The Captive Flame: Brotherhood of the Griffon • Book 1

by Richard Lee Byers

  Aoth and Jet floated on a northerly wind and studied the fortress. Other griffon riders glided to either side but surely couldn’t see the outpost, not at such a distance in the feeble predawn light.

  To the untrained eye, the stronghold with its palisade walls might not have looked impressive. But it had a warren of tunnels underneath it, and a garrison large and varied enough to fill up both the above ground and subterranean barracks.

  “You don’t like this, do you?” asked Jet.

  “I don’t dislike it,” Aoth replied, “but it’s about the limit of what we ought to tackle by ourselves, especially with Gaedynn, Jhesrhi, and Khouryn absent.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “The Threskelans have a lot of supplies stored there. On top of that, it’s supposed to be a mustering point for troops bound for Chessenta. So let them arrive and find the place burned, its provisions stolen, and its garrison slaughtered. It might give them second thoughts, particularly the sellswords.”

  “Let’s get on with it, then.”

  Aoth peered down at the rolling scrubland and the foot soldiers and horsemen making their way across it. In theory, a ridge higher than the surrounding terrain shielded them from the view of the sentries in the fortress. “We’ll give our comrades on the ground a little more time to maneuver into position.”

  As he waited, his thoughts drifted back to the events of the day before the previous one. He’d eliminated Cera as a possible traitor—to say the least—but otherwise he was no closer to flushing out the dragonborn assassins or figuring out why they wanted to kill him.

  In fact, the jaunt into the past had left him with new questions. Why had all those dragons been palavering? Were they all Alasklerbanbastos’s allies? Was every single one of them going to attack Chessenta at the dracolich’s behest? If so, then how could the war hero’s forces possibly withstand them?

  He scowled and tried to set such puzzles aside. He needed to focus on winning this battle. Everything else could wait.

  He looked at the pale gleam on the eastern horizon and decided he’d delayed long enough. He willed power into the head of his spear to make it glow yellow, then swept it forward to point at the fortress. All around him, wings snapped and flapped as riders urged their griffons toward the objective.

  Men laid arrows on their bows. Aoth pondered whether to start with fire or lightning and decided on the latter. Griffons furled their wings and swooped lower.

  Then a horn blatted in the watchtower at one of the corners of the palisade. Aoth had hoped sentries who’d watched through the night would be tired and inattentive at the end of it, but evidently one was still alert.

  Annoyed, Aoth rewarded the fellow’s vigilance by hurling a bright, booming lightningbolt at the tower. It blew apart the clapboard roof and, he hoped, fried whoever was underneath.

  Meanwhile, arrows whistled down at the wall walks, stabbing into other sentries as they tried to ready their own bows. Orcs and kobolds toppled from their perches to smash down in the courtyards below.

  But what came next wouldn’t be as easy. Warriors scrambled from the buildings below. They scurried for their various stations and started shooting back at the attackers in the sky. A crossbow bolt whizzed past Jet’s beak, and he screeched in irritation.

  Then an expanding glimmer of force leaped upward. Jet lashed his wings, flung himself to the side, and avoided all but the edge of the flare. Still, cold bit into Aoth’s body. Hit squarely and encrusted with frost, another mount and rider plunged toward the ground.

  Aoth roused a tattoo to warm him and looked for the source of the magic. At first, even his fire-touched eyes couldn’t spot it. There was just too much happening. Then the tip of a white wand poked out an arrow loop at the top of one of the towers.

  Jet dodged, and the next shimmering blaze missed him entirely. Aoth rattled off words of power and pointed his spear. A dark cloud materialized around the top of the bastion. The boards sizzled and crumbled as the acidic vapor ate into them. Inside the structure, people screamed.

  As Aoth turned Jet toward the gate, he noticed the watchtower he’d blasted apart was barely burning. The flaming arrows some of the griffon riders were loosing weren’t doing much to set the fort on fire either. Some treatment evidently kept the timbers from burning easily.

  Oh well, he’d half expected as much. Once they won the battle, the Brotherhood could still turn the place into a useless ruin. It would just take a little more sweat.

  He threw a lightningbolt at the gate—which jumped in its frame, but weathered the assault without a mark. It definitely possessed protective enchantments.

  But fortunately, the men and orcs poised to defend it didn’t. He bloodied them with a barrage of fist-sized hailstones, and while they were still reeling, he and three other griffon riders plunged down into their midst.

  Beaks snapped and talons snatched, tearing the Bone Wyrm’s warriors to gory tatters. Aoth looked for an enemy to stick with his spear, but Jet didn’t give him the chance. The familiar was still angry from the blast of cold that had chilled him to the marrow, and this was a good opportunity to take it out on someone.

  When all the defenders were dead, Aoth and his human companions dismounted, shoved back the bars securing the gate, and swung it open. The sellswords massed outside came streaming in.

  After that, the combat became a chaos of packed bodies and slashing, jabbing blades, with aerial cavalry shooting from on high and occasionally diving to pick off some particularly appealing target. Aoth circled with the other griffon riders. It made it easier to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole and to use his spells to best effect.

  Gradually the sellswords cleared the courtyards and bastions until only stubborn pockets of resistance remained. Khouryn’s spearmen regrouped, lighting lanterns and unpacking everburning torches with their heatless, greenish flames as they prepared to venture into the tunnels. It might well turn out to be the most dangerous part of the attack, but they knew what they were doing. A dwarf had trained them to fight underground.

  Still, Aoth wondered if he should lead them personally. Then something burst out of one of the buildings with access to the burrows below. It could have fit through the doorway, but only just, and only if it had been moving carefully. In its haste, it smashed loose scraps of wood and sent them flying.

  The beast was an enormous blue lizard with big frilled ears and a spike on its snout. It moved in a glittering haze that also shrouded the creature on its back. The rider was a kobold with a single enormous azure scale seemingly grafted in the center of his chest. The scale flickered repeatedly, like lightning was flashing inside it, and pus seeped around the edges.

  The blue lizard crashed into the front ranks of the spearmen. Dipping and tossing its head, it caught sellswords on its horn and flung them into the air. At the same time, small lightning bolts leaped from its massive body to sear one soldier, then another. The men so afflicted danced spastically in place, and the kobold howled with laughter.

  Aoth wondered why this terror was only entering the battle now. He was lucky it hadn’t shown up earlier, before the balance tilted in the attackers’ favor.

  He rattled off words of power and hurled darts of light. They vanished when they touched the seething aura. Other griffon riders loosed arrows. The shafts broke on contact with the haze.

  Still laughing, the kobold raised a length of blue metal. Lightning crackled from the tip and burned into a griffon. The beast dropped, then spread its wings and arrested its fall. Plainly injured and struggling, it flew beyond the walls, no doubt looking for a safe place to set down. Aoth couldn’t tell if the man now slumped on its feathery neck was still alive or not.

  Meanwhile, the stormlizard went on bulling, rending, and trampling its way through the lines of spearmen. Aoth decided its master might not have waited too long to unleash it after all. If somebody didn’t find a way to stop it, it could still win the fight for Threskel.

  He cast a rainbow from his sp
ear. Each colored beam had the potential to smite the reptile in a different way. None of them pierced its halo.

  “There’s no way to hurt it except close up,” said Jet. “Of course, then the halo burns us. But I’m game.”

  “Wait.” Aoth rattled off charms of protection against lightning in particular and hostile magic in general. He activated tattoos with similar functions. “There. That might help. Now yank the kobold off the beast’s back.”

  Jet poised his talons and swooped.

  The kobold twisted and pointed his wand. Jet dived even lower and streaked along mere inches from the ground. Aoth ducked, and lightning crackled over his head.

  Jet lashed his wings and bobbed back up to the kobold shaman’s level. Aoth aimed his spear, just in case the griffon’s claws somehow missed the target.

  Then, faster and more nimbly than Aoth had imagined it could move, the stormlizard spun around and reared up onto its hind legs like a horse. One of its forefeet struck at Jet.

  Through their psychic link, Aoth felt his mount’s determination to swerve and avoid the blow, and then the shock when it hit him anyway. They lurched off balance and nearly tumbled over, and the griffon fought to stay right side up and regain control of his trajectory.

  He managed the former but not quite the latter. He jolted to earth amid a scatter of dead orcs, and momentum pitched him off his feet.

  Fortunately, Aoth could feel that neither the stormlizard’s claws nor slamming into the ground had hurt Jet badly. Mostly they’d made him angry. He drew breath to let out a screech and plunge back into the fight.

  “Wait!” Aoth snapped. “Pretend you’re hurt. Stay here. When they’ve forgotten all about you, then come at them again.” He swung himself out of the saddle.

  As he started to run, he saw that the stormlizard had resumed tearing into the spearmen. No doubt realizing that even if they avoided the jabbing horn, the flares of lightning would sear them where they stood, the sellswords were falling back, their ranks disintegrating.

  “That’s right!” Aoth yelled. “Get clear! Leave it to me!”

  Charging his spear with destructive power, he poised himself in front of the stormlizard. He was close enough to attack it—close enough too that the kobold would have difficulty casting spells at him past the enormous blue reptile’s head.

  Which was good as far as it went, but it also put him within easy reach of the stormlizard’s horn. It surged forward and tossed its head, and the spike nearly caught him even though the creature had done exactly what he expected.

  Still, he did sidestep the blow and riposted with a thrust. His spear leaped through the sparkling haze without difficulty and stabbed the stormlizard in the face. It roared, and he grinned. He’d finally hurt the thing.

  The trick was hurting it enough. Over the course of the next several heartbeats Aoth inflicted several wounds on its snout and jaws, but the superficial punctures only made it more eager to rend him. And he couldn’t get past the tossing, jabbing horn to attack a different part of its body.

  Meanwhile, lightning leaped repeatedly from the stormlizard’s body to his. At first he couldn’t feel it. Then it stung like insect bites. His protective magic was wearing away.

  Trying to line up a shot, the kobold leaned from side to side. He slashed the wand through a zigzag pass and started a lengthy incantation. Aoth inferred that while lightning was the shaman’s favorite weapon, he knew other magic as well and had decided now was the time to use it.

  Then Jet hit the kobold like a bolt from a ballista. His talons pierced the scaly little body all the way through, and his momentum whisked the corpse off the stormlizard’s back, all in the blink of an eye.

  Enraged by Aoth’s stabbing spear, and his refusal to stand still and let himself be gored, the stormlizard didn’t even seem to notice its rider was gone. It just kept striking at the man on the ground.

  Jet streaked in, plunged his claws into almost the exact spot where the kobold had sat, clung, and ripped away scaly blue hide and the muscle beneath with his beak. The stormlizard bellowed and rolled, trying to crush the griffon beneath it.

  But Jet beat his wings and sprang clear. And when the stormlizard flopped over, it exposed its underside. Aoth willed fresh power into the head of his spear, charged, plunged it into the spot where he judged the beast’s heart ought to be, and instantly yanked it out for a second thrust.

  Hot blood sprayed and spattered him from head to toe. He swiped the blinding gore from his eyes.

  Just in time to see the stormlizard heave itself around, and its horn rip upward. He tried to jump away. The point caught him anyway and flipped him through the air to smash down on his back.

  His chest ached, but when he looked down he saw the horn had only grazed him. It hadn’t breached his mail to cleave the flesh beneath.

  And that had been the stormlizard’s final effort. Now it simply lay shuddering, more blood pumping out in diminishing spurts and its shimmering corona fading. One final arc of lightning crackled from the tip of a claw to the ground.

  At that same instant, an idea popped into Aoth’s head.

  He had no idea why. He’d resolved to concentrate solely on the assault, and he had. But apparently without him even being aware of it, some buried part of his mind had kept on worrying at his other problems, and now it was making a suggestion.

  It was a suggestion he couldn’t take if his men still needed him. But when he glanced surreptitiously around, that didn’t appear to be the case. There were no more stormlizards coming out of the tunnels, and in general the Brotherhood seemed to have things under control. In battle, few things were ever absolutely certain, but he was willing to gamble they could carry on without him.

  Smelling of singed feathers, wings rustling, Jet landed beside him. “Why aren’t you getting up?” the familiar asked.

  Because, Aoth replied, speaking mind to mind, I’m horribly wounded. Don’t you see all the blood?

  It’s the lizard’s blood. Its horn just bumped you.

  You’re right. But no one else was standing close enough to tell.

  Using his spear as a prop and doing his best to move like a man in hideous pain, Aoth rose and clambered onto the griffon’s back.

  * * * * *

  The staff seemed to quiver in Jhesrhi’s hand like a dog straining at a leash. She willed it into quiescence.

  Patience, she thought. If this idiot scheme works, you’ll get the chance to make plenty of fire. But in the meantime, she needed to avoid sparking big, telltale flashes of light in the midst of all the gloom.

  She peered from the brush Gaedynn had chosen to serve as their blind at the trail meandering down the hillside several yards away. Tchazzar’s captors traversed it often to take gray crawfish as long as her forearm and black eyeless pike from the murky river at the end.

  Though she and Gaedynn were waiting for the dark men, their silence and the dusk that shrouded the wooded hills even by day kept her from spotting them until they were unnervingly close. One was a shadar-kai with a bow in his hand, a chain around his waist, and triangular scars on his forehead and cheeks. The other six were hunched servants carrying cast nets and baskets.

  Jhesrhi whispered to the earth, and the patch of trail beneath the creatures’ feet turned to muck. They all plunged in up to their knees or deeper.

  Gaedynn sprang to his feet and loosed his last two arrows. The first pierced the shadar-kai’s torso. The second stabbed all the way through a servant’s throat.

  She willed the soil to well up higher around the foes who were still alive, like waves in a stormy sea. Dirt flowed over one and covered him entirely.

  But the other three vanished, leaving holes in the ground. Prompted by instinct, Jhesrhi spun around. Two of the servants were right behind her. Covered in mud, ugly faces contorted, they sprang at her with their knives raised over their heads.

  She spoke to the wind, and it howled and shoved them back. That gave her time to rattle off a charm of slumber, each syl
lable softer than the one before.

  The little gray men collapsed. She killed one by ramming the butt of her staff into his forehead. His scimitar already bloody—from dispatching the servant who’d shifted elsewhere, presumably—Gaedynn trotted up beside her and slashed the throat of the other. The bodies exploded into dark vapor, and their killers stepped back to avoid it.

  “Well,” Gaedynn said, “that was easy enough.”

  “It will get harder once their friends find the corpses and realize we’re still in their territory. And hunting them as they hunted us.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we’ll cope.” He strode to the mired corpse of the shadar-kai and removed the dead man’s quiver. He pulled out one of the many black arrows, sighted down the length of it, and smiled.

  * * * * *

  Cera sat cross-legged on a flat portion of the temple roof. The elevation brought her closer to the sun.

  Amaunator’s radiance was shining just as brightly at ground level, so her ascent was purely a symbolic gesture. But every acolyte learned early on that where meditation was concerned, symbolism helped the practitioner achieve the proper frame of mind.

  She studied the golden light reflecting from the rooftops around her. Then, when she felt centered, she lifted her eyes and gazed directly at the sun. No layman could have done so without pain and, if he persisted nonetheless, permanent damage to his sight. But the blaze simultaneously calmed and exalted her. It made her feel the majesty of her god.

  Until a screech split the air, and a big black shape with outstretched wings cut between her and the object of her adoration. She felt a pang of dread, but the emotion disappeared when she recognized Jet for what—or, according to Aoth, who—he was.

  “Sunlady!” cried the griffon.

  “Yes?” she replied, thinking that even though she knew the beast could speak, it was a marvel to hear it nonetheless.

  “Meet me in your garden! Now!”

  She started to ask why. But then Jet swooped level with her rooftop, and she gasped at the sight of a crimson figure slumped on his back.