The Captive Flame botg-1

by Richard Lee Byers

  Patrin grinned and gripped Medrash’s shoulder. “I knew I could count on you. How could it be otherwise, when your god and mine are staunch friends and fellow lords of Celestia?”

  The suggestion that Torm willingly associated with any sort of dragon deity struck Medrash as blasphemous, but he did his best to hide his distaste. “I look forward to fighting alongside you as well.”

  “Then let’s go kill some giants.”

  As the warriors of the company fell into a loose formation, Balasar said, “It’s a funny thing. I wouldn’t think a bit less of myself if I stayed behind.”

  “Yet here you are,” Medrash answered. Patrin flourished his sword, and everyone started forward.

  “Here we all are,” Khouryn said, his urgrosh in one hand and a crossbow in the other. “Me, because I want to see how this ragtag band accomplishes what a better company couldn’t.”

  “Let’s hope the answer isn’t pure luck,” Balasar said. “Or if it is, let’s hope this isn’t the day the luck runs dry.”

  When they reached the top of a rise, they saw the giants awaiting them. Several ash spires towered in the enemy’s vicinity, three with horizontal branches interconnecting them, two others sliding sluggishly. Medrash couldn’t actually tell if the enemy had a shaman capable of pushing the landforms around, but he assumed so.

  The dragonborn jogged forward. Khouryn broke stride for a moment to discharge his crossbow. Other warriors loosed their bows.

  Medrash just had time to see some of the shafts hit their marks. Then one of the giants-clearly the adept he’d been trying to spot-swung a long stone rod in a circle over his head and growled a word of power. The interconnected spires exploded into ash. The wind howled and blew the grit into the oncoming dragonborn’s faces.

  Medrash’s eyes burned, and he coughed. The ground shuddered under his feet, surely a sign that the giants were charging and perhaps that other ash spires were sliding toward the Tymantherans as well.

  He raised his sword over his head and chanted a prayer. Off to his left in the streaming murk, visible only by virtue of the white light shining from his blade, Patrin did the same. Nala chanted a spell.

  The wind died, and the blinding, choking ash simply vanished from the air. Someone had countered the shaman’s power. Or perhaps they’d all three done it working together.

  But unfortunately, the ash storm had lasted long enough to neutralize the advantage afforded by their bows. The giants were closing fast. So were two ash spires, looping in on either flank.

  “Swords!” bellowed Patrin. “Charge!” Medrash saw it was the right move. At least once the Tymantherans closed with their foes, the spires couldn’t threaten them anymore. Not without running into the giants as well.

  The attackers raced forward. An enormous javelin flew at Medrash. He threw himself flat, it hurtled over his head, and he leaped up again.

  His allies were as eager to close as he was, and the momentary break in his advance allowed the foremost to reach the giants ahead of him. As a result, he had a good view when they spat their breath weapons.

  Then he nearly faltered in amazement. A dragonborn’s breath attack could be formidable but, in his experience, rarely as devastating as this. The blasts of fire, frost, or what have you hurled the gray giants reeling backward.

  About half the dragonborn pressed their foes and spewed a second attack. That was astonishing too. The ability almost never renewed itself so quickly. In that moment, Medrash almost believed the Platinum Cadre had found a way to invoke a “dragon within.”

  But only almost, because the notion of such a kinship was obscene. And, combined with the shame attendant on all his previous blunders and defeats, the illusion of it fueled his determination to show every deluded follower of a false creed like Patrin, and every scoffer like Balasar, what the servant of a true god could do.

  “Torm!” he bellowed. “Torm!”

  A giant ran at him with a sword made of stone held in a middle guard. The edges of the weapon glowed and threw off heat like a bed of red-hot coals.

  The ash giant cut. Medrash caught the blow on his shield, and sparks flew. It was a hard impact, but not hard enough to rob him of his balance.

  He shifted forward and slashed the giant’s knee. As the huge barbarian pitched off balance, he shifted behind him and cut the same leg again. The giant toppled, and he drove his sword point into the knobbed ridge of his spine.

  He glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye and pivoted toward another giant rushing to avenge his comrade. The creature hadn’t quite closed to striking distance, so Medrash used the time to chant a prayer.

  White light flared from his sword. The giant cried out and stumbled as a spasm wracked his body. Hoping to strike him before he recovered his balance, Medrash rushed in.

  The giant managed to jab the tip of his greatclub at Medrash’s head. Medrash slipped the attack and slashed. His sword bit into his opponent’s flank.

  And hurt him badly too, if Medrash was any judge, but he didn’t seem to feel the effects as yet. He twisted, pulling free of the sword in the process, and swung his club straight down at Medrash’s skull.

  At another moment, Medrash would have dodged out from underneath. Now, however, instinct prompted him to hold his shield over his head and depend on his god.

  Composed of hazy luminescence, the form of an upturned hand in a metal gauntlet flickered into being around the shield. The greatclub hit the combined defense and shattered into three pieces. Medrash scarcely felt the jolt.

  The phantom gauntlet vanished, but its power didn’t. That burned down Medrash’s arm and through his body, and he cried out in exhilaration. He felt strong as one of the Brotherhood’s griffons and light as air.

  He sprang high enough to make it easy to strike at the startled giant’s neck. His sword sheared through slate-colored flesh. The huge creature toppled backward, blood leaping like a geyser from the gash.

  “Torm!” Medrash shouted. He turned, seeking another foe, and spotted the adept. He still had his wand, but now he was holding up an egg-shaped crystal in his offhand. Unlike the gray talisman the other shaman had used, this one was red.

  Medrash charged the adept. But before he could close the distance, a drift of ash churned, then exploded. A creature lunged out of the flying grit.

  Massive enough that it almost seemed to waddle on its four thick legs, the gigantic lizard had scales of a mottled, dirty red. Its piggy eyes gleamed white, and a pair of horns swept back from the base of its skull. Rows of fangs lined its beaklike jaws, and fire flickered at the back of its mouth. Its body threw off heat like an oven.

  It immediately oriented on Medrash, either because the adept wanted it to or simply because he was the nearest foe. It opened its jaws wide and, with a thunderous belching noise, spewed a plume of fire.

  Medrash threw himself down, and the flame washed over him. The red lizard charged, and he rolled aside to avoid the champing, fiery jaws and stamping feet.

  The firebelcher turned, trying to compensate, and bumped him as he started to rise. The beast was heavy enough that even that slight contact flung him reeling off balance.

  Meanwhile, the huge lizard completed its turn and put him in front of its jaws again. It spewed more flame, and a shock ripped through him. For an instant, he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

  “Torm,” he croaked, and a cool surge of vitality restored him. It didn’t heal all his burns and blisters, or quite take away the pain, but it turned it from something that hindered him into a source of righteous fury.

  And fortunately, it did so quickly enough for him to dodge when the firebelcher tried to catch him in its fangs. He spun aside, and the triangular teeth clashed shut on empty air. He cut. His blade split scaly hide and grated on the bone beneath. The lizard thing kept coming.

  And coming. As the fight progressed, he channeled Torm’s power repeatedly, using it to augment his natural might and to smite the brute with attacks that cut both
flesh and spirit, until he simply couldn’t draw down any more. Still, the creature wouldn’t stop-and soon, heart pounding, breath rasping in his throat, he felt his physical might flagging as certainly as his mystical talents had.

  Then Balasar and Khouryn rushed in on the firebelcher’s flank. Medrash’s clan brother spat frost at the creature. The dwarf chopped it with his urgrosh. The lizard spun in the direction of the attack, taking the pressure off Medrash for what felt like the first time in days. He wanted to retreat and catch his breath. He snarled Torm’s name and swung his sword instead.

  “Do you… want us… to back off?” Balasar panted. “You seemed so… keen… to kill giants all by… yourself!”

  “You can… have a piece of this thing,” Medrash answered.

  “That’s… very generous.”

  As the three of them fought on, circling in an effort to stay away from the firebelcher’s jaws, Medrash caught glimpses of the rest of the battle. Giants and dragonborn slashed, battered, and stabbed at one another. Piles and pits of ash churned as the adept tried to summon more reinforcements. But no more creatures burst or clambered into view-probably because Nala stood chanting with her shadow-wood staff sketching S curves in the air. Patrin stood protectively before her, his sword uplifted to kill whatever threatened her. Light shone through the red blood on the blade like sunbeams through stained glass.

  Evidently Nala’s countermagic was holding the shaman’s power in check. That was useful, but Medrash couldn’t help wishing she’d started a little sooner. Because even with three warriors hacking at it, the firebelcher still wouldn’t drop.

  Suddenly it heaved itself around in an arc, spewing fire as it spun. The jet washed over all three of them, but Balasar caught the worst of it, reeled, and fell. The firebelcher lunged at him. Medrash and Khouryn scrambled to intercept the beast and, striking furiously, held it back.

  Risking a glance over his shoulder, Medrash saw Balasar coughing and stirring feebly. He was trying to get up but couldn’t manage it.

  “We have to end this,” growled Khouryn, voice tight with the pain of his burns. “Can you keep its attention on you for a few moments?”

  “Yes.” Medrash hurled himself at the lizard.

  He struck and dodged repeatedly, evading the snapping, fiery fangs by inches, unable to retreat more than a step or two lest he leave Balasar exposed. Then suddenly, Khouryn appeared on the beast’s humped back. Medrash realized he must have run up its tail.

  As he was still running, while avoiding the spikes jutting at intervals from the firebelcher’s spine, the lizard lunged at Medrash. Khouryn staggered and appeared on the brink of losing his balance, but then somehow recovered. He scrambled onward, grabbed one of the creature’s horns, and used it to anchor himself in place while he jabbed and scraped at its eyes with the spearhead on the haft of his urgrosh.

  For a moment, the firebelcher didn’t seem to notice him. Then the spearhead skated across one of its eyes, and it shrieked and spewed flame straight at Medrash, most likely without even intending it. He caught the jet on his shield.

  The firebelcher lashed its head back and forth, trying to shake Khouryn off. Most dragonborn would have lost their grips and gone flying, or else had their arms jerked out of their sockets. But the dwarf, though bounced from side to side, kept himself steady enough to go on fishing for an eye.

  With everything shaking, he wasn’t able to gouge one out. But while he kept the firebelcher preoccupied, Medrash rushed in and thrust his sword point deep into the hollow where its neck jointed its body.

  The red lizard froze, then shuddered. Seeming to topple with a dreamlike slowness, it flopped over onto its side. Khouryn jumped clear and landed with a clink of mail.

  “Help Balasar,” gasped the dwarf. “I’ll keep watch.”

  Medrash dropped to his knees beside his clan brother. Please, Torm, he thought, grant me just a little more of your grace. He rested his hand on Balasar’s shoulder, then felt power flow through the point of contact. New scales covered raw, seeping burns.

  “That looks better,” Khouryn said, his voice sounding from behind Medrash’s back. If he could stand there and talk, it must mean the firebelcher really was dead, and that no other threats were advancing on them.

  Balasar grinned up at the dwarf. “That was a good trick.” He wheezed. “Were you a ropewalker in a carnival, to keep your balance like that?”

  “I’m a dwarf,” Khouryn answered. “We have low centers of gravity.”

  *****

  Even with an invasion looming, Hasos couldn’t completely neglect the mundane business of the barony. On market day, that meant he had to sit in judgment on his dais in Whistler’s Square.

  It wasn’t a permanent platform. Workers set it up in the morning and dismantled it again in the evening, and in recent years it had started to creak and quiver at odd moments.

  Hasos tried to stop wondering if and when it might actually collapse, and at what cost to him in dignity and bruises. Tried to focus instead on the two peasants squabbling over where one’s farm ended and the other’s began.

  It was an effort, because he despised boundary disputes. In the wake of the Spellplague and the changes it wrought, his greatgrandfather had ordered the fief surveyed. That should have settled every conceivable conflict in advance. Yet somehow the glib and the greedy still found arguments to challenge the placement of markers, hedgerows, and fences.

  “The stones have always marked the line,” said the farmer nervously twisting a soft, broad-brimmed hat in his hands.

  “You dug them up and moved them!” said the plaintiff, an old fellow seemingly bedizened with every religious trinket he could lay his hands on, either to persuade the gods to favor him or to convince Hasos he was devout and thus, surely, honest. “Do you think people can’t see the fresh-turned dirt?”

  “Has anyone else seen it?” Hasos asked. Or would he have to send someone to look?

  The pious peasant hesitated. “Well… not exactly. The wife has bunions. She can’t-”

  Hasos spotted a stirring at the back of the crowd of waiting disputants and spectators, and a flash of bright yellow clothing. He raised his hand to silence the plaintiff and craned for a better look at what was happening. Followed by a pair of her subordinates, Cera came bustling toward his platform.

  His feelings for Cera were complicated. They’d been lovers for a season, and he’d liked her well enough to start considering whether a priestess of her rank could possibly make a suitable wife for a baron. Then she’d told him that as far as she was concerned, their affair had run its course.

  It had probably saved him from making a foolish decision, but it still stung, and kept stinging at odd moments over the three years since. It was worse when he knew she was keeping company with another man, and had been particularly bad since she’d taken up with the very scoundrel-a soulless mage, no less!-who’d come to Soolabax to subvert his authority.

  Yet there was a part of him that always craved her company, even when he felt most jealous and resentful-even when he expected it to hurt. And besides, whatever she wanted, it was bound to be more interesting than the trivia on the docket.

  He rose and gave her the shallow bow appropriate to their stations. “Sunlady. This is an unexpected pleasure.”

  “Milord.” Cera was a little out of breath, and her golden vestments hung slightly askew. “I realize others have been waiting for their turns, and I apologize for shoving in ahead of them. But the dignity of Amaunator demands immediate action!”

  “What do you mean?” Hasos asked.

  “You’re aware Captain Fezim is badly wounded.”

  “Of course. It’s a pity. Although I did warn him that his forays into Threskel were reckless in the extreme.”

  “I assume you know too that I’m tending him myself in the temple.”

  Just kick me in the stones, why don’t you? Hasos thought. “Yes, I heard.”

  “Well, I don’t mind doing it. Since the war hero herse
lf sent the sellswords to us, it seems only right that a senior priest or priestess should take the responsibility. But I won’t have the Keeper’s worship and rituals disrupted!”

  She seemed so put out that Hasos wondered if he could have been mistaken about her interest in the Thayan. Or maybe that too had already run its course. Small wonder if it had. With his tattoos and glowing eyes, the man was positively freakish.

  “Actually,” he said, “the way I see it, it was Nicos Corynian who sent the sellswords. But I take your point. Well, part of it. How does the presence of one invalid interfere with temple business?”

  “If it was only Captain Fezim,” Cera answered, “it wouldn’t. But his soldiers insist on standing guard over him, and they’re a pack of thieving, blasphemous ruffians. Worse, his griffon is there! A huge, black, man-eating beast roaming among the altars! People are afraid to come and pray! My clerics can’t perform their sacred offices!”

  For a moment Hasos enjoyed her distress and thought that if he refused to help her, it would only be what she deserved. But whatever his personal feelings, public order was his responsibility. And anyway, even though he realized the notion was probably stupid, he couldn’t help wondering if this was a chance to win back her affections.

  “I assume you want me to clear out the riffraff,” he said.

  “If you can,” she said.

  “Certainly I can. While the mage was well, he and I shared command. But now that he’s incapacitated, every soldier in Soolabax, whether loyal Chessentan or sellsword, answers to me.” And didn’t that assertion taste sweet in his mouth!

  So sweet, in fact, that he left his humbler petitioners to wait while he helped Cera shoo the surly outlanders and the black griffon-which truly was an enormous, terrifying brute-out of her domain. She gave him a hug and a light little kiss when they finished.

  *****

  His burns aching, but not as badly as before Medrash healed him, Balasar looked up at his clan brother and Khouryn. Both were blistered, and Khouryn’s black beard was singed and smoking. Their chests heaved as they sucked in air.