Aoth and Jet floated on a northerly wind and studied the fortress. Other griffon riders glided to either side but surely couldn’t see the outpost, not at such a distance in the feeble predawn light.
To the untrained eye, the stronghold with its palisade walls might not have looked impressive. But it had a warren of tunnels underneath it, and a garrison large and varied enough to fill up both the above ground and subterranean barracks.
“You don’t like this, do you?” asked Jet.
“I don’t dislike it,” Aoth replied, “but it’s about the limit of what we ought to tackle by ourselves, especially with Gaedynn, Jhesrhi, and Khouryn absent.”
“Then why do it?”
“The Threskelans have a lot of supplies stored there. On top of that, it’s supposed to be a mustering point for troops bound for Chessenta. So let them arrive and find the place burned, its provisions stolen, and its garrison slaughtered. It might give them second thoughts, particularly the sellswords.”
“Let’s get on with it, then.”
Aoth peered down at the rolling scrubland and the foot soldiers and horsemen making their way across it. In theory, a ridge higher than the surrounding terrain shielded them from the view of the sentries in the fortress. “We’ll give our comrades on the ground a little more time to maneuver into position.”
As he waited, his thoughts drifted back to the events of the day before the previous one. He’d eliminated Cera as a possible traitor-to say the least-but otherwise he was no closer to flushing out the dragonborn assassins or figuring out why they wanted to kill him.
In fact, the jaunt into the past had left him with new questions. Why had all those dragons been palavering? Were they all Alasklerbanbastos’s allies? Was every single one of them going to attack Chessenta at the dracolich’s behest? If so, then how could the war hero’s forces possibly withstand them?
He scowled and tried to set such puzzles aside. He needed to focus on winning this battle. Everything else could wait.
He looked at the pale gleam on the eastern horizon and decided he’d delayed long enough. He willed power into the head of his spear to make it glow yellow, then swept it forward to point at the fortress. All around him, wings snapped and flapped as riders urged their griffons toward the objective.
Men laid arrows on their bows. Aoth pondered whether to start with fire or lightning and decided on the latter. Griffons furled their wings and swooped lower.
Then a horn blatted in the watchtower at one of the corners of the palisade. Aoth had hoped sentries who’d watched through the night would be tired and inattentive at the end of it, but evidently one was still alert.
Annoyed, Aoth rewarded the fellow’s vigilance by hurling a bright, booming lightningbolt at the tower. It blew apart the clapboard roof and, he hoped, fried whoever was underneath.
Meanwhile, arrows whistled down at the wall walks, stabbing into other sentries as they tried to ready their own bows. Orcs and kobolds toppled from their perches to smash down in the courtyards below.
But what came next wouldn’t be as easy. Warriors scrambled from the buildings below. They scurried for their various stations and started shooting back at the attackers in the sky. A crossbow bolt whizzed past Jet’s beak, and he screeched in irritation.
Then an expanding glimmer of force leaped upward. Jet lashed his wings, flung himself to the side, and avoided all but the edge of the flare. Still, cold bit into Aoth’s body. Hit squarely and encrusted with frost, another mount and rider plunged toward the ground.
Aoth roused a tattoo to warm him and looked for the source of the magic. At first, even his fire-touched eyes couldn’t spot it. There was just too much happening. Then the tip of a white wand poked out an arrow loop at the top of one of the towers.
Jet dodged, and the next shimmering blaze missed him entirely. Aoth rattled off words of power and pointed his spear. A dark cloud materialized around the top of the bastion. The boards sizzled and crumbled as the acidic vapor ate into them. Inside the structure, people screamed.
As Aoth turned Jet toward the gate, he noticed the watchtower he’d blasted apart was barely burning. The flaming arrows some of the griffon riders were loosing weren’t doing much to set the fort on fire either. Some treatment evidently kept the timbers from burning easily.
Oh well, he’d half expected as much. Once they won the battle, the Brotherhood could still turn the place into a useless ruin. It would just take a little more sweat.
He threw a lightningbolt at the gate-which jumped in its frame, but weathered the assault without a mark. It definitely possessed protective enchantments.
But fortunately, the men and orcs poised to defend it didn’t. He bloodied them with a barrage of fist-sized hailstones, and while they were still reeling, he and three other griffon riders plunged down into their midst.
Beaks snapped and talons snatched, tearing the Bone Wyrm’s warriors to gory tatters. Aoth looked for an enemy to stick with his spear, but Jet didn’t give him the chance. The familiar was still angry from the blast of cold that had chilled him to the marrow, and this was a good opportunity to take it out on someone.
When all the defenders were dead, Aoth and his human companions dismounted, shoved back the bars securing the gate, and swung it open. The sellswords massed outside came streaming in.
After that, the combat became a chaos of packed bodies and slashing, jabbing blades, with aerial cavalry shooting from on high and occasionally diving to pick off some particularly appealing target. Aoth circled with the other griffon riders. It made it easier to oversee the progress of the battle as a whole and to use his spells to best effect.
Gradually the sellswords cleared the courtyards and bastions until only stubborn pockets of resistance remained. Khouryn’s spearmen regrouped, lighting lanterns and unpacking everburning torches with their heatless, greenish flames as they prepared to venture into the tunnels. It might well turn out to be the most dangerous part of the attack, but they knew what they were doing. A dwarf had trained them to fight underground.
Still, Aoth wondered if he should lead them personally. Then something burst out of one of the buildings with access to the burrows below. It could have fit through the doorway, but only just, and only if it had been moving carefully. In its haste, it smashed loose scraps of wood and sent them flying.
The beast was an enormous blue lizard with big frilled ears and a spike on its snout. It moved in a glittering haze that also shrouded the creature on its back. The rider was a kobold with a single enormous azure scale seemingly grafted in the center of his chest. The scale flickered repeatedly, like lightning was flashing inside it, and pus seeped around the edges.
The blue lizard crashed into the front ranks of the spearmen. Dipping and tossing its head, it caught sellswords on its horn and flung them into the air. At the same time, small lightning bolts leaped from its massive body to sear one soldier, then another. The men so afflicted danced spastically in place, and the kobold howled with laughter.
Aoth wondered why this terror was only entering the battle now. He was lucky it hadn’t shown up earlier, before the balance tilted in the attackers’ favor.
He rattled off words of power and hurled darts of light. They vanished when they touched the seething aura. Other griffon riders loosed arrows. The shafts broke on contact with the haze.
Still laughing, the kobold raised a length of blue metal. Lightning crackled from the tip and burned into a griffon. The beast dropped, then spread its wings and arrested its fall. Plainly injured and struggling, it flew beyond the walls, no doubt looking for a safe place to set down. Aoth couldn’t tell if the man now slumped on its feathery neck was still alive or not.
Meanwhile, the stormlizard went on bulling, rending, and trampling its way through the lines of spearmen. Aoth decided its master might not have waited too long to unleash it after all. If somebody didn’t find a way to stop it, it could still win the fight for Threskel.
He cast a rainbow from his spear. Each colored beam had the potential to smite the reptile in a different way. None of them pierced its halo.
“There’s no way to hurt it except close up,” said Jet. “Of course, then the halo burns us. But I’m game.”
“Wait.” Aoth rattled off charms of protection against lightning in particular and hostile magic in general. He activated tattoos with similar functions. “There. That might help. Now yank the kobold off the beast’s back.”
Jet poised his talons and swooped.
The kobold twisted and pointed his wand. Jet dived even lower and streaked along mere inches from the ground. Aoth ducked, and lightning crackled over his head.
