Elenari wiped green blood off her face with the back of her arm. With the pouring rain, all she managed to do was smear it into her mouth.
She spat and grimaced. “You came.”
I grinned at her, my own face speckled with blood. “You didn’t think I’d miss this, did you?” I asked.
“I should have known when it started raining underground that you wouldn’t be far behind,” the elf said, punching me on the arm.
“Well, you know I love to make a modest entrance,” I replied.
“The others?” Elenari asked me.
“All here,” I said. I pointed beyond the edge of the walls. “Out there. Fighting the wild dragons. Speaking of which, we should probably go and help them.”
A mammoth flash illuminated the flog and turned it suddenly from gray to white. A deafening shriek that made the rock under our feet quiver quickly followed.
“That sounded like another dragon biting the dust,” I said, turning to Elenari.
The elf nodded. “Did you see what happened to—”
“Not now,” I said. “Don’t mourn Antou and Hulong now. Grief can shake your resolve, or destroy you if you let it. Or it can lend you a new edge, a new sharpness. Stay sharp, Elenari. We have plenty of cutting left to do.”
The elf sniffed and blinked a few times. “You’re right. Plenty of cutting still to do.”
A couple of massive shadows passed overhead then. The kobolds nearest us jabbered and cried out in their grating tongue. They held their hands up to shield their reptilian eyes from the unaccustomed rain. The Imperial troops fighting doggedly nearby took the opportunity to disembowel and delimb tens of them, spitting them with swords and clubbing them with warhammers. Still more came though.
Things looked dire. I was seriously considering that the only Imperial soldiers left at the end of this might be us.
And that was if we were lucky.
Chapter 24
The shadows passed overhead. They were dragon-shaped, that much could be seen, but anything more was obscured by the sudden bright lightning that rippled across the magical cloud bank above.
The dragon shadows swept back around and then abruptly shrunk and drastically changed shape altogether. Then, landing hard and rolling to soak up the impact of their fall, Ashrin and Jazmyn hit the slippery stone work nearby and got unsteadily to their feet.
Both women were soaked. Ashrin’s usually spiky black hair was plastered to her head, making her cat-like ears all the more prominent. Jazmyn had a long scratch running down her cheek. It looked superficial, though it was hard to tell for certain due to the rain washing the blood away even as it welled up.
“The Sun Dragon?” I asked the two women.
Jazmyn pulled a small knife from her boot and threw it, all in one smooth motion. The blade cartwheeled past the side of my face, passing so close to my cheek that I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it had taken off my stubble. There was a dull squawk from behind me, and I stepped neatly to the side, without taking my eyes off the two black-clad dragonmancers, so that the kobold Jaz had just killed fell where I had been standing a moment before.
“The Sun Dragon?” I repeated, as if nothing had happened.
“Gone,” Ashrin said, her breath coming hard, like she had just gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight champ.
“Gone?” I asked.
Ashrin drew her thumb across her throat. “Gone,” she repeated. “Your plan worked well, Mike Noctis, but Jazmyn and I… We’re pretty spent. We used up a lot of mana very quickly, trying to finish that damned dragon as fast and humanely as we could.”
Jazmyn puffed out her cheeks and touched the scratch on her cheek. “We’ll keep trying to keep the ramparts free of these fuckin’ kobolds,” she said, “but I don’t think we’re going to be too much help against the other two dragons.”
“One down is better than nothing,” I said. “Far better. All right, you two keep our soldiers’ morale from dipping up here. Elenari and I will help the others from the air.”
Jazmyn pulled her sword from the red sash at her waist and made the sign of the claw against her heart.
“Good luck up there,” she said.
I made the sign of the claw with my index finger back at her. “You too,” I replied.
“If some of us don’t make it,” Ashrin said, cracking her knuckles and casting an eye at the kobolds clambering over the edge of the wall fifty yards away, “well, I guess we’ll see you in hell!”
I laughed and made a face. “Come on, let’s face it, this unforgiving world we live in is our hell and we are the devils that inhabit it. Go and remind the kobolds of this fact!”
With that, Elenari and I summoned Gharmon and Noctis to our Leg slots and took to the smoky, waterlogged air.
The rain made seeing difficult, but there were more important things to worry about just then. Like not being burned to a crisp, knocked out of the air, or in some other way killed by one of the two remaining dragons.
Saya and Penelope were flying, on the backs of Scopula and Glizbe, around the head of the silver dragon, whipping it up into
