The Road to Death

55

Kandler stood and drew his blade as Ibrido leaped from the dragon’s claws and landed on the deck of the airship, the unconscious Esprë in his arms. Beside him, Sallah did the same, silvery flames crawling up and down the length of her sacred sword. Xalt drew a short knife from a sheath on his side, and the three stood ready to face the dragon together.

As Nithkorrh rested his weight on Phoenix, the entire ship dipped in the air, and Kandler lost his footing. Sallah and Xalt went down too.

“Here you are, half-breed,” the dragon rumbled as it flapped its wings to take the bulk of its mass off the sinking airship, which then stopped falling again. “Time to earn your keep. I do not intend to carry you and the elfling all the way to Argonnessen.”

The dragon-elf lay Esprë down on the deck, then drew his blade, a length of what looked like ivory fashioned into a long, curved blade, serrated along its cutting edge. He held it as if it weighed nothing in his hands, swinging it about in tight loops, weaving a deadly defense around him.

The dragon growled with delight, baring its many teeth. It crouched back on its massive haunches, clutching at the airship with its massive claws as its beating wings kept it partially in the air, ready to savor the upcoming battle. Kandler had no doubt it would make quick work of him if he somehow managed to defeat Ibrido. First, though, he had to keep the dragon-elf from killing him.

Kandler glanced up in the sky and had to stifle a smile. He snapped his eyes back down to Ibrido and stalked toward him, making sure he and the dragon kept their eyes focused on him. Sallah strode up on his left and Xalt on his right, each of them keeping pace with him, forming a line across the ship that Ibrido would not be able to dodge past.

The dragon-elf leaped forward, over Esprë’s sleeping body, and swung his sword down at Kandler. The justicar brought up his sword to parry the blow, catching Ibrido’s strange blade on the tip of his own. A strange clang sounded in Kandler’s ears, and when he brought his sword back he saw that Ibrido had notched it nearly in half at its tip.

“You face no sell-sword here,” the dragon-elf said. “No mindless skeleton, no careless vampire.”

Kandler glanced at his weapon again. “There’s more to your blade than to you,” he said, taunting Ibrido. “It’s easy to boast with a dragon at your back.”

“Nithkorrh is only here as an audience. I don’t need his help to deal with trash like you.”

“Well,” Kandler said, “here’s your chance to prove it.”

With that, Kandler, Sallah, and Xalt all turned and threw themselves against the railing that ran along the bow of the ship. Confused, Ibrido stood where he was for a moment, his sword held out before him.

“Cowards!” he shouted at them. “Face me, or I will kill you where you are!”

Kandler kept crouched against the railing and made sure that Sallah and Xalt were pressed in tight there too. He didn’t want anyone going over the edge again. “Hold on tight,” he whispered to them.

Ibrido turned to Nithkorrh for guidance. “What am I to do with such—” Right then, he spotted Keeper’s Claw soaring in behind the dragon. “Master!” he cried.

Startled, the dragon beat its wings harder and lifted a few feet off the deck of Phoenix. The claws that it had dug into the ship, though, didn’t come free so easily. As the dragon tried to free itself, Burch’s shockbolt slammed into it, right between the bases of its wings.

The explosion hurtled the dragon into the air. It knocked down Ibrido as it went cartwheeling over the bow, howling in pain and rage. It disappeared over Phoenix’s gunwale and went plummeting toward the mountains below, smoke trailing from its back.

A cheer went up from the bridge, and Kandler stood up to see Monja leaping up and down on the wheel. As he rose, he grabbed Xalt by the shoulder and said to him, “Protect Esprë. That’s your job. Leave Ibrido to Sallah and me.”

The warforged nodded and circumnavigated the dragon-elf to the right, hoping to work around him to reach the young elf. Ibrido scoffed and stepped to the left, leaving the way wide open.

“If you wish to care for her while I carve up your friends, please do,” the dragon-elf said. “With luck, I’ll finish them off before my master returns.”

Kandler ignored Ibrido and said to Sallah, “Get to the bridge and fly the ship.”

The lady knight froze. “Monja can handle it,” she said.

“We need Monja to check out Esprë,” he said. “We don’t know how badly she’s hurt.”

Sallah stared at Kandler for a moment, locking him in her beautiful green eyes. “All right,” she said. “Just don’t get yourself killed.”

Brandishing her blade before her, Sallah followed in Xalt’s path then sprinted by him toward the bridge. As she went, the warforged picked up Esprë and started to carry her aft.

“How foolish—I mean, ‘brave’—of you,” Ibrido said. “With three of you working together against me, you might have stood a chance. Sequentially, I shall dissect each of you with my blade and leave you for the carrion fowl to testify to my handiwork.”

“Shut up and fight,” Kandler said, readying his notched blade. He wanted to make this quick, to kill Ibrido before the dragon came back, while he still had a chance. Esprë came first, of course, but faced with the dragon-elf and his mysterious sword, he felt as alone as he ever had.

Ibrido stepped forward and slashed out at Kandler with his blade. The justicar sidestepped the blow and returned it with a quick stab to the dragon-elf’s ribs. The point of his sword skittered off Ibrido’s hide, slicing open the creature’s shirt but little else. He realized to hurt Ibrido he would have to land a much more solid blow.

The dragon-elf swung his sword back, and Kandler had to hurl himself to the side to avoid the blade. It slid off the edge of his sword, just missing slicing off a bit of his ear.

“First blood!” Ibrido said.

Kandler rolled back to his feet and saw that red fluid covered the tip of Ibrido’s bone-colored sword. He brought his hand to the side of his head, and it came away the same color. The dragon-elf’s blade was so sharp, his strike so fast, that the justicar had not even felt it.

Kandler wanted nothing more than to wipe the smug look from Ibrido’s face. Instead of pointing out, though, that his own touch would have brought blood on anyone not covered with scales, he gripped the hilt of his sword even tighter and launched his next attack.

The ferocity of Kandler’s assault drove the dragon-elf a few steps back. Try as he might, though, the justicar could not penetrate Ibrido’s defenses. Every time he tried a new angle, Ibrido’s blade leaped out to protect him, almost as if it had a mind of its own.

Eager to put an end to this fight, Kandler shifted to a two-handed grip on his sword’s hilt and brought it down in a sweeping overhand motion designed to smash the dragon-elf’s blade aside. A mighty clang sounded as the two blades met, and Kandler smiled as his sword met little resistance past that. As he pulled back from the fight, hoping to find that he’d sliced into Ibrido’s scaled flesh, he realized he held only half a blade in his hand. The upper portion had gone sailing off after smashing into Ibrido’s amazing sword.

The dragon-elf cackled with glee.

“My blade is superior to yours in every way,” he said. “It was a gift from the dragon kings, forged in furnaces stoked with their own fiery breath, from an ancient dragon’s own fang. No weapon can stand against it. No armor can hope to stop it.”

As Ibrido launched his own counterattack, Kandler raised what was left of his blade and swore.

“Is she all right?” Sallah asked, glancing down to where Monja and Xalt huddled over Esprë’s body. Duro gave her a thumbs-up sign and then went back to peering over the aft railing, looking for any signs of the dragon’s return.

“She’s still breathing,” Monja said, “but just barely.”

Xalt cradled the young elf in his arms as the halfling shaman began to pray, a warm, golden glow washing over her arms.

As a member of the Church of the Silver Flame, Sallah believed that there was only one true god, the Silver Flame itself. All others were mere pretenders, unwitting reflections of the Flame viewed through a cracked prism. Watching the shaman work her prayers to the Sovereign Host, though, she felt a moment of doubt. Monja connected to her gods so effortlessly that it seemed churlish to think that her relationship with them was somehow less than that of Sallah or the elders in her church.

Now was not the time to worry about such things though, Sallah told herself. Her main concern was keeping the ship away from Nithkorrh. An enraged roar from somewhere below told her that Burch’s shockbolt hadn’t put the great beast down for good. Since she couldn’t see the creature from that angle, she figured the best thing she could do was push the airship to its top speed and hope the dragon would never catch up.

The elemental in the ship didn’t like the idea much though. It fought against Sallah’s control, perhaps sensing that the dragon in pursuit could damage the ship enough to finally free it.

Sallah shoved the elemental along as hard as she could. She sensed that if she relinquished the wheel it would go back to slacking, but for the moment it obeyed her as well as she could hope.

She peered down the deck and saw Kandler facing off against Ibrido. Over their short time together, she’d come to respect the justicar as a top swordsman. When she’d first met him working as the justicar for Mardakine, that tiny little town in a crater on the edge of nowhere, she’d thought he’d just been the only man in town crazy enough to take on the job.

Kandler carried his skill with a blade so quietly that few would ever guess its extent. He never went for flashy or showy moves, preferring to get the job done with as few strokes of his sword as possible. “The longer the fight, the more chances for something to go wrong,” he’d once told her.

Ibrido, though, seemed to be pushing the justicar to his limits. At first, Sallah couldn’t understand it. The only reason she’d agreed to leave Kandler with the dragon-elf was that she figured he’d make quick work of the dragon’s minion. As the fight wore on, though, she knew something was wrong, and she began to regret her choice.

“No!” she said when she saw Kandler’s blade part on Ibrido’s. It looked like the dragon-elf’s blade had cut right through the justicar’s, leaving him armed with only its remnant.

Sallah looked down and saw Xalt helping Esprë to her feet. Monja’s prayers had been answered, and the young elf looked fit if yet a little dazed.

“Take the wheel,” Sallah said, not caring if Monja or Esprë complied with the order, as long as someone did. She drew her blade and leaped off the bridge, shouting, “I have to go save your father!”