by Kate Novak
A second and a third explosion followed, as screaming fanfares of fireworks and smoke struck two more of the stone fangs, blinding anyone looking at them. Dragonbait at once recognized the handiwork of Akabar Bel Akash, as the southerner proved he was indeed a mage of no small water.
Then the saurial felt small hands creep across his body. He turned his head, intent on biting them if he could. He caught himself when he spotted Olive Ruskettle moving alongside him. The halfling carried a glass vial, from which she poured a thick, greenish mixture on his metal tethers. The wires smoked and gave off a deadly, acrid stench, but weakened immediately, as if suddenly rusted through.
Dragonbait yanked at his bonds, snapping them in half as the halfling moved to free his legs. Still caught up in the mild trance of his shen sight, the saurial could not help but notice that the halfling was purged of much of her bitterness and her vacillating spirit burned with a strength of purpose.
A Fire Knife charged at Olive with a blade tipped with the yellow ichor that had felled Dragonbait in Westgate. The halfling dodged, and Dragonbait swung his free foot with claws extended. His sharp, natural weapons sank deep into the assassin’s belly, and she fell backward, spurting a fountain of blood.
Dragonbait searched the circle for Alias. She was surrounded by Fire Knives, but she had acquired one of their swords and two of the assassins already lay at her feet. He looked in the other direction for Cassana, but she had disappeared. The saurial slid off the sacrificial stone and moved to regain Hill Cleaver.
Cold, bony fingers closed around Dragonbait’s throat from behind, and an icy chill flowed into his veins and crept through his body. Prakis laughed hoarsely as his paralyzing touch began draining the saurial paladin’s strength. On a human, the lich’s grip might have been impossible to break, but taking a saurial from behind was not so easy. Dragonbait threaded his tail between himself and the lich and used it as a lever to pry Prakis away from him. The lich staggered back a few paces, then lowered his staff’s tip at the saurial and muttered something.
Prakis burst into a pillar of fire.
That was hardly the reaction Dragonbait had expected. He whirled around to see who might have aided him. Standing atop the stone was a graying, clean-shaven man in ragged garb. He pulled a small vial from his cloak and flung it at Phalse, who was trying to take Alias from behind. Phalse saw the missile and dodged. A Fire Knife behind him was not so lucky and became a human pyre.
Dragonbait recognized the man. He had been the one who had demanded the saurial protect Alias in exchange for his freedom. Dragonbait had seen him only once since then, in Alias’s dream in Shadow Gap—Nameless. Now he fought openly on their side. The saurial took the briefest moment to study Nameless with his shen sight, but all he detected was a gray mountain against a gray sky. Neither evil, nor good, but very, very proud.
Prakis laughed with the horrible mechanical vocal sounds of the undead and walked out of the pyre that Nameless’s potion had lighted around him. The lich’s clothes were ash, and his remaining skin a blackened ruin, crumbling from the bones. Yet the pinpricks of light still danced in his eyes, and he still carried his staff.
Alias had felled two more assassins, but they had tightened their ring around her. She was closed in on all sides. One blade was deflected by the tightly knit chain shirt, but another came perilously close to her head, clipping some of her hair.
A bolt of lightning struck at Alias’s feet, knocking her to the ground. Action froze on the battlefield. Blackened Prakis grinned through fire-stained teeth, swaying his staff of power back and forth, aiming it at Dragonbait, then Ruskettle, then Nameless, making it quite clear that any sudden moves would result in instant destruction. The remaining assassins stood guard around the fallen swordswoman.
A red light shot up from one of the remaining stone plinths. Cassana stood atop the pillar, one hand clutching her wand, the other gripping shut the skin of her chest, as a modest woman would hold closed the front of a torn gown. Dragonbait twitched, debating whether he could lunge for Hill Cleaver and put an end to the mages’ threats before they fried him to a cinder
“Let this be ended,” the sorceress shouted from her perch. “Nameless, your little play is over. Phalse, take a sword and slay the saurial and Nameless. I will keep Puppet occupied.” She raised the wand over her head. Dragonbait could feel a sympathetic ache as Cassana used the blue wand to rack Alias’s body with pain.
A shadow rose behind Cassana, snatching the wand and kicking the sorceress off the stone. Cassana screamed a curse as she fell and landed hard on her side. Zrie Prakis whirled with his staff, trying to set his sights on his mistress’s attacker. Akabar’s flying form appeared for a moment above the stone pillar, the wand grasped tightly in his hand, then he dodged back and forth in an erratic pattern. Long lances of energy spat from the tip of Prakis’s staff, exploding just behind the mage in huge fireballs, but Akabar stayed just ahead of their swelling blossoms of flame.
Dragonbait finally managed to grab his sword, but with Akabar in flight he couldn’t risk using Hill Cleaver to dispel magic in the area. Instead, he used the sword to bite deeply into the lich, pulling ribs from the burned chest. Prakis’s fighting ability was still unaffected, though. He backhanded Dragonbait with a swipe of his wickedly sharpened finger bones.
“Akabar!” Nameless shouted. “Throw the wand into the disk!”
Dragonbait whirled about anxiously. It made the best tactical sense to remove the wand from their enemies’ reach, but would it ultimately prove their undoing? What effect would it have on Alias?
Akabar swooped low to evade the lancing bolts of the staff of power. One caught him in the leg, and he almost lost concentration and flight. He reached his goal, however, pulling up at the last moment and flinging the wand into the silver and red disk.
Three screams went up at once. Phalse shouted and barreled toward the disk. Olive stood blocking his path, but he leaped over her and tumbled into the vertical pool. He was swallowed without a ripple.
Zrie Prakis screamed and in screaming fell apart. With the wand thrust into another plane of being, he could not tap the energy bound up in it that kept him from death. He crumbled to dust. But in the moment before his spirit fled from the bones that Cassana had “cherished,” the lich cried out, “Die, Cassana!” His hideous laughter was carried away on the breeze.
His staff of power fell to the ground. Dragonbait felt a sharp pain in his chest, just as he had when Moander had died. Without checking, he knew that a sigil had disappeared. He glanced at Alias, who was wielding a sword two-handed, but if she felt Zrie Prakis’s mark burn away from her arm, she did not let it disrupt her combat.
Lastly, Cassana shrieked, for much of her own magic was locked up in that wand. She, too, began to decay—her shoulders stooped, her skin became more torn and ragged, so that she looked dressed in the tatters of her own dead flesh. The sorceress’s chest wound began spurting blood.
Akabar swooped down and plucked the staff of power from the battlefield. Some of the Fire Knives, uncertain whether or not the mage could wield it, began to move toward the perimeter of the circle. Dragonbait stood guarding the rear, as Olive and Alias backed toward him. The saurial paladin now bid Hill Cleaver to swallow any magic cast.
And not a moment too soon. The hag form of Cassana pointed toward the saurial paladin and muttered. A bolt of zigzag lightning shot from her finger, only to dissipate into a harmless shower of sparks.
“Kill them!” the sorceress shrieked to the remaining assassins, as she struggled to her feet.
The Fire Knives regrouped and began driving the party back. Akabar could only use the staff of power to strike their foes. Alias had lost her weapon, and Olive stumbled as she moved. In the chaos and frenzy of the sword fight, no more of the assassins had chosen to poison their blades. That was fortunate for the adventurers; Alias was bleeding from half a dozen cuts, and Olive was clutching at a jagged wound running down her side. Dragonbait risked taking his attent
ion from parrying a sword thrust long enough to look for Nameless. The graying man dove into the silver pool. Like Phalse, he disappeared without a trace.
The saurial felled an assassin closing on their left flank and chirped to gain the swordswoman’s attention. When Alias met his eyes, he jerked his head toward the silver pool. She jerked her head back indicating he must go first. He growled. If he went first, Cassana could again use her magic to attack them, but he couldn’t explain this to Alias. He jerked his head indicating again that she must go before him, but she shook her head seconds before she launched a kick at an assassin’s chin with her boot.
Minutes ago, she had no will power of her own, he thought with grim amusement. Why does she pick now to be so stubborn? He caught her attention with another chirp before he spun Hill Cleaver about and tossed it to her.
Alias caught the weapon, reclasped her hands about the grip, and spun to decapitate an assassin who had lunged forward when her attention was focused on the saurial. Dragonbait snatched up the halfling and loped to the planar disk.
The silver pool had already shrunk to half its original size. The swirls had become solid rings and the portal now resembled the bull’s eye sigil of Phalse’s master.
Dragonbait plunged in, taking Olive with him. Alias and Akabar blocked the portal. The Turmish mage brought the end of the staff up hard, cracking the jaw of an assassin.
Then two withered hands, strong as steel, closed around the staff. The aged face of Cassana, drooling and twisted beyond the limits of humanity, confronted the mage. “You use it as a club,” she lisped. “Now feel its full force.”
Alias slew another assassin with Hill Cleaver, but there were more than a dozen left, and the effects of her wounds were taking their toll on her reaction time. “Into the portal!” she ordered the mage.
“But the witch,” Akabar protested, as Cassana began to intone words of power.
“In!” the swordswoman cried.
Alias put her foot on Akabar’s stomach and shoved the mage through the disk. Akabar would not loosen his hold on the staff, and Cassana was dragged toward the bull’s eye. Akabar was lost to sight beyond the silvery glow of the portal, but the haggish sorceress managed to plant her feet firmly on the ground and hold her position. With the tendons of her arms popping from the strain, Cassana began to pull the staff back from the portal.
Alias stepped halfway into the portal, straddling it with one foot on each side of the planar gate. She brought Hill Cleaver down on the half of the staff of power that jutted out from the disc hovering over the Hill of Fangs.
The blade cut through the ancient wood like an axe, and a multicolored fireball blossomed out from the broken staff. Alias felt heat wash over her body as the force of the explosion pushed her through the gateway, into the lands that lay beyond. The shock wave caught the last pieces of Cassana’s body and the fire-ravaged forms of the remaining assassins, carrying them from the top of the Hill of Fangs. The last curved and pointed stones toppled from their moorings, and, for the second day in a row, a new star burned over Westgate.
The Citadel of White Exile
“Alias, are you all right?” Olive asked, bending over the swordswoman.
“I feel like I’ve been taken apart and put back together, with lots of pieces missing,” Alias moaned.
“That’s a pretty sick joke,” Olive chided. “Apt, but sick.”
“What do you expect?” A throbbing pain had filled her head, her flesh stung from half a dozen cuts, and she felt badly sunburned. She opened her eyes, then shut them instantly, growling, “Well, that was a mistake.”
A bright white light seared her eyeballs, leaving blue dots dancing before her mind even after she’d squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. This was not the icy white of sun on snow or the ivory white of silk, but the hot, burning white of coals in the center of a forge.
Shielding her eyes, she ventured another look. The sky above was convoluted whirls of white-whites and off-whites—hot matter and even hotter matter swirling and twisting in a vain attempt to combine.
“This is where the gods roll across the sky like storm fronts,” she muttered.
“What?” Olive asked.
“Nothing. Just a line from an old tale.”
“Right,” the halfling said, realizing just who must have told her the tale. “You going to lay there all day?” she asked.
Alias sighed and sat up. Beneath her were gray flagstones shimmering in the light of the white-on-white sky overhead.
Olive knelt beside her. The halfling’s glittering white dress, a copy of the one Cassana had worn to last evening’s midnight dinner, was covered in mud and blood.
To Alias’s right, Akabar and Dragonbait were kneeling over a fifth figure—the stranger who’d helped them fight the battle on the Hill of Fangs. Alias felt a momentary twinge of jealousy that they were looking after the stranger before they did so for her.
Don’t be a fool, she told herself. For someone who’s just fought two dozen assassins, a witch, and a lich, and who’s broken a staff of power, you’re in pretty good shape. You got off easier than Sylune did in Shadowdale. A pang of grief went through her, though, as she remembered how the river witch had met her end.
Is there a difference, she wondered, between the sadness that real people feel and the sadness I was made to feel? What reason would any of my makers have to make me grieve for someone like Sylune? None, she decided. I can think for myself, and I can feel for myself. The “masters” don’t have anything to do with it.
Remembering the recent deaths of all but one of the masters, she looked down to examine her sword arm. The limb still ached from the disappearance of the top three sigils—Cassana’s, Zrie Prakis’s, and the Fire Knives’. All remaining members of the assassins must have been wiped out by the explosion of Zrie’s staff of power. The arm that the sigils occupied had been overgrown with the waving serpent pattern, but only the concentric rings of Phalse’s master remained. And the blank space that’s left, Alias thought, remembering with a shudder Olive’s prediction that something might now grow there.
Alias tried to stand and stumbled to one knee. She was tired and battered. She leaned on Dragonbait’s sword, stood up, and looked around. They were atop a very tall tower that thrust into the shining white sky. The crenelations of the wall about them were curved and pointed like the stones about the Hill of Fangs had been.
She looked down from the tower. It rose from a plain of shining, gray stone that spread out in all directions as far as the eye could see. In a circle about the tower’s foundation, the stone was solid and unmoving, but just beyond, the ground was cracked and shifting like a mud or lava flow.
“You know, Olive, I don’t think we’re in the Realms anymore.”
She limped over to Akabar and Dragonbait. The stranger’s faded garb was a shredded mass of tatters, and his arms and legs were lacerated by a hundred bites the size of large coins. Larger gashes lay across his forehead, chest, and torso, and blood ran freely from his wounds. Olive came up beside Alias and whistled in a low tone.
Dragonbait had the man’s head cradled in his claws, and small, bright arcs of yellow bridged the space between his hands and the man’s face, visible even in the bright light of the white sky. The smell of woodsmoke filled the air. Before their eyes, the flow of blood ceased, and the wounds on the man’s face began to heal. The stranger’s grimace faded and his expression grew peaceful, the deeper wrinkles smoothed from his weather-worn face.
Akabar moved swiftly and surely, tending to the damage that remained when Dragonbait’s healing powers were exhausted. The mage smeared a viscous, green paste over the wounds not yet closed and bound them with strips of his borrowed robe.
Alias knelt beside the mage and the saurial. “Who is he?” she asked.
Dragonbait turned a curious stare on her, and Akabar said, “You don’t recognize him? Are you sure?”
Alias studied the face. He was familiar. Beneath the gray hair
and the wrinkled flesh was a man who must once have been very handsome, with a well-formed figure. “Nameless!” Alias whispered.
She turned to explain to the others. “He was in my dream in Shadow Gap, only much, much younger. Unless this is his grandfather or someone.”
“You don’t remember him from anywhere else?” Akabar prompted.
Alias screwed up her face trying to think, but she couldn’t recall him. He wasn’t in her pseudo-memory and there was no other time that she could have known him.
“Of course she can’t remember him,” Olive said with a sniff. “She was just a baby then.”
“What are you talking about?” Alias asked.
“You were just born—so to speak. He set you loose with Dragonbait to look after you. You might say he’s your father.” Olive reached down to touch her on her right wrist where the tattoo wound about the empty space. “He’s the Nameless Bard. Ring a bell?”
“The Nameless Bard,” Alias echoed as she leaned back and thought deeply. She knew that story, but hadn’t associated it with Nameless from her dream. She rocked back and forth as she recalled the tale in full and began to really understand for the first time what she was meant to be and what she had actually turned out to be.
Nameless opened his eyes, and, though his sight was mostly shielded from the bright sky by the four adventurers surrounding him, he raised his hands to shield his eyes. He scowled deeply and muttered, “Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig.”
Akabar and Olive exchanged glances. The halfling shrugged. Alias moved closer to the old man.
When Nameless caught sight of the swordswoman, he tried to sit up, but his remaining wounds caused him too much pain to do so. Dragonbait moved to support his back, but Nameless waved him away. With some effort, he pulled himself to a seated position, facing Alias.
He gazed at her bloodied, disheveled form and sighed. “You are everything I intended—and more.”