*****
Gaedynn considered himself proficient at evading pursuit. But in the past, his goal had generally been to leave the enemy far behind as expeditiously as possible. It was trickier when he needed to stay just a little way ahead so they wouldn’t get discouraged, give up, and go back to their captive dragon. Trickier too, when he was fleeing with a living beacon to draw his pursuers on.
Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary to have the fire spirit constantly burning at his side. He could make her disappear when his foes drew as near as they were now. He held out his hand.
The elemental’s features were a vague, inconstant blur, but he thought he saw her pout. Then she thinned to a long sliver of flame, which leaped into his palm and vanished. The contact stung for an instant-further evidence, perhaps, that she didn’t want to go.
He slipped between two stands of brush, on a course at right angles to the one he’d been following before. He climbed a steep hillside, then looked around.
Dark figures stood clustered together not far from the point where he’d started his ascent. As usual he couldn’t really hear shadar-kai voices, but he suspected they were trying to figure out what direction he’d taken. The elemental’s abrupt disappearance had confused them.
Well, Gaedynn thought, maybe I can help them out with that. He nocked an arrow, drew it to his ear, and let it fly. One of the shadar-kai reeled and fell.
Without even pausing to check on him, the others swarmed up the slope. Gaedynn turned and scurried into a tangle of gnarled, scabrous-looking oaks.
Something whispered from behind one of the trees. A slim, shadowy hand beckoned. It filled him with a yearning so keen that when he strode on anyway, it was like tearing free of a barbed hook. His would-be seducer giggled after him.
He didn’t think the haunt was an ally of the shadar-kai. It was just one of the many small perils infesting the Shadowfell. In fact, for an instant as he peered around, he wondered if he was leaving the chase too far behind. Then a pair of gray-black figures skulked out of the gloom.
Naked, genderless, and hairless, virtually identical, at first glance they looked less like creatures of flesh and blood than living sculptures-and unfinished ones at that. They had empty pits for eyes and a vertical groove to suggest both a nose and a mouth. Otherwise their heads were featureless bulbs.
Gaedynn had seen such things in the company of the shadar-kai. But he had no idea exactly what they were or how they went about attacking a foe, and he hoped to avoid finding out. He snatched out an arrow and drove it into the nearest creature’s chest.
The dark thing frayed apart to nothing. Maybe it was its nature to dissolve when it died, or perhaps the black arrows carried an enchantment that made them particularly deadly to such beings. Pleasantly surprised that the kill had been so easy, Gaedynn pivoted toward his remaining foe.
It was gone. And when it suddenly rematerialized, it was standing right in front of him. Its empty sockets stared into his eyes.
Pain ripped through Gaedynn’s skull. His guts churned. His legs buckled and dumped him to his knees. The faceless creature grabbed his bow, jerked it out of his hand, and tossed it aside.
Hard as it was to think with his head throbbing, Gaedynn realized it was his enemy’s gaze that was hurting him. He tried to avert his eyes. The creature caught his chin in cold, leathery fingers and held his head in place. He struggled to grip its forearm and break its hold, but could only paw and fumble feebly.
He held out his hand and the fire spirit leaped into existence. The dark thing automatically turned its head to track the apparition.
Gaedynn still felt weak and sick, but not quite so much as before. He yanked an arrow from his quiver and stabbed it into his enemy’s stomach like a dagger.
The creature didn’t fall down or break apart, but its grip on Gaedynn’s chin loosened. He knocked its hand away and scrambled to his feet. The ground tilted beneath him, but then he caught his balance.
The dark thing’s head turned back in his direction. Making sure not to meet its gaze, he pulled out another arrow and thrust, aiming for the spot where a human would carry his heart.
Made of a substance that resembled polished obsidian, the black point punched into his adversary’s chest. The creature stumbled backward, but he had the feeling it still wasn’t ready to drop. He drew his scimitar and slashed three times. That made it fall down and start unraveling too.
He just had time to grin. Then a cold hand grabbed him by the wrist of his sword arm and jerked him around.
He could tell from the arrow still sticking out of its chest that it was the first faceless creature, not slain after all. Even though strips of its body had dissolved all the way through from front to back and it was impossible to understand how the remaining pieces maintained their proper positions with nothing but empty air between them. Its eyeless gaze reached out for his own and, startled as he was, he waited an instant too long to start resisting.
He felt compulsion take hold of him. He was going to look, and the fire sprite, now simply standing and watching the struggle from several paces away, wouldn’t save him a second time.
He shifted the scimitar to his off hand and cut at the dark creature’s head. At the same instant, its power blazed into his eyes, and the world exploded into agony.
When the pain ebbed, he was sprawled on his belly. He looked around. The faceless thing was gone again. For good this time, he hoped.
Suddenly the nausea he was suffering became irresistible, and he retched up the contents of his stomach. It left a foul taste and burning sensation in his mouth and nose, but even so he felt better afterward.
Not well, though. He supposed it would take time for the faceless things’ poisonous influence to work its way out of his system completely.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t wait. Sick or hale, he had to move or more of his pursuers would catch up with him. He sheathed the scimitar, retrieved his bow, and loped onward. The living flame fell into step beside him.
*****
Though it was difficult to be certain from high above, Aoth thought that he and Jet were looking down at an apartment house. The assassin slipped through the easternmost in a row of doors.
Aoth decided to descend. Sensing his intent, Jet furled his wings, swooped, and set down lightly in the empty, darkened street, far enough away from the apartment in question that no one looking out a window was likely to see them.
Although Aoth doubted anybody was. The shutters were closed, and no light gleamed through the cracks.
“What now?” asked Jet.
Aoth swung himself off the griffon’s back. “I go in after him.” He considered taking his shield, then left it clipped to the saddle. He’d rather have both hands available to grip his spear.
“Is that wise?” asked Jet. “You could watch the place from here while I go for reinforcements.”
“When someone breaks in in force, the enemy will know it. It will give them another chance to destroy their papers and such. If I sneak in alone, it increases the odds of finally getting some answers.”
“It increases the odds of somebody tearing your head off too.”
“We killed a number of dragonborn that night in the garden. There can’t be an unlimited supply hiding here in Soolabax with nobody noticing. Even if one of them spots me, I expect I can contend with however many are left until you get back with those reinforcements you mentioned.”
“All right. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” The familiar trotted, lashed his wings, and soared up toward the stars.
Aoth invoked the magic of one of his tattoos, and for a moment the design felt cold as ice on his chest. The charm didn’t grant actual invisibility, but it made the bearer easy to overlook.
Then he skulked up to the door the dragonborn had entered. He couldn’t hear anything on the other side. He tried the handle. As he’d expected, it was locked.
He slipped the point of his spear into the crack beneath the latch and released a bit of power
from the weapon. The door made a sharp snapping sound and lurched open.
He peered into an unfurnished hallway with doorways opening off it and stairs leading upward. He neither saw nor heard anything moving, which suggested that no one had caught the noise of his forced entry.
Aoth prowled onward. None of the rooms on the ground floor was furnished or showed any signs of recent occupancy. It made him wonder if he and Jet actually had killed all the dragonborn but one.
In a small room at the back, his fire-kissed eyes saw the square outline of a low concealed panel that evidently connected the apartment with another. He reached for it, and then it started to slide. Somebody was opening it from the other side.
He turned and scrambled through the doorway to an adjacent room. Then he peeked around the corner.
Stooping, a man with bushy salt-and-pepper side-whiskers, eyebrows to match, and a mole at the corner of his narrow mouth came through the low opening, then closed the panel behind him. He wore a slashed velvet doublet with turned cuffs, like a prosperous merchant, and Aoth realized they’d actually been introduced at some point. Although he couldn’t recall the fellow’s name.
Whoever the whoreson was, he walked on without noticing anything amiss. Aoth considered jumping him, then opted to follow instead.
The man headed down the cellar stairs. Aoth gave him time to reach the bottom, then crept down just far enough to see what lay below.
Someone had done a fair amount of work to turn the basement into a proper shrine to Tiamat, the five-headed Dragon Queen. Votive candles burned before a bronze statue of the goddess. One flame glowed red, one white, one blue, one green, and one was a quivering teardrop of shadow. The sculpture’s necks almost appeared to weave in the soft, wavering light.
A portrait depicting the Nemesis of the Gods in her human guise as a beautiful woman with long black hair hung on the wall beside an intricately painted, multicolored pentagram. The smell of bitter incense hung in the air.
Dark scales glinting in the candlelight, the dragonborn assassin stood naked before the pentagonal bloodstone altar. His robe lay discarded on the floor.
He glared at the man with the side-whiskers. “I don’t like mortals in general,” he said. “I definitely don’t like it when they keep me waiting.”
Aoth frowned. Mortals? What in Kossuth’s name was that supposed to mean?
“I have an ordinary life,” the man replied. “I have to devote some time to living it. Otherwise people will get suspicious.”
“Just restore me to myself.”
“I’m working on it.” He took down a robe from a peg on the wall and pulled it on over his other clothing. Its shimmering scales changed color whenever he moved. He slipped on five rings, each bearing a stone the hue of one of the candle flames, and picked up an implement or weapon like a miner’s pick.
Evidently he himself was the wyrmkeeper of this particular sanctuary.
He faced the dragonborn. “Stand still.” He recited sibilant words of power and swung the heavy, unwieldy-looking pick through a looping figure with a dexterity that would have done credit to a juggler. The five wedge-shaped heads of the Tiamat statue seemed to cock forward ever so slightly, although that was likely just Aoth’s imagination.
And the assassin changed form.
His features remained reptilian, but twisted from a dragonborn’s rather handsome lineaments into ugliness. Batlike wings sprouted from his back, and a long tail with a spike on the end writhed out from the base of his spine. He-or it-dropped into a crouch.
Aoth wasn’t a scholar of demons. But he’d met a fair assortment on the battlefield, and knew an abishai when he saw one. And it made sense that with the aid of magic, one of the devil-like spirits could assume the form of a dragonborn. Both races were kin to wyrms and thus to each other, whatever the Tymantherans might care to believe.
In fact, a lot of things suddenly made sense. Like why the dragonborn murderers, raiders, and pirates had no clan piercings and why knowledgeable Tymantherans like Perra were unable to account for them. Why they possessed supernatural abilities ordinary dragonborn didn’t, and how they could lurk unnoticed in the heart of a city between atrocities. In point of fact, they didn’t. They went home to Tiamat’s domain in the astral world called Banehold until a human spellcaster saw fit to call them forth again.
Aoth felt a swell of elation. This truly had been a puzzle worth solving. When he reported what he’d discovered, it would save the alliance between Chessenta and Tymanther.
Its metamorphosis complete, the black abishai said, “Good. Now send me-” It whipped around toward the stairs.
Aoth realized it had glimpsed him from the corner of its eye. His veil had sufficed to fool it while it wore its dragonborn shape, but not now when its senses were evidently somewhat different.
The abishai charged up the risers. Sweating drops of fuming acid, its tail reared over its shoulder to strike like a scorpion’s stinger.
Aoth hurled darts of green light from his spear. The devil-kin twisted aside, and they missed. It resumed its climb. He charged the head of his weapon with destructive power and thrust it at the creature’s chest.
The abishai dodged that attack as well. Its tail whipped at Aoth’s shoulder. The bony point clanked against his mail and rebounded, although just the track of vapor it left in the air was enough to sting his eyes and make them water.
Meanwhile, the wyrmkeeper chanted.
Aoth feinted to the abishai’s foot. It leaped upward, beating its leathery wings as well as it could in the cramped space of the stairway, to rise above the attack. He whirled his spear-another maneuver that wasn’t easy in the confines-and smashed the butt into his opponent’s fanged, snarling mouth and snout.
The blow knocked the abishai back down the steps. He hurled more darts of light and, deprived of its balance, the creature couldn’t dodge. The missiles plunged into its body. It jerked and then lay still.
Aoth immediately looked for the wyrmkeeper. Whatever magic the bastard was attempting, he needed to put a stop to it.
But it was too late. The man with the pick had finished his incantation, and the pentagram, and the section of wall on which he’d painted it, had disappeared. In their place, a hole opened on a bleak, rocky landscape and a red sky mountainous with black thunderheads. Abishais were swarming through.
*****
Jhesrhi studied the hillside with all its new pits and ditches to show where the underlying tunnels had collapsed. The dragon lay motionless, his head between his forefeet like a dog’s, as though merely looking around at all the commotion had exhausted him.
As far as she could tell, nothing else was moving either. That didn’t mean there wasn’t someone lying in wait-if there was one thing for which the denizens of the Shadowfell had a natural gift, it was sneaking and hiding-but if there was, she’d just have to wait for him to reveal himself and kill him when he did.
She strode out into the open. Drew breath to hail Tchazzar. Then a patch of earth heaved as something started to force its way out from underneath.
All right, she thought, let’s get this over with. She lifted her staff and felt its pleasure that she finally meant to use it in the manner it preferred.
Huge hands, their skin the same color as the surrounding dirt, gripped the edge of the new hole and heaved. A head with brutish features and curved taurine horns surged into view. Beneath it were massive shoulders armored in bands of sculpted stone.
Jhesrhi started backing away. She tried to stop.
I’m not a coward, she told herself. It unsettled me to return to Chessenta, and then to Threskel, but I got better. Gaedynn said I was better.
But evidently she wasn’t, because she couldn’t stop retreating. She couldn’t stop shaking or gasping either. Although she knew it couldn’t really be there, she seemed to feel her stiff, scratchy, filthy slave collar half choking her neck.
The elemental mage-a ken-kuni, one of the giants with an affinity for earth-sneered, drew
himself to his feet, and lumbered toward her.
*****
Abishais of various colors rushed the stairs. Aoth knew that like the dragons they resembled, each was largely immune to the force that infused its nature. The reds couldn’t burn, the whites couldn’t freeze, and so forth. So he hurled a rainbow of destructive power down the steps in the hope that multiple varied attacks would kill them all.
The barrage blasted them back and smashed the wooden risers beneath them. Some then lay motionless, charred and shriveled or transformed into stone. Another, plunged into dementia, looked around in confusion.
But others picked themselves up and snarled at the man who’d hammered them. And more of the vile things were still coming through the hole.
Maybe if Aoth killed the man who’d opened it, the gate would close. He pointed his spear, rattled off words of power, and hurled a jagged bolt of shadow. Like the abishais, the wyrmkeeper might be impervious to an attack resembling one or even all of his goddess’s breaths. But Aoth hoped the pure essence of death would knife through any defenses.
The magic pierced the wyrmkeeper’s torso. He dropped his pick and fell, patches of his flesh dissolving into slime before he even hit the floor.
But the hole didn’t close. And hands locked around Aoth’s ankles. While he’d focused his attention on the priest, one of the abishais had jumped up through the splintered wreckage of the stairs and grabbed him.
The devil-kin’s weight nearly dragged him over the edge. Its green stinger stabbed repeatedly against his reinforced boot, and the haze that surrounded the creature seared his mouth and nose and made him cough. The section of staircase beneath him, hanging with little or no support from below, swayed like it was about to give way.
He struggled not to cough. To articulate instead a word that swelled into an unearthly howl. The green abishai lost its hold and fell away. Three of its fellows dropped dead too.
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