The Queen of Death

52

Sallah stood over the dragon queen s crimson tail, her sword held high in both hands. She’d reversed her grip on the hilt and pointed the tip straight down so that she could stab into the dragon’s flesh with every ounce of her weight.

She glanced at Xalt, who’d suggested this mad plan. At first she’d thought him insane. Attacking a dragon as large and powerful as the queen was tantamount to begging to be murdered.

“No one lives forever,” the warforged had said in his sanguine way.

She’d had to kiss him on the cheek for that. He’d stared at her in stunned silence afterward, and although she could not read his stolid face, she’d decided to interpret his bare expression as a smile.

Now, though, the plan—if it could be called that—seemed madder than ever. The Church of the Silver Flame had sent her on a mission to recover a young elf from the edges of the Mournland, not battle dragons in far-off lands where the light of the flame had yet to reach.

She’d lost her friends and her father in the course of following their quest, though, and to back away from that now, to admit defeat, would only dishonor their memories. If she were to fail, she knew that she could do no less than die in the process, just as they had.

Sallah could barely believe that she and Xalt had been able to sneak over here behind the dragon queen. She suspected that the crimson creature knew that they were there but had long since decided that they were insignificant enough to ignore. If so, she would soon regret that choice.

The knight glanced back over her shoulder and saw Te’oma come sliding down the rope ladder leading down from the Phoenix, more falling than climbing. She wondered what could have happened to cause the changeling to leave the airship so quickly, but she didn’t have time to ponder it. She had to strike now, before the red dragon noticed Te’oma approaching.

Sallah’ gritted her teeth tight and brought her blade down as hard as she could. The tip of the sword glanced off of the dragon’s blood-red scales, and stabbed into the stone floor, jarring the knight’s arms.

The dragon froze at the strange sensation and sound near her tail.

“Do it again,” Xalt whispered. “Now!”

Without another thought, Sallah reversed her grip on her blade, and it burst into silvery flames along its length. With a desperate prayer to the Silver Flame, she slammed the blade down once more, this time hammering the dragon’s tail with the edge of her sword rather than its point.

The blazing blade sliced through the red scales and kept going through the far softer flesh beneath—until it cut into the bone under that. Sallah yanked on the sword, hoping to get in one more blow before the dragon could turn on her, but the force of her strike had embedded the blade in the bone. Straining with all her might, she still could not draw it forth.

Xalt grabbed the lady knight by the collar of her armor and hauled her away. Her fingers—still a bit numb from her first, failed attack—slipped from her weapon’s hilt.

Before Sallah could protest, the dragon’s tail rose up and sliced through the air. The bottom of it just nicked the knight’s shoulder. Without the warforged’s support, the impact would have sent her sprawling. Instead, the spaulder covering her right shoulder tore away from the rest of her armor and went spinning off to clatter against the far wall.

Sallah gritted her teeth and suppressed a scream as Xalt hauled her toward the gigantic crystal at which they’d found Greffykor working when they’d first entered the observatory. “We may find shelter there,” the warforged said.

The knight could barely hope for that to be so, but true to her training she murmured a prayer to the Silver Flame to deliver herself and her fellows from the evil that the dragon queen represented. She knew that if she fell, her mission—given to her by the Speaker of the Flame herself—would fail. No one would take up where she left off and bring Esprë to Flamekeep.

As long as the Flame burns, there is hope, Sallah recited in her head. Her father had spoken these words to her countless times. She still remembered the first time she heard them clearly, though, and understood what they meant.

Her family had followed Deothen, her father, on yet another one of his seemingly endless series of quests. She had only been six years old at the time, and her mother had been younger than Sallah was now. They’d had the same mane of long, red hair, and Sallah remembered being so proud when people would remark how much alike they looked. She’d thought of her mother as the most beautiful woman in the world, and being linked to that made her smile.

On their way from Flamekeep to Arthawn Keep—a Thranite holding on the border with both Breland and Cyre—they’d fallen prey to an ambush at the hands of the Azure Bandits. The Cyran government had given this notorious group of killers a letter of marques, absolving them from responsibility for any crimes they might commit—as long as they were committed against Cyre’s foes in the Last War.

The bandits’ strike against the Thranite caravan had been doomed from the start, although they couldn’t have known it at the time. As leader of the caravan, Deothen had ordered the wagons and their accompanying cavalry to be disguised as an apolitical wagon train of merchants traveling through Thrane.

He had, of course, been hoping the Azure Bandits would attack. When they took the bait, Deothen led the charge against the bandits. He and the other knights stripped off their disguises and rushed into action, their polished armor and shining blades glinting in the sun.

Sallah remembered thinking that she wanted nothing more at that moment than to be a knight, to follow in her father’s footsteps. The battle lasted mere minutes. In the end, the Knights of the Silver Flame crushed their foes.

Sallah’s mother lay dead.

An errant arrow had skittered past the knights and entered the woman’s unarmored chest as she’d wrapped her arms around Sallah to protect her with her own body. Had she not done so, the arrow might have taken Sallah’s life instead. Many times in the following years, she would wish that it had.

Right then, though, she had no other thoughts than to mourn her mother, to hold her red-haired head in her tiny lap as the woman coughed her life’s blood up from her lungs.

As long as the Flame burns, there is hope. Deothen had said these words to Sallah as he pulled her from her mother’s corpse, and he’d repeated them to her time and again since. She was sure those would have been his dying words to her if she’d been able to hear them instead of fighting for her own life in Construct.

These words had echoed in her head as she’d considered parting ways with Kandler and Esprë and heading back to Thrane. Frustrated as she’d been, she’d threatened to leave, but Kandler had called her bluff—even when she hadn’t known it was a bluff herself.

The man amazed her. He understood her so well, and they’d only known each other for such a short time. It almost seemed as if fate—or the Flame—had pushed them together.

That wasn’t the reason she’d changed her mind and decided to come with them to Argonnessen. Her love for the justicar might be growing by the day, but to Sallah, her duty to the Flame would always come first.

As long as Esprë still lived, there would be hope that she would accompany Sallah back to Thrane. The knight clung to that notion with every bit of her faith. It had brought her here to this observatory, and it had forced her forth to take a stab at a dragon’s tail.

Now, it seemed, it might put out the light that burned within her own soul.

As Xalt dragged Sallah toward the gigantic crystal, she felt the floor behind them shake. The impact of something the size of a small mountain behind her nearly knocked the knight from her feet. She stumbled forward, reaching out for the crystal, wishing she still had her sword in her hand, knowing it would do her no good.

A claw as wide as Sallah was tall slashed across her back, laying open her armor and slicing into the flesh beneath.

The blow slammed her forward, and she slid under the transparent base that held the massive crystal in its place. She scrambled forward on her hands and knees, praying that the dragon would not hit her again.

Sallah didn’t think she could take another blow like the last. It would kill her for sure. A part of her prayed for that to happen, to put an end to her struggles, which seemed to have gone on for so long. To fall in battle in the service of the Silver Flame would ensure that her own light would join with it in the afterlife.

The Flame still burned.

Sallah stopped scrambling when she ran into the observatory’s outer wall, against which the towering crystal sat. As she considered her next move, Xalt pulled her to her feet and turned her around.

Looking through the crystal, she could see something that had to be the dragon queen. It seemed far tinier than could be possible, though, and it took her a moment to realize that the shape of the crystal distorted the creature’s size.

The dragon leaned forward and snarled, almost putting the end of her snout against the crystal. Her image swelled until its bloated face filled the entire crystal, and Sallah’s breath caught in her chest as she waited for the monstrosity to swallow her alive.

But the crystal still stood between her and the dragon. The spaces around the crystal were too small for the dragon to fit through, she could tell. When she noticed this, she started to laugh.

The laughter arose not from humor but relief, but the dragon didn’t take it that way. The creature sat back on her haunches—shrinking again as she did—and bellowed at the lady knight and her warforged companion.

“Perhaps angering it wasn’t such a good idea,” Xalt said.

“She would have killed Kandler,” she said. “It’s too late for recriminations.”

“Or, perhaps, for anything else.”

Sallah had never heard such terror in the unflappable warforged’s voice before. She looked up at the crystal and saw the dragon’s head seem to explode inside it as the creature thrust her snout forward.

Then fire seemed to engulf the entire world.

Sallah screamed, and the effort burned her lungs.