Whisper of Venom: Brotherhood of the Griffon, Book II

by Richard Lee Byers

  Then they strolled through the darkened camp with its paucity of crackling, smoky fires. (Aoth didn’t want enemy scouts to count the points of light and arrive at an accurate estimate of the size of their army.) Chessentan soldiers and sellswords alike saluted as the war hero passed. Tchazzar acknowledged them, but in a perfunctory fashion.

  For a while Jhesrhi wondered if they were simply going to wander around in silence. Then he said, “The enemy force is stronger than expected.”

  “I know,” she said. By then everyone knew what Gaedynn and Oraxes had seen.

  “Hasos recommends that we fall back to Soolabax.”

  She said what she knew Aoth must have said if he’d heard that particular proposal. “Your troops didn’t break one siege of the town just to run back inside the walls and wait for another. We need to take the fight to the enemy to solve the problem of Threskel for good and all. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Tchazzar smiled a tight-lipped, troubled smile. “Of course. What king, what god, could tolerate a part of his dominions defying his authority? It’s just … Do you understand why I didn’t want that wretched little witch to call the dead?”

  Jhesrhi hesitated. “Not entirely, Majesty.”

  “The dead are dark things. And it was here, in this very place, that dark things held and tortured me until I nearly lost my mind.”

  “It wasn’t really here, Majesty. It was in the Sky Riders. It was also in the Shadowfell, a whole different world than the one we’re walking and talking in now.”

  “Can I trust a necromancer, who draws her strength from darkness? Or a Thayan mage? They’re all necromancers, aren’t they? And when you consider that the man profaned my temple—”

  “Majesty, I beg you to remember that like the rest of Chessenta’s arcanists, Meralaine owes everything to you. And Aoth is as honorable a mercenary as you could hope to hire, and outcast from his own people for fighting necromancers. There’s no question that either of them is loyal.”

  “I suppose.” Some of the tension went out of his face. “I’m fortunate to have you for my lovac.”

  She could tell he meant it as a compliment, and that pleased her. Still, she had to admit, “I don’t know that word, Majesty.”

  He hesitated, then said, “It’s an old Draconic word. It means the faithful friend and lieutenant of a king.”

  The enemy had seen a few griffon riders. So Tchazzar’s army wasn’t giving away any secrets by having a few in the air as the foe approached. Aoth had chosen to be among them to obtain the best possible view of all that was happening.

  The decoy force stood at the top of a rise behind earthen ramparts. He wished Khouryn were there to command it. He tried to draw some comfort from everyone’s assurances that while it was always Hasos’s instinct to avoid battle if possible, he fought well if you managed to push him into one.

  Aoth had had a century to grow accustomed to his fire-kissed eyes. Still, it was momentarily disconcerting to look down at the various stands of oaks and elms and plainly see the rest of the illusion-veiled army. He had to remind himself that the Threskelans couldn’t.

  Or at least that was the idea. Unfortunately, dragons had keen senses. But if Tymora smiled, the wyrms would have other things to occupy their attention.

  All three enemy dragons, the two reds and the green, were in the air along with other flying creatures. They were heading for the top of the rise. Aoth assumed the wyrms intended to start the battle by raking the position with flame and poisonous fumes.

  My feelings are hurt, said Jet.

  Don’t worry, Aoth replied. We’ll give them a reason to pay attention to us in a moment.

  Though he lacked Jhesrhi’s enhanced rapport with the winds, he was wizard enough to feel it when she started to command them. The enemy dragons and flying drakes floundered and plunged as gusts of wind shoved them one way and another, and the air beneath their wings thinned.

  Aoth lifted his ram’s horn bugle and blew three notes. No doubt the battlefield was already noisy with the thumping, clanking sound of Threskelan saurians, horsemen, and infantry—a mix of men, orcs, and kobolds—hurrying along beneath their flying allies. But his men were listening for the call, and he was confident they’d hear it even so.

  They did. More griffon riders bounded from the copses, then—clear of the branches that would otherwise have hindered their ascent—beat their way up into the sky. Meanwhile, arrows flew from the trees and over the earthworks. Threskelan warriors and creatures began to drop.

  Aoth grinned. Discerning what he wanted through their psychic link, Jet raced toward the nearer of the red dragons. Since the elementals weren’t playing pranks on him, the familiar could fly as nimbly as ever.

  Which was a good thing. Aoth judged that like its companions, the red was relatively young. But it was still capable of burning Jet and him out of the sky or biting and clawing them to shreds.

  He chanted words of power and aimed his spear, releasing some of the energy bound inside it to augment the innate force of the spell. A silvery blast of cold erupted from the weapon’s point and splashed across the dragon’s crested back.

  It roared, twisted its neck, and spat fire in return. But perhaps the turbulence around it threw off its aim, because Jet didn’t even have to dodge.

  Once they’d flown on by, Aoth conjured fire of his own and blasted two spiretop drakes out of the air. As Jet wheeled for another pass at the red dragon, there was a moment to take a look at how everyone else was faring.

  Aoth’s fellow griffon riders loosed arrow after arrow at the winged reptiles. Often, for all their skill, they missed, since few things were more difficult than hitting a moving target from the back of a flying griffon. Sometimes the unquiet air around their targets sent the shafts glancing and tumbling awry. But Aoth estimated that one arrow in five hit and penetrated its mark. With luck, that would be good enough.

  On the ground, archery was exacting a heavier toll. Caught in a three-sided box, the Threskelan warriors and their saurian allies scrambled to break out. But whenever they reached the earthworks or the stands of trees, they ran into shield walls bristling with spears.

  In short, everything looked like it was going well. Then the blue sky darkened.

  Aoth snarled an obscenity. His old enemy Ysval had been capable of blotting out the sunlight. As had Xingax, after he grafted the night-haunt’s hand onto his own arm. Both were long dead, but someone or something on the Threskelan side knew how to create the same effect.

  One of the dragons? asked Jet.

  I doubt it, Aoth replied. With the wind bashing them around and arrows sticking into them, it’s unlikely they could exert the necessary concentration. Fly over the ground troops. Maybe we’ll spot a wizard.

  They did catch sight of spellcasters of one sort or another—human sorcerers chanting and sweeping staves, wands, or orbs through intricate passes; wyrmkeepers doing much the same with their picks; and orc and kobold shamans brandishing fetishes made of bone, mummified hands, and shrunken heads. At another time Aoth would have seized the opportunity to hurl flame or hail at any one of them. But none looked capable of leeching the sunlight out of the sky.

  Then he noticed a pocket of murk under a stand of oaks at the back of what passed for the enemy formation. No eyes but his could have made out the huge green form hidden in the darkness, or, quite possibly, even noticed the blotch of shadow itself amid the general gloom.

  The dragon was staring into a night black orb supported by an iron tripod. So was a circle of his attendants—men, or things that had once been men, with gaunt frames and ashen skin. Judging from the way their mouths were moving, they were chanting in unison as well. The trees around them dropped their leaves as though spring had turned to fall.

  The wyrm was almost certainly Jaxanaedegor, the vampiric dragon who was Alasklerbanbastos’s chief lieutenant. Aoth recognized him from Gaedynn and Jhesrhi’s description, and he knew it would be worse than reckless for Jet and him to attack
the creature and his followers alone.

  But somebody needed to disrupt their conjuring before it produced something worse than darkness. Aoth looked around to see how many griffon riders he could gather. Then he felt a chill and smelled decay. A sense of virulent wrongness knotted his guts.

  EIGHT

  15 KYTHORN, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

  Scar gave a querulous rasp. He wanted to fly and fight with his brothers and sisters, not hide behind the earthworks at the top of the hill.

  But for the moment at least, Jhesrhi could direct the winds from where she was, so it would be foolish to take to the air and make herself a target. Entranced, perceiving what the winds perceived and in the same manner—by a sort of remote touching—she was nonetheless aware of the griffon’s displeasure just as she heard the clash of metal on metal, snarls, and screams sounding along the ramparts. She stroked the feathers on his head.

  Then the bright day dimmed to filthy twilight. Without leaving the battle line, Hasos bellowed for the sunlords the army had brought along to do something about it.

  Jhesrhi could only wish them luck. She couldn’t abandon her own task to help.

  The priests chanted prayers and swept their golden maces over their heads in arcs that suggested the sun’s daily passage from east to west. Power warmed the air. But the unnatural gloom persisted.

  Until the dead began to rise from their forgotten graves, or perhaps the places where they lay unburied after Meralaine’s ancient dragon had massacred them. For the most part they were invisible. But warriors on both sides felt their nearness, gasped, and cringed.

  The ghosts ignored the combatants on the ground and soared up into the air. Where, insubstantial as the spirits of the wind, they assailed them as even dragons couldn’t, snatching with hands that ripped away vitality.

  Variously enraged, terrified, or shocked at feeling pain and weakness for the first time in their immortal existences, the winds struck back, faltered, or sought to flee. Few of them kept trying to hinder the dragons and other flying reptiles. The creatures roared and snarled in joy at the cessation of the harassment.

  Concentrating, whispering words of command, Jhesrhi strained to reassert her control over the winds. To direct them so they could both defend themselves and continue hampering the winged saurians. Then warriors in front of her cried out and shrank back from the ramparts.

  She looked up at the green dragon swooping at the top of the rise. Hating the necessity, she gave up on the spirits of the air, gripped her staff, and called for fire.

  Shala’s guts turned to water when she saw the wyrm diving out of the gloom. Still, it wasn’t panic that sent her scrambling back from the earthworks. She did it to salvage the situation.

  Meanwhile, Jhesrhi swung her staff over her head like the arm of a trebuchet. A point of light hurtled from the tip, hit the dragon in the head, and exploded into roaring, crackling fire. The wyrm screamed and veered off.

  It occurred to Shala that they were lucky, if that was the right word for it, that the green had been the first to reach the hilltop. Fire likely wouldn’t have harmed either of the reds.

  Not that the spell had hurt the green enough to deter it for long. It was wheeling to come at them again. Jhesrhi leaped onto the back of her griffon. And Shala reached Tchazzar.

  The living god was still in human guise. The plan had called for him to remain so until the enemy army had fully committed itself to battle. Only then would he transform and attack with all the allegedly awesome power at his command.

  But at this point, the Threskelans had committed themselves—and anyway, the plan had turned to dung. Yet Tchazzar still stood passively, as far back from the melee as the sunlords and the reserves. His eyes were wide and darted back and forth.

  Shala pointed at the oncoming dragon with her bloody sword. “It’s there!” she gasped. “Right there!”

  Jhesrhi hurled more fire as her winged steed sprang into the air. This time the wyrm bore the punishment without flinching and spewed vapor in return. Shala winced, but the griffon somehow wrenched himself and his rider out of the way.

  Tchazzar still wasn’t moving. “Change!” Shala said. “Kill the thing!”

  “It’s what they want,” Tchazzar said.

  “What? Who?”

  “The things that come in the dark. They want me to transform so they can find me.”

  Shala didn’t understand and had no idea what to say to him. She only knew that if the god wasn’t going to fight, then it was all up to the mortals. Despising him, she sucked in a deep, steadying breath, then strode back to the ramparts.

  Jet lashed his wings, bobbed above the drake that had apparently believed he didn’t notice it driving in on his flank, and tore its head apart with his talons. Where’s Tchazzar? he asked. If he’s anything like what he’s supposed to be, he can still turn this thing around.

  I don’t know, Aoth replied. Nor did he have time to try to spot the war hero. Without the help of the air elementals, the fight in the sky had become far more difficult. And after he won that—if he and his fellow griffon riders could win it—there were half a dozen other situations that needed their immediate attention.

  He chanted and aimed his spear. A bolt of dazzling, crackling lightning leaped from the point and struck one of the red dragons. The creature convulsed and plummeted halfway to the ground before it regained control of its wings.

  But while Aoth was busy with that one, the other red dived toward the archers and spearmen in one of the copses.

  Relatively safe behind the sellswords and their shields, Oraxes hurled darts of force at the Threskelans who kept rushing the formation. Despite the ominous and unnatural darkness, it seemed to him that things were going reasonably well. Then their living enemies—scaly kobolds and pig-faced orcs—fell back and let the dead assault them.

  Oraxes had felt though not seen the initial arrival of the phantoms, but then they’d simply gone away again. Now they were back and advancing in the form of skull-faced shadows. It was like they’d fed on something that made them more real.

  Sellswords who’d faced the previous foes stolidly or even with sneering bravado quailed. But only for an instant, and then they braced themselves for what was to come. Oraxes remembered that they were men who’d followed Aoth into Thay and fought the undead horrors there.

  But courage and experience didn’t always save them. Sometimes their jabbing spears and slashing swords bit, but just as often passed harmlessly through their insubstantial targets. When that happened, the ghosts reached right through shields and mail to plunge their fingers into living bodies. Then men screamed, withered, and collapsed.

  One phantom felled a mercenary, then glided through his body before he could flop all the way to the ground. Oraxes conjured a burst of vitriol, which flew right through the ghost to splash and sizzle on its previous foe.

  Stupid! Oraxes should have thrown darts of light. Resolved to do so, he started to backpedal and chanced to look squarely into the vacant orbits of the murky, wavering skull face. Suddenly he couldn’t look away, move, or even draw a breath. The ghost reached for him—

  Behind him, Meralaine chanted rhyming words in a language that even he, a fellow mage, didn’t recognize. Her voice was soft, but something about it made certain syllables seem to ring like hammer strokes on an anvil.

  It was the ghost’s turn to falter. Its form rippled in place like it was straining to break free of the power constraining it. Then, with a howl, it turned and launched itself at one of its fellow spirits. Two other phantoms did the same.

  Oraxes sucked in a breath. He wanted to attack the enemy ghosts, not the ones serving Meralaine, but it was hard to tell which shadow was which. He was still trying to choose a target when he glimpsed motion overhead.

  A dragon swooped at the coppice. It opened its jaws and spewed bright yellow flame. The lance of fire ignited or simply obliterated everything in its path—branches, archers on their elevated platforms, and living wa
rriors and ghosts battling on the ground. And, like an artist’s brush painting a line of ruin on the earth, it was heading straight at Oraxes.

  He started to scramble out of the way, then noticed that if Meralaine didn’t move, the wyrm’s breath would sweep right over her as well. And, evidently startled, she wasn’t moving.

  He grabbed her and dragged her with him. His foot caught on a corpse’s outstretched arm. He fell, carrying Meralaine down with him. The jet of flame slashed by just a couple of finger-lengths from their feet, close enough to make him gasp at the searing heat.

  Close enough too for the grass and fallen twigs and leaves the flare set on fire to pose an immediate threat. He scrambled to his feet, dragged Meralaine up beside him, looked around, and felt a stab of terror.

  At first glance it seemed that everything was burning, in all directions, with no path through the flames. The heat hammered at him. Smoke set him coughing. A burning platform, the charred corpses of the bowmen who’d perched there, and the boughs that had supported it crashed down in front of him. Meralaine yelped.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I can handle this.” Fighting the need to cough again, for that would spoil the cadence, he rasped an incantation.

  A corona of flame sprang up around him, staining the world blue—but it didn’t burn him. Instead, it replaced the heat of the dragon’s conflagration with a pleasant coolness.

  He pulled Meralaine into the blue fire, and she cried out at what felt painfully cold to her. But once he put his arm around her and drew her close, she was completely inside the effect and experienced it as he did.

  “Now we run,” he said. Before the protective enchantment faded.

  He tried to flee in the opposite direction from the enemy—although with his surroundings transformed, suffused with the glare of flame and the blur of smoke, he wasn’t sure of his bearings. He also tried to lead Meralaine around the worst of the fires. But sometimes, if they didn’t want to retrace their steps, they had no choice but to plunge right through. At those moments their shield couldn’t keep out all the heat, and it was speed as much as magic that protected them.