“It’s not that exactly. But I have a war to fight. It won’t matter who wanted to blacken the name of the dragonborn, or why, if the Great Bone Wyrm and his troops slaughter us all.”
Frowning, she studied him for a time. Then she said, “I think you’re perverse. Your truesight gave you at least one vision to warn you that something mysterious and dangerous is happening.”
“I don’t know that that’s what it meant,” he interjected.
She continued on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Then the Keeper gave us both a sign indicating the same thing. That would make many another man more eager to search for the truth. But I have the feeling it made you more reluctant. Why?”
He sighed. “You mean above and beyond the intelligent, practical reasons I’ve already given you?”
“Yes. So tell me.”
He hesitated, as he supposed most men would hesitate to admit any sort of fear or weakness to a woman. But his instincts told him it wouldn’t make her think any less of him. Mustering his thoughts, he ran his palm over the top of his head. His calluses scratched his hairless scalp.
“I told you where my visions led me before,” he said. “To that mountaintop in Szass Tam’s artificial world. Where, until my comrades showed up, it was just me against Malark Springhill and all the undead horrors under his control.”
“Where you saved thousands of lives,” she said. “Perhaps even all the lives there are.”
“Yes! That’s exactly the point! I didn’t really feel the weight of the responsibility at the time. You can’t allow yourself to feel things like that in the midst of battle or they’ll slow you down. But I’ve felt it over and over in the months since. I feel it in my nightmares.”
“I don’t understand. By your own choice, you’ve always carried a lot of responsibility. You’re responsible for the welfare of your company. For the fate of the lords and realms that hire you to fight.”
“That’s different. Battle sorcery and leading the Brotherhood suit me. I understand them. I’m big enough to handle them. But what happened on the mountaintop …” He shook his head. “It was too strange, and too much.”
“Throughout the centuries,” she said, “Amaunator, either as himself or in the guise of Lathander, called many champions to serve the cause of righteousness. Some of them protested that the burden was too heavy for them to bear. Yet they acquitted themselves nobly in the end.”
“That’s one reason I like worshiping Kossuth. He doesn’t have stories like that.”
She scowled. “You’re impossible.”
“Just let me work on driving Alasklerbanbastos back into his hole. I promise we’ll all be better off.”
“All right. If that’s what you think is best.”
They lay in silence for a while.
Then, when he’d begun to wonder if she’d drifted off to sleep, and if she’d start snoring the gurgling little snore he liked, she said, “I can’t go back to Soolabax with you tomorrow.”
“No?”
“No. Daelric wants me to report what I know about the raids out of and into Threskel, Tchazzar’s return, and all the rest of it. I’ll come home as soon as I can.”
Aoth scrutinized her. But if there was more she wasn’t telling him, his fire-kissed eyes failed even to hint at what it might be.
To Balasar’s relief, no one remarked on the knife hidden in his boot. Many warriors carried an extra weapon in a similar fashion, particularly if, like him, they made a habit of patronizing Djerad Thymar’s seamier taverns and entertainments.
When he was naked, Patrin picked up a steel helmet. For a moment, Balasar couldn’t see what distinguished it from an ordinary one. Then he noticed the lack of eyeholes, and the U-shaped piece intended to fit under the wearer’s snout.
Patrin put it over his head and so deprived him of sight. The locking mechanism clicked shut. The chin piece was snug enough to dig uncomfortably into the spot where a dragonborn’s lower jaw joined his neck, but not quite tight enough to choke him.
“Now,” Patrin said, “your pilgrimage begins.” A hand, perhaps the paladin’s, perhaps another initiate’s, shoved Balasar stumbling forward.
He groped to keep from running into whatever was in front of him. He found an empty space that was presumably the mouth of another passage leading away from the pentagonal room. He headed down it, once again running his hand along the wall to steady and orient himself.
The voice whispered. Eerie though it was, he supposed he ought to be glad. It should keep him creeping in the right direction.
He tried to slow his breathing and so quell the fear nibbling at his mind. He’d heard of secret societies initiating their recruits via nerve-racking ordeals. His current state of extreme vulnerability didn’t mean anything was going to happen to him. To the contrary. The members of the Platinum Cadre wouldn’t bother with this game if they realized he was here to spy.
Somewhere in the blackness, the voice breathed his name.
Then somehow he lost contact with the cool, granite surface he’d been touching, and instinct told him he’d entered a much broader space. Still, he judged that the most sensible way to traverse it was to work his way along the wall. But when he groped, first to the sides and then behind him, he couldn’t find anything solid.
All he could do was walk toward the whisper.
It grew colder with every step. Something crunched beneath his naked feet, chilling them. He realized it was snow. A frigid wind rose and, howling, tried to shove him back the way he’d come. He leaned into it.
This can’t be here, he thought. It’s some kind of trick. But it felt real. It felt like he was outdoors traversing some bitter winter landscape.
Then he heard something else moving through the snow. But the sound was a continuous slithering drag, not the rhythmic crunch of footsteps. He felt a malicious scrutiny, and then the wind roared.
No, not the wind, not this time. A blast that stabbed cold into his very core. He reeled off balance, and something swept his feet out from under him. He crashed down on the ground.
He scrambled to his knees, then lashed out with his claws. They didn’t connect with anything.
Shuddering with the cold, he tried to stand and was grateful to find that the blow that had knocked him down hadn’t broken his ankles. The voice whispered, and he turned toward it.
His unseen tormentor knocked him sprawling in the snow with a hard thump to the chest. He clawed and missed again.
Whatever was abusing him, he couldn’t fight it weaponless and blind. The cultists surely didn’t expect him to. He was just supposed to persevere and get past it.
He crawled toward the whisper, enduring the freezing discomfort of wallowing in the snow. Because if he wasn’t standing up, his adversary couldn’t knock him down.
But it could shove him down onto his belly. Suddenly something big and heavy pressed on his back and smashed him into the snow, like a foot squashing an insect.
It was crushing him. And there was no air to breathe, just snow filling his mouth and nostrils.
He struggled, but couldn’t break free of whatever was holding him down. Terror screamed through his mind.
You’re fighting the dragon in your own soul, whispered the voice, finally saying something besides his name. The dragon nature you have always scorned. Claim it and all will be well.
With the words came a sense of something stealthily prying at his mind, trying to open it up like an oyster. Apparently the idea was that if raw fear alone didn’t convince a fellow to yield to the voice’s demand, a touch of enchantment might tip him over the edge.
Yes! Balasar thought, I accept the dragon! Meanwhile, he tried to hold his deeper self clenched tight against the Power seeking to penetrate it.
He could only hope it would work. He was no mystic, and no one had ever taught him how to feint or parry on a psychic battlefield. But he’d always been a good liar, and he was stubborn by nature.
Both forms of pressure abated. The dragon’s foot, if
that was what it was, lifted off his back. The sense of influence faded from inside his head. As he floundered back onto his knees, spat out snow, and gasped in breaths of frigid air, the phantom voice called his name. But it was only a whisper, no longer a force trying to breach his soul.
Hoping the harassment was over, he rose and stumbled onward. After a few steps, the snow under his feet disappeared and the wind stopped screaming and shoving him around. He groped and found walls to either side. He was back in the corridor.
I was right, he told himself, it was all an illusion. The thought was reassuring, but not enough so to quell every trace of his anxiety. For all he knew, a person could die in a dream if it was a magical one.
Suddenly the air was humid and smelled of rotting vegetation. His lead foot plunged deep into muck. He waded onward. The slippery, sucking ooze was even harder to traverse than the snow had been.
A prodigious roar jolted him. Then liquid sprayed him from head to toe. It clung to him and burned.
He dropped to his knees and ripped up handfuls of mud and weeds. Using them, he tried to scour the corrosive slime off his body. Gradually, the worst of the searing pain subsided.
But by that time, he could hear the pad of the new dragon’s stride. It was coming at him.
Something pierced his shoulder from both front and back. Fangs? No, claws. They lifted him into the air and tossed him. He crashed into what might have been a tree. As he slammed down on the ground, something—broken twigs dislodged by the impact?—pattered down around him. The wyrm advanced on him.
The punishment continued in the same vein for a while. Balasar endured it as best he could, holding panic at bay by insisting to himself that none of it was real, nor was it meant to harm him.
Finally, the voice spoke. You despised the dragon inside you, and so you are afraid. Accept its gift of courage and all will be well.
He responded much as he had before. Then the second dragon allowed him to pass.
Next came a sandy place and a hammering storm that erupted in an instant. The wyrm in residence blasted him with a crackling something that made him dance an excruciating, spastic dance in place. He had to accept his inner dragon’s gift of strength to pass through.
After that was a place where the rocky, uneven earth groaned and rumbled, and the hot air stank of smoke and sulfur. Its drake seared him with what he took to be flame, and he promised to accept the gift of rage.
Then he entered a place where the air was cool. Something that might have been fallen leaves rustled beneath his soles. Unlike the other environments along the way, this one wasn’t immediately unpleasant. Was the nasty part of the initiation over?
Something hissed, and agony seared his nose, mouth, throat, and the inside of his chest. He collapsed, coughing and retching, trying to expel the vileness. But the vileness was in the air. It was all he had to breathe, and with every inhalation he sucked in more of it.
The dragon in your soul and the dragon deity are one and the same, whispered the voice. Embrace the deity as your own and all will be well.
I do! Balasar replied. I embrace him! Meanwhile, on a deeper level, he thought, never. Never in this life or any other.
The burning air didn’t clear. Perhaps it started to, but then the hiss sounded again, and afterward the floating, burning poison was thicker than before.
The sensation of psychic pressure intensified. The voice whispered its requirement once again. Evidently, this time it wasn’t satisfied with Balasar’s response.
Fearing that he was on the brink of passing out, Balasar repeated his assurance with all the vehemence he could muster. He did his best to mean and not mean it, believe and disbelieve it, at the same time—in much the same way a fellow pledged undying love to a female he wanted to seduce.
Enormous talons gripped him, but without piercing his hide. The dragon dragged him out of what must be a localized cloud of poison. Once he was clear, it permitted him to lie there, cough, and clear his lungs in peace.
The voice whispered, Balasar. When he felt able, he stumbled after it. He stretched out his hands so he wouldn’t bump into a tree.
Other hands took hold of him. They weren’t rough, but, his nerves frayed to tatters, he strained to break free anyway.
“Easy!” Patrin said. “It’s over. Let me take the helmet off.”
Balasar did. After being deprived of sight, even the soft amber glow of the magical sconce made him squint and blink.
He was back in the pentagonal chamber, and he wondered if he’d ever left it at all, even to the extent of fumbling his way down a passage. He seemed to be free of frostbite, blisters, bruises, scrapes, and all the other injuries that his ordeal, had it been entirely real, would likely have produced.
The cultists had removed their silvery masks, and Nala had at some point arrived to preside over whatever festivities remained. She had brown hide speckled with gold, and a pale puckered scar on the left side of her brow ridge. It was where she’d carried her piercing before her clan cast her out for the sin of adoring wyrms. She wore a vestment made of platinum scales. As she swayed rhythmically and ever so slightly from side to side, traces of other colors rippled through the folds of the garment. A glint of blue, a shimmer of red.
“Welcome, brother,” she said. “You’re one of us now.”
“Thank you,” Balasar said. His response felt too brief and matter-of-fact for the occasion, but he was too spent to come up with anything better.
“Let us pray,” Nala said. She raised her hands and recited in a language Balasar didn’t recognize. He caught the name Bahamut but nothing more.
Whatever she was babbling, there was magic in it. He felt a hot sting of Power in the air. As it in some measure possessed them, the other cultists—all but Patrin—started to writhe from side to side like she was.
Balasar did his best to imitate the motion. He supposed he was going to have to practice.
TWO
21–27 MIRTUL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
In a different year, the fields around Soolabax would have been busy with peasants attending to the spring planting. Instead, they were empty.
Well, empty of anyone who belonged there. As they winged their way north, the griffon riders periodically saw some of Alasklerbanbastos’s men, orcs, or kobolds scouting, foraging, and—for no apparent reason beyond pure malice—setting farmhouses and barns on fire. Columns of dirty smoke striped the blue sky.
Aoth surveyed it all with a certain sense of contentment. He wasn’t oblivious to the fact that innocent people were having their property destroyed, and that was, well, sad. But he didn’t know those people, and war was his trade. Certainly he felt more at home there than mired in the intrigues and rivalries of Tchazzar’s court.
Thanks to their psychic link, he knew Jet felt much the same, only without the occasional mild twinge of empathy for the victims. And with the hope that soon he’d have a chance to kill and eat some horses.
But Oraxes might feel very differently. Though the adolescent had an insolent tongue, he’d gotten quieter when he mounted up behind Aoth and Jet lashed his wings and carried them both up into the sky. And he’d been completely silent for some time.
“Does seeing this bother you?” Aoth asked.
“No!” Oraxes replied, a little too quickly and vehemently.
“That’s good. Because you’re likely to see worse before you and your friends are done.”
On Tchazzar’s authority, he’d ordered four of Luthcheq’s sorcerers, ones who looked fit and claimed some knowledge of combat magic, to travel north with him. As far as he was concerned, it was fair recompense for saving their skins during the riot and ending the ongoing persecution. Besides, some of them might even discover they liked the soldier’s life. Certainly, his wizardry notwithstanding, Oraxes hadn’t seemed to be doing much with his days beyond slouching around and acting like a street tough.
Or maybe he and his fellows would hate war and prove utterly useless to boot.
Only one thing was certain—Aoth would have traded them all to have Jhesrhi back. But she was stuck in Luthcheq for the moment. Tchazzar wanted her to help him draft new laws on magic, or some such nonsense.
Soolabax appeared on the plain ahead. “Curse it,” said Aoth.
“What?” Oraxes asked.
“You’ll see in a heartbeat or two if your eyes are good.”
During Aoth’s absence, the enemy had arrived to lay siege to the town. Since Soolabax controlled one of the primary routes south, it was only what he’d expected. But he wished the enemy had allowed him a little more time to prepare.
You always think that, said Jet.
The Threskelans were still in the first stage of the seige, pitching tents, digging trenches and latrines, and throwing up earthworks. Looking for ways to disrupt their activities, Aoth studied the vista below. Then on the far side of the town, a blue dragon spread its wings, lashed them, and soared upward. Its scales glinted in the late afternoon sunlight.
Aoth was no authority on wyrms, but he judged that the specimen wasn’t as big, old, and accordingly powerful as some. So that much was good. What was bad was that none of his companions seemed aware of the foe soaring up into the air to attack them. Thanks to some spell or talisman, the creature was currently invisible. Not to Aoth’s spellscarred eyes—or to Jet, who could look through them at will—but to everybody else’s.
Aoth pointed his spear and rattled off a charm. A spark leaped from the point and streaked over Soolabax. When it came close to the blue, it exploded with a boom, engulfing the reptile in a burst of yellow flame. The dragon screeched.
It kept coming though, and as soon as it hurtled beyond the point of detonation, everyone but Aoth and Jet lost track of its exact location. But at least the other griffon riders understood they were facing some sort of threat. They veered off and unlimbered their bows.
Meanwhile, the blue opened its jaws wide and spat a dazzling bolt of lightning. Jet swooped lower, and the thunderbolt burned over Aoth’s head.
Whisper of Venom: Brotherhood of the Griffon, Book II Page 4
