The Spectral Blaze

FOURTEEN

7 E LEINT, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE

If Jhesrhi survived the night, she’d choose a new griffon and teach it to know and obey her. For the time being, though, she’d coaxed a wind into the form of a giant eagle to bear her aloft.

That was where she needed to be, along with every other member of the Brotherhood who could get into the air. If Lady Luck smiled, their earthbound comrades could fend off Tchazzar’s human servants, but it would take flying cavalry to contend with dragons on the wing.

Having sharpened her eyes with a charm that enabled them to pierce the darkness, she looked around and found Aoth and Gaedynn soaring on their own steeds. For a moment at least, that sight lifted her heart.

Then the dragons hurtled into view.

Being wyrms, they unquestionably perceived the foes gliding and wheeling in front of them. But if Oraxes’s enchantments were working as promised, the dragons didn’t see as many griffon riders as were actually there. They registered only a handful and were experiencing a subtle psychic pressure to disregard those and look elsewhere for a more significant threat.

The illusion would hold for only a breath or two. But that was time enough for a first barrage of arrows and spells. Hurtling forward on Jet, his blue eyes glowing in the gloom, Aoth hurled a dazzling thunderbolt from his spear. Gaedynn nocked and loosed shafts fast as the eye could follow. Jhesrhi brandished her staff, and fire leaped from the top to lash a sapphire dragon across the eye. The creature screamed and she and her weapon laughed together.

Even though fire magic was likely to prove useless against him, she’d wanted to engage Tchazzar. She felt he was her responsibility. But it had been impossible to predict exactly where he’d appear, and chance had put them on opposite sides of the fight for the moment.

Her eagle plunged past the sapphire wyrm’s head and along its neck, and she seared it with another burst of flame. It swatted at her with an enormous wing, but her mount swooped safely under the stroke and, with a sweep of its own pinions, bobbed up again.

Elsewhere, her comrades were likewise streaking by dragons before the creatures could turn and retaliate. The defense worked because the colossal reptiles weren’t as nimble in flight as a griffon or a spirit of the wind.

From then on, the fight would be tougher. But as the eagle wheeled, Jhesrhi insisted to herself that it wouldn’t be any worse than the worst of Thay. Then her steed vanished beneath her, and she plummeted toward the rooftops below.

She tried to speak a word to slow her fall, and darts of amber light stabbed into her body. The jolt of pain made her botch the spell.

But fortunately the entity that had been the eagle shook off its own distress. Although it didn’t resume the form she’d given it, it managed a screaming invisible updraft that arrested her fall just short of someone’s chimney.

Bobbing like a cork in a brook, she looked around for her attacker or, as it turned out, attackers. A skinny, wrinkled, bent old woman and a bearded young man with a wart at the corner of his eye were perched on a rooftop a stone’s throw away. Jhesrhi winced because she recognized them both. She’d met them the night Aoth had convened a meeting of Luthcheq’s mages and on several occasions since.

“You’re fighting on the wrong side!” Jhesrhi called, voice grating with the lingering ache in her chest.

“No,” the elderly sorceress quavered. “Tchazzar set us free, and you’re betraying him.”

“It isn’t like that,” Jhesrhi said. “But if you won’t fight on the right side, just go away. Don’t make me hurt you.”

Instead of answering, the old woman gripped her staff with both hands and raised it over her head. Tears of blood slid from her eyes, and suddenly it made Jhesrhi feel dizzy and sick to her stomach to look at her. Meanwhile, the male wizard held a doll of jointed wood up to his face and whispered in its painted ear. Ghostly imps like deformed fetuses flitted and flickered around him, half-visible one instant, gone the next.

Jhesrhi could tell both her foes were casting lethal magic. And they’d started first. But neither of them was a battle wizard. Pointing her staff, she rattled off words of power, twice as fast as their author had intended but still with the proper rhythm and intonation, and she was the one who finished first. The resulting blast of fire tore her foes apart, along with much of the roof beneath them.

She sighed and, tainting her own true emotions, the staff’s excitement only made her sorrow worse. But she thrust regret aside and, whispering rhymes in one of the languages of Sky Home, set about helping her mount return to avian form.

Pain ripped through Gaedynn’s head, and parts of his visual field shattered into a distorted patchwork like stones in a mosaic. He cried out, then, focusing his will despite the pounding anguish, he pushed the psychic intrusion out of his skull as Aoth and Jhesrhi had taught him. The headache subsided, and his sight returned to normal.

“My turn,” he gritted to the sapphire dragon sweeping along beneath him and Eider. He had little doubt that it was the foe who’d attacked him. Together with a number of other griffon riders, he’d been doing his best to bring it down, and by all accounts, gem wyrms possessed exotic psychic abilities.

He loosed an arrow, and it plunged deep into the muscle at the base of the dragon’s right wing. The creature convulsed and, with its wings no longer outstretched to catch the air, plummeted.

Gaedynn grinned as it smashed down on top of a house and plunged on through the roof. But satisfaction turned to disgust when it emerged from the newly ruined structure by shoving through a wall.

The fall had plainly hurt it. Its left wing was torn and crumpled, and one bull-like, forward-curving horn had broken off short. But it still looked able and willing to fight.

Indeed, it had even found itself some allies. Gaedynn had been too busy shooting and dodging dragons to register much of what was happening on the ground. But he saw that by wretched luck, the creature had fallen right in front of a company of Tchazzar’s soldiers circling to threaten the Brotherhood and its allies on their right flank. Like sensible folk, the common warriors balked at the violent and unexpected advent of such a huge, fearsome creature. But they had a couple of wyrmkeepers with them, and the priests hurried forward to palaver with the dragon. No doubt, since it could no longer fly, they were urging it to join the fight on the ground.

If it did, the results could be devastating. Seeking a way for his earthbound comrades to withstand such an attack, Gaedynn looked around and found the genasi, fairly close at hand but standing idle. Despite Tchazzar’s threats, no one had attacked them yet, so they hadn’t abandoned hope of avoiding battle.

Guiding Eider with his knees, Gaedynn sent her streaking over his embattled allies, then plunged her down behind some of Brotherhood’s own archers. Startled, the nearest bowmen recoiled. Then three sellswords started jabbering at him at once.

Ignoring them, he cast around and found Son-liin. “Come here!” he called, shouting to make himself heard above the roaring, pounding clamor of battle. “Mount up behind me!” She scurried to obey. “Where are the mages?”

The stormsoul pointed. “That way.”

Gaedynn sent Eider bounding in that direction, and mercenaries scrambled out of the way. The young wizards gaped at him.

“Before,” Gaedynn said, “you made the riders in the air seem fewer than we were. Now Son-liin and I have to seem like more than we are.”

Oraxes frowned. “Well, if I-”

“Don’t explain it!” Gaedynn snapped. “Do it! Now!” Sweeping his left hand in a serpentine fashion, Oraxes murmured too softly for Gaedynn to make out the words. But perhaps Meralaine could, somehow, because she joined in at the end.

As soon as they finished, Gaedynn sent Eider leaping back into the air. “Now,” he said to the girl mounted behind him, “I need you to be the genasi-est genasi anybody ever saw, with sparks flying everywhere. The foe has to see what you are despite the dark.”

“All right,” she said. “But what are we doing?”

“Killing a dragon,” he said. “Well, just hurting it, probably. But do your best.”

He wheeled Eider over the Akanulan formation. A few of the genasi sensed them passing and looked up.

Then Eider was streaking across the stretch of ground that separated the genasi from the sapphire dragon and Tchazzar’s men. Trusting his safety straps to keep him in the saddle, Gaedynn leaned far to the left. It made archery more difficult, but it was necessary to give the enemy a good look at Son-liin and open up a line for her to shoot.

The foes ahead looked as if they were just about ready to resume their advance with the sapphire wyrm in the forefront. In a just world, that would mean they’d miss Eider hurtling out of the dark on their own flank.

But they didn’t, or at least not all of them did. The dragon’s head whipped around, then cocked back.

Gaedynn nudged Eider with his elbow, then realized he hadn’t needed to. Over the course of the past several tendays, the griffon had learned what a dragon looked like when it was about to spew its breath weapon, and she was already dodging. Dangling sideways as he was, the sudden motion whipped Gaedynn’s body, but the punishment was preferable to getting hit. And although he heard a shrill whine, nothing touched him.

He loosed arrows. One glanced off but the rest pierced the dragon’s neck and chest. Behind him, the discharge from Son-liin’s body popped and crackled. Eider’s muscles twitched when it stung her. The shafts the former firestormer shot flickered with lightning.

The sapphire dragon opened its jaws to spew another attack, and one such arrow streaked all the way to the back of its throat. The resulting flash made the creature flail its head and pound its tail on the ground in pain. The jolts sent its human allies staggering.

Gaedynn judged that that attack had likely accomplished their purpose if anything could. Besides, some of Tchazzar’s soldiers were raising their crossbows. He turned Eider and the griffon carried him and Son-liin back the way they’d come.

He glanced around and grinned to see the enraged dragon bound after them because that meant it was also charging the ranks of genasi. After a moment’s hesitation, its allies did the same.

Ripples of motion ran through the Akanulans’ formation as they hastily prepared to defend. Flame and lightning flickered. Windsouls rose into the air.

“Welcome to the party,” Gaedynn said.

Medrash stared in amazement. Maybe that was ironic, considering that it was his premonition that had persuaded him and his companions to make the final leg of their journey as fast as sorcery would allow. But his worries and imaginings had fallen short of the reality.

Though distance and darkness obscured some of the details, he could tell humans, genasi, and wyrms were fighting in and above the western portion of the city up ahead, in a battle at least as big and chaotic as any the dragonborn had fought against the giants. Shouts, screams, roars, and crashes blended into one huge, throbbing drone. Buildings burned and columns of gray smoke striped the sky. Wyrms wheeled over the rooftops, the glow of their breath weapons and the blasts of magic that came in response momentarily revealing the griffon riders who whirled around them like gnats.

“What is it?” asked Biri, perched behind him.

The question nudged him out of his astonishment, and he tried to order his thoughts. “War,” he said. “Though who exactly is fighting whom, I can’t yet tell.”

“So what do we do?” Praxasalandos asked.

“I came to free Tchazzar from the madness of the Great Game,” Medrash said. “That’s still worth doing, no matter what else is going on.”

“Then I’ll find him for you,” the quicksilver dragon said. Wings beating, he hurtled forward, and Khouryn and Balasar’s bats kept pace. Balasar shot his clan brother and the white-scaled wizard a grin.

As they reached the outskirts of the city and the fringe of the struggle, a dragon hurtled from the right. Medrash thought it was a black, although in the darkness he wasn’t sure. He shifted his lance and shield and prepared to channel Torm’s power. Biri took a deep breath and let it out again, centering herself to wield her own kind of magic.

But the dragon swooped right past Praxasalandos and Khouryn and Balasar as well. Either it had mistaken the quicksilver wyrm for one of its allies or, in the midst of the darting, wheeling struggle in the sky, hadn’t noticed him at all. The griffon riders it was actually diving at scattered before it.

“If we hit it while its back is turned-” said Prax.

“No,” Medrash answered. “Stick to the plan.”

They did and somehow avoided the hostile attentions of any other dragons or any of the archers and spellcasters on the ground. Then Khouryn made Iron dive. Medrash could only assume that, with his superior night vision, the dwarf had spotted something he thought needed his immediate attention.

Then fire exploded across the sky.

It was Tchazzar’s breath, and Aoth Fezim and his black griffon swooped beneath the flare. But instead of dying away for want of fuel, the streak of flame floated in the air, drew in on itself, and took on the shape of a dragon. The bright horror turned and, wings lashing, shot after the Thayan captain.

That would likely keep him from threatening Tchazzar for a little while at least, and ignoring the flyers who were simply loosing arrows at him, the Red Dragon glared at the action of the ground. There, to all appearances, two masses of Chessentan soldiers were fighting one another. One company was pushing the other back, and despite the height at which he was flying and the general cacophony, Medrash could make out what the humans who had the upper hand were chanting:

“Shala! Shala! Shala!”

Medrash still didn’t entirely understand what was happening in Luthcheq. But it seemed that, like Aoth, Shala Karanok was fighting Tchazzar. And that meant someone should intervene before the wyrm dived and attacked her and the warriors under her command.

“Get me close!” Medrash said. In response, Praxasalandos’s wings beat even faster.

Medrash raised his lance high and opened himself to the Loyal Fury’s boundless, righteous power. As he did, he dimly sensed Bahamut, in some nonphysical sense, standing with the other deity and ready to lend his strength as well. Though it was possible that no one else could see it, cold, white fire poured down the lance, into his steel-gauntleted hand, and on into his core.

Then he felt vibrant with strength, so full that he almost doubted his ability to contain it. Still, the sensation wasn’t frightening but ecstatic. If his body burned away, then surely the soul that remained would burn in glory forever, like a star.

He strained to put such fancies aside and focus. Joyous as it might be simply to revel in his communion with the divine, it was his duty to use the gift and quickly. Tchazzar was already furling his wings to dive at the humans below.

Medrash pointed the lance, and silvery flame streamed out. He was certain everyone could see it, and Tchazzar jerked as the flare washed over his body.

“Tchazzar!” Medrash called. “Let Torm help you! Let him purge you of Tiamat’s stain and xorvintaal too!”

Tchazzar beat his wings and leveled out of his dive. He simply seemed to be gliding, as though dazed or oblivious to the furious struggle raging on all sides. Prax turned and pursued him.

Medrash kept the Loyal Fury’s power playing over Tchazzar’s form until he’d expended every bit of it. When the flare died, he slumped in fatigue.

“Did it work?” Biri asked.

Meanwhile, Prax’s swooping trajectory carried them both lower and closer to the wyrm ahead of them.

“I think so,” Medrash answered.

Then, yellow eyes burning, Tchazzar whipped his head around. Biri gasped. Medrash thought, we’re too close. Then flame erupted from the Red Dragon’s jaws.

Khouryn knew a warrior in an aerial battle, where danger could come from above, below, or any side, had to stay vigilant. He was also doing his best to look for Tchazzar, although he imagined that an ancient red dragon spitting flame would be hard to miss once he and his companions got reasonably close.

Still, whenever he deemed it relatively safe, he stole a moment to scrutinize the action on the ground. Since the Brotherhood’s griffon riders were in the air, his spearmen were surely down there somewhere, and he needed to see how they were faring.

There! There they were, anchoring the center of an allied battle formation-if one cared to dignify the jumbled masses of men below with that name-with a war band mustered around a Threskelan crown-and-wand standard on their left and a company flying red Chessentan banners on their right.

An entirely different horde of Chessentans was attacking all along the front of the formation, and as was inevitable, what had surely started out as straight, unbroken ranks were bent and ragged. But they were holding.

The problem was at the back of the formation. Some of the enemy had made their way all around the allies to attack there as well, and they looked to be on the brink of breaking through the rearguard, who were probably screaming for reinforcements, but no one was answering. Amid all the noise and confusion, it was possible that no one even realized.

But as Khouryn sent Iron plunging downward, he thought that somebody should know. He understood why, if there were dragons in the air, Aoth, Jhesrhi, and maybe even Gaedynn needed to be there too. But still, someone needed to oversee what was happening on the ground.

As he unbuckled his safety harness, he realized he was actually reproaching himself for being absent as long as he had.

Then Iron plunged down on top of one of the enemy soldiers, who collapsed under the impact and the bat’s ripping claws. Khouryn thrust his lance into another foe, grabbed his battle-axe, and flung himself out of the saddle.

Iron lurched beneath him and robbed the dismount of any grace it might otherwise have had. Khouryn tumbled off the bat’s body and slammed down on the ground. He grunted at the jolt, then jumped up and started swinging.

Startled, the enemy was slow to react. He chopped down two men before the others started defending themselves, and even then they were more worried about Iron. To Khouryn’s surprise, the bat stayed on the ground with him, and even though the animal was clumsy, flailing and flopping about, his hammering wings and ripping fangs were murderous. Heartened by the havoc he and his master were wreaking, the rearguard rallied and surged at the enemy.

Still, for a while, Khouryn thought the struggle could go either way. Then, just as he was killing his current opponent with a cut to the guts, men started screaming. He glanced around to find out why and took advantage of the moment to catch his breath. Iron looked fearsome, even to him, when he was suddenly invested with a demonic aura of menace that even his size and bloodstained teeth and talons couldn’t explain.

Then dead men lurched up from the ground and stabbed and struck at the Chessentans, and that was finally too much. The attackers turned and fled, some flinging away their weapons and shields to scurry faster.

The sellswords didn’t run, but they, too, shrank back from the swaying, shuffling corpses. “It’s all right!” called a high, breathless voice. “They’re on our side!”

Khouryn pushed between two spearmen and saw a petite, snub-nosed girl astride a drakkensteed, of all things. He dimly recalled her from Aoth’s assembly of Luthcheq’s mages.

She remembered him too. “Khouryn Skulldark! You came back!”

“Of course I did,” he said, “and here on the ground, I’m in charge. In five breaths or less, tell me exactly what in the name of the Twin Axes is going on.”

There was no hope of avoiding Tchazzar’s fiery breath. Though it was a pitifully inadequate defense, Medrash raised his shield to protect Biri and himself.

Meanwhile, Praxasalandos had essentially the same idea. He couldn’t dodge the flame but managed to flip himself upward so it burned into his ventral surface and not the riders on his back.

Unfortunately, since his body was aligned vertically, Medrash started slipping from his back. Bellowing, trying to shout the weakness out of his muscles, he clutched at the dragon’s hide with fingers and knees. He prayed Biri was holding on too. He certainly couldn’t do anything to help her.

Prax continued his backward somersault until he was belly up. Then, his flesh still burning like dry wood, he plummeted.

Medrash looked down at the peaked roof rushing up from below.

He reached out to Torm, and a smaller surge of the deity’s power-all that he could gather and hold in his depleted state-shivered into him. He concentrated it in his clutching fingers, then passed it on to Prax.

Wings suddenly flailing, the dragon heaved underneath him. Prax couldn’t arrest his fall, but perhaps he slowed it, just as he twisted to drop feet first.

He also liquefied as he smashed down onto the rooftop, and maybe, to some degree, that cushioned the shock for his riders. Still, the jolt shattered Medrash’s thoughts into jangling confusion. By the time he snapped out of his daze, he’d nearly slid down the slope to the eaves, with rivulets of quicksilver streaming along beside him. He clutched at the shingles and anchored himself.

He looked around. Biri was higher up on the roof. She didn’t seem to be in any danger of rolling or sliding off, but he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

Horribly, not all of Prax had turned to liquid metal. Some still on fire, body parts lay amid the globs and spatter.

Alarming as all that was, Medrash could barely spare it a glance because, yellow eyes burning, flames leaping from between his fangs, Tchazzar was swooping toward the rooftop.

Still shaky from the fall, keenly aware of the treacherous slope beneath his boots and the drop-off at his back, Medrash heaved himself to his feet. Realizing that at some point he’d dropped his lance, he snatched for his sword. He hoped he could at least land a cut before the red wyrm overwhelmed him.

Then Balasar and his bat hurtled at Tchazzar’s head, and the Daardendrien threw his lance at the dragon’s eye. He didn’t hit it, but the missile did stick in the creases of hide underneath.

Tchazzar struck back but the bat dodged, and the blazing jaws clashed shut on nothing. Balasar kept on flitting around the wyrm’s head. His arm cocked and snapped as he threw knives.

Leveling off, Tchazzar twisted his neck for another strike. Then the wind howled. Though Medrash felt only the fringe of the blast, that was enough to send him tottering backward before he caught himself.

Tchazzar took the full force of the gale. It slammed him sideways into a tower to smash the facade. He and chunks of broken sandstone fell down into the street together. Meanwhile, Balasar and his bat tumbled through the air but fortunately didn’t suffer a collision of their own.

Roaring, Tchazzar rose with a lash of his wings that threw banging, clattering rubble in all directions. Then Jhesrhi Coldcreek swooped over him. To Medrash’s surprise, the sellsword wizard was riding a huge eagle, not a griffon.

He had little doubt that she’d conjured the wind, and Tchazzar apparently thought so too. He spit flame but missed the eagle as it raced on by. And since the street in which he’d landed was too narrow for him to spread his wings, he couldn’t immediately return to the air to chase it there. He snarled and bounded after it on foot.

Medrash had no way of following even had he wanted to, and he realized he still hadn’t checked Biri. Just as he scrambled up to her, she groaned and shifted her arm.

Then Balasar set his bat down on the roof and swung himself out of the saddle. “Are you all right?” he said.

“I think I’m just bruised,” said the mage. She tried to sit up, and Balasar crouched to help her. “Thanks to Prax.” She looked around the rooftop, and sorrow entered her voice. “He’s not going to put himself back together this time, is he?”

“I don’t think so,” Medrash said.

“So,” Balasar said, “I gather the exorcism didn’t work.”

“No,” Medrash said, and a bewildered anger welled up inside him. “And I don’t understand! Why would the Loyal Fury urge me to rush here if I can’t affect the outcome of the battle?”

“I’ll be a son of a toad if I know,” Balasar said. “It’s your superstition and your magic. But maybe there’s a reason. Think it through.”

Medrash gripped his gauntlet-shaped pendant as though he could squeeze inspiration out of it. “All right. I freed Prax but he was a metallic. Tchazzar’s a chromatic and it’s the chromatics who are really Tiamat’s people. Maybe I can’t channel enough power to break her grip on them.”

“But not all the dragons fighting on Tchazzar’s side are chromatics,” Biri said. “I spotted gem wyrms.”

“And if I can get them to turn on Tchazzar,” Medrash said, “or just go away, it will change the odds considerably. It might give Aoth and Shala Karanok a real chance to win.”

“Take the bat,” Balasar said. “You’ll need it to get close to your targets.”

“Thanks.” Medrash clambered toward the crest of the roof and the animal perched atop it. “Will you two be all right?”

“Fine,” Biri said. “I just need a moment to catch my breath, and then we’ll find a way down to the ground. I imagine Khouryn and his infantry can use an extra swordsman and wizard.”

Medrash touched his heels to the bat’s flanks, and the animal lashed its wings and soared upward. Resenting the dark, the eye-stinging smoke, and the taller structures, all of which seemed engaged in a conspiracy to deny him a clear view of the air around him, he looked for dragons.

The first one he spotted was Alasklerbanbastos, unmistakable even to someone who’d never seen him by virtue of his hugeness and the lightning flickering around his bare bones. According to Jhesrhi by way of Khouryn, Aoth had found a way to control the lich. But if so, the creature had slipped the leash, because he and his erstwhile master were fighting.

The Great Bone Wyrm spit a thunderbolt. Jet raised one wing and swept his rider safely to one side. Aoth hurled a rainbow of presumably destructive power from his spear. But Alasklerbanbastos didn’t even bother dodging, and the magic played over his skeletal form without doing any discernible damage.

Medrash wanted to go to the Thayan’s aid. Everything about Alasklerbanbastos outraged his sensibilities as both a paladin and a dragonborn. He could barely look at the lich without clenching and shivering with hate.

And besides, Aoth seemed to need help because at the moment there weren’t many other griffon riders fighting Alasklerbanbastos. Evidently the dragons were thinning them out, either by hurting them and their mounts or simply exhausting their supplies of arrows. It wouldn’t be long before there weren’t enough foes left in the air to keep the wyrms from turning their attention to the relatively helpless warriors on the ground.

And that, Medrash decided, was why he had to stick to his original plan. It offered the only real hope of winning. Though his instincts cried out against it, he passed the dracolich and the beleaguered warmage by.

The smoke seemed to thicken. Then he realized it wasn’t smoke anymore, not over that bit of the city, but rather something damper and cleaner: fog.

But though the mist was easier to breathe, it was an even greater hindrance to sight, and he soon realized that others had discovered the same thing to their cost. Below him, just visible in the cloud, battered sellswords tended their wounded mounts.

Then he heard crashing, and a squat, drum-shaped tower swam out of the vapor and the gloom. Even if it hadn’t originally been intended as a bastion, it resembled one, and troops on Aoth and Shala’s side had taken refuge inside. They could probably have held off the warriors who’d surrounded the structure for a long time too, except for the thing that was smashing and tearing its way down to them from above.

Medrash couldn’t see it even when he was nearly on top of it, although its existence was apparent from the long, deep tears appearing as it clawed the wood beneath it. Not content merely to blind its adversaries with fog, it had wrapped itself in true invisibility as well.

And that, Medrash realized, meant he had no way of knowing when it was about to use its breath weapon. But fortunately the bat had its own ways of sensing and had probably fought dragons on Black Ash Plain. The animal flung itself sideways, and although the shriek that sounded an instant later was painfully loud, it didn’t do Medrash any actual harm.

He resolved to let his mount fly as it saw fit. At the moment it understood how it ought to maneuver far better than he did. He reached out to Torm and Bahamut and, grateful that his mystical strength had returned, drew cold fire down.

Then pain ripped through his skull. He almost lost focus and let the gift the gods had given him spill from his grasp, but not quite. Snarling, he pushed the clawing alien presence out of mind.

But by the time he accomplished that, new rips had stopped scarring the rooftop, and the rapidly disintegrating surface no longer bowed under an unseen weight. The dragon was on the wing.

The bat flung itself to the right then the left, swooping and whirling, dodging more attacks that Medrash couldn’t see. But its agility wouldn’t save it for long, not against a foe who could strike with fang and claw, a burst of sound, the hammering force of its will, and Torm only knew what other tricks.

Medrash had to end the fight quickly, and-he hoped-he still held the means shivering and burning like ice inside him. But how could he cast the power at an invisible mark?

He needed to sense Tiamat’s taint as he’d sensed it before. He reached out with his intuition or some faculty akin to it and thought he felt a sickening locus of vileness arcing through the air.

He stretched out his hand and shouted, “Torm!” A white blaze leaped from his fingers. The fog diffused some of its light, but the rest played across and half-revealed the serpentine form of a dragon.

The creature roared. Flailing its wings, it made a final furious effort to close with the bat and Medrash. Then, as he scoured it with the last of the holy light, it gave up that effort and its invisibility too. The glow of a burning building gleamed on scales like plates of polished emerald.

You’ve… restored me to myself, the dragon said, speaking mind to mind. The words were like a kettledrum throbbing and rumbling inside Medrash’s head.

“Then here’s how to thank me,” he replied. “My comrades and I need your help against Tchazzar and Alasklerbanbastos.”

I acknowledge a debt to you, dragonborn, and I’ll repay you if I can. But I’m no match for the Red Dragon of Chessenta and the Great Bone Wyrm. I’d only be throwing my life away.

“Like the rest of us,” Medrash said, “you’re no match for them by yourself. But I’m going to purge the other dragons too. As many as I can, until I run out of strength.”

The emerald dragon pondered that for a breath or two as it and the bat glided over the rooftops. Then it said, Don’t bother with the black. I doubt you can break the Great Game’s hold on him.

“I already guessed that. Does this mean you’ll help?”

Until I judge my debt is paid. The wyrm lashed its wings and climbed.

Alasklerbanbastos hissed words of power, and a shape like a huge, black sword appeared in the air. Someone else might have called it a shadow, but Aoth’s fire-kissed eyes recognized it for what it truly was: a movable wound slashed in the fabric of the world, a hole through which a man could fall into nonexistence.

The sword cut at him and Jet. The griffon swooped under the attack. It was bad tactics to give up the high air to the dracolich. But Aoth could feel how tired Jet was and that the familiar had been unsure of his ability to dodge the cut in any other way.

The shadow sword leaped at them again. Aoth rattled off a counterspell and jabbed his spear at the blade. Nothing happened.

Jet kept dodging, though the cuts were forcing him lower and lower. Aoth hurled fire at the black sword, and the flare winked out of existence as the two magics collided. The sword kept coming.

Aoth rasped words of power, spun his spear over his head, and thrust it at the magical threat. A shadow sword of his own, smaller but identical in every other way, leaped from the point and shot at Alasklerbanbastos’s creation.

The air, or a spherical portion of space itself, squirmed as the two manifestations of nothingness struggled to swallow one another. Bile burning in the back of his throat, Aoth averted his eyes. His instincts told him that if he didn’t, his truesight might discern something that would damage his mind.

Twisted and knotted together like fighting serpents, the blades vanished. But Jet’s claws were nearly brushing the cobblestones, and looming overhead, lightning dancing over his naked bones, Alasklerbanbastos had nearly completed another incantation, one that would rain thunderbolts down on the narrow, crooked street. The air smelled of the coming storm.

Aoth hurled darts of azure light from his spear. It was something he could do virtually instantaneously, but it was also a relatively weak spell. He knew it likely wouldn’t be enough to make the dracolich fumble his casting, and sure enough, it didn’t.

But something else did. A howl stabbed through the air and smashed Alasklerbanbastos’s crested skull to the side. The lich whipped his head back around, seeking the new foe who’d dared to strike him.

Aoth judged that gave him and Jet one chance to get out of Tchazzar’s view and catch their breaths. Perceiving what he wanted, the griffon touched down and charged at a door. Aoth pointed his spear and blasted the panel and much of the frame away with a pulse of pure force.

Jet leaped through and they found themselves in a chandler’s shop. Aoth smashed away a section of wall, and they raced on into a hatter’s establishment.

Alasklerbanbastos couldn’t see the impudent wretch who had struck him. But he heard leathery wings flapping as the coward beat a hasty retreat into the… smoke? It actually looked like it might be fog.

He spit a booming, blazing thunderbolt into the cloud. But nothing screamed or thudded to the ground afterward.

He hesitated, momentarily uncertain whether to go after the traitor or finish off Aoth Fezim, and the dithering cost him. When he looked back down into the street, the sellsword and griffon were gone.

Alasklerbanbastos snarled, then strained to put frustration aside and think. And when he had, he lashed his clattering wings, climbed, and looked around the sky for flashes of fire.

They led him to Tchazzar, who was chasing Jhesrhi Coldcreek. Plainly the wizard’s battle sense and the agility of her steed had thus far kept her alive in a confrontation with a vastly more powerful foe in much the same way that Fezim had survived his clash with Alasklerbanbastos.

But now Jhesrhi would have two ancient wyrms to contend with, and she was so busy fencing with Tchazzar that she might not even have noticed Alasklerbanbastos’s approach. He studied the eagle, discerned its true nature, and whispered words of unmaking.

The eagle vanished from underneath its rider. Jhesrhi plummeted between the tops of two buildings and vanished from view. Spewing flame, Tchazzar let out a roar of shock and anguish. He was afraid Alasklerbanbastos had cheated him out of his revenge by killing the wizard himself.

Alasklerbanbastos doubted that, and when they each settled atop one of the houses-the structures creaked as they took their weight-and looked down into the twisting alley dividing them, he saw he was right. There was no corpse lying at the bottom.

“These humans are tricky,” he said. “You have to give them that.”

Tchazzar glared at him. “You piece of dung! I nearly had her! And then you… startled me!”

The red’s petulance reminded Alasklerbanbastos of just how much he despised him, how much he wanted to lash out… but no. Not yet. Maybe not for many years to come. “I understand how you feel,” he began.

“You don’t!” Tchazzar snapped.

“I do. You hate the wizard for deceiving you. I hate Fezim for making a slave of me. And so we’ve both spent much of the battle chasing them around. Meanwhile, the complexion of the fight is changing around us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Llemgradac balked me just when I was about to finish off Fezim. Or at least I’m virtually certain it was him.”

“Why would he do that? He must understand that he’ll score more points helping us preserve the sanctity of the game than he could pursuing any other course.”

Alasklerbanbastos snorted. “So I assumed. But perhaps I overlooked the fact that we’re playing a game devised to last for decades or even centuries, and every worthy player employs a long-term strategy. Llemgradac may be willing to sacrifice points now in the expectation that it will pay off later on.”

Tchazzar’s burning yellow eyes narrowed. “Whatever schemes he’s scheming, he wouldn’t dare cross us by himself.”

“No, he wouldn’t. We have to assume the other wyrms will turn on us too.”

“Curse you! You’re the one who brought them here!”

“And fortunately for you, I’m also the one who’s figured out how to adapt to our changing circumstances.”

“How?”

“We stop allowing ourselves to be distracted even by the enemies we particularly detest,” Alasklerbanbastos said, “or any petty harassment from the air. We finish the fight on the ground now, quickly, before the other dragons come at us together.”

“How do we do that?” Tchazzar asked.

“We locate Shala Karanok and hit her with everything we have because she’s Chessenta’s one alternative to you, and if we kill her, your rebels will lay down their arms. And if any Threskelans or genasi are stupid enough to keep fighting afterward, your loyal troops will overwhelm them.”

Tchazzar grunted. “It could work.”

“It will! And net us Jhesrhi Coldcreek and Aoth Fezim in the bargain. They’ll stand their ground to defend Shala. And afterward, when the other dragons see the city is ours, they’ll turn tail. They won’t stick around to fight us and every bowman and artilleryman who can send a shaft or a stone into the air.”

Tchazzar spread his wings. “Let’s do it.”

After punching through several walls, Aoth and Jet went to ground in a butcher shop and waited to see if Alasklerbanbastos would track them or if he’d raze the entire street to flush them out. Aoth used the time to swig water from his waterskin and ease his smoke-parched throat. Jet discovered that the butcher dealt in horseflesh and set about devouring that portion of the stock.

After a while, it became apparent that Alasklerbanbastos had given up the pursuit. Aoth slumped, releasing tension he hadn’t realized he was holding, even though he expected that he and Jet would be back fighting the dracolich soon enough.

You know that clever plan you had? the griffon asked, speaking mind to mind because his gnashing beak was busy tearing horsemeat. The one where you and I would sneak off to Akanul and kill a dragon and because of that there wouldn’t be a war?

“Yes,” Aoth replied.

How do you think that’s working out?

Aoth scowled then laughed. “Plainly it’s working brilliantly. The actual goal was to prevent the invasion of Tymanther and we did. We’re fighting on Chessentan soil instead. Do you feel ready to go back aloft?”

Jet gulped a final chunk of horsemeat. “Just open the door.”

Aoth did and peeked out. There was no dracolich glaring down at him, or any other foe in view. There was battle somewhere nearby-he could hear the muddled roar of it-but it hadn’t yet spilled into that section of street.

When he and Jet took flight, he had the griffon climb high. It made him feel exposed, but it was his only hope of assessing the overall progress of the battle despite the billowing, eye-stinging smoke and the buildings breaking up the view.

Even after Jet reached the apex of his ascent, no dragon, living or undead, attacked them. But when Aoth saw where Tchazzar and Alasklerbanbastos actually were, he cursed.

Troops loyal to the Red Dragon were plainly massing to assault a central part of the allied formation. Tchazzar himself towered in their midst, no doubt giving them orders and trying to inspire them to valor. Flickering with lightning, Alasklerbanbastos perched on a rooftop a little way back, probably so he wouldn’t spook his new partner’s warriors. He’d join the attack when it began.

“They’re throwing everything into a run at Shala,” said Jet.

“Yes,” Aoth answered. “Get us over there.”

As they streaked toward Shala’s troops, he blew calls on his bugle because, while the sellswords on the ground had little hope of reaching Shala, griffon riders could. And one by one and two by two, those who were still able flew out of the night to race along beside him.

They swung west to avoid a premature brush with the enemy, then looped in over Shala’s formation. As they arrived, still more flyers came to join their wheeling, swooping company. Riding double on Eider, Gaedynn and Son-liin preceded a band of windsouls with fluttering garments and blue lines glinting on their faces. Her staff rippling with fire, Jhesrhi floated like the genasi; something had evidently happened to her eagle. Oraxes and Meralaine rode their stolen drakkensteeds.

And others flew in as well, folk Aoth hadn’t even dared to hope would appear just when he needed them most. Khouryn was riding a giant bat, of all things. Balasar and a white-scaled dragonborn arrived on horses made of congealed fog whose bodies dispersed as soon as the Tymantherans dismounted.

“We might actually live through this,” murmured Aoth.

“Or at least have all our friends with us in the afterlife,” Jet replied. “Either way, it’s starting.”

He was right. Tchazzar spread his wings, and his warriors scurried or dropped low to avoid being swatted. The red dragon leaped into the air, and Alasklerbanbastos sprang from his rooftop. A flick of his fleshless tail tore half the shingles and several planks away. Beneath the dragons, warriors bellowed war cries and charged.

Aoth and Oraxes hurled bursts of flame at Alasklerbanbastos. Settling to the ground behind the sheltering ranks of Shala’s warriors then swinging her staff overhand like a greatsword, Jhesrhi threw a howling wind full of hailstones in Tchazzar’s face. Her hands moving ceaselessly like a juggler’s, Meralaine plucked bits of darkness from the fabric of the night and lobbed those at the red dragon too. Griffon riders, hovering windsouls, and the bowmen on the ground loosed whistling clouds of arrows at the oncoming wyrms.

And none of it even slowed them down. Alasklerbanbastos hissed words of power, and a huge, clawed hand made of shadow appeared in the air. It snatched and Jet dodged it by a hair. Tchazzar spewed a dazzling blast of fire. When the blaze died away, Jhesrhi was standing unharmed where it had fallen, but bodies lay black and twisted to either side.

Meanwhile, the masses of spearmen, axemen, and swordsmen crashed together. But although Aoth actually knew better, it was hard not to feel that their struggle was meaningless compared to the violence and terror erupting over their heads.

Aoth cast a blast of focused sound at Alasklerbanbastos, and a tremor rattled down the length of the creature’s skeletal form. But the bones didn’t break apart, and the lich still didn’t falter. He whipped his head from right to left, and the pale light in the empty eye sockets flared. Aoth felt his muscles try to clench into immobility. He growled a word of denial and released the power of a warding tattoo, and his limbs relaxed.

Several windsouls were less fortunate. They couldn’t move or, apparently, even command the air to shift them as the Great Bone Wyrm snarled an incantation, and acid exploded in their midst. Bubbling and sizzling, their flesh dissolved, and their steaming bones showered out of the sky.

The vitriol dropped too and splashed on the ground below. It reared up into a rippling, flowing dragon shape and swiped at a nearby crossbowman with its forefoot. He fell down, thrashing and screaming until the liquid eating into his face and chest stole his voice away.

Alasklerbanbastos was close. Jet dodged to the right, and the dracolich turned to keep the griffon and his rider in front of his jaws and paralyzing gaze. Then like a bright, roaring waterfall, flame cascaded down on the wyrm from overhead.

Jhesrhi did her best to maintain the confidence and indomitable will that wizardry required. Still, as the dragons came driving in, it was hard to ignore the fear whispering that she and her friends were overmatched. And when the other wyrms came swooping into view, she felt a pang of near despair.

Then, its blue scales gleaming in the light of a fire, a swooping sapphire dragon punched a hole in Tchazzar’s wing with the shriek that was its breath weapon. The red jerked and veered off course, and before he could recover, an emerald wyrm plunged down on top of him and smashed him to the ground.

The emerald dragon leaped back into the air. Tchazzar lurched to his feet. His whipping tail killed men without his even intending it. He spewed flame at the green-colored wyrm, but the creature lashed its wings and dodged.

Jhesrhi had no idea why the lesser dragons had changed sides, but since they had, maybe she and her comrades had a real chance after all. She blasted Tchazzar with frost. Jabbing with a wand crafted from a wisp of cloud, a dragonborn with snowy scales and silver skewers for piercings did the same.

Cera led her gaggle of priests forward, toward the howl and clangor of battle. Then the mass of warriors in front of her parted for a moment, giving a woman of less-than-average height her first clear look at what was actually happening up ahead. She gasped and stopped short.

She and the rest of Amaunator’s clerics had indeed found wyrmkeepers holding other priesthoods prisoner in their own temples. The dragon worshipers apparently hadn’t possessed sufficient manpower to capture everyone, but they had neutralized every order known to be particularly unhappy about the ascendancy of the Church of Tchazzar.

Surprising the captors as they’d likely surprised their captives, the sunlords found it fairly easy to overwhelm them, especially since every victory added fresh recruits to their band. Cera tried not to feel too much vicious satisfaction as the wyrmkeepers fell, although, when she remembered how they’d imprisoned and tortured her, it was hard not to feel that, if anything, a quick death by sword thrust or battle prayer was too good for them.

When every servant of a true god was free, she took her company west, toward the armies who, judging from the echoing racket, had begun to fight in earnest. She and her comrades had to handle a couple of skirmishes, but they swung around the bulk of Tchazzar’s forces and avoided a major confrontation. It seemed the wiser course. Rich in magic though she and the other priests were, a band of trained warriors would still stand a fair chance of slaughtering them until they united with the soldiers on Aoth and Shala’s side.

Her success at reaching Shala’s company safely left Cera feeling a little smug about her own emerging talents as a war leader, and she knew a fierce resolve to do whatever she could to aid the defense. But that feeling fell away when she saw the heart of the battle, and awe welled up to take its place.

Dragons were fighting one another, and their struggle had all but become the entire conflict, at least on the part of the discontinuous, irregular battleground that she could see. Warriors had fallen back to keep a stray blast of breath weapon or the stamp of a huge foot from killing them. That limited their ability to engage one another, not that they seemed much inclined to do so anyway. No doubt experiencing the same amazement and dread as Cera, for the most part, they, too, were simply watching the dragons assail one another.

Which was to say, they were watching, not helping. Either they doubted the ability of mere human beings and genasi to affect the outcome, or they were afraid of hitting the wrong dragon. Only mages such as Aoth and a few master archers such as Gaedynn sent flares of power blazing or shafts streaking into the swooping, wheeling, lunging blur of motion.

For a few heartbeats, Cera wondered if salvation was at hand, if the dragons who had inexplicably joined their cause would take down Alasklerbanbastos and Tchazzar. After all, they outnumbered the blue and the red and had forced them onto the ground. The gold and the earthbound sapphire with the broken wing had burned or ripped a horn, alar phalanges, ribs, and other pieces of the dracolich’s skeletal form away. The emerald and the other sapphire had torn bloody gashes in Tchazzar’s hide. Their howls had hammered his left foreleg so the knee cocked inward, and he could no longer use the limb to slash or to bear his weight.

Then a dark liquid sprayed the gold from above, and it jerked in pain. An instant later, yet another wyrm, a black, plunged down on it like a hawk snatching a pigeon on the wing. The chromatic’s momentum slammed them both through the wall of a house, and they started struggling inside. Cera could tell because their fury was smashing and shaking the building apart.

With the gold otherwise occupied, Alasklerbanbastos glared at the sapphire and snarled an incantation. The living wyrm turned to run but not quickly enough. Tentacles of shadow erupted from the earth, whipped around it, and dragged it down onto its belly.

The dracolich whirled and spit a booming thunderbolt at the emerald dragon. The gem wyrm convulsed and crashed to earth. Tchazzar sprang, lashed his wings, and seized hold of the remaining sapphire’s forefoot in his burning jaws. He whipped his neck, yanking his foe out of the air and biting down at the same time.

The foot ripped off as the sapphire slammed to the ground. Blood spurted from the stump, and the creature spasmed. Tchazzar gnashed the extremity, bones and all, and gulped it down.

Then he and Alasklerbanbastos turned their gazes on the humans and genasi before them and, not even bothering to take flight again, lunged forward. Some warriors screamed and scattered. Others tried to fight, and the wyrms smashed them aside or trampled them flat.

Cera couldn’t strike at both dragons at once. But she prayed she could do something to hinder Alasklerbanbastos. Why not? He was undead and she had all the best priests in the city at her back. Even without them, she’d hurt him before, and although she’d lost the shadow gem that had made it possible, perhaps some vestige of the link it had forged remained.

She reached out to the Keeper, and he filled her with his light. She swung her mace over her head, and dazzling radiance leaped from it, passed harmlessly through any of the living who happened to be in the way, and burned into Alasklerbanbastos’s skull face. The undead blue lurched to a halt, then backward, some irresistible pressure shoving him.

Other sunladies and lords started chanting. Their warm light poured into her and through her to add to the force she was exerting. Then the rest of the priests began to pray, and although their might derived from sources other than the nurturing and purifying sun, it, too, lent a measure of strength to the forbiddance.

We’ve got him! Cera thought. We’ll burn him away! Then, defying the pressure of the light, Alasklerbanbastos came straight at her, picking up speed with every stride.

Tchazzar coiled his hind legs and unfurled his wings for a spring. Jhesrhi could tell the leap would carry him over most of the warriors who still stood between him and Shala and bring him smashing down on top of the former sovereign and her personal guards.

Jhesrhi pointed her staff and splashed flame across the dragon’s eyes. It wouldn’t hurt him, but it was something she could do instantly and, she hoped, would distract him before he pounced. The staff crowed in idiot glee at being used to conjure fire at last, and despite the exigencies of the moment, she felt a corresponding thrill.

Startled, Tchazzar whirled in her direction.

“Isn’t it me you want most of all?” she shouted.

“I did,” the red dragon gritted. Blood pattered from his wounds down onto the ground. “I loved you. I wanted to give you everything.”

“I loved you too,” she said. “And I wanted to believe you could be the hero from the legends. But you can’t. You were trapped in the dark too long, and it broke you. Now there’s nothing to do but put you down.”

“Try,” Tchazzar said. He started toward her.

She hurled a screaming blast of ice and hail at him. The dragonborn wizard augmented the effect with a jab of her misty wand. Meralaine threw tatters of darkness.

Tchazzar kept coming, though not nearly as fast as he could have. He must want Jhesrhi to feel helpless before he killed her.

Shala and some of her soldiers charged him from behind. Without even glancing around, he held them back with potentially bone-shattering sweeps of his tail.

Gaedynn and other griffon riders swooped and wheeled around him, driving arrows into his scaly hide. Tchazzar swatted a sellsword who came too close with a flick of his wing, sending man and steed tumbling helplessly through the air, but otherwise ignored the harassment as he took another limping stride.

Jhesrhi melted the earth to quicksand beneath his feet, then drew strands of muck streaming up his body to bury and smother him more quickly. But, wings lashing and snapping, he heaved himself clear of the effect, and in the process nearly closed the distance.

At most, Jhesrhi had time for one more spell, but which, when they all seemed useless? For one ghastly instant, her mind was blank. Then a notion came to her.

Why was Tchazzar unstoppable? Because she’d given him strength and life in the Shadowfell and again on the battlefield where Alasklerbanbastos had nearly killed him. And maybe what she’d given she could take away.

She fused her will and perception with those of the staff, reached through the instrument, outward, and into the core of the colossal creature in front of her. She seized hold of the flame that suffused and sustained him and pulled.

Tchazzar threw back his head and screamed.

So far, so good. But it felt as if there were an ocean of flame to drain, the remnants of what she’d given him and the vast reserves he’d produced for himself in the days since his restoration. She wasn’t sure she could handle the torrent rushing into the staff and her. But she had to. If it slipped from her control, it could explode across the battlefield and kill everyone except Tchazzar.

She cast some of the fire back into the Undying Pyre from which she and her weapon had drawn it in the first place. She sent part of it leaping up around her in a blue and gold pillar higher than the tallest spire in Luthcheq. Yet still there was more, shaking and drowning her at the same time.

She struggled against panic until something-a wizard’s intuition, perhaps-told her there was something else she could do with the fire, some alchemy it might accomplish and expend or cage itself thereby. Without trying to understand further-there was no time-she willed that magic into being. Heat blazed along her nerves and through her veins.

The staff screamed with the ecstasy of manipulating so much flame. It was still caterwauling when it exploded, and the shock flung Jhesrhi from brightness into darkness.

Flying above all the foot soldiers and horsemen, Aoth could see exactly what ailed Alasklerbanbastos. Clad in their vestments and regalia, a collection of the city’s priests stood in the luminous haze of the power they were raising. The cloud grew brighter at the front, where it was transferring all that divine might to Cera. It burned from the head of the mace in her outstretched hand as a beam that was shoving Alasklerbanbastos backward, breaking away pieces of bone, and charring other bits to ash.

Unfortunately even that wasn’t enough to stop him. Breasting the tide of light, he plunged forward.

Discerning Aoth’s intent, Jet dived at the dracolich.

Aoth had already expended the greater part of his magic, but he blasted Alasklerbanbastos with flame on the way down. Then Jet slammed onto the naked vertebrae of the undead dragon’s neck.

The griffon instantly started clawing and biting. Thanks to their psychic link, Aoth felt both Jet’s fury and his frustration as the massive bones proved difficult to crack or even scratch. Rider and mount jerked as the lightning sizzling around their foe’s body jolted them.

Aoth flailed his arm and flung his shield away. He gripped his spear with both hands, charged it with destructive force, and began stabbing at the narrow gap between two vertebrae. He wanted to break whatever it was that held them together.

Alasklerbanbastos lurched to a halt. He tried to twist his head around to get at his attackers but couldn’t manage it. Jet had plunged down too close to the skull.

That didn’t mean the blue was helpless. Aoth listened for the start of an incantation and watched for any little shift that might signal Alasklerbanbastos’s intention to fling him and Jet loose with a snap of his neck or to crush them by rolling.

None of that happened. But suddenly Aoth realized that the little shocks that had stabbed into him and Jet had stopped. Yet the smell of an oncoming storm was stronger than ever.

“Fly!” he bellowed and Jet sprang into the air. An instant later, big lightning bolts flared down the length of Alasklerbanbastos’s skeleton, arcing and crackling from his skull to the end of his tail and back again.

Aoth and Jet had avoided that attack, but by returning to the air, they made it possible for the lich to reach them by other means. With more little pieces of his body crumbling and falling away as ash, Alasklerbanbastos whirled and struck.

Jet lashed his wings and dodged. The huge fangs snapped shut on empty air, showering sparks as they clashed together.

Jet tried to get out from in front of the dragon’s gnashing jaws and paralyzing stare. But Alasklerbanbastos matched him shift for shift, meanwhile snarling words of power.

Aoth stood up in the stirrups and drove the spear deep into Alasklerbanbastos’s brow, between the empty, glowing orbits and the bony spikes above. The undead blue jerked his head back and so tore his attacker’s weapon from his grip. Aoth cursed. But at least when the lich recoiled, he stumbled in the cadence of his conjuring, and it finally gave Jet the chance to swing out from in front of him.

As the griffon climbed, Aoth saw that they weren’t the only ones who’d engaged Alasklerbanbastos in close combat. Medrash, Balasar, and others were on the ground, hacking at the blue’s legs like woodsmen felling trees. Somewhat to Aoth’s surprise, neither the paladin nor his sword was glowing, nor were there any luminous runes floating around his body. Apparently he’d already expended every bit of mystical strength at his command.

But he must have been doing some damage even so because Alasklerbanbastos raised his foot high to stamp on him.

Aoth sent Jet diving back down onto the blue’s neck. Alasklerbanbastos staggered and Medrash scrambled out from under the creature’s talons.

Jet bit and tore at the dracolich. Aoth willed his safety harness to unbuckle, grabbed the warhammer strapped to the saddle to serve as a backup weapon, and clambered over the griffon’s rump. Without the reach his lost spear had provided, it was the only way to get at his foe.

A jerk of Alasklerbanbastos’s neck almost flung him off, but he crouched low and grabbed a projecting knob of bone. He stayed in that attitude as he began to pound. The impacts woke the enchantments bound in the hammer. The glyphs graven into the steel glowed brighter and brighter, and each blow hit harder than the one before it.

Finally somebody’s attack-Aoth had no idea whether it came from him, Jet, one of the dragonborn, Oraxes, or Cera and the priests-proved lethal. Alasklerbanbastos roared, convulsed, and shattered like a piece of porcelain.

That left Aoth with nothing underneath him. But he released the magic bound in a tattoo quickly enough to turn a plummet into a slower descent. Bits of bone clattering beneath him, he drifted down into a cloud of dust and ash.

Caught in the midst of it, Balasar coughed and spat. “This is why I hate fighting the undead,” he panted. “You always get filthy.”

The twin strands of fire-the one streaming from Tchazzar to Jhesrhi and the one leaping from the wizard up into the sky-winked out at the same moment.

The sudden loss of all that brightness muddled Gaedynn’s sight. For a heartbeat, he imagined that the magic had stopped because Jhesrhi had killed or crippled the dragon. Then he saw that, although Tchazzar had shrunken into a wasted thing like the prisoner from the Shadowfell, with his gashed hide hanging loose on shriveled limbs, he was still on his feet. It was Jhesrhi who toppled with her body still wreathed in flame. Gaedynn couldn’t tell if that was a last, harmless manifestation of the magic she’d just worked or if she was in imminent danger of burning to death.

But he did see Tchazzar resume hobbling toward her, and he knew that if the red dragon reached her, she was going to die no matter what.

He sent Eider plunging to the ground. He tore at his safety straps and leaped off the griffon’s back. “Fly!” he shouted. Eider lashed her wings and sprang back into the air.

But Son-liin didn’t go along. She, too, swung herself off Eider’s back and snatched an arrow from her quiver.

His golden eyes burning as brightly as ever, Tchazzar glared down at the human and genasi who stood between him and the fallen wizard. “This is good,” he rumbled. “You’re another one I wanted to kill personally.”

“Shut up and die,” Gaedynn answered. He shot at the wyrm’s right eye. Son-liin loosed her shaft too.

Tchazzar tossed his head, and neither arrow hit an eye or any other particularly vulnerable spot, although Gaedynn’s did stick in the creature’s face. He reached for another of the few shafts left in his quiver, and the dragon advanced. His legs were so long that, even limping, he would come within reach of his foes with another stride or two.

Then Khouryn charged in on the dragon’s right. He bellowed, “East Rift!” and chopped at Tchazzar’s good foreleg with his axe. Armed with lances, Hasos and other warriors jabbed at the colossal creature’s belly. Meralaine and a white-scaled dragonborn hurled jagged blades of shadow and bursts of pale frost respectively.

Tchazzar reeled. But then, striking like a snake, hammering his wings up and down, swinging his tail like a flail, he scattered his new assailants and kept coming.

Shooting as fast as she could, the argent lines in her purple skin shining like white-hot metal, Son-liin pierced the red with arrows charged with lightning. Each balked him for maybe an instant but no longer.

Meanwhile, Gaedynn did something he almost never did. He took his time aiming.

He no longer had much hope of piercing an eye and the brain behind it. Tchazzar reflexively protected his eyes. But confident in his armor of scales, he sometimes disregarded attacks that mere human warriors aimed at other parts of his body.

That, Gaedynn resolved, was going to turn out to be a mistake because his recent dragon fighting had taught him where an artery lay close to the surface in the underside of a wyrm’s neck. He’d have to hit the spot exactly, and the loose, dangling skin would only make it more difficult. But if he did, even a living god should find the results unpleasant.

He loosed. The shaft hurtled from the bow. And maybe Tchazzar somehow sensed it was a genuine threat because he started to twist his neck. But he was too slow, and the arrow plunged deep into the mark.

Tchazzar stumbled then swayed. He sat back on his haunches, lifted his good forefoot, and swiped the arrow out of his flesh, but that only made things worse. Gouts of blood spurted rhythmically from the wound, and the red dragon collapsed onto his side.

But then he rolled halfway onto his belly and somehow contrived to drag himself forward. And as Gaedynn and Son-liin drew their bows, he flailed with his claws and forced them to scatter. Had they stood their ground, the stroke would have torn them apart.

Panting, Tchazzar visibly gathered his strength for one final heaving motion to drag himself within reach of Jhesrhi. Then Shala ran out of the darkness with a gory broadsword in her hand. She thrust it into the base of Tchazzar’s neck. The red wyrm shuddered, a tremor so violent that Gaedynn could feel it through the earth, then slumped motionless.

As soon as Gaedynn was sure Tchazzar was no longer a threat, he whirled and dashed to Jhesrhi. When he reached her, he didn’t know whether to feel horrified or relieved.

Fire still covered the unconscious woman from head to toe. It was hot enough that it took an effort of will to stand within a pace of her, and it had burned every thread of clothing away. But it wasn’t burning her. She didn’t have even a blister.

Phicos scurried through the cellars, grabbing a scroll here, an onyx statuette of Tiamat there, a five-headed wand elsewhere, and stuffing them into his satchel. Thanks to an enchantment, the bag was bigger inside than out, but it still couldn’t hold everything he and his fellow wyrmkeepers had used to equip and sanctify their shrine. Even if there were time to gather more, only the holiest and most powerful artifacts could go.

A footstep scuffed on the floor behind him. Startled, he spun and snatched for the dagger on his hip. He relaxed when he saw that it was Esvele who’d come up behind him.

To venture into the streets, the priestess had traded her vestments for nondescript clothing, including a hood to shadow her thin, sallow face with its pentacle tattoo. On such a terrible day, it was no longer safe for Luthcheq’s few surviving wyrmkeepers to look like what they were.

“Did you find out about Ferzath?” Phicos asked.

“Yes,” Esvele said. “He’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Chelnadatilar-the gold-killed him.”

Phicos cursed because it was an offense against the Dark Lady for any other being to kill a chromatic dragon but also because he and Esvele had hoped the black might help them escape the city.

“Well-” he began and, with a clinking and clattering of beads and pendants, someone else staggered into the multicolored candlelight. It was Halonya, with the layers of her grotesque, trailing costume muddy and askew.

The “high priestess” gaped at the satchel in Phicos’s hand. “What are you doing?” she shrilled.

“Running,” he answered. “Before Shala Karanok’s guards show up to arrest us.”

“No! I order you to stay and defend the temple!”

“Sorry,” Phicos said. “While Tchazzar lived, we deferred to you because he wanted us to. But now he’s gone.”

“He isn’t! He’ll rise again because he’s a god!”

“No,” Phicos said, “he wasn’t. We went along with his pretensions too since it was necessary to serve him and, through him, our true deity. But the time for that has passed as well.”

“Blasphemer!” Halonya screamed.

Phicos drew breath to deny the change, but Esvele said, “You’re wasting time we don’t have debating with a lunatic.”

And plainly she was right. Phicos pulled his knife from its sheath, stepped, and thrust. Mouth and eyes gaping wide, Halonya toppled backward, the sharkskin hilt jutting from her chest.

“Dangerous as the city is,” Esvele said, “I’m glad we lingered long enough for that.”