confines of the street were supposed to hamper it!
It spun toward Anton, its beak gaping. He started to dodge, and a jagged block of ice materialized in the creature’s open mouth. Finally, one of the wizards had balked the creature in its furious assault. It flailed in shock and pain.
Anton kicked, shot into the distance, and cut at the reptile. The greatsword bit deep into the side of its beak. Maybe a mage had succeeded in cursing it with one of the enchantments devised to soften a wyrm’s scales, for other warriors, likewise taking advantage of the behemoth’s sudden incapacitation, were also piercing its natural armor.
Unfortunately, its incapacitation lasted only a moment. Then it bit down hard, and the ice jammed in its mouth crunched to pieces. Its head whirled toward Anton, and he wrenched himself out of the way.
More ice! he silently implored—it worked for a second—or, if not that, some other magic to hinder the brute.
But it didn’t happen. The warlocks were still trying. Power glimmered on the dragon turtle’s shell, and leering, lopsided faces formed and dissolved amid the swirls of blood in the water. Yet now, for whatever reason, the spells simply failed to bite.
So it was up to the warriors. Anton cut, dodged, slashed, feinted low and kicked high. When he’d battled Eshcaz, he’d tried to stay on the red’s flank, away from his dead
liest natural weapons. But now he couldn’t even do that, because it would be futile to hack at the shell. A combatant had to hover within easy reach of a dragon turtle’s head and flippers, trusting to his reflexes to save him from its attacks, because there was nowhere else to hit it.
Anton lost another comrade every couple of heartbeats. He wondered how many were left—with his attention fixed on the reptile, it was impossible to count—and if anyone else would have the nerve to come forth to engage the creature once it had torn the first squad to drifting crumbs of fish food. Then he spotted Tu’ala’keth swimming up from below the behemoth’s jaws.
He’d lost track of her early on. But he’d known that if she still lived, she was skulking around the periphery of the battle, seeking a chance to slip in close to the dragon turtle’s beak while it was concentrating on other foes, because that was what the plan required her to do.
A couple of other shalarins, also carrying satchels, should have been attempting the same thing, but he still saw no sign of them. Maybe they hadn’t been quick or stealthy enough to escape the reptile’s attention.
If so, then Tu’ala’keth absolutely had to have her chance. He opened himself fully to the greatsword’s malice, kicked forward, and attacked furiously.
The dark blade sliced deep, once just missing an eye. The dragon turtle snarled, and the gaping beak shot forward at the end of the long scaly neck.
Tu’ala’keth hurtled up from below it, a crystalline bulb in her hand. Unused to working with liquids requiring containment, the artisans and spellcasters of Myth Nantar had experienced a certain amount of trouble transferring the cult’s poison into those silvery, translucent orbs, but had finally managed to devise a method.
Tu’ala’keth lobbed the ball into the dragon turtle’s open mouth. Necessitating close proximity, the move was insanely dangerous, but at least it brought the virulent stuff to the target. Had they simply released the poison in a cloud, it might well have diffused to harmlessness without slaying a wyrm, or drifted unpredictably to kill the wrong victim. If they’d dipped an arrowhead or blade in it, the sea would simply have washed it off.
Anton couldn’t tell for certain—the angle was wrong—but assumed the ball shattered as soon as it entered the dragon’s mouth. That was what Pharom, Jorunhast, and their fellow mages had enchanted the orbs to do. Tu’ala’keth instantly whirled, kicked, and stroked in the opposite direction, less afraid now of attracting the wyrm’s notice than of poison reaching her gills or mouth.
Her desperate haste didn’t matter. The dragon turtle still didn’t notice her, but neither did it react to the poison. Flippers stroking, it kept on lunging and snapping at Anton, twisting its neck to compensate when he zigzagged in a futile effort to shake it off his tail.
He kicked high, cut downward, and finally tore an eye in its socket. He’d have that little victory to cherish in Warrior’s Rest, anyway. But he didn’t expect it to stop the leviathan, and sure enough, it didn’t. The creature’s throat swelled, and the water abruptly grew warmer as it prepared to loose another burst of its breath. He had scant hope of evading it when he was right in front of its head.
From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Tu’ala’keth, trident poised, swimming in to fight beside him. He waved her off, but she kept coming, pig-headed to the last.
Then the dragon turtle shuddered. It tried to spit its breath, but now evidently lacked the strength, for no blast engulfed them. Rather, the heat simply boiled the water around its own head and directly above it; the rising bubbles like flame leaping up from a torch.
In the wake of those, a cloud of blood and slime erupted from the reptile’s gullet, as if something had ripped and corrupted its flesh from the inside. Anton shrank from the miasma, not because he feared it would hurt him, but simply repelled by the foulness. Tu’ala’keth did the same.
The dragon turtle drifted toward the bottom. For a moment, the spectacle of such a colossus brought to ruin held everyone awestruck. Then a crossbowman in an upper-story window cheered. An instant later, everyone was doing it.
Tu’ala’keth turned to Anton. “The poison,” she said, “simply takes a moment to do its work.”
“Evidently,” he wheezed. It seemed unfair that he was always the only one gasping and panting. But she had gills instead of lungs; exertion didn’t affect her the same way.
“If we swim above the rooftops,” she said, “we should be able to see how Myth Nantar as a whole is faring.”
“Good idea.”
They peered about before completing the ascent, making sure no wyrm was lurking nearby. Once they determined it was safe, it was easy enough to squirm through the interstices of the net. Its weavers had fashioned it to hold dragons, not creatures as small as themselves.
Gazing down on the city from above, they beheld battle raging on every side. The screeching, roaring clamor stung the ears. Drifting blood clouded everything, the taste and smell of it vaguely sickening. Spires had fallen and spurs of reef shattered where dragons had torn them apart in their frenzy. Everywhere, bodies sank slowly, or already lay on the bottom, and as Anton contemplated them, he felt a swell of elation. For while too many of the corpses were mermen, locathahs, allies of one species or another, several were immense.
“It’s working,” he said. “The poison, the strategy, all of it.”
“Praise be to the Queen of the Depths,” replied Tu’ala’keth.
A yellow shimmer at the edge of his vision snagged Anton’s attention. As he twisted his head, it flickered into two shimmers.
Slender and black, covered with luminous mosaics of purple and golden wyrms winging over a benighted sea, Jorunhast’s tower constituted one wall of a dragon trap. In it, he and his comrades had snared the topaz.
Judging by the gouges on the decorations, the topaz had been trying to claw and batter its way into the human magician’s spire, either to slaughter those assailing it from within or simply to crash on out the other side. Thus far, the structure had withstood the abuse. Now, however, a pair of identical topazes swam before it, wings beating, yellow eyes burning. By dint of enchantment or some innate ability, the dragon had duplicated itself.
Ignoring the crossbow bolts streaking from neighboring structures and the swimmers swirling about them jabbing with their spears, the twin wyrms launched themselves at the tower and, striking together, tore an enormous hole. The folk inside, many Dukars with the coral bonded to their bones now manifest as ridges of external armor or blades sprouting from their hands, quailed from the oncoming wyrms then flailed and thrashed as some unseen power overwhelmed them.
But one figure floated calm and untroubled. Despite the distance, Anton could just tell that it was Jorunhast, strands of his hair and beard tossing in the agitated water. He held out a crystalline bulb in either hand, as if casually proffering them to friends, and they vanished.
The display made the topazes pause for a heartbeat, maddened though they were. Anton assumed they couldn’t understand the purpose of such a petty, pointless conjuring trick.
They found out when pain ripped through them, and they, too, flailed in helpless spasms. The exiled wizard had magically transported the poison into their throats.
Tu’ala’keth nodded. “We are going to win. But there are many dragons left. The sooner they die, the less harm they will cause. Shall we rejoin the battle?”
Anton grinned. “Why not?”
EPILOGUE
The festival of thanksgiving proved to be as solemn an observance as any cleric might have wished, and it seemed to Anton that for the most part, Myth Nantar offered at the Bitch Queen’s altars willingly enough. Even Morgan Ildacer wasn’t overtly grudging.
After the prayers and sacrifices, however, solemnity gave way to jubilation, and the human enjoyed that a good deal more, especially since he didn’t lack for companionship. It turned out that a good many folk regarded him as a hero even if they were vague on precisely how he’d helped Tu’ala’keth procure the poison and other weapons
that had saved the city. His well-wishers gave him morsels of spiced shrimp and candied sea urchin as intoxicating as any brandy, and sea-elf ladies and mermaids—the latter coping superbly despite the obvious handicaps—tendered more intimate rewards.
But eventually even such exotic delights lost a bit of their savor. Maybe it was because he craved the sight of the sky and the touch of the sun or heard duty whispering it was past time to report to his superiors, but in any case he felt in his gut it was time to go.
Fortunately, nobody had asked for the bone mask back. He’d mastered the tricks of riding a seahorse, and he knew where Tu’ala’keth kept her animals when not in use. He could leave whenever he liked. He threw himself into a final night of revelry then swam into Umberlee’s house early the following morning.
The sanctuary positively glittered with new offerings—so many that the vast majority had to sit on the floor. But that wouldn’t do for his purposes. He cleared a space on the largest and most sacred of the altars then laid the greatsword down. Wordless thought surged into his mind, reminding him how brilliantly he fought with the blade in his grasp and what ecstasy it was to kill with it, pleading with him to reconsider. Then he took his hand away, and the psychic voice fell silent.
“Are you sure?” asked Tu’ala’keth.
He turned to see her floating in a doorway. In her own shrine, her own home, she had no need of silverweave or a trident, but the drowned man’s hand hung on her breast as always.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll never have a better sword, but I’m not myself when I use it. I’m worried that eventually I wouldn’t be me even when it was in the scabbard.”
“You might be something greater. If you wished, you could remain here, continue to bear the blade in Umberlee’s service … but I see that is not what you desire.”
“No. I’m sorry, but I never felt what you feel. Not once.” If it wasn’t quite true, it was certainly true enough.
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