A long pause followed. Jhesrhi imagined Tchazzar glaring and trembling with the futile urge to strike out at a creature hundreds of miles beyond his reach.
“I promise you,” the red dragon said at last, “you’ll have your new Unther, and the dragonborn will die. But first you have to help me.”
“I already explained why that’s impossible.”
“Then in accordance with the Sixty-Seventh Precept, I cut you off. You won’t have an inch of Alasklerbanbastos’s lands or one clipped copper from his hoard.”
“You can’t do that. The One Hundred and Seventh Precept-”
After a moment, Jhesrhi inferred that Tchazzar had ended the spell of communication, because there was nothing to hear but thumps and clacks. Evidently the war hero was kicking his camp furniture around.
She tried to make sense of the conversation that had triggered his frustration. It was like the parley with Jaxanaedegor; much of the import was maddeningly opaque.
But she understood that Skuthosiin and possibly other wyrms meant to exterminate the dragonborn, and it didn’t matter that Aoth and Cera had proved the Tymantherans innocent of crimes against Chessenta. Tchazzar wanted to kill them too.
Tchazzar, to whom she’d pledged her absolute fidelity.
TWELVE
28 KYTHORN -5 FLAMERULE T HE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)
Summer had come, and, as Khouryn had observed on the march southwest, Tymanther was blooming. Trees were full of green leaves and singing birds; pastures of grass and the sheep, goats, and cattle grazing there; and fields of oats and barley. In contrast, Black Ash Plain had simply gotten nastier. The hot air was smokier, and some of the cinders adrift on it were stinging hot.
I don’t blame the giants for wanting to steal somebody else’s country, he thought. I wouldn’t want to live here either.
He wondered how they even managed to live in the midst of such desolation, then dismissed the question as irrelevant. His concern was to make sure that a goodly number of them didn’t live much longer. To that end, he took another look at the ash drifts and cracked, rocky soil to either side of the column.
Towers of ash glided in the distance, somewhat like ships under sail except that they moved independently of the wind. Then suddenly a gray-black bump bobbed up and then back down out of sight behind one of the true cinder dunes, if that was the right term for them. They were drifts big as hills, and a fellow could climb them like hills until he set his foot wrong. Then the ash would swallow him like quicksand.
Despite the haze in the air, and the smarting blur in his eyes, Khouryn knew he’d just seen a giant skirmisher. He drew breath to shout an alert, but one of the dragonborn marching under the banners of the Platinum Cadre did it first.
So instead Khouryn shouted, “Form up! Protect yourselves!” He was sure there were only a few giants lurking on their flank, or somebody would have spotted one before then. Since they were too few to pose a serious threat, their purpose was to slow the advance, giving the bulk of Skuthosiin’s army more time to prepare. By halting and covering up with their shields, the Tymantherans were essentially giving them what they wanted. But they had to do something to keep the barbarians from picking them off one and two at a time.
Five giants popped up, and their long arms whipped. They didn’t throw spears or any other sort of crafted weapon. They must have been hoarding those for the true battle to come. But they were an offshoot of the race called stone giants and, like others of their kind, could fling rocks with deadly force and accuracy.
The impacts cracked and banged. One dragonborn fell down. But no stones streaked past shields to hammer the bodies behind them.
The barbarians ducked back down. Several crossbows clacked, an instant too late to have any hope of hitting their targets.
A female voice chanted words that sent a pang of chill stabbing through the hot air.
Khouryn turned. Several paces to his left, Kanjentellequor Biri, the albino wizard who’d unraveled the deeper secrets of Nala’s papers, had somehow prevailed on two spearmen to open a gap in the shield wall. Where she stood, inviting another stone as she rattled off her incantation and flicked a rod of roughly hewn and polished quartz through small, repetitive downstrokes.
Just as Khouryn reached her side, hailstones pounded down to batter the far slope of the dune. A giant howled.
Khouryn gripped Biri’s wrist and hauled her back behind the warriors. “I didn’t tell you to do that,” he said.
She grinned. “But it worked. They had cover, but not in relation to something that dropped straight down from overhead.”
“You didn’t have any cover either. It’s only by the Luckmaiden’s grace that you didn’t end up with your brains splashed across the ground. As it is, you showed the giants where you are.”
Tarhun had scattered the mages throughout the army, partly so the giants couldn’t target all of them at once. He’d also instructed them to refrain from casting spells till he said otherwise.
Biri’s smile melted away. Despite his time among them, Khouryn wasn’t good at guessing how old a dragonborn was. But he got a feeling the wizard was younger than he’d first supposed. “I just wanted to help,” she said.
“You already have,” Khouryn said, “and trust me, you will again. But for now, let the soldiers do the work. They can handle it.”
As if to illustrate his point, a squadron of outriders charged the giants. Khouryn couldn’t see everything that happened next. His hulking spearmen with their overlapping shields were in the way, and so was the ash dune. But he made out Medrash’s heater, painted with the steel gauntlet of Torm, and Balasar’s targe, emblazoned with the six white circles of Clan Daardendrien. He also saw giants toppling with lances embedded in their guts, or blood streaming from sword cuts on their necks and chests.
The infantry raised a cheer. Except that there was something wrong with it. Khouryn strained to make out the one voice that wasn’t jubilant, all but lost amid the clamor.
“Turn around!” someone bellowed. “Turn around!”
Khouryn did, and suffered a shock of amazement and dread. A brown dragon was heaving itself out of the ground. Huge as the burrowing creature was, it defied common sense that so few of the dragonborn had noticed its relatively blunt head with its mass of short, thick horns looming high above their own. But there hadn’t been anything there just a moment before, and almost everyone was watching the fight between the outriders and the giants.
The dragon glanced around, then oriented on Khouryn. Or maybe on the wizard standing beside him.
“Crouch down behind me!” he shouted. He wanted to tell her to close her eyes and turn her head too, but the brown didn’t give him time. Its neck whipped forward. Its jaws opened and spewed its breath weapon.
Khouryn covered up with his shield and squinched his own eyes shut, which was possibly the only thing that saved them from the hot grit that rasped across his skin. When he opened them again, sand and ash hung so thick in the air as to make the smoky haze he’d despised before seem clear by comparison.
Dragonborn cried out, because the brown’s breath had scraped them, or simply in fear and confusion. Khouryn could see some of the nearer ones, milling around or sprawled on the ground, but he couldn’t see the wyrm. A moment before, the sudden appearance of such a behemoth had seemed a nightmarish impossibility. Its vanishing felt like another, even though he assumed the cloud was actually responsible.
He only knew when it charged because its strides jolted the ground, and because dragonborn yelled as it trampled them or brushed them out of the way. “Run!” he rasped, his mouth foul with sand, and then his huge foe pounced out of the murk. The scalloped, winglike frills that extended down the sides of its body were undulating. Maybe that was how it kept the air agitated and full of grit even when it wasn’t spitting the stuff out of its gullet.
It struck at Khouryn, and he met its head with a thrust of his spear. The weapon drove straight into a nostril.
