Whisper of Venom: Brotherhood of the Griffon, Book II

by Richard Lee Byers

  Unfortunately, the artificial tranquility would only last for a few heartbeats. “Dismount!” Medrash bellowed. “Fight on foot, but like Khouryn taught you!”

  Riders swung themselves down from their mounts. Shaking off passivity, one of the gray saurians charged a dragonborn who had one foot still in the stirrup and one on the ground.

  Medrash couldn’t intercept the threat in time, but his breath could. As he snatched for the hilt of his sword, he spat lightning. The crackling flare seared the lizard thing’s body, bursting some of the tumorlike growths bulging from its flank. It stumbled and jerked for the moment the punishment lasted, then whirled toward the one who’d hurt it.

  Medrash let it come to him, then sidestepped just as it rushed into striking distance. Its snapping jaws still bashed his shield and jolted his arm, but at least its momentum didn’t knock him off his feet. He cut into the creature’s hide and shouted “Torm!” The god’s Power manifested as a thunderclap. Though Medrash perceived just how supremely loud it was, he heard it without distress. But, unprotected by the Loyal Fury’s grace, the lizard thing lurched and roared like it had suffered a second and even more damaging sword stroke.

  But that didn’t finish it either. It spun in Medrash’s direction, tearing his blade from its body and splashing him with a droplet or two of blistering fluid. It struck at him, and he interposed his shield. The attack slammed into the obstruction, and then the saurian twisted its neck and caught the edge of the shield in its fangs. It gnawed as it lashed its head back and forth. Bits of smoking, dissolving oak and hide fell away from the shield. Medrash’s arm throbbed like it was coming out of its socket. He staggered in a frantic effort to keep his foe from yanking him off his feet.

  He cut at the lizard-bear, only to find that off balance as he was, he could do no more than scratch its hide. He tried to pull his arm free of the straps securing it to the crumbling shield but, perhaps because of the attitude into which his adversary had twisted it, he couldn’t.

  He pushed aside incipient panic and drew down Torm’s glory once again. He willed the saurian to recognize the Power burning inside him, and to fear it.

  Which, from a mundane perspective, was absurd. At that moment, the lizard thing was like some enormous hound at furious play, while he resembled its helpless bone. Yet the brute faltered, its eyes widening.

  Medrash recovered his balance, stepped, and thrust with all his strength. His sword punched deep into the creature’s skull, and its legs buckled beneath it. But even in death it clung to the shield, and so dragged him down to the ground along with it. Finally, on one knee, he managed to slip his aching arm from the loops.

  A shadow fell over him.

  Instinct made him raise his shield arm as he turned. The slashing wing claws that might otherwise have shattered his skull or broken his neck clattered against his armored limb instead. Still, the multiple impacts stabbed pain through the already-tortured arm and flung him backward, away from the dead lizard-bear and the sword still embedded in its head.

  The glider landed on its short, thick legs, then pivoted. Medrash scrambled toward his weapon. The saurian’s head snapped forward. Its jaws opened wide and spewed greenish vapor over him.

  Medrash’s skin burned, and his eyes filled with blinding tears. He started coughing and couldn’t stop. He needed to use Torm’s Power to cleanse him of poison, inside and out, but he knew his foe wasn’t going to give him the chance.

  Then a spear jabbed through one of the creature’s batlike wings. It snarled, turned, and found itself facing three more such weapons, two aimed high, the other low. It whirled a wing back to slash with the bony fingertips protruding from the scalloped edge, and its foes backpedaled. More spears jabbed it from behind, as warriors assaulted it with the same tactics they’d employed against the hovering wooden Beast.

  Despite the handicap posed by his burning nose, mouth, throat, and lungs, Medrash wheezed a prayer. All his pains eased, including the fierce one in his shield arm. He flexed it and found that even if had been broken a moment before, it wasn’t anymore.

  Tears still streaming from his eyes, he scrambled onward to the lizard thing’s carcass and jerked his sword out of it. Then he drew himself to his feet and looked around.

  On every side, dragonborn fought saurians and the ash giants who’d advanced behind the conjured horrors. Some of the warriors were the surviving members of Medrash’s dismounted cavalry, often using lances as spears for the sake of the reach they provided. Others were actual spearmen, who must have rushed forward to support their embattled comrades. Medrash recognized the hammer and axe emblem of the company Khouryn was commanding personally, although amid all the howling, crashing frenzy, he failed to spot the dwarf himself.

  He could see that in such chaotic circumstances, when a new enemy could come at a fighter at any instant and from any side, Khouryn’s tactics were less effective than they might have been otherwise. Still, they were working to a degree, and as a result the fight wasn’t over yet.

  Medrash looked around for a fallen lance, spear, or an intact shield. He failed to find any of them in his immediate vicinity, but spotted a battered heater lying between a giant’s bare, filthy feet. He shouted a battle cry and charged.

  Balasar winced when the horses balked, turning what should have been a devastating attack into little more than a sacrificial offering to the ash giants and their reptilian pets.

  To their credit, Patrin and some of the other cultists looked just as horrified as he felt. Nala, however, simply kept swaying back and forth and crooning a sibilant prayer or incantation.

  Over the course of the next little while, Medrash managed to jump off his panicked steed and use his paladin gifts. Balasar couldn’t tell precisely what his clan brother had done, but it seemed to affect everyone and every beast in his vicinity, and to create a pocket of savage resistance in what was otherwise a massacre.

  Then Khouryn’s spearmen charged up to engage the enemy. Other dragonborn might follow eventually, but—perhaps astonished by the bloody fiasco the lancers’ charge had become—they were slow to act. Nor were the flying trumpeters sounding the signal. Maybe Tarhun was currently incapable of giving the order.

  In any case, it seemed clear that without more support that even Khouryn could provide, the Tymantherans fighting in the center of the field couldn’t hold. Balasar turned to Patrin. “We have to help them.”

  “I agree,” Patrin said. But instead of ordering everyone forward, he wound his way through his swaying, twitching, shuddering troops toward Nala. Balasar followed.

  When he came close enough, he felt the sting of the magic seething in the air around her. It muddled his senses—for an instant, he experienced the purple of her robe as a sweet stink like that of rotting flowers and the unevenness of the ground beneath his feet as a shrill glissando.

  With one hand, Nala gripped her staff. The other was clenched too, and Balasar’s intuition told him it was holding something, even though no trace of the object protruded beyond her fingers.

  He suddenly suspected he knew exactly what sort of spell she was working. And if he’d been confident of his ability to prove it afterward, he would have run her through that instant.

  “Sir Balasar recommends that we attack immediately,” Patrin said. He’d stopped walking, but his beard of chains was still swinging and clinking a little. “I do too.”

  Nala looked annoyed at having to suspend her chant, then smoothed her features into a fonder though solemn expression. “Not yet,” she said. “The god will tell me when the moment is right.”

  “Our comrades need us now,” Balasar said.

  “I promise you,” the priestess said, “I’ll give the word as soon as I can.”

  Right, thought Balasar. Just as soon as Medrash and Khouryn’s warriors are dead, and the new tactics discredited. As soon as you can once again make the claim that only dragon-worshipers can defeat the giants.

  “As soon as you can,” said Patrin. He turned aw
ay.

  As they strode back to their positions in the vanguard, Balasar said, “No one respects Nala more than I do. As our priestess. But you’re the soldier. The war leader. If you think—”

  “No,” Patrin said. “It’s as hard for me as it is for you, but no. Why did we march here under this banner”—he nodded to indicate the purple pennon with the platinum dragon coiling down its length—“if not to assert our faith?”

  Actually, Balasar thought, I’m here to destroy your ridiculous creed. But not at the cost of Medrash’s life. He would have forsaken the cultists and run forward to help his kinsman that instant, except that it would have been an empty gesture. A single warrior couldn’t turn the tide, no matter how skillful he might be. He needed all the split-tailed sons of toads swaying and jerking around him.

  Swaying and jerking … with the fury of the dragon god boiling up inside them, they were as frantic to attack as he was.

  Balasar started writhing like the others. “Bahamut!” he howled. “Bahamut!” His companions echoed the cry. He clashed his sword against his targe, and the others did that too.

  He gripped his weapon midway up the blade, then used the foible to slice the right side of his face, where the bone piercings of Clan Daardendrien wouldn’t snag it. He swept the sword through the air, spattering his neighbors with drops of blood. “Bahamut!” he roared.

  The wyrm-worshipers cut themselves too. It spread through their disorderly ranks like a ripple in a pond. Balasar then punched the olive-scaled fellow on his left.

  The cultist rounded on him with rage in his eyes and tongues of yellow fire flickering between his fangs. Balasar screamed, “Bahamut!” And instead of spitting flame at him, the dragon-lover punched him back, then turned to give someone else a shove.

  When they were all thumping one another, Balasar judged that they were about as crazy as he knew how to make them. He brandished his bloody sword at the melee up ahead, bellowed, “Kill!” and charged.

  For a heartbeat or two, he had the horrible feeling that despite all he’d done to stir them up, no one was going to follow. Then the cultists too screamed, “Kill!”—or else the name of their god—and pounded after him.

  He would have been happy to let them catch up. Unfortunately, a person couldn’t pretend to be mad with bloodlust and behave cautiously at the same time. So he kept running as fast as he could, and met the enemy before any of his companions.

  But not the enemy he wanted to engage, not the ash giants and green and gray reptiles locked in battle with Medrash and Khouryn’s troops up ahead. Earlier he’d noticed the brown, hunched, long-armed creatures with dangling folds of skin maneuvering to the edges of the battlefield. Now they came scurrying forward to attack the charging cultists’ flank.

  They didn’t look like much of a threat compared to either the ash giants themselves or the other minions the barbarian adepts had summoned. Balasar hoped the ones that managed to intercept him would only delay him a moment or two. Then a pair of them lashed their arms at him like they were throwing rocks.

  Wind screamed. Either scooped from the ground or simply conjured out of nothing, sand battered Balasar. It stung his eyes, forced its way into his nostrils and mouth, and choked him.

  Blinking and spitting, he covered up with his shield, then peeked over its rim as soon as the blast subsided. Through a stinging blur of tears, he saw the brown creatures rushing him, one a scuttling stride or two in advance of the other.

  Turning back and forth, he pretended he couldn’t see them at all. Then he lunged and cut at the head of the one in the lead the instant it came close enough.

  The brown creature’s body dissolved in a puff of sand, and the sword swept through the grit. The sand leaped several paces away, where, swirling, it congealed into solid flesh and bone once more.

  The trick startled Balasar, but not enough to make him lose track of the second sand thing, which had scrambled around him to strike from behind while its comrade had him distracted. He whirled and shifted his shield, and claws rasped across its surface. He riposted with a chest cut, and the creature collapsed. It was reassuring to see that the things couldn’t evade every attack by dissolving into dust.

  He whirled back toward its partner. It cocked back its apelike arm to hurl more sand. Balasar spat frost at it.

  Its staggered and pawed at the rime suddenly encrusting its blunt-snouted, lizardlike face. Balasar rushed it. It wiped the ice off its eyes just in time to see the slash that sheared through its throat.

  Balasar looked around. The sand things had proved tougher than anticipated, but, frenzied, spewing their breath weapons repeatedly, the members of the Platinum Cadre were making short work of them. He judged that in a few moments, everyone should be ready to race on to the real fight up ahead.

  Then a huge black bat slammed down on the ground—not plummeting, but almost. A split second later, the life went out of its eyes. Mangled and burned, it had plainly given the last of its strength to save its rider from a fatal fall.

  For a moment Balasar thought it a valiant effort wasted, because the big dragonborn slumped into the saddle looked as dead as his steed. But then the fellow groggily lifted his head, revealing the square gold studs pierced into the green hide under his eyes. The rider was the vanquisher himself.

  His trappings and armor charred, as was, no doubt, some of the flesh beneath, he fumbled with the straps holding him in the saddle. Then something else, something bigger even than a Lance Defender’s mount, thudded down on the ground.

  Like Tarhun’s bat, the crimson reptile had shredded wings, with arrows embedded in various places where its halo of fire had yet to burn them away. It might have trouble returning to the air. But judging from the way it immediately headed for the vanquisher, each step igniting grass and weeds, it still had plenty of fight left in it.

  Alas, Tarhun didn’t. He managed to unbuckle the last of his straps, dismount, and lift his greatsword as high as his chest. Then he collapsed.

  Patrin had three brown opponents alternately trying to flense the flesh from his bones with their talons or scour it off with blasts of sand. Still, as he pivoted to and fro, he glimpsed the maimed bat’s plunge to earth and all that followed. He saw Balasar sprint to interpose himself between the huge red beast and the sprawled, motionless Tarhun.

  No lone swordsman, no matter how skilled, was a match for such a behemoth. Patrin decided he had to help, and quickly. He’d held off using Bahamut’s gifts, saving them for foes more formidable than his current adversaries, but now he reached out to the Platinum Dragon for aid.

  Power thrilled along his nerves. It simultaneously seemed to descend from above and to well up inside him, a sensation impossible to describe to anyone who hadn’t experienced it for himself.

  Patrin whirled his sword in a circle, and brightness—or the pure, rarefied idea of it—exploded from the blade. The light became a spinning horizontal wheel of glowing glyphs with himself at the hub. Assailed by their holy Power, the summoned creatures shrieked and floundered backward.

  He didn’t know how badly he’d hurt them, nor did he care. Someone else could finish them off if need be. The important thing was that they didn’t have him tightly surrounded anymore. He ran toward Balasar and his enormous foe.

  Flames leaping from its jaws, the crested, wedge-shaped head at the end of the long neck struck like a snake. Balasar managed to sidestep and land a cut three times. But on its fourth bite, the reptile caught the edge of his shield in its fangs. It used that hold to pick him up, whip its neck, and fling him to the side. He slammed down hard and slid, and the beast strode on toward Tarhun. Either it innately understood that the dragonborn monarch was the more important target, or its summoner had so instructed it.

  Fortunately, Patrin judged that Balasar had delayed the beast just long enough for him to place himself between the reptile and Tarhun and play the same role his comrade had played. But as he put on a final burst of speed, as he neared the huge creature and saw it even m
ore clearly, doubt suddenly assailed him.

  It had nothing to do with fear for his own survival, although obviously that was uncertain in the extreme. Rather, it involved the essential nature of the creature he was about to challenge.

  He’d noticed that all the beasts the giant shamans summoned with their crystal globes shared certain characteristics with dragons. All, even the brown, hunched sand things, appeared reptilian. Some possessed acidic spittle or poison breath.

  Still, the fiery beast was different. Patrin didn’t think it was a true wyrm, but it was so like one that he wondered if, despite all the manifest reasons to do so, it could be right for a champion of the dragon god to oppose it.

  But his uncertainty only lasted a heartbeat. Then came a surge of supernal strength he hadn’t even requested, and with it clarity. He often asked Bahamut for guidance. For once, the god had chosen to provide it, assuring him without the necessity of words that it was, in fact, his sacred duty to battle creatures like the one that loomed before him.

  When the reptile struck, it was like a tree or tower falling at him. He leaped aside, which saved his life, but didn’t spare him from the blistering heat the saurian radiated like an oven. Grateful that at least at the moment flame didn’t shroud the thing’s entire crested head, he stepped in, shouted the name of his god, and cut.

  Guided by Bahamut’s Power, Patrin’s sword found a place where the creature’s scales overlapped imperfectly. As a result, the stroke bit deeper than any of Balasar’s efforts. The creature jerked its head high. Hot enough to scald, blood showered down. Patrin twisted away to protect his face.

  Unfortunately that meant he’d looked away from his foe, and instinct immediately screamed that he’d made a mistake. He sprang from the shadow of the immense foot hurtling down to crush him. Something—the tip of a claw, he realized—snagged the back of his surcoat and started to yank him down onto his back. But then the purple garment ripped instead. He reeled, then caught his balance.