The brown screeched and recoiled, jerking the spear out of his hand. It whipped its head back and forth until the foreign object tumbled out.
That gave Khouryn just enough time to discard his shield and snatch the urgrosh off his back.
The brown dragon clawed at him. He spun aside and chopped at its foot. The axe glanced off its scales.
At almost the same instant, the head at the end of the long neck arced over him, too high for him to attack. The brown was reaching for Biri. But she conjured a blast of frost that spattered the wyrm’s jaws and eyes and made it falter.
“You get away from it!” Khouryn bellowed. “Spears, follow my voice! It’s here!”
The dragon lifted a forefoot high. He only just spotted the action in the brown, swirling gloom. It stamped down at him. He sidestepped, cut, and that time hacked a gash in its hide.
Thunder boomed and light flared as Biri burned the wyrm with lightning. From a safer distance, Khouryn hoped. They were holding their own, but it couldn’t last-not unless they had help. Where were the damn spearmen?
There! Shadows swarmed out of the murk on either side of the dragon. Spears jabbed.
The brown struck left, then right, biting a dragonborn to pieces with each snap. Some spearmen cried out and retreated madly. But others were less frantic. They fell back just far enough to protect themselves, then attacked again as soon as the wyrm pivoted away.
Not that such maneuvering was easy. The dragon was faster and less predictable than the Beast. Its rippling alar membranes could swat a warrior, or its sweeping tail could shatter his legs, whether it was facing him or not.
Still, most of the warriors managed to stay alive for a few moments. Long enough for Khouryn to charge the wyrm and, taking advantage of his shorter stature, dash on underneath it.
He reversed his grip on the urgrosh and stabbed repeatedly upward with the spearhead. At first the dragon didn’t seem to notice. But then when he yanked the spike free, arterial blood spurted after it, spattering his arms, and the reptile jerked.
The brown wheeled, stamping, trying to claw and crush him or, failing that, at least get him out from underneath it. He scurried to avoid its feet, keep its ventral surface above him, and go on stabbing.
That worked long enough for him to draw a second huge spray of gore. Then the wyrm lashed its winglike frills and pounced far enough that he had no hope of keeping up with it. The same leap carried it back in striking distance of Biri.
Its head hurtled at her. But, galloping, Balasar reached her first. Leaning out of the saddle, he scooped her up, and the brown dragon’s fangs clashed shut on empty air.
Meanwhile, Medrash charged the wyrm, and his lance plunged into its flank. The brown jerked and roared. It was still roaring when a second lancer speared it a couple of heartbeats later.
Like the brown, hunched, long-armed saurians Khouryn and his comrades had met before, the dragon dissolved into a flying swirl of sand. The grit streamed through the air and hissed down the hole from which the reptile had first emerged.
Where, Khouryn hoped, it would return to dragon form and bleed out. Although he wasn’t certain of it. Dragons were notoriously hard to kill.
But as he could see since the cloud of sand was subsiding, at least they’d driven it off before it could kill or injure very many of them. The spearmen who’d surrounded it deserved much of the credit, and half of them wore purple and silver tunics or tokens.
Khouryn caught Medrash’s eye, then jerked his head toward the group. The paladin nodded in acknowledgment.
Balasar set Biri back on her own two feet. Then he grinned, bowed from the saddle, and said, “A thousand thank-yous for the dance, milady.” To say the least, his gallantry seemed incongruous amid the warriors noisily spitting out sand and ash on every side, but it made the mage smile in return.
But her smile withered as soon as she turned and took a good look at the corpses, and at the wounded clenching their teeth against the urge to cry out as the healers set to work on them. Khouryn realized that what looked like minimal harm to a hardened sellsword might seem like ghastly carnage to even a dragonborn, if she’d never been to war before.
She asked, “Is this my fault?”
“No,” Khouryn said. “The dragon was going to hit us at some point, and some of us were going to die when it did. But follow orders from now on.”
The unnatural power of his condition compensating for the lack of hide stretched across the bony framework of his wings, Alasklerbanbastos floated on the night wind and studied the enemy camp. Gliding at his master’s side, Jaxanaedegor surreptitiously studied him.
Tchazzar and his servants weren’t relying on invisibility to mask their true strength. It was difficult to keep such a glamour in place for days on end, and a wizard as accomplished as a dracolich was apt to see through it anyway. Instead they were using other tricks. A paucity of campfires, tents, and noise. Men and beasts tucked away wherever there was cover to obscure their numbers. Freshly turned earth to give the appearance of a mass grave. Lamplight and motion inside the healers’ pavilions. The absence of any whisper or tingle of mystical power at work.
Finally the Great Bone Wyrm wheeled. Jaxanaedegor did the same, and they beat their way back toward the north and the massed might of Threskel’s army.
But they didn’t go all the way back to their own camp. Alasklerbanbastos evidently didn’t want to wait that long to talk. Blue sparks jumping and cracking on his naked bones, he spiraled down to the crest of a low hill. From there, he’d be able to spot anyone or anything suicidal enough to approach him.
You’re always so wary, Jaxanaedegor thought. But not wary enough of me. I could strike at you right now, while you’re on the ground and I’m still on the wing.
But it was just a pleasant fantasy. Neither the high air nor the element of surprise would suffice to defeat a creature so endowed with every other advantage. Jaxanaedegor set down on coarse grass and weeds that had already started to wither simply because the dracolich was near.
Pale light gleamed in Alasklerbanbastos’s eye sockets, and the air around him smelled like a rising storm. “There are more soldiers,” he growled, “than you led me to believe.”
Jaxanaedegor felt a pang of uneasiness. He made sure it didn’t reflect in his tone or expression. “Truly, my lord? I estimated their numbers as accurately as I could.”
“Yes,
“I can’t imagine how. They would have had to swing far to the east. Even if they’d had time, our watchers in the Sky Riders would have spotted them.”
Alasklerbanbastos grunted.
Jaxanaedegor had hoped he wouldn’t need to encourage the undead blue to attack. It seemed better-safer-if Alasklerbanbastos arrived at the decision on his own. But if he was having second thoughts, Jaxanaedegor supposed he’d have to give him a nudge.
“If I did underestimate,” the vampire said, “I apologize. But even so, there are more of us than there are of them, and you can feel the pall of demoralization hanging over their camp. The battle we already fought cost us, but we won. We crippled them.”
“They supposedly had necromancers. And sunlords.” Alasklerbanbastos was particularly cautious of those who wielded special power against the undead.
“We killed them,” Jaxanaedegor said. “Or most of them, anyway.”
Using the tip of a claw, Alasklerbanbastos scratched a rune in the dirt. A different symbol inscribed itself beside it, and then another after that, until there were seven in a line. Despite his own considerable knowledge of arcana, Jaxanaedegor didn’t recognize any of the characters, nor did he have any idea what the magic was meant to accomplish. Not knowing twisted his nerves a little tighter.
“But you didn’t kill Tchazzar,” the Bone Wyrm said.
“No,” Jaxanaedegor replied. “But our spies say he’s behaving erratically, and I myself told you how long it took him to join the battle. He’s not the same dragon you remember, and surely not Tiamat’s Chosen
