empty, darkened street, far enough away from the apartment in question that no one looking out a window was likely to see them.
Although Aoth doubted anybody was. The shutters were closed, and no light gleamed through the cracks.
“What now?” asked Jet.
Aoth swung himself off the griffon’s back. “I go in after him.” He considered taking his shield, then left it clipped to the saddle. He’d rather have both hands available to grip his spear.
“Is that wise?” asked Jet. “You could watch the place from here while I go for reinforcements.”
“When someone breaks in in force, the enemy will know it. It will give them another chance to destroy their papers and such. If I sneak in alone, it increases the odds of finally getting some answers.”
“It increases the odds of somebody tearing your head off too.”
“We killed a number of dragonborn that night in the garden. There can’t be an unlimited supply hiding here in Soolabax with nobody noticing. Even if one of them spots me, I expect I can contend with however many are left until you get back with those reinforcements you mentioned.”
“All right. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” The familiar trotted, lashed his wings, and soared up toward the stars.
Aoth invoked the magic of one of his tattoos, and for a moment the design felt cold as ice on his chest. The charm didn’t grant actual invisibility, but it made the bearer easy to overlook.
Then he skulked up to the door the dragonborn had entered. He couldn’t hear anything on the other side. He tried the handle. As he’d expected, it was locked.
He slipped the point of his spear into the crack beneath the latch and released a bit of power from the weapon. The door made a sharp snapping sound and lurched open.
He peered into an unfurnished hallway with doorways opening off it and stairs leading upward. He neither saw nor heard anything moving, which suggested that no one had caught the noise of his forced entry.
Aoth prowled onward. None of the rooms on the ground floor was furnished or showed any signs of recent occupancy. It made him wonder if he and Jet actually had killed all the dragonborn but one.
In a small room at the back, his fire-kissed eyes saw the square outline of a low concealed panel that evidently connected the apartment with another. He reached for it, and then it started to slide. Somebody was opening it from the other side.
He turned and scrambled through the doorway to an adjacent room. Then he peeked around the corner.
Stooping, a man with bushy salt-and-pepper side-whiskers, eyebrows to match, and a mole at the corner of his narrow mouth came through the low opening, then closed the panel behind him. He wore a slashed velvet doublet with turned cuffs, like a prosperous merchant, and Aoth realized they’d actually been introduced at some point. Although he couldn’t recall the fellow’s name.
Whoever the whoreson was, he walked on without noticing anything amiss. Aoth considered jumping him, then opted to follow instead.
The man headed down the cellar stairs. Aoth gave him time to reach the bottom, then crept down just far enough to see what lay below.
Someone had done a fair amount of work to turn the basement into a proper shrine to Tiamat, the five- headed Dragon Queen. Votive candles burned before a bronze statue of the goddess. One flame glowed red, one white, one blue, one green, and one was a quivering teardrop of shadow. The sculpture’s necks almost appeared to weave in the soft, wavering light.
A portrait depicting the Nemesis of the Gods in her human guise as a beautiful woman with long black hair hung on the wall beside an intricately painted, multicolored pentagram. The smell of bitter incense hung in the air.
Dark scales glinting in the candlelight, the dragonborn assassin stood naked before the pentagonal bloodstone altar. His robe lay discarded on the floor.
He glared at the man with the side-whiskers. “I don’t like mortals in general,” he said. “I definitely don’t like it when they keep me waiting.”
Aoth frowned. Mortals? What in Kossuth’s name was that supposed to mean?
“I have an ordinary life,” the man replied. “I have to devote some time to living it. Otherwise people will get suspicious.”
“Just restore me to myself.”
“I’m working on it.” He took down a robe from a peg on the wall and pulled it on over his other clothing. Its shimmering scales changed color whenever he moved. He slipped on five rings, each bearing a stone the hue of one of the candle flames, and picked up an implement or weapon like a miner’s pick.
Evidently he himself was the wyrmkeeper of this particular sanctuary.
He faced the dragonborn. “Stand still.” He recited sibilant words of power and swung the heavy, unwieldy- looking pick through a looping figure with a dexterity that would have done credit to a juggler. The five wedge- shaped heads of the Tiamat statue seemed to cock forward ever so slightly, although that was likely just Aoth’s imagination.
And the assassin changed form.
His features remained reptilian, but twisted from a dragonborn’s rather handsome lineaments into ugliness. Batlike wings sprouted from his back, and a long tail with a spike on the end writhed out from the base of his spine. He-or it-dropped into a crouch.
Aoth wasn’t a scholar of demons. But he’d met a fair assortment on the battlefield, and knew an abishai when he saw one. And it made sense that with the aid of magic, one of the devil-like spirits could assume the form of a dragonborn. Both races were kin to wyrms and thus to each other, whatever the Tymantherans might care to believe.
In fact, a lot of things suddenly made sense. Like why the dragonborn murderers, raiders, and pirates had no clan piercings and why knowledgeable Tymantherans like Perra were unable to account for them. Why they possessed supernatural abilities ordinary dragonborn didn’t, and how they could lurk unnoticed in the heart of a city between atrocities. In point of fact, they didn’t. They went home to Tiamat’s domain in the astral world called Banehold until a human spellcaster saw fit to call them forth again.
Aoth felt a swell of elation. This truly had been a puzzle worth solving. When he reported what he’d discovered, it would save the alliance between Chessenta and Tymanther.
Its metamorphosis complete, the black abishai said, “Good. Now send me-” It whipped around toward the stairs.
Aoth realized it had glimpsed him from the corner of its eye. His veil had sufficed to fool it while it wore its dragonborn shape, but not now when its senses were evidently somewhat different.
The abishai charged up the risers. Sweating drops of fuming acid, its tail reared over its shoulder to strike like a scorpion’s stinger.
Aoth hurled darts of green light from his spear. The devil-kin twisted aside, and they missed. It resumed its climb. He charged the head of his weapon with destructive power and thrust it at the creature’s chest.
The abishai dodged that attack as well. Its tail whipped at Aoth’s shoulder. The bony point clanked against his mail and rebounded, although just the track of vapor it left in the air was enough to sting his eyes and make them water.
Meanwhile, the wyrmkeeper chanted.
Aoth feinted to the abishai’s foot. It leaped upward, beating its leathery wings as well as it could in the cramped space of the stairway, to rise above the attack. He whirled his spear-another maneuver that wasn’t easy in the confines-and smashed the butt into his opponent’s fanged, snarling mouth and snout.
The blow knocked the abishai back down the steps. He hurled more darts of light and, deprived of its balance, the creature couldn’t dodge. The missiles plunged into its body. It jerked and then lay still.
Aoth immediately looked for the wyrmkeeper. Whatever magic the bastard was attempting, he needed to put a stop to it.
But it was too late. The man with the pick had finished his incantation, and the pentagram, and the section of wall on which he’d painted it, had disappeared. In their place, a hole opened on a bleak, rocky landscape and a red sky mountainous with black thunderheads. Abishais were swarming through.
