that rift and tear into the armies on both sides. Nobody will win this battle.”
“You called it a bridge,” Rienne said. “Does that mean it has something to do with the Storm Dragon’s ascension?”
“You said it in the City of the Dead,” Darraun said. “You said, ‘the Storm Dragon walks through the gates of Khyber and crosses the bridge to the sky.’”
Gaven nodded, only half listening to Darraun. His nightmare continued to unfold before his eyes. Darraun muttered a curse, and Rienne gripped Gaven’s arm, convincing him that the scene was not merely another waking dream.
The creatures that began to exude from the rift could not have existed in a sane world. Some resembled earthly beasts, but they had been so twisted by the corruption of Khyber that they were barely recognizable. Tentacles sprouted from their sides or backs or protruded where their mouths should have been. Joints bent in obscene ways. Faces erupted from wounds in their skin and then retreated back into horrible bodies. Others could not be compared to anything natural-they were mounds of flesh or agglomerations of bone covered with parchment skin, or slimy things that slithered on pale bellies or skittered on innumerable legs. Blank eyes stared out from pale gray faces, and hundreds of humanlike eyes covered an oozing mass of half-congealed blood.
Worse, somehow, than the sight of the creatures vomiting from the gulf was their sound-part keening, part lunatic babble, part predatory growl. It began quietly as the first monstrosities emerged, but it grew louder with each successive wave, building until it drowned out the other sounds of the battlefield and battered at the walls of Gaven’s sanity. He couldn’t form words with that babble assaulting his mind, and he couldn’t hope to be heard above the cacophony if he did.
A blast of lightning engulfed the ship, followed by a deafening crash as an enormous copper-scaled dragon smashed into her hull. The impact knocked Gaven off his feet and slammed him against the bulwarks. The ring of elemental fire surged out to engulf the dragon’s body, charring its flesh and making the airship buck and roll. The dead dragon plummeted down, pulling the Eye of the Storm down with it.
Gaven leaped up to grab at the helm, desperately hoping to regain control of the airship before she crashed to the ground. He sensed the elemental’s acquiescence to his will, but then he felt the impact rumble through the hull. He had slowed their fall, but he was too late to stop it. Timbers groaned and then cracked, the ring of fire sputtered and went out. The airship lurched backward, jerked to port, and was still.
Rienne had kept her feet through it all, and Maelstrom was already in her hand. She swung it through slow repetitions of the whirling patterns of strikes and blocks she favored in battle. The sword seemed to sing in her hand, adding a voice of storm and steel to the mounting clamor around them. Darraun pulled himself to his feet and slid his mace out of the loop in his belt. Gaven looked up at the darkening sky, calling out to the brewing storm. If he was to be a force of destruction, best to use that power in a cause like this-to help protect the soldiers of both armies from the slaughter that surged toward them. If Vaskar was determined to be the Storm Dragon, let him face the Soul Reaver.
In the blink of an eye, the hordes of the Soul Reaver swarmed over the bulwarks of the grounded airship, and Gaven forgot himself and his friends in the storm of battle. Eyes wide open, he plunged headlong into the nightmares that had plagued him for twenty-six years.
Roaring with horror and fury, he swung his greatsword back and forth, cutting through alien flesh, shattering bone, spilling blood and ichor onto the deck. Shouting arcane syllables, he created fire and lightning to sear his foes, summoned invisible and irresistible forces to push them back, cast spells to guide his blade to the vital parts of tentacled things that refused to die. Bile rose in his throat as unspeakable horrors stared him in the face and spat oozing slime onto him in their death throes. He lashed out in reflexive fear to sever tentacles that grasped at him. The wailing ululation of the horde battered at his ears and at the ramparts of his will, threatening to break his concentration and reduce his resolve to quivering terror. And all the time the storm’s fury built around him, torrents of rain and hail, blasts of wind, and eruptions of lightning that tore great holes in the teeming carpet of aberrations that covered the Starcrag Plain.
Without warning, the battlefield fell silent, and the raving legions paused. Gaven’s ears rang in the sudden quiet, and he seized the opportunity to check that Rienne and Darraun were still alive. But the respite was brief. A moment later, every monstrosity raised its voice in a shriek, lifting arms and tentacles and limbs into the air, and the onslaught resumed. Gaven roared and spun his blade in a wide circle. A whirlwind followed his sword through the air and forced the nearest creatures back, giving him room to assess the battlefield.
He glanced up at the Crystal Spire, towering above them a bowshot away, a radiant beacon through the driving rain. He saw what had made the creatures pause: a figure hung suspended in the shaft of light, roughly human in size and shape. It was smaller than many of the creatures he had already slain, but even at that distance, it projected an aura like a low grumbling roar, tearing at the very roots of his sense and will. Long tentacles thrashed the air around its face, and clawed hands stretched up to the sky.
“Tearer and reaver and flayer of souls,” Gaven whispered.
The hordes renewed their assault, and Gaven lost himself in the battle again.
Haldren surveyed a battlefield over which he no longer had any control, clutching his reins until they bit into his palms. The full extent of Vaskar’s duplicity had made itself clear: in addition to bringing dragons to fight on both sides of the battle, Vaskar had convinced him to launch his assault against Thrane on this field-here, above the prison of the Soul Reaver. Haldren had known Vaskar would have to face that foe in the end-Gaven had seen the Eye of Siberys used as a spear to defeat the creature. But he had not expected to provide the stage for that battle. Not only had Vaskar undone the advantage he had given Haldren, but he had actually consigned both armies to slaughter at the hands of the Soul Reaver’s aberrant legions. Now Haldren would be forced to watch Vaskar’s moment of triumph, his ascension to godhood, in the air above the spectacle of his own crushing defeat. And rather than having an ally among the gods of the world, Haldren would have a bitter enemy. It was too much to bear.
His eyes wandered over the field, straining to see the magnitude of the carnage through the driving rain. To his right, ir’Fann’s infantry was falling under a renewed press, which meant that his pikemen had been overwhelmed. Near the middle of the field, a clump of Kadra’s knights stood in a tight circle as the aberrations advanced over the corpses of their steeds. He lifted his spyglass and saw Kadra Ware herself lying at the center of that circle, bloody and unmoving. To the left, ir’Cashan’s troops fled toward the sheltering hills. A group of knight phantoms, well-armored infantry riding conjured steeds of smoke and shadow, ranged back and forth along the rear, looking in vain for a place where their aid might turn the tide of battle. There could be no doubt: the field was lost. Lord General Haldren ir’Brassek had never known such a crushing defeat.
He lifted his eyes to the radiant column at the hub of the spreading devastation, and saw for the first time the tiny figure suspended in its light. He pressed the spyglass to his eye again. The Soul Reaver. Hatred welled up in his gut like bile, and he cursed under his breath. “Kill Vaskar for me, damn him.” The creature stretched its shriveled arms upward as tentacles writhed out around its face, and Haldren imagined it urging its subterranean hordes to greater fury as they swept over their foes or calling down the storm to add its wrath to theirs.
“And damn the rain,” he said aloud. “Can I not at least see my defeat through clear eyes?”
“It’s Gaven,” Senya said, pointing at the excoriate’s grounded airship. “The storm battles for him.”
“You still believe his lies? You still think he’s the Storm Dragon?”
Senya turned her gaze to meet his angry glare. “That’s our only hope.”
“Then hope is lost,” Haldren said, biting back his rage.
Cart rumbled on Haldren’s right. “We’ll see soon enough,” he said. Haldren turned to look at him, then followed his gaze back to the towering shaft of light.
A blast of lightning engulfed the Soul Reaver. For an instant, Haldren thought that the storm had lashed out at the monstrosity, but then he saw the lightning’s source: Vaskar had begun his attack.
“The Bronze Serpent,” Senya said. “He’s doomed to fail.”
“Good,” Haldren spat.
CHAPTER 48
The dragon’s roar cut through the wails of the Soul Reaver’s hosts. Gaven drove his sword down through the
