Over the course of the next little while, Medrash managed to jump off his panicked steed and use his paladin gifts. Balasar couldn’t tell precisely what his clan brother had done, but it seemed to affect everyone and every beast in his vicinity, and to create a pocket of savage resistance in what was otherwise a massacre.
Then Khouryn’s spearmen charged up to engage the enemy. Other dragonborn might follow eventually, but- perhaps astonished by the bloody fiasco the lancers’ charge had become-they were slow to act. Nor were the flying trumpeters sounding the signal. Maybe Tarhun was currently incapable of giving the order.
In any case, it seemed clear that without more support that even Khouryn could provide, the Tymantherans fighting in the center of the field couldn’t hold. Balasar turned to Patrin. “We have to help them.”
“I agree,” Patrin said. But instead of ordering everyone forward, he wound his way through his swaying, twitching, shuddering troops toward Nala. Balasar followed.
When he came close enough, he felt the sting of the magic seething in the air around her. It muddled his senses-for an instant, he experienced the purple of her robe as a sweet stink like that of rotting flowers and the unevenness of the ground beneath his feet as a shrill glissando.
With one hand, Nala gripped her staff. The other was clenched too, and Balasar’s intuition told him it was holding something, even though no trace of the object protruded beyond her fingers.
He suddenly suspected he knew exactly what sort of spell she was working. And if he’d been confident of his ability to prove it afterward, he would have run her through that instant.
“Sir Balasar recommends that we attack immediately,” Patrin said. He’d stopped walking, but his beard of chains was still swinging and clinking a little. “I do too.”
Nala looked annoyed at having to suspend her chant, then smoothed her features into a fonder though solemn expression. “Not yet,” she said. “The god will tell me when the moment is right.”
“Our comrades need us now,” Balasar said.
“I promise you,” the priestess said, “I’ll give the word as soon as I can.”
Right, thought Balasar. Just as soon as Medrash and Khouryn’s warriors are dead, and the new tactics discredited. As soon as you can once again make the claim that only dragon-worshipers can defeat the giants.
“As soon as you can,” said Patrin. He turned away.
As they strode back to their positions in the vanguard, Balasar said, “No one respects Nala more than I do. As our priestess. But you’re the soldier. The war leader. If you think-”
“No,” Patrin said. “It’s as hard for me as it is for you, but no. Why did we march here under this banner”-he nodded to indicate the purple pennon with the platinum dragon coiling down its length-“if not to assert our faith?”
Actually, Balasar thought, I’m here to destroy your ridiculous creed. But not at the cost of Medrash’s life. He would have forsaken the cultists and run forward to help his kinsman that instant, except that it would have been an empty gesture. A single warrior couldn’t turn the tide, no matter how skillful he might be. He needed all the split-tailed sons of toads swaying and jerking around him.
Swaying and jerking … with the fury of the dragon god boiling up inside them, they were as frantic to attack as he was.
Balasar started writhing like the others. “Bahamut!” he howled. “Bahamut!” His companions echoed the cry. He clashed his sword against his targe, and the others did that too.
He gripped his weapon midway up the blade, then used the foible to slice the right side of his face, where the bone piercings of Clan Daardendrien wouldn’t snag it. He swept the sword through the air, spattering his neighbors with drops of blood. “Bahamut!” he roared.
The wyrm-worshipers cut themselves too. It spread through their disorderly ranks like a ripple in a pond. Balasar then punched the olive-scaled fellow on his left.
The cultist rounded on him with rage in his eyes and tongues of yellow fire flickering between his fangs. Balasar screamed, “Bahamut!” And instead of spitting flame at him, the dragon-lover punched him back, then turned to give someone else a shove.
When they were all thumping one another, Balasar judged that they were about as crazy as he knew how to make them. He brandished his bloody sword at the melee up ahead, bellowed, “Kill!” and charged.
For a heartbeat or two, he had the horrible feeling that despite all he’d done to stir them up, no one was going to follow. Then the cultists too screamed, “Kill!”-or else the name of their god-and pounded after him.
He would have been happy to let them catch up. Unfortunately, a person couldn’t pretend to be mad with bloodlust and behave cautiously at the same time. So he kept running as fast as he could, and met the enemy before any of his companions.
But not the enemy he wanted to engage, not the ash giants and green and gray reptiles locked in battle with Medrash and Khouryn’s troops up ahead. Earlier he’d noticed the brown, hunched, long-armed creatures with dangling folds of skin maneuvering to the edges of the battlefield. Now they came scurrying forward to attack the charging cultists’ flank.
They didn’t look like much of a threat compared to either the ash giants themselves or the other minions the barbarian adepts had summoned. Balasar hoped the ones that managed to intercept him would only delay him a moment or two. Then a pair of them lashed their arms at him like they were throwing rocks.
Wind screamed. Either scooped from the ground or simply conjured out of nothing, sand battered Balasar. It stung his eyes, forced its way into his nostrils and mouth, and choked him.
Blinking and spitting, he covered up with his shield, then peeked over its rim as soon as the blast subsided. Through a stinging blur of tears, he saw the brown creatures rushing him, one a scuttling stride or two in advance of the other.
Turning back and forth, he pretended he couldn’t see them at all. Then he lunged and cut at the head of the one in the lead the instant it came close enough.
The brown creature’s body dissolved in a puff of sand, and the sword swept through the grit. The sand leaped several paces away, where, swirling, it congealed into solid flesh and bone once more.
The trick startled Balasar, but not enough to make him lose track of the second sand thing, which had scrambled around him to strike from behind while its comrade had him distracted. He whirled and shifted his shield, and claws rasped across its surface. He riposted with a chest cut, and the creature collapsed. It was reassuring to see that the things couldn’t evade every attack by dissolving into dust.
He whirled back toward its partner. It cocked back its apelike arm to hurl more sand. Balasar spat frost at it.
Its staggered and pawed at the rime suddenly encrusting its blunt-snouted, lizardlike face. Balasar rushed it. It wiped the ice off its eyes just in time to see the slash that sheared through its throat.
Balasar looked around. The sand things had proved tougher than anticipated, but, frenzied, spewing their breath weapons repeatedly, the members of the Platinum Cadre were making short work of them. He judged that in a few moments, everyone should be ready to race on to the real fight up ahead.
Then a huge black bat slammed down on the ground-not plummeting, but almost. A split second later, the life went out of its eyes. Mangled and burned, it had plainly given the last of its strength to save its rider from a fatal fall.
For a moment Balasar thought it a valiant effort wasted, because the big dragonborn slumped into the saddle looked as dead as his steed. But then the fellow groggily lifted his head, revealing the square gold studs pierced into the green hide under his eyes. The rider was the vanquisher himself.
His trappings and armor charred, as was, no doubt, some of the flesh beneath, he fumbled with the straps holding him in the saddle. Then something else, something bigger even than a Lance Defender’s mount, thudded down on the ground.
Like Tarhun’s bat, the crimson reptile had shredded wings, with arrows embedded in various places where its halo of fire had yet to burn them away. It might have trouble returning to the air. But judging from the way it immediately headed for the vanquisher, each step igniting grass and weeds, it still had plenty of fight left in it.
Alas, Tarhun didn’t. He managed to unbuckle the last of his straps, dismount, and lift his greatsword as high as his chest. Then he collapsed.
Patrin had three brown opponents alternately trying to flense the flesh from his bones with their talons or scour it off with blasts of sand. Still, as he pivoted to and fro, he glimpsed the maimed bat’s plunge to earth and all that followed. He saw Balasar sprint to interpose himself between the huge red beast and the sprawled, motionless
