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 recite
d 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.
Aoth struck back by hurling darts of green light. Jet’s wings pounded as he sought to maneuver and climb. They were rapidly approaching the dragon, only at a lower altitude, and neither of those things boded well for their survival.
Talons outstretched, the blue plummeted at them. Jet raised one wing, lowered the other, and flung himself and his riders to the left. The gigantic reptile plunged by. It leveled off fifty feet above the ground and then, wings beating, began to rise again.
An arrow appeared in the dragon’s back. Aoth hadn’t seen who loosed it, but he was sure it was Gaedynn. Master bowman that he was, he’d hit a rapidly moving target he couldn’t even see. Unfortunately, the reptile didn’t even appear to notice.
Aoth abruptly became aware of a band of pressure around his torso. Even though he was securely strapped to Jet’s saddle, Oraxes was hanging on to him. The youth was panting too, a ragged, rasping sound.
Positioned as he was, Aoth couldn’t grab the lad and shake him, so he elbowed him in the stomach. “Calm down!” he snapped. “Make yourself useful! The thing we’re fighting is a dragon. Do you know a spell to turn it visible?”
“Yes.”
“Then cast it. My attacks will show you where to aim.”
He conjured localized rains of pounding hailstones and silvery flares of frost. The blue still wasn’t slowing down. Jet zigzagged and wheeled, swooped and climbed madly, fighting to stay out of reach of the dragon’s fangs and claws and dodge its bright, crackling breath. Oraxes chanted an incantation. After a pause he repeated it, once again to no avail.
“If he botches it a third time,” Jet growled, “cut him loose and shove him off. I could do without the extra weight.”
Oraxes drew a long breath, then started again.
Then somehow, despite the griffon’s cunning maneuvers, the blue was above them and the rooftops of Soolabax below. Lightning blazed down, and Jet just managed to dodge it. The thunderbolt blasted shingles tumbling loose from the roof of a house and set the structure on fire.
Even spellscarred eyes weren’t immune to glare. Squinting against the flash of the attack, it took Aoth a precious moment to perceive that the blue had spat its lightning, then immediately dived after it. “Dodge!” he screamed.
Jet threw himself to the right. One of the dragon’s claws grazed him anyway, tearing feathers from his wing in a shower of blood. Aoth felt the slash of pain through their psychic bond.
Can you still fly? he asked.
You’d better hope so, the griffon replied.
Raising his voice, Oraxes snarled the last line of his incantation. Neither Aoth’s frightened outcry, Jet’s last frantic evasion, nor the sudden appearance of the bloody wound had shaken his concentration.
A greenish shimmer danced across the dragon’s body. Afterward, the creature didn’t look any different to Aoth. But he could tell from the way the other griffon riders oriented on it that they could finally see it too.
Arrows flew at the wyrm from all directions. Some glanced off its scales, but others stabbed deep into its flesh. Two of the other mages riding behind sellswords threw magic. One conjured a flying sword made of golden light. The blade slashed rents in the dragon’s leathery wing. In his excitement, the other resorted to a thunderbolt of his own. It was likely his favorite attack, but essentially useless against a creature with a natural affinity for the powers of the storm.
Realizing it was in trouble, the dragon wheeled and climbed. Its head swiveled at it looked for the easiest way through the foes who
surrounded it.
Aoth snarled words of power. A line of floating, whirling blades abruptly materialized in front of the wyrm. The reptile’s own momentum carried it into the magical weapons, and they sheared gory wounds into various portions of its body.
Oraxes crooned a rhyme in a demonic tongue. Some of the flesh on the dragon’s shoulder melted and flowed like wax.
An arrow, one of the poisonous black ones Gaedynn had brought back from the Shadowfell, punctured the reptile’s left eye.
And then at last it fell, crashing down on a house that partially collapsed beneath the impact. Aoth studied it until he was sure it wasn’t going to get up again.
Oraxes let out a whoop.
Aoth grinned. “I take it you enjoyed that.”
The adolescent hesitated, and when he spoke again, it was in his customary sullen tone. “It was all right.”
Today, Tchazzar seemed content for Jhesrhi to wear her usual functional, comfortable clothing, and thank the gods for that. She told herself that if she never had to wear ridiculous court attire again, she’d count herself blessed.
But if she didn’t relish fancy dress, Halonya plainly did. The prophetess still didn’t look especially clean, but she’d donned layer upon floppy, trailing layer of bejeweled and embroidered garments, all in various shades of red. Apparently the ensemble represented her notion of the regalia appropriate to a high priestess.
At the moment, a parade of architects was regaling her and the rest of those assembled in the audience chamber with concepts for the new temple. Halonya listened with rapt attention, although Jhesrhi suspected the girl didn’t understand more than half.
Tchazzar looked just as interested, but as time passed, his frown made it clear that he was dissatisfied as well. Finally he turned to Jhesrhi and said, “What do you think, my friend?”
Caught off guard, she fumbled for an answer. “Uh, the second one? With the fountain of flame?”
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