the Chessentan formation.
In the night, few of the advancing enemy could see Tchazzar as clearly as Aoth could. Yet even so, every one of them faltered. Lurching, stumbling hesitation rippled across the battlefield.
Tchazzar was supposed to fight hard during the opening movements of the battle, wreaking havoc on Alasklerbanbastos’s army and creating the appearance that he was squandering his strength. Assuming he conducted himself as he had in past conflicts, the Great Bone Wyrm would let his archenemy wear himself down, then attack when he judged he had the advantage. At which point Jaxanaedegor and his fellow traitors would turn on their overlord, and they and Tchazzar would take him down together.
It would be a neat trick if it came together. Aoth could think of a dozen ways it could go wrong. But then, that was the case with most such plans.
Tchazzar hurtled toward a blue dragon on the wing. The blue had an unusually long beard of bladelike scales dangling beneath her chin, and the massive horn on her snout lacked a secondary point. By those details, Aoth identified her as Venzentilax, one of the wyrms genuinely loyal to Alasklerbanbastos.
She spat a bright, twisting flare of lightning. Tchazzar didn’t even try to dodge. Nor did he jerk, falter, or reveal any other sign of distress when the attack hit him, although it blackened a spot at the base of his neck.
“Watch out!” a griffon rider shouted. His mount gave a piercing screech, and others took up the cry, spreading the alarm across the sky.
Aoth turned to behold a flight of undead hawks the size of horses, with green phosphorescence shimmering in their sunken eyes and bone showing through holes in their rotting feathers and skins. The raptors had come up on his flank while the dragons’ duel distracted him.
He pointed his spear and started to hurl fire at the hawks. Then Jet lashed his wings and flung himself sideways.
Even so, a stab of cold chilled both the griffon and Aoth to the bone-he could feel the familiar’s distress through their psychic link. Both undead, another mount with another master plunged down at them. They’d flown in higher than the hawks, and that had kept Aoth from noticing them before. Even fire-kissed eyes couldn’t spot trouble if he was looking in the wrong direction.
The steed was the reanimated corpse of a chimera. It had the pallid wings, hind legs, and serpentine tail of a white dragon, while the rest of the body was leonine. Three heads sprouted from the shoulders-the wyrm’s, the lion’s, and the odd one out, a ram’s complete with curving horns.
The rider had three heads too, although they all looked the same-naked human skulls perched atop a single skeleton. It clutched a staff in its bony hands.
Beating his wings, Jet flew out from under the chimera. Aoth tried to aim his spear and recite an incantation, but the aftereffects of the jolt of cold made his hand shake and his mouth stammer. He botched the spell, and as his attackers dived past, the skull lord-as such things were called-glared at him. Pale light seethed in the orbits of the fleshless head on the left, and cold burned through him once again.
But that was even worse than the dragon head’s frigid breath, because it also sent terror howling through his mind. Suddenly, all he wanted to do was flee.
He looked around, but horribly could find no clear path to safety. His sellswords and the undead hawks were fighting on all sides. Apparently the griffon riders had discovered that their bows were of little use, for they were relying on their mounts to fight the raptors, beak to beak and claw to claw, with the losers falling to earth in pieces.
Aoth realized it was true. He struggled to focus past the fear and activate the countermagic bound in one of his tattoos. A bracing sting of power restored him to himself.
But why let the skull lord know it? He mimed panic while the undead chimera wheeled and climbed for another pass. Jet floundered in flight like a mount infected with his rider’s distress or confused by nonsensical commands.
The chimera swooped at them. Aoth let it get close, then leveled his spear and spoke the single word necessary to release one of the spells bound inside the weapon.
The fiery blast sent the ram’s head tumbling in one direction and the dragon’s in the other. The wings tore away to drift like burning kites on the night wind, while the remains of the body dropped away beneath them. The skull lord’s six orbits stared upward in impotent astonishment or rage.
Nala cradled the green orb in both hands and focused her will on it. If she established a psychic bond, she’d be able to summon dragonspawn a shade more quickly in a little while, when the defenders of Ashhold needed them.
As they would. Created from actual wyrm eggs with rituals imparted by Tiamat herself, dragonspawn had proved insufficient to win the last big battle in Tymanther. But surely this time would be different. The giants were fighting on their home ground, where the towering masses of rock and the channels of fire running through the ground would make a mass charge of lancers impossible. What was more, Skuthosiin himself would take the field.
And after he won, the green would surely recognize just how valuable a weapon her talismans had been.
Nala needed that because the failure of her schemes in Djerad Thymar had cost her his favor. He’d granted her asylum among the giants, but hadn’t seen fit to include her in his great magical ritual or even explain what it was meant to accomplish. That had to change if she was ever to assume her rightful role as a high priestess of the Nemesis of the Gods. Indeed, if she was even to be certain of avoiding the grim fate he intended for every other Tymantheran.
Her mind reached into the globe in somewhat the same way that she might have stuck her hand through a hole. Then her companion, a giant shaman who was doing the same thing with a gray talisman, cried out.
Nala glanced around in time to see the adept flounder back against a basalt wall. Blood streaming from his mouth and his left eye, he heaved the globe away from him. It smashed against the rock face on the other side of the relatively narrow alley in which they’d taken shelter.
Nala felt a stab of outrage. She and her true acolytes had worked long and hard to make the globes. Then, perhaps because the giant’s distress alerted her, she sensed resistance in her own orb. A heartbeat earlier it had been a doorway. Now it was a trap snapping shut. She snatched her psychic presence clear before it could catch her.
“Betrayer,” the shaman mumbled. He pushed off the wall, swayed, and stumbled toward her, enormous gray hands outstretched.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I didn’t ruin the talismans. The vanquisher’s wizards found a way to do it. If you’re hurt, let me help you.” She grabbed hold of one of the giant’s fingers and rattled off a healing prayer. Tiamat’s Power manifested as a glow of warmth at her core, which then streamed through the point of contact.
The giant grunted.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, no longer sounding dazed. Although he seemed nonplussed that his menacing advance hadn’t frightened her.
“Then go find the other shamans. Warn them not to use the orbs. Or if they already did, heal them so they can fight.”
