Текст книги "The Spectral Blaze"

Автор книги: Richard Lee Byers

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“Spirits have spoken to me!” Halonya declared. “The dragon exarchs who love Your Majesty!”

Jhesrhi had never heard of the “dragon exarchs,” but Tchazzar simply asked, “What did they tell you?”

The priestess hesitated for a heartbeat. Jhesrhi assumed that she was working out exactly how to put what she had to say.

“That Your Majesty is completely right!” Halonya said. “Or would be! Ordinarily! But perhaps he’s overlooked his new temple. That would be natural since it’s not even built yet. The work has barely begun. But already the ground is the holiest in all Faerun. And if I lead the children in prayer there, we’ll work bigger miracles than we could anywhere else!”

Jhesrhi inclined her head again. “Sister, as always, I feel humble before your wisdom.”

But Tchazzar was frowning. “My servants, mortal and supernatural, are wise. But not as wise as me. And my own divine judgment tells me to take these youngsters and all the others like them to Tymanther.”

Jhesrhi took a breath. “Majesty, from all that I’ve heard you say today, I’m guessing you feel that way because Djerad Thymar is supposed to be impregnable. But I can guarantee you it isn’t. The Brotherhood of the Griffon took one of Szass Tam’s Dread Rings, and we-excuse me, they-can help you take the dragonborn citadel too.”

Tchazzar snorted. “That might be helpful if Captain Fezim and his men weren’t busy chasing traitors and ghosts in Threskel.”

“I believe they must have finished that work or nearly so,” Jhesrhi said. “After all, we haven’t had any more attempts on Your Majesty’s life or any more undead sneaking into the War College. We haven’t had any recent reports of unrest.”

“We haven’t had any news,” Tchazzar said, “even from the wyrmkeepers Halonya sent to find out what the sellswords have accomplished.”

Jhesrhi felt a pang of alarm. That was the first she’d heard of that particular pack of spies. But apparently the folk charged with concealing Aoth’s absence had handled the situation somehow.

And while Halonya would ordinarily have pounced on the opportunity to interpret the priests’ silence to the Brotherhood’s detriment, her priority now was to avoid the possibility of a dragon born’s spear in her guts. “I believe,” she said, “that we can take the quiet as a good sign. After all, I sent four men. If something were badly wrong, surely at least one would have rushed back to warn us.”

“Hmm.” Tchazzar studied the only two humans he truly trusted, united for once in their opinion. “All right, have it your way. The children will stay here, and the Brotherhood of the Griffon will march south with us.” He pivoted toward Hasos. “Send for them immediately, and tell them to come as fast as they can. Tell Aoth Fezim to fly on ahead and get to Luthcheq as fast as he can.”

“Yes, Majesty,” Hasos said.

And now I’ve done it, Jhesrhi thought. If we’ve been running a race, this is the final leg. She wished she knew how far Gaedynn, Aoth, and Khouryn had traveled along the course.

*****

“It’s been a long time,” Balasar whispered.

Khouryn scowled. They were supposed to be lying in wait in silence. But in fairness to his friend, Balasar was keeping his voice low, and using a dwarf’s understanding of how sound carried and echoed underground, Khouryn had chosen their current hiding place partly because any noise they made wouldn’t travel far. So he decided not to make an issue of the dragonborn’s indiscretion.

“It seems like it,” he whispered back, “but then, it always does when you’re waiting.”

Lying on his belly on the ledge, Balasar rolled his shoulders until they popped. “Especially when you’re waiting on a dragon. Specifically the same dragon who’s already tried to kill the lot of us.”

A few spaces farther down the line, Vishva frowned to hear Praxasalandos so disparaged. Medrash simply said, “Prax is a different creature now. We just have to hope Gestanius didn’t sense that.”

“Or else she’ll have killed him,” Khouryn said, “and won’t come within a mile of our ambush.”

“Quicksilver wyrms are supposed to be tricky,” Biri said. She was lying beside Balasar-not, Khouryn assumed, by accident-and she smiled in the Daardendrien’s direction. “If you give him a chance, you may find out you’ve got a lot in common.”

Balasar snorted. “I may be friends with a gaggle of dragon worshipers, but forgive me if I stick at the dragons themselves.”

Across the cavern and near the mouth of the tunnel, an Imaskari in a nook in the wall waved both hands above his head. According to Jemleh, the fellow had the sharpest ears of any soldier in his command, sharp enough that his captain trusted him to hear Praxasalandos’s wings rustle and snap when the dragon shook them out to signal his approach.

Only Khouryn and those wizards who’d chosen to enhance their eyesight could see the waving. Everyone else lay prone or crouched, blind in the darkness. Khouryn whispered that everyone should shut up and be ready. The message traveled up and down the line in the form of a series of fumbling grips.

Then Praxasalandos strode into the chamber. Gestanius prowled right behind him. Khouryn winced.

It wasn’t because of the enormous size and manifest strength of the ancient blue, although they were daunting enough. It was the indefinable but gut-wrenching ugliness she shared with her ally Skuthosin. Like the green, she’d been a Chosen of Tiamat in her time, before Tchazzar killed and ate them to add his power her own. Then the Dark Lady had given them back their lives, and all that commerce with one of the supreme powers of evil had left a taint.

But so what? thought Khouryn. We killed Skuthosin and we’re going to kill you too.

Bringing the scent of a coming storm with her, her movements quick and flowing despite her hugeness, Gestanius stalked several paces into the cavern. Then she stopped abruptly, as if she’d sensed something or wondered if she had.

“How much farther?” she asked. Buzzing sparks and tiny lightning bolts crawled and arced on the double-pointed horn on her snout and the hornlets on her brow ridges. For those who could see nothing else, beholding the flickering must be somewhat like looking at a dragon-shaped constellation in the night sky.

“We’re nearly there,” Praxasalandos replied. He’d told Gestanius that he’d killed intruders in the tunnels as he was supposed to but that one of them had turned out to be a gold dragon shapeshifted into Imaskari form. The blue was coming to see if she could see identify the body. “In fact, we are there.”

“What do you mean?” Gestanius asked, looking around in vain for torn and mangled corpses.

Biri whispered words of power and flicked her wand back and forth as though leading a band of musicians. Medrash gripped his steel-gauntlet medallion and breathed a prayer to Torm. Elsewhere in the chamber, Khouryn knew, other spellcasters were raising and shaping power in their own fashions.

And maybe Gestanius heard the whispering or simply felt magic smoldering in the air because she suddenly craned her neck and twisted her head one way then the other. “Something-” she began.

Prax whirled and blasted her with a silvery plume of his breath. The vapor washed across her eyes, and she roared in shock and pain.

At the same time, a golden shimmer abruptly filled the opening through which the dragons had entered, and crackling flames leaped up to fill the exit on the opposite wall. Floating orbs of glowing power popped into existence to provide additional light.

Warriors howled battle cries. Crossbows clacked and quarrels thrummed through the air. Some glanced off Gestanius’s scales but others stuck. Khouryn discharged his own arbalest then grabbed his axe, leaped to his feet, and charged down the steep slope that descended from the shelf to the cavern floor.

It was a reckless, sliding scramble, but Medrash, Balasar, and others rushed along right beside him. For the moment Gestanius was slow with amazement and dazzled and sick from the poisonous kiss of Prax’s breath. Her enemies needed to press the advantage while they had it.

An Imaskari wizard splashed yellow fire across the tops of Gestanius’s wings. A stray wisp of Praxasalandos’s breath weapon stung Khouryn’s nose and filled his mouth with a nasty, metallic taste. He twisted his head and spat without breaking stride.

Then the stone beneath him started shaking, knocking him off balance and making him stumble. For a moment he assumed that one of his wizard allies had cast a spell that was causing the quaking. Then he recognized the distinctive rhythm of the vibration.

He sucked in a breath to yell a warning. But before he could get it out, a purple worm burst up out of the floor, its emergence flinging bits of rock through the air.

It was hard to be sure with the back end of it still in the burrow, but the creature looked as huge as Gestanius herself. Rearing like a serpent, it swiveled its head this way and that. That head, though bigger than a dwarf or man, was small in proportion to its possessor’s thick, leechlike body, and it was all jaws, with protruding tusks above and below. But Khouryn knew the lack of eyes wouldn’t keep the beast from orienting on its prey.

He had time to wonder if, mistrusting Praxasalandos, Gestanius had commanded the purple worm to shadow them or if it was just exceptionally rotten luck that had placed the creature within easy reach of its mistress’s psychic call. He wondered too if the magical barriers emplaced to hold the blue in the killing box might now ensure the slaughter of every last dragonborn, Imaskari, and stray dwarf instead. Then the worm decided on its target and, jaws gaping wide, plunged down at him like a mudslide.

*****

Alasklerbanbastos stalked through the tunnels and lava tubes under Dragonback Mountain, and his anger intensified with every stride.

Zombies and other guardians lay charred and ripped where Tchazzar had destroyed them on his way to the deepest vaults. Here and there, coins and even a gem or two lay amid the carnage, dropped when the red or his servants were hauling treasure out.

The latter warned Alasklerbanbastos what to expect at the heart of the mountain, so he considered not going there at all. But he wanted to see the empty chamber where, century after century, he’d amassed his hoard. He knew the sight would feed his hatred.

And so it did. In fact, it maddened him. Crackling, the flashes painting the walls, arcs of lightning danced across his flayed, decaying flesh. He raised his head and gave a roar that echoed away through the plundered lair.

He likewise felt compelled to look at the smaller chamber that had held his phylactery, even though there was no practical reason for that either. Perhaps he hoped to find some indication of how Tchazzar had found and opened it despite the layered illusions and wards. But there was nothing to see except black stains of soot on the walls.

Well, the violation at least didn’t matter. Alasklerbanbastos walked the earth and owned his own soul again despite the worst his enemies could do. True, he was a feeble thing compared to what he once had been, but he was about to remedy that because Tchazzar and any other scavengers who’d looted the vaults hadn’t stolen everything.

He stalked back to one of the larger chambers and fixed his eyes on the wall. Hissing an incantation, he used a talon to scratch runes on the floor. Sparks danced and sizzled on each of the runes as they did on his body.

Drawn by the accumulating power, petty spirits whispered to one another. White fungus grew across a section of the ceiling, and rudimentary faces took shape in the furry mass. The wall on which Alasklerbanbastos had focused his will grew soft as wax, and enormous bones slid out and dropped, clattering, to the floor.

The lair contained dozens of dragon bodies laid up against the day when he might need another. But before him was the best of them. Before Alasklerbanbastos engineered his demise, Faarinnjaallafon had been a blue as ancient and huge as himself, the terror of a land so distant that few folk in Faerun had ever even heard its name.

When the last bone had crawled forth, they all lay in a big mound on the floor. Alasklerbanbastos chanted different rhymes, and the sections of skeleton floated into the air one and two at a time. The truesilver and dark-iron hinges attached to the ends clinked and rang as they secured one bone to the next like the pieces of an enormous puzzle.

As the last bone locked itself to its neighbors, Alasklerbanbastos refocused his will. Up until then, the working had been easy enough for a necromancer of his caliber. The last part would be harder.

Moving with ceremonial slowness and exactitude, he set the shadow stone on the floor between the skeleton and himself. Then he resumed his chanting. He wasn’t trying to speak any louder than before, but the charge of dark magic in the words made them boom like thunder all by itself. The rock around him shook and cracked.

As the final word echoed, he spit his breath weapon.

But it wasn’t just lightning. He spewed forth himself: mind, magic, and the pure, raging essence of a storm all mingled together. Calabastasingavor’s husk collapsed behind him, and he hung, blazing and crackling, in the air.

Untethered from coarse matter, he felt the void tugging at him. A door had opened in the unseen architecture of the world, and Nature wanted him to pass through in the common fashion of the dead.

But Nature was weak compared to his will and his wizardry. He thrust himself forward and hurtled into the core of the shadow gem like an arrow driving into a bull’s-eye.

Once there, he was no longer conscious of having a ghostly, burning form or any form at all. He was simply consciousness suspended in emptiness. But that was all right. He was safe there and no longer felt death’s pull. He was free to catch his breath-metaphorically speaking-and prepare for the final stage of his transformation.

When he was ready, he reached out with a mode of perception that was neither squinting, blurry sight nor groping, fumbling touch but vaguely akin to both. He found Faarinnjaallafon’s skeleton and launched himself in its direction.

He took possession of the skeleton with the brightest flash and the loudest thunderclap yet, both blasting forth from the core of him. Others followed, one after another, fast as the beats of a racing heart.

Finally the flares and the cacophony subsided. He tried to spread his wings, and rattling a little, they responded exactly as they should. The meld of mind and physical form was perfect.

Perfect and intoxicating because he could feel that he was finally, truly the Great Bone Wyrm once more, every bit as strong as he had ever been. And how he would make his foes regret it!

The only problem, he thought with a twinge of humor, was deciding where to begin. For there were so many enemies whose deeds cried out for revenge.

Perhaps the way to choose was to assess how vengeance could best work in the service of his other goals. And when he considered his situation in those terms, he knew where to go next.

*****

Khouryn leaped aside, and the purple worm’s fangs clashed shut in the spot where he’d just been standing. He stepped in, swung his axe, and gashed one of bulges that ran down the length of the creature’s body.

The riposte should have been safe. By rights, the worm shouldn’t have been able to twist the neckless nub of a head at the end of its thick form far enough to threaten him anew. But somehow it did. The jaws opened wide, revealing the fanglike protrusions that lined the mouth all the way back and on down the throat. The spikes heaved and rippled with a kind of peristalsis, and a hot, rotten stench poured forth.

The creature’s head jumped at him. Khouryn tried to dodge, and his boot landed on something slippery. He lurched off balance and felt a jolt of terror at the likely consequences. Then a hand clutched his shoulder and jerked. It was just enough to drag him out of harm’s way, and the enormous fangs grated as they once again snapped shut on empty air.

Medrash had let his sword dangle from its martingale to take hold of him. The paladin tossed his arm and caught the weapon by the hilt as it flipped upward. “Have you fought these before?” he asked.

“A couple times,” Khouryn said. “It takes a lot of cutting.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Balasar said, advancing on the creature with his buckler extended and his sword high. “Because there are two of them.”

Khouryn snarled an obscenity. He wanted to glance around and determine where the other worm had popped up-and determine what Gestanius was doing, for that matter-but then the first worm resumed moving, and he realized it could easily mean his death to look away.

The creature finished writhing out of its hole and struck at Medrash simultaneously. He blocked with his shield and must have channeled some of Torm’s power to do it, or the impact would have knocked him off his feet. Probably hoping to reach some vulnerable or tender part, he stepped in close and slashed at the inside of the worm’s mouth. The beast recoiled, jerking its head back, up, and out of the dragonborn’s reach.

But the creature immediately twisted and bit at one of the Platinum Cadre warriors. The fellow interposed his targe as Medrash had, and it saved his life. But the worm’s teeth clanged shut on the edges of the shield and wrenched it away. The jerk had surely either broken or dislocated the dragonborn’s arm, and he dropped his mace and reeled backward. The worm swallowed the targe.

“Squads!” Khouryn bellowed. “Flank it! Like fighting anything big! Like I taught you!”

Warriors scrambled to form up. Afterward they attacked the purple worm when its attention was elsewhere and fell back when the beast turned toward them. Meanwhile, wizards, including Biri, pierced it with darts of light and dropped nets of steaming, sizzling slime onto its back. The strands seared its flesh and left crosshatches of burns behind.

The accumulating wounds looked as if they ought to do some good eventually. But the worm wasn’t slowing down yet, and Khouryn wasn’t surprised. In his youth, he’d seen one of the behemoths split open from end to end and knew it scarcely had any vital organs as such. It was just a length of gut sheathed in muscle with a brain that was only a bump at the top of the spinal cord and a dozen hearts to pump its blood around.

Standing at the center of a wheel of floating, glowing runes, Medrash cut deep into the worm’s flank. Khouryn rushed in and did the same. As the beast twisted in their direction, Balasar darted forward to attack it from the other side.

The eyeless head jerked back in his direction, and caught by surprise, he couldn’t stop in time. His own momentum flung him into the worm’s mouth. The creature heaved its head high to swallow.

Medrash cried out and he and Khouryn both struck savagely. If Balasar was even still alive, his only hope was for his allies to slay the worm and cut him out of its body quickly.

Then Biri ran toward the struggle, which was wrong. She should have stayed on the ledge and cast her spells from a relatively safe distance. Khouryn drew breath to yell for her to go back. Then he noticed the five swords of crimson light hovering around her, the halo of coppery shimmer between the conjured blades and her body, and realized what she intended.

Medrash glimpsed her coming and opened his mouth. Most likely his first impulse, too, was to order her back.

“Let her come!” Khouryn snapped. He hoped that by so doing, he hadn’t assured the death of a second friend.

Medrash’s eyes narrowed. Then he pivoted, raised his bloody sword and his steel-gauntleted fist high, and shouted, “Torm, please, shield her!”

Points of silvery light started glinting amid the coppery shimmer. They might even have been shaped like hands, but they winked on and off too quickly for Khouryn to be sure.

Biri planted herself squarely in front of their colossal form. “Here, wormy, wormy, wormy!” she cried.

The great jaws swung in her direction. Then they hurtled down at her.

The white-scaled dragonborn gasped. She flinched back an involuntary half step but no farther.

The worm snapped her up, raised its head, and swallowed. Then it gave a deafening roar as it felt the flying blades slicing it from the inside.

Khouryn hoped that would distract it from external dangers. “Everyone!” he shouted. “Hit it! Now!”

The Cadre warriors rushed in from all sides. And the worm didn’t attack them, although the twisting, heaving convulsions of its colossal body threatened to crush them even so.

Fire blazed out of the beast’s mouth as, apparently still alive and capable of action, Biri unleashed incendiary magic.

Medrash spun his sword over his head with a flourish quite unlike his usual no-nonsense way of handling a weapon. The spin kindled a brilliant glow inside the blade, and when he attacked, the edge cut as though the worm’s thick hide and dense muscle were soft as melting butter.

The beast’s head toppled forward and thudded on the cavern floor. It convulsed for another few moments, then sprawled motionless.

“Get them out!” Medrash shouted.

Khouryn could guess Biri’s location. She should be just below the part of the worm that gave steaming, blistered evidence of having cooked from the inside. Using his axe alternately like a saw and a butcher knife, he ripped at the creature’s hide. Guided either by his deity’s prompting or simple inference, Medrash attacked a spot a few paces farther down. Cadre warriors scrambled to help them both. Khouryn was peripherally aware of the roaring cacophony and furious motion of the rest of the battle, of the fact that the ongoing violence could engulf the rescuers at any moment. But he still couldn’t afford to worry about it.

Gripping the head of the axe with one hand and its haft with the other, he sawed the hole he was making a couple of strokes deeper then, grunting, pulled the edges apart. A booted foot appeared amid the muscle, blood, and slime. He yelled, “Here!” Together, he and the dragonborn working beside him cut and tore the opening larger still then dragged Biri out into the open.

She came out, bleeding in a dozen places, but Khouryn judged that none of the cuts was serious. Torm’s blessing and her own power had protected her. Slippery with ooze, retching and coughing, she wheezed, “Nothing… to breathe.”

“You’re all right now,” Khouryn told her.

“Balasar,” she said.

Voices babbled behind them. By the time Khouryn looked around, Medrash and the cultists were pulling Balasar out of the worm’s body.

He was cut badly, indeed, covered in blood from head to toe. Ordinary armor of steel and leather hadn’t done enough to protect him as the purple worm’s countless internal teeth pierced and ground him and peristalsis crushed him again and again. But he was alive. He must be because, whispering, Medrash was praying the silvery light of healing into his hands.

Khouryn shifted position to keep Biri from getting a good look. “He’s fine,” he said then turned to one of the Cadre warriors. “Get her back on the ledge.”

Biri shook her head. “I can-”

“You can’t do anything more until you at least catch your breath,” Khouryn said. “Now, both of you, move!”

The warrior helped her to her feet. Khouryn pivoted to find out-finally-what else was going on.

Though it was pretty much all raw, oozing burns and bloody wounds from end to end, the second purple worm was still alive and striving furiously to reach several Imaskari wizards perched on a ledge. One of them was Nellis Saradexma, who held his orb of dark crystal paled in one long-fingered hand and shifted it up and down and side to side. A ghostly, floating shield made of green phosphorescence shifted with it to block the worm’s attacks. Meanwhile, Nellis’s fellow wizards and the dragonborn and Imaskari warriors surrounding the lower portion of the beast assailed it furiously.

Unfortunately the diplomat’s defense wasn’t impenetrable. Khouryn gave a wordless little snarl when the green shield failed to jump quickly enough, and the worm snatched a mage off the shelf. Like Balasar and Biri before him, the Imaskari slid down the beast’s gullet in an instant-golden staff, long, black greatcoat, and all.

But despite that loss, it looked to Khouryn as if the worm’s foes were wearing it down. He couldn’t say the same about Gestanius.

At the moment the green dragon was primarily concerned with killing Praxasalandos, a duel that, because of the difference in sizes, reminded Khouryn of a dog fighting a cat. And the dog was winning. Prax had at least two serious wounds and several minor ones. The severed tip of his tail and a couple of the short horns from under his jaw lay on the cavern floor.

The wyrms were lunging, whirling, and striking so quickly that no human or dragonborn dared to venture close and risk a trampling or the bone-shattering flick of a lashing tail. Instead, warriors shot arrows and quarrels, missing as often as not despite Gestanius’s hugeness. When they did hit the mark, the shafts frequently glanced off her scales.

Attacking with blasts of frost and howls of focused noise, Jemleh Bluerhine and a couple other arcanists-thank the Luckmaiden that the knack for magic ran in the Imaskari blood-were inflicting somewhat greater harm. But it was not enough to make Gestanius falter.

Gestanius suddenly opened her jaws and, without any of the telltale preparatory movements that Khouryn had learned to watch for, spewed acid. The attack seemingly caught Praxasalandos by surprise as well, for the sizzling acid hit him straight on, and he shuddered, jerked, and burned helplessly.

Gestanius pounced the instant the acid dissolved, before even another dragon could shake off the punishment she’d just inflicted. She caught Praxasalandos’s neck in her jaws and reared onto her hind legs, so the frills at the back of her head brushed the ceiling. She bit down and clawed at her opponent’s chest at the same time.

Blood gushed and Prax splashed apart into streams and globs, which rained down from Gestanius’s fangs and talon to make a gleaming pool on the floor. The colossal green immediately dropped into the center of it and kept on clawing. Now she looked like a dog digging, and her efforts flung bits of the quicksilver dragon’s substance far and wide. One spattered right at Khouryn’s feet.

As it did, Gestanius wheeled to glare at Jemleh and his fellow mages. Without Prax-or someone-to keep her busy with close combat, she was likely to destroy the spellcasters in a couple of heartbeats.

Khouryn yelled as loudly as he could, raised his axe, and charged. He was keenly aware that if he was the only one who rushed in, he might well be living out the last few moments of his life.

For a heartbeat, as Gestanius spun in his direction, all the crossbowmen, archers, and slingers stayed right where they were. Then Vishva yelled, “Bahamut!” She dropped her arbalest, snatched her warhammer off the floor, and charged. Other members of the Cadre followed her example, and Imaskari soldiers did it too.

That didn’t distract Gestanius from striking at the one mad dwarf on the field. Her huge jaws plunged down at him, and his own momentum nearly consigned him to the same ignominious disaster that had overtaken Balasar. But somehow he managed to fling himself aside and even chop at the side of the dragon’s head, although he only nicked it a little. Still charging, he dodged a raking forefoot.

He plunged into the shadow under the dragon’s belly and started chopping at a foreleg. The ceiling was too low for Gestanius to fly. If he could cut a couple of legs out from under her, it would immobilize her.

He created a couple of nice, deep gashes, deep enough to recapture her attention, apparently, for then she started stamping. She likely hoped to catch him squarely under her foot and squash him flat, but that might not be necessary. If she simply snagged him with a claw, she stood a fair chance of ripping him apart.

He dodged frantically and scrambled whenever Gestanius’s lunging and turning threatened to separate them. He swung the axe when he could manage it and, though intent on his own small part of the struggle, occasionally caught glimpses of the rest:

A swat from a leathery wing smashed an Imaskari spearman.

An umber-scaled dragonborn axeman ran to join Khouryn underneath Gestanius until the green’s jaws hurtled down and nipped away everything from the waist up. Gestanius spit out what she’d taken as she lifted her head again. The warrior’s eyes blinked once, seemingly at the sight of his severed legs toppling in front of him.

Cloudy with bits of dissolving flesh, steaming fluid poured down off Gestanius’s flanks. Jemleh or one of his colleagues was attacking her with acid.

Khouryn bellowed “East Rift!” and swung, burying most of the axe’s head in Gestanius’s flesh. When he wrenched it free, blood spurted, spattering his chest, beard, and flesh and blinding him till he sidestepped and swiped the gore in his eyes away.

Gestanius howled and snatched her foot off the floor, and Khouryn was ecstatic when it didn’t come stamping down again. She folded up her foreleg against her chest where he couldn’t reach it.

Khouryn barked a laugh and ran toward the rear of her body. If he could cripple a hind leg too, that would accomplish his purpose.

But before he could reach the limb, Gestanius roared a word that seemed to stab him through like a rapier. He fell on his face, and the sound hung in the air like the shivering note of a gong. It twisted and tore at him, and just as horribly, he somehow felt it twisting and tearing at the very structure of the world. It was magic so powerful and malign that it tortured reality itself.

Finally the sound faded. But Khouryn ached in every nerve and couldn’t focus his thoughts. When Gestanius sprang away from him, he almost didn’t realize that was a problem.

Almost but not quite. Gritting his teeth against a pang of sharper pain, he forced himself to lift his head.

Nearly as fast as ever despite her laming, Gestanius whirled to face him. He supposed it was an accolade of sorts that out of all the foes who’d been assailing her, he was the one she particularly wanted to dispose of.