“Help me up,” Balasar said.
Khouryn held out a hand. “Sure you’re ready?”
Balasar gripped the dwarf’s hand and dragged himself upright. He felt a trifle unsteady on his feet, but it was nothing he couldn’t manage. “That patch of ground would make anyone ready. It’s hard, and it smells like rotten eggs.”
“Balasar’s not one to stay down while the outcome of a battle’s still in doubt,” Medrash said. Which was true, but it sounded idiotic when spoken aloud.
“That does Daardendrien credit,” Khouryn said. “But I’m not sure it is. In doubt, I mean.”
Balasar took a look around and decided the dwarf was right. Most of the giants had already fallen, and the Platinum Cadre was pressing the others hard. It really didn’t appear that there was much left for his companions and him to do.
Medrash’s face betrayed little, but Balasar thought he knew what was going on behind it. His clan brother was undoubtedly glad the dragonborn were winning, and if he had any sense, he must realize he’d acquitted himself in a manner that brought honor to his peculiar creed. Still, on some level, it bewildered and even rankled him that their demented new allies had performed so much better than a war band of Daardendriens.
“Look.” Khouryn pointed with the axe head of his urgrosh.
Nala and the ash giant adept now stood a stone’s throw apart, staring fixedly at each other. Light rippled up and down the rods they swung and shifted like swordsmen cutting and parrying. The space between them seethed and shimmered with the forces contending there.
Meanwhile, Patrin fought to keep a giant warrior away from the dragonborn wizard. A huge greatclub crashed repeatedly on his shield.
Balasar decided Patrin’s adversary had the right idea. Kill the enemy spellcaster while he and his opposite number were busy tossing magic back and forth. He ran toward the adept, and Medrash and Khouryn followed.
But they were only halfway to their objective when Nala cried out in a voice as loud as thunder, and rainbows swirled around her body. The shaman froze in position, and a kind of discoloration ran through his flesh, staining it a different shade of gray. Then his outstretched arms crumbled under their own weight, because Nala had turned him into a figure of solidified ash like the spires. The red crystal egg fell to the ground.
An instant later, Patrin roared, “Bahamut!” His sword streaked in a high horizontal slice that opened his opponent’s belly. Guts bulged out, and the giant dropped his weapon and clutched at the wound to hold himself together. While he was working on that, Patrin thrust his point up under the rib cage into his heart.
Khouryn had been right the first time. There truly wasn’t much more to do. Balasar felt an odd mix of anticlimax and relief.
As the giant warrior fell, Nala trotted toward the gradually eroding remains of the adept. Patrin followed, but he was a pace behind her.
She bent at the waist and straightened up with the scarlet egg in her hand. She glared into its translucent depths, and Patrin said, “Stop!”
But she didn’t look away. And the talisman suddenly blazed with multicolored light bright enough to make Balasar squint and avert his eyes. When the glow faded, the egg was gone.
“Curse it!” Patrin exclaimed. Balasar realized it was the first time he’d heard the fellow sound upset. Up until then, he’d projected the same annoying calmness that Medrash so often displayed. “I told you, if we kept one of those intact, the vanquisher’s wizards could study it and maybe learn something useful.”
“And I told you,” said Nala, “the stones are evil.” She still sounded calm. In fact, Balasar thought he heard a trace of amusement lurking in her tone. “Bahamut wants them destroyed.”
“I’m his champion, and I don’t sense that.”
“I’m his champion too, in my own fashion, and he talks to me about different things.” She gazed into his eyes. “I hope you aren’t going to start doubting me now. Not after we’ve come so far.”
Patrin sighed, his glare softened, and Balasar’s suspicion that the two of them were lovers as well as fellow fanatics strengthened into certainty. “Of course I trust you.”
“Then let’s talk of other things. If you can draw down more power, the wounded could use your healing touch. And we need to get everyone organized again.”
“All right.” Patrin turned toward Balasar, Medrash, and Khouryn. “Can you help?”
“I don’t know that I can work any more magic,” Medrash said. “Not for a while. But I can knot a bandage.”
“That’s something at least.” Patrin led them toward two dragonborn, one lying on his back, the other applying pressure to his comrade’s bloody chest wound.
When they’d left Nala several paces behind, the dwarf murmured, “For what it’s worth, I agree with you. We should have kept the talisman for study.”
Patrin shook his head. “No. No. Nala’s wise. You see what we can accomplish with her powers backing up our swords and bows.” He peered down at the wounded warrior. “I can handle this. You help someone else.”
Medrash led the rest of them onward, toward another injured cultist. Meanwhile, other dragonborn sank to their knees.
In itself, that wasn’t strange. Combat was exhausting. Soldiers often flopped down where they stood when it was over.
But the members of the Platinum Cadre also rocked their upper bodies from side to side. It was the same repetitive motion that kept Nala’s frame perpetually writhing, only more pronounced.
“Do you see this?” Balasar asked.
“Yes,” Medrash said, “but I also see something more pressing.” Evidently perceiving just how badly his prospective patient was hurt, he broke into a trot and left his companions behind.
“Fair enough,” said Balasar, “but I want a closer look.” He headed for the nearest swaying cultist, a ruddy-scaled female with the silver falcons of Clan Clethtinthtiallor pierced into her right ear and the back of her right hand. Khouryn tramped along at his side.
Suddenly the Clethtinthtiallor turned and scuttled to the nearest giant corpse. Her sway becoming more pronounced, and she clawed the foe’s gray, ash-smeared flesh with alternate swipes of her right and left hands.
Balasar and Khouryn faltered in surprise and distaste.
The cultist tore out a handful of flesh, then peered down at it as though entranced. She opened her mouth.
Balasar lunged, grabbed her by the shoulders, and gave her a shake. “No!”
She tried to twist free of his grip and bring the raw flesh to her face at the same time. But by then Khouryn was there too. He seized hold of her wrist with one hand and dug most of the meat out of her fingers with the other.
Then a feminine voice murmured a string of words, each softer than the one before. For a moment, Balasar’s eyelids drooped. The Clethtinthtiallor went limp in his grasp and started snoring.
“Thank you,” Nala said, stepping closer. Her hand trailed a blur of power as she lowered it to her side. “We wouldn’t want her to do something that might embarrass her later.”
Balasar laid the sleeping cultist on the ground. “What’s wrong with her? With all of them?” He waved his hand to indicate the other swaying warriors. Some of them had started tearing at giant bodies too, although it didn’t look like they necessarily meant to eat them.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Nala answered. “It’s just… well, you saw how powerful their breath attacks were, and how fiercely they fought in general.”
“Yes.”
“That’s because the Platinum Dragon exalted them as Torm grants power to Medrash. And it isn’t always easy for ordinary people to channel the might of a god. Afterward, they sometimes experience a brief period of… altered consciousness.”
“I understand why you’re taking the ears. But it’s degrading to oneself to desecrate the body of any enemy, even an ash giant, in some sort of frenzy. And sick to want to eat it!”
“I assure you,” Nala said, “the urge to eat is unusual, and we stop those few
who feel it. But even if we didn’t, you can’t condemn what a person does while under the control of the divine. The gods are beyond your judgment.”
Balasar smiled. “With respect, wizard, not even Medrash’s special god matters a flyspeck to me, and I don’t consider anything beyond my judgment.”
“You may yet,” Nala said. “You may yet.”
TEN
12 MIRTUL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
Gaedynn straightened up and loosed two arrows. Jhesrhi looked in the direction they flew and belatedly spotted the black silhouettes of two sentries, each of whom collapsed with a shaft in his chest.
The humans waited until it seemed plain that no one else had noticed the shadar-kai falling. Then they crept onward until they had a clear view of the hillside where Tchazzar lay manacled to the ground.
“Are you ready?” Gaedynn whispered.
“Of course,” she snapped.
Actually, she wasn’t certain. Since arriving in the Shadowfell, she’d gradually discerned that even the elements here had a filthy, alien feel. In her own world, they leaped to do her bidding. In the Shadowfell, they balked and looked for ways to turn her magic against her.
It didn’t matter as long as she was working an ordinary sort of spell. But it might when she tried to exert her powers to the fullest.
Essentially it was a problem of attunement, and she’d spent the better part of a day meditating, striving for a better fit between her consciousness and the shadow world she currently inhabited. It had helped, but the only way to find out just how much was to attempt a truly powerful spell and see what happened.
But first she had two lesser ones to cast. “Hold out your hand,” she said.
He did. She poised a fingertip over his palm and sketched a rune there. For a second it glowed yellow, and the pseudomind inside her staff experienced a pang of pleasure.
“It tickles,” Gaedynn said.
“Shut up. Get ready.”
She spoke to the fire implicit in the air, in all that could burn, and to the fire locked inside her staff. It cloaked her in warmth and wavering yellow light. Across the hillside, shadar-kai and their stunted servants jerked around toward the radiant figure suddenly burning in the dark.
Gaedynn shot the three nearest, dropping them before they had a chance to recover from their surprise. Giving Jhesrhi time to cast the first major spell without interference.
Fortunately, it had been possible to cast part of it in advance. If she tried, she could feel the forces she’d invoked balanced and aligned like the works of a mill, waiting for a final push to set the waterwheel turning and the stones grinding. She chanted words of power.
As she’d feared, when the process was at its most precarious, the earth tried to deny her. She could feel its spite and defiance as an ache in her feet and ankles.
But she knew how to talk to it now. She promised to satisfy the love of pain and destruction festering in everything in the Shadowfell. She wallowed in fantasies of slaughter by crushing and suffocation.
It didn’t make earth and stone despise her any less. It did, however, persuade them that she could help them lash out at other soft, scurrying mites they hated just as much. It beguiled them into using her as she was using them.
She pounded the butt of her staff repeatedly on the ground. Rings of swell flowed outward from the point of impact like ripples in a pond.
She kept hammering, and the ripples rose higher and swept farther. She could feel the disturbance, but had no trouble keeping her balance. The sensation in her feet had changed from gnawing pain to one of pure connection, like she’d set down roots as deep as a mountain’s. Gaedynn, however, staggered, fighting to keep his feet, then fell down anyway. He wasn’t alone. No shadar-kai could stand up either. The ones struggling free of the burrows had to crawl.
The captive dragon stared at Jhesrhi, but she had no idea what it was thinking. Nor, at that moment, did it matter. She had to stay focused on jolting the ground harder and harder and harder.
Cracking and crashing, trees toppled against their neighbors. Sections of hillside, and thinner strips connecting them, fell in on themselves. The earth laughed a rumbling laugh as it squeezed the shadar-kai caught in the tunnels in its murderous grasp.
Jhesrhi realized it was time to stop, but it took three more stamps of the staff before she managed it. Her will was entangled with the earth’s, and her mad collaborator wanted to go on quaking until it knocked down, shattered, or buried everything-even itself.
Gaedynn sprang to his feet. “Keep moving!”
He was right. That was exactly what they had to do, no matter how tired she felt. They turned and ran into the trees.
There, she willed her blazing cloak to go out. Gaedynn waved the hand where she’d drawn the rune. A tongue of flame leaped from his skin to become a tall, slender figure with a feminine shape. From a distance, the elemental ought to pass for a mortal woman wrapped in fire.
Gaedynn dashed onward. The living flame sprang after him.
Jhesrhi stepped behind an oak and whispered charms of silence and concealment. Invisibility was largely a magic of the mind, and she was nowhere near as proficient at it as she was at elemental wizardry. But since she’d given the enemy a nice, bright lure to follow, perhaps they wouldn’t even bother to look elsewhere.
It was only a few heartbeats before, moving in eerie quiet even now, the first shadar-kai came racing after Gaedynn and the fire spirit. Had they been human, some of the dark men might have stayed behind to dig for survivors or simply because they’d succumbed to grief for those presumably lost. But she and Gaedynn had learned that malice and bloodlust were the shadar-kai’s ruling passions even when unprovoked, and they’d done everything in their power to enrage them. They hoped the final outrage would goad every last one of them into giving chase. Leaving Tchazzar unattended.
It looked like it was working. Dozens of the gray-skinned, black-clad folk, and the other creatures that dwelled alongside them, hurried past her hiding place.
But she wouldn’t know for certain until she returned to the hillside and determined what was waiting for her there. She let a final band of the dark little servants flicker by, then took a breath, shifted her grip on her staff, and headed in that direction.
*****
Aoth sat inside the wardrobe with Cera’s garments dangling all around him. He peered out the peephole he’d bored and reflected that he was like a lover in a bawdy tale hiding from the jealous husband or suspicious father.
He was trying to find the humor in his situation but was too impatient to feel truly amused. Come on, he thought, what are you waiting for?
He was impatient because he’d decided that whatever did or didn’t happen, he couldn’t continue the ruse beyond that night. It had seemed pretty clever when he’d first hit on it, but now that it was underway, he realized that he couldn’t allow a do-nothing like Hasos to have sole charge of the defense of the barony for very long, nor could he leave the Brotherhood without a single one of its senior officers in command. Any number of his men might decide that their obligations to their unlucky company had died with its leader and that they preferred to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
He reached out with his mind and made contact with Jet, who was skulking on the gabled roof of a building adjacent to the temple. He could tell immediately that the griffon hadn’t noticed anything suspicious.
He scowled in frustration. But at that moment, the door swung open and a figure in a hooded robe slipped into Cera’s bedchamber. Aoth wasn’t surprised that this time there was only one assassin. It should only take one to kill an invalid, and a single murderer could sneak into a sickroom more easily than a larger number, even with a kind of invisibility aiding the endeavor.
The black-scaled dragonborn took a wary look around. Then he strode to the bed and pulled back the blankets, revealing the motionless form beneath. Aoth held his breath. This was the moment when the scheme could all too easily fall apart.
Cera had used cosmetic and magical tricks to mask the appearance of death. It was Aoth’s good fortune that little Soolabax had no temple of Kelemvor and that in the absence of doomguides, other clerics had to learn how to prepare the dead for their funerals.
Still, despite the plotters’ best efforts, it was entirely possible the dragonborn would realize the man lying before him wasn’t Aoth. Or that he was no longer alive and therefore this must be some sort of trap.
But it didn’t happen that way. As soon as the dragonborn had the corpse uncovered to the waist, he whipped out a poniard, drove it into his victim’s heart, then turned and headed for the door. He was eager to finish his task and get well away before anyone discovered his handiwork.
Too late, thought Aoth. I’ve got you, you son of a whore.
He gave the assassin time to exit the temple. Then he ran through the building, startling yellow-clad sunlords who were astonished to see him up and around and fully armed. He plunged out into Cera’s garden. Aware of his need through their psychic link, Jet swooped down in front of him.
Aoth swung himself into the saddle. “The dragonborn didn’t spot you, did he?”
“He shouldn’t have,” said the familiar, “but I can’t be sure because I still haven’t seen him.”
“Go,” said Aoth. “Stay high and be quiet.”
Jet grunted. “I know how to hunt.” He loped forward, beat his wings, and carried Aoth aloft.
Once they were well above the rooftops, the griffon flew in a spiral search pattern. At first Aoth couldn’t see any sign of their quarry and feared that somehow the dragonborn had already gotten away. Then he spotted a robed figure hurrying down a narrow, crooked alley.
Got him, said Jet, speaking mind to mind. Now that his master’s fire-kissed eyes had spotted the assassin, he could see him as well. I wonder where he’ll lead us.
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